In the midst of my triumph, which was as intense as if I myself, instead of pure luck, had engineered our journey, I became aware of a tiny qualm as I sat gazing across the stream. Perhaps the gathering night affected me, or the air, which was growing chilly, or the remnants of the village, which were cheerless, to say the least. But that castle, perched so darkly on its crag, with a strip of blood-red sky framing it, was at the heart of my feeling. If it had been a nice, worldly-looking, well-kept chateau, with poplared walks and a formal garden, I should have welcomed it with open arms; but it wasn’t, decidedly! It was the threatening age-blackened sort of place that inevitably suggests Fulc of Anjou, strongholds on the Loire, marauding barons, and the good old days with their concomitants of rapine and robbery and death.
It was picturesque, but it was intensely gloomy; the proper spot for a catastrophe rather than a happy denouement. I was not impressionable, of course; but now that I thought of it, our jaunt had been going with a smoothness almost ominous. Could one expect such clock-like regularity to run forever without a break?
Take the utter disappearance of the gray car, for instance. That had seemed to me reassuring; but was it? Those four men had cared enough about Miss Falconer’s movements to involve themselves in a murder. Why, then, should they have given up the chase in so mysterious a way?
And the girl herself! When I looked at her I felt horribly worried. She was shivering through her furs; yet it was not with the cold, I felt quite sure. With her hands clasped, she sat staring at that confounded castle with a look of actual hunger. She cared too much about this thing; she couldn’t stand a great deal more.
Well, she wouldn’t have to, I concluded, my brief misgivings fading. We were out of the woods; another hour would see the business closed. As for the men in the car, they were victims of their guilty consciences, were no doubt in full flight or hiding somewhere in terror of the law.
At any rate, there was no point in my sitting here like a graven image; so I roused myself and wrapped the rugs closer about the girl.
“I’m to drive to the chateau?” I inquired with recovered cheerfulness. I had to repeat the words before they broke her trance.
“Yes,” she answered. Suddenly, impulsively, she turned toward me, her face almost feverish, her eyes astonishingly large and bright. “I haven’t told you much,” she acknowledged tremulously; “but you won’t think that I don’t trust you. It is only that I couldn’t talk of it and keep my courage; and I must keep it a little longer—until we know the truth.”
“That’s quite all right, Miss Falconer.” I was switching on the lamps. Then I extinguished them; their clear acetylene glare seemed almost weirdly out of place. “We can muddle along without any lights. Not much traffic here,” I muttered. I had a feeling, anyhow, that unostentatiousness of approach might not be bad.
There was intense silence about us; not even a breeze was stirring. A thin crescent moon was out, silvering the river and the trees. The road was atrocious; on one dark stretch the car, rocking into a rut, jolted us viciously and brought my teeth together on the tip of my tongue.
“Sorry,” I gasped, between humiliation and pain.
With the silence and the dimness, we were like ghosts, the car like a phantom. An old stone bridge seemed to beckon us, and we crossed to the other side. There, at Miss Falconer’s gesture, I drew the automobile off the road at the edge of the town, halted it beneath some trees, and helped her to alight. We started up the hill together without a word.
Two ghosts! More and more, as we climbed through the wreck and desolation, that was what we seemed. The road was choked with stones between which the grass was sprouting; there was nothing left of the little church save a single pointed shaft. We climbed rapidly, the girl always gazing up at the castle with that same feverish eagerness. She had forgotten, I think, that I was there.
At last we were coming to the hilltop and the chateau. Rather breathless, I studied its looming walls, its turrets, its three round towers. It looked dark and inexplicably menacing, but I had recovered my form and could defy it. When we halted at a great iron-studded oak gate and Miss Falconer pulled the bell-rope, I was astonished. It had not occurred to me that the castle would be more inhabited than the town.
Nor was it, apparently; for no one answered its summons, though I could hear the bell jingling faintly somewhere within. Miss Falconer rang a second time, then a third; her face shone white in the moonlight; she was growing anxious.
“Did you think,” I ventured finally, “that there was some one here?”
“Yes; Marie-Jeanne,” she answered, listening intently. Then she roused herself. “I mean thegardienne. She never left, not even when the Germans came. They made her cook for them; she said she had been born in the keeper’s lodge, and her grandfather before her, and that she would rather die at Prezelay than go to any other place. But of course she may have walked down the river for the evening. Her son’s wife is at Santierre, two miles off. She may be there.”
