Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/444

 436 She did indeed look young. A fair, pale, sweet face, lying there with its golden-brown hair falling around it. In the alarm of the first moment Mrs. Pepperfly had snatched off the cap, and the hair fell down. Her mouth was upon, and the pretty pearly teeth were visible. They sighed as they looked upon her.

“May her soul have found its rest!” murmured the clergyman, bending over her for a moment ere they took their departure.

Mr. Carlton lingered behind the rest. He visited her box with his own hands, the nurse lighting him, but it contained no clue whatever as to who she was. Nothing but clothes were in it; not a card, not a scrap of paper, not a letter; nothing was there to solve the riddle.

“Was this one trunk all she brought?” he asked.

“All, sir,” replied Mrs. Pepperfly. “There’s her work-box a standing on the drawers there, by the bed’s head.”

The surgeon turned to the work-box, and examined it searchingly and thoroughly, as he had the trunk. Its contents consisted of cotton, needles, and such like accessories to work. There was a piece of embroidery in a midway stage; a baby’s little cambric night-cap just begun; and a few paper patterns. Nothing whatever that could throw any light upon herself or her previous history. Her pocket—a loose pocket which Mrs. Pepperfly drew from under the pillow, where the invalid had kept it—contained a purse alone. Nothing else: and in the purse there was not much money. Her keys lay on the drawers.

Mr. Carlton locked both the boxes, and sealed them with his own seal. “I don’t know much about the routine of these affairs,” he observed, “but it is right, I suppose, to make all sale until the police come—they can break my seals if they will.”

Barely had he spoken when a policeman appeared upon the scene. The news had travelled to the station, and the sergeant himself had come down. He was a big man, with round red cheeks, and a small, sharp-pointed nose. He listened in silence to the details which were given him partly by Mr. Carlton, partly by the nurse, and took possession of the basin that had contained the gruel and the bottle.

Next he laid hold of the candle and began to peer about the two rooms, for what purpose, or how it could at all help the inquiry, he alone knew. He carried the candle out in the landing and examined that, gazing up at the walls, raising his face to the window, through which the moonlight shone so brightly in.

“Is that a door?” he suddenly asked.

Without waiting for a reply he strode to the opposite end of the landing to the window, and pulled a door open. The walls had been grained to imitate grey marble, and this door was grained also. It looked like part of the wall, and it opened with a key only. It was that key which had attracted the keen sight of the sergeant.

“It’s only a closet for brooms and the slop-pail, sir,” spoke up Mrs. Gould, who was shivering timidly on the top stairs, holding on by the balustrade.

Even so. It was a very innocent closet, containing only a pail and a couple of brooms. The officer satisfied himself on that point, and closed the door again; but Mr. Carlton, who had not previously known any closet was there, immediately saw that it might have afforded a temporary hiding place for the owner of that face he had seen so close to it earlier in the evening—if indeed that face had not been a myth of his own imagination.

Mr. Carlton could do nothing more, and he took his departure, the face all too present to him as he walked through the moonlit streets. It may be asked why he did not speak of it to the police—why he had not spoken of it to the gentlemen who had been gathered with him round the death-bed. But of what was he to speak? That he thought he saw a strange-looking face, a face half ghostly, half human; a face which had jet black whiskers on its cheeks; that he had thought he saw this on the staircase in the moonbeams, and that when he brought out the candle and threw its rays around nothing was to be seen? It could not, if it belonged to a human, walking being, have had time to get down the stairs unseen; that was impossible; and he had satisfied himself that it had not taken refuge in the bed-room. It is true there was this closet, which he had not known of, but he did not believe it could have gone in there and closed the door again before he was out with the light. Had he spoken of this, nine persons out of ten would have answered him—it was nothing but your own imagination.

And he was not sure that it was not his imagination. When he had descended the stairs after seeing it, he put the question in a careless sort of way to the landlady, as she came from the kitchen and Mrs. Pepperfly’s society to open the door for him—was any strange man on the staircase or in the house?—and Mrs. Gould had answered, with some inward indignation, that there was no man at all in the house, or likely to be in it. Beyond that Mr. Carlton had not spoken of the circumstance.

He went straight on to his home through the moonlit streets, and soon afterwards