Adventure stories; City and town life -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction
When, with new courage, he directed his feet towards the site, upon
which he knew there was an old chapel known as Queen's Glasshouse
Chapel, whose ownership had slipped from the nerveless hand of a dying
sect of dissenters, he could not find the site and he could not see
the chapel. For an instant he was perturbed by a horrid suspicion that
he had been victimized by a gang of swindlers posing as celebrated
persons. Everything was possible in this world and century! None
of the people who had appeared in the transaction had resembled his
previous conceptions of such people! And confidence-thieves always
operated in the grandest hotels! He immediately decided that if the
sequel should prove him to be a simpleton and gull, he would at any
rate be a silent simpleton and gull. He would stoically bear the loss
of two hundred pounds and breathe no word of woe.
But then he remembered with relief that he had genuinely recognized
both Rose Euclid and Seven Sachs; and also that Mr. Bryany, among
other documents, had furnished him with a photograph of the Chapel and
surrounding property. The Chapel therefore existed. He had a plan in
his pocket. He now opened this plan and tried to consult it in the
middle of the street, but his agitation was such that he could not
make out on it which was north and which was south. After he had been
nearly prostrated by a taxi-cab, a policeman came up to him and said,
with all the friendly disdain of a London policeman addressing a
provincial:
"Safer to look at that on the pavement, sir!"
Edward Henry glanced up from the plan.
"I was trying to find the Queen's Glasshouse Chapel, officer," said
he. "Have you ever heard of it?"
(In Bursley, members of the Town Council always flattered members
of the Force by addressing them as "officer"; and Edward Henry knew
exactly the effective intonation.)
"It _was there_, sir," said the policeman, less disdainful, pointing
to a narrow hoarding behind which could be seen the back-walls of high
buildings in Shaftesbury Avenue. "They've just finished pulling it
down."
"Thank you," said Edward Henry, quietly, with a superb and successful
effort to keep as much colour in his face as if the policeman had not
dealt him a dizzying blow.
He then walked towards the hoarding, but could scarcely feel the
ground under his feet. From a wide aperture in the palisades a cart
full of earth was emerging; it creaked and shook as it was dragged by
a labouring horse over loose planks into the roadway; a whip-cracking
carter hovered on its flank. Edward Henry approached the aperture and
gazed within. An elegant young man stood solitary inside the hoarding
and stared at a razed expanse of land in whose furthest corner some
navvies were digging a hole....
The site!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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