“That’s it,” I agreed hastily, the more hastily because I doubted. “She’s sitting over a fire, toasting her toes, and gossiping and having a cup of tea, or whatever people like that use for an equivalent in these parts.” I suppressed the unwelcome thought that a woman living here alone ran a first-rate chance of getting her throat cut by strolling vagrants. “Shall we have to wait until she comes back?” I asked. “Then let’s sit down. I choose this stone!”
On my last word, however, something surprising happened. Miss Falconer, in her impatience, put a hand on the bolt of the gate, shook it, and raised it, and, lo and behold! the oak frame swung open. Before I quite realized the situation, we were inside, in a square courtyard, with thegardienne’slodge at the right of us, impenetrably barred and shuttered, and before us the portal of the castle, surmounted with quaint stone carvings of men in armor riding prancing steeds. The court, as revealed by the moonlight, was intact, but neglected. Weeds were sprouting between the square blocks of stone that paved it, and in the center a wide circular space, charred and blackened, showed where the German sentries had built their fires. It was not cheerful, nor was it homey. I scarcely blamed Marie-Jeanne for flitting. The faint sound of the cannonading had begun again in the distance, but otherwise the place was as silent as a tomb.
“It seems strange!” Miss Falconer murmured, looking about in puzzled fashion. “Why in the world should she have left the gate open in this careless way? Of course there is nothing here for thieves; the Germans saw to that; but still, as keeper—Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. It saves us from waiting till she comes home.”
As I followed her toward the castle entrance, she opened the bag she carried, and produced a candle, which I hastened to take and light. I nearly said, “The latest thing in the housebreaking line, madame, is electric torches, not tapers;” but I decided not to. After all, perhaps we were housebreakers. How could I tell?
Hot candle wax splashed my fingers and scorched them, but I scarcely noticed. My sense of high-gear adventure had reached its zenith now. There was something thrilling, something stimulating in this stealthy night entrance into a deserted castle. It was an experience, at all events; there was noconciergeto stump before one through dim passages and up winding staircases; no flood of dates and names and anecdotes poured inexorably into one’s bored ears to insure adouceurwhen the tour of the chateau should be done.
The door—faithless Marie-Jeanne!—opened as readily as the outer gate. We were entering. I glimpsed in a dim vista a superb Gothic hall of magnificent architecture and most imposing proportions, arched and carved and stretching off with apparent endlessness into the gloom. Holding up my light, I scanned the place with growing interest. It had not been demolished, but neither had it been spared. The furniture was gone, save for a few scattered chairs and a table; the walls were defaced with cartoons and scrawled inscriptions; the floor was stained, and littered with empty bottles and broken plates. From the chimney-place—a medieval-art jewel topped with carved and colored enamels—pieces had been hacked away by some deliberately destructive hand. I glanced at Miss Falconer, whose eyes had been following mine.
“They tore down the tapestries,” she said beneath her breath. “They slashed the old portraits with their swords and broke the windows and took away the statues and candlesticks and plate. They cut up the furniture and had it used for fire-wood; and the German captain and his officers had a feast here and drank to the fall of Paris and ordered their soldiers to burn the village to the ground. Oh, I don’t like the place any more; too much has happened. And—and I don’t like Marie-Jeanne’s not being here, Mr. Bayne. I feel as if there were something wrong about it. I believe I am a little—just a little afraid!”
“Come, now, you don’t expect me to believe that, do you?” I countered promptly. “Because I won’t. Why, it’s your pluck that has kept me up all day. Just the same, on general principles, I’ll take a look round if you’ll allow me. Here’s a chair, and if you will rest a minute, I’ll guarantee to find out.”
The chair I mentioned was standing near the chimney, and as I spoke I walked over to it and started to spin it round. It resisted me heavily; I bent over it, lifting my candle. Then I uttered an exclamation, stood petrified, and stared.
In the chair, concealed from us until now by the high carved back of wood, was something which at first looked like a huddled mass of garments, but which on closer scrutiny resolved itself into a woman in a striped dress, an apron, and a pair of heavy shoes. There was a cut on her cheek, a bruise on her forehead. Locks of graying hair straggled from beneath her disarranged white cap, and she glared at me from a lean, sallow face with a pair of terrified eyes.
