Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint s-4 Page 10

  He pushed a chair across to the couch where she sat, and settled himself, facing her, his hands clasped over his knees. Through his thick spec­tacles a pair of pale blue eyes regarded her fixedly.

  "You are beautiful," he remarked presently. "I am glad. It was promised me that you would be beautiful."

  When he spoke it was like some weird Oriental chant; his voice rose and fell monotonously with out reference to context, and remained horribly dispassionate. For the first time the girl felt a qualm of panic, that still was not strong enough to shake her bleak inertia.

  She cleared her throat.

  "And who made this promise?" she inquired calmly.

  "Ah, you would like to know!"

  "I'm just naturally interested."

  "It was an old friend of me." He nodded ruminatively, still staring, like a bearded man­darin. "Yess—I think Sir Isaac Lessing will be sorry to have lost you...."

  Then the nodding slowed up and stopped abruptly, and the stare went on.

  "You love him—Sir Isaac?"

  "Does that matter? I don't see what difference it makes—now."

  "It makes a difference."

  "The only difference I can see is that Sir Isaac Lessing had a few gentlemanly instincts. For in­stance, he did take the trouble to ask my per­mission before he arranged to marry me."

  "Ah!" Vassiloff bent forward. "You think Sir Isaac is a gentleman? Yet he is an enemy of me. This"—he spread out one hand and returned it to his knee—"has been done because he is an enemy."

  Sonia shrugged, returning the man's stare coldly. Her composed indifference seemed to in­furiate Vassiloff. He leaned further forward, so that his face was close to hers, and a pale flame glinted over his eyes.

  "You are ice, yess? But listen. I will melt you. And first I tell you why I do it."

  He put his hand on her shoulder; and she recoiled from the touch; but he took no notice.

  "Once," he said, in that crooning voice, "there was a very poor young man in London. He went to ask for work of a rich man. He was starving. He could not see the rich man at his office, so he went to the rich man's house, and there he see him. The rich man strike in his face, like he was dirt. And then, for fear the young man should strike him back, he call his servants, and say, 'Throw him out in the street.' I was that young man. The rich man is Sir Isaac Lessing."

  "I should call that one of the most com­mendable things Lessing ever did," said the girl gently.

  He ignored her interruption.

  "Years go by. I go back to Russia, and there are revolutions. I am with them. I see many rich men die—men like Lessing. Some of them I kill myself. But always I remember Lessing, who strike in my face. I promoted myself—I have power—but always I remember."

  Overhead, on the bridge, could be heard the regular pacing of the officer of the watch; but in that brightly lighted cabin Sonia felt as if there was no one but Alexis Vassiloff on the ship. His presence filled her eyes; his sing-song accents filled her ears.

  "Lessing makes money with the oil. I, also, make control of the oil. He does not remember me, but still he try to strike in my face—but this time it is in the oil. I, too, try to fight him, but I cannot. There are great ones with him. And then I meet a great one, and he becomes a friend of me, and I tell him my story. And he make the plan. First, he will take you away from Lessing and give you to me. He show me your picture, and I say— yess. That will make Lessing hurt. It is for the strike in the face he once give me. But that is not enough. I must make to ruin Lessing. And my friend make another plan. He say that when he tell Lessing you are with me, Lessing will try to make war. 'Now,' he say, 'I will make Lessing think that when he make war against you he will have all Europe with him; but when the war come he will find all the big countries fight among themselves, and they cannot take notice of the little country Lessing will use to make his war against you.' All this my friend can do, because he is a great one. He is greater than Lessing. He is Rayt Marius. You know him?"

  "I've heard of him."

  "You have heard of him? Then you know he can do it. Behind him there are other great ones, greater than there are behind Lessing. He show me his plans. He will send out spies, and make the big countries hate each other. Then, when we have take you, he send men to kill someone—the French President, perhaps—and there is the war. It is easy. It is just another Serajevo. But it is enough. And I have my revenge—I, Vassiloff—for the strike in the face. I will have Sir Isaac Lessing crawl to my feet, but I will not be merciful. And our Russia will be great also. The big countries will fight each other, and they will be tired; and when we have finished one little country we will conquer another, and we shall be victorious over all Europe, we of the Revolution...."

