Yes, it was evidently a candle burning there, and as I passed I saw a long shadow fall directly across the window, then suddenly disappear.
Could it be that the animal had been placed there as a signal to someone who would pass outside?
Somehow I became convinced that this was so. The blind had been raised just sufficiently to show the small bear cub mounted on its hind-legs and holding a card tray. I recollected having seen one very similar on the table of the Savage Club—a present from one of the members.
My natural cautiousness prompted me to wait and watch for the coming of the person for whom the silent signal was intended—if signal it were; therefore, I lit a cigarette and halted at the dark corner of East Street, the short turning at the end of the thoroughfare wherein the silent house was situated.
As I was dressed only in a thin suit of blue serge, which one generally wears in summer in Italy when not in white ducks, the steadily falling rain soon soaked me through. My straw hat hung clammily on my head, and the water dripped down my neck, rendering me most uncomfortable. There was every prospect of a soaking night—different, indeed, from that clear, rainless sky that I had just left. Ah! how dismal London seemed to me at that hour, jaded, wet, and worn-out as I was! Still, with that dogged determination which some of my enemies have said is my chief characteristic, I remained there watching for the coming of the unknown, who must be privy to the plot.
Time after time as I stood back in the shelter of a doorway, compelled ever and anon to go forth into the rain and keep my vigil, I wondered whether the conclusion I had formed was actually the right one.
The feeble light flickered in the dark room, but showed not the interior, because of the smoky lace-curtains, dingy and yellow. Yet there stood the stuffed bear cub clearly silhouetted, almost startlingly—the only object visible upon that dark, forbidding façade.
More than once I heard footsteps coming from Theobald’s Road, and rushed from my hiding-place to encounter the passer-by. But each time I was disappointed. The postman came on his last delivery, but only stopped at the big offices of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, almost opposite the house I was watching, then swung round the corner to Lamb’s Conduit Street.
A policeman passed with heavy tread, flashing his bull’s eye carelessly down the areas and glancing at me inquiringly; then in the roadway through the slush came a man and a woman, Italians, dragging a street-organ wearily homeward to Saffron Hill. I watched them and wondered from what part of Italy they came.
As they went by I heard the man, a strong, black-browed fellow of twenty-seven or so, exclaim, “Accidenti!” and knew that he was a Tuscan. The woman (old, brown-faced, and wrinkled) only sighed and dragged harder.