Like most writers, Donald Megbie was of a nervous and sensitive temperament. Both mental and physical impressions recorded themselves very rapidly and completely upon his consciousness.
He arrived at the Inner Temple with every nerve in a state of excitement, such as he had hardly ever known before.
He walked down the dim echoing ways towards the river, his chambers being situated in the new buildings upon the embankment.
A full moon hung in the sky, brilliant and honey-coloured, attended by little drifts of amber and sulphur-tinted clouds.
But the journalist saw nothing of the night's splendour. He almost stumbled up the stairs to the first floor.
A lamp was burning over the door of his rooms, and his name was painted in white letters upon the oak. He went in and turned on the electric light. Then, for a moment, he stood still in the hall, a richly-furnished place surrounded on all sides by doors painted white. His feet made no sound upon the thick Persian carpet, and the whole flat was perfectly still.
He felt uneasy, curiously so, as if some calamity was impending. The exhilaration of his stirring talk with Sir William Gouldesbrough—so recent, so profoundly moving—had now quite departed. His whole consciousness was concentrated upon a little box of metal in the pocket of his overcoat. It seemed alive, he was acutely conscious of its presence, though his fingers were not touching it.
"By Jove!" he said to himself aloud, "the thing's like an electric battery. It seems as if actual currents radiated from it." His own voice sounded odd and unnatural in his ears, and as he hung up his coat and went into the study with the cigarette-case in his hand, he found himself wishing that he had not given his man a holiday—he had allowed him to go to Windsor to spend a night at his mother's house.
A bright fire glowed in the grate of red brick. It shone upon the book-lined walls, playing cheerily upon the crimson, green and gold of the bindings, and turned the great silver inkstand upon the writing-table into a thing of flame.
Everything was cheerful and just as usual.
Megbie put the box down on the table and sank into a huge leather arm-chair with a sigh of relief and pleasure.
It was good to be back in his own place again, the curtains drawn, the lamps glowing, the world shut out. He was happier here than anywhere else, after all! It was here in this beautiful room, with its books and pictures, its cultured comfort, that the real events of his life took place, those splendid hours of solitude, when he set down the vivid experiences of his crowded life with all the skill and power God had given him, and he himself had cultivated so manfully and well.
Now for it! Tired as his mind was, there lay a time of deep thinking before it. There was the article for to-morrow to group and arrange. It was probably the most important piece of work he had ever been called upon to do. It would startle the world, and it behoved him to put forth all his energies.
Yet there was something else. He must consider the problem of the cigarette-case first. It was immediate and disturbing.
How had this thing come into Sir William's possession? What communication had Gouldesbrough had with Guy Rathbone? That they were rivals for the hand of Miss Poole Megbie knew quite well. Every one knew it. It was most unlikely that the two men could have been friends or even acquaintances. Indeed Megbie was almost certain that Rathbone did not know Sir William.
Was that little shining toy on the table a message from the past? Or was it rather instinct with a present meaning?
He took it up again and looked at it curiously.
Immediately that he did so, the sense of agitation and unrest returned to him with tremendous force.
Megbie was not a superstitious man. But now-a-days we all know so much more about the non-material things of life that only the most ignorant people call a man with a belief in the supernatural, superstitious.
Like many another highly educated man of our time, Megbie knew that there are strange and little-understood forces all round us. When an ex-Prime Minister is a keen investigator into the psychic, when the principal of Birmingham University, a leading scientist, writes constantly in dispute of the mere material aspect of life—the cultured world follows suit.
Megbie held the cigarette-case in his hand. All the electric lights burned steadily. The door was closed and there was not a sound in the flat.
Then, with absolute suddenness, Megbie saw that a man was standing in front of him, at the other side of the fireplace, not three yards away. He was a tall man, clean-shaven, with light close-cropped hair and a rather large face. The eyes were light blue in colour and surrounded by minute puckers and wrinkles. The nose was aquiline, the mouth clean-cut and rather full. The man was dressed in a dark blue overcoat, and the collar and cuffs of the coat were heavily trimmed with astrachan fur.
The room was absolutely still.
Something like a grey mist or curtain descended over Megbie's eyes. It rolled up, like a curtain, and Megbie saw the man with absolute clearness and certainty. He could almost have put out his hand and touched him.
Measured by the mere material standard of time, these events did not take more than a second, perhaps only a part of a second.
Then the writer became aware that the room was filled with sound—sudden, loud and menacing. It was a sound as of sudden drums at midnight, such a sound as the gay dances in Brussels heard on the eve of Waterloo, when the Assembly sounded in the great square, and the whole city awoke.
In another moment, Megbie knew what the sound in his ears really was. His own heart and pulses were racing and beating like the suddentraillerieof drums.
In a flash he recognized the face and form of his visitor—this outward form and semblance of a man which had sprung up and grown concrete in the night! The phantom—if indeed it was a phantom—wore the dress and aspect of Eustace Charliewood, the well-known man about town who had killed himself at Brighton a few years ago!
Megbie had never spoken to Charliewood—so far as he could remember—but he knew him perfectly well by sight, as every one in the West End of London had known him, and he was a member of one of the clubs to which the dead man had belonged.
The Thing that stood there, the Thing or Person which had sprung out of the air, wore the earthly semblance of Eustace Charliewood.
Megbie shouted out loud. A great cry burst from his lips, a cry of surprise and fear, a challenge of that almost dreadfulcuriositythat men experience now and then when they are in the presence of the inexplicable, the terrible and the unknown.
Then Megbie saw that the face of the Apparition was horribly contorted.
The mouth was opening and shutting rapidly in an agony of appeal. It seemed as though a torrent of words must be pouring from it, though there was not a sound of human speech in the large warm room.
Great tears rolled down the large pale cheeks, the brow was wrinkled with pain. The hands gesticulated and pointed, flickering rapidly hither and thither without sound. And continually, over and over again, the hands pointed to the gleaming silver case for cigarettes which Donald Megbie clasped tightly in his right hand.
The silent agitated Thing, so close—ah, so close! was trying to tell Donald something.
It was trying to say something about the cigarette-case, it was trying to tell Megbie something about Guy Rathbone.
And what? What was this fearful message that the agonized Thing was so eager and so horribly impotent to deliver?
Megbie's voice came to him. It sounded thin and muffled, just like the voice of a mechanical toy.
What is it? What is it? What are you trying to say to me about poor Guy Rathbone?
And then, as if it had seen that Megbie was trying to speak to it, but it could not hear his words, the figure of Eustace Charliewood wrung its hands, with a gesture which was inexpressibly dreadful, unutterably painful to see.
Megbie started up. He stepped forward. "Oh, don't, don't!" he said. As he spoke he dropped the cigarette-case, which, up to the present he had clutched in a hot wet hand. It fell with a clatter against the fender—that at any rate was a real noise!
In a moment the mopping, mourning, weeping phantom was gone.
The room was exactly as it had been before, still, warm, brilliantly-lit. And Donald Megbie stood upon the hearth-rug dazed and motionless, while a huge and icy hand seemed to creep round his heart and clutch it with lean, cold fingers.
