BRITISH MYSTERIES - Fergus Hume Collection: 21 Thriller Novels in One Volume. Fergus Hume

      “They have already tried to do so,” retorted Xuarez, triumphantly. “When they left the harbour, I suppose they discovered you were left behind. The boat returned; but a few shot from the forts, and the war-ships made her retreat, and when I last saw her she was steaming full speed for Tlatonac.”

      “Yes? I knew as much. To bring back an army to level Acauhtzin to the ground. To capture you! to rescue me!”

      “No one can rescue you!” replied Xuarez, in a sombre tone. “Your only chance of escape is to give up Doña Dolores!”

      “To you! to you!” cried Jack, fiercely. “You who love her not for herself, but because she is the guardian of the opal stone! Ah, yes, Señor Xuarez! I know well what you design. You wish to marry Dolores—to secure the opal stone, to gain over the Indians to your cause. All ambition; there is no love. I tell you, Señor, such a thing can never be. Dolores would sooner die than give herself up to a villain like yourself. You will never possess Dolores—you will never be master of the Chalchuih Tlatonac! Turn your ambitions to other things, Don Hypolito. Dolores is not for you!”

      Don Hypolito sprang to his feet with a cry of rage. Hitherto he had restrained himself in a most admirable manner; but now the insulting speeches of his prisoner proved too much for even his well-trained temper. A torrent of passion swept away all his reserve, and he burst out into a furious speech.

      “Dolores is for me! She will be mine in another week or so. She is the guardian of the opal, and that also will be mine. When I am possessed of the devil stone, the Indians will flock round my standard. I have the fleet, I have an army, I will have the Indians, too, my allies, guided by the devil stone. That, also, will be mine, and Dolores with it. I will become Dictator of Cholacaca. I will raise her to a pinnacle of power. She will rule the South—nay, the North also. Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Guatemala, they will all be mine. In the North, the United States; in the South, the Empire of the Opal, with myself as Ruler. It is a grand——”

      “Dream!” interrupted Jack, faintly, for the pain of his wound was telling on his frame. “It is a dream! a dream!”

      “It is no dream! Or, if a dream, it will soon turn out a reality. And you—you low-born Englishman, would dare to bar my way to this fame. Lie there, Señor, and wait my commands. You will die, and by a death which will break even your spirit. You will die and be forgotten, while I, Hypolito Xuarez, will reconstruct on this continent the Empire of Montezuma!”

      He spoke to deaf ears, for, overcome by fatigue and pain, Duval had fainted. Xuarez bent over him, and held the lantern to his face. It was deadly pale, and the eyes were closed.

      “I do not want him to die,” muttered the remorseless Mestizo, going towards the door. “I shall send a doctor to look after his wound. He shall be made whole again, but only to perish in tortures. Not for you, Don Juan, is Dolores; not for you the opal, but death and dishonour. You fall! I rise! My star quenches yours in its burning splendour.”

      In another moment he had quitted the prison, leaving his rival stretched out in the darkness, to all appearances lifeless and lost.

Chapter V.

       In Shadowland

       Table of Contents

      Weary body, aching brain,

       Tortured mind, and heavy soul,

       Fourfold being, one existence!

       Life with troublous insistence,

       To ye brings but constant dole,

       Ceaseless weeping, endless pain;

       Yet is all this sorrow vain

       When the waves of slumber roll

       Over body, over soul.

       In such slumber should ye list, hence

       Flies the spirit to attain

       That far land of dreams and stories,

       Misty realms of airy glories,

       Where the body hath no being,

       Nor the eyes an earthly seeing

       And the mind makes no resistance

       To events which overleap

       Nature’s laws, which bind existence;

       From our sphere the spirit fleeing

       Dwells but in the realm of sleep.

      After that extraordinary interview with Don Hypolito in the prison, Jack ceased to take any interest in earthly matters, and went for a space into shadow-land. He was not dead, but delirious. As a captive balloon is anchored to earth, so Jack’s soul had flown into the realms of dream, yet was held to his body by a small amount of life.

      Yet curiously enough he retained a dull impression of earthly events. All things actually done to his body coloured his dreams and decided his visions. As the fancies of the sleepers are determined by external actions, so as through a veil the wounded man faintly perceived the every-day life going on around his inert body. Through the chain extending from body to soul which held the latter captive to earth passed the thrills hinting at corporeal-existence, and these dominating his spirituality whirled him hither and thither, according as they happened. We in health feel in slumber the power of the unseen world guiding our every action; this man, in sickness dwelt, spiritually speaking, in the world of shadows, whereof we have no knowledge, and therefrom felt rather than saw the happening of earthly events which coloured his ghostly being.

      Oh those dreams, those visions apocalyptical, what agonies, what ecstacies, what feelings did they not beget? Now of earth, now of heaven, frequently of hell. Years afterwards, Jack remembering portions of these fantasies, would shudder and turn pale at the mere thought of having endured them. Wild as the visions of Ezekiel, gorgeous as the Arabian Nights, hideous as De Quincey’s dreamings, delicate and spiritual as the songs of Aeriel, those chimeras, at once terrible and fascinating, racked his spiritual being with the pangs of pleasure and pain. As thus:—

      … Darkness! the infinite darkness of chaos, before the light-creating word was spoken by the Deity. Ages and ages and ages of gloom, of horror, of thick opacity. No light, no glimmer, no glow to break this all-pervading blackness. No earth beneath, no sky above, nothing but clinging gloom on all sides. So chill, so freezing—surely hell were not more terrible….

      Ha! a burst of light penetrating the gloom. The word is spoken, the light is here…. Day divides itself from night … from the womb of the darkness springs the faint radiance of dawn. Then the sun, the glorious sun, rises like a god to conquer the foul fiends of shadow. See how his arrows fly, golden and swift, from his never-empty bow … east, west, north, south … and the glory of light spreads over all creation…. I am borne along on the wings of a mighty wind blown from the gates of the dawn … faster and faster and faster…. I swim through the crystalline air…. I poise myself like a bird in the opaline glories of a whirling sphere…. In the heart of the rainbow … still no earth … but air and the coruscation of infinite colours—red and yellow and green and blue…. They swirl in circles, they shoot on all sides from a spot of brilliance as the spokes of a wheel…. They range themselves in lines of ever-changing hues … and now I am blown resistlessly onward by that mighty wind….

      The sea! gloom once more! I can see nothing but darkness, yet penetrated by faint gleams of light…. The wash of many waves break on my ears…. Overhead a sky veiled in clouds, beneath the black breast of ocean, heaving restlessly in white lines of foam…. I smell the salt brine of the ocean…. The keen wind lashes my face as with a whip…. Ho! yeo, ho!… the sailors are at work…. Hark! the throb of a heart. Beat! beat! beat! beat! It is the beating of the propeller blades now striking the water … I am in the engine-room … the pistons slide silently in and out of the cylinders…. Now the giant cranks rise and fall with monotonous motion … and yon gleaming steel shaft, revolving rapidly, turns the screw in the dark waters without … the hiss of escaping