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The City in the Clouds
Guy Thorne
C. Ranger Gull
The City in the Clouds
TO SIR GRIFFITH BOYNTON, Bt
My Dear Boynton,
We have had some strange adventures together, though not as strange and exciting as the ones treated of in this story. At any rate, accept it as a souvenir of those gay days before the War, which now seem an age away. Recall a Christmas dinner in the Villa Sanglier by the Belgian Sea, a certain moonlit midnight in the Grand' Place of an ancient, famous city, and above all, the stir and ardors of the Masked Ball at Vieux Bruges. – Haec olim meminisse juvabit!
Yours,
C. R. G.
NOTE By Sir Thomas Kirby, Bt
The details of this prologue to the astounding occurrences which it is my privilege to chronicle, were supplied to me when my work was just completed.
It forms the starting point of the story, which travels straight onwards.
PROLOGUE
Under a gay awning of red and white which covered a portion of the famous roof-garden of the Palacete Mendoza at Rio, reclined Gideon Mendoza Morse, the richest man in Brazil, and – it was said – the third richest man in the world.
He lay in a silken hammock, smoking those little Brazilian cigarettes which are made of fragrant black tobacco and wrapped in maize leaf.
It was afternoon, the hour of the siesta. From where he lay the millionaire could look down upon his marvelous gardens, which surrounded the white palace he had built for himself, peerless in the whole of South America.
The trunks of great trees were draped with lianas bearing brilliantly-colored flowers of every hue. There were lawns edged with myrtle, mimosa, covered with the golden rain of their blossoms, immense palms, lazily waving their fans in the breeze of the afternoon, and set in the lawns were marble pools of clear water from the center of which fountains sprang. There was a continual murmur of insects and flashes of rainbow-colored light as the tiny, brilliant humming birds whirred among the flowers. Great butterflies of blue, silver, and vermilion, butterflies as large as bats, flapped languidly over the ivory ferns, and the air was spicy and scented with vanilla.
Beyond the gardens was the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, the most beautiful bay in all the world, dominated by the great sugar-loaf mountain, the Pão de Azucar, and studded with green islands.
Gideon Morse took a pair of high-powered field-glasses from a table by his side and focused them upon the harbor.
A large white yacht, lying off Governador, swam into the circle, a five-thousand-ton boat driven by turbines and oil fuel, the fastest and largest private yacht in existence.
Gideon Morse gave a little quiet, patient sigh, as if of relief.
He was a man of sixty odd, with a thick thatch of white hair which came down upon his wrinkled forehead in a peak. His face was tanned to the color of an old saddle, his nose beaked like a hawk, and his mouth was a mere lipless cut which might have been made by a knife. A strong jaw completed an impression of abnormal quiet, and long enduring strength. Indeed the whole face was a mask of immobility. Beneath heavy black brows were eyes as dark as night, clear, but without expression. No one looking at them could ever tell what were the thoughts behind. For the rest, he was a man of medium height, thick-set, wiry, and agile.
A brief sketch of Gideon Mendoza Morse's career must be given here. His mother was a Spanish lady of good family, resident in Brazil; his father an American gentleman of Old Virginia, who had settled there after the war between North and South. Morse was born a native of Brazil. His parents left him a moderate fortune which he proceeded to expand with extraordinary rapidity and success. When the last Emperor, Dom Pedro II., was deposed in 1889, Gideon Mendoza Morse was indeed a rich man, and a prominent politician.
He took a great part in establishing the Republic, though in his earlier years he had leaned towards the Monarchy, and he shared in the immense prosperity which followed the change.
His was not a paper fortune. The fluctuations of stocks and shares could hardly influence it. He owned immense coffee plantations in Para, and was practically the monopolist of the sugar regions of Maranhao, but his greatest revenues came from his immense holdings in gold, manganese, and diamond mines. He had married a Spanish lady early in his career and was now a widower with one daughter.
She came up upon the roof-garden now, a tall slip of a girl with an immense quantity of lustrous, dead-black hair, and a voice as clear as an evening bell.
"Father," she said in English – she had been at school at Eastbourne, and had no trace of Spanish accent – "what is the exact hour that we sail?"
Morse slipped out of the hammock and took her arm in his.
"At ten to-night, Juanita," he replied, patting her hand. "Are you glad, then?"
"Glad! I cannot tell you how much."
"To leave all this" – he waved his hand at what was probably the most perfect prospect earth has to offer – "to leave all this for the fogs and gloom of London?"
"I don't mind the fogs, which, by the way, are tremendously exaggerated. Of course I love Rio, father, but I long to be in London, the heart of the world, where all the nicest people are and where a girl has freedom such as she never has here."
