Chafed at his insolence as I was, I could not help noticing that his hands were small, white, and beautifully shaped, with the long taper fingers of the artist, and pink carefully-trimmed nails.
When he had quite finished, he closed the knife deliberately and put it on a little shelf by the bunk, then darting a sudden sideways glance at me, he inquired sharply, almost viciously, “Well, sir, and what have you to say for yourself?”
It was the first time he had looked at me since I had entered the cabin, and as I met his eye it seemed to me that he started perceptibly, and that I saw a sudden dilatation of the pupil which gave a look of consternation if not of fear to his face. The next moment he turned from me and flashed at Hughes a look of such malignity that I fully expected to see the look succeeded by a blow—a look which, if I read it aright, was the portent of a terrible vengeance to the man who had played him false.
I am almost ashamed to write what followed. Not for the first time in my life—not for the first time in this enterprise—I acted as only one could act who was possessed by some spirit of mischief for his own undoing. Even to myself the impulse which comes over me at times to play the fool—to say or do at the critical moment the one word or thing which ought to be left unsaid or undone, is altogether unaccountable.
This uncertainty of character, this tendency to lose my head and to bring tumbling about my ears, by the utterance of a word, the entire edifice which I have perhaps spent laborious months in building up, has been my stumbling-block through life, and must inevitably stand in the way of my ever becoming a good detective. But a good detective I have, as the reader knows, never claimed to be. Were it so, I should undoubtedly suppress the incident I am about to relate, for it tells very much against myself without in any way strengthening the probability of my story.
When the man in hiding on the “Cuban Queen” lifted his head and looked me in the face, I knew at once that I was in the presence, if not of James Mullen, at all events of the person with whom I had travelled to Southend on the occasion when he had objected so forcibly to the striking of a fusee. The bright prominent eyes, beautiful as a woman’s, the delicately clear complexion, the straw-coloured hair, the aquiline nose with the strange upward arching of the nostrils, the curious knitting of the brows over the eyes, the full lips that spoke of voluptuousness unscrupulous and cruel, the firm, finely-moulded chin—all these there was no mistaking, in spite of his woman’s dress. As I looked at him the scene in the stuffy smoking carriage on the Southend railway came back to me, and when in his quick, incisive way he asked, “Well, sir, and what have you to say for yourself?” I stammered foolishly for a moment, and then, prompted by what spirit of perversity and mischief I know not, answered him by another question, which under the circumstances must have sounded like intentional insolence.
“You’re the man wot couldn’t stand the smell of fusees?”
Had horns suddenly sprouted out on each side of my head he could not have looked at me with more absolute amazement and dismay. For a very few seconds he stared wide-eyed with wonder, and then a look of comprehension and cunning crept into his eyes. They narrowed cat-like and cruel, the muscles about the cheeks tightened, the lips parted, showing the clenched teeth, I heard his breath coming and going like that of a winded runner, and the next second his face flamed out with a look of such devilish ferocity and uncontrollable fury as I pray God I may never see on face of man again.
With a howl of hatred more horrible than that of any tiger—for no wild beast is half so hellish in its cruelty as your human tiger—he sprang at me, beating at my face, now with closed fist, now open-handed and with clutching, tearing nails, kicking with his feet, biting and snapping at my hands and throat like a dog, and screaming like a very madman.
To this day it consoles me not a little for the lapse of self-possession which I had just before manifested to think that I never lost presence of mind during this onslaught. When he came at me, my one thought was to see that he made use of no weapons. His wild-cat clawing and scratching it was no difficult matter for any one with a quick eye and cool head to ward off; but when I saw him clap his hand to his hip, where, had he been wearing male clothing, a pistol or knife might well have lain, the eye I kept upon him was, I promise you, a keen one.