5
Jack as an instinctive precaution returned to close the vault door, and the inner steel door. The latter was provided with a handle on the closet side to draw it to. When Jack closed it the irritating little bell stopped ringing.
"That was to warn him if any one opened it while he was inside," thought Jack. "And the band of soot on the floor was to inform him if his stronghold had been entered during his absence. What a queer old boy to take so much trouble to hide himself!"
Silas Gyde's room in its architectural features was exactly like thousands of second floor backs in the endless rows of houses built from forty to fifty years ago. As Jack stood inside the closet door by which he had entered, two windows faced him, looking out on the back yards he knew, though they were closely curtained. At his right was a fireplace with a composition mantel, at his left was the door leading to the stair hall. The bed was below the hall door: it is always there. And adjoining the room on that side would be the bath room. Jack had lived in many such houses.
The air in the room was heavy, but less foul than might have been expected. Jack found behind the curtains that ventilators had been ingeniously contrived, which could be opened and shut without one's showing oneself at the window. For that matter the glass of the windows was well-nigh opaque with the accumulation of years of dust. The bed was tumbled but clean. Jack suspected that the old man had changed linen with the bed in the hotel. There was a similar oil lamp and oil heater in here.
"Those outside were a plant while these got the oil he carried in," thought Jack.
The room was hideously cheerless. Rubbish was piled everywhere. There was an old flat-topped desk with its back to the windows, and a sort of path had been cleared from the desk to the closet door with a branch to the bed midway. Elsewhere the litter had swamped everything. It was principally newspapers. Jack had never seen so many old newspapers in his life. One corner of the room was filled by a small mountain of scrap books containing faded clippings. When Jack came to examine them he found that all the items related to Silas Gyde, and most of them were abusive.
Yet from the walls of this unlovely room looked down a few rarely beautiful old pictures, and, as Jack was to learn later, they were of almost priceless value. Evidently at some period of his career the old miser had had generous stirrings. One of these pictures caused Jack a great start. It occupied the space next to the closet door, hence he did not see it until he had come into the room and had turned around.
It was his mother. An enlargement by a talented hand of the wistful girlhood picture Delamare had given him that morning. She looked down on the fusty disarray with pitying eyes: she was startlingly young and alive in that dark place. The tears welled up in Jack's eyes again.
"Think of her presiding over a den like this! I'll give her a sunnier prospect. But he must have loved her well! I'll credit him with that."