XXXVII

Rex Lander was smiling as he drove through the rain, for it seemed to him that a great trouble had passed from his mind. The solution of all his difficulties had appeared miraculously. He did not hurry, the end was sure now and the woman who had completely occupied his mind for four years, whose portraits by the hundred he had secretly treasured, whose face he had watched, to whose voice he had listened night after night, until she had become an obsession that excluded all other thoughts and fancies, was his!

He had hated his sometime friend since the day Tab had made mock of his adoration. He had loathed him when the incredible fact had been proved beyond doubting, that Tab had stolen into the girl’s heart, and had won her in his absence.

He never doubted that with his great wealth, Ursula Ardfern was his wife for the asking. He had planned his life on this supposition. Wealth! The possession of great power, the ability to bestow upon the object of his choice all that human vanity or human weakness could desire.

Tab was dead now, he thought complacently, and his confession was ashes. He regretted the impulse which had made him write. He had had no intention of doing that when he brought Tab to Mayfield, and he was rather puzzled at his own stupidity. It was a mad thing to do. Mad? He frowned. He was not mad. It was very sane to desire a woman of Ursula Ardfern’s grace and beauty. It was sane enough to want money and to go to extremes to obtain what he wanted. Throughout all the ages men had killed others that their position might be enhanced. They were not madmen. And he was not mad. He had a definite plan, and madmen do not have definite plans.

Ursula would this night consent to marry him, and would be glad, if she refused, to consider her decision. He would be her accepted lover before he left the house, and the thought took his breath away.

“Am I mad?” he asked aloud, as he parked his car in the side turning where Carver had almost found it once.

Madmen did not take such elaborate precautions. Madmen did not remember that by some mischance her servant might telephone for the police, nor carry in their pockets a weighted cord to throw over the telephone wire and bring it down. They did not even buy the cord of such and such a length, so much to bind Tab Holland, so much to break the wire and buy just sufficient for the purpose.

“I am not mad,” said Rex Lander, as he went in through the gate.

The house was in darkness; no lights glowed from the upper window where she was sleeping.

He had made a very careful reconnaissance of the house, and knew its vulnerable points. He opened the casement window of the drawing-room, and had stepped softly inside the room before, in ordinary circumstances, a servant could have answered his ring at the door.

He was in her room! Her sitting-room! It held the very charm of her presence, and he would have been content to sit here, absorbing the atmosphere which she lent to everything she touched, dreaming dreams as he had dreamt so often in the night watches at Doughty Street, at his office, when he should have been working, in the solitary walk home from the theatre, after he had been listening entranced to her wonderful voice.

He took from his pocket a large electric torch and flashed it round. On the little cottage piano was a bowl of roses; reverently he drew one out, nipped off its stalk, and threaded it tenderly in his buttonhole. Her hand had placed it there. She had taken it from the garden, kissed it perhaps⁠—he bent his head, and his lips touched the velvety petals.

The door was not locked. He was in the hall, the wide-flagged hall. In the corner was a grandfather’s clock that ticked sedately.

Her room was in the front of the house: he knew he could not miss it, but must stand on the landing in an ecstasy of anticipation. He put down his torch upon the settee, took off his coat and mechanically smoothed his hair. Then he tiptoed forward. His hand was on the knob of the door when an arm came round his neck, a lithe sinewy arm that strangled the cry which rose in his throat.

Such was the man’s strength, that he lifted his assailant bodily from the ground, and twisting, would have flung him down, but Yeh Ling’s leg gripped his, and then Rex Lander wrenched his hands free and dived for his pocket. Yeh Ling saw the gleam of the automatic.

“Sorry,” he breathed.

It seemed to Rex Lander that he felt a momentary spasm of pain in his left side.

“You!” he gurgled. He coughed deeply once, and Yeh Ling eased him down to the settee.

The Chinaman stood, his head bent forward, listening. No sound but the clac-cloc, clac-cloc from the hall below. He lifted Lander’s eyelid’s and touched the ball of the eye gently. The man was dead.

