Reginald was angry with himself for his delay in fleet Street, and questioned further. The young lady had been gone, now, some twenty minutes or half an hour. No, she hadn’t said anything in particular, beyond asking for him, and bringing in with her Mrs. Churcher’s bunch of keys, which she had supposed to be Mr. Drinkwater’s, left in the outer door by accident.
Reginald had his lunch sent in, and kept within doors for the rest of the day; but he saw nothing of Lucia da Silva. After breakfast next morning he perceived, with uncommon serenity, that the weather was damp and foggy, and afforded some sort of excuse for hanging about in his rooms, or at farthest on the stairs and lobby, while Mrs. Churcher performed her daily rites. But he waited and watched in vain till Mrs. Churcher had been gone out an hour, and more.
Then at last there was a timid tap at his door, which he opened instantly, to see Lucia before him.
“I have come,” she said, “only because I have made you a promise. Do you remember the promise?”
“Indeed I do—that you would tell me if I could be in any way of service to you and your brother. Tell me, now, what I can do.”
“I think, perhaps, you might not like it.”
“If it will serve you—and your brother—I shall delight in it. I will do anything. What is it?”
“They have discovered our lodgings—the men.”
“The men who were watching you?”
“Yes. How I do not know. Perhaps they followed the cab—perhaps some other way; who can tell? They have found us out again, and we must go; but they are watching us, and it is difficult.”
“Where will you go?”
“That is for my brother to settle; but I think he has plans, if—if we have a friend—a devoted, noble friend who will help us. Will you be the noble friend?”
“Of course—I have promised. I will do anything. What is the plan?”
“I will say what my brother thinks. We have been going out, my brother and I, every evening, in a cab, to dinner at a restaurant. Will you come with me tonight, instead of my brother?”
Could there be a pleasanter deed of heroism? Reginald heard the proposal with perhaps as much relief as surprise, for this was an act of devotion that he was quite ready to perform every day of his life. “It will give me the greatest pleasure,” he said. “Where shall I come for you?”
“This is where we are staying,” she replied, and handed him a card. It was that of a house—obviously a boarding-house—in a quiet square near the New River Head; a place that Reginald remembered to have seen in his wanderings in London, and to have noticed because of its contrast of character with the neighboring streets.
“You must not come to the front door,” she resumed, “as you will understand when I explain. There is a path behind the houses, with stables. Each house has a door in the garden wall, and you must come to the fourth, where I shall be waiting before six o’clock; let us say half-past five.”
“That will be early for dinner, won’t it?”
“Oh, we need not go to dinner at once. Often my brother and I go out early. The house on the north side of the square, remember. Will you come? I must not wait here—my brother is expecting me. You will come?”
Nothing should stop him, Reginald resolved, that left him with legs to stand on; and he said so, in more elegant terms. And even as he was gathering his wits to frame certain inquiries that should not seem to pry, she was gone, with a press of the hand and a glance from her black eyes that kept him vastly elated for ten minutes; at the end of which period it dawned on him, as it might have done before, that it must be intended that he should assume the character of Lucia’s brother for the evening, together with the liabilities of that relationship, including any casual bullet that his enemies might consider a suitable token of their sentiments. With that his elation sensibly diminished, and it occurred to him that it was much pleasanter to listen to Lucia’s praises of his magnanimity than to do anything to deserve them.
Still, it was an adventure, and he was in for it beyond withdrawal; morever, the danger somehow did not affect him as very immediate. The design appeared fairly clear. He was to enter the house from the back unobserved, and to leave it from the front, so as to draw off the attention of the watchers. Then, while the house was free from their observation, Luiz da Silva would make his escape and find some other retreat. “You must not come to the front door,” Lucia had said, “as you will understand when I explain.” But she had explained nothing as yet, and no doubt meant to reserve explanations till his arrival; though the plan seemed clear enough.
On the whole he decided that he must dress for dinner. He could not tell whether or not Luiz da Silva had brought a dress-suit with him, that being one of the things he had meant to ask; but it could make little difference, either way. So dress he did.
The fog thickened during the day, and it was dark some time before the hour fixed. Reginald left his cab a street or two away, and walked the remaining distance. The square was not difficult to find, nor the pathway behind the garden wall; and as he reached the fourth of the doors it opened while his hand was raised to tap, and he could see Lucia’s dim figure within.
“Hush!” she said, “do not speak now. It is most noble of you.”
She took his arm, led him in and quietly closed and fastened the door. The garden was a small enough space, but they traversed it slowly as well as noiselessly; and Reginald began to feel that this was something more like an adventure than any previous experience of his life. They climbed a short flight of stone steps, and entered the house by a door which stood ajar; and then she spoke again.
“There is a cab waiting,” she said. “Will you turn up your coat-collar? If you will do that, and pull your hat a little forward, you will look much like my brother.”
He did as he was bid, and they emerged into the dim light of the hall, with its feeble gas-jet.
He could now see that Lucia was already prepared, with hat and cloak. She opened the front door.
“I think they are at the corner of the square, to the left,” she whispered. “Do not look in that direction, but come straight into the cab. We go to the Café Royal.”
