CHAPTER XXIII. A CRY ON THE MOOR
Of the events intervening between this moment and that when death calledto us out of the night, I have the haziest recollections. An excellentdinner was served in the bleak and gloomy dining-room by the mulatto,and the crippled author was carried to the head of the table by thissame Herculean attendant, as lightly as though he had but the weight ofa child.
Van Roon talked continuously, revealing a deep knowledge of all sorts ofobscure matters; and in the brief intervals, Nayland Smith talked also,with almost feverish rapidity. Plans for the future were discussed. Ican recall no one of them.
I could not stifle my queer sentiments in regard to the mulatto, andevery time I found him behind my chair I was hard put to repressa shudder. In this fashion the strange evening passed; and to theaccompaniment of distant, muttering thunder, we two guests retiredto our chambers in Cragmire Tower. Smith had contrived to give me myinstructions in a whisper, and five minutes after entering my own room,I had snuffed the candles, slipped a wedge, which he had given me, underthe door, crept out through the window onto the guttered ledge, andjoined Smith in his room. He, too, had extinguished his candles, and theplace was in darkness. As I climbed in, he grasped my wrist to silenceme, and turned me forcibly toward the window.
"Listen!" he said.
I turned and looked out upon a prospect which had been a fit setting forthe witch scene in Macbeth. Thunder clouds hung low over the moor, butthrough them ran a sort of chasm, or rift, allowing a bar of lurid lightto stretch across the drear, from east to west--a sort of lane walled bydarkness. There came a remote murmuring, as of a troubled sea--a hushedand distant chorus; and sometimes in upon it broke the drums of heaven.In the west lightning flickered, though but faintly, intermittently.
Then came the call.
Out of the blackness of the moor it came, wild and distant--"Help!help!"
"Smith!" I whispered--"what is it? What..."
"Mr. Smith!" came the agonized cry... "Nayland Smith, help! for God'ssake...."
"Quick, Smith!" I cried, "quick, man! It's Van Roon--he's been draggedout... they are murdering him..."
Nayland Smith held me in a vise-like grip, silent, unmoved!
Louder and more agonized came the cry for aid, and I became more thanever certain that it was poor Van Roon who uttered it.
"Mr. Smith! Dr. Petrie! for God's sake come... or... it will be ...too... late..."
"Smith!" I said, turning furiously upon my friend, "if you are going toremain here whilst murder is done, I am not!"
My blood boiled now with hot resentment. It was incredible, inhuman,that we should remain there inert whilst a fellow man, and our host toboot, was being done to death out there in the darkness. I exerted allmy strength to break away; but although my efforts told upon him, as hisloud breathing revealed, Nayland Smith clung to me tenaciously. Had myhands been free, in my fury, I could have struck him, for the pitiablecries, growing fainter, now, told their own tale. Then Smith spokeshortly and angrily--breathing hard between the words.
"Be quiet, you fool!" he snapped; "it's little less than an insult,Petrie, to think me capable of refusing help where help is needed!"
Like a cold douche his words acted; in that instant I knew myself afool.
"You remember the Call of Siva?" he said, thrusting me away irritably,"--two years ago, and what it meant to those who obeyed it?"
"You might have told me..."
"Told you! You would have been through the window before I had utteredtwo words!"
I realized the truth of his assertion, and the justness of his anger.
"Forgive me, old man," I said, very crestfallen, "but my impulse was anatural one, you'll admit. You must remember that I have been trainednever to refuse aid when aid is asked."
"Shut up, Petrie!" he growled; "forget it."
The cries had ceased now, entirely, and a peal of thunder, louder thanany yet, echoed over distant Sedgemoor. The chasm of light splitting theheavens closed in, leaving the night wholly black.
"Don't talk!" rapped Smith; "act! You wedged your door?"
"Yes."
"Good. Get into that cupboard, have your Browning ready, and keep thedoor very slightly ajar."
He was in that mood of repressed fever which I knew and which alwayscommunicated itself to me. I spoke no further word, but stepped intothe wardrobe indicated and drew the door nearly shut. The recess justaccommodated me, and through the aperture I could see the bed, vaguely,the open window, and part of the opposite wall. I saw Smith cross thefloor, as a mighty clap of thunder boomed over the house.
