THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE
_Man wanted immediately to assist in practical refutation of
calumny. Apply Judex: Raxe’s Private Hotel, Aldwych._
The above advertisement met Gilead’s eyes a day or two after his
adventure with the beautiful lepidopterist. He fastened upon it at
once.
“I shall follow this up,” he said to the secretary. “What can a
‘practical refutation’ mean?”
Nestle shook his head, with a smile.
“I really can’t guess, sir,” he said. “Unless it refers to the
_argumentum baculinum_.”
Gilead mused a little.
“It says ‘immediately’,” he reflected. “I must go at once, then, or I
shall be forestalled.”
He rose, and looked about him.
“Miss Halifax enters to-day, you understand,” he said, “upon her
duties as my personal typewriter and amanuensis. You will see that she
is made comfortable here in my absence.”
Perhaps the ghost of a smile twitched the soft-speaking secretary’s
mouth, as he answered that his chief’s commands should be scrupulously
obeyed.
Gilead took a cab to Raxe’s Hotel, and enquired at once for “Judex.”
He seemed conscious of a twinkle in the right eye of the hall-porter
who took his name, and of that of the boy who went off with it, as if
some telegraphic levity had passed between them. But in a little the
boy came back, with a perfectly sober face, and informed him that Mr
Judex would see him. He was shown upstairs into a private
sitting-room, where by a table sat a little old man, shrewd and
withered, but of a very spruce appearance. His eyes were piercing
black, his lips kept a perpetual chewing motion, like a crab’s, a few
threads of white hair clung to the barren slopes of his scalp. But he
was very neatly dressed in grey twill frock-coat and trousers, with a
shepherd’s plaid bow at his neck.
[image: images/img_041.jpg
caption: “A LITTLE OLD MAN, SHREWD AND WITHERED.”]
“Mr Judex?” said Gilead.
“My name, sir,” said the stranger. “You thought it a pseudonym, no
doubt. Now, usher!”
The exclamation was addressed to the boy, who vanished.
“I called in answer to your advertisement,” said Gilead, not
unprepared for surprises.
“Be seated,” said the stranger. The bright eyes bent upon him. “You
are young, and a gentleman, I take note, Mr Balm,” he said. “A hard-up
one--eh?”
“No, not hard-up.”
“What then?”
“A seeker after the truth,” said Gilead. “I pursue it day by day
through the columns of the _Daily Post_. Money is no object to me.”
The little old man bent forward, and eagerly scanned his visitor.
“If that is so,” he said, “fortune could not have sent me a better
coadjutor. You are dispassionate, disinterested, whole-hearted?”
“Entirely,” said Gilead.
The old man rubbed his palms gleefully together.
“It is a providence,” he said. “It is to demonstrate a truth, a
momentous truth, that I advertised for an agent.”
“May I ask,” said Gilead, “what truth.”
“Hush-sh-sh!” said Mr Judex, putting a finger to his lips with
exaggerated gravity. “It lies to prove in the wine-cellar of number
forty-one, Belgrave Crescent--a very deep and dark cellar.”
Gilead’s eyes opened a little; but he sat calm and collected. He
thought he perceived that he had to do here with an eccentric, not to
say a daft old gentleman. But, if the quest was to bear fruit, he must
betray nothing of his feelings. The other stretched out, and put a
soft impressive hand upon his arm.
“Have you a clean conscience?” he said.
“I believe I may claim one,” answered the young man, smiling.
“No sense of guilt anywhere within?”
“Nothing to trouble me.”
“Exactly. You are not afraid of being alone with your thoughts?”
“O! no.”
“Even in the dark?”
“Even in the dark.”
“If you were conscience-stricken, on the other hand, you might dread
your own company unspeakably?”
“It is very likely, I think.”
“Especially in the dark?”
“I daresay.”
“So much so as to be urged to any means to escape it, perhaps?”
“Indeed,” said Gilead, “I could not answer for myself under the
circumstances.”
Mr Judex threw himself back in his chair with galvanic quickness and a
beaming face.
