CHAPTER III.
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 theCrucifixion 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. "Itreminds 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'tthink 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 ghastlyfigure of the Crucified One stretching bare arms over them on the wall.
"Good-night," smiled the leader again. "Good-night, andbon 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 frontdoor 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.