The Soul Stealer

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.

CHAPTER XX

THOUGHTS OF ONE IN DURANCE

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."

CHAPTER XXI

HOW THEY ALL WENT TO THE HOUSE IN REGENT'S PARK

The little door in the wall of Sir William Gouldesbrough's old Georgian house stood wide open. Carriages were driving up, and the butler was constantly ushering visitors into the vast sombre hall, while a footman kept escorting this or that arrival up the gravel path among the laurel bushes.

It was afternoon, a dull and livid afternoon. Clouds had come down too near to London, and thunder lurked behind them. Never at any time a cheerful place, the old walled house of the scientist to-day wore its most depressing aspect.

The well-known people, who were invited to the demonstration of a stupendous and revolutionary discovery, looked with ill-concealed curiosity at the house, the garden, and the gloomy dignity of the hall.

There has always been a great deal of surmise and curiosity about Sir William's home and private life. That so distinguished a man was a bachelor was in itself an anomaly; and, though Gouldesbrough went continually into society, when he himself entertained it was generally at restaurants, except in very rare instances. So the world of London had come to regard the house in Regent's Park as a sort of wizard's cave, a secret and mysterious place where the modern magician evolved wonders which were to change the whole course of modern life.

About forty people had been invited to the demonstration.

Lord Malvin was there, of course. He came in company with Donald Megbie and Sir Harold Oliver.

All three men seemed singularly grave and preoccupied, and, as the other guests noted the strange, and even stern, expression upon Lord Malvin's face, they whispered that the leader of the scientific world felt that on this day he was to be deposed and must resign his captaincy for ever.

But in this case, as it generally is, gossip was at fault. Nobody knew of the strange conference which had been held by Donald Megbie with Lord Malvin and Sir Harold Oliver. Nobody knew how Miss Marjorie Poole had driven up to Lord Malvin's house in Portland Place one afternoon with Donald Megbie. Nobody would have believed, even if they had been told, how the two grave scientists (who realized that, however many truths are discovered, there still lie hidden forces which we shall never understand this side of the Veil) had listened to the extraordinary story the journalist and the society girl had to tell.

Therefore, on this important afternoon, though Lord Malvin's seriousness was commented upon, it was entirely misunderstood.