The vampire nemesis and other weird stories of the China coast (9 page)

I crossed the approach to the Broadway Bridge and turned into the gardens, walking straight toward the summer-house that stands facing the river. As I approached, the violent trembling to which my frame was growing so accustomed shook me, and I did the last few paces at a run. It seemed but the logical result of a natural law of causation that as I approached I should see Arnold Rawdon seated on the bench in the semiobscurity within. There was the usual intense yet far-away look in his eyes, as he held poised between finger and thumb the stump of a cigar that had long since gone out for lack of attention.

I say I was not surprised, for I realised with an inward groan of anguish that it was for this I had come. I appeared now to have known it all along ; it was for this I had paid off my rickshaw at the
creek and hurried to the rendezvous. My master had called me, and I had come. As my form cut off the light in the doorway his eyes focussed themselves upon me, and he gave a little gasp of relief and sat erect, a faint colour tinging the ghastly pallor of his cheeks and lips.

I ran eagerly forward with outstretched hand. " Did you want me, Rawdon ? I am come." He rose and took my hand, looking at me with those terrible eyes in which lurked so much expression, a vindictive sneer of malice curving his lips.

" Oh, yes ! " he answered quietly. " I am very glad to see you here, of course. You know I am always glad to avail myself of the benefit of your society."

I felt a fierce longing to use the hand that was so cordially shaking his to strike him down at my feet. Instead, I stood gazing at him with the servile look a spaniel bends on his master. He continued—

" I am glad, too, to see you are sober. It must be fearfully harassing to dear Mrs. Keith to see her husband straying so recklessly from the paths of moderation and virtue."

He stopped suddenly and seemed to be making an effort to concentrate his mind, while the pupils of his eyes, that had been so horribly dilated, narrowed and contracted almost to their normal size. I could see the iris drawing together as one
sees the iris of a cat contract when brought from darkness into a brilliant light.

I felt his power over me slipping away and my own will beginning, very faintly at first, to assert itself. He felt the waning of his strength, too, and strove desperately to regain the ground he was losing.

" You hound! " I cried, marvelling at my own temerity while yet the words passed my lips, "This is your doing!"

" My doing ? My dear fellow"—he was still cool and collected, and spoke with the same bitter sneer —" I quite fail to see wherein I am responsible for your erratic doings. And yet I suppose it is my fault—a fault of omission. Still," he added ironically, " one would hardly expect me to go very far out of my way to keep an ungrateful friend sober for the sake of preserving the connubial concord."

" You cursed devil!" I cried again, this time feeling more emboldened. " You know that it is your vile machinations that have forced me to drink against my will."

" My dear Keith! "—he raised his eyebrows in well-simulated astonishment—" surely you are not quite yourself. Consider; were anyone to hear you say such an absurd thing they might insinuate you were demented."

" I know! I know ! " I answered. "And if I go mad, if there is a God above us, the cause will be judged to you."

The white lips drew back from his teeth in a smile that resembled the snarl of a savage beast.

" Ah, I think I said I would make you both suffer!—and somebody was kind enough to deride the idea. We must try now what we can do with Mrs. Keith—the charming Ethel!"

At the mention of my sweet Ethel's name, I blazed out in sudden fury, and the intensity of my passion helped to throw off the last vestige of his dominating will. I advanced a step nearer him.

" Have a care, Rawdon," I said hoarsely. " You have me more or less in your viperous toils; but by the God in Heaven, if harm comes to Ethel, I will never allow myself a moment's rest so long as you are in this world, if I have to drag you down to hell in my own arms! "

I was at bay and desperate, and he cowered away from the menace in my eyes, sinking back limply on the seat. Man to man, I was vastly Arnold Rawdon's superior in physical strength, and he knew it. He knew too, as I was beginning to feel, that for the time his power was in abeyance, crushed down by the strength of my passion.

For the moment I was master of the situation, and while I still could do it I turned swiftly and made my way blindly out of the gardens, and along Broadway to my home.

