That Affair Next Door | Page 3

my
ears had not played me false.
"The lady's right," he declared; and pushing by me quite disrespectfully,
he led the way to the basement door, into which he and the so-called
cleaner presently disappeared.
I waited in front. I felt it to be my duty to do so. The various passers-by
stopped an instant to stare at me before proceeding on their way, but I
did not flinch from my post. Not till I had heard that the young woman
whom I had seen enter these doors at midnight was well, and that her
delay in opening the windows was entirely due to fashionable laziness,
would I feel justified in returning to my own home and its affairs. But it
took patience and some courage to remain there. Several minutes
elapsed before I perceived the shutters in the third story open, and a
still longer time before a window on the second floor flew up and the
policeman looked out, only to meet my inquiring gaze and rapidly
disappear again.
Meantime three or four persons had stopped on the walk near me, the
nucleus of a crowd which would not be long in collecting, and I was
beginning to feel I was paying dearly for my virtuous resolution, when
the front door burst violently open and we caught sight of the trembling
form and shocked face of the scrub-woman.
"She's dead!" she cried, "she's dead! Murder!" and would have said
more had not the policeman pulled her back, with a growl which
sounded very much like a suppressed oath.
He would have shut the door upon me had I not been quicker than
lightning. As it was, I got in before it slammed, and happily too; for
just at that moment the house-cleaner, who had grown paler every
instant, fell in a heap in the entry, and the policeman, who was not the
man I would want about me in any trouble, seemed somewhat
embarrassed by this new emergency, and let me lift the poor thing up
and drag her farther into the hall.

She had fainted, and should have had something done for her, but
anxious though I always am to be of help where help is needed, I had
no sooner got within range of the parlor door with my burden, than I
beheld a sight so terrifying that I involuntarily let the poor woman slip
from my arms to the floor.
In the darkness of a dim corner (for the room had no light save that
which came through the doorway where I stood) lay the form of a
woman under a fallen piece of furniture. Her skirts and distended arms
alone were visible; but no one who saw the rigid outlines of her limbs
could doubt for a moment that she was dead.
At a sight so dreadful, and, in spite of all my apprehensions, so
unexpected, I felt a sensation of sickness which in another moment
might have ended in my fainting also, if I had not realized that it would
never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none
too many of his own. So I shook off my momentary weakness, and
turning to the policeman, who was hesitating between the unconscious
figure of the woman outside the door and the dead form of the one
within I cried sharply:
"Come, man, to business! The woman inside there is dead, but this one
is living. Fetch me a pitcher of water from below if you can, and then
go for whatever assistance you need. I'll wait here and bring this
woman to. She is a strong one, and it won't take long."
"You'll stay here alone with that----" he began.
But I stopped him with a look of disdain.
"Of course I will stay here; why not? Is there anything in the dead to be
afraid of? Save me from the living, and I undertake to save myself from
the dead."
But his face had grown very suspicious.
"You go for the water," he cried. "And see here! Just call out for some
one to telephone to Police Headquarters for the Coroner and a detective.

I don't quit this room till one or the other of them comes."
Smiling at a caution so very ill-timed, but abiding by my invariable rule
of never arguing with a man unless I see some way of getting the better
of him, I did what he bade me, though I hated dreadfully to leave the
spot and its woful mystery, even for so short a time as was required.
"Run up to the second story," he called out, as I passed by the prostrate
figure of the cleaner. "Tell them what you want from the window, or
we will have the