My back was now to the open door, and I was just lifting the glass to my lips, eagerly enough, I am afraid, when, very softly, something descended upon each of my shoulders.
I had not heard a sound of any sort, save the gurgle of the aerated water in the glass, but now a shriek like that of a frightened woman rang out into the room, and it came from me.
I was gripped horribly by the back of the throat, whirled round with incredible speed and force, and flung heavily against the opposite wall, falling sideways into an armchair, gasping for breath and my eyes staring out of my head.
Then I saw him. Mark Antony Midwinter was standing on the other side of the table, smiling at me. He wore a fashionable morning coat and a silk hat. Under his left arm was a gold-headed walking-cane, and he carried his gloves in his left hand. In the right was the gleaming blue-black of an automatic pistol, pointed at my heart.
At that, I pulled myself together. In an instant I knew that I had failed. The brute must already have been in the house when Sliddim admitted me—he had outwitted all of us!
"Ah!" he said, "Sir Thomas Kirby! You have crossed my path very many times of late, Sir Thomas, and I have long wished to make your acquaintance."
His voice was suave and cultured. The rather full, clean-shaved face had elements of fineness—many women would have called him a handsome man. But in his dull and opaque eyes there was such a glare of cold malignity, such unutterable cruelty and hate, that the whole room grew like an ice-house in a moment; for it is not often that any man sees a veritable fiend of hell looking out of the eyes of another.
"You have come a little earlier than I expected," I managed to say, but my voice rang cracked and thin.
"It is a precaution that I frequently take, Sir Thomas, and one very much justified in the present instance. To tell the truth, I had little or no suspicion that I was walking into a trap—that much to you! But a life of shocks"—here he laughed pleasantly, but the little steel disk pointed at my heart never wavered a hair's breadth—"has taught me always to have something in reserve. I see that I shall not have the pleasure of settling accounts with Mr. Gideon Morse and his daughter to-night. Well, that can wait. Meanwhile, I propose within a few seconds to remove another obstacle from my path—do you think the mandarin, Pu-Yi, will be waiting for you at the golden gates, Sir Thomas Kirby?"
So this was the end! I braced myself to meet it.
"How long?" I said.
"I will count a hundred slowly," he answered.
He began, and I stared dumbly at the pistol. I could not think—I could not commend my soul to my Maker even. The function of thought was entirely arrested.
"Thirty ... thirty-one ... thirty-two!"
And then I suddenly burst out laughing.
My laughter, I know, was perfectly natural, full of genuine merriment. Something had happened which seemed to me irresistibly comic. He stopped and stared at me, his face changing ever so little.
"May I ask," he said, "what tickled your sense of humor?"
What had tickled my sense of humor was this. Stealing round from behind him, right under his very nose, so to speak, but quite unseen, was an arm which with infinite care and slowness was removing the heavy cut-glass decanter from the table. It vanished. It reappeared in the air behind him in a flashing diamond and amber circle.
"Have some whisky, Mr. Midwinter," I said, as it descended with a crash upon the side of his head.
Without a sound he sank into a huddled heap out of my sight, hidden by the table.
"You little devil!" I said, staggering to my feet, for Bill Rolston stood there, white-faced and grinning. "I had to come, Sir Thomas," he said, "it wasn't any use."
"Have you killed him, Bill?"
We bent down and made an examination. Midwinter's face was dark and suffused with blood, but his pulses were all right.
"What a pity!" said Rolston. "Help me to get him on to that chair, Sir Thomas, and we'll tie him up. If I had killed him, it would have been so much simpler!"
We dragged the unconscious man to the very armchair where I had sat under the menace of his pistol, and, tearing the tablecloth into strips, tied him securely.
"Fortunately," said Bill, "I didn't break the decanter. The stopper didn't even come out! You look pretty sick, Sir Thomas"—and indeed a horrible feeling of nausea had come over me, and my hands were shaking—"let's each have a drink and then I'll tell you what I think."
We sat down on each side of the table, and I listened to him as if the whole thing were some curious dream. For the second time I had been snatched from the very brink of death, and though I suppose I ought to have been getting used to it my only sensation was one of limpness and collapse.
"Can you do it?" my little friend said, pointing to the pistol between us.
I took it up, weighed it in my hand, half-pointed it at the stiff, red-faced figure in the chair, and laid it down again.
"No, I'm damned if I can!" I answered. And then—I must have been more than half-dazed—I actually said: "You have a go, Bill."
He looked at me in horror.
"Murder him in cold blood! I should never know a moment's peace, Sir Thomas!"
"Well, you nearly did it in hot, and you've just been tempting me—"
"Let us bring him to, if we can," he said, tactfully changing the conversation and advancing upon our friend with the siphon of soda-water.
There was a grotesque horror about the whole of our adventure that night. I laughed weakly as the soda hissed and the stream of aerated water splashed over Midwinter's face.
Before the final gurgle he awoke. His eyes opened without speculation. Then his jaw dropped. For a moment his face was as vacant as a doll's, and then it flared up into a snarl of realization and hatred, only, in another instant, to settle down into a dead calm.
"My turn now," I said.
He knew the game was up. I will do him the justice to say he did not flinch.
"Very well, count a hundred," was his answer, and his eye fell to the two pistols on the table—his own and mine.
I shook my head. "I can't do it—I wish I could!"
"You'll find it quite easy—I speak from experience," he replied, with a desperate, evil grin.
"No. I have talked the situation over with my friend. You are going to die, that is very certain, but not by my hand now, and not, Mr. Midwinter, by the hand of the English law."
He was very quick. Even then he had an inkling of my meaning, for a perceptible shadow fell over his face and his eyes narrowed to slits.
"You mean?"
"We are going to telephone to the City in the Clouds. People will come from there and take you away—that will be easily managed. You will have some form of trial, and then—execution."
