FullReads

At the entrance of the side street in which it stood he halted and motioned me to come close.

“I forget,” he said with a jerk of his thumb, “if you still have the entry. These people are not particular, to be sure.”

“I have not,” I answered, and felt my cheeks burning. He could not see this, nor could I see the lift of his eyebrows as he answered–

“Ah? I hadn’t heard of it. . . . You’d better step round by the mews, then. You know the window, the one which opens into the passage leading to Pollox Street. Wait there. It may be ten minutes before I can open.”

I nodded. The house was a corner one, between the street and a by-lane tenanted mostly by cabmen; and at the back of it ran the mews where they stabled their horses. Half-way down this mews a narrow alley cut across it at right angles: a passage un-frequented by traffic, known only to the stablemen, and in the daytime used only by their children, who played hop-scotch on the flagged pavement, where no one interrupted them. You wondered at its survival–from end to end it must have measured a good fifty yards–in a district where every square foot of ground fetched money; until you learned that the house had belonged, in the ‘twenties, to a nobleman who left a name for eccentric profligacy, and who, as owner of the land, could afford to indulge his humours. The estate since his death was in no position to afford money for alterations, and the present tenants of the house found the passage convenient enough.

My footsteps disturbed no one in the sleeping mews; and doubling back noiselessly through the passage, I took up my station beside the one low window which opened upon it from the blank back premises of the house. Even with the glimmer of snow to help me, I had to grope for the window-sill to make sure of my bearings. The minutes crawled by, and the only sound came from a stall where one of the horses had kicked through his thin straw bedding and was shuffling an uneasy hoof upon the cobbles. Then just as I too had begun to shuffle my frozen feet, I heard a scratching sound, the unbolting of a shutter, and Gervase drew up the sash softly.

“Nip inside!” he whispered. “No more noise than you can help. I have sent off the night porter. He tells me the bank is still going in the front of the house–half-a-dozen playing, perhaps.”

I hoisted myself over the sill, and dropped inside. The wall of this annexe–which had no upper floor, and invited you to mistake it for a harmless studio–was merely a sheath, so to speak. Within, a corridor divided it from the true wall of the room: and this room had no window or top-light, though a handsome one in the roof–a dummy–beguiled the eyes of its neighbours.

There was but one room: an apartment of really fine proportions, never used by the tenants of the house, and known but to a few curious ones among its frequenters.

The story went that the late owner, Earl C–, had reason to believe himself persistently cheated at cards by his best friends, and in particular by a Duke of the Blood Royal, who could hardly be accused to his face. The Earl’s sense of honour forbade him to accuse any meaner man while the big culprit went unrebuked. Therefore he continued to lose magnificently while he devised a new room for play: the room in which I now followed Gervase.

I had stood in it once before and admired the courtly and costly thoroughness of the Earl’s rebuke. I had imagined him conducting his expectant guests to the door, ushering them in with a wave of the hand, and taking his seat tranquilly amid the dead, embarrassed silence: had imagined him facing the Royal Duke and asking, “Shall we cut?” with a voice of the politest inflection.