I didn’t think, when I
asked you about my old friend, I should strike on such strange metal. Well, I must be off; good-day.”

Villiers went away, thinking of his own conceit of the Chinese boxes;
here was quaint workmanship indeed. IV
THE DISCOVERY IN PAUL STREET


A few months after Villiers’ meeting with Herbert, Mr. Clarke was
sitting, as usual, by his after-dinner hearth, resolutely guarding his
fancies from wandering in the direction of the bureau. For more than a
week he had succeeded in keeping away from the “Memoirs,” and he
cherished hopes of a complete self-reformation; but, in spite of his
endeavours, he could not hush the wonder and the strange curiosity that
the last case he had written down had excited within him. He had put
the case, or rather the outline of it, conjecturally to a scientific
friend, who shook his head, and thought Clarke getting queer, and on
this particular evening Clarke was making an effort to rationalize the
story, when a sudden knock at the door roused him from his meditations. “Mr. Villiers to see you sir.”

“Dear me, Villiers, it is very kind of you to look me up; I have not
seen you for many months; I should think nearly a year. Come in, come
in. And how are you, Villiers? Want any advice about investments?”

“No, thanks, I fancy everything I have in that way is pretty safe. No,
Clarke, I have really come to consult you about a rather curious matter
that has been brought under my notice of late. I am afraid you will
think it all rather absurd when I tell my tale. I sometimes think so
myself, and that’s just why I made up my mind to come to you, as I know
you’re a practical man.”

Mr. Villiers was ignorant of the “Memoirs to prove the Existence of the
Devil.”

“Well, Villiers, I shall be happy to give you my advice, to the best of
my ability. What is the nature of the case?”

“It’s an extraordinary thing altogether. You know my ways; I always
keep my eyes open in the streets, and in my time I have chanced upon
some queer customers, and queer cases too, but this, I think, beats
all. I was coming out of a restaurant one nasty winter night about
three months ago; I had had a capital dinner and a good bottle of
Chianti, and I stood for a moment on the pavement, thinking what a
mystery there is about London streets and the companies that pass along
them. A bottle of red wine encourages these fancies, Clarke, and I dare
say I should have thought a page of small type, but I was cut short by
a beggar who had come behind me, and was making the usual appeals. Of
course I looked round, and this beggar turned out to be what was left
of an old friend of mine, a man named Herbert. I asked him how he had
come to such a wretched pass, and he told me. We walked up and down one
of those long and dark Soho streets, and there I listened to his story. He said he had married a beautiful girl, some years younger than
himself, and, as he put it, she had corrupted him body and soul. He
wouldn’t go into details; he said he dare not, that what he had seen
and heard haunted him by night and day, and when I looked in his face I
knew he was speaking the truth. There was something about the man that
made me shiver. I don’t know why, but it was there. I gave him a little
money and sent him away, and I assure you that when he was gone I
gasped for breath. His presence seemed to chill one’s blood.”

“Isn’t this all just a little fanciful, Villiers? I suppose the poor
fellow had made an imprudent marriage, and, in plain English, gone to
the bad.”

“Well, listen to this.” Villiers told Clarke the story he had heard
from Austin. “You see,” he concluded, “there can be but little doubt that this Mr.
Blank, whoever he was, died of sheer terror; he saw something so awful,
so terrible, that it cut short his life. And what he saw, he most
certainly saw in that house, which, somehow or other, had got a bad
name in the neighbourhood. I had the curiosity to go and look at the
place for myself. It’s a saddening kind of street; the houses are old
enough to be mean and dreary, but not old enough to be quaint. As far
as I could see most of them are let in lodgings, furnished and
unfurnished, and almost every door has three bells to it. Here and
there the ground floors have been made into shops of the commonest
kind; it’s a dismal street in every way. I found Number 20 was to let,
and I went to the agent’s and got the key. Of course I should have
heard nothing of the Herberts in that quarter, but I asked the man,
fair and square, how long they had left the house and whether there had
been other tenants in the meanwhile. He looked at me queerly for a
minute, and told me the Herberts had left immediately after the
unpleasantness, as he called it, and since then the house had been
empty.”

Mr. Villiers paused for a moment. “I have always been rather fond of going over empty houses; there’s a
sort of fascination about the desolate empty rooms, with the nails
sticking in the walls, and the dust thick upon the window-sills. But I
didn’t enjoy going over Number 20, Paul Street. I had hardly put my
foot inside the passage when I noticed a queer, heavy feeling about the
air of the house. Of course all empty houses are stuffy, and so forth,
but this was something quite different; I can’t describe it to you, but
it seemed to stop the breath. I went into the front room and the back
room, and the kitchens downstairs; they were all dirty and dusty
enough, as you would expect, but there was something strange about them
all. I couldn’t define it to you, I only know I felt queer. It was one
of the rooms on the first floor, though, that was the worst. It was a
largish room, and once on a time the paper must have been cheerful
enough, but when I saw it, paint, paper, and everything were most
doleful. But the room was full of horror; I felt my teeth grinding as I
put my hand on the door, and when I went in, I thought I should have
fallen fainting to the floor. However, I pulled myself together, and
stood against the end wall, wondering what on earth there could be
about the room to make my limbs tremble, and my heart beat as if I were
at the hour of death. In one corner there was a pile of newspapers
littered on the floor, and I began looking at them; they were papers of
three or four years ago, some of them half torn, and some crumpled as
if they had been used for packing. I turned the whole pile over, and
amongst them I found a curious drawing; I will show it to you
presently. But I couldn’t stay in the room; I felt it was overpowering
me. I was thankful to come out, safe and sound, into the open air. People stared at me as I walked along the street, and one man said I
was drunk. I was staggering about from one side of the pavement to the
other, and it was as much as I could do to take the key back to the
agent and get home. I was in bed for a week, suffering from what my
doctor called nervous shock and exhaustion.