  The Russian's voice had risen to a higher pitch as he spoke, and the light of madness burned in his eyes.

  Sonia watched him, listening, hypnotized. At no time before, even when she had heard and incredulously accepted the Saint's inspired deductions, had she fully grasped the immensity of the plot in which she had been made a pawn. And now she saw it in a blinding flash, and the vision appalled her.

  As Vassiloff went on, the hideously solid facts on which his insanity was balanced showed up with greater and greater definition through his raving. It was here—all the machinery of which the Saint had spoken was there, and strains and stresses and counter-actions measured and calculated and balanced, every cog in the hole ghastly engine cut and ground and trued-up ready for Marius to play with as he chose. How the mechanism would be put together did not matter—whether Marius had lied to Vassiloff, or meant to lie to Lessing. The rocks had been drilled in their most vital parts, the charges loaded and tamped in, the fuses laid; the tremendous fact was that the Saint had been right—right in every prophecy, vague only in the merest details. The axe had been laid to the root of the tree....

  She saw the conspiracy then as the Saint himself had seen it, months before: intrigue and counter-plot, deception and deception again, and the fiend­ish forces that had been disentombed for this devil's sleight-of-hand. And she saw in imagina­tion the unleashing of those forces—the tapping drums and the blast of bugles, the steady tramp of marching feet, the sonorous drone of the war birds snarling through the sky. Almost she could hear the earth-shaking reverberations of the guns, the crisp clatter of rifle fire; and she saw the swirling mists of gas, and men reeling and stumbling through hell; she had seen and heard these things for a dollar's worth of evening entertainment, in a comfortably upholstered chair. But the men there had been only actors, fighting again the battles of a generation that was already left behind; the men she saw in her vision were of her own age, men she knew....

  She hardly heard Vassiloff any more. She was thinking, instead, of that morning. "Have we the right?" Simon Templar had asked. . . . And she saw once again the sickening sway and plunge of the figure in the motorboat. . . . Roger Conway— where had he been? What had happened to him. He should have been somewhere around; but she had not seen him. And if he were not to be counted in it meant that no power on earth could prevent her vision coming true. . . . "That'd mean we'd given Marius the game...."

  Slowly, grotesquely, the presence of Alexis Vassiloff drifted in again upon her tempestuous thought.

  His voice had sunk back to that eerie crooning note to which it had been tuned before.

  "But you—you will not be like the others. You will stand beside me, and we will make a new empire together, you and I. You will like that?"

  She started up.

  "I'll see you damned first!"

  "So you are still cold ....."

  His arms went round her, drawing her to him. With her hands still securely bound behind her back she was at his mercy—and she knew what that mercy would be. She kicked at his legs, but he bore her down upon the couch; she felt his hot breath on her face....

  '' Let me go—you swine —''

  "You are cold, but I will melt you. I will teach you how to be warm—soft—loving. So —"r />
  Savagely she butted her head into his face, but he only laughed. His lips stung her neck, and an uncontrollable shudder went through her. His hands clawed at her dress....

  "Are you ready, Mr. Vassiloff?"

  The captain spoke suavely from the doorway, and Vassiloff rose unsteadily to his feet.

  "Yess," he said thickly. "I am ready."

  Then he leered down again at the girl.

  "I go to prepare myself," he said. "It is perhaps better that we should be married first. Then we shall not be disturbed...."

  3

  THE DOOR closed behind him.

  Without a flicker of expression, the captain crossed the cabin and sat down at his desk. He drew towards him a large book like a ledger, found a place in it, and left it open in front of him; then, from the box in his drawer, he selected another of his thin cigars, lighted it, and leaned back at his ease. He scarcely spared the girl a glance.

  Sonia Delmar waited without speaking. She remembered, then, how often she had seen such situations enacted on the stage and on the screen, how often she had read of them! ...

