Lights glimmered dimly in the windows of Southac street, but Roux’s windows were in darkness. Some negro boys, sitting on the wooden steps of his abode, made way for them, and ascending they entered the open outer door, and tapped at the panels of his room. No answer. They tapped louder. No answer still. Harrington, oddly remembering the strenuous snoring of Tugmutton on the nights in March when Roux was sick, and he had watched with him, put his ear to the door and listened for those tokens of the fat boy’s slumbers. But no sound reached him.
“Pray Heaven nothing has happened,” said Muriel. “Let us try the other door.”
Harrington turned to the opposite side of the passage, and knocked loudly. There was an instant stir within, and presently the door opened, and a strange little wizened colored man, not more than four feet high, with a pair of tin-rimmed spectacles on his shrunken nose, and a long coat reaching nearly to his heels, appeared, with a copy of the “Commonwealth” newspaper in his left hand, and in the other a tallow candle stuck in a bottle which he held above his head. Harrington had seen him before, though he had forgotten his name.
“Good evening, sir. Can you tell me where Mr. Roux is this evening?” asked Harrington.
The little man stood still for a moment, gazing past them at nothing, and looking like some fantastic little corpse, set bolt upright.
“Good evening, Mr. Harrington. Good evening, Mrs. Harrington,” he said, at length, in a voice like the squeak of a mouse. Then he paused. Muriel smiled faintly at the oddity of being called Mrs. Harrington, and though the wizened creature was not looking at her, he seemed to see the smile, for he smiled also in a slow, fantastic, frozen way.
“Willum Roux’s been took off,” he at length squeaked in a deliberate tone.
Harrington and Muriel started violently, and holding each other, looked at the speaker.
“Took off!” gasped Harrington. “What do you mean?”
The little man made another long pause, then squeaked like an incantation, “Ophelee!”