"I might have been in the library of a country house, except for two things. There were no windows to this large and gracious room. It was lit from above, like a billiard-room—domed skylights in the roof. But the light that came down was not a light like anything I had ever seen. It lit up every detail of the magnificent and stately place, but it was new—'the light that never was on earth or sea.' It was just that that made me realize where I was—two thousand three hundred feet up in the air, alone with Gideon Morse, who had snatched me out of life three months before."
"I know Mr. Morse, Rolston. What impression did he make on you?"
"For a moment he stunned me, Sir Thomas. I knew I was in the presence of a superman. All that I had heard about him, all the legends that surrounded his name, the fact of this stupendous sky city in which I was—the ease with which he had stretched out his hand and made me a prisoner, all combined to produce awe and fear."
"Yes, go on."
"I saw two other things—I think I did. One was that the man's sanity is trembling in the balance. The other that if ever a human being lives and moves and has his being in deadly temporal fear, Gideon Mendoza Morse is that man."
The words rang out in that East-end room with prophetic force. It was as though a brilliant light was snapped on to illumine a dark chamber in my soul.
"What did he say to you, Rolston?"
"He was suavity and kindness itself. He said that he immensely regretted the necessity for secluding me so long. 'But of course I shall make it up to you. You're a young man, Mr. Rolston, only just commencing your career. A little capital would doubtless assist that career, in which I may say I have every belief. Shall we say that you leave Richmond this afternoon with a solatium of five hundred pounds?'
"'A thousand would suit me better,' I said.
"He shrugged his shoulders, and suddenly smiled at me.