The Beetle Part 10

I fancy, if I had performed that portion of the act I should have lain quiet for a second or two, to consider whereabouts I was, and which end of me was uppermost. But there was no nonsense of that sort about that singularly agile stranger,-if he was not made of india-rubber he ought to have been. So to speak, before he was down he was up,-it was all I could do to grab at him before he was off like a rocket.

Such a figure as he presented is seldom seen,-at least, in the streets of London. What he had done with the rest of his apparel I am not in a position to say,-all that was left of it was a long, dark cloak which he strove to wrap round him. Save for that,-and mud!-he was bare as the palm of my hand, Yet it was his face that held me. In my time I have seen strange expressions on men's faces, but never before one such as I saw on his. He looked like a man might look who, after living a life of undiluted crime, at last finds himself face to face with the devil. It was not the look of a madman,-far from it; it was something worse.

It was the expression on the man's countenance, as much as anything else, which made me behave as I did. I said something to him,-some nonsense, I know not what. He regarded me with a silence which was supernatural. I spoke to him again;-not a word issued from those rigid lips; there was not a tremor of those awful eyes,-eyes which I was tolerably convinced saw something which I had never seen, or ever should. Then I took my hand from off his shoulder, and let him go. I know not why,-I did.

He had remained as motionless, as a statue while I held him,- indeed, for any evidence of life he gave, he might have been a statue; but, when my grasp was loosed, how he ran! He had turned the corner and was out of sight before I could say, 'How do!'

It was only then,-when he had gone, and I had realised the extra- double-express-flash-of-lightning rate at which he had taken his departure-that it occurred to me of what an extremely sensible act I had been guilty in letting him go at all. Here was an individual who had been committing burglary, or something very like it, in the house of a budding cabinet minister, and who had tumbled plump into my arms, so that all I had to do was to call a policeman and get him quodded,-and all that I had done was something of a totally different kind.

'You're a nice type of an ideal citizen!' I was addressing myself, 'A first chop specimen of a low-down idiot,-to connive at the escape of the robber who's been robbing Paul. Since you've let the villain go, the least you can do is to leave a card on the Apostle, and inquire how he's feeling.'

I went to Lessingham's front door and knocked,-I knocked once, I knocked twice, I knocked thrice, and the third time, I give you my word, I made the echoes ring,-but still there was not a soul that answered.

'If this is a case of a seven or seventy-fold murder, and the gentleman in the cloak has made a fair clearance of every living creature the house contains, perhaps it's just as well I've chanced upon the scene,-still I do think that one of the corpses might get up to answer the door. If it is possible to make noise enough to waken the dead, you bet I'm on to it.'

And I was,-I punished that knocker! until I warrant the pounding I gave it was audible on the other side of Green Park. And, at last, I woke the dead,-or, rather, I roused Matthews to a consciousness that something was going on. Opening the door about six inches, through the interstice he protruded his ancient nose.

'Who's there?'

'Nothing, my dear sir, nothing and no one. It must have been your vigorous imagination which induced you to suppose that there was, -you let it run away with you.'

Then he knew me,-and opened the door about two feet.

'Oh, it's you, Mr Atherton. I beg your pardon, sir,-I thought it might have been the police.'

'What then? Do you stand in terror of the minions of the law,-at last?'

A most discreet servant, Matthews,-just the fellow for a budding cabinet minister. He glanced over his shoulder,-I had suspected the presence of a colleague at his back, now I was a.s.sured. He put his hand up to his mouth,-and I thought how exceedingly discreet he looked, in his trousers and his stockinged feet, and with his hair all rumpled, and his braces dangling behind, and his nightshirt creased.

'Well, sir, I have received instructions not to admit the police.'

'The deuce you have!-From whom?'

Coughing behind his hand, leaning forward, he addressed me with an air which was flatteringly confidential.

'From Mr Lessingham, sir.'

'Possibly Mr Lessingham is not aware that a robbery has been committed on his premises, that the burglar has just come out of his drawing-room window with a hop, skip, and a jump, bounded out of the window like a tennis-ball, flashed round the corner like a rocket,'

Again Matthews glanced over his shoulder, as if not clear which way discretion lay, whether fore or aft.

'Thank you, sir. I believe that Mr Lessingham is aware of something of the kind.' He seemed to come to a sudden resolution, dropping his voice to a whisper. 'The fact is, sir, that I fancy Mr Lessingham's a good deal upset.'

'Upset?' I stared at him. There was something in his manner I did not understand. 'What do you mean by upset? Has the scoundrel attempted violence?'

'Who's there?'

The voice was Lessingham's, calling to Matthews from the staircase, though, for an instant, I hardly recognised it, it was so curiously petulant. Pushing past Matthews, I stepped into the hall. A young man, I suppose a footman, in the same undress as Matthews, was holding a candle,-it seemed the only light about the place. By its glimmer I perceived Lessingham standing half-way up the stairs. He was in full war paint,-as he is not the sort of man who dresses for the House, I took it that he had been mixing pleasure with business.