“Nothing could be happier,” he said delightedly. “It lies in your
power to exonerate me from a very gross and cruel accusation.”
“So far as my conscious probity is concerned,” said Gilead, “I am at
your service.”
The old man bent forward again, and patted him three times on the
knee.
“Meet me,” he said, “at nine o’clock--this evening--outside number
forty-one--Belgrave Crescent.”
For one moment Gilead hesitated. The oddity of the request, the
lateness of the hour named, the suggestion of something sinister and
uncanny connected with that abysmal crypt so darkly alluded to,
impressed him with a sense of some unseemliness in prospect which it
would be wiser in him to leave unexplored. What could possibly bear
upon the refutation of a calumny in those obscure depths? An aspersed
bin (he reflected, with concern, that he had no palate for
“bouquets”)? A deceased butler? An immured traducer, like him in the
terrific Mr Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado!”? Nothing, he hoped, to do
with buried corpses or concealed “swag.” But in the end the spirit of
the Romantic Quest decided him.
“I will be punctual to the appointment,” he said, and rose from his
chair.
He returned to the Bureau to find Miss Halifax already installed in
his private office. She struck him as looking a supremely attractive
amanuensis, and he congratulated himself on the good fortune which had
attended his first personal venture. If she should prove as
sympathetic to his aims as she was grateful to his vision, he would
come to hold, he told himself, having the perfect feminine on one side
of him and the perfect male on the other, the most admirable balance
between reason and emotion. In fact he informed her so, quite frankly
and quietly, and she blushed as she made a very pretty and modest
acknowledgment of his kindness, and of her determination to win his
good opinion.
“Mr Winsom Wyllie is first down among my mental notes,” he told her.
“I shall not forget him.”
He went, indeed, that very afternoon to Somerset House in order to
ascertain if the Will had as yet been proved, but was unsuccessful in
his search. “Never mind,” he thought. “Such a rapacious scoundrel will
not be long in realizing his ill-gotten gains, and in a very short
time, I fancy, we shall be possessed of a clue.”
He was as little inclined to effusive confidences as to senseless
reticence; but for some reason he told Miss Halifax about his
forthcoming venture. To his surprise she received his story with some
signs of emotion.
“I don’t think it sounds nice,” she said. “I wish you would let one of
the others go instead.”
He looked at her kindly.
“What do you doubt?” he answered; “my proficiency, or my discretion,
or my savoir-faire?”
“None of these,” she said--“or your courage or generosity. Forgive me
and my presumption in offering advice so soon.”
“I should have thought,” said he, smiling, “that the success of my
first essay would have inclined you to a greater confidence in my
judgment.”
She seemed to hang her head a little, biting her full lower lip.
“I have no right whatever to speak,” she murmured. “Only please,
please be on your guard.”
“Trust me,” he said. “But timidity, you must remember, Miss Halifax,
never won to a vision of the Grail.”
She raised her head, and looked at him a moment with shining eyes;
then returned to her work.
The evening closed in dark and sinister, bringing with it black rushes
of wind and sudden avalanches of rain. Gilead despatched a simple but
recherché dinner at a choice restaurant, and, at twenty minutes to
nine, betook himself on foot to the rendezvous. It was part of his
principle to avoid every show of ostentation in his adventures. He
wished to decide them on their own exclusive merits, and any
confession of his resources would have tended to confuse the issues.
Exactly at the hour appointed, he stood, battling with his umbrella,
outside number forty-one Belgrave Crescent.
The street, in this stately district, was almost entirely deserted at
this mid-prandial hour. The dark garden which contained one side of it
stood not more lifeless in suggestion than the black house-fronts
opposite. Here and there a gas-lamp winked in the driven tumult; here
and there a thread of light under a blind gleamed like a gold stitch
in the curtain of night. Far up a solitary motor-car throbbed against
the kerb; the thunder of remote traffic spoke like a distant surge;
other token of human contiguity there was none.
