The Riddle of the Night

by Thomas W. Hanshew

And between the table and the door he saw something more startling and dismaying than all the rest.

With his hand on the switch that controlled the electric light, his head bent forward, and his small, ferret eyes brightly gleaming, Mr. Harry Raynor stood looking him in the face.

"Hullo! I say, who the devil are you?" snarled that startled and amazed young man. "What's your game? What are you up to? You're no servant in this house, dash you! You can't fool me on that point, b'gad! What are you doing here? What are you up to? What's your little dodge, eh?"

For the present Cleek's "little dodge" was to get out of that room as expeditiously as possible. For here was an emergency which could not be adequately met by mental finesse; a situation which could result only in exposure and the complete undoing of all his plans if he made any attempt to bolster up his claim to being one of the servants in this house, or stopped to be "interviewed" by young Raynor; and being never slow to make up his mind or to act, he did both now with amazing celerity.

Without one word of reply to young Raynor's challenge, indeed without one second's hesitation, he backed out of the door by which he had just entered, shut it sharply after him, snicked out the electric light in the passage, and dodged back into his own room with the fleet soundlessness of a hunted hare, shutting and bolting himself in with no more noise than a cat would have made in getting over a garden wall.

In a twinkling, young Raynor, although taken somewhat aback by this unexpected action, was out after him, being obliged, of course, to stop for a second and turn on the extinguished light before he could see in which direction this pseudoservant had gone, much less follow him; but by the time he had done this Cleek was safely out of sight, and was engaged in tearing off his evening clothes and bundling them back into the kit bag as fast as his hands could fly.

The turning on of the light had resulted in the discovery that the passage was empty, and in a moment there was an uproar. For no sooner had Raynor voiced one astonished "Good Lord! why, the fellow's gone—gone as clean as a whistle, blow him!" than Lord St. Ulmer began to rattle out an absolute fusillade of excited cries and frightened queries and suggestions, all snarled up in one hopeless tangle of jumbled words, and to tug with all his force at the bell rope hanging beside his bed.

"Head him off! Have him stopped! Find out who he is and what he's up to!" he shrilled out in an excited treble, which was audible to Cleek, even through the thickness of the dividing wall. "Send for your father. Call up the servants. I want to know who that man is and what he was doing here."

If that were possible, he had certainly gone the surest and the shortest way about accomplishing what he desired, for the wild pulling of the bell rope had brought the servants flocking up by one staircase and the General and a couple of footmen dashing up by another; and for the next twenty seconds, what with young Raynor trying to give his version of the affair and his lordship excitedly flinging out his, there was confusion and hubbub enough in all conscience. Nobody had any light to shed on the mysterious occurrence, however; nobody had seen any man coming down any staircase, and nobody had the very slightest idea who that particular one could be, whence or why he had come, nor whither and how he could have gone.

It was in the midst of this confusion that suddenly the door of the room immediately adjoining his lordship's bedchamber was drawn sharply inward, and then as sharply reclosed until it left but a half foot or so between itself and the casing, and through that half foot of space the head of Mr. Philip Barch was thrust; not, however, before the General and his son and the two footmen had had a chance to see that the owner of that head was arrayed simply in his underclothing, and to understand why he had partly reclosed the door when he found people in the immediate neighbourhood of it.