Nothing more was to be learned from Sam. Laurie thoughtfully walked out into the square. He had taken not more than a dozen steps when a voice, strange yet unpleasantly familiar, accosted him.
"Good-evening, Mr. Devon," it said.
Laurie turned sharply. Herbert Ransome Shaw was walking at his side, which was as it should be. It was to meet and talk with Herbert Ransome Shaw that he had so abruptly ended his call.
"Look here," he said at once, "I want a few words with you."
"Exactly." Shaw spoke with suave affability. "It is to have a few words that I am here."
"Where can we go?"
Shaw appeared to reflect.
"Do you mind coming to my rooms?" Laurie hesitated. "I live quite near, and my quarters, though plain, are comfortable."
Anger surged up in the young man beside him. There was something almost insulting in Shaw"s manner as he uttered the harmless words, and in the rea.s.suring yet doubtful intonation of his voice.
"Confound him!" Laurie told himself. "The hound is actually hinting that I"m afraid to go!" Aloud, he said brusquely, "All right."
"You have five minutes to spare? That"s capital!"
Shaw was clearly both surprised and pleased. He strode forward with short steps, rapid yet noiseless, and Laurie adapted his longer stride to his companion"s. He, too, was content. Now, at last, he reflected, he was through with mysteries, and was coming to a grip with something tangible.
CHAPTER X
THE LAIR OF SHAW
The walk was not the brief excursion Herbert Ransome Shaw had promised.
It was fifteen minutes before he stopped in front of a tall building, which looked like an out-of-date storehouse, and thrust a latch-key into a dingy door. The bolt was old and rusty. Shaw fumbled with it for half a minute before it yielded. Then it grudgingly slipped back, and Laurie followed his guide into a dark hall, which was cold and damp.
"They don"t heat this building." The voice of Shaw came out of the darkness. He had closed the door and was standing by Laurie"s side, fumbling in his pocket for something which proved to be a match-box.
"They don"t light it, either," he explained, unnecessarily, as the blaze of his match made a momentary break in the gloom. "But it"s quite comfortable in my room," he added rea.s.suringly. "I have an open fire there."
As he spoke he led the way down the long hall with his noiseless, gliding steps. Laurie, following close behind him, reflected that the place was exactly the sort the ophidian Shaw would choose for a lair, a long black hole, ending in--what?
The match had gone out and he could see nothing. He kept close to his guide. He almost expected to hear the creature"s scales rattle as it slid along. But snakes like warmth, and this place--Laurie shivered in the chill and dampness of it. The next instant Shaw pushed open a door and, standing back, waved his guest into a lighted room.
On first inspection it was a wholly rea.s.suring room, originally intended for an office and now turned into a combination of office and living-apartment. A big reading-lamp with an amber shade, standing on a flat writing-desk, made a pleasant point of illumination. Real logs, large and well seasoned, burned with an agreeable crackle in the old-fashioned fireplace. Before this stood two easy-chairs, comfortably shabby; and at the arm of one of them a small table held a decanter, gla.s.ses, a siphon, and a box of cigars.
As he took in these familiar details, Devon"s features unconsciously relaxed. He was very young, and rather cold, and the quick reaction from the emotions he had experienced in the outer hall was a relief. Also, Shaw"s manner was as rea.s.suring as his homely room. He dropped the visitor"s coat and hat on a worn leather couch, which seemingly served him as a bed, and waved a hospitable hand toward an easy-chair.
Simultaneously, he casually indicated a figure bending over a table on the opposite side of the room.
"My secretary," he murmured.
The figure at the table rose and bowed, then sat down again and continued its apparent occupation of sorting squares of paper into a long, narrow box. In the one glance Laurie gave it, as he returned the other"s bow with a casual nod, he decided that the "secretary" was arranging a card-catalogue. But why the d.i.c.kens should Shaw have a secretary? On the other hand, why shouldn"t he?
Laurie began to feel rather foolish. For a few moments, in that hall, he had actually been on the point of taking Shaw seriously; and an aftermath of this frame of mind had led him to turn a suspicious regard on a harmless youth whose occupation was as harmless as he himself looked. Laurie mentally cla.s.sified the "secretary" as a big but meek blond person, who changed his collars and cuffs every Wednesday and Sunday, and took a long walk in the country on Sunday afternoons.
