BUT IT WAS the Saint who talked the most on that strange return voyage, standing up to the wheel, with the breeze through the open door fluttering his tie, and his shoulders sweeping wide and square against the light, and his tanned face seeming more handsome and devil-may-care and swaggeringly swift of line than ever.
She came to know him then as otherwise she might never have come to know him. It was not that he talked pointedly of himself—he had too catholic a range of interests to aim any long speech so monotonously—and yet it would be idle to deny that his own personality impregnated every subject on which he touched, were the touch never so fleeting. It was inevitable that it should be so, for he spoke of things that he had known and understood, and nothing that he said came at secondhand. He told her of outlandish places he had seen, of bad men that he had met, of forlorn ventures in which he had played his part; and yet it was nothing like a detailed autobiography that he gave her—it was a kaleidoscope, an irresponsibly shredded panorama of a weird and wonderful life, strewn extravagantly under her eyes as only the Saint himself could have strewn it, seasoned with his own unique spice of racy illusion and flippant phrase; and it was out of this squandered prodigality of inconsequent reminiscence, and the gallant manner of its telling, that she put together her picture of the man.
And, truly, he told her much of his amazing career, and even more of the ideals that had shaped it to the thing it was. And because she was no fool she gleaned from the tale a clear vision of the fantastic essence of the facts—of D'Artagnan born again without his right to a sword. . . .
"You see," he said, "I'm mad enough to believe in romance. And I was sick of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called Life. I'm not interested to read about maundering epileptics, and silly nymphomaniacs, and anaemic artists with a Message; and I'm not interested to meet them. If I notice them at all, they make me want to vomit. There's no message in life but the message of splendid living—which doesn't mean crawling about on a dunghill yapping about your putrid little repressions. Nor does it mean putting your feet on the mantelpiece and a soapily beatific expression on your face, and concentrating on God in the image of a musical-comedy curate or Aimee Semple McPherson. It means the things that our forefathers were quite contented with, though their children have got so damned refined that they really believe the said forefathers would have been much 'naicer' if they'd spent their days picking over the scabs on their souls instead of going in for the noisy vulgar things they did go in for—I mean battle, murder, and sudden death, with plenty of good beer and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. The low-down shocker is a decent and clean and honest-to-God form of literature, because it does deal with things that have a right to occupy a man's mind—a primitive chivalry, and damsels in distress, and virtue triumphant, and a wholesale slaughter of villains at the end, and a real fight running through it all. It mayn't be true to life as we know it, but it ought to be true, and that's why it's the best stuff for people to read—if they must read about things instead of doing them. Only I preferred to do them. ..."
And he told her other things, so that the vision grew even clearer in her mind—that vision of a heroic revolt against circumstance, of a huge and heroic impatience against the tawdry pusillanimity that had tried and failed to choke his spirit, of a strange creed and a challenge. . . . And with it all there was a lack of bitterness, a joyous fatalism, that lent the recital half its glamour; the champion of lost causes fought with a smile. . . .
"Of course," he said, "it makes you an outlaw—in spirit as well as in fact. But that again seems worth while to me. Isn't the outlaw one of the most popular figures in fiction? Isn't Robin Hood every schoolboy's idol? There's a reason for everything that people love, and there must be a reason for that—it must be the response of one of the most fundamental impulses of humanity. And why? For the same reason that Adam fell for the apple—because it's in the nature of man to break laws—because there's no real difference between the thrill of overthrowing a legitimate obstacle and the thrill of overthrowing a legitimate thou-shalt-not. Man was given legs to walk the earth; and therefore, out of divine cussedness of his inheritance, he chooses his heroes, not from the men who walk superlatively well, but from the men who trespass into the element for which they were never intended, and fly superlatively well. In the same way, man was also given moral limitations by his ancestors after God Almighty; and therefore he reserves his deepest and most secret admiration for those who defy those limitations. He would like to do it himself, but he hasn't the courage; and so he enjoys the defiance even more when it's done for him by someone else. But compare that pleasure with the pleasure of the outlaw himself, when he chooses his outlawry because he loves it, and goes forth into the wide world to rob bigger and better orchards than he ever dreamed of when he was a grubby little urchin with a feather in his cap!"
