FACE TO FACE WITH DEVLIN, I DEMAND AN EXPLANATION OF HIM.
I rapped with my knuckles, and a voice which could have been none other than the voice of Devlin immediately responded, calling to me to enter. The next moment I stood face to face with the strange creature, concerning whom my curiosity was raised to the highest pitch. He was sitting in a chair upon my entrance, and he did not rise from it; therefore I looked down upon him and he looked up at me. As my eyes rested on his face, I saw in it the inspiration of the evil expression in the faces of Mr. Lemon's portrait, the stone monster, and the bird's beak, which had made so profound an impression upon me in the parlour on the ground-floor.
"You have been in the house some time," said Devlin.
"And have had a long, a very long, conversation with my worthy landlady," he observed.
"About me," he said, not in the form of a question but as a statement of fact.
"Sit down," said Devlin, "I expected you."
There was only one other chair in the room besides the one he occupied, and I accepted his invitation, and drew it up to the table. And there we sat gazing at each other for what appeared to me a long time in silence.
The room was very poorly furnished. There were the two chairs, a small deal table, and a single iron bedstead in the corner. Off the room was a kind of closet, in which I supposed were a washstand and fittings. There was only one other article in view in addition to those I have mentioned, and that was a desk at which Devlin was writing.[1] He did not put away his papers, and I was enabled to observe, without undue prying, that his writing was very fine and very close.
How shall I describe him? A casual observation of his face and figure would not suffice for the detection of anything uncanny about him, but it must be remembered that I was abnormally excited, and most strangely interested in him. He was tall and dark, his face was long and spare; his forehead was low; his eyes were black, with an extraordinary brilliancy in them; his mouth was large, and his lips thin. He wore a moustache, but no beard. In the order and importance of the impressions they produced upon me I should place first, his black eyes with their extraordinary brilliancy, and next, his hands, which were unusually small and white. They were the hands of a lady of gentle culture rather than those of a man in the class of life to which Devlin appeared to belong. Not alone was his social standing presumably fixed by the fact of his living in a room so poorly furnished at the top of a house so common as Mr. Lemon's, but his clothes were a special indication. They were shabby and worn; black frock-coat, black trousers and waistcoat, narrow black tie. Not a vestige of colour about them, and no sign of jewellery of any kind.