The Wharf By The Docks Part 13

"Do you know her address?" asked Max.

The landlord smiled.

"It 'ud take a clever head to keep the addresses of all the chance customers as comes in here. For the matter of that, very few of 'em have any addresses in particular; it's one court one week, and t'other the next."

"But she's a very respectable woman, the Mrs. Higgs I mean," said Max, tentatively.

"Oh, yes, sir; I've nothin' to say ag'inst her," and the landlord, with a look which showed that he objected to be "pumped," turned to another customer.

Max took the brandy he had bought for the girl and hurried back to the place where he had left her. As he went, an instinct of curiosity, natural enough, considering his recently acquired knowledge, made him go down the pa.s.sage and try to look in through the grim, dusty window of the shop. But this also was boarded up on the inner side, so that no view could be obtained of what was within.

It seemed to Max, however, as he stood there, with his eyes fixed on the planks, trying to discover an aperture, that between the cracks of the boards there glimmered a faint light. It seemed to flicker, then it died out.

Surely, he thought, the girl has not summoned enough courage to go into the room by herself?

He hurried back down the pa.s.sage, and made his way as before to the wharf. Stumbling round the piles of timber, he found the lane by which he had entered and left the house. It seemed to him, though he told himself it must be only fancy, that some of the loose planks had been disturbed since his last journey over them. Reaching the door of outhouse, which he had left ajar, he found it shut.

He was now sure that some one had gone in, or come out, since he left; and for a moment the circ.u.mstance seemed to him sufficiently suspicious to make him pause. The next moment, however, the remembrance of the girl's white face, of the pleading blue eyes, returned to him vividly, calling to him, drawing him back by an irresistible spell. He pushed open the door boldly, crossed the brick floor and reentered the inner room. The candle was still burning on the table, but the girl was not there.

Max looked round the room. He was puzzled, suspicious. As he stood by the table staring at the wall opposite the fireplace, wondering whether to go out or to explore further, he found his eyes attracted to a spot in the wall-paper where, in the feeble light, something like two glittering beads shone out uncannily in the middle of the pattern. With a curious sensation down his spine, Max took a hasty step back to the door, and the beads moved slowly.

It was a pair of eyes watching him as he moved.

CHAPTER IX.

THE MAN WHO HESITATES.

Max had become accustomed, in the course of this adventurous visit, to surprises and alarms. Every step in the enterprise he had undertaken had brought a fresh excitement, a fresh horror. But nothing that he had so far heard or seen had given him such a sick feeling of indefinable terror as the sight of these two eyes, turning to watch his every movement. For a moment he watched them, then he made a bold dash for the place where he had seen them, and aimed a blow with his fist at the wall.

He heard the loose plaster rattle down; but when he looked for the result of his blow, he saw nothing but the old-fashioned, dirty paper on the wall, apparently without a hole or tear in it.

The discovery made him feel sick.

He turned to make his escape from the house, to which he felt that he was a fool to have returned at all, when the door by which he had entered opened slowly, and the girl came in.

A little flash, as of pleased surprise, pa.s.sed over her white face. Then she said, under her breath:

"So you have come back. I didn't think you would. I--I am sorry you did."

Max looked rather blank. The girl's attraction for him had increased during the short period he had been absent from her. He had had time to think over his feelings, to find his interest stimulated by the process.

Imagination, which does so much for a woman with a man, and for a man with a woman, had begun to have play. He had come back determined to find out more about the girl, to probe to the bottom of the mystery in which, perhaps, consisted so much of the charm she had for him.

Even now, upon her entrance, the first sight of her face had made his heart leap up.

There was a pause when she finished speaking. Max, who was usually fluent enough with her s.e.x, hesitated, stammered and at last said:

"You are sorry I came back? Yet you seemed anxious enough to make me promise to come back!"

He observed that a great change had come over her. Instead of being nerveless and lifeless, as he had left her, with dull eyes and weak, helpless limbs, she was now agitated, excited; she glanced nervously about her while he spoke, and tapped the finger-tips of one hand restlessly with those of the other as she listened.

"I know," she replied, rapidly, "I know I was. But--Granny has come back. She came in while you were gone."

Max glanced at the wall, where he had fancied he saw the pair of watching eyes.

"Oh," said he, "that explains what I saw, perhaps. Where is your grandmother?"

"She has gone upstairs to her room under the roof."

"Ah! Are you sure she is upstairs? That she is not in the next room, for instance, watching me through some secret peep-hole of hers?"

The girl stared at him in silence as he pointed to the wall, and as he ran his hand over its surface.

"I saw a pair of eyes watching me just now," he went on, "from the middle of this wall. I could swear to it!"

The girl looked incredulous, and pa.s.sed her hand over the wall in her turn. Then she shook her head.

"I can feel nothing," said she. "It must be your fancy. There is no room there. It is the ground-floor of an old warehouse next door which has been to let for years and years--longer than this."

He still looked doubtful, and she added, sharply:

"You can see for yourself if you like."

As she spoke, she was turning to go back into the outhouse, with a sign to him to follow her. But even as she did so, another thought must have struck her, for she shut the door and turned back again.

"No," she said, decisively, "of course you don't want to see anything so much as the outside of this gloomy old house. Don't think me ungrateful; I am not, but"--she came a little nearer to Max, so that she could whisper very close to his ear--"if Granny knew that I'd let a stranger into the place while she was away, I should never hear the last of it; and--and--when she's angry I'm afraid of her."

Max felt a pang of compa.s.sion for the girl.

"If you are afraid of her being angry," said he, "you had better let her see me and hear my explanation. I can make things right with her. I have great powers of persuasion--with old ladies--I a.s.sure you; and you don't look as if you were equal to a strife of tongues with her or with anybody just now; and I'd forgotten; I've brought something for you."

Max took from the pocket of his overcoat the little flat bottle filled with brandy with which he had provided himself; but the girl pushed it away with alarm.

"Don't let Granny see it!" she whispered.

"All right. But I want you to taste it; it will do you good."

She shook her head astutely.

"I am not ill," she said, shortly, "and I don't know that I should take it if I were. I see too much of those things not to be afraid of them.

And, now, sir, will you go?" After a short pause she added, in an ominous tone--"while you have the chance."

Max still lingered. He had forgotten his curiosity, he had almost forgotten what had brought him to the house in the first instance. He did not want to leave this girl, with the great, light-blue eyes and the scarlet lips, the modest manner and the moving voice.

When the silence which followed her words had lasted some seconds, she turned from him impatiently, and leaving him by the door, crossed the little room quickly, opened one of the two wooden doors which stood one on each side of the fireplace, revealing a cupboard with rows of shelves, and took from the bottom a few chips of dry wood, evidently gleaned from the wharf outside, a box of matches and part of a newspaper, and dropping down on her knees on the hearth, began briskly to rake out the ashes and to prepare a fire.