The Yellow Claw | Page 5

Leroux, anxiously.
"If you please," whispered the visitor.
She dropped her arms and fell back upon the chesterfield, insensible.
II
MIDNIGHT AND MR. KING
Leroux clutched at the corner of the writing-table to steady himself and stood there looking at the deathly face. Under the most favorable circumstances, he was no man of action, although in common with the rest of his kind he prided himself upon the possession of that presence of mind which he lacked. It was a situation which could not have alarmed "Martin Zeda," but it alarmed, immeasurably, nay, struck inert with horror, Martin Zeda's creator.
Then, in upon Leroux's mental turmoil, a sensible idea intruded itself.
"Dr. Cumberly!" he muttered. "I hope to God he is in!"
Without touching the recumbent form upon the chesterfield, without seeking to learn, without daring to learn, if she lived or had died, Leroux, the tempo of his life changed to a breathless gallop, rushed out of the study, across the entrance hail, and, throwing wide the flat door, leapt up the stair to the flat above--that of his old friend, Dr. Cumberly.
The patter of the slippered feet grew faint upon the stair; then, as Leroux reached the landing above, became inaudible altogether.
In Leroux's study, the table-clock ticked merrily on, seeming to hasten its ticking as the hand crept around closer and closer to midnight. The mosaic shade of the lamp mingled reds and blues and greens upon the white ceiling above and poured golden light upon the pages of manuscript strewn about beneath it. This was a typical work-room of a literary man having the ear of the public-- typical in every respect, save for the fur-clad figure outstretched upon the settee.
And now the peeping light indiscreetly penetrated to the hem of a silken garment revealed by some disarrangement of the civet fur. To the eye of an experienced observer, had such an observer been present in Henry Leroux's study, this billow of silk and lace behind the sheltering fur must have proclaimed itself the edge of a night-robe, just as the ankle beneath had proclaimed itself to Henry Leroux's shocked susceptibilities to be innocent of stocking.
Thirty seconds were wanted to complete the cycle of the day, when one of the listless hands thrown across the back of the chesterfield opened and closed spasmodically. The fur at the bosom of the midnight visitor began rapidly to rise and fall.
Then, with a choking cry, the woman struggled upright; her hair, hastily dressed, burst free of its bindings and poured in gleaming cascade down about her shoulders.
Clutching with one hand at her cloak in order to keep it wrapped about her, and holding the other blindly before her, she rose, and with that same odd, groping movement, began to approach the writing-table. The pupils of her eyes were mere pin-points flow; she shuddered convulsively, and her skin was dewed with perspiration. Her breath came in agonized gasps.
"God!--I . . . am dying . . . and I cannot--tell him!" she breathed.
Feverishly, weakly, she took up a pen, and upon a quarto page, already half filled with Leroux's small, neat, illegible writing, began to scrawl a message, bending down, one hand upon the table, and with her whole body shaking.
Some three or four wavering lines she had written, when intimately, for the flat of Henry Leroux in Palace Mansions lay within sight of the clock-face--Big Ben began to chime midnight.
The writer started back and dropped a great blot of ink upon the paper; then, realizing the cause of the disturbance, forced herself to continue her task.
The chime being completed: ONE! boomed the clock; TWO! . . . THREE! . . . FOUR! . . .
The light in the entrance-hall went out!
FIVE! boomed Big Ben;--SIX! . . . SEVEN! . . .
A hand, of old ivory hue, a long, yellow, clawish hand, with part of a sinewy forearm, crept in from the black lobby through the study doorway and touched the electric switch!
EIGHT! . . .
The study was plunged in darkness!
Uttering a sob--a cry of agony and horror that came from her very soul--the woman stood upright and turned to face toward the door, clutching the sheet of paper in one rigid hand.
Through the leaded panes of the window above the writing-table swept a silvern beam of moonlight. It poured, searchingly, upon the fur-clad figure swaying by the table; cutting through the darkness of the room like some huge scimitar, to end in a pallid pool about the woman's shadow on the center of the Persian carpet.
Coincident with her sobbing cry--NINE! boomed Big Ben; TEN! . . .
Two hands--with outstretched, crooked, clutching fingers--leapt from the darkness into the light of the moonbeam.
"God! Oh, God!" came a frenzied, rasping shriek--"MR. KING!"
Straight at the bare throat leapt the yellow hands; a gurgling cry rose--fell--and died away.
Gently, noiselessly, the lady of the civet