Donald Megbie stood perfectly motionless for nearly a minute.
Then he knelt down and prayed fervently for help and guidance. At moments such as this men pray.
Much comforted and refreshed he rose from his knees, and went to one of the windows that looked out over the Thames.
He pulled aside the heavy green curtain, and saw that a clear colourless light immediately began to flow and flood into the room.
It was not yet dawn, but that mysterious hour which immediately presages the dawn had come.
The river was like a livid streak of pewter, the leafless plane-trees of the embankment seemed like delicate tracery of iron in the faint half-light. London was sleeping still.
The writer felt very calm and quiet as he turned away from the window and moved towards his bedroom.
The fire was nearly dead, but he saw the silver cigarette-case upon the rug and picked it up. He went to bed with the case under his pillow, and this is what he dreamed—
He saw Guy Rathbone in a position of extreme peril and danger. The circumstances were not defined, what the actual peril might be was not revealed. But Megbie knew that Rathbone was communicating with his brain while he slept. Rathbone was living somewhere. He was captive in the hands of enemies, he was trying to "get through" to the brain of some one who could help him.
The journalist only slept for a few short hours. He rose refreshed in body and with an unalterable conviction in his mind. The events of the last night were real. No chance or illusion had sent the vision and the dream, and the innocent-looking cigarette-case that lay upon the table, and which had come into his hands so strangely, was the pivot upon which strange events had turned.
The little silver thing was surrounded by as black and impenetrable a mystery as ever a man had trodden into unawares.
And in the broad daylight, when all that was fantastic and unreal was banished from thought, Megbie knew quite well towards whom his thoughts tended, on what remarkable and inscrutable personality his dreadful suspicions had begun to focus themselves.
He sat down and wrote his article till lunch-time. It was the best thing he had ever done, he felt, as he gathered the loose sheets together, and thrust a paper-clip through the corners.
He rose and was about to ring for his man—who had returned at breakfast-time—when the door opened and the man himself came in.
"Miss Marjorie Poole would like to see you, sir, if you are disengaged," he said.
Donald Megbie's face grew quite white with surprise.
Once more he felt the mysterious quickenings of the night before.
"Ask Miss Poole to come in," he said.
The valet showed Marjorie Poole into Donald Megbie's study.
She wore a coat and skirt of dark green Harris Tweed with leather collar and cuffs, and a simple sailor hat.
Megbie, who had never met Miss Poole in the country, but only knew her in London and during the season, had never seen her dressed like this before. He had always admired her beauty, the admirable poise of her manner, the evidences of intellectuality she gave.
At the moment of her entry the journalist thought her more beautiful than ever, dressed as if for covert-side or purple-painted moor. And his quick brain realized in a moment that she was dressed thus in an unconscious attempt to escape observation, to be incognito, as it were.
But why had she come to see him? She was in trouble, her face showed that—it was extraordinary, altogether unprecedented.
Megbie showed nothing of the thoughts which were animating him, either in his face or manner. He shook hands as if he had just met Miss Poole in Bond Street.
"Do sit down," he said, "I think you'll find that chair a comfortable one."
Marjorie sat down. "Of course, Mr. Megbie," she said, "you will think it very strange that I should come here alone; when I tell you why, you will think it stranger still. And I don't want any one to know that I have been here. I shall tell mother, of course, when I get back."
Megbie bowed and said nothing. It was the most tactful thing to do.
"I feel you will not misunderstand my motives," the girl went on, "when I explain myself. In certain cases, and among certain persons, conventions are bourgeois. We don't know each other very well, Mr. Megbie, though we have sometimes had some interesting talks together. But in a sense I know you better than you know me. You see, I have read your books and other writings. In common with the rest of the world I can gather something of your temper of mind, and of your outlook upon life."
Megbie once more inclined his head. He wondered furiously what all this might mean. At the moment he was absolutely in the dark. He stretched out his hand towards a tin of cigarettes that stood on a bracket by the side of the fireplace, and then withdrew it suddenly, remembering who was present.
"Oh, do smoke," she said, instantly interpreting the movement. "Now let me just tell you exactly why I am here, why Ihadto come here. Of all the men I know, you are the most likely to understand. You have made a study of psychical affairs, of what the man in the street calls 'spooks'—you know about dreams."
At that Megbie started forward, every muscle in his body becoming rigid and tense, his hands gripping the knobs of his chair arms.
"Of course!" he said, in a voice that rippled with excitement. "Go on, please. I might have known your coming here this morning is all part of the wonderful and uncanny experiences I had last night. You've come about Guy Rathbone!"
It was the girl's turn to start. Fear came creeping into eyes which were not wont to show fear, the proud mouth grew tremulous.
Marjorie stretched out her hands—little hands in tan-coloured gloves. "Ah!" she cried, in a voice that had become shrill and full of pain, "then it is true! Things have happened to you too! Mr. Megbie, you and I have become entangled in some dark and dreadful thing. I dare not think what it may be.But Guy is not dead."
Megbie answered her in the same words.
"No," he said, "Guy Rathbone is not dead." His voice had sunk several tones. It tolled like a bell.
"Miss Poole," he went on, "tell me, tell me at once what happened to you last night."
With a great effort of control, Marjorie began her story.
"It was very late when we got home last night after the party," she said. "I was in a curious state of nerves and excitement. I must touch upon a personal matter—this is no time for reticence or false shame. I had been with William Gouldesbrough. You know that we were at one time engaged—oh, this is horribly difficult for me to say, Mr. Megbie."
"Go on, Miss Poole. I know, I know. But what does it matter in such a time as this?"
"Nothing at all," she answered in a resolute voice. "I was engaged to Sir William when I found out that my affection was going elsewhere—Guy, Mr. Rathbone——"
"You needn't go into the past, Miss Poole," Donald broke in, "tell me about last night."
"I was with Sir William at supper-time. There was a remarkable scene. It was a sort of triumph for him, and I was with him, every one included me in it. It was, obviously, generally assumed that we had become engaged once more. On the way home, Sir William again asked me to be his wife. I told him that I could not give him an answer then. I said that I would tell him to-night. He is coming to Curzon Street to-night."
"I beg you, I implore you to wait."
Megbie's words were so grave, he seemed so terribly in earnest, that the girl shrank from them, as one would shrink from blows.
The same thought began to lurk in the eyes of the woman and the man, the same incredible and yet frightful thought.
Marjorie's cheeks were almost grey in colour. To Megbie, as he watched her, she seemed to have grown older suddenly. The lustre seemed to him to have gone out of her hair.