"Yes, but the end of it!"
"The end?" said the Saint, with far-away eyes and a reckless smile. "Well—
'What gifts hath Fate for all his chivalry?
Even such as hearts heroic oftenest win:
Honour, a friend, anguish, untimely death.'
And yet—I don't know that that's a bad reward. . . . Do you remember me telling you about Norman Kent? I found his grave when I came back to England, and I had those lines carved over it. And do you know, I've often thought I should be proud to have earned them on my own." He could talk like that with fresh blood upon his hands and his heart set upon another killing! For a moment the girl felt that it could not be true — she could not be sitting there listening to him with no feeling of revulsion for such a smug hypocrisy. But it was so. And she knew, at the same time, that that charge would not have been true — his simple sincerity was as natural as the half smile that went with the words.
So they talked. . . . And the Saint opened up for her a world of whose existence she had never known, a world of flamboyant colours and magnificently medieval delights. His magic made her see it as he saw it — a rich romance that depended on no cloaks or ruffles or other laboriously picturesque trappings for its enchantment, a play of fierce passions and grim dangers and quixotic loyalties, a tale that a man had dreamed and gone out to live. It was Gawain before the Grail, it was Bayard on the bridge of Garigliano, it was Roland at the gates of Spain; a faith that she had thought was dead went through it all, a thread of fairy gold with power to transmute all baser metals that it touched. Thus and thus he showed her glimpses of the dream; and he would have shown her more; but all at once she faltered, she who from the first had matched his stride so easily, she saw a step that he had deliberately missed, and she could not be silent. She said: "Oh, yes, but there are other things — in your own life! Even Robin Hood had to admit it!"
"You mean Maid Marian? ' '
"Roger told me. I asked him."
"About Patricia?"
"Yes."
The Saint gazed across the tiny cabin; but he could not see beyond the windows.
"Patricia—happened. She came in an adventure, and she stayed. She's been more to me than anyone can ever know."
"Do you love her?"
The Saint turned.
"Love?" said the Saint softly. "What is love?"
"You should know," she said.
"I've wondered."
Now they had been talking for a long time.
'' Have you never been in love? " she asked.
The Saint drew back his sleeve and looked thoughtfully at his watch.
"We ought to be getting near land," he said. "Would you mind taking over the wheel again, old dear, while I go and snoop round the horizon?"
HE WAS GONE for several minutes; and when he came back it was like the return of a different man. And yet, in truth, he had not changed at all; if anything, he was an even more lifelike picture of himself. It was the Saint as she had first met him who came back, with a Saintly smile, and a Saintly story, and a spontaneous Saintly mischief rekindling in his eyes; but that very quintessential Saintliness somehow set him infinitely apart. Suddenly, in a heart-stopping flash of understanding, she knew why. . . .
"Do they keep a lookout on any of your father's yachts?" he drawled. "Or don't they do any night work?"
"A lookout? I don't know."
"Well, they certainly stock one on this blistered buque, as they do on any properly conducted ship, but blow me if I hadn't forgotten the swine!"
"Then he must have heard you lowering that boat!"
The Saint shook his head. His smile was ridiculously happy.
"Not he! That's just one more point we can chalk up to ourselves for the slovenliness of this bunch of Port Mahon sodgers. He must have been fast asleep—if he hadn't, we'd have known all about him before now. But he woke up later, by the same token—I saw him lighting a cigarette up in the bows when I went out on the bridge. And it was just as well for us that he did take the idea of smoking a cigarette at that moment, for there was land on the starboard bow as plain as the hump on a camel, and in another few minutes he couldn't have helped noticing it."
"But what shall we do?"
Simon laughed.
"It's done, old darling," he answered cheerfully, and she did not have to ask another question.
