Elk 02 The Joker Read Online Free PDF Page B

his pale eyes was a look of horror such as Jim Carlton had never seen in the face of a man. Elk sprang forward and caught him as he swayed and led him to a big settee. Into this Stratford Harlow sank and leaning forward, covered his face with his hands.
    ‘Oh, my God!’ he said as he rocked slowly from side to side and fell in a heap on the ground.
    The colossus had fainted.

    CHAPTER 5

    ‘A LITTLE heart trouble,’ said Mr Harlow, smiling as he set down the glass of water. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have given you so much trouble, Miss Rivers. I haven’t had an attack in years.’
    He was still pale, but such was his extraordinary self-control that the hand that put down the glass was without a tremor.
    ‘Phew!’ He dabbed his forehead with a silk handkerchief and rose steadily to his feet.
    Elk was engaged in the prosaic task of brushing the dust stains from his knees and looked up.
    ‘You’d better let me take you home, Mr Harlow,’ he said.
    Stratford Harlow shook his head.
    ‘That is quite unnecessary - quite,’ he said. ‘I have my car at the door and a remedy for all such mental disturbances as these! And it is not a drug!’ he smiled.
    Nevertheless, Elk went with him to the car.
    ‘Will you tell my chauffeur to drive to the Charing Cross power station?’ was the surprising request; and long after the car had moved off in the fog Elk stood on the sidewalk, wondering what business took this multi-millionaire to such a venue.
    They evidently knew Mr Harlow at the power station and they at any rate saw nothing remarkable in his visit.
    The engineer, who was smoking at the door, stood back to let him walk into the great machinery hall, and placed a stool for him. And there for half an hour he sat, and the droning of the dynamos and the whirr and thud of the great engines were sedatives and anodynes to his troubled mind.
    Here he had come before, to think out great schemes, which developed best in this atmosphere. The power and majesty of big wheels, the rhythm of the driving belts as they sagged and rose, the shaded lights above the marble switchboards, the noisy quiet of it all, stimulated him as nothing else could. Here he found the illusion of irresistibility that attuned so perfectly to his own mood; the inevitable effects of the inevitable causes. The sense that he was standing near the very heart of power was an inspiration. This lofty hall was a very home of the gods to him.
    Half an hour, an hour, passed, and then he rose with a catch of his breath, and a slow smile lit the big face. ‘Thank you, Harry, thank you.’
    He shook the attendant’s hand and left something that crinkled in the hard palm of the workman. A few minutes later he drove through brilliantly illuminated Piccadilly Circus and could offer a friendly nod to the flickering and flashing lights whose birth he had seen and whose very brilliance was a homage to the steel godhead.
    To be thoroughly understood, Mr Stratford Harlow must be known.
    There had been five members of the Harlow family when Stratford Selwyn Mortimer Harlow was born, and they were all immensely rich. His mother died a week later, his father when he was aged three, leaving the infant child to the care of his Aunt Mercy, a spinster who was accounted, even by her charitable relatives, as ‘strange’. The boy was never sent to school, for his health was none of the best and he had his education at the hands of his aunt. An enormously rich woman with no interest in life, she guarded her charge jealously. Family interference drove her to a frenzy. The one call that her two sisters paid her, when the boy was seven, ended in a scene on which Miss Alice, the younger, based most of her conversation for years afterwards.
    The main result of the quarrel between Miss Mercy and her maiden sisters was that she shut up Kravelly Hall and removed, with her maid Mrs Edwins, to a little cottage at Teignmouth. Here she lived unmolested by her relatives for seven years. She then went