Robert Welles Ritchie

“ All of the legation staffs of the various nations represented in Seoul, with their ladies, were there—a brilliant and changing throng, gold-laced and silk-frocked. And there, by the side of the Japanese minister, Hasegawa in full war panoply flanking him on the left, stood the man who was to take Korea in his fingers and snap its national life of a thousand years.
A striking figure! Above the average height of the Japanese, massive head firmly set on broad shoulders, there was the subtle hint of strength and tremendous vital force in the poise of his body. But the face of the man ”

“ Even though the maniac in the apartment below has been three hours at her “finger exercise,” and the old—clothes man is screeching in the street, it is not hard to open a shutter in my mind and live once more, right in the midst of the musty old wilderness of Seoul’s antiquities, those days of terror and of high adventure. Ha! When I, a flat dweller of staid Brooklyn, was a Lord of the Golden Umbrella, and the Girl was an emperor’s kidnaper!
I’ll have to begin by telling who Bethell was. ”

“ So now, that I am living in the drab security of an elevator apartment house in Brooklyn, and the Jamaican Mercury in the tapestried hallway does not in the least resemble one of Hasegawa’s cute little spies, why should I not put to paper the story of how three in Korea flirted with sudden death—walked blindfolded in the jungle of fine Oriental diplomacy—for the sake of that weird old rummy, the Emperor Bugs? ”

“ Prince Min Yung, in his excitement, acted for us the craven old monarch, eyes roving and palsied hands trembling in alternate gusts of hope and of despair.
“Once he says that he will have to consult the soothsayers and get a favorable time set for his departure; he cannot take such an important step without the consent of the gods and devils.
“‘What, your majesty!’ says this woman of the burning hair. ‘Are you not emperor, lord of all in earth? Will you be fooled to your destruction by these traitorous witch doctors? ”

“ She did not say a word as we came panting up to where she stood, but motioned that Looie bring the lamp. She preceded us into her room and nodded to a little alcove, jutting out into the broad balcony which girdled the second story of the hotel. There her trunk stood, opened. By it was a sprawling blotch of blue—the blue of the Japanese coolie’s surtout.
It was Bethell who turned the dead man over so that his coarse, simian face with its topping brush of black wire hair lay in the light. ”

“ Not since the beginning of time has a king of Korea fled beyond his borders. His soothsayers and wise men will all persuade against it.”
“But they must not know,” Bethell broke in impetuously. “They are all secretly in Japanese pay, and if a word, a whisper, of this should get to their ears, Hasegawa would have the palace surrounded by troops within an hour. You—you alone—must have the secret. You must find a way to-morrow to get a word to his majesty’s ear; to tell him why the Girl comes to paint his portrait. There will be private sittings; you must be on hand to act as interpreter. ”

“ Oh, poor old Bugs is beside himself with fear—says he won’t budge unless he gets some sign from heaven or the earth beneath. Prince Min Yung is with him, and Bethell dared to slip into the palace in the absence of Hagiwara. They are arguing with the old boy—they tell him that if not to-night, it will be never, for Ito will visit the palace to-morrow, and then—the end. ”

“ As for the Girl, she was not to take any part in the actual flight through the city, but she would be on hand at the North Gate to accompany us to the yacht, whose position in the river she had not yet learned.
“I will arrange for the horses,” the prince assured us; “you cannot do that yourselves without danger. All that we depend upon you to do is to form a fitting escort for his majesty on the ride from the city walls to the yacht. He will be in terror of the Japanese every foot of the way. ”

“ He heard, right away, that the Girl, who was a humble painter person from America, and who had enjoyed the honor of putting on canvas the sacred features of the dowager of China, could not feel that life was complete until she had done similarly by his augustness, of whose greatness and glory she had heard wondrous tales in far—away America. ”

“ But here is the point: if the emperor’s seal is not set on that protocol of a protectorate that Ito is coming here to obtain, Japan will not dare to steal Korea. Furthermore, poor old Bugs believes that if he does not sign away his rights the Japanese will assassinate him. “Well?” the Girl asked with an odd light in her eyes. “What’s the answer?”
I shook my head. I was bewildered; did not catch the drift of her design.
“Why, Russia will offer him through me an asylum in Shanghai. By flight the old emperor will show Japan’s hand down on the table. Ito cannot put his deal through. ”

“ The Girl—Shanghai—you?”
“Old chap—dear old chap”—Bethell was wringing my hand—“a gentleman, particularly a young gentleman who would like a wife, could do nothing else. Not for a minute—no, not a minute—would I think you were running away from the music. And now, God bless you, and be off!”
The Girl took the hand of Bethell and of Prince Min Yung in turn, and nodded the good-by which she could not speak. His majesty, who was sniveling quietly, she ignored.
Then we sat our horses for a minute and watched three figures ride into black dark, back on the road to Seoul—to fate. ”

