Coryndon listened no longer. He closed the door of the silk cupboard, bundled up the yards of silk in his arms and extinguishing the lamp darted behind a screen. It was a heavy carved teak screen, inset with silk panels embroidered with a long spray of hanging wistaria on a dark yellow ground. As he hid himself, he cursed his own stupidity. In the excitement of his desire to enter the curio shop, he had forgotten to hamper the lock with pebbles.
After what seemed an age, the door opened slowly and Mhtoon Pah came in. Something, he knew not what, had dragged him away from the Pagoda, and dragged him back to his shop. His eyes looked mad and unnatural in the light of the lantern he held in his hand, and he shut the door and stood like a dog who scents danger, and stared round the room. He walked to the silk cupboard and looked in through the glass panes, but did not open it or discover that it was unlocked. He paced round the room, stopping before the screen, his eyes still reflecting his trouble of mind.
From behind the screen, Coryndon watched every stir he made; he saw the look on his face and noted Mhtoon Pah's smallest movement. There was no evidence of thieves, and yet suspicion made itself plain in every line of the curio dealer's body. At last, with a gasping sigh, he sat before the small figure of an alabaster Gaudama and stared at it with unwinking eyes.
"I shed no blood," he said, in a low rattling voice. "I shed no blood. My hands are clean."
Over and over he repeated the words, like an incantation, his voice rising and falling, until Coryndon could have emerged from his hiding and taken him by the throat.
The thought of coming out upon Mhtoon Pah crossed his mind, but his instinct held him back. He wondered desperately where Leh Shin had gone, and if he would come in upon the Burman making his strange prayer. Still Mhtoon Pah repeated the words and swayed to and fro before the image of the Buddha, and the very moments seemed to pause and listen with Coryndon. The shop was close and the air oppressive. Little trickles of sweat ran down his neck and made channels in the stain on his skin, and still Coryndon waited in tense suspense.
For nearly ten minutes Mhtoon Pah continued to rock and mutter on the floor, and then he got up, and, taking his lantern, went out by the door into the passage. Coryndon waited for the sound of a scuffle and a fall, but none came, and he was in the dark, surrounded by silence once more.
Without waiting to consider, he followed across the room and saw the swinging light go down the passage and disappear suddenly. It seemed to Coryndon that Mhtoon Pah had disappeared, as though he had gone through the wall at the end of the passage, and he followed slowly. Silence locked him in again, the dark, motionless silence of enclosed space.
He did not dare to call out again to Leh Shin, and for all that he could tell, the Chinaman might have been an arm's-reach away from him in the darkness, also waiting for some sudden thing to happen. The dark passage was an ante-chamber to some event: Coryndon's tingling nerves told him that; and he steadied himself, holding in his imagination in a close, resolute grip.
He had no way of judging the time that passed, but he guessed that it seemed longer to him than it possibly could have been; when from somewhere far below him, he heard a cry and the noise of several voices, all raised into indistinct clamour.