SONIA DELMAR heard the shooting as she was hustled across the deck and up an outside companion. Before that, she had seen the speeding motorboat and the shape of the man crouched in the stern. The drone of its engine had rattled deafeningly across the waters as she was hurried up the gangway; she had heard the perplexed mutterings of her captors, without being able to understand what they said; and she herself, in a different way, had been as puzzled as they were. She had seen the Saint on the cliff path, and had understood from the signs he made that he was not yet proposing to interfere; after a fashion, she had been relieved, for so far she had gained no useful information. But she appreciated that, if he had meant to interfere, his chance had been then and there, on the cliff path, when he could have taken by surprise a mere handful of men who would have been additionally hampered by the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe; and she wondered what could have made him elect instead to come so noisily against a whole boatload.
But these questions had no hope of a leisured survey at that moment; they rocketed hazily across the back of her conscience as she stumbled onto the upper deck. The two men in charge of her, at least, placed the mysterious motorboat second in their considerations, whatever their fellows might be doing. There was a quietly efficient discipline about everything that she had seen done that was unlike anything she had expected to find in such a criminal organization as Simon Templar had pictured for her. Nor had anything that she had read of the ways of crime prepared her for such an efficiency: the gangs on her native side of the Atlantic, by all reports, were not to be compared with this. Again came that vicious snap of the rifle on the lower deck; but the men who led her took no notice. She tripped over a cleat in the darkness, and one of the men caught her and pulled her roughly back to her balance; then a door was opened, and she barely had a glimpse of the lighted cabin within before she herself was inside it, and she heard the key turned in the lock behind her.
The howl of the motorboat grew steadily louder, and then died down again to a fading moan.
Crack!... Crack!...
The clatter of two more shots came to her ears as she reached an open porthole; and then she could see the boat itself and the swaying figure in the stern. She saw the boat turn and make for the ship again; and then came the last shot....
Slowly she sank onto a couch and closed her eyes. She felt no deep emotion—neither grief, nor terror, nor despair. Those would come afterwards. But at the time the sense of unreality was too powerful for feeling. It seemed incredible that she should be there, on that ship, alone, alive, destined for an unknown fate, with her one hope of salvation lost in the smooth waters outside. Quite quietly she sat there. She heard the empty motorboat whine past, close by, for the last time, and hum away towards the shore. Her mind was cold and numb. When she heard a new sound in the night— a noise not unlike that of the motorboat, but more deep-throated and reverberating—she did not move. And when upon that sound was superimposed the thrum and clutter of steam winch forward, she opened her eyes slowly and felt dully surprised that she could see....
Mechanically she took in her prosaic surroundings.
The cabin in which she sat was large and comfortably furnished. There were chairs, a table, a desk littered with papers, and one bulkhead completely covered with well-filled bookcases. One end of the cabin was curtained off; and she guessed that there would be a tiny bedroom beyond the curtain, but she did not move to investigate.
Presently she knelt up on the couch and looked up again. The ship was turning, and the dark coast swung lazily into view. Somewhere on the black line of land a tiny light winked intermittently for a while, and vanished. After a pause, the light flickered again, more briefly. She knew that it must have been a signal from the house on the cliffs, but she could not read the code. It would not have profited her to know that a question had been asked and answered and felicitations returned; for the answer said that the Saint was dead....
She lay down again, and stared at the ceiling with blind eyes. She did not think. Her brain had ceased to function. She would have liked to weep, to fling herself about in a panic of fear; but though there was the impulse to do both, she knew that neither outlet would have been genuine. That kind of thing was not in her. She could only lie still, in a paralyzing daze of apathy. She lost track of time. It might have been five minutes or fifty before the cabin door opened, and she turned her head to see who had come.
"Good-evening, Miss Delmar."
It was a tall man, weather-beaten of face and trimly bearded, in a smart blue uniform picked out with gold braid. His greeting was perfectly courteous.
"Are you the captain?" she asked; and he nodded.
"But I am not responsible for your present position," he said. "That is the responsibility of my employer."
"And who's he?"
"I am not at liberty to tell you."
He spoke excellent English; she could only guess at his nationality.
"I suppose," she said, "you know that you're also responsible to the American Government?"
