The City in the Clouds Part 25

"Wait a bit, my son," said Arthur. "I have thought about that incident rather carefully. Remember that Morse was given a certain time in which to come in line and join the Hermandad. From what I have heard of the punctilious, senile Marquis da Silva, he wouldn't have allowed the campaign against Morse to be started a moment before the time of immunity was up. Might not Midwinter at that time, quite ignorant that the towers were being built as a refuge for Morse, have tried to go behind his own employers and offer to betray them, and to drop the whole business for a million or so? From what I know of the man's career I should think it extremely probable."

I whistled. Arthur seemed to have penetrated to the center of that night's mystery. There was nothing more likely. I could imagine the whole scene, the panther man laying his cards on the table and offering to save Morse and Juanita from certain death--Morse, already half maddened by what hung over him, chuckling in the knowledge that he had built an impregnable refuge, dismissing the scoundrel with utter firmness and contempt.

"I believe you've hit it, Arthur," I said. "It fits in like the last bit of a jig-saw puzzle."

"I'm pretty sure myself, but even now you don't know all. Quite early in his life, when Midwinter--he's the last of the Staffords.h.i.+re Midwinters, an ancient and famous family--was expelled from Harrow, he went out to South America. Morse was at that time in the wilds of Goyaz, where he was developing his mines. There was a futile attempt to kidnap the child, Juanita, who was then about two years old, and Midwinter was in it. The young gentleman, I understand, was caught. Morse was then, as doubtless he is now, a man of a grim and terrible humor. He took young Midwinter and treated him with every possible contemptuous indignity.

They say his head was shaved; he was birched like a schoolboy by Morse's peons; he was branded, tarred and feathered, and turned contemptuously adrift. The fellow came back to Europe, married a celebrated actress in Paris, who is now dead, and has been, as I say, one of the most successful uncaught members of the higher criminal circles that ever was. He made an attempt at the Ritz, swallowing his hatred. It failed.

His employers in Brazil know nothing of it. He is here in London--as Pat so wonderfully discovered--supplied with unlimited money, burning with a hatred of which a decent man can have no conception, and confronted with his last chance in the world."

As he said this, Arthur got up, bit his lip savagely and left the room.

It was about two-thirty in the afternoon.

Though he closed the door after him, I heard voices in the corridor, and the door reopened an inch or two as if some one was holding it before coming in.

"You are not well, my lord?"

"Oh, I'm all right, Preston; just feeling a little faint, that's all.

Sorry to nearly have barged into you; I'll go and lie down for half an hour."

The door opened and Preston came in with a telegram.

I opened it immediately and felt three or four flimsy sheets of Government paper in my hand.

The telegram was in the special cipher of the _Evening Special_, and was from Rolston.

"The tower top is connected with Richmond telephone exchange by private wire. I have been rung up and in long conversation with Pu-Yi. Early in the evening you will receive a letter from certain lady. Owing to certain complication of circ.u.mstances your attempt at storming the tower and seeing lady must be carried out to-night. Our friend is making all possible arrangements to this end and urgently begs you to be prepared. He implicitly urges me to warn you the attempt is not without grave danger. Please return to 'Swan' at once. There is much to be arranged, and at lunch time two strange-looking customers were in the bar whose appearance I didn't like at all. Also Sliddim thinks he recognized one of them as an exceedingly dangerous person."

For to-night! At last the patient months of waiting were over and it had all narrowed down to this. To-night I should win or lose all that made life worth living; and the fast taxi that took me back to Richmond within twenty minutes of receiving the telegram, carried a man singing.

CHAPTER TEN

The wind was getting up on Richmond Hill and ma.s.ses of cloud were scudding from the South and obscuring the light of the moon, when at about half-past nine a small, well-appointed motor coupe drew up in front of the great gate at the tower inclosure.

The small closed-in car was painted dead black, the man who drove it was in livery, and a professional-looking person in a fur coat stepped out and pressed the electric b.u.t.ton of a small door in the wall by the side of the huge main gates. In his hand he had a little black bag.

In a moment the door opened a few inches and a large, saffron-colored, intelligent face could be seen in the aperture.

"The doctor!" said the gentleman from the coupe. The door opened at once to admit him.

He turned and spoke to the chauffeur.

"As I cannot tell you how long I shall be, Williams," he said, "you had better go back to the surgery and wait there. I have no doubt I can telephone when I require you."

The man touched his cap and drove off, and the doctor found himself in a vaulted pa.s.sage, to the right of which was a brightly lit room. Standing in the pa.s.sage and bowing was a gigantic Chinaman, Kw.a.n.g-su, the keeper of the gate, in a quilted black robe lined with fur. The man bowed low, and a second Chinaman came out of the room, a thin ascetic-looking person.

"Ah, Dr. Thomas!" he said, "we've been expecting you. I am secretary to Mr. Morse. Perhaps you will come this way."

He led the doctor down the pa.s.sage, unlocked a further door and the two men emerged into the grounds, proceeding down a wide, graveled road, bordered by strips of lawn and lit at intervals with electric standards.

