When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy

All the chairs were more massive in material and upholstered warmly in soft leather; the logs in the fireplace crackled with white flame, amethyst in the glowing cavern beneath.

However the winter winds might sweep over the Thames below or the rain splash and welter on the Embankment, no sound or sign of the turmoil could reach or trouble the people who moved in the fragrant warmth and comfort of this room.

For his own part Schuabe never gave any attention to the mise-en-scène by which he was surrounded, here or elsewhere. The head of a famous Oxford Street firm was told to call with his artists and undermen; he was given to understand that the best that could be done was to be done, and the matter was left entirely to him.

In this there was nothing of the parvenu or of an ignorance of art, as far as Schuabe was concerned. He was a man of catholic and cultured taste. But experience had taught him that his furnishing firm were trained to be catholic and cultured also, that an artist would see to it that no jarring notes appeared. And since he knew this, Schuabe infinitely preferred not to be bothered with details. In absolute contrast to Llwellyn, his mind was always busy with abstractions, with thought and forms of thought, things that cannot be handled or seen. They were the real things for him always.

The millionaire sat alone by the glowing fire. He was wearing a long gown of camel's hair, dyed crimson, confined round the waist by a crimson cord. In this easy garment and a pair of morocco slippers without heels, he looked singularly Eastern. The whole face and figure suggested that – sinister, lonely, and splendid.

The morning papers were resting on a chair by his side. He was reading one of them.

It announced the death from heart disease of Mr. Cyril Hands while taking a few days' rest in a remote village of Cornwall. Not a shadow of regret passed over the regular, impassive face. The eyes remained in fixed thought. He was logically going over the bearings of this event in his mind. How could it affect him? Would it affect him one way or the other?

He paced the long room slowly. On the whole the incident seemed without meaning for him. If it meant anything at all it meant that his position was stronger than ever. The voice of the discoverer was now for ever silent. His testimony, his reluctant but convinced opinion, was upon record. Nothing could alter that. Hands might perhaps have had doubts in the future. He might have examined more keenly into the way in which he came to examine the ground where the new tomb was hidden. Yes, this was better. That danger, remote as it had been, was over.

As his eyes wandered over the rest of the news columns they became more alert, speculative, and anxious. The world was in a tumult, which grew louder and louder every hour. Thrones were rocking, dynasties trembling.

He sank down in his chair with a sigh, passing his hand wearily over his face. Who could have foreseen this? It was beyond belief. He gazed at the havoc and ruin in terrified surprise, as a child might who had lit a little fire of straw, which had grown and devoured a great city.

It was in this very room – just over there in the centre – that he had bought the brain and soul of the archæologist.

The big man had stood exactly on that spot, blanched and trembling. His miserable notes of hand and promises to pay had flamed up in this fire.

And now? India was slipping swiftly away; a bloody civil war was brewing in America; Central Europe was a smouldering torch; the whips of Africa were cracking in the ears of Englishmen; the fortunes of thousands were melting away like ice in the sun. In London gentlemen were going from their clubs to their houses at night carrying pistols and sword-sticks. North of Holborn, south of the Thames, no woman was safe after dark had fallen.

He saw his face in an oval silver glass. It fascinated him as it had never done before. He gripped the leather back of a chair and stared fiercely, hungrily, at the image. It was this, this man he was looking at, some stranger it seemed, who had done all this. He laughed – a dreadful, mirthless, hollow laugh. This mass of phosphates, carbon, and water, this moving, talking thing in a scarlet gown, was the pivot on which the world was turning!

His brain became darkened for a time, lost in an awful wonder. He could not realise or understand.

And no one knew save his partner and instrument. No one knew!

The secret seemed to be bursting and straining within him like some live, terrible creature that longed to rush into light. For weeks the haunting thought had grown and harassed him. It rang like bells in his memory. If only he could share his own dark knowledge. He wanted to take some calm, pale woman, to hold her tight and tell her all that he had done, to whisper it into her ears and watch the mask of flesh change and shrink, to see his words carve deep furrows in it, sear the eyes, burn the colour from the lips. He saw his own face was working with the mad violence of his imaginings.

He wrenched his brain back into normal grooves, as an engineer pulls over a lever. He was half-conscious of the simile as he did so.

Turning away from the mirror, he shuddered as a man who has escaped from a sudden danger.

That above all things was fatal. His luxuriant Eastern imagination had been checked and kept in subjection all his life; the force of his intellect had tamed and starved it. He knew, none better, the end, the extinction of the brain that has got beyond control. No, come what may, he must watch himself cunningly that he did not succumb. A tiny speck in the brain, and then good-bye to thought and life for ever. He was a visitor of the Lancashire Asylum – had been so once at least – and he had seen the soulless lumps of flesh the doctors called "patients." … "I am the master of my fate.I am the captain of my soul," he repeated to himself, and even as he did so, his other self sneered at the weakness which must comfort itself with a poet's rhyme and cling to an apothegm for readjustment.

