The Lodger eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 305 pages of information about The Lodger.

The Lodger eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 305 pages of information about The Lodger.

“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?”

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Project Gutenberg
The Lodger from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.