The incidents of the night in London are too often incredible. A man can meet with adventures in the metropolis as strange, as exciting and as perilous as any in unknown lands. Here, surely, was one in point.
I remember experiencing a strange dizziness, a curious nausea, due, perhaps, to the fact that my head lay lower than my body. My thoughts became muddled. I regretted deeply that I had not signed the cheque and saved Sylvia. Yet were they not absolute blackguards? Would they have kept faith with me?
I was breathless in apprehension. What had happened to Sylvia?
By slow, imperceptible degrees the candle burned lower. The flame was long and steady. Nearer and nearer it approached that thin green cord which alone separated me from death.
Again the serpent hissed and darted forth, angry at being so near its prey, and yet prevented from striking—angry that its tail was knotted to the cord.
I saw it writhing and twisting upon the table, and noted its peculiar markings of black and yellow. Its eyes were bright and searching. I had read of the fascination which a snake’s gaze exercises over its prey, and now I experienced it—a fatal fascination. I could not keep my eyes off the deadly reptile. It watched me intently, as though it knew full well that ere long it must be victorious.
Victorious! What did that mean? A sharp, stinging pain, and then an agonizing, painful death, my head swollen hideously to twice its size, my body held there in that mechanical vice, suffering all the tortures of the damned!
The mere contemplation of that awful fate held me transfixed by horror.
Suddenly I heard Sylvia’s shriek repeated. I shouted, but no words came back to me in return. Was she suffering the same fearful agony of mind as myself? Had those brutes carried out their threat? They knew she had betrayed them, it seemed, and they had, therefore, taken their bitter and cowardly revenge.
Where was Pennington, that he did not rescue her?