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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10496 ***
+
+[Illustration: “_Prince Victor gave a gesture of pain and reluctance.
+‘Must I tell you?_’”]
+
+
+
+
+RED MASQUERADE
+
+_Being the Story of_
+THE LONE WOLF’S DAUGHTER
+
+BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+1921
+
+
+TO
+J. PARKER READ, JR., ESQ.
+THE CINEMA THAT WAS HIS
+
+
+
+
+APOLOGY
+
+
+This tale quite brazenly derives from the author’s invention for motion
+pictures which Mr. J. Parker Read, Jr., produced in the autumn of 1919
+under the title of “The Lone Wolf’s Daughter.”
+
+It is only fair to state, however, that the author has in this version
+taken as many high-handed liberties with the version used by the
+photoplay director as the latter took with the original.
+
+The chance to get even for once was too tempting....
+
+Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Company in the first instance, and then Mr.
+Arthur T. Vance, editor of _The Pictorial Review_, in which the story
+was published as a serial, were equally guilty of the encouragement
+which results in its appearance in its present guise.
+
+L.J.V.
+
+
+Westport—31 December, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+Books by Louis Joseph Vance
+
+CYNTHIA-OF-THE-MINUTE
+JOAN THURSDAY
+NOBODY
+NO MAN’S LAND
+POOL OF FLAME
+PRIVATE WAR
+SHEEP’S CLOTHING
+THE BANDBOX
+THE BLACK BAG
+THE BRASS BOWL
+THE BRONZE BELL
+THE DARK MIRROR
+THE DAY OF DAYS
+THE DESTROYING ANGEL
+THE FORTUNE HUNTER
+THE ROMANCE OF TERENCE O’ROURKE
+TREY O’ HEARTS
+
+_Stories About “The Lone Wolf”_
+
+THE LONE WOLF
+THE FALSE FACES
+RED MASQUERADE
+ALIAS THE LONE WOLF
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ BOOK ONE: A CHAPTER FROM THE YOUTH OF MONSIEUR MICHAEL LANYARD
+ CHAPTER I. PLEBEIAN AND PRINCE
+ CHAPTER II. THE PRINCESS SOFIA
+ CHAPTER III. MONSIEUR QUIXOTE
+ CHAPTER IV. THE FOOL AND HIS MONEY
+ CHAPTER V. IMPOSTOR
+ CHAPTER VI. THÉRÈSE
+ CHAPTER VII. FAMILY REUNION
+ CHAPTER VIII. GREEK VS. GREEK
+ CHAPTER IX. PAID IN FULL
+
+ BOOK TWO: THE LONE WOLF’S DAUGHTER
+ CHAPTER I. THE GIRL SOFIA
+ CHAPTER II. MASKS AND FACES
+ CHAPTER III. THE AGONY COLUMN
+ CHAPTER IV. MUTINY
+ CHAPTER V. HOUSE OF THE WOLF
+ CHAPTER VI. THE MUMMER
+ CHAPTER VII. THE FANTASTICS
+ CHAPTER VIII. COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS
+ CHAPTER IX. MRS. WARING
+ CHAPTER X. VICTOR ET AL
+ CHAPTER XI. HEARTBREAK
+ CHAPTER XII. SUSPECT
+ CHAPTER XIII. THE TURNIP
+ CHAPTER XIV. CONFERENCE OF THE DAMNED
+ CHAPTER XV. INTUITION
+ CHAPTER XVI. THE CRYSTAL
+ CHAPTER XVII. THE RAISED CHEQUE
+ CHAPTER XVIII. ORDEAL
+ CHAPTER XIX. UNMASKING
+ CHAPTER XX. THE DEVIL TO PAY
+ CHAPTER XXI. VENTRE À TERRE
+ CHAPTER XXII. THE SEVEN BRASS HINGES
+
+
+BOOK I
+A CHAPTER FROM THE YOUTH OF MONSIEUR MICHAEL LANYARD
+
+
+
+
+RED MASQUERADE
+
+
+
+
+I
+PLEBEIAN AND PRINCE
+
+
+The gentleman was not in the least bored who might have been and was
+seen on that wintry afternoon in Nineteen hundred, lounging with one
+shoulder to a wall of the dingy salesroom and idly thumbing a catalogue
+of effects about to be put up at auction; but his insouciance was so
+unaffected that the inevitable innocent bystander might have been
+pardoned for perceiving in him a pitiable victim of the utterest ennui.
+
+In point of fact, he was privately relishing life with enviable gusto.
+In those days he could and did: being alive was the most satisfying
+pastime he could imagine, or cared to, who was a thundering success in
+his own conceit and in fact as well; since all the world for whose
+regard he cared a twopenny-bit admired, respected, and esteemed him in
+his public status, and admired, respected, and feared him in his
+private capacity, and paid him heavy tribute to boot.
+
+More than that, he was young, still very young indeed, barely beyond
+the threshold of his chosen career. To his eagerly exploring eye the
+future unrolled itself in the likeness of an endless scroll illuminated
+with adventures all piquant, picturesque, and profitable. With the
+happy assurance of lucky young impudence he figured the world to
+himself as his oyster; and if his method of helping himself to the
+succulent contents of its stubborn shell might have been thought
+questionable (as unquestionably it was) he was no more conscious of a
+conscience to give him qualms than he was of pangs of indigestion.
+Whereas his digestive powers were superb....
+
+This way of killing an empty afternoon, too, was much to his taste. The
+man adored auctions. To his mind a most delectable flavour of discreet
+scandal inhered in such collections of shabby properties from anonymous
+homes. Nothing so piqued his imagination as some well-worn piece of
+furniture—say an ancient escritoire with ink stains on its green baize
+writing-bed (dried life-blood of love letters long since dead!) and all
+its pigeon-holes and little drawers empty of everything but dust and
+the seductive smell of secrets; or a dressing-table whose bewildered
+mirror, to-day reflecting surroundings cold and strange, had once been
+quick and warm to the beauty of eyes brilliant with delight or blurred
+with tears; or perchance a bed....
+
+And even aside from such stimuli to a lively and ingenious fancy, there
+was always the chance that one might pick up some priceless treasure at
+an auction sale, some rare work of art dim with desuetude and the
+disrespect of ignorance: jewellery of quaintest old-time artistry; a
+misprized bit of bronze; a book, it might be an overlooked copy of a
+first edition inscribed by some immortal author to a forgotten love; or
+even—if one were in rare luck—a picture, its pristine brilliance faded,
+the signature of the artist illegible beneath the grime of years,
+evidence of its origin perceptible only to the discerning eye—to such
+an eye, for instance, as Michael Lanyard boasted. For paintings were
+his passion.
+
+Already, indeed, at this early age, he was by way of being something of
+a celebrity, in England and on the Continent, as a collector of the
+nicest discrimination.
+
+And then he found unfailing human interest in the attendance attracted
+by auction sales; in the dealers, gentlemen generally of pronounced
+idiosyncrasies; in the auctioneers themselves, robust fellows, wielding
+a sort of rugged wit singular to their calling, masters of deep guile,
+endowed with intuitions which enabled them at a glance or from the mere
+intonation of a voice to discriminate between the serious-minded and
+those frivolous souls who bid without meaning to buy, but as a rule for
+nothing more than the curious satisfaction of being able to brag that
+they had been outbid.
+
+But it was in the ranks of the general public that one found most
+amusement; seldom did a sale pass off undistinguished by at least one
+incident uniquely revealing or provocative. And for such moments
+Lanyard was always on the qui vive, but quietly, who knew that nothing
+so quickly stifles spontaneity as self-consciousness. So, if he studied
+his company closely, he was studious to do it covertly; as now, when he
+seemed altogether engrossed in the catalogue, whereas his gaze was
+freely roving.
+
+Thus far to-day a mere handful of people other than dealers had drifted
+in to wait for the sale to begin—something for which the weather was
+largely to blame, for the day was dismal with a clammy drizzle settling
+from a low and leaden sky—and with a solitary exception these few were
+commonplace folk.
+
+This one Lanyard had marked down midway across the room, in the
+foremost row of chairs beneath the salesman’s pulpit: by his attire a
+person of fashion (though his taste might have been thought a trace
+florid) who carried himself with an air difficult of definition but
+distinctive enough in its way.
+
+Whoever he was and what his quality, he was unmistakably somebody of
+consequence in his own reckoning, and sufficiently well-to-do to dress
+the part he chose to play in life. Certainly he had a conscientious
+tailor and a busy valet, both saturate with British tradition. Yet the
+man they served was no Englishman.
+
+Aside from his clothing, everything about him had an exotic tang,
+though what precisely his racial antecedents might have been was rather
+a riddle; a habit so thoroughly European went oddly with the hints of
+Asiatic strain which one thought to detect in his lineaments.
+Nevertheless, it were difficult otherwise to account for the faintly
+indicated slant of those little black eyes, the blurred modelling of
+the nose, the high cheekbones, and the thin thatch of coarse black hair
+which was plastered down with abundant brilliantine above that mask of
+pallid features.
+
+The grayish pallor of the man, indeed, was startling, so that Lanyard
+for some time sought an adjective to suit it, and was content only when
+he hit on the word _evil_. Indeed, evil seemed the inevitable and only
+word; none other could possibly so well fit that strange personality.
+
+His interest thus fixed, he awaited confidently what could hardly fail
+to come, a moment of self-betrayal.
+
+That fell more quickly than he had hoped. Of a sudden the decent quiet
+of King Street, thus far accentuated rather than disturbed by the
+routine grind of hansoms and four-wheelers, was enlivened by spirited
+hoofs whose clatter stilled abruptly in front of the auction room.
+
+Turning a speciously languid eye toward the weeping window, Lanyard had
+a partial view of a handsomely appointed private equipage, a pair of
+spanking bays, a liveried coachman on the box.
+
+The carriage door slammed with a hollow clap; a footman furled an
+umbrella and climbed to his place beside the driver. As the vehicle
+drew away, one caught a glimpse of a crest upon the panel.
+
+Two women entered the auction room.
+
+
+
+
+II
+THE PRINCESS SOFIA
+
+
+These ladies were young, neither much older than Lanyard, both were
+very much alive, openly betraying an infatuation with existence very
+like his own, and both were lovely enough to excuse the exquisite
+insolence of their young vitality.
+
+As is frequently the case in such associations, since a pretty woman
+seldom courts comparison with another of her own colouring, one was
+dark, the other fair.
+
+With the first, Lanyard was, like all London, on terms of visual
+acquaintance. The reigning beauty of the hour, her portrait was
+enjoying a vogue of its own in the public prints. Furthermore, Lady
+Diantha Mainwaring was moderately the talk of the town, in those prim,
+remotely ante-bellum days—thanks to high spirits and a whimsical
+tendency to flout the late Victorian proprieties; something which,
+however, had yet to lead her into any prank perilous to her good
+repute.
+
+The other, a girl whose hair of golden bronze was well set off by
+Russian sables, Lanyard did not know at all; but he knew at sight that
+she was far too charming a creature to be neglected if ever opportunity
+offered to be presented to her. And though the first article of his
+creed proscribed women of such disastrous attractions as deadly
+dangerous to his kind, he chose without hesitation to forget all that,
+and at once began to cudgel his wits for a way to scrape acquaintance
+with the companion of Lady Diantha.
+
+Their arrival created an interesting bustle, a buzz of comment, a
+craning of necks—flattery accepted by the young women with ostensible
+unconcern, a cliché of their caste. As they had entered in a humour
+keyed to the highest pitch of gaiety consistent with good breeding, so
+with more half-stifled laughter they settled into chairs well apart
+from all others but, as it happened, in a direct line between Lanyard
+and the man whose repellent cast of countenance had first taken his
+interest.
+
+Thus it was that Lanyard, after eyeing the young women unobserved as
+long as he liked, lifted his glance to discover upon that face a look
+that amazed him.
+
+It wasn’t too much to say (he thought) that the man was transfigured by
+malevolence, so that he blazed with it, so that hatred fairly flowed,
+an invisible yet manifest current of poisoned fire, between him and the
+girl with the hair of burnished bronze.
+
+All the evil in him seemed to be concentrated in that glare. And yet
+its object remained unconscious of it or, if at all sensitive,
+dissembled superbly. The man was apparently no more present to her
+perceptions than any other person there, except her companion.
+
+Presently, becoming sensible of Lanyard’s intrigued regard, the man
+looked up, caught him in a stare and, mortally affronted, rewarded him
+with a look of virulent enmity.
+
+Not to be outdone, Lanyard gave a fleeting smile, a bare curving of
+lips together with an almost imperceptible narrowing of amused
+eyes—goading the other to the last stage of exasperation—then calmly
+ignored the fellow, returning indifferent attention to the progress of
+the sale.
+
+Since nothing was being offered at the moment to draw a bid from him,
+he maintained a semblance of interest solely to cover his thoughts,
+meanwhile lending a civil ear to the garrulous tongue of a dealer of
+his acquaintance who, having edged nearer to indulge a failing for
+gossip, found a ready auditor. For when Lanyard began to heed the sense
+of the other’s words, their subject was the companion of Lady Diantha
+Mainwaring.
+
+“... Princess Sofia Vassilyevski, you know, the Russian beauty.”
+
+Lanyard lifted his eyebrows the fraction of an inch, meaning to say he
+didn’t know but at the same time didn’t object to enlightenment.
+
+“But you must have heard of her! For weeks all London has been talking
+about her jewels, her escapades, her unhappy marriage.”
+
+“Married?” Lanyard made a sympathetic mouth. “And so young! Quel
+dommage!”
+
+“But separated from her husband.”
+
+“Ah!” Lanyard brightened up. “And who, may one ask, is the husband?”
+
+“Why, he’s here, too—over there in the front row—chap with the waxed
+moustache and putty-coloured face, staring at her now.”
+
+“Oh, that animal! And what right has he got to look like that?”
+
+The buzz of the scandalmonger grew more confidential: “They say he’s
+never forgiven her for leaving him—though the Lord knows she had every
+reason, if half they tell is true. They say he’s mad about her still,
+gives her no rest, follows her everywhere, is all the time begging her
+to return to him—”
+
+“But who the deuce is the beast?” Lanyard interrupted, impatiently.
+“You know, I don’t like his face.”
+
+“Prince Victor,” the whisper pursued with relish—“by-blow, they say, of
+a Russian grand duke and a Manchu princess—half Russian, half Chinese,
+all devil!”
+
+Without looking, Lanyard felt that Prince Victor’s stare had again
+shifted from the women, and that the mongrel son of the alleged grand
+duke was aware he had become a subject of comment. So the eminent
+collector of works of art elected to dismiss the subject with a
+negligent lift of one shoulder.
+
+“Ah, well! Daresay he can’t help his ugly make-up. All the same, he’s
+spoiling my afternoon. Be a good fellow, do, and put him out.”
+
+The Briton chuckled a deprecating chuckle; meaning to say, he hoped
+Lanyard was spoofing; but since one couldn’t be sure, one’s only wise
+course was to play safe.
+
+“Really, Monsieur Lanyard! I’m afraid one couldn’t quite do _that_, you
+know!”
+
+
+
+
+III
+MONSIEUR QUIXOTE
+
+
+The sale dragged monotonously. The paintings offered were mostly of
+mediocre value. The gathering was apathetic.
+
+Lanyard bid in two or three sketches, more out of idleness than because
+he wanted them, and succeeded admirably in seeming ignorant of the
+existence of the Princess Sofia and the husband whose surface of a
+blackguard was so harmonious with his reputation.
+
+In time, however, a change was presaged by an abrupt muting of that
+murmured conversation between the beautiful Russian and the almost
+equally beautiful Englishwoman. An inquisitive look discovered the
+princess sitting slightly forward and intently watching the auctioneer.
+
+The pose of an animated, delightful child, hanging breathlessly upon
+the progress of some fascinating game: one’s gaze lingered approvingly
+upon a bewitching profile with half-parted lips, saw that excitement
+was faintly colouring the cheeks beneath shadowy and enigmatic eyes,
+remarked the sweet spirit that poised that lovely head.
+
+And then one looked farther, and saw the prince, like the princess,
+absorbed in the business at the auction block, his slack elegance of
+the raffish aristocrat forgotten, all his being tense with purpose,
+strung taut—as taut at least as that soft body, only half-masculine in
+mould and enervated by loose living, could ever be. One thought of a
+rather elderly and unfit snake, stirred by the sting of some
+long-buried passion out of the lassitude of years of slothful
+self-indulgence, poising to strike....
+
+At the elbow of the auctioneer an attendant was placing on exhibition a
+landscape that was either an excellent example of the work of Corot or
+an imitation no less excellent. At that distance Lanyard felt inclined
+to dub it genuine, though he knew well that Europe was sown thick with
+spurious Corots, and would never have risked his judgment without
+closer inspection.
+
+He was accordingly perplexed when, after a brief exhortation by the
+auctioneer, discreetly noncommittal as to the antecedents of the
+canvas—“attributed to Corot”—Prince Victor, who had been straining
+forward like a hound in leash, half rose in his eagerness to offer:
+
+“One thousand guineas!”
+
+The entire company stirred as one and sat up sharply. Even the
+auctioneer was momentarily stricken dumb. And for the first time the
+Princess Sofia acknowledged the presence of her husband, and got from
+him that look of white hatred with a sneer of triumph thrown in for
+good measure.
+
+Though she affected indifference, Lanyard saw her slender body
+transiently shaken by a shudder, it might have been of dread. But she
+was quick to pull herself together, and the auctioneer had scarcely
+found his tongue—“One thousand guineas for this magnificent canvas
+attributed to Corot”—when her clear and youthful voice cut in:
+
+“Two thousand guineas!”
+
+This the prince capped with a monosyllable:
+
+“Three!”
+
+Stupefaction settled upon the audience. The auctioneer hesitated,
+blinked astonished eyes, framed unspoken phrases with halting lips.
+Prince Victor, again gave his wife the full value of his vindictive
+snarl. She would not see, but it was plain that she was cruelly
+dismayed, that it cost her an effort to rise to the topping bid:
+
+“Thirty-five hundred guineas!”
+
+“Four thousand!”
+
+“Four thousand I am offered ...”
+
+The auctioneer faltered, a spasm of honesty shook him, he proceeded:
+
+“It is only fair, ladies and gentlemen, that I should state that this
+canvas is not put up as an authentic Corot. It very possibly is such,
+in fact”—the seizure was passing swiftly—“it bears every evidence of
+having come from the brush of the master. But we cannot guarantee it.
+There is, however, a gentleman present who is amply qualified to pass
+upon the merits of this work. With his permission”—his eye sought
+Lanyard’s—“I venture to request the opinion of Monsieur Michael
+Lanyard, the noted connoisseur!”
+
+Lanyard detached a deprecating smile from the pages of his catalogue,
+but his contemplated response was cut short by Prince Victor.
+
+“I am not aware,” that one said, icily, “that the authenticity of this
+painting is a material question. Nor have I any need of the opinion of
+this gentleman, whatever his qualifications. I have bid four thousand
+guineas, and insist that the sale proceed. If there are no further
+bids, the canvas is mine.”
+
+The auctioneer shrugged, and offered Lanyard an apologetic bow. “I am
+sorry—” he began.
+
+“Four thousand guineas!” snapped the prince.
+
+Resigned, the auctioneer resumed:
+
+“Four thousand guineas offered. Are there any more bids? Going—”
+
+“Forty-five hundred!”
+
+Beyond reasonable doubt the princess had spurred herself mercilessly to
+find sufficient courage to make this latest bid. Lanyard saw her in a
+rigour of despair, hoping against hope. Only too surely something in
+the picture, some association—heaven knew what!—was more precious to
+her, almost, than life, though she had gone already to the limit of her
+means and perhaps a bit beyond. If this bid failed, she was lost. Her
+anxiety was pitiful.
+
+“Five thousand!”
+
+In the princess something snapped: she recoiled upon herself, sat
+crushed, head drooping, white-gloved hands working in her lap. One
+detected an appealing quiver on her lips, and noted, or imagined, a
+suspicious brightness beneath the long dark lashes that swiftly
+screened her eyes. Her young bosom moved convulsively. She was beaten,
+near to tears.
+
+“Five thousand guineas ... going ... going ...”
+
+The face of the prince was a mocking devil-mask in gray and black.
+Lanyard found himself loathing it. Impossible to stand idle and see the
+creature get the better of an unhappy girl ...
+
+“Five thousand one hundred guineas!”
+
+With his wits in a blur of amaze, Lanyard knew the echo of his own
+voice.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+THE FOOL AND HIS MONEY
+
+
+One reflected rather bitterly on the many and obvious oversights of a
+putatively all-wise Providence, in especial on its failure so to
+fashion the body of man as to enable him on occasion to discipline his
+own flesh in the most ignominious manner imaginable.
+
+Lanyard could have kicked himself; that is to say, he wanted to, and
+thought it rather a pity he couldn’t, and publicly, at that. For the
+freak he had just indulged was rank quixotism, something which had as
+much place in the code of a man of his calling as milk of human
+kindness in the management of a pawnshop.
+
+On second thought, he wasn’t so sure. It might have been that quixotism
+had inspired his infatuate gesture, but it might quite as conceivably
+have been everyday vanity or plain cussedness: a noble impulse to serve
+a pretty lady in distress, a spontaneous device to engage her interest,
+or a low desire to plague a personality as antipathetic to his own as
+that of a rattlesnake.
+
+In point of simple fact (he decided), his impelling motive had been a
+mixture of all three.
+
+In all three respects, furthermore, it proved notably successful; in
+the two last named without delay.
+
+The Princess Sofia at once took note of Lanyard, with wonder, some
+misgivings, and a hint of admiration. For he was not only a personable
+person in those days, with a suggestion of devil-may-care in his air
+that measurably lifted the curse of his superficial foppishness, but he
+was putting a spoke in Prince Victor’s wheel. And whosoever did that,
+by chance, out of sheer voluptuousness, or with malice prepense, won
+immediate title to Sofia’s favourable regard. If she couldn’t thwart
+Victor herself, she would be much obliged to anybody who could and did;
+and she was nothing loath to betray her bias by looking kindly upon her
+self-appointed champion.
+
+A whispered communication from Lady Diantha did nothing to abate her
+overt approbation.
+
+As for Victor, his face of leaden gray took on a tinge of green; he
+quaked with rage, and the glare he loosed on Lanyard made that young
+man wonder if he were mistaken in believing that the eyes of the prince
+shone in that dusky room with something nearly akin to the
+phosphorescence to be seen in the eyes of an animal at night.
+
+The notion was amusing: Lanyard paid it the tribute of a quiet smile,
+in direct acknowledgment of which Prince Victor snarled:
+
+“Six thousand guineas!”
+
+“And a hundred,” Lanyard added.
+
+Brief pause prefaced a bid designed to squelch him completely:
+
+“Ten thousand!”
+
+In a fatigued voice he uttered: “One hundred more.”
+
+“Fifteen—!”
+
+This time Lanyard contented himself with nodding to the auctioneer; and
+the lips of the latter had barely parted to parrot the bid when Victor
+sprang to his feet, his features working, his limbs shaking so that the
+legs of the chair beside him, whose back he seized, chattered on the
+floor, while the high-pitched voice broke into a screech:
+
+“Twenty!”
+
+And Lanyard said: “And one.”
+
+“Twenty thousand one hundred guineas!” chanted the auctioneer. “Are
+there any more bids? You, sir—?” He aimed a respectful bow at Prince
+Victor, who snubbed him with a sign of fury. “Going—going—gone! Sold to
+Monsieur Lanyard for twenty thousand and one hundred guineas!”
+
+And Lanyard had the satisfaction of seeing Prince Victor, after a vain
+effort to master his emotion, snatch up his topper, clap it on his
+head, and make for the door with footsteps whose stuttering haste was
+in poor accord with the dignity of his exalted station.
+
+But it was debatable whether this satisfaction plus the possession of a
+questionable Corot was worth its cost. And Lanyard wasn’t in the
+humour, now that the heat of contest began to abate, to look to
+Princess Sofia for promise of further reward. Even if he could have
+been guilty of such impertinence, indeed, he must have forborne for
+very shame. After all (he told himself) he hadn’t figured very
+creditably, permitting petty prejudice to sway him as it had. He felt
+singularly sure he had played the gratuitous ass in this affair, and he
+didn’t in the least desire to see the reflection of a like conviction
+in the eyes of a pretty young woman with a flair for the ridiculous.
+
+He dissembled his diminished self-esteem, however, most successfully,
+as he proceeded to the desk of the auctioneer’s clerk, filled in a
+cheque for the amount of his purchase, and gave instructions for its
+delivery.
+
+Whether by intention or inadvertence, he was followed from the auction
+room by the Princess Sofia and Lady Diantha Mainwaring; and just
+outside the entrance he found Prince Victor waiting with all the air of
+a gentleman impatient for a cab to happen along and pick him up out of
+the drizzle.
+
+But in view of the fact that he made no overtures to a passing hansom,
+which swerved in to the curb in response to a signal of Lanyard’s cane,
+this last concluded that the prince was up to his reputedly favourite
+game of waylaying his rebel wife.
+
+If such were the case, Lanyard had no wish to witness a public wrangle
+between the two. So he stepped briskly up on the carriage-block, and
+only hesitated when he saw that the prince, utterly ignoring the
+presence of the princess and Lady Diantha, was edging forward and
+cocking an alert ear to catch the address which Lanyard was on the
+point of giving the cabby.
+
+Hugely diverted, the adventurer looked round with a quirk of his brows,
+and amiably commented:
+
+“Monsieur’s interest is so flattering! If he really must know, I’m
+going home now, to my rooms in Halfmoon Street. Au revoir, monsieur le
+prince!”
+
+He beamed benignly upon that convulsed countenance, and saw crestfallen
+Prince Victor slink away, to the music of smothered laughter from the
+ladies in the doorway—toward which Lanyard was careful not to look.
+
+Then, in high feather with himself, he chirped to the driver and hopped
+into the hansom.
+
+
+
+
+V
+IMPOSTOR
+
+
+As Lanyard’s cab swung away, the carriage wheeled in to take up the
+Princess Sofia and Lady Diantha Mainwaring. Observing this, Lanyard
+poked his stick through the little trap in the roof of the hansom and
+suggested that the driver pull up, climb down, adjust some imaginary
+fault with the harness and, when the carriage had passed, follow it
+with discretion.
+
+Enchanted by sight of a half-sovereign in the palm of his fare, the
+cabby executed this manoeuvre to admiration; with the upshot that
+Lanyard got home half an hour later than he would have had he proceeded
+to his rooms direct, but with information of value to recompense him.
+
+It wasn’t his habit to lose time in those days of his youth. And lest
+his character be misconstrued (which would be deplorable) it may as
+well be stated now that he had not laid down upward of twenty thousand
+good golden guineas for a colourable Corot without having a tolerably
+clear notion of how he meant to reimburse himself if it should turn out
+that he had paid too dear for his whistle.
+
+The hint imparted by his garrulous acquaintance of the auction room—to
+the effect that the Princess Sofia was famous, among other things, for
+the magnificence of her personal jewellery—had found a good home where
+it wasn’t in danger of suffering for want of doting interest.
+
+And now one knew where their owner lived, and in what state ...
+
+Alighting at his own door, the adventurer surprised Prince Victor,
+morosely ambling by, in his vast fatuity no doubt imagining that his
+passage through Halfmoon Street would go unremarked in the dusk of that
+early winter evening. He wasn’t at all pleased to find himself
+mistaken; and though Lanyard did his best with his blandest smile to
+make amends for having discomfited the prince by getting home later
+than he had promised to, his good-natured effort was repaid only by a
+spiteful scowl.
+
+So he laughed aloud, and went indoors rejoicing.
+
+An hour or so later the painting was delivered by a porter from the
+auction room. But Lanyard was in his bath at the time and postponed
+examining his doubtful prize till he had dressed for dinner. For,
+though it was his whim to dine in his rooms alone, and though he had no
+fixed plans for the evening, Lanyard was too thoroughly cosmopolitan
+not to do in Cockaigne as the Cockneys do.
+
+Besides, in this uncertain life one never knows what the next hour will
+bring forth; whereas if one is in evening dress after six o’clock, one
+is armoured against every emergency.
+
+At seven he sat down to the morbid sort of a meal one gets in London
+lodgings: a calm soup; a segment of vague fish smothered painlessly in
+a pale pink blanket of sauce; a cut from the joint, rare and lukewarm;
+potatoes boiled dead; sad sea-kale; nonconformist pudding; conservative
+biscuit, and radical cheese.
+
+With the aid and abetment of a bottle of excellent Montrachet, however,
+one contrived to worry through.
+
+Meanwhile, Lanyard inspected his recent purchase, which occupied a
+place of honour, propped up on the arms of the chair on his right.
+
+It was seldom that Lanyard entertained a guest of such equivocal
+character. Wagging a reproving head—“My friend,” he harangued the
+canvas, “you are lucky to have been sold. Sorry I can’t say as much for
+myself.”
+
+It was really too bad it wasn’t a bit better. It wasn’t often that one
+encountered so genuine a counterfeit. The hand of an artist had painted
+it, but never the hand of Corot. Everything Corot was accustomed to put
+into his painting was there, except himself. The abode had been
+prepared in all respects as the master would have had it, but his
+spirit had not entered into it, it remained without life.
+
+Still, Lanyard concluded, surveying his prize through the illusioning
+fumes of his cigar, while the waiter cleared away, it wasn’t so bad
+after all, it wouldn’t be in the end a total loss. He could afford to
+cart the thing back to Paris with him and give it room in his private
+gallery; and some day, doubtless, some rich American would pay a
+handsome price for it on the strength of its having found place in the
+collection of Michael Lanyard, even though it lacked the cachet of his
+guarantee.
+
+But what the devil had made it so precious to the soi-disant Prince
+Victor and his charming wife?
+
+But for a single circumstance Lanyard would have been tempted to
+believe he had been craftily rooked by an accomplished chevalier
+d’industrie and his female confederate; but too much and too real
+passion had been betrayed in the auction room to countenance that
+suspicion.
+
+No: he hadn’t been rigged; at least, not by design. Something more than
+its intrinsic value had rendered the canvas priceless in the esteem of
+those two, something had been at stake more than mere possession of
+what they might have believed to be a real Corot.
+
+But what?
+
+Perplexed, Lanyard took the picture in his hands—it was not too
+unwieldy, even in its frame—and examined it with nose so close to the
+painted surface that he seemed to be smelling it. Then he turned it
+over and scowled at its reverse. And shook a baffled head.
+
+But when he tapped the face of the picture smartly with a finger-nail,
+he gave a slight start, passed a hand over it with the palm pressed
+flat, and suddenly assumed the humanly intelligent expression of a
+hunting-dog that has hit on a warm scent.
+
+Strong fingers and a fruit knife quickly extracted the painting from
+its frame and loosened the canvas from its stretcher, proving that the
+latter held in fact two canvases instead of one. Between these had been
+secreted several sheets of notepaper of two kinds, stamped with two
+crests, all black with closely penned handwriting.
+
+Lanyard gathered them into a sheaf and scanned them cursorily, even
+with distaste. True enough, it might be argued that he had bought and
+paid for the right to pry into the secrets they betrayed; but it was
+not a right he enjoyed exercising. A fairly thoroughgoing state of
+sophistication, together with some innate instincts of delicacy, worked
+to render him to a degree immune to such gratification as others might
+derive from being made privy to an exotic affair of the heart.
+Revelation of human weakness was no special treat to him. And if his
+eyebrows mounted as he read, if the corners of his mouth drew down, if
+once and again he uttered an “_Oh! oh!_” of shocked expostulation, he
+was (like most of us, incurably an actor in private as well as in
+public life) merely running through business which convention has
+designated as appropriate to such circumstances. At bottom he was being
+stimulated to thought more than to derision.
+
+Putting the letters aside, he bowed his head upon a hand and reflected
+sagely that love was the very deuce.
+
+He wondered if he could or ever would love or be loved so madly.
+
+He rather hoped not ...
+
+Here, if you please, was the scion of a reigning royal family risking
+as pretty a scandal as one could well imagine—and all for love! Given a
+few more days of life, and he would have jeopardized his right of
+succession and set half-a-dozen European chancelleries by the ears—and
+all for love! But for his untimely end, that poor, pretty creature
+would have joined her life to his, consummating at one stroke her
+freedom from the intolerable conditions of existence with Victor and a
+diplomatic convulsion which might only too easily have precipitated all
+Europe into a great war—and all for lawless love!
+
+So once more in history Death had served well the interests of public
+morality.
+
+After a year these letters alone survived ...
+
+How they had survived, what hands had collected and secreted them, and
+for what purpose, intrigued the imagination no end. Lanyard inclined to
+credit Princess Sofia with the indiscretion of saving these souvenirs
+of a grande passion that had almost made history. There was the
+sentimental motive to account for such action, and another: the
+satisfaction of knowing she had concrete proof of her intention to
+treat Victor as he had treated her.
+
+Then somehow the painting must have passed out of her possession; and
+in all likelihood she had made frantic and awkward efforts to regain it
+which had aroused the suspicions of Victor; with the sequel of that
+afternoon....
+
+Lanyard’s speculations were interrupted by the peremptory telephone.
+Without premonition he picked up the combination receiver and
+transmitter. But his memory was still so haunted by echoes of that
+delightful voice which he had heard in the auction room, he couldn’t
+entertain any doubt that he heard it now.
+
+“Are you there?” it said “Will you be good enough to put me through to
+Monsieur Lanyard?”
+
+The inspiration to mischief was instantaneous: Lanyard replied promptly
+in accents as much unlike his own as he could manage:
+
+“Sorry, ma’am; Mister Lanyard dined hout to-night. Would there be any
+message, ma’am?”
+
+“Oh, how annoying!”
+
+“Sorry, ma’am.”
+
+“Do you know when he will be home?”
+
+“If this is the lidy ’e was expectin’ to call this evenin’—”
+
+“Yes?” the dulcet voice said, encouragingly.
+
+“—Mister Lanyard sed as ’ow ’e might be quite lite, but ’e’d ’urry all
+’e could, ma’am, and would the lidy please wite.”
+
+“Thank you _so_ much.”
+
+“’Nk-you, ma’am.”
+
+Smiling, Lanyard replaced the receiver and rang for the waiter.
+
+When that one answered, the adventurer was hatted and coated and
+opening his door.
+
+“I’m called out,” he said—“can’t quite say when I’ll be back. But I’m
+expecting a lady to call. Will you tell the doorman to show her into my
+rooms, please, and ask her to wait.”
+
+
+
+
+VI
+THÉRÈSE
+
+
+Posed in a blaze of lights, the Princess Sofia contemplated captiously
+the charming image reflected in her cheval-glass. One little wrinkle,
+not precisely of dissatisfaction, rather of enquiry, nestled between
+her delicately arched brows. A look of misgiving clouded her wide eyes
+of a wondering child. The bow of an exquisitely modelled mouth, whose
+single fault lay in its being perhaps a trace too wide, described a
+shadowy pout.
+
+She was beautiful: yes. Nobody could question that. La beauté du
+diable, no doubt, to Anglo-Saxon eyes, with that skin of incomparable
+texture and whiteness relieved by a heavily coiled crown of living
+bronze, the crimson insolence of that matchless mouth, those luminous
+and changeable eyes so like the sea, whose green melted into blue with
+the swiftness of thought, whose blue at times as swiftly shaded into
+stormy purple-black: but however bizarre and barbaric, beauty none the
+less, and under the most meticulous examination indisputable.
+
+But was she as radiant as she had been?
+
+On this her birthday she was twenty-five. Appalling age! Five years
+hence she would be thirty, in ten more—forty! And woman’s beauty fades
+so swiftly: everybody said so. Was the shadow of to-morrow already
+dimming her loveliness? How could it be otherwise? She had lived so
+long and so fully, she had begun to live so young. Six years of
+marriage to Victor—that alone should have been enough, one would think,
+to metamorphose the fairest face into a blasted battlefield of
+passions.
+
+She had a little shiver of voluptuous horror, remembering what she had
+endured and escaped. The sweet, true lines of her flawlessly made body
+were transiently undulant within a sheath of shimmering sequins: a
+daring gown, by British standards of that day, but permissible because
+she was Russian; foreigners, you know, are so frightfully weird even
+when they’re quite all right.
+
+And yet she was growing old, she was twenty-five! Though she didn’t
+feel in the least like one on the threshold of middle age. Indeed, she
+had never felt younger, more thrillingly instinct with the power and
+the will to live extravagantly in one endless riot of youth
+unquenchable....
+
+Reaction, of course: the swing of the pendulum to its farthest extreme.
+It was now two years since she had been forced to separate from Victor,
+finding herself unable longer to countenance and suffer his many-sided
+beastliness; and a year since the hand of Death had penned an
+inexorable finis to the too-brief chapter of her one great romance.
+
+For there had never been love in her life with Victor. She had been too
+young at first to appreciate what love and marriage meant, she had been
+led to the altar and sacrificed upon it as an animal is led in
+sacrificial rites—without premonition or understanding, only wondering
+(perhaps) to find itself so groomed and garlanded, so flattered and
+adored. She had hardly known Victor before she was given to him in
+marriage by Imperial ukase ... to get rid of her, probably, for some
+inscrutable reason related to the mysterious circumstances of her
+parentage.
+
+And now after six years of hell with her husband and one of mourning in
+solitude for her love that was lost, she was coming back to life again
+... at last!
+
+She lifted up arms that might have been a dream of Phidias chiselled in
+Parian marble, and stretched them luxuriously. She was superbly alive,
+indeed—and henceforth she meant to live. Only she must be careful to
+retain her looks ... If Youth must surely go, Beauty must linger and
+reign long in its stead.
+
+A maid, a comely creature, trim and smart in black and white, with that
+vividly coloured prettiness which is too often the omen of premature
+decline into the fat and florid thirties, fetched a wrap and settled it
+upon Sofia’s shoulders.
+
+Long and dark, it disguised her figure as completely as it covered her
+toilette. She nodded her satisfaction, and accepted the veil which she
+had desired to complete her disguise, a thing of Spanish lace, black
+and ample, like a mantilla. But before donning it she delayed one
+minute more before the mirror.
+
+“Thérèse! Am I still beautiful?”
+
+“Madame la princesse is always beautiful.”
+
+“As beautiful as I used to be?”
+
+“But madame la princesse grows more lovely every day.”
+
+“Beautiful enough to-night, to keep out of jail, do you think?”
+
+To the mirth in the voice of her mistress the maid responded with a
+smile demure and discreet.
+
+“Oh, madame!” was all she said; but the manner of her saying it was
+rarely eloquent.
+
+Sofia laughed lightly, and affectionately pinched the cheek of the
+maid.
+
+“And you, my little one,” she said in liquid French—“you yourself are
+too ravishingly pretty to keep out of trouble. Do you know that?”
+
+Her little one looked more than ever demure as she enquired after the
+hidden meaning of madame la princesse.
+
+“Because you will marry too soon, Thérèse—too soon some worthless man
+will persuade you to dedicate all those charms to him alone.”
+
+“Oh, madame!”
+
+“Is it not so?”
+
+“Who knows, madame?” said Thérèse, as who should say: “What must be,
+must.”
+
+“Then there is a man! I suspected as much.”
+
+“But, madame la princesse, is there not always a man?”
+
+“Then beware!”
+
+“Madame la princesse need not fear for me,” Thérèse replied. “Me, my
+head is not so easily turned. There is always some man, naturally—there
+are so many men!—but when I marry, rest assured, it will be for
+something more.”
+
+With the compressed lips of self-approbation she deftly assisted her
+mistress to swathe her head in the mantilla-like veil.
+
+“Something more than a man?” Sofia enquired through its folds. “What
+then?”
+
+“Independence, madame la princesse.”
+
+“What an idea! Marriage and independence: how do you reconcile that
+paradox?”
+
+“Madame la princesse means love, I think, when she speaks of marriage.
+But love—that is all over and done with when one marries. One is then
+ready to settle down; one has put by one’s dot, and marries a worthy,
+industrious man with a little fortune of his own. With such a husband
+one collaborates in the maintenance of the ménage and the management of
+a small business, something substantial if small. And so one ends one’s
+days in comfortable companionship. That, madame la princesse, is the
+marriage for Thérèse! It may not sound romantic, madame, but it has
+this rare virtue—it lasts!”
+
+
+
+
+VII
+FAMILY REUNION
+
+
+The London night was normal: that is to say, wet. Darkness had
+transformed the streets into vast sheets of black satin shot with
+golden strands and studded with lamp-posts like sturdy stems for
+ethereal blooms of golden haze. Within their areas of glow the air
+teemed with atoms of liquid gold. The ring of hoofs on wet pavements
+was at once disturbing and inspiriting.
+
+Alone in her hired hansom the Princess Sofia sat with the window
+raised, drinking deep of the soft damp air, finding it as heady as
+strange wine. Under cover of the veil her eyes were brilliant with
+awareness of her audacity, her lips were parted with the promise of a
+smile.
+
+She loved it all, she adored this mood of London: its nights of rain
+were sheer enchantment, arabesque, nights of secrecy and stealth,
+mystery, and romance under the rose. On nights such as this lovers
+prospered, adventures were to the venturesome, brave rewards to the
+bold.
+
+For herself she was unafraid, she foretasted entire success. How should
+it be otherwise? Consider how famously chance had prospered her
+designs, playing into her hands the information that this Monsieur
+Lanyard was not at home, might not return till very late, and was
+expecting a call from somebody whom he desired to await his return in
+his rooms!
+
+With such an open occasion, how could one fail?
+
+Sofia asked only three minutes alone with the painting....
+
+And if by any mishap she were caught, still she would not be dismayed.
+The letters were hers, were they not? They had been stolen from her, he
+had no right title to them who had purchased only the picture which had
+served as their hiding-place. By all means, let him keep that stupid
+canvas; he could hardly refuse to let her have her letters, not if she
+pleaded her prettiest. And even if he should prove obtuse,
+ungenerous....
+
+Her smile was definite and confident. She was beautiful—and Monsieur
+Lanyard was aware of that. Had she not, that afternoon, in the auction
+room, without his knowledge detected admiration in his eyes, a look
+warm with something more than admiration only?
+
+He was impressionable, then. And it would be no distasteful task to
+play upon his susceptibilities. He was not only personally attractive
+(“magnetic” was the catch-word of the period), but if half that Lady
+Diantha had hinted concerning him were true, to make a conquest of
+Michael Lanyard would be a feather in the cap of any woman, to attempt
+it a temptation all but irresistible to one—like Sofia—in whose veins
+ran the ichor of progenitors to whom the scent of danger had been as
+breath of life itself. It was hardly conceivable; even now Sofia must
+smile at her friend’s amiable endeavours to identify this mysterious
+monsieur with a celebrated and preposterous criminal.
+
+It might be true that, as Lady Diantha had declared, wherever Michael
+Lanyard showed himself in open pursuit of his avowed avocation as a
+collector of rare works of art—in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or
+where-not—there in due sequence the Lone Wolf would consummate one of
+his fantastic coups.
+
+And it was indisputable that Lanyard was at present living in London,
+where for some time past the Lone Wolf had been perniciously busy; or
+else his bad name had been taken in vain by a baffled and exasperated
+Scotland Yard.
+
+Again: Diantha had insisted that the Lone Wolf was by every evidence
+completely woman-proof; and there might be something in her contention
+that such an elusive yet spectacularly successful thief could hardly
+have won the high place he held in the annals of criminology and in the
+esteem of the sensation-loving public, if he were one who maintained
+normal relations with his kind.
+
+Sooner or later (so ran Diantha’s borrowed reasoning) the criminal who
+has close friends, a wife, a mistress, children, family ties of any
+sort, or even body-servants, must willy-nilly repose confidence in one
+of these, and then inevitably will be betrayed. Depend upon envy,
+jealousy, spite, or plain venal disloyalty, if accident or inadvertence
+fail, to lay the law-breaker by the heels.
+
+Therefore (Diantha argued) the Lone Wolf must be a confirmed solitary
+and misogynist—very much like this Monsieur Lanyard, according to
+reports which declared the latter to be a man who kept to himself, had
+many acquaintances and not one intimate, and was positively insulated
+against wiles of woman.
+
+But—granting all this—it was none the less true that the utmost
+diligence, spurred by the pique, ill-will, and ambition of the police
+of all Europe, had failed as yet to forge any link between the
+supercriminal of the age and the distinguished connoisseur of art.
+Other than Lady Diantha and the gossips whose arguments she was
+retailing, never a soul (so far as Sofia knew) had ventured to breathe
+a breath of suspicion upon the good repute of Monsieur Lanyard.
+
+In short, Diantha’s conjectures had been entirely second-hand, and not
+even meant to be taken seriously.
+
+And yet the suggestion had fastened firm hold upon the imagination of
+the Princess Sofia.
