Part 14

A livid face, whose eyes seemed to blind her own, materialized suddenly before her. “Drink it up, damn you!” said the voice hoarsely. “And then get out--you----!”

It was insult for the sake of insult, and therefore the full measure of her victory. But it meant less than nothing to June now. She scarcely heard, or hearing did not comprehend. Beyond pain and suffering, beyond good and evil her torn spirit only craved release.

As soon as the fire in the glass had kindled her veins this desire was met, less, however, by the operation of her own will than by the will of Keller. As if she had been a noisome reptile whom his flesh abhorred, and yet had a superstitious fear of killing, he dragged her out of the room, along the short passage as far as the door of the flat. Slipping back the catch, he flung her out on to the landing.

As she fetched up against the iron railing opposite the door, which guarded the well of the staircase, she heard a low hiss: “Take yourself off as soon as you like, you----, or you’ll find the police on your track.”

XLII

JUNE had no idea of the time that she lay in a huddle against the railing. But it may not have been so long in fact as it was in experience. Shattered she might be, yet unknown to herself, there was still a reserve of fighting power to draw upon.

Cold iron, moreover, and raw air had a magic of their own. Clear of that mephitic room and the foul presence of Keller, a fine human machine began slowly to renew itself. Except for a faint gleam from the room out of which she had just come, stealing through the fanlight of the door out of which she had been flung, there was not a sign of light upon the staircase. The entire building appeared to be deserted. Its stone-flagged steps were full of echoes as soon as she ventured to move upon them; and when clinging to the railing for support she had painfully descended two she entered a region of total darkness.

It was like going down into a pit. Could she have only been sure that death awaited her below, she might have been tempted to fling herself into it headlong. But she knew that the ground was not far off.

Three or four steps more brought her to the vestibule. At the end of it was a door, open to the street. Outside this door shone a faint lamp, round which weird shadows circled in a ghostly witch-dance. The night beyond was a wall of horrors, which she had lost the will to face.

Met by this pitiless alternative, she recoiled against the wall of the vestibule, huddling in its darkest corner, behind the stairs. Crouching here, like a hunted thing at bay, she fought for the courage to go out and face her destiny.

She fought in vain. Half collapsed as she now was, a spur was needed to drive her into the grim wilderness of the open street. One glance at the crypt outside sufficed to tell her that with no point to make for, it would be best to stay where she was and hope soon to die.

Why had she not had the sense to throw herself down the stairs and kill herself? A means would have to be found before the night was out. She could bear no more. A terrible reaction was upon her. It was as if a private door in her mind had suddenly given way and a school of awful phantoms had rushed in and flooded it.

She was living in a nightmare that was too bad to be true. But it was true and there lay its terror. Adrift in the dark canyons of that vast city, penniless and alone, with the marks of thieves and murderers upon her bruised body, and her treasure stolen, there was only one thing to look for now.

Death, however, would not be easy to come by. As she huddled in cold darkness in the recess behind the stairs she felt that her will was going. To enter the night and make an end would need courage; but a miserable clapping together of the jaws was sign enough that the last hope of all was slipping away from her.

XLIII

COWERING in body and spirit in that dark corner, time, for June, became of no account. Perhaps, after all, she might be allowed to die where she was. As a kind of inertia crept upon her she was able to draw something of comfort from the thought. It would be better than the river or being run over in the street.

She grew very cold; yet a lowering of the body’s temperature induced a heightened consciousness. Aches and pains sprang into life; the forces of her mind began to reassert themselves; the phantoms about her took on new powers of menace. Gradually it became clear to June, under the goad of this new and sharper phase of suffering, that mere passivity could not induce the death she longed for.

No, it was not in that way the end would come. She would have to go into the shadow-land beyond the lamp, and seek some positive means of destroying herself. For that reason she must hold on to the fragment of will that now remained to her. It alone could release her from the awful pit in which she was now engulfed.

