Yvonne Yale was in the little room which overlooked the courtyard of the Governor’s yamen. She sat on the edge of the kang, her hands clasped on her knees, her face tense and pale.
So this was the meaning of it--the meaning of that telegram which had sent her flying across Europe into the barbaric regions of Asia, that had set her down at a little wayside station, where a polite and tidy escort waited to convey her to her lover.
With no knowledge of the language, she had hesitated before accompanying them, and had stood on the platform for half an hour before she at last yielded to the agitated entreaties of the officer in charge of the escort--a man with little English, and who knew that his life depended upon his persuading the beautiful Westerner to accompany him.
Why had not Talham come himself to receive her? The officer-escort had been full of apologies and explanations in his pidgin English. Captain Talham was honourably engaged, also he had honourably hurt his foot digging and could not ride.
He had not sent her a line of welcome, which was strange, but she had come so far, and it was absurd to shrink from the thirty miles journey which she was promised.
A luxurious palanquin, borne upon mules and lined with rose silk, was a tempting conveyance. The bottom of the shaky vehicle was covered with down cushions. That novelty of the silken nest pleased her.
An impassive bystander, watching the departure of the caravan, sidled up on some pretext to where she sat and muttered under his breath “Ko’lien,” shaking his head the while.
She repeated it, “Ko’lien.”
“What does it mean?”
The officer rode by her side and chatted with her in such English as he could master.
It occurred to her, after they had gone some ten li on the road, to ask carelessly the meaning of the words which the strange Chinaman had employed.
“Ko’lien,” repeated the escort with a beaming smile. “He mean makee piecee solly.”
“Makee piecee solly,” she repeated. “So it meant ‘I am sorry for you!’ Why should he be sorry?”
Later she understood, and was sorry enough for herself.
Her destination was farther than thirty miles. They halted that night at a village where rough but reasonable accommodation was provided for her, and Hoo Sin was promised in the morning.
But it was not until the evening of the next day, after hard going, that they passed through the deserted streets of a big city, and turned into a walled courtyard and came to a halt before a handsome building.
She got out of the palanquin, stiff and aching. She was feeling depressed and untidy, and in no mood to meet the man of her choice.
They made it clear to her that she might go to her room, and for this she was grateful.
Again there was no Talham, but the commander of the escort was at pains to explain that possibly her lover would not be in till later, and that he had not expected her arrival so soon.
She was shown to the room which she now occupied, a curious little room filled with Western knick-knacks, and evidently prepared for her. She had made her hurried toilet, and was wondering exactly how she could summon the attendant, when the door opened and a Chinaman walked into the room.
She saw at once that he was of a different class to the men who had escorted her. His garments were of silk and beautifully embroidered; his face was almost aesthetic, his mien lofty and commanding.
“I hope you have everything you want,” he said in perfect English.
She gave a gasp of horror, for she recognised the voice of the man in whose power she had been before.
He smiled genially, reading her thoughts.
“Yes,” he said, smoothing the breast of his silk jacket delicately. “I am Soo T’si, whom your friends ‘bottled up.’”
There was something in that expression which had been particularly hateful to the man. His weakness lay in his vanity, perhaps, and the implied reflection upon his inability to evade the English police had rankled.
“Bottled up,” he repeated, as with relish; “and now I think I have you ‘bottled up’ also.”
“You must let me leave here at once,” she said.
“I am sorry that cannot be done,” he replied coolly. “You see, you are not in Hoo Sin. You are in Tai Pan, which is my particular stronghold, and where I hold certain rights which you would describe as feudal. I owe you an apology,” he went on, “for telegraphing to you.”
“Then it was you?” she said.
He nodded.
“I thought you would have guessed that. Hoo Sin is some distance,” he went on, “and I am afraid your lover is pursuing his warlike preparations in blissful ignorance of the fact that some forty li away the lady of his heart is a prisoner in the hands of his worst enemy.”
She made no reply.
What use was there in arguing with this man? Whatever was to happen, no word of hers could move him to pity or to compassion. She must face whatever had to be faced with all the courage which God would give her in her extremity.
Fortunately, Soo did not prolong his visit. He made a few enquiries as to whether she was comfortable, and left her, having first brought into the room a Chinese girl who was to act as her servant.
“I have decided what I shall do with you,” was his parting speech, “and you may be sure it will be something highly entertaining.”
For two long days, where every minute seemed an hour and every hour a year, she was kept prisoner in the little room under the roof of the Yamen. No indignity was offered to her. Her commands, such as did not procure greater freedom of movement, were instantly obeyed. Even her food was cooked in Western style by Soo’s own chef.