"I reached home," she said. "Mother made me take a cup of beef-tea, and I went to my room. I was preparing for bed, indeed I was brushing my hair before the mirror, when a curious sense of disturbance and almost of fear came over me. I felt as if there was another presence in the room. Now my looking-glass is a very large one indeed. It commands the whole of the room. The whole of the room is reflected in it without any part left out, except of course which I could see where I sat. When this strange feeling of another presence came over me, I thought it was merely reaction after a terribly exciting night. I looked into the glass and saw that the room was absolutely empty. Still the sensation grew. It became so strong at last that I turned round. And there, Mr. Megbie, I tell you in the utmost bewilderment, but with extreme certainty, there, though the mirror showed nothing at all, a figure was standing, the figure of a man. It was not three feet away."
Megbie broke in upon her narrative.
"The figure," he said in a hushed voice, "was the figure of Mr. Eustace Charliewood, who shot himself at Brighton some little time ago."
She cried out aloud, "Yes! But how did you know?"
"He came to me also, last night. He came to me out of the other world, which is all round us, but which we cannot see. He was trying to tell me something about Guy Rathbone."
Marjorie Poole began to sob quietly.
"I knew it," she answered. "Mr. Charliewood in another state sees more than we see, he knows where Guy is. Oh, my love, my love!"
Megbie went up to her. He had some sal-volatile in his dressing-case, and he made her take it.
"Be brave," he said; "you have more to tell me yet, as I have more to tell you. Guy is alive, we are certain of that. But he is in some one's power. The spirit of this man, Eustace Charliewood, knows where he is. He is trying to tell us. He is trying to make amends for something. He must have had something to do with Guy's disappearance."
"Mr. Charliewood," Marjorie said in a whisper, "was William Gouldesbrough's intimate friend. He was always about the house. When Guy Rathbone disappeared, Eustace Charliewood killed himself. William was at Brighton at the time. He was trying to help me and my mother to find Guy."
"Go on with your story, if you can," Megbie said. "One more effort!"
"I knew that the figure was trying to tell me about Guy. Something told me that with absolute certainty. But it couldn't tell me. It began to weep and wring its hands. Oh, it was pitiful! Then suddenly, it seemed to realize that it was no use. It stood upright and rigid, and fixed its eyes upon me. Mr. Megbie, such mournful eyes, eyes so full of sorrow and terrible remorse, were never in a human face. As those eyes stared down at me, a deep drowsiness began to creep over me. Sleep came flooding over me with a force and power such as I had never known before. It was impossible to withstand it. People who have taken some drug must feel like that. Just as I was, in the chair in front of the dressing-table, I sank into sleep."
"And your dream?" Megbie said quietly.
She started. "Ah, you know," she said. "The spirit of Eustace Charliewood could not tell me while I was conscious. But in sleep he could influence my brain in some other mysterious way. I dreamed that Guy was in a sort of cell. By some means or other I knew that it was underground. A man was there, a man whom I have met, a man—a horrible creature—who is a fellow-worker of Sir William Gouldesbrough. The man was doing something to Guy. I couldn't see what it was. Then the picture faded away. I seemed to be moving rapidly in a cold empty place where there was no wind or air, sound, or, or—I can't describe it. It was a sort of 'between place.'"
"And then?"
"Then I saw you standing by the side of William Gouldesbrough. It was at the party—Lord Malvin's party, which we had just left. I saw this as if from a vast distance. It was a tiny, tiny picture, just as one could see something going on under a microscope. William was talking to some one whom I couldn't see. But I knew it was myself, that I was looking at the exact scene which had happened at the party, when you were going away with William, and he had stopped on the way to ask me to go into supper with him. And, strangely enough, in another part of my mind, the sub-conscious part I suppose, I knew that I was looking at an event of the past, and that this was the reason why it seemed so tiny and far-off. The picture went away in a flash—just like an eye winking. You've been to one of those biograph shows and seen how suddenly the picture upon the screen goes?—well, it was just like that. Then a voice was speaking—a very thin and very distant voice. If one could telephone to the moon, one would hear the voice at the other end just like that, I should think. And though the voice was so tiny, it was quite distinct, and it had a note of terrible entreaty. 'Go to Donald Megbie,' it said. 'Go at once to Donald Megbie, the writer. He will help. There is still time. Go to Donald Megbie. I have been able to communicate with him. He has the silver—Guy——' And then, Mr. Megbie, the voice stopped suddenly. Those were the exact words. What they meant, I did not know. But when I awoke they remained ringing in my ears like the echo of a bell heard over a wide expanse of country. In the morning I resolved to come to you. I didn't know where you lived, but I looked you up in 'Who's Who.' And as soon as I could get away without any one knowing, I came here."
Donald Megbie rose from his chair. He realized at once that it was necessary to keep the same high tension of this interview. If that were lost everything would go.
"I know what the poor troubled spirit—if it is a spirit—of the man, Charliewood, meant by his last words. There is a thing called psychometry, Miss Poole. In brief, it means that any article which belongs, or has belonged, to any one, somehow retains a part of their personality. It may well be that the mysterious thought-vibrations which Sir William Gouldesbrough has discovered can linger about an actual and material object. Last night, when Sir William left me to take you in to supper at Lord Malvin's, he left his cigarette-case behind him in the conservatory where we had been sitting. I didn't want to bother him then, so I put it in my pocket, intending to send it to him to-day; here it is. It belonged to Guy Rathbone. I found it in Sir William's possession, and I believe that it has been the means—owing, to some law or force which we do not yet understand—of bringing us together this morning." He handed her the cigarette-case.
Neither of them could know that this was the case which Eustace Charliewood had found in the pocket of Rathbone's fur coat, when he had taken it from the Bond Street coiffeur in mistake.
Neither of them could see how it had been restored by Charliewood to Rathbone, and had been appropriated by Mr. Guest, when the captive had been taken to his silent place below the old house in Regent's Park.
And even Sir William Gouldesbrough did not know that he had seen the thing in his study, just as he was starting for Lord Malvin's house, and had absently slipped it into his pocket, thinking it was his own.
Sir William Gouldesbrough stood in the large laboratory. The great room was perfectly dark, save only for a huge circle of bright light upon one of the walls, like the circle thrown upon a screen by a magic-lantern.
A succession of dim and formless figures moved and slid over the illuminated space in fantastic silence. Now and then the face of part of the dress of one of the figures would suddenly glow out into colour and absolute distinctness. Then it would fade away into mist.
There was a "click," and the circle of light vanished, another, and the vast laboratory glowed out into being as Sir William turned on a hundred electric bulbs.
Mr. Guest was sitting upon a long, low table swinging his legs. His great pink face was blotched and stained by excess, and his hand shook like an aspen leaf.
He jerked his head towards the opposite wall upon which the huge screen was stretched—an enormous expanse of white material stretched upon rollers of hollow steel.
"Rathbone's getting about done," he said. "I give him another month before his brain goes or he pegs out altogether. Look at those results just now! All foggy and uncertain. He's losing the power of concentrating his thoughts. Continuous thinking is getting beyond him."
Sir William was sitting in an arm-chair. By the side of it was a circular table with a vulcanite top, covered with switch-handles and controlling mechanism. His long thin finger played with a little brass button, and his face was set in lines of deep and gloomy thought. His eyes were fixed and brooding, and sombreness seemed to surround him like an atmosphere. He showed no signs of having heard his assistant for a moment or two. Then he turned his face suddenly towards him.