She gathered herself for an effort to move towards the fog-encircled light at the entrance to the street. But the effort, when made, amounted to nothing. Her limbs were paper, all power of volition was gone.

The October raw struck to her blood. She began to whimper miserably. To pain of mind was added pain of body, but the delicate apparatus from whose harmony sprang the fuse of action was out of gear. Something must be done; yet no matter how definite the task, any form of doing was beyond her now.

At this dire moment, however, help came. It came, moreover, in an unlooked-for way. She heard a door slam over head. There was the sound of a match being struck, and then came a gingerly shuffle of feet on the stone stairs.

Someone was coming down. June cowered still lower into the dark recess at the back of the stairway. A man was approaching. And by the flicker of the match which he threw away as he reached the floor of the vestibule she saw that the man was Keller.

Faint and but momentary as was the glimpse afforded, June, with every sense strung again to the point of intensity, saw that under Keller’s arm was a brown paper parcel. The sight of it was like a charm. Some fabulous djinnee might have lurked in that neat package, who commanded a miraculous power of reaction upon the human will.

Keller struck a second match and peered into the shadows. June knew that he was looking to see if she had lingered there, but the light could not pierce to the corner in which she crouched; and it burnt itself out, leaving him none the wiser.

Without striking another match Keller moved away from her towards the doorway, and as he did so June felt a swift release of heart and brain. A thrill of new energy ran through her. No sooner had Keller passed out of the vestibule, beyond the lamp into the fog, than without conscious impulse or design she began to follow him.

It may have been the reasoned act of a lucid being, but at first it did not appear to be so. Once, however, her limbs were moving, all her faculties, now intensely awake, seemed as if by magic to bear them company. As soon as she reached the open street, with Keller a clear ten yards ahead, the keen air on her face had an effect of strong wine. Her nerves felt again the sense of motion; the impulse of the natural fighter unfurled strong pinions within her. All the virile sense and the indomitable will of a sound inheritance rallied to her need.

Growing sensibly stronger at every yard, she followed Keller round the corner into Manning Square. The mist was thick, the lamps poor and few, but as well as she could she kept on his track. Lurking pantherlike in the deep shadows of the house-walls, she had approached within five yards of him by the time he had turned the corner into a bye-street. He went a few yards along this, and then zigzagged into a squalid ill-smelling thoroughfare whose dismal length seemed unending.

June had no difficulty in keeping up with these twists and winds, for Keller, impeded by the fog, moved slowly. For her, however, the fog had its own special problem, since there was a danger of losing him if he was allowed to get too far ahead; and yet if his steps were dogged too closely there was always the fear that he might turn round suddenly and see her.

At last the interminable street seemed to be nearing its end. For June, whose every faculty was now strung up to an unnatural acuteness, saw but a short distance in front the brightly lit awning of the Underground looming through the fog.

In a flash she realized the nature of the peril. Only too surely was this the bourn for which Keller was making. Once within its precincts and her last remaining hope would be gone.

It must be now or never. The spur of occasion drove deep in her heart. She knew but too well that the hope was tragically small, but wholly desperate as she was, with the penalty of failure simply not to be met, she would put all to the touch.

Closer and closer she crept up behind the quarry. But the entrance to the Tube loomed now so near that it began to seem certain that she must lose him before she could attempt what she had to do. Abruptly, however, within ten yards or so of his goal, Keller stopped. He began to search the pockets of his overcoat for a box of matches to relight his pipe which had gone out. While so doing, and in the preoccupation of the moment, he took the parcel from under his right arm, and set it rather carelessly beneath his left.

Providence had given June her chance. Like a falcon, she swooped forward. Aim and timing incredibly true, at the instant Keller struck a match and bent over his pipe, her fingers closed on the Van Roon, and whisked it out of his unguarded grasp.

XLIV

AS June turned and ran she heard a wild and startled oath. Before her was the eternal fog-laden darkness of the narrow street. But now it struck her with a thrill of pure terror that the mist was not thick enough to conceal her flight. The swift surprise of the onset had gained for her a start of a few yards, but instantly she knew that it would not suffice.

