The Grand Babylon Hotel Part 34

'That is merely a ventilation grating. Good ventilation is absolutely essential.'

'Looks broken, doesn't it?' Racksole suggested and then, putting a finger quickly on Babylon's shoulder, 'there's someone in the cellar.

Can't you hear breathing, down there, behind that bin?'

The two men stood tense and silent for a while, listening, under the ray of the single electric light in the ceiling. Half the cellar was involved in gloom. At length Racksole walked firmly down the central pa.s.sage-way between the bins and turned to the corner at the right.

'Come out, you villain!' he said in a low, well-nigh vicious tone, and dragged up a cowering figure.

He had expected to find a man, but it was his own daughter, Nella Racksole, upon whom he had laid angry hands.

Chapter Twenty-Three FURTHER EVENTS IN THE CELLAR

'WELL, Father,' Nella greeted her astounded parent. 'You should make sure that you have got hold of the right person before you use all that terrible muscular force of yours. I do believe you have broken my shoulder bone.' She rubbed her shoulder with a comical expression of pain, and then stood up before the two men. The skirt of her dark grey dress was torn and dirty, and the usually trim Nella looked as though she had been shot down a canvas fire-escape. Mechanically she smoothed her frock, and gave a straightening touch to her hair.

'Good evening, Miss Racksole,' said Felix Babylon, bowing formally.

'This is an unexpected pleasure.' Felix's drawing-room manners never deserted him upon any occasion whatever.

'May I inquire what you are doing in my wine cellar, Nella Racksole?'

said the millionaire a little stiffly He was certainly somewhat annoyed at having mistaken his daughter for a criminal; moreover, he hated to be surprised, and upon this occasion he had been surprised beyond any ordinary surprise; lastly, he was not at all pleased that Nella should be observed in that strange predicament by a stranger.

'I will tell you,' said Nella. 'I had been reading rather late in my room--the night was so close. I heard Big Ben strike half-past twelve, and then I put the book down, and went out on to the balcony of my window for a little fresh air before going to bed. I leaned over the balcony very quietly--you will remember that I am on the third floor now--and looked down below into the little sunk yard which separates the wall of the hotel from Salisbury Lane. I was rather astonished to see a figure creeping across the yard. I knew there was no entrance into the hotel from that yard, and besides, it is fifteen or twenty feet below the level of the street. So I watched. The figure went close up against the wall, and disappeared from my view. I leaned over the balcony as far as I dared, but I couldn't see him. I could hear him, however.'

'What could you hear?' questioned Racksole sharply.

'It sounded like a sawing noise,' said Nella; 'and it went on for quite a long time--nearly a quarter of an hour, I should think--a rasping sort of noise.'

'Why on earth didn't you come and warn me or someone else in the hotel?'

asked Racksole.

'Oh, I don't know, Dad,' she replied sweetly. 'I had got interested in it, and I thought I would see it out myself. Well, as I was saying, Mr.

Babylon,' she continued, addressing her remarks to Felix, with a dazzling smile, 'that noise went on for quite a long time. At last it stopped, and the figure reappeared from under the wall, crossed the yard, climbed up the opposite wall by some means or other, and so over the railings into Salisbury Lane. I felt rather relieved then, because I knew he hadn't actually broken into the hotel. He walked down Salisbury Lane very slowly. A policeman was just coming up. "Goodnight, officer,"

I heard him say to the policeman, and he asked him for a match. The policeman supplied the match, and the other man lighted a cigarette, and proceeded further down the lane. By cricking your neck from my window, Mr Babylon, you can get a glimpse of the Embankment and the river. I saw the man cross the Embankment, and lean over the river wall, where he seemed to be talking to some one. He then walked along the Embankment to Westminster and that was the last I saw of him. I waited a minute or two for him to come back, but he didn't come back, and so I thought it was about time I began to make inquiries into the affair. I went downstairs instantly, and out of the hotel, through the quadrangle, into Salisbury Lane, and I looked over those railings. There was a ladder on the other side, by which it was perfectly easy--once you had got over the railings--to climb down into the yard. I was horribly afraid lest someone might walk up Salisbury Lane and catch me in the act of negotiating those railings, but no one did, and I surmounted them, with no worse damage than a torn skirt. I crossed the yard on tiptoe, and I found that in the wall, close to the ground and almost exactly under my window, there was an iron grating, about one foot by fourteen inches. I suspected, as there was no other ironwork near, that the mysterious visitor must have been sawing at this grating for private purposes of his own. I gave it a good shake, and I was not at all surprised that a good part of it came off in my hand, leaving just enough room for a person to creep through. I decided that I would creep through, and now wish I hadn't. I don't know, Mr Babylon, whether you have ever tried to creep through a small hole with a skirt on. Have you?'

'I have not had that pleasure,' said little Felix, bowing again, and absently taking up a bottle which lay to his hand.

'Well, you are fortunate,' the imperturbable Nella resumed. 'For quite three minutes I thought I should perish in that grating, Dad, with my shoulder inside and the rest of me outside. However, at last, by the most amazing and agonizing efforts, I pulled myself through and fell into this extraordinary cellar more dead than alive. Then I wondered what I should do next. Should I wait for the mysterious visitor to return, and stab him with my pocket scissors if he tried to enter, or should I raise an alarm? First of all I replaced the broken grating, then I struck a match, and I saw that I had got landed in a wilderness of bottles. The match went out, and I hadn't another one. So I sat down in the corner to think. I had just decided to wait and see if the visitor returned, when I heard footsteps, and then voices; and then you came in. I must say I was rather taken aback, especially as I recognized the voice of Mr Babylon. You see, I didn't want to frighten you.

