Читать книгу The Gilded Man - Smyth Clifford - Страница 8

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“Leave him with me,” said Leighton. “Wait for us with Mrs. Quayle.”

“No! No!” answered the girl passionately, kneeling beside David, who was lying on the couch. “You have killed him!”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said coldly, yet with sympathy in his keen gray eyes. “This had to be, and I took my own way about it. Now, go. He is all right. He is safe with me.”

David drew a long breath. He looked vacantly at Leighton, then turned to Una.

“Do as he says,” he whispered.

“David, I will stay with you.”

“Not now; I must speak to your uncle.”

“David!”

She looked into his eyes, trying to read there the mystery that was parting them.

“It will be better for all of us,” said Leighton gruffly.

Unable to hide her fears, Una rose and moved away from them. The boards of the well worn floor creaked harshly as she walked to the far end of the room. Pausing at the door, she looked back.

“I will wait for you,” she said.

When the sound of her footsteps died away, David turned to the old man, who was busied with his scientific apparatus.

“Well, how do you feel?” asked Leighton, gathering up the notes which were strewn on the little table.

“Curiously here,” replied David, drawing his hand across his forehead. Then he asked: “How did you know?”

“That’s easily answered. About two years ago I read, in the Journal of Psychology, a paper by your friend, Raoul Arthur, describing the strange mental effect produced on a young man by a dynamite explosion in a South American mine. Arthur is something of an authority in abnormal psychology, and his report of the accident interested me. The name of the young man was not given. I made inquiries long before our chance meeting with you in England. I learned, among other things, who the young man was. Before we met on the Derwentwater, I had watched you at the hotel.”

“You wrote to Raoul Arthur?”

“I did not,” he answered drily. “A newspaper account of the accident gave me the clue I needed. According to this account, you were killed in the mine explosion, and no trace of your body or clothing was found. It was long afterwards, in Arthur’s report, that your reappearance, under peculiar circumstances, was described. Since then I have learned of your travels. But I have noticed that you always avoid any reference to your South American experiences. So, I appealed to the psychometer.”

Leighton, absorbed in his notes, was apparently unaware of the eagerness with which David followed his explanation.

“It’s all very simple,” mused the young man. “And yet, it seemed like necromancy.”

“Science is not necromancy.”

“But the report,” urged David; “I didn’t know Raoul had written a report.”

“You know he is a psychologist, a hypnotist?”

“Yes,” was the answer, with something of a shudder. “But—why all this elaborate experiment of yours?”

“To prove a theory—and to be certain about you.”

“Why?”

“What a question! You expect to marry Una. Before your marriage takes place—if it does take place—I wish to clear up whatever mystery there is hanging over your past.”

“And your experiment has shown you——?” David asked in a low voice.

“It confirms the theories of Tarchanoff and Jung,” he replied pedantically. “It proves the intimate connection existing between mental and physical phenomena. The personal result is still incomplete. On that side I must know more.”

“I will tell you what I can,” said David resolutely. “But first—what has Raoul written about me?”

“Merely a reference. Read it after you have told me your story. Our experiment is still unfinished, you know.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the very thing you want to know. The series of words in your test seemed to revive some forgotten nightmare; and the horror of it was that this nightmare kept just beyond my reach—as it always does—its riddle unsolved. This, with your strange knowledge of what had happened, surprised me into this ridiculous weakness.”

“So I thought,” said Leighton. “Now, what do you remember?”

“I’ll have to go back a little. But—you probably know it all, you know so much of my history.”

“Never mind. I want you to prove the truth of what I know.”

David looked at Leighton doubtfully.

“Very well,” he said, “I’ll do what I can.”

Much of his story, as he told it, was decidedly vague. In the main outline, however, it was simple enough, although ending in a mystery that he was unable to clear up.

Three years ago, it seems, David went to work on a project based on a legend belonging to prehistoric America. Traditions of the immense wealth and the civilization found in certain parts of South America by the Spanish conquerors had always fascinated him. And of all these traditions the one telling of El Dorado, the Gilded Man, interested him most.

