CHAPTER XXI

Through the ever-deepening dusk Cleek and Arjeeb Noosrut moved onward together; and onward behind them moved, too, the same dilatory messenger boy who had loitered about in the neighbourhood of the park, squandering his halfpence now as then, leaving a small trail of winkle shells and trotter bones to mark the record of his passage, and never seeming to lose one iota of his appetite, eat as much and as often as he would.

The walk led down into the depths of Soho, that refuge of the foreign element in London; but long before they halted at the narrow doorway of a narrow house in a narrow side street—­a street that seemed to have gone to sleep in an atmosphere of gloom and smells—­Cleek had adroitly “pumped” Arjeeb Noosrut dry, and the riddle of the sacred son was a riddle to him no longer.  He was now only anxious to part from the man and return with the news to Lady Chepstow, and was casting round in his mind for some excuse to avoid going indoors with him and wasting precious time in breaking bread and eating salt, when there lurched out of an adjoining doorway an ungainly figure in turban and sandals and the full flower of that grotesque regalia which passes muster at cheap theatres and masquerade balls for the costume of a Cingalese.  The fellow had bent forward out of the deeper darkness of the house-passage into the murk and gloom of the ill-lit street, and was straining his eyes as if in search for someone long expected.

“Dog of an infidel!” exclaimed Arjeeb Noosrut, speaking in Hindustani, and spitting on the pavement as he caught sight of the man.  “See, well-beloved, he is of those ‘others’ of which I spoke when I first met thee.  There are many of them, but true believers none.  They dwell in a room huddled up as unclean things in the house there; they drink and make merry far into the night, and a woman veiled and in European garb comes to them and drinks with them sometimes—­and sometimes a man of her kind with her; and they speak a tongue that is not the tongue of our people; yet have I seen them go forth into the city and do homage as we to the sacred son.”

Cleek sucked in his breath and, twitching round, stared at the dim figure leaning forward in the dim light.

“By George!” he said to himself; “if I know anything, I ought to know the slouch and the low-sunk head of the Apache!  And the woman comes!—­And a man comes!—­And there are five lacs of rupees!  I wonder!  I wonder!  But no—­she wouldn’t come here, to a place like this, if she had ventured back into England and had called some of the band over to help.  She’d go to the old spot—­to the old haunt where she and I used to lie low and laugh whilst the police were hunting for me.  She’d go there, I’m sure, to the old Burnt Acre Mill, where, if you were ‘stalked,’ you could open the sluice gates and let the Thames and the mill stream rush in and meet, and make a hell of whirling waters that would drown a fish.  She would go there if it were she.  And yet—­it is an Apache:  I swear it is an Apache!”