A gleam of lightning flickered through the gloom.
I saw the bed for a moment, distinctly, and it appeared to me that Smithlay therein, with the sheets pulled up over his head. The light wasgone, and I could hear big drops of rain pattering upon the leadengutter below the open window.
My mood was strange, detached, and characterized by vagueness. That VanRoon lay dead upon the moor I was convinced; and--although I recognizedthat it must be a sufficient one--I could not even dimly divine thereason why we had refrained from lending him aid. To have failed to savehim, knowing his peril, would have been bad enough; to have refused, Ithought was shameful. Better to have shared his fate--yet...
The downpour was increasing, and beating now a regular tattoo upon thegutterway. Then, splitting the oblong of greater blackness which markedthe casement, quivered dazzlingly another flash of lightning in whichI saw the bed again, with that impression of Smith curled up in it. Theblinding light died out; came the crash of thunder, harsh and fearsome,more imminently above the tower than ever. The building seemed to shake.
Coming as they did, horror and the wrath of heaven together, suddenly,crashingly, black and angry after the fairness of the day, thesehappenings and their setting must have terrorized the stoutest heart;but somehow I seemed detached, as I have said, and set apart from thewhirl of events; a spectator. Even when a vague yellow light creptacross the room from the direction of the door, and flickered unsteadilyon the bed, I remained unmoved to a certain degree, although passivelyalive to the significance of the incident. I realized that the ultimateissue was at hand, but either because I was emotionally exhausted, orfrom some other cause, the pending climax failed to disturb me.
Going on tiptoe, in stockinged feet, across my field of vision, passedKegan Van Roon! He was in his shirt-sleeves and held a lighted candle inone hand whilst with the other he shaded it against the draught fromthe window. He was a cripple no longer, and the smoked glasses werediscarded; most of the light, at the moment when first I saw him, shoneupon his thin, olive face, and at sight of his eyes much of the mysteryof Cragmire Tower was resolved. For they were oblique, very slightly,but nevertheless unmistakably oblique. Though highly educated, andpossibly an American citizen, Van Roon was a Chinaman!
Upon the picture of his face as I saw it then, I do not care todwell. It lacked the unique horror of Dr. Fu-Manchu's unforgettablecountenance, but possessed a sort of animal malignancy which thelatter lacked... He approached within three or four feet of the bed,peering--peering. Then, with a timidity which spoke well for NaylandSmith's reputation, paused and beckoned to some one who evidently stoodin the doorway behind him. As he did so I noted that the legs of histrousers were caked with greenish brown mud nearly up to the knees.
The huge mulatto, silent-footed, crossed to the bed in three strides.He was stripped to the waist, and, excepting some few professionalathletes, I had never seen a torso to compare with that which, brown andglistening, now bent over Nayland Smith. The muscular development wassimply enormous; the man had a neck like a column, and the thews aroundhis back and shoulders were like ivy tentacles wreathing some gnarledoak.
Whilst Van Roon, his evil gaze upon the bed, held the candle aloft,the mulatto, with a curious preparatory writhing movement of the mightyshoulders, lowered his outstretched fingers to the disordered bedlinen...
I pushed open the cupboard door and thrust out the Brow
ning. As I didso a dramatic thing happened. A tall, gaunt figure shot suddenly uprightfrom beyond the bed. It was Nayland Smith!
Upraised in his hand he held a heavy walking cane. I knew the handle tobe leaded, and I could judge of the force with which he wielded it bythe fact that it cut the air with a keen swishing sound. It descendedupon the back of the mulatto's skull with a sickening thud, and thegreat brown body dropped inert upon the padded bed--in which not Smith,but his grip, reposed. There was no word, no cry. Then:
"Shoot, Petrie! Shoot the fiend! Shoot..."
Van Roon, dropping the candle, in the falling gleam of which I saw thewhites of the oblique eyes turned and leaped from the room with theagility of a wild cat. The ensuing darkness was split by a streak oflightning... and there was Nayland Smith scrambling around the foot ofthe bed and making for the door in hot pursuit.