They called him Ho-Lao-Ae, “the river Mandarin,” and the name of Soo T’si seemed to be unknown to them. That he was a person of the greatest importance she realised from the fear in which his servants held him.
He had returned from Europe in time to quell a rebellion against his father, a rebellion which had brought about the death of his distinguished parent, and a multiplication of deaths amongst other parents not so distinguished, for Soo punished swiftly and terribly, and the execution ground outside the city walls ran red with blood as the executioner wielded his long, heavy sword.
On the third night of her arrival she was awakened by the Chinese maid, who signalled to her to rise. The girl would have dressed, but the servant snatched the clothes away.
“Puh p’a!” she said. (“You have nothing to fear”.)
It was a conventional assurance, and the girl attached greater significance to the phrase than it deserved.
She was allowed to put on her dressing-gown, and thrust her feet into her slippers, and she followed the beckoning finger through the door.
There was nothing to be gained by resistance as she saw, for in the corridor outside were six men of the Yamen Guard.
With terror in her heart, but with her head erect, she followed the serving-maid through what seemed innumerable corridors until she came to a door before which hung a heavy curtain of orange velvet.
She had no idea as to what was the time. Her own watch had stopped, but from the glimpse of sky she caught as she passed a window, she thought it must be nearly three o’clock in the morning.
The servant pulled aside the portière and knocked timidly on the door, and a voice bade her enter.
Yvonne followed the girl. She was in a larger room than that to which she was accustomed. It was hung around with Chinese embroideries, the floor was of polished wood, and divans, cushions, and little stools formed the only furniture in the place, save for a few carved Buddhas and a huge hanging lamp suspended from the ceiling. It was unlit, the only light in the room being a small lamp placed on the floor within reach of Soo.
He was there alone, but what caught her eye and held her was something which stood in the very centre of the apartment.
It was a huge glass bottle, ten feet in height, and modelled in the shape of a medicine bottle. That, in fact, was the design which Soo had given to his artificers to cast.
The servant left her. The door closed with a click behind the girl, and she was left alone confronting this man with his cruel, smiling lips and his sly eyes.
He was smoking a Chinese pipe and was a model of comfort and self-satisfaction.
“I have sent for you,” he said, “because you represent the last fragment of opposition offered to me in Europe, and I desire that you shall be disposed of with the ceremony which the occasion demands.”
Planted against the bottle’s neck was a light bamboo ladder; inside, dangling from the top, and secured from the outside by a ring fastened to the wall, was another ladder, a ladder of silk.
He saw her wondering eyes surveying this, and smiled.
“When I was in Europe,” he said cheerfully, “there was a phrase employed which interested me more than ordinarily. It was the phrase of ‘bottled up.’ Now, I have never seen any human being so circumstanced.”
He spoke slowly, choosing his words with great deliberation. “And I am particularly anxious that this reproach should be removed. You will mount those steps,” he pointed to the ladder, “and lower yourself gently to the bottom of the bottle. You will notice that there is a down cushion upon which you may sit, and you will probably find it most comfortable.”
“Suppose I refuse?” she said.
He smiled again.
“I think you will not refuse,”--he was very urbane, almost gentle of speech--“but if you do refuse, I will promise you that you shall be glad to have that bottle as a place of refuge.”
He uttered two words sharply. The doors at the farther end of the apartment opened and four men came in naked to the waist--great muscular coolies with scarcely any humanity in their brutalised faces.
“Suppose,” suggested Soo, “suppose, instead of putting you into the bottle and disposing of you as I shall in an especially novel fashion, I find a quicker death for you by handing you to these cattle?”
Her hands went to her face.
“No, no, no!” she shuddered.
At a nod from Soo the men departed.
“Montez!” said Soo mockingly, and she went up the creaking ladder without hesitation.
It said much for the immense size and solidity of the bottle that it did not budge under the strain of her weight. She sat for a moment on the edge of the neck with her feet dangling in the cavity where, in a bottle of ordinary dimensions, the cork would be fixed.
“Go on,” said Soo, and glanced at the door.
She lowered herself with hands that shook down the swaying rope ladder, and came to rest on a cushion below.
She was in the room, but not of it. She saw Soo speaking but did not hear his voice till quite a second later, when it had travelled over the neck of the bottle and down to her. He came across and gave a pull upon the silk ladder and withdrew it flinging it down on the ground, and kicked the bamboo steps away. He spoke again, and his servants removed the only means by which she could escape.
