Page 1099 - bleak-house

with the deceased on former occasions—even threatening
him, as the witness made out. If you ask me, Sir Leicester
Dedlock, whether from the first I believed George to be the
murderer, I tell you candidly no, but he might be, notwith-
standing, and there was enough against him to make it my
duty to take him and get him kept under remand. Now, ob-
serve!’
As Mr. Bucket bends forward in some excitement—
for him—and inaugurates what he is going to say with
one ghostly beat of his forefinger in the air, Mademoiselle
Hortense fixes her black eyes upon him with a dark frown
and sets her dry lips closely and firmly together.
‘I went home, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, at night
and found this young woman having supper with my wife,
Mrs. Bucket. She had made a mighty show of being fond
of Mrs. Bucket from her first offering herself as our lodger,
but that night she made more than ever—in fact, overdid
it. Likewise she overdid her respect, and all that, for the la-
mented memory of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn. By the
living Lord it flashed upon me, as I sat opposite to her at
the table and saw her with a knife in her hand, that she had
done it!’
Mademoiselle is hardly audible in straining through her
teeth and lips the words, ‘You are a devil.’
‘Now where,’ pursues Mr. Bucket, ‘had she been on the
night of the murder? She had been to the theayter. (She re-
ally was there, I have since found, both before the deed and
after it.) I knew I had an artful customer to deal with and
that proof would be very difficult; and I laid a trap for her—

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