In such a universal eclipse of things there was little to
differentiate one respectable building from another; wherefore the
watcher was unable to draw any exclusively portentous suggestion from
the gloom and silence of the house he faced. It appeared like any
other of its neighbours in the essentials of brown brick and closed
shutters, and the rain that plashed off its sills into the deep area
was burdened with no exceptional sound of omen or melancholy. The
brass knocker was hospitably bright, the antique extinguishers on the
rail-posts of the steps were even suggestive of home, and an asylum
gained at last from obscure wanderings in the streets. Gilead moved
closer to examine one of them.
“Faithful Achates!” said a small voice at his elbow. He started and
turned about.
He had come up and upon him without a sound, a little weird blown
figure, hopping under an umbrella like some odd-winged night-fowl. His
eyes gleamed like drops of ink; he pinched Gilead’s arm in a shrewd
ecstasy, while that young man, momentarily paralysed, stood
speechless. In truth the apparition had taken him from an unexpected
quarter; he had looked to Mr Judex, for some reason, to emerge from
the house itself.
As they dwelt thus an instant, a clap of wind took the little figure,
and seemed to blow it clean up the steps.
“Quick!” he whispered from that eyrie, closing his umbrella. “I am
pressed for time in all things these days--quick!”
A little reluctantly Gilead joined him.
“Pressed for time,” repeated the other, bending and fumbling; “and my
movements must be swift and secret. This is excellently fine of you.
Your reward shall consist in the vindication of a calumniated soul.
Quick! We will make straight for the cellar.”
He was busy with a labelled latchkey as he spoke, fitting it into the
lock.
“Procured from the house agents,” he murmured. “My own key and my own
house; but they weren’t to know that.”
The door fell open with the word, revealing a cavern of chill
blackness. Involuntarily Gilead shrunk a little. The other noticed and
protested.
“There is nothing to apprehend--neither goblins nor conspirators,” he
said. “You were quite confident as to the dark, you know.”
With a blush of shame, Gilead entered; and instantly the little man
shut the door softly upon them both, and producing an electric lamp
from his breast-pocket, switched on a spark, whose tiny brilliancy
hung in the gloom like a fen-candle, obscurely peopling its thickness.
But it was enough to reveal a desert of bare walls, carpetless floors
and lightless ceilings. Gilead, after one look around, addressed his
companion firmly:--
“This is your house, you say?”
“Unquestionably.”
“It is empty--unoccupied.”
“But it is my house, all the same.”
The young man considered. A deserted building, a conceivably demented
owner, and the rest of the circumstances! What was he to conclude? He
seemed to be on the verge of some disturbing discovery. But it was his
duty, to himself and his Bureau, to proceed. Certain diffident tremors
in him had of late weakened of their force. He had enjoyed his
incredible possessions long enough to evolve that sixth sense of
omnipotence which is peculiar to plutocracy. All risks appeared easily
negotiable to him, endowed with that Fortunatus’s purse. Luckily for
the world, as it happened, the chances that tempted him were all on
the side of chivalry and justice.
“Will you come?” said Mr Judex.
He went before, treading softly, and holding his lamp high overhead.
Gilead followed as quietly, through the empty hall, to the head of the
basement stairs, and down them into a vortex of reeling night.
Domestic catacombs, rows of cobwebby bells, disconnected gas-meters, a
remote gurgle of drain-water, horrible, secret, suggestive of
blood-choked lungs labouring somewhere in the darkness, a clammy smell
of distempered walls and icy flags--all these things, glimpsed or
divined in passing, were spectrally impressed upon his consciousness
as he pursued the tiny jack-o’-lantern dancing before him into
foundering glooms. And then suddenly, turning off into a deep alcove,
they had brought up before a door, strong and solid, standing slightly
ajar, with a great key in its lock. “The wine-cellar!” whispered his
guide; and he gingerly swung open the door, and backed to the wall.
“I await your solution of the problem, sir,” he said. “Will you oblige
me by pronouncing upon it?” With a curious tingling in his nerves,
Gilead entered.
