Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts Part 5

"Hullo, constables!" said a voice. "What's the row?" It was Gervase.

He had turned leisurely back from the slope of Conduit Street, and came strolling down the road with his hands in his pockets.

"This fellow, Sir--we have reason to think he was followin' you."

"Quite right," Gervase answered cheerfully, "of course he was."

"Oh, if you knew it, Sir--"

"Certainly I knew it. In fact, he was following at my invitation."

"What for did he tell me a lie, then?" grumbled the constable, chapfallen.

I had picked myself up by this time and was wiping my face.

"Look here," I put in, "I asked you the way to Oxford Street, that and nothing else." And I went on to summarise my opinion of him.

"Oh! it's you can swear a bit," he growled. "I heard you just now."

"Yes," Gervase interposed suavely, drawing the glove from his right hand and letting flash a diamond finger-ring in the lamp-light. "He _is_ a bit of a beast, policeman, and it's not for the pleasure of it that I want his company."

A sovereign pa.s.sed from hand to hand. The other constable had discreetly drawn off a pace or two.

"All the same, it's a rum go."

"Yes, isn't it?" Gervase a.s.sented in his heartiest tone. "Here is my card, in case you're not satisfied."

"If _you're_ satisfied, Sir--"

"Quite so. Good night!" Gervase thrust both hands into his pockets again and strode off. I followed him, with a heart hotter than ever-- followed him like a whipped cur, as they say. Yes, that was just it.

He who had already robbed me of everything else had now kicked even the pedestal from under me as a figure of tragedy. Five minutes ago I had been the implacable avenger tracking my unconscious victim across the city. Heaven knows how small an excuse it was for self-respect; but one who has lost character may yet chance to catch a dignity from circ.u.mstances; and to tell the truth, for all my desperate earnestness I had allowed my vanity to take some artistic satisfaction in the sinister chase. It had struck me--shall I say?--as an effective ending, nor had I failed to note that the snow lent it a romantic touch.

And behold, the unconscious victim knew all about it, and had politely interfered when a couple of unromantic "Bobbies" threatened the performance by tumbling the stalking avenger into the gutter! They had knocked my tragedy into harlequinade as easily as you might bash in a hat; and my enemy had refined the cruelty of it by coming to the rescue and ironically restarting the poor play on lines of comedy. I saw too late that I ought to have refused his help, to have a.s.saulted the constable and been hauled to the police-station. Not an impressive wind-up, to be sure; but less humiliating than this! Even so, Gervase might have trumped the poor card by following with a gracious offer to bail me out!

As it was, I had put the whip into his hand, and must follow him like a cur. The distance he kept a.s.sured me that the similitude had not escaped him. He strode on without deigning a single glance behind, still in cold derision presenting me his broad back and silently challenging me to shoot. And I followed, hating him worse than ever, swearing that the last five minutes should not be forgotten, but charged for royally when the reckoning came to be paid.

I followed thus up Conduit Street, up Regent Street, and across the Circus. The frost had deepened and the mud in the roadway crackled under our feet. At the Circus I began to guess, and when Gervase struck off into Great Portland Street, and thence by half-a-dozen turnings northward by east, I knew to what house he was leading me.

At the entrance of the side street in which it stood he halted and motioned me to come close.

"I forget," he said with a jerk of his thumb, "if you still have the entry. These people are not particular, to be sure."

"I have not," I answered, and felt my cheeks burning. He could not see this, nor could I see the lift of his eyebrows as he answered--

"Ah? I hadn't heard of it. . . . You'd better step round by the mews, then. You know the window, the one which opens into the pa.s.sage leading to Pollox Street. Wait there. It may be ten minutes before I can open."

I nodded. The house was a corner one, between the street and a by-lane tenanted mostly by cabmen; and at the back of it ran the mews where they stabled their horses. Half-way down this mews a narrow alley cut across it at right angles: a pa.s.sage un-frequented by traffic, known only to the stablemen, and in the daytime used only by their children, who played hop-scotch on the flagged pavement, where no one interrupted them. You wondered at its survival--from end to end it must have measured a good fifty yards--in a district where every square foot of ground fetched money; until you learned that the house had belonged, in the 'twenties, to a n.o.bleman who left a name for eccentric profligacy, and who, as owner of the land, could afford to indulge his humours.

The estate since his death was in no position to afford money for alterations, and the present tenants of the house found the pa.s.sage convenient enough.

My footsteps disturbed no one in the sleeping mews; and doubling back noiselessly through the pa.s.sage, I took up my station beside the one low window which opened upon it from the blank back premises of the house.

Even with the glimmer of snow to help me, I had to grope for the window-sill to make sure of my bearings. The minutes crawled by, and the only sound came from a stall where one of the horses had kicked through his thin straw bedding and was shuffling an uneasy hoof upon the cobbles. Then just as I too had begun to shuffle my frozen feet, I heard a scratching sound, the unbolting of a shutter, and Gervase drew up the sash softly.