She must be dead, I thought. No living woman could sit so still and stare so wildly. The scene in the inn garage rushed back upon me, and I must say that my blood turned cold. But she was alive, I saw now; she was certainly breathing. And an instant later I realized why she stayed so immobile; she was bound hand and foot to the chair she sat in, and a colored handkerchief, her own doubtless, had been twisted across her mouth to form a gag.
“I think,” I head myself saying, “that we have been maligning Marie-Jeanne.”
A choked, frightened cry from Miss Falconer made me wheel about sharply, to find her staring not a me, but at the further wall. Prepared now for anything under heaven, I followed her gaze. Above us, circling the whole hall, there ran a gallery from which at a distance of some fifteen feet from where we stood a wide stone staircase descended; and half-way down this, as motionless as statues, as indistinct as shadows, I saw four men in the uniform of officers of France.
For an uncanny moment I wondered whether they were specters. For a stupid one, I thought they might be people whom the girl had come here to meet. Still, if they were, she wouldn’t be looking at them in this paralyzed fashion. I could not see them plainly,—but they must be the men from Bleau.
“Well, Mr. Bayne,” the foremost was asking, “did you think we had deserted you? Not a bit of it! We came on ahead and rang up the old woman there and commandeered her keys. We’ve been killing time here for a good half hour, waiting for you. You must have had tire trouble. And you don’t seem very pleased to see us now that you’ve come—eh, what?”
At Bleau the previous night, I was recalling dazedly, there had been only three men wearing the horizon blue. Who was this fourth figure, who knew my name and spoke such colloquial English? I raised my candle as high as possible and scanned him. Then I stood transfixed.
“Van Blarcom!” I gasped. “And in a uniform, by all that’s holy!”
He grinned.
“No. You haven’t got that quite right,” he told me. “What’s the use keeping up the game now that we’re here, all friends together? My name isn’t Van Blarcom. It’s Franz von Blenheim, Mr. Bayne.”
The words of Franz von Blenheim seemed to fill the hall and reecho from the walls and arches, deafening me, leaving me stunned as if by an earthquake or by a flash of lightning from clear skies. Yet I never though of doubting them. Comatose as my state was, slowly as my brain was working, I recognized vaguely how many features of the mystery, both past and present, these words explained.
It was odd, but never once had it occurred to me that Van Blarcom might be a German. He himself, I began to realize, had taken care of that. With considerable acumen he had filled every one of our brief interviews with vigorous denunciations of somebody else, dark hints as to intrigues that surrounded me and might enmesh me, and solemn warnings and prudent counsels, which had brilliantly served his turn. He had kept me so busy suspecting Miss Falconer—at the thought I could have beaten my head against the wall in token of my abject shame—that my doubts had never glanced in his direction; a most humiliating confession, since I couldn’t deny, reviewing the past in this new light, that circumstances had afforded me every opportunity to guess the truth.
There was no time, however, for dwelling on my deficiencies. The next half hour would be an uncommonly lively one, I felt quite sure. I might call the thing bizarre, fantastic; I might dub it an extravaganza; the fact remained that I was shut up in this lonely spot with four entirely able-bodied Germans and must match wits with them over some affair that apparently was of international consequence; for if it had been a twopenny business, Herr von Blenheim, the star agent of the kaiser, would never have thought it worth his pains.
With all my fighting spirit rising to meet the odds against us, I cast a speculative eye over the Teutons, who had now dissolved their group. Van Blarcom himself—Blenheim, rather—descended in a leisurely fashion while one of his friends, remaining on the staircase, fixed me with a look of intentness almost ominous and the other two placed themselves as if casually before the door. They were stalwart, well set-up men, I acknowledged as I surveyed them. Though not bad at what our French friends callla boxe, I was outnumbered. It was obviously a case of strategy—but of what sort?
A much defaced table, flanked with a few battered chairs, stood near me, and with a premonition that I should want two hands presently, I set my candle there. Then I drew a chair forward and turned to the girl with outward coolness.
“Please sit down, Miss Falconer,” I invited. I wanted time.
She inclined her head and obeyed me very quietly. She was not afraid; I saw it with a rush of pride. As she sat erect, her head thrown back, on gloved hand resting on the table, she was a picture of spirit and steadiness and courage. If I had needed strength I should have found it in the fact that her eyes, oddly darkened as always when her errand was threatened did not rest on our captors, but turned toward me.
“We’ll all sit down,” Franz von Blenheim agreed most amiably. It evidently amused him to retain the late Mr. Van Blarcom’s dialect and air. “We can fix this business up in no time; so why not be sociable?” He strolled to a chair and sank into it and motioned me to do the same.