He lounged against the binnacle, a fresh white cylinder between his lips, his lighter flaring in his hand. The adventure had swept him up again: she could mark all the signs. The incident of which he had returned to speak so airily was a slight thing in itself, as he would have seen it; but it had turned a subtle scale. Though he lounged there so lazily relaxed, so easy and debonair, it was a dynamic and turbulent repose. There was nothing about it of permanence or even pause: it was the calm of a couched panther. And she saw the mocking curve of the eager fighting lips, the set of the finely chiselled jaw, the glimmer of laughter in the clear eyes half-sheathed by languid lids; and she read his destiny again in that moment's silence.
Then he straightened up; and it was like the uncoiling of tempered steel. His hand fell on her shoulder.
"Come and have a look," he said.
She secured the wheel amidships and followed him outside.
The wind touched her hair, cool and sweet as a sea nymph's breath; it whispered in the rigging, a muted chant to the rustle and throb of the ship's passage. Somewhere astern, between the bridge and the frayed white feather of their wake, the rattle and swish of a donkey engine shifting clinker jarred into the softness of the night. The sky was a translucent veil of purple, spangled with silver dust, a gossamer canopy flung high above the star-spearing topmasts, with a silver moon riding between yardarm and water. And away ahead and to her right, as the Saint had prophesied, a dark line of land was rising half a hand's-breath from the sea. ...
She heard the Saint speaking, with a faint tremor of reckless rapture in his voice.
"Only a little while now and then the balloon! ... I wonder if they've all gone to bed, to dream about my obituary notice in the morning papers. . . . You know, that'd make the reunion too perishingly perfect for words—to have Angel Face trying to do his stuff in a suit of violently striped pajamas and pink moccasins. I'm sure Angel Face is the sort of man who would wear striped pajamas, "said the Saint judicially. . . .
It did not occur to her to ask why the Saint should take the striping of pajamas as such an axiomatic index of villainy; but she remembered, absurdly, that Sir Isaac Lessing had a delirious taste in stripes. They had been members of the same house party at Ascot that summer, and she had met him on his way back from his bath. . . . And Sonia said abruptly: "Aren't you worried about Roger?"
"In a way .... But he's a great lad. I trained him myself."
"Did he—think the same as you?"
"About the life?"
"Yes."
Simon leaned on the rail gazing out to the slowly rising land.
"I don't know," he said. "I'm damned if I know. ... I led him on, of course, but he wasn't too hard to lead. It gave him something to do. Then he got tied up with a girl one time, and that ought to have been the end of him; but she let him down rather badly. After that—maybe you'll understand—he was as keen as knives. And I can't honestly say I was sorry to have him back."
"Do you think he'll stay?"
"I've never asked him, old dear. There's no contract—if that's what you mean. But I do know that nothing short of dynamite would shift him out of this particular party, and that's another reason why I'm not fretting myself too much about him tonight. You see, he and I and Norman were the original Musketeers, and—well, I guess Roger wants to meet Rayt Marius again as much as I do ...."
"And you mean to kill Marius?" said the girl quietly.
The Saint's cigarette end glowed brighter to a long, steady inhalation, and she met the wide, bland stare of Saintly eyes.
"But of course," he said simply. "Why not?"
And Sonia Delmar made no answer, turning her face again towards the shore. Words blazed through her brain; they should have come pelting—but her tongue was tied. He had shown her the warning, made it so plain that only a swivel-eyed half-wit could have missed it: "NO ENTRY—ONE WAY STREET," it said. And not once, but twice, he had edged her gently off the forbidding road, before her own unmannered obstinacy had pricked him to the snub direct. Yet he had broken the strain as easily and forthrightly as he had broken the spell; by now the entire circumstance had probably slipped away to the spacious background of his mind. He was as innocent of resentment as he was innocent of restraint; he pointed her retreat for the third time with no whit less of gentle grace; and she could not find the hardihood to breach the peace again. .
THE SHIP ploughed on through a slow swell of dark shining steel; and the Saint's lighter gritted and flared again in the gloom. His soft chuckle scarcely rose above the sigh of the breeze.
"If you want to powder your nose or anything, Sonia," he murmured, "this is your chance. I guess we'll be decanting ourselves in a few minutes now. We don't want to drive this gondola right up to the front door—I've no idea what the coast is like around here, and it might be infernally awkward to run aground at the critical moment."
