Immediately that he found himself alone, Labertouche made of Quain's letter a second burnt offering to prejudice upon the tray of hammered brass. He was possessed of an incurable aversion to waste-paper baskets and other receptacles from which the curious might fish out torn bits of paper and, with patience, piece together and reconstruct documents of whose import he preferred the world at large to remain unadvised. Hence the tray of brass—a fixture among the furnishings of his desk.
This matter attended to, he lost himself in Bradshaw and the Peninsular & Oriental Steamship Company's list of sailings; from which he derived enlightenment. "He was to come direct," mused Labertouche. "In that case he'll have waited over in London for the Poonah." He turned to the copy of the Indian Daily News which lay at his elbow, somewhat anxiously consulting its shipping news. Under the heading of "Due this Day" he discovered the words: "Poonah, London—Calcutta—Straits Settlements." And his face lengthened with concern.
"That's short notice," he said. "Lucky I got back to-day—uncommon lucky!… Still I may be mistaken." But the surmise failed to comfort him.
He drew a sheet of paper on which there was no letter-head to him and began to write, composing deliberately and with great care.
The building in which his offices were located stood upon a corner; at either end of the long corridor on the upper floor, upon which the various offices opened, were stairways, one descending to Dhurrumtollah Street, the other to a side street little better than an alley. It may be considered significant that, whereas Labertouche himself was not seen either to enter or to leave the building at any time that day, an Attit mendicant did enter from Dhurrumtollah Street shortly after Frank had gone to lunch—and disappeared forthwith; while, in the dusk of evening, a slim Eurasian boy with a clerkly air left by the stairs to the alley. I say a boy, but he may have been thirty; he was carefully attired in clothing of the mode affected by the Anglo-Indian, but wore shoes that were almost heelless. His height may have been five-feet seven inches, but he carried himself with a slight, studious rounding of the shoulders that assorted well with the effect of his large gold-rimmed spectacles.
He stumbled out of the alley into Free School Street and set his face to the Maidan, shuffling along slowly with a peering air, his spectacles catching the light from the shop-windows and glaring glassily through the shadows.
CHAPTER VIII
FIRST STEPS
Forward on the promenade deck of the Poonah, in the shadow of the bridge, Amber stood with both elbows on the rail, dividing his somewhat perturbed attention between a noisy lot of lascar stewards, deckhands, and native third-class passengers in the bows below, and the long lines of Saugor Island, just then slipping past on the starboard beam.
On either hand, ahead, the low, livid green banks of the Hooghly were closing in, imperceptibly constricting the narrow channel through which the tawny tide swirled down to the sea at the full force of its ebb. Struggling under this handicap, the Poonah trembled from stem to stern with the heavy labouring of the screw, straining forward like a thoroughbred, its strength almost spent, with the end of the race in sight. Across the white gleaming decks, as the bows swung from port to starboard and back again, following the channel, purple-black shadows slipped like oil. A languid land-wind blew fitfully down the estuary, in warm puffs dense with sickly-sweet jungle reek. The day was hot and sticky with humidity; a haze like a wall of dust coloured the skies almost to the zenith.