From the early South American chronicles he learned that, within a few years of Pizarro’s discovery of Peru, three other explorers, starting independently from points on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, after months of perilous adventure, reached a great tableland in the Upper Andes, where Bogota, the capital of Colombia, now stands. It was “El Dorado” who drew these explorers thither. From the Indians on the coast they had heard stories of the great Man of Gold, who lived among the mountains of the interior and who possessed treasure so vast that all the wealth of the rest of the world could not equal it. Arrived in this mysterious region, they found, not El Dorado, but a superior race of people, somewhat like the ancient Peruvians, showing, in the barbaric splendor of their temples and palaces, every evidence of wealth and culture. These people, however, known as the Chibchas from their worship of the god Chibchacum, were suspicious of the Spaniards. A war of conquest followed, in which thousands of the natives were massacred and their finest temples and monuments destroyed. Sajipa, the Chibcha king, was subjected to the cruelest torture by his conquerors in their effort to find out from him where he had hidden his treasure. But he proved hero enough to suffer martyrdom rather than reveal the secret. For this he was put to death, and the Spaniards contented themselves with the trivial amount of gold and emeralds extorted from his subjects. They then established themselves in colonies on the Plains of Bogota. The climate was delightful, the land fertile and, as they soon discovered, rich in minerals. From the few surviving Indians they learned some of the native legends. In one of these, the legend of El Dorado, they believed they had the clew to the treasure they had been seeking. This legend was mixed up with the ancient mythology of the Chibchas, and had played a leading part in their religious ceremonial for centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards. It was as follows:

On the edge of the Bogota tableland, not many miles from the city that is to-day the capital of Colombia, there is a lake, Guatavita—the Sacred Lake of the Chibchas. Geologically, it is a pocket formed by a cluster of spurs near the foot of a conical mountain. It is small, circular in shape, and reaches a central depth of 214 feet. Beneath this lake, according to tradition, lived the national god, Chibchacum. To keep on the right side of this god, to make atonement for the people, a semi-annual feast was observed—the Feast of El Dorado.

Twice a year the king of the Chibchas, in celebrating this Feast, was floated on a raft to the center of the Sacred Lake. He was then stripped of his royal robes, his body anointed with oil and covered with gold dust. Glittering in the sunlight this Gilded Man stood at the edge of the royal raft and was saluted by his subjects, who encircled the shores of the lake, each one bearing an offering of gold and emeralds. Then, as if dazzled by the splendor of their monarch, the people reverently turned their faces away from him and, at a signal from the priests, threw their treasures over their heads into the lake, while the Gilded Man, followed by the heaps of precious stones and metals which were with him on the raft, plunged into its waters. No god ever received such a shower of wealth at his shrine as was thus lavished twice a year, for centuries, on the god Chibchacum. All this wealth, except an insignificant sum that the Spaniards rescued, is to-day, according to the legend, at the bottom of Guatavita.

Besides this semi-annual tribute, it was rumored that at the time of Sajipa’s murder the entire remaining treasure of the Chibchas had been thrown into the lake, not as a votive offering, but as a means of hiding it from the Spaniards. It took fifty men, so runs tradition, to carry the gold dust to Guatavita from the king’s treasury alone. All the minor chieftains of the kingdom made a similar sacrifice of their possessions on this occasion.

Years afterwards, the Spaniards, stirred by these stories, attempted to drain the lake. This meant the piercing of earth and rock walls nearly nine hundred feet thick and proved too great an undertaking for the engineering machinery that they had in those days. But before they gave up the work they succeeded in lowering the level of the lake sufficiently to recover a certain amount of treasure. Since that time the secret of Guatavita has remained undisturbed. To solve it David went to Bogota. Raoul Arthur, who had done most of the practical planning for the expedition, went with him.

The motives of the two men engaged in the enterprise were not exactly similar. David, according to what he told Leighton, hoped to solve an archæological riddle and to study a hitherto lost people whose prehistoric civilization equaled that of their neighbors, the Incas of Peru. Arthur, on the contrary, whose fortune was still to be made, regarded it frankly as a mining scheme that promised fabulous returns in money, with a comparatively small amount of risk and labor. The two points of view were not antagonistic, and for a time the friends worked amicably enough together. In Bogota they easily secured from the government the necessary permit to drain Guatavita. But the attractions of the Colombian capital, the hospitality with which they were received, delayed the actual working out of their plans. Fascinated by the romance of this picturesque city and charmed by the unique race of mountaineers inhabiting it, David postponed the prosaic task of mining, while Raoul became absorbed in studies relating to their proposed venture, meeting people with whom his companion seldom came in contact. Lake Guatavita and its secret was thus, for a time, forgotten—at least by David.

