The City in the Clouds. Thorne Guy
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