by Sax Rohmer
But she stood motionless, startled, gazing, but giving no sign.
“Fleurette!” Sterling spoke in a low voice, yet loudly enough for the girl in the room to hear him. “It’s Alan. Open the window, darling — open the window!”
But she gave no sign.
“Fleurette! Can you hear me? It’s Alan. Open the window.”
He had found the handle. The strangeness of his reception by this girl who only a few days before had lain trembling in his arms because three or four weeks of separation pended, was damping that glad exultation, chilling the hot blood dancing through his veins.
The window was locked, as he had assumed it would be. He could see the key inside.
“Fleurette, darling! For God’s sake open the window. Let me in. Don’t you understand? It’s Alan! It’s Alan!”
Fleurette shook her head, and turning, walked across the room.
Surely she had recognized him? In spite of his rough dress, could Fleurette, his Fleurette, fail to recognize him?
Pressing his face against the glass, Sterling, astounded, saw her take up a pencil and a writing-block from a dimly seen bureau. He could endure no more. Premature action might jeopardize the success of Nayland Smith’s plans, but there were definite limits to Sterling’s powers of endurance. These had been reached.
Stepping back a pace he raised his right foot, and crashed the heel of his shoe through the small leaded pane of glass just above the lock of the French window.
He had expected an echoing crash; in point of fact the sound made was staccato and oddly muffled. He paused for a second to listen... Somewhere in the distance a train whistle shrieked...
Thrusting his hand through the jagged opening, he turned the key, pushed the French window open and stepped into the room. Three swift strides and he had Fleurette in his arms.
She had turned at the crash of his entrance — eyes widely opened, and a look of fear upon her beautiful face.
“My darling, my darling!” — he crushed her against him and kissed her breathlessly. “What has happened? Where have you been? Above all, why didn’t you open the window?”
Fleurette’s eyes seemed to be looking through him — beyond him — at some far distant object. She made a grimace of pain — good God! of contempt. Leaning back, continuing to look not at him, but through him, and wrenching one arm free, she brushed it across her lips as if something loathsome had touched them!
Sterling released her.
He had read of one’s heart growing cold, but was not aware that such a phenomenon could actually occur. Where there had been mystery — there was mystery no more. Fleurette’s love for him was dead. Something had killed it.
With a tiny handkerchief she was wiping her lips, watching him, watching him all the time. There was absolute silence in the room, and absolute silence outside. He found time to wonder if Gallaho had heard the crash, if those inside the house had heard it.
But this thought was a mere undercurrent.
All of him that was real, all of him that lived, was concentrated upon Fleurette. And now, looking him up and down, with a glance of such scornful anger as he had never sustained in his life from man or woman:
“You are just a common blackguard, then?” she said, in that musical voice which he adored, and yet again raised the fragment of cambric to her lips. “I hate you for this.”
“Fleurette, darling!”
His own voice was flat and toneless.
“If you ever had a right to call me Fleurette, you have that right no longer.”
Her scorn was like a lash. Alan Sterling writhed under it. But although she stared straightly at him, he could not arrest that strange, far-away gaze. She turned suddenly, and walked towards the bureau. Over her shoulder:
“Get out!” she said. “I am going to call the servants, but I will give you this chance.”
“Fleurette, dear!” he extended his arms distractedly. “My darling! What has happened? What wrong have I done?”
He followed her, but she turned and waved him away, fiercely.
“Leave me alone!” she cried, her eyes flashing murderously. “If you touch me again, you will regret it.”
She picked up a pencil and began to write.
Sterling, quivering in muscle and nerve, stood close beside her. Whoever had interfered between himself and Fleurette, upon one point he was determined. She should not remain here, in this house. Explanations could come later. But he proposed to pick her up, regardless of protests, and carry her out to the police car.
Slowly he moved nearer, making up his mind just how he should seize her. There was a silk-shaded lamp on the bureau and in its light he was able quite clearly to read the words which Fleurette was writing upon the pad.
As he read, he stood stock still, touched by a sort of supernatural horror. This is what he read: —
“Alan darling. If you touch me I shall try to kill you. If I speak to you I shall tell you I hate you. But I can write my real thoughts. Save me, darling! Save me!”Came a flash of inspiration — Alan Sterling understood.
Fleurette was the victim of some devilish device of the Chinese physician. He had induced in her either by drugs or suggestion, a complete revulsion of feeling in regard to those she had formerly loved. But because of some subtlety of the human brain which he had overlooked, although, as in some cases of amnesia, she could not express her real thoughts in words, she could express them in writing!
“My darling!”
Sterling bent forward and tore the page from the writing-block.
Whereupon Fleurette turned, her face contorted.
“Don’t touch me! I detest you!” — she glared at him venomously; “I detest you!”
Sterling stooped, threw his left arm around her waist and his right under her knees. He lifted her. She screamed wildly and struck at him.
He forced her head down upon his shoulder to stifle her cries, and carried her towards the open window...
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR. THE LACQUER ROOM
Gallaho by now very breathless pulled up, watching the porch of Rowan House.
The front door was open; this dimly, he could divine; but there seemed to be no light in the entrance hall.