“At the other end, if you will favour me,” said Mr Judex.
Thrilling in the prospect of some unconscionable discovery, Gilead
advanced an uncertain step or two. On the instant the light went out,
and a heavy slam and snap at his back told him that the door had been
shut and locked upon him.
He stood for some moments absolutely still and incredulous; then
turned in a labouring way, and saw the intense darkness split low down
with a faintest edge of light. He stumbled towards it, and found the
door.
“Mr Judex!” he cried--“Mr Judex!”
A tiny chuckling laugh reached him from without.
“How can I resolve the problem without light?” he pleaded, conscious
of a sudden moisture breaking out over his face and chest.
Again the small laugh came to him, followed by a voice.
“Darkness is the very essence of the problem, Mr Balm. I wish you to
remain there, entirely by yourself, until the morning, when I will
return to release you.”
“Mr Judex, why? In God’s name, why, Mr Judex?”
He dwelt in anguish on the answer.
“Shall I tell you?” said the voice, apparently after consideration. “I
wish you no harm--I wish you no harm whatever, Mr Balm. On the
contrary, in your mastery of fate lies my hope. Did you ever hear of
Mr Justice Starkey?”
“Yes.”
“I am he, Mr Balm, and this is my house. You will pardon, I am sure,
the deception, excusable and necessary under the circumstances. I
desired to demonstrate to the world the wickedness of its conclusions
in holding me primarily responsible for the man Maudsley’s suicide.
Confinement in the dark cell would, I am convinced, never drive a
guiltless conscience to self-destruction. It remains with you, if you
have not lied to me, to substantiate that truth.”
Somewhere in his racing thoughts, Gilead found and caught at a memory.
It was of a notorious recent case in which a prisoner, sentenced to a
term of penal servitude, and too late proved innocent, had strangled
himself in the dark cell to which he had been committed for
insubordination. There had been considerable press comment on the
matter, when aired, and Mr Justice Starkey, who had summed up
flagrantly against the accused, in despite of a strong presumption in
his favour, had met with some caustic criticism, with the result that
he had shortly after retired from the bench and withdrawn into
seclusion.
“Into the seclusion of a madhouse,” thought Gilead, appalled; “and he
has either escaped or been discharged from it.” Such, indeed, appeared
the fair presumption. He leaned against the solid door, gasping for
speech.
“I daresay the man,” he began, and stopped. He had been going to say,
“was guilty after all;” but, even in that crisis, he would not commit
his soul to a conscious untruth.
“Yes?” enquired the voice.
“Was unsophisticated, unselfpossessed in the sense of educated
reason,” he finished.
“I admit that the cases are not parallel,” answered the voice. “The
advantage is certainly on your side in that respect.”
“I would submit,” said Gilead, “that the test, to be adequate, should
be applied to a like unintelligence.”
“I am dogged and spied upon,” said the voice. “The time is too short,
and the risk of delay too instant. A bird in the hand--eh? And you
make it your interest to pursue the truth. I am sure you will surmount
the ordeal triumphantly. Good-night! I shall be here again in the
morning.”
The thread of light went out. Gilead threw himself against the door,
yelling and battering; but its jambs were solidly sunk in the
brick-work, and he barked his knuckles in vain. Pausing in the midst
of his frenzy, he heard a far distant boom as of the hall door
shutting, and knew that he was left alone, immured deep down in the
deserted house.
On the instant he recollected himself, and, with a violent wrench of
will, brought all his reason to bear on the situation.
To be buried for a few hours in a dark crypt! What was there in that
to appal an educated mind? He tried to laugh; but stopped aghast to
hear his own voice in that tremendous silence. It seemed to evoke
somewhere a wicked response. That was nonsense, of course. There was
nothing inherently sinister in his position or his surroundings. He
was merely shut into the commonplace wine-cellar of a commonplace
house. Let him consider the prospect and its obvious necessities. The
first was to forget himself--in sleep, if possible. That should be
obtainable by a calm method of reflection.