She ran, all the same, as if her heart would burst. But her legs seemed to wear the shackles that afflict one in a dream. Her most frantic efforts did not urge them on, and yet, in spite of that, they bore her better than she knew. Not a soul was in sight. She could hear Keller’s boots echo on the damp pavement as they pounded behind her. It could only be a matter of seconds before his fingers were again on her throat. But this time, before robbing her of the Van Roon and getting clear, he would have to kill her.

The vow had hardly been made, when at the other side of the street she saw a thread of light. It came from a house whose door was open. Instinctively she turned and made one final dash for it. This was the last wild hope there was.

A man, it seemed, was in the act of leaving the house. Wearing overcoat and hat, he stood just within the doorway peering into the murk before venturing out. June flung herself literally upon him.

“Save me! Save me!” she was able to gasp. “A man! A man is after me!”

The house was of the poverty-stricken kind whose living room opens on to the street. June had a confused vision of a glowing lamp, a bright fire, a dingy tablecloth and several people seated around it. Her wild impact upon the man who was about to put off from its threshold drove him backwards several paces into the room. At the same instant a female voice, loud and imperious, rose from the table.

“Shut the door, Elbert, can’t yer? The fog’s comin’ in that thick it’ll put out the perishin’ fire.”

The bewildered Elbert, raked fore and aft by fierce women, automatically obeyed the truculent voice at his back, even while he gave ground in a collision which seemed to rob him of any wit that he might possess. With a deft turn of the heel, he dealt the door a kick which effectually closed it in the murderous face of the halting and hesitating Keller.

June, shuddering in every vein, clung to her protector.

“Gawd-love-us-all!” Cries and commotion arose from the table, yet almost at once the imperious voice soared above the din. “Set her down, can’t yer, Elbert? Didn’t yer see that bloke?”

“Ah--I did,” said Elbert, stolidly pressing his queer armful into a chair near the fire.

“Better git after him lively,” said the voice at the table. “He’s the one as did in Kitty Lewis last week.”

Elbert, a young man six feet tall and proportionately broad of shoulder, was not however a squire of dames. With a scared look on a face that even in circumstances entirely favourable could hardly rank as a thing of beauty, he moved to the door and slipped a bolt across. “Not goin’ near the----” he said, sullenly. “Not goin’ to be mixed up wiv it--not me.”

The voice at the table, whose owner was addressed as Maw, proceeded “to tell off” Elbert. He was a skunk, he was no man, he was a mean swine. In the sight of Maw, who ran to words as well as flesh, Elbert was all this and more. She rose majestically, threatening to “dot him” if he didn’t “’op in,” and she came to June with an enormous bosom striving to burst from its anchorage, an apron that had once been white, and with her entire person exuding an odour peculiar to those of her sex who drink gin out of a teacup.

Three other people were at the table, and they were engaged upon a meal of toasted cheese, raw onions and beer. Of these, two were girls about sixteen, scared, slatternly and anæmic; the third was a toothless hag who looked ninety; and as the whole family, headed by Maw, suddenly crowded round June, the terrified fugitive, shuddering in the chair by the fire, hardly knew which of her deliverers was the most repulsive.

June fought with every bit of her strength against the threat of total collapse that assailed her now. In the desperate hope of warding off disaster, she gathered the last broken fragment of will. But nature had been driven too hard. For the second time within the space of one terrible hour, she lost the sense of where she was.

XLV

THE faces, with one exception, had receded into the background, when June returned slowly and painfully to a knowledge of what was happening. Maw was bending over her, and holding a cracked cup to her lips, and also “telling off” the others with a force and a scope of language that added not a little to June’s fear.

Perhaps the smell of its contents had quite as much effect upon the sufferer as the cup’s restorative powers. It was so distasteful to one who had been taught to shun all forms of alcohol, that a sheer disgust helped to bring her round.