He tried to shut out the world's alarm from his mental eyes and ears.

He went back to the scenes of his first triumph. They had been sweet indeed.

Yes! worth all the price he had paid and might be called upon to pay.

All over England his life's thought, his constant programme had been gloriously vindicated. They had hailed him as the prophet of Truth at first – a prophet who had cried in the wilderness for years, and who had at last come into his own.

The voices of great men and vast multitudes had come to him as incense. He was to be the leader of the new religion of common sense. Why had they doubted him before, led away by the old superstitions?

Men who had hated and feared him in the old days, had spoken against him and his doctrines as if both were abhorred and unclean, were his friends and servants now. Christians had humbled themselves to the representative of the new power. Bishops had consulted him as to the saving of the Church, and its reconstruction upon "newer, broader, more illuminated lines." They had come to him with fear – anxious, eager to confess the errors of the past, swift to flatter and suggest that, with his help, the fabric and political power of the Church might yet stand.

He was shown, with furtive eyes and hesitating lips, from which the shame had not yet been cleansed, how desirable and necessary it was that in the reconstruction of Christianity the Church should still have a prominent and influential part.

He had been a colossus among them all. But – and he thought of it with anger and the old amazement – all this had been at first, when the discovery had flashed over a startled world. While the thing was new it had been a great question, truly the greatest of all, but it had been one which affected men's minds and not their bodies. That is speaking of the world at large.

As has already been pointed out, only religious people – a vast host, but small beside the mass of Englishmen – were disturbed seriously by what had happened. The price of bread remained the same; beef was no dearer.

During these first weeks Schuabe had been all-powerful. He and his friends had lived in a constant and stupendous triumph.

But now – and in his frightful egoism he frowned at the thick black head-lines in the newspapers – the whole attitude of every one was changed. There was a reflex action, and in the noise it made Schuabe was forgotten.

Men had more to think of now. There was no time to congratulate the man who had been so splendidly right.

Consols were at 65!

Bread was rising each week. War was imminent. On all sides great mercantile houses were crashing. Each fall meant a thousand minor catastrophes all over the country.

The antichristians had no time to jeer at the Faithful; they must work and strain to save their own fortunes from the wreck.

The mob, who were swiftly bereft of the luxuries which kept them in good-humour, were turning on the antichristian party now. In their blind, selfish unreason they cried them down, saying that they were responsible for the misery and terror that lay over the world.

With an absolute lack of logic, the churches were crowded again. The most irreligious cried for the good old times. Those who had most coarsely exulted over the broken Cross now bewailed it as the most awful of calamities.

Christianity was daily being terribly avenged through the pockets and stomachs of the crowd!

It was bizarre beyond thinking, sordid in its immensity, vulgar in its mighty soulless greed, but TRUE, REAL, a FEARFUL FACT.

A stupendous confusion.

Two great currents had met in a maelstrom. The din of the disturbance beat upon the world's ear with sickening clamour.

Louder and louder, day by day.

And the man who had done all this, the brain which had called up these legions from hell, which had loosed these fiery sorrows on mankind, was in a rich room in a luxurious hotel, alone there. Again the shock and marvel took hold of the man and shook him like a reed.

There was a round table, covered with a gleaming white cloth, by the fire. The kidneys in the silver dish were cold, the grease had congealed. The silent servants had brought up a breakfast to him. He had watched their clever, automatic movements. Did they know whom they were attending on, what would happen – ?

His thoughts flashed hither and thither, now surveying a world in torture, now weaving a trivial and whimsical romance about a waiter. The frightful activity of his brain, inflamed by thoughts beyond the power of even that wonderful machine, began to have a consuming physical effect.

He felt the grey matter bubbling. Agonising pains shot from temple to temple, little knives seemed hacking at the back of his eyes. Once again, in a wave of unutterable terror, the fear of madness submerged him.

On this second occasion he was unable to recall his composure by any effort which came from within himself. He stumbled into his adjoining dressing-room and selected a bottle from a shelf. It was bromide of potassium, which he had been taking of late to deaden the clamour and vibration of his nerves.

In half an hour the drug had calmed him. His face was very pale, but set and rigid. The storm was over. He felt shattered by its violence, but in an artificial peace.

He took a cigarette.

As he was lighting it his valet entered and announced that Mr. Dawlish, his man of business, was waiting in an anteroom.