"My friend," he said, "you yourself will not last another month if you go on as you are going. That is quite certain. You ought to know it as well as I do. Another attack of delirium and nothing can save you."
Mr. Guest smiled horribly. "Very possibly, William," he said, "I have thought that it may be so myself. But why should I care? I'm not like you. I have no human interests. Nothing matters to me except my work."
"And if you die in delirium tremens you won't be able to go on with your work."
"My dear William, there is nothing left for me to do. In this new discovery of ours, yours has been the master-mind. I quite admit that. But you could not have done without me. I know, as you know, that there is no one else in Europe except myself who could have helped you to bring the toil of years to such a glorious conclusion. Well, there is the end of it. I am nearly fifty years old. There is no time to start again, to begin on something new. Life will not be long enough. I have used up all my powers in the long-continued thought-spectrum experiments. I have no more energy for new things. I rest upon my laurels, content that I have done what I have, and content from the purely scientific point of view. I've fulfilled my destiny. My mind is not like the minds of other men I meet. It is not quite human. It's a purely scientific mind, a piece of experimental apparatus which has now done its work."
He laughed, a laugh which was so mirthless and cold that even Gouldesbrough shuddered at the soulless, melancholy sound. Then he got down from the table and shambled over the floor of the laboratory towards a cupboard. He took a bottle of whisky from a shelf, half filled a tumbler with the spirit, and lifted it towards his chief in bitter mockery.
"Here's luck, William," he said, "luck to the great man, the pet of Europe, the saviour of the race! You see I have been reading Mr. Donald Megbie's articles in the papers." He drank the whisky and poured some more into the glass. "Yet, William, most fortunate of living men! you seem unhappy. 'The Tetrarch has a sombre air,' as the play says. What a pity it is that you are not like me, without any human affections to trouble me! I don't want to pry into your private affairs—I never did, did I?—but I presume something has gone wrong with your matrimonial affairs again? I'm right, am I not? Can't Miss Marjorie make up her mind? Tell me if you like. I can't give you any sympathy, but I can give you advice."
Gouldesbrough flushed and moved impatiently in his chair. Then he began to speak.
"If what you say is true, Guest, then you must be a happy man. Your life is complete, you have got what you wanted, you have done what you wanted to do. And if you choose to kill yourself with amyl alcohol, I suppose that's your affair. What you say is quite right. I am terribly worried and alarmed about the success ofmygreat desire, the one wish remaining to me. I don't expect or want sympathy from you, but your advice is worth having, and you shall give it to me if you will."
Wilson Guest nodded. "Tell me what is worrying you," he said.
"You know that I have had great hopes of obtaining Miss Poole's consent to our re-engagement. Everything has been going on well. Miss Poole believes—or did believe—that the man Rathbone is dead. I used your suggestion and hinted at a vulgar intrigue. At Brighton, when Charliewood shot himself, I was constantly with Miss Poole and her mother. My pretended efforts to solve the mystery of Rathbone's disappearance told. I saw that I was winning back all the ground I had lost. I had great hopes. These seemed to culminate the other night at Lord Malvin's reception. Miss Poole promised to receive me the next day and give me a definite answer. I knew what that meant; it meant yes. I was prepared to stake everything upon it. When I called at Curzon Street in the evening I was told that she was unwell, and could not see me. The next day I succeeded in seeing her. I was taken aback. There was a distinct change in her manner. The old intimacy and freedom which I had been able to re-establish had gone. There was almost a shrinking in her attitude—she seemed afraid of me."
"Well, that is easily accounted for. You have done something hitherto beyond human power. Naturally she regards you as a person apart—some one who can work miracles. But what did she say?"
"It wasn't that sort of shrinking, Guest. I know Miss Poole well. I understand the real strength and brilliancy of her mind. She is not a foolish, ordinary girl to be frightened as you suggest. I told her that I had come for my answer. I think I spoke well. My heart was in what I said, and I urged my cause as powerfully as I could. Miss Poole absolutely refused to give me any answer at all."
"Well, that is no very terrible thing, William. I know little of women, but one is told that is their way. She will not yield at once, that is all."
"I wish I could think so, Guest. It did not strike me in that way at all. And she said a curious thing also. She said that I might re-open the question after the public demonstration. She wouldn't pledge herself to give an answer even then. But she said that I must say nothing more to her on the subject until after the demonstration."
Wilson Guest laughed.
"What a powerful drug this love is!" he said. "It's as unexpected in its action as ether! My dear William, you are worrying yourself about nothing. I'm sure of it. Remember that you can't look at the thing with an unprejudiced eye. It's all quite clear to me. Miss Poole simply wants to wait until she has seen your triumph with her own eyes. That is all, believe me. You are in too much of a hurry. How curious that is! It is the strangest thing in the world to findyou—you of all men—in a hurry. It is only by monumental and marvellous patience that you have succeeded in discovering a law, and applying that law with my help, which makes you the greatest man of science the world has ever known. And yet you leap at the fence of a girl's hesitation and reserve as if everything depended on breaking a record for the jump!"
Gouldesbrough smiled faintly and shook his head. He was not convinced, but it was plain that he was comforted by what Guest had said.
His smile was melancholy and gently sad; and in the electric radiance of the huge mysterious room he seemed like some eager and kindly priest or minister who bewailed the sins of his flock, but with a humorous and human understanding of mortal frailty.
And there he stood, the greatest genius of modern times, and also one of the most cruel and criminal of living men. Yet so strange and tortuous is the human soul, so enslaved can conscience be by the abnormal mind, that he thought of himself as nothing but a devoted lover.
His passion and desire for this girl were horrible in their egotism and their intensity alike. But the man with the marvellous brain thought that the one thing which set him apart from the herd and redeemed him for his crime was his love for Marjorie Poole. He really, honestly and truly, believed that!
It was not without reason that Donald Megbie had seen the blaze of insanity in Sir William's eyes. A supreme genius is very seldom sane. Professor Lombroso has said so, Max Nordau agitated scientific Europe by saying it a few years ago.
Yet some one more important said it many years before—
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,And thin partitions do their bounds divide."
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,And thin partitions do their bounds divide."
"So the matter rests there?" Guest asked.
"Yes," Sir William answered; "but I have altered the day of the demonstration. There is no need to wait after all! Everything is prepared. I have sent out cards for Friday next, three days from now."
Guest poured out some more of the spirit. He laughed rather contemptuously.
"Can't wait, then!" he said. "I'm glad I'm free from these entanglements, William. Of course it doesn't matter when the people come to see the thing at work. As you say, everything is quite ready. But there is another thing to be considered. What about Rathbone? He's no more use to us now, and he must be got rid of. Shall I go down-stairs and kill him?"
He said it with the indifference with which he might have proposed to wash his hands.