"And even then we don't know where we are," she said.
"Well I'm not expecting we'll find ourselves a hundred miles away, and the nearest signpost will give us our bearings. . . . Glory be! Do you know, old dear?—I believe I shall be more interested in Marius's pantry than in his pajamas when we do arrive!"
He had so many other things to think about that he was only just becoming aware that he had gone through a not uneventful day on nothing but breakfast and a railway-station sandwich; and when the Saint developed an idea like that he never needed roller skates to help him catch up with it. After another wary glance at the land he wandered off the bridge in search of the galley; and in a few minutes he was back, with bulging pockets and a large sandwich in each hand. Even so, he had run it rather fine—the shore was looming up more quickly than he had thought.
"Here we are, che-ild—and off you go," he said briskly. "The orchestra's tuned up again, and we're surely going to start our symphony right now." He grinned, thrusting the sandwiches into her hands. "Paddle along down the gangway, beautiful, and begin gnawing bits out of these; and I'll be with you as soon as I've ported the plurry helm."
"O.K., Simon. ..."
Yet she did not go at once. She stood there facing him in the starlight. He heard her swift breath, and a puzzled question shaped itself in his mind, on the brink of utterance; but then, before he could speak, her lips brushed his mouth, very lightly.
Then he was alone.
"Thank you, Sonia," whispered the Saint.
He knew there was no one to hear.
Then he went quickly into the wheelhouse; and his hands flashed over the spokes as he put the wheel hard over. And once again he remembered his song:
"Modest maiden will not tarry;
Though but sixteen year she carry,
She must marry, she must marry,
Though the altar be a tomb— "
The Saint smiled crookedly.
For a space he held the wheel locked over, judging his time; and then he went out again onto the bridge. The line of land was slipping round to the starboard quarter, dangerously near. He went back and held the wheel for a few moments longer; when he emerged for a second survey the coast was safely astern, and he permitted himself a brief prayer of contented thanksgiving.
The quartermaster and the third officer, at the starboard end of the bridge, had both returned to life. Simon observed them squirming in helpless fury as he made for the companion, and paused to sweep them a mocking bow.
"Bon soir, mes enfants," he murmured. "Remember me to Monsieur Vassiloff."
He sped down to the upper deck to the cabin below. His business there detained him only for a matter of seconds; and then he raced down another companion to the main deck. Every second lost, now that the ship was headed away from the shore, meant so much more tedious rowing; and the Saint, when pruning down an affliction of that kind of toil, was in the habit of moving so fast that a pursuing jack rabbit would have suffocated in his dust.
The girl was waiting at the foot of the gangway.
"Filled the aching void, baby? . . . Well, stand by to make the jump when I give the word. It's a walk-over really—but don't lose your nerve, because I shan't be able to hold the boat for ever."
He dropped on one knee, locking one arm round the lowest rand-rail stanchion and gripping the tworope with his other hand. Inch by inch he edged the boat up to the grating on which they stood, until it was plunging dizzily through the wash only a foot away.
"Go!" said the Saint through his teeth; and she went.
He saw her stumble as the boat heaved up on a vicious flurry of water, and held his breath; but she fell inside the boat—though only just—with one hand on the gunwale and the other in the sea. He watched her scramble away towards the stern; and then he let go the slack of the rope, buttoned his coat, and leaped lightly after her.
A loose oar caught him across the knees, almost bringing him down; but he found his balance, and pivoted round with Belle flashing in his hand. Once, twice, he hacked at the straining rope, and it parted with a dull twang. The side of the ship seemed to gather speed, slipping by like a huge moving wall.
"Hallelujah," said the Saint piously.
The transhipment had been a merry moment, in its modest way, as he had known all along it would be, though he had characteristically refused to grow any gray hairs over it in anticipation. And in this case his philosophy was justified of the result.
