The Essential Writings of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes

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      But young Chandler exclaimed in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice, “Well, a man would look foolish at such a time as that, with all his plans brought to naught—and knowing he’s only got a second to live —now wouldn’t he?”

      “Yes, I suppose he would,” said Bunting slowly.

      Daisy had gone a little pale. The sinister, breathless atmosphere of the place was beginning to tell on her. She now began to understand that the shabby little objects lying there in the glass case close to her were each and all links in the chain of evidence which, in almost every case, had brought some guilty man or woman to the gallows.

      “We had a yellow gentleman here the other day,” observed the guardian suddenly; “one of those Brahmins—so they calls themselves. Well, you’d a been quite surprised to see how that heathen took on! He declared—what was the word he used?”—he turned to Chandler.

      “He said that each of these things, with the exception of the casts, mind you—queer to say, he left them out—exuded evil, that was the word he used! Exuded—squeezed out it means. He said that being here made him feel very bad. And twasn’t all nonsense either. He turned quite green under his yellow skin, and we had to shove him out quick. He didn’t feel better till he’d got right to the other end of the passage!”

      “There now! Who’d ever think of that?” said Bunting. “I should say that man ‘ud got something on his conscience, wouldn’t you?”

      “Well, I needn’t stay now,” said Joe’s good-natured friend. “You show your friends round, Chandler. You knows the place nearly as well as I do, don’t you?”

      He smiled at Joe’s visitors, as if to say good-bye, but it seemed that he could not tear himself away after all.

      “Look here,” he said to Bunting. “In this here little case are the tools of Charles Peace. I expect you’ve heard of him.”

      “I should think I have!” cried Bunting eagerly.

      “Many gents as comes here thinks this case the most interesting of all. Peace was such a wonderful man! A great inventor they say he would have been, had he been put in the way of it. Here’s his ladder; you see it folds up quite compactly, and makes a nice little bundle—just like a bundle of old sticks any man might have been seen carrying about London in those days without attracting any attention. Why, it probably helped him to look like an honest working man time and time again, for on being arrested he declared most solemnly he’d always carried that ladder openly under his arm.”

      “The daring of that!” cried Bunting.

      “Yes, and when the ladder was opened out it could reach from the ground to the second storey of any old house. And, oh! how clever he was! Just open one section, and you see the other sections open automatically; so Peace could stand on the ground and force the thing quietly up to any window he wished to reach. Then he’d go away again, having done his job, with a mere bundle of old wood under his arm! My word, he was artful! I wonder if you’ve heard the tale of how Peace once lost a finger. Well, he guessed the constables were instructed to look out for a man missing a finger; so what did he do?”

      “Put on a false finger,” suggested Bunting.

      “No, indeed! Peace made up his mind just to do without a hand altogether. Here’s his false stump: you see, it’s made of wood —wood and black felt? Well, that just held his hand nicely. Why, we considers that one of the most ingenious contrivances in the whole museum.”

      Meanwhile, Daisy had let go her hold of her father. With Chandler in delighted attendance, she had moved away to the farther end of the great room, and now she was bending over yet another glass case. “Whatever are those little bottles for?” she asked wonderingly.

      There were five small phials, filled with varying quantities of cloudy liquids.

      “They’re full of poison, Miss Daisy, that’s what they are. There’s enough arsenic in that little whack o’ brandy to do for you and me —aye, and for your father as well, I should say.”

      “Then chemists shouldn’t sell such stuff,” said Daisy, smiling. Poison was so remote from herself, that the sight of these little bottles only brought a pleasant thrill.

      “No more they don’t. That was sneaked out of a flypaper, that was. Lady said she wanted a cosmetic for her complexion, but what she was really going for was flypapers for to do away with her husband. She’d got a bit tired of him, I suspect.”

      “Perhaps he was a horrid man, and deserved to be done away with,” said Daisy. The idea struck them both as so very comic that they began to laugh aloud in unison.

      “Did you ever hear what a certain Mrs. Pearce did?” asked Chandler, becoming suddenly serious.

      “Oh, yes,” said Daisy, and she shuddered a little. “That was the wicked, wicked woman what killed a pretty little baby and its mother. They’ve got her in Madame Tussaud’s. But Ellen, she won’t let me go to the Chamber of Horrors. She wouldn’t let father take me there last time I was in London. Cruel of her, I called it. But somehow I don’t feel as if I wanted to go there now, after having been here!”

      “Well,” said Chandler slowly, “we’ve a case full of relics of Mrs. Pearce. But the pram the bodies were found in, that’s at Madame Tussaud’s—at least so they claim, I can’t say. Now here’s something just as curious, and not near so dreadful. See that man’s jacket there?”

      “Yes,” said Daisy falteringly. She was beginning to feel oppressed, frightened. She no longer wondered that the Indian gentleman had been taken queer.

      “A burglar shot a man dead who’d disturbed him, and by mistake he went and left that jacket behind him. Our people noticed that one of the buttons was broken in two. Well, that don’t seem much of a clue, does it, Miss Daisy? Will you believe me when I tells you that that other bit of button was discovered, and that it hanged the fellow? And ’twas the more wonderful because all three buttons was different!”

      Daisy stared wonderingly, down at the little broken button which had hung a man. “And whatever’s that!” she asked, pointing to a piece of dirty-looking stuff.

      “Well,” said Chandler reluctantly, “that’s rather a horrible thing —that is. That’s a bit o’ shirt that was buried with a woman— buried in the ground, I mean—after her husband had cut her up and tried, to burn her. ’Twas that bit o’ shirt that brought him to the gallows.”

      “I considers your museum’s a very horrid place!” said Daisy pettishly, turning away.

      She longed to be out in the passage again, away from this brightly lighted, cheerful-looking, sinister room.

      But her father was now absorbed in the case containing various types of infernal machines. “Beautiful little works of art some of them are,” said his guide eagerly, and Bunting could not but agree.

      “Come along—do, father!” said Daisy quickly. “I’ve seen about enough now. If I was to stay in here much longer it ‘ud give me the horrors. I don’t want to have no nightmares to-night. It’s dreadful to think there are so many wicked people in the world. Why, we might knock up against some murderer any minute without knowing it, mightn’t we?”

      “Not you, Miss Daisy,” СКАЧАТЬ