At first, however, her mind was hardly more than a blank. But when, at last, a few links of recognition floated up into it out of the immediate past and hitched themselves to this strange present, a shock of new terror nearly overwhelmed her again. Recollection was like a knife stab. The Van Roon! The Van Roon! Where was it? Oh, God--if she had not got it after all!

The thought was pain, pure and exquisite. But the case did not really call for it. She was clutching the Van Roon convulsively to her breast like a child holds a doll. As she wakened slowly to this fact her brain wonderfully cleared.

The mind must be kept alive, if only to defend this talisman for whose sake she had already suffered so outrageously. She did not know where she was, and the evil presence holding the foul cup to her lips, and those other evil presences filling the background beyond gave her an intense apprehension.

Maw, however, in spite of a general air of obscenity, meant well. It was not easy for this fact to declare itself through that loud voice and ruthless mien; but gradually it began to percolate to June’s violated nerves, and so gave her a fleck of courage to hold on to that sense of identity which still threatened at the first moment again to desert her.

“Where was you goin’, deery?”

Rude the tone, but when June’s ear disentangled the words, she was able to appreciate that they were spoken in the way of kindness. But if the knowledge brought a spark of comfort it was quickly dowsed. Where was she going? To that grim question there was no possible answer.

“Scared out of her life, poor lamb!” said Maw. With furtive truculence she announced the fact to the rather awed spectators who gathered once more about the sufferer.

“Where you come from?”

June’s only answer was a shiver. The frozen silence was so full of the uncanny that Maw shook her own head dismally and tapped it with a grimy finger.

In the view of Maw, for such a calamity there was only one remedy. Once more the cup was pressed to June’s lips; once more it was resisted, this time with a hint of fierceness reassuring to the onlookers, inasmuch that it implied a return of life.

“Looks respectable,” said the cracked voice of the crone, who was now at Maw’s elbow.

“Where was you goin’?” demanded Maw again.

June was beyond tears, or she would have shed them. Now that the facts of the situation in all their hopelessness were streaming back to her, a feeling of sheer impotence kept her dumb.

“Off her rocker,” said Elbert gloomily.

XLVI

AMID the silence which followed Elbert’s remark, June fought hard to cast her weakness off. She wanted no longer to die. The recovery of the talisman inhibited, at least for the time being, that desire. Acutely aware that the Van Roon was still miraculously hers, she felt that come what might she must go on.

But her position was hopeless indeed. She dare not venture out of doors, with a murderous thief waiting to spring upon her. And if venture she did, there was nowhere she could go. Besides, had there been any place of refuge for such a weary bundle of frightened misery, without money and with a sorry ignorance of the fog-bound maze of bricks and mortar in which she was now lost, there would have been no means of getting to her destination.

At the same time, she had no wish to stay with these uncouth, ill-looking, evil-smelling people one moment longer than was necessary. In a curiously intimate way she was reminded of that grim story Oliver Twist, which had so powerfully haunted her youth. To her distorted mind, this squalid interior was a veritable thieves’ kitchen, the crone a female Fagin, the angel of the cup, a counterpart of Bill Sikes, and the gloomy, beetle-browed Elbert a kind of Artful Dodger grown up. She and her treasure could never be safe in such a place, yet at the other side of the door nameless horrors awaited her.

In June’s present state it was far beyond her power to cope with so dire a problem. Keeping a stony silence as those faces, devoured by curiosity, pressed ever closer upon her, she half surrendered to her weakness again.

Amid the new waves of misery which threatened to submerge her, she was wrenched fiercely back to sensibility. The Van Roon was torn by a strong hand from her grasp. As if a spring had been pressed in her heart she rose with a little cry. Maw was in the act of handing the picture to Elbert. “There’s a label on it, ain’t there?” she said.

Still half stupefied, June clung to the table for support, while Elbert, who was evidently the family scholar, read out slowly the name and address that was written upon the parcel: “Miss Babraham, 39b Park Lane, W.”

