Queer Classics – 10 Novels Collection. Radclyffe Hall

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      Overhead, Without

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      Among the other treasures of Rubbish Palace, I had inherited Stillfleet’s liqueur-case. It was on a generous scale, — a grand old oaken chest, bristling with griffins’ heads and claws, armed with massive iron handles, and big enough to hold all the favorite tipples of a royal household, or to hide a royal pair if they heard a Revolution coming up the stairs.

      Stillfleet had traced the pedigree of his chest to within three generations of Ginevra, in her family. He had no doubt that this was the identical coffer which that sportive lady had made her coffin.

      “Clip!” said Stillfleet, shutting down the lid as he told me this legend in the afternoon. “Clip! listen to that snap-lock! Fancy her feelings! Taste that gin! ‘Geniévre’ from Ginevra’s box. I like to keep my nectars in a coffin; it’s my edition of the old plan of drinking from a scull. Life is short. ‘Come, my lad, and drink some beer!’”

      To this grand sarcophagus I proceeded to seek a restorative for Cecil Dreeme. Locksley’s alternative, “opodildoc,” was not at hand.

      Lifting the heavy lid, instead of poor Ginevra’s bare bones, I found a joyous array of antique flasks and goblets. They flashed at me as the gas-light struck them, each with the merry wink of a practised bacchanal. I saw the tawny complexion of the brandy shining through a tall bottle, old enough to have figured at the banquet of the Borgia. Around this stately personage, and gaping for the generous juices he might impart, was a circle of glasses, the finest work of the best days of Venice, clear and thin as bubbles, and graceful as the cups of opening flowers.

      I took the decanter and a glass, and, thus armed, followed Locksley into the corridor.

      His prickly scare had so teazled the poor fellow that he was now quite like a picture of Remorse or Despair. It was entirely dark in the building. Our single candle carried its little sphere of light along with it. Beyond and overhead might have been the vaults and chambers of a cavern, for all we could see.

      Passing Densdeth’s padlocked door, we turned toward the side staircase. I looked up and down the well of the stairs. No oubliette ever showed a blacker void. It almost seemed to my excited imagination that we ought to hear the gurgle of a drowning prisoner, flung down into that darkness by us, his executioners.

      “Awful black!” said Locksley, and the shadow of his bristly hair on the wall stiffened with alarm.

      By the dim gleam of the candle, the paint of the wood and stucco of the walls of Chrysalis changed to oak and marble. The sham antique vanished. It became an actual place, not mere theatrical scenery. Seen by daylight, the whole edifice was so unreal and incongruous, that I should not have been surprised to see a squad of scene-shifters at work sliding it off and rolling it up, and leaving Ailanthus Square nothing but its bald brick houses to stare at. Now, as we climbed up the stairs, torch-bearer ahead, cupbearer behind, Chrysalis passed very well for a murky old castle of the era of plots, masks, poison, and vendetta.

      “Yes,” thought I, “Locksley’s three knocks did announce a new act in my drama. Cecil Dreeme is the new actor. He follows Densdeth and Churm, he precedes Emma Denman. Is he in the plot? Is he underplot, counterplot, or episode? I hope, poor lonely fellow, that he has not already passed off the stage, as Locksley dreads. That would be a dismal opening of my life in Chrysalis.”

      The janitor now pushed open the partition-door from the upper landing into the northern corridor.

      The haggard moon, in its last quarter, hung just above a chimney of Mannering Place opposite, like a pale flame struggling up from a furnace. Its weird light slanted across the mullion of the narrow window.

      There was just enough of this feeble pallor to nullify the peering light of Locksley’s candle. Ghostly, indeed, the spot appeared! My anxiety and my companion’s alarm were lively enough to shape a score of ghosts out of a streak of moonshine.

      “To Let,” the tenant of the left-hand rooms, had no business with us, nor we with him. On the other side was the modest little card: —

      CECIL DREEME,

       PAINTER.

      Destiny had brought us together. I was about to know him, alive or dead.

      Alive or dead! That doubt in both our minds made us hesitate an instant. Locksley looked up to me for orders.

      “Knock!” whispered I.

      He knocked gently. If there were a sick man within, his hearing, sharpened by silence, would abhor a noise.

      We both listened, without whisper or sigh. Locksley deposited his candle on the floor and put his ear to the keyhole. The low light flung a queer, distorted СКАЧАТЬ