The wardrobe cleared the bend, and Audrey Cunningham followed it into the cellar.
It was only natural that she should look with some curiosity at the place in which Philip Esdaile had spent that unaccounted-for half hour on the morning of the day before. I did the same thing myself at a later stage. But all that she saw was the most ordinary of cellars. Hubbard himself, who seemed to have cellar-on-the-brain, would have found nothing remarkable in it. This is all that was to be seen:—
A roomy, gloomy, clammy place, with old plastered walls, and neither door nor window of any kind nor other means of entry than that they had just used. Its air hit skin and nostrils like that of a grave. The light of the single candle seemed lost in its obscurity. When Audrey held the candle up above her head a couple of heavy beams could be seen, necessary for the support of the largish area of the studio floor; when she held it to one side it showed in a corner a couple of gas-meters with the usual pipes, and underneath them the improvised rack in which Esdaile kept his modest stock of wine. When she held it to the other side its light hardly reached the farther wall, but wavered over the dim objects that half-filled the floor-space. These were merely the furniture for which Esdaile had no present use, and consisted of a large couch covered with a dingy dust-sheet, a few oddments of chairs, a number of packing-cases, and in fact the usual miscellaneous collection of household lumber that one day seems hardly worth keeping and the next looks just too good to throw away. Nearest to hand on the wine-rack stood the bottle of curaçao, just where Esdaile himself had replaced it. And that was all.
"Well, where will you have it, Audrey?" said Philip. "What about over by the sofa there?"
Mrs. Cunningham was once more holding the candle over her head. Any young woman's face by candlelight always seems singularly attractive to me, especially if she is a dark-eyed woman, and she was a slight and graceful thing to have endured so much. Had Joan been holding that candle up she would have given you the impression of a statue, but Mrs. Cunningham was just the opposite—all warm and fleeting and impermanent charm, a creature depending on the varying accidents of color, even when that color was only the sooty black of her home-made dress, the candlelight on her face and the tiny reflections in her large and lustrous eyes.
Suddenly she gave a shiver and a nervous laugh.
"I don't think I should like to be shut in here alone," she said.
"Why not?" Philip asked.
But the "why not" hardly needed saying, with that same candlestick in her hand and, as she once more moved it, that same jar of curaçao seeming to advance a little out of the shadows. These things brought the shock and dread of that other morning all too plainly before her again. It was within these chill sweating walls that Philip Esdaile had done the "wool gathering" he had spoken of. What wool? She saw none. Then why, up to that very moment almost, had he shuffled so? Why had he seemed so anxious that the wardrobe should be placed anywhere rather than in the place where they now stood? Here she was. She could not imagine any kind of cellar, however earthy and tomblike, that so changed its nature or properties that at one moment it must be jealously guarded and the next thrown open for her to look as much as she pleased. She was free to look. Monty also was wandering about in the farther corner there, as greedy for knowledge as she. The only check on her freedom was that she felt that Philip at the same time was covertly watching her.