He got his hat from that inner room, and prepared to depart. I had put
the keys back on the table, and I saw him eyeing them; I took the key I
had from my pocket, and dropped it with the others. "It's a great game
of chance," I whispered to him, "and you may never be discovered, after
all. Come away--and leave him there; you are safe so far as I am
concerned."
He went to the door and opened it; at a sign from me he waited at that
outer door, to be certain that no one was about. Then I blew out the
candle, and crept out to join him; and for a moment we stood close
together, listening. Then he opened the door, and slipped out, and I
came after him. I pulled the door, and heard the lock click; and knew
that the ghastly thing inside was safely shut in, until some one should
break down the door, and find it.
We stood for a moment or two listening, and then crept down into the
quiet of Lincoln's Inn Fields. As our feet touched the pavement Jervis
Fanshawe stopped, and looked over his shoulder back into the dark house.
"Don't you hear anything, Charlie?" he whispered.
"Nothing," I replied. "What should we hear?"
"No door opening quietly?--no soft pad, pad of feet down the stairs?
Quick!--don't you hear it?"
"Come away," I said abruptly; for the horror of the thing was creeping
over me again.
Yet before we were out of the place he had turned--not once but many
times--to look over his shoulder, whispering to me more than once that
something was creeping along the other side--there--in the shadow of the
railings!--and didn't I see that hand against the breast, gripping
something?--and was I sure that the door had been closed?--and would it
not be better if we went back, and listened again outside it?
We were well on our way back to his lodging when he stopped, and gripped
me, and cried out suddenly that the candle had been left alight; he was
sure of it--sure that some one would see it shining through the chinks
of the door. But that I gripped him firmly he would have set off then
and there, perhaps to burst into the place in some mad fashion, to see
what had happened. But I got him back to his lodging, and saw him
presently stretched upon the bed, muttering and moaning to himself, and
starting up every now and then to ask me if there wasn't a footstep on
the stairs, or a hand knocking at the door.
But in the morning he was calmer, and I made him as respectable as
possible, and took him down presently to the docks. There we found the
_Eaglet_, in the midst of much bustle and excitement, getting ready to
start; and I sent him on board, and left him there. The last I saw of
him was when the vessel was moving away into the river, and I was
standing at the dock side, watching. And Jervis Fanshawe was leaning
over the side, with that nervous hand of his plucking at his lips, and
with his haunted eyes staring straight through me and behind me, as
though at the last he saw Murray Olivant, with the knife in his breast,
rushing to stop him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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