CHAPTER VII
A QUESTIONABLE GUIDE
Max started violently at the girl's voice.
"A dead man? In there? How do you know?"
In a hoarse voice, the girl answered:
"How do I know? The best way possible. I saw it done!"
There was an awful silence. Max was so deeply impressed by the girl's words, her looks, her manner, by the gloom of the cold, dark passage, by the desolate appearance of the two deserted buildings before which they stood, that his first impulse was an overpowering desire to run away. Acting upon it he even took a couple of rapid steps in the direction of the street he had left, passing the girl and getting clear of the uncanny boarded-up front of the shop.
A moan from the girl made him stop and look around at her. Emboldened by this, she came close to him again and whispered:
"You're a man; you ought to have more pluck than I've got. It's two days since it happened—"
"Two days!" muttered Max, remembering that it was two days ago that he had surprised Dudley with his blood-stained hands.
"And for those two days, I've been outside here waiting for somebody to come because I daren't go inside by myself. Two days! Two days!" she repeated, her teeth chattering.
Max looked at her with mixed feelings of doubt, pity, and astonishment. It was too dark in the ill-lighted passage for him to see all the details of her appearance. She was young, quite young; so much was certain. She looked white and pinched and miserably cold. Her dress was respectable, very plain, and bore marks of her climbing and crawling over the timber on the wharf.
"Won't you go in with me?" she asked again, more eagerly, more tremulously than before. "I can show you the road—round at the back. You will have a little climbing to do, but you won't mind that."
"But what do you want me to do if I do get inside?" said Max. "It's the police you ought to send for if a man has died in there. Go to the police station and give information."
The girl shook her head.
"I can't do that," she whispered. Then, after a shuddering pause, she came a step nearer and said, in a lower whisper than ever: "He didn't die—of his own accord. He was murdered."
Max grew hot and cold. He heartily wished he had never come.
"All the more reason," he went on in a blustering voice, "why you should inform the police. You had better lose no time about it."
"I can't do that," said the girl, "because he—the man who did it—was kind to us—kind to Granny and me. If I tell the police, they will go after him, and perhaps find him, and—and hang him. Oh, no," and she shook her head again with decision, "I could not do that."
Max was silent for a few moments, looking at her for the first few seconds with pity and then with suspicion.
"Why do you tell all this to me, then—a stranger—if you're so afraid of the police finding out anything about it?"
The girl did not answer for a moment. She seemed puzzled to answer the question. At last, she said:
"I didn't mean to. When I saw you first, at the wharf, at the back there, I just looked at you and hid myself again. And then I thought to myself that as you were a gentleman perhaps I might dare to ask you what I did."
Max, not unnaturally, grew more doubtful still. This apparently deserted building, which he was asked to enter by the back way, might be a thievish den of the worst possible character, and this girl, innocent as she certainly looked, might be a thieves' decoy. Something in his face or in his manner must have betrayed his thoughts to the shrewd Londoner; for she suddenly drew back, uttering a little cry of horror. Without another word, she turned and slunk back along the passage and into the street.
Now, if Max had been a little older, or a little more prudent, if he had indeed been anything but a reckless young rascal with a taste for exciting adventure, he would have taken this opportunity to get away from such a very questionable neighborhood. But, in the first place, he was struck by the girl's story, which seemed to fit in only too well with what he knew; and in the second place, he was interested in the girl herself, the refinement of whose face and manner, in these dubious surroundings, had impressed him as much as the expression of horror on her face and the agony of cold which had caused her teeth to chatter and her limbs to tremble.
Surely, he thought, the suspicions he had for a moment entertained about her were incorrect. He began to feel that he could not go away without making an effort to ascertain if there was any truth in her story.
He went along the passage and got back to the wharf by the same means as before. Making his way around the pile of timber upon which he had first seen the girl, he discovered a little lane, partly between and partly over the planks, which he promptly followed in the hope of coming in sight of her again.
And, crouching under the wall of a ruinous outhouse, in an attitude expressive of the dejection of utter abandonment, was the white-faced girl.
The discovery was enough for Max. All considerations of prudence, of caution, crumbled away under the influence of the intense pity he felt for the forlorn creature.
"Look here," said he, "I'll go in if you like. Have you got a light?"
"No—o," answered the girl, in a voice which was thick with sobs. "But I can show you where to get one when you get inside."
Max had by this time reached the ground, which was slimy and damp under the eaves; and he pushed his way, with an air of recklessness which hid some natural trepidation, into the outhouse, the door of which was not even fastened.
"Why," said he, turning to the girl, who was close behind him, "you could have got in yourself easily enough. At least you would have been warmer in here than outside."
His suspicions were starting up again, and they grew stronger as he perceived that she was paying little attention to him, that she seemed to be listening for some expected sound. The place in which they now stood was quite dark, and Max, impatient and somewhat alarmed by the position in which he found himself, struck a match and looked around him.
"Now," said he, "find me a candle, if you can."
Even by the feeble light of the match, he could see that he was in a sort of scullery, which bore traces of recent occupation. A bit of yellow soap, some blacking, and a couple of brooms in one corner, a pail and a wooden chair in another, were evidently not "tenant's fixtures."
And then Max noted a strange circumstance—the two small windows were boarded up on the inside.
By the time he had taken note of this, the girl had brought him a candle in a tin candlestick, which she had taken from a shelf by the door.
"That's the way," she said, in a voice as low as before, pointing to an inner door. "Through the back room, and into the front one. He lies in there."
Max shuddered.
"I can't say that I particularly want to see him," said he, as he took stock of her in the candlelight, and was struck by the peculiar beauty of her large blue eyes.
He felt a strong reluctance to venture further into this very questionable and mysterious dwelling; and he took care to stand where he could see both doors, the one which led farther into the house and the one by which he had entered.
The girl heaved a little sigh, of relief apparently. And she remained standing before him in the same attitude of listening expectancy as he had remarked in her already.
"What are you waiting for—listening for?" asked Max sharply.
"Nothing," she answered with a start. "I'm nervous, that's all. Wouldn't you be, if you'd been waiting two days outside an empty house with a dead man inside it?"
Her tone was sharp and querulous. Max looked at her in bewilderment.
"Empty house!" he repeated. "What were you doing in it, then?"
And he glanced round 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 today?"
"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. Besides his old suspicions, a new one had just started in 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-defense, struck a blow that 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 around 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."
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