When Wilson Guest spoke of the final extinction of the wretched subject of their experiments, Sir William Gouldesbrough did not answer. He began to pace the long room, his head was sunk upon his breast, and his face was like the face of Minos, inscrutable and deadly calm.
Suddenly the whistle of a speaking tube sounded in the wall. All the laboratories and experimental rooms were thus connected with the house proper. None of the servants were allowed to pass the connecting door, unless by special leave.
Guest went to the speaking-tube and placed it against his ear—an ear that was pointed like a goat's ear.
Then he looked at the tall figure which was pacing the laboratory. "William," he called out with an impish giggle, "a lady has called to see you. A lady from Curzon Street!"
Gouldesbrough stopped short in his walk and raised his head. His face suddenly became a mask of eager attention and alertness.
Guest tittered with amusement at the effect which his words had produced. "Don't be agitated," he said, "and don't look like Henry Irving when he played Romeo. It isn't the young lady. It's the old one. It's Lady Poole. The butler has shown her into the study, and she's waiting to know if you can see her."
Gouldesbrough did not reply, but left the laboratory at once. Guest could hear his hurried footsteps echoing along the corridor. Then the pink-faced man turned to the whisky bottle again. He poured out a four-finger peg and sat down in the arm-chair which stood by the vulcanite table which controlled the vast and complicated apparatus of the thought spectrum. He sipped the whisky and looked at his watch. "Rathbone's had the cap on for an hour," he said. "Well, he can go on wearing it for a bit. If William agrees when he comes back it will be the last time Rathbone will have the pleasure of helping in our experiments. I may as well take a peep at his thoughts now. Lord! what a fascinating game it is!" He turned a switch, and all the lights in the place went out suddenly. Then his fingers found the starting lever of the machines.
He moved it, and immediately a low humming sound, as of a drum or fan revolving at immense speed was heard, far away at the other end of the laboratory. Then, immediately in front of where the scientist sat, the great white disc of light, full twelve feet in diameter, suddenly flashed into view.
Images and pictures began to form themselves upon the screen.
Sir William found old Lady Poole in his study, not sitting placidly in the most comfortable chair she could find, her usual plan wherever she might be, but standing upon the hearth-rug and nervously swinging a thin umbrella, the jewelled handle of which sparkled in the firelight.
"Ah, William," she said at once in an agitated voice, letting him lead her to a chair while she was speaking. "Ah, William, I am upset about Marjorie. I am very upset about the girl. I thought over what was best to be done, and I determined that I would take the bull by the horns and come and talk things over with you. That is right, isn't it?"
There was a little anxiety in the good lady's voice, for, however much she desired Sir William for a son-in-law and liked him personally, she was considerably afraid of him in certain of his moods.
"My dear Lady Poole," he replied with one of his rare and charming smiles, "there is no one whom I would rather see than you. And I'm sure that you know that. Tell me all about it."
His tone was gentle and confidential, and Lady Poole's face brightened at once.
"Dear William!" she said. "Well, I've come to you to talk about Marjorie. Our interests are absolutely identical in regard to her. You can't want to marry my daughter more than I want to see my daughter married to you. Lately things have been going well between you both. I saw that at once; nothing escapes me where Marjorie is concerned. She was quite forgetting her foolish fancy for that wretched young Rathbone, owing to his perfectly providential disappearance or death or whatever it was. Then I made sure that everything had come right at Lord Malvin's party, and especially when I heard that you were going to call next day. I went out. I thought it better. And when I came home my maid told me that Marjorie had not seen you after all. And since then I've kept an eye on all that was going on, and I'm very seriously disturbed. Anything I say seems to have no effect. Marjorie will hardly let me mention your name to her; I cannot understand it at all. Her manner is changed too. She seems expecting something or some one. My firm conviction is that she has another fit of pining for young Rathbone. I told her as much one evening. In fact, I'm afraid I rather lost my temper. 'Guy Rathbone is most certainly dead,' I told her. 'I was as kind and sympathetic as I could be,' I said, 'when Mr. Rathbone first disappeared. I very much disapproved of him, but I recognized you had a certain right to choose your own future companion, within limits. But now you're simply making yourself and me miserable and ridiculous, and you're treating one of the best-hearted and distinguished men in England in a way which is simply abominable. It's heartless, it's cruel, and you will end by disgusting society altogether, and we shall have to go and live among the retired officers at Bruges or some place like that.'"
Lady Poole paused for breath. She had spoken with extreme volubility and earnestness, and there were tears in her voice.
It is a mistake to assume that because people are worldly they are necessarily heartless too. Lady Poole really loved her daughter, but she did earnestly desire to see her married to this wealthy and famous man who seemed to have no other desire.
Sir William broke in upon the pause. "All you tell me, dear Lady Poole," he said, "is very chilling and depressing to my dearest hope. But difficulties were made to be overcome, weren't they? and to the strong man there are no fears—only shadows. But what answer did Marjorie make when you said all this to her?"
"A very strange one, William. She said, 'Guy is not dead, mother. I know it. I feel it. I feel certain of it. And when I feel this how can I say anything to Sir William!' Then I asked her if she proposed to keep you waiting for the rest of both your lives before she said anything definite. She burst into tears and said that she was very miserable, but that she intended to say something definite to you after the coming reception here when you are going to show every one your new invention."
"Yes," Sir William answered. "She has promised that, but I fear what her answer will be. Well, we must hope for the best, Lady Poole. If I were you I shouldn't worry. Leave everything to me. I have everything at stake."
"Well, I felt I must come and tell you, William," Lady Poole said. "I felt that it would help you to know exactly how things stand. Perhaps all will come well. Girls are very difficult to manage. I wanted Marjorie to go out a great deal in order to occupy her mind and to keep her from brooding over this absurd fancy that Guy Rathbone is alive. But she seems to shun all engagements. However, she's fortunately thought that she would like to try her hand at writing something, she was always interested in books, you know. So she's spending a good deal of time over it—a story I think—and Mr. Donald Megbie is helping her. He calls now and then and makes suggestions on what she has done. A nice, quiet little man he seems, and a fervent admirer of yours. I sounded him on that point the other day. So even this little fancy of Marjorie's for writing may turn out to be a help. Mr. Megbie is sure to become enthusiastic if your name is mentioned in any way, and it will keep the fact of how the world regards you well before Marjorie. Now, good-bye. It's a relief to have come and told you everything. I must fly, and I know you will want to get back to your electricity and things."
Sir William went with her to the garden-gate in the wall, where her carriage was waiting. Then he went back to the study and took down the speaking-tube that communicated with the large laboratory. He asked Wilson Guest to come to him at once.
In a few minutes the assistant shambled in. His eyes were bright with the liquid brightness of alcoholic poisoning; his speech was much clearer and more decided than it had been earlier in the day. It had tone andtimbre. The crimson blotches on the face were less in evidence. Guest had drunk a bottle of whisky since breakfast-time, a quantity which would hopelessly intoxicate three ordinary men and probably kill one. But this enormous quantity of spirit was just sufficient, in the case of this man, to make him as near the normal as he could ever get. A bottle of whisky in the morning acted upon the drink-sodden tissues as a single peg might act upon an ordinary person who was jaded and faint.