The headlamps of Sir Bertram’s Rolls gleamed dimly, but the inside lights were turned off. Evidently, Sir Bertram was leaving — after a very brief visit.
Why was there no light in the entrance hall?
Gallaho’s bewilderment was growing by leaps and bounds. To the problems of the scream, the broken window and Sterling’s absence now was added that of Sir Denis’s disappearance. Gallaho’s own inclination, for he was a man of forthright action, was to run up the drive quite openly to the porch, and to demand to see the occupier of the house.
But Sir Denis was in charge tonight. He could not act without his authority, and his last instruction had been: “Do nothing, until I give the word.”
A muted bang told him that the door of Sir Bertram’s car had been closed. Who had entered it he didn’t know. Suddenly the headlights cleaved a lane through darkness, illuminating the gravel drive, depicting trees of elfin shapes in silhouette, goblin trees. The entrance to Rowan House was transformed magically into a haunted forest.
The Rolls moved off, turned, and entered the drive. Gallaho darted half right into the shrubbery, crouched down, and watched...
Someone was seated beside the chauffeur. The fleeting impression which Gallaho derived conveyed to his mind the idea of a native servant of some kind. This surely meant that Sir Bertram was not returning home, but was proceeding elsewhere?
And there was no means of following! The Flying Squad car was presumably at the local police station, picking up a party of men to raid Rowan House!
The Rolls purred swiftly by. Of its occupants, Gallaho had never a glimpse. But as it passed he sprang to his feet and stepped out on to the drive.
“Where in hell has everybody got to?” he growled.
The door of the house was open. He could see the bl
ack gap which it made in the dingy gray frontage of the pillared porch. Something very strange was happening here — had already happened; and now:
“Gallaho!” came a distant voice, “Gallaho!”
It was Nayland Smith!
“Where are you, sir?” Gallaho shouted.
He raced towards the porch of the house from which the cry had seemed to come, throwing precaution to the winds now, for there was urgency in Nayland Smith’s voice.
And as he reached the steps he saw him...
Sir Denis was standing in the open doorway, the lobby behind him in darkness.
“He’s slipped us, I think, Gallaho. We’re too late. But my main concern at the moment is not with him... show a light here. I am looking for the switch.”
Gallaho’s torch flashed in the darkness of that strange Assyrian hall.
“There it is, sir.”
The lights were switched on. It was a queer looking place, of pillars and bas-reliefs, a freak of the former eccentric owner of Rowan House. There was no sound. They might have been alone in the building.
“What the devil has become of Mr. Sterling?” Gallaho’s face looked very lined and grim. “And I thought I heard a woman scream.”
“I did hear a woman scream,” snapped Smith. “I started around the house in the direction you had taken. Did you notice a door in a sort of archway which opens into the stable yard?”
“Yes, it was locked.”
“Not when I reached it,” Smith replied grimly. “I went in, venturing to use my torch. It communicated with an absolutely unfurnished passage, which I followed, and found myself here, looking out of the open front door — just as Sir Bertram’s car disappeared down the drive. Ssh! What’s that?”
From somewhere within the recesses of the silent house, a faint sound of movement had come...
Slowly and with extreme caution, in order not to rattle the rings, Inspector Gallaho drew aside a curiously patterned curtain which hung in one of the square openings of the Assyrian hall. It was from behind this curtain that the slight sound had come.
A thickly carpeted passage appeared, dimly lighted. There was a door at the further end immediately facing them and one to the right. That at the further end — apparently a sliding door — was ajar... and light shone out from the room beyond.
Nayland Smith exchanged a significant glance with the detective, and the two tip-toed along the corridor. Their footsteps made next to no sound upon the thick carpet. Outside the door, both paused, listening.
In the room beyond, someone was walking up and down, restlessly, ceaselessly.
Gallaho displayed an automatic in his open palm. Smith nodded, and drew the door open.
He found himself in a fairly large room which was a combination of a library and a laboratory. It was a type of room with which he had become familiar during the long years that he had battled with Dr. Fu-Manchu. There were preserved snakes and reptiles in jars upon a high shelf. Many queer looking volumes in orderly rows appeared behind a big table upon which, in addition to evidence of literary activity, there was a certain amount of chemical paraphernalia. Lacquer was the dominant note.
At the moment of Nayland Smith’s entrance, the man who had been promenading the room turned, startled, and stared at the intruders.
It was Sir Bertram Morgan, Governor of the Bank of England.
“Well I’m damned!” — the growling words came from Gallaho.
“Sir Bertram!” Nayland Smith exclaimed.
Sir Bertram Morgan experienced a not unnatural difficulty in recognizing Smith, whom he had met socially, in his present attire; but at last:
“Sir Denis Nayland Smith, I believe?” he replied. The financier had quite recovered his poise. He was a man of remarkably cool nerve. “The Marquis Chang Hu did not inform me that I should have the pleasure of meeting you here tonight.”
Gallaho exchanged glances with Sir Denis and then stood by the open door, listening — listening for the Scotland Yard car and the raiding party. Sir Denis twitched the lobe of his ear, staring all about him, and then:
“I fear, Sir Bertram,” he said, “that you have been decoyed here under false pretenses.”