+
+If it were true ... what an adventure!
+
+There was unaccustomed light of daring in the eyes of the princess,
+unwonted colour tinted her cheeks.
+
+The hansom stopped, discharged the fairest fare it had ever carried,
+and rattled off, leaving Sofia just a trifle daunted and dubious, the
+animation of her anticipations something dashed by the uncompromising
+respectability, the self-conscious worthiness of Halfmoon Street.
+
+Enfolded in the very heart of Mayfair, its brief length bounded on the
+north by Curzon Street (its name alone sufficient voucher for its
+character), on the south by Piccadilly (hereabouts somewhat oppressive
+with its hedge of stately clubs, membership in any one of which is
+equivalent to two years’ unchallenged credit) Halfmoon Street is
+largely given over to furnished lodgings. But it doesn’t advertise the
+fact, its landlords are apt to be retired butlers to the nobility and
+gentry, its lodgers English gentlemen who have brought home livers from
+India, or assorted disabilities from all known quarters of the globe,
+and who desire nothing better than to lead steady-paced lives within
+walking distance of their favourite clubs. So Halfmoon Street remains
+quietly estimable, a desirable address, and knows it, and doggedly
+means to hold fast to that repute.
+
+A strange environment (Sofia thought) for an adventurer like the Lone
+Wolf.
+
+But then—of course!—Diantha’s innuendoes had been based on flimsiest
+hearsay. The chances were that Michael Lanyard was an utterly
+uninteresting person of blameless life.
+
+So thinking, the Princess Sofia was sensible of a pang of regret, and
+tried to be prepared against bitter disappointment as she rang the
+bell. Either she would fail to obtain admittance (perhaps the lady whom
+he was really expecting had forestalled her) or else Lanyard would fail
+to come home in time to catch her! Quite probably it would turn out to
+be a dull and depressing evening, after all....
+
+The servant who admitted her in manner and appearance lent colour to
+these forebodings. A creature hopelessly commonplace, resigned, and
+unemotional, to her enquiry for Monsieur Lanyard he returned the
+discounted response: Mister Lanyard was hout, ’e might not be ’ome till
+quite lite, but ’ad left word that if a lidy called she was to be
+awsked to wite. The princess indicating her desire to wite, the man
+turned to the nearest door (Lanyard’s rooms were on the street level),
+opened it with a pass-key, stepped inside to make a light, and when
+Sofia entered silently bowed himself out.
+
+Now when the latch clicked behind him, the Princess Sofia forgot that
+the simplicity of her success thus far was almost discouraging. Her
+heart began to beat more quickly, and a little tremor shook the hands
+that lifted and threw back her veil. After all, she was committing an
+act of lawless trespass, she was on the errand of a thief; if caught
+the penalty might prove most painful and humiliating.
+
+Of a sudden she lost appetite entirely for a piquant encounter with the
+prepossessing tenant of these rooms. Now she desired nothing so dearly
+as to consummate her business and escape with all possible expedition.
+
+A swift and searching survey of the living-room descried nothing that
+seemed apt to hinder or detain her. A large room, unusually wide and
+deep, it had two windows overlooking the street, with a curtained
+doorway at the back that led (one surmised) to a bedchamber. It was
+furnished in such excellent taste that one suspected Monsieur Lanyard
+must have brought in his own belongings on taking possession. The
+handsome rug, the well-chosen draperies, the several excellent pictures
+and bronzes, were little in character with the furnished lodgings of
+the London average, even with those of the better sort.
+
+She had no time, however, to squander on appreciation of artistic
+atmosphere, however pleasing, and needed to waste none searching for
+the object of her desires. It faced her, distant not six paces from the
+door—that shameless little “Corot”!—resting on the arms of a
+straight-backed chair.
+
+A low laugh of delight on her lips, she went swiftly to the chair and
+laid hold of the picture by its frame. In that act she checked,
+startled, transfixed, the laugh freezing into a gasp of alarm.
+
+Brass rings slithered on a pole supporting the portières at the back of
+the room. These parted. Through them a man emerged.
+
+Her grasp on the picture relaxed. It struck a corner against the chair
+and clattered on the floor—the canvas on its stretcher simultaneously
+flying out of the frame.
+
+“Victor!”
+
+“Sweet of you to remember me!”
+
+He advanced slowly with that noiseless, cat-like tread of his which she
+had always hated, perceiving in it a true index to his character: the
+prowl of a beast of prey, furtive, cowardly, cruel. It was so: Victor
+was as feline and as vicious as a jungle-cat. Watching him with this
+thought in mind, one could almost credit old tales of beasts bewitched
+and walking in human guise.
+
+Near by he paused, alertly poised, prepared to spring. The slotted
+black eyes glimmered malignantly. His lips drew back in mockery from
+his teeth. His hands were hidden in the pockets of his dinner-coat; but
+she could guess how they were held, like claws, in that concealment,
+claws itching for her throat. She dared not stir lest she feel them
+there, digging deep into her soft white flesh.
+
+Witless, in the extremity of her terror, she stammered: “What do you
+want?”
+
+A nod indicated the picture that lay between them, at their feet.
+
+“My errand,” the man said in a silken tone that gloved grimmest menace,
+“is much the same as yours—quite naturally—but more fortunate; for I
+shall get not only what I came for, but something more.”
+
+“What—?”
+
+“The opportunity to plead with you, face to face. I think you will
+hardly refuse to listen to me now.”
+
+“How—how did you get in?”
+
+“Oh, secretly! By the window, if you must know; but quite unseen. You
+see, _I_ had no invitation.”
+
+“I never thought you had—”
+
+“Nor did I think you had—till now.”
+
+Puzzled, she faltered: “I don’t understand—”
+
+“Surely you don’t wish me to believe my pretty Sofia has turned thief?”
+
+That stung her pride. She drew upon an unsuspected store of spirit,
+confronting him bravely.
+
+“What is it to me, what you choose to think?”
+
+“I refuse to think that of you. My reason will not let me believe it.”
+
+She saw that he was shaking with rage; so she shrugged and drawled:
+“Oh, your _reason_—!”
+
+“It tells me you for one did not come here to-night uninvited.” He was
+rapidly losing grip on his temper. “Oh, it’s plain enough! I was a fool
+not to understand, there in the auction room, when my face was slapped
+with proof of your liaison with this Lanyard!”
+
+She said in mild expostulation: “But you are quite mad.”
+
+“Perhaps—but not so as to be blind to the truth. You had him there this
+afternoon to bid that picture in for you if your own means failed. Why
+else should the man, who knows pictures as I know you, pay twenty
+thousand guineas for a footling copy of a Corot that wouldn’t deceive
+a—a Royal Academician! Yes: he bid it in for you—the sorry fool!—bought
+with his own money the evidence of your infatuation for his predecessor
+in your affections—and expects you here to-night to receive it from him
+and—pay him _his_ price! Ah, don’t try to deny it!”
+
+He growled like a very animal, beside himself. “Why else should you be
+admitted to these rooms without question in his absence?”
+
+Without visible resentment, the Princess Sofia nodded thoughtfully into
+those distorted features.
+
+“Yes,” she commented: “quite, quite mad.”
+
+As if she had offered without warning to strike him, Victor recoiled
+and for an instant stood gibbering. And she took advantage of this
+moment in one lithe bound to put the table between them.
+
+The manoeuvre sobered him. He did not move, but in two breaths forced
+himself to cease to tremble, and subdued every symptom of his passion.
+Only his face remained sinister.
+
+“Graceful creature!” he observed, sardonic. “Such agility! But what
+good will that do you, do you think? Eh? Tell me that!”
+
+It was her turn to shiver, and inwardly she did, who was never quite
+able to combat the fear which Victor could inspire in her by such
+demonstrations of the power of his will. The self-control which he had
+always at his command was something that passed her understanding; it
+seemed inhuman, it terrified her.
+
+Nevertheless, so exigent was this strait, she continued to confront him
+with a face of unflinching defiance.
+
+In a voice whose steadiness surprised her she declared: “The letters
+are mine. You shan’t have them.”
+
+“Undeceive yourself: I’ll have them though you never leave this room
+alive.”
+
+More to give herself time to think than in any hope of moving him, she
+began to plead:
+
+“Let me have them, Victor—let me go.”
+
+Smiling darkly, he shook his head.
+
+“The letters mean nothing to you. What good—?”
+
+He interrupted impatiently: “I shall publish them.”
+
+“Impossible—!”
+
+“But I shall.”
+
+Aghast, she protested: “You can’t mean that!”
+
+“Why not? The world shall know your true reason for leaving me—that you
+were the mistress of another man—and who that man was!”
+
+Staring, she uttered in a low voice: “Never!”
+
+“Or,” he amended, deliberately, “you may keep them, burn them, do what
+you will with them—on fair terms—_my_ terms.”
+
+She said nothing, but her dilate eyes held fixedly to his. He moved a
+pace or two nearer, his voice dropped to a lower key, the light she had
+learned to loathe flickered in the depths of his eyes.
+
+“Come back to me, Sofia! I can’t live without you ...”
+
+Her lips moved to deny him, but made no sound. Now it was revealed to
+her, the way.
+
+“Come back to me, Sofia!”
+
+His hand crept along the edge of the table and lifted, quivering, to
+capture hers. She steeled herself to endure its touch, against
+sickening repulsion she fought to achieve a smile that would carry a
+suggestion of at least forgetfulness.
+
+“And if I do—?” she murmured.
+
+He gave a violent start, blood suffused his face darkly, his arms leapt
+out to enfold her. She stepped back, evading him with a movement of
+coquetry that served, as it was intended, to inflame him the more.
+
+“Wait!” she insisted. “Answer me first: If I return to you—then what?”
+
+“Everything shall be as you wish—everything forgotten—I will think of
+nothing but how to make you happy—”
+
+“And I may have my letters?”
+
+He nodded, swallowing hard, as if the concession well-nigh choked him.
+
+Under his gloating gaze her flesh crawled. Only by supreme effort did
+she succeed in resisting a mad impulse to risk a rush for door or
+windows, and whipped her will into maintaining what seemed to be frank
+response.
+
+“Very well,” she said; “I agree.”
+
+Again he offered to touch her, again she moved slightly, eluding him.
+
+“No,” she stipulated with an arch glance—“not yet! First prove you mean
+to make good your word.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“Let me go—with my letters—and call on me to-morrow.”
+
+His look clouded. “Can I trust you?” He was putting the question to
+himself more than to her. “Dare I?” He added in a tone colourless and
+flat: “I’ve half a mind to take you at your word. Only—forgive my
+doubts—appearances are against you—you seem almost too keen for the
+bargain. How can I know—?”
+
+“What proof do you want?”
+
+“Something definite.... You pledge yourself to me?” A movement of her
+head assented. “You will give yourself back to me?” He came nearer, but
+she contrived to repeat the sign of assent. “Wholly, without reserve?”
+
+An invincible disgust shook her as the full sense of his insistence
+struck home. Still she whipped herself to play out the scene—and win!
+
+“As you say, Victor, as you will....”
+
+He moved still nearer. She became conscious of his nearness as if a
+palpable aura of vileness emanated from his person.
+
+“Then give me proof—here and now.”
+
+“How?”
+
+He laughed a throaty, evil laugh. “Need you ask? Not much, my Sofia ...
+only a little ... something on account ...” Suddenly she could no more:
+memories unspeakable rose like disturbed dregs to the surface of her
+consciousness. Involuntarily, not knowing what she did, she flung out
+an arm and struck down his hands.
+
+“You—leper!”
+
+The epithet was like a knout cutting through the decayed fibre of the
+man and raising a livid welt on his diseased soul. Galled beyond
+endurance, his countenance convulsed with fury, he struck wickedly; and
+the vicious blow of his open palm across her mouth brought flecks of
+blood to the lips as her teeth cut into the tender flesh.
+
+It did far more, it shattered at one stroke the brittle casing of
+self-command with which centuries of civilization had sought to veneer
+the Slav. In a trice a woman whose existence neither of them had
+suspected was revealed, a fury incarnate flew at the dismayed prince,
+clawing, tearing, raining blows upon his face and bosom. Overcome by
+surprise, blinded, dazed, staggered, he gave ground, stumbled, caught
+at a chair to steady himself.
+
+As abruptly as it had begun, the assault ceased. Panting and frantic,
+the girl fell back, paused, renewed her grasp upon herself, gazed
+momentarily in contempt on that dashed and quaking figure, then swiftly
+swooped down to retrieve the picture, and madly pelted toward the door.
+
+In an instant, Victor was after her. His clutching fingers barely
+missed her shoulder but caught a flying end of the veil that swathed
+her throat and head. With finger-tips touching the door-knob Sofia was
+checked and twitched back so violently that she was all but thrown off
+her feet.
+
+She tried desperately to regain her balance, but the pressure round her
+throat, tightening, bade fair to suffocate her; and reeling, while her
+hands tore ineffectually at the folds of the veil, she was drawn back
+and back, and tripped, falling half on, half off the table.
+
+Already her vision was darkening, her lungs were labouring painfully,
+her head throbbed with the revolt of strangulated arteries as if sledge
+hammers were seeking to smash through her skull.
+
+Through closing shadows she saw that savage mask which hovered over
+her, moping and mowing, as Victor twisted and drew ever more tight the
+murderous bindings round her throat.
+
+A groping hand encountered something on the table, a lump of metal,
+cold and heavy. She seized and dashed it brutally into that hateful
+face, saw his head jerk back and heard him grunt with pain, and struck
+again, blindly, with all her might.
+
+Instantly the pressure upon her throat was eased. She heard a groan, a
+fall ...
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+GREEK VS. GREEK
+
+
+She found herself standing, partly resting upon the table. Great,
+tearing sobs racked her slight young body—but at least she was
+breathing, there was no more constriction of her windpipe; Her head
+still ached, however, her neck felt stiff and sore, and she remained
+somewhat giddy and confused.
+
+She eyed rather wildly her hands. One held torn and ragged folds of the
+veil ripped from her throat, the other the weapon with which she had
+cheated death: a bronze paperweight, probably a miniature copy of a
+Barye, an elephant trumpeting. The up-flung trunk was darkly stained
+and sticky....
+
+With a shudder she dropped the bronze, and looked down. Victor lay at
+her feet, supine, grotesquely asprawl. His face was bruised and livid;
+the cheek laid open by the bronze was smeared with scarlet,
+accentuating the leaden colour of his skin. His mouth was ajar; his
+eyes, half closed, hideously revealed slender slits of white. More
+blood discoloured his right temple, welling from under the matted,
+coarse black hair.
+
+He was terribly motionless. If he breathed, Sofia could detect no sign
+of it.
+
+In panic she knelt beside the body, threw back Victor’s dinner-coat,
+and laid an ear above his heart.
+
+At first, in her mad anxiety, she could hear nothing. But presently a
+beating registered, slow and harsh but steady-paced.
+
+With a sob of relief she sat back on her heels, and after a little
+while got unsteadily to her feet.
+
+The house door closed with a dull bang, and from the entrance hallway
+came a sound of voices. She stood petrified in dread till the voices
+fell and she heard stairs creak under an ascending tread.
+
+Thus reminded that Lanyard’s return might occur at any moment, she made
+all haste to patch up the disarray of veil and coiffure. Fortunately
+her costume, protected by the cloak of heavy and sturdy stuff, was
+quite undamaged.
+
+Not till on the point of leaving did she remember the painting. It lay
+unharmed where it had fallen when Victor seized her veil. She was calm
+enough now to consider herself fortunate in finding it so poorly
+secured in its frame; without the latter it would be far easier to
+smuggle the canvas away under her cloak.
+
+In the final glance she bent upon Victor’s beaten and insensible body
+there was no pity, no regret, no trace of compunction. What he had
+suffered he had ten times—no, a hundred, a thousand—earned. Long before
+she left him Sofia had lost count of the blows she had taken at his
+hands, the insults worse than blows, the lesser indignities
+innumerable.
+
+But in those abolished days she had never once struck back, she had
+been faint of heart, cowed and terrified, and had lacked what two years
+of separation had given her, that spiritual independence which never
+before had been able to realize itself, lift up its head, and grow
+strong in the assurance of its own integrity.
+
+Two years ago she would not have dared to lift a hand to Victor, no
+matter how sore the provocation. To-night—if she had one regret it was
+that she had struck so feebly: not that she desired his death, but that
+she knew it was now her life or his. She knew the man too well to
+flatter herself that he would rest before he had compassed such revenge
+as the baseness of his degenerate soul would deem adequate. Half the
+world were not too much to put between them if she were now to sleep of
+nights in comfortable consciousness of security from his quenchless
+hatred.
+
+Callously enough she switched off the lights and left him lying there,
+in darkness but for the ash-dimmed glimmer of a dying fire.
+
+In the entrance hallway she hesitated, coldly composed and alert. But
+seemingly the noise of their struggle had not carried beyond the door.
+There was no one about.
+
+With neither haste nor faltering, without the least misadventure, she
+let herself quietly out into the empty, silent, rain-swept street, and
+scurried toward the lights of Piccadilly.
+
+Before long a cruising four-wheeler overhauled her. In its obscure and
+stuffy refuge she sat hugging her precious canvas and pondering her
+plight.
+
+It was borne in upon her that she would do well to leave London, yes,
+and England, too, before Victor recovered sufficiently to scheme and
+put a watch upon her movements.
+
+She had need henceforth to be swift and wary and shrewd....
+
+A singular elation began to colour her temper, a quickening sense of
+emancipation. Necessity at a stroke had set her free. Because she must
+fly and hide to save her life, society had no more hold upon her, she
+need no longer fight to keep up appearances in spite of her status as a
+woman living apart from her husband, little better than a divorcée—an
+estate anathema to the English of those days.
+
+She experienced, through the play of her imagination upon this new and
+startling conception of life, an intoxicating prelibation of freedom
+such as she had never dreamed to savour.
+
+That waywardness which was a legitimate inheritance from generations of
+wilful forebears, impatient of all those restraints which a fixed
+environment imposes upon the individual, an impatience which had always
+been hers though it slumbered in unsuspected latency, asserted itself
+of a sudden, possessed her wholly, and warmed, her being like forbidden
+wine.
+
+In this humour she was set down at her door.
+
+None saw her enter. In a moment of vaguely prophetic foresight she had
+bidden Thérèse not to wait up for her and to tell the other servants
+there was no necessity for their doing so. She might be detained,
+Heaven alone knew how late she might be; but she had her latch-key and
+was quite competent to undress and put herself to bed.
+
+And Thérèse had taken her at her word.
+
+She was glad of that. In event that anything should leak out and be
+printed by the newspapers concerning the theft of Monsieur Lanyard’s
+famous “Corot” by a strange, closely veiled woman, it was just as well
+that none of the servants was about to see her come in with the canvas
+clumsily hidden under her cloak.
+
+So she exercised much circumspection in shutting and bolting the door,
+mounted the stairs without making any unnecessary stir, and at the door
+of her boudoir waited, listening, for several moments, in the course of
+which she heard, or fancied she heard, a slight noise on the far side
+of the door which made her suspect Thérèse might after all still be up
+and about.
+
+The sound was not repeated, but to make sure Sofia slipped out of her
+cloak and wrapped it round the canvas before she went in; which last
+she did sharply, with head up and eyes flashing ominously beneath
+scowling brows—prepared to give Thérèse a rare taste of temper if she
+found she had been disobeyed.
+
+But though the maid had left the lights on, she was nowhere to be seen.
+Nor did she answer from the bedchamber when the princess called her.
+
+With a sigh of relief that ran into the chuckle of a child absorbed in
+mischief, Sofia threw the cloak across a chaise-longue, and bore her
+prize in triumph to the escritoire.
+
+It was her intention to rip the canvas off with a knife, to get at the
+letters; and a long, thin-bladed Spanish dagger that now did service as
+a paper-knife was actually in her hand when she noticed how slightly
+the painting was tacked to its stretcher, and for the first time was
+visited by premonition.
+
+Dropping the knife, she caught a loose edge of the canvas and with one
+swift tug stripped it clear of the unpainted fabric beneath.
+
+The cry that disappointment wrung from her was bitter with protest and
+chagrin.
+
+Fortune had failed her, then, the jade had tricked her heartlessly.
+With success within her grasp, it had trickled like quicksilver through
+her fingers. Victor had been beforehand with her, had purloined the
+letters and restored the canvas to its frame. She might have suspected
+as much if she had only had the wit to draw a natural inference from
+the way the painting had parted company with its frame when she dropped
+it.
+
+So the letters for which she had risked and suffered so much must be
+back there, in Lanyard’s lodgings, in Victor’s possession—lost
+irretrievably, since she would never find the courage to go back for
+them, even if she dared assume that Victor had not yet recovered and
+escaped or that Lanyard had not yet come home.
+
+If only she had thought to rifle Victor’s pockets ...
+
+“Too late,” she uttered in despair.
+
+“Ah, madame, never say that!”
+
+She swung round but, shocked as she was to the verge of stupefaction,
+made no outcry.
+
+The intruder stood within arm’s-length, collected, amiable, debonair,
+nothing threatening in his attitude, merely an easy and at the same
+time quite respectful suggestion of interest.
+
+“Monsieur Lanyard!”
+
+His bow was humorous without mockery: “Madame la princesse does me much
+honour.”
+
+She was silent another instant, in a wide stare comprehending the
+incredible, the utterly impossible fact of his presence there. The one
+conceivable explanation voiced itself without her volition:
+
+“The Lone Wolf!”
+
+“Oh, come now!” he remonstrated, indulgently—“that’s downright
+flattery.”
+
+She moved aside, lifting a hand toward the bell-cord.
+
+“Wait!”
+
+Involuntarily she deferred, her arm dropped. Then, appreciating that
+she had yielded where he had no right to command, she mutinied.
+
+“Why?” she demanded, resentfully.
+
+“Why ring?” he countered, smiling.
+
+“To call my servants—to have them call in the police.”
+
+“But surely madame la princesse must appreciate the police might be at
+a loss to know which housebreaker to arrest.”
+
+He cocked an eye of mocking significance toward the purloined “Corot,”
+and in sharp revulsion of feeling Sofia had need to bite her lip to
+keep from laughing. She hesitated. He was right and reasonable enough,
+this impudent and imperturbable young elegant. Yet she could not afford
+to concede so much to him. She was quick to accept his gage.
+
+“Who knows,” she enquired, obliquely, “why Monsieur the Lone Wolf
+brought with him this counterfeit Corot when he broke in to steal—”
+
+“The counterfeit jewels of a titled adventuress!”
+
+An interruption brusque enough to silence her; or else it was its
+innuendo that struck the princess dumb with indignation. Lanyard’s
+laugh offered amends for the rudeness, as if he said: “Sorry—but you
+asked for it, you know.” He stepped aside, caught up a handful of her
+jewels that had been left, a tempting heap, openly exposed on her
+dressing-table (as much her own carelessness as anybody’s, Sofia
+admitted) and tossed them lightly upon the face of the fraudulent
+canvas.
+
+“Birds of a feather,” was his comment, whimsical; “coals to Newcastle!”
+
+“My jewels!” The princess gathered them up tenderly and faced him,
+blazing with resentment. He returned a twisted smile, an apologetic
+shrug.
+
+“Madame la princesse didn’t know? I’m so sorry.”
+
+“How dare you say they’re paste?”
+
+“I’m sorry,” he repeated; “but somebody seems to have taken advantage
+of madame’s confidence. Excellent imitations, I grant you, but articles
+de Paris none the less.”
+
+“It isn’t true!” she stormed, near to tears.
+
+“But really, you must believe me. A knowledge of jewels is one of my
+hobbies: I _know!_”
+
+She looked down in consternation at the exquisite trinkets he had
+condemned so bluntly. Then in a fit of temper she flung them from her
+with all her might, threw herself upon the chaise-longue, and wept
+passionately into its cushions. Then the young man proved himself
+tolerably instructed in the ways of womankind. He said nothing more,
+made no offer to comfort her by those futile and empty pats on the
+shoulder which are instinctive with man on such occasions, but simply
+sat him down and waited.
+
+In time the tempest passed, Sofia sat up and dabbled her eyes with a
+web of lace and linen. Then she looked round with a tentative smile
+that was wholly captivating. She was one of those rare women who can
+afford to cry.
+
+“It’s so humiliating!” she protested with racial ingenuousness—one of
+her most compelling charms. “But it’s ridiculous, too. I was so sure no
+one would ever know.”
+
+“No one but an expert ever would, madame.”
+
+“You see”—apparently she had forgotten that Lanyard was anything but a
+lifelong friend—“I needed money so badly, I had them reproduced and
+sold the originals.”
+
+“Madame la princesse—if she will permit—commands my profound sympathy.”
+
+“But,” she remembered, drying her eyes, “you called me an adventuress,
+too!”
+
+“But,” he contended, gravely, “you had already called me the Lone
+Wolf.”
+
+“But what do you expect, monsieur, when I find you in my rooms—?”
+
+“But what does madame la princesse expect when I find she had been to
+mine—and brought something valuable away with her, too!”
+
+“I had a reason—”
+
+“So had I.”
+
+“What was it?”
+
+“Perhaps it was to see madame la princesse alone—secretly—without
+exciting the jealousy, which I understand is supernormal, of monsieur
+le prince.”
+
+“But why should you wish to see me alone?” she demanded, with widening
+eyes.
+
+“Perhaps to beg madame’s permission to offer her what may possibly
+prove some slight consolation.”
+
+She weighed his words in dark distrust. What was this consolation? What
+his game? His attitude remained consistently too deferential and
+punctilious for one to suspect that by consolation he meant
+love-making.
+
+“But how did you get in?”
+
+“By the front door, madame. I find it ajar—one assumes, through
+oversight on the part of one of the servants—it opens to a touch, I
+walk in—et voila!”
+
+His levity was infectious. In spite of herself, she smiled in sympathy.
+
+“And what, pray, is this wonderful consolation you would offer me?”
+
+He produced from a pocket a packet of papers.
+
+“I think madame la princesse is interested in these,” he said. “If she
+will be so amiable as to accept them from me, with my compliments and
+one little word of advice....”
+
+“Ah, monsieur!” Look and tone thanked him more than words could ever.
+“You are too kind! And your advice—?”
+
+“They tell too much, madame, those letters. And I see you have a fire
+in the grate ...”
+
+“Monsieur has reason....”
+
+She rose, went to the fireplace and, half kneeling, thrust the letters
+one by one into the incandescent bed of coals. A ceremony of sentiment
+at any other time, but not now: her thoughts were far from the man with
+whose memory these letters were linked, they were in fact not wholly
+articulate. Just what was passing through her mind she herself would
+have found it hard to define; she was mainly conscious of a flooding
+emotion of gratitude to Lanyard; but there was something more, a
+feeling not unakin to tenderness....
+
+The reaction of her vital young body from a desperate physical
+conflict, the rapid play of her passions from anger and despair through
+triumph and delight to gratification and content, from the bitterest
+sense of frustration and peril to one of security; the uprush of those
+strange instincts which had lain dormant till roused by the knowledge
+that she was free at length from the maddening stupidity of social
+life, together with her recent, implicit self-dedication to a life in
+all things its converse: these influences were working upon her so
+strongly as to render her mood more dangerous than she guessed.
+
+Disturbed in her formless reverie, an aimless groping through a
+bewildering maze of emotions but vaguely apprehended, she started up,
+faced round and saw Lanyard, topcoat over arm and hat in hand, about to
+open the door.
+
+“Monsieur!”
+
+He looked back, coolly quizzical. “Madame?”
+
+“What are you doing?”
+
+“Taking my unobtrusive departure, madame la princesse, by the way I
+came.”
+
+“But—wait—come back!”
+
+He shrugged agreeably, released the door-knob, and stood before her, or
+rather over her—for he was the taller by a good five inches—looking
+down, quietly at her service.
+
+“I haven’t thanked you.”
+
+“For what, madame? For treating myself to an amusing adventure?”
+
+“It has cost you dear!”
+
+“The fortunes of war ...”
+
+Her hands rose unconsciously, with an uncertain movement. Her face was
+soft with an elusive bloom of unwonted feeling. Her eyes held a puzzled
+look, as if she did not quite understand what was moving her so deeply.
+
+“You are a strange man, monsieur....”
+
+“And what shall one say of madame la princesse?”
+
+She could but laugh; and laughter rings the death-knell of constraint.
+
+But Lanyard remembered uneasily that somebody—Solomon or some other who
+must have led an interesting life—had remarked that the lips of a
+strange woman are smoother than oil.
+
+“None the less, monsieur, I am deeply in your debt.”
+
+His smile of impersonal courtesy failed. He was becoming more sensitive
+than he liked to her charm and the warm sentiment she was giving out to
+him. This strange access in her of haunting loveliness, the gentle
+shadows that lay beneath her wide—yet languorous eyes, the almost
+imperceptible tremor of her sweetly fashioned lips, all troubled him
+profoundly. He exerted himself to break the spell upon his senses which
+this woman, wittingly or not, was weaving. But the effort was at best
+half-hearted.
+
+“I am well repaid,” he said a bit stiffly, “by the knowledge that the
+honour of madame la princesse is safe.”
+
+Sofia laughed breathlessly. Somehow her hands had found the way to his.
+Her glance wavered and fell.
+
+“But is it?” she asked in a tone so intimate that it was barely
+audible. And she laughed once more. “I am not so sure ... as long as
+monsieur is here.”
+
+Lanyard’s mouth twitched, slow colour mounted in his face, the light in
+his eyes was lambent. He found himself looking deep into other eyes
+that were like pools of violet shadow troubled by a deep surge and
+resurge of feeling for which there was no name. Aware that they
+revealed more than he ought to know, he sought to escape them by
+bending his lips to Sofia’s hands.
+
+Sighing softly, she resigned them to his kisses.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+PAID IN FULL
+
+
+It was late when Lanyard got home, but not too late: when he entered
+his living-room enough life lingered in the embers in the grate to
+betray to him a feline shape on all-fours creeping toward his
+bedchamber door. As he switched up the lights it bounded to its feet
+and dived through the portières with such celerity that he saw little
+more of it than coat-tails level on the wind.
+
+Dropping hat and canvas, Lanyard gave chase and overhauled the marauder
+as he was clambering out through the open window, where a firm hand on
+his collar checked his preparations to drop half a dozen feet to the
+flagged court.
+
+Victor swore fretfully and lashed out a random fist, which struck
+Lanyard’s cheek a glancing blow that carried just enough sting to
+kindle resentment. So the virtuous householder was rather more than
+unceremonious about yanking the princely housebreaker inside and
+lending him a foot to accelerate his return to the living-room; where
+Victor brought up, on all-fours again, in almost precisely the spot
+from which he had risen.
+
+He bounced up, however, with a surprising amount of animation and
+ambition, and flew back to the offensive with flailing fists. In this
+his judgment was grievously in fault. Lanyard sidestepped, nipped a
+wrist, twitched it smartly up between the man’s shoulder-blades (with a
+wrench that won a grunt of agony), caught the other arm from behind by
+the hollow of its elbow, and held his victim helpless—though
+ill-advised enough to continue to hiss and spit and squirm and kick.
+
+A heel that struck Lanyard’s shin earned Victor a shaking so
+thoroughgoing that he felt the teeth rattle in his jaws. When it was
+suspended, he was breathless but thoughtful, and offered no objection
+to being searched. Lanyard relieved him of a revolver and a dirk, then
+with a push sent Victor reeling to the table, where he stood panting,
+quivering, and glaring murder, while his captor put the dagger away and
+examined the firearm.
+
+“Wicked thing,” he commented—“loaded, too. Really, monsieur le prince
+should be more careful. One of these fine days, if you don’t stop
+playing with such weapons, one of these will go off right in your
+hand—and the next high-light in your history will be when the judge
+says: ‘And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!’”
+
+Victor confided his sentiments to a handkerchief with which he was
+mopping his face. Lanyard sat down and wagged a reproving head.
+
+“Didn’t catch,” he said; “perhaps it’s just as well, though; sounded
+like bad words. Hope I’m mistaken, of course: princes ought to set
+impressionable plebeians a better pattern.”
+
+He cocked a critical eye. “You’re a sight, if you don’t mind my saying
+so—look as if the sky had caved in on you. May one ask what happened?
+Did it stub its toe and fall?”
+
+Victor suspended operations with the handkerchief to bend upon his
+tormentor a louring, distrustful stare. His head was still heavy, hot,
+and painful, his mental processes thick with lees of coma; but now he
+began to appreciate, what naturally seemed apparent, that Lanyard must
+be unacquainted with the cause of his injuries.
+
+A searching look round the room confirmed him in this error. The canvas
+lay where Lanyard had dropped it on entering, not in the spot where
+Victor remembered seeing it last, but where conceivably an unheeded
+kick might have sent it in the course of his struggle with Sofia. She
+must have forgotten it, then, when she fled from what she probably
+thought was murder, and what might well have been.
+
+He was much too sore and shaken to be subtle; and the general trend of
+his conjectures was perfectly legible to Lanyard, who without delay set
+himself to conjure away any lingering suspicion of his guilelessness.
+
+“Not squiffy, are you, by any chance?” he enquired with the kindliest
+interest. “You look as if you’d wound up a spree by picking a fight
+with a bobby. Your cheek’s cut and all (shall we say, in deference to
+the well-known prejudices of the dear B.P.?) ensanguined. Sit down and
+pull yourself together before you try to explain to what I owe this
+honour—and so forth.”
+
+He got up, clapped a hand on Prince Victor’s shoulder, and steered him
+into an easy chair.
+
+“Anything more I can do to put you at your ease? Would a brandy and
+soda help, do you think?”
+
+The suggestion was acceptable: Victor signified as much with an
+ungracious mumble. Lanyard fetched glasses, a decanter, a
+siphon-bottle, and supplied his guest with a liberal hand before
+helping himself.
+
+Victor took the drink without a word of thanks and gulped it down
+noisily. Lanyard drank sparingly, then crossed the room to a bell-push.
+Seeing his finger on it Prince Victor started from his chair, but
+Lanyard hospitably waved him back.
+
+“Don’t go yet,” he pleaded. “You’ve only just dropped in, we haven’t
+had half a chance to chat. Besides, you mustn’t forget I’ve got your
+pistol and your dirk and the upper hand and a sustaining sense of moral
+superiority and no end of other advantages over you.”
+
+“Why,” the prince demanded, nervously—“why did you ring?”
+
+“To call a cab for you, of course. I don’t imagine you want to walk
+home—do you?—in your present state of shocking disrepair. Of course, if
+you’d rather ... But do sit down: compose yourself.”
+
+“Let me be,” the other snapped as Lanyard offered good-naturedly to
+thrust him back into the chair. “I am—quite composed.”
+
+“That’s good! Excellent! Hand steady enough to write me a cheque, do
+you think?”
+
+“What the devil!”
+
+“Oh, come now! Don’t go off your bat so easily. I’m only going to do
+you a service—”
+
+“Damn your impudence! I want no services of you!”
+
+“Oh, yes you do!” Lanyard insisted, unabashed—“or you will when you
+learn what a kind heart I’ve got. Now do be nice and stop protesting!
+You see, you’ve touched my heart. I’d no idea you were so passionate
+about that painting. If I had for one instant imagined you cared enough
+about it to burglarize my rooms ... But now that I do understand, my
+dear fellow, I wouldn’t deny you for worlds; I make you a free present
+of it, at the price I paid—twenty thousand and one hundred
+guineas—exacting no bonus or commission whatever. You’ll find blank
+cheques in the upper right-hand drawer of my desk there; fill in one to
+my order, and the Corot’s yours.”
+
+For a moment longer the prince stared, hate and perplexity in equal
+measure tincturing his regard. Then slowly the look of doubt gave way
+to the ghost of a crafty smile.
+
+What a blazing fool the fellow was (he thought) to accept a cheque on
+which payment could be stopped before banking hours in the morning—!
+
+Such fatuity seemed incredible. Yet there it was, egregious,
+indisputable. Why not profit by it, turn it to his own advantage? To
+secure what he had sought, the letters concealed between the canvases,
+and turn them against Sofia, and to play this Lanyard for a fool, all
+at one stroke—the opportunity was too rich to be slighted.
+
+He dissembled his exultation—or plumed himself on doing so.
+
+“Very well,” he mumbled, sulkily. “I’ll draw the cheque.”
+
+“That’s the right spirit!” Lanyard declared, and escorted him to the
+desk.
+
+A knock sounded. Lanyard called: “Come in!” A sleepy manservant,
+half-dressed and warm from his bed, entered.
+
+“You rang, sir?”
+
+“Yes, Harris.” Lanyard tossed him a sovereign. “Sorry to rout you out
+so late, but I need a cab. Whistle up a growler, will you?”
+
+“’Nk-you, sir.”
+
+The man retired cheerfully, rewarded for many a night of broken
+slumber. Prince Victor got up from the desk and proffered Lanyard the
+cheque.
+
+“I fancy,” he said with a leer, “you’ll find that all right.”
+
+Lanyard scrutinized the cheque minutely, nodded his satisfaction.
+
+“Thanks ever so ... No, not a word!” He forbade inflexibly a wholly
+imaginary interposition on the part of Prince Victor. “You don’t know
+how to thank me—do you? Then why try? I know I’m too good, but I really
+can’t help it, it’s my nature—and there you are! So what’s the good of
+bickering about it?... Now where did you leave your coat and hat? On my
+bed, as you came in?”
+
+He smiled charmingly and darted through the portières, returning with
+the articles in question. “Do let me help you.”
+
+The prince struggled into the coat and grunted an acknowledgment of the
+service. Lanyard pressed the hat into his hand, picked up the canvas,
+replaced it in its frame, and tucked both under the princely arm.
+
+Another knock: Harris returned.
+
+“The four-wheeler is w’iting, sir.”
+
+“Thanks, Harris. Half a moment: I want a word with you. You see this
+gentleman?” Lanyard caught Victor’s look of angry resentment and
+interrupted himself. “Don’t forget yourself, monsieur le prince.
+Remember ...”
+
+He patted significantly the pocket which held the revolver, and turned
+back to Harris.
+
+“This gentleman,” he said, consulting the signature to the cheque, “is
+Prince Victor Vassilyevski. Please remember him. You may have to bear
+witness against him in court.”
+
+“What insolence is this?” Victor demanded, hotly.
+
+“Calm yourself, monsieur le prince.” Lanyard repeated the warning
+gesture. “He is a nobleman of Russia, or says he is, and—strangely
+enough, Harris!—a burglar. I caught him burglarizing my rooms when I
+came home just now. You may judge from his appearance what difficulty I
+had in subduing him.”
+
+“’E do seem fair used up, sir,” Harris admitted, eyeing Victor
+indignantly. “Would you wish me to call a bobby and give ’im in
+charge?”
+
+“Thanks, no. Prince Victor and I have compromised. He doesn’t relish
+going to jail, and I’ve no particular desire to send him there. But he
+does want what he broke in to steal—that painting you see under his
+arm—and I’ve agreed to sell it to him. Here’s the cheque he has just
+given me. Providing payment is not stopped on it, Harris, you will hear
+no more of this incident. But if by any chance the cheque should come
+back from his bank—I may ask you to testify to what you have seen and
+heard here to-night.”
+
+“It is a lie!” Prince Victor shrilled. “You brought me in with you,
+assaulted me, blackmailed that cheque out of me! Nobody saw us—”
+
+“Sorry,” Lanyard cut in; “but it so happens, that the gentleman who has
+the rooms immediately above came in when I did, and can testify that I
+was alone. That’s all, monsieur le prince. Your carriage waits.”
+
+Harris opened the door. Choking with rage, the prince shuffled out,
+Lanyard politely escorting him to the curb. There, with a foot lifted
+to enter the four-wheeler, Prince Victor turned, shaking an impassioned
+hand in Lanyard’s face.
+
+“You’ll pay me for this!” he spluttered. “I’ll square accounts with
+you, Lanyard, if I have to follow you to the gates of hell!”
+
+“Better not,” Lanyard warned him fairly, “if you do, I’ll push you in
+... Bon soir, monsieur le prince!”
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+THE LONE WOLF’S DAUGHTER
+
+
+
+
+I
+THE GIRL SOFIA
+
+
+She sat all day long—from noon, that is, till late at night—on a high
+stool behind the tall, pulpit-like desk of the caisse; flanked on one
+hand by the swing door of green baize which communicated with the
+kitchen, on the other by a hideous black walnut buffet on which fruits
+of the season were displayed, more or less temptingly, to the taste of
+Mama Thérèse.
+
+But for these articles of furniture, the buffet, the desk, and the door
+to the kitchen quarters, uninterrupted rows of tables, square, with
+composition-marble tops, lined three walls of the room. The fourth was
+mainly plate-glass window, one on either side of the main entrance.
+
+Back of the tables were wall-seats upholstered in red plush, dusty and
+threadbare; and, above, a frieze of mirrors. The floor of the
+restaurant was a patternless mosaic of small hexagonal tiles, bare in
+warm weather, in the winter covered by a thick but well-worn Brussels
+carpet of peculiarly repulsive design. The windows wore half-curtains
+of net which, after nightfall, were reinforced by ruffled draperies of
+rep silk. Through the net curtains, by day, the name of the restaurant
+was shadowed in reverse by plain white-enamel letters glued to the
+glass:
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The girl stared so constantly at these letters, during the off hours of
+the day, that she sometimes wondered if they were not indelibly stamped
+upon her brain, like this:
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She gazed in the direction of the windows as a matter of habit, because
+Mama Thérèse objected to her reading at the desk (all the same,
+sometimes she did it on the sly) because the glimpses she caught, above
+the half-curtains, of heads of passersby gave her idle imagination
+something to play with, but mostly because it was difficult otherwise
+to seem unconscious of the stares that converged toward her from every
+table occupied by a masculine patron, whether regular or casual—unless
+the patron happened to be accompanied by a lady, in which unhappy event
+he had to content himself with furtive, sidelong glances, not always
+furtive enough by half.
+
+The feminine patrons stared, too, but from quite another angle of view.
+
+Sofia knew why. If she hadn’t, the mirror across the room would have
+enlightened even a woman without vanity; which paradox this thoroughly
+human young person was not.
+
+She was, indeed, healthily vain; and when she wasn’t focussing
+dream-dark eyes upon the windows, or verifying additions and making
+change, she was as likely as not to be stealing consultations with the
+mirror opposite, making sure she hadn’t, in the last few minutes, gone
+off in her looks. Not that her comeliness bade fair ever to prove the
+cause of any real excitement. Mama Thérèse made a first-rate dragon:
+she was very much on the job of discouraging enterprising young men,
+and this without respect for union hours or overtime. And when she
+wasn’t functioning as the ubiquitous wet-blanket, Papa Dupont
+understudied for her, and did it most efficiently, too. If anything he
+was more vigilant and enthusiastic when it came to administering the
+snub sufficient than even Mama Thérèse; in Sofia’s sight, indeed, he
+betrayed some personal feeling in the business; he seemed to consider
+alien admiration of his charge an encroachment upon his private
+prerogatives, to be resented accordingly.
+
+Sofia understood. At eighteen—thanks to the comprehensive visual
+education in the business of life which she could hardly have failed to
+assimilate from a coign of vantage overlooking every table of a Soho
+restaurant—there were precious few things she didn’t understand. But
+her insight into Papa Dupont’s mind in respect of herself was wholly
+devoid of sympathy. She was just a little bit afraid of him, and she
+despised him without measure. And this contempt was founded on
+something more than his weakness for taking numerous and surreptitious
+nips (surreptitious, at least, until they became numerous) while
+presiding over the zinc in the pantry between the restaurant proper and
+the kitchen; and on something more than his reluctance to let Mama
+Thérèse make an honest man of him, although these two had squabbled
+openly for so many years that most of the house staff believed them to
+be married hard and fast enough.
+
+For the matter of that, Sofia herself might have been the dupe of this
+popular delusion—which Mama Thérèse did her best to encourage by never
+referring to Dupont save as “mon mari”—had they been less imprudent in
+recriminations which had passed between them in private when Sofia was
+of an age so tender that she was presumed to be safely immature of
+mind. Whereas she had always been precocious, if rather a
+self-contained child. Almost from infancy she had been conversant with
+many things which she knew it wouldn’t do to talk about.
+
+Such sympathy as Sofia wasted on the couple was all for Mama Thérèse.
+What with keeping an eye on Papa Dupont that prevented his drinking
+himself to death seven times per calendar week, and an eye on Sofia
+that was fondly credited with being largely responsible for her failure
+to run away with each and every presentable man who ogled her, and
+browbeating the waiters and frustrating their attempts to cheat the
+house out of its fair dues, and supervising the marketing and the
+cuisine: believe it or not, Mama Thérèse led a tolerably busy life and
+deserved whatever gratification she got out of it, to say nothing of
+highest commendation for industry, fidelity, and frugality. But that
+did nothing to prevent Sofia from not liking her.
