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....