He waved a cheery hand to the girl, and clambered aft. As he flopped onto a thwart and started to unship a pair of oars the black bulge of the steamer's haunches went past him; so close that he could have put out a hand and touched it; and the flimsy cockleshell, slithering into the unabated maelstrom of the ship's wake, lurched up on its tiller and smashed down into a seething trough with a report like a gunshot. An undercarry of fine spray whipped into his eyes. "Matchless for the complexion," drawled the Saint, and dipped the first powerful oar.
The lifeboat yawed round, reeling back into easier water. A few strong pulls, and the merry moment was over altogether.
"Attaboy ....!"
He rested on his oars, with the frail craft settling down under him to comparative equilibrium, and carefully mopped the salt spume from his face. Over the girl's shoulder he could watch the shadowy hull of the departing ship sliding monstrously away into the darkness. The steady pulse-beats of its engines came more and more faintly to his ears—fainter, very soon, than the booming and boiling of its wash against the coast. . . .
The Saint reached forward, lifted a battered sandwich from the girl's lap, and took a large contented bite.
"Feelin' good again, lass?"
"All right now, Big Chief."
"That's the spirit." All the Saint's buoyant optimism reached her through his voice. "And how you'd better get gay with those vitamins, old dear, while I do my Charon act. You can't keep your end up on an empty stomach—and this wild party is just getting into its stride!''
And, with his mouth full, Simon bent again to the oars.
IT WAS A STIFF twenty minutes' pull to the shore, but the Saint took it in his night's work cheerfully. It gave him a deep and enduring satisfaction to feel his muscles limbering up to the smooth rhythm of the heavy sweeps; and the fact that the boat had never been designed for one-man sculling practice robbed him of none of his pleasure. The complete night's party wasn't everyone's idea of a solo piece, anyway, if it came to that; but the Saint wasn't kicking. He was essentially a solo performer; and, if the circumstances required him to turn himself into a complete brass band—well, he was quite ready to warm himself up for the concert. So he rowed with a real physical enjoyment of the effort, and when the boat grounded at last, with a grating bump, there was a tingle of new strength rollicking joyously through every inch of his body.
"This way, sweetheart!"
He stood up in the bows. Fortunately the beach shelved steeply; watching his chance with the ebb of a wave he was able to jump easily to dry land. The girl followed. As her feet touched the shingle he caught her up and swung her bodily out of reach of the returning water, and stood beside her, his hands on his hips.
"Home is the sailor, home from the spree. . . . And now, what price Everest?"
With a hand on her arm he steered her over the stones. Something like a low wall rose in front of them. He lifted her to the top of it like a feather, and joined her there himself a moment later; and then he laughed.
"Holy Haggari—this is indubitably our evening!"
"Why—do you know where we are?"
"That's more than I could tell you. But I do know that there's going to be no alpine work. Pass down the car, Sonia!"
The land reared up from where they stood—not the scarp that he had expected, but a whale's back, overgrown with stunted bushes. They moved on in a steady climb, the Saint's uncanny instinct picking a way through the straggling obstacles without a fault. For about fifty yards the slope was steep and the foothold precarious; then, gradually, it began to flatten out gently for the summit. Their feet stumbled off the rubble onto grass. . . .
He stopped by a broken-down fence at the top of the climb to give the girl a breather.
Eighty feet below, the sea was like a dark cloth laid over the floor of the world; and over the cloth moved two steady points of luminance—the masthead lights of the ship that they had left. To right and left of them the coast was shrouded in unbroken obscurity. Behind them, the land fell smoothly away in an easy incline, rising again in the distance to the line of another hill, a long slow undulation with one lonely spangle of light on its farthest curve.
"Where there's a house there's a road," opined the Saint. "We may even find a road before that, but we might as well head that way. Ready?"
"Sure."
He picked her up lightly in his arms and set her down on the other side of the fence. In a moment they were pushing on again together.
His zest was infectious. She found that the spirit of the adventure was gathering her up again, even as it had gathered up the Saint. Reason went by the board; the Saint's own fantastic delight took its place. She managed a glance at the luminous dial of her wrist watch, and could have gasped when she saw the time. A truly comprehensive realization of all that she had lived through in a day and two half-nights was only just beginning to percolate into her brain, and the understanding of it dazed her. In four circuits of the clock she had lived through an age, and yet with no sense of incongruity until that moment; her whole life had been speeded up in one galvanic acceleration, mentally and emotionally as well as in event, and somewhere in that fabulous rush she had found something that would have amazed the Sonia Delmar of a few days ago.