+
+Her inability to play up to the relationship in which she stood to Mama
+Thérèse in the manner prescribed by sentimentalists worried Sofia more
+than a little. She was as hungry to give affection as to receive it;
+and surely she ought to be fond of Mama Thérèse, who (Sofia was forever
+being reminded) had in the goodness of her great heart adopted her as
+the orphaned offspring of a cousin far-removed, and had brought her up
+at her own expense, expecting no return (excepting humility, gratitude,
+unquestioning affection, and uncomplaining acceptance of a life of
+incessant toil at tasks uncongenial when not downright unsavoury,
+without spending money or hours of untrammelled liberty in which to
+spend it).
+
+Surely such nobility ought to be requited with nothing less than love!
+
+Nevertheless, the plain, and to Sofia disquieting, truth was: it
+wasn’t.
+
+She was fond of Mama Thérèse after a fashion. No one was ever more
+ready to acknowledge the woman’s good qualities. But her faults, which
+included avarice, bad temper, gluttony, native cruelty of inclination,
+and simple inability to give a damn for anybody but herself, forbade
+satisfaction of Sofia’s yearnings to give her affections freely through
+bestowing them upon the abundant and florid person of Mama Thérèse.
+
+Still, she made no murmur. There was more than a trace of fatalism in
+the composition of her spirit. As she conceived it, in this life either
+things were or they were not; and as a rule they uncompromisingly were
+not: one couldn’t have everything.
+
+She was not happy, it would be stretching the truth to say she was
+content, but she was resigned, she was patient, she waited not
+altogether without confidence....
+
+All the same, sometimes, as she sat, day in day out, on her high stool,
+looking down on familiar aspects of life’s fermentation as it manifests
+in public restaurants, or peering out of the windows to catch
+tantalizing glimpses of its freer, ampler, and—alas!—more recondite
+phases—sometimes Sofia wondered whether there were not grimly cynic
+innuendo in those three words which the mystery of choice had affixed
+to the window-panes and graven so deep into her soul.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+For surely she was in exile there, an exile from all the fun and frolic
+and, fury of life, marooned in weary isolation, on a high stool, in a
+frowsty table d’hôte, in the living heart of London.
+
+
+
+
+II
+MASKS AND FACES
+
+
+Quite naturally she became acquainted with Faces....
+
+She grew adept at a game which consisted mostly in keeping close watch
+upon those who for this reason or that engaged her attention, without
+giving them the slightest reason to suspect she was doing anything of
+the sort.
+
+One could not always be staring in abstraction at nothing in particular
+as it passed to and fro on the sidewalk in front of the Café des
+Exiles; one could not often or for long at a time succeed in reading a
+book held open in one’s lap, below the level of the cashier’s desk,
+Mama Thérèse was too brisk for that; one had to do something with one’s
+mind; and it was sometimes diverting to watch and speculate about
+people who looked interesting.
+
+There were so many Faces, they came and went so constantly, like
+bubbles in a tideway, that to Sofia most of them seemed
+indistinguishable one from another, mere blurs of flesh colour studded
+with staring eyes and slitted by apertures which automatically and
+alternately gaped to receive gobbets of food and goblets of drink and
+closed to gulp them down. A man needed to be remarkable for something
+in his looks, not necessarily pulchritude, or for uncommon
+individuality, for Sofia to favour him with more than one of her
+seemingly casual glances or to remember him if he visited the café a
+second time.
+
+But those there were who stood out from the rank and file, for whom she
+watched, whom she missed if they failed to put in appearance at their
+accustomed hours, about whom her idle but able imagination wove
+wonderful fantasies, enduing them with histories and environments as
+far removed from fact as the drab dreams of the realists are from the
+picturesque commonplaces of everyday.
+
+And there were others who came once and never again, but whom she never
+forgot. But for some of these last, indeed, she would never have
+remembered some of the former. The brown-eyed youngster with the
+sentimental expression and the funny little moustache, for example,
+lurked in the ruck a long time before the one and only visit of a bird
+of passage dignified him in the sight of the girl on the high stool.
+
+On the occasion of his first appearance (but that was long ago, Sofia
+couldn’t remember how long) the slender young man with the soulful eyes
+and the insignificant moustache had commended himself to her somewhat
+derisive attention by seeming uncommonly exquisite for that atmosphere.
+
+The Café des Exiles was little haunted by the world of fashion; its
+diner á prix fixe (2/6), although excellent, surprisingly well done for
+the money, did not much seduce the clientèle of the Carlton and the
+Ritz. Now and again its remoteness, promising freedom from embarrassing
+encounters save through unlikely mischance, would bring it the custom
+of a clandestine couple from the West End, who would for a time make it
+an almost daily rendezvous, meeting nervously, sitting if possible in
+the most shadowy corner, the farthest from the door, and holding hands
+when they mistakenly assumed that nobody was looking—until the affair
+languished or some contretemps frightened them away.
+
+Aside from such visitations, however, the great world coldly passed the
+café by; although it couldn’t complain for lack of patronage, and in
+fact prospered exceedingly if without ostentation on the half-crowns of
+loyal Soho and more fickle suburbia.
+
+The Sohobohemian on its native heath and the City clerk on the loose,
+however, were not prone to such vestments as young Mr. Karslake
+affected. It wasn’t that he overdressed; even the ribald would have
+hesitated to libel him with the name of a “nut”—which is Cockney for
+what the United States knows as a “fancy (or swell) dresser”; it was
+simply that he was always irreproachably turned out, whatever the form
+of dress he thought appropriate to the time of day; and that his
+wardrobe was so complete and varied that he seldom appeared twice in
+the same suit of clothes—except, of course, after nightfall; though his
+visits to the Café des Exiles for dinner or afterward were so
+infrequent that each attained (after Sofia began to notice him at all)
+the importance of an occasion. Luncheon was his time, and those empty
+hours at the end of the afternoon which London fills in with tea and
+Soho with drinks.
+
+He seemed to have a very wide and catholic acquaintance among people of
+all ranks and stations in life; one could hardly call them friendships,
+for he lunched or sipped an aperti not often with the same person twice
+in a blue moon. And whether his companion were a curate or some ragged
+wastrel of the quarter; painted young person from the chorus of the
+newest revue or proper matron from Bayswater; keen adventurer from
+Fleet Street or solid merchant from the City, his attitude was much the
+same: easy, impersonal, unaffected, courteous, detached. He was as apt
+as not (going on his facial expression) to be mooning about Sofia when
+his guest was gesticulating wildly and uttering three hundred words a
+minute. When he spoke it was modestly, in a voice of agreeable cadences
+but pitched so low that Sofia never but twice heard anything he said;
+and his manner was not characterized by brisk decision. All the same,
+one noticed that he had, as a rule, the last word, that what he said
+left his hearer either satisfied or pensive.
+
+He was unmistakably silly about Sofia; though that didn’t impress her,
+too many of the regulars were just as hard hit, one more or less didn’t
+count. But he never stared to the point of rudeness, and it always
+seemed to make him hugely uncomfortable if she appeared in the least
+aware of his adoration; and Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont never even
+noticed him, so circumspect was he. Still, Sofia saw, and sometimes
+wondered, just as she wondered now and then about most of the possible
+men who seemed disposed to be sentimental about her.
+
+For there were times when she felt she could do with a little more
+first-hand experience and a little less second-hand knowledge.
+
+Love (she supposed) must be a very agreeable frame of mind to be in, it
+was so generally vogue....
+
+What first led her to think that Mr. Karslake might be an interesting
+person to know, entirely aside from his admiration, happened on an
+afternoon in June, a warm day for England, when a temperature of some
+81 degrees was responsible for “heat-wave” broadsides issued by the
+evening papers.
+
+At about tea time, Mr. Karslake, faultlessly arrayed, ambled in,
+selected a table diagonally across the room from the caisse, exchanged
+pleasantries with the waiter who served him a picon, and used a copy of
+The Evening Standard & St. James’s Gazette as a cover for his wistful
+admiration of Sofia.
+
+Presently he was joined by a gentleman twice his age, if not older,
+whose conservative smartness was such that one wondered if he hadn’t
+strayed out of bounds through inadvertence. One would have thought his
+place was in the clubs of Piccadilly if not (at that particular hour)
+at a tea table on the river terrace of the Houses of Parliament. On the
+other hand, there wasn’t a trace of self-importance in his habit, it
+achieved distinction solely through the unpretending dignity of a
+decent self-esteem.
+
+Sofia tried to fix what it was that made her think him the handsomest
+man she had ever seen. She failed. He wasn’t at all handsome in the
+smug fashion associated with the popular interpretation of that term;
+his features were engagingly irregular of conformation, but the
+impression they conveyed was of a singular strength together with as
+rare a fineness of spirit. A mobile and expressive face, stamped with a
+history of strange ordeals; but this must not be interpreted as meaning
+that it was haggard or prematurely aged; on the contrary, it had
+youthful colour and was but lightly scored with wrinkles, its sole
+confession of advancing years was in the gray at either temple. The
+eyes, perhaps, told more than anything else of trials endured and
+memories that would never rest.
+
+Once they had looked into hers (but that came later) Sofia was sure she
+would never forget those eyes. And as she saw them then, she never did
+forget them. But the next time she saw them she did not know them at
+all.
+
+The newcomer hailed Mr. Karslake by his name (which was the first time
+Sofia had heard it), sat down on the wall-seat beside him and, when the
+waiter came, desired an absinthe.
+
+He had used two languages already, English to Karslake, French to the
+waiter; Sofia understood both and spoke them to perfection. So it was
+rather exasperating when, his absinthe having been served and the
+customary platitudes passed on the weather and their respective states
+of health, the conversation was continued in a tongue with which Sofia
+was not only unacquainted but which sounded like none she had ever
+heard spoken. This seemed the more annoying because there were few
+people in the restaurant to drown with chatter the sound of those two
+voices and because, in spite of their guarded tones, their table was
+one so situated that some freak of acoustics carried every syllable
+uttered at it, even though whispered, to the quick ears at the
+cashier’s desk. A circumstance which had treated Sofia to many a moment
+of covert entertainment and not a few that threatened to shatter what
+slender illusions had survived eighteen years of Mama Thérèse. But
+nobody else (with the possible exception of the last) was acquainted
+with this secret of the restaurant, and Sofia was careful never to
+mention it.
+
+Now it so happened that Mr. Karslake had never before sat at that
+particular table.
+
+The language spoken at it to-day intrigued Sofia extravagantly. It was
+rich in labials, gutturals, and odd sibilances. She was positive it was
+not a European tongue, though she thought it might possibly be Russian,
+because it sounded rather like Russian print looks; it might just as
+well have been Arabic or Choctaw, for all Sofia could say to the
+contrary. But his fluent ease in it impressed her with the notion that
+young Mr. Karslake might not, after all, be as negligible a person as
+he looked and as she indifferently had assumed.
+
+She determined to study him more attentively.
+
+It was rather a long confabulation, too, and one that both men seemed
+to take very seriously—though its upshot was apparently quite
+acceptable to both—and terminated abruptly with Mr. Karslake
+announcing, in English, with every evidence of satisfaction:
+
+“Good! Then that’s settled.”
+
+To this the older man dissented tolerantly.
+
+“Pardon: nothing is settled; it is proposed, merely.”
+
+“Well,” said Karslake with a little laugh that to Sofia sounded empty,
+“at all events it ought to be amusing.”
+
+The other lifted one eyebrow and smiled remotely.
+
+“You think so?”
+
+“To be ordering you about, sir? I should say so!” But his companion
+wasn’t listening or chose purposely to ignore that accent of respect.
+
+“You are right, my friend,” he said, abstractedly: “it will be amusing.
+But what in life is not? I fancy that is why most of us go on, because
+we find the play entertaining in spite of ourselves. And even when we
+think of Death ... there’s the possibility that on the other side of
+the curtain, where the unseen audience sits, whose hisses and applause
+we never hear ... over there it may be more entertaining still!”
+
+Karslake was inquisitively watching his face.
+
+“You would say that,” he commented, deference and admiration in his
+voice. “By all accounts you’ve had a most amusing life.”
+
+“I have found it so.” The other nodded with glimmering eyes. “Not
+always at the time, of course. But when I look back, especially at my
+beginnings, at the times that seemed hardest and most intolerable ...”
+
+He was thoughtful for a moment, glancing interestedly round the room.
+
+“It takes one back.”
+
+“What does?”
+
+“This café, my friend.”
+
+“To your beginnings, you mean?”
+
+“Yes. It is very like the café at Troyon’s, at this hour especially,
+when there are so few English about.”
+
+“Troyon’s?”
+
+“A restaurant in Paris. Famous in its day. Several years ago—before the
+war—it burned down one night, cremating many memories. While it stood I
+hated it, now I miss it; Paris without it is no more the Paris that I
+knew.”
+
+“Why did you hate it, sir?”
+
+“Because I suffered there.”
+
+He indicated a weedy young Alsatian across the room, a depressed and
+pimply creature in a waiter’s jacket and apron, who was shambling from
+table to table and collecting used glasses and saucers.
+
+“You see that omnibus yonder? What he is to-day, that was I in
+mine—omnibus, scullion, valet-de-chambre, butt and scapegoat-in-general
+to the establishment, scavenger of food that no one else would eat....
+I suffered there, at Troyon’s.”
+
+“You, sir?” Karslake exclaimed in astonishment. “Whoever would have
+thought that you ... How did you escape?”
+
+“It occurred to me, one day, I was less than half alive and never would
+be better while I stayed on in that servitude. So I walked out—into
+life.”
+
+“I wish you’d tell me, sir,” Karslake ventured, eagerly.
+
+“Some day, perhaps, when I get back. But now”—he looked at his
+watch—“I’ve got just time enough to taxi to my hotel, pack, and catch
+the boat train.”
+
+“Don’t wait for me,” Karslake suggested, signalling the waiter.
+
+“Perhaps it would be as well if I didn’t.”
+
+They shook hands, and the older man got up, secured his hat and stick,
+and started out toward the door, moving leisurely, still looking about
+him with the narrowed eyes and smile of reminiscence.
+
+Of a sudden that look was abolished utterly. He had caught sight of
+Sofia.
+
+Her interest had been so excited by the singular confidences she had
+overheard that the girl had quite forgotten herself and her
+professional pose of blank neutrality. She was bending forward a
+little, forearms resting on the desk, frankly staring.
+
+The man’s stride checked, his smile faded, his eyes grew wide and
+cloudy with bewilderment. For a moment Sofia thought him on the point
+of bowing, as one might on unexpectedly encountering an acquaintance
+after many years: there was that hint of impulse hindered by
+uncertainty. And in that moment the girl was conscious of a singular
+sensation of breathlessness, as if something impended whose issue might
+change all the courses of her life. A feeling quite insane and
+unaccountable, to be sure; and nothing came of it whatever. With a
+readiness so instant that the break in his walk must have been
+imperceptible to anybody but Sofia, the man recollected himself,
+composed his face, and proceeded to the door.
+
+Confounded with inexplicable disappointment, Sofia sat unstirring.
+
+In the open doorway the man turned and looked back, not at her, but at
+Karslake, as if of half a mind to return and say something more to the
+younger man. But he didn’t.
+
+He never came back.
+
+
+
+
+III
+THE AGONY COLUMN
+
+
+Sofia dated from that afternoon the first stirrings of a discontent
+which grew in her throughout the summer till everything related to her
+lot seemed abominable in her sight.
+
+Even without this subjective inquietude it would have been an
+unpleasant summer. All the world was at sixes and sevens, the social
+unrest stirred up by the war showed no signs of subsiding, but indeed,
+quite the contrary, there was trouble in the very air—ominous portents
+of a storm whose dull, grim growling down the horizon could be heard
+only too clearly by those who did not wilfully close their ears, grin
+fatuous complacence, and bleat like brainless sheep: “All’s well!”
+
+High-spirited youth and witless wealth a-lust for strange new pleasures
+turned from the long strain of conflict to indulgence in endless orgies
+of extravagance like nothing ever witnessed by a world long since
+surfeited with contemplation of weird excesses: daily that wild dance
+of death attained wilder stages of saturnalia, the bands blaring ever
+louder to drown the mutter of savage elemental forces working
+underneath the crust.
+
+And ever and anon a lull would fall and the world would shudder to the
+iteration of a word that spelled calamity to all things fair and sweet
+and lovable in life, the word _Bolshevism_....
+
+In the Café des Exiles there was endless discord and strife.
+
+For several reasons trade was not what it had been, even for the slack
+season of summer it was poor. The cost of everything had gone up,
+waiters were insubordinate and unreasonable in their demands, Mama
+Thérèse had been constrained to increase the fixed price of the dinner,
+old customers took umbrage at this and their patronage elsewhere.
+
+Mama Thérèse cultivated a temper that grew day by day more vile, Papa
+Dupont displayed new artfulness in the matter of sneaking his daily
+toll of drink and showed it; the two squabbled incessantly.
+
+One of the chefs, surmising the irregularity of their relations and
+foreseeing an imminent break, sought to turn it to his own profit by
+making amorous overtures to Mama Thérèse, who for reasons of her own,
+probably hoping to make Papa Dupont jealous, encouraged the idiot. And,
+as if this were not sickening enough, Papa Dupont, far from resenting
+this menace to the pseudo-peace of the ménage, ignored if he did not
+welcome it, and daily displayed new tenderness for Sofia. He kept near
+her as constantly as he could, he would even interrupt a wrangle with
+Mama Thérèse to favour the girl with a languishing glance or a term of
+endearment; he was forever caressing her disgustingly with his eyes.
+
+The swing door between the café and the pantry had warped on its hinges
+and would not stay quite shut. Normally it stuck in a position which
+permitted whoever was at the zinc an uninterrupted view of the desk of
+la dame du comptoir. Instead of having it fixed, Papa Dupont put off
+that duty from day to day and developed a fond attachment for the place
+at the zinc. For hours on end Sofia, on her high stool, would be
+conscious of his gloating regard, his glances that lingered on the
+sweet lines of her throat, the roundness of her pretty arms.
+
+She dared make no sign to show that she knew and resented, to do so
+would be merely to draw upon herself the spite of Mama Thérèse.
+
+But she simmered with indignation, and contemplated futile
+plans—especially in the long, empty hours of the afternoon, between
+luncheon and the hour of the apertifs—countless vain plans for
+abolishing these intolerable conditions.
+
+She thought a great deal of the strange man who had talked with young
+Mr. Karslake, and wondered about him. Somehow she seemed unable to
+forget him; never before had any one she didn’t know made such a
+lasting impression upon her imagination.
+
+Sometimes she wasted time trying to explain to herself why the man had
+seemed, for that brief instant, to think he knew her, only to dismiss
+such speculations eventually with the assurance that she probably
+resembled in moderate degree somebody whom he had once known.
+
+But mostly she was preoccupied with pondering the strangeness of it,
+that he who seemed so brilliant and brave a figure of the great world
+should, according to his own confession, have risen from beginnings as
+lowly as her own. All that he had suffered in the days of his youth, in
+that place in Paris which he called Troyon’s, Sofia had suffered here
+and in large part continued to suffer without prospect of alleviation
+or hope of escape. And remembering what he had said, that his own
+trials had come to an end only when he awakened to the fact that he
+was, as he had put it, “less than half alive” there at Troyon’s, and
+had simply “walked out into life,” she was persuaded that the cure for
+her own discomfort and discontent would never be found in any other
+way. But she lacked courage to adventure it.
+
+To say “walk out and make an end of it” was all very well; but assuming
+that she ever should muster up spirit enough to do it—what then? Which
+way should she turn, once she had passed out through the doors? What
+could she do? She had neither means nor friends, and she was much too
+thoroughly conversant with the common way of the world with a woman
+alone to imagine that, by taking her life in her own hands, she would
+accomplish much more than exchange the irk of the frying pan for the
+fury of the fire.
+
+All the same, she knew that she must one day do it and chance the
+consequences. Things couldn’t go on as they were.
+
+And even granting that the outcome of any effort at self-assertion must
+be unhappy, she grew impatient.
+
+Meanwhile, she did nothing, she sat quietly on her perch, looked with
+stony composure over the heads of the multitude, indifferent alike to
+admiration and the uncharitable esteem of her own sex, and waited with
+a burning heart.
+
+Mr. Karslake ran true to form. He drifted in and out casually, always
+idle and dégagé and elegant, he continued his irregular conferences
+with ill-assorted companions, he worshipped discreetly and evidently
+without the faintest hope, he seemed more than ever a trifling and
+immaterial creature. Chance did not again lead him to the table where
+he had sat with the man whom Sofia could not forget, and only the
+memory of that conversation held any place for Karslake in the
+consideration of the girl.
+
+Even at that she didn’t consider him seriously, she looked for him and
+missed him when he didn’t appear solely because of a secret hope that
+some day that other one would come back to meet him in the café.
+
+Why she held fast to that hope Sofia could not have said.
+
+Toward the middle of summer Mr. Karslake absented himself for several
+weeks, and when he showed up again his visits were fewer and more
+widely spaced.
+
+On an afternoon late in August, a hot and weary day, he sauntered in
+with his habitual air of having in particular nothing to do and all the
+time there was to do it in, and found a man waiting for him.
+
+This was a person whom Sofia had quite overlooked after one glance had
+classified and pigeon-holed him. A single glance had been enough. They
+do some things better in England; a man cast for any particular rôle in
+life, for example, is apt to conform himself, mentally, physically, and
+even as to his outer habiliments, so nicely to the mould that he is
+forever unmistakably what he is even to the most casual observer. So
+this man was a butler, he had been born and bred a butler, he lived by
+buttling, a butler he would die; not a pompous, turkeycock butler, such
+as the American stage will offer you when it takes up English
+fashionable life in a serious way, but a mild-mannered, decent body,
+with plain side-whiskers, chopped short on a line with the lobes of his
+ears, otherwise clean-shaven, his hair pathetically dyed, a colourless
+cast of countenance, eyes meek and mild.
+
+He was soberly dressed in black coat and waistcoat, the latter showing
+a white triangle of hard-polished shirt and a black bow tie, with
+indefinite gray trousers and square-toed boots by no means new. His
+middle was crossed by a thick silver watch-chain, and curious,
+old-fashioned buttons of agate set in square frames of gold fastened
+his round stiff cuffs of yesterday. He carried a well-brushed bowler as
+unfashionable as unseasonable.
+
+When Mr. Karslake entered, the polished pattern of a young gentleman of
+means, slenderly well set-up in an exquisitely tailored brown lounge
+suit, wearing a boater and carrying a slender malacca stick in one
+chamois-gloved hand, the butler stood up at his table, quietly
+acknowledged his greeting—“Ah, Nogam! you here already?”—and waited for
+the younger man to be seated before resuming his own chair: a
+stoop-shouldered symbol of self-respecting respectability, not too
+intelligent, subdued by definite and unresentful acceptance of “his
+place.”
+
+Their table was the one immediately beyond the buffet; and the café was
+very quiet, with only three other patrons, two of whom were playing
+chess while the third was reading an old issue of the Echo de Paris. So
+Sofia could, if she had cared to eavesdrop, have overheard everything
+that passed between Mr. Karslake and the man Nogam. But she didn’t;
+their first few speeches failed to excite her curiosity in the least.
+
+She heard Mr. Karslake, who was becomingly affable to one of inferior
+station, express the perfunctory hope that he hadn’t kept Nogam waiting
+long, and Nogam reply to the simple effect of “Oh, not at all, sir.” To
+this he added that he ’oped there had been no ’itch, he was most heager
+to be installed in his new situation, and would do his best to give
+satisfaction. Karslake replied airily that he was sure Nogam would do
+famously, and Nogam said “Thank you, sir.” Then Karslake announced they
+must bustle along, because they were expected by some person unnamed,
+but just the same he meant to have a drink before he budged a foot. And
+he called a waiter and requested a whiskey and soda for himself and
+some beer for Nogam.... And Sofia turned her attention to other things.
+
+The murmur of their talk meant nothing to her after that, and she
+forgot them entirely till they got up to leave, and then wasted only a
+moment in wondering why Mr. Karslake, if he were, as he seemed to be,
+engaging a butler for some friend or employer, should have arranged to
+meet the man in a café of Soho. But it didn’t matter, and she dismissed
+the incident from her mind.
+
+What did matter was that she was to-day more than ever galled by the
+deadly circumstances of her existence. If they were to continue to
+obtain, she felt, life would grow simply unendurable, and she would to
+do something reckless to get a little relief from the tedium and the
+ugliness of it all.
+
+She was fed up with everything, the shrewishness of Mama Thérèse, the
+drunkenness of Papa Dupont, the hideous dullness of the café, the smell
+of food, the fumes of tobacco, the reek of wines.
+
+She was fed up with the leers of Papa Dupont, the scowls of Mama
+Thérèse, the grimaces of waiters, the stares of customers, the very
+sight of herself in the mirror across the room.
+
+She was fed up with being fed up, she wanted to do something lunatic,
+she wanted to kick and scream and drum on the floor with her heels.
+
+And all the while, beyond the threshold, life in the street was flowing
+by, a restless stream, and the voice of it was a siren call to her
+hungry heart, whispering of freedom, laughing low of love, roaring
+robustly of brave adventures.
+
+And she sat there with folded hands, mutinous yet impotent, afraid, a
+useless thing with sullen eyes ... wasted ...
+
+As was her custom, between six and seven, before the busy hours of the
+evening, she had her dinner fetched to a table near by.
+
+Somebody had left a copy of a morning paper on the wall-seat. Sofia
+glanced through it without much interest. None the less, when she had
+finished, she took the sheet back to the caisse with her and
+intermittently, as occasion offered, read snatches of it quite openly,
+so bored that she didn’t care if Mama Thérèse did catch her at this
+forbidden practice; a good row would be almost welcome ... anything to
+break the monotony....
+
+When she had digested without edification every item of news, she
+devoured the advertisements of the shops, then turned to the Agony
+Column, which she had saved up for a savoury.
+
+She read the appeal of the widow of the English army officer who wanted
+some kind-hearted and soft-headed person to finance her in setting up
+an establishment for “paying guests.”
+
+She read the card of the young gentleman of good family but
+impoverished means who admitted that he had every grace and talent
+heart could desire and who, in frantic effort to escape going to work
+for his living, threw himself bodily upon the generosity of an unknown,
+and as yet non-existent, benefactor, hinting darkly at suicide if
+nothing came of this last attempt to get himself luxuriously maintained
+in indolence.
+
+She read the advertisements of money-lenders who yearned to advance
+fabulous sums to the nobility and gentry on their simple notes of hand.
+
+She read the thinly disguised professional cards of lonely ladies whose
+unhappy lot could be mitigated only by congenial male companionship.
+
+She read the ingenuous matrimonial bids.
+
+She read the announcement of the lady of (deleted) title who was
+willing, for a substantial consideration, to introduce gentlefolk of
+means and their daughters to the most exclusive social circles.
+
+She read the naïve solicitation of the alleged ex-officer of the
+B.E.F., who had won through the war with every known decoration except
+the Double Cross of the Order of St. Gall and with nothing of his
+anatomy left whole except his cheek, begging some great-hearted soul to
+buy him a barrel organ to play in the streets.
+
+And then her eye was arrested by the appearance of her own name in the
+text of a brief advertisement, which she read naturally, with
+heightened interest:
+
+IF MICHAEL LANYARD will communicate privately he will hear news of
+Sofia his daughter. Address Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, Lincoln’s
+Inn Fields, W.C. 3
+
+
+
+
+IV
+MUTINY
+
+
+Sofia had never heard the name of Michael Lanyard. Neither did the firm
+style of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, mean anything to her.
+Notwithstanding, she wasted more time than she knew trying to picture
+to herself a man who looked like Michael Lanyard sounded, and wishing
+(no matter what his looks might be) that she were his long-lost
+daughter Sofia, and that he would see the advertisement, and
+communicate privately as requested, and hear news of her, and come
+speeding in a Rolls-Royce to the Café des Exiles, and walk in and
+humble Papa Dupont with a look of hauteur and confound Mama Thérèse
+with a peremptory word, and take Sofia by the hand and lead her out and
+induct her into such an environment as suited her rightful station:
+said environment necessarily comprising a town house if not on Park
+Lane at least nearly adjacent to it, and a country house sitting, in
+the mellowed beauty of its Seventeenth Century architecture, amid
+lordly acres of velvet lawn and private park.
+
+She hoped the country house would be within sight of the sea, and that
+the family garage would run to a comfortable little town-car for her
+personal use when she went shopping in Bond Street, or to pay calls or
+leave cards, or to concerts and matinees....
+
+At about this stage her châteaux en Espagne began to rock upon their
+foundations; a seismic phenomenon due to the appearance of Mama Thérèse
+and Papa Dupont, coming from zinc and kitchen for their dinner, which
+meal they habitually consumed in the café when the evening rush was
+over, the tables undressed, and the establishment had settled down to
+drowse away the dull hours till closing time.
+
+Thus reminded that it was nine o’clock or thereabouts of a stuffy
+evening in a stodgy world where nothing ever happened that hadn’t
+wearily happened the day before and the day before that and so back to
+the beginning of Time, and wasn’t scheduled tediously to continue
+happening to-morrow and the day after and so on to the end of Eternity,
+Sofia sighed and shook herself and put away the vanity of dreams.
+
+But her beauty, as she sat brooding, was as sultry as the night.
+
+In the rear of the room Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont wrangled sourly
+over their food; not with impassioned rancour but in the natural order
+of things—as others might discuss the book of the moment or the play of
+the year or scandal or Charlie Chaplin or the thundering fiasco of
+Versailles—these two discussed each other’s failings with utmost
+candour and freedom of expression: handling their subjects without
+gloves; never hesitating to touch upon topics not commonly mentioned in
+civil intercourse or to use the apt, unprintable word; never dreaming
+of politely terming a damned old hoe a spade; tossing the ball of
+recrimination to and fro with masterly ease.
+
+Their preoccupation with this pastime was so thoroughgoing that Mama
+Thérèse even failed to notice the passage of the postman on his last
+round of the day. Ordinarily, for reasons best known to herself and
+which Sofia had never thought to question, Mama Thérèse preferred
+personally to receive all letters and contrived to be on hand at the
+postman’s customary hours of call. But to-night she only realized that
+he had come and gone when, happening to glance toward the caisse, she
+saw Sofia shuffling the half-dozen envelopes which had been left with
+her.
+
+Immediately Mama Thérèse pushed back the table and got up, wiping chin
+and moustache with her napkin as she rolled toward the desk.
+
+But she was too late. Already Sofia had sorted out and was staring in
+blank wonder at an envelope addressed to Mama Thérèse and bearing in
+its upper left-hand corner the imprint of its origin:
+
+_Secretan & Sypher
+Solicitors
+Lincoln’s Inn Fields
+London, W.C. 3._
+
+
+As yet she was simply startled by the coincidence, her brain had not
+had time to absorb its full significance—that Mama Thérèse should
+receive a communication from these distinctively named solicitors on
+the evening of the very day on which they advertised concerning a young
+woman named Sofia!—when the letter was snatched out of her hand, a
+torrent of objurgation was loosed upon her devoted head, and she looked
+into the black scowl of the Frenchwoman.
+
+“Sneak! Spying little cat! How dare you pry into my letters?”
+
+“But, Mama Thérèse—!”
+
+“Be still, you! Has one asked you to speak? Give me those others”—Mama
+Thérèse with a vast show of violence appropriated them from Sofia’s
+unresisting grasp—“and after this keep your nose of a mouchard out of
+what doesn’t concern you!”
+
+“But, Mama Thérèse!—”
+
+“Hold your tongue. I wish to hear nothing from you, I hear too
+much—yes, and see too much, too! Oh, don’t flatter yourself I am like
+that fat dolt of a Dupont, to be taken in by a pair of round eyes and
+innocent ways. I know your sort, I know _you_, mam’selle, too well! Me,
+I am nobody’s fool, least of all yours, young woman. What goes on under
+my nose, I see; and if you imagine otherwise you are a bigger simpleton
+that you take me for.”
+
+She snapped her fingers viciously in Sofia’s crimsoned face, uttered a
+contemptuous “_Zut!_” and waddled off, shaking her head and growling to
+herself.
+
+Sofia felt stunned. The offensive had been launched so swiftly, she was
+conscious of having done so little to invite it, she had been taken
+unprepared, thrown into confusion, her feeble objections silenced and
+overwhelmed by that deluge of abuse, publicly disgraced....
+
+Her face was burning, and tears started in her eyes; but she winked
+them back, she would not let them fall. Conscious of the grins of the
+handful of patrons, and the leers of the waiters, she steeled herself
+to suppress every betrayal of the mortification in which her soul was
+writhing, she made no sign but stared on stonily at the blackness of
+the night that peered in at the open doors.
+
+Then indignation came to her rescue, the flaming colour ebbed from her
+face and left it unnaturally white, the mists before her eyes
+dissipated and their look grew fixed and hard, even her lips took on a
+grim, unyielding set. Beneath the desk her hands clenched into small
+fists. But she did not move.
+
+The sensation stirred up by the outbreak of Mama Thérèse subsided, the
+domino players resumed their game, the old gentleman reading Le Rire
+turned a page and read on with a knowing smile, lovers returned to
+their low-voiced love-making, waiters yawned behind their hands, all
+was as it had been save that, at their table (Sofia could see by the
+mirror, without looking directly) Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont seemed
+to have declared an armistice and were gobbling down the rest of their
+meal in silence and indecorous haste.
+
+Presently they got up and sought their living quarters. To do this they
+had to pass the caisse and through the green baize door. Mama Thérèse
+marched ahead with forbidding frown and quivering chins, with the
+militant carriage of misprized and affronted rectitude. To her, it was
+obvious, Sofia for the time being did not exist. At her heels Papa
+Dupont shambled uneasily, hanging the head of deep thoughtfulness,
+avoiding Sofia’s gaze. It was his part to pretend that all was well and
+always would be; only he lacked the effrontery, just then, for his
+usual smirk.
+
+When they had disappeared Sofia began to think.
+
+There was something more in this affair than mere coincidence, there
+was mystery, a sinister question.
+
+Her countenance grew as dark as the complexion of her reverie. Athwart
+the field of her abstracted vision drifted the figure of young Mr.
+Karslake. She was barely conscious of it.
+
+He seated himself with plain premeditation directly opposite the
+caisse, staring openly. But Sofia did not heed him at all. An odd smile
+shadowed his lips, an expression half eager, half apprehensive; there
+was a hint of puzzlement in his scrutiny. It was rather as if he had
+unexpectedly found some new reason for thinking the girl an
+exceptionally interesting personality. But she continued all unaware.
+
+Shortly after being served with a drink which he ordered but made no
+offer to taste, he moved as if minded to rise and cross to Sofia, sat
+up and edged forward on the wall-seat with a singular air of timidity
+and embarrassment. But whatever his intention, he reconsidered and sat
+back, glancing round the room to see if anybody were watching him. He
+could not see that anybody was. Not even Sofia. Relieved, he settled
+back, found a handsome gold case in the waistcoat of his dinner jacket,
+extracted a cigarette, nipped it between his lips—and forgot to light
+it.
+
+Of a sudden Sofia had arrived at a decision; and with every expression
+of it in her manner she slipped down from the high stool and left the
+caisse to take care of itself. Turning to the swing door she barged
+through with a high head and fire of determination illuminating her
+face. She had had enough of riddles.
+
+Behind the zinc an elderly and trusted waiter was nodding. The kitchen
+was cold and dark for the night. Papa Dupont, then, would be upstairs,
+closeted with the genius of the establishment.
+
+From the pantry a narrow staircase led up to the apartment above the
+restaurant. Sofia mounted rapidly, with a firm tread that was
+nevertheless practically noiseless, thanks to the paper-thin soles of
+well-worn slippers. She could hear voices bickering above.
+
+At the top there was a short, dark corridor, with three doors. Two of
+these were closed on sleeping-rooms; the third door, to a sort of
+combination office and living-room, stood open, letting out a stream of
+light.
+
+Sofia approached on tiptoe, though the altercation going on within had
+reached a stage so acute that it was doubtful whether either of the
+disputants would have heard had she stumped like a navvy.
+
+The point of dissension was not at first apparent, because Mama Thérèse
+was speaking, and what she said had exclusively to do with her estimate
+of Dupont’s character, the mettle of his spirit, the stuff of his
+mentality, the authenticity of his pedigree (with especial reference to
+the virtue of his maternal ancestry) and the circumstances of his
+upbringing; which estimate in sum was low but by no means so low as the
+terms in which Mama Thérèse was inspired to couch it.
+
+Papa Dupont did not seem to be greatly interested. He had heard all
+this before, many a time, with insignificant phraseological variations.
+Sofia, pausing unseen and unsuspected in the darkness just outside the
+doorway, could see him slouching deep in his chair, to one side of the
+table, his soft fat hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, his chin
+sunken on his chest, something dogged in the louring frown which he was
+bending upon nothing, something of genuine indifference in his passive
+attitude toward the blowsy virago who was leaning across the table the
+better to spit vituperation at him.
+
+And he waited with singular patience until she had to stop for want of
+breath. Then he shrugged and said heavily:
+
+“Still, I don’t see what else you propose to do, my old one.”
+
+Apparently his old one was as poor in expedient as he. “It is for
+nothing,” she said, acidly, “that one looks to you!”
+
+“I have said my say. If you have anything better to suggest....” He
+made a rhetorical pause for reply, but Mama Thérèse was well blown and
+sulky for the moment. “I am not old, not so old as you, and I have
+reason to believe the girl is not indifferent to my person.”
+
+“Drooling old pig,” Mama Thérèse observed with reason: “if you dream
+she would trouble to look twice at you—!”
+
+“That remains to be seen. And I, for one, fail to see how else we are
+to hold her. All this money that has been coming in, paid on the dot
+every quarter—that means there is more, much more to come to her. Are
+you ready to give it up?”
+
+“Never!” Mama Thérèse thumped the table vehemently. “It is mine by
+rights, I have earned it. Look at the way I have slaved for her, the
+tender care I have lavished upon her, ever since she was a little one
+in my arms.”
+
+“By all means,” Papa Dupont agreed, “look at it, but don’t talk about
+it to her. She might not understand you. Also, do not depend upon her
+to endorse any claim you might set up based upon such assertions.”
+
+“She is an ungrateful baggage!”
+
+“Possibly; but she is human, she has a memory—”
+
+“Are you going to be sentimental about her again?” Mama Thérèse
+demanded. “Pitiful old goat!”
+
+“But I am not in the least sentimental,” Papa Dupont disclaimed. “It is
+rather I who am practical, you who are sentimental. I ask you: Is there
+any way we can hold on to that money unless I marry Sofia? You do not
+answer. Why? Because there _is_ no other way. Then I am practical. But
+you will not admit that. And why? Because we have lived together for a
+number of years through force of habit, because once, very long ago, we
+were lovers, you and I—so long ago that you have forgotten you ever had
+a softer name for me than pig or goat. Who is the sentimentalist
+now—eh?”
+
+“Shut your face!” Mama Thérèse growled. “You annoy me. I have a
+presentiment I shall one day murder you.”
+
+“You would have done that long ago,” Papa Dupont pointed out, “if you
+had had the courage. Enough! I am silent. But when you are tired trying
+to think out another way, reflect on my solution. Meantime, let me have
+another look at that accursed letter.”
+
+Mama Thérèse did not respond, she offered no objection when Dupont took
+up the sheet of paper that lay between them, but ground the heels of
+her hands into her fat cheeks and sat glowering vindictively while he
+read aloud, slowly, with the labour of one to whom reading is
+unaccustomed dissipation:
+
+DEAR MADAM:
+
+
+Herewith we beg to enclose our cheque to your order in the sum of two
+hundred and fifty pounds, being the quarterly payment in advance due
+you from the estate of our deceased client, the Princess Sofia
+Vassilyevski, for your care of her daughter. We further beg to advise
+that, pursuant to the provisions of her will, we begin to-day, on the
+eighteenth birthday of the young Princess Sofia, a search for her
+father with the object of apprising him of his daughter’s existence.
+Therefore we would request you to make arrangements to have the young
+Princess Sofia brought to England forthwith from the convent in France
+where we understand she is finishing her education. We take leave,
+however, to advise that, pending the outcome of our enquiries, the
+question of her father’s existence be not discussed with the young
+princess. In event of his death being established or of failure to find
+him within six months, the Princess Sofia is to enter without more
+delay or formality into possession of her mother’s estate.
+
+
+Papa Dupont put down the letter. “It is plain enough,” he expounded:
+“if this father is found, we can whistle for our money; whereas if I
+were married to Sofia, as her husband I would control—”
+
+He broke off sharply, and added in consternation: “One million
+thunders!”
+
+Sofia stood between them.
+
+And yet she wasn’t the Sofia they knew, but another person altogether,
+a transfigured and exalted Sofia, aflame with righteous wrath and
+contemptuous with the pride of birth which had leaped into full being a
+moment since.
+
+A princess, born the daughter of a princess, now she knew and looked
+it.
+
+All thought of fear or deference was gone, she had nothing left but
+scorn for these two despicable creatures, the fat harpy and her
+crapulent consort who had battened so long upon her misery, who had
+held her in bondage to the most menial tasks of their wretched
+restaurant while they filched and hoarded the money paid them for
+giving her the care and the advantages that were her due.
+
+And something of this new-found dignity, to which her title was so
+unquestionable, which set her upon a level from which she could not but
+look down on these two paltry frauds, so abashed the Frenchwoman that
+the phrases of invective and vilification which gushed instinctively
+from the foul springs of her temper stuck in her throat, she couldn’t
+utter them, and she well-nigh choked with impotent fury and fear as the
+girl spoke.
+
+“You swindlers!” Sofia said, deliberately. “You poor cheats! To pocket
+a thousand pounds a year of my mother’s money—and make me slave for you
+in your wretched café! And for eighteen years! For eighteen years you
+have been robbing me of every right I had in the world, robbing me of
+everything I’ve needed and longed and prayed for, everything you were
+paid to give me—while I drudged for you and endured your ill-temper and
+your abuse and the contamination of association with you!... Give me
+that letter.”
+
+She possessed herself of it unopposed. But now Mama Thérèse found her
+tongue.
+
+“What—what do you mean?” she gasped, livid with fright. Was not a
+fortune slipping through her avaricious fingers? “What are you going to
+do?”
+
+“Do?” Sofia cried. “I don’t know, more than this: I’m not going to stay
+another hour under this roof, I’m going to leave to-night—now—
+immediately! That’s what I’m going to do!”
+
+“Where are you going?”
+
+The question halted Sofia in the doorway.
+
+“To find my father—wherever he is!”
+
+She left the two staring at each other, dumbfounded and aghast.
+
+At the far end of the passage she flung open her bedchamber door,
+entered, turned up the light, and snatched her cloak and hat from pegs
+beneath the curtained shelf that held her scanty wardrobe.
+
+Adjusting these before the mirror she could hear Thérèse bawling at
+Dupont to follow and stop her. Sofia had little fear he would find
+heart to attempt that, none the less she hurried. Once her hat was
+adjusted there was nothing to detain her; the best she had she stood
+in; no sentimental associations invested that room, the tomb of her
+defrauded childhood, the prison of her maltreated youth, to make her
+linger there, but only hateful ones to speed her going.
+
+She turned and fled.
+
+Stumbling on the stairs, she heard Thérèse still screaming imprecations
+and commands at Dupont, then the clumping of the man’s feet as,
+yielding at length, he started in pursuit.
+
+Through the green baize door she burst into the café like a young
+tornado. Every head turned her way with gaping mouths and protruding
+eyes of astonishment as she stopped at the caisse and brazenly, in the
+face of them all, plundered the till.
+
+This was a matter of necessity. Sofia had not one shilling of her own.
+But those two had robbed her, what she took was not so much as a
+thousandth part of the money of which they had despoiled her. Moreover,
+she dared not go out penniless to face London.
+
+Snatching a handful of loose coin, she made for the door. But the delay
+had been fatal. Dupont was now at her heels, and displaying
+extraordinary agility in a man of his years of dissipation and
+sedentary habits. And Thérèse was not far behind.
+
+Seeing coins trickling through the fingers of the fugitive and falling
+to ring and spin upon the floor, the Frenchwoman raised an anguished
+shriek of “_Thief! Stop thief!_”—and such part of the audience as had
+remained in its seats rose up as one man.
+
+In the same instant Dupont’s fingers clamped down on Sofia’s shoulder.
+She screamed, and he chuckled and dragged her back. Then his arm was
+struck up by a deft hand, the girl slipped from his hold and darted out
+through the doors.
+
+Roaring with rage (now that his blood was up, his heart in the chase)
+Dupont turned upon the meddler. This was young Mr. Karslake. Dupont did
+not know him except by sight, but that slender, boyish figure and the
+semi-apologetic smile on Karslake’s lips did not inspire respect.