“Thanks,” I returned, not complying. “If you don’t mind, I’d like first to untie that woman. I confess to a queer sort of prejudice against seeing women bound and gagged. In fact I feel so strongly on the subject that it might spoil our whole conference for me.” I took a step toward the shadowy figure of Marie-Jeanne.
Blenheim did not move, but his eyes seemed to narrow and darken.
“Just leave her alone for the present. She is too fond of shrieking—might interrupt our argument,” he declared. “And see here, Mr. Bayne,” he added, warned by my manner, “I want to call your attention to the gentleman on the stairs, my friend Schwartzmann. He’s a crack shot, none better, and he has got you covered. Hadn’t you better sit down and have a friendly chat?”
Though the stairs were dim, I could see something glittering in the hand of the person mentioned, who was impersonating for the evening a dashing young captain of the general staff. My fingers strayed toward my pocket and my own revolver. Then I pried them away, temporarily, and took a provisional seat.
“That’s sensible,” Franz von Blenheim approved me blandly. “Now, Miss Falconer, you know what I’m here for, isn’t that so? Just hand me those papers and you’ll be as free as air. I’ll take myself off; you’ll never see me again probably. That’s a fair bargain, isn’t it? What do you say?”
I was sitting close to the girl, so close that her soft furs brushed me and I could feel the flutter of her breath against my cheek. At Blenheim’s proposition I glanced at her. She was measuring him steadily. Then she looked at me, and her eyes seemed to hold some message that I could not read.
“Perhaps, Miss Falconer,” I interposed, “you have not quite grasped the situation.” I was sparring for time; she wanted to convey something to me, I was sure. “It is rather complicated. This gentleman has turned out to be a well-known agent of the kaiser. He was traveling on theRe d’Italia, I gather, on a forged passport, and had helped himself to my baggage as the most convenient way of smuggling some papers to the other side.”
He grinned assentingly.
“You owe me one for that,” he owned. “You see, it was my second trip on that line, and I thought they might have me spotted; I had a lot of things to carry home,—reports, information, confidential letters, and I concluded they would be safer with a nice, innocent young man like you. It didn’t work, as things went. It was just a little too clever. But if you hadn’t mixed yourself up with this young lady, and tossed packages overboard for her under the noses of the stewards, and got yourself suspected and your baggage searched, I should have turned the trick!”
His share in the tangled episode on board the steamer was unfolding. I understood now why he had sprung to my rescue in the salon when I was accused. Naturally he had not wanted my traps searched, considering what was in them.
“As you say, you were a little too clever,” I agreed.
His eyes glinted viciously.
“Well, it’s no use crying over spilt milk,” he retorted; “and besides, the papers you are going to hand me to-night will even up the score. It was a piece of luck, my running across Miss Falconer on the liner. Of course the minute I heard her name I knew what she was crossing for.” The dickens he did! “All I had to do was to follow her, and by the time we reached Bleau I had guessed enough to come ahead of her. But I’ll admit, Mr. Bayne, now it’s all over, it made me nervous to have you popping up at every turn! I began to think that you suspected me—that you were trailing me. If you had, you know, I shouldn’t have stood a chance on earth. You could have said a word to the first gendarme you met and had me laid by the heels and ended it. That was why I kept warning you off. But I needn’t have worried. You drank in everything I told you as innocent as a babe!”
If he wanted revenge for my last remark, he had it. I looked at the girl beside me, so watchfully composed and fearless, then at the fixed, terrified glare of the motionless Marie-Jeanne. With a little rudimentary intelligence on my part this situation would have been spared us.
“Yes,” I acknowledged bitterly; “I did.”
“Except for that,” he grinned, “it went like clockwork. There wasn’t even enough danger in the thing to give it spice. Do you know, there isn’t a capital in Europe where I can’t get disguises, money, passports within twelve hours if I want them. Oh, you have a bit to learn about us, you people on the other side! I’ve crossed the ocean four times since the war started; I’ve been in London, Rome, Paris, Petrograd—pretty much everywhere. I’m getting homesick, though. Thelaissez-passerI’ve picked up, or forged, no matter which, takes me straight through to the Front; and I’ve got friends even in the trenches. Before the Frenchies know it I’ll be across no-man’s-land and inside the German lines!”
