Chapter FIVE: Held by the Enemy

In an instant I saw that the woman Hilda Bennett had not recognized me. For that I was thankful.

The pale-faced young Englishman, however, was beside her in a moment, exclaiming:

“This man has spied upon us! We are deciding what shall be done with him!”

It was plain that the woman was a member of the criminal gang, and, in all probability, the man who had lost his life while grappling with me was also one of its members. In any case, the police had identified him by his finger-prints, taken after death.

“How has he spied? How did he get in here?” inquired the woman in surprise.

“He evidently has a false key. He is a detective!” said the girl Hatten. “He lives in the same house with me, and calls himself Paige. He pretended to come up from the country, but I’ve been watching him. He only goes out at night--never in the day.”

“And he tells us a ridiculous story that the reason he is in hiding is because it was he who shot Monkey Dick!” explained the pale-faced young man.

“Yes!” cried Lisely, turning to Hilda Bennett. “You know who did that! Is this the man?” she demanded fiercely, pointing at me.

The woman who in her fury had lied to the police against me, regarded me steadily, and I feared that my faltering gaze might betray me. She looked straight into my face for some moments, and then she spoke.

Again I held my breath.

“No,” she said decisively. “He’s a liar! This is not the man who killed Monkey Dick!”

My heart leapt within me at that declaration, which cleared me of suspicion, but next second the undersized foreigner, who seemed to be the chief, remarked in his broken English:

“Ah! Then he must be a police-spy from Scotland Yard! So we are right!”

“I swear I have no connection with Scotland Yard!” I cried in dismay.

All laughed me to derision, hurling at me epithets in their inexplicable language, which not till long afterwards did I know to be Roumanian.

“What shall we do with him?” asked the woman Bennett, whose face was rouged and powdered, and whose lips were almost vermilion. The shabby, long, old tweed coat she wore had fallen back, revealing her to be dressed in a gorgeous evening-gown of shell-pink net, covered with pearly sequins, a Parisian creation that would have attracted attention in any West End ballroom.

I had escaped the real charge against me, only to face a greater and more perilous one.

“Let’s put out the spy’s eyes, so that he’ll never be able to identify us!” suggested the girl who was my fellow-lodger.

“A good idea!” cried the woman Bennett. “He’s a spy in any case. Monkey Dick always said that it was far safer to prick a spy’s eyes than to take on his body for disposal. In the latter, a trace is always left. Let’s serve him as we did that spy Turner. He never spied again. I saw him last year, tapping with his stick on the curb in Waterloo Road.”

I stood helpless and horrified.

“Yes, I remember!” declared the stunted little foreigner in his bad English. “We did well not to kill him--very well! It was far better so. No police magistrate would accept the evidence of the blind!”

“Then let us prick out his eyes!” cried Lisely, exultant at the success of her suggestion. “He will then be sufficiently punished for spying upon us.”

I confess that, defenceless in the hands of that desperate gang, I became petrified by terror. What use was it to exhibit the boldness inbred by a brave and ancient family?

I contemplated making a dash for the door. But such action was forestalled by the two men who had first seized me clapping a pair of handcuffs upon me ere I could divine their intention. Thus was I rendered utterly powerless.

The thought that they meant to blind me held me speechless in horror. I stood there with fettered hands, helpless to raise a finger in self-defence, utterly paralyzed.

“Let me have the extreme satisfaction of pricking the spy’s eyes!” cried the girl Lisely who, for some mysterious reason, had turned entirely against me, and was now my bitterest enemy.

“For God’s sake, don’t!” I shouted in appeal.

“Has anybody got a long pin, or needle?” the girl asked, turning to her companions, whereat the flashily-dressed woman produced a large, thick safety-pin which she straightened out and handed to her. The girl who posed so cleverly as a typist in the City, and yet who was one of a desperate association of criminals, as proved by the pile of stolen gems upon the table, seemed to have been suddenly transformed into a diabolical virago.

“Come, Bertram. You’re at Guy’s. Help me. We’ll perform the operation together in the other room!”

“No, here!” demanded the woman Bennett. “Let us all witness the punishment.”

“Let Lisely do as she wishes. It is her affair,” decided the little man, whose word as leader was law. “She it is who has tracked him down as a spy!”

I held my shackled hands in front of my face to ward off her attack. In my ears resounded excited voices speaking that unintelligible tongue, punctuated by ribald laughter, while the young Englishman addressed as Bertram, with my fellow-lodger at Mrs. Bowyer’s, and aided by one of the men, bundled me into the adjoining room, a small, cheaply-furnished bedroom, lit by a flaring gas-jet, stuffy and full of the faint, not unpleasant, odor that seemed to fill the house and mingle with the fog.

“Go back!” ordered the girl. “We will do this alone!” And the man who had helped to force me into the room against my will, despite my strenuous struggles--for I assure you I did not give in as a craven coward--retired, closing the door after him. I stared at Lisely Hatten in bewildered helplessness.