+Blindly and with all his might Dupont swung his right to the other’s
+head, only to find it wasn’t there.
+
+The weight of the unexpended blow carried Dupont off his feet. He fell
+in a heap, and Mama Thérèse, charging wildly after Sofia, tripped on
+his body and deposited fourteen stone of solid flesh squarely in the
+small of Dupont’s back with a force that drove the breath out of him in
+one agonized blast.
+
+Karslake laughed aloud: it was all as good as a cinema. Then he
+followed Sofia.
+
+It was a dark and silent street by night, little used, a mere link
+between two main thoroughfares. Sofia, running for dear life, was still
+far from the nearest corner. Karslake doubled nimbly across the street
+to the only vehicle in sight, an impressive Rolls-Royce town-car.
+Jumping on the running-board he pointed out the fleeing shadow to the
+chauffeur.
+
+“Lay alongside that young woman before she makes the corner, Albert!”
+
+Without delay the car began to move.
+
+Meanwhile, the Café des Exiles was erupting antic shapes, waiters,
+customers, Dupont, Thérèse. The quiet hour was made hideous by their
+yells.
+
+“_Stop thief!” “À la voleuse!” “L’arrêtez!” “À la voleuse!” “Stop
+thief!_”
+
+An entirely superfluous bobby weathered the corner, discovered Sofia in
+flight across the street, came about, and shaped a diagonal course to
+cut across her bows. She saw him coming and stopped short with a gasp
+of dismay. Simultaneously the Rolls-Royce slid smoothly in between them
+and Karslake hopped down. Sofia uttered a small cry, more of surprise
+than fright, and hung back, trying to free the arm by which he was
+trying to guide her to the open door.
+
+“It’s our only chance,” he warned her, coolly. “We’re between two
+fires. Better not delay!”
+
+She yielded and tumbled in. Karslake followed and slammed the door. The
+car shot away and rounded into the cross street before the bobby could
+collect himself enough to look at its license plate. He made after it,
+but when he had reached the corner it had turned another and was lost.
+
+At the second turning Karslake looked round from the window with a
+reassuring laugh, and settled back beside Sofia.
+
+“So that ends that!”
+
+She stared wide-eyed through the shadows. She knew him now, she was not
+in the least afraid, but she was confused beyond measure.
+
+“Why—why—” she faltered—“what—who are you and where are you taking me?”
+
+“Oh, I beg your pardon!” said the young man, contritely. “I forgot. One
+ought to introduce one’s self before rescuing ladies in distress—but
+there really wasn’t time, you know. If you’ll overlook the informality,
+my name’s Karslake, Roger Karslake, Princess Sofia, and I’m taking you
+to your father.”
+
+
+
+
+V
+HOUSE OF THE WOLF
+
+
+This startling announcement Sofia received without comment and with a
+composure quite as surprising. The life which had made her what she
+was, a young woman singularly unillusioned, well-poised, and
+well-informed, had brought out in her nature a strong vein of
+scepticism. She was not easily to be impressed. The more remarkable the
+circumstance in question, the less inclined was she to exclaim about
+it, the stronger was her propensity to look shrewdly into the matter
+and find out for herself just what it was that made it seem so odd.
+
+She didn’t repose much faith in those striking synchronizations which
+apparently unrelated influences sometimes effect with related events,
+and which we are accustomed to term coincidences. She distrusted their
+specious seeming of spontaneity, she suspected a deep design behind
+them all.
+
+For example: Up to the moment of her flight from the Café des Exiles
+there had been, as Sofia saw it, nothing extraordinary or inexplicable
+in the chapter of happenings which had made her acquainted, as abruptly
+as tardily, with certain facts concerning her parentage.
+
+You might, if you felt like it, call it a strange coincidence that she
+should have read the advertisement of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher just
+before their letter was delivered and Mama Thérèse by her intemperate
+conduct warmed Sofia’s simmering suspicions to the boiling point. But
+then Sofia read the Agony Column every time it came into her hands: she
+would have been more surprised had she missed noticing her given name
+in print, and downright ashamed of herself if she had failed to
+associate the letter with the advertisement.
+
+If you asked her, she called it Fate, the foreordained workings of
+occult forces charged with dominion over human affairs. Sooner or later
+she must somehow have learned the truth about her right place in the
+world; and to her way of thinking it was no more astonishing that she
+should have learned it through accident supplemented by the acute
+inferences of a sharply stimulated imagination, rather than through
+being waited upon by a delegation of legal gentlemen commissioned with
+the duty of enlightening her. And the colossal set-piece of the evening
+having been duly exploded, no sequel whatever could expect anything
+better than relegation to the cheerless limbo of anticlimax.
+
+Thus when young Mr. Karslake explained his uninvited if timely
+intervention by stating that he was conducting her to the parent of
+whose existence she had so recently been informed, he succeeded—not to
+put too fine a point upon it—only in making it all seem a bit thick.
+
+So for the time being Sofia contented herself with silent study of his
+face as fitfully revealed by the passing lights of Shaftesbury Avenue.
+
+A nice face (she thought) open and naïve, perhaps a trace too much so;
+but, viewed at close quarters, by no means so child-like as she had
+thought it, and by no means wanting in evidences of quiet strength if
+one forgave the funny little moustache which (now one came to, observe
+it seriously) was precisely what lent that possibly deceptive look of
+innocence and inconsequence, positively weakening the character of what
+might otherwise have been a countenance to foster confidence.
+
+As for Mr. Karslake, he endured this candid scrutiny with a faintly
+apprehensive smile, but volunteered nothing more; so that, when the
+silence in time acquired an accent of constraint, it was Sofia who had
+to break it, not Mr. Karslake.
+
+“I’m wondering about you,” she explained quite gravely.
+
+“One fancied as much, Princess Sofia.”
+
+She liked his way of saying that; the title seemed to fall naturally
+from his lips, without a trace of irony. None the less, it wouldn’t do
+to be too readily influenced in his favour.
+
+“Do you really know my father?”
+
+“Rather!” said Mr. Karslake. “You see, I’m his secretary.”
+
+“How long—”
+
+“Upward of eighteen months now.”
+
+“And how long have you known I was his daughter?”
+
+Mr. Karslake, consulting a wrist-watch, permitted himself a quiet
+smile.
+
+“Thirty-eight minutes,” he announced—“say, thirty-nine.”
+
+“But how did you find out—?”
+
+“Your father called me up—can’t say from where—said he’d just learned
+you were acting as cashier at the Café des Exiles, and would I be good
+enough to take you firmly by the hand and lead you home.”
+
+“And how did he learn—?”
+
+“That he didn’t say. ’Fraid you’ll have to ask him, Princess Sofia.”
+
+Genuinely diverted by the cross-examination, he awaited with unruffled
+good humour the next question to be put by this amazingly collected and
+direct young person. But Sofia hesitated. She didn’t want to be rude,
+and Karslake seemed to be telling a tolerably straight story; still,
+she couldn’t altogether believe in him as yet. She couldn’t help it if
+his visit to the restaurant had been a shade too opportune, his account
+of himself too confoundedly pat.
+
+No: she wasn’t in the least afraid. Even if she were being kidnapped,
+she wasn’t afraid. She was so young, so absurdly confident in her
+ability to take care of herself. On the other hand, intuition kept
+admonishing her that in real life things simply didn’t happen like
+this, so smoothly, so fortunately; somehow, somewhere, in this curious
+affair, something must be wrong.
+
+“Please: what is my father’s name?”
+
+“Prince Victor Vassilyevski.”
+
+“You’re sure it isn’t Michael Lanyard?”
+
+Now Mr. Karslake was genuinely startled and showed it. Sofia remarked
+that he eyed her uneasily.
+
+“My sainted aunt! Where did you get hold of that name?”
+
+“Isn’t it my father’s?”
+
+“Ye-es,” the young man admitted, reluctantly; at least with something
+strongly resembling reluctance. “But he doesn’t use it any more.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+Mr. Karslake was silent, thoughtful. Sofia felt that she had scored and
+with determination pressed her point.
+
+“Do you mind telling me why he doesn’t use that name, if it’s his?”
+
+“See here, Princess Sofia”—Karslake slewed round to face her squarely
+with his most earnest and persuasive manner—“I am merely Prince
+Victor’s secretary, I’m not supposed to know all his secrets, and those
+I do know I’m supposed not to talk about. I’d much rather you put that
+question to Prince Victor yourself.”
+
+“I shall,” Sofia announced with decision. “When am I to see him?
+To-night?”
+
+“Of course. That is, I presume you will. I mean to say, Prince Victor
+wasn’t at home when I left, but if I know him he’s sure to be when we
+arrive. And I’m taking you there as directly as a motor can travel in
+this blessed town.”
+
+Sofia looked out of the window. The car, having turned down Regent
+Street from Piccadilly Circus, was now traversing sedate Pall Mall; and
+in another moment it swung into the passage between St. James’s Palace
+and Marlborough House Chapel; and then they were in The Mall, with the
+Victoria Memorial ahead, glowing against the dingy backing of
+Buckingham Palace.
+
+Now, since all Sofia’s reading had inculcated the belief that the
+enterprising kidnapper always made off with his victim by way of dark
+bystreets and unsavoury neighbourhoods, she felt somewhat reassured.
+
+“Have we very far to go?”
+
+“We’re almost there now—Queen Anne’s Gate.”
+
+A good enough address. Though that proved nothing. There was still
+plenty of time, anything might happen....
+
+Sofia shrugged, and settled back to await developments.
+
+But there was nothing to warrant misgivings in the aspect of the
+dwelling before which the car presently drew up. If it wasn’t the
+palace Sofia had unconsciously been looking forward to, it owned a
+solid, dull-faced dignity that suited well the town-house of a person
+of quality, it measured up quite acceptably to Sofia’s notion of what
+was becoming to the condition of a prince in exile—who naturally would
+live quietly, in view of the recent revolution in Russia.
+
+Without augmented fears, then, though still on the alert for anything
+that might seem questionable, and more agitated with excitement than
+she let him suspect, Sofia permitted Mr. Karslake to conduct her to the
+door.
+
+He had barely touched the bell-button when this door opened, revealing
+a vista of spacious entrance-hall.
+
+To one side stood a manservant to whom Sofia paid no attention till the
+sound of his name on Karslake’s tongue struck an echo from her memory.
+“Thanks, Nogam. Prince Victor home yet?”
+
+“Not yet, sir.”
+
+“Tell him, please, when he comes in, we’re waiting in the study.”
+
+“’Nk-you, sir.”
+
+The servant was the man whom Karslake had met in the Café des Exiles
+only a few hours before. Catching Sofia’s quick, questioning glance,
+Nogam paused at respectful attention. And, even then, she was struck
+again with his fidelity to the rôle in the social system for which Life
+had cast him. In the café, that afternoon, he had cut a mildly
+incongruous figure, unpretending but alien to that atmosphere; here, in
+the plain evening-dress livery of his station, he blended perfectly
+into the picture.
+
+Karslake gave his hat and stick to the man, then opened one wing of a
+great double doorway, and with a bow invited Sofia to precede him. She
+faltered, hazily conceiving that threshold in the guise of an
+inglorious Rubicon. But she had already gone too far into this
+adventure to draw back now without forfeiting her self-respect. With a
+deceptively firm step she entered a room to wonder at.
+
+Sombre shadows masked much of its magnificent proportions, but what
+Sofia could see suggested less the study of a man of everyday interests
+than the private museum of an Orientalist whose wealth knew no limits.
+
+The air was warm and close, aromatic with the ghosts of ten thousand
+perished perfumes. The quiet, when Karslake had closed the door, was
+oppressive, as if some dark enchantment here had power to tame and
+silence the growl of London that was never elsewhere in all the city
+for an instant still.
+
+On a great table of black teakwood inlaid with mother of pearl burned a
+solitary lamp, a curious affair in filigree of brass, furnishing what
+illumination there was. Its closely shaded rays made vaguely visible
+walls dark with books, tier upon tier climbing to the ceiling; chairs
+of odd shape, screens of glowing lacquer; tables and stands supporting
+caskets of burning cinnabar, of ivory, of gold, of kaleidoscopic
+cloisonné; trays heaped high with unset jewels; cabinets crowded with
+rare objects of Eastern art; squat shapes of neglected gods brandishing
+weird weapons; grotesque devil masks ferociously a-grin; chests of
+strange woods strangely fashioned, strangely carved, and decorated with
+inlays of precious metals, banded with huge straps of black iron, from
+which gushed in rainbow profusion silks and brocades stiff with
+barbaric embroideries in gold- and silver-thread and precious stones.
+
+Confused by the impact upon her perceptions of so much that was
+unexpected and bizarre, the girl looked round with an uncertain smile,
+and found Karslake watching her with a manner of peculiar gravity and
+concern.
+
+“Prince Victor is an extraordinary man,” Karslake replied to her
+unspoken comment; “probably the most learned Orientalist alive.
+Sometimes I think the East has never had a secret he doesn’t know.”
+
+He paused and drew nearer, with added earnestness in his regard.
+
+“Princess Sofia,” said he, diffidently, “if I may say something without
+meaning to seem disrespectful—”
+
+Perplexed, she encouraged him with one word: “Please.”
+
+“I’m afraid,” Karslake ventured, “you will have many strange
+experiences in this new life. Some of them, I fancy, you won’t
+immediately understand, some things may seem wrong to you, you may find
+yourself confronted with conditions hard to accept ...”
+
+He rested as if in doubt, and she fancied that he was listening
+intently, almost apprehensively, for some signal of warning. But on her
+part Sofia heard no sound.
+
+Impressed and puzzled, she uttered a prompting “Yes?”
+
+“I only want to say”—he employed a tone so low that she could barely
+hear him—“if you don’t mind—whatever happens—I’d be awf’ly glad if
+you’d think of me as one who sincerely wants to be your friend.”
+
+“Why,” she said in wonder—“thank you. I shall be glad—”
+
+She checked in astonishment: a man was approaching from the general
+direction of the door by which they had entered.
+
+The effect was uncanny, as if the figure had materialized before her
+very eyes, out of clear air, as if one of those many shadows had taken
+on shape and substance while she looked.
+
+The man himself was nothing unusual in general aspect, of no remarkable
+stature, neither tall nor small, neither robust nor slender. His
+evening clothes were without fault, but as much might be said of ten
+thousand men who might be seen any night in the public rendezvous of
+leisured London. His carriage had special distinction only in that he
+moved with a sort of feline grace. Still, something elusive made him
+unlike any other man Sofia had ever met, something arresting and not
+altogether prepossessing.
+
+As he drew nearer and his features became more clearly defined by the
+light, she was sensible of gazing into a face of unique cast. Of an odd
+grayish pallor accentuated by hair so black that it might have been
+painted on his skull with india-ink, the skin seemed to be as soft and
+smooth as a child’s, beardless and wholly without lustre. The mouth was
+sensuous yet firm, with hard, full lips. Leaden pouches hung beneath
+heavy-lidded eyes set at a noticeable angle. The eyes themselves were
+as black as night and as lightless; the rays of the lamp struck no
+gleam from them; in spite of this they were compelling, masterful, and
+disconcerting.
+
+Karslake at once fell back, with a bow so low it was little less than
+an obeisance.
+
+“Prince Victor!”
+
+The man nodded acknowledgment of this greeting without detaching
+attention from the girl. His voice, slightly tremulous with emotion,
+uttered her name: “Sofia?”
+
+She collected herself with an effort. “I am Sofia,” she replied almost
+mechanically.
+
+“And I, your father...”
+
+Prince Victor lifted hands of singular delicacy, slender and tapering,
+whose long fingers were dressed with many curious rings.
+
+A reluctance she could not understand hindered Sofia from going gladly
+into those arms. She had to make herself yield. They tightened hungrily
+about her. She closed her eyes and experienced a slight, invincible
+shudder.
+
+“My child!”
+
+The lips that touched her forehead astonished her with their warmth.
+Instinctively she had expected them to be cool, as frigid as the effect
+of that strange mask of which they formed a part.
+
+Then, held at arm’s-length, she submitted to an inspection whose sum
+was enunciated with a strange smile of gratification:
+
+“You are beautiful.”
+
+In embarrassment she murmured: “I am glad you think so—father.”
+
+“As beautiful as your mother—in her time the most beautiful creature in
+the world—her image, a flawless reproduction, even to her colouring,
+the shade of the hair, the eyes—so like the sea!”
+
+“I am glad,” the girl repeated, nervously.
+
+“And until to-night I did not know you lived!”
+
+She mustered up courage enough to ask: “How—?”
+
+The heavy lids drooped lower over the illegible eyes. “My attention was
+called to a newspaper advertisement signed by a firm of solicitors. I
+got in touch with them—a matter of some difficulty, since it was after
+business hours—and found out where to look for you. Then, prevented
+from acting as quickly as I wished, myself, I sent Karslake here to
+bring you to me.”
+
+“But, according to their letter, the solicitors thought I was in
+France, in a convent!”
+
+“When they advertised for me—yes. But by the time I enquired they were
+better informed.”
+
+“But the advertisement was addressed to Michael Lanyard!”
+
+The thin lips formed a faint smile. “That was once my name. I no longer
+use it.”
+
+Against a feeling that she was adopting an attitude both undutiful and
+unbecoming, Sofia persisted.
+
+“Why?”
+
+Prince Victor Vassilyevski gave a gesture of pain and reluctance.
+
+“Must I tell you? Why not? You must know some day, as well now as
+later, perhaps. Twenty years ago the name of Michael Lanyard was famous
+throughout Europe—or shall I say infamous?—the name of the greatest
+thief of modern times, otherwise known as ‘The Lone Wolf’.”
+
+Involuntarily, Sofia stepped back, as if some shape of horror had been
+suddenly thrust before her face.
+
+“The Lone Wolf!” she echoed in a voice of dismay. “A thief! You!”
+
+The man who called himself her father replied with a series of slow,
+affirmative nods.
+
+“That startles you?” he said in an indulgent voice. “Naturally. But you
+will soon grow accustomed to the thought, you will condone that chapter
+in my history, remembering I am no longer that man, no longer a thief,
+that for many years now my record has been without reproach. You will
+remember that there is more joy in Heaven over the one sinner who
+repents ... You will forgive the father, if only for your mother’s
+sake.”
+
+“For my mother’s sake—?”
+
+“What the Lone Wolf was in his day, your mother was in hers—the most
+brilliant adventuress Europe ever knew.”
+
+“Oh!” cried the girl in semi-hysterical protest. “Oh, no, no!
+Impossible!”
+
+“I assure you, it is quite true. Some day I may tell you her
+history—and mine. For the present, you will do well to think no more
+about what I have confessed. Repining can never mend the past. It is
+to-day and to-morrow you must think of: that you are restored to me,
+and that I have not only the means but a great hunger to make you
+happy, to gratify your slightest whim.”
+
+“I want nothing!” Sofia insisted, wildly.
+
+“You want sleep,” Prince Victor corrected, fondly—“you want it badly.
+You are nervous, overstrung, in no condition to understand the great
+good fortune that has befallen you. But to-morrow you will see things
+in a rosier light.”
+
+Apparently he had manipulated some signal unremarked by Sofia. The door
+opened, framing the figure of the man Nogam. Without looking round, but
+with an inscrutable smile, Prince Victor took the girl in his arms
+again and held her close.
+
+“You rang, sir?”
+
+“Oh, are you there, Nogam? Is the apartment ready for the Princess
+Sofia?”
+
+“Quite ready, sir.”
+
+“Be good enough to conduct her to it.” Again Prince Victor kissed
+Sofia’s forehead, then let her go. “Good-night, my child.”
+
+Moving slowly toward the door, drooping, Sofia made inarticulate
+response. She felt suddenly stupefied with fatigue. To think meant an
+effort that mocked her flagging powers. A vast lassitude was weighing
+upon her, body and spirit were faint in the enervation of an inexorable
+disconsolation.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+THE MUMMER
+
+
+Alone with his secretary, Prince Victor Vassilyevski dropped
+indifferently the guise of manner with which he had clothed himself for
+the benefit of the woman whom he claimed as his own child. That
+semblance of shy affection coloured by regrets for the past and
+modified by the native nobility of a prince in exile—so becoming in a
+parent to whose bosom a daughter whom he had never seen was suddenly
+restored—being of no more service for the present, was incontinently
+discarded. In its stead Victor favoured Karslake with a slow smile of
+understanding that broadened into an insuppressible grin of successful
+malice, a grimace of crude exultation through which peered out the
+impish savage mutinously imprisoned within a flimsy husk of modern
+manner.
+
+Suspecting this self-betrayal, he erased the grin swiftly, but not so
+swiftly that Karslake failed to note it. And the young man, smiling
+amiably and respectfully in return, was sensible of a thrill: yet
+another glimpse had been given him into the mystery that slept behind
+that countenance normally so impenetrable.
+
+But he was studious to show nothing of his own emotion. It was his part
+to be merely a mirror, to reflect rather than to feel, to be an
+instrument infinitely supple and unfailing, never an independent
+intelligence. Not otherwise could he count on holding his place in
+Victor’s favour.
+
+“You were quicker than I hoped.”
+
+“I had no trouble, sir,” Karslake returned, cheerfully. “Things rather
+played into my hands.”
+
+Victor dropped into a chair beside the table and lifted the lid of a
+small golden casket. Helping himself to one of its store of cigarettes,
+he made Karslake free of the remainder with a gracious hand. The
+secretary demurred, producing his pocket case.
+
+“If you don’t mind, sir ...”
+
+Victor moved a supercilious eyebrow. “Woodbines again?”
+
+“Sorry, sir; I know they’re pretty awful and all that, but they were
+all I could get in France, and I contracted a taste for them I can’t
+seem to cure. I remember, while I lay in a hospital, hardly a whole
+bone in my body, thanks to the Boche and his flying circus—it was that
+lot sent me crashing, you know—the nurses used to tempt me with the
+finest Turkish; but somehow I couldn’t go them; I’d beg for Woodbines.”
+
+Prince Victor dismissed the subject curtly. “I am waiting to hear about
+Sofia.”
+
+“Not much to tell, sir. There seemed to be a storm of sorts brewing
+when I got there. The young woman was at her desk with a face like a
+thundercloud. While I was trying to make up my mind what would be my
+best approach, she jumped down, flew upstairs and, I gathered, kicked
+up a holy row. You see, she’d seen that advertisement of Secretan &
+Sypher’s, and smelt a rat.”
+
+“What did she say?”
+
+“Nothing definite, sir: seemed to understand she was the daughter of
+Princess Sofia Vassilyevski, only she objected to her father being
+anybody but Michael Lanyard.”
+
+“Go on.”
+
+“After a bit she stampeded downstairs again, with the old girl and that
+swine of a Dupont at her heels. I blocked him and gave Sofia a chance
+to get outside. The whole establishment boiled out into the street
+after us, yelling like fun, but I got the girl into the car ... and
+here we are.”
+
+But Prince Victor seemed to have lost interest. The glow ebbing from
+his face, his lips tightening, the thick lids drooping low over his
+eyes, he sat in apparent abstraction, aping the impassivity of the
+graven idols that graced his study.
+
+“I don’t mind owning, sir,” the younger man resumed, nervously, “she
+had me sparring for wind when she put it to me point-blank her father’s
+name was Michael Lanyard.”
+
+Without moving Victor enquired in a dull voice: “What did you tell
+her?”
+
+“That it was a name you had once used, sir, but.... Well, what you told
+her, all except the Lone Wolf business. Don’t mind telling you I was in
+a rare funk till you capped my story so neatly.”
+
+He laughed and ventured with a hesitation quite boyish: “I say, Prince
+Victor—if it’s not an impertinent question—was there any truth in that?
+I mean about your having been the Lone Wolf twenty years ago.”
+
+“Not a syllable,” said Victor, dryly.
+
+“Then your name never was Michael Lanyard?”
+
+“Never, but ...”
+
+During a long pause the secretary fidgeted inwardly but had the wisdom
+to refrain from showing further inquisitiveness. He could see that
+strong passions were working in Victor: a hand, extended upon the
+table, unclosed and closed with a peculiar clutching action; the
+muscles contracted round mouth and eyes, moulding the face into a cast
+of disquieting malevolence. The voice, when at length it resumed, was
+bitter.
+
+“But Michael Lanyard was my enemy ... and is to-day.... He became a
+lover of Sofia’s mother, he had a hand in overturning plans I had made,
+he humiliated, mocked me.... And to-day he is interfering again.... But
+...”
+
+Victor sank back in his chair. Suddenly that unholy grin of his flashed
+and faded.
+
+“But now his impertinence fails, his insolence over-reaches itself. Now
+I have the whip-hand and ... I shall use it!”
+
+Vindictiveness that could find relief only in action mastered the man.
+
+“Be good enough to take this dictation.”
+
+Karslake turned to the table and opened a portfolio of illuminated
+Spanish leather.
+
+“Ready, sir,” he said, with pencil poised.
+
+_“To Michael Lanyard, Intelligence Division, the War Office, Whitehall.
+Sir: Your daughter Sofia is now with me. Permit me to suggest that, in
+consideration of this situation, you cease to meddle with my affairs.
+Your own intelligence must tell you nothing could be more fatal than an
+attempt to communicate with her.”_
+
+“Sign on the typewriter with the initial _V_.”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Type it on plain paper, use a plain envelope, be sure that neither has
+a watermark, and get it off to-night without fail. Take a taxi to St.
+Pancras station and post it there. If you make haste you can get it in
+a pillar-box before the last collection.”
+
+“I shan’t lose a minute, sir.”
+
+Karslake straightened up, folding the paper, and made for the door.
+
+“One moment, Karslake.... This man, Nogam: where did you pick him up?”
+
+“He used to buttle for my father, sir, but got into trouble—some
+domestic unpleasantness, I believe—needed money, and raised a cheque.
+The old boy let him off easy; but I’ve got the cheque, and Nogam knows
+it. The fellow’s perfectly trained and absolutely dependable, knows his
+place and his duties and not another blessed thing. I’ll send him in if
+you like.”
+
+Prince Victor uttered with dry accent: “Why?”
+
+“Thought you might care to have a talk with him, sir.”
+
+“I have.”
+
+“Oh!” Mr. Karslake exclaimed—“I didn’t know.”
+
+“Quite so,” commented Prince Victor. “I shan’t need you again to-night,
+Karslake.”
+
+“Good-night, sir.”
+
+When the secretary had gone, Victor sat motionless, so still that his
+breathing scarcely stirred his body, with a face absolutely
+imperturbable, steadfastly gazing into that darkness which shrouded the
+workings of his mind.
+
+On the doorstep a shrill whistle sounded: Nogam calling Karslake’s
+taxi. Victor heard the vehicle roll in and stand panting at the curb,
+then the slam of its door, the diminishing rumble of its departure.
+
+The house door closed, and after a little the study door opened, and
+Nogam halted on the threshold.
+
+Unstirring Victor enquired: “What is it, Nogam?”
+
+“I wished to enquire would there be anything more to-night, sir.”
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+“’Nk you, sir.”
+
+“But Nogam: in this house, regardless of the custom which may have
+obtained in other establishments where you have served, you will always
+knock before entering a room, and never enter until you obtain
+permission.”
+
+“But if I’m sure the room is empty, sir, and get no answer—?”
+
+“Then you may enter any room but this. Never this, unless I am here—or
+Mr. Karslake is—and you get leave.”
+
+“’Nk you, sir.”
+
+“Good-night.”
+
+As the door closed Victor extended a thin, effeminate hand to a casket
+of ivory, searched with sensitive finger-tips its exquisite tracery
+until a cunningly hidden spring responded and the lid, splitting in
+two, sank down into its walls. In the pocket thus revealed were many
+pills, apparently hand-moulded, of a grayish-brown substance,
+putty-soft.
+
+Slowly Victor selected three, placed one after another upon his tongue,
+and swallowed them.
+
+He shut the casket and sat waiting.
+
+Slowly the keenness of his countenance became blurred, as if the hand
+of an unseen sculptor were rubbing down its features, doing away the
+veneer with which Europe had overlaid the primitive Asiatic, which now
+showed on the surface, in every detail of coarsely modelled nose,
+oblique eyes of animal cunning, pendulous lips cruel and sensual.
+
+By degrees a faint trace of colour began to flush Victor’s cheeks, a
+smile modified the set of his mouth, the heavy-lidded eyes lost their
+lustreless opacity and glimmered with uncanny light.
+
+He breathed deeply, evenly, with an evident relish. The action of the
+opium was visibly renewing his powers. His expression, softening,
+became terrible with brute tenderness and longing. Gazing into shadows
+in which he saw that which he wished ardently to see, he stretched
+forth his arms, and his lips moved, shaping a name:
+
+“Sofia!”
+
+As those syllables, freighted with that undying passion which consumed
+the man, sounded upon the stillness, Victor turned sharply, with a
+gesture of irritation, looking aside, listening.
+
+Instantaneously the Asiatic disappeared, thrust back into its habitual
+latency within the prison of European: Prince Victor was as he had
+been, as always to the world, cool, composed, and crafty, master, never
+creature, of his emotions.
+
+A faint buzzing was audible, broken by muffled clicks.
+
+Rising, Victor approached a table in a corner and with a key from his
+pocket ring unlocked a heavy casket of bronze. As he raised its cover a
+small electric bulb illuminated the interior, focussing on the
+paper-covered face of a mechanical writing device, upon which a pencil
+with a broad flat lead operated by a metal arm was tracing characters
+resembling the hieroglyphics of the Chinese.
+
+When the clicking ceased and the pencil was at rest, Victor caught an
+end of the paper and pulled it forward until a blank surface again
+occupied the writing-bed. Upon this with another pencil he inscribed a
+reply, then closed and relocked the casket.
+
+Back at the table with the lamp, the message just received became crisp
+black ash on a brazen tray.
+
+From a locked chest Victor produced an inverness and a soft hat of
+black felt. Wearing these he moved quietly out of the lamp’s radius of
+light, and made himself one with the shadows that crowded one another
+round the walls. He did not leave by the hall door; but of a sudden the
+room was untenanted.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+THE FANTASTICS
+
+
+Downstream from The Pool, a little way below Shadwell, an uncouth row
+of dilapidated dwellings in those days stood—or, better, squatted, like
+a mute company of draggletail crones—atop a river-wall whose ancient
+blocks, all ropy with the slime of centuries, peered dimly out through
+groups of crazy spiles at the restless pageant of Thames-life.
+
+Viewed by day, say from the deck of a river steamer, the spectacle they
+offered was, according to bias of mood and disposition, unlovely and
+drear or colourful and romantic: Whistler might have etched these
+houses, Dickens have staged therein a lowly tragedy, Thomas Burke have
+made of one a frame for some vignette unforgettable of Limehouse life.
+
+Builded of stone or brick or both as to their landward faces, without
+exception they presented to the river false backs of wooden framework
+which overhung the water. Ordinarily, their windows were tight-shut,
+the panes opaque with accumulated grime—many were broken and boarded.
+Their look was dismal, their squalor desperate.
+
+Below, by day, heavy wherries swung moored to the ooze-clad spiles or,
+when the tide was out, sprawled upon stinking mud-flats with a gesture
+of pathetic helplessness peculiar to stranded watercraft. Seldom was
+one observed in use: to all seeming they existed for purposes of
+atmosphere alone.
+
+More seldom still did any dwelling betray evidence of inhabitation
+beyond faint wisps of smoke, like ghosts of famine, drifting from the
+chimneypots, or—perhaps—some unabashed exhibit of red flannel hung out
+to dry with wrist or ankle-bands nipped between a window-sash and sill.
+
+By night, however, a stir of furtive life was to be surmised from
+cryptic lights that flared and faded behind the crusted window-glass or
+fell through opened floor-traps to the thick black element that swirled
+about the spiles, and from guarded calls as well, inarticulate cries of
+hate and love and pain, rumours of close and crude carousal.
+
+And ever and again the belated riverfarer would encounter one of the
+wherries, its long oars swung by brawny arms and backs, stealing
+secretly across the inky waters on some errand no less dark.
+
+On land the buildings lined a cobbled street, from dawn to dark a
+thoroughfare for thundering lorries and, twice daily, in murk of early
+morning and gloom of early night, scoured by a nondescript rabble
+employed in the vast dockyards whose man-made forests of masts and
+cordage, funnels and cranes, on either hand lifted angular black
+silhouettes against the misty silver of the sky.
+
+Black and white and yellow and brown, men of every race and skin, they
+came and went, their brief hours loud with babel of strange tongues and
+a scuffling of countless feet like the sound of surf; and their goings
+left the street strangely hushed, a way of sinister reticences, its
+winding length ill-lighted by infrequent corner-lamps, its mephitic
+glooms enlivened by windows of public houses all saffron with specious
+promise of purchasable good-fellowship.
+
+One of these, the Red Moon, faced the row of waterfront houses,
+standing at the intersection of a street which struck inland to the
+pulsing heart of Limehouse. A retired bully of the prize-ring ruled
+with a high hand over its several bars and many patrons, yellow men and
+white girls, deck-hands and dock-workers, pugilistic and criminal
+celebrities of the quarter, and their sycophants. Its revels rendered
+the nights cacophonous, its portals sucked in streams of sweethearts
+and more impersonal lovers of life and laughter, and spewed out sots
+close-locked in embraces of maudlin affection or brutal combat. Bobbies
+kept an eye on the Red Moon, a respectful one: interference with the
+time-hallowed customs and prerogatives of its clientèle was something
+to be adventured with extreme discretion.
+
+Out of the hinterland of Limehouse, a tall man came to the Red Moon
+that night, walking with long, loose-jointed strides, holding his head
+high and looking over the heads of all he passed with a fixed, far
+gaze. He had a hatchet-face, sallow, with lantern jaws, a petulant
+mouth, hot eyes that showed too much white above their pupils. A lank
+black mane greased his collar. His garments, shoddy but whole, were
+stained and bleached in spots, apparently the work of acids, and so
+wrinkled and shapeless as to suggest that their owner slept without
+undressing as a matter of habit. The pockets of his coat bulged
+noticeably.
+
+Shouldering heedlessly into the saloon-bar, he found it deserted except
+for a chinless potman: the liveliest evening trade was always plied in
+the cheaper bars adjacent.
+
+One glance sufficed to identify him: with a surly nod the potman ducked
+behind a partition to call the proprietor. Drinks were in order when
+this last appeared; and a brief conference in undertones ended when,
+having made careful reconnaissance, the publican nodded shortly to the
+patron, a jerk of his thumb designating a small door let into the wall
+to one side of the bar proper.
+
+Through this the tall man passed to find himself upon a dark stairway,
+at the foot of which another door admitted to an underground chamber
+where an apparently exclusive social gathering was in session of
+Saturnalia.
+
+In one corner a long-suffering piano was taking cruel punishment at the
+hands of a flashily dressed, sharp-faced man of horsey type. Flanking
+him, two young women of the world, with that insouciance which
+appertains—in Limehouse—to sweet sixteen, were chanting shrilly to his
+accompaniment: both more than comfortably drunk. In the middle of the
+room assorted lawbreakers gathered round a table were playing fan-tan
+at the top of their lungs. At smaller tables men and women sat
+consuming poisons of which they were obviously in no crying need; while
+in bunks builded against one wall devotees of the pipe reclined in
+various stages of beatitude. The air was hot, and foul with cigarette
+smoke, sickening fumes of sizzling opium, effluvia of beer and spirits,
+sour reek of sweating flesh.
+
+Incurious glances greeted the newcomer: none paid him more heed than an
+indifferent nod. On his part, brief but comprehensive survey having
+deepened the stamp of scorn upon his features, he ignored them all and,
+proceeding directly to a bunk of the lowermost tier, aroused its
+occupant with a smart tap on the shoulder.
+
+The ostensible drug-addict looked up dreamily, then opened his eyes
+wide, with surprising docility rolled out and, uttering no word,
+lurched to the fan-tan table. The tall man took his place, lay down,
+and drew together the unclean curtains of sleazy stuff provided to
+afford privacy to shrinking souls. This done, he turned on his side and
+knuckled in peculiar rhythm the back of the bunk, a solid panel which
+slipped smoothly to one side, permitting the man to tumble out into
+still another room, a cheerless place, with floor of stone and the
+smell of a vault.
+
+When the panel had slipped back into place, closing out the bunk, the
+man stood in night absolute. But after a minute a slender beam of
+golden light struck suddenly athwart the darkness and found his face.
+This he endured impassively, only lifting a hand to describe an obscure
+sign. Immediately the light was shut off, a door opened in the wall
+opposite, dull light from behind disclosed the silhouette of a man in
+Chinese robes, his head inclined in a bow of courteous dignity.
+
+In good English but with musical Eastern inflection a voice gave
+greeting:
+
+“Good evening, Thirteen. You are awaited—and welcome!”
+
+“Good evening, Shaik Tsin,” the European replied in heavy un-English
+accents. “Number One is here, yes?”
+
+“Not yet. But we have just received a telautographic message saying he
+is on his way.”
+
+Nodding impatiently, Thirteen passed through the door, which the
+Chinaman quickly closed and barred.
+
+The chamber to which one gained admittance by ways so devious and
+fantastic was large—exactly how large it was difficult to guess, since
+all its walls were screened by black silk panels upon which golden
+dragons writhed and crawled. A thick carpet of black covered every inch
+of visible floor space, a black silk canopy hid the ceiling, and all
+the room was in deep shadow save the space immediately beneath a great
+lamp of opalescent glass, likewise draped in black.
+
+Here stood an octagonal table of black teakwood, on seven sides of
+which seven chairs were placed. When Thirteen had taken his seat all
+these were occupied. On the eighth side an eighth chair stood empty on
+a low dais, the heavy carving of its high back, its massive arms and
+legs, picked out with gold.
+
+The six who had anticipated Thirteen at this bizarre rendezvous hailed
+him as a familiar, according to their several idiosyncrasies,
+brusquely, indifferently, or with some semblance of cordiality. They
+made a motley crew.
+
+Two were Englishman in appearance, though the figure of languid
+elegance in evening dress that might have graced the lounge of a West
+End club had a voice soft with Celtic brogue. The other owned a gross
+body clothed in loud checks and, with his mean blue eyes, his mottled
+complexion, and cunning leer, would not have seemed out of place in a
+betting-ring.
+
+Aside from these there were a moon-faced Bengali babu, a dark Italian
+with flashing eyes and teeth, and a stout person of bovine Teutonic
+cast—the type that is sage, shrewd, easy-going when unopposed, but
+capable under provocation of exhibiting the most conscienceless
+brutality.
+
+From this last Thirteen got his warmest welcome.
+
+“You are late, mine friend.”
+
+“In good time, however,” Thirteen responded with a nod toward the
+vacant chair. “More than that, the summons was handed me only twenty
+minutes ago.”
+
+“How was that?” the babu asked. “It was sent at six o’clock.”
+
+“I was at work in the laboratory and had left orders I was not to be
+disturbed. But for one thing”—the petulance of Thirteen’s habitual
+expression was lightened by a flash of self-gratulation, and his voice
+shook a little with excitement—“I might not have received the summons
+before morning.”
+
+“And that one thing?”
+
+“Success, comrades! At last—after months of experimentation—I have been
+successful!”
+
+“’Ow?” dryly demanded the man in the checked suit.
+
+“I have discovered a great secret—discovered, perfected, adapted it to
+common means at our command. Comrades, I tell you, to-night we hold all
+England in the hollow of our hands!”
+
+With an incoherent exclamation and eyes afire the Russian sat forward.
+Unconsciously the others imitated his action. Only the man in evening
+dress made a show of remaining unimpressed.
+
+“It’s fine, fat words you’re after using,” he commented. “‘All England
+in the hollow of our hands!’ If they mean anything at all, comrade,
+they mean—”
+
+“Everything!” Thirteen cut in with arrogant assertiveness; “all we’ve
+been waiting for, hoping for, praying for—the end of the ruling
+classes, extinction of the accursed aristocrats, subjugation of the
+thrice-damned bourgeois, the triumph of the proletariat, all at a
+single stroke, swift, subtle, and sure! Freedom for Ireland, freedom
+for India, freedom for England, the speedy spreading of that red dawn
+which lights the Russian skies to-day, till all the wide world basks in
+its warm radiance and acclaims us, comrades, its redeemers!”
+
+“Lieber Gott!” the German breathed. “Colossal!”
+
+“’Ear, ’ear!” the Englishman applauded, perfunctory and skeptical.
+“Bli’me if you didn’t mike me forget where I was—’ad me thinking I was
+in ’Yde Park, you did, listening to a bloody horator on a box.”
+
+“You may laugh,” Thirteen replied with a sour glance; “but when you
+have heard, you will not laugh. I am not boasting—I am telling you.”
+
+“Not a great deal,” the Irishman suggested. “Your mouth is full of
+sounds and fury, but till you tell us more you’ll have told us
+nothing.”
+
+The face of Thirteen grew darker still, and for a moment he seemed to
+meditate an angry retort; but he thought better of it, contenting
+himself with an impatient movement and a mutter: “All in good time;
+Number One is not here yet.”
+
+“W’y wyste time w’itin’ for ’im?” demanded the Englishman. “’E’s no
+good, ’e’s done.”
+
+Thirteen’s eyes narrowed. “How so?”
+
+“’E’s done, Number One is—finished, counted out, napoo! ’E’s ’ad ’is
+d’y, and a pretty mess ’e’s mide of it—and it’s ’igh time, I say, for
+’im to step down and let a better man tike ’old.”
+
+Growls in chorus endorsed this declaration of mutiny; but suddenly were
+stilled by a voice, sonorous and calm, from outside the circle:
+
+“You think so, Seven? Well—who knows?—perhaps you are right.”
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS
+
+
+Someone exclaimed in an accent of alarm: “Number One!”
+
+With a concerted turning of startled heads, a hasty thrusting back of
+chairs, the gathering rose in involuntary deference. That is, five rose
+as one; and, after a moment during which his spirit of insubordination
+faltered and failed, the Englishman got awkwardly to his feet and stood
+abashed and sullen.
+
+The one to remain seated was the Irishman so well turned out by Conduit
+Street; who made no move more than slightly to elevate supercilious
+brows and slouch a little lower in his chair, glancing from face to
+face of the circle, then back to the cold countenance presented by the
+author of the abrupt interruption.
+
+This last stood quietly beside the eighth chair, a hand on its carved
+arm, one foot on the edge of the dais. A long robe of black silk
+enveloped him; on its bosom a Chinese unicorn was embroidered. His
+girdle clasp was of Imperial jade set with rubies. The girdle itself
+was yellow. A great ruby button, nearly an inch in diameter, set in a
+mounting of worked gold, crowned a hat like an inverted round bowl. His
+black silk shoes were heavy with golden embroidery, and had white soles
+an inch thick. Authority lent inches to his stature, so that he seemed
+to dominate his company physically as well as spiritually.
+
+A pace or two in the rear Shaik Tsin, with impassive face and arms
+folded in voluminous sleeves, waited as might a bodyguard.
+
+A sardonic glimmer in eyes half visible under heavy lids alone betrayed
+relish of the situation, the homage commanded and the sensation created
+by this inopportune and unheralded arrival: deliberately Number One
+mounted the dais and posed himself in the throne-like chair. Then, as
+his look read face after face, he smiled with twitching and disdainful
+nostrils.
+
+“Gentlemen of the Council,” he said, slowly, “I bow to you all. Pray be
+seated.”
+
+In confounded silence the six resumed their seats, while the
+seventh—who had not moved—lighted a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and
+through a veil of smoke continued to regard Number One with insolent
+eyes.
+
+“I fear my arrival was ill-timed, gentlemen. Seven had the floor, and I
+confess to finding what I happened to overhear extremely interesting.
+If he will be good enough to continue ...”
+
+The Irishman gave a light, derisive laugh. Shifting uneasily in his
+chair, the man in the checked suit flushed darkly, then stiffened his
+spine, hardened his eyes, set his jaw, and faced Number One defiantly.
+
+“You ’eard ... I ’olds by w’at I said.”
+
+“I am to understand, then, you think it time for me to abdicate and let
+another lead you in my stead?”
+
+The Englishman assented with an inarticulate monosyllable and a surly
+nod.
+
+“And may one ask why?”
+
+“Blue’s plice in Pekin Street was r’ided this afternoon,” Seven
+announced truculently. “But per’aps you didn’t know—”
+
+“Not until some time before the news reached you,” One replied,
+pleasantly. “And what of it?”
+
+“Three fycers in a week, Gov’ner—anybody’ll tell you that’s comin’ it a
+bit thick.”
+
+“Granted. What then?”
+
+“That’s only part of it. Tike last week: Eighteen pinched, the queer
+plant in ’Igh Street pulled by the coppers—”
+
+“I know, I know. To your point!”
