never in all her life had jane seen anything so beautiful as the clear rain-washed sky, the grey rain-stilled sea. the little thud of the stone closing between her and mr. molloy was one of the most delightful sounds that she had ever heard. she felt as if she had never really appreciated the daylight before. there were nice woolly clouds on the horizon. the damp air was fresh, not like the air in those abominable passages. there was a gorse bush with about two and a half yellow flowers on it, rather sodden with the rain. jane regarded them with intense affection.
she walked down the gravel path, drawing long breaths and ready to sing with pure relief—“ease after toyle, port after stormie seas.” she frowned, remembering the next line. after all, they were not out of the wood yet. an unpleasant proverb succeeded spenser’s line—“he laughs longest who laughs last.”
“rubbish,” said jane out loud, and she began to run.
she came in with such a glowing colour that mr. ember, who met her in the hall, was moved to remark upon it.
“you seem to have enjoyed your walk. where have you been?”
“round by the headland,” said jane.
the roll of typed paper pricked her knee beneath her stocking top. in her arms she carried a sheaf of yellow tulips. she made haste to her room and set the flowers in a jar on the broad window ledge where they could be plainly seen from the terrace. with all her heart she prayed that george patterson, who was anthony luttrell, would see them. she did not know that george patterson had ceased to exist, and that anthony luttrell, having taken the law into his own impatient hands, was on his way to london.
there had been an encounter with raymond in the laboratory—her hand for a moment on his arm, his muscles rigid under her touch; not a word spoken on either side, not a word needed. the scene carried anthony to his breaking-point. at the next roll-call george patterson was missing. meanwhile raymond was behind a locked door, and jane set yellow tulips on her window-sill.
having made her signal, jane turned her mind to the lists. she was afraid to keep them on her, and she was afraid to hide them anywhere else. if molloy missed them, and had any means of communicating with ember, she would be searched, and her room would be searched. whatever happened to her, they must not recover the lists until she had copied them.
she remembered the trap-door in the cupboard, but it was just possible that ember knew about it, not likely but possible. after five minutes’ profound thought, she went to a drawer into which she had emptied a quantity of odds and ends.
renata, it appeared, had a mild taste for drawing. there were pencils, indiarubber, a roll of cartridge paper, and some drawing-pins. jane took out the cartridge paper and the drawing-pins. she extracted the lists from her stocking top and smoothed them out flat. then she opened the cupboard door, mounted on a chair drawn as close to the cupboard as possible, and pinned the lists on to the cupboard ceiling with a sheet of cartridge paper covering them. they just fitted in between two rows of hooks. jane got down with a sigh of relief and unlocked her bedroom door.
the evening passed like a dream. lady heritage did not appear at all, and jane found a strange unreality in the situation which kept her talking to mr. ember in set schoolgirl phrases whilst he condescended to her with more than a hint of sarcasm. she was glad when she could take a book and read.
it was eleven o’clock before she dared begin her night’s work, but she came up to her room with her plan all ready. first she took off her dress and put on a dressing-gown, just in case any one should come to the door. then, having turned the key and switched off the light, she took a candle into the cupboard, set it on a shoe box, and took down the lists. she put a cushion on the floor, fetched renata’s fountain pen and some sheets of foolscap which she had taken from the library, and began her work of copying. with the cupboard door shut there was no chance that any one would see her candle.
she wrote steadily, town after town, name after name. more towns, more names. as she finished each sheet, she checked it very carefully by its original. it was weary, monotonous work; but the weariness and the monotony were like a grey curtain which hung between her and something which she dreaded inexpressibly.
the idea of descending into the passage again, of creeping up to the laboratory in order to put back the lists before they were missed, filled her with shuddering repugnance. to allow her mind to dwell upon this idea was to become incapable of carrying it out. she therefore held her attention firmly to the endless names, and drove an industrious pen. she had to get up twice for more ink. each time, as she stretched herself and walked the few paces to the table and back, the thought came to her like a cold breath, “it’s coming nearer.”
at last, in the dead stillness of the sleeping hours, the lists were finished. she pinned the copies on to the cupboard ceiling in the same way that she had pinned the originals, carefully covered with a piece of cartridge paper. then she took the originals in her hand and faced the necessity for action. her feet and hands were very cold. she felt as if it were days since she had had anything to eat. she wanted most dreadfully to go to bed and sleep. she wanted to have a good cry. what she had to do was to go down into slug- and possibly rat-haunted passages and risk waking an anarchist uncle out of his beauty sleep. jane gave herself a mental shake.