"For you, Miss Delmar? I do not think I shall be charged."
"Also to the British Government—for murder."
He shrugged.
"There is no great risk, even of that accusation."
She was silent for a moment. Then she asked, casually: "And what's your racket—ransom?"
"You have not been informed?"
"I have not."
"Good. That was a question I came to ask." He sat down at the desk and I selected a thin cigar from a box which he produced from a drawer. "You have been brought here, frankly, in order that you may be married to a gentleman who is on board—a Mr. Vassiloff. The ceremony will be performed whether you consent or not; and if there should ever be a need to bring forward witnesses, we have those who will swear that you consented. I am told that is is necessary for you to marry Mr. Vassiloff—I do not know why."
THE NEWS did not startle her. It came as a perfect vindication of the Saint's deductions; but now it had a grim significance that had been lacking before. Yet the sense of unreality that lay at the root of her inertia became by that much greater instead of less. She could not imagine that she was dreaming—not in that bright light, that commonplace atmosphere—but still she could not adjust herself to the facts. She had found herself speaking mechanically, as calmly as if she had been sitting in the drawing room of the American Embassy in London, carrying on the game exactly as she had set out to play it, as if nothing had gone amiss. Her conscious mind was stunned and insentient; but some blind, indomitable instinct had emerged from the recesses of her subconscious to take command, so that she amazed whatever logic was left sensible enough within her to be amazed.
"Who is this man Vassiloff?"
"I am not informed. I have hardly spoken to him. He has kept to his cabin ever since he came on board, and he only came out when we were— shooting. He is on the bridge now, waiting to be presented."
"Don't you even know what he looks like?"
"I have scarcely seen him. I can tell you that he is tall, that he wears glasses, that he has a moustache. He may be young or old—perhaps he has a beard—I do not know. When I have seen him he has always had the collar of his coat buttoned over his chin. I assume that he does not wish to be known."
"Do you even know where we're going?"
"We go to Leningrad."
"And then?"
"As far as you are concerned, that is a matter for Mr. Vassiloff. My own employment will be finished."
His manner was impeccably restrained and impeccably distant. It made her realize the futility of her next question before she asked it.
"Aren't you at all interested in the meaning of what you're doing?"
"I am well paid not to be interested."
"People have been punished for what you're doing. You're very sure that you're going to escape."
"My employer is powerful as well as rich. I am well protected."
She nodded.
"But do you know who I am?"
"I have not been told."
"My father is one of the richest men in America. It's possible that he might be able to do even more for you than your present employer."
"I am not fond of your country, Miss Delmar." He rose, deferential and yet definite, dismissing her suggestion without further speech, as if he found the discussion entirely pointless. "May I tell Mr. Vassiloff that he may present himself?'"
She did not answer; and, with a faintly cynical bow, he passed to the door and went out.
She sat without moving, as he had left her. In those last few moments of conversation her consciousness had begun to creep back to life, but not at all in the way she would have expected. She was still unaware of any real emotion; only she became aware of the frantic pounding of her heart as the sole sign of a nervous reaction which she felt in no other way. But a queer fascination had gripped her, born, perhaps, of the utter hopelessness of her plight, a fantastic spell that subordinated every rational reflection to its own grotesque seduction. She was a helpless prisoner on that ship, weaponless, without a single human soul to stand by her, and every pulse of the rhythmic vibrations that she could feel beneath her was speeding her farther and farther from all hope of rescue; she was to be married with or without her consent to a man she had never seen, and whose very name she had only just heard for the first time; and yet she could feel nothing but an eerie, nightmare curiosity. The hideous bizarreness of the experience had taken her in a paralyzing hold; the stark certainty that everything that the captain had announced would inexorably follow in fact seemed to sharpen and vivify all her senses, while it stupefied all initiative; so that a part of her seemed to be detached and infinitely aloof, watching with impotent eyes the drama that was being enacted over herself. There was nothing else that she could do; and so, with that strange fatalism wrapping her in an inhuman impassivity she had only that one superbly insane idea—to see the forlorn game through to the bitter end, for what it was worth . . . facing the inevitable finale with frozen eyes. . . .