If I had bobbed up from behind the bottles and said "Booh!" you would have had a serious shock. I wanted to think of a way of breaking my presence gently to you. But you saved me the trouble, Dad. Was I really breathing so loudly that you could hear me?'

The girl ended her strange recital, and there was a moment's silence in the cellar. Racksole merely nodded an affirmative to her concluding question.

'Well, Nell, my girl,' said the millionaire at length, 'we are much obliged for your gymnastic efforts--very much obliged. But now, I think you had better go off to bed. There is going to be some serious trouble here, I'll lay my last dollar on that?'

'But if there is to be a burglary I should so like to see it, Dad,'

Nella pleaded. 'I've never seen a burglar caught red-handed.'

'This isn't a burglary, my dear. I calculate it's something far worse than a burglary.'

'What?' she cried. 'Murder? Arson? Dynamite plot? How perfectly splendid!'

'Mr Babylon informs me that Jules is in London,' said Racksole quietly.

'Jules!' she exclaimed under her breath, and her tone changed instantly to the utmost seriousness. 'Switch off the light, quick!' Springing to the switch, she put the cellar in darkness.

'What's that for?' said her father.

'If he comes back he would see the light, and be frightened away,' said Nella. 'That wouldn't do at all.'

'It wouldn't, Miss Racksole,' said Babylon, and there was in his voice a note of admiration for the girl's sagacity which Racksole heard with high paternal pride.

'Listen, Nella,' said the latter, drawing his daughter to him in the profound gloom of the cellar. 'We fancy that Jules may be trying to tamper with a certain bottle of wine--a bottle which might possibly be drunk by Prince Eugen. Now do you think that the man you saw might have been Jules?'

'I hadn't previously thought of him as being Jules, but immediately you mentioned the name I somehow knew that he was. Yes, I am sure it was Jules.'

'Well, just hear what I have to say. There is no time to lose. If he is coming at all he will be here very soon--and you can help.' Racksole explained what he thought Jules' tactics might be. He proposed that if the man returned he should not be interfered with, but merely watched from the other side of the gla.s.s door.

'You want, as it were, to catch Mr Jules alive?' said Babylon, who seemed rather taken aback at this novel method of dealing with criminals. 'Surely,' he added, 'it would be simpler and easier to inform the police of your suspicion, and to leave everything to them.'

'My dear fellow,' said Racksole, 'we have already gone much too far without the police to make it advisable for us to call them in at this somewhat advanced stage of the proceedings. Besides, if you must know it, I have a particular desire to capture the scoundrel myself. I will leave you and Nella here, since Nella insists on seeing everything, and I will arrange things so that once he has entered the cellar Jules will not get out of it again--at any rate through the grating. You had better place yourselves on the other side of the gla.s.s door, in the big cellar; you will be in a position to observe from there, I will skip off at once. All you have to do is to take note of what the fellow does. If he has any accomplices within the hotel we shall probably be able by that means to discover who the accomplice is.'

Lighting a match and shading it with his hands, Racksole showed them both out of the little cellar. 'Now if you lock this gla.s.s door on the outside he can't escape this way: the panes of gla.s.s are too small, and the woodwork too stout. So, if he comes into the trap, you two will have the pleasure of actually seeing him frantically writhe therein, without any personal danger; but perhaps you'd better not show yourselves.'

In another moment Felix Babylon and Nella were left to themselves in the darkness of the cellar, listening to the receding footfalls of Theodore Racksole. But the sound of these footfalls had not died away before another sound greeted their ears--the grating of the small cellar was being removed.

'I hope your father will be in time,' whispered Felix

'Hus.h.!.+' the girl warned him, and they stooped side by side in tense silence.

A man cautiously but very neatly wormed his body through the aperture of the grating. The watchers could only see his form indistinctly in the darkness.

Then, being fairly within the cellar, he walked without the least hesitation to the electric switch and turned on the light. It was unmistakably Jules, and he knew the geography of the cellar very well.

Babylon could with difficulty repress a start as he saw this bold and unscrupulous ex-waiter moving with such an air of a.s.surance and determination about the precious cellar. Jules went directly to a small bin which was numbered 17, and took there from the topmost bottle.

'The Romanee-Conti--Prince Eugen's wine!' Babylon exclaimed under his breath.

Jules neatly and quickly removed the seal with an instrument which he had clearly brought for the purpose. He then took a little flat box from his pocket, which seemed to contain a sort of black salve. Rubbing his finger in this, he smeared the top of the neck of the bottle with it, just where the cork came against the gla.s.s. In another instant he had deftly replaced the seal and restored the bottle to its position. He then turned off the light, and made for the aperture. When he was half- way through Nella exclaimed, 'He will escape, after all. Dad has not had time--we must stop him.'

But Babylon, that embodiment of caution, forcibly, but nevertheless politely, restrained this Yankee girl, whom he deemed so rash and imprudent, and before she could free herself the lithe form of Jules had disappeared.