I reached the house sanguine and cheerfull Surely in that struggle I had at last broken away
from the spell that had been cast over me. Already I saw my life, that had been so grimly lurid, opening out in new vistas of peace and happiness. Oh, was ever the divine gift of freewill dearer, more precious than it seemed to me at that moment, after thinking I had for ever lost it!

Looking
back, I see now with what resiliency the mind is apt to spring back to hope and buoyancy the instant the pressure is removed. Crushed though the spirit appears beneath the weight, at the first respite it is ready to leap up and fancy that because the sun is shining and the stars invisible, they do not exist.

Rawdon, I remembered with a thrill of thankfulness, had been plainly cowed by my threatening demeanour. He would not dare now to goad me further to desperation.

As day after day passed, and my will remained my own to guide my actions as I chose, I was filled with deep gratitude for my release from the talons of this fiend in human shape. Thus I soothed my soul with specious comfort, nor dreamed that my tormentor was but fostering his dissipated mental energy.

I did not gauge the black depths of Rawdon's malignant soul. I did not know how dear to the hypnotist was his power, so dear as to make him wish to exercise it at all risks. But I was to find out. My God! I was to find that in the midst of
my fancied security I was as heavily fettered at if bound with visible chains !

A few days before my editor had called me into his room and recommended me to take a brief holiday. He had noted my harassed looks, had noticed, too, the discrepancies in my work, that of late had become too glaringly frequent, and concluded that the strain of the last few weeks—we were in the middle of the Japanese war—had been too much for me.

" Take your wife down to Hong-Kong and back," he had said kindly; "we can spare you, I think, for three weeks, and you will return all the more fit and ready to do two men's share."

I had thanked him and declined. I did not want to go. In truth, I could not have gone had I wislied. But now everything was different. I told my chief that I intended to avail myself of his liberality, and would take a trip to Chefoo. He looked mildly surprised that I should choose to go North instead of South. It was still early in the year, and Chefoo would be much too cold to be pleasant. However, he acquiesced readily in my wish for a holiday, so we made all preparations, my wife and I, to go up by one of the Butterfield boats.

The day before we sailed I received a note from Rawdon. I read it through, then put it away with a smile. I was so confident in my new strength that I did not care a rap what he had to say or what he did.

" I am glad," it said, " that you propose taking a holiday at Chefoo, and hope it will be a long and enjoyable one, though I sadly fear you may find it convenient to return long before the expiration of the allotted period.—Yours very sincerely, A.
Rawdon."

Long before we reached our destination the words of the note had begun to haunt me with the ominous and now familiar presentiment of coming danger; yet at the time of its receipt I read it through and tossed it carelessly into my desk, for I could afford to smile then at his vague innuendoes.

And so we left Shanghai for Chefoo in the steamship
Hunan,
I, poor fool, cheerful at my release and confident in my newly-recovered strength ; Ethel, with quick womanly sympathy, noticing my altered looks, equally rejoiced at my obvious improvement in health.

In the wisdom of after-knowledge I wonder at myself for thinking that the reptile could so easily have allowed his power to slip from him. I see now that those vague premonitions of approaching disaster that towards the latter end of our journey assailed me, were a warning that this old man of the sea was still clinging tenaciously to my shoulders, riding me to destruction, though for the time he had apparently relinquished the curb and forborne to use the spurs. I see it all so plainly now, and it makes it all the more bitter to look back upon. There is nothing more pitifully sad than to look
back, as we rise bruised and broken, at the pit over which we have stumbled, and see how plain it was had we but looked.

It was the commencement of the foggy season. The typhoons had made way for the blistering north-east monsoon, which in turn had yielded place to the dreaded fog, and the harassed sailor could look forward, with what resignation he might, to two or three months of constant groping and creeping out of the darkness astern into the darkness ahead, with nothing but the fog whistle of the passing steamers, braying like frightened animals out there in the blackness, to assure him that earth and sea yet existed.