Yeh Ling pulled a blue silk handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped the perspiration from his face and eyes, replacing the handkerchief carefully. Then, bending down, he brought the limp arm of Lander about his neck, and with a jerk, lifted him to his shoulder. Slowly, painfully, he passed down the stairs with his burden. At the foot of the stairs he was compelled to lay the man down. He tried to find a chair, but without success. Sitting on the floor by the side of his victim, Yeh Ling recovered his breath, and getting up noiselessly, opened the door wide.

Black as the night was, there was sufficient light to distinguish objects faintly. He could not hoist the man again; he could only drag him across the hall. He knocked over a chair in the process, but fortunately it fell on the carpet and made no sound. Into the garden, along the paved path, out into the road.

Yeh Ling’s breath came in a thin whistle. He had to stop again to recover himself. He made another effort to lift the body and was partially successful. He staggered up the road, his knees giving way under him, but his will dominated, and when he reached a safe distance from the house, he put his burden down and went in search of Lander’s car. This he found with no trouble: it was unlikely that he should fail, for he had seen the man arrive. He started the engine and brought the car backward along the road until it was level with the Thing. Then he got down and hoisted it into the back of the car, and covering it with a coat he found, lit a cigarette, put on the lights, and drove slowly along the road toward Storford.

Half-a-mile from where his new house was situated, he turned off the lights, and covered the remainder of the distance without their assistance. Drawing his car up close to a hedge, he gathered the limp figure on his shoulder, and tramped across the muddy ground until he came to the uprights that supported the cement vats. There was a flicker of lightning on the horizon. Yeh Ling could see in that flash (even if he had not known), that no progress had been made in the construction of his Pillar of Grateful Memories: the tub-like molds stood in place, the steel core, like an attenuated tree-trunk, leaned and swayed in the gale drunkenly.

After much seeking, he found the end of a rope fastened to one of the cross pieces of the platform, and this he tied about the Thing’s waist, and went to the windlass. A growl of thunder, a more prolonged quiver and splash of blue light. Looking up, Yeh Ling saw a bundle suspended in midair, and took another turn of the wheel.

The wind was blowing fiercely, sending that limp weight at the rope’s end swaying to and fro, and Yeh Ling peered up, striving to follow its every movement. Presently came another flash and another, and yet another. The body had swung over the edge of the mould. Yeh Ling released the primitive brake, and the body dropped. From his breast pocket he took the torch that he had found on the settee and flashed a light up at the wooden mould. Yes. The Thing had disappeared.

There was a ladder against the wooden casing, and he climbed up, found another ladder inside, and descended the eight feet which intervened between the mould and the top of the hardening concrete beneath. Without loosening the rope, he dragged the body to its feet, and with quick, strong hands, lashed it to the steel core, winding the rope round and round. Presently he cut and knotted the binding, and climbed up again to the top of the woodwork, looking down in an effort to see the sagging figure. The lightning was now incessant, the thunder growing in intensity. He saw, and was satisfied. Pulling up the inside ladder, he dropped over, and in a few moments was himself back on ground level.

And now he made a search. He had to find the rope which controlled the shoot, and he discovered it at last. Pulling it gingerly, he heard the rush of the viscid concrete as it flowed down the shoot into the mould. He pulled the sluice gate wider yet, and heard the swish, swish of the flood as it gained in volume. After a while he released the rope, found a shovel, and climbed up the ladder again. The concrete had nearly reached the top of the mould. There was no sign of Rex Lander. Plying the tool, he levelled down the uneven surface of the cement, and descended for the last time.

The storm was local and passing, but if it had been the most cataclysmic disturbance of nature, Yeh Ling would not have noticed. He sat on the running-board of Lander’s car, wet to the skin, his hands raw and bleeding, every bone aching, and he smoked a cigarette and thought. So thinking, he heard the roar of an oncoming car, and ran to the cover of the hedge. It passed in a flash.

“I cannot afford to wait,” said Yeh Ling.

He got into the car and drove off, avoiding Storford village, and taking instead, a road which led by the river. Here he stopped and got off, keeping his engines running. With his hands he released the clutch and the car tumbled down the bank into the black water. Then Yeh Ling went back for his own rattling machine.

When day was breaking, Yeh Ling lay in a hot scented bath in his apartment overlooking Reed Street. His hands, free from the water, held a thin selection of Browning’s poems; he was reading “Pippa Passes”.