When the social gayeties of the capital were exhausted, he took up in earnest the work he had planned to do. He bought a full equipment of the best mining machinery and hired a large number of laborers. But the enterprise proved more difficult than he expected. The Spaniards, who had worked at the problem three centuries before, were bound to fail on account of their lack of engineering machinery. To empty Lake Guatavita, they tried to cut through the mountain which formed one of the containing walls of that body of water. Under the circumstances their partial success was amazing. The V-shaped gash they cut through the mountain is a proof of their industry, even if it failed of its full purpose. But it did lower the level of the lake—although this result was followed by an unforeseen catastrophe. The sudden release of the water through the channel opened for it left the precipitous shores of the lake unsupported. These shores then caved in, covering whatever treasure there might be in the center of the basin with masses of rock and earth, and thus placing a new obstacle in the way of the future miner.

David and Raoul took the problem from a different angle. They abandoned the old cuttings of the Spaniards and planned a tunnel through the thinnest part of the mountain to the bottom of the lake. In this way they hoped to control the outflow of water, after which, they calculated, the recovery of the treasure would be a mere matter of placer mining. To do this they had boring machines and dynamite—modern giants, of whose existence the old Spaniards never dreamed.

As a first test of the existence of treasure in the lake, native divers explored some of the shallow places near the shore. A few ancient gold images were thus secured, enough to corroborate the legend regarding Guatavita. These images were curiously carved. One represented a small human figure seated in a sort of sedan chair. Another was a heart-shaped breastplate upon which were embossed human faces and various emblems. Others were statuettes, rude likenesses, probably, of those who threw them into the lake as votive offerings.

These gold tokens spurred on the miners. Work on the tunnel was rushed, and a subterranean passage, several hundred feet in length, directed to a point just below the bottom of the lake, was soon completed. Then a peculiarly hard rock formation was reached that the boring machines could not pierce. To overcome it, dynamite was used.

“Since dynamite was one of the final words in your test,” said David, in telling his story to Leighton, “you know that its use in our venture brings the climax of my mining experience. How to explain this climax to you—or to myself—is beyond me.

“When we decided to use dynamite in our excavations, a long fuse was laid from the tunnel’s entrance to the unyielding wall at the other end. There this fuse was connected with a dynamite charge placed in the crevice of the rock to be destroyed. Raoul, waiting to set off the fuse, remained at the opening of the tunnel. I was at the further end, looking after the laying of the dynamite. As I started for the entrance, I was a little behind the others. The latter no sooner gained the outer air than a muffled roar shook the tunnel. The ground swayed, the terrific concussion of air seemed to rend my very brain, and I fell unconscious.”

David’s story came abruptly to an end. Pale and listless, wearied by the effort to give a coherent account of his experiences, he looked hopelessly at Leighton.

“Well,” said the latter, “what then?”

“If I could only tell you!”

“Surely, you remember something—there is some clew——”

“Nothing! Just—darkness.”

“Some faint flashes here and there—glimpses of people, scenes, a house, a street—the sound of voices, a word——?”

“Nothing!”

“Try to remember.”

“No use. I’ve tried it too often. It’s all a blank. I thought, for an instant, that in your psychometer test the veil would be lifted. Instead—as you know—I went to pieces.”

“Very well,” said Leighton reassuringly, “let us go back to your story. You were in the tunnel when the dynamite went off. You were thrown to the ground; you lost consciousness. What is the next step in memory?”

“Wait,” said David slowly. “The explosion was on the ninth of May. The date was indelibly fixed in my mind; I have verified it since. When I recovered consciousness——”

“You mean, your normal consciousness,” interjected Leighton.

“Very well. When I came to myself, then, it was on the morning of the fifth of August.”