And, if she thought of anything else, she thought with a whimsical homesickness of a sunny room on a quiet Sunday morning, and the aromatic hiss and crackle of grilling bacon; and she thought she would like a cigarette....
And then the door opened again.
It was not the captain. This man came alone—a man such as the captain had described, with the wide brim of a black velour overshadowing his eyes, and the fur collar of a voluminous coat turned up about his face.
"Good-evening—Sonia.''
She answered quietly, with a soft contempt: "You're Vassiloff, I suppose?"
"Alexis."
"Once," she said, "I had a dog called Alexis. It's a nice name—for a dog."
He laughed, sharply.
"And in a few moments," he said, "you will have a husband of the same name. So are you answered."
He pushed a chair across to the couch where she sat, and settled himself, facing her, his hands clasped over his knees. Through his thick spectacles a pair of pale blue eyes regarded her fixedly.
"You are beautiful," he remarked presently. "I am glad. It was promised me that you would be beautiful."
When he spoke it was like some weird Oriental chant; his voice rose and fell monotonously with out reference to context, and remained horribly dispassionate. For the first time the girl felt a qualm of panic, that still was not strong enough to shake her bleak inertia.
She cleared her throat.
"And who made this promise?" she inquired calmly.
"Ah, you would like to know!"
"I'm just naturally interested."
"It was an old friend of me." He nodded ruminatively, still staring, like a bearded mandarin. "Yess—I think Sir Isaac Lessing will be sorry to have lost you...."
Then the nodding slowed up and stopped abruptly, and the stare went on.
"You love him—Sir Isaac?"
"Does that matter? I don't see what difference it makes—now."
"It makes a difference."
"The only difference I can see is that Sir Isaac Lessing had a few gentlemanly instincts. For instance, he did take the trouble to ask my permission before he arranged to marry me."
"Ah!" Vassiloff bent forward. "You think Sir Isaac is a gentleman? Yet he is an enemy of me. This"—he spread out one hand and returned it to his knee—"has been done because he is an enemy."
Sonia shrugged, returning the man's stare coldly. Her composed indifference seemed to infuriate Vassiloff. He leaned further forward, so that his face was close to hers, and a pale flame glinted over his eyes.
"You are ice, yess? But listen. I will melt you. And first I tell you why I do it."
He put his hand on her shoulder; and she recoiled from the touch; but he took no notice.
"Once," he said, in that crooning voice, "there was a very poor young man in London. He went to ask for work of a rich man. He was starving. He could not see the rich man at his office, so he went to the rich man's house, and there he see him. The rich man strike in his face, like he was dirt. And then, for fear the young man should strike him back, he call his servants, and say, 'Throw him out in the street.' I was that young man. The rich man is Sir Isaac Lessing."
"I should call that one of the most commendable things Lessing ever did," said the girl gently.
He ignored her interruption.
"Years go by. I go back to Russia, and there are revolutions. I am with them. I see many rich men die—men like Lessing. Some of them I kill myself. But always I remember Lessing, who strike in my face. I promoted myself—I have power—but always I remember."
Overhead, on the bridge, could be heard the regular pacing of the officer of the watch; but in that brightly lighted cabin Sonia felt as if there was no one but Alexis Vassiloff on the ship. His presence filled her eyes; his sing-song accents filled her ears.
"Lessing makes money with the oil. I, also, make control of the oil. He does not remember me, but still he try to strike in my face—but this time it is in the oil. I, too, try to fight him, but I cannot. There are great ones with him. And then I meet a great one, and he becomes a friend of me, and I tell him my story. And he make the plan. First, he will take you away from Lessing and give you to me. He show me your picture, and I say— yess. That will make Lessing hurt. It is for the strike in the face he once give me. But that is not enough. I must make to ruin Lessing. And my friend make another plan. He say that when he tell Lessing you are with me, Lessing will try to make war. 'Now,' he say, 'I will make Lessing think that when he make war against you he will have all Europe with him; but when the war come he will find all the big countries fight among themselves, and they cannot take notice of the little country Lessing will use to make his war against you.' All this my friend can do, because he is a great one. He is greater than Lessing. He is Rayt Marius. You know him?"
"I've heard of him."