"Freedom!" he said. "Ah!" – and was about to continue when a native Indian servant in a uniform of white linen with gold shoulder knots, advanced towards them with a salver upon which were two calling cards.
Morse took the cards. A slight gleam came into his eyes and passed, leaving his face as impassive as before.
"You must run away, darling," he said to Juanita. "I have to see some gentlemen. Are all your preparations made?"
"Everything. All the luggage has gone down to the harbor except just a couple of hand-bags which my maid has."
"Very well then, we will have an early meal and leave at dusk."
The girl flitted away. Morse gave some directions to the servant, and, shortly after, the rattle of a lift was heard from a little cupola in one corner of the roof.
Two men stepped out and came among the palms and flowers to the millionaire.
One was a thin, dried-up, elderly man with a white mustache – the Marquis da Silva; his companion, powerful, black-bearded and yellow-faced, obviously with a touch of the half-caste in him – Don Zorilla y Toro.
"Pray be seated," said Morse, with a low bow, though he did not offer to shake hands with either of them. "May I ask to what I owe the pleasure of this visit?"
"It is very simple, señor," said the marquis, "and you must have expected a visit sooner or later."
The old man, speaking in the pure Spanish of Castille, trembled a little as he sat at a round table of red lima-wood encrusted with mother-of-pearl.
"We are, in short," said the burly Zorilla, "ambassadors."
They were now all seated round the table, under the shade of a palm whose great fans clicked against each other in the evening breeze which began to blow from the cool heights of the sugar-loaf mountain. The face of Gideon Morse was inscrutable as ever. It might have been a mask of leather; but the old Spanish nobleman was obviously ill at ease, and the bulging eyes of the well-dressed half-caste, with his diamond cuff links and ring, spoke of suppressed and furious passion.
In a moment tragedy had come into this paradise.
"Yes, we are ambassadors," echoed the marquis with a certain eagerness.
"A grand and full-sounding word," said Gideon Morse. "I may be permitted to ask – from whom?"
Quick as lightning Don Zorilla held out his hand over the table, opened it, and closed it again. There was a little glint of light from his palm as he did so.
Morse leant back in his chair and smiled. Then he lit one of his pungent cigarettes.
"So! Are you playing with those toys still, gentlemen?"
The marquis flushed. "Mendoza," he said, "this is idle trifling. You must know very well – "
"I know nothing, I want to know nothing."
The marquis said two words in a low voice, and then the heads of the three men drew very close together. For two or three minutes there was a whispering like the rustle of the dry grasses of the Brazilian campos, and then Morse drew back his chair with a harsh noise.
"Enough!" he said. "You are madmen, dreamers! You come to me after all these years, to ask me to be a party in destroying the peace and prosperity our great country enjoys and has enjoyed for more than thirty years. You ask me, twice President of the Republic which I helped to make – "
Zorilla lifted his hand and the great Brazilian diamonds in his rings shot out baleful fires.
"Enough, señor," he said in a thick voice. "That is your unalterable decision?"
Morse laughed contemptuously. "While Azucar stands," he said, "I stand where I am, and nothing will change me."
"You stand where you are, Mendoza," said the marquis with a new gravity and dignity in his voice, "but I assure you it will not be for long. You have two years to run, that's true. But at the end of them be sure, oh, be very sure, that the end will come, and swiftly."
Morse rose.
"I will endeavor to put the remaining two years to good use," he said, with grim and almost contemptuous mockery.
"Do so, señor," said Zorilla, "but remember that in our forests the traveler may press onward for days and weeks, and all the time in the tree-tops, the silent jaguar is following, following, waiting – "
"I have traveled a good deal in our forests in my youth, Don Zorilla. I have even slain many jaguars."
The three men looked at each other steadily and long, then the two visitors bowed and turned to go. But, just as they were moving off towards the lift dome, Zorilla turned back and held out a card to Don Mendoza. It was an ordinary visiting card with a name engraved upon it.
Morse took it, looked at the name, and then stood still and frozen in his tracks.
He did not move until the whirr of the bell and the clang of the gate told him the roof-garden was his own again.
Then he staggered to the table like a drunken man, sank into a chair and bowed his head upon the gleaming pearl and crimson.
CHAPTER ONE
When my father died and left me his large fortune I also inherited that very successful London newspaper, the Evening Special. I decided to edit it myself.
To be six-and-twenty, to live at high pressure, to go everywhere, see everything, know everybody, and above all to have Power, this is success in life. I would not have changed my position in London for the Premiership.
On the evening of Lady Brentford's dance, I dined alone in my Piccadilly flat. There was nothing much doing in the way of politics and I had been playing golf at Sandown the whole of the day. I hadn't seen the paper until now, when Preston brought it in – the last edition – and I opened it over my coffee.