“Nearly three months afterwards,” ruminated the old man. “You found yourself——?”

“Seated in a chair, in a room in a strange house in Bogota.”

“Alone?”

“Raoul Arthur was with me. He was bending over me, his eyes fixed on mine, making passes with his hand before my face.”

“You were in a hypnotic trance.”

“I was coming out of one apparently.”

“It would be hard to define your condition. Of course, after the explosion you had been picked up and carried to this house in Bogota, where you had remained, suffering from a severe nervous shock—perhaps concussion of the brain—for three months.”

“I had been in that house scarcely an hour before my memory was suddenly revived.”

“How do you know that?” demanded Leighton sharply.

“The rainy season was on in August in Bogota. I found myself in my riding dress. My rubber poncho, dripping with rain, was on the floor. My boots, the spurs still attached to the heels, were caked with mud.”

“And Arthur told you——?”

“At first, I was bewildered, as one is when suddenly aroused from a long sleep. With full return of consciousness, I asked Raoul how I came to be there. He said he didn’t know.”

“He must have given some explanation.”

“Very little. What he said mystified me more than ever. He declared that a short time before a messenger had come saying that I was in the house, waiting for him.”

“Whose house was it?”

“Raoul’s. He had rented it two months before and was living in it alone with two servants who were running it for him.”

“And this messenger——?”

“An Indian, whom neither of us saw or heard of again, although we inquired high and low.”

“The servants must have had information to give?”

“On being questioned they said I had arrived that morning on horseback, with an Indian, who left me there. This Indian was probably the messenger who informed Raoul of my arrival, and who afterwards disappeared. My horse was tethered in the courtyard.”

“The clews seem to have been pretty well obliterated,” remarked Leighton sarcastically. “But Arthur must have been able to shed some light on the affair.”

“He said that when he found me, I did not recognize him and was in a sort of dazed mental state. Then he tried hypnotism. He had often hypnotized me before that, and was thus familiar with my condition while in a trance. Well, as soon as he saw me, after my long disappearance, he declared that I showed every symptom of hypnotic trance. So, he at once tried the usual method for bringing me back to a normal condition—and with complete success.”

“In his report Arthur emphasizes that as the singular feature of the case. His account, so far as it goes, agrees with yours. It gives the facts of the explosion, how you were supposed to be killed, how you disappeared for three months, and how, when you were found, you were in a trance from which he awakened you.”

“Does he say that, on coming out of the trance, I could remember nothing that happened during those three months?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s the whole case. You know all that I do about it.”

“All that Raoul Arthur knows?”

“All that he says he knows.”

“Ah, then you have your doubts?”

“Just a suspicion. I have a feeling that he could tell more about my disappearance than he chose to tell.”

“Why did you leave him?”

“I left Bogota the day after I came out of the trance. My distrust of Raoul and the horror that I felt for everything connected with my mysterious experience, made my stay there more than I could stand. But we parted friends, and I’ve sent him money to go on with the excavations. How he’s getting on I can’t tell you. I’ve lost my interest in El Dorado. I won’t visit Bogota again.”

For some minutes Leighton paced up and down the shadowy room. Then he stopped, with the air of one who has reached a decision.

“Our course is plain,” he announced.

“I’ve tried everything; there’s nothing to be done,” said the other hopelessly.

“David, you’ve missed the obvious thing,” was the emphatic reply. “We must go to Bogota.”

“Go to Bogota!”

“You and I will face Arthur together. If he knows anything more about this matter, he’s bound to tell us. If he doesn’t know—if your suspicions are groundless—we’ll solve the mystery of those three months some other way. And perhaps we’ll stumble upon your Gilded Man at the same time,” he added with a chuckle.

“And Una——?”

“She has a way of deciding things for herself. For all I know she may want to go with us.”

“Would you consent?”

“There’s no reason against it. In a ghost hunt a woman’s wit may help.”

“Very well, then,” said David, new energy in his words and manner.

“You agree?”

“I am entirely in your hands.”

“Then we’ll take up our interesting little experiment again in the land of El Dorado—and this time we’ll run it out to the end.”

“Without a psychometer, I hope,” said David.