And she went in.
He had yet another alarm. Something moved on the balcony itself, near a row of flower-pots. Then he felt a pressure against his leg.
“Ah, Beppo!” he whispered, suddenly relieved, smiling at his nervous timidity. A great Angora cat leaped on to his knees, and began clawing at the superb pile of his purple trousers. He stroked the animal, and Beppo purred with a volume of sound equal to that of many sawmills. “Don’t purr so loud, Bep,” he advised the cat; but the cat, under the impression that it was the centre of importance in the best of all possible worlds, purred with undiminished vigour.
Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour passed so, and then Carpentaria heard heavy footsteps in the avenue from the direction of the Central Way. He jumped up, shattering the illusions of Beppo, and listened intently. A man presently appeared, walking slowly. He wondered who it could be; but when the figure paused at Ilam’s steps, mounted them, and pushed open the unlatched door, he saw that it was Ilam himself, and that Ilam was holding in his arms a bundle of what looked like black cloth. The vision of him was but transient, for Ilam closed the door at once. Ilam, then, must have left his house before Carpentaria had come on to the balcony. The watcher on the balcony felt his heart beating rapidly. His calm had vanished. The frenzy of the music, the perturbation caused by the bullet, had passed, only to give way to another and perhaps a more dreadful excitation. What could these secret journeys of Ilam portend? He clutched fiercely the rail of the balcony in his apprehensive anxiety.
After a time—not a very long time—the door opened again, and for at least five seconds Josephus Ilam stood plainly silhouetted against a light within the house, and over his shoulders, which were bent, he carried an enormous limp burden, draped in black. He looked back into the house once, then turned awkwardly, because of his burden, to shut the door behind him, and with excessive deliberation descended the steps and came out into the avenue. The figure and its burden were now nothing but a shape in the gloom.
Carpentaria decided in the fraction of a second what he would do. He slipped into his bedroom, took off his boots, put on a pair of felt slippers, scurried downstairs, opened the side-door, and gently slipped out. Ilam, tramping slowly with clumsy footsteps, had reached the arch leading to the Central Way.
CHAPTER VII—The Cut
Carpentaria dogged him with all the precautions of silence as he turned to the right down the Central Way. The great thoroughfare of the City of Pleasure was, of course, absolutely deserted. Its fountains were stilled; its pretty cable-cars had disappeared; its flags had been hauled down. The meagre trees rustled chilly in the night-wind. Its vast and floriated white architecture seemed under the sombre sky to be the architecture of a dream. The one sign of human things was the illuminated face of the clock over the Exposition Palace, which showed twenty-five minutes past twelve. Of the two thousand souls employed in the City, more than half had gone to their homes in the other city, London, and several hundreds slept in the dormitories that had been built for them at the southern extremity of the Central Way. The remaining hundred or so were dispersed in various parts of the City, either watching or asleep. Some had the right to sleep at their posts. But the men of the highly-organized fire service would be awake and alert.