Then he went in, barred and bolted very carefully, and set the spring burglar alarum—for once. Ponsonby was unusually careful and deliberate in his movements on this particular night. Then he sat down on the hall bench and took off his boots. Then he switched off the electric hall light. Then he pondered whether he should or should not have just one brandy and soda before going to bed—because he had come home so clear and calm and cool-headed from that City dinner. Ay or No—and the Ayes had it. He went into the dining-room. It had been furnished for the Ponsonbys on the best authority; in oak, with Brummagem-Benares brass pots and tea trays. The window curtains, and the drapery which hung before a deepish recess in the wall to the left of the door as you entered, were plush, of that artistic shade of olive-green which is so shabby when it is new that you can’t tell when it gets old. The recess had originally been intended for a book case; but young married people just starting in life never have any books—they are too much bound up in each other—and so it had been covered up. You can put things behind a covering of this sort which you do not care to expose to the gaze of the casual guest—a row of old slippers, or a pile of superannuated Army Lists, or a collection of summonses—or the Family Skeleton.
Ponsonby switched on the light, and opened the liquor case with his watch-chain key, and got a tumbler and soda siphon from the buffet, and lighted a cigar. Then he sat down in an armchair, unbuttoned his white waistcoat, loosened his collar, and prepared to be lonelily convivial. He thought of his girl-like bride asleep upstairs, with her cheek upon her hand, and her gold-brown hair swamping the pillow. It says much for the state of Ponsonby’s affections, that while he knew the uses of the monthly half pint of peroxide which was an unfailing item on the chemist’s bill, he could still be poetical about that tinge of gold. But newly married men seldom look into the roots of anything. He lifted his glass and drank her health. “To Mamie!� he said, as the frisky gas bubbles snapped at his nose. And then he glanced over the edge of the tumbler at the curtained recess behind the door. And the short hairs of his head rose up and began to promenade. And his teeth clicked against the glass he held. For a bolt of ice had shot through either ear orifice straight to his brain. In other words—Something had laughed—an ugly laugh—behind that drawn curtain.
In another moment it was put aside. A woman came out of the recess that had concealed her, and stood before him.
Not to mince matters, she belonged to the class we are content to call unfortunate. From her tawdry bonnet to the mud-befouled hem of her low-necked silk dress—a preposterous garment, grease-stained and ragged, and partly hidden by an opera cloak of sullied whiteness—the nature of her profession was written on her from head to foot. She was not without beauty, or the archæological traces of what had been it; but as she grinned at the astonished man, showing two rows of strong square teeth, yellowed with liquor and cigarette smoking, and the gathered muscles of her cheeks pushed up her underlids, narrowing her fierce, greedy eyes to mere slits, and the hood of her soiled mantle fell back from her coarsely dyed hair, she was a thing unlovely. She seemed to snuff the air with her broad nostrils, as scenting prey; she worked her fingers in their dirty white gloves, as though they were armed with talons that longed to tear and rend; and, as she did so, Ponsonby was irresistibly reminded of a panther.
Ponsonby had shot panthers in India, and had once been slightly mauled by a female specimen. It was an odd coincidence that the old scars on his left shoulder and thigh should have begun to burn and throb and shoot unpleasantly as the yellow-white fangs of the intruder gleamed upon him, framed in by her grinning, painted lips.
But Ponsonby recovered himself after a moment, and asked her, without ceremony, how the devil she came there? He was not a particularly bright man, but he knew, even as he asked. She had been crouching in the shadow under the portico—some of the Sloane Street houses have porticoes—when his cab drove up. She had watched him get out. Then, when he had been standing with his foolish back to the open door, gaping at the moon, the Pantheress had skulked in, with the noiseless, cushioned step that distinguishes her race. And now he had to get rid of her.
Which was not as easy a task as one might think.
He began by telling her that he was a married man.
“Knew that,� said the Pantheress. “Saw you take off your boots in the hall. Saw you drink her health.� She mimicked him. “To Mamie!� And laughed again—that unspeakably jarring laugh.
Ponsonby grew irate. He took his courage in both hands and went into the hall, where he softly undid the door fastenings. Then he came back, and offered to show his visitor out.