The Yellow Claw | Page 4

old-fashioned enough, and sufficient of an enthusiast, to pen his work, while lesser men dictated.
So, amidst that classic company, smiling or frowning upon him from the oaken shelves, where Petronius Arbiter, exquisite, rubbed shoulders with Balzac, plebeian; where Omar Khayyam leaned confidentially toward Philostratus; where Mark Twain, standing squarely beside Thomas Carlyle, glared across the room at George Meredith, Henry Leroux pursued the amazing career of "Martin Zeda."
It wanted but five minutes to the hour of midnight, when again the door bell clamored in the silence.
Leroux wrote steadily on. The bell continued to ring, and, furthermore, the ringer could be heard beating upon the outer door.
"Soames!" cried Leroux irritably, "Soames! Why the hell don't you go to the door!"
Leroux stood up, dashing his pen upon the table.
"I shall have to sack that damned man!" he cried; "he takes too many liberties--stopping out until this hour of the night!"
He pulled open the study door, crossed the hallway, and opened the door beyond.
In, out of the darkness--for the stair lights had been extinguished--staggered a woman; a woman whose pale face exhibited, despite the ravages of sorrow or illness, signs of quite unusual beauty. Her eyes were wide opened, and terror-stricken, the pupils contracted almost to vanishing point. She wore a magnificent cloak of civet fur wrapped tightly about her, and, as Leroux opened the door, she tottered past him into the lobby, glancing back over her shoulder.
With his upraised hands plunged pathetically into the mop of his hair, Leroux turned and stared at the intruder. She groped as if a darkness had descended, clutched at the sides of the study doorway, and then, unsteadily, entered--and sank down upon the big chesterfield in utter exhaustion.
Leroux, rubbing his chin, perplexedly, walked in after her. He scarcely had his foot upon the study carpet, ere the woman started up, tremulously, and shot out from the enveloping furs a bare arm and a pointing, quivering finger.
"Close the door!" she cried hoarsely--"close the door! . . . He has . . . followed me!" . . .
The disturbed novelist, as a man in a dream, turned, retraced his steps, and closed the outer door of the flat. Then, rubbing his chin more vigorously than ever and only desisting from this exercise to fumble in his dishevelled hair, he walked back into the study, whose Athenean calm had thus mysteriously been violated.
Two minutes to midnight; the most respectable flat in respectable Westminster; a lonely and very abstracted novelist--and a pale- faced, beautiful woman, enveloped in costly furs, sitting staring with fearful eyes straight before her. This was such a scene as his sense of the proprieties and of the probabilities could never have permitted Henry Leroux to create.
His visitor kept moistening her dry lips and swallowing, emotionally.
Standing at a discreet distance from her:--
"Madam," began Leroux, nervously.
She waved her hand, enjoining him to silence, and at the same time intimating that she would explain herself directly speech became possible. Whilst she sought to recover her composure, Leroux, gradually forcing himself out of the dreamlike state, studied her with a sort of anxious curiosity.
It now became apparent to him that his visitor was no more than twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, but illness or trouble, or both together, had seared and marred her beauty. Amid the auburn masses of her hair, gleamed streaks, not of gray, but of purest white. The low brow was faintly wrinkled, and the big--unnaturally big--eyes were purple shaded; whilst two heavy lines traced their way from the corner of the nostrils to the corner of the mouth--of the drooping mouth with the bloodless lips.
Her pallor became more strange and interesting the longer he studied it; for, underlying the skin was a yellow tinge which he found inexplicable, but which he linked in his mind with the contracted pupils of her eyes, seeking vainly for a common cause.
He had a hazy impression that his visitor, beneath her furs, was most inadequately clothed; and seeking confirmation of this, his gaze strayed downward to where one little slippered foot peeped out from the civet furs.
Leroux suppressed a gasp. He had caught a glimpse of a bare ankle!
He crossed to his writing-table, and seated himself, glancing sideways at this living mystery. Suddenly she began, in a voice tremulous and scarcely audible:--
"Mr. Leroux, at a great--at a very great personal risk, I have come to-night. What I have to ask of you--to entreat of you, will . . . will" . . .
Two bare arms emerged from the fur, and she began clutching at her throat and bosom as though choking--dying.
Leroux leapt up and would have run to her; but forcing a ghastly smile, she waved him away again.
"It is all right," she muttered, swallowing noisily. But frightful spasms of pain convulsed her, contorting her pale face.
"Some brandy--!" cried