The Prisoner in the Opal

Not even a board creaked or a door rattled in that old house. They might have been standing together in a catacomb a hundred feet beneath the earth. Then the pencil of golden light clove the darkness again, flickered over mildewed wall and discoloured ceiling, and shone steadily upon a distant door. Hanaud moved forward into the light and noiselessly opened that door inch by inch. He let it swing wider and went in. The others followed⁠—Mr. Ricardo with a delicious thrill of fear running up and down his spine. At that moment he would not have exchanged his position for any other in the world. For he was dramatising himself with a concentration so intense that but for some apprehension of Hanaud, he would have claimed the lead and issued orders aloud. He was his own spectator too. He sat in the stalls and wholeheartedly admired his performance. “The great ones of the earth!” he reflected. “Pooh to them all!” He had seen them or met them⁠—more often seen them than met them, to be sure⁠—and thought nothing of them at all. Which of them had crept at night with plainclothes men into a house of infamy, searching for a⁠—well, what? He stood stock-still and asked himself that question. The widow Chicholle? Yes, no doubt, since there was so close a cordon round Suvlac that no one could get through. But after all⁠—the widow Chicholle? Were all these precautions necessary?

Hanaud had taken the electric torch into his own hand, and was exploring with its beam this inner hall. But it was rather a corridor than a hall, with a window at the end, a couple of doors upon the left, a broad staircase on the right, and close to the foot of the staircase another door of tattered green baize. But no sound penetrated from behind any of the three doors, nor did any light gleam beneath them. Hanaud opened the two doors upon the left to make sure. The rooms faced the Rue Grégoire, but they were both shuttered and empty. One of them was furnished cheaply as a sitting-room; the other was merely a place of cupboards and bare boards. Thereafter he stood for a while looking up the staircase and listening, it seemed, with every nerve of his body. But the upper storeys were as silent as this hall in which they stood. The stillness of death lay brooding throughout the house.

The door of green baize led to the offices and the kitchen, and here at all events they came upon signs of life. For a clock ticked upon the wall and the grate showed the dull red of an expiring fire.

“There will be good cellars to this old house,” said Hanaud, and though he spoke in a low and quiet voice, to Ricardo’s strained fancies it seemed loud enough to wake the town.

He came at the end of a passage to a narrow flight of stone steps which wound downwards into darkness. He bent his head, then turned it and shook it at his companions. By the light of the torch he carried his face showed white and desperately afraid; and the fear leaped from his face to the faces of all about him. For a moment they were numbed by the chill of an immense failure.

“But it must be!” Hanaud whispered. “It must be!”

No one contradicted him, but no one agreed. They even closed together a little as men will in the presence of some dreadful catastrophe. That tiny movement drove the dismay from Hanaud’s face. He threw back his head with defiance.

“My God, but it has got to be!” he said stubbornly.

With three swift flashes of his hand he bade two of his men and Ricardo to stay where they were and the rest to follow him. Himself he moved downwards, but he was still within their view when from beneath their very feet, so close at hand it seemed, a piercing scream shattered the silence. Mr. Ricardo was startled out of his wits. Panic seized him by the heart. He reeled back against the wall, gasping for breath. But he was astounded as much as startled. For his eyes were upon Hanaud’s face, and he saw relief and triumph transfigure it. It took Mr. Ricardo a few seconds to reconcile that look with a scream of such terror as he had never thought human being could utter and go on living. Then he understood. Hanaud was in time; Hanaud was right.

He heard a heavy door slam and felt it shake the house. He saw Hanaud leap. Behind Hanaud the whole party clattered and trembled, Ricardo and the two men bidden to stay behind with the rest of them.

“This is the moment to disobey orders,” cried Mr. Ricardo, with a vague recollection of other national heroes; and “Attention!” cried Hanaud in a ringing voice.

The warning reached him just in time. For he tottered on the edge of a gaping hole in the floor of the cellar, and with a gasp recovered his balance. He recovered it to see a line of light beneath a door across the cellar suddenly vanish and to hear a heavy lantern crash upon a floor. Before the sound ceased to echo Hanaud was at the door. It was of thick, solid wood. Hanaud shook it; it was bolted. But there was a Judas at the level of the eyes to ventilate the cellar within. Hanaud tore it open. For a second his torch, held in his left hand, played upon wall and ceiling and floor. Then his right hand flashed to his pocket, something gleamed in it⁠—a pistol barrel⁠—and that hand too slipped within the Judas.

“Up with the hands⁠—all three of you,” he cried. “So!” Then he spoke to the men behind him. “A lantern! Quick!” A match was struck, a lantern lit. “Now you, the widow Chicholle, open this door!”

There was a pause and then the shuffling of feet dragging in carpet slippers across the flags. “The