We had our full share of it. Off the Shantung promontory it shut down like a pall that made either end of the ship melt away and vanish; but while the captain and the officer of the watch anxiously paced the bridge, or leaned over the rails as though trying to get just a foot or two nearer and to catch the welcome shriek of the lighthouse syren, I stood on the deck below, positively glorying in the fog. It was to me as a solid wall that shut me out completely from the world and the force I had begun again to dread. We rounded the promontory guided by nothing but that weird shriek, that commenced in a gurgle and died away in a groan, and as we bore up in the direction of Eddy Island, the og continued as impenetrably dense as before. To my wayward fancy, it seemed like the hand of a
protecting Providence hiding my tracks from the ken of my malevolent pursuer.

We reached Chefoo and put up at the cosy little Beach Hotel; and here for two days life ran smoothly, and I was happy and at ease. On the third I got up early and went alone for a stroll along one of the prettiest stretches of sandy beach the China coast can boast.

It was a glorious morning; the fresh sea-breeze blew in upon me with a sense of freedom infinitely soothing to my oppressed spirit. Far out, the Kutai Islands were waging their passive war against the encroaching sea, as it boiled and seethed angrily around the rocks on their shore, in its mad endeavour to sweep in on the ships lying so snugly at anchor in the harbour.

I had intended walking right out to the wall that crests the hill beyond the bay, but soon after passing the schools I stopped in indecision, and stood looking back along the curving sweep of the yellow sands that terminated in the bold headland of Tower Hill, with its shades of green and brown, backed by the sunlit blue of the sea. And as I looked at the few ships that, anchored farther out than the others, peeped coyly round its base, I turned and, hardly aware of what I was doing, commenced to retrace my steps. Upon passing the French ViceConsulate, instead of continuing along the beach as I had come, I turned to the left, going by way of the fields to the custom house jetty in the town.

Here I paused, gazing restlessly out toward the Bluff and the open sea, until a Japanese steamer, with the " blue-peter " flying at the fore, caught my eye. A jet of steam was issuing from her forecastle head as she hove short her cable, and still blindly obeying the sudden impulse that had brought me thus far, I hastened down the steps, and, jumping into a sampan, directed the boatman to pull with all speed to the outgoing steamer.

Once on board, I had no need to ask of the astonished captain where she was going. I knew. How could she be bound for any place but Shanghai, since that resistless force had drawn me on board of her ?—drawn me as easily across these four hundred and eighty miles as if I had still been at Shanghai.

I engaged my passage on board, and tearing a leaf out of my note-book, scribbled a few hurried lines to my wife, telling her I had been recalled to town on a matter of the utmost importance, and directing her to collect our baggage and follow me down by the first steamer. I gave the note with directions to the sampan man who had brought me off; then, as the steamer began to move out from the roads, I went below to the cabin that had been hastily cleared out for my reception, overwhelmed by a shuddering terror I dare not attempt to depict.

This was the meaning of that note of his. The fiend! He was dragging me back, fight against it as I might, to the bondage I feared and loathed.
Dragging me back as surely and relentlessly as the cat, with one cruel paw, claws back the wounded mouse that is trying to crawl beyond her reach.

I sat down on the settee and cried like a little child. It was the first time I remembered to have shed tears since I entered upon boyhood, but I wept now with the feeling of utter helplessness of a child in the dark.

I believe, in the numbness of my despair, I would have flung myself over the ship's side and so have ended all. A dozen times during that short voyage, the wish formed itself in my mind and crystallised into resolution, but I dared not carry it out. It was not the constraint of fear, for who would fear a welcome visitor with freedom and rest in his gift ? I had to go to Shanghai, and go I must. Even the last grim remedy, which all Humanity holds itself free to grasp when the burdens of life have become too oppressive to be borne, was denied me.

The horror of it! That haunting conviction that I was no longer a free agent—that I could not even seek death without another's permission ! Insanity itself would have been a relief. I thought, enviously, as we swung past the Saddles, of a lunatic I had once seen, to whom the cares of the world were but shadows, who, laughing ever, lived but in the glorious present among joys of his own conjuring.

And so we turned into the Yangste, and catching
a convenient tide at Woosung, reached Shanghai that same evening. It was growing dark before we passed the bar signal station, and the red lights hoisted on the flag-staff looked to my shuddering sight like the glaring orbs of an Argus-eyed monster, gloating luridly over my recapture, as they blinked at us from astern.