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Page 49
I commenced to knock out my pipe in the ash-tray; then paused,
pipe in hand. The house was quite still, for my landlady
and all the small household were out.
Above the noise of the passing tramcar I thought I had heard the hall
door open. In the ensuing silence I sat and listened.
Not a sound. Stay! I slipped my hand into the table drawer,
took out my revolver, and stood up.
There WAS a sound. Someone or something was creeping upstairs
in the dark!
Familiar with the ghastly media employed by the Chinaman, I was seized
with an impulse to leap to the door, shut and lock it. But the rustling
sound proceeded, now, from immediately outside my partially opened door.
I had not the time to close it; knowing somewhat of the horrors
at the command of Fu-Manchu, I had not the courage to open it.
My heart leaping wildly, and my eyes upon that bar of darkness with its
gruesome potentialities, I waited--waited for whatever was to come.
Perhaps twelve seconds passed in silence.
"Who's there?" I cried. "Answer, or I fire!"
"Ah! no," came a soft voice, thrillingly musical. "Put it down--
that pistol. Quick! I must speak to you."
The door was pushed open, and there entered a slim figure wrapped
in a hooded cloak. My hand fell, and I stood, stricken to silence,
looking into the beautiful dark eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu's messenger--
if her own statement could be credited, slave. On two occasions
this girl, whose association with the Doctor was one of the most
profound mysteries of the case, had risked--I cannot say what;
unnameable punishment, perhaps--to save me from death; in both cases
from a terrible death. For what was she come now?
Her lips slightly parted, she stood, holding her cloak about her,
and watching me with great passionate eyes.
"How--" I began.
But she shook her head impatiently.
"HE has a duplicate key of the house door," was her amazing statement.
"I have never betrayed a secret of my master before, but you must arrange
to replace the lock."
She came forward and rested her slim hands confidingly upon my shoulders.
"I have come again to ask you to take me away from him," she said simply.
And she lifted her face to me.
Her words struck a chord in my heart which sang with strange music,
with music so barbaric that, frankly, I blushed to find it harmony.
Have I said that she was beautiful? It can convey no faint
conception of her. With her pure, fair skin, eyes like the velvet
darkness of the East, and red lips so tremulously near to mine,
she was the most seductively lovely creature I ever had looked upon.
In that electric moment my heart went out in sympathy to every man
who had bartered honor, country, all for a woman's kiss.
"I will see that you are placed under proper protection,"
I said firmly, but my voice was not quite my own.
"It is quite absurd to talk of slavery here in England.
You are a free agent, or you could not be here now.
Dr. Fu-Manchu cannot control your actions."
"Ah!" she cried, casting back her head scornfully, and releasing a cloud
of hair, through whose softness gleamed a jeweled head-dress. "No?
He cannot? Do you know what it means to have been a slave?
Here, in your free England, do you know what it means--the razzia,
the desert journey, the whips of the drivers, the house of the dealer,
the shame. Bah!"
How beautiful she was in her indignation!
"Slavery is put down, you imagine, perhaps? You do not believe that
to-day--TO-DAY--twenty-five English sovereigns will buy a Galla girl,
who is brown, and"--whisper--"two hundred and fifty a Circassian,
who is white. No, there is no slavery! So! Then what am I?"
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