The door shut softly behind them, and Reginald, his eyes fixed rigidly on the cab, valiantly resisted a desperate impulse to plunge into it headlong, and descended the steps with nervous deliberation. Truly this was an adventure at last.
He experienced a feeling of much relief when they were safely seated in the cab and bowling through the streets toward Bloomsbury; but he got little conversation from his companion, who seemed nervous and thoughtful. He ventured to doubt the possibility that they were being followed; but she assured him that she and her brother had been followed on just such an occasion on the previous evening, a little later, and surmised that the enemy must keep a cab within call. And to a suggestion that an arrival at the Café Royal at six o’clock would be a little awkward she replied that there was a very particular reason for it, which her brother would explain in detail when he had the happiness of personally meeting Mr. Drinkwater, to whom he would be eternally grateful.
Through Hart Street they turned into New Oxford Street, and so down Shaftesbury Avenue. As they neared Picadilly Circus she spoke again. “If you will pay the man through the roof-door,” she said, “we shall not have to stand long when we alight.”
Reginald admired the mental alertness that could suggest this expedient to a foreigner in London, and complied with the suggestion; so that when the cab pulled up before the Café Royal they lost no time in reaching the swing-doors. Reginald saw, with some apprehension, that another cab stopped a little way behind them though after all with so many other cabs about it might not be worth considering.
The doors swung behind them, and Reginald felt a further accession of confidence. What an adventure!
But here he encountered surprise and disappointment. For Lucia turned to him and said
hurriedly: “Oh, Mr. Drinkwater, I can never repay you! How brave you are! I have been in terrible fear for you all the way. Perhaps I ought not to have brought you, but there was no other friend for my dear brother—the brother I love so well! Will you promise to stay here, and not show yourself outside till after dinner? Till nine o’clock?”
“Certainly—we must wait before dinner—we—we—”
“Thank you, oh, thank you!” she interrupted, seizing his hand. “I must leave you now—I must go at once to my brother. There is a side door here, I know, into a little dark street; I shall not be seen. I will see you, or write to you, very soon. Good-bye, my noble friend!”
And with that she was gone, leaving Reginald dumb and blinking. So he stood till it occurred to him that he was attracting notice; which indeed he was. Whereupon he stalked gloomily across the room and flung himself into a seat; and being impelled to do scmething desperate, he ordered absinthe, which he did not like, but which was the most desperate form of refreshment he could think of.
He sat alone and glowered and smoked cigarettes for an hour and a half; a period of time which sufficed to relieve his disappointment, and arouse his interest in the very excellent dinner which was to follow. And the excellent dinner reconciled him to his circumstances so far that he began to congratulate himself on having very cleverly foiled a very desperate gang of conspirators. He fell to wondering when and how he should next hear of Lucia da Silva; and so, a little past nine o’clock, he made his way home on foot, rather better satisfied with himself, on the whole, that he had felt after any other dinner he could remember. For he had an idea that he had acquitted himself very well; and, indeed, it was a very jewel of an adventure.
Once more next morning he endured the society of Mrs. Churcher after breakfast—the fog was even heavier, today—but there was no caller. None, indeed, till the afternoon, and then it was a messenger-boy, with a letter; a letter written on scented paper in violet ink, but scribbled so hurriedly that it was often difficult to separate words and sentences. This done, however, it read thus:
MY DEAR FRIEND,—
My brother and I cannot thank you enough for your generous kindness last night, which, alas, did not avail so effectually as we had hoped. The watching enemy were, as you know, two, and it would seem that only one followed us, leaving the other, the small, short man, to watch and confront my brother. This led to something which has altered our plans and makes us ask you for one favor more. Will you do it? Do not refuse after such kindness as you have shown. Will you go with a cab this evening at about six to the house we have left and bring away a large box? Enclosed is a note for the landlady, who will give you the box, and will hand you a hasty note of instructions I have left. Do not stay to read that note till you are in the cab and safely away with the box, and do not let the cab stand at the house longer than you can help. Also do not mention our real name to the landlady—you will understand that we have been obliged to conceal it. This time you will go to the front door, of course. Send me a note by this messenger saying that you will do this without fail.
Ever yours gratefully and hopefully,
LUCIA
Here was more food for Reginald’s romantic appetite, which was by no means sated yet, but rather sharpened by experience. He longed to learn what had happened as the result of the encounter of Luiz and his enemy, and how the plot stood now. So he sent by the messenger a hurried note that he would certainly and gladly do all that was asked of him, and addressed himself to preparations. Such an adventure!
III
IT was within a very few minutes of six that Reginald’s cab—this time a four-wheeler, because the box might be large—brought him once more to the house in Pentonville. There was some little difficulty in finding it, for the fog had been thickening all day. This he judged an advantage as regarded the removal of the boxa thing no doubt that would be better done unobserved.
His knock brought to the door a very common-place general servant, who took the note, and presently returned with another, addressed in Lucia’s handwriting, to himself. Then she led him into a side room and shortly indicated the box by a jerk of the hand and a suggestion that he would find it “pretty heavy.”
It was a larger box than he had expected, long and unwieldy, and more than he could carry by himself. So he called the cabman, and they found it no very easy carrying, together; the cabman, in fact, growling furiously.
