That Affair Next Door | Page 4

whole street in here."
So I ran up-stairs,--I had always wished to visit this house, but had
never been encouraged to do so by the Misses Van Burnam,--and
making my way into the front room, the door of which stood wide open,
I rushed to the window and hailed the crowd, which by this time
extended far out beyond the curb-stone.
"An officer!" I called out, "a police officer! An accident has occurred
and the man in charge here wants the Coroner and a detective from
Police Headquarters."
"Who's hurt?" "Is it a man?" "Is it a woman?" shouted up one or two;
and "Let us in!" shouted others; but the sight of a boy rushing off to
meet an advancing policeman satisfied me that help would soon be
forthcoming, so I drew in my head and looked about me for the next
necessity--water.
I was in a lady's bed-chamber, probably that of the eldest Miss Van
Burnam; but it was a bed-chamber which had not been occupied for
some months, and naturally it lacked the very articles which would
have been of assistance to me in the present emergency. No eau de
Cologne on the bureau, no camphor on the mantel-shelf. But there was
water in the pipes (something I had hardly hoped for), and a mug on the
wash-stand; so I filled the mug and ran with it to the door, stumbling,
as I did so, over some small object which I presently perceived to be a
little round pin-cushion. Picking it up, for I hate anything like disorder,
I placed it on a table near by, and continued on my way.

The woman was still lying at the foot of the stairs. I dashed the water in
her face and she immediately came to.
Sitting up, she was about to open her lips when she checked herself; a
fact which struck me as odd, though I did not allow my surprise to
become apparent.
Meantime I stole a glance into the parlor. The officer was standing
where I had left him, looking down on the prostrate figure before him.
There was no sign of feeling in his heavy countenance, and he had not
opened a shutter, nor, so far as I could see, disarranged an object in the
room.
The mysterious character of the whole affair fascinated me in spite of
myself, and leaving the now fully aroused woman in the hall, I was
half-way across the parlor floor when the latter stopped me with a shrill
cry:
"Don't leave me! I have never seen anything before so horrible. The
poor dear! The poor dear! Why don't he take those dreadful things off
her?"
She alluded not only to the piece of furniture which had fallen upon the
prostrate woman, and which can best be described as a cabinet with
closets below and shelves above, but to the various articles of
bric-à-brac which had tumbled from the shelves, and which now lay in
broken pieces about her.
"He will do so; they will do so very soon," I replied. "He is waiting for
some one with more authority than himself; for the Coroner, if you
know what that means."
"But what if she's alive! Those things will crush her. Let us take them
off. I'll help. I'm not too weak to help."
"Do you know who this person is?" I asked, for her voice had more
feeling in it than I thought natural to the occasion, dreadful as it was.

"I?" she repeated, her weak eyelids quivering for a moment as she tried
to sustain my scrutiny. "How should I know? I came in with the
policeman and haven't been any nearer than I now be. What makes you
think I know anything about her? I'm only the scrub-woman, and don't
even know the names of the family."
"I thought you seemed so very anxious," I explained, suspicious of her
suspiciousness, which was of so sly and emphatic a character that it
changed her whole bearing from one of fear to one of cunning in a
moment.
"And who wouldn't feel the like of that for a poor creature lying
crushed under a heap of broken crockery!"
Crockery! those Japanese vases worth hundreds of dollars! that ormulu
clock and those Dresden figures which must have been more than a
couple of centuries old!
"It's a poor sense of duty that keeps a man standing dumb and staring
like that, when with a lift of his hand he could show us the like of her
pretty face, and if it's dead she be or alive."
As this burst of indignation was natural enough and not altogether
uncalled for from the standpoint of humanity, I gave the woman a nod
of approval, and wished I were a man myself that I