June was hardly in a state just then to grasp the significance of the words. Her mind was wholly given up to concern for the treasure which had passed to alien hands. And yet the words had significance, even for her, as the mind-process they induced soon began to reveal.

A locked door of memory, of which she had lost the key, seemed to glide back. Thoughts of William, of his friend, the tall, beautiful and distinguished wearer of the blue crepe de chine, and of Sir Arthur, her father, came crowding into her brain. And with them came a perceptible easing of spirit, as if they had been sped by the kindly hand of that Providence, of whom she had never been so much in need.

The recognition of this acted upon her like a charm. Girt by the knowledge that she was not alone in the world after all, and that friends might be at hand if only she could reach out to them, her mind began once more to function.

Even while Maw and Elbert were occupying themselves with the parcel’s address and its specific importance, June was fain to inquire of an awaking self how such magic words came to be there at such a moment. Casting back to recent events, over which oblivion had swept, she was able to recall certain strands in the subtle woof of Fate. Days ago, years they seemed now, Miss Babraham had sent to William a picture frame to be restored. The stout brown paper in which it had been wrapped appealed to June’s thrifty soul, and she had stowed it away in her box for use on a future occasion. Her mind’s new, almost dangerous clarity, enabled her to remember that upon the paper’s inner side was an old Sotheran, Bookseller, Piccadilly label which bore the name and address of Miss Babraham.

The piecing together of this slender chain gave June the thing she needed most. At this signal manifestation of what Providence could do, hope revived in her. If only she could get to Park Lane--wherever Park Lane might be!--to Miss Babraham.

As if in answer to the half-formed wish, Maw’s dominant voice took up the parable. “Elbert, you’d better see this lidy as fur as Park Lane.”

XLVII

ELBERT did not welcome the prospect with open arms. Nature had not designed him for such a task. All the same, Maw was imaged clearly in his mind as one whose word was law.

At the best of times, Elbert’s obedience to that word was apt to be grudging. And to-night, with murder lurking outside in the darkness, he was full of a disgusted reluctance at having to face such a prospect. Even in circumstances wholly favourable to it, the countenance of Elbert was not attractive; to June at this moment it was very much the reverse. She felt that its owner was not to be trusted an inch.

Meanwhile her mind was growing very active. Miss Babraham’s name and address, that magic omen, was like an elixir; it quickened the blood, it strengthened the soul. If only she could bear her treasure to Park Lane all might yet be well!

Urged by this spur, native wit sprang to her aid. The first thing to be done was to get clear of present company. She was haunted still by the likeness to Fagin’s kitchen; but also there was a recollection of the fact that a Tube Station was only a few yards along the street. That was the haven wherein salvation lay.

Pressing hard upon the hope, however, was the dismal knowledge that only one penny remained in her pocket. This sum could not take her to Park Lane, unless that Elysium was close at hand. Alas, it was not at all likely. Her ignorance of London was so great, moreover, that she would need help to find her way there; and in the process of obtaining it in her present state of weakness she might be caught by new perils. For it was only too likely that Keller was lurking outside in the fog, waiting to spring upon her and tear the Van Roon from her grasp at the first chance that arose.

Beset by such problems, June felt that she was between the devil and the deep sea. Perhaps the best thing she could do was to dash along the street to the Tube, and then put herself in the hands of the nearest policeman. But even to attempt such a feat was to run a grave risk.

Elbert, in the meantime, scowling and disgruntled, was bracing himself under further pressure from Maw to brave the perils of the night. June felt, however, that it would be wise not to saddle herself with this reluctant champion if it could be avoided. To this end, she was now able to pluck up the spirit to ask what was the best means of getting to Park Lane.

Maw did not know, but Elbert when appealed to said that she could take the Tube to Marble Arch, or she might turn the corner at the end of the street and pick up a bus in Tottenham Court Road.