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He held tightly in his hand the end of a rope, which reached up high above them and was lost in the mass of cordage. He had opened the valve to its widest.
“Don’t venture to move,” he added, “or Mr. Ilam will break your head for you. This affair will cost us nothing but a few thousand cubic feet of gas at a half-a-crown a thousand. What it will cost you, I shall have to consider.”
And without saying anything further for the moment, he unloosed a very thin cable that was wound round a windlass in the car itself, and, tying a white flag at the end of it, he began to lower it rapidly over the edge of the car.
Thanks to the perfect calm which reigned, the balloon was still well over the Amusements Park.
Soon the voyagers could perceive the excited movements of the crowds below, and then the white flag touched earth, and was seized by the eager hands of the balloonists, and slowly the balloon, in a condition bordering on collapse, subsided to the ground with the gentleness of a fatigued British workman falling asleep. And great cheers, for the second time that day, filled the air.
“You might have been sure,” said Carpentaria, when they were ten feet off safety, “that in a show like this due precautions would be taken against accidents and idiots!”
Smithers, nearly as limp as the balloon, made no reply. Josephus Ilam glared over him.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing!” cried Carpentaria to the staff, who besieged the party with questions. “Fill her up as quick as you can, attach the rope, and get ready for your public. Don’t bother me!” And he leapt out of the car and was running, literally running, away, when Ilam called out: “Hi! wait a minute. What’s to be done with this maniac here?” And Ilam muttered to himself, “Why does he run away like that? What’s his next caprice going to be?”
“I was forgetting,” said Carpentaria, stopping. “Young man”—and he addressed Smithers severely—“follow me, and no nonsense!”
Smithers obediently followed, pushing after Carpentaria through the curious crowds. They came at length to the Central Way, and Carpentaria halted and took Smithers by the coat collar.
“Listen!” said he. “We’re much too busy to trouble with police-court proceedings. And besides, there’s your brace of penniless aunts. Cut! Clear out! Hook it! I rather admire you. See?”
Smithers saw, and vanished.
Carpentaria hastened on, rushing across the Central Way, scarcely avoiding cable-cars, and so, by a private passage between two shops, into the Oriental Gardens. Now, just within the Oriental Gardens, on either side of the grand entrance to them, were two spacious houses, built in the bungalow style, with enclosed gardens of their own. One of these was occupied by Josephus Ilam and his mother, and the other by Carpentaria and his half-sister, Juliette D’Avray. Between the house of Ilam and the back of the shops in Central Way was one of those small waste trifles of ground which often get left in planning a vast exhibition or show. It was skilfully hidden from the view of the public by wooden palisades, and in this palisading was a door, painted so as to escape detection. The plot of ground, about three yards by two, was already being utilized for lumber. Carpentaria entered by the door and shut it after him. A man—a middle-aged man, in a blue suit of rather shabby appearance—was seated on some planks. He started up, and then seemed to sway.
“What are you doing here?” Carpentaria curtly demanded.
“Look ’ere,” said the man, swaying towards Carpentaria, “I’m aw ri’—you’re aw ri’—eh? I’m a gemman. Come here to re’—rest. You leave me ’lone—I leave you ’lone. Stop, I give you my car’.”
The man was obviously inebriated and Carpentaria was in no mood to spend precious minutes in diplomacy with a victim of Bacchus. He departed, shutting the door, and leaving the victim fumbling with a card-case. He meant to send some one to eject the man, but he forgot.
“Say!” cried the drunkard after him, “how ju know I wazz ’ere? Mus’ been up in a b’loon—I repea’—b’loon.”
In another moment Carpentaria was in the study of his bungalow, panting.
“Quick!” he said to Juliette, an extremely natty little woman of thirty or so.
He sank into the chair before his desk. Juliette placed some music-paper in front of him and put a pen in his hand, and he scrawled across the top of the page “The Balloon Lullaby,” and began to scribble notes—quavers, crotchets, semibreves, and some other strange wonders—all over the page.
“It came to me all of a sudden,” he murmured, “while we were up in the balloon.”
“Don’t talk, dear,” said Juliette. “Write.”
And he wrote.
When it was finished Carpentaria wiped his brow and drank a whisky and milk which Juliette had prepared for him. He sighed with content and exhaustion. The creative crisis was over.
“Play it,” he ejaculated.
And Juliette sat down at the piano near the window overlooking the magnificent gardens, and played softly the two hundred and forty-seventh’ opus of Carpentaria.
“It is lovely,” she said.
“Yes,” he admitted. “It’s a classy little thing. Came to me just like that!” He snapped his fingers.
“Your best ones always do,” Juliette smiled.
“I’ll have that performed this very night,” he stated.
CHAPTER IV—Mrs. Ilam
Somewhat later on the same afternoon, in the drawing-room of the house opposite, Josephus Ilam was drinking tea with his mother. The aged Mrs. Ilam, who was very thin and not in the least tall—her son would have made a dozen of her—sat tremendously upright in her chair, while Josephus lolled his great bulk in angry attitudes on a sofa, near which the tea-table had been placed. Mrs. Ilam wore widow’s weeds, though it was many years since she had lost her husband, a man who had made a vast fortune out of soda-water—in the days when soda-water was soda-water. She had a narrow, hard face, with intensely black eyes, and intensely white hair, and when she directed those eyes upon her son, it became instantly plain that her son was at once her idol and her slave. She lived solely for this man of fifty, who had scarcely ever left her side. For her this mass of fifteen stone four was still a young child, needing watchful care and constant advice. Certainly she spoilt him; but, just as certainly, he went in awe of her. The fact that by judicious investments in hotel and public-house property he had more than doubled the fortune which his father left, did not at all improve his standing with the antique dame; it only made him in her view a clever boy with financial leanings. Moreover, every penny of the Ilam fortune was legally hers during her lifetime. Even Ilam’s share in the City of Pleasure was hers. When Carpentaria had discovered him, he had had to decide whether or not he should put more than a million pounds into the enterprise, and it was his mother who decided, who listened to everything, and then briefly told him that he would be a fool to leave the thing alone.
“Well,” she said, in her high quavering voice, as she passed him a cup of tea—the cup rattled on the saucer in her blue-veined parchment hand—“so you are not getting on with Carpentaria? I was afraid you wouldn’t.”
“He won’t listen to reason about the advertisements,” said Ilam crossly, stirring his tea.
“No?”
“And