He had not moved as yet--had not dared to. The blackness was gross,
terrific. Now, all of a sudden, he remembered his matchbox, and with
a sigh of relief felt for and found it. Opening it with infinite
caution, he fingered a couple of matches, no more. One on the instant
slipped from his nervous hold, and fell to the floor. Taking an
instinctive step to recover it, his foot trod out a little flare and
explosion, gone in a moment, and only a single match remained to him.
He clutched it as a drowning man a straw.
Should he nurse that little potential spark--keep the moral of its
consolation always between himself and despair? Better, he thought, to
resolve at once the mystery of his prison than to torment himself with
imagined terrors.
The match was a stout wax one. Giving himself no time for reflection,
he struck it, and, guarding the flame jealously, held it aloft.
The cellar he found himself in was fairly deep, but nothing out of the
common. Stone bins pigeon-holed all one side of it; the other was the
bare wall. Moving pallidly, Gilead examined all its bricked-up length.
At the last moment he recollected the door, and thinking to return to
it and investigate the lock, found the match burned low in his
fingers. Only a second or two of life remained to it; he was standing
by the ultimate bin, when he perceived a heap of sacking lying within
it. He dragged the mass hurriedly out, and, casting it on the floor,
observed a solitary bottle which it had concealed. He had but time to
grasp this by the neck, when the match burned his fingers, and, with a
gasping exclamation, he dropped it, and was in utter darkness once
more. Feeling for the sacking, he let himself down upon it, hugging
his find.
And now, in truth, he was committed to the ordeal, with only a bottle
for his companion. He was a completely temperate man, and in any case
he had no idea what the bottle contained; yet somehow the feel of its
sleek sides was a solace to him. Unopened it seemed to cheer and
inebriate, as the presence of a jovial comrade might, though fast
asleep by one’s side in a haunted house. He patted it fondly, and
closed his eyes.
The blackness weighed upon them, instantly and horribly. He opened
them with a start, as if he had only emerged just in time from
drowning waters. But they took no comfort from that sightless
recovery. He strove to concentrate his thoughts on his interests, his
ambition, even his gold. It was all useless. Light, he realized, or at
least some dilution of darkness, was necessary to sane thought as it
was to healthy growth. Without it all things stagnated and fed upon
themselves. The coffers of his banks might be bursting with his
hoards; they were impotent to buy him one moment of
self-forgetfulness. All his omnipotence could not command him a right
ray of reason.
“This will not do,” he thought. “It is childish and contemptible.”
Lying on his side, he closed his lids again determinedly; and straight
with the action, it seemed, there was shut into his mind a torturing
demon. “The innocent man,” it kept whispering to him, “failed, for all
his innocence, to keep his reason. No self-conscious probity can be
proof for long against these supernormal conditions. A hardened
conscience could resist them more effectually.”
He reviled the tempter, hated him, found himself suddenly listening to
him, with his forehead all clammy and his hands shaking. To be goaded
into strangling himself in this black and loathsome pit! The thought
was monstrous, incredible--and it clung to him. He sat up in a gasping
panic. He forced himself to repeat hundreds of lines and passages from
memory. Presently he found that his tongue was running involuntarily
into inanities and blasphemies, and he stopped.
“What on earth is the matter with me?” he reflected. For the moment a
re-dawn of sanity glowed within him; his pulses slowed. “It is too
utterly ridiculous!” he said aloud.
He rose to his feet, and, feeling by the wall, went up and down, up
and down, hoping to tire himself in a normal way. But gradually he
seemed to become conscious, every time he approached the door, of some
evil invisible presence lurking outside. The vast emptiness of the
house above occurred to him with a horror even greater than his cell
inspired. “They are trooping down,” he thought awfully, “to listen at
my door.”
Who the ‘they’ were only his excited imagination might say. Little by
little, he contracted his area, until he was standing once more
motionless by the heap of sacking.
“Solitary confinement in a dark cell is an unutterable wickedness--an
unutterable wickedness,” he kept repeating to himself. Then, in a
spasm of horror, he turned, and clawed blindly at the wall, like a
trapped animal. He dared not go near the door again, or he would have
concentrated all his strength on one frenzied effort to burst it open.
