LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1525, 7 January 1879, Page 3

LITERATURE.

SHADOWED FORTH. By the Author of “In the Dead of Night.” [Continued .) To all appearance Imray’a murder was destined to add one more to the long list of undiscovered crimes. I mourned my friend long and sincerely. If any recollection of the foolish compact we had entered into as young men ever came into my memory, it was speedily dismissed as something unworthy of serious thought. But it certainly did strike me as a singular coincidence that the murder took place on the very morning, and, as nearly as could he calculated, at the very hour that I had been startled by that strange shadow on the ceiling of my bedroom. It struck me as a singular coincidence, but as nothing more. Some six or seven months had passed away, when a commission to paint a certain picture necessitated my taking a journey from London to a place some distance north of Aberdeen. I left home early one morning hoping to reach my journey’s end sometime in the course of the forenoon of the following day. In order to do this it was necessary that I should travel all night. About ten o’clock, being alone in my compartment and thoroughly tired out, I dropped into a refreshing sleep. The train was still dashing along at express speed when I awoke with the sensation of not having been asleep for more than a few minutes. I looked at my watch, and was surprised to find how late it was. Then I rubbed the window and peered out, but the night was moonless and overcast Not even the vaguest outline could be discerned of the great hills sleeping around, whose sacred silence we seemed so rudely to disturb. I let down the window to obtain a breath of fresh air. A minute later the train shot into a tunnel.

From my seat close to the open window I could see the clear reflection of each lighted compartment on the black damp wall of the tunnel. There, too, w'as my own shadow, sharply focussed on the wall, as I sat peering forward with the peak of my travellingcap pulled well over my brows. And there too, as I lived, and emanating from the next compartment, was a second shadow still more sharply defined than mine—the twin shadow of that other shadow I had seen six months before in my inn bedroom! So well did I remember its every feature —if a shadow can be said to have features —that it was impossible for me to be mistaken. There, as before, was the cloaked and stooping figure, the slouched hut, the parrot like nose, and there, above all, was the uplifted arm and the hand that clutched a dagger. I seemed to freeze as I looked. Not to have saved my life could I have either stirred or spoken during those few moments. As before, the shadow was motionless, or would have been but for the slight oscillation of the train. The tragedy, if such it were, did rot advance—the uplifted dagger diduot fall—the unseeu victim put forth no arm in self defence. Another minute and we were out of the tunnel, and the shadow, focussed no longer on the black enclosing walls, radiated into space and vanished. I was more disturbed in my mind than I would have cared to own. What did the sscoud appearance of this same ominous shadow portend ? Was it sent as a warning, or as a clue to the murder : or was it merely ono of those singular coincidences, by no means uncommon in everyday life, but which we yet find it impossible satisfactorily to explain ? For that night, at least, • Macbeth had murdered sleep.’

By-and-by the train slackened speed. Wo were approaching a station at which we were timed to stop. Before the train had come fairly to a stand my carriage-door was opened and I was on the platform. No one had had time to leave the compartment next to mine : no one did leave it. I tried the door ; it was locked; I peered through the windows; the compartment was empty. I made my way to the guard of the train. ‘ The middle compartment of that carriage is empty and locked,’ I said; ‘but there was certainly some one in it as we came through the tunnel just now-’

For a moment he looked startled. Then he held up his lamp and looked at the number on the painted door. ‘M 98,’ ho said, as he read it out. ‘No, sir; no one was in that carriage as we came through the tunnel. No one has been in it since we left B . I locked it there myself; and, as you see, it is locked still.’ I did not care to tell the man what I had seen, so I merely said that I supposed I must have been mistaken, and loft him. Two minutes later, as I was standing at the refreshment bar, ho came up to mo with a mysteriously confidential air. ‘ About that carriage,’ sir,’ he whispered. * I may tell you that there is something uncommon about it, though it would not do to tell everybody so It’s the very carriage in which poor Mr Imray was murdered. M 98—that’s the number. The middle compartment it was that ho was found in. I was the guard that was examined at the inquest. Ycu have not forgotten the case, sir ?’

