The Wharf by the Docks by Florence Warden (novel24 TXT) 📖

him, assuring himself afresh by this second scrutiny of the fact that the brick floor and the bare walls of this scullery had been kept scrupulously clean.

The girl's white face, pale with the curious opaque pallor of the Londoner born and bred, flushed a very little. She dropped her eyelids guiltily.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," she said, at last, rather sulkily. "I was living here. Is that enough?"

It was not. And her visitor's looks told her so.

"I was living here with my grandmother," she went on hurriedly, as she saw Max glance at the outer door and take a step toward it. "We're very poor, and it's cheaper to live here in a house supposed to be empty than to pay rent."

"But hardly fair to the landlord," suggested Max.

"Oh, Granny doesn't think much of landlords, and, besides, this is part of the property which used to belong to her old master, Mr. Horne--"

"Ah!" ejaculated Max, with new interest.

The girl looked at him inquiringly.

"What do you know about him?" she asked, with eagerness.

"I have heard of him," said Max.

But the astute young Londoner was not to be put off so easily.

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

"No."

"Do you know--his son?"

"Yes."

"Oh!" She assumed the attitude 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 assailants? 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 amusement 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 hoarse 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 passionate 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."

She took up the candle, which she had put on a shelf while she knelt to find out whether he was hurt, and crossing the brick floor with rapid, rather stealthy steps, she put her fingers on the latch of the inner door.

"Keep close!" whispered she.

Max obeyed. He kept so close that the girl's soft hair, which was of the ash-fair color so common in English blondes who have been flaxen-headed in their childhood, almost touched his face. She opened the door and entered what was evidently the back room of the deserted shop.

A dark room it must have been, even in broadest daylight. Opposite to the door by which they had entered was one which was glazed in the upper half; this evidently led into the shop itself, although the old red curtain which hung over the glass panes hid the view of what was beyond. There was a little fireplace, in which were the burnt-out ashes of a recent fire. There was a deal table in the middle of the room, and a cloth of a common pattern of blue and red check lay in a heap on the floor. A couple of plain Windsor chairs, and a third with arms and a cushion, a hearth-rug, a fender and fire-irons, completed the furniture of the room.

And the one window, a small one, which looked out upon the wharf, in a corner formed by the outhouse on the one side and a shed on the other, was carefully boarded up.

Grimly desolate the dark, bare room looked, small as it was; and a couple of rats, which scurried over the floor as Max entered, added a suggestion of other horrors to the deserted room. The girl had managed to get behind Max, and he turned sharply with a suspicion that she meant to shut him into the room by himself.

"It's all right--it's all right," whispered she, reassuringly. "He isn't in here. But he's there."

And she pointed to the door with the red curtain.

Max stopped. The farther he advanced into this mysterious house the less he liked the prospect presented to his view. And the girl herself seemed to have forgotten her pretext of wanting something fetched out of that mysterious third room. She remained leaning against the wall, close by the door by which she and Max had entered, still holding the candlestick and staring at the red curtain with eyes full of terror. Max found his own eyes fascinated by the steady gaze, and he looked in the same direction.

Staring intently at the bit of faded stuff, he was almost ready to imagine, in the silence and gloom of the place, that he saw it move. His breath came fast. Overcome by the uncanny influences of the dreary place itself, of the hideous story he had heard, of the girl's white face, Max began to feel as if the close, cold air of the unused room was like the