"Why, then," Lord Ballina broke in suddenly--"why, then, it"s this afternoon!" His voice had grown high and thin with excitement, and Levison saw once more a face from which all the color had ebbed, and hands that twitched with sudden realization.

Mimi Addington suddenly rose up from her seat with a curiously sinuous and panther-like movement.

"This afternoon!" she said. "Then I shall sleep happy this night!"

"Oh, come, Mimi," Lord Ballina said, "you needn"t go quite so far as that. As a matter of fact, I--er--confound it, I wish we"d let the chap alone!"

The woman had sunk back upon the divan. She stretched out one slender, white hand, covered with flashing rings, and patted Levison upon the arm.

He shuddered at her touch, scoundrel as he was, but she did not see it.

Ballina was walking up and down the room, his feet making no sound upon the thick pile of the carpet. He snapped his fingers in an odd, convulsive fashion.

"I say, you know," he said at length, "I really don"t like it. I wish to Heaven I"d never been mixed up in the affair. Supposing anything gets out?"

"Well, that"s supposing me to be rather a bigger fool than I am,"

Levison answered, though the fear of the other had in some subtle way affected him, and all his own tremors of the morning were beginning to revive.

Then there was silence in the room for a time.

Although the morning had been bright and cheerful, the sun had become obscured shortly after midday, and a heavy gloom of fog above which thunder had muttered now and then had spread itself high up in the sky.

The oppression in the air had become much more marked during the last hour, and now, as the three people sat together, they were all experiencing it to the full.

For a long time n.o.body spoke at all, and when at length Mimi Addington made some casual observation, both the men started involuntarily. The woman"s voice also was changed now. It was like the voices of her companions, loaded with sinister apprehension.

"When do you suppose," Lord Ballina said, in a shaking voice--"when do you suppose that we shall know if anything has happened, Andrew? Have you made arrangements with your--er--er--friends to report to you about it?"

"I"m not mad!" Levison answered shortly. "Hear! Why, if there"s anything to hear you"ll hear soon enough----What"s that?"

He had started violently, and the perspiration was beginning to run down his face. A distant rumble of thunder breaking suddenly in upon the quiet of the room had startled him and betrayed more than anything else in what a state his nerves were.

"It"s only thunder," Mimi replied. "Good Heavens, Andrew, you are enough to give one the jumps yourself! But if we"re to know, how shall we know?"

"Why, it"s very simple," Levison answered. "Don"t you see that if anything has--er--happened, it"ll be in the evening papers and in the streets within three-quarters of an hour from the time it"s occurred.

There will be journalists with this man Joseph, of course, there always are wherever he goes. Well, the papers will be up here by the motors in half-an-hour after they"re issued, and we shall hear the newsboys shouting it out all over the place."

"There"s an old man who sells papers at the corner of Florence Street, only a few yards away," Mimi Addington broke in quickly. "The boys on the bicycles come up and supply him with all the new editions as they come out. I often hear them shouting."

"Then all we"ve got to do," said Andrew Levison, "is to wait until we hear that shouting."

They sat waiting--three murderers--and as they sat there a presence stole into the room, unseen, but very real. The grisly phantom Fear was among them. Waiting!

CHAPTER XXII

THE HOUSE DESOLATE

The echo of the shot which had struck down Sir Augustus Kirwan had hardly died away when two of the police inspectors, accompanied by Eric Black, rushed into one of the open doorways of the court. Their feet could be heard thundering up the rickety, wooden stairs of the old house, as Joseph and Sir Thomas Ducaine knelt, horror-struck, by the side of the dead man, while the others crowded round in uncontrollable dismay.

Joseph himself seemed absolutely stunned for a moment. And it was Sir Thomas"s firm and capable hands which were moving rapidly over Sir Augustus" chest, endeavoring to test the movement of the heart.

The young Duke of Dover was talking rapidly and in an undertone with the police inspector, and pointing upwards to the black, unglazed window-hole from which the smoke of the shot was still eddying out.

The whole series of events had occurred in a mere flash of time, with an astonishing swiftness which seemed to outstrip or to numb the lightning operations of thought itself.

There they stood in a group, stiffened and frozen into momentary immobility. The tall figure of Joseph bent over the empty sh.e.l.l which lay upon the ground; the others cl.u.s.tered round, with wan faces of horror. The peer had his right hand upon the shoulder of the inspector and his left extended to the black and silent orifice above. And still the thunder of the feet of Eric Black and his companions could be heard as they raced upwards towards the room of the a.s.sa.s.sin.

Then suddenly, as if the noise of the shot, which now must have been fired for at least thirty-five or forty seconds, had awakened a sleeping population, a murmur arose like the murmur of a hive of bees suddenly disturbed.

It arose, grew louder and louder, resolved itself into tumultuous and divided voices, and then, from every doorway, the foul, mocking, and unclean denizens of the worst slum in London came pouring, trotting, and slouching out of their lairs.

The air was immediately filled with a horrid clamor, and to the keen, attentive ears of, at any rate, the Duke and the policeman, there seemed something ungenuine in the sound--that is to say, it was not the instinctive product of real surprise, but as though the people who had suddenly appeared out of what had seemed silence and desolation were well aware that this was going to happen.

Of this Joseph and Sir Thomas Ducaine, who were lifting the portly body of the great financier, saw and understood nothing at all.

Just as Joseph and Sir Thomas, a.s.sisted by the others, were supporting the limp figure in their arms, the remaining inspector lifted his whistle to his lips and blew a loud and piercing call.

At the sound, the horrid crowd which surrounded the little group of death suddenly grew silent. They knew that ominous summons very well; it was in their blood to know it, for to many of them it had been a note of doom.

The silence continued for a very short time, and was only broken in one significant and instinctive way.

A tall, thin man, with a face which was a sheer wedge of sin and b.e.s.t.i.a.l impulse, suddenly pressed to the front of the crowd, where his eyes fell upon Joseph.

The inspector heard him say, in a quick, vibrating voice to some one at his side whom the inspector could not see--

"The wrong bloke!"

The whistle had its effect, and in a s.p.a.ce of time which would have suggested to any one who had thought of it that the police arrangements for guarding the distinguished company which had ventured into these dark places were more complete than that company itself had any idea of, several uniformed constables came hurrying into the court.

The crowd of slum-dwellers melted away as a small piece of ice in the sun, and, save that the doors and low windows of the surrounding houses were now thronged with interested faces, the group in the middle of the place was free of interruption.

Three stalwart constables lifted up the body and bore it away. Joseph and the rest of his friends filed in a horror-struck procession.

The Teacher"s head was bowed. His thin, white hands were clasped in front of him, and the tears were rolling down his cheeks.

Hampson was at his side, and as he looked up at his old comrade once more he was thrilled to the very marrow, even as he had been thrilled on that strange eventful afternoon when the two great beams of wood had fallen from on high and struck down Joseph Bethune in the form of a cross.

For what Hampson now saw in his quick, imaginative brain, accustomed as it was to constant artistic images of the past, when Jesus walked in Jerusalem, was now the tall, bowed figure of the Saviour with wrists bound in front of Him, moving towards the shameful death which was to save and regenerate mankind.

Another scene in the Via Dolorosa!

It was now the middle of the afternoon. With magic celerity, even in that poverty-stricken district, carriages were found, and an ambulance brought from an adjacent police-station.

Then, through the crowded streets of the East, the long and busy thoroughfares of Fleet Street and the Strand, into the wide and s.p.a.cious district where the rich dwell, the sad procession took its way.