"Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs.""All right," said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured way in an armchair."Don't hurry for us," he said, glancing round at the litter of the room, "we have all the illustrated papers."Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as Ipassed through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil's voice continuing conversationally:
"And now, Mr Burrows," he said, settling himself sociably in the chair, "there's no reason why we shouldn't go on with that amusing argument.I'm sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the floor, and, as I told you before, I've no more notion why you are there than the man in the moon.A conversationalist like yourself, however, can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture.You were saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments of science might with advantage be made public.""Precisely," said the large man on the floor in an easy tone."Ihold that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science can be..."And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement.Inoticed that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy.
Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings with a slight degree of resentment.Mr Burrows, however, was all philosophy and chattiness.We left them, as I say, together, and sank deeper and deeper into the under-world of that mysterious house, which, perhaps, appeared to us somewhat more Tartarean than it really was, owing to our knowledge of its semi-criminal mystery and of the human secret locked below.
The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house;doors that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry, the servants' hall, and so on.Rupert flung open all the doors with indescribable rapidity.Four out of the five opened on entirely empty apartments.The fifth was locked.Rupert broke the door in like a bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted room.
Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an abyss:
"Whoever you are, come out.You are free.The people who held you captive are captives themselves.We heard you crying and we came to deliver you.We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot.You are free."For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead silence in it.Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning.We might easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have heard it before.It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman, drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.
"Has anybody got a match?" said Rupert grimly."I fancy we have come pretty near the end of this business."I struck a match and held it up.It revealed a large, bare, yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of it near the window.An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped, leaving darkness.It had, however, revealed something more practical--an iron gas bracket just above my head.I struck another match and lit the gas.And we found ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of the captive.
At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling silver hair.She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair of Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress.The glare of the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown background of the shutters.The background was blue and not brown in one place;at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the wood about an hour before.
"Madam," said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, "permit me to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free.Your complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and we have therefore ventured to come to your rescue."The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot.
Then she said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:
"Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say you had rescued me?""Yes, madam," said Rupert, with a beaming condescension."We have very satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows.We have settled affairs with them very satisfactorily."The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.
"What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?" she cried.
"We persuaded them, my dear madam," said Rupert, laughing, "by knocking them down and tying them up.But what is the matter?"To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat by the window.
"Do I understand," she said, with the air of a person about to begin knitting, "that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and tied him up?""We have," said Rupert proudly; "we have resisted their oppression and conquered it.""Oh, thanks," answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.
A considerable pause followed.
"The road is quite clear for you, madam," said Rupert pleasantly.
The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us for an instant.
"But what about Greenwood and Burrows?" she said."What did Iunderstand you to say had become of them?""They are lying on the floor upstairs," said Rupert, chuckling.
"Tied hand and foot."
"Well, that settles it," said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang into her seat again, "I must stop where I am."Rupert looked bewildered.
