Page:The Collector by May Sinclair.djvu/9

Rh the back garden. There were fri3Ieri.es in it, and bedroom suites, and twisty corri- dors, and little staircases where you least expected them. The door Watt Gunn had disappeared through led into the li- brary, and the library led into the Italian 'room, and the Italian room into the Jap- anese room, and the Japanese room into Mrs. Abadam's boudoir. Mrs, Folyat-Rai lees's first movement was comparatively simple. It was to go back up the big front staircase, and, avoid- ing the reception-room, enter the library where Watt Gunn was. through the door that gave upon the landing. Watt Gunn was all alone in the library. He had found a comfortable arm-chair under the electric ring, and he %vas read- ing;. He had his back to the door Mrs. Folyat-Raikes went in by, but he says he felt it in his spine that she was there. That door was near and at right angles to the door of the reception-room, so that he had only one way of escape— the door into the Italian room. He took it. He says that the rest of his flight through Abadam's house was like an abominable dream. He was convinced that Mrs. Folyat-Raikes was following him. He closed every door behind him, and he felt her following him. He went slap through the Italian room, at a hard gallop, into the Japanese room. The Jap- anese room was difficult to negotiate be- cause of the screens that were about. He saw Buddhas smiling and frightful gods and samurais grinning at him as he clashed into Mrs. Abadam's boudoir. He had had the presence of mind to switch the electric light off behind him as he went ; hut there was no light in the boudoir. He went tumbling over things; he trod on a cat, and upset a table and a cage with Mrs, Abadam's parrot in it. He says he thought that he heard a screen go down in the Japanese room as he left it, and that frightened him. At the far end of the boudoir there was a little door. It was ajar, and a light showed in the opening. He rushed through, slamming the door behind him, and found himself on a narrow landing at the toot of a little spiral staircase. On his left, another little staircase, went twist- ing away to the floor below. Watt Gunn did n't know it, but these were the almost secret stairs leading to Mrs. Abadam's private apartments. He said he thought they were the back stairs. We asked him later on whether at atiy moment of his flight, after he had broken loose Irom us, he had seen Mrs. Folyat- Raikes pursuing him. And he said no T not exactly ; not,, that was to say, with his eyes. He saw her with his spine. He says that, as far as he could describe his sen- sations, long, wriggling, fibrous threads— feelers, he called them— went streaming out backward from each one of his ver- tebra?, and that by means of them he knew that she was after him, He says that when he slammed the door of the boudoir, these feelers recoiled, and lashed him up the spiral staircase. He came out, at the corner of a long corridor, into what he took to he the servants* quarters, where, if anywhere, he would he safe. There was a door at each end of the corridor. The nearer one was open, dis- closing a housemaid's cupboard; but the passage through it was obstructed by the housemaid. The corridor gave him a clear course for sprinting, so he made at top speed for the farther door. It took him straight into Mrs, Aba- dam's bath-room. His first thought was wonder at the marvelous luck that had landed him just there, in the most secret, the most abso- lutely safe position, in the whole house, where, without incurring grave suspicion, he could lock himself in. There were three doors, the one he 'd come by, one leading into Abadam's dress- ing-room, and one into Mrs. Abadam's bedroom. He locked them all, the outer door first, then the bedroom door, then, to make himself, as he put it, impregnable, the inner door of the dressing-room. Be- yond it was Abadam's bedroom. He says he never saw anything like that bath-room, neither could he have imagined it. It was worth the whole adventure just to have seen it once. He could have spent hours in it, going round and looking at tilings. It was all white tiles, white por- celain, and silver fittings. There was a great porcelain bath in one corner, and a shower-bath in another, with white-silk mackintosh curtains all round it; and a recess all fitted up with sprays — rose sprays, and needle sprays that you could direct on to any part of you you chose. There was a couch where you could lie