“Decoyed...?”
Sir Bertram assumed his well-known expression which has appeared in so many Press photographs, his bushy eyebrows slightly raised in the center.
“I said ‘decoyed’ advisedly. You came with a woman. She is half Chinese. By what name you know her I cannot say. I have known her by several.”
“Indeed! You probably refer to Madame Ingomar?”
Nayland Smith smiled, but without mirth.
“Fah Lo Suee’s invention is failing her,” he murmured; “that was the name in which she crept into the good graces of Sir Lionel Barton in Egypt three years ago. However, all this is beside the point. You have taken a very grave risk, Sir Bertram.”
The banker, unused to that brusque mode of address which characterized Nayland Smith in moments of tension, stared rather coldly.
“Your meaning is not clear to me,” he replied. “I was invited to this house to discuss what I may term a purely professional matter with the Marquis Chang Hu.”
“Chang Hu? Will you describe Chang Hu?”
Sir Bertram was becoming definitely offended with Nayland Smith, largely because the latter’s force was beating him down.
“A tall, distinguished Chinese aristocrat,” he replied quietly.
“Correct. He is tall, he is distinguished, and he is an aristocrat. Pray proceed.”
“A member of the former Royal House of China.”
“Correct. He is.”
“A man, roughly, sixty years of age.”
“Say a hundred and sixty,” snapped Nayland Smith, “and you may be rather nearer the mark! However, I quite understand, Sir Bertram. May I ask you briefly to outline what occurred?”
“Certainly.” Sir Bertram leaned against a bookcase which contained works exclusively Chinese in character. “I met the marquis by appointment. His daughter, Madame Ingomar, had informed me (frankly, I didn’t believe her) that her father, an advanced student of mineralogy, had perfected a system for the transmutation of gold. I know something of gold...”
“You should,” Nayland Smith murmured.
But his smile was so disarming — it was that delightfully ingenuous smile which so rarely relieved the ruggedness of his features — that no man seeing it could have held antagonism.
Sir Bertram was mollified. He smiled in return.
“Tonight,” he went on impressively, and pointed to the big table, “an ingot of gold was offered to me by the Marquis Chang Hu, together with the assurance that he was prepared to supply any quantity up to three hundred-weights in the course of the next few weeks!”
“What!”
“Sst!”
Gallaho at the open door had raised his hand in warning.
“Listen!”
The purr of an approaching car became audible.
“It’s Markham with the police,” said Gallaho.
He ran out.
Nayland Smith was staring curiously at Sir Bertram.
“It was pure gold?”
“Pure gold.”
“He claimed to be able to make gold,” murmured Smith. “I wonder... I wonder. May I ask, Sir Bertram, how the interview terminated?”
“Certainly. Madame Ingomar, my host’s daughter, called out from somewhere in the house. The door was closed, and her cry was somewhat indistinct, but her father, naturally, was disturbed.”
“Naturally.”
“He excused himself and went to see what had occurred, begging me to remain here.”
“He took the ingot of gold?”
“Apparently he did.”
“He closed the door behind him?”
“He did. I opened it recently, beginning to wonder what had become of the marquis.”
“It may surprise you to learn, Sir Bertram,” said Nayland Smith quietly, “that only three or at the outside fou
r of the rooms in Rowan House are furnished.”
“What!”
“It was a plot. But by a miracle the plotters have been tricked. I regret to say that this is not the worst. I don’t know all the truth, yet, but when the police arrive, I hope to learn it.”
Detective-inspector Gallaho appeared in the open doorway, Sir Bertram’s chauffeur at his heels.
“Preston!” Sir Bertram exclaimed— “what’s this?”
“A very nasty business, sir, if I may say so,” the man replied.
He was an obvious ex-Service man, clean limbed and of decent mentality. His hazel eyes were very angry and his fists clenched.
“Tell me,” Sir Bertram directed, tersely.
“Well, sir,” Preston went on, looking from face to face, “that Burmese butler who opened the door when we arrived, you remember, came out about ten minutes ago, and I naturally thought you were leaving. As I went up to him in the dark he jabbed a pistol in my ribs, and invited me to jump to the wheel. I am sorry, sir, but I did it...”
“Don’t blame you,” growled Gallaho.
“Several people got into the car, sir. I had an impression that one was carried in. Then, the colored swine beside me gave the order to go.”
“Where did you go to?” asked Nayland Smith.
“To an old mews not three miles from here, sir, where I was told to pull up — and I pulled up. This blasted Burman sat with his gun in my ribs the whole time that the party in the car were getting out. But I had my eye on the reflector and I think there were two women and two men.”
“Any idea of their appearance?” Smith demanded.
“Not the slightest, sir. It was very dark. I’m not sure, even, of their number. But one of the men was very sick, the others seemed to drag him out of the car.”
The roar of the powerful engine of the Flying Squad proclaimed itself; voices were heard.
“Here they are!” said Gallaho.
“Quick!” Sir Denis directed Preston: “What happened then?”
“The Burman jumped off, keeping me under cover. He told me to drive back. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, sir.”
Uniformed police were pouring into Rowan House.
