On the piece of paper in a childish hand was scrawled this ill-spelt message: "Please come as quikley as you can or it will be to late."
Mr. King's factotum, a long, thin young man with carroty hair, had brought the envelope five minutes before. The St. James' church clock had just struck five; it was raining hard, the water running from the eaves above Henry's attic window across and down with a curious little gurgling chuckle that was all his life afterwards to be connected with this evening.
There was no signature to the paper; he had never seen Christina's handwriting before; it might be a blind or a decoy or simply a practical joke. Nevertheless, he did not for a moment hesitate as to what he would do. He had already that afternoon decided in the empty melancholy of the deserted Hill Street library that he must that same evening make another attack on Peter Street. He was determined that this time he would discover once and for all the truth about Christina even though he had to wring Mrs. Tenssen's skinny neck to secure it.
He had returned to Panton Street fired with this resolve; five minutes later the note had been delivered to him.
He washed his face, put on a clean collar, placed the note carefully in his pocket-book and started out on the great adventure of his life. The rain was driving so lustily down Peter Street that no one was about. He moved like a man in a dream, driven by some fantastic force of his imagination as though he were still sitting in Panton Street and this were a new chapter that he was writing in his romance—or as though his body were in Panton Street and it was his soul that sallied forth. And yet the details about Mrs. Tenssen were real enough—he could still hear her crunching the sardine-bones, and Peter Street was real enough, and the rain as it trickled inside his collar, and the bump on his forehead.
Nevertheless in dreams too details were real.
As though he had done all this before (having as it were rehearsed it somewhere), he did not this time go to the little door but went rather to the yard that had seen his first attack. He stumbled in the dusk over boxes, planks of wood and pieces of iron, hoops and wheels and bars.
Once he almost fell and the noise that he made seemed to his anxious ears terrific, but suddenly he stumbled against the little wooden stair, set his foot thereon and started to climb. Soon he felt the trap-door, pushed it up with his hand and climbed into the passage. Once more he was in the gallery, and once more he had looked through into the courtyard beyond, now striped and misted with the driving rain.
No human being was to be seen or heard. He moved indeed as in a dream. He was now by the long window, curtained as before. This time no voices came from the other side; there was no sound in all the world but the rain.