She was silent for a moment. Those slim curves enclosed by my arms taunted me. One nervous, slender hand stole up and rested on my shoulder.
“I am not mocking you. You frighten me. I don’t understand. I am very, very sorry for you. I want to save you from danger. But there is some great mistake. You ran after me across Hydie Park tonight, and now, you are here. You tell me”—her voice faltered— “that you love me. How can that be?”
Her fingers were clutching my shoulder, and I knew, although I kept my head averted, that she was looking up; I knew, too, and wondered if war had driven the whole world mad, that there were tears in her eyes.
“It has always been, since the first moment I saw you. It will always be—always, Ardatha. Now lead me to Smith—I shall not let you go until we find him.”
But she clung to me, resisting.
“No, no! Wait—let me try to understand. You say, since the first moment you saw me. The first moment I saw you was tonight, when you cried out to me—cried my name—in the Park!”
“Ardatha!”
“Yes—you cried out ‘Ardatha’. I looked back, and I saw you. Perhaps I liked you and wished that I knew you. But I did not know you, and your eyes were glaring madly. So I ran. Now—“
I suppose, for the whole situation was illusory, dream-line, that my grasp had changed to a caress; I had stooped to kiss her, liar, hypocrite though she might be. I know that her voice, as she trembled in my arms, had thrust out everything else in the world except my blind hopeless love.
“No! you dare not!” She dashed her hand against my lips; I kissed her palm, her fingers. “Do you think I am a courtesan? I don’t even know your name!”
I stood suddenly still, but I did not release her.
“Ardatha,” I said, “has Dr. Fu Manchu ordered you to torture me?” At those words I felt a quiver pass through her body. She inhaled a sobbing breath, and was silent. “I loved you—I shall love you always—and you ran away. You sent me no message, no word, even to tell me that you were alive. Now, when I find you, you say that you don’t know my name . . . . Ardatha!”
She crushed her head against me and burst into passionate tears.
“I want to believe!” she sobbed; “I want to believe; I cannot understand; but I have no one in all the world to turn to! If it were true, if in some way, I had forgotten, if you were really—”
And as I held her, tenderly now, certain words of Nayland Smith’s were singing in my brain: “Don’t despair . . . Dr. Fu Manchu once had a daughter.’9 The significance of the words was not yet clear to me, but I found in them, gladly, something to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable.
“Ardatha, my dearest, you must believe. How could I know your name—or worship you as I do—if we had never been lovers? You have forgotten—God knows why or how—and it is true.”
She made a perceptible effort to control herself, and when she spoke, although her voice was unsteady it had regained its natural timbre.
“I am trying to believe you—although to do so means that I must have had a mental breakdown and forgotten that, too. You asked me where Nayland Smith had gone. He ran to the garage: it is straight along this path. I cannot tell you where Dr. Fu Manchu is: I do not know. But unless you let me go I shall die—“
“Die! why should you die?”
“Next time we meet I will try to tell you.” She pressed her face against my shoulder. “But if I am to believe you, then you must believe me. See ~ I trust you. I took it a long time ago from your pocket—“
And she handed me my Colt!
I released Ardatha and stood there, the automatic in my hand, trying to adjust my ideas to a new scheme of things, when from far away up near the house came Barton’s great voice: “Kerrigan! Where are you? Give me a hail.”
I turned and shouted: “This way. Barton.”
But, as I swung about again—Ardatha had vanished! Her cloak I held over my arm, the Colt was still grasped in my hand. I dropped it back in my pocket, snatched out the torch and flashed a ray ahead.
Nothing moved, and I could hear no footstep. Water was dripping mournfully from the roof of a glass-house, and a long way off I detected insistent hooting of a motor horn.
The raid squad was coming.
Why was Nayland Smith silent? There was something ominous about it. I have said, and I confess it again, that at first sight of Ardatha every other idea in my mind had been swept out; and whilst I had stood there (my heart was still pounding madly) it was quite possible—
“Have you found Smith?” Barton cried. “Show a light. I’ve caught something, and—“
I turned back and threw a moving fan of light on the path which led to the house. As I did so, an overpowering smell of hawthorn swept down upon me as if borne on a sudden breeze. Too late, a decimal of a second too late, I ducked and half turned.
My head was enveloped in what felt like a moist rubber bag . . . I experienced a sensation of sinking, not swiftly, but as if floating gently downward, into deep clouds of hawthorn blossom.
CHAPTER VI
DR. FU MANCHU EXPERIMENTS
I seemed to break through some brittle surface into a plane of violet light—and silence. There was a rapidly receding background, a memory of wild action, of the drip of moisture, of a noisome tunnel and moving water. Here, all was still; nothing was visible in that luminous expanse. Then, a long way off, I heard the voice ofDr. Fu Manchu.
“A member of my family, a mandarin of my rank, is bound by codes stronger than bands of steel. For myself I ask nothing. I hold the key which unlocks the heart of the secret East; holding that key, I command the obedience of an army greater than any ever controlled by one man . . . . ”
This must be delirium; for no living thing was in sight: I. was alone in a violet void.
“My power rests in the East, but my hand is stretched out to the West. I shall restore the lost grandeur of China. When your civilization, as you are pleased to term it, has exterminated itself, when you have reduced to ashes your palaces and your temples, when in your blindness you have set back the clock which so laboriously you fashioned, I shall stir. Out of the fire I shall arise. The red dusk of the West will have fallen, the golden dawn of the East will come—“
The voice faded, and at the same time that mysterious radiance also grew dim, as though it had been a mirage created by the voice or the aura of the speaker.
I was lying, in a constrained position, upon a cushioned settee which had a metal base, in a long, narrow, low-ceilinged room which possessed no visible windows. It was lighted by hanging lamps and permeated, by a carnal smelclass="underline" I thought of the Morgue. That half of the room which contained the settee or couch was unfurnished except for a tall glass-fronted cabinet. In this cabinet, preserved in jars, were all kinds of anatomical specimens; a collection so gruesome that I doubted the verity of this phase, too.
There were several human hands, black, yellow, and white; there was a brown forearm; there were internal organs which I need not describe: and, half covered by a sheet of gauze, a decapitated Negro head grinned from the largest jar.
The lower half of the room was a small but well equipped laboratory where some experiment was actually in progress. An apparatus resembling a Bunsen burner, but dissimilar in some way which my indifferent knowledge of chemistry did not enable me to define, hissed below a retort fitted with a condenser.
One glance I took at the object in process of distillation, and looked elsewhere. I grew nauseated and closed my eyes for a moment. But I had seen something which might have accounted for the violet mirage.