The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes. Bernard Capes

type – such as might have existed in preneurotic days. His complexion was of a smooth golden russet; his nose and lips were cut rather in the lines of sensuous cynicism; the look in his polished brown eyes was of defiant self-confidence, capable of the extremes of devotion or of obstinacy. Short curling black hair covered his scalp, and his moustache and small crisp beard were of the same hue.

      ‘Thanks, stranger,’ he said, in a somewhat nasal but musical voice. ‘Your attack – a little cowardly, perhaps, for all its provocation – has served to release me before my time. Thanks – thanks indeed!’

      Amos sent a sick and groping glance towards the alcove. The curtain was pulled back – the couch was empty. His vision returning, caught sight of Adnah still standing motionless.

      ‘No, no!’ he screeched in a suffocated voice, and clasped his hands convulsively.

      There was an adoring expression in her wet eyes that grew and grew. In another moment she had thrown herself at the stranger’s feet.

      ‘Master,’ she cried, in a rich and swooning voice: ‘O Lord and Master – as blind love foreshadowed thee in these long months!’

      He smiled down upon her.

      ‘A tender welcome on the threshold,’ he said softly, ‘that I had almost renounced. The young spirit is weak to confirm the self-sacrifice of the old. But this ardent modern, Adnah, who, it seems, has slipped his opportunity?’

      Passionately clasping the hands of the young Jew, she turned her face reluctant.

      ‘He has blood on him,’ she whispered. ‘His lip is swollen like a schoolboy’s with fighting. He is not a man, sane, self-reliant and glorious – like you, O my heart!’

      The Jew gave a high, loud laugh, which he checked in mid-career.

      ‘Sir,’ he said derisively, ‘we will wish you a very pleasant good-morning.’

      How – under what pressure or by what process of self-effacement – he reached the street, Amos could never remember. His first sense of reality was in the stinging cold, which made him feel, by reaction, preposterously human.

      It was perhaps six o’clock of a February morning, and the fog had thinned considerably, giving place to a wan and livid glow that was but half-measure of dawn.

      He found himself going down the ringing pavement that was talcous with a sooty skin of ice, a single engrossing resolve hammering time in his brain to his footsteps.

      The artificial glamour was all past and gone – beaten and frozen out of him. The rest was to do – his plain duty as a Christian, as a citizen – above all, as a gentleman. He was, unhypnotised, a law-abiding young man, with a hatred of notoriety and a detestation of the abnormal. Unquestionably his forebears had made a huge muddle of his inheritance.

      About a quarter to seven he walked (rather unsteadily) into Vine Street Police Station and accosted the inspector on duty.

      ‘I want to lay an information.’

      The officer scrutinised him, professionally, from the under side, and took up a pen.

      ‘What’s the charge?’

      ‘Administering a narcotic, attempted murder, abduction, profanity, trading under false pretences, wandering at large – great heavens! what isn’t it?’

      ‘Perhaps you’ll say. Name of accused?’

      ‘Cartaphilus.’

      ‘Any other?’

      ‘The Wandering Jew.’

      The Inspector laid down his pen and leaned forward, bridging his finger-tips under his chin.

      ‘If you take my advice,’ he said, ‘you’ll go and have a Turkish bath.’

      The young man grasped and frowned.

      ‘You won’t take my information?’

      ‘Not in that form. Come again by-and-by.’

      Amos walked straight out of the building and retraced his steps to Wardour Street.

      ‘I’ll watch for his coming out,’ he thought, ‘and have him arrested, on one charge only, by the constable on the beat. Where’s the place?’

      Twice he walked the length of the street and back, with dull increasing amazement. The sunlight had edged its way into the fog by this time, and every door and window stood out sleek and self-evident. But amongst them all was none that corresponded to the door or window of his adventure.

      He hung about till day was bright in the air, and until it occurred to him that his woeful and bloodstained appearance was beginning to excite unflattering comment. At that he trudged for the third time the entire length to and fro, and so coming out into Oxford Street stood on the edge of the pavement, as though it were the brink of Cocytus.

      ‘Well, she called me a boy,’ he muttered; ‘what does it matter?’

      He hailed an early hansom and jumped in.

       THE SHADOW-DANCE

      ‘Yes, it was a rum start,’ said the modish young man.

      He was a modern version of the crutch and toothpick genus, a derivative from the ‘Gaiety boy’ of the Nellie Farren epoch, very spotless, very superior, very – fundamentally and combatively – simple. I don’t know how he had found his way into Carleon’s rooms and our company, but Carleon had a liking for odd characters. He was a collector, as it were, of human pottery, and to the collector, as we know, primitive examples are of especial interest.

      The bait in this instance, I think, had been Bridge, which, since some formal ‘Ducdame’ must serve for calling fools into a circle, was our common pretext for assembling for an orgy of talk. We had played, however, for insignificant stakes and, on the whole, irreverently as regarded the sanctity of the game; and the young man was palpably bored. He thought us, without question, outsiders, and not altogether good form; and it was even a relief to him when the desultory play languished, and conversation became general in its place.

      Somebody – I don’t remember on what provocation – had referred to the now historic affair of the Hungarian Ballet, which, the rage in London for a season, had voluntarily closed its own career a week before the date advertised for its termination; and the modish young man, it appeared, was the only one of us all who had happened to be present in the theatre on the occasion of the final performance. He told us so; and added that ‘it was a rum start’.

      ‘The abrupt finish was due, of course,’ said Carleon, bending forward, hectic, bright-eyed, and hugging himself, as was his wont, ‘to Kaunitz’s death. She was the bright particular “draw”. It would have been nothing without her. Besides, there was the tragedy. What was the “rum start”? Tell us.’

      ‘The way it ended that night,’ said the young man. He was a little abashed by the sudden concentration of interest on himself; but carried it off with sang-froid. Only a slight flush of pink on his youthful cheek, as he flicked the ash from his cigarette with the delicate little finger of the hand that held it, confessed to a certain uneasy self-consciousness.

      ‘I have heard something about it,’ said Carleon. ‘Give us your version.’

      ‘I’m no hand at describing things,’ responded the young man, committed and at bay; ‘never wrote a line of description in my life, nor wanted to. It was the Shadow-Dance, you know – the last thing on the programme. I dare say some of you have seen Kaunitz in it.’

      One or two of us had. It was incomparably the most beautiful, the most mystic, idyll achieved by even that superlative dancer; a fantasia of moonlight, supported by an ethereal, only half-revealed, shimmer of attendant sylphids.

      ‘Yes,’ said Carleon eagerly.

      ‘Well,