“I’m from Police Headquarters,” the man on the doorstep explained, with the easy mendacity that was a heritage of his older days. He produced the one official card that remained with him, the one worn and dog-eared and once water-soaked Deputy-Commissioner’s card which still remained in his dog-eared wallet. “I’ve got to see him on business, Departmental business!”
“Mr. and Mrs. Copeland are at the Metropolitan, sir,” explained the servant. “At the Opera. And they are not back yet.”
“Then I’ll wait for him,” announced Blake, placated by the humbler note in the voice of the man in the service-coat.
“Very good, sir,” announced the servant. And he led the way upstairs, switching on the electrics as he went.
Blake found himself in what seemed to be a library. About this softly hung room he peered with an acute yet heavy disdain, with an indeterminate envy which he could not control. It struck him as being feminine and over fine, that shadowy room with all its warm hangings and polished wood. It stood for a phase of life with which he had no patience. And he kept telling himself that it had not been come by honestly, that on everything about him, from the silver desk ornaments to the marble bust glimmering out of its shadowy background, he himself had some secret claim. He scowled up at a number of signed etchings and a row of diminutive and heavily framed canvases, scowled up at them with quick contempt. Then he peered uncomfortably about at the shelves of books, mottled streaks of vellum and morocco stippled with gold, crowded pickets of soft-lettered color which seemed to stand between him and a world which he had never cared to enter. It was a foolish world, that world of book reading, a lackadaisical region of unreality, a place for women and children, but never meant for a man with a man’s work to do.
His stolidly contemptuous eyes were still peering about the room when the door opened and closed again. There was something so characteristically guarded and secretive in the movement that Blake knew it was Copeland even before he let his gaze wheel around to the newcomer. About the entire figure, in fact, he could detect that familiar veiled wariness, that enigmatic and self-concealing cautiousness which had always had the power to touch him into a quick irritation.
“Mr. Blake, I believe,” said Copeland, very quietly. He was in full evening dress. In one hand he held a silk hat and over one arm hung a black top-coat. He held himself in perfect control, in too perfect control, yet his thin face was almost ashen in color, almost the neutral-tinted gray of a battle-ship’s side-plates. And when he spoke it was with the impersonal polite unction with which he might have addressed an utter stranger.
“You wished to see me!” he said, as his gaze fastened itself on Blake’s figure. The fact that he remained standing imparted a tentativeness to the situation. Yet his eyes remained on Blake, studying him with the cold and mildly abstracted curiosity with which he might view a mummy in its case.
“I do!” said Blake, without rising from his chair.
“About what?” asked Copeland. There was an acidulated crispness in his voice which hinted that time might be a matter of importance to him.