path: root/10496-0.txt

*** 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 ***