Page:Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger.djvu/106

Rh Then Daisy Bunting gradually became aware that, standing on a shelf just below the first of the broad, spacious windows which made the great room look so light and shadowless, was a row of life-size white plaster heads, each head slightly inclined to the right. There were about a dozen of these, not more—and they had such odd, staring, helpless, real-looking faces.

"Whatever’s those?" asked Bunting in a low voice.

Daisy clung a thought closer to her father’s arm. Even she guessed that these strange, pathetic, staring faces were the death-masks of those men and women who had fulfilled the awful law which ordains that the murderer shall be, in his turn, done to death.

"All hanged!" said the guardian of the Black Museum briefly. "Casts taken after death."

Bunting smiled nervously. "They don’t look dead somehow. They looks more as if they were listening," he said.

"That’s the fault of Jack Ketch," said the man facetiously. "It’s his idea—that of knotting his patient’s necktie under the left ear! That’s what he does to each of the gentlemen to whom he has to act valet on just one occasion only. It makes them lean just a bit to one side. You look here?"

Daisy and her father came a little closer, and the speaker pointed with his finger to a little dent imprinted on the left side of each neck; running from this indentation was a curious little furrow, well ridged above, showing how tightly Jack Ketch’s necktie had been drawn when its wearer was hurried through the gates of eternity.