For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman, drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.
“Has anybody got a match?” said Rupert grimly. “I fancy we have come pretty near the end of this business.”
I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare, yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped, leaving darkness. It had, however, revealed something more practical—an iron gas bracket just above my head. I struck another match and lit the gas. And we found ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of the captive.
At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling silver hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair of Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare of the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one place; at the place where Rupert’s knife had torn a great opening in the wood about an hour before.
“Madam,” said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, “permit me to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and we have therefore ventured to come to your rescue.”
The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:
“Rescue? Where is Mr. Greenwood? Where is Mr. Burrows? Did you say you had rescued me?”
“Yes, madam,” said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. “We have very satisfactorily dealt with Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Burrows. We have settled affairs with them very satisfactorily.”
The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.
“What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?” she cried.
“We persuaded them, my dear madam,” said Rupert, laughing, “by knocking them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?”
To the surprise of everyone the old lady walked slowly back to her seat by the window.
“Do I understand,” she said, with the air of a person about to begin knitting, “that you have knocked down Mr. Burrows and tied him up?”
“We have,” said Rupert proudly; “we have resisted their oppression and conquered it.”
“Oh, thanks,” answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.
A considerable pause followed.
“The road is quite clear for you, madam,” said Rupert pleasantly.
The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us for an instant.
“But what about Greenwood and Burrows?” she said. “What did I understand you to say had become of them?”
“They are lying on the floor upstairs,” said Rupert, chuckling. “Tied hand and foot.”
“Well, that settles it,” said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang into her seat again, “I must stop where I am.”
Rupert looked bewildered.
“Stop where you are?” he said. “Why should you stop any longer where you are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserable cell?”
“The question rather is,” said the old lady, with composure, “what power can force me to go anywhere else?”
We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both.
At last I said, “Do you really mean to say that we are to leave you here?”
“I suppose you don’t intend to tie me up,” she said, “and carry me off? I certainly shall not go otherwise.”
“But, my dear madam,” cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, “we heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out.”
“Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things,” replied the captive grimly. “I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that.”
“Some sense of honour?” repeated Rupert, and the last light of intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot with rolling eyes.
He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet once more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. “Can we do nothing for you, madam?” I said forlornly.
“Why,” said the lady, “if you are particularly anxious to do me a little favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs.”
Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his vague violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the door of the sitting-room and scene of battle.
“Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true,” Mr. Burrows was saying, lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; “but we must consider the matter as it appears to our sense. The origin of morality …”
“Basil,” cried Rupert, gasping, “she won’t come out.”
“Who won’t come out?” asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted in an argument.
“The lady downstairs,” replied Rupert. “The lady who was locked up. She won’t come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to let these fellows loose.”
“And a jolly sensible suggestion,” cried Basil, and with a bound he was on top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting his bonds with hands and teeth.
“A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr. Greenwood.”
In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the purple jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as particularly sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the other hand, was heaving with herculean laughter.
“Well,” said Basil, in his cheeriest way, “I think we must be getting away. We’ve so much