"You have heard of him? Then you know he can do it. Behind him there are other great ones, greater than there are behind Lessing. He show me his plans. He will send out spies, and make the big countries hate each other. Then, when we have take you, he send men to kill someone—the French President, perhaps—and there is the war. It is easy. It is just another Serajevo. But it is enough. And I have my revenge—I, Vassiloff—for the strike in the face. I will have Sir Isaac Lessing crawl to my feet, but I will not be merciful. And our Russia will be great also. The big countries will fight each other, and they will be tired; and when we have finished one little country we will conquer another, and we shall be victorious over all Europe, we of the Revolution...."
The Russian's voice had risen to a higher pitch as he spoke, and the light of madness burned in his eyes.
Sonia watched him, listening, hypnotized. At no time before, even when she had heard and incredulously accepted the Saint's inspired deductions, had she fully grasped the immensity of the plot in which she had been made a pawn. And now she saw it in a blinding flash, and the vision appalled her.
As Vassiloff went on, the hideously solid facts on which his insanity was balanced showed up with greater and greater definition through his raving. It was here—all the machinery of which the Saint had spoken was there, and strains and stresses and counter-actions measured and calculated and balanced, every cog in the hole ghastly engine cut and ground and trued-up ready for Marius to play with as he chose. How the mechanism would be put together did not matter—whether Marius had lied to Vassiloff, or meant to lie to Lessing. The rocks had been drilled in their most vital parts, the charges loaded and tamped in, the fuses laid; the tremendous fact was that the Saint had been right—right in every prophecy, vague only in the merest details. The axe had been laid to the root of the tree....
She saw the conspiracy then as the Saint himself had seen it, months before: intrigue and counter-plot, deception and deception again, and the fiendish forces that had been disentombed for this devil's sleight-of-hand. And she saw in imagination the unleashing of those forces—the tapping drums and the blast of bugles, the steady tramp of marching feet, the sonorous drone of the war birds snarling through the sky. Almost she could hear the earth-shaking reverberations of the guns, the crisp clatter of rifle fire; and she saw the swirling mists of gas, and men reeling and stumbling through hell; she had seen and heard these things for a dollar's worth of evening entertainment, in a comfortably upholstered chair. But the men there had been only actors, fighting again the battles of a generation that was already left behind; the men she saw in her vision were of her own age, men she knew....
She hardly heard Vassiloff any more. She was thinking, instead, of that morning. "Have we the right?" Simon Templar had asked. . . . And she saw once again the sickening sway and plunge of the figure in the motorboat. . . . Roger Conway— where had he been? What had happened to him. He should have been somewhere around; but she had not seen him. And if he were not to be counted in it meant that no power on earth could prevent her vision coming true. . . . "That'd mean we'd given Marius the game...."
Slowly, grotesquely, the presence of Alexis Vassiloff drifted in again upon her tempestuous thought.
His voice had sunk back to that eerie crooning note to which it had been tuned before.
"But you—you will not be like the others. You will stand beside me, and we will make a new empire together, you and I. You will like that?"
She started up.
"I'll see you damned first!"
"So you are still cold ....."
His arms went round her, drawing her to him. With her hands still securely bound behind her back she was at his mercy—and she knew what that mercy would be. She kicked at his legs, but he bore her down upon the couch; she felt his hot breath on her face....
'' Let me go—you swine —''
"You are cold, but I will melt you. I will teach you how to be warm—soft—loving. So —"
Savagely she butted her head into his face, but he only laughed. His lips stung her neck, and an uncontrollable shudder went through her. His hands clawed at her dress....
"Are you ready, Mr. Vassiloff?"
The captain spoke suavely from the doorway, and Vassiloff rose unsteadily to his feet.
"Yess," he said thickly. "I am ready."
Then he leered down again at the girl.
"I go to prepare myself," he said. "It is perhaps better that we should be married first. Then we shall not be disturbed...."
THE DOOR closed behind him.
Without a flicker of expression, the captain crossed the cabin and sat down at his desk. He drew towards him a large book like a ledger, found a place in it, and left it open in front of him; then, from the box in his drawer, he selected another of his thin cigars, lighted it, and leaned back at his ease. He scarcely spared the girl a glance.
