The Wharf By The Docks Part 11

"You know something of the whole family, perhaps? Did you know the old gentleman himself?"

"No."

"Do you know--his son?"

"Yes."

"Oh!" She a.s.sumed the att.i.tude of an inquisitor immediately. "Perhaps it was he who sent you here to-day?"

"No."

She looked long and scrutinizingly in his face, suspicious in her turn.

"Then what made you come?"

Max paused a moment, and then evaded her question very neatly.

"What made me come in here? Why, I came by the invitation of a young lady, who told me she was afraid to go in alone."

The girl drew back a little.

"Yes, so I did. And I am very much obliged to you. I--I wanted to ask you to go into that room, the front room, and to fetch some things of mine--things I have left there. I daren't go in by myself."

Max hesitated. Beside his old suspicions, a new one had just started into his mind.

"Did you," he asked, suddenly, "know of some letters which were written to Mr. Dudley Horne?"

A change came over the girl's face; the expression of deadly terror which he had first seen upon it seemed to be returning gradually. The blue eyes seemed to grow wider, the lines in her cheek and mouth to become deeper. After a short pause, during which he noticed that her breath was coming in labored gasps, she whispered:

"Well, what if I do? Mind, I don't say that I do. But what if I do?"

Her manner had grown fiercely defiant by the time she came to the last word. Max found the desire to escape becoming even stronger than his curiosity. The half-guilty look with which his companion had made her last admission caused a new light to flash into his mind. This "Granny"

of whom the girl spoke, and who was alleged to have disappeared, was a woman who had known something of the Horne family. Either she or this girl might have been the writer of the letter Dudley had received while at The Beeches, which had summoned him so hastily back to town. What if this old woman had accomplices--had attempted to rob Dudley? And what if Dudley, in resisting their attempts, had, in self-defence, struck a blow which had caused the death of one of his a.s.sailants? Dudley would naturally have been silent on the subject of his visit to this questionable haunt, especially to the brother of Doreen.

"I think," cried Max, as he strode quickly to the door by which he had come in, "that the best thing you can do is to sacrifice your things, whatever they are, and to get out of the place yourself as fast as you can."

As he spoke he lifted the latch and tried to open the door. But although the latch went up, the door remained shut.

Max pulled and shook it, and finally put his knee against the side-post and gave the handle of the latch a terrific tug.

It broke in his hand, but the door remained closed.

He turned round quickly, and saw the girl, with one hand on her hip and with the candle held in the other, leaning against the whitewashed wall, with a smile of amus.e.m.e.nt on her thin face.

What a face it was! Expressive as no other face he had ever seen, and wearing now a look of what seemed to Max diabolical intelligence and malice. She nodded at him mockingly.

"I can't get out!" thundered he, threateningly, with another thump at the door.

The girl answered in the low voice she always used; by contrast with his menacing tones it seemed lower than ever:

"I don't mean you to--yet. I guessed you'd want to go pretty soon, so I locked the door."

CHAPTER VIII.

FOREWARNED, BUT NOT FOREARMED.

"By Jove!" muttered Max. Then, with a sudden outburst of energy, inspired by indignation at the trap in which he found himself, he dashed across the floor to the zinc pail he had previously noticed, and swinging it round his head, was about to make such an attack upon the door as its old timbers could scarcely have resisted, when the girl suddenly shot between him and the door, placing herself with her back to it and her arms spread out, so quickly that he only missed by a hair's breadth dealing her such a blow as would undoubtedly have split her skull.

In the effort to avoid this, Max, checking himself, staggered and slipped, falling on the brick floor, pail and all.

"Oh, I am sorry! So sorry!"

Again the oddly expressive face had changed completely. Her scarlet lips--those vividly red lips which go with an opaque white skin--were instantly parted with genuine terror. Her eyes looked soft and shining, full of tender feminine kindness and sympathy. Down she went on her knees beside him, asking anxiously:

"Are you hurt? Oh, I know your wrist is hurt!"

Max gave her a glance, the result of which was that he began to feel more afraid of her than of the locked door. About this strange, almost uncannily beautiful child of the riverside slum there was a fascination which appealed to him more and more. The longer he looked at the wide, light-blue eyes, listened to the hoa.r.s.e but moving voice, the more valiantly he had to struggle against the spell which he felt her to be casting upon him.

"I've strained my wrist a little, I think. Nothing to matter," said he.

But as he moved he found that the wrist gave him pain. He got up from the floor, and stood with his left hand clasping the injured right wrist, not so eager as before to make his escape.

"Why don't you let me out?" he asked at last, sharply, with an effort.

The girl looked at him with yet a new expression on her mobile face--an expression of desperation.

"Because I couldn't bear it any longer," she whispered. And as she spoke her eyes wandered round the bare walls and rested for a moment on the inner door. "Because when you've been all alone in the cold, without any food, without any one to speak to for two days and two nights, you feel you must speak to some one, whatever comes of it. If I'd had to wait out there, listening, listening, for another night, I should have been mad, raving mad in the morning."

"But I don't understand it at all," said Max, again inclining to belief in the girl's story, impressed by her pa.s.sionate earnestness. "Where has your grandmother gone to? Why didn't she take you with her? Can't you tell me the whole story?"

The girl looked at him curiously.

"Just now you only thought of getting away."

"I don't care to be detained by lock and key, certainly," said Max. "But if you will unlock the door, I am quite ready to wait here until you have unburdened your mind, if you want to do that."

She looked at him doubtfully.

"That's a promise, mind," said she at last. "And it's a promise you wouldn't mind giving, I think, if you believed in half I've gone through."

She took a key from her pocket, unlocked the outer door and set it ajar.

"Will that do for you?" asked she.

"Yes, that's all right."