  She found herself trembling; but the physical reaction had no counterpart in her mind. She could not help recalling all the stereotyped jargon that had been splurged upon the subject by a hun­dred energetic parrots. "A fate too horrible to contemplate"—"a thing worse than death." . . . All the heroines she had encountered faced the horror as if they had never heard of it before. She felt that she ought to have experienced the same emotions as they did; but she could not. She could only think of the game that had been thrown away—the splendid gamble that had failed.

  At the desk, the captain uncrossed his legs and inhaled again from his cigar.

  It seemed to Sonia Delmar that that little cabin was the centre of the world—and the world did not know it. It was hard to believe that in other rooms, all over the world, men and women were gathered together in careless comradeship, talking perhaps, reading perhaps, confident of a thousand to­morrows as tranquil as their yesterdays. She had felt the same when she had read that a criminal was to be executed the next day—that same shat­tering realization that the world was going on unmoved, while one lonely individual waited for dawn and the grim end of the world.. ..

  And yet she sat upright and still, staring ahead with unfaltering eyes, buoyed with a bleak and bitter courage that was above reason. In that hour she found within herself a strength that she had not dreamed of, something in her breed that for­bade any sign of fear—that would face death, or worse than death, with scornful lips.

  And the door opened and Vassiloff came in.

  Anything that he had done to "prepare" himself was not readily visible. He still wore his hat, and his fur collar was muffled even closer about his chin; only his step seemed to have become more alert.

  He gave the girl one cold-blooded glance; and then he turned to the captain.

  "Let us waste no more time," he said harshly.

  The captain stood up.

  "I have the witnesses waiting, Mr. Vassiloff. Permit me...."

  He went to the door and called two names curtly. There was a murmured answer; and the owners of the names came in—two men in coarse trousers and blue seamen's jerseys, who stood gazing uncomfortably about the cabin while the captain wrote rapidly in the book in front of him. Then he addressed them in a language that the girl could not understand; and, hesitantly, one of the men came forward and took the pen. The other followed suit. Then the captain turned to Vassiloff.

  "If you will sign —"

  As the Russian scrawled his name the captain spoke a brusque word of dismissal, and the wit­nesses filed out.

  "Your wife should also sign," added the captain, turning back to the desk. "Perhaps you will arrange that?''

  "I will." Vassiloff put down the pen. "I want to be left alone now—for a little while—with my wife. But I shall require to see you again. Where shall I find you?"

  "I shall finish my cigar on the bridge."

  "Good. I will call you."

  Vassiloff waved his hand in a conclusive gesture; and, with a slightly sardonic bow, the captain accepted his discharge.

  The door closed, but Vassiloff did not turn round. He still stood by the desk, with his back to the girl. She heard the snap of a cigarette case, the sizzle of a match; and a cloud of blue smoke wreathed up towards the ceiling. He was playing with her—cat and mouse....

  "So," he said softly, "we are married—Sonia."

  The girl drew a deep breath. She was shivering, in spite of the warmth of the evening; and she did not want to shiver. She did not want to add that relish to his gloating triumph—to see the sneer of sadistic satisfaction that would flame across his face. She wanted to be what he had called her— ice. ... To save her soul aloof and undefiled, in­finitely aloof and terribly cold....

  She said swiftly, breathlessly: "Yes—we're married—if that means anything to you.... But it means nothing to me. Whatever you do to me, you'll never be able to call me yours—never."

  He had unbuttoned his coat and flung it back; it billowed away from his wide shoulders, making him loom gigantically under the light.

  "Perhaps," he said, "you think you love some­one else."

  "I'm sure of it," she said in a low voice.

  "Ah! Is it, after all, that you were not being sold to Sir Isaac Lessing for the help he could give your father?"

  "Lessing means nothing to me."

  "So there is another?"

  "Does that matter?"

  Another cloud of smoke went up towards the ceiling, "His name?"

  She did not answer.

  "Is it Roger Conway?" he asked; and anew fear chilled her heart.

  "What do you know about him?" she whis­pered.

  "Nearly everything, old dear," drawled the Saint; and he turned around, without beard, without glasses, smiling at her across the cabin, a mirthful miracle with the inevitable cigarette slanted rakishly between laughing lips.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  How Simon Templar borrowed a gun— and thought kindly of lobsters

  1

  "SAINT!"