+
+Seven hesitated under that steely stare. “I leave it to you, Gov’ner,”
+he continued to stammer at length. “S’y you was me and I was Number
+One—w’at would you think?”
+
+“Why, quite naturally, that some superior intelligence has latterly
+been collaborating with Scotland Yard.”
+
+“Aren’t you a bit behindhand in arriving at that conclusion?” the
+Irishman suggested with an ill-dissembled sneer.
+
+“No, Eleven,” Number One replied, mildly, “since I arrived at it some
+time since.”
+
+“But took no measures—”
+
+“You are in a position to state that as a fact?”
+
+Eleven shrugged lightly. “Need I be? Does not our situation speak for
+itself?”
+
+“Since you cannot be as thoroughly acquainted as I am with the
+situation, and since it seems I am required to account for my
+leadership or surrender it to you, Eleven ... I believe you have
+selected yourself to replace me as Number One, have you not?—that is to
+say, in the improbable event of my abdication.”
+
+“Improbable?” repeated the Irishman. “I wouldn’t call it that.”
+
+“You are right,” Number One assented, gravely: “unthinkable is the
+word. But you haven’t answered my question.”
+
+“Oh, as for that, if the Council should see fit to appoint me Number
+One, I’d naturally do my best.”
+
+“And most noble of you, I’m sure. But rather than bring down any such
+disaster upon this organization, I will say now that measures have
+already been taken, and I am to-night in a position to promise you that
+the new spirit in Scotland Yard will no longer be a factor in our
+calculations.”
+
+“That wants proving,” Eleven contended.
+
+A spasm of anger shook the figure in the throne-like chair, but only
+for an instant; immediately the iron will of the man imposed rigid
+self-control; almost without pause he proceeded in level and civil
+accents:
+
+“I think I can satisfy you and—this once—I consent to do so. But first,
+a question: Have you yourself formed any theory as to the identity of
+this hostile intelligence which has so hindered us of late?”
+
+“I’d be a raw fool if I hadn’t,” the Irishman retorted. “We know the
+Lone Wolf has been hand-in-glove with the authorities ever since the
+British Secret Service used him during the war.”
+
+“You think, then, it is Lanyard—?”
+
+“It’s a wise saying: ‘Set a thief to catch a thief.’ I believe there’s
+no man in England but Lanyard who has the wit and vision and audacity
+to fight us on our ground and win.”
+
+“I agree entirely. Therefore, I have this day tied the hands of the
+Lone Wolf; he will not again dare to contend against us.”
+
+Eleven sat up with a startled gesture.
+
+“Are you meaning you’ve got the girl?”
+
+Number One indulged a remote and chilly smile.
+
+“Then you, too, noticed the advertisement? Accept my compliments,
+Eleven. Decidedly you might prove a dangerous rival—were I in a temper
+to countenance competition.... But it is true: I have the girl
+Sofia—the Lone Wolf’s daughter.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+The smile faded; the man on the dais looked down loftily.
+
+“It is enough for you to know I have proved far-sighted and unfailing
+in my fidelity to our common cause.”
+
+“So _you_ say ...”
+
+Though the Irishman winced and fell silent under the cold glare of the
+other’s eyes, the voice that answered him was level and passionless.
+
+“I am not here to have my word challenged—or my authority. If any one
+of you imagines I am even thinking of surrendering the latter, under
+any conceivable circumstances, he is mad. And if any one of you doubts
+my power to enforce my will, I promise him ample proof of it before the
+night is ended.... Let us now proceed to business, the question held
+over from our last meeting. If Comrade Four will consult his minutes”—a
+nod singled out the babu, who, beaming with importance, produced a
+note-book—“they will show we adjourned to consider overtures made by
+the Smolny Institute of Petrograd, seeking our coöperation toward
+accelerating the social revolution in England.”
+
+“Thatt,” the Bengali affirmed, “is true bill of factt.”
+
+“If the temper in which you received those proposals is fair
+criterion,” Number One resumed, “there can be little doubt as to our
+decision. Speaking for myself, I think it would be suicidal to reject
+the overtures of the Soviet Government in Russia. Let me state why.”
+
+He bowed his forehead upon a hand and continued with thoughtful gaze
+downcast:
+
+“England is ripe for revolution. The social discontent resulting from
+the war has reached an acute stage. Only a spark is needed. It remains
+for us to decide whether to permit Russia to bring about the explosion
+or—bring it about ourselves. The soviet movement is irresistible, it
+will sweep England eventually as it has swept Russia, as it is now
+sweeping Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, as it must soon sweep France
+and Spain. Our power in England is great; even so, we could hope to do
+no more than delay the soviet movement were we to set ourselves against
+it—we could never hope to stop it. It would seem, then,
+self-preservation to set ourselves at the head of it, seize with our
+own hands—in the name of the British Soviet—the symbols of power now
+held by an antiquated and doddering Government. So shall we become to
+England what the Smolny Institute is to Russia. Otherwise, in the end,
+we must be crushed.”
+
+“If we adopt the indicated course, there will be an end forever to this
+hole-and-corner business which so hampers us, we will be able to work
+in the open, the police will become our tools rather than weapons in
+the hands of our enemies; our power will be without limits, Soviet
+Russia itself must bow to our dictation.”
+
+He paused and lifted his head, looking round the circle of intent
+faces.
+
+“If I am wrong or too sanguine, I am ready to be corrected.”
+
+He heard only a murmur of admiration, never a note of dissent; and a
+smile of gratification, yet half satiric, curved his thin lips.
+
+“I take it, then, the Council endorses my decision to proceed with the
+negotiations instituted by Soviet Russia; to accept its proposals and
+pledge our cooperation in every way?”
+
+This time there was no mistaking the accuracy with which he had gauged
+the minds of his associates.
+
+“One thing remains to be decided: a plan of action, something which
+will demand all that we have of imagination, ingenuity, common sense,
+and far prevision. We can afford to waste not a single ounce of
+strength: the blow, when we strike, must be sudden, sharp,
+merciless—irresistible. But if Thirteen is not over-confident of the
+discovery which he says he has to-day perfected, the means to deal just
+such a blow is ready to our hands.... Thirteen?”
+
+A nod and gracious smile invited that one to speak. He rose, trembling
+a little with excitement, bowed to Number One and, delving into
+capacious pockets, produced a number of small tin canisters together
+with three sealed bottles of brown glass. Surveying these, as he
+arranged them on the teakwood table before him, he smiled a little to
+himself: the stars, it seemed to him, were warring in their courses in
+his behalf; this was to prove his hour of hours.
+
+He began to speak in a quivering voice which soon grew more steady.
+
+“It is true, Excellency—it is true, comrades—I have perfected a
+discovery which I offer as a free gift to the cause, and by means of
+which, intelligently employed, we can, if we will, make all London a
+graveyard. Put the resources of this organization at my command, give
+me a week to make the essential preparations, select a time of national
+crisis when the Houses of Parliament are sitting and the Cabinet meets
+in Downing Street with the King attending or in Buckingham Palace ...”
+
+He paused and held the pause with a keen feeling for dramatic effect,
+his eyes seeking in turn the faces of his fellow conspirators, an
+insuppressible grin of malicious exultation twisting his scornful and
+mutinous mouth.
+
+“Let this be done,” he concluded, “and by means of these few tins and
+bottles which you see before you, in one brief hour the ruling classes
+will have perished almost to a man, there will be no more government of
+a tyrannical bourgeoisie to grind down the proletariat, a bloodless
+revolution will have made England the cradle of the new liberty!”
+
+“Bloodless?” the man on the dais repeated; and even he was seen
+perceptibly to shudder at the prospect unfolded to the vision of his
+mind. “Yes—but more terrible than the massacre of the Huguenots, more
+savage than the French Revolution!”
+
+“But I believe,” the inventor commented, “your Excellency said we
+required the means to deal a ‘blow sudden, sharp,
+merciless—irresistible’.”
+
+“Surely now,” the Irishman suggested, mockingly—where a wiser man would
+have held his tongue—“you’ll not be sticking at a small matter like
+wholesale murder if it’s to make us masters of England?”
+
+“Of England?” the German echoed. “Herr Gott! Of the world!”
+
+“And you, Excellency, our master,” the inventor added, shrewdly.
+
+A sign at once impatient and imperative demanded silence, and for a few
+minutes it obtained unbroken, while the gathering, keyed to high
+tension, studied closely the face of their leader and found it
+altogether illegible.
+
+On his part he seemed forgetful of the existence of anybody but
+himself, forgetful almost of himself as well: sitting low in his great
+chair, his body as stirless as it were bound by some spell of black
+magic, his far gaze probing unfathomable remotenesses of thought.
+
+Slowly he recalled himself to his surroundings; with a suggestion of
+weariness he sat up and reviewed the little company that hung so
+breathlessly upon the issue of his judgment. The shadow of that satiric
+smile returned.
+
+“If the thing be feasible,” he promised, “it shall be done. It remains
+for Thirteen to be more explicit.”
+
+With an extravagant flourish the inventor whipped from his breastpocket
+a folded paper, and spread it out face uppermost on the table.
+
+“A map of London,” he announced, “based on the latest Ordnance Survey
+and coloured to show the districts supplied by the mains of each
+individual gas depot. Thus you will observe”—what his long, bony finger
+indicated—“the district supplied by the mains of the Westminster gas
+works, comprising Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the War
+Office, and the Admiralty, Downing Street, the homes of hundreds of the
+aristocracy. All these we can at will turn into the deadliest of death
+traps.”
+
+A tense voice interrupted with the demand: “How?”
+
+“Quite easily, comrade: with the ramifications of our power throughout
+London, all under the control of his Excellency”—the inventor bowed to
+Number One—“it should be an easy matter to place a few trustworthy men
+with the Westminster gas works.”
+
+“It can readily be done,” Number One affirmed. “And then—?”
+
+“While this is being done means must be found to smuggle other men, in
+the guise of servants, into the various buildings selected, or to
+corrupt those already so employed therein. At the designated hour—”
+
+The words dried upon his lips as somewhere a hidden bell stabbed the
+quiet with short, sharp thrills of sound, a code that spelled a message
+of terrifying significance. The inventor started violently, but no more
+so than every man about the table. Even Number One, shocked out of his
+lounging pose, grasped the arms of his throne with convulsive hands.
+
+Quietly and without a hint of hurry, the Chinese, Shaik Tsin, moved
+back into the shadows and, unnoticed, disappeared behind a screen.
+
+For a moment, when the bell had ceased, nobody spoke; but pallid face
+consulted face and eyes grown wide with dread sought eyes that winced
+in terror.
+
+Then the Bengali leaped from his chair, jabbering with bloodless lips.
+
+“Police! Raid! We are betrayed!”
+
+He made an uncertain turn, as if thinking to seek safety in flight but
+doubting which way to choose; and the movement struck panic into the
+minds and hearts of his fellows. In a twinkling all were on their feet.
+But before one could move a step the lamp in the ceiling winked out,
+the room was left in darkness unrelieved, and the accents of Number One
+were heard, coldly imperative.
+
+“Gentlemen! be good enough to resume your places—let no one move before
+there is light again. We are in no immediate danger: Shaik Tsin will
+show you out by a secret way long before the police can hope to find
+and break into this chamber. In the meantime—”
+
+The infuriated voice of the Englishman interrupted:
+
+“And ’oo’re you to give us orders?—you ’oo talked so big about ’avin’
+tied the ’ands of the Lone Wolf and Scotland Yard! You blarsted
+blow’ard! Bli’me if I don’t believe it’s you ’oo—”
+
+“Quietly, Seven! Have you forgotten you have a bad heart?—that
+excitement may mean your sudden death?”
+
+The rage of the Englishman ran out in a gasp and a whisper.
+
+“In the meantime,” Number One resumed as if there had been no break, “I
+promised that, before the night was out, you should have proof of my
+ability to enforce my will.”
+
+A groan of agony answered him, followed by an oath of witless fear.
+From a distance the voice, now thin but still sonorous, added:
+
+“Thirteen will hold himself ready to wait on me when I send for him
+to-morrow. Gentlemen of the Council, I bow to you all.”
+
+Again silence held for a long minute during which no man stirred or
+spoke. Then overhead the lamp burned bright again, discovering six
+frightened men upon their feet and one who, still seated, did not stir,
+and never would again.
+
+His head fallen forward, chin resting on his chest, mouth ajar, inert
+arms dangling over the arms of the chair, heavy legs lax, the
+Englishman sat quite dead, dead without a sign to show how death had
+come to him.
+
+Number One had disappeared.
+
+There was a remote rumour of cries and shouts, the muffled sound of
+axes crashing into woodwork....
+
+
+
+
+IX
+MRS. WARING
+
+
+Late in the forenoon a pencil of golden light found a chink in
+jealously drawn draperies, and groped the rich dusk of the bedchamber
+till it came to rest, as if happy that its search had found so lovely a
+reward, upon the face of a young girl who lay sleeping in a bed whose
+exquisite adornment must have flattered even the exalted person of a
+princess.
+
+With a swift but silent movement another girl, who had been sitting
+patiently on a low stool near by, rose and put herself in the way of
+the sunbeam. But too late: already long lashes were a-flutter upon the
+delicately modelled cheeks of the sleeper.
+
+A gentle sigh brushed parting lips; the sweet body stirred luxuriously;
+unclouded by any shadow of misgiving, the blue eyes of the Princess
+Sofia looked out upon the first day of her new world.
+
+Then they grew wide with wonder, comprehending the sleek, pretty face
+of a Chinese girl of about her own age who, with eyes downcast, demure
+mouth and folded hands, submissively awaited recognition.
+
+“Who are you?” Sofia demanded in a breath.
+
+A bob of courtesy, wholly charming, prefaced a reply pattered in
+English of quaintest accent:
+
+“You’ handmaiden—Chou Nu is my name.”
+
+“My handmaiden!”
+
+“Les, Plincess Sofia.”
+
+“But I don’t understand. How—when—?”
+
+“Las’ night Numbe’ One he send for me, but when I come you go-sleep.”
+
+“Number One?”
+
+Surprise coloured faintly the explanation: “Plince Victo’, honol’ble
+fathe’ of Plincess Sofia. You like get up now, take bath, have
+blekfuss?”
+
+The smile was irresistibly ingratiating: Sofia could not but return it.
+Delighted, Chou Nu ran to the windows, threw wide their draperies, and
+darted into the bathroom.
+
+Autumnal sunlight kindled to burning beauty the golden-bronze tresses
+coiled upon the pillows where Sofia lay unstirring, like a princess
+enchanted—as indeed she was. Surely nothing less potent than magic had
+wrought this metamorphosis in the fabric of her life! And whether the
+magic were white or black—what matter? Its work was good.
+
+No more the Café des Exiles, no more the deadly tedium of daily service
+at the desk of the caisse, no more the shrewish tongue of Mama Thérèse,
+the odious oglings of Papa Dupont, the ceaseless cark of discontent....
+
+Incredible!
+
+As one who moves in a dream, Sofia rose presently and bathed, then,
+robed in a ravishing negligée of rare brocade, breakfasted on melon,
+tea, and toast from a service of eggshell china.
+
+In a long mirror she saw and watched but did not know herself. Like
+Goody Twoshoes of nursery fame she could have cried: Lawkamercy! this
+is never I!
+
+The presence of Chou Nu served merely to stress the sense of unreality:
+for, obviously, only the heroine of a true fairy tale could have broken
+from a chrysalis stage of sordid Soho to the brilliant butterfly
+existence of a Russian princess domiciled in the most aristocratic
+quarter of London and attended by a Chinese maid!
+
+And Chou Nu proved a delight. Once satisfied she need fear neither
+ill-temper nor arrogance from her new mistress, she indulged an even
+and constant flow of artless high spirits, her amusing, clipped English
+affording Sofia considerable entertainment together with not a little
+food for thought.
+
+Thus one learned that the main body of the service staff was Chinese
+under a major domo named Shaik Tsin—Chou Nu’s “second-uncle”—who
+enjoyed Prince Victor’s completest confidence and was, second to the
+latter only, the real head of the establishment, its presiding genius.
+The front of the house alone was dressed with a handful of English
+servants nominally under the man Nogam, but actually, like him,
+answerable in the last instance to Shaik Tsin.
+
+Why this should be Chou Nu couldn’t say. Sofia supposed it was because
+Prince Victor thought his Occidental guests would feel more at ease
+with English servants; or perhaps he himself preferred them, when it
+came to the question of personal attendance.
+
+No success rewarded efforts to extract from Chou Nu her reason for
+referring to Victor as “Number One.” She stated simply that all
+Chinamans in London called him that; and being pressed further added,
+with as near an approach to impatience as her gentle nature could
+muster, that it was obviously because Plince Victo’ _was_ Numbe’ One:
+ev’-body knew _that_.
+
+A knock at the door interrupted Sofia’s questioning. Answering, Chou
+brought back word that the honourable father of Princess Sofia
+submitted his august felicitations and solicited the immediate favour
+of her serene attendance in his study.
+
+Hasty search failed to locate the garments discarded on going to bed
+and, in the indifference of depression and fatigue, left in a tumble on
+the floor. All had vanished while Sofia slept; Chou Nu professed blank
+ignorance of their fate; and apparently nothing had been provided in
+their stead but Chinese robes, of sumptuous vestments well suited to
+one of high estate. With these, then, and with Chou Nu’s guidance as to
+choice and ceremonious arrangement, Sofia was obliged to make shift;
+and anything but unbecoming she found them—or truly it was a shape of
+dream that looked out from her mirror.
+
+Yet it was with reluctant feet that she left her room, descended the
+broad staircase to the entrance hall, and addressed herself to the
+study door. It had been so beautiful, that waking dream the sequel to
+her night of dreamless sleep, too beautiful to be foregone without
+regret.
+
+For Sofia had not forgotten, she could never forget, she had merely
+been successful temporarily in banishing from mind that bitter
+disillusionment which had poisoned what should have been her time of
+greatest joy.
+
+To be told, by the father of whose dear existence one had only learned
+within the hour, that one was the child of a notorious thief and an
+adventuress ...
+
+It needed more than common fortitude to face renewed reminder of that
+shame.
+
+Oddly enough, it seemed to help a bit, somehow to lend her courage and
+assurance, to pass the man Nogam in the hall and acknowledge his bow
+and smile. Sofia wondered vaguely what it was that made his smile seem
+so kind; it was entirely respectful, there was nothing more in it that
+she could fix on; and yet ...
+
+She was able to offer Victor a composed, almost a happy countenance,
+and to return cheerful assurances to punctilious enquiries after her
+well-being and her comfort overnight. To the real affection in which he
+held her, the warmth of his embrace, and the lingering pressure of his
+lips gave convincing testimony; and in time, no doubt, as she grew to
+know him better, her response would become more spontaneous and true.
+Indeed, she insisted, it must; she would school herself, if need be, to
+remember that this strange man was the author of her being, the natural
+object of her affections—deserving all her love if only because of that
+nobility which had enabled him to renounce those evil ways of years
+long dead.
+
+But to-day—and this, of course, she couldn’t understand—a slight but
+invincible shiver, perceptible to herself alone, attended her
+submission to paternal caresses; and the eyes were too dispassionate
+with which she saw Prince Victor. Still, they found little to which
+fair exception might be taken. If Life had thus far been callously
+frank with Sofia as to its broader aspects, the niceties of its
+technique remained measurably a mystery, she was insufficiently
+instructed to perceive that Victor’s morning coat (for example) had
+been cut a shade too cleverly, or that the ensemble of his raiment was
+a trace ornate; and where a mind more mondain would have marked
+ponderable constraint in his manner, she saw only dignity and reserve.
+But for all that she recognized intuitively a lack of something in the
+man, the sum of this second impression of him was formless
+disappointment, she felt somehow cheated, disheartened, chilled.
+
+That she was able at all to dissemble this sense of dashed expectations
+was thanks in the main to a third party, a stranger whose presence she
+overlooked on entering, when Prince Victor met her near the door, while
+the other remained aside, half hidden in the recess of a window.
+
+Directly, however, that Victor half turned away, saying “I have found a
+friend for you, my dear,” Sofia, following his glance, discovered a
+woman whose every detail of dress and deportment was unmistakably of
+the fashionable world and whose face carried souvenirs of loveliness as
+unmistakable.
+
+Smiling and offering her hands, she approached, while Victor’s voice of
+heavy modulations uttered formally:
+
+“Sybil, permit me to present my daughter. Sofia, Mrs. Waring has
+graciously offered to sponsor your introduction to Society, to guide
+and instruct you and be in every way your mentor.”
+
+“My dear!” the woman exclaimed, holding Sofia’s hands and kissing her
+cheek. And then, looking aside to Victor, “But how very like!” she
+added with the air of tender reminiscence.
+
+“Oh!” Sofia cried, “you knew my mother?”
+
+“Indeed—and loved her.” Sofia never dreamed to question the woman’s
+sincerity; and her charm of manner was irresistible. “You must try to
+like me a little for her sake—”
+
+“As if one could help liking you for your own, Mrs. Waring!”
+
+“Prettily said, my dear. You have inherited more from your mother than
+your good looks alone. Is it not so, mon prince?”
+
+“Much more.” Victor’s enigmatic smile gave place to a look of regret
+and uneasiness. “Let us hope, however, not too much. Heredity,” he
+mused in sombre mood, “is a force of such fatality in our lives....”
+
+He gave a gesture of solicitude and continued with characteristic
+deliberation, and that preciseness of diction which he seemed never
+able to forget, even though deeply moved.
+
+“More than ever, now that Sofia is restored to me, I could wish the
+past other than what it was, that she might start life with a handicap
+less cruel of inherited tendencies. But when I reflect that both her
+parents—”
+
+“Please!” Sofia begged, piteous. “Oh, please!”
+
+“I am sorry, my dear.” Victor closed tender hands over those which the
+girl had lifted in appeal. “It is for your own good only I give myself
+this pain of warning you against your worst enemy, I mean yourself, the
+self that is so strange a compound of hereditary weaknesses.... Please
+remember always that, no matter what may happen, however far you may be
+led into transgression of the social codes, I shall never reproach you,
+on the contrary, you may count implicitly on my sympathetic
+understanding. Never forget, I, too, have known, have suffered and
+fought myself—and in the end won at a cost I am not yet finished
+paying, nor will be, I fear, this side my grave.”
+
+He sighed from his heart, and bowing a stricken head, seemed to lose
+himself in disconsolate reverie—but not so far as to suffer the
+interruption which Sofia made to offer and which he stayed with an
+eloquent hand.
+
+“You do not understand? But naturally. Let me explain. No: there is no
+reason why Sybil—Mrs. Waring—should not hear. She is a dear friend of
+long years, she understands.”
+
+With a quiet murmur—“Oh, quite!”—Mrs. Waring ran an affectionate arm
+round Sofia’s shoulders and gently held the girl to her.
+
+“When I determined to forsake the bad old ways,” Victor pursued—“this
+you must know, my dear—I had friends—of a sort—who resented my
+defection, set themselves against my will and, when they found they
+could not swerve me from my purpose, became my enemies. That was long
+ago, but to this day some of them persist in their enmity—I have to be
+constantly on my guard.”
+
+“You mean there is danger?” Sofia asked in quick anxiety. “Your life—?”
+
+“Always,” Victor assented, gravely. With a shrug he added: “It is
+nothing; for myself, I am used to it, I do not greatly care. But for
+you—that is another matter altogether. I have a great fear for you, my
+child. That, indeed, is why I never tried to find you till
+yesterday—believing, as I mistakenly did, you were in good hands, well
+cared for, happy—lest my enemies seek to strike at me through you. But
+when I saw that unfortunate advertisement I dared delay not another
+hour about bringing you within the compass of my protection. Even now,
+untiring as my care for you shall ever be, I know my enemies will be as
+tireless in endeavours to rob me of you. You will be followed, hounded,
+importuned, lied to, threatened—all without rest. If they cannot take
+you from me bodily, they will seek to poison your mind against me.
+Therefore, rather than keep you practically a prisoner in your home, I
+feel obliged to require a promise of you.”
+
+Deeply stirred by the melancholy gravity that informed his pose, the
+girl protested earnestly: “Anything—I will promise anything, rather
+than be an anxiety to one who is so kind.”
+
+“Kind? To my own daughter?” Victor smiled sadly. “But I love you,
+little Sofia. Nor is it much that I must ask of you: merely that you
+never go out alone, but only in the company of Mrs. Waring or Mr.
+Karslake or, preferably, both.”
+
+“Oh, I promise that—”
+
+“But there is more: If by any accident you should ever find yourself
+left alone in public, do not let strangers speak to you, refuse to
+listen to them.”
+
+“I promise.”
+
+“And finally: If anybody should ever seek to turn you against me, come
+to me instantly and tell me about it.”
+
+“But naturally I would do that, father.”
+
+“Good. I rely upon your discretion and loyalty. At another time I will
+explain matters in more detail. For the present—enough of an unpleasant
+subject. You have a busy day before you. At my request Mrs. Waring has
+arranged to have various tradespeople wait upon you this morning to
+take your orders for the beginnings of a wardrobe. If you can find
+something ready-made to wear you will want, no doubt, to spend the
+afternoon shopping. A car will be at your disposal, and I give you
+carte blanche. I wish you never to know an unsatisfied need or desire.
+Still, I am selfish enough to reserve for myself the happiness of
+selecting your jewels.”
+
+“Oh!” Sofia cried, breathlessly. Victor was holding his arms open; and
+how should she deny him? “You are too good to me,” she murmured. “How
+can I ever show my gratitude?”
+
+Holding her close, Victor smiled a singular smile.
+
+“Some day I may tell you. But to-day—no more. I am much preoccupied
+with affairs; but Mrs. Waring will take care of you till evening, when
+I promise myself the pleasure of dining with you both.”
+
+At the sound of a knock he put Sofia gently from him, and said in a
+strong voice:
+
+“Enter.”
+
+The door opened, Nogam announced:
+
+“Mr. Sturm.”
+
+Hard on the echo of his name a man swung into the room with an air at
+once nervous and aggressive—a tall man shabbily dressed, holding his
+head high—and at sight of Sofia and Mrs. Waring, where he had doubtless
+thought to find Prince Victor alone, stopped short, betraying
+disconcertion in the way he instinctively assumed the stand of a
+soldier at attention, bringing his heels together with an undeniable
+click, straightening his shoulders, stiffening both arms to rigidity at
+his sides. And for a bare thought his eyes rolled almost wildly in
+their deep sockets. Then he bowed twice, from the hips, with mechanical
+precision, profoundly to Victor, with deep respect to the women.
+
+Victor smothered an exclamation of annoyance.
+
+Unbidden, a word shaped in Sofia’s consciousness, a French monosyllable
+into which the war had packed every shade and gradation of hatred and
+contempt, the epithet _Boche_.
+
+Immediately erasing every sign of irritation, Victor greeted the man
+with casual suavity. “Oh, there you are, eh, Sturm?” Then, as Sofia and
+Mrs. Waring turned to go, he added quickly: “A moment, please. Since
+Mr. Sturm to-day becomes a member of the household, acting as my
+assistant in some research work which I am undertaking, I may as well
+present him now. Mrs. Waring, permit me: Mr. Sturm. And the Princess
+Sofia Vassilyevski, my daughter ...”
+
+Mumbling their names after Victor, the man Sturm executed two more
+bows. At the same time he seemed to remind himself that his soldierly
+carriage was perhaps injudicious, and forthwith abandoned it for a
+studied slouch which, in Sofia’s sight, was little less than insolent.
+And unmistakably there was something nearly resembling insolence in the
+eyes that boldly sought hers: a look equivocal at best and,
+intentionally or no, wholly offensive in essence; as if the fellow were
+asserting their partnership in some secret understanding; or as if he
+knew something by no means to Sofia’s credit....
+
+Her acknowledgment of his salute was accordingly cool, and she was glad
+when a nod from Prince Victor gave her leave to go.
+
+
+
+
+X
+VICTOR ET AL
+
+
+Those first few weeks of emancipation from the ennui of existence at
+the Café des Exiles were so replete with wonders that Sofia lived
+largely in a beatific state of breathless excitement, devoting the best
+part of her days to thoughtless flying from delight to new delight, and
+going nightly to her bed so healthily tired that she slept like a top
+and never once awakened to memories of disturbing dreams.
+
+Perhaps her pleasure burned the brighter for its dark, ambiguous
+background—those many questions which Prince Victor persisted in
+leaving unanswered. Sofia knew bad times of perplexity and depression,
+when the price of translation from drudge to princess seemed a sore
+price to pay.
+
+And yet, required to state the cost to her in terms explicit, she must
+have hesitated lest she appear ungrateful in complaining, who hardly
+needed to express a wish to have it granted, who indeed knew many a
+wish realized in fact before she was fully aware of its inception in
+her private thoughts.
+
+All those lovely material things of life which her famished girlhood
+had ached for so hopelessly now were hers in abundant measure, and all
+the less tangible things, too, so requisite to the happiness of women
+in a worldly world—or nearly all. Frocks she had, with furs and
+furbelows no end; flowers and flattery and frivolities; freedom within
+limitations as yet not irksome; jewels that would have graced an
+imperial diadem—everything but the single essential without which
+everything is hollow nothing and life itself only the dreaming of a
+dream.
+
+The one lack known to the Sofia of those days was the lack of Love.
+
+She had gone so long longing to love, questing blindly and vainly for
+some human being to whom her affection would mean something vital and
+dear—it seemed cruel that her longing must be still denied. As it had
+been with Mama Thérèse, it was now with the romantic father so newly
+self-declared. She wanted desperately and tried her best to love Victor
+as his daughter should; and that he cared for her profoundly she knew
+and never questioned; yet when she searched her secret heart Sofia
+discovered no feeling for the man other than a singular form of fear.
+His look, his tone, his manner, his presence altogether, inspired a
+nameless sort of shrinking, inarticulate apprehensions, and mistrust
+which the girl found at once utterly unaccountable and dismally
+disappointing; so that, with every wish and will to do otherwise, she
+found herself involuntarily making excuse of trivial interests to keep
+out of Victor’s way and, when there was no escaping, sitting silent and
+ill at ease in his society, or seizing on some slender pretext, it
+didn’t matter what, to inveigle into their company a third somebody, it
+didn’t matter whom—Mrs. Waring, Karslake, even the unspeakable Sturm.
+
+Nevertheless, there were times, far too many of them, too, when of a
+sudden Victor would forsake his occult preoccupations and,
+unceremoniously upsetting whatever arrangements Sofia might have made
+with Mrs. Waring or Karslake, would find other pleasures of his own
+invention for her to share with him alone: long motor jaunts through
+the English countryside, apparently his favourite recreation; a box all
+to themselves at a theatre, where Victor would sit watching the girl
+with a fascination only rivalled by her fascination with the traffic of
+the boards; curiously constrained little dinners à deux in fashionable
+restaurants; morning rides in Rotten Row, where it oddly appeared that
+Victor knew everybody, whereas not one in five hundred seemed to know
+him—or to care to know him.
+
+Sofia, indeed, was often puzzled to account for what to her appeared to
+be an almost pathetic eagerness on the part of Victor, in strange
+accord with his lofty pretensions, to claim acquaintanceship with and
+win the recognition even of persons of the utmost inconsequence. And
+she remarked, too, that his temper was apt to be raw in sequel to their
+excursions into the haunts of the well-known. But it was for other
+reasons altogether that she came to dread them most.
+
+For one thing, Victor’s conversation was ordinarily rather dull; at
+best, the reverse of exhilarating. And in spite of her unquestioning
+acceptance of him as her father, he remained to Sofia actually a new
+acquaintance; in effect, a strange man. And from strangers, more than
+from relatives with whose minds one is presumably on terms of close
+intimacy, one is warranted in expecting something in the way of mutual
+stimulation through the opening of new perspectives of experience,
+thought, and feeling. Whereas—with Sofia, at least—Victor seemed unable
+to talk on more than two subjects, one or the other of which was
+constantly uppermost in his thoughts.
+
+He never wearied of warning Sofia against the dangers of those moral
+infirmities which he asserted were hers by legitimate inheritance; and
+which, if Victor were right in his contentions, she could hardly hope
+to overcome without a desperate struggle. She would have to be forever
+on guard, he insisted, lest the temptation of some moment, not to be
+foreseen, prove too strong for her latent weakness of character, and
+commit her, through some unpremeditated act of defiance to the law—most
+probably an act of theft—to the life of a social outcast.
+
+To do her justice, the girl was consciously not much impressed by this
+alleged peril. She had never been aware of any failing such as Victor
+would have endowed her with; so far as she could remember she had never
+been tempted to commit more venial sins than inhered in lying to Mama
+Thérèse now and then in order to escape unmerited disciplining at the
+heavy hands of that industrious virago; and as for thieving, the very
+thought of anything of that sort was detestable to Sofia.
+
+But unconsciously, no doubt, the everlasting iteration of Victor’s
+admonitions had its purposed effect upon that sensitive and
+impressionable spirit.
+
+Then, too, by degrees, but all too soon, it became manifest that the
+memory of his passionate attachment for her mother possessed Victor to
+the point of monomania. It was only with an effort that he could force
+himself to talk to Sofia on other subjects. He thought of nothing else
+while with her; if she read his eyes aright, often glimpses of weird
+light flickering in their opaque depths, like heat lightning of a murky
+summer’s night, fairly frightened her, and she knew a shuddering
+perception of the possibility that Victor was at times in danger of
+confusing the daughter with the mother.
+
+“Never was there such resemblance,” he once uttered, in a stare. “You
+are more like her than she herself!”
+
+Sofia was pardonably puzzled, and looked it.
+
+“I mean, you re-create my vision of the woman I loved and lost—the
+woman I saw in her, not the woman she was.”
+
+“Lost?” the girl murmured.
+
+The gray countenance took on an added shade of sombre passion. “She
+never understood me, she treated me badly. Once, in a fit of pique, she
+ran away. I did everything—everything, I tell you!—to win her back,
+but—”
+
+He choked on bitter recollections—and Sofia was painfully reminded of
+the Chinese devil-masks in Victor’s study. But the likeness faded even
+as she saw it, under her gaze the twisted features were ironed back
+into their accustomed cast of austerity.
+
+“Before I could persuade her, you were born.... Then she died.”
+
+Sensible though she was of the ellipsis, and afraid it would never be
+filled in if she interrupted, Sofia could not help uttering a sound of
+regret and pity for the lot of the mother she had never seen, whose
+untimely death had ended a life accounted unendurable as Victor’s wife,
+for reasons unknown but none the less, to the daughter, vaguely and
+lamentably understandable.
+
+For Sofia by now had passed the stage of pretending to herself that she
+was not happier away from her father.
+
+Victor mistook the nature of the feeling that swayed the girl—took to
+himself the sympathy excited by his revelations.
+
+“But do not grieve on my account. Is not that which was lost restored
+again to me? In you my old love lives once more ... little Sofia!”
+
+He caught and pressed a hand that rested on the cloth between them.
+(They happened that night to be dining at the Ritz.) And Sofia
+re-experienced that inevitable, hateful flinching with which she was
+growing too familiar.
+
+She dropped her head that her eyes might not betray her.
+
+“People will see ...”
+
+“What if they do? Those who know us will hardly see any wrong in my
+squeezing the hand of my own daughter; and the others—not that they
+matter—will only think me the luckiest dog alive—as I am!”
+
+Chuckle and smirk both were indescribably odious, reminding Sofia of
+the creature Sturm; _he_ had a laugh like that for her, on the rare
+occasion when chance propinquity encouraged the Boche to begin one of
+his uncouth essays in flirtation.
+
+Sturm’s attitude, in truth, perplexed Sofia to exasperation; that is to
+say, as much as it offended her. For Victor the man seemed to entertain
+an exaggerated yet deeply rooted respect, approaching actual awe, which
+he tried his best to carry off with a swagger; for to hold anybody in
+any degree of deference was, one judged, somehow deplorable, even
+shameful, in the code of Sturm; but in Victor’s presence the fellow’s
+bravado would quickly wilt into hopeless servility, he would cringe and
+crawl like a dog currying the favour of a harsh master.
+
+Nevertheless, Victor’s daughter seemed to be no more than fair game, in
+Sturm’s understanding, and a source of supercilious amusement but
+thinly veiled or not at all. Alone with the girl, Sturm put on the airs
+of a Prussianized pasha condescending to a new odalisque.
+
+Sofia held the animal in a deadly loathing which, betrayed in word or
+look or gesture, animated in him only a spirit of derision. In the
+absence of Victor, Sturm’s eyes were ever ironic, his bows and leers
+mocking, his speeches flavoured with clumsy sarcasm; from which it
+resulted that the girl never quite forgot the impression which he had
+managed to convey in those few moments of their first encounter, that
+Sturm knew something she ought to know but didn’t, and was meanly
+jeering at her in his sleeve.
+
+What virtues Victor Vassilyevski perceived in the man passed
+comprehension. But so did most of Victor’s whims and ways. What riddle
+more obscure than that portentous business which permeated the
+atmosphere of the establishment with the taint of stealth and
+terror?—the famous “research work” that kept Victor closeted with Sturm
+in his study daily for hours at a time, often in confabulation with
+others of like ilk, men of furtive and unprepossessing cast who came
+and went by appointment at all hours, but as a rule late at night!
+
+Into these conferences, Sofia observed, Karslake was never summoned.
+She wondered why. He was, as she saw him, so unquestionably the better
+man, everything that Sturm was not, open of countenance, fair of temper
+and tongue, well-bred and well-mannered, light of heart and high
+spirited, and at the same time dependable, with metal of sincerity and
+earnestness like tempered steel in his character—or Sofia misread him
+woefully.
+
+She had been quick to see the man behind the misleading little
+moustache. And already she was beginning to count that amusement tame
+which Karslake did not share.
+
+Mrs. Waring was undeniably a dear. Sofia could hardly be grateful
+enough to the happy chance which had cast that lady for the rôle of her
+chaperone; lacking her guidance the girl must have been innocently
+guilty of many a gaucherie in ways new and strange to untried,
+faltering feet. And it was to her alone that Sofia owed the slow but
+constant widening of her social horizon. For Sybil Waring, it seemed,
+quite literally “knew everybody”; and Sofia soon learned to count it an
+off day when Sybil failed to present her protégée to the notice of
+somebody of position and influence.
+
+Most of these persons were women with sounding names and the solid
+backing of much money conspicuously in evidence—matrons of the younger
+and more giddy generation which was just then so busily engaged in
+providing material for the most hectic chapters of London’s post-war
+social history. But Sofia was scarcely qualified to be critical or to
+guess that they were climbers equally with herself, and that if their
+footing had been of older establishment the name of Vassilyevski would
+have rung sinister echoes in their memories, deafening them to the rich
+allure inherent in the title of princess.
+
+So she was fain to accept them all at their own valuation, and thought
+most of them entirely charming. And though she had hardly had time as
+yet to progress beyond the introductory stages of chance meetings and
+informal little teas in public, she began clearly to descry enchanting
+vistas of better days to come, when the Princess Sofia Vassilyevski
+would have not only teas but dinners and dances given in her honour,
+and would be asked to spend gay week-ends in the country houses of the
+people with whom she contracted the stronger friendships.
+
+But for the immediate present, and especially in the paramount business
+of having a good time, Karslake was fairly a necessity. He thought of
+everything and forgot nothing, was ever fertile of fresh expedient if
+the pastime of a moment began to pall, and was capable of sustained
+fits of irresponsible gaiety which enchanted Sofia, so well did they
+chime with her own eagerness for sheer fun.
+
+Decidedly she would have been lost without Sybil Waring; but without
+Karslake she would have been forlorn.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+HEARTBREAK
+
+
+Not yet prepared to admit it even to herself, in her heart Sofia knew
+she prized the companionship of Karslake for something more than the
+mere amusement it afforded her: there was a deeper feeling she would
+not name. For all that, her times of solitude knew dreams quick and
+warm with the thought of Karslake, his words and ways, the gracious
+little attentions he had accustomed her to expect of him and which his
+manner subtly invested with a personal flavour inexpressibly
+delightful, indispensably sweet.
+
+Nor did she ever quite forget how long he had worshipped with
+unostentatious devotion at her lowly shrine of the caisse in the Café
+des Exiles, and how shabbily she had rewarded his admiration—never
+once, in those many months, with so much as a smile—and how unresentful
+had been his acceptance of her half-feigned, half-real indifference to
+his existence.
+
+But whenever her reflections took that back-turning she would recall
+the man who had talked to Karslake in the café, that day so long ago,
+of his own humble past as a ’bus-boy in Troyon’s in Paris, and who on
+leaving had given Sofia herself that odd look of half-recognition
+tempered by bewilderment.
+
+She tried once to draw Karslake about this acquaintance of his, but
+Karslake’s memory proved unusually sluggish.
+
+“No-o,” he drawled after a tolerably long pause for thought—“can’t say
+I place the chap you mean, can’t seem somehow to think back that far,
+you know. One meets such a lot of people, first and last, they talk
+such a lot of tosh—”
+
+“But it couldn’t have been only tosh you were talking,” the girl
+persisted, “because—_I_ remember—you were so keen about keeping what
+you said secret, you spoke the strangest language together most of the
+time. I could hear every word”—she had already explained about the
+freak acoustics of the Café des Exiles—“and not one meant anything to
+me.”
+
+“Stupid of me, but I simply can’t think what it could have been.”
+
+“I can—now.”
+
+Karslake looked askance at Sofia.
+
+“Since I’ve heard so much Chinese spoken by the servants—now I come to
+think of it”—Sofia’s eyes grew bright with triumph—“I’m sure it must
+have been Chinese you were speaking to the man I mean.”
+
+“Impossible,” Karslake pronounced calmly.
+
+“But you do know Chinese, don’t you?”
+
+“Not a syllable.”
+
+Sofia opened her lips to protest, but delayed to study Karslake’s face
+intently. He didn’t try to escape her scrutiny, he even seemed to court
+it; but there was a curious, quizzical look in his eyes, those
+half-smiling lips had a whimsical droop.
+
+“Mr. Karslake!” Sofia announced, severely, “you’re fibbing.”
+
+“Nice thing to say to me.”
+
+“You do speak Chinese—confess.”
+
+“My dear Princess Sofia,” Karslake protested: “if I had known one word
+of Chinese I could never have landed my job with your father.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“He expressly stipulated that I should be ignorant of that language.”
+
+“What a silly condition to make!”
+
+“Still, I daresay Prince Victor had his reasons.”
+
+“I can’t imagine what ...”
+
+“Possibly preferred a secretary who couldn’t understand everything he
+said to the servants. I’ve never pretended to know all Prince Victor’s
+secrets, you know.”
+
+After a little pause Sofia asked gently: “Did you really need the job
+so badly, Mr. Karslake?”
+
+“To get it meant more to me than I can tell you—almost as much as to
+hold on to it does to-day.”
+
+Sofia turned her eyes away at this, and for the rest of the ride—they
+were homeward bound from a matinée, having dropped Sybil Waring at her
+flat in Mayfair—kept her thoughts to herself.
+
+Only the most perfunctory civilities passed between them, in fact,
+until they had been ushered into the study by Nogam, who advised them
+that Prince Victor had ordered tea to be served there and had promised
+to be home in good time for it.
+
+The tea service was already set out on a little table beside the
+fireplace in that room of secrets, whose normal atmosphere of brooding
+gloom was now the darker for the deepening dusk. Only the tea itself
+remained to be served, a special rite never performed in that household
+by hands more profane than those of the major-domo, Shaik Tsin himself.
+And this last could be counted upon not to put in appearance until
+Nogam took him word that Victor was waiting.
+
+So, having laid aside her furs and satisfied herself, by a seemingly
+aimless but in fact exacting survey, that the abominable Sturm was not
+skulking anywhere in the shadows, Sofia established herself on a lounge
+that faced the fireplace, while Karslake stood before the fire, looking
+down with an expectant smile of which she was but half aware.
+
+“Aren’t you going to forgive me?” he asked, quietly, after a time.
+
+Sofia withdrew a pensive gaze from the ruddy bed of coals.
+
+“For what?”
+
+“You were kind enough to call it merely fibbing.”
+
+“I’m still thinking about that.”
+
+In fact, she had been thinking of nothing else. There was so much to be
+considered. Imprimis, that Karslake had been guilty of practising a
+deception upon her father. Deceit in itself was one form of treachery.
+And how often had Victor stressed to her the dangers of his position,
+surrounded by nameless but implacable enemies who would stick at no
+infamy to compass his ruin!
+
+But if she told him that Karslake understood Chinese she would lose her
+friend forever—no question about that. Victor would not hesitate an
+instant—indeed, Sofia felt sure he was only waiting for some such
+pretext to get rid of his secretary. She was anything but unobserving,
+this child of Soho, whose wits had been sharpened in the sophisticated
+atmosphere of a French restaurant; and more than once she had seen
+Victor’s face duplicate the expression Papa Dupont’s had so often
+assumed on his discovering that some patron of the café was taking too
+personal an interest in the pretty young dame du comptoir. A look of
+insensate jealousy ...
