The secretary looked at him narrowly, and decided that he was really ill; that there was nothing in his face to suggest the impostor.
'Come into my room for a moment,' he said, and sent the footman upstairs to make sure that no small property of the Club was missing. 'Here, drink down the brandy. . . . Feeling better? You are aware, no doubt, that I might call in the police and have you searched?'
For a moment Dick did not answer, but stood staring with rigid eyes.
At length,—
'They—won't—find—what—I—want,' he said slowly, dropping out the words one by one. The secretary now felt certain that here was a genuine case of mental derangement. With such he had no desire to be troubled; and so, the footman bringing word that nothing had been stolen, he dismissed Dick to the street.
CHAPTER VI.
The brandy steadying him, Dick went down the steps with a fairly firm tread. But he went down into a world that for him was all darkness— darkness of chaos—carrying an entity that was not his, but belonged Heaven knew to whom.
The streets, the traffic, meant nothing to him. Their roar was within his head; and on his ears, nostrils, chest, lay a pressure as of mighty waters. Rapidly as he walked, he felt himself all the while to be lying fathoms deep in those waters, face downwards, with drooped head, held motionless there while something within him struggled impotently to rise to the surface. The weight that held him down, almost to bursting, was as the weight of tons.
The houses, the shop-fronts, the street-lamps, the throng of dark figures, passed him in unmeaning procession. Yet all the time his feet, by some instinct, were leading him towards the water; and by-and-by he found himself staring—still face downwards—into a black inverted heaven wherein the lights had become stars and swayed only a little.
He had, in fact, halted, and was leaning over the parapet of the Embankment, a few yards from Cleopatra's Needle; and as he passed the plinth some impression of it must have bitten itself on the retina; for coiled among the stars lay two motionless sphinxes green-eyed, with sheathed claws, watching lazily while the pressure bore him down to them, and down—and still down. . . .
Upon this dome of night there broke the echo of a footfall. A thousand footsteps had passed him, and he had heard none of them. But this one, springing out of nowhere, sang and repeated itself and re-echoed across the dome, and from edge to edge. Dick's fingers drew themselves up like the claws of the sphinx. The footsteps drew nearer while he crouched: they were close to him. Dick leapt at them, with murder in his spring.