Gouldesbrough knew all the symptoms of his assistant's disease very well. He recognized that the moment in the day when Guest was most himself and was most useful had now arrived. The effects of yesterday's drinking were now temporarily destroyed.
"I want your help, Wilson," he said, with a strange look in his eyes. "I want to resume the discussion we were beginning when Lady Poole called. You are all right now?"
"Oh yes, William," the man answered without a trace of his usual giggle, with the former sly malice of his manner quite obliterated. "This is my good hour. I feel quite fit—for me—and I'm ready. About Rathbone you mean?"
"Exactly. Lady Poole has given me to understand that her daughter is still pining after this person."
"Call him athing, William. He isn't a person any more. He is just a part of our machinery, nothing more. And moreover a part of our machinery that is getting worn out, that we don't want any more, and that we ought to get rid of."
"You think so?"
"I'm certain of it. We must not lose sight of the fact that while there is life in that body there is always danger for us. Not much danger, I admit—everything was managed too well in the first instance. But still there is danger, and a danger that grows."
"How grows?"
"Because at the present moment the newspapers of the civilized world are full of your name. Because the eyes of the whole world are directed towards this house in Regent's Park."
"There is something in that, Wilson. Now my thought is that if the body could actually be found, then Miss Poole would know, with the rest of the world, that the fellow was actually dead. Could that be managed?"
Guest lit a cigarette. "I suppose so," he said, thoughtfully. "But that would be giving up an experiment I had hoped to have had the opportunity of performing. Human vivisection would give us such an enormous increase of scientific knowledge. It is only silly sentiment that does not give the criminal to the surgeon. But have it your own way, William. I will forego the experiment. It is obvious that if the body is to be found, there must be no traces of anything of that sort. There would be a post-mortem of course."
"Then what do you propose, Guest?"
"Let me smoke for a moment and think."
He sat silent for two or three minutes with the heavy eyelids almost veiling the large bistre-coloured eyes.
Then he looked up. His smile was so horrible in its cunning that Gouldesbrough made an involuntary shrinking movement. But it was a movement dictated by the nerves and not by the conscious brain, for, dreadful as was the thing Guest was about to say, there was something in Sir William Gouldesbrough's mind which was more dreadful still.
"The body shall be found," Guest said, "in the river, somewhere down Wapping way, anywhere in the densely-populated districts of the Docks. It shall be dressed in common clothes. When it is discovered and identified—I know how to arrange a certain identification—it will be assumed that Rathbone simply went down to the slums and lost himself. There have been cases known where reputable citizens have suddenly disappeared from their surroundings of their own free will and dropped into the lowest kind of life for no explainable reason. De Quincey mentions such a case in one of his essays."
"Good. But how can it be done? We can't carry a body to Wapping in a brown paper parcel."
"Of course not. But has it not occurred to you that we are close to the Regent's Canal? I haven't worked out details. They will shape themselves later on. But there are plenty of barges always going up and down the canal. Certainly we can do the thing. It is only a question of money. We have an unlimited command of money. But, listen. Our body is alive still. It will be quite easy for us—with our knowledge—to treat this living body with certain preparations, and in such a way that when it is dead it will present all the appearance of having been killed by excess in some drug. The post-mortem will disclose it. If we keep it alive during a month from now, we can make it a morphia maniac to all appearance. We can inject anything we like into this Rathbone and make him a slave to some drug, whether he likes it or not!"
"No, Guest. The really expert pathologist would discover it. It couldn't be done in a month. It might in six."
"The really expert pathologist won't perform the post-mortem, William. There are only ten in London! Some local doctor of the police will apply the usual tests and discover exactly what we wish him to discover. He will analyze a corpse. He won't synthesize a history of the corpse. Only ten men in England could do that with certainty, and you and I are two of those ten, though it is many years ago since we gave up that sort of work for physics. So you see your object will be doubly served. The actual death will be proved, and the fellow's life be discredited while the apparently true reason of his disappearance will be revealed."
Sir William looked steadily at his assistant. "Your brain is wonderfully sufficient," he said. "It is extraordinary how it withstands the ravages of alcohol. Really, my dear Wilson, you are a remarkable man. All you say is quite excellent. And, meanwhile, I have a proposal to make."
He suddenly rose from his chair, and his eyes began to blaze with insane passion. He shook with it, his whole face was transformed. In his turn he became abnormal.
And just as the famous man had thought of the lesser, a moment or two ago—had regarded him coldly and spoken of him, to him, as a mind diseased—so now the lesser, stimulated to spurious sanity for the moment, saw the light of mania in his chief's eyes.
Two great forces, two great criminals, two horrid egotists, and both lost men! Lost far more certainly and irrevocably than the prisoned and dying gentleman far below in the strong room, where the electric fans whispered all day and night, where the fetters jingled and the heart was turning to salt stone!
The man was changed utterly. The grave courtly ascetic vanished as a breath on glass vanishes. And in his stead stood a creature racked with evil jealousy and malice, a gaunt inhuman figure in whose eyes was the glitter of a bird of prey.
Guest saw the swift and terrible drop into the horrible and the grotesque. He realized that for a brief moment he was master of the situation.
"Tell me, William," he said. "And what is your idea?"
Gouldesbrough stopped. He turned towards his questioner and shook a long, threatening arm at him.
"Why," he said, "all this time the man Rathbone has never known why we are keeping him in prison. He has never seen me, but day by day you have descended to his cell, caught him up in the toils of the chains which he wears, and hoisted him on to the couch. And all this time, when you have fitted the cap upon his head, the man has known nothing of the reasons. He is in the dark, mentally, as he is so often in the dark from a physical point of view, when you, his jailer, see fit to turn off the light. But now he shall know what we are doing with him. I am going down to tell him that every thought which has been born in his brain has been noted and recorded by you and by me. I am going to tell him what we are going to do with his wretched body. He shall know of your proposals, how that we, his lords and masters, will simulate in his tissues the physical appearances of protracted vice. He shall know to-day how his body will be discovered, and how his memory will be for ever discredited in the eyes of the world. And I shall tell him to-day, that as he lies bound and in my power, wearing the helmet of brass which robs him of his own power of secret thought, that I am going up-stairs to watch his agony in pictures, and that Marjorie will be with me—that she is utterly under my influence—and that we shall laugh together as we see each thought, each agony, chasing one another over the screen. We shall be together, I shall tell him, my arms will be round her, her lips will seek mine, and for the first time in the history of the world...."
He stopped for a moment. His hand went up to his throat as if the torrent of words were choking him. Then Guest cut in to his insane ecstasy.
"You are a fool, William," came from the pink-faced man, in an icy titter. "Of course when you tell him why and how we have used him, he will believe it. But I don't think that he will believe in your pleasant fiction of you and the girl as a sort of latter-day Lacoön in one arm-chair, laughing together as you take your supreme revenge."