“don’t be a rabbit, jane smith,” she said. “it’s got to be done. you know that just as well as i do. if it’s got to be done, you can do it. get going at once.”
she got going. first she put the lists back in her stocking top. then she put on the old serge dress. her fancy played hopefully with the thought that some day she would give herself the pleasure of burning that abominable garment. she extracted the maroon felt slippers from the paper parcel to which she had consigned them. they were still sopping. she put them on. they felt limp, damp, and discouraging, but they had the merit of making no noise. then she took a good length of candle and a box of matches and opened her door.
“well, here goes,” said jane, and stepped into pitch darkness. this time she shut the door behind her. as she took her hand off the handle she felt as if she were letting go of her last hold on safety, an idiotic thought, as she instantly told herself. she knew by now just how many paces took one to the place where the light should have been burning, and just how many more to the stairhead. the rose window showed like a pattern painted on the dark. it gave no light, but it marked the position of the door.
jane felt the soles of her feet stick and cling to the damp slippers as she crawled down the stairs. they just didn’t squelch and that was all; they only felt like it.
she hated moving the big chair in the dark, but it had to be done. suppose she dropped it with a crash, suppose she pulled willoughby luttrell’s picture down when she was feeling for the catch; suppose a mouse ran over her foot—there is no end to the cheerful suppositions which will throng one’s brain in circumstances like these.
jane did not drop the chair with a crash, neither did willoughby luttrell’s picture fall down, nor did a mouse run over her foot. she passed through the panelled door, shut it behind her, groped her way to the foot of the steps, and lighted the candle. it was then that the cheering thought that she might perhaps encounter henry came to her, only to fade as she remembered how long past midnight it now was. however, if she had not henry she had at least a light. it is much harder to be brave in the pitch dark even when, as in the present case, the darkness is really a protection.
jane walked quite blithely up the second passage on the left until she came to the point where she knew that she must put the light out again. molloy might be awake. she blew out her candle and began to feel her way forward. she came to the corner, and passed it. moving very slowly and cautiously, she crept up to the steel gate and stood with her fingertips on it, listening, and thinking hard. she could feel that the door was ajar. that struck her as strange, very strange. if there ever was a man badly scared, molloy was that man when she had said that the secret of the passages was not confined to himself and ember. yet he had gone to sleep leaving the gate ajar. had he? jane’s mind gave her a clear and definite answer. he hadn’t, he wouldn’t. she had been so sure that the gate would be shut, so ready with her plan. she was going to unfold the papers, push them between the bars, and jerk them as far across the room as possible. molloy might think they had fallen from the bench, or, if he had his doubts, might well wish to avoid letting ember know that jane had been in the laboratory. all this she had so present in her thought, that to feel the gate give to her hand staggered her and set her shaking. she quieted herself and listened intently. not a sound.
she did not somehow fancy that molloy would be a quiet sleeper. she had anticipated snores of a certain rich bass quality. here was silence in which one might have heard an infant draw its breath, a silence undisturbed, inviolate.
it was not only the silence which spoke to jane. that odd, dim, only half-understood sense which some people possess, clamoured to her that the place was empty. as she stood there, and the seconds dragged into minutes, this sense became so insistent that she found herself resolving to act in obedience to its dictates.
she pushed the gate and heard the alarm ring. with all her ears she listened for the sound of a man stirring, waking, and starting up. at the first movement she would have been away, and molloy, new roused from sleep, would never have caught sight of her. there was no movement. the bell went on ringing, a little continuous trickle of metallic sound, not loud but as confusing as the buzzing of a mosquito.
jane switched on the light, slipped round the gate, and closed it. the bell stopped ringing. the jarred silence settled slowly, as dust settles when it has been stirred. there was no one there. the unshaded light showed every corner of the chamber. molloy’s bag was gone. like a flick in the face came certainty. “he’s gone. molloy’s gone too.”
slowly, almost mechanically, jane extracted the rolled-up lists from her stocking. she was still holding the unlighted candle in her left hand. the lists bothered her. she moved towards the bench to put them down, but first she laid the candle carefully on its side so as not to stub the wick, and, sitting down, began to smooth the papers out upon her knee. it was whilst she was doing this that she saw the note.
it lay on the end of the bench propped up against a book. it was addressed to jeffrey ember, esquire. the capital e’s were magnificent flourishes; an underlining like an ornamental scroll supported the superscription. jane, like other well-brought-up people, was not in the habit of opening letters not addressed to herself. it may be said, however, that no solitary scruple so much as raised its head on this occasion. she tore open the tough linen envelope, and unfolded a lordly sheet. molloy wrote a good, bold hand and legible withal. every word stood clear.