Sonia Delmar waited without speaking. She remembered, then, how often she had seen such situations enacted on the stage and on the screen, how often she had read of them! ...
She found herself trembling; but the physical reaction had no counterpart in her mind. She could not help recalling all the stereotyped jargon that had been splurged upon the subject by a hundred energetic parrots. "A fate too horrible to contemplate"—"a thing worse than death." . . . All the heroines she had encountered faced the horror as if they had never heard of it before. She felt that she ought to have experienced the same emotions as they did; but she could not. She could only think of the game that had been thrown away—the splendid gamble that had failed.
At the desk, the captain uncrossed his legs and inhaled again from his cigar.
It seemed to Sonia Delmar that that little cabin was the centre of the world—and the world did not know it. It was hard to believe that in other rooms, all over the world, men and women were gathered together in careless comradeship, talking perhaps, reading perhaps, confident of a thousand tomorrows as tranquil as their yesterdays. She had felt the same when she had read that a criminal was to be executed the next day—that same shattering realization that the world was going on unmoved, while one lonely individual waited for dawn and the grim end of the world.. ..
And yet she sat upright and still, staring ahead with unfaltering eyes, buoyed with a bleak and bitter courage that was above reason. In that hour she found within herself a strength that she had not dreamed of, something in her breed that forbade any sign of fear—that would face death, or worse than death, with scornful lips.
And the door opened and Vassiloff came in.
Anything that he had done to "prepare" himself was not readily visible. He still wore his hat, and his fur collar was muffled even closer about his chin; only his step seemed to have become more alert.
He gave the girl one cold-blooded glance; and then he turned to the captain.
"Let us waste no more time," he said harshly.
The captain stood up.
"I have the witnesses waiting, Mr. Vassiloff. Permit me...."
He went to the door and called two names curtly. There was a murmured answer; and the owners of the names came in—two men in coarse trousers and blue seamen's jerseys, who stood gazing uncomfortably about the cabin while the captain wrote rapidly in the book in front of him. Then he addressed them in a language that the girl could not understand; and, hesitantly, one of the men came forward and took the pen. The other followed suit. Then the captain turned to Vassiloff.
"If you will sign —"
As the Russian scrawled his name the captain spoke a brusque word of dismissal, and the witnesses filed out.
"Your wife should also sign," added the captain, turning back to the desk. "Perhaps you will arrange that?''
"I will." Vassiloff put down the pen. "I want to be left alone now—for a little while—with my wife. But I shall require to see you again. Where shall I find you?"
"I shall finish my cigar on the bridge."
"Good. I will call you."
Vassiloff waved his hand in a conclusive gesture; and, with a slightly sardonic bow, the captain accepted his discharge.
The door closed, but Vassiloff did not turn round. He still stood by the desk, with his back to the girl. She heard the snap of a cigarette case, the sizzle of a match; and a cloud of blue smoke wreathed up towards the ceiling. He was playing with her—cat and mouse....
"So," he said softly, "we are married—Sonia."
The girl drew a deep breath. She was shivering, in spite of the warmth of the evening; and she did not want to shiver. She did not want to add that relish to his gloating triumph—to see the sneer of sadistic satisfaction that would flame across his face. She wanted to be what he had called her— ice. ... To save her soul aloof and undefiled, infinitely aloof and terribly cold....
She said swiftly, breathlessly: "Yes—we're married—if that means anything to you.... But it means nothing to me. Whatever you do to me, you'll never be able to call me yours—never."
He had unbuttoned his coat and flung it back; it billowed away from his wide shoulders, making him loom gigantically under the light.
"Perhaps," he said, "you think you love someone else."
"I'm sure of it," she said in a low voice.
"Ah! Is it, after all, that you were not being sold to Sir Isaac Lessing for the help he could give your father?"
"Lessing means nothing to me."
"So there is another?"
"Does that matter?"
Another cloud of smoke went up towards the ceiling, "His name?"
She did not answer.
"Is it Roger Conway?" he asked; and anew fear chilled her heart.
"What do you know about him?" she whispered.
"Nearly everything, old dear," drawled the Saint; and he turned around, without beard, without glasses, smiling at her across the cabin, a mirthful miracle with the inevitable cigarette slanted rakishly between laughing lips.