Chapter Ten.
The Bookworm at Home.
As Chester waited for an answer to his summons the thought of the awkwardness of his position struck him, but he was strung up and determined to go on with his quest at all hazards. At the end of a minute there was no reply, and he knocked and rang again, with the hope rising that he was on the right tack at last, for the silence accorded with the mystery of the place he sought.
It was not until he had roused the echoes within the house for the third time that he heard the rattle of a chain being taken down; then the door was opened slowly, and Chester’s heart sank as he found himself face to face with a dim-eyed, sleepy-looking old man, thin, stooping, and untidy of aspect, in his long, dusty dressing-gown and slippers. He was wearing an old-fashioned pair of round glass, silver-rimmed spectacles, whose ends were secured by a piece of black ribbon; and these he pushed up on his forehead as he turned his head side-wise and peered at the visitor.
“I’m afraid you knocked before, sir,” he said in a quiet, dreamy tone.
“Yes—yes. I ought not to have come in this unceremonious way.”
“Pray do not apologise,” said the old gentleman, mildly. “I was busy reading, and did not hear.”
He pushed his glasses a little higher and smiled in a pleasant, benevolent fashion, while at the first glance Chester saw that he was quite off the scent. For he gazed past the old man into the great hall whose walls were covered with book-shelves, while parcels and piles of volumes were heaped up in every available corner.
“I see that I have made a mistake,” said Chester, hastily.
“Indeed?”
“I have come to the wrong house. I am very sorry. I am trying to find some people here.”
“Yes? Well, houses are very much alike. Will you step in? I can perhaps help you. I think I have a Directory somewhere—somewhere, if I can lay my hand upon it, for I seldom use such a work, and I have so many books.”
The old gentleman, whose appearance branded him as a dreamy, absorbed bookworm, drew back, and Chester involuntarily entered the hall, to note that with the book-cases away it would be such a place as he had visited; but while that was magnificently furnished, and pervaded by the soft glow of electric light, here all was dust and mouldering knowledge, the entrance suggesting that the rest of the house must be the same.
“Pray come in,” said the old man, after closing the door; and he led the way into what had been intended for a large dining-room, but had been turned by its occupant into a library, packed with books from floor to ceiling; piles were upon the tables and chairs, and heaps here and there upon the dusty old Turkey carpet.
“Directory—Directory,” said the old man, looking slowly round. “Books, books, books, but not the one we want.”
“You seem to have a large and valuable library,” Chester ventured to observe.
“Eh? Yes, I suppose so. The work of a long life, sir. But very dusty all over the house. What did you say was the name of the people you wanted?”
“I—that is,” stammered Chester, confusedly, “I do not know their name. Some patients whom I want to find out.”
“Are you a doctor, sir?” said the old man, looking at his visitor with a benevolent smile. “Grand profession. I should have liked to have been a doctor. But is not that a very vague description? Names are so useful for distinguishing one person, place, or thing, from another. But it was in this street, you say?”
“Well—er—no, I am not sure,” said Chester, hurriedly.
“Dear me! that is rather perplexing,” said the old man, taking off his spectacles and beginning to wipe them upon the tail of his dressing-gown. “But,” he added, as if relieved, “the Directory would be of no use if you do not know the name.”
“None whatever,” said Chester, who was smarting with the thought that this pleasant old gentleman must take him for a lunatic. “Pray forgive me for troubling you in this unceremonious way.”
“Oh, not at all, my dear sir, not at all. I have so few visitors, though,” he added, “as you see I am surrounded by old friends.”
“The same style of house—the same sort of hall,” thought Chester, as he went out after a few more words had been exchanged. “Could it have been in this street?”
He looked up sharply at a heavy-faced butler and a tall, smart, powdered-headed footman, who were standing at the door of the next house, doing nothing, with the air of two men whose employers were out.
Chester looked eagerly at them and passed by, but the door was nearly closed, and he could not see inside.
His sharp look was returned with interest, the two men evidently expecting him to come up the steps and address them, but he went on for a short distance in an undecided way, thinking deeply, and trying hard to see through the mental mist which shut him in. But a short time before he had felt convinced that he had found the house and been disappointed; now he felt quite as sure that the mansion where the two servants were standing must be the place. He had no special reason for coming to the conclusion, but all the same a curious feeling of attraction made him slacken his pace, angry and annoyed the while that he had not stopped and spoken to the men.
“Great heavens! What a vacillating moral coward I have grown,” he said to himself. “What would have been easier?”
He said this but felt that the task was terribly hard, for it seemed such a childish thing to do—to go about asking folk if that was the house where some people lived who had fetched him to attend a man who had been shot, and kept him a prisoner for days and days before drugging him and having him shut up in a cab to be driven about in the middle of the night.
“Why, if I could explain all this to them,” he said to himself at last, “they’d think I was a harmless kind of madman, troubled with memories of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, which I was trying to drag into everyday life like a Barber’s hundredth brother, or a one-eyed Calendar. Come, come, old fellow,” he continued, as he mentally apostrophised himself; “go back home and prescribe for yourself, and then begin to show someone that you have been suffering from a strange mental vagary, brought about by over-excitement. She will believe it in time, and all may come right again. Ah! how like.”
He started and hurried after an open carriage in which two ladies were seated. He only saw the profile of one of them very slightly, and her back as she passed, but there was a turn of the figure—a particularly graceful air, as she leaned forward to give some instruction to the coachman—which struck him as being exactly similar to attitudes he had seen Marion assume again and again when attending upon her brother.
He jumped into a cab and told the man to follow the victoria, with the result that the latter came to a standstill in front of one of the fashionable West-End drapery establishments.
Chester was close up as the lady alighted, and he sprang out excitedly to go and speak to her.
There was every opportunity, for the carriage drove on with her companion, and she crossed the pavement alone, to walk a few steps alone in front of the great plate-glass window, gazing carelessly in at the various costumes displayed.
“A woman after all,” he said to himself, bitterly annoyed at what he considered her frivolity in thinking of dress at a time when her brother was in all probability suffering still.
“But it is their nature, or the result of their education,” he said the next minute, as he went close up behind her, and saw her face reflected clearly in the long series of mirrors at the back.