"YOUR extraordinary proposal fills me with horror, Mr. Smith!"
The sleek little man in the dress suit, who looked like a head waiter
(but was the trusted legal adviser of the house of Southery) puffed at
his cigar indignantly. Nayland Smith, whose restless pacing had led
him to the far end of the library, turned, a remote but virile figure,
and looked back to where I stood by the open hearth with the solicitor.
"I am in your hands, Mr. Henderson," he said, and advanced upon the
latter, his gray eyes ablaze. "Save for the heir, who is abroad on
foreign service, you say there is no kin of Lord Southery to consider.
The word rests with you. If I am wrong, and you agree to my proposal,
there is none whose susceptibilities will suffer--"
"My own, sir!"
"If I am right, and you prevent me from acting, you become a murderer,
Mr. Henderson."
The lawyer started, staring nervously up at Smith, who now towered over
him menacingly.
"Lord Southery was a lonely man," continued my friend. "If I could
have placed my proposition before one of his blood, I do not doubt what
my answer had been. Why do you hesitate? Why do you experience this
feeling of horror?"
Mr. Henderson stared down into the fire. His constitutionally ruddy
face was pale.
"It is entirely irregular, Mr. Smith. We have not the necessary
powers--"
Smith snapped his teeth together impatiently, snatching his watch from
his pocket and glancing at it.
"I am vested with the necessary powers. I will give you a written
order, sir."
"The proceeding savors of paganism. Such a course might be admissible
in China, in Burma--"
"Do you weigh a life against such quibbles? Do you suppose that,
granting MY irresponsibility, Dr. Petrie would countenance such a thing
if he doubted the necessity?"
Mr. Henderson looked at me with pathetic hesitance.
"There are guests in the house--mourners who attended the ceremony
to-day. They--"
"Will never know, if we are in error," interrupted Smith. "Good God!
why do you delay?"
"You wish it to be kept secret?"
"You and I, Mr. Henderson, and Dr. Petrie will go now. We require no
other witnesses. We are answerable only to our consciences."
The lawyer passed his hand across his damp brow.
"I have never in my life been called upon to come to so momentous a
decision in so short a time," he confessed. But, aided by Smith's
indomitable will, he made his decision. As its result, we three,
looking and feeling like conspirators, hurried across the park beneath
a moon whose placidity was a rebuke to the turbulent passions which
reared their strangle-growth in the garden of England. Not a breath of
wind stirred amid the leaves. The calm of perfect night soothed
everything to slumber. Yet, if Smith were right (and I did not doubt
him), the green eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu had looked upon the scene; and I
found myself marveling that its beauty had not wilted up. Even now the
dread Chinaman must be near to us.
As Mr. Henderson unlocked the ancient iron gates he turned to Nayland
Smith. His face twitched oddly.
"Witness that I do this unwillingly," he said--"most unwillingly."
"Mine be the responsibility," was the reply.
Smith's voice quivered, responsive to the nervous vitality pent up
within that lean frame. He stood motionless, listening--and I knew for
whom he listened. He peered about him to right and left--and I knew
whom he expected but dreaded to see.
Above us now the trees looked down with a solemnity different from the
aspect of the monarchs of the park, and the nearer we came to our
journey's end the more somber and lowering bent the verdant arch--or so
it seemed.
By that path, patched now with pools of moonlight, Lord Southery had
passed upon his bier, with the sun to light his going; by that path
several generations of Stradwicks had gone to their last resting-place.
To the doors of the vault the moon rays found free access. No branch,
no leaf, intervened. Mr. Henderson's face looked ghastly. The keys
which he carried rattled in his hand.
"Light the lantern," he said unsteadily.
Nayland Smith, who again had been peering suspiciously about into the
shadows, struck a match and lighted the lantern which he carried. He
turned to the solicitor.
"Be calm, Mr. Henderson," he said sternly. "It is your plain duty to
your client."
"God be my witness that I doubt it," replied Henderson, and opened the
door.
We descended the steps. The air beneath was damp and chill. It
touched us as with clammy fingers; and the sensation was not wholly
physical.
Before the narrow mansion which now sufficed Lord Southery, the great
engineer whom kings had honored, Henderson reeled and clutched at me
for support. Smith and I had looked to him for no aid in our uncanny
task, and rightly.
With averted eyes he stood over by the steps of the tomb, whilst my
friend and myself set to work. In the pursuit of my profession I had
undertaken labors as unpleasant, but never amid an environment such as
this. It seemed that generations of Stradwicks listened to each turn
of every screw.
At last it was done, and the pallid face of Lord Southery questioned
the intruding light. Nayland Smith's hand was as steady as a rigid bar
when he raised the lantern. Later, I knew, there would be a sudden
releasing of the tension of will--a reaction physical and mental--but
not until his work was finished.
That my own hand was steady I ascribed to one thing
solely--professional zeal. For, under conditions which, in the event
of failure and exposure, must have led to an unpleasant inquiry by the
British Medical Association, I was about to attempt an experiment never
before essayed by a physician of the white races.
Though I failed, though I succeeded, that it ever came before the
B.M.A., or any other council, was improbable; in the former event, all
but impossible. But the knowledge that I was about to practice
charlatanry, or what any one of my fellow-practitioners must have
designated as such, was with me. Yet so profound had my belief become
in the extraordinary being whose existence was a danger to the world
that I reveled in my immunity from official censure. I was glad that
it had fallen to my lot to take at least one step--though blindly--into
the FUTURE of medical science.
So far as my skill bore me, Lord Southery was dead. Unhesitatingly, I
would have given a death certificate, save for two considerations. The
first, although his latest scheme ran contrary from the interests of
Dr. Fu-Manchu, his genius, diverted into other channels, would serve
the yellow group better than his death. The second, I had seen the boy
Aziz raised from a state as like death as this.
