The Luck of the Vails: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

A confused idea of metholycine, a distinct idea that he did not wish Harry to run the risk of being seen by Sanders going to another room than the ordinary, made itself felt in the doctor's reply.

"Not for worlds!" he said. "A poisonous habit."

"That means I mustn't have any, does it?" asked Harry from the doorway. "Now that is hard lines. I want some, but not enough to go and fetch it from the hall myself. Do have some: give me an excuse."

"Not even that," said the doctor.

"Well, good-night," said the lad, and he closed the door between the two rooms.

For so tired a man, the doctor on the closing of the door exhibited a considerable briskness. Very quickly and quietly he took off dress coat, shoes, and shirt, and buttoning a dark-gray coat over his vest, set his door ajar, and switched off his light. The hour for action, he well realized, might strike any moment, but he was prepared, as far as preparation was possible. Outside there was waiting Geoffrey with the rook rifle; inside the secret passage the spurious Harry—both, he knew, calm and bland for any emergency. Meanwhile the real Harry was safe for the present; none but he and Templeton knew of the change of room, and none could reach him but through the chamber he himself occupied. But an intricate and subtle passage was likely to be ahead, and as yet its windings were unconjecturable. As a working hypothesis, for he could find no better, he had assumed that Mr. Francis's plans were in the main unaltered. Harry, drugged and unconscious, was to be taken to the plate closet at some hour in this dead night, where Sanders would be waiting. Yet this conjecture might be utterly at fault; in any case the drugged whisky, mixed as it now was with innocuous salt, could not have the effect desired, and for anything unforeseen (and here was at least one step untraceable), he must have every sense alert, to interpret to the best of his ability the smallest clew that came from the room opposite. Mr. Francis and Sanders were there now, firearms were not to be feared: here was the sum of his certainties. This also, and this from his study of Mr. Francis he considered probable to the verge of certainty, Harry would be unconscious when the death blow was given.

In the dark, time may either fly with swallows' wings or lag with the tortoise, for the watch in a man's brain is an unaccountable mechanism, and the doctor had no idea how long he had been waiting, when he heard the latch of a door open somewhere in the passage outside. Two noiseless steps took him to his own, and through the crack, where he had left it ajar, he saw a long perpendicular chink of light; bright it seemed and near. Without further audible sound this grew gradually fainter, and with the most stealthy precautions he opened his own door and peered out. Some fifteen yards distant, moving very slowly down the passage, were two figures—those of Mr. Francis and his valet. The latter was dressed in ordinary clothes, the former, vividly visible by the light of the candle the servant carried, in a light garish dressing gown and red slippers. At this moment they paused opposite the door of the room Harry usually occupied, and here held a word of inaudible colloquy. There was a table just outside the door, fronting the top of the stairs, and a dim lamp on a bracket hung above it. On it Mr. Francis put down a small bottle, and what looked like an ordinary table napkin, and the two went down the stairs.

It was the time for caution and rapidity; already, as he knew, luck had favoured him, in that neither had entered Harry's room, and after giving them some ten seconds' law, he went noiselessly over the thick carpet of the passage to the table and opened the bottle Mr. Francis had left there. The unmistakable fumes of chloroform greeted his nostril, and he stood awhile in unutterable perplexity. Fresh and valuable as this evidence was, it was difficult to form any certain conclusions about it. Conceivably, the chloroform was an additional precaution, in case Harry had not drunk the whisky; conceivably also the metholycine idea had been altogether abandoned in the absence of a skilled operator. That at least he could easily settle, and turning into the bedroom Harry usually occupied, he switched on the electric light. Templeton had followed his instructions about making the room look habitable, but on the dressing table stood what was perhaps not the work of Templeton. A cut-glass bottle was there on a tray, with a glass and a siphon. He spilled a teaspoonful of the spirit into the glass and tasted it. Salt.