In the distance there were ranges of lit buildings with figures flitting backwards and forwards before the orange oblongs of doors and windows.

In another quarter rose the lighted dome of the great Power House from which the low hum of dynamos and the steady throb of engines could be faintly heard in pauses of the gale. It was exactly like standing at night in the center of some great exhibition grounds, save that straight ahead, overshadowing everything and covering an immense area of ground, were the bases of the three great towers, a nightmare of fantastic steel tracery such as no man's eye had beheld before in the history of the world.

"So far, so good," said Pu-Yi with a sigh of relief. "That was excellently managed, the motor-car was quite in keeping. Your wonderful little friend who speaks my language so well is already in the compound with some of the men. He will await here to take any orders that may be necessary."

I was trembling with excitement and could hardly reply.

Here I was at last, pa.s.sed into the Forbidden City with the greatest ease.

"We will walk slowly towards tower number three, which is the one we shall ascend," said my companion, "and I will explain the situation to you. On the tower top I have supreme authority, except for one man, and that's the Irish-American, Boss Mulligan. This worthy is much addicted to the use of hot and rebellious liquors, and is generally more or less intoxicated about this time, though he is more alert and ferocious than when sober. To-night I have taken the opportunity to put a little something in his bottle, a little something from China, which will not be detected, and which will by now have sent him into a profound, drugged slumber. I then telephoned all down the tower to the lift men on the various stages, and also to Kw.a.n.g there, that a doctor was to be expected and that I would come down to meet him and conduct him to Mr.

Morse."

"Excellent!" I said, "and now--?"

"Now we are going straight up to the very top. Every one will see us but no one will think anything strange. Moreover, and this is a fact in our favor, when Mulligan awakes no one will be able to tell him of the incident even if they suspected anything, for few, if any, of the tower men speak more than a few rudimentary words of English, and I am the intermediary between them and their master. This was specially arranged by Mr. Morse so that none of them could get into communication with Europeans. The fact is greatly in our favor."

I pressed my hand to a pocket over my heart, where lay a little note which had been mysteriously conveyed to me early in the evening--a little agitated note bidding me come at all costs--and pa.s.sed on in silence until we came under the gloomy shadows of the mighty girders and columns which sprang up from an expanse of smooth concrete which seemed to stretch as far as eye could reach.

We changed our lift at each stage; and I could have wished that it was day or the night was finer, for the experience is wonderful when one undergoes it for the first time.

"We shall ascend by one of the small rapid lifts built for four or five persons only, and not the large and more c.u.mbrous machines. Even so, you must remember, Doctor"--he chuckled as he called me that--"we have nearly half a mile to go."

On and on we went, amid this lifeless forest of steel with its smooth concrete and s.h.i.+ning electric-lamps, until at last we approached a small, illuminated pavilion, where two silent celestials awaited us. We stepped into the lift, the door was closed, a bell rang and we began to move upwards. I sat down on a plush-covered seat and didn't attempt to look out of the frosted windows on either side until at length, after what seemed an interminable time, we stopped with a little jerk. Pu-Yi opened the door and led me down on to a platform.

"We are now," he said, "on the first stage--just fifty feet higher than the golden cross on the top of Saint Paul's. If you will come up this slant--see! here's the next lift."

I followed him along a steel platform for some twenty or thirty yards, the wind whistling all around. On looking to the right I saw nothing but a black void, at the bottom of which, far, far below, was the yellow glow of Richmond town. On looking to the left I stopped for a moment and stared, unable to believe my eyes. As I live, there was an immense lake there, surrounded by rushes that sang and swished in the wind, with a boat-house, and a little landing-stage!

Then, with a clang of wings and a chorus of shrill quacks, a gaggle of wild duck got up and sped away into the dark.

"Yes," said Pu-Yi, "that's the lake. There are many variety of water fowl fed there, who make it their home. On a quiet afternoon, walking round the margin, or in a canoe, one can feel ten thousand miles away from London. But that's nothing to what you will see if circ.u.mstances permit."

I have but a dim recollection of the second stage, which was only a stage in the particular tower we were mounting, and did not extend between the three as the lower and two upper ones did, forming the immense plateaus of which the lake was one and the City in the clouds itself another.

It was when we had slowed down, and even in the dark lift, that I began to have a curious sensation of an immense immeasurable height, and Pu-Yi gave me a warning look as who would say, "Now, get ready, the adventure really begins."

We stopped, the door slid back and immediately we were in a blaze of light. We were no longer out of doors. The lift had come up through the floor of a large room. It was divided into two portions by polished steel bars extending from ceiling to floor. A cat could not have squeezed through. On our side, the lift side, the floor was covered with matting but there was no furniture at all. Beyond the bars were a Turkey carpet, several armchairs, a mahogany table with bottles, siphons, newspapers, and a large, automatic pistol. An electric fire burned cheerily in one corner and at right angles to it was a couch.

Upon this couch, purple-faced and snoring like a bull, lay Mulligan, huge, relaxed, helpless.

"Good heavens!" I whispered. "Gideon Morse is safe enough here."