+
+To risk forfeiting the comradeship that had grown to be so dear? Or to
+be constructively derelict in her duty as a daughter?
+
+A difficult choice to make; but Sofia made it honestly. In point of
+fact, she assured herself, coldly, there was no choice, there was only
+one thing she could do under the circumstances. And she hardened her
+heart and eyes as she rose to face Karslake on more equal terms.
+
+But when she saw him waiting patiently, with that friendly smile of his
+she knew so well, she hesitated long enough to permit his anticipating
+her with a quiet question:
+
+“Well, Princess Sofia?”
+
+And then, amazingly, her tongue betrayed her, the phrases she had
+framed so carefully vanished utterly from out her mind; and she heard
+herself saying in rather tremulous accents:
+
+“It’s all right. I shan’t tell.”
+
+“About my understanding Chinese?”
+
+“Yes—about that.”
+
+“Then you do care—?”
+
+She was panicky with knowledge that somehow her emotions had managed to
+slip their moorings and get beyond her handling. It didn’t help or mend
+matters much to hear her own voice stammering:
+
+“Yes, of course, I—I don’t want you to—to have to go away—”
+
+Oh, the vanity of trying to hoodwink him who knew so well what she was
+now for the first time realizing!
+
+“Because you like me a little, Princess Sofia?”
+
+“Why—yes—of course I do—”
+
+“Because you know I love you, dear.”
+
+And then she found herself clinging to Karslake; and his lips were warm
+upon her hands ...
+
+So suddenly and at long last it came to Sofia, that Love for which all
+her days had been one long weariness of waiting, Love that brimmed with
+raptures what had been only aching emptiness and made the desert places
+to blossom as the rose. And the joy of it proved overmastering,
+sweeping her off her feet and dazing her, leaving her breathless and
+thoughtless but for the all-obscuring thought—at length she loved, and
+the one whom she loved loved her!
+
+And for a space she existed in an iridescent dream of happiness,
+without sense of relation to a material world, forgetful of the flight
+of time, lost to everything but her lover’s arms and voice and lips.
+
+It might have been five minutes, it might have been sixty, before she
+became aware that Karslake was gently disengaging her hands. “Dearest,
+dearest!” she heard him say. “We must be sensible. That was the front
+door, I’m afraid.”
+
+The meaning in his insistence presently began to penetrate, if vaguely,
+and she suffered him to go from her a pace or two. But, still a little
+blind with the beauty of the revelation that had been granted unto her,
+nothing that met her gaze seemed to be in true focus except her lover’s
+face: even the countenance of Victor swam into her ken as if blurred by
+veils of mist, its dour, forbidding look had no significance to her
+intelligence. Victor himself, for that matter, was a figure without
+real consequence other than as a symbol of the old order, the tedious
+old ways of the world from which she had magically escaped.
+
+A ring of sarcastic apology provided the only clue she got to the
+import of Victor’s words. Sobered a trifle, her mental processes
+somewhat less incoherent, still she knew she would hardly regain her
+poise until she was alone. And breathing an excuse, she left the room
+with such dignity as she could muster.
+
+In the hall, with the closed door behind her, she paused to collect
+herself. Then she missed furs and gloves and handbag and, remembering
+that she had left them in the study, for some obscure reason imagined
+she must have them before proceeding to her room.
+
+Much more mistress of herself by now, it never occurred to Sofia that
+there could be any reason why she should hesitate about returning or
+feel embarrassed before Victor. True, he had surprised them, Sofia was
+not at all sure he hadn’t actually seen her in Karslake’s arms. But
+what of that? Love like hers was nothing to be ashamed of; and that
+Victor could reasonably object to her giving her heart to one of his
+secretaries was something far from her thought just then.
+
+She put a hand to the knob, turned it, and swung the door open—all on
+impulse—then faltered, transfixed by the tableau before the fireplace.
+
+The door was silent on its hinges, and Karslake’s back was to her.
+Victor, on the other hand, facing both Karslake and the door,
+unquestionably saw Sofia, but pretended not to, and had his say out
+with Karslake in a manner bitterly cynical.
+
+“... sadly in error if you flatter yourself I pay you a wage to make
+love to Sofia behind my back.”
+
+“Sorry, sir.” Karslake’s tone was level, respectful but firm. “Your
+instructions were, I believe, to win her confidence. Well—I have always
+found love the one sure key to a woman’s confidence. Of course, if I
+had understood you cared one way or the other—”
+
+Sofia heard no more: unconsciously she had closed the door, at one and
+the same time shutting from her sight Victor’s exultant sneer and from
+her hearing the words with which the man whom she loved had damned
+himself irretrievably and dashed her spirit from radiant pinnacles of
+ecstasy into the profoundest black abyss of shame and despair.
+
+Primitive instinct bade the stricken girl seek her room and hide her
+suffering there; but the shock had stunned her to the point of physical
+weakness. Already a hand was pressed above her heart, that ached
+cruelly; and as she moved to cross to the foot of the staircase her
+knees gave under her. She clutched the newel-post for support, waiting
+to find strength for the ascent.
+
+From the shadowed back part of the hall the man Nogam moved hastily
+into view, his features twisted in a grimace of concern as he
+recognized the bleak misery of Sofia’s face. His voice sounded
+strangely thin and remote.
+
+“Is there anything the matter, miss?—anything I can do?”
+
+She contrived to shake her head slightly and utter an inarticulate
+sound of negation, then began slowly to mount the stairs.
+
+Below, Nogam stood watching, in a pose of indecision, as if tempted to
+follow and offer the support of an arm lest she fall, restrained only
+by fear of a rebuff. But Sofia’s leaden limbs carried her safely to the
+upper landing, then on to the blessed shelter of her room, where she
+collapsed upon a chaise-longue and there lay in a stirless huddle, dry
+of eye but deaf to the plaintive entreaties of Chou Nu and numb to all
+sensation but the anguish of her humiliated heart.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+SUSPECT
+
+
+Toward mid-evening the man Victor Vassilyevski and his creature Sturm
+sat where the lamp of hand-wrought brass made the top of the teakwood
+table an oasis of light amid a waste of shadows, their heads together
+over a vast glut of books and papers—maps printed and sketched, curious
+diagrams, works of reference, documents all dark with columns of
+figures and cabalistic writings intelligible only to initiated eyes.
+
+They had the study all to themselves. Nevertheless, when they spoke it
+was in the discreet pitch of those who deal in fatal secrets. At a
+distance of two paces only a lip-reader could have caught the substance
+of their communications, and even such a one must have failed unless
+equally at home in German and in English.
+
+Aside from these occasional and circumspect voices, and the busy rustle
+of a steel pen in the hand of Sturm, the quiet of the room had a
+tolerably constant background of sound in a subdued whisper punctuated
+by muffled clicks, emanating from the bronze casket that housed the
+telautographic apparatus.
+
+From time to time, as this noise temporarily suspended, Victor would
+get up, read what the mechanical stylus had inscribed, tear off the
+paper, and return to his chair.
+
+Some of the messages thus received he made known to Sturm, who
+invariably acknowledged this courtesy with effusive gratitude,
+sometimes adding a few words of contented comment. Other messages
+Victor chose to keep to himself, silently setting fire to them and
+adding their brittle ashes to those of their predecessors on the brazen
+tray provided for the purpose. At such times Sturm would bend lower
+over his work. But Victor was well able to guess what resentment
+glimmered in the eyes so studiously averted; and his cold, sardonic
+smile more than once commented, unknown to Sturm, upon the accuracy
+with which he read the mean workings of his “secretary’s” mind.
+
+The buzz of a muted bell presently interrupted the even tenor of their
+industry, causing Sturm to start sharply, drop his pen, and slue round
+in his chair, turning to Victor a livid face in which his dark eyes of
+a fanatic were live embers of excitement.
+
+Without a sign to show he shared or even was aware of Sturm’s emotion,
+Victor deliberately fished from beneath the table a telephone
+instrument, unhooked the receiver, and pronounced a conventional phrase
+of greeting. To this he added a short “Yes,” and after listening
+quietly for some seconds, “Very good—in twenty minutes, then.” Wasting
+no more time on the author of the call, he hung up, returned the
+telephone to its place of concealment, and helped himself to a
+cigarette before deigning to acknowledge Sturm’s persistent stare.
+
+Then, elevating his eyebrows in mild impatience, he made the laconic
+announcement:
+
+“Eleven.”
+
+Sturm’s mouth twitched nervously, his eyes burned with a keener fire.
+
+“Coming here? To-night?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Then”—a gaunt hand described a gesture of agitation—“the hour
+strikes!”
+
+Victor looked bored.
+
+“Who knows?” he replied, as who should say: “Does it matter?”
+
+“But—Gott in Himmel—!”
+
+“Sturm,” Victor interposed, critically, “if you Bolsheviki were a
+trifle more consistent, one might repose greater faith in your
+sincerity. But when one hears you deny the Deity in one breath and call
+on him by name in the next—!”
+
+“A mere mode of speech,” Sturm muttered.
+
+“If you must invoke a spiritual patron, why not Satan? Or don’t you
+believe in the Powers of Darkness, either?”
+
+“I believe in you.”
+
+“As temporal viceroy of Lucifer? Many thanks! But you were about to
+say—?”
+
+“Nothing. That is—I was envying your poise, Excellency. You take things
+so coolly.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“With Eleven coming here to tell us when we are to strike?”
+
+“Why not?” Victor repeated. “We are prepared to strike at any hour.
+What matters whether to-night or a week from to-night—since we cannot
+fail?”
+
+“If that were only certain!”
+
+“It rests with you.”
+
+“That’s just it,” Sturm doubted moodily. “Suppose _I_ fail?”
+
+“Why, then—I suppose—you will die.”
+
+“I know. And so will all of us, Excellency.”
+
+“Oh, no. Undeceive yourself, my friend. I shall survive. You will
+surely die, and perhaps many others with you; but I would not be Number
+One if I had turned my hand to this scheme without discounting failure
+first of all. My way of escape is sure.”
+
+“I believe you,” Sturm grumbled.
+
+With a languid hand Victor found and pressed a button embedded in the
+table near the edge.
+
+“You have reason. Whatever my shortcomings, my good Sturm, they do not
+include hypocrisy; I do not pretend, like your noble Bolsheviki, I am
+in this business for the sake of humanity or anything but my own
+selfish ends—power, plunder”—a slight wait prefaced one final word,
+spoken in a key of sombre passion—“revenge.”
+
+“Revenge?” Sturm echoed, staring.
+
+“I have more than one score to pay out before I can cry even with life
+... one above all!”
+
+Studying intently that darkened face, and misled by its look of
+abstraction, Sturm was guilty of the indiscretion of his malicious
+smile.
+
+“The Lone Wolf?”
+
+Victor turned weary eyes his way, and under their black and lustreless
+regard the smile merged swiftly into a grin of nervous apology.
+
+“You are shrewd,” Victor observed, thoughtfully. “Be careful: it is a
+dangerous gift.”
+
+The man Nogam gently opened the door and approached the table, stopping
+just outside the area of illumination shed by the shaded lamp. But
+since Victor continued to smoke absently, paying no attention, Nogam
+resigned himself to wait with entire patience: the perfect pattern of a
+servant tempered by long servitude to the erratic winds of employers’
+whims; efficient, assiduous, mute unless required to speak,
+long-suffering.
+
+Victor addressed him suddenly, in a sharp voice that drew from Sturm a
+glitter of eager spite.
+
+“Nogam!”
+
+“Yes, sir?”
+
+“Where is the Princess Sofia?”
+
+“In ’er apartment, sir.”
+
+“And Mr. Karslake?”
+
+“In ’is.”
+
+“Then be good enough to send Shaik Tsin to me.”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“And, Nogam!”—the servant checked in the act of turning—“I shan’t need
+you again to-night.”
+
+“’Nk you, sir.”
+
+When Nogam had left the room, Sturm, remarking the slight frown that
+knitted Victor’s brows, ventured an impertinence couched in a form of
+respectful enquiry:
+
+“Excellency, perhaps you trust that fellow too much, hein?”
+
+“You think so?”
+
+“He is too perfect, if you ask me—never makes a false move.”
+
+“Either he is what he seems, in which event a false move would be
+against nature; or he is not, and knows one slip would mean his death.”
+
+“Still, I maintain you trust him too much.”
+
+“With what?”
+
+“The freedom of your house, the opportunity to spy, to get to know who
+comes to see you and when, to listen at doors.”
+
+“You have caught him listening at doors?”
+
+“Not yet. But in time—”
+
+“I think not. I don’t think he has to.”
+
+“You mean,” Sturm stammered, perturbed, “you think he knows—suspects?”
+
+“I think he is one thing or the other: merely Nogam, or one of the
+greatest of living actors. In either case he is flawless—thus far. But
+if not merely Nogam, he will have a subtler means of eavesdropping than
+by listening at doors.”
+
+“The dictograph?”
+
+“Make your mind easy about that. This room is searched regularly by
+Shaik Tsin. So is Nogam’s. It is certain there is neither a dictograph
+installed here nor any means at Nogam’s disposal for connecting with a
+dictograph installation. Indeed, so closely is Nogam watched, and by
+more cunning eyes than mine—sometimes I begin to be afraid he is simply
+what he seems.”
+
+“Then you do suspect him!”
+
+“My good Sturm, I suspect everybody.”
+
+Sturm pondered this before pressing his point again.
+
+“Karslake found the fellow for you,” he suggested at length.
+
+“True.”
+
+“And Karslake—”
+
+“Has been guilty of nothing more treacherous than falling in love with
+Sofia.”
+
+“Your daughter, Excellency!”
+
+“The young woman seems content to call herself that.... Can’t say I
+blame Karslake.”
+
+“But do you forgive him?”
+
+“Ah, that is another matter. Mine is not a forgiving nature, Sturm—not
+even toward excessive shrewdness.”
+
+Victor took up a docket of papers, and Sturm, mumbling an apology, gave
+himself up to jealous brooding till he forgot the broad hint he had
+received.
+
+“If I can satisfy you that Nogam is untrustworthy—” he began, meaning
+to continue: _Karslake will stand his proved accomplice_.
+
+But Victor would not let him finish. “Nothing could please me more,” he
+interrupted. “Do so, by all means—if you can—and earn my everlasting
+gratitude.”
+
+Sturm questioned him with puzzled eyes.
+
+“I ask no greater service of any man,” Victor elucidated with a smile
+that made Sturm shiver, “than proof that Nogam is what I suspect him of
+being.” A hand extended upon the table unclosed and closed slowly, with
+fingers tensed, like a murderous claw. “I want no greater favour of
+Heaven or Hell—!”
+
+He broke off abruptly. Having entered noiselessly in his padded shoes,
+Shaik Tsin now stood before Victor, offering a low obeisance.
+
+“You took your time,” Victor grumbled. And Shaik Tsin smiled serenely.
+“I want you to tend the door to-night,” Victor pursued. “Eleven is
+expected at any moment. You need not announce him, simply show him in.”
+
+“Hearing is obedience.”
+
+“Wait”—as the Chinaman began to bow himself out—“Karslake is still in
+his room, I suppose?”
+
+“Yes, master.”
+
+“And Nogam?”
+
+“Has just gone to his.”
+
+“When did you last search their quarters?”
+
+“During dinner.”
+
+“And of course found nothing?” Shaik Tsin bowed. “Make sure neither
+leaves his room to-night. Set a watch outside each door.”
+
+“I have done so.”
+
+Victor gave a sign of dismissal.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+THE TURNIP
+
+
+In a spacious chamber beneath the eaves, hideously papered and
+furnished with cheerless, massive relics of the early Victorian era,
+the man Nogam pursued methodical preparations for bed.
+
+Spying eyes, had there been any—and for all Nogam knew, there
+were—would have seen him follow step by step a programme from whose
+order he had departed by scarcely as much as a single gesture on any
+night since his first installation in the house near Queen Anne’s Gate.
+
+Loosening the waistcoat of his evening livery, he freed the heavy
+silver watchchain from its buttonhole, drew from its pocket an
+old-fashioned silver watch of that obese style which first earned the
+portable timepiece its nickname of “turnip,” and opening its back
+inserted a key attached to the other end of the chain. Its winding was
+a laborious process, prodigiously noisy. Once finished, Nogam shut the
+back with a loud click, and reverently deposited the watch on the
+marble slab of the black walnut bureau.
+
+Then he hung coat and waistcoat over the back of a chair which stood
+between the foot of his bed and the door. Sheer chance may have decreed
+selection of this chair for the purpose on Nogam’s first night in the
+room; whether or no, it was not in character that, having established
+this precedent, Nogam should depart from it. And in any event, the
+coat-draped chair effectually eclipsed a possible keyhole view of the
+room.
+
+Notwithstanding, Nogam pursued his bedtime rites with precisely the
+same deliberation and absence of perceptible self-consciousness as
+before. One never knew: there might be other peepholes in the walls.
+
+His trousers, neatly folded, he laid out on the seat of the chair. Then
+he pulled off square-toed boots with elastic inserts in their uppers,
+put on a pair of worn slippers, carried the boots to the door and set
+them outside, closed the door, and turned the key in its lock.
+
+If aware that, by so doing, he made his privacy just as secure as if he
+had fastened the door with a bent hair-pin, he gave evidence of no
+uneasiness in the knowledge. A clear conscience is the best of nerve
+tonics.
+
+Throughout, his features preserved their mild, subdued, dull habit with
+which the household was familiar. Nogam off duty was in no way
+different from the unthinking creature of habit who performed
+belowstairs the prescribed functions of his office.
+
+Having donned a nightshirt of coarse cotton, he knelt for several
+minutes in a devout attitude by the side of his bed, then rising opened
+the window, took the turnip from the bureau, and snuggled it beneath
+his pillow, inserted his bare shanks between the sheets, and opened at
+a marked place a Bible bound in black cloth.
+
+On the table by his shoulder a battered electric standard with a frayed
+cord and a dingy shade remained alight long enough to permit Nogam to
+spell out a short chapter. Then he put the Bible aside, yawned wearily,
+and switched out the lamp.
+
+Profound darkness now possessed the room, immaterially modified by the
+light-struck sky beyond the windows. And in this grateful obscurity
+Nogam permitted himself the luxury of ceasing to be Nogam. A light
+suddenly flashed upon his face would have discovered a keen and alert
+intelligence transfiguring the apathetic mask of every day. Also, it
+would have rendered Nogam’s probable duration of life an interesting
+speculation.
+
+Under cover of the darkness, furthermore, he did a number of things
+which Nogam, qua Nogam, would never have dreamed of doing.
+
+His first act was to withdraw from under his pillow the turnip, his
+next to re-open the back of its silver case and then the inner
+lid—something which a deft thumbnail accomplished without a sound.
+
+From the roomy interior of the case—whose bulky ancient works had been
+replaced by a wafer-thin modern movement, leaving much useful space
+back of the dial—sensitive fingers extracted a metal disk about the
+size and thickness of a silver dollar. One face of this disk was
+generously perforated, the other, solid, boasted a short blunt post
+round which several feet of extremely fine wire had been coiled.
+
+Unwinding the wire and bending the free end into the form of a rude
+hook, the man attached this last to the cord of his bedside lamp at a
+point, located by sense of touch, where a minute section of electric
+light wire had been left naked by defective insulation.
+
+Direct connection now being established with a microphone secreted in
+the base of the brass lamp on the study table, three floors below, and
+the perforated side of the microphone detector serving as an earpiece,
+one could hear every word uttered by the conspirators.
+
+The man in bed contributed a broad smile to the kind darkness—sheer
+luxury to facial muscles cramped and constrained to the cast of Nogam
+for eighteen hours a day. He was now at last to reap the reward of
+three months of preparation and three weeks of ingenious, but
+necessarily spasmodic, and at all times desperately dangerous,
+tampering with the house wiring system.
+
+He lay very still for a long time, listening ...
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+CONFERENCE OF THE DAMNED
+
+
+An Irish voice was making the hush of the study musical with mellow
+cadences.
+
+“This week-end sure, your Excellency—within the next three nights—the
+little Welshman will be after summoning the Cabinet to sit in secret in
+Downing Street, with His Most Gracious Majesty attending in person; the
+emergency extraordinary being thoughtfully provided by this shindig me
+amiable but spirited fellow-countrymen are kicking up across the
+Channel—God bless the work!”
+
+The speaker laughed lightly, flashing white teeth at Prince Victor
+across the width of the paper-strewn table.
+
+“In more Parliamentary language, by the Irish Question. But we’ll hear
+no more of that, I’m thinking, once we’ve proclaimed the Soviet
+Government of England.”
+
+Victor bowed in grave assent.
+
+“You have my word as to that,” he said; and after a moment of
+thoughtful consideration: “You speak, no doubt, from the facts?”
+
+“I do that. It’s straight I’ve come from the House of Commons to bring
+you the news without an hour’s delay. There’s more than one advantage
+in being an Irish Member these days.”
+
+“On the other hand, Eleven”—Victor stressed the numeral as if to remind
+the Irishman that even a Member of Parliament for Ireland held no
+higher standing in his esteem than any other underling in his
+association of anonymous conspirators—“even so, it appears you are
+uncertain as to the night.”
+
+“I’m after telling you it’ll be to-morrow night or more likely
+Saturday—Sunday at the latest.” A mildly impatient accent alone
+betrayed resentment of the snub. “I’ll know in good time, long before
+the hour appointed; and that ought to do, providing you on your part
+are prepared.”
+
+“An hour’s notice will be ample,” Victor agreed. “We have been ready
+for days, needing only the knowledge you bring us—or will, when you
+have it definitely.”
+
+The Irishman chuckled.
+
+“It’s hard to believe. Not that I’d dream of doubting your statement,
+sir—but yourself won’t be denying you must have worked fast to organize
+England for revolution in less than three weeks.”
+
+“I have been busy,” Victor admitted. “But the work was not so difficult
+... Seeds of revolution are easily sown in land thoroughly tilled by
+forces of discontent. And what land has been better tilled? To vary the
+figure: England is all seething beneath a thin crust of custom and
+established habit whose integrity a conservative and reactionary
+government has ever since the war been struggling desperately to
+preserve. The blow we shall strike within three days will shatter that
+crust in a hundred places.”
+
+“And let Hell loose!” the Irishman added with a nervous laugh.
+
+In a dry voice Victor commented: “Precisely.”
+
+“Omelettes,” Sturm interjected, assertively, “are not made without
+breaking eggs.”
+
+“And all rivers, no doubt, flow to the sea? What a lot you know, Herr
+Sturm! Is it the Portfolio of the Minister of Education you’ve picked
+out for your very own, after the explosion comes off—if it’s a fair
+question?”
+
+“You Irish are all mad,” the German complained, sourly—“mad about
+laughing. Even me you will laugh at, while you trust your very life to
+me, while you trust to my genius to make Soviet England possible and
+Ireland free.”
+
+“Faith! you’re away off there, me friend. If it was you and your genius
+I had to trust, it’s meself would turn violent reactionary and advise
+Ireland to be a good dog and come to England’s heel and lick England’s
+hand and live off England’s leavings. I’ll trust nobody in this black
+business but himself—Number One.”
+
+“You have changed your tune since that night at the Red Moon,” Sturm
+reminded him, angrily.
+
+“I had me lesson then and there,” Eleven agreed, cheerfully. “And I
+don’t mind telling you, the next time I’m taken with a fancy to call me
+soul me own, I’ll be after asking himself first for a license.”
+
+Victor put a period to the passage with a dispassionate “By your leave,
+gentlemen—that will do.” To the Irishman he added: “You understand the
+danger, I believe, of remaining within the condemned area—that is to
+say, except in the open air?”
+
+“Can’t say I do, altogether.”
+
+“It is simple: no person in any house supplied by the mains of the
+Westminster gas works will be safe for hours after the formula of
+Thirteen has begun its work. My advice to you is to keep out of the
+district entirely.”
+
+“Faith, and I’ll do that! But how about yourself in this house?”
+
+“I shall spend the week-end outside of London,” Victor replied, “not
+too far away, of course, and”—the shadow of his satiric smile was
+briefly visible—“prepared at any moment to answer the call of my
+stricken country.... The few who remain here will be provided with the
+essentials for their protection. Furthermore, a general warning will be
+sent out to all who can be trusted.”
+
+“And the others—?”
+
+“With them it must be as Fate wills.”
+
+“Women and children, potential sympathizers and supporters of all
+classes?” the Irishman persisted in incredulous horror—“all?”
+
+“All,” Victor affirmed, coldly. “We who deal in the elemental passions
+that make revolutions, that is to say, in Life and Death, cannot afford
+qualms and scruples. What are a few lives more or less in London? These
+British breed like rabbits.”
+
+“I see,” said Eleven, indistinctly. He stared a moment and swallowed
+hard, then glanced hastily at his watch. “I’ll be after bidding you
+good-night,” he said, “and pleasant dreams. For meself, I’m a fool if I
+go to bed this night sober enough to dream at all, at all!”
+
+Victor rang for Shaik Tsin to show him out.
+
+“One question more, if you won’t take it amiss,” Eleven suggested,
+lingering. And Victor inclined a gracious head. “Have you thought of
+failure?”
+
+“I have thought of everything.”
+
+“Well, and if we do fail—?”
+
+“How, for example?”
+
+“How do I know what hellish accident may kick our plans into a cocked
+hat? Anything might happen. There’s your friend, the Lone Wolf, for
+instance ...”
+
+“Have you not forgotten him yet?” Victor enquired in simulated
+surprise. “Have you neglected to remark that since the blunderer failed
+to find the Council Chamber that night, when his raid at the Red Moon
+netted him only a handful of coolie gamblers and drug-addicts, he has
+left us to our own devices?”
+
+“That’s what makes me wonder what the divvle’s up to. His sort are
+never so dangerous as when apparently discouraged.” “Be reassured. I
+promised you three weeks ago his interference would not continue beyond
+that night. It has not. Lanyard knows I have his daughter, that any
+blow aimed at me must first strike her.”
+
+“Doubtless yourself knows best....”
+
+With the Irishman gone, Prince Victor turned to Sturm.
+
+“You will want a good night’s sleep,” he suggested with pointed
+solicitude. “Who knows but that to-morrow will bring your night of
+nights, my friend?”
+
+He lapsed immediately into remote abstraction, sitting with chin bent
+to the tips of his joined fingers, his eyes downcast, motionless.
+
+Disgruntled, but afraid to show it, the German cleared away the litter
+of papers, assorting them into huge portfolios, and took himself off.
+Shaik Tsin replaced him, moving noiselessly about the room, restoring
+the reference books to the shelves and stowing the portfolios away in a
+massive safe hidden behind a lacquered screen. This done, he stationed
+himself before his master, awaiting his attention, a shape of affable
+placidity, intelligent, at ease; his attitude not entirely lacking a
+suggestion of familiarity.
+
+Without changing his pose by so much as the lifting of an eyelash,
+Victor spoke in Chinese:
+
+“To-morrow afternoon, late, I shall motor down into the country with
+the girl Sofia. I shall be gone three days—perhaps. I will leave a
+telephone number with you, to be used only in emergency. As soon as I
+have left, you will dismiss all the English servants, with a quarter’s
+wage in advance in lieu of notice. Karslake will provide the money.”
+
+“He does not accompany you?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“And the man Nogam?”
+
+Victor appeared to hesitate. “What do you think?” he enquired at
+length.
+
+“What I have always thought.”
+
+“That he is a spy?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“But with no tangible support for your suspicions?”
+
+“None.”
+
+“You have not failed to watch him closely?”
+
+“As a cat watches a mouse.”
+
+“But—nothing?”
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+“Yet I agree with you entirely, Shaik Tsin. I smell treachery.”
+
+“And I.”
+
+“Nogam shall go with me as my bodyservant. Thus I shall be able to keep
+an eye on him. Let Chou Nu be prepared to accompany us as maid to the
+girl Sofia. In my absence you will be guided by such further
+instructions as I may leave with you. These failing, consider the man
+Sturm, my personal representative. In the contingency you know of,
+Sturm will warn you in time to clear the house.”
+
+“Of everybody?”
+
+“Of all servants except those whom you may need to guard the man
+Karslake. These and yourself will be provided with means of
+self-protection by Sturm.”
+
+“And Karslake?”
+
+“I have not yet made up my mind.”
+
+“Hearing is obedience.”
+
+Victor relapsed into another reverie which lasted so long that even the
+patience of Shaik Tsin bade fair to fail. In the end the silence was
+broken by two words:
+
+“The crystal.”
+
+From a cabinet at the end of the room Shaik Tsin brought a crystal ball
+supported on the backs of three golden dragons standing tail to tail,
+superbly wrought examples of Chinese goldsmithing. This he placed
+carefully on the black teakwood surface at Victor’s elbow.
+
+“And now, inform the girl Sofia I wish to see her.”
+
+“And if she again sends her excuses?”
+
+“Say, in that event, I shall be obliged to come to her room.”
+
+
+
+
+XV
+INTUITION
+
+
+She had not thought, of course, of going down to dinner; she had,
+instead, sent Victor word simply that she begged to be excused from
+joining him for that meal. Then, unable longer to endure Chou Nu’s
+efforts to comfort or distract her, Sofia had stepped out of her street
+frock and into a négligée and, dismissing the maid, returned to the
+chaise-longue upon which, in vain hope of being able to cry out the
+wretchedness of her heart, she had thrown herself on first gaining the
+sanctuary of her room.
+
+For hours, she did not guess how many, she scarcely stirred. Neither
+was the blessed boon of tears granted unto her. Alone with her immense
+and immitigable misery, she lay in darkness tempered only by the dim
+skyshine that filtered through the window draperies; hating life, that
+had no mercy; hating the duplicity that had led Karslake into making
+untrue love to her, but inexplicably not hating Karslake himself, or
+the enshrined image that wore his name; hating herself for her facile
+readiness to give love where all but the guise of love was lacking, and
+for knowing this deep hurt where she should have felt only scorn and
+anger; but hating, most of all, or rather for the first time
+discovering how well she hated, him to whom unerring intuition told her
+she owed this brimming measure of heartbreak and humiliation, the man
+who called himself her father.
+
+For if Karslake had done her a cruel wrong in winning her avowal of the
+love that had been growing in her heart these many weeks, while he was
+merely amusing himself or serving a secret purpose—whose was the
+initial blame for that?
+
+Who had egged Karslake on, as he had asserted, “to win her confidence,”
+leaving to him the choice of means to that end?
+
+And—_why_?
+
+The formulation of this question marked the turning point in Sofia’s
+descent toward the nadir of shame and anguish; from the moment its
+significance was clearly apprehended (but it took her long to reach
+this stage) the complexion of her thoughts took on another colour, and
+the smart of chagrin was soothed even as the irritation excited by
+critical examination of Victor’s conduct grew more acute.
+
+Why should the self-styled author of her being have thought it
+necessary, or even wise or kind, to commission a paid employee to win
+his daughter’s confidence?
+
+What had rendered the conquest of her confidence so needful in his
+sight?
+
+What had made him think Sofia would prove loath to resign it to him, or
+more likely to give it to another?
+
+Why had Victor hesitated to bid for her confidence with his own tongue,
+on his own merits?
+
+One would think that, if he were her father—
+
+If!
+
+_Was_ he?
+
+Sofia sat up sharply, her young body as taut as her temper. Pulses and
+breathing quickened, intent eyes probed the shadows as if she thought
+to wrest from them a clue to the mystery of her status in the household
+of Victor Vassilyevski.
+
+What proof had she that he was her father?
+
+None but his word.... Well, and Karslake’s.... None that would stand
+the test of skepticism, none that either sentiment or reason could
+offer and support. Certainly she resembled Prince Victor in no respect
+that she could think of, not in person, not in mould of character, not
+in ways of thought. From the very first she had been perplexed, and
+indeed saddened, by her failure, her sheer inability, to react
+emotionally to their alleged relationship. And surely there must exist
+between parent and child some sort of spiritual bond or affinity,
+something to draw them together—even if neither had never known the
+other. Whereas she on her part had never been conscious of any sense of
+sympathy with Victor, but only of timidity and reluctance which had
+latterly manifested in unquestionable aversion. And then there was his
+attitude toward her, raising a question so repugnant to her
+understanding that never before to-night had Sofia admitted its
+existence and given it the freedom of her thoughts.
+
+She had seen men, in the Café des Exiles, toast their mistresses with
+such looks as Victor Vassilyevski reserved for the girl whom he claimed
+as his child.
+
+What, then, if he were not her father?
+
+What if he had only pretended to paternal rights in furtherance of some
+deep scheme of his?—perhaps thinking to use her as a pawn in that dark
+plot which he was forever brewing in his study (with canaille like
+Sturm for collaborators!) that mysterious “research work” that
+flavoured the atmosphere of the house with a miasmatic reek of
+intrigue, stealth, and fear—perhaps (more simply and terribly)
+designing in his own time and way to avenge himself upon the daughter
+for the admitted slights he had suffered at the hands of the mother,
+that poor dead woman whose fame he never ceased to blacken while still
+her memory was potent to kindle fires in those eyes otherwise so
+opaque, impenetrable, and lightless!
+
+Now Sofia found herself unable to sit still; only through action of
+some sort could she hope to win any measure of ease for brain and
+nerves. A thought was shaping, claiming precedence over all others, the
+thought of flight; bred of the feeling that, as long as she remained in
+ignorance of the exact truth concerning their relationship, it was
+impossible for her to remain longer under Victor’s roof, eating his
+bread and salt, schooling herself to suffer his endearments whose good
+faith she could not help challenging, who inspired in her only
+antipathy, fear, and distrust.
+
+It seemed clear beyond dispute that she must leave his protection, this
+very night, before he could guess her mind and move to check her.
+
+Sofia swung her feet down to the floor. One of her silken mules had
+fallen off. Semi-consciously she groped for it with stockinged toes. As
+the inanimate will, the mule eluded recapture with impish ease. But
+beneath her foot something rustled and crackled lightly. She bent over
+and picked it up: a square white envelope, sealed.
+
+Switching on a lamp near by, she examined her find. It carried no
+address. How it could have got there she could not imagine ... unless
+Chou Nu had dropped it by inadvertence, which seemed as far-fetched as
+to suppose she had left it there by design; for that would mean Chou Nu
+had been bribed to convey a surreptitious note to her mistress; and
+Sofia knew that the Chinese girl was at once too loyal to her
+“second-uncle,” and too much in awe of “Number One,” to be corruptible.
+
+None the less, there the envelope was; and nobody but Chou Nu had
+entered the room since Sofia had come straight from the study to it,
+late in the afternoon.
+
+It was just possible, however—Sofia’s eyes measured the distance—that a
+deft hand and a strong wrist might have slipped the envelope under the
+door and sent it skimming across the floor to the foot of the
+chaise-longue.
+
+But nobody would have dared do that without a powerful motive for
+wishing to communicate secretly with Sofia.
+
+She tore the flap and withdrew a single sheet of notepaper penned in a
+hand she knew too well. Her heart leapt....
+
+I implore you, of your charity, do not condemn me without a hearing
+because of anything you may have overheard me say. After you left us in
+the study I saw his eyes watching the door while we talked, and knew
+from his look that something to please him had happened behind my back.
+And in the temper he was in only one thing could possibly have pleased
+him.
+
+I said what I said to him, dear, because I had to—or lose the right,
+dearer to me than life, to be near you, to serve and protect you. I
+lied to him because I loved you. But I have never lied to you about my
+love—and only once, through necessity, about anything else. Perhaps you
+can guess what that lie was, somehow I rather think you do; at least, I
+am sure, you are beginning to wonder if I told the truth—or knew it,
+then.
+
+If this sound cryptic, I can only beg you to be patient and charitable
+until I find opportunity to clear away this one lie which stands
+between us—and which is, by comparison, almost immaterial, since all
+that matters is the one great truth in my life, that I love you beyond
+all telling.
+
+R.K.
+
+If questions trouble your mind, I beg you do not let him know it. Your
+only safety now lies in his continuing to believe that you are
+unsuspicious. Above all, do your best to seem to fall in with his
+wishes, however strange or unreasonable they may seem. It will be only
+a few days more before I can claim you for my own, and laugh at his
+pretensions.
+
+A curious love-letter; yet it was Sofia’s first. If it made her
+thoughtful, it made her illogically happy as well. If it put the issue
+to her squarely, of loyalty to Prince Victor or loyalty to Karslake,
+she was unaware that she had any choice of courses. When Shaik Tsin
+thumped the panels of her door, she crushed the note into the bosom of
+her négligée before answering.
+
+When one is of an age to love, it is never the parent who gets the
+benefit of a doubt.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+THE CRYSTAL
+
+
+Like some shy, sad shade summoned up by the malign genius of a haunted
+chamber, a slender shape of pallor in softly flowing draperies slipped
+through the silent door and, advancing a few reluctant steps into the
+soundless gloom, paused and in apprehensive diffidence awaited the
+welcome that was for a time withheld.
+
+For minutes Victor gave no sign or stir; and in all the room nothing
+moved but ghostly whorls of smoke writhing slowly upward from a pungent
+censer of beaten gold.
+
+The great lamp of brass was dark, and there was no other light than a
+solitary bulb, whose hooded rays were concentrated upon the crystal
+ball, so that the latter shone with a dead-white glare, somehow
+baleful, like an elfin moon deeply lost in a sea of sombre enchantment.
+
+Bending forward in his chair, an elbow planted on the table, his
+forehead resting upon the tips of long, white fingers, Victor’s gaze
+was steadfast to the crystal. Refracted light sculptured with curious
+shadows that saturnine face intent to immobility.
+
+Too young, too inexperienced and sensitive to be insusceptible to the
+spell of the theatrical, the girl was conscious of a steady ebb of her
+new-found store of fortitude, skepticism, and defiance, together with
+an equally steady inflow of timidity and uneasiness. That sinister
+figure at the table, absorbed in study of the inscrutable sphere—what
+did he see there, to hold his faculties in such deep eclipse? Adept in
+black arts of the Orient as he was said to be, what wizardry was he
+brewing with the aid of that traditional tool of the necromancer? What
+spectacle of divination was in those pellucid depths unfolding to his
+rapt vision? And what had this consultation of the occult to do with
+the man’s mind concerning herself?
+
+Sofia was shaken by a tremor of dread....
+
+And as if her emotion were somehow communicated, arousing him to
+knowledge of her presence, Victor started, sat back, and with a sigh
+passed a hand across his eyes. When the hand fell, his face wore its
+habitual look for Sofia, modified by a slightly apologetic and weary
+smile.
+
+“My child!” he exclaimed in accents of contrite surprise, “have I kept
+you waiting long?”
+
+“Only a few minutes. It doesn’t matter.”
+
+But her voice seemed sadly small and thin in comparison with Victor’s
+rotund and measured intonations.
+
+“Forgive me.” Victor rose, nodding to indicate the shining crystal. “I
+have been consulting my familiar,” he said with a light laugh. “You
+have heard of crystal-gazing? A fascinating art that languishes in
+undeserved neglect. The ancients were more wise, they knew there was
+more in Heaven and Earth.... You are incredulous? But I assure you, I
+myself, though far from proficient, have caught strange glimpses of
+unborn events in the heart of that transparent enigma.”
+
+He took her hands and cuddled them in his own.
+
+She quivered irrepressibly to his touch.
+
+“But you are trembling!” he protested, solicitous, looking down into
+her face—“you are wan and sad, my dear. Tell me you are not ill.”
+
+“It is nothing,” Sofia replied—again in that faint, stifled voice. She
+added in determined effort to subdue her trembling and turn their talk
+to essentials: “You sent for me—I am here.”
+
+“I am so sorry. If I had guessed ...” Enlightenment seemed to dawn all
+at once. “But surely it isn’t because of that stupid business with
+Karslake? Surely you didn’t take him seriously?”
+
+“How should I—?”
+
+“It is too absurd. The poor fool misconstrued my instructions to make
+himself agreeable—I am so taken up with the gravest matters at present,
+I didn’t want you to feel lonely or neglected—and, it appears, felt it
+incumbent upon him to flirt with you as a matter of duty. I am out of
+temper with him, but not unreasonable; I shan’t dispense with his
+services altogether, without more provocation, but will find other work
+to keep him busy and out of your way. You need fear no more annoyance
+from that quarter.”
+
+“I was not annoyed,” Sofia found heart to contend. “I—like him.”
+
+“Nonsense!” Victor’s laugh was rich with derision. “Don’t ask me to
+believe you were actually touched by the fellow’s play-acting. You—my
+daughter—wasting emotion on a mere commoner! The thing is too
+ridiculous. Oblige me by thinking no more about it. I have better
+things in store for you.”
+
+“Better than—love?” the girl questioned with grave eyes.
+
+“When the time comes for that, you shall find a worthier parti than
+poor Karslake, well-meaning though he may be. Moreover, you
+heard—forgive me for reminding you—there was not an ounce of sincerity
+in all his philandering for you to hold in sentimental recollection.
+So—forget Karslake, please. It is a duty you owe your own pride and my
+dignity; it is, furthermore, my wish.”
+
+She bowed her head, that he might not see the reflection in her face of
+the glow that warmed her bosom, where Karslake’s letter nestled. But
+Victor took the nod for the word of submission, and patted her shoulder
+with an indulgent hand, guiding her to a chair close by his.
+
+“Sit down, my dear. I want to explain why I asked you to come to me at
+this late hour—never dreaming my message would find you so
+overwrought.... You quite see how needless it was to permit yourself to
+be upset by such a trifling matter, don’t you?”
+
+“Oh, quite,” Sofia murmured, with gaze fixed on the interlacing fingers
+in her lap.
+
+“That is sensible.” Offering her shoulder one last accolade of
+approbation, Victor moved toward his own chair. “And now that you are
+here, we may as well have our little talk out,” he continued, but broke
+off to stipulate: “If, that is, you are sure you feel up to it?”
+
+“Yes,” Sofia assented, but without moving.
+
+“I am not so sure. Perhaps a glass of wine might do you good.”
+
+“Oh, no!” the girl protested—“I don’t need it, really.”
+
+But Victor wouldn’t listen; and disappearing into shadowed distances,
+returned presently with a brimming goblet.
+
+“Drink this, dear. It will make you feel quite fit again.”
+
+Obediently, Sofia raised the goblet to her lips.
+
+“You have never tasted a wine like that,” Victor insisted, smiling down
+at her.
+
+It was true enough, what he claimed; though it had something of
+character of a sound old Madeira, this wine had more, a surpassing
+richness, a fruitiness in no way cloying, a peculiarly aromatic taste
+and fragrance, elusive and provoking, with a hint of bitterness never
+to be analyzed by the most experienced palate.
+
+“What is it?” Sofia asked after her first sip.
+
+“You like it, eh? An old wine of China, unknown to Western Europe.”
+Victor gave it a musical name in what Sofia took to be Chinese.
+“Outside my cellars, I’ll wager there’s not another bottle of it this
+side of Constantinople. Drink it all. It will do you good.”
+
+He seated himself. “And now my reason for wishing to talk with you
+to-night.... A note came by the last delivery from Lady Randolph West.
+You met her, I understand, through Sybil Waring, a few days ago. She
+was apparently much taken with you.”
+
+“She is very kind.”
+
+Victor had found a sheet of notepaper and, bending to the light, was
+searching its scrawled lines with narrowed eyes.
+
+“‘Too lovely,’ she calls you—and quite justly, my dear. Yes; here it
+is: ‘Too lovely for words.’ And she wants me to bring my ‘charming
+daughter’ down to Frampton Court for this week-end.”
+
+Sofia said nothing, but put her half-empty glass aside. The wine had
+done her good, she thought. She felt better, stronger, mentally more
+alert, and at the same time curiously soothed.
+
+Victor refolded the note and tapped the table with it, holding Sofia
+with speculative eyes.
+
+“It should be amusing,” he said, thoughtfully, “a new experience for
+you. Elaine—I mean Lady Randolph West, of course—is a charming hostess,
+and never fails to fill Frampton Court with delightful people.”
+
+“I’m sure I should love it.”
+
+“I am sure you would. And yet ... I may have been a little premature,
+since I have already written accepting the invitation.” He indicated an
+addressed envelope face up on the table. “But on second thoughts, it
+seemed perhaps wiser to consult you first.”
+
+“But if it is your wish, I must go,” Sofia replied, mindful of
+Karslake’s injunction not to oppose Victor. “What have I to say—?”
+
+“Everything about whether we accept or do not—or if not everything, at
+least the final word. I must abide by your decision.”
+
+“But I shall be only too glad—”
+
+“Think a moment. It might be wiser not to go. You alone can say.”