We gained it almost together. Smith had dropped the cane, and nowheld his pistol in his hand. Together we fired into the chasm of thecorridor, and in the flash, saw Van Roon hurling himself down thestairs. He went silently in his stockinged feet, and our own clatterwas drowned by the awful booming of the thunder which now burst over usagain.
Crack!--crack!--crack! Three times our pistols spat venomously afterthe flying figure... then we had crossed the hall below and were inthe wilderness of the night with the rain descending upon us in sheets.Vaguely I saw the white shirt-sleeves of the fugitive near the cornerof the stone fence. A moment he hesitated, then darted away inland, nottoward Saul, but toward the moor and the cup of the inland bay.
"Steady, Petrie! steady!" cried Nayland Smith. He ran, panting, besideme. "It is the path to the mire." He breathed sibilantly between everyfew words. "It was out there... that he hoped to lure us... with the cryfor help."
A great blaze of lightning illuminated the landscape as far as the eyecould see. Ahead of us a flying shape, hair lank and glistening in thedownpour, followed a faint path skirting that green tongue of morasswhich we had noted from the upland. It was Kegan Van Roon. He glancedover his shoulder, showing a yellow, terror-stricken face. We weregaining upon him. Darkness fell, and the thunder cracked and boomed asthough the very moor were splitting about us.
"Another fifty yards, Petrie," breathed Nayland Smith, "and after thatit's unchartered ground."
On we went through the rain and the darkness; then:
"Slow up! slow up!" cried Smith. "It feels soft!"
Indeed, already I had made one false step--and the hungry mire hadfastened upon my foot, almost tripping me.
"Lost the path!"
We stopped dead. The falling rain walled us in. I dared not move, for Iknew that the mire, the devouring mire, stretched, eager, close aboutmy feet. We were both waiting for the next flash of lightning, I think,but, before it came, out of the darkness ahead of us rose a cry thatsometimes rings in my ears to this hour. Yet it was no more than arepetition of that which had called to us, deathfully, awhile before.
"Help! help! for God's sake help! Quick! I am sinking..."
Nayland Smith grasped my arm furiously.
"We dare not move, Petrie--we dare not move!" he breathed. "It's God'sjustice--visible for once."
Then came the lightning; and--ignoring a splitting crash behind us--weboth looked ahead, over the mire.
Just on the edge of the venomous green path, not thirty yards away, Isaw the head and shoulders and upstretched, appealing arms of Van Roon.Even as the lightning flickered and we saw him, he was gone; with onelast, long, drawn-out cry, horribly like the mournful wail of a seagull, he was gone!
That eerie light died, and in the instant before the sound of thethunder came shatteringly, we turned about... in time to see CragmireTower, a blacker silhouette against the night, topple and fall! Ared glow began to be perceptible above the building. The thunder camebooming through the caverns of space. Nayland Smith lowered his wet faceclose to mine and shouted in my ear:
"Kegan Van Roon never returned from China. It was a trap. Those were twocreatures of Dr. Fu-Manchu..."
The thunder died away, hollowly, echoing over the distant sea...
"That light on the moor to-night?"
"You have not learned the Morse Code, Petrie. It was a signal, and itread:--S M I T H... SOS."
"Well?"
"I took the chance, as you know. And it was Karamaneh! She knew of theplot to bury us in the mire. She had followed from London, but could donothing until dusk. God forgive me if I've misjudged her--for we owe herour lives to-night."
Flames were bursting up from the building beside the ruin of the ancienttower which had faced the storms of countless ages only to succumb atlast. The lightning literally had cloven it in twain.
"The mulatto?..."
Again the lightning flashed, and we saw the path and began to retraceour steps. Nayland Smith turned to me; his face was very grim in thatunearthly light, and his eyes shone like steel.
"I killed him, Petrie... as I meant to do."
From out over Sedgemoor it came, cracking and rolling and booming towardus, swelling in volume to a stupendous climax, that awful laughter ofJove the destroyer of Cragmire Tower.