Forgotten it ? Should I ever forget ? I don’t know How I answered the man, hut he must have seen that his words had moved mo. ‘And now,’ he went on, ‘ whenever I see M 98 running as part of my train, I always make a point of locking the middle compartment, and if anybody wants to get into it I tell them it’s engaged. It seems to me as if I couldn’t bear to see anybody travelling in it, knowing what I know about it. ’

I slipped a coin into tho man’s hand. ‘Have my traps got out of the train,’ I said ; ‘ I shall go no further to night. ’ Was th ere nothing more than a coincidence in all this ? I kept asking myself. Had I not been singled out for some mysterious purpose, of which as yet I know nothing. ‘lt is—it roust be, something more than blind chance,’ I said to myself. _ The more I turned tho matter over in my mind, the more settled became my conviction that there was something more yet to come —that 1 had but to wait patiently, and in due time tho riddle would bo read for me—tho mystery solved.

But when week a and months passed away, and nothing farther happened : when no sign or token was vouchsafed me. and when time bad in some measure blunted the sharp edge of memory ; ] began to think lliat J must have been led away by my own nervous fancies; that for once I had allowed my imaginat'ou to outstrip my common-sense. Finady, I came to believe that I had never seen the shadow in the tunnel at all, but that the fact of thinking I had seen such a thing was a pretty good proof that my mental cquinoiae was not quite so finely adjusted as I had fondly imagined it to be. Had I laid the case before ray doctor, bis verdict would have been that I had overworked myo-lf, and that all I needed was rest and change of scene. About thh fine I received a commission to paint a picture illustrative of a certain t>ba.so of low cls' S London life. In my search for types and faces to embody in my picture, I found myself after nightfall on s *veral occasions in some of the lowest neighborboo: Ih, and among some of the vilest dens, that the metropolis had at that time reason to be ashamed of. I had several acquaintances among tire police, and under tluir shelf-ring wings I visited sundry places into which it would not have beensafe for me to venture alone. Sai l one of these acquaintances, Sergeant Smith, to me one night, after we had, been the round of several queer places ‘ There’s obon a rum lot in here, sir, though mostly foreigners, S.upp. so we finish up by taking a po p at them,' The place he spoke of was a mean and diugy-lookmg cafe, situated in

a mean and dingy street somewhere in the purlieus of Soho and Leicester square. We pushed open the swing door and went in, and at |once I could have fancied that I was hundreds of miles from London, and that I had lost myself in some low neighborhood of the Quartier Latin. But with the place and the people found there I ha' c nothing here to d > —or rather, 1 have to do with one person only, 1 did not see him when I first went in, nor till after 1 had sat down and ordered a cup of coffee. But as soon as I did see him, or rather, as soon as I caught sight of the shadow reflected on the wall beyond him, I started to my feet with an exclamation that turned a dozen suspicious pairs of eyes on me in a moment. On the coarse whitewashed wall of this mean cafe I beheld, for the third time, the sinister outline which had haunted me twice already—once in my bedroom at the inn on the Dove, and once in the tunnel, as I was travelling in the carriage in which poor Imray had been murdered. Unbidden and unsought by me, for the third time, there it was, as clearly defined as though it were the same shadow outlined in charcoal to the most minute particular that I had seen before. It was the shadow and not the man that in the first instance drew my eyes to the remote corner of the room which they accupied, apart from anyone, but ray gaze now turned involuntarily to the man himself. I was filled with a sort of dread curiosity—a feeling which I could not analyse had possession of me. Who and what manner of man was this that had been so strangely singled out before me from all the other millions of living units scattered over the face of the earth ? Was the riddle going to be read for me at last ? He was tall, thin, and bony, as well as could bo seen for the long, heavy, oldfashioned cloak, with its fur collar and j quaint clasps, in which he w r as wrapped. He wore a soft felt hat, pulled low down over his brows, He bad red hair, and a short, pointed beard and moustache of the same color. His large Roman nose made his thin cadaverous face look thinner and more cadaverous that it would otherwise have looked, When my attention was first drawn to him, ho had risen to his feet, and was staring intently at the door, through which three or four new comers were filing slowly into the room. He looked as if he were impatiently awaiting the coming of some one. To he continued.