+
+“I don’t quite understand ...”
+
+Victor sighed. “It is a painful subject,” he said, slowly—“one I
+hesitate to reopen. But we can never profit by closing our minds to
+facts; I mean, to the reality of the danger which is always with us,
+since it is within us.”
+
+“What danger?” Sofia enquired, sullenly, knowing the answer too well
+before it was spoken.
+
+“The danger of sudden temptation to indulge the lawless appetites with
+which heredity has endued us—me from the nameless forebears whom I
+never knew, you directly from parents both of whom boasted criminal
+records.”
+
+“I don’t believe it!” Sofia declared, passionately—“I can’t believe it,
+I won’t! Even if you are—”
+
+She was going on to say “if you are my father,” but caught herself in
+time. Had not Karslake warned her in his note: “_Your only safety now
+lies in his continuing to believe that you are unsuspicious._” She
+continued in a tempest of expostulation whose fury covered her break:
+
+“Even if you were once a thief and my mother—my mother!—everything
+vile, as you persist in trying to make me believe—God knows why!—it is
+possible I may still have failed to inherit your criminal tendencies;
+and not only possible, but true, if I know myself at all. For I have
+never felt the temptation to steal that you insist I must have
+inherited from you—nor any other inclination toward things as mean,
+contemptible, and dishonourable as they are dishonest!”
+
+With only his slow, forbearing smile by way of comment, Victor heard
+her out, but when she paused to reassort her thoughts, lifted a
+temporizing hand.
+
+“Not yet, perhaps,” he said, gently. “There is always the first time
+with every rebel against man-made laws. But, where the predisposition
+so indubitably exists, it is inevitable, soon or late it must come to
+you, my dear—the time when the will is too weak, temptation too strong.
+Against it we must be forever on our guard.”
+
+“I am not afraid,” Sofia contended.
+
+“Naturally; you will not be before the hour of ordeal which shall prove
+your strength or your weakness, your confidence in yourself, or my
+loving fears for you.”
+
+Sofia gave a gesture of weariness and confusion. What did it matter? If
+he would have it so, let him: it couldn’t affect the issue in any way,
+what he believed, or for his own purposes pretended to believe. Had not
+Karslake promised ...
+
+She tried to recall precisely what it was that Karslake had promised,
+but found her memory of a sudden singularly sluggish. In fact, her mind
+seemed to have lost its marvellous clarity of those first moments after
+tasting the wine of China. Small wonder, when one remembered the
+emotional strain she had experienced since early evening!
+
+“Still,” she argued, stubbornly, “I don’t see what all this has to do
+with Lady Randolph West’s invitation.”
+
+“Only that to accept means to expose you to the greatest temptation one
+can well imagine.”
+
+Sofia stared blankly. Her wits were working even more slowly and
+heavily than before. And the glare in her eyes from the luminous sphere
+of crystal was irritating. Almost without thinking, she lifted her
+glass again; when she put it down it was empty.
+
+“The jewels of Lady Randolph West,” Victor went on to explain without
+her prompting, “are considered the most wonderful in England; always
+excepting, of course, the Crown jewels.”
+
+“What is that to me?”
+
+Resentment sounded in her tone. She was thinking more readily once
+more, thanks to that second magical draught, but was nevertheless
+conscious of a general failing of powers drained by her great fatigue.
+She wished devoutly that Victor would have done and let her go....
+
+“Elaine is very careless, leaves her jewels scattered about, hardly
+troubles to put them away securely at night. If you should be tempted
+to appropriate anything, she might not discover her loss for days; and
+then, again, she might. And if you were caught—consider what shame and
+disgrace!”
+
+“I think I see,” the girl said, slowly, after some difficult thinking.
+“You don’t want me to go.”
+
+“To the contrary, I do—but I want more than anything else in the world
+that my daughter should be sure of herself and fall into no irreparable
+error.”
+
+“But I am sure of myself—I have told you that.”
+
+“Then let us fret no more about it, but accept, and go prepared to
+enjoy ourselves. I will send the letter.”
+
+Victor rang, and Shaik Tsin presented himself so quickly that Sofia
+wondered dully where he could have been waiting. In the room with them,
+perhaps? It wasn’t impossible. The Chinaman’s thick soles of felt
+enabled him to move about without making the least noise.
+
+“Have this posted immediately.”
+
+Shaik Tsin bowed deeply, and backed away with the letter. Unless she
+turned to watch him, Sofia could not say whether he left the room or
+not.
+
+She offered to rise.
+
+“If that is all ...”
+
+“Not quite. There are certain details to be arranged; and I may not see
+you again before we leave to-morrow afternoon. We will motor down to
+Frampton Court—it’s not far, little more than an hour by train—starting
+about half after four, if you can be ready.”
+
+“Oh, yes.”
+
+“Sybil Waring will tell you what to take, and Chou Nu will see to your
+packing. Both, by the way, will accompany us. Sybil’s maid will follow
+by train. For myself, I am taking Nogam—having found that English
+servants do not take kindly to my Chinese valet.”
+
+“Yes ...” Sofia uttered, listlessly, wondering why this information
+should be considered of interest to her.
+
+“And one thing more: I am forgiven? You are not cross with me?”
+
+“Why should I be?”
+
+“Because of what happened this afternoon—when I scolded Karslake for
+making love to you.”
+
+“Oh,” said Sofia with a good show of indifference—she was so
+tired—“that!”
+
+“Believe me, little Sofia”—Victor put out a hand to hers, and held her
+eyes with a compelling gaze—“boy-and-girl romance is all very well, but
+there is a greater destiny reserved for you than marriage to a hired
+secretary, however amiable, personable, and well-meaning. You must
+prepare yourself to move in a world beyond and above the common
+hearthstone of bourgeois domesticity.”
+
+The girl shook a bewildered head.
+
+“It is a riddle?” she asked, wearily.
+
+“A riddle?” Victor echoed. “Why, one may safely term it that. Is not
+the Future always a riddle? Nature knows the Future as the Past, but
+Nature holds it secret, lest man go mad with too much knowledge. Only
+to the few, the favoured, does she grant rare glimpses through media
+which she has provided for the use of the initiate—such as this crystal
+here, in which I was studying your future, when you came in, the high
+future I plan for you.”
+
+“And—you won’t tell me?”
+
+“I may not. It is forbidden. Nature deals unkindly with those who
+violate her confidence. But—who knows?”
+
+He checked himself as if struck by a new turn of thought, and studied
+the girl’s face intently.
+
+“Who knows?” he repeated, as if to himself.
+
+“What—?”
+
+“It is quite within the bounds of possibility,” Victor mused, “that you
+should have inherited some of the psychic power which was born in me.
+Perhaps—who knows?—to you as well Nature will be supple and disclose
+her secrets.... If you care to seek her favour?”
+
+“But—how?”
+
+“By consulting the crystal.”
+
+Sofia’s eyes sought that coldly burning stone. Her head was so heavy,
+she hesitated, oppressed by misgivings without shape that she could
+name, phases of formless timidity having rise in some source which she
+was too tired to search out.
+
+But she lingered and continued to stare at the crystal.
+
+“Why not?” Victor’s accents were gently persuasive. “At worst, you can
+only fail. And if you do not fail, it will make me happy to think that
+you have been given a little insight into my dreams for you.”
+
+“Yes,” Sofia assented in a whisper—“why not?”
+
+Victor drew her forward by the hand.
+
+“Look,” he said “look deep! Divest your mind as nearly as you can of
+all thought—let the crystal give up its message to a mind devoid of
+prejudice, its receptiveness unimpaired. Think of nothing, if you can
+manage it—simply look and see.”
+
+Automatically to a degree the girl obeyed, already in a phase of
+crepuscular hypnosis, her surface senses dulled by the potent “wine of
+China.” And watching her closely, Victor permitted himself a smile of
+satisfaction as he noted the rapidity with which she yielded to the
+hypnogenic spell of the translucent quartz; how her breathing
+quickened, then took on a measured tempo like that of a sleeper; how a
+faint flush warmed the unnatural pallor of her cheeks, how her dilate
+eyes grew fixed in an unwinking stare, and slightly glassed....
+
+Under her regard the goblin sphere took on with bewildering rapidity
+changing guises. Its rotundity was first lost, it assumed the semblance
+of a featureless disk of pallid light, which swiftly widened till it
+obscured all else, then seemed to advance upon and envelope her bodily,
+so that she became spiritually a part of it, an atom of identity
+engulfed in a limpid world of glareless light, light that had had no
+rays and issued from no source but was circumambient and universal.
+Then in its remote heart a weird glow of rose began to burn and grow,
+pulsing through all the colours of the spectrum and beyond. Toward this
+she felt herself being drawn swiftly, attracted by an irresistible
+magnetism, riding the wings of a great wind, whose voice boomed without
+ceasing, like a heavy surf thunderously reiterating one syllable,
+“_Sleep_!” ... And in this flight through illimitable space toward a
+goal unattainable, consciousness grew faint and flickered out like a
+candle in the wind.
+
+Behind her chair the placid yellow face of Shaik Tsin appeared, as if
+materialized bodily out of the shadows. With folded arms he waited,
+dispassionately observant. Presently Prince Victor nodded to him over
+the head of the girl. Immediately the Chinaman moved round her chair
+and, employing both hands, in one instant switched off the hooded bulb
+and reilluminated the lamp of brass.
+
+As the light died out in the crystal Sofia sighed heavily, and relaxed.
+Leaden eyelids closed down over her staring eyes, she sank back into
+the chair, simultaneously into plumbless depths....
+
+Victor made a sound of gratification. Shaik Tsin enquired briefly:
+
+“It is accomplished, then?”
+
+Victor nodded. “She yielded more quickly than I had hoped—worn out
+emotionally, of course.”
+
+“She sleeps—”
+
+“In hypnosis, in absolute suspense of every faculty and function save
+those concerned solely with the maintenance of existence—in a state,
+that is, comparable only to the pre-natal life of a child.”
+
+“It is most interesting,” Shaik Tsin admitted. “But what is the use?
+That is what interests me.”
+
+“Wait and see.”
+
+Bending close to the girl, Victor called in a strong voice of command:
+“Sofia! Sofia! It is I, Prince Victor, your father. Waken and attend!”
+
+A slight spasm shook the slender body, the lips parted, respiration
+became hurried and broken, the long lashes fluttered on the cheeks.
+
+“Do you hear me? I, Victor, command you: Waken and attend!”
+
+Another struggle, more brief and sharp, ended with the opening of the
+eyes, which sought and remained steadfast to Victor’s, yet without
+intelligence or animation.
+
+“Do you hear me, Sofia?”
+
+A voice like a sigh rustled on the parted lips, whose stir was
+imperceptible:
+
+“I hear you....”
+
+“Then heed what I say. My will is your law. You know that?”
+
+Faintly the voice breathed: “Yes.”
+
+“Tell me what it is you know.”
+
+“Your will is my law.”
+
+“You will not resist my will, you cannot. Tell me that.”
+
+“I will not resist your will, I cannot.”
+
+“Good. I, Prince Victor Vassilyevski, am your father. You believe that.
+Do you understand? Tell me what you believe.”
+
+“I believe that you, Prince Victor Vassilyevski, are my father.”
+
+“You will not forget these things?”
+
+“I shall not forget.”
+
+“In all things.”
+
+“I will obey you in all things.”
+
+“Without question or faltering.”
+
+“Without question or faltering.”
+
+“You recall what arrangements we made this afternoon for to-morrow?”
+
+“I remember.”
+
+“Listen carefully. Memorize my wishes with respect to our visit to
+Frampton Court, remembering that I communicate my will, which you must
+obey.”
+
+The girl remained silent, waiting. Victor took a moment to marshall his
+thoughts, then proceeded:
+
+“After arriving at Frampton Court, you will make occasion quietly to
+find out how your room is situated in relation to the boudoir of Lady
+Randolph West. You will do this without knowing why you do it. You
+understand?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“At night, on going to bed, you will go promptly to sleep. After an
+hour you will wake up, put on a dressing gown and slippers, and proceed
+to Lady Randolph West’s boudoir, taking care not to be observed. Is
+that clear?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Once in the boudoir, you will proceed to the safe where Lady Randolph
+West keeps her jewels. It will not be locked, she is careless in such
+matters. Having found the safe, you will open it, take whatever jewels
+you find therein, and return to your room. All this you will perform
+with utmost circumspection, taking all pains not to make any noise. In
+your room you will hide the jewels in your dressing-case. Then you will
+go back to bed and to sleep. Have you committed all this to memory?”
+
+The sleeping girl answered in the affirmative. Then, to the injunction,
+“Tell me what you are to do to-morrow night?” she repeated in a
+toneless voice every item of the programme outlined for her, while
+Victor nodded in undisguised delight, and Shaik Tsin grinned blandly
+over her head.
+
+“On waking up to-morrow morning, you will remember nothing of my
+instructions, but you will carry them precisely as memorized in your
+subconciousness, and you will carry them out without thought of
+opposition to my will, understanding that you are without will of your
+own in this matter. Finally, on waking up on the morning following your
+abstraction of the jewels, you will remember nothing of the affair
+until reminded of it by me, and then only this much: That in obedience
+to irresistible impulse, you stole the jewels. Is that clear? Repeat
+...”
+
+Without a mistake the woman in hypnosis iterated the commands imposed
+upon her.
+
+The impish grin of the latent savage broke through the habitual
+austerity of Victor’s countenance.
+
+“There is no more,” he said, “but this: Sleep now, and do not waken
+before noon to-morrow—_sleep_!”
+
+With a quavering sigh, the girl reclosed her eyes and instantly
+relapsed into the sleep of trance which was insensibly in the course of
+the night to merge into natural slumber.
+
+Victor ironed out his grimace, and signed to Shaik Tsin.
+
+“Bear her back to her room. Instruct Chou Nu to put her to bed and not
+to wake her up before noon.”
+
+“Hearing is obedience.”
+
+The Chinaman bent over, gathered the inert body into his arms, and
+without perceptible effort stood erect. But in the act of turning away
+he paused and, continuing to hold the girl as easily as if she weighed
+no more than a child, interrogated the man he served.
+
+“You believe she will do all you have ordered?”
+
+“I know she will.”
+
+“Without error?”
+
+“Barring accidents, without flaw from beginning to end.”
+
+“And in event of accidents—discovery—?”
+
+“So much the better.”
+
+“That would please you, to have her caught?”
+
+“Excellently.”
+
+Shaik Tsin nodded in grave yet humorous comprehension. “Now I begin to
+understand. If she is caught, that gives you a power over her?”
+
+“Precisely.”
+
+“And if she is not, when the robbery becomes known, your power over her
+will be still more strong?”
+
+“And over yet another stronger still.”
+
+“The Lone Wolf?”
+
+Victor inclined his head. “To what lengths will he not go to cover up
+his daughter’s shame, if it threatens to become public that she is a
+thief? I do nothing without purpose, Shaik Tsin.”
+
+“That is to say, you have to-night taken out insurance against
+punishment if this other business fails.”
+
+“If it fail, others may suffer, but if necessary the Lone Wolf himself
+will arrange my escape from England.”
+
+“To serve so wise a man is an honour my unworthiness can never hope to
+merit.”
+
+“As to that, Shaik Tsin,” Victor said without a smile, “our minds are
+one. Go now. Good-night.”
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+THE RAISED CHEQUE
+
+
+While the Princess Sofia, Sybil Waring, and Prince Victor motored down
+from London in the lilac dusk of that dim September day, and the maid
+Chou Nu accompanied them, riding in front beside a newly engaged
+Chinese chauffeur, the man Nogam made the journey to Frampton Court by
+train, and alone.
+
+Alone, at least, in the finer shading of that adjective; aside from the
+usual assortment of self-contained fellow-travellers in the third-class
+carriage, he had no company other than his thoughts; a gray and meagre
+crew, if that pathetic face of middle-age furnished trustworthy
+reflection of his mind.... So absolute was the submergence of that
+ardent adventurer who, overnight, had lain awake for hours, a
+dictograph receiver glued to his ear, eavesdropping upon the traffic of
+those malevolent intelligences assembled in Prince Victor’s study, and
+alternately chuckling and cursing beneath his breath, aflame with
+indignation and chilled by inklings of atrocities unspeakable abrew!
+
+If he surmised that he travelled alone in appearance only, it was with
+no evident concern or astonishment. If his mind was uneasy, oppressed
+by a nightmarish burden of half-knowledge, guesses, and premonition, it
+was not apparent to the general observer. His most eloquent gesture was
+when, from time to time, he tamped an ancient wooden pipe with a
+fingertip that wasn’t as calloused as he could have wished,
+philosophically sucked in strangling fumes of rankest shag and,
+ignoring his company in the carriage as became a British-made
+manservant, returned jaded, gentle eyes to those darkling vistas of
+autumnal landscape that were forever radiating away from the window
+like spokes of a gigantic wheel.
+
+Alighting in the first dark of evening at the station for Frampton
+Court, he suffered himself to be herded, with a half-score more, into
+the omnibus provided for other bodyservants to arriving guests. Even to
+these compeers he found little to say: a loud lot, imbued with the
+rowdy spirit of the new day; whereas Nogam was hopelessly of the old
+school—in the new word, he dated—though his form was admittedly
+unimpeachable. And if because of this he was made fun of more or less
+openly, to an extent that added shades of resignation to his
+countenance, secretly he commanded considerable respect.
+
+Neither was Victor, with all the ill-will in the world, able to find
+fault with Nogam’s services in his new office. The most finished of
+self-effacing valets, he knew just what to do and did it without being
+told; and when he spoke it was only because he had been spoken to or
+commissioned to convey a message.
+
+Victor watched him from every angle, overt and covert, but had his
+trouble for his pains; Nogam, observed in a mirror, when Victor’s back
+was turned, went about his business with no more betrayal of personal
+feeling or independent mentality than when waiting upon his master face
+to face. Victor could have kicked him for sheer resentment of his
+pattern virtues. When all was said and done, it _was_ damned
+irritating. . . .
+
+In the servants’ hall he religiously kept his ears open and his mouth
+shut. And, listening, he learned. For some things said in his hearing
+were distinctly not pretty, and made one wonder if Prince Victor’s
+deep-rooted confidence in an England mortally cankered with social
+discontent were not grounded in a surprising familiarity with
+backstairs morale. Other observations, again, were merely ribald, some
+were humorous, while all were enlightening.
+
+Not a few of the company had seen domestic service in great houses
+before the war; they knew what was what and—more to the point—what
+wasn’t. One gathered that this pretentious country home fell within the
+latter classification. Here, it was stated, anybody could buy his way
+into favour: the more bounding the bounder the brighter his chances of
+success at Frampton Court.
+
+War, the ironic, had caused this noble property to pass into the
+keeping of a distant and degenerate branch of an old and honoured
+house; and its present lord and lady, having failed to win the social
+welcome they had counted on too confidently, were doing their silly,
+shabby best to squander a princely fortune and dedicate a great name to
+lasting disrepute by fraternizing with a motley riffraff of
+profiteering nouveaux riches. Other than bad manners and worse morals,
+the one genuine thing in the whole establishment was, it seemed, the
+historic collection of family jewels.
+
+This information explained away much of Nogam’s perplexity on one
+score.
+
+After dinner, when the house party began to settle into its stride, he
+made occasion, aping the other servants, to peep in at a door of the
+great ballroom, where an impromptu dance had been organized; and was
+rewarded by sight of the Princess Sofia circling the floor in the arms
+of a boldly good-looking young man whose taste was as poor in
+flirtation as in self-adornment.
+
+To Nogam the young girl looked wan and wistful—as if she were missing
+somebody. And he wondered if Mr. Karslake knew what a lucky young devil
+he was.
+
+He wondered still more about the present whereabouts and welfare of Mr.
+Karslake. Prince Victor must have contrived some devious errand to get
+the young man out and away early that day; for by the time Nogam had
+looked for him in the morning, Karslake was nowhere to be found;
+neither had he returned when the party left for Frampton Court—a
+circumstance which Nogam regretted most bitterly. Watched as he was, it
+hadn’t been possible, that is to say it would have been fatally
+ill-advised, to have left any sort of message or to have attempted
+communication through secret channels; and all the while, hours heavy
+with, it might be, the destiny of England were wasting swiftly into
+history.
+
+Perhaps it was nervousness bred of this anxiety that, in the end, made
+Nogam’s hand slip. Or perhaps the impatient nature of the man who lay
+so closely secret within the husk of Nogam decided him upon a desperate
+gamble. In either event, this befell:
+
+About the middle of the evening Prince Victor happened to look up from
+an interesting tête-à-tête in the brilliant drawing-room with his
+handsome and liberal-minded hostess opportunely to espy Nogam staring
+at him from the remote recesses of the entrance hall.
+
+It was the merest of glimpses; for Victor’s casual glance had barely
+identified the servant when Nogam started guiltily and in a twinkling
+disappeared; but a glimpse was enough for eyes and a mind alike quick
+with distrust, enough to assure Victor that Nogam’s face had worn an
+indescribably furtive and hangdog expression, most unlike its ordinary
+look of amiable stupidity, and widely incongruous with the veniality of
+his fault.
+
+What the deuce, then, was the fellow up to, that he should glower and
+dodge like a sleuth in a play?
+
+Promptly Victor became deaf, blind, and numb to the fascinations so
+generously paraded by Lady Randolph West; and presently excusing
+himself, left her and sought his rooms.
+
+As he went up the stairs, he saw the door to his bedchamber cautiously
+opened far enough to permit one eye to spy out and discover his
+approach. Immediately then the door swung wide, and Nogam ambled into
+view with an envelope on a salver and an air of childlike innocence, an
+assumption of ease so transparent, indeed, that only the vision of a
+child could have been cheated by it.
+
+“Just coming to look for you, sir,” he announced, glibly. “Telegram,
+sir—just harrived.”
+
+“Thanks,” said Victor, shortly, taking the envelope and marching on
+into his rooms.
+
+His manner toward his servants was always abrupt. No need to be alarmed
+by this manifestation of it. Blinking mildly, Nogam trotted at his
+heels.
+
+Seating himself at an escritoire, Victor opened the envelope with a
+display of languid interest. Curiosity about the contents of a telegram
+is ordinarily acute. Victor, on the contrary, sat for a long moment
+staring thoughtfully at nothing and absently turning the envelope over
+and over in his hands; while Nogam with specious nonchalance found
+something unimportant to do in another quarter of the room.
+
+The envelope was damp and warm to the touch. True: nightfall had
+brought with it a thick drizzle, and Frampton Court was more than a
+mile from the post-office. On the other hand, the night was as cold as
+charity; and an envelope recently steamed open might be expected to
+hold the heat for a few minutes.
+
+Victor thumbed the flap. It lifted readily, without tearing, its gum
+was wet and more abundant than usual—in fact, it felt confoundedly like
+library paste, a pot of which, in an ornamental holder, was among the
+fittings of the escritoire. On the desk pad of blotting paper, too,
+Victor detected marks of fresh paste defining the contour of the flap.
+
+With a countenance whose inscrutability alone was a threat, Victor took
+out and conned the telegraph form.
+
+“CONSULTATION SET FOR MIDNIGHT TO-NIGHT TAKING YOUR ADVICE SHALL NOT
+ATTEND BUT LEAVE FOR BRIGHTON ELEVEN P.M.”
+
+A message ostensibly so open and aboveboard that it hadn’t been thought
+worth while to hide its wording under the cloak of a code.
+
+There was no signature—unless one were clever or wise enough to
+transpose the two final letters and take them in relation to the word
+immediately preceding. “Eleven, M.P.”, however, could mean nothing to
+anybody but Victor—except a body clever enough to hide a dictograph
+detector in a turnip. So Victor saw no reason to believe that Nogam,
+although undoubtedly guilty of the sin of prying, had been able to read
+the meaning below the surface of this communication.
+
+Nevertheless, undue inquisitiveness on the part of a servant in the pay
+of Victor Vassilyevski could have but one reward.
+
+“Nogam!”
+
+“Sir?”
+
+“Fetch me an A-B-C.”
+
+“Very good, sir.”
+
+With Nogam out of the way, Victor enclosed the telegram in a new
+envelope and addressed it simply to _“Mr. Sturm—by hand.”_ Then he took
+a sheet of the stamped notepaper of Frampton Court, tore it roughly, at
+the fold, and on the unstamped half inscribed several characters in
+Chinese, using a pencil with a fat, soft lead for this purpose. This
+message sealed into a second envelope without superscription, he
+lighted a cigarette and sat smiling with anticipative relish through
+its smoke, a smile swiftly abolished as the door re-opened; though
+Nogam found him in what seemed to be a mood of rare sweet temper.
+
+Taking the railway guide, Victor ruffled its pages, and after brief
+study of the proper table remarked:
+
+“Afraid I must ask you to run up to town for me to-night, Nogam. If you
+don’t mind ...”
+
+“Only too glad to oblige, sir.”
+
+“I find I have left important papers behind. Give this to Shaik
+Tsin”—he handed over the blank envelope—“and he will find them for you.
+You can catch the ten-fifteen up, and return by the twelve-three from
+Charing Cross.”
+
+“Very good, sir.”
+
+“Oh—and see that Mr. Sturm gets this, too, will you? If he isn’t in,
+give it to Shaik Tsin to hand to him. Say it’s urgent.”
+
+“Quite so, sir.”
+
+“That is all. But don’t fail to catch the twelve-three back. I must
+have the papers to-night.”
+
+“I shan’t fail you, sir—D.V.”
+
+“Deo volente? You are a religious man, Nogam?”
+
+“I ’umbly ’ope so, sir, and do my best to be, accordin’ to my lights.”
+
+“Glad to hear it. Now cut along, or you’ll miss the up train.”
+
+Long after Nogam had left the memory of their talk continued to afford
+Victor an infinite amount of private entertainment.
+
+“A religious man!” he would jeer to himself. “Then—may your God help
+you, Nogam!”
+
+Some thought of the same sort may well have troubled Nogam’s mind as he
+sat in an otherwise untenanted third-class compartment blinking
+owlishly over the example of Victor’s command of the intricacies of
+Chinese writing.
+
+He was happily free of surveillance for the first time in his waking
+hours of many days. The Chinese chauffeur had driven him to the
+station, and had furthermore lingered to see that Nogam did not fail to
+board it. And Nogam felt reasonably safe in assuming that he would not
+approach the house near Queen Anne’s Gate without seeing (for the mere
+trouble of looking) a second and an entirely gratuitous shadow attach
+itself to him with the intention of sticking as tenaciously as that
+which God had given him. But the next hour was all his own.
+
+His study of the Chinese phonograms at length resulted in the
+transformation of his careworn face by a slowly dawning smile, the
+gleeful smile of a mischief-loving child. And when he had worked for a
+while on the message, touching up the skillfully drawn characters with
+a pencil the mate to that which Victor had used, he sat back and
+laughed aloud over the result of his labours, with some appreciation of
+the glow that warms the cockles of the artist’s heart when his deft pen
+has raised a cheque from tens to thousands, and he reviews a good job
+well done.
+
+The torn envelope which had held the message to Shaik Tsin lay at his
+feet. Nogam had not bothered to worry it open so carefully that it
+might be resealed without inviting comment; though that need not have
+been a difficult matter, thanks to the dampness of the night air.
+
+Of the envelope addressed to Sturm, however, he was more considerate;
+to violate its integrity and seal it up again was an undertaking that
+required the nicest handling. Nor was it accomplished much before the
+train drew into Charing Cross.
+
+Outside the station taxis were few and drivers arrogant; and all the
+’buses were packed to the guards with law-abiding Londoners homeward
+bound from theatres and halls. So Nogam dived into the Underground, to
+come to the surface again at St. James’s Park station, whence he
+trotted all the way to Queen Anne’s Gate, arriving at his destination
+in a phase of semi-prostration which a person of advancing years and
+doddering habits might have anticipated.
+
+Such fidelity in characterization deserved good reward, and had in it a
+rare stroke of fortune; for as he drew up to it, the door opened, and
+Sturm came out, saw Nogam, and stopped short.
+
+“Thank ’Eaven, sir, I got ’ere in time,” the butler panted. “If I’d
+missed you, Prince Victor wouldn’t ’ave been in ’arf a wax. ’E told me
+I must find you to-night if I ’ad to turn all Lunnon inside out.”
+
+Pressing the message into Sturm’s hand, he rested wearily against the
+casing of the door, his body shaken by laboured breathing, and—while
+Sturm, with an exclamation of excitement, ripped open the
+envelope—surveyed the dark and rain-wet street out of the corners of
+his eyes.
+
+Across the way a slinking shadow left the sidewalk and blended
+indistinguishably with the crowded shadows of an areaway.
+
+In a voice more than commonly rich with accent, Sturm demanded sharply:
+
+“What is this? I do not understand!”
+
+He shook in Nogam’s face the half-sheet of notepaper on which the
+Chinese phonograms were drawn.
+
+“Sorry, sir, but I ’aven’t any hidea. Prince Victor didn’t tell me
+anything except there would be no answer, and I was to ’urry right back
+to Frampton Court.” Nogam peered myopically at the paper. “It might be
+’Ebrew, sir,” he hazarded, helpfully—“by the looks of it, I mean. I
+suppose some private message, ’e thought you’d understand.”
+
+“Hebrew, you fool! Damn your impudence! Do you take me for a Jew?”
+
+“Beg pardon, sir—no ’arm meant.”
+
+“No,” Sturm declared, “it’s Chinese.”
+
+“Then likely Prince Victor meant you to ask Shaik Tsin to translate it
+for you, sir.”
+
+“Probably,” Sturm muttered. “I’ll see.”
+
+“Yes, sir. Good-night, sir.”
+
+Without acknowledging this civility, Sturm turned back into the house
+and slammed the door. Nogam lingered another moment, then shuffled
+wearily down the steps and toward the nearest corner.
+
+Across the street the voluntary shadow detached itself from cover in
+the areaway, and skulked after him. He paid no heed. But when the
+shadow rounded the corner, it saw only a dark and empty street, and
+pulled up with a grunt of doubt. Simultaneously something not unlike a
+thunderbolt for force and fury was launched, from the dark shelter of a
+doorway near by, at its devoted head. And as if by magic the shadow
+took on form and substance to receive the onslaught. A fist, that
+carried twelve stone of bone and sinew jubilant with realization of the
+hour for action so long deferred, found shrewdly the heel of a jawbone,
+just beneath the ear. Its victim dropped without a cry, but the impact
+of the blow was loud in the nocturnal stillness of that bystreet, and
+was echoed in magnified volume by the crack of a skull in collision
+with a convenient lamppost.
+
+Followed a swift patter of fugitive feet.
+
+Tempered by veils of mist, the lamplight fell upon a face upturned from
+a murmurous gutter, a yellow face, wide and flat, with lips grinning
+back from locked teeth and eyes frozen in a staring question to which
+no living man has ever known the answer.
+
+The pattering footsteps grew faint in distance and died away, the
+street was still once more, as still as Death....
+
+In the study of Prince Victor Vassilyevski the man Sturm put an
+impatient question:
+
+“Well? What you make of it—hein?”
+
+Shaik Tsin looked up from a paper which he had been silently examining
+by the light of the brazen lamp.
+
+“Number One says,” he reported, smiling sweetly, while his yellow
+forefinger moved from symbol to symbol of the picturesque writing:
+_‘“The blow falls to-night. Proceed at once to the gas works and do
+that which you know is to be done.’”_
+
+“At last!” The voice of the Prussian was full and vibrant with
+exultancy. He threw back his head with a loud laugh, and his arm
+described a wild, dramatic gesture.
+
+“At last—der Tag! To-night the Fatherland shall be avenged!”
+
+Shaik Tsin beamed with friendliest sympathy Sturm turned to go, took
+three hurried steps toward the door, and felt himself jerked back by a
+silken cord which, descending from nowhere, looped his lean neck
+between chin and Adam’s apple. His cry of protest was the last
+articulate sound he uttered. And the last sounds he heard, as he lay
+with face hideously congested and empurpled, eyeballs starting from
+their deep sockets, and swollen tongue protruding, were words spoken by
+Shaik Tsin as that one knelt over him, one hand holding fast the ends
+of the bowstring that had cut off forever the blessed breath of life,
+the other flourishing a half-sheet of notepaper.
+
+“Fool! Look, fool, and read what vengeance visits a fool who is fool
+enough to play the spy!”
+
+He brandished the papers before those glazing eyeballs.
+
+In an eldritch cackle he translated:
+
+_“‘He who bears this message is a Prussian dog, police trained, a spy.
+Let his death be a dog’s, cruel and swift.—Number One.’”_
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+ORDEAL
+
+
+Reviewing the day, as she undressed and prepared for bed, Sofia told
+herself she had never yet lived through one so wearing, and thought the
+history of its irksome hours all too legible in the lack-lustre face
+that looked back from the mirror when Chou Nu uncoifed her hair and
+brushed its burnished tresses.
+
+Though she had slept late, in fact till noon and something after, her
+sleep had been queerly haunted and unhappy, she could not remember how
+or why, and she had awakened already ennuyé, with a mind incoherently
+oppressed, without relish for the promise of the day—in a mood
+altogether as drear as the daylight that waited upon her unclosing
+eyes.
+
+Main strength of will had not availed to dispel these vapours, neither
+did their melancholy yield to the distraction provided by first
+acquaintance with ways of a world unique alike in Sofia’s esteem and
+her experience.
+
+She who had theretofore known only in day-dreams the life of light
+frivolity and fashion which found feverish and trumpery reflection at
+Frampton Court, was neither equipped nor disposed to be hypercritical
+in the first hours of her début there; and at any other time, in any
+other temper, she knew, she must have been swept off her feet by its
+exciting appeal to her innate love of luxury and sensation. But the sad
+truth was, it all seemed to her unillusioned vision an elaborate sham
+built up of tinsel, paste, and paint; and the warmth of her welcome at
+the hands, indeed in the very arms, of Lady Randolph West, and the
+success her youth and beauty scored for her—commanding in all envy,
+admiration, cupidity, or jealousy, according to age, sex, and temporal
+state of servitude—did nothing to mitigate the harshness of those first
+impressions.
+
+If anything her depression grew more perversely morbid the more she was
+catered to, courted, flattered, and cajoled. Something had happened,
+she could never guess what, perhaps some mysterious reaction effected
+through the chemistry of last night’s slumber, to turn her vivid zest
+in life to ashes in her mouth, so that nothing seemed to matter any
+more.
+
+Thoughts of Karslake as her lover, recollection of her first deep joy
+in his avowal and her subsequent passion of shame and regret,
+re-perusal of his note, that last night had seemed so sweet a thing,
+precious beyond compare—found her indifferent to-day, and left her so.
+Try as she would, she failed to recapture any sense of the reality of
+those first raptures. And yet, somehow, she didn’t doubt he loved her
+or that, buried deep beneath this inexplicable apathy, love for
+Karslake burned on in her heart; but she knew no sort of comfort in
+such confidence, their love seemed as remote and immaterial an issue as
+the menu for day after to-morrow’s dinner. Nothing mattered!
+
+She was able even to meet Prince Victor without her customary shiver of
+aversion; and when she recalled the persistence and enthusiasm with
+which she had reasoned herself into believing, last night, that he
+might be another than her father, she came as near to mirth as she was
+to come that day; but it was mirth bitter with self-derision. Of course
+he was her father, she had been a ninny ever to dream contrariwise, or
+that it mattered.
+
+Nor had she met with more success in efforts to find a cause for this
+drab humour; unless, indeed, it were simply the farthest swing of the
+pendulum from yesterday’s emotional crises, a long swing out of sunlit
+spaces swept by the brave winds of young romance into a gloomy zone of
+brooding torpor, whose calm was false, surcharged with unseizable
+disquiet, its atmosphere electrical with formless apprehensions, its
+sad twilight shot with lurid gleams no sooner glimpsed than gone.
+
+In this state Sofia’s sensibilities were less benumbed than bound in a
+palsy of suspense not wholly destitute of dread; beneath the lethargic
+shallows of consciousness lay soundless deeps troubled by sinister
+premonitions....
+
+Now, retracing stage by stage the record of the day, Sofia became aware
+that its most poignant moment for her was actually the present, with
+its keen wonder that she had contrived to survive such exquisite
+tedium.
+
+She perceived that she had moved throughout like an automaton swayed by
+a will outside its own; functioning rather than living; performing
+appointed business, executing prescribed gestures, uttering
+foreordained observations, and making dictated responses, all without
+suggestion of spontaneity, and all without meaning other than as means
+to bridge an empty space of waiting.
+
+Waiting for what?
+
+Sofia could not guess....
+
+She went to bed presently, hoping only to find surcease of boredom; and
+her head no sooner touched the pillow than oblivion closed down upon
+her faculties like a dense, dark cloud.
+
+Discreet and well-instructed, Chou Nu turned the night-light down to a
+glimmer, placed on and under a chair adjacent to the bed a robe of
+cashmere that wouldn’t rustle, and slippers of fine felt with soles of
+soft leather, in which footfalls must be inaudible—and glided gently
+from the room.
+
+For sixty minutes its deep hush was unbroken; the even respiration of
+the girl made no sound, she rested without tossing, without moving a
+finger.
+
+Then, sleep having held her for precisely one hour by the clock, Sofia
+opened her eyes, drew in a deep breath, and at once sat up on the side
+of the bed.
+
+The memory of that hour was not to leave the girl while life was in
+her; nor was the question it raised ever to be answered in a fashion
+satisfactory to her intelligence. When later she heard it stated with
+authority, by men reputed to be versed in psychic knowledge, that a
+subject in hypnosis cannot be willed to act contrary to the instincts
+of his or her better nature, she held her peace, but wondered. Was
+Victor right, then, and the crime he had willed her to commit in final
+analysis not repugnant to her instincts? Or was it some secret faculty
+of the soul, telepathy or of its kin, that roused and sent her to keep
+her rendezvous with destiny?
+
+A riddle never to be read: Sofia only knew that, finding herself awake,
+she got up, donned négligée and slippers, and set her feet upon the way
+appointed without its occurring to her that the way was strange,
+without stopping to question why or whether.
+
+If independent volition, sensible or subliminal, were absent, it could
+hardly have been apparent. Sofia herself was not aware of its suspense
+or supersession. She knew quite well what she was doing, her every
+action was direct and decided, the goal alone remained obscure. She
+only knew that somewhere, somehow, something was going wrong without
+her, and her presence was required to set it right.
+
+Letting herself out into the corridor, she drew the door to behind her,
+but left it unlatched; with what object, she did not know. But the
+lateness of the hour, the stillness of the sleeping household, made it
+seem quite in order that she should pause to look cautiously this way
+and that and make sure that nobody else was astir to spy upon her or
+challenge the purpose of this as yet aimless nocturnal flitting.
+
+There was nobody that she could see.
+
+Down the corridor, then, never asking why that way, like a ghost in
+haste she sped, but as she drew near to a certain door found her pace
+faltering. Sofia knew that door; through it Lady Randolph West herself
+had introduced the girl to her boudoir, not two hours since, when
+chance, or Fate, or the smooth working out of malicious mortal
+machinations had moved the two women simultaneously to seek their
+quarters for the night. And in the boudoir Sofia had spent the quarter
+of an hour before going on to her own room and bed, civilly attending
+to vapid chatter and admiring as in duty bound the admirable jewels of
+the family.
+
+Now she saw the door a few inches ajar with, beyond it, a dim glow. The
+circumstance seemed singular, because—now that she remembered—when
+Sofia had expressed perfunctory curiosity concerning what precautions
+were taken to safeguard the jewels, Lady Randolph West had airily
+informed her that she considered insurance to their appraised value
+plus a stout lock on the boudoir door better than any strong-box as yet
+devised by the ingenuity of man.
+
+“There’s the safe they’re kept in, of course,” the lady had
+declared—“but, my dear, a cardboard box will do as well when any
+burglar who knows his business makes up his mind to get at my trinkets.
+I never even trouble to lock the thing. I’d rather lose the jewels—and
+collect the insurance money—than be frightened out of my wits by
+hearing it blown open. No, thanks ever so: any cracksman skillful
+enough to pick the lock on the door may bag his loot and go in peace
+for all of me!”
+
+Impulse, at least she called it that, moved Sofia to approach and
+cautiously open the door still wider.
+
+Upon the antique writing-desk that housed the safe burned a single lamp
+of low candle-power. A door that led to the adjoining bedchamber was
+tightly shut. Sofia’s mistrustful eyes reconnoitred every corner of the
+room, and reckoned it empty. Again obedient to undisputed impulse, she
+stepped inside and shut the door. The spring-latch of the American lock
+found its socket with a soft click. Thereafter, silence, no sound in
+the boudoir, none from the room beyond. But to Sofia the hurried
+beating of her heart reverberated on the stillness like the rolling of
+a drum.
+
+Without clear appreciation of how she had got there, she found herself
+standing over the writing-desk, and discovered what the indifferent
+light had till now kept hidden, that a false panel in the front of the
+desk had been thrust back, exposing the face of the safe, and that this
+last was not even closed.
+
+At the same time she grew conscious that her hands were shaking
+violently, that her every limb, her whole body indeed, was agitated by
+desperate trembling. And dully asked herself why this should be ... But
+didn’t hesitate.
+
+Her actions now more than ever resembled those of an unthinking puppet,
+although she knew quite well what she was doing; and her gestures might
+have been the fruit of long lessoning at the hands of some master of
+stage melodrama, so true were they to theatrical convention.
+
+With furtive, frightened glances toward both doors, Sofia dropped to
+her knees before the safe....
+
+When she stood up again her hands were filled with jewellery, her two
+hands held a treasure of incalculable price in precious stones.
+
+She paused for a little, staring at them with dilate eyes dark in a
+pale, rapt face. Her lips were parted, but only her quickened breathing
+whispered past them. She was trembling more painfully than ever. But
+she seemed unable to think of anything but the jewels, her gaze was
+held in fascination by their coruscant loveliness as revealed by the
+light of the little lamp.
+
+Hers for the taking!
+
+Then, without warning, a tremendous convulsion laid hold on her body
+and soul, and she was racked and shaken by it, and at its crisis her
+outstretched hands opened and showered the top of the desk with jewels,
+then flew to her head and clutched her throbbing temples.
+
+She cried out in a low voice of suffering: _“No!”_
+
+And of a sudden she was reeling back from the desk, toward the corridor
+door, repeating over and over on an ascending scale: _“No! no! no! no!
+no!”_
+
+Her quaking legs blundered against a chair, her knees gave, she
+tottered to fall; strong arms caught her, held her safe, a voice she
+knew yet didn’t know in its guarded key muttered in her ear: “Thank
+God!”
+
+She made no struggle, but her eyes of pain and terror sought the
+speaker’s face, and saw that he was the man Nogam. In extremity of
+amazement she spoke his name. He shook his head.
+
+“No longer Nogam,” he said in the same low accents, and smiled—“but
+your father, Michael Lanyard!”
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+UNMASKING
+
+
+One more instant the girl rested passive in uncomprehending
+astonishment; then abruptly she exerted herself to break free from the
+supporting embrace, but found the effort wasted for lack of opposition,
+so that her own violence sent her reeling away half a dozen paces, to
+bring up against the desk; while Lanyard, making no move more than to
+drop his rejected arms, remained where she had left him, and requited
+her indignant stare with a broken smile of understanding, a smile at
+once tender, tolerant, and sympathetic, with a little quirk of rueful
+humour for good measure.
+
+“My father!” Sofia repeated in a gasp of disdain—“_you!_”
+
+He gave a slight shrug.
+
+“Such, it appears, is your sad fortune.”
+
+“A servant!”
+
+“And not the proud prince you were promised? Rather a come down, one
+must admit.” Lanyard laughed low, and moved nearer. “I’m sorry, I mean
+I might be (for myself, too) if Nogam were less a fraud than that
+pretentious mountebank, Prince Victor—or for the matter of that, if you
+were as poor of spirit as you would seem on your own valuation, if you
+were not at heart your mother’s daughter, and mine, my child by a woman
+whom I loved well, and who long ago loved me!”
+
+He paused deliberately to let her grasp the full sense of his words,
+then pursued:
+
+“It may help you get your bearings to know that I am truly the Michael
+Lanyard to whom Messieurs Secretan & Sypher addressed their
+advertisement—you remember—as this should prove.”
+
+He offered a slip of paper, and after another moment of dumb staring,
+the girl took it and read aloud the message which Victor had dictated
+following Sofia’s flight to him from the Café des Exiles.
+
+_“‘To Michael Lanyard, Intelligence Division, the War Office,
+Whitehall—’”_
+
+“That is to say,” Lanyard interpreted, “of the British Secret Service.”
+
+“You!”
+
+He bowed in light irony. “One regrets one is at present unable to offer
+better social standing. To-morrow, it may be ... But who knows?”