From the phial of amber-hued liquid which I had with me, I charged the
needle syringe. I made the injection, and waited.
"If he is really dead!" whispered Smith. "It seems incredible that he
can have survived for three days without food. Yet I have known a
fakir to go for a week."
Mr. Henderson groaned.
Watch in hand, I stood observing the gray face.
A second passed; another; a third. In the fourth the miracle began.
Over the seemingly cold clay crept the hue of pulsing life. It came in
waves--in waves which corresponded with the throbbing of the awakened
heart; which swept fuller and stronger; which filled and quickened the
chilled body.
As we rapidly freed the living man from the trappings of the dead one,
Southery, uttering a stifled scream, sat up, looked about him with
half-glazed eyes, and fell back. "My God!" cried Smith.
"It is all right," I said, and had time to note how my voice had
assumed a professional tone. "A little brandy from my flask is all
that is necessary now."
"You have two patients, Doctor," rapped my friend.
Mr. Henderson had fallen in a swoon to the floor of the vault.
"Quiet," whispered Smith; "HE is here."
He extinguished the light.
I supported Lord Southery. "What has happened?" he kept moaning.
"Where am I? Oh, God! what has happened?"
I strove to reassure him in a whisper, and placed my traveling coat
about him. The door at the top of the mausoleum steps we had reclosed
but not relocked. Now, as I upheld the man whom literally we had
rescued from the grave, I heard the door reopen. To aid Henderson I
could make no move. Smith was breathing hard beside me. I dared not
think what was about to happen, nor what its effects might be upon Lord
Southery in his exhausted condition.
Through the Memphian dark of the tomb cut a spear of light, touching
the last stone of the stairway.
A guttural voice spoke some words rapidly, and I knew that Dr.
Fu-Manchu stood at the head of the stairs. Although I could not see my
friend, I became aware that Nayland Smith had his revolver in his hand,
and I reached into my pocket for mine.
At last the cunning Chinaman was about to fall into a trap. It would
require all his genius, I thought, to save him to-night. Unless his
suspicions were aroused by the unlocked door, his capture was imminent.
Someone was descending the steps.
In my right hand I held my revolver, and with my left arm about Lord
Southery, I waited through ten such seconds of suspense as I have
rarely known.
The spear of light plunged into the well of darkness again.
Lord Southery, Smith and myself were hidden by the angle of the wall;
but full upon the purplish face of Mr. Henderson the beam shone. In
some way it penetrated to the murk in his mind; and he awakened from
his swoon with a hoarse cry, struggled to his feet, and stood looking
up the stair in a sort of frozen horror.
Smith was past him at a bound. Something flashed towards him as the
light was extinguished. I saw him duck, and heard the knife ring upon
the floor.
I managed to move sufficiently to see at the top, as I fired up the
stairs, the yellow face of Dr. Fu-Manchu, to see the gleaming,
chatoyant eyes, greenly terrible, as they sought to pierce the gloom.
A flying figure was racing up, three steps at a time (that of a brown
man scantily clad). He stumbled and fell, by which I knew that he was
hit; but went on again, Smith hard on his heels.
"Mr. Henderson!" I cried, "relight the lantern and take charge of Lord
Southery. Here is my flask on the floor. I rely upon you."
Smith's revolver spoke again as I went bounding up the stair. Black
against the square of moonlight I saw him stagger, I saw him fall. As
he fell, for the third time, I heard the crack of his revolver.
Instantly I was at his side. Somewhere along the black aisle beneath
the trees receding footsteps pattered.
"Are you hurt, Smith?" I cried anxiously.
He got upon his feet.
"He has a dacoit with him," he replied, and showed me the long curved
knife which he held in his hand, a full inch of the blade bloodstained.
"A near thing for me, Petrie."
I heard the whir of a restarted motor.
"We have lost him," said Smith.
"But we have saved Lord Southery," I said. "Fu-Manchu will credit us
with a skill as great as his own."
"We must get to the car," Smith muttered, "and try to overtake them.
Ugh! my left arm is useless."
"It would be mere waste of time to attempt to overtake them," I argued,
"for we have no idea in which direction they will proceed."
"I have a very good idea," snapped Smith. "Stradwick Hall is less than
ten miles from the coast. There is only one practicable means of
conveying an unconscious man secretly from here to London."
"You think he meant to take him from here to London?"
"Prior to shipping him to China; I think so. His clearing-house is
probably on the Thames."
"A boat?"
"A yacht, presumably, is lying off the coast in readiness. Fu-Manchu
may even have designed to ship him direct to China."
Lord Southery, a bizarre figure, my traveling coat wrapped about him,
and supported by his solicitor, who was almost as pale as himself,
emerged from the vault into the moonlight.
"This is a triumph for you, Smith," I said.
The throb of Fu-Manchu's car died into faintness and was lost in the
night's silence.
"Only half a triumph," he replied. "But we still have another
chance--the raid on his house. When will the word come from Karamaneh?"
Southery spoke in a weak voice.
"Gentlemen," he said, "it seems I am raised from the dead."
It was the weirdest moment of the night wherein we heard that newly
buried man speak from the mold of his tomb.
"Yes," replied Smith slowly, "and spared from the fate of Heaven alone
knows how many men of genius. The yellow society lacks a Southery, but
that Dr. Fu-Manchu was in Germany three years ago I have reason to
believe; so that, even without visiting the grave of your great
Teutonic rival, who suddenly died at about that time, I venture to
predict that they have a Von Homber. And the futurist group in China
knows how to MAKE men work!"