“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” thought Mr. Belrose. “This will upset the Steps, this will.”
He was afraid. He had what he would have called the “creeps.” Gingerly he touched Mr. Earlforward’s left hand which lay on the desk. It was cold and rather stiff. He bent down in order to look into Mr. Earlforward’s averted face. What a dreadful face! White, blotched, hairy skin drawn tightly over bones and muscles—very tightly. An expression of torment in the tiny, unseeing eyes! None of the proverbial repose of death in that face!
“Mustn’t touch it! Mustn’t disturb anything!” thought Mr. Belrose, straightening his knees.
He left the office and peered up the dark stairs. No light. No sound. He felt for his matches, but he had come away without them, and he suspected that he was not sufficiently master of himself to look effectively for matches. Still, the house must be searched. Although much averse from returning into the office, he did return, on the chance of finding a box of matches, and the first thing he saw was a box on the mantelpiece. Striking matches, he stumbled up the stairs and came first to the bathroom. Empty. Nothing unusual therein except thick strings stretched across it and an orange box in the bath. A bedroom, well furnished, the bed unmade; a cup and saucer on the night-table; one door of the wardrobe ajar. Everything still, expectant. Then he found the living room similarly still and expectant. He went back to the landing. No sound. The second flight of stairs dreadfully invited him to ascend. As he reached and pushed against the door at the head of those stairs another of his matches died. He struck a fresh one, and when it slowly flamed he stepped into the faintly fire-lit room and was amazed, astounded, thrilled, shocked and very seriously shaken to descry a young man lying on the bed in the corner and a young woman, Elsie, lying in abandonment across him, her head sunk in his breast. And he heard a regular sound of breathing. There was something in the situation of the pair which penetrated right through Mr. Belrose’s horse sense and profoundly touched his heart. Never had he had such a sensation at once painful and ravishing (yes, ravishing to the awed cheesemonger) as he had then. The young man raised his head an inch from the pillow and dropped it again.
“She’s asleep,” said the young man in a low, deep, tired voice. “Don’t wake her.”
XIII
Disappearance of T. T.’s
The transience of things human was wonderfully illustrated in the next fortnight. A short and drab account of the nocturnal discoveries of Mr. Belrose at T. T.’s appeared in one morning paper, and within six hours the evening papers, with their sure instinct for the important, had lifted Riceyman Steps to a height far above prizefighting, national economics and the embroiled ruin of Europe. Such trivialities vanished from the contents-bills, which displayed nothing but “Mysterious Death of a Miser in Clerkenwell” (the home of Bolshevism), “Astounding Story of Love and Death,” “Midnight Tragedy in King’s Cross Road,” and similar titles, legends and captions. Riceyman Steps was filled with ferreting special reporters and photographers. The morning papers next following elaborated the tale. The Steps became the cynosure of all England and the subject of cables to America, South Africa and the antipodes. The Steps rose dizzily to unique fame. The coroner’s inquest on the body of Henry Earlforward was packed like a divorce court on an illustrious day and stenographed verbatim. Jurymen who were summoned to it esteemed themselves fortunate.
The Reverend Augustus Earlforward, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, home for a holiday from his labours in the West Indies, and brother of the deceased, found himself in a moment extremely famous. He had nearly missed the boat at Kingston, Jamaica, and he saw the hand of Providence in the fact that he had not missed it. He had not met his younger brother for over thirty years, nor heard from him; did not even know his address; had scarcely thought of trying to hunt him up. And then at tea in the Thackeray Hotel, Bloomsbury, his stern eyes had seen the name of Earlforward written large in a newspaper. The affair was the most marvellous event, the most marvellous coincidence, of his long and honourable career. Wisely he flew to a solicitor. He caused himself to be represented at the inquest. He had reached England in a critical mood, for, like many colonials, he suspected that all was not well with the blundering and decadent old country. And the revelations of life in Clerkenwell richly confirmed his suspicions, which did not surprise him, because much commerce with negroes had firmly established in his mind the conviction that he could never be wrong. From the start he had his ideas about Elsie, the servant-girl asleep with a young man in her bedroom. They were not nice ideas, but it is to be remembered that he was taking a holiday from the preaching and practice of Christian charity. His legal representative put strange questions to Elsie at the inquest (during which it was testified, after postmortem, that Henry had died of a cancer at the junction of the gullet and the cardiac end of the stomach), and these questions were reinforced by the natural cynicism and incredulity of the coroner. Elsie was saved from opprobrium by Dr. Raste’s statement
