THE LUCIFER THAT SAVED MY LIFE.
Surprised, not to say startled, I certainly was, and all the more so
for the reason that I recognised the voice of the speaker. It was that
of my long time friend and at one time colleague, Robert Grant, the
detective.
When I turned round--not suddenly or abruptly, for I feared to attract
the attention, possibly the suspicion, of the four men still whispering
on the landing--the two Chinamen were still sucking nonchalantly at
their flute-shaped opium pipes, and still eyeing me, as I have already
said, as pigs, lying on a muck-heap in the sunshine, eye a terrier who
has entered their domain.
Stretching my arms, I affected to yawn, as if tired of waiting the
result of the conference outside. Then, hands deep in my trousers
pockets, I slouched leisurely across the room and bent over the
Chinamen's mattress, as if to examine the picture of the Crucifixion
which was plastered on the wall above.
The nearer of the two Chinamen made a great pretence of puffing noisily
at his pipe, as if trying hard to prevent it from going out, but
between each puff came a volley of whispered words in soft staccato:
"Make pretence to be friendly with them--disarm suspicion--but get
away--if they'll let you--go to police station--say it's me--arrest the
lot. Look out--they're coming--go away!"
The "they" were the leader and the other man.
They now returned to the room, still whispering, and the two who had
been on guard at the head of the stairs, after noisily calling out
"Good-night," made their way down, and so into the street, for we could
distinctly hear them unlocking the door, which this time--as I did not
hear it banged to--they had apparently left open.
"I don't think much of your Art Exhibition," I said, turning to the
leader of the gang and jerking my thumb over my shoulder in the
direction of the hideous representation of the Crucifixion, at which I
had made pretence to be looking. "It reminds me of what I once said to
a famous art critic and æsthete about a picture that hung in some cheap
bachelor lodgings of mine.
"'I have a picture in my room,' I said to him, 'that will give your
æsthetic senses a cold chill, not to say a shock. It's "Daniel in the
Lions' Den," done in chromo--four colours--and loud enough to win a
whistling match.'
"'How terrible!' said my friend. 'But I can imagine something even more
terrible.'
"'What is it?' I inquired.
"'A poor lion in a den of Daniels,' was the reply."
I told this story, as the reader will have surmised, in pursuance of
Grant's advice to "make pretence to be friendly," and apparently it had
the desired effect, for the leader of the gang seemed amused.
"I think I can place the man who said it," he said. "I used to meet him
often in Paris. No; we're not great on Art here, and that picture over
the couch is a terror. I've made it all right for you with my friends.
Would you like to smoke a pipe of opium, now you're here? You can if
you like."
"That's very kind of you, but I don't think I'll stop to-night," I
replied. "Fact is, you gave me a fright between you, for really I
thought you meant knocking me on the head."
He laughed.
"All right; come some other night, if you like. I'm sorry if we
frightened you, but of course we have to protect ourselves, and really
I thought at first that you had come here to interfere with our
customers and with our business. But it is all right now, and if you
want to be off, we won't detain you. Good-night."
"Good-night," I answered pleasantly, glad to get away, and making for
the door. With my hand on the handle I turned and looked back. My late
host, the man whom I have called the leader, was standing--a sort of
pocket caricature of Napoleon--his hands behind his back, and his
short legs straddled widely apart. His great head, resting almost on
his shoulders, was thrust forward, vulture-wise, the eyes glittering
venomously out of the dead-white face. On the mattress behind him, the
two men whom I had supposed to be Chinamen, but one of whom I now knew
to be Detective Grant, pulled away at their pipes as nonchalantly as
ever, the ghastly figure of the Crucified One stretching bare arms
over them on the wall.
"Good-night," smiled the leader again. "Good-night, and _bon voyage_."
I do not know why I shuddered--perhaps out of fear for Grant;
perhaps at the thought of the sacred figure of the Saviour in such
surroundings; perhaps merely because I was tired and overstrained.
But with the shudder shaking me, almost like an ague, I turned, closed
the door, and made my way down the stairs.
From the second landing window, the yard which lay immediately
underneath and the stretch of waste land beyond, looked more
darkly-desolate than ever. A single light on the far side of the river
made a snake of fire, writhing and twisting as if in the throes of
torturing agony upon the water. Otherwise, nothing moved, nothing
stirred.
Arrived at the first landing I saw that the chink of light from under
the two doors had gone, so that the stairs, leading down to the passage
and to the kitchen door, were in absolute darkness. As I reached the
bottom of the stairs and turned into the passage, I was immensely
relieved to see that the front door stood ajar, evidently as the two
men who had just gone out had left it. The whiff of outer air which
blew through the opening was infinitely sweet after the reek and stench
of opium in the den upstairs. My spirits rose at a bound. Surely I must
have been mistaken in thinking the house other than merely a place for
the smoking of opium. If anything illicit, anything in the nature of
crime, were carried on here, the door would not have been left ajar,
as I now found it, nor have been left unlatched and unlocked as it was
when I had first come to the place.
All this went through my brain in a flash while my foot was between the
last step of the staircase and the passage floor. Then suddenly the
picture I had seen, when looking in the eyes of the leader of the gang,
flashed before me--the picture of a man in a dark passage, as I at that
moment was, and two other men waiting to brain him as he groped his way
out.
"It's precious dark here!" I said aloud as if to myself, and in the
most unconcerned voice I could assume. "I must go carefully, for I
nearly came a cropper over the break-neck stairs in going up."
Meanwhile, I had been feeling stealthily in my pocket for a match-box.
Ah! I had it!
Slipping out a vesta, I struck it sharply, and placing the palm of my
open hand between the flame and myself, so as to shade my own face and
to cast what light there was in the direction of the door, I scanned
the passage as if I had of a sudden become all eyes. Stretched across,
just where it would take me over the ankle and so cause me to stumble
forward, was a piece of wire. Behind the door, and with what looked
like an iron bar, upraised ready to strike as I fell, was a man; and in
case he failed to finish me, another--for I saw the white face of him
peeping through the chink of the partly opened door--stood outside. And
then, as the light in my hand suddenly flickered and went out, I heard
behind me the stealthy steps of someone creeping down the stairs.