So they entered into the occupation of No. 84 Camford Street. I went with them and saw them enter. It was a curious process, that of entry; an unreasonably, unnaturally curious process. It should be necessary to enter no honest house like that. The first step suggested, possibly, that something unsavoury was concealed within, which it was necessary, at all and any cost, to keep hidden from the light of day.
When they were in, and the door was closed, and they had gone from sight, an icy finger seemed to be pressed against my spine. I shivered as with cold. An almost irresistible longing possessed me to batter at the door and compel them to come out. But I had not sufficient courage to write myself down an ass.
Instead, I rode home in the cab which had brought us to the house to which I had taken so cordial a disrelish, oppressed by a sense of horrible foreboding which weighed upon my brain nearly to the point of stupefaction.
“Before I go to bed to-night,” I told myself, “I’ll take a dozen of somebody or other’s antibilious pills. I had no idea I was so liverish.”
CHAPTER XXI.
THE AGITATION OF MISS PURVIS.
That bachelor’s balm, a night at a music hall, was of no avail in diverting my mind from the house in Camford Street. In the body I might be present at a vocal rendering of the latest things in comic songs; in the spirit I was the other side of the water. Before the night was over I was there physically, too.
As the ten o’clock “turn” was coming on, and the brilliancy of the entertainment was supposed to have reached high-water mark, I walked down the stairs of the Cerulean and out into the street. I strolled down the Haymarket without any clear idea of where I meant to go.
“You’re an ass,” I told myself. “An ass, sir! If you’d stopped to see Pollie Floyd she’d have driven the cobwebs out of your head. You pay five shillings for a seat, and when, at last, there is going to be something worth looking at, and listening to, you get out of it, and throw away your money. At this time of night, where do you think you’re going?”
I knew all the time, although even to myself I did not choose to confess it—Camford Street. I made for it as straight as I could. It was past half-past ten when I got there. The street was nearly all in darkness. The public-houses were open; but, as they were not of the resplendent order, they were of but little use as illuminants. Mr. Kennard’s establishment was shut. Lights were visible in but few of the houses. No. 84, in the prevailing shadows, looked black as pitch. If the two girls had been obedient to the injunctions laid down in Mr. Batters’ will—and that first night, at any rate, they would have hardly ventured to contravene them—they were long since within doors. Doing what? Asleep? Were both of them asleep? I wondered, if she was awake, what occupied her thoughts? Was she thinking of—the person in the street?
Too ridiculous! Absurd! It is amazing of what crass stupidity even the wisest men are capable. Why should a girl who was a perfect stranger, be thinking, whether awake or sleeping, at that hour of the night, of an individual who had been brought into accidental business association, on one occasion only, with a friend of hers? I kept on putting such-like brain-splitting questions to myself. Without avail. I simply shirked them. I only hoped. That was all.