The box safely mounted on the roof, Reginald lost no time in entering the cab, giving the cabman the first direction for farringdon Road, that being the nearest main road he could think of at the moment. After an excruciating delay—the cabman was exasperatingly deliberate with his rug—they moved off, and Reginald pulled out his note of instructions. It was even more hurriedly scribbled, he noticed, than the letter he had received by the messenger-boy a few hours before, the words running on with scarcely a lift of the pen, and no punctuation at all. The streets were dark as well as foggy, and he could only catch a glimpse on the paper now and again as they passed a shop or an uncommonly bright street-lamp, and one or two of the more legible words started out and vanished again. “Waterloo Station” was clear, near the bottom, and higher up “trouble,” “difficulty,” and “remains.” At this last word Reginald sat up with an awful shock. Remains? What was in that heavy box on the roof?
At this moment the cab emerged into a street so full of lighted shops that the whole note became plain; separating words and sentences with some difficulty, this is what he read:
“Sorry to trouble, but difficulty with small man caused. Troublesome thing. We must remove remains in box. Trust you implicitly. Bring to York Road gate of Waterloo Station 6.30.”
What words can paint the consternation of Reginald Drinkwater as he read this note? “We must remove remains in box!” This, then, was the event that had altered their plans and caused them “to ask one favor more.” The encounter in the fog between Luiz da Silva and his enemy had ended in the death of the small man, and here was he, Reginald Drinkwater, carrying the corpse across London in a cab!
The callousness of the note, too! The “difficulty” with the small man had caused the trouble, and it—or he—was merely a “troublesome thing!” A truly Southern contempt of human life!
As he sat, amazed and confounded, the cab pulled up in farringdon Road, and the driver, with growls from the box, invited further instructions.
The interruption recalled Reginald to action. “The York Road gate of Waterloo Station,” he said, “as quick as you can get there!”
For, indeed, this was all he could do. They trusted him; he had accepted the trust and had given his word, though he had never guessed what it involved. And after all, he reflected, this was a different thing, far from murder; nothing but simple self-defence. Though that consideration somehow made very little difference to the horror of the long box on the roof and what it held.
The cab crawled and thumped and clattered through the fog, and Reginald prayed for the fog to thicken and so hide the ghastly box from human sight. And thicken it did, so that after a martyrdom of stopping and starting and crawling through farringdon Road and Street, the vehicle emerged from Ludgate Circus to encounter an increasing blackness in New Bridge Street. On it crept, close by the curb, and presently was lost in an immensity of mist, wherein nothing could be seen but nebulous light in distant random spots. They were making across the end of Queen Victoria Street for Blackfriars Bridge.
The voyage across this smoky ocean seemed to be the longest stretch of the interminable journey. Once or twice the lights of some other vehicle neared and faded again, and shouts came from invisible depths; but the traffic hereabout was sparse just now. Reginald had begun to consider the possibility that the cab was making circles among the multitudinous crossings of these regions, when suddenly the horse stumbled and fell in a heap.
The cabman made one roll of it out of his rug and off the box, and was diml
y visible hauling at his horse’s head and clearly audible cursing its entire body. The horse, for its own part, seemed disposed to approve of the situation, and willingly to accept the opportunity for a prolonged rest. Blows and shouts, it would seem to reflect, were much the same, lying or standing, and lying was the easier posture.
Reginald’s terrors increased tenfold; there would be a crowd, and a policeman, and the long box would be hauled down under general observation; and in his disordered memory the thing seemed now to have looked so like a stumpy coffin that he wondered he had not suspected it at once. He must, at any rate, keep it from the eye of a policeman.
He scrambled out, and addressed the cabman. “If your horse is long getting up,” he said, “I’ll have another cab. I’m in a hurry.”
“All right,” replied the cabman, extending his palm. “I’ve ’ad enough of it, if you ’ave. ’E ain’t a easy one to get up, once ’e’s down, an’ I b’lieve ’is knees is cut. Gimme my fare.”
Reginald hastily produced half a crown, and stood as firmly as he could while the man shoved the horrible box into his arms, and then slung his end on the neighboring curb. Having done which the cabman turned his attention once more to his horse, leaving his late fare to wrestle his luggage across the pavement; for Reginald’s immediate purpose was to elude the eye of the policeman who must inevitably arrive to inspect the recumbent horse.
Plainly the cab had strayed in the wide space before Blackfriars Bridge, and wandered diagonally across the approach; for now Reginald perceived that he had landed on the footpath of the Victoria Embankment. He pushed the box, end over end, into the darkest available spot under the parapet, and peered out into the choking fog in search of another cab.
But very soon he began to understand that he was attempting something near an impossibility. A passing light in the wide, dark road was the most that could be seen of any cab, and each dash from the curb which he made only revealed that the cab was engaged. He began to grow seriously alarmed. He could not carry the thing—indeed he began to experience a growing repugnance to touch it or go near it—and there seemed to be positively no means of getting it to Waterloo. Moreover, the time appointed was already long overpast, and it was near seven.
The Arthur Morrison Mystery Page 169