"Nip inside!" he whispered. "No more noise than you can help. I have sent off the night porter. He tells me the bank is still going in the front of the house--half-a-dozen playing, perhaps."

I hoisted myself over the sill, and dropped inside. The wall of this annexe--which had no upper floor, and invited you to mistake it for a harmless studio--was merely a sheath, so to speak. Within, a corridor divided it from the true wall of the room: and this room had no window or top-light, though a handsome one in the roof--a dummy--beguiled the eyes of its neighbours.

There was but one room: an apartment of really fine proportions, never used by the tenants of the house, and known but to a few curious ones among its frequenters.

The story went that the late owner, Earl C--, had reason to believe himself persistently cheated at cards by his best friends, and in particular by a Duke of the Blood Royal, who could hardly be accused to his face. The Earl's sense of honour forbade him to accuse any meaner man while the big culprit went unrebuked. Therefore he continued to lose magnificently while he devised a new room for play: the room in which I now followed Gervase.

I had stood in it once before and admired the courtly and costly thoroughness of the Earl's rebuke. I had imagined him conducting his expectant guests to the door, ushering them in with a wave of the hand, and taking his seat tranquilly amid the dead, embarra.s.sed silence: had imagined him facing the Royal Duke and asking, "Shall we cut?" with a voice of the politest inflection.

For the room was a sheet of mirrors. Mirrors panelled the walls, the doors, the very backs of the shutters. The tables had mirrors for tops: the whole ceiling was one vast mirror. From it depended three great candelabra of cut-gla.s.s, set with reflectors here, there, and everywhere.

I had heard that even the floor was originally of polished bra.s.s.

If so, later owners must have ripped up the plates and sold them: for now a few cheap Oriental rugs carpeted the unpolished boards. The place was abominably dusty: the striped yellow curtains had lost half their rings and drooped askew from their soiled vallances. Across one of the wall-panels ran an ugly scar. A smell of rat pervaded the air.

The present occupiers had no use for a room so obviously unsuitable to games of chance, as they understood chance: and I doubt if a servant entered it once a month. Gervase had ordered candles and a fire: but the chimney was out of practice, and the smoke wreathed itself slowly about us as we stood surrounded by the ghostly company of our reflected selves.

"We shall not be disturbed," said Gervase. "I told the man I was expecting a friend, that our business was private, and that until he called I wished to be alone. I did not explain by what entrance I expected him. The people in the front cannot hear us. Have a cigar?"

He pushed the open case towards me. Then, as I drew back, "You've no need to be scrupulous," he added, "seeing that they were bought with your money."

"If that's so, I will," said I; and having chosen one, struck a match.

Glancing round, I saw a hundred small flames spurt up, and a hundred men hold them to a hundred glowing cigar-tips.

"After you with the match." Gervase took it from me with a steady hand.

He, too, glanced about him while he puffed. "Ugh!" He blew a long cloud, and s.h.i.+vered within his furred overcoat. "What a gang!"

"It takes all sorts to make a world," said I fatuously, for lack of anything better.

"Don't be an infernal idiot!" he answered, flicking the dust off one of the gilt chairs, and afterwards cleaning a s.p.a.ce for his elbow on the looking-gla.s.s table. "It takes only two sorts to make the world we've lived in, and that's you and I." He gazed slowly round the walls.

"You and I, and a few fellows like us--not to mention the women, who don't count."

"Well," said I, "as far as the world goes--if you must discuss it-- I always found it a good enough place."

"Because you started as an unconsidering fool: and because, afterwards, when we came to grips, you were the under-dog, and I gave you no time.

My word--how I have hustled you!"

I yawned. "All right: I can wait. Only if you suppose I came here to listen to your moral reflections--"

He pulled the cigar from between his teeth and looked at me along it.

"I know perfectly well why you came here," he said slowly, and paused.

"Hadn't we better have it out--with the cards on the table?" He drew a small revolver from his pocket and laid it with a light clink on the table before him. I hesitated for a moment, then followed his example, and the silent men around us did the same.

A smile curled his thin lips as he observed this multiplied gesture.

"Yes," he said, as if to himself, "that is what it all comes to."

"And now," said I, "since you know my purpose here, perhaps you will tell me yours."

"That is just what I am trying to explain. Only you are so impatient, and it--well, it's a trifle complicated." He puffed for a moment in silence. "Roughly, it might be enough to say that I saw you standing outside my house a while ago; that I needed a talk with you alone, in some private place; that I guessed, if you saw me, you would follow with no more invitation; and that, so reasoning, I led you here, where no one is likely to interrupt us."