Gouldesbrough strode up to Guest. He clutched him by the shoulder. "Give me the keys," he said, "the keys, the keys."
Guest was not at all dismayed. Laughing still, he put his hand into his pocket and took out the pass-key of the strong-room.
"There you are, William," he said; "now go down and enjoy yourself. Our friend is still tied down on the couch—he's been like that for several hours, because I've forgotten to go and loose him. I'm going to have some more whisky, and then I shall go to the big laboratory and switch on the current. If I'm not very much mistaken, our friend's brain will provide a series of pictures more intense and vivid, more sharply defined in both outline and colour, than I have ever seen before, during the whole course of our experiments."
Gouldesbrough took the key and was out of the room in a flash. Guest groped for the decanter.
His hair was quite grey now. All the gold had gone from it, just as the youth had passed from his face—his face which was now the colour of ashes, and gashed with agony.
And he lay there, trussed and tied in his material fetters of india-rubber and aluminium. On his head the gleaming metal cap was clamped. He was supine and an old man. All the sap had gone from the fine athlete of a few weeks ago, and the splendid body that had been, was just a shell, a husk.
But the soul looked through the eyes still, tortured but undaunted, in agony but not afraid.
In the lower silence of that deep cellar where Guy suffered there were but two sounds. One was the insistent whisper of the electric fan, the other was the voice which came from Sir William Gouldesbrough as he bent over the recumbent figure—the broken, motionless figure in which, still, brave eyes were set like jewels.
"So now you know! You know it all, you realize, dead man, all that I have done to you, and all that I am going to do. Down here, in this little room, you have thought that you were alone. You have imagined that whatever had happened to you, you were yet alone with the agony of your thoughts, and with God! But you were not! Though you never knew it until now, you never were! Each prayer that you thought you were sending up to the unknown force that rules the world, was caught by me. For weeks I have daily seen into your soul, and laughed at its irremediable pain. I have got your body, and for the first time in the history of the world, your mind, your soul, are mine also."
The voice stopped for a moment. It had become very harsh and dry. It clicked and rang with a metallic sound in this torture-chamber far underground.
And still the bright eyes watched the body of the man who was possessed, very calmly, very bravely.
The horrid voice rose into an insane shriek.
"She is up-stairs now, the girl you presumed to love, the rose of all the roses that you dared to come near, is sitting, laughing as she sees all that you are thinking now, vividly before her in pictures and in words. In a moment I shall be with her, and together we shall mock your agonies, twined in each other's arms."
Perhaps a vault in the dungeons of the Inquisition or in some other place of horror where merciless men have watched the agonies of their brethren, has echoed with pure merriment. Who can say, who can tell?
Such a thing may have happened, but we do not know. But to-night, at this very moment, from the prone figure stretched on its bed of pain, from the heart of a man who had just heard that he was doomed to a cruel death, and robbed of his very individuality, there came a bright and merry laugh which rang out in that awful place as the Angelus rings over the evening fields of France, and all the peasants bow in homage to their Maker.
And then the voice. "I know now why I am here, and what has been done to me during these long, leaden hours. I am now at the point of death. But, with all your devilish cleverness, with all your brilliancy, you are but as a child. I suppose I shall not see you again, but I forgive you, Gouldesbrough, forgive you utterly. And it is easier for me to do this, because I know that you are lying. In this world she still loves me, in the next she is mine, as I am hers. And it is because you know this that you come and rant and laugh, and show yourself as the fearful madman that you are. Good-bye, good-night; I am happier than you as I lie here, because I know that, for ever and a day, Marjorie loves me and I love Marjorie. And it won't be any time at all before we meet."
And once again the laugh that echoed from stone wall to ceiling of stone, was blithe and confident.
Once more the cell was only tenanted by the victim. Sir William had gone, the great door had clanked and clicked, and Guy Rathbone still lay upon his couch of torture.
The electric light still shone, as Gouldesbrough had forgotten to turn it off, or perhaps did not know that this was the invariable custom of his assistant when Rathbone was clanked and bolted down to his bed of vulcanite. It was the first visit that Sir William had paid to the living tomb to which he had consigned his rival.
Rathbone had laughed indeed, and his laugh was still echoing in the frenzied brain of the scientist as he mounted upwards to the light of day. But the laugh, though it had indeed been blithe and confident, had been a supreme effort of will, of faith and trust, was merely the echo and symbol of a momentary state which the tortured body and despairing mind could not sustain.
Rathbone could not move his head, fixed tight as it was in its collar. But two great tears rolled from the weakened and trembling eyelids down the gaunt, grey cheeks. The supreme ecstasy of belief and trust in the girl he loved, the hope of meeting her again in another world where time was not and where the period of waiting would be unfelt, passed away like a thing that falls through water. Once more a frightful emptiness and fear came down over him like a cloud falls.
From where his couch was placed, though he could not turn his head, he could see nearly the whole interior of his cell. There were the concrete walls, each cranny and depression of which he knew so well. There was the other, and scarcely less painful, bed upon which he slept, or tried to sleep at such times when exhausted nature mercifully banished the pain of his soul. It was not day when he slept, it was not night, for day and night are things of the world, the world with which he was never to have any more to do, and which he should never see again with material eyes.
There was the little table upon which was the last book they had let him have, a book brought to him in bitter mockery by Wilson Guest a child's picture book called "Reading without Tears." And he could see the network of ropes and india-rubber attachments which went up to the pulley in the roof, and which rendered him absolutely helpless by means of the mechanism outside the cell which was set in motion before his jailor entered.
There was hardly any need for these ingenious instruments any longer. The athlete was gaunt and wasted, his skin hung upon him in grey folds. The gold had faded out of his hair and it was nearly white. The firm and manly curve of the lips was broken and twisted. The whole mouth was puckered with pain and torture. It was almost a senile mouth now. Very little physical strength remained in the body—no, there was hardly any need for the pulley and ropes now, and soon there would be no need for them at all, until, perhaps, some other unhappy captive languished in the grip of these monsters.
His tired eyes gazed round the cell, and his thoughts were for a moment numbed into nothingness. There was just a piece of lead at the back of his brain, that was all. He was conscious of it being there, drowsily conscious, but no more than that.
Quite suddenly something seemed to start his mental lethargy, his brain resumed its functions instantaneously. There was a roaring in his ears like the sound of a wind, and he awoke to full consciousness and realization of what Sir William had told him, of the unutterable terror and frightfulness of his coming doom. All over his face, hands, and body, beads of perspiration started out in little jets. Then he felt as if a piece of ice were being slid smoothly down his spine—from the neck downwards. His hands opened and shut convulsively, gripping at nothing, and the soles of his feet, in their list slippers, became suddenly and strangely hot. The collar round his neck seemed to be throttling him, and his mouth opened, gasping for air.
Then that deep and hidden chamber was filled with a wail so mournful, melancholy and hopeless, so dismal and inhuman that the very concrete walls themselves might also have melted and dissolved away before the fire of such agony and the sound of such despair.