'It's I, Lessingham,-Atherton. Do you know that a fellow has jumped out of your drawing-room window?'

It was a second or two before he answered. When he did, his voice had lost its petulance.

'Has he escaped?'

'Clean,-he's a mile away by now.'

It seemed to me that in his tone, when he spoke again, there was a note of relief.

'I wondered if he had. Poor fellow! more sinned against than sinning! Take my advice, Atherton, and keep out of politics. They bring you into contact with all the lunatics at large. Good night! I am much obliged to you for knocking us up. Matthews, shut the door.'

Tolerably cool, on my honour,-a man who brings news big with the fate of Rome does not expect to receive such treatment. He expects to be listened to with deference, and to hear all that there is to hear, and not to be sent to the right-about before he has had a chance of really opening his lips. Before I knew it-almost!-the door was shut, and I was on the doorstep. Confound the Apostle's impudence! next time he might have his house burnt down-and him in it!-before I took the trouble to touch his dirty knocker.

What did he mean by his allusion to lunatics in politics,-did he think to fool me? There was more in the business than met the eye,-and a good deal more than he wished to meet mine,-hence his insolence. The creature.

What Marjorie Lindon could see in such an opusculum surpa.s.sed my comprehension; especially when there was a man of my sort walking about, who adored the very ground she trod upon.

CHAPTER XII

A MORNING VISITOR

All through the night, waking and sleeping, and in my dreams, I wondered what Marjorie could see in him! In those same dreams I satisfied myself that she could, and did, see nothing in him, but everything in me,-oh the comfort! The misfortune was that when I awoke I knew it was the other way round,-so that it was a sad awakening. An awakening to thoughts of murder.

So, swallowing a mouthful and a peg, I went into my laboratory to plan murder-legalised murder-on the biggest scale it ever has been planned. I was on the track of a weapon which would make war not only an affair of a single campaign, but of a single half- hour. It would not want an army to work it either. Once let an individual, or two or three at most, in possession of my weapon- that-was-to-be, get within a mile or so of even the largest body of disciplined troops that ever yet a nation put into the field, and-pouf!-in about the time it takes you to say that they would be all dead men. If weapons of precision, which may be relied upon to slay, are preservers of the peace-and the man is a fool who says that they are not!-then I was within reach of the finest preserver of the peace imagination ever yet conceived.

What a sublime thought to think that in the hollow of your own hand lies the life and death of nations,-and it was almost in mine.

I had in front of me some of the finest destructive agents you could wish to light upon-carbon-monoxide, chlorine-trioxide, mercuric-oxide, conine, pota.s.samide, pota.s.sium-carboxide, cyanogen-when Edwards entered. I was wearing a mask of my own invention, a thing that covered ears and head and everything, something like a diver's helmet-I was dealing with gases a sniff of which meant death; only a few days before, unmasked, I had been doing some fool's trick with a couple of acids-sulphuric and cyanide of pota.s.sium-when, somehow, my hand slipped, and, before I knew it, minute portions of them combined. By the mercy of Providence I fell backwards instead of forwards;-sequel, about an hour afterwards Edwards found me on the floor, and it took the remainder of that day, and most of the doctors in town, to bring me back to life again.

Edwards announced his presence by touching me on the shoulder,- when I am wearing that mask it isn't always easy to make me hear.

'Someone wishes to see you, sir.'

'Then tell someone that I don't wish to see him.'

Well-trained servant, Edwards,-he walked off with the message as decorously as you please. And then I thought there was an end,- but there wasn't.

I was regulating the valve of a cylinder in which I was fusing some oxides when, once more, someone touched me on the shoulder. Without turning I took it for granted it was Edwards back again.

'I have only to give a tiny twist to this tap, my good fellow, and you will be in the land where the bogies bloom. Why will you come where you're not wanted?' Then I looked round. 'Who the devil are you?'

For it was not Edwards at all, but quite a different cla.s.s of character.

I found myself confronting an individual who might almost have sat for one of the bogies I had just alluded to. His costume was reminiscent of the 'Algerians' whom one finds all over France, and who are the most persistent, insolent and amusing of pedlars. I remember one who used to haunt the repet.i.tions at the Alcazar at Tours,-but there! This individual was like the originals, yet unlike,-he was less gaudy, and a good deal dingier, than his Gallic prototypes are apt to be. Then he wore a burnoose,-the yellow, grimy-looking article of the Arab of the Soudan, not the spick and span Arab of the boulevard. Chief difference of all, his face was clean shaven,-and whoever saw an Algerian of Paris whose chiefest glory was not his well-trimmed moustache and beard?