Thorne Guy
The City in the Clouds
ENVOI
I take up my pen this evening, exactly ten years after I wrote the last paragraph of the above narrative, to read of James Antony Midwinter, dead like a poisoned rat in his chair, with a sort of amazement in my mind.
The whole story has been locked in a safe for ten long years, and that blessed and happy time has made the wild adventures, the terrible moments in the City in the Clouds, indeed seem things far off and long ago.
This afternoon I paid what will probably be my last visit to the strange kingdom up there.
I stood with my little son, Viscount Kirby, and my small daughter, Lady Juanita, and my wife, the Countess of Stax, at a very solemn ceremony.
In the presence of a Government official, a representative of His Majesty – Colonel Patrick Moore, of the Irish Guards, A.D.C. – the Cardinal Archbishop, and a few private friends, I watched the elmwood shell, containing Gideon Mendoza Morse, placed in its marble tomb.
It was his wish, to be buried there in his fantastic City, and no one said him nay. Well, the body lies in its place, two hundred weeping Chinamen are returning to the Flowery Land, wealthy beyond their utmost hopes, and in a few months the City in the Clouds will dissolve and disappear.
The rich treasures are coming to Stax, my castle in Norfolk – such as are not bequeathed, by Morse's munificence, to the museums of England and the galleries at Brazil.
Soon the immense plateau will be England's aerial terminus for the mail ships from all parts of the world.
While Gideon Morse lived it was impossible to publish the truth. It is to appear now, at last, and I simply want to tie a few loose ends, and to bring down the curtain, leaving nothing unexplained.
First of all let me say that the general public knew nothing at all of the horrors in which I was so intimately concerned.
Juanita and I were married very quietly in Westminster Cathedral soon after Midwinter went to his account. The enormous fortune that she brought me, supplementing my own very considerable means, operated in the natural way. Other journals were added to the Evening Special, and we started a great campaign for the sweetening of ordinary life, and not unsuccessfully, as every one knows.
They made me a baron, and four years afterwards, Earl of Stax. As for my father-in-law, he refused to budge from the City in the Clouds.
I don't mean that he didn't make appearances in society, but he loved to get back to his fantastic haven, from whence, like a magician, he showered benefits upon London.
Arthur Winstanley, as everybody knows, is Under-Secretary for India and the most rising politician of our day.
It is said that William Rolston, editor of the Evening Special, is our most brilliant journalist, though the older school condemn him for an excess of imagination. I saw the other day, in the old-fashioned Thunderer, a slashing attack upon a series of articles which had recently appeared upon China, and which the critic of the Thunderer conclusively proved to be written from an abysmal depth of ignorance.
I don't often go to the office now, though I am still proprietor of the paper, but when I do, and sit in the editorial room, I miss Julia Dewsbury, best of all private secretaries since the beginning of the world.
Bill, however, assures me that she is all right, entirely taken up with the children, and not in the least inclined to bully him in spite of her eight years advantage in age.
"To that woman," says Bill reverentially, "I owe everything."
Let me wind up properly.
Crouching behind a high wall on Richmond Hill is a modest hostelry still known as the "Golden Swan." It is still my property, and pays me a satisfactory dividend. It is run by a co-partnership, which I should say is unique.
The Honest Fool and my ex-valet, Mr. Preston, perform this feat together, but, now that Morse is dead and the Chinese have all departed, I fear they will lose a good deal of custom. This I gathered from Mr. Mogridge, that pillar of the saloon bar, who happened to meet me by chance in Fleet Street not long ago.
"'Allo! Why, it's Mr. Thomas, late landlord of the 'Golden Swan'!" said Mr. Mogridge. "'Aven't seen you for years. What are you doing now?"
"Oh, I'm doing very well, thank you, Mr. Mogridge. And how is the old 'Swan'?"
"Same as ever and no dropping off in the quality of the drinks. Still, I fear it's going down. I'm afraid it will never be quite the same as it was in the days of Ting-A-ling-A-ling," and here Mr. Mogridge placed his hands upon his hips and roared with laughter at that ancient joke.