He knew the dark and more sinister reason of his captivity, he knew what they had made him and for what dreadful purpose.
Ah! It was a supreme revenge. They had stolen him from his love and they had stolen his very inmost soul from him. All the agonized prayers which had gone up to God like thin flames had been caught upon their way like tangible and material things, caught by the devilish power of one man, and thrown upon the wall for him to see and laugh over. All his passionate longing for Marjorie, all the messages he tried to frame and send her through the darkness and the walls of stone, all these had been but an amusement and a derision for the fiend whose slave he had become. And all his hatred, his deep cursings of his captor, all his futile half-formed plans for an escape were all known to the two men. And still worse, his very memories, his most sacred memories, had been taken from him and used as a theatre by William Gouldesbrough and Wilson Guest. He understood now the remarks that the assistant had sometimes made, the cruel and extraordinary knowledge he seemed to display of things that had happened in Rathbone's past. It was all quite plain, all terribly distinct.
And worst of all, the sacred moments when he had avowed his love for Marjorie, and she, that peerless maiden, had come to him in answer, these dear memories, which alone had kept his cooling mind from madness, were known and exulted over by these men. They had seen him kiss Marjorie; all the endearments of the lovers had passed before them like tableaux in a pantomime. Yes; this indeed was more than any brain could bear.
Rathbone knew now that he was going mad.
Of course, God never heard his prayers, they could not get up to God. Those beasts had caught them in a net and God never heard them. There had always been that one thought, even in the darkest hour—that thought that God knew and would come to his aid.
The face, the rigid face, worked and wrinkled horribly. Ripples of agony passed up and down it like the ripples upon the wind-blown surface of a pool. It was not human now any longer, and the curious and lovers of what is terrible may see such faces in the museum of the mad painter of pictures at Brussels.
Then, as a stone falls, consciousness flashed away, though the face still moved and wrinkled automatically.
Presently the door of the cell was unlocked, and Wilson Guest came in. He was rather drunk and rather angry also.
Sir William had come back from telling Rathbone the truth about what had been done to him and what they proposed to do. Guest had been waiting in the study with great expectation. He congratulated himself on having worked up his patron sufficiently to make him visit Rathbone himself and inform him of his fate. He had not thought that Gouldesbrough could have been brought to do any such thing, and he had awaited his chief's arrival with intense and cynical expectation.
When at last Sir William did enter the room, his face was very pale, but the passion of hideous anger had quite gone from it, and it was calm and quiet. The eyes no longer blazed, the lips were set in their usual curve.
"Have you told him, William?" Guest asked in his malicious voice. "Have you told him everything? Come along, then, let's go into the laboratory at once and see what he thinks about it."
There was no response. Sir William seemed as a man in a dream. When at length he did answer his voice appeared to come from a long distance, and it was sad and almost kindly.
"Yes," he said, in that gentle mournful voice; "yes, my friend, I have told him. Poor, poor fellow! How terrible his thoughts must be now. I wish I could do something for him. The spectacle of such agony is indeed terrible. Poor, poor fellow!"
He sank into a chair, his head fell upon his breast, his fingers interlocked, and he seemed to be sleeping.
Guest looked at him for a moment stupidly. The assistant was fuddled with drink, and could not understand these strange symptoms and phenomena of a great brain which was swiftly being undermined.
All he noticed was that Sir William certainly seemed sunk in upon himself like an old man.
With a gesture of impatience he left the room and traversed the corridor until he came to the largest laboratory, where the Thought Spectroscope instruments were. He turned up the electric light, found the switch which controlled part of the machinery, moved the switch and turned down the electric light once more, looking expectantly at the opposite wall. There was no great circle of light such as he waited for.
With an oath he stumbled out of the laboratory, not forgetting to lock it carefully. And then, unlocking another door, a door which formed the back of a great cupboard in No. C room, a door which nobody ever saw, he went down a flight of stone steps to those old disused cellars, in one of which Rathbone was kept. He opened the door and found the captive still lying upon the vulcanite couch, his face still working like the face of a mechanical toy, and in a deep swoon.
Guest hastily unbuckled the straps and released the neck from the collar. He carried Rathbone to the bed, locked the thin steel chains, which hung from the roof, upon the anklets and the handcuffs, and then dashed water repeatedly in his face.
In his pocket, Mr. Guest invariably carried a supply of liquor. It sometimes happened that in going from a room where he had exhausted all the liquor, into another room where he knew he would find more, the two rooms would be separated by a corridor of some little length, and it sometimes happened that Mr. Guest needed a drink when he arrived in the middle of the corridor. So he always carried a large, silver-mounted flask in the pocket of his coat. He unscrewed this now and poured some whisky down the captive's throat. In a minute or two a faint tinge of colour appeared upon the cheekbones, and with a shudder and sob the tortured soul came back to the tortured body, which even yet it was not to be suffered to leave.
"That's better," Mr. Guest remarked. "I thought you had gone off, I really did. Not yet, my dear boy, not yet. Would not do at all. Would not suit our purpose. I'm sure you won't be so disobliging as to treat us in such a shabby way after all we have done for you. I understand William has told you of the delicate attentions by which we propose to make your exit as interesting and as valuable to science as possible."
Rathbone looked at him steadily. He spoke to him in a weak, thin voice.
"Yes," he said, "I know now, I know everything. But have you no single spark of pity or compassion within you, that you can come here to mock and gloat over a man who is surely suffering more than any one else has ever suffered in the history of the world? Is it impossible to touch you or move you in any way?"
Mr. Guest rubbed his hands with huge enjoyment.
"Ah!" he said chuckling, while the pink, hairless face was one mask of pleasure. "Ah, that is how I have been wanting to hear you talk for a long, long time. I thought we should break you down at last, though. For my part I should have told you long before, only William thought that you would not give yourself away about Miss Marjorie Poole if you knew that we saw it all. However, we know now, so it don't matter. Dear little girl she is, Mr. Rathbone. Sir William sees her every day. She thinks you have gone off with a barmaid and are living quite happily, helping her to manage a pub. in the East. Sir William sees her every day, and she sits on his knee, and they kiss each other and laugh about being in love. Charming, isn't it? Fancy you talking to me like that. Pity? Pity? Aren't I your best friend? Don't I bring you your food every day? And didn't I give you a drink just now? That's more than William did. And besides to-morrow aren't I going to begin the injections that in a month's time or so will make you appear a confirmed dipsomaniac, just before I come down here and hold your head in a bucket of water until you are drowned? Then, dress your body in nice, dirty clothes and have you dropped in the Thames just above Wapping. Oh, Mr. Rathbone, how could you say such cruel things to your good friend, Mr. Wilson Guest? Well, I must be going. I don't think you will want anything more to-night, will you? Good night. Sleep pleasantly. I am going to go to bed myself, and I shall lie awake thinking of the fun there will be at the inquest when the Doctor reports after the post-mortem that you were a confirmed drunkard, and all the world, including Miss Marjorie Poole, will know the real truth about Guy Rathbone's disappearance."