The City in the Clouds

We sat hand in hand upon the odd little Chinese couch.

"Now look here, darling," I said, "you've told me all about your Governor. How he says that you must live up here in this extraordinary place and never go into the world again. You think him mad, and yet, d'you know, I don't."

"But, my heart – ?"

"I've got to tell you, dearest, that he has more reason than you think."

She shrugged her shoulders – it was about the most graceful thing I had ever seen in my life.

"But to tell me that I am to be a nun because, if I were to go back into the world, my life wouldn't be worth a moment's purchase. Caro! It is madness! It cannot be anything else."

I didn't quite know how to tell her, and I was considering, when she went on:

"It is getting dreadful. Father cannot sleep, he prowls about this nightmare of a place all the night long."

"Sweetheart," I said, "I've been making all sorts of inquiries and I've found out that your Governor is really in serious danger of assassination – or was until he built this place, to which I think the devil could hardly penetrate without an invitation. Don't think your father a coward. Remember what we saw that night in the Ritz Hotel, when I was just about to tell you that I adored you. No, I'd lay long odds, Juanita darling, that Mr. Morse is more afraid for you than for himself. And there I'll back him up every time."

She laughed, and her laughter was like water falling into water in paradise!

"I have you," she said; "I have father – what do I care?"

"Quite so," I replied. "I think you take a very sensible view of it. The obvious thing to do is to relieve your father by coming with me to-night, while the coast is clear. Lady Brentford is in town. She will be delighted to receive you. Once out of the place, we can be free within an hour. To-morrow morning I can get a special license from the Archbishop of Canterbury and we can be married.

"Once that happens, I'll defy all the Santa Hermandads, and all the Mark Antony Midwinters in the world, to hurt you. And as for Mr. Morse, we'll protect him too, in a far more sensible way than – "

I suppose I had been holding her rather tightly. At any rate she broke away and stood up in the center of the little room. The brightness of her face was clouded with thought.

I had not risen and she stared down at me with great, smoldering eyes.

"So it is true!" she said, nodding her head, "it is true, father and I are in peril, after all! Names escaped you just now, I think I have heard one of them before – "

She passed her hand over her brow, like some one awaking from sleep, and I watched her, fascinated.

Oh, how lovely she was at that moment, my dear, my perfect dear!

"But, caro, of course I cannot run away with you and be married. I must stay with father, cannot you see that?"

Well, of course I did, there were no two words about it. "Very well," I answered, "Little Lady of my heart, I'll stick by the old chap too. I've crept up here in a sort of underhand way, but not for underhand reasons. After all, I've just as much right to love you as anybody else in this world."

I took her by her sweet hands and I laughed in her face.

"I'm not the Duke of Perth," I said, "but, but, Juanita – ?"

There came a little knocking at the door.

Juanita swirled round, flung up her arm – I saw her sweet face glowing for an instant – and then she seemed to whirl away like an autumn leaf.

The only thing I could possibly do was to light a cigarette.

Juanita, having met me, having delivered her ultimatum, having turned me into a jelly, flitted away quite oblivious of the fact that I was a burglar, an intruder into what was probably the most guarded and secret place in Europe at that moment.

My heart sang high music, and that was well. But at the same time I recognized that I was in the deuce of a mess and had planned out no course of action at all.

I prayed, almost audibly, for Pu-Yi.

But nobody came. There I was in the sexagonal room, with the gold dragons with their jeweled eyes leering at me.

A dull anger welled up within me. On every side, mentally as well as physically, I seemed baffled, hemmed in. I determined, at any risk to myself, to get out into the library. I took two steps towards the door through which Juanita had gone, when I heard a sharp snap just behind me.

I whipped round, clutching the only weapon I had – which was a brass knuckle-duster in the side pocket of my coat, and then I stood absolutely still.

One of the dragon panels had rolled up like a theater curtain, and standing in what appeared to be the end of a passage, was the great brute Mulligan, with a Winchester rifle at his shoulder, covering me.

As a man does in the presence of imminent danger, I swerved out of the line of the deadly barrel.

As I did so – click! A second panel disappeared, and I was confronted by Gideon Morse, his hands in the pockets of his dinner jacket, his mouth faintly smiling, his eyes inscrutable.

Imagine it! let the picture appear to you of the fool, Thomas Kirby, trapped like a rat!

Once, twice I swallowed in my throat, and I swear it wasn't from fear but only from an enormous, immeasurable disgust.

I turned to Morse.

"You've been listening," I said, "you and your servant here."

"I have been listening, Sir Thomas Kirby, that's true. I have every right to. When a man breaks into my house without my knowledge and makes clandestine love to my daughter, he's not the person to accuse one of eavesdropping. As for my servant there, you do me an injustice, which I find harder to forgive than anything, when you suggest that I allowed him to overhear what passed in this room just now. He was not at his post until Juanita had been gone from here some seconds. Mulligan, you can go now. Sir Thomas, please come with me into the library."

There was something so magnetic about this strange and compelling personality that I followed him without a word.

"Then you knew," I asked in a husky voice, "you knew all the time?"

He smiled.

"Yes," he said, "I arranged a little comedy. The faithful Mulligan was not drugged at all, and I did everything to facilitate your entrance."

"Then that treacherous cur, Pu-Yi, was playing with me the whole time! And yet I could have sworn that he was genuine. When I meet him – "

"You will shake hands with him if you are a wise man. Pu-Yi was absolutely genuine, but he, in common with my daughter, knew nothing of the truth until you told it him. He had believed me a madman. Then he understood not only the peril in which I was, and am, but also that of my daughter. Do you think, Kirby, that I should have built these towers, let imagination transcend itself, made myself the cynosure of Europe, unless I was sure of what I was doing? Now, alas, you've told Juanita, and brought terror into her life as well as mine."

"Sir," I said, "her relief is greater than any fear. I'll answer for that."

I faced him fair and square.

"God knows," I said, "I'm not worth a single glance of her sweet eyes, but somehow or other she loves me, though she wouldn't fly with me when I suggested it."

"She has some decent feeling left," he answered, with a dry chuckle. "Well, I overheard everything that passed in that little room and I must say I rather appreciate the way in which you behaved. You are a rapid thinker, Sir Thomas. What suggests itself to you as the next move in our relations?"

"Quite obvious, sir. You give your consent to my engagement with your daughter. You please her, you bind me to your interests by hoops of steel – though as a matter of fact I'm bound already – and you add a not invaluable auxiliary to your staff."