CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A BLUNDER AND A DISCOVERY
Cleek's knuckles had no more than touched the panel before he became aware of a singular and most significant circumstance. A faint "snick" sounded upon the other side of the door, a quick, metallic "snick," which his trained ears identified at once as the switching off of an electric light; and quick as he was in opening the door, it was an utterly black room he looked into. Still, that did not dismay him. He knew full well that the button controlling the switch must be near the bed for it to be so quickly reached; and Lord St. Ulmer was most certainly in bed, as the creaking springs told him, and it was always within his power to make an awkward slip and, with every appearance of an accident, to switch the light on again.
But for the present—as he had thoughtfully stepped in and closed the door behind him that he might not stand there in the full glow of the lights in the outer passage, seen, but himself unseeing—for the present he was in blackness as dark as ink and as thick as tar, as far as the eye was concerned; and through that blackness the sharp staccato of an excited man's voice was flinging a challenge at him.
"Who are you? What do you want? What the devil do you mean by coming in here, unasked?" that voice rapped out with an unmistakable note of alarm in it.
"Master sent me up, your lordship," replied Cleek in the bland, deeply deferential tones of the well-trained manservant. "He is anxious to know if your lordship would prefer some especial dish prepared for your lordship's dinner, or if——"
He got no further than that, for the rasping, excited voice broke sharply in, and the violent jangling of the bed springs told that the speaker had as sharply turned over in bed.
"Your master sent you up about my dinner?" the voice trumpeted out in a sort of panic. "Sent you about my dinner—and by that door?"
Then came yet another sound—the jingle of a spoon or a fork against a plate or a cup—and hard after it a noise of rustling paper, and Cleek had just time to realize that he had blundered, that there must be another staircase and another door by which the servants came and went, and that, in all probability, judging from that telltale clink of metal and china, his lordship's dinner had already been served, when he made another and a yet more embarrassing discovery: his lordship was not alone in the room. Some one was there with him, some one who simply gave an amazed exclamation without putting it into words, then moved swiftly, snicked on the light, and scattered all the darkness with one dazzling electric glare.
In that sudden outburst of light Cleek saw a bed and a man on it, a man who had turned over, so that his face was to the opposite wall, while an open newspaper—one of many—almost covered his head. Beside that bed there was a table and a salver loaded with many dishes, and beyond that an open door, and beyond that again a gaping passage and the head of a staircase that led up from below.