Next moment with shouts of laughter, the blue flames shedding a weird light upon our faces, we were pulling the plums out of the fire—a childish amusement.
I had placed one in my mouth, and swallowed it, but as I was taking a second from the blue flames, I suddenly felt a faintness. At first I put it down to the heat of the room, but a moment later I felt a sharp spasm through my heart, and my brain swelled too large for my skull. My jaws were set. I tried to speak, but was unable to articulate a word!
I saw the fun had stopped, and the faces of all were turned upon me anxiously. The Baron had risen, and his dark countenance peered into mine with a fiendish murderous expression.
"I'm ill!" I gasped. "I—I'm sure I'm poisoned!"
The faces of all smiled again, while the Baron uttered some words which I could not understand, and then there was a dead silence, all still watching me intently.
"You fiends!" I cried, with a great effort, as I struggled to rise. "What have I done to you that you should—poison—me?"
I know that the Baron grinned in my face, and that I fell forward heavily upon the table, my heart gripped in the spasm of death.
Of what occurred afterwards I have no recollection, for, when I slowly regained knowledge of things around me, I found myself, cramped and cold, lying beneath a bare, leafless hedge in a grass field. I managed to struggle to my feet and discovered myself in a bare, flat, open country. As far as I could judge it was midday.
I got to a gate, skirted a hedge, and gained the main road. With difficulty I walked to the nearest town, a distance of about four miles, without meeting a soul, and to my surprise found myself in Hitchin. The spectacle of a man entering the town in evening dress and hatless in broad daylight was, no doubt, curious, but I was anxious to return to London and give information against those who had, without any apparent motive, laid an ingenious plot to poison me.
At the old Sun Inn, which motorists from London know so well, I learned that the time was eleven in the morning. The only manner in which I could account for my presence in Hitchin was that, believed to be dead by the Baron and his accomplices, I had been conveyed in a motor-car to the spot where I was found.