“my dear ember,—i’m off. the place is getting altogether too crowded. i’ve seen renata, and she tells me that there are two men use the passages. one has a beard, but she couldn’t tell me their names or describe them further. she knows all about the passages herself. she confessed to having found them through following number one. she has also seen you come in and go out. i don’t think this place is very healthy, so i’m making my get-away whilst i can. drop the whole thing and get out quick is what i advise. i’m staunch, as you’ll find. why did you take the lists after saying you’d leave them for me to look through? i’ll not work with a man that doesn’t trust me. you can write me at the old place.”
the letter was signed with a large roman three. it appeared that mr. molloy was more careful over his own identity than over that of mr. jeffrey ember.
jane sat looking at the letter. it made her feel rather sick. if she had not come down, if she had shirked putting the papers back, if the letter addressed to jeffrey ember, esquire, had reached jeffrey ember’s hands—well, it was a good enough death-warrant, and molloy must have known that very well when he wrote it.
“it’s exactly like a moral tract,” said jane. “i hated coming back, and i did it from a sense of duty, and this is the reward of virtue.”
she put the reward of virtue down rather gingerly on the bench beside her. she felt about touching it rather as she had felt when she touched the slug. she wanted to wash her hands. an odd creature molloy. he had given her away exactly and completely, yet he had left her any small shred of protection which she might be supposed to derive from passing as his daughter.
jane turned her thoughts from molloy to the more pressing consideration of her own immediate course of action. ember would come in the morning, and would find molloy gone, and no word to say where he had gone, or why. the idea of following in molloy’s footsteps presented itself vividly before jane’s imagination. why should she stay any longer at luttrell marches? the idea of getting away set her heart dancing. and what was there to stay for? she had all the evidence necessary to procure ember’s arrest and the smashing of the conspiracy. the sooner she was out of luttrell marches and with her precious papers in a place of security the better. for a moment she contemplated taking the originals of the lists; ember would naturally conclude that it was molloy who had gone off with them. but on second thoughts she decided that it would be in the highest degree unwise to put ember on his guard. his distrust of molloy might be so great as to induce flight. she decided to leave the originals and to take the copies—but she had left the copies in her room pinned to the cupboard ceiling. go back for them she could not. even if she could have forced herself to the effort, the risk was too great. they must stay where they were, whilst she found henry. the sooner she got off the better. she had no watch, but the night must be very far spent, and if ember were to take it into his head to come back——
the bare idea brought jane to her feet. she picked up her candle, lit it, and with feelings of extreme satisfaction set fire to molloy’s letter, making a little pent roof of it like the beginning of a card house on the stone floor. she had often admired the way in which masses of compromising documents are consumed in an instant by the hero or heroine of the adventure novel. she used four matches before she considered that this particular letter was really harmless. the envelope took two more. then she collected the ash very carefully, crumbled it up well, and scattered it amongst the rubble in the broken-down passage where molloy had found her. then, having taken a good look round to make sure that nothing compromising remained, she picked up her candle and passed through the gate, leaving the laboratory in darkness behind her. when she came to the turn she hesitated, and finally went straight on, following the passage which she had not yet explored, down which molloy and ember had come the day before. she was almost sure that it would lead back into the main corridor just short of the headland exit; but she had not gone more than a yard or two along it when she heard something that brought her heart into her mouth.
almost as the sound reached her she had blown her candle out and was pinching the glow from the wick. for a moment the darkness was full of phantom tongue-shaped flames; then she stopped seeing them and saw instead a faint glow coming from the direction in which she herself had come on her way to the laboratory. somebody was coming along the passage. if she had gone back by the same way that she had come, she would have met this somebody. as it was, she might escape notice. if the person were going to the laboratory, he would have to take a sharp turn to the left, a right-angled turn. the passage in which she was ran off at an acute angle, and the person approaching would have his back to her as he passed.