  Sonia Delmar spoke the name incredulously, storming the silence and the dream with that swift husky breath. And the silence was broken; but the dream did not break. ...

  "Well—how's life, honey?" murmured the dream; but no dream could have miraged that gay, inspiring voice, or the fantastic flourish that went with it.

  "Oh, Saint!"

  He laughed softly, a sudden lilt of a laugh; and in three strides he was across the cabin, his hands on her shoulders.

  "Weren't you expecting me, Sonia?"

  "But I saw them shoot you—"

  "Me? I'm bullet-proof, lass, and you ought to have known it. Besides, I wasn't the man in the comic canoe. That was an Italian exhibit—a senti­mental skeezicks with tender memories of the girl he left behind him in Sorrento. And I'm afraid his donna is completely mobile now."

  She, too, was half laughing, trembling un­ashamedly now that the tense cord of suspense was snapped.

  "Set me loose, Saint!"

  "Half a sec. Has Vassiloff sung his song yet? "

  "Yes—everything."

  "And all done by kindness. . . . Sonia, you wonderful kid!"

  "Oh, but I'm glad to see you, boy!"

  "Are you?" The Saint's smile must have been the gayest thing in Europe. "But my show was easy! I came aboard off the motorboat several minutes before Antonio stopped the bit of lead that was meant for me. I'd got all my clothes with me, as good as new; but when I say that my own personal corpse was damp I don't mean peradven­ture, and I just naturally wandered into the nearest cabin in search of towels. I'd just got dried and dressed, and I was busy putting this beautiful shoe-shine on my chevelure with a pair of gold-mounted hair-brushes that were lying around, when who should beetle in but old Popoffski himself. There followed some small argument about the tenancy of the cabin, but I got half a pillow into our friend's mouth before he could raise real h
ell. Then I trussed him up with the sash of his own dressing gown; and after that there was nothing for it but to take his place."

  Simon's deft fingers were working on the ropes that bound the girl's hands, and she felt the cir­culation prickling back through her numbed wrists.

  "I breezed in pretty much on the off-chance. I'd still got the beard I used this morning, and that was good enough for the moment, with Vassiloff's own coat buttoned round my chin and his glasses on my nose; but I couldn't trust to it indefinitely.

  The performance had to be speeded up—particu­larly, I had to find you. If Vassiloff hadn't laid his egg I should have had to go back to the cabin and perform a Caesarean operation with a hot iron, or something—otherwise the accident that I'd chosen his cabin for my dressing room might have mucked things badly. When I came in here and saw you and the skipper, I just said the first thing that came into my head, and after that I had to take my cue from him." Simon twitched the last turn of Manila from her wrists and grinned. "And there's the bitter blow, old dear; behold us landed in the matrimonial casserole. What sort of a hus­band d'you think I'll make?"

  "Terrible."

  "So do I. Now, if it had been Roger—"

  "Simon—"

  "My name," said the Saint cheerfully. "I know—I owe you an apology for that last bit of cross-examination before the unveiling of the monument, but the chance was too good to miss. The prisoner pleaded guilty under great provoca­tion, and threw himself upon the mercy of the court. Now tell me about Marmaduke."

  He sank onto the couch beside her, flicking open his cigarette case. She accepted gratefully; and then, as quietly and composedly as she could, she told him all she had heard.

  He was a surprisingly sober listener. She found that the flippant travesty of his real character with which he elected to entertain the world at large was a flimsy thing; and, when he was listening, it fell away altogether. He sat perfectly still, temporarily relaxed but still vivid in repose, alert eyes intent upon her face; the boyish effervescence that was his lighter charm bubbled down into the back­ground, and the tempered metal of the man stood out alone and unmistakable. He only interrupted her at rare intervals—to ask a question that went to the heart of the story like aimed lightning, or to help her to make plain a point that she had worded clumsily. And, as he listened, the flesh and blood of the plot built itself up with a frightful solidity upon the skeleton that was already in his mind. . . .