I never saw a change from red to white so sudden. That big face suddenly became a hideous, sickly white, toneless and opaque like the belly of a sole.
"You won't deliver me to the Chinese?" he gasped. "You can't know them as I do. They'd take a week killing me! They have horrible secrets—"
His voice died away in a whimper, and if ever I saw a man in deadly terror, it was that man then.
But I hardened my heart. I remembered how Morse and Juanita had suffered for two years at this man's hands. I remembered four murders, to my own knowledge, and I shrugged my shoulders.
"I can't help that. You have made your bed, and you must lie upon it."
"But such a bed!" he murmured, and his head fell forward on his chest.
His arms were bound at the elbow, but he could move the lower portion, and he now brought his right hand to his face.
"I'll telephone," said Bill, and went to the wall by the door where hung the instrument.
I sat gloomily watching the man in the chair.
What was he doing? His jaw was moving up and down. He seemed biting at his wrist.
Suddenly there was a slight, tearing, ripping noise, followed by a jerk backwards of his head and a deep intake of the breath.
"What is he doing?" Rolston said, turning round with the receiver of the telephone at his ear.
Midwinter held out his arm. I saw that the braid round the cuff of his morning coat was hanging in a little strip.
"I told you I always had something in reserve," he said, showing all his teeth as he grinned at me. "Always something up my sleeve—literally, in this case. I have just swallowed a little capsule of prussic acid which—"
If you want to learn of how a man dies who has swallowed hydrocyanic acid—the correct term, I believe—consult a medical dictionary. It is not a pleasant thing to see in actual operation, but, thank heavens, it is speedy!
The sweat was pouring down my face when it was over, but Bill Rolston had not turned a hair.
"Put something over his face, Sir Thomas," he said, "and I'll get through to Mr. Morse."
I take up my pen this evening, exactly ten years after I wrote the last paragraph of the above narrative, to read of James Antony Midwinter, dead like a poisoned rat in his chair, with a sort of amazement in my mind.
The whole story has been locked in a safe for ten long years, and that blessed and happy time has made the wild adventures, the terrible moments in the City in the Clouds, indeed seem things far off and long ago.
This afternoon I paid what will probably be my last visit to the strange kingdom up there.
I stood with my little son, Viscount Kirby, and my small daughter, Lady Juanita, and my wife, the Countess of Stax, at a very solemn ceremony.
In the presence of a Government official, a representative of His Majesty—Colonel Patrick Moore, of the Irish Guards, A.D.C.—the Cardinal Archbishop, and a few private friends, I watched the elmwood shell, containing Gideon Mendoza Morse, placed in its marble tomb.
It was his wish, to be buried there in his fantastic City, and no one said him nay. Well, the body lies in its place, two hundred weeping Chinamen are returning to the Flowery Land, wealthy beyond their utmost hopes, and in a few months the City in the Clouds will dissolve and disappear.
The rich treasures are coming to Stax, my castle in Norfolk—such as are not bequeathed, by Morse's munificence, to the museums of England and the galleries at Brazil.
Soon the immense plateau will be England's aerial terminus for the mail ships from all parts of the world.
While Gideon Morse lived it was impossible to publish the truth. It is to appear now, at last, and I simply want to tie a few loose ends, and to bring down the curtain, leaving nothing unexplained.
First of all let me say that the general public knew nothing at all of the horrors in which I was so intimately concerned.
Juanita and I were married very quietly in Westminster Cathedral soon after Midwinter went to his account. The enormous fortune that she brought me, supplementing my own very considerable means, operated in the natural way. Other journals were added to theEvening Special, and we started a great campaign for the sweetening of ordinary life, and not unsuccessfully, as every one knows.
They made me a baron, and four years afterwards, Earl of Stax. As for my father-in-law, he refused to budge from the City in the Clouds.
I don't mean that he didn't make appearances in society, but he loved to get back to his fantastic haven, from whence, like a magician, he showered benefits upon London.
Arthur Winstanley, as everybody knows, is Under-Secretary for India and the most rising politician of our day.
It is said that William Rolston, editor of theEvening Special, is our most brilliant journalist, though the older school condemn him for an excess of imagination. I saw the other day, in the old-fashionedThunderer, a slashing attack upon a series of articles which had recently appeared upon China, and which the critic of theThundererconclusively proved to be written from an abysmal depth of ignorance.
I don't often go to the office now, though I am still proprietor of the paper, but when I do, and sit in the editorial room, I miss Julia Dewsbury, best of all private secretaries since the beginning of the world.
Bill, however, assures me that she is all right, entirely taken up with the children, and not in the least inclined to bully him in spite of her eight years advantage in age.
"To that woman," says Bill reverentially, "I owe everything."
Let me wind up properly.
Crouching behind a high wall on Richmond Hill is a modest hostelry still known as the "Golden Swan." It is still my property, and pays me a satisfactory dividend. It is run by a co-partnership, which I should say is unique.
The Honest Fool and my ex-valet, Mr. Preston, perform this feat together, but, now that Morse is dead and the Chinese have all departed, I fear they will lose a good deal of custom. This I gathered from Mr. Mogridge, that pillar of the saloon bar, who happened to meet me by chance in Fleet Street not long ago.
"'Allo! Why, it's Mr. Thomas, late landlord of the 'Golden Swan'!" said Mr. Mogridge. "'Aven't seen you for years. What are you doing now?"
"Oh, I'm doing very well, thank you, Mr. Mogridge. And how is the old 'Swan'?"
"Same as ever and no dropping off in the quality of the drinks. Still, I fear it's going down. I'm afraid it will never be quite the same as it was in the days of Ting-A-ling-A-ling," and here Mr. Mogridge placed his hands upon his hips and roared with laughter at that ancient joke.