Long ragged grasses rustled about their ankles. They dropped into a hollow, rose again momentarily, faced a hedge; but the Saint found a gap for them as if he could see as clearly in the dark as he could have seen by daylight. Then they plodded over a ploughed field. Once she stumbled, but he caught her. He himself had an almost supernatural sense of country; in the next field he checked her abruptly and guided her round a fallen tree that she would have sworn he could not have been told of by his eyes. Came another hedge, a ditch, and a field of corn; he found a straight path through it, and she heard him husking a handful of ears as he walked.
"It's not even Sunday any longer," he remarked, "so we shan't be bawled out."
And once again she was bewildered by a mind that could remember such pleasant far-off things at such a time—Scribes and Pharisees, old family Bibles, fields of Palestine!
Presently they came to a gate; the Saint ran his fingers lightly along the top, feeling for wire; then he stood still.
"What is it? "she asked.
"The road!"
He might have been Cortez at gaze before the Pacific; his ravishment could not have been greater.
He vaulted over; she followed more cautiously, and he lifted her down, with a breath of laughter. They went on. Road he might have called, but it was really no more than a lane; yet it was something—a less nerve-racking surface for her feet, at least. For about half a mile they took its winding course, until she had lost her bearings altogether. With that loss she lost also an iota of the fickle enthusiasm that had helped her over the fields; about a road, or even a lane, there was a brusque reminder of more prosaic atmospheres and more ordinary nights. And it was definitely the threshold of a destination. . . .
But Simon Templar was happy; as he walked he hummed a little tune; she could feel, as by a sixth sense, the quickened spring in his step, though he never set a pace that would have spent her endurance. His presence was even more vital for this restraint. For the destination and the destiny were his own; and she knew that there was a song in his heart as well as on his lips, an exultation that no one could share.
So they were following the lane. And then, of a sudden, he stopped, his song stopping with him; and she saw that the lane had at last brought them out upon an unquestionable road. She saw the telegraph poles reaching away on either side—not very far, for they stood between two bends. But it was a road. . . .
"I don't see a signpost," she remarked dubiously. "Which way shall we—"
"Listen!"
She strained her ears, and presently she was able to pick up the sound he had heard—the purr of a powerful car.
"Who cares about signposts?" drawled the Saint. "Why, this bird might even give us a lift—it might even be Roger!"
They stood by the side of the road, waiting. Slowly the purr grew louder. Simon pointed, and she saw the reflection of the headlights as a pale nimbus in the sky; then, suddenly a clump of trees stood out black and stark against a direct glare.
"Stand by to glom the Saltham Limited!"
The Saint had slipped out into the middle of the road. Beyond him, at the next bend in the road, a hedge and a tree were picked out in a strengthening shaft of light. The voice of the car was rising to a querulous drone. Then, all at once, the light began to sweep along the hedge; then, in another instant, it blazed clear down the road itself, corrugating the tarmac with shadows; and the Saint stood full in the centre of the blinding beam, waving his arms.
She heard the squeal of the brakes as he stepped aside; and the car slid past with an expiring swish of wind, and came to rest a dozen yards beyond.
The Saint sprinted after it, and Sonia Delmar was only just behind him.
"Could you tell me—"
"Ja!"
The monosyllable cracked out with a guttural swiftness that sent the Saint's hand flying to his hip, but the man in the car already had him covered. Simon grasped the fact—in time.
But the girl was not a yard away, and she also had a gun. Simon tensed himself for the shot. . . .
"Put up your hands, Herr Saint."
There was a note of leering triumph in the harsh voice, and the Saint, blinking the last of the glare of the headlights out of his eyes, recognized the man. Slowly he raised his hands, and his breath came in a long sigh.
"Bless my soul!" said the Saint, who was never profane on really distressing occasions. "It's dear old Hermann. And he's going to give us our lift!"