The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [5365]
"Oh," whispered Mollie Gretna, in the darkness, "I believe I am going to scream!"
Pyne closed the door, and a dimly discernible figure on the opposite side of the room stooped and opened a little cupboard in which was a lighted ship's lantern. The lantern being lifted out and set upon a rough table near the stove, it became possible to view the apartment and its occupants.
It was a small, low-ceiled place, having two doors, one opening upon the street and the other upon a narrow, uncarpeted passage. The window was boarded up. The ceiling had once been whitewashed and a few limp, dark fragments of paper still adhering to the walls proved that some forgotten decorator had exercised his art upon them in the past. A piece of well-worn matting lay upon the floor, and there were two chairs, a table, and a number of empty tea-chests in the room.
Upon one of the tea-chests placed beside the cupboard which had contained the lantern a Chinaman was seated. His skin was of so light a yellow color as to approximate to dirty white, and his face was pock-marked from neck to crown. He wore long, snake-like moustaches, which hung down below his chin. They grew from the extreme outer edges of his upper lip, the centre of which, usually the most hirsute, was hairless as the lip of an infant. He possessed the longest and thickest pigtail which could possibly grow upon a human scalp, and his left eye was permanently closed, so that a smile which adorned his extraordinary countenance seemed to lack the sympathy of his surviving eye, which, oblique, beady, held no mirth in its glittering depths.
The garments of the one-eyed Chinaman, who sat complacently smiling at the visitors, consisted of a loose blouse, blue trousers tucked into grey socks, and a pair of those native, thick-soled slippers which suggest to a Western critic the acme of discomfort. A raven, black as a bird of ebony, perched upon the Chinaman's shoulder, head a-tilt, surveying the newcomers with a beady, glittering left eye which strangely resembled the beady, glittering right eye of the Chinaman. For, singular, uncanny circumstance, this was a one-eyed raven which sat upon the shoulder of his one-eyed master!
Mollie Gretna uttered a stifled cry. "Oh!" she whispered. "I knew I was going to scream!"
The eye of Sin Sin Wa turned momentarily in her direction, but otherwise he did not stir a muscle.
"Are you ready for us, Sin?" asked Sir Lucien.
"All ready. Lola hate gotchee topside loom ready," replied the Chinaman in a soft, crooning voice.
"Go ahead, Kilfane," directed Sir Lucien.
He glanced at Rita, who was standing very near him, surveying the evil little room and its owner with ill-concealed disgust.
"This is merely the foyer, Rita," he said, smiling slightly. "The state apartments are upstairs and in the adjoining house."
"Oh," she murmured--and no more.
Kilfane and Mollie Gretna were passing through the inner doorway, and Mollie turned.
"Isn't it loathsomely delightful?" she cried.
"Smartest leg in Buenos Ayres!" shrieked the raven. "Sin Sin, Sin Sin!"
Uttering a frightened exclamation, Mollie disappeared along the passage. Sir Lucien indicated to Rita that she was to follow; and he, passing through last of the party, closed the door behind him.
Sin Sin Wa never moved, and the raven, settling down upon the Chinaman's shoulder, closed his serviceable eye.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BLACK SMOKE
Up an uncarpeted stair Cyrus Kilfane led the party, and into a kind of lumber-room lighted by a tin oil lamp and filled to overflowing with heterogeneous and unsavory rubbish. Here were garments, male and female, no less than five dilapidated bowler hats, more tea-chests, broken lamps, tattered fragments of cocoanut-matting, steel bed-laths and straw mattresses, ruins of chairs--the whole diffusing an indescribably unpleasant odor.
Opening a cupboard door, Kilfane revealed a number of pendent, ragged garments, and two more bowler hats. Holding the