+
+Sofia shook her head impatiently, and in a murmur of deepening
+amazement resumed her reading of the note:
+
+_“‘Your daughter Sofia is now with me.. Your own intelligence must tell
+you nothing could be more fatal than an attempt to communicate with
+her’”_
+
+To the interrogation eloquent in her eyes Lanyard replied:
+
+“Dictated by Victor to Karslake, who passed it on to me, the night he
+brought you to the house from the Café des Exiles.”
+
+“You knew—you, who claim to be my father—yet permitted him—?”
+
+“You were in the house before I knew I had a daughter; Karslake had no
+chance to consult me before fetching you. Furthermore, if he had
+hesitated to carry out Victor’s orders just then, not only would he
+have nullified all our preparations to secure evidence enough to
+convict the man, or at least run him out of England—”
+
+“Prince Victor? What was he doing, that you should—?”
+
+“Dabbling in all manner of infamy, from financing a thieves’ fence to
+organizing an association of common criminals to bring it business;
+from maintaining a corps of agitators to foment social discontent to
+fostering this last, most imbecile scheme of all, which comes to naught
+to-night, an attempt to overthrow the British Empire and set up in its
+stead a Soviet England, with Victor Vassilyevski in the dual rôle of
+Trotsky and Lenine!”
+
+The girl made a sign of bewilderment and incredulity.
+
+“What are you telling me? Are you mad?”
+
+“No—but Victor is, mad with lust for power, insane with illusions of
+personal aggrandizement. You don’t believe? Listen to me, then,
+appreciate to what demoniac lengths he was prepared to go to flatter
+his insane ambitions:”
+
+“Sturm has invented a new poison gas, odourless, colourless, the most
+deadly known, and easily manufactured in vast quantities by adding
+simple ingredients to ordinary illuminating gas. Fanatic Bolshevist
+that he was, Sturm offered his formula to Victor, to be used to clear
+the way for social revolution; and Victor jumped at the offer—has spent
+vast sums preparing to employ it. His money paid for the recent strike
+at the Westminster works of the Gas Light and Coke Company, by means of
+which Victor was able to smuggle a round number of his creatures into
+its service. His money has corrupted servants employed in Downing
+Street, the Houses of Parliament, in the homes of the nobility, even in
+Buckingham Palace itself, men ready at a given signal secretly to turn
+on gas jets in remote corners and flood the buildings with the very
+breath of Death itself. And that signal was to have been given
+to-night. Well, it will not be.”
+
+“But could any scheme be more grotesquely diabolical? Do you ask more
+proof of the man’s madness? Do you require more excuse for my
+permitting you to be deceived by Victor for a few weeks, rather than
+wreck our plans to frustrate his, when all the while Karslake and I
+were near you, watching over you, learning to love you—he in his
+fashion, I as your father—and both ready at all times to die in your
+protection, if it had ever come to that?”
+
+Lanyard had drawn so near that only a few inches separated them, and
+had his voice in such control that at three paces’ distance a vague and
+inarticulate murmur at most might have been heard; but in Sofia’s
+hearing his accents rang with passionate sincerity, persuading her
+against the reason which would have rejected his indictment of Victor
+as too fantastic, too imaginative, and too hopelessly overdrawn to be
+given credence. She believed him, knowing in her heart that he believed
+his statements to the last word; and knowing more, that he was surely
+what he represented himself to be, her father.
+
+Inscrutable the processes of human hearts: even as from the very first
+Sofia had instinctively yet unconsciously recognized the intrinsic
+falsity of Victor’s pretensions, so now she perceived the integral
+honesty that informed Lanyard’s every word and nuance of expression,
+and accepted him without further inquisition.
+
+To his insistent “Have I made you understand?” she returned a wan
+wraith of a smile, pitiful with entreaty, while one of her hands found
+the way to his.
+
+“I think so,” she replied in halting apology—“at least, I believe you.
+But be a little patient with me. It is all so new and strange, what you
+tell me, it’s hard at first to grasp, there’s so much I must accept on
+faith alone, so much I don’t understand ...”
+
+“I know.” Lanyard pressed her hand gently.
+
+“But try to have faith; I promise you it shall be fairly rewarded. Only
+a little longer now, an hour or two at most, and Karslake will be here
+to prove the truth of all I have asserted. You will believe him, at
+least.”
+
+“Of course,” the girl said, simply. “I love him. You knew that?”
+
+“I guessed, and I am glad, glad for both of you.”
+
+“But he is safe?” Sofia demanded in sudden access of alarm so strong
+that her voice rose above the pitch of discretion.
+
+“Quietly. Yes, he is safe enough.”
+
+“You know that for a fact? How do you know—?”
+
+“I’ve seen him to-night, talked with him—not two hours since.”
+
+“You have been in London?” she questioned—“to-night?”
+
+“Rather! Victor sent me.” Lanyard laughed lightly. “You didn’t know, of
+course, but—well, I gave him reason to suspect me, so he sent me up to
+be assassinated by Shaik Tsin. As it turned out, however, Herr Sturm
+most obligingly understudied for me.... Before coming back, I looked
+Karslake up. He’d been busy, playing a lone hand, ever since Victor
+trumped up an errand to keep him out of your way all day. No need to go
+into tedious details; I found Karslake had matters well in hand: the
+gas works surrounded by a cordon of troops, the house under close
+watch, and—best of all—a sworn confession from an Irish Member of
+Parliament whom Victor had managed to buy with a promise to free
+Ireland once Soviet England was an accomplished fact. So I left
+Karslake to wind up loose ends in London, and posted back with my heart
+in my mouth for fear I’d be too late.”
+
+“Too late?” Sofia queried with arching brows.
+
+“Need I remind you where we are?”
+
+A sweep of Lanyard’s hand indicated the boudoir; and Sofia started
+sharply in perplexity and alarm.
+
+“Where we are!” she echoed in a frightened whisper.
+
+Of a sudden memory returned of what had passed in that room before
+Lanyard had revealed himself to her, and knowledge of her peril so
+narrowly escaped drove home like a knife to her heart.
+
+“What am I doing here?” she breathed in horror. “What have I done?”
+
+“Nothing more dreadful than prove yourself as true as you are fine, by
+revolting in the end against the most powerful force known to man, the
+force of suggestion implanted in hypnotism. You couldn’t know that it
+was hypnotic not natural sleep you passed into last night, when Victor
+tricked you with that damned crystal, or that, while you slept, he
+willed you to do here to-night what, when it came to the final test,
+your nature would not let you do.”
+
+“But he so often told me I had the instincts of a thief—!”
+
+“So often—_I_ know—that you were, against your will and reason, by dint
+of the very iteration of it, coming to accept that lie as a truth whose
+power there was no contesting. That is why, that you might prove
+yourself by your own acts, I had to let you undergo your ordeal here
+to-night, only standing by to make sure no ill came of it. Otherwise
+you might have carried to your grave the fear instilled into your soul
+by that blackguard. But now you know he lied, and will never doubt
+again—or reproach your father for the dark record of his younger
+years.”
+
+He checked, lifting hands of desolate appeal, then let them fall.
+
+“Dear, if you knew you would not judge me harshly. If only you could
+know what I have fought up from, a foundling without a name abandoned
+in a third-rate Parisian hotel, reared a scullion, butt and scapegoat,
+with associates only of the lowest, scullions, beggars, pickpockets,
+Apaches, and worse—!”
+
+“As if that mattered!”
+
+The girl turned a softly suffused face with shining eyes to Lanyard’s.
+Now at last she knew him, now the romance of her dreams of yesterday
+came true: through the mean masquerade of Nogam the man emerged,
+identifying himself in her sight unmistakably with that splendid
+stranger whom she had never quite forgotten since that old-time
+afternoon when he had met Karslake in the Café des Exiles and talked so
+intimately of his antecedents, hinting at a history of youthful years
+strangely analogous with her own.
+
+Involuntarily her arms lifted and settled upon his shoulders.
+
+“I am so proud to think—”
+
+A shrill scream drowned out her words, a woman’s voice ranging swiftly
+the staccato gamut of terror and cracking discordantly on its most
+piercing note.
+
+Then with a bang that shook the flooring and must have been heard in
+the farthest corners of the house, the bedchamber door was slammed
+behind their backs. But beyond it the screaming went on in volume
+imperceptibly muffled by its barrier, one ear-splitting caterwaul
+following another with such continuity that the wonder was where Lady
+Randolph West found breath to keep up that atrocious row, and whether
+any dozen women of average lung-power could have rivalled it.
+
+In one sharp movement Lanyard and Sofia disengaged and fell apart,
+their eyes consulting, hers in dismay, his in mixed exasperation and
+remorse.
+
+“I ought to be shot,” he declared, bitterly—“who knew better!—to have
+delayed here, exposing you to this danger—!”
+
+“It couldn’t be helped,” Sofia insisted; “you had to make me
+understand. Besides, if I hurry back—”
+
+In quick strides Lanyard crossed to the corridor door, unlatched and
+opened it an inch, peered out, and gave the sum of what he saw in a
+gesture of finality, then leaving the door ajar turned swiftly back to
+the girl.
+
+“Too late,” he said: “they’re swarming out into the hall like bees. In
+another minute ...”
+
+Of a sudden he closed with Sofia, roughly clasping her body to him.
+
+“Struggle with me!” he pleaded—“get me by the throat, throw me back
+across the desk—”
+
+“What do you mean? Let me go!”
+
+In answer to her efforts to wrench away, Lanyard only tightened his
+hold and swung her toward the desk.
+
+“Do as I bid you! It’s the only way out. Let them think you heard a
+noise, got up to investigate, found me here, rifling the safe—”
+
+“No,” she insisted—“no! Why should I save myself at your
+expense?—betray you—my father—!”
+
+“Then give me the obedience of a daughter ... or let Victor succeed in
+branding you a thief, the daughter of a thief!”
+
+He stilled the protest she would have uttered by placing fingers over
+her lips.
+
+“Listen!”
+
+In the corridor an angry rumour of voices, alarmed calls and cries,
+with thumps and scuffles of hasty feet, in the bedchamber the shrieks
+persisting without the least hint of failing: as a damned soul might
+bawl upon its bed of coals ...
+
+“Sofia, I implore you!”
+
+Still she hesitated.
+
+“But you—?”
+
+“Never fear for me, remember that I am of the Secret Service: two
+minutes after I see the inside of the nearest police station, I shall
+be free—and happy in the assurance that your name is without stain.
+Then Karslake will come for you, bring you to me ... Now!”
+
+Lanyard caught the girl’s two wrists together and, throwing himself
+bodily backward across the desk, carried her hands to his throat.
+
+With a simultaneous crash the door was flung back to the wall. Led by
+Victor Vassilyevski a dozen men, guests and servants, in various stages
+of dishabille, streamed into the room.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+THE DEVIL TO PAY
+
+
+When it was all over, when the gravelled drive no longer crunched to
+wheels that bore away the man Nogam to answer for his misdeeds, when
+the household had quieted down and the most indefatigable
+sensation-monger had wearied of singing the praises of the Princess
+Sofia and, tossing off a final whiskey-and-soda, had paddled sleepily
+back to bed, lights burned on brightly in two parts only of Frampton
+Court, in the bedchambers tenanted respectively by Prince Victor
+Vassilyevski and his reputed daughter.
+
+Alone, Prince Victor sat at the desk where he had, four hours earlier,
+inscribed those characters which should have hurried Nogam into a
+premature grave. That they had failed of their mission was something
+that fretted Victor Vassilyevski, his mind and nerves, to a pitch of
+exacerbation all but unendurable.
+
+What had become of that sentence to death? And what of that other, the
+telegram which, forwarded by Nogam’s hand to Sturm, should long since
+have set in motion the organized machinery of murder and demolition?
+
+Had Nogam, as he had meekly insisted on being questioned subsequent to
+his subjugation, truly delivered the two messages as directed and,
+miraculously escaping his fate decreed, returned to Frampton Court by
+the twelve-three, likewise in strict conformance with instructions?
+
+This statement Nogam had neglected to amplify, and Victor had been
+chary of too close questioning, lest it elicit too much in the hearing
+of others. Once overpowered, Nogam had been philosophic about his bad
+luck; but the eyes in his face of a stoic had held a gleam that Victor
+didn’t altogether like, a light that seemed suspiciously malicious, a
+suggestion of spirited humour deplorable to say the least in a
+self-confessed sneak-thief caught in the very act, deplorable and
+disturbing; in Victor’s sight a look constructively indicative of more
+knowledge than Nogam had any right to possess. Take it any way you
+pleased, something to think about ...
+
+Still more disquieting Victor thought the circumstance that nobody else
+had seemed to notice that anomalous light in Nogam’s eyes; which of
+course might mean merely that Victor had worked himself into such a
+state of nerves that he was seeing things, but equally well that the
+look was one reserved for Victor alone, intentionally or not holding
+for him a message, if he had but had the wit to read it, of peculiarly
+personal import.
+
+It might have implied, for example, that Victor’s half-hearted and
+paltering distrust of Nogam had all along been only too well warranted.
+In which case, the fat was already in the fire with a vengeance, and
+Victor’s probable duration of life was dependent wholly upon the speed
+with which he could quit Frampton Court and hurl his motor-car through
+the night to the lower reaches of the Thames.
+
+Envisagement of the worst at its blackest being part of the holy duty
+of self-preservation, Victor sat fully dressed, with every other
+provision made for flight at the first flash of warning, only waiting
+to make sure, and with what impatience was apparent in the working of
+paste-coloured features, the wincing and shifting of slotted eyes, the
+incessant shutting and unclosing of tensed fingers.
+
+All rested with the telephone that stood mockingly mute at the man’s
+elbow, callous alike to his anxiety and the rancorous regard in which
+he held it. His call for the house near Queen Anne’s Gate had now been
+in for more than forty minutes; in that interval he had no less than
+three times pleaded its urgency to the trunk-line operator. And still
+the muffled bell beneath the desk was dumb.
+
+And the worst of it was, fatal though the delay might prove, he dared
+not stir a hand to save himself until he _knew_....
+
+In the taut torment of those long-drawn minutes a sound of circumspect
+scratching was enough to bring Victor to his feet in one startled
+bound.
+
+He stood for a moment, a-twitch, but intent upon the corridor door,
+then composed himself with indifferent success, approached and opened
+the door. The girl Chou Nu slipped in, offered a timid courtesy, and
+awaited his leave to speak.
+
+“Well? What is it?”
+
+“Excellency: the Princess Sofia refuses to let me stay in the room with
+her.”
+
+“Why? Don’t you know?”
+
+“I think she means to run away. She would not go back to her bed, but
+walked up and down, till I ventured to urge her to take rest, when she
+turned on me in a rage and bade me be gone. Then I came to you.”
+
+Victor took thought and finished with a dour nod.
+
+“You have done well. Return, keep watch, let me know if she leaves—”
+
+“The door is locked, Excellency: she will not let me in.”
+
+“Spy through the keyhole, then; or hide in one of the empty rooms
+across the corridor, and watch—”
+
+A muted mutter from the direction of the desk dried speech on Victor’s
+lips. He started hastily toward the source of the sound, midway
+wheeled, and dismissed the maid with a brusque hand and
+monosyllable—“Go!”—then fairly pounced upon the telephone.
+
+But all he heard, in the course of the ensuing five minutes, was the
+voice of the trunk-line operator advising him, to begin with, that she
+was ready to put him through to Westminster, then maddeningly
+punctuating the buzz and whine of the empty wire with her call of a
+talking doll—“Are you theah?... Are you theah?... Are you theah?”
+
+At length, however, the connection was established; and Victor, hearing
+the falsetto of Chou Nu’s second-uncle cheerily respond to the
+operator’s query, unceremoniously broke in:
+
+“Shaik Tsin? It is I, Number One. And the devil’s own time I’ve had
+getting through. Why didn’t you answer more promptly? What’s the
+matter? Has anything gone wrong?”
+
+“All is well, Excellency, as well as you could wish, knowing what you
+know.”
+
+Profound relief found voice in a sigh from Victor’s heart.
+
+“You got my messages, then? Nogam delivered them?”
+
+“So I understand. I myself did not see him, Excellency. The man Sturm—”
+
+On that name the voice died away in what Victor fancied was a gasp that
+might have been of either fright or pain.
+
+“Hello!” he prompted. “Are you there, Shaik Tsin? I say! Are you there?
+Why don’t you answer?”
+
+He paused: no sound for seconds that dragged like so many minutes, then
+of a sudden a deadened noise like the slam of a door heard afar—or a
+pistol shot at some distance from the telephone in the study.
+
+Further and frantic importuning of the cold and unresponsive wire
+presently was silenced by a new voice, little like that of Shaik Tsin.
+
+“Hello? Who’s there? I say: that you, Prince Victor?”
+
+Involuntarily Victor cried: “Karslake!” “What gorgeous luck! I’ve been
+wanting a word with you all evening.”
+
+“What has happened? Why did Shaik Tsin—?”
+
+“Oh, most unfortunate about him—frightfully sorry, but it really
+couldn’t be helped, if he hadn’t fought back we wouldn’t have had to
+shoot him. You see, the old devil murdered Sturm to-night, for some
+reason I daresay you understand better than I: we found a paper on the
+beggar, written in Chinese, apparently an order for his assassination
+signed by you. Half a mo’: I’ll read it to you ...”
+
+But if Karslake translated Victor’s message, as edited by the hand of
+Nogam, it was to a wire as deaf as it was dumb.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+VENTRE À TERRE
+
+
+With exceeding care to avoid noise, Sofia unlocked the door and for the
+second time since midnight let herself stealthily out into the darkened
+corridor; but now with the difference that she did what she did in full
+command of all her wits and faculties, with no subjective war of wills
+to hinder and confuse her, and with a definite object clearly
+visioned—a goal no less distant than the railway station.
+
+Lanyard had promised that Karslake should come for her within an hour
+or two and take her away with him, back to London and the arms of the
+father whom, although so recently revealed and accepted, she had
+already begun to love; if indeed it were not true that she had in
+filial sense fallen in love with Lanyard at first sight, through
+intuition, that afternoon in the Café des Exiles so long, so very long
+ago!
+
+Well: she might as well await Karslake at the station. It would be
+simpler, she would be more at ease there, would breathe more freely
+once she turned her back on Frampton Court and all its hateful
+associations. Where Victor was, she could not rest.
+
+If she had feared the man before, now she hated him; but hatred had
+added to her fear instead of replacing it, she remained afraid,
+desperately afraid, so that even the thought of continuing under the
+same roof with him was enough to make her prefer to tramp unknown roads
+alone in the mirk of that storm-swept night.
+
+Though she went in trembling, she felt sure nobody spied upon her
+going; and in this confidence crept to the great staircase, down to the
+entrance hall, and on to the front doors; and a good omen it seemed to
+find these not locked, but simply on the latch. And if the night into
+which she peered was dark and loud with wind and rain, its countenance
+seemed kindlier, more friendly far than that of the world she was
+putting behind her. Without misgivings Sofia stepped out.
+
+It was like stepping over the edge of the universe into the eternal
+night that bides beyond the stars. Neither did waiting seem to
+habituate her vision to the lack of light.
+
+Still, the feel of gravel underfoot ought to guide her down the drive
+to the great gateway; and once outside the park, clear of its
+overshadowing trees, one would surely find mitigation of darkness
+sufficient to show the public road.
+
+She took one tentative step out of the recessed doorway and into
+Victor’s arms.
+
+That they were Victor’s she knew instantly, as much by the crawling of
+her flesh as by the choking terror that stifled the scream in her
+throat and froze body and limbs with its paralyzing touch.
+
+And then his ironic accents:
+
+“So good of you to spare me the trouble of coming for you!”
+
+Before she could reply or even think, other hands than his were busy
+with her. A folded cloth was whipped over the lower half of her face,
+sealing her lips, and knotted at the nape of her neck. Stout arms
+clipped her knees and swung her off her feet, leaving her body helpless
+in Victor’s tight embrace. And despite her tardy recovery and efforts
+to struggle, she was carried swiftly away, a dozen paces or so, then
+tumbled bodily in upon the floor of a motor-car.
+
+The door closed as she tried to pick herself up, the smooth purring of
+the motor became a leonine roar while she was still on her knees, gears
+clashed, and the car leaped with a jerk that drove her headlong against
+the cushions of the seat. Then the dome light was switched on, and she
+saw Victor with a bleak face sitting over her, an automatic pistol
+naked in his hand.
+
+“Get up!” he said, grimly, “and if there’s any thought of fight left in
+you, think better of it, remember your mother paid with her life the
+price of defying me, and yours means even less to me. Up with you and
+sit quietly beside me—do you hear?”
+
+He lent her a hand that wrenched her arm brutally and wrung a cry which
+Victor mocked as Sofia fell upon the seat and cringed back into the
+corner.
+
+For perhaps thirty seconds, while the car raced away down the drive, he
+continued to hold her in the venom of her sneer; then his gaze veered
+sharply, and leaning over he switched off the light.
+
+With the body of the car again the dwelling-place of darkness, objects
+beyond its rain-gemmed glass—the heads of the Chinese maid and
+chauffeur, the twin piers of the nearing gateway—attained dense relief
+against the blue-white glare of two broad headlight beams, that of the
+limousine boring through the gateway to intersect at right angles that
+of another car approaching on the highroad but as yet hidden by the
+wall of the park.
+
+In one breath and the same the lights of the second car swerved in
+toward the gateway, and consternation seized hold of Sofia’s
+intelligence and wiped it clear of all coherence.
+
+Already the strange lamps were staring blankly in between the piers—and
+the momentum of Victor’s car was too great to be arrested within the
+distance. The girl cried out, but didn’t know it, and crouched low; the
+horn added a squawk of frenzy to a wild clamour of yells; all prefatory
+to a scrunching, rending crash as, in the very mouth of the gateway, a
+front fender of the incoming car ripped through the rear fender above
+which Sofia was sitting. Thrown heavily against Victor, then instantly
+back to her place, she felt the car, with brakes set fast, turn
+broadside to the road, skid crabwise, and lurch sickeningly into the
+ditch on the farther side.
+
+For an interminable time, while the ponderous fabric rocked and
+toppled, threatening very instant to crash upon its side, the rear
+wheels spun madly and the chain-bound tires tore in vain at greasy road
+metal.
+
+Without clear comprehension of what was happening, Sofia heard shouts
+from the other car, now at a standstill, and an oddly syncopated
+popping. The window in the door on Victor’s side rang like a cracked
+bell, shivered, and fell inward, clashing. With a growl of rage, Victor
+bent forward and levelled an arm through the opening. From his hand
+truncated tongues of orange flame, half a dozen of them, stabbed the
+gloom to an accompaniment of as many short and savage barks.
+
+Then the chains at last bit through to a purchase, the car scrambled to
+the crown of the road and lunged precipitately away; and the lights of
+the other dropped astern in the space of a rest between heartbeats.
+
+Sitting back, Victor turned on the dome light again, and extracting an
+empty magazine clip from the butt of his automatic pistol, replaced it
+with another, loaded.
+
+From this occupation he looked up with lips curling in contempt of
+Sofia’s terror.
+
+“Your friends,” he observed, “were a thought behindhand, eh? When you
+come to know me better, my dear, you’ll find they invariably are—with
+me.”
+
+Aftermath of fright made her tongue inarticulate; and Victor’s sneer
+took on a colour of mean amusement.
+
+“Something on your mind?”
+
+She twisted her hands together till the laced fingers hurt.
+
+“Wha-what are you go-going to do with me?”
+
+“Make good use of you, dear child,” he laughed: “be sure of that!”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“What do you think?”
+
+“I don’t know ...”
+
+“Really not? But there I think you do injustice to your admirable
+intelligence.”
+
+The jeering laugh sounded as he put out the light again, in darkness
+the derisive voice pursued:
+
+“If you must know in so many words—well, I mean to keep you by me till
+the final curtain falls. As long as it lasts, yours will be an
+interesting life—I give my word.”
+
+“And you call yourself my father!”
+
+“Oh, no! No, indeed: that’s all over and done with, the farce is played
+out; and while I’m aware my rôle in it wasn’t heroic, I shan’t play the
+purblind fool in the afterpiece—pure drama—upon which the curtain is
+now rising. Neither need you. Oh, I’ll be frank with you, if you wish,
+lay all my cards on the table.”
+
+A deliberate pause ended in a chuckle.
+
+“I have at present precisely two uses for my precious little Sofia: She
+will serve excellently as insurance against further persecution on the
+part of her accomplished and energetic father—with whom I shall deal in
+my good leisure—and ... But need one be crudely explicit?”
+
+Sofia answered nothing to that, for a long time she said nothing, but
+sat pondering....
+
+And Victor was speedily provided with another interest which engrossed
+him to the exclusion of further efforts to bait a victim defenseless
+against his insolence.
+
+When for the third time after that narrow scrape at the gates the man
+roused up to peer back through the rear window of the limousine, Sofia
+heard a harshly sibilant intake of breath between shut teeth, and
+surmised the discovery that the car which had so narrowly missed
+blocking their escape had picked up the trail, and was now in hot
+chase.
+
+Even youth, however, could distill but slender hope from this. The pace
+was too terrific at which Victor’s car was thundering through the
+night-bound countryside, it seemed idle to dream that another could
+overhaul it, even though driven with as much skill and maniacal
+recklessness. And Sofia returned to thoughts to which Victor’s innuendo
+had given definite shape and colour, if with an effect far from that of
+his intention. Threatened, the spirit of the girl responded much as
+sane young flesh will to a cold plunge. She had forgotten to tremble,
+and though still tense-strung in every fibre was able to sit still,
+look steadily into the face of peril, and calculate her chances of
+cheating it.
+
+Presently, in a tone so even it won begrudged admiration, she asked:
+
+“Where are you taking me?”
+
+“Do you really care?”
+
+“Enough to ask.”
+
+“But why should I tell you?”
+
+“No reason. I presume it doesn’t really matter, I’ll know soon enough.”
+
+“Then I don’t mind enlightening you. We’re bound for the Continent by
+way of Limehouse. A launch is waiting for us in Limehouse Reach, a
+yacht off Gravesend. Oh, I have forgotten nothing! By daybreak we’ll be
+at sea.”
+
+“We?”
+
+“You and I.”
+
+“You deceive yourself, Prince Victor. I shan’t accompany you.”
+
+“How amusing! And is it a secret, how you propose to stand against my
+will?”
+
+Sofia was silent for a little; then, “I can kill myself,” she said,
+quietly.
+
+“To be sure you can! And when I tire of you, perhaps I’ll humour your
+morbid inclinations—if they still exist.”
+
+“You are a fool,” Sofia returned, bluntly, “if you think I shall go
+aboard that yacht alive.”
+
+“Brava!” Victor laughed, and clapped his hands. “Brava! brava!”
+
+He sat up for another look out of the rear window, sucked at his breath
+even more sharply than before, and snatching up the speaking-tube
+pronounced urgent words in Chinese.
+
+The head of the chauffeur, in stark silhouette against the leading
+glow, bent toward the tube, and nodded rapidly. And to the
+deep-throated roar of an unmuffled exhaust, the heavy car leaped, like
+a spirited animal stung by whip and spur, and settled into a stride to
+which what had gone before was as a preliminary canter to the
+heartbreaking drive down to the home-stretch.
+
+Lights began to dot the roadside. Widely spaced at first, unbroken
+ranks were soon streaking past the tear-blind windows. Outskirts of
+London were being traversed; but neither driving sheets of rain against
+which human vision failed, nor the chance of encountering belated
+traffic, worked any slackening of the pace. Only when a corner had to
+be negotiated did the car slow down, and then never to the point of
+sanity; and the turn once rounded, its flight would again become
+headlong, lunatic, suicidal.
+
+The stringed lamps wove a wavering luminous ribbon without end; a
+breeze laden with the wet fragrance of London drove great gusts of rain
+in stringing showers through the broken window. Turns and twists grew
+more frequent, apparently favouring the pursuit.
+
+Victor now knelt constantly on the back seat, his face in the fitful
+play of light and shadow uncannily resembling that of a hunted jungle
+cat. On the polished steel of his pistol sinister gleams winked and
+faded. From his snarling lips foul oaths fell, a steady stream, black
+blasphemies spewed up from the darkest dives of the Orient—most of them
+happily couched in the tongues of their origin and so unintelligible to
+his one auditor. As it was, she heard and understood enough, too much.
+
+Nevertheless, the man was not too completely absorbed in watching the
+shifting fortunes of the race to be unmindful of the girl. And when
+once she sat up to ease cramped limbs, he misread her intention and,
+catching her viciously by an arm, threw her back into her corner and
+advised her not to play the giddy little fool.
+
+After that Sofia was at pains to stir as seldom as possible, and bided
+her time quietly enough, but never for an instant relaxed her
+watchfulness or lost heart.
+
+The shouldering houses that hedged their course discovered a profile,
+ragged, black against a sky whose purple dimness held the first dull
+presage of dawn.
+
+In the wild rush of a marauding tomcat the car crossed a broad public
+square and sped up the graded approach to a bridge. The smell of the
+Thames was unmistakable, the far-flung lamps of the Embankment were
+pearls aglow upon violet velvet.
+
+Leaving the bridge, the limousine took a turn on two wheels, and
+immediately something happened, seemingly some attempt to stop it was
+made. Vociferous voices hailed it, only to induce an augmented bellow
+of the exhaust with an instantaneous acceleration of impetus. Then
+something was struck and tossed aside as a bull might toss a dog—a dark
+shape whirling and flopping hideously; and an agonized screaming made
+the girl cower, sick with horror, and cover her ears with her hands.
+
+Before she was able to forget those qualms many more minutes of frantic
+driving had flung to the rear many a mile of silent streets.
+
+Of a sudden she heard an inhuman cry and, looking up, saw Victor dash
+the butt of his pistol through the glass, then reversing the weapon
+pour through the opening a fusillade whose effect was presumably
+gratifying, for he laughed to himself when the pistol was empty,
+laughed briefly but with vicious glee.
+
+That laugh levelled the last barrier of doubt and fear and nerved Sofia
+finally to test the forlorn hope she had been nursing ever since Victor
+had let her see a little way into his mind as to her fate.
+
+Until he could reload, only the tradition of the sexes lent him
+theoretical superiority; whereas he was in fact a man well on the
+thither side of middle-age, his virility sapped by long indulgence of
+unbridled appetites; while Sofia was a woman in the fullest flush of
+her first mature powers.
+
+Gathering herself together, she inched forward and made ready to
+spring, bear him down, overpower him—by some or any means put him hors
+de combat long enough for her to fling a door open and herself out into
+the street....
+
+With squealing brakes the car shaved an acute corner and slid on locked
+wheels to a dead halt so unexpected that it was Sofia who plunged
+floundering to the floor, while Victor only by a minor miracle escaped
+catapulting through the front windows.
+
+The next instant, as Sofia struggled to her knees, the door behind her
+was wrenched open from without and, at a sign from Victor, rough hands
+laid hold of the girl and dragged her out bodily.
+
+In a passion of despair, she lost her senses for a time and like a
+madwoman fought, shrieking, biting, kicking, clawing, scratching....
+
+With returning lucidity she found herself, panting and dishevelled,
+arms pinned to her sides, struggling on for all that, being hustled by
+some half a dozen men across a narrow sidewalk of uneven flagstones.
+
+Simultaneously the shutter of perceptions snapped, photographing
+permanently upon the super-sensitized film of conscious memory the
+glimpsed vista of a grim, mean street whose repellent uglinesses
+grinned through the boding twilight like lineaments of some monstrous
+mask of evil.
+
+Then she tripped on a low stone step, stumbled, and was half-carried,
+half-thrown into a narrow and malodorous hallway.
+
+Between her and the sweet liberty of the rain-washed air a door crashed
+like the crack of doom.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+THE SEVEN BRASS HINGES
+
+
+Into a space perhaps four feet in width from wall to wall and seven
+deep from the front door to the foot of a cramped flight of crazy
+wooden stairs, some ten people were crowded, Sofia and the maid Chou Nu
+in a knot of excited men.
+
+In the saffron glow of an ill-trimmed paraffin lamp smoking in a wall
+bracket, desperate faces, yellow and brown and white, consulted one
+another with rolling eyeballs and strange tongues clamorous. Sofia
+heard the broken rustling of heavy respirations; she saw uncouth
+gesticulations carve the shadows; her nostrils were revolted by
+effluvia of unclean bodies, garments saturate with opium smoke and
+curious cookery, breaths sour with alcohol.
+
+Two were busy at the door, under the direction of Prince Victor,
+setting stout bars into iron sockets. When they had finished, Victor
+elbowed them out of his way and thrust back the slide of a narrow
+horizontal peephole, through which he reconnoitred.
+
+The tall, thin body stiffened as he looked, and without turning he
+flung an open hand behind him and snapped a demand in Chinese. Somebody
+slipped a revolver into his palm. Levelling it he sent a volley
+crashing through the peephole. Yells responded, and in the hush that
+fell upon the final shot a noise of fugitive feet scraping and
+stumbling on cobbles. A bullet struck the door a sounding thump and all
+but penetrated, raising a bump on the inner face of its thick oaken
+panels; and Victor shut the slide and turned back.
+
+Subservient silence saluted him. He spoke in Chinese, issuing (Sofia
+gathered) instructions for the defense of the house. One by one the men
+designated dropped out of the group about her. Three shuffled off into
+a room adjoining the hallway. Two others ran briskly up the stairs. A
+sixth Victor directed to stand by the barred door. His chauffeur and
+another Chinaman he told off for his personal attendance.
+
+The maid Chou Nu was left to shift for herself, and while Sofia could
+see her she did not shift a finger from her pose of terror, flattened
+to the wall. When Sofia came back that way, the girl had vanished,
+however. Nor was she seen again alive.
+
+Her arms held fast, Sofia was partly led and partly dragged down the
+hall, Victor herding the group on past the staircase and into a bare
+room at the back of the house, where a solitary lamp burning on a deal
+table discovered for all other furnishing broken chairs, coils of
+tarred rope, a rack of ponderous oars and boat-hooks, a display of
+shapeless oilskins and sou’westers on pegs. The windows were boarded up
+from sills to lintels, the air was close and dank with the stale
+flavour of foul tidal waters.
+
+Here Victor took charge of Sofia, the chauffeur holding the lamp to
+light the other Chinaman at his labours with a trap-door in the floor,
+a slab of woodwork so massive that, when its iron bolts had been drawn,
+it needed every whit of the man’s strength to lift and throw it back
+upon its hinges; and its crashing fall made all the timbers quake and
+groan.
+
+Through the square opening thus discovered Sofia saw a ladder of
+several slimy steps washed by black, oily waters that sucked and
+swirled sluggishly round spiles green with weed and ooze.
+
+Down these steps the Chinaman crept gingerly, but halfway paused with a
+cry, then cringed back to the head of the ladder, yellow face blanched,
+slant eyes piteous with fear, as he exhibited an end of stout mooring
+line whose other end was made fast to a ring bolt in one of the joists.
+
+With a smothered oath Victor snatched the rope’s end from the trembling
+hand and examined it closely. Even Sofia could see that it had been
+cleanly severed by a knife.
+
+Victor’s countenance was ablaze as he dropped the rope. Before the
+tempest of his wrath the Chinaman bent like a reed, with faint,
+protesting bleats and feebly weaving hands.
+
+But in full tide the tirade faltered, Victor seemed to forget his anger
+or else to remind himself it was puerile in contrast with the mortal
+issues that now confronted him.
+
+He turned to Sofia eyes of cold fire in a wintry countenance.
+
+“So,” he pronounced, slowly, “it appears you are to have your way,
+after all, and more speedily than either of us reckoned. You are to
+die, and so am I, this day—you in my arms. Well, it is time, I daresay,
+when I permit myself to be duped and overreached by police spies like
+your persevering father and lover. Yes; I am ready to pay the price of
+my fatuity—but not until they had paid me for their victory—and dearly.
+Come!”
+
+He motioned to the Chinese to reclose and fasten the trap-door, and
+grasping Sofia’s wrist with cruel fingers hurried her back through the
+hallway.
+
+Repeated breaks of pistol-fire guided them to the front room, a racket
+echoed in diminished volume from the street.
+
+In an atmosphere already thick with acrid fumes of smokeless powder two
+men held the windows, firing through loopholes in iron-bound blinds of
+oak. At their feet a third squatted, reloading for them as occasion
+required. As Sofia and Victor entered one man dropped his weapon and,
+grunting, fell back from his window to nurse a shattered hand.
+Releasing the girl without another word, Victor caught up the pistol
+and took the vacant post.
+
+Instantly, on peering out, he fired once, then again. Evidently missing
+both shots, he settled to await a better target, eyes intent to the
+loophole. In the course of the next few minutes he changed position but
+once, when, after firing several more shots, he tossed the empty weapon
+to the man on the floor and received a loaded one in exchange.
+
+Seeing him thus employed, altogether forgetful, Sofia began to back
+toward the hall, step by cautious step, keeping her attention fixed to
+Victor throughout. But he seemed to be completely preoccupied with his
+markmanship, and paid her no heed.
+
+Nevertheless, when she at length found courage to swing and dart away
+through the door, Victor flung three curt words to the fellow at his
+feet, who grunted, rose, and glided from the room in close chase.
+
+The guard at the front door was not so busy as Sofia had hoped to find
+him, not too interested in the progress of siege operations outside to
+note her approach and look round from his peephole with a menacing grin
+of welcome; and his unmistakable readiness, as pistol in hand he took a
+single step toward her, drove the girl back to the foot of the stairs.
+
+Then the other came swiftly after her, and Sofia swung in panic and
+stumbled up the steps. There were others up above, two to her certain
+knowledge, possibly many more of Victor’s creatures; but if only she
+could find some sort of refuge in the uppermost fastnesses of the
+rookery, perhaps ...
+
+Like a shape of smoke wind-driven, she sped up the first flight, then
+the second, only pausing at the head of the third and last flight to
+throw hunted glances right, left, and behind her.
+
+Overhead a skylight with dingy panes diffused a dull blue glimmer which
+discovered a yawning door at her elbow, a pocket of black mystery
+beyond, and on the uppermost steps of the staircase her patient yellow
+shadow, his upturned eyes inscrutable but potentially revolting with
+their very concealment of the intent behind them.
+
+Impossible that a worse thing could await her beyond that dark
+threshold....
+
+She crossed it in one stride, swung the door to, and set her shoulders
+against it.
+
+Outside she heard the shuffling footfalls pause. The knob rattled. But
+instead of the inward thrust against which she stood braced, there came
+the least of outward pulls, as if to make sure that the latch had
+caught; and after a brief pause a key grated in the lock, was
+withdrawn, and the slippered feet withdrew in turn.
+
+When her lungs ceased to labour painfully, she took her courage in both
+hands and began to explore, groping blindly through darkness,
+encountering nothing till she blundered into a table which held a glass
+lamp for paraffin oil, like those in use below.
+
+Fumbling over the top of the table, she found matches, struck one, and
+set its fire to the wick.
+
+The flame waxed and grew steady in a crusted chimney, revealing a room
+with a slant ceiling and two dormer windows, boarded; in one corner a
+cot-bed with tumbled blankets, near this a low wooden stand, with a
+pipe, spirit lamp, and other paraphernalia of an opium smoker—no
+chairs, not another stick of furniture of any kind.
+
+Removing the lamp, the girl set it on the floor, and pushed the table
+over against the door. By not so long as half a minute would its
+reinforcement delay Victor when he made up his mind to get in. But in
+such emergencies the human kind is not impatient of the most futile
+expedients.
+
+There was nothing more she could do. She stood still, listening. The
+rattle of pistol fire three floors below continued in fits and starts,
+but the sound of it was oddly unreal, resembling more stammering
+explosions of a string of firecrackers than snaps of the whiplash of
+Death.
+
+She tried one of the windows without encouragement, but at the other
+found a board with a loose end, which she pried aside, till through
+begrimed glass she could see a ghastly, weeping sky of daybreak and, by
+craning her neck, peer down into the dark gully of the street.
+
+At first she thought it empty; but presently her straining vision made
+out two huddled shapes upon the farther sidewalk, close under the walls
+of a public house whose sign she could just barely decipher: the Red
+Moon.
+
+Then, about to draw back from the window, she saw five men, oddly
+foreshortened figures from that lofty coign of view, leave the Red Moon
+by one of its bar entrances, bearing between them a heavy beam of wood,
+and with this improvised battering-ram aimed at the door to the
+besieged house, charge awkwardly across the cobbles.
+
+The house spat fire from door and windows, a withering blast. In the
+middle of the street the beam was abandoned, three of its fool-hardy
+bearers took to their heels, each shaping an individual course, while
+one lay still upon the wet black stones, and another, apparently
+wounded in the legs, sought pitifully to drag himself by his arms, inch
+by inch, out of the zone of fire. But presently his efforts grew
+feeble, then he, too, lay stirless, prone in the sluicing rain.
+
+The girl shrank back from the window, hiding her eyes as if to blot out
+that picture.
+
+The light, that is to say the absence of it in true sense, the angle of
+view, and the distance, all had conspired to prevent her from making
+sure that neither her father nor Karslake were of those four whose
+broken bodies cluttered the street. But the fear and uncertainty were
+maddening....
+
+She wheeled suddenly toward the door: the ancient stairs were creaking
+beneath a measured tread. She made an offer to add her weight to that
+of the table, but checked and fell back immediately, seeing the folly
+of sacrificing her strength, the wisdom of saving it to serve her when
+finally....
+
+The creaking ceased, the wards of the lock grated, the knob turned, the
+door was thrust open—the table offering little hindrance if any. From
+the threshold Victor eyed the girl with a twitching grin.
+
+“The time is at hand,” he announced with a parody of punctilio. “We
+have beaten them off in the street, but they have found the tunnel from
+the cellar of the Red Moon, and are attacking from the river besides.
+So, my dear, it ends for us....”
+
+In silence, shoulders to the wall farthest from the door, Sofia watched
+him unwinking. The lamp at her feet painted the tensely poised young
+body and bloodless face with quaint, stagey shadows.
+
+Victor’s glance ranged the cheerless room.
+
+“I think you understand me,” he said.
+
+She might have been a waxwork dummy out of Madame Tussaud’s.
+
+A white blaze of madness transfigured Victor’s countenance. He took one
+step toward Sofia.
+
+In movements so precisely coordinated that they seemed one and
+instantaneous, the girl stooped, caught up the lamp, and threw it with
+all her might. Victor ducked his head. The lamp sailed on, described a
+descending curve through the open doorway into the well of the
+staircase, struck, and exploded. In the clutches of the maniac, Sofia
+was aware of the lurid glare, momentarily gaining strength, that filled
+the rectangle of the doorway.
+
+In through this last, while iron hands tightened on her throat and
+consciousness grew dark with closing shadows, a man’s shape passed,
+then another....
+
+The grip on her throat grew lax, the hands left it free. She reeled,
+but somebody caught her up and bore her swiftly from the room, leaving
+two who fought together like beasts on the floor, locked in each
+other’s arms, rolling and squirming, rearing and flopping....
+
+The scorch of flames stung her cheek, but she forgot that when their
+broken light made visible the features of Karslake above the arms
+wherein she lay cradled.
+
+Turning aside from the staircase, Karslake bore her to the ladder
+leading to the skylight, whose broken glass crunched beneath his heels
+at every step.
+
+In the open air he pulled up for a moment’s rest, but continued to hold
+Sofia in his arms. The wind raved about them, buffeted them, tore their
+breath away, rain pelted them like birdshot; but they clung to each
+other and were unaware of reason for complaint.
+
+Presently, however, Karslake remembered, and anxiously endeavoured to
+disengage from these tenacious arms.
+
+“Let me go, dearest,” he muttered. “I must go back—I left your father
+to take care of Victor, and—”
+
+As if evoked by his very solicitude Lanyard emerged from the skylight
+hatch, waved a hand in gay salute, then turned to stare down into the
+flaming pit from which he had climbed.
+
+After a little he fell back a pace. Then slowly, with the laboured
+movements of exhaustion, Victor worked head and shoulders through the
+opening and dragged himself out upon the roof.
+
+On all fours he held in doubt, his head moving from side to side like
+the head of a stricken beast, seeking his enemy with dazzled eyes. Then
+he made Lanyard out and, pulling himself together for the supreme
+effort, launched at his throat with the pounce of a great cat.
+
+Lanyard met him halfway, caught him in the middle of his bound, wound
+wiry arms round the man and held him helpless.
+
+His voice rang clear above the crackle of flames:
+
+“Victor! have you forgotten how you threatened one night, twenty years
+ago, to follow me to the very gates of Hell, and what I promised
+you—that, if you did, I’d push you inside? Or did you think I would
+forget?”
+
+He cast the man from him, backward, down into the hungry maw of that
+inferno....
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10496 ***