But he had come to dread horribly the thought of evoking an uproar in
that blind silence. As long as he was quiet _they_ might keep outside.
Presently, his legs seeming to give under him, he sank down again upon
his rough couch. An hour went by in such mental suffering as he had
never before experienced or conceived. And then, suddenly, with a
ghastly groan, he pulled himself together and sat up.
“I can stand no more,” he whispered, and, reaching for the bottle,
knocked its head off against the wall. A gush of liquid came over his
hand, a stinging fragrance to his nostrils--brandy!
“Thank God!” he ejaculated fervently, and without hesitation put his
mouth to the shattered edge, indifferent to consequences, and gulping
once or twice, replaced the bottle on the stones. The potent stuff
poured into his veins; its fumes rose to his brain. Like any overtaken
sot, he toppled prone, and lapsed into quick insensibility.
A cry in his brain, a pertinacious worry of light in his eyes, awoke
him, and he raised his head. There were people in the cellar--his
secretary, Miss Halifax, a curious stranger, a police constable
holding a dark-lantern. The lady, from whom the pity-stricken
exclamation seemed to have come, stood, one hand poised at her lips, a
little apart. The secretary bent over him.
“It’s all right, sir,” he said. “He’s caught, thank God!”
Gilead, with assistance, staggered to his feet.
“What--where!” he exclaimed wildly--“Mr Justice Starkey?”
“Ah!” said the secretary; “you know his name, then?”
“He told me plain enough,” said Gilead faintly--“and his purpose; but
that was after he’d locked me in. How did you know? how did you find
me?”
“It was Miss Halifax, sir,” said the secretary. “You told her about
the appointment, you know, and the thing worried her--worried her to
that degree that in the evening she must come round to confide her
fears to me. I didn’t like the sound of it myself, and, after
consultation, we decided to take a cab to Raxe’s hotel and discover
what we could about Mr Judex. That was near ten o’clock, and we
reached the place to find it in a commotion over the man himself. It
appeared that he had escaped from a private asylum at Sutton, and had
eluded recapture until his own advertisement gave him away. The
attendants had been waiting for his return to the hotel, and had
nabbed him just before our arrival. I stated our fears to them, and
sure enough, on overhauling him, they found in his possession the key
of his own front-door, which he had procured, under his assumed name,
from the house-agents. This gentleman representing the asylum, we all
came on together, and engaging the services of a constable, entered
the house. From a hint let fall by the madman, we gathered that we
should find you locked in somewhere down here, and your snoring, sir,
led us to the spot.”
Gilead, with a faint blush, glanced down at the tell-tale bottle.
“He said it was his wish to demonstrate,” he murmured, “how the dark
cell could hold no terrors for the impeccable conscience, and how,
therefore, arguing per contra, the man Maudsley _must_ have been
guilty of the crime for which he was sentenced.”
The constable put in a word:--
“He went mad on it, sir, did his Lordship. The papers and his own
conscience druv him off of his head.”
“Thank you,” said Gilead quietly; “and thank you, too, Nestle.” He
crossed, with some sign of emotion, to where Miss Halifax stood by the
wall. “You advised me,” he said, “and I have had a fine lesson in
self-sufficiency. It is humiliating to have to own that I owe my
reason, such as it is, to a chance bottle of brandy which I found in
one of the bins. But for that, I am afraid, you would have exhumed a
gibbering idiot. I shall think more mercifully of one form of drunkard
for the future, and less confidently of myself.” He turned. “If this
gentleman,” he added courteously, “will favour me with his address, I
shall take pleasure in acquitting myself of my considerable
obligations to him. You, Constable, will no doubt find an opportunity
of calling at Lamb’s Agency some time during your off-hours, when a
closed envelope will be put into your hands.”
He bowed punctiliously to each, offered his arm to Miss Halifax, and,
waiting for the Constable to lead, quitted the place of durance.