“ The other night, you know that Japanese who came in to look over your trunk; the littlest cog in the admirable spy machine here in Seoul. What he might have done———”
She interrupted me with a low laugh, thrilling with suppressed animal spirits.
“Clumsy—clumsy,” said the Girl. “These little brown brothers are very elemental, after all. Now, in Russia, or France, a polite agent of the secret service would have waited until one was away from one’s room—and then would not have disturbed so much as a pleat in one’s dinner gown when going through the trunk. ”

“ Why, there’s only the Girl and myself, and when I met her by chance over at the Astor House in Shanghai only last winter, and suggested that she might put what she knew into a moving-picture film which would unreel to packed houses all over the circuit, she shuddered a bit and said with a queer little gasp: “Billy, it would be like opening the doors of a tomb. ”

“ The minutes that we have been alone, his majesty, and the artist, and I, have been hundreds of golden years for the hope of Korea. Now the emperor is hot—now he is cold. Once he says that he will fly, and the light in that woman’s eyes is beautiful to see ”

“ On the night of November I7, not two weeks after the events narrated in this closing chapter, General Hasegawa surrounded the palace with troops, then Ito went in to the cowering emperor, and forced him to sign away Korean sovereignty under a Japanese protectorate. In July, two years later, old Emperor Bugs was deposed and made a prisoner in his own palace, while the blood of his patriotic garrison was shed in the streets of Seoul. A prisoner he remains to-day. ”

“ I assured her that I would obliterate myself utterly rather than risk being a stumblingblock in the path of her great scheme.
“Oh, no, my friend,” she said, laughing up at me, her eyes dancing with the surge and rush of the big hazard we were playing. “I will not allow you to say, ‘The carriage waits,’ in this little melodrama. When your cue comes you will have the spotlight all to yourself; but in the meantime——”
She brought out of a pocket in the lining of her trunk a cable form, already filled, and handed it to me. ”

“ I must—I must keep Hagiwara away until they have persuaded the emperor finally. I believe—I hope that we will win to-night. Bethell can tell you definitely at the Astor House at six o’clock.”
Hagiwara, his hands crammed with dishes, appeared down the aisle of shrubbery.
“Run along now, Billy,” she urged, “and be prepared to jump out of Korea itself if worse comes to worst. They’ll strike in the dark, you know, if they get desperate, and—and nobody wants to be a ‘damp, demnition body’!” ”

“ Bethell told the prince of the means by which the old emperor might be delivered from all the menace and the bullying of his enemies; explained how, by flight to a Russian asylum in Shanghai, the harried monarch could call the attention of the whole world to his plight and prevent the absorption of his empire by the Japanese. The fighting British editor urged the merits of the great scheme with the enthusiasm of a crusader. ”

“ To be officially adopted into the legation family was to remove the last possible suspicion as to the object of her mission from the cunning mind of Hagiwara and his crew.
The American minister’s compound abutted on the rear of the palace grounds, and it was but a step from there to the rear of the building wherein old Bugs was practically a prisoner. Moreover, she could not afford to continue living in the neighborhood of Bethell, who was pariah in the minds of the Japanese, and was always watched. ”

“ Bethell is dangerous person. I sent a man to inves-tigate. Ver’ clumsy, excoos! And you shot him, for which I am ver’ happy.” Hagiwara was floundering hopelessly. I could hardly restrain a chuckle.
“And I understand that you sincerely apologize?” Her voice was all silk and tenderness again.
“On my knees, beau-tiful madam.”
“Then let us have an understanding, Mr. Hagiwara. During my minutes with his majesty in these past few days, when I am very, very busy trying to catch the spirit of his portrait, you have insisted on remaining in the room with us. ”

“ Then away to the yacht, and the devil take old Ito, the rotter!”
So sanguine was Bethell that I could not get him to admit that the Girl’s seeming fears of failure were well grounded. I asked him what he and I were to do if everything went well and the emperor actually got away to China; suspicion surely would fall upon us.
“Oh, drat it, man; we’1l face the music,” said the fighting editor. “They can't do more than deport us, you know, unless they hire some rough to stick a knife between our ribs. ”

“ Bethell looked up at the Girl with a quizzical face.
“Yes,” she said in a fiat, emotionless voice. “Beginning right away, are they not?”
CHAPTER II. It was Stevens who arranged the audience with his majesty two days after the Girl’s arrival in Seoul. I believe that this was the only mistake Stevens ever made. He was, you see, adviser to the Japanese advisers of the Korean government—the shrewd, calculating wheel within a wheel, who earned all the Tokyo ministry paid him by directing the devious course of its diplomacy at that grand old mud heap of Seoul. ”

“ Certainly not. This is it: The instant that our good friend in Shanghai receives this message, he will send another to Chefoo, on the Pechili coast, and just ninety miles away from Chemulpo, you know. That wire will start a swift little steam yacht away from her moorings, and within twenty-four hours that yacht will be tied up on the river just ten miles from Seoul. ”

“ The crisis is on at the palace. Hagiwara possesses a dreadful sixth sense of premonition, and he has been trying to make a break for the old emperor’s audience chamber ever since I arrived. He must not ”