S THE cathedral chimes struck eleven, Hubert Quality raised the corner of the blind and looked into the street.
A deep peace reigned; the cobbles of the road glistened from recent rain; wet wads of yellowed leaves padded the pavements. Very far away on the horizon, a fitful red quiver told of heathen fires lighted to the dark god Thor.
No human form was visible in the street. Yet Quality shrank from the uneasy sensation that some one was spying upon him.
Bracing himself with an effort, he looked up furtively into the indigo vault of the heavens—knowing the while that he was about to be subjected to some fresh demonstration of trickery on the part of his nerves.
Instantly, he started back with a stifled cry.
A face was watching him from the moon.
For several full seconds it bleached him, the unhuman stare of century-old eyes, before it blended again into the blank silver disc.
With shaking fingers, Quality dropped the curtain—the pallor of his face and the twitching of his features testifying to the cumulative effect of oft-repeated shocks.
For the past two weeks his terror-maddened nerves had rent him with the strength of lunatic devils—making every heart-beat leap like a bead of quicksilver, and chopping up each breath into demi-semiquavers of panting panic. Only the consciousness of one supreme fact held them back from their objective—the wreck of Quality’s sanity.
On the morrow, their victim was going home.
It was his day.
The most cursory glance at his face proclaimed him the predestined prey of his imagination. His dreamy eyes, sensitive mouth and delicate physique denoted him student—or visionary—rather than man of action, and, as such, averse from any act or form of violence.
During the siege and occupation of the town by the enemy, in his role of spectator, he had been plunged into a super-hell, in which he groped in a red delirium—fire-flecked and blood-smudged. His razor-keen sympathies supplying the lack of experience, he had died, by proxy, many deaths a day. He had seen human faces blasted by the red-hot touch of the Martian hand, and the sight had not been good to see. Above all, his ears were deafened by the constant terrific speech of great guns that spoke.
Peace—passionately he prayed for it. And tomorrow that peace would be his.
Soothed by the mere thought of his imminent release, he turned back again towards the room which he had grown to hate. It was a prim, mid-Victorian-looking apartment, stuffy from a porcelain stove and crowded with horsehair furniture. At the round table of highly-polished walnut wood, his landlady sat at her knitting.
Apparently about forty years of age, madame was of ponderous build, clumsy as a Flemish horse, with massive heaving shoulders, and broad hips. Abundant black hair was brushed back from her face and gathered in a knot on the top of her head. Her sallow skin was partially redeemed by the beauty of her eyes—velvet-brown and fringed with thick lashes. Her full lips were penciled with a fine line of black down. It was a typical enough face of a daughter of the people, sprung from peasant stock and now the wife of a small tradesman.
This was the woman whom Quality feared with his very soul.
When he had first rented her apartment she had reminded him of a woman in a fairy tale, who, while apparently honest and homely, concealed under her ordinary exterior that element of the sinister supernatural that often accompanies such histories. Thus looked the pleasant-faced female, who afterwards figured as the ogress; thus appeared the harmless peasant, who changed nightly into a were-wolf.
It was not his fanciful idea of a composite personality, however, which inspired Quality’s dislike of his landlady. That had come with the knowledge that she was utterly lacking in the usual sentiments of humanity. Undisturbed by any horrors of the siege, and showing neither pity nor fear, she continued her daily routine with the mechanical precision of a machine. The sole interest that she ever showed in her boarder was connected with the weekly note.
It was since the War that his distaste had magnified into fear. And his fear was the craven terror of one who, amidst hostile surroundings, carries his very life on a tongue-string. For Fate, choosing her instrument with callous cruelty, had ordained that he should serve his country by means of those subterranean methods, for which the punishment is summary death.
Quality now eyed the woman with the oblique glance of suspicion.
How much did madame know? Did she merely suspect? Was her inaction a sign of ignorance? Or was she on crouch, bidding her time to pounce?