The instant the door was closed the girl’s attitude changed. She seemed to half relent, for she said:

“I will spare you as much pain as I can, Mr. Paige--or Mr. Hipwell--eh?” And she produced from a little case a hypodermic syringe. “The shock would be too severe without this, but--a few moments’ sleep, and then all will be darkness.”

“God!” I cried. “Spare me. Are you mad? I’ve done nothing--the story I’ve told you is true--every word of it. I swear it is!”

“My dear fellow,” said the good-looking young criminal, who was evidently a medical student. “Don’t let’s argue. You’ve, unfortunately for yourself, seen us; you know us, and you would be a constant danger to us. When we discover danger we always remove it as far as possible. You can congratulate yourself that your body is not in a furnace to-night. You will live, to think over to-night, and to repent your intrusion here.”

Meanwhile, the girl had filled the little syringe with some pale-blue liquid which she held to the light. Then, in a caressing voice, she said:

“Don’t worry. This will save you much pain in the present, and, Mr. Paige,” she added in a strange voice full of meaning, “much disability in the future.”

“Damn you!” I shouted in fury. “What do you hell-fiends intend to do?”

“Hush!” the woman whispered. “Trust us both and don’t worry.”

“Worry? When you are going to blind me?” I yelled, heedless of her warning.

“You fool!” she cried. And as I raised my fettered hands against my eyes I felt the sharp prick of the hypodermic needle in my left wrist. A moment later I felt her finger pressed hard upon the puncture.

What happened immediately afterwards I have no idea. Probably I shall never know.

I somehow felt myself carried as though in air, lightly, buoyantly, through space, over a wide, unruffled sapphire sea. I recollect a feeling that I had discovered the secret of flight; for, I was alone, skimming the water like a swallow, without fatigue, ever forward in boundless space. Before me I saw in the far blue distance a range of snow-capped mountains, raising their glacier-clad peaks into the clouds, peaks higher than the giant Jungfrau which I had seen in Switzerland--higher indeed than I had even seen. They rose as a dark, insurmountable barrier before me, and I was approaching them at what seemed hundreds of miles an hour.

Suddenly, I came to a great, gray, granite, treeless precipice, and knew that I must be dashed against it to my death. But, instead, I again rose in short, rapid spirals, higher and higher and yet still higher, over a region of eternal snows and ice. And, once more I was out into the illimitable sunshine, soaring in space, as a bird with tireless wings, flying in the limitless space, heedless and intoxicated with the pleasure of a newly-awakened interest in life.

A panorama of busy cities and of great stretches of picturesque country passed before my vision. Dark forests, placid lakes, green swards, mighty rivers, babbling brooks, wildly excited crowds of men on ’Change in cities, the homely comfort of the great country houses of the rich, all of these passed in rapid review before my distorted vision.

I beheld scenes which I had never before gazed on. I smelt the perfume of flowers hitherto unknown to me, strange, wonderful tropical flowers. Then all those other scenes faded to give place to a great arid desert, brown, inhospitable, without any sign of vegetable life as far as my eyes could see.

It was astounding, bewildering. I tried to collect my thoughts; but they were addled. My brain was not normal. It seemed wrapped in cotton-wool. Sometimes, over everything was the clear azure light of evening; at others, the sun shone fiercely, revealing far-distant objects with great distinctness. Yet, at others, they were half obscured by an uncertain, blood-red mist.

On I sailed; on through space, reviewing the whole world as I went. Strange tongues sounded in my ears and stranger scenes greeted me at every moment. Now upon land, now upon the boundless ocean, and sometimes in express trains, I sped through a new and unknown world, bright and brilliant, that knew not darkness or night; for day was unending.

Distinctly, to-day I remember wondering if I were dead. Had I passed into the Beyond, into which the modern world is striving so strenuously to penetrate? Those devils into whose privacy I had so accidentally stumbled had murdered me, without doubt. They had closed my lips to prevent my betraying their super-criminal methods.

The face of that innocent, good-looking girl, Lisely Hatten, rose before me, together with that of the pallid young Englishman whom I had at first taken for a naval officer, but who was a medical student. And--why, I know not--I actually welcomed the recollection! No hatred did I experience of that fiery-tempered girl with the soft brown eyes and wavy hair, who had begged her companions to allow her to put out my eyes with that large safety-pin.

My last remembrance was of the prick of the hypodermic needle. At any rate, the girl had treated me humanely! Perhaps that was the reason I felt no malice against her.

When, however, I recalled the face of the woman Bennett, I experienced a fierce revulsion of feeling against her. She was my bitterest enemy, even in the fact that she had failed to identify me and to substantiate the story of my meeting with Monkey Dick when he was in Bloomsbury. That very denial had corroborated the girl Lisely’s declaration that I was a police-spy. Hence the vengeance which the gang had taken on my unfortunate self!

Still I sped on in mid air, light as down, now rising, now falling, tireless as ever, whirling through space, traveling without count of time, witnessing fresh scenes, meeting fresh people, seeing fresh faces, yet unable to find tongue to communicate with them.

The whole experience coincided with something I had read about dealing with life after death.

Was I dead, I wondered?