Descending the steps, he found himself in the small, musty cellar. The vault-like room was empty save for a couple of barrels standing in a corner and a small pile of firewood under the stairs that led to regions above. Selecting a faggot of kindling-wood from this pile, he fashioned a torch by whittling the end into a confusion of partially detached slivers. This he lighted with a match, and then mounted the stairs.
The door at the head opened at the lifting of an old-fashioned latch. A thick screen of cobwebs almost closed the upper half of the aperture. He burnt it away with the flaming torch, and passed on into the kitchen. He was grateful for the snapping fire of the faggot, for otherwise the silence of the grave would have fallen about him as he stood motionless for a moment peering about the empty room. No light penetrated from the outside. The air was dead. Spiders had clothed the corners and the ceiling with their silk, over which the dust of years lay thick and ugly. He felt, with a queer little shiver, that the eyes of a thousand spiders peered gloatingly down upon him from the murky fastnesses.
He hurried on. The rooms on the lower floor had been stripped of all signs of habitation. His footsteps resounded throughout the house. Boards creaked under his tread. Without actually realizing what he was doing, he began to tiptoe toward the stairway that led to the upper floor. He laughed at himself for this precaution, and yet could not rid himself of the feeling that some one was listening, that the stealth of the midnight burglar was necessary. The stairs groaned under his weight, the dust-covered banister cracked loudly when he laid his hand upon it. He had the strange notion that they were sounding the alarm to some guardian occupant of the premises,—to a slumbering ghost perhaps.
He came at last to the room where Alix and David had played at book-writing. In the centre stood a kitchen table, on either side of which was a rudely constructed bench,—evidently the handiwork of David Strong. Two strips of rag carpet served as a rug. At each end of the table was a candlestick containing a half-used tallow candle. There was a single ink pot, but there were two penholders beside it, and a couple of blue blotters. Nearby were two ancient but substantial rocking chairs,—singularly out of place,—no doubt discarded survivors of long-distant days of comfort, rescued from an attic storeroom by the young trespassers. A scrap basket, half-full of torn and crumpled sheets of paper, stood conveniently near the table.
He lighted both of the candles and extinguished the flickering faggot. The steady glow of the candlelight filled the room. On the mantel above the blackened fireplace he saw a small, white framed mirror. A forgotten pair of gloves lay beside it, and two or three hairpins. He picked up the gloves, slapped them against his leg to rid them of accumulated dust, and then stuck them into his coat pocket. They were long and slim and soiled by wear.
A closet door, standing partly open, drew him across the room. Hanging from one of the hooks was a moth-eaten vicuna smoking jacket of blue. Beside this garment hung a girl's bright red blazer, with black collar; protecting, business-like paper cuffs were still attached. In the corner of the closet reposed a broom, a mop and an empty pail.
He smiled at the thought of young Alix sweeping and scrubbing the floor of this sequestered retreat.
Returning to the table, he pulled out the drawer, and there, side by side, lay two neat but far from voluminous manuscripts, each weighted down by the unused portion of the scratch pad from which the written sheets had been torn. One was in the bold, superior scrawl of a boy, the other ineffably feminine in its painstaking regard for legibility and tidiness.
III — These literary efforts had been cut off short in their infancy. David's vigorously written pages, marred by frequent scratchings and erasures, far outnumbered Alix's. He was in the midst of Chapter Three of a novel entitled "The Phantom Singer" when the calamitous interruption came. Alix's work had progressed to Chapter Five. Inspection revealed the further fact that she was thrifty. She had written on both sides of the sheets, while the prodigal David confined himself to the inexorable "one side of the sheet only." There were unmistakable indications of editorial arrogance on the part of Alix on every sheet of David's manuscript. Her small, precise hand was to be seen here, there and everywhere,—sometimes in the substitution of a single word, often in the rewriting of an entire sentence. But nowhere on her own pages was to be found so much as a scratch by the clumsy hand of her fellow novelist.
Her story bore the fetching title: "Lady Mordaunt's Lover."