She had to attune her ear to her strange position, and after a while, when she had learnt to ignore the movements of his lips and wait for the words to float down to her, she knew as well as though no solid wall of glass was between them.
He was sitting cross-legged on a cushion, still smoking his pipe. By and by he knocked the pipe out on to a little porcelain tray and devoted the whole of his attention to her.
“You may wonder,” he said, “why I have awakened you at this inconvenient hour to begin a process which is to end your earthly career.”
She made no reply.
“I do not doubt,” he said, “that you expected sooner or later that your lover would learn of your unhappy plight and come hastening across China like a modern knight-errant to your rescue.”
He spread out his hands in deprecation.
“Alas,” he mocked, “your lover is not in a position to assist you, and far less is he in a position to assist himself.”
“What do you mean?” she was startled into asking, and her voice sounded strange in that confined place.
“Alas!” repeated Soo. “He sits in the house of the dead, waiting for death.”
She stared at him in horror.
He picked up another pipe and lit it from the tiny flame in the smoke-box by his side.
“He discovered the secret of the Emperor’s tomb, you will be pleased to learn, and even penetrated its interior. I watched his interesting operations for close on an hour and a half without learning much, for the Emperor’s tomb was known to me, and I might have forestalled him.”
He thought awhile.
“It was better that he should do the work,” he said, “and that I should have no more to do than to take the reward of his industry. I watched him enter, he and his Italian friend, and closed the door behind them. It was very simple, and was a matter of inductive reasoning, for the pulling on one silver lamp would open the door as the pulling on the second silver lamp would close it, since the robbers must find some way of veiling from the outside world the fact that they had been guilty of sacrilege. So it proved. Waiting there in the darkness whilst your friends were exploring the chamber below, I tested the second lamp and found that the door moved slowly. A dozen steps lay between them and liberty and life when I pulled with greater strength, and the door closed upon those inquisitive foreigners--that is all.”
Something in his tone told her that he was speaking the truth. What hope was there now? In her heart of hearts she had depended upon Talham discovering her capture. If he were dead, nothing mattered. If all this man said was true, death could not come too quickly on her.
She sat crouched at the bottom of the bottle, her hands clasping her knees, her face fixed on his.
The end must come slowly if he spoke the truth. Soo was looking above the bottle thoughtfully: his gaze was fixed. She followed the direction of his eyes. From a round hole recently cut in the ceiling suspended a thick silken rope which hung directly over the mouth and came down to within a foot of the neck.
She had seen it before, and thought that it had been placed there to afford her assistance in making her entry into the bottle, whilst the ladder was removed, and still remained.
Soo’s voice came to her soothingly.
“I see you have noticed it. That cord will give you some moments of interesting thought. Above this room is a smaller one, and in that small chamber is a large cage,” he said, “and in that cage is a python. I presume you know what a python is. It is a snake of unusual size, and, in this particular case, unusually hungry. As to the habits of the python I am not well acquainted, but I hope to discover much interesting data from a closer observance than hitherto I have been able to secure.”
He smiled.
She saw the smile almost before she had heard the last words.
“At your leisure”--he inclined his head--“you will clap your hands three times, and my servants, who will be on duty day and night, will release the reptile.”
What did he mean?
She was soon to learn.
“I do not know what are the effects such confinement as yours will have upon you,” he said, “but I rather think that after the end of twenty-four hours you may easily welcome the happy release, even though it be in so unpleasant a form.”
He sat watching her with the drowsy eyes of a man under the influence of some narcotic. The sight of her fascinated him. All that was Oriental in him, all that loved suffering for suffering’s sake, was alive to the possibilities which the situation offered. He had planned this end for her with such elaboration; and now found something wanting--something dramatic, something sudden.
Twenty-four hours was a long time, he might be sleeping when she gave the signal. She might die of fright or of exhaustion--these Western women were particularly fragile. Through the glass walls of her prison she watched the man, saw the curious look in his face, and knew instinctively that the respite he had given her he had already taken away. Something froze within her, her heart almost stopped beating as he raised his hand.
“I do not think I can afford to wait,” he said apologetically.
He did not clap, for there came a slight knock at the door through which she had entered. He turned his frowning face to the portal.
“Come in!” he said quickly in Chinese.
It might be a message from the Mandarin of Hoo Sin. It might even be an Imperial rescript. The summons was not obeyed, and then he remembered that he had dropped the bar across the entrance. He rose slowly and walked across the room and slipped the lacquered bolt aside.
The sliding doors slipped apart, and Captain Talham stepped into the room, a revolver in each hand.