There were, and are, few things that I love better than the Evening Special. I claim for it that it is the most up-to-date evening newspaper in England, bright and readable from the word "go," and singularly accurate in all its information.
There was a long time yet before I need dress, and I sat by the balcony, with the mellow noises of Piccadilly on an early summer's evening pouring into the room, and read the rag through.
On one of the last pages, where the society gossip and women's chat appear, I saw something that interested me. Old Miss Easey, who writes the society news, was one of my most valued contributors. With her hooked nose, her beady black eyes and marvelous coffee-colored wig, she went everywhere by right of birth, for she was connected with half the peerage. Her news was accurate and real. She faked nothing, because she got all her stuff from the inside, and this was known all over London. She was well worth the thousand a year I paid her, and the daily column signed "Vera" was an accepted fact in the life of London society.
To-day the old girl had let herself go. It seemed – of course there had been paragraphs in the papers for some days – that the great Brazilian millionaire, Gideon Mendoza Morse, had exploded in society like a bomb. He had taken a whole floor of the Ritz Hotel, and it was rumored that he was going to buy an empty palace in Park Lane and astonish town. Every one was saying that he had wealth beyond the dreams of avarice – which is, of course, awful rot when you come to think of it, because there are no bounds whatever to avarice.
"Vera" was not expatiating upon the Brazil Nut's wealth, but upon his only daughter. It was put in a veiled way, and that with well-bred reticence for which we paid Miss Easey a thousand a year – no cheap gush, thank you, in the Evening Special– that Miss Morse was a young girl of such superlative loveliness that there was not a débutante to come within a mile of her. I gathered, also, that the young lady's first very public appearance was to be made to-night at the house of the Marchioness of Brentford in Belgrave Square.
The news certainly gave an additional interest to the prospect of the evening, and I wondered what the girl was really like.
I had motored up from Sandown and sat down to dinner as I was. Perhaps I was rather tired, but as I sat by the window and dusk came over the Green Park while all the lights of Piccadilly were lit, I sank into a sort of doze, assisted by the deep, organ-like hum of the everlasting traffic.
Yes, I must really have fallen asleep, for I was certainly in the middle of some wild and alluring adventure, when I woke with a start to find all the lights in my dining-room turned on, Preston standing by the door, and Pat Moore shaking me violently by the shoulder.
"Confound you, don't do that!" I shouted, jumping up – Pat Moore was six feet two in height, and the heaviest man in the Irish Guards. "Hallo, what are you doing here?"
"It's myself that has looked in for a drink," he said. "I thought we'd go to the ball together."
I was a little more awake by this time and saw that Pat was in full evening kit, and very grand he looked. He was supposed to be the handsomest man in London, on the large swaggering side, and certainly, whether in uniform or mufti, he was a very splendid figure. Nevertheless, he had no more idea of side than a spaniel dog, and he was just about as kind and faithful as the sportsman's friend. He possessed a certain downright honesty and common sense that endeared him to every one, though his own mother would hardly have called him clever. At an earlier period of our lives he had caned me a good deal at Eton, and it was difficult to get out of his dear, stupid old head that he had not some vague rights over me in that direction still.
"Now, Tom," he said, pouring himself out a mighty drink – for his head was cast-steel, "you go and make yourself look pretty and then come back here, 'cos I have something to tell you."
I went obediently away, bathed, shaved, was assisted by Preston into evening clothes and returned to the dining-room about a quarter to ten.
"What have you got to tell me, Pat?"
He thought for a moment. I believe that he always had to summon his words out of some cupboard in his brain – "Tom, I've seen the most beautiful girl in the world."
"Then leg it, Pat, hare away from temptation, or she'll have you!" – Pat had ten thousand a year and had been a dead mark for all sorts of schemes for the last two years.
"Don't be a silly ass, Tom, you don't know what you're talking about. This is serious."
"I don't know who you're talking about."
He was heaving himself out of his chair to explain, when the door opened and Preston announced "Lord Arthur Winstanley."
"Hallo, what brings you here?" I said.
"Thought I'd come in for a drink. Saw you were going to mother's to-night, Tom, thought we might as well be going together. Hallo, Pat. You coming along too?"
"Thought of doin' so," said Captain Moore.
Arthur threw himself into a chair – slim, clean shaved, with curly black hair and dark blue eyes, his clean-cut, clever face alive with youth and vitality.
"Tom," he said to me, "to-night you are going to see the most beautiful girl in the world."
"Hallo!" Pat shouted, "you've seen her too?"
"Seen her? Of course I have. Mother's giving the dance for her to-night."
Then I understood.
"Oh, Miss Morse?" I said.
"Jooaneeta!" said Pat in his rich, Irish voice.
"Generally pronounced 'Whanita' soft – like tropic moonlight, my old geranium," said Arthur.