However, the fellow had pursuing eyes. Evidently his work did not need his whole attention, for his pale blue eyes kept returning to the guest.
Once Laurie met them straight, and coolly stared them down. After this they pursued him more stealthily. He soon forgot them and their owner.
Despite Shaw"s hospitable gestures, Laurie was still standing. He had chosen a place by the mantel, with one elbow resting upon it; and from this point of vantage his black eyes slowly swept the room, taking in now all its details--a type-writer, a letter-file, a waste-paper basket that needed emptying, a man"s worn bedroom slipper coyly projecting from under the leather couch, a litter of newspapers.
It was all so rea.s.suringly ordinary that he grinned to himself. Whatever hold this little worm had on Doris--Shaw had even ceased to be a snake at this point in Laurie"s reflections--would be loosed after to-night; and then she could forget the episode that had troubled her, whatever it was.
At precisely this point in his meditations Laurie"s eyes, having completed a tour of the room and returned to the fireplace, made two discoveries. The first was that the room had no windows. The second, and startling one, was that it contained Doris"s photograph. The photograph stood on the mantel, in a heavy silver frame. It was a large print and a good one. The girl"s eyes looked straight into his. Her wonderful upper lip was curved in the half-smile that was so familiar and so baffling.
"Well," the smile asked, "what do you think of it all, now that you are here? Still a bit confusing, isn"t it? For you didn"t expect to find _me_ here, seemingly so much at home; did you?"
In the instant when his eyes had found the photograph, Laurie had been about to light the inevitable cigarette. The discovery arrested his hand and held him for an instant, motionless. Then, with fingers that trembled, he completed the interrupted action, threw the match into the fire, and with blind eyes stared down into the flames.
In that instant he dared not look at Shaw. He was shaken by an emotion that left him breathless and almost trembling. What was Doris"s photograph doing in this man"s room? In the momentary amazement and fury that overwhelmed him at the discovery, he told himself that it would not have been much worse to find her actual presence here.
All this had taken but a moment. Shaw, hospitably busy with his decanter and siphon, had used the interval to fill two gla.s.ses, and was now offering one to his guest.
"No, thanks." Laurie spoke with abrupt decision.
"No?" Shaw looked pained. Then he smiled a wide smile, and Laurie, seeing it and the man"s pointed teeth, mentally changed him again from the worm to the serpent. He understood Shaw"s mental process. The fellow thought he was afraid to drink the mixture. But what did it matter what the fellow thought?
"Perhaps, then, you will have a cigar, and sit down comfortably for our chat?"
Shaw himself set the example by dropping into one of the easy-chairs and lighting a fat Perfecto. His smooth brown head rested in what seemed an accustomed hollow of the chair back. His wide, thin lips were pursed in sybaritic enjoyment of his cigar. He stretched himself in the warmth of the fire, sleek, torpid, and loathsome.
"Mr. Shaw."
"Y-e-s."
Still standing, with his elbow braced against the mantel, the visitor tossed his cigarette into the fire and looked down into his host"s projecting eyes. It appeared that Shaw roused himself with difficulty from the gorged comfort of the moment. There was a perceptible interval before he gave his guest his whole attention. Then he straightened in his chair, and the projecting eyes took on their veiled but watchful look.
"Yes," he repeated, more briskly.
In the brief interval Laurie had planned his little campaign. He would address this creature as man to man; for perhaps, after all, there was more of the man in him than he revealed.
"I am going to ask you to be frank with me."
"Yes?" Shaw let it go at that.
"When we met on the street it appeared that you were as anxious as I am for this interview. Will you tell me at once why you brought me here, and what you wish to say?"
"Willingly." Shaw flicked the ash off his cigar, and kept his eyes on its lighted end as he went on: "I brought you here because I want you out of the way."
"Why?"
"Because, my temperamental young friend, you are a nuisance. You are interfering with my plans. I can"t be bothered with you."