the glow became a beam. next moment ember passed without turning his head. jane saw the back of his shoulder dark against the light from his torch, and caught a fleeting glimpse of his profile, just enough for recognition and no more. indeed, it was the fur coat that she recognised as much as the man. she stood quite still whilst he switched on the electric light and passed into the laboratory, then she turned and walked away as quickly as she dared, feeling her way by the wall till a turn in the passage gave her enough courage to light her candle. she put the spent match in her pocket, looked ahead, and drew a sharp, almost agonised, breath.
about two feet from where she stood, and exactly in her path, was the black mouth of an uncovered well. jane looked at it, and quite suddenly, she had no idea how, found herself sitting on the floor with hot wax running down her hand from the guttering candle. it seemed to be quite a little time before she could make sure of walking steadily enough to skirt the well. she went by it at last with averted head and fingers that, regardless of slime, clung to the wall.
as she had expected, the passage ran suddenly into the main corridor. she passed the headland exit, and once more was on unknown ground. the passage swung round to the right and began to slope downhill. jane held her candle high and looked at every step; but there were no more traps. she quickened her pace almost to a run as the dreadful thought came to her that ember might follow molloy. the passage sloped more and more. finally there were steps, smooth, worn, and damp, that went down, and down, and down. at the bottom of the steps a yard or two of peculiarly slimy passage, and then a blank stone wall. obviously jane had arrived.
she looked at the stone wall, and the stone wall presented a front of uncompromising blankness. she looked up and she looked down, she looked to the left and she looked to the right, she gazed at the ceiling and she gazed at the floor. nowhere was there any sign of a catch, a knob, a spring, or a lever. there must be one, but where was it? she tapped the wall and stamped on the floor, but with no result. the door in the panelling opened from inside with an ordinary handle. she had not been close enough to lady heritage to see what she did to pivot the stone behind the bench on the headland. in any case, this exit might have been quite differently planned.
a most dreadful sense of discouragement came over her. to have got so far, to have been, as it were, halfway to safety and henry, and to have to turn back again! then for the first time it occurred to her that, even if she had got out and got away, she had no money and no hat. she looked down at the maroon slippers, and pictured herself descending ticketless upon a london platform in bedroom slippers whose original colour was almost obscured by green slime.
jane wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry. she did not know which she wanted most, but presently she found that the tears were running down her face. she kept winking them away, because it is not at all easy to climb slippery stone steps by the light of a guttering candle if your eyes keep filling with tears. the tears magnified the candle flame, and sometimes made it look like two or three little flames, which was dreadfully confusing. jane stood still, wiped her eyes with determined energy, and then climbed up more steps and back along the way that she had come.
at the headland exit she stood still, taking breath and thought. nothing would induce her to pass that well again. she would keep to the main passage, and, horrid thought, she would have to put out her light in case ember should suddenly emerge from the side passage.
“thinking about things makes them worse, not better,” said jane to herself. “it’s perfectly beastly; but then it’s all perfectly beastly.”
she blew out the candle and moved slowly forward.
it seemed ages before she came past the opening where she had run into henry to the foot of the steps. she went up three steps, raised her foot to take the fourth, and felt a hardly perceptible check. instantly she drew back a shade, set her foot down beside the other, and put out a tentative, groping hand. there was a thread of cotton stretched from wall to wall at the level of her waist. if her movements had been less gentle she would have brushed through it without noticing. then, as she stood there thinking, the thread between her fingers, something else came to her. the last yard of passage just at the stair foot had felt different—dry, gritty.
jane descended the three steps backwards, and, crouching on the bottom one, put down her hand and felt the floor of the passage. there was sand on it, dry sand which had not been there when she came down, and in the dry sand her footprints would be clearly marked. obviously mr. ember had his suspicions and his methods of verifying them: “though what on earth he’d make of cork soles i don’t know,” said jane. she decided not to worry him with this problem.
it was horribly dangerous, but she must have a light. she set her candle end on the step above her and struck a match. it made a noise like a squib and went out. she struck another and got the candle lighted.
the sand was yellow sand off the beach, but nice and dry. two and a half of her footprints showed plainly on its smooth surface. jane leaned forward and smoothed them out. then she blew out her candle and felt safer. feeling for the thread of cotton, she crawled beneath it, then very, very slowly up the rest of the steps, her hand before her all the way till she came to the door in the panelling. she opened it and slipped through into the hall.
the grey, uncertain light was filtering into it. everything looked strange and cold. jane closed the door, and never knew that a loose strand of cotton had fallen as she passed. neither did she know that at that very moment jeffrey ember was standing by the open well mouth, the ray from his powerful electric torch focused upon a little patch of candle grease.
