Ainslee's Magazine, February 1913 — page 159: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE BEAST still gaping, as I had left them a mo- ment ago downstairs, at the final touches to the decorations of the ball- room. I stopped as I passed what I thought was Mawlyn’s door to listen, and, find- ing it again, to my surprise, ajar, and the light out, stood straining my ears on the threshold to make sure he was asleep. If he was not, I intended again to enter and be, if possible, of some service to him. I kept motionless, lis- tening—no sound—then my ears were startled by a faint click within the room, That unmistakable dry click of the cocking of a revolver. Instantly Mrs. Mawlyn flashed across my mind, for I fully believed that beast of a wife of his capable of shooting him in his sleep, and charging him with suicide. Even that—to obtain her freedom from an in- valid, and, as a natural sequence, marry Cyril Reeves. I hesitated no longer. I stepped across the threshold in the dark, deter- mined to thrust my presence in, as a block, if possible, to a crime. Vainly I groped for the electric-light button by his bedside I had just turned on and off a few moments ago. It was not there. Was I in the wrong room? Three steps more in the dark ran me against the corner of a wall and a heavy cur- tain. Instinctively I reached out, con- fused in the dark, and parted the portiere. There, not ten paces beyond me, in the light from the half-open door of a cabinet de toilette, stood the figure of a man in a gray bath robe, with his back to me, bending over a_ green leather jewel case, open upon a wom- an’s dressing table. So amazed and engrossed was I in watching him, that it did not even then occur to me that I was in the Countess of Baylesford’s bedroom. I saw him empty the contents of two flat drawers and lift out from beneath them a long, glittering string of diamonds, which he slipped into the pocket of his bath robe. The figure turned. To my stupefaction, it was Mawlyn! Before I had time to speak or move, 149 I heard the door I had entered closed at my back—I wheeled, and in that brief second I recognized before me, half crouching in the half light—silent, devilish, and terrible—Cyril Reeves. The next instant he dealt me a blow with his fist that sent me reeling to my knees—his hands closed on my throat, and he had me down. “Finish him,” said Mawlyn coolly, standing by and surveying us. In my frenzy to free myself from the strangling grip of my assailant, I managed for a second to part his hands from my throat, and shouted with all my might. Shouted for my life. He was upon me again like a flash—silent— skillful, terrible. Again, for a moment, I felt I had the advantage of him. I had freed my throat again, and gotten a breaking leverage upon his left arm. Then Mawlyn knocked me on the head with the butt of his revolver. The floor seemed to open beneath me, black and fathomless, and I knew no more, save the sensation of dropping, drop- ping, dropping. When I awoke the colonel and the archduke were by my bedside, and the proprietor and a physician were just leaving. “He'll be all right by to-morrow,” I heard the physician say. - The door opened, and Miss Munt en- tered, closed it, and, at a sign from the archduke, slipped the inside bolt to further intruders. But for a sense of weakness and a dull ache at the back of my neck, I was none the worse. I was the first to speak, for, despite what had happened, I was, I confess, bewildered at their total change of manner. The colonel held up his hand. “You have had enough, my friend,” he said, in an even, businesslike voice. “We'll do the talking.” The drawl in his English accent had vanished as completely as the broken English of the archduke, who added, laying his big hands on his knees: “We have no intention of tiring you. There are some details, however, which we wish to make clear.” (C@ DOOLK (C@