For a moment, as I listened, I was dangerously near admiring him. He was certainly exaggerating; but it couldn’t all be brag. The life of this spy of the first water, of international fame, must be rather marvelous; to defy one’s enemies with success, to journey calmly through their capitals, to stroll undetected among their agents of justice—were not things any fool could do. He carried his life in his hand, this Franz von Blenheim. He had courage; he even had genius along his special lines. His impersonation on the liner, shrewd, slangy, coarse-grained, patronizing, had been a triumph. Then, suddenly, I remembered a murdered boy beside whom I had knelt that morning, and my brief flicker of homage died.
“You think I can’t do it, eh?” He had misinterpreted my expression. “Well, let me tell you I did just a year ago and got over without a scratch. To get across no-man’s-land you have to play dead, as you Yankees put it; you lie flat on the ground and pull yourself forward a foot at a time and keep your eye on the search-lights so that when they come your way you can drop on your face and lie like a corpse until they move on. It’s not pleasant, of course; but in this game we take our chances. And now I think I’ll be claiming my winnings if you please.”
I straightened in my chair, recognizing a crisis. With his last phrase he had shed the bearing of Mr. John Van Blarcom, and from the disguise all in an instant there emerged the Prussian, insolent, overbearing, fixing us with a look of challenge, and addressing us with crisp command. No; the kaiser’s agent was not a figure of romance or of adventure. He was a force as able, as ruthless, as cruel as the land he served.
“Miss Falconer,” he demanded briefly, “where are those papers? I am not to be played with, I assure you. If you think I am, just recall this morning, and your chauffeur. We didn’t kill him for the pleasure of it; he had his chance as you have. But when we went for our car he was there in the garage, sleeping; he seemed to think we had designs on him, and tried to rouse the inn.”
“Do you call that an excuse for a murder?” I exclaimed. “You cold-blooded villain!”
“I don’t make excuses.” His voice was hard and arrogant. “I am calling the matter to your notice as a kind warning, Mr. Bayne. You said a little while ago that to see a woman gagged and bound distressed you. Well, unless I have those papers within five minutes, you will see something worse than that!”
At the moment what I saw was red. There was something beating in my throat, choking me; I knew neither myself nor the primitive impulses I felt.
“If you lay a finger on Miss Falconer,” I heard myself saying slowly, “I swear I’ll kill you.”
Then through the crimson mist that enveloped me I saw Blenheim laugh.
“Come, Mr. Bayne,” he taunted me, “remember our friend Schwartzmann. This is your business, Miss Falconer, I take it. What are you going to do?”
The girl flung her head back, and her eyes blazed as she answered him.
“You can torture me,” she said scornfully. “You can kill me. But I will never give you the papers; you may be sure of that.”
I thought of a number of things in the ensuing thirty seconds, but they all narrowed down swiftly to a mere thankfulness that I had been born. Suppose I hadn’t; or suppose I had not happened to stop at the St. Ives Hotel and sail on theRe d’Italia; or that I had remained in Rome with Jack Herriott instead of hurrying on to Paris; or had let my quest of the girl end in the rue St.-Dominique instead of trailing her to Bleau. If one of these links had been omitted, the chain of circumstance would have been broken, and Miss Falconer would have sat here confronting these four men alone.
It was extremely hard for me to believe that the scene was genuine. The dark hall, the one wavering, flickering candle lighting only the immediate area of our conference, the bound woman in the chair, the watchful attitude of our captors. Mr. Schwartzmann’s ready weapon—all were the sort of thing that does not happen to people in our prosaic day and age. It was like an old-time romantic drama; I felt inadequate, cast for the hero. I might have been Francois Villon, or some such Sothern-like incarnation, for all the civilized resources that I could summon. There were no bells here to be rung for servants, no telephones to be utilized, no police station round the corner from which to commandeer prompt aid.
The most alarming feature of the affair, however, was the manner of Franz von Blenheim, which was not so much melodramatic as businesslike and hard. At Miss Falconer’s defiance he looked her up and down quite coolly. Then, turning in his seat, he began giving orders to his men.
“Schwartzmann,” ran the first of these, “I want you to watch this gentleman. He will probably make some movement presently; if he does, you are to fire, and not to miss. And you”—he turned to the men by the door—“pile some wood in the chimney-place and light it. There are some sticks over yonder,—but if you don’t find enough, break up a chair. Then when you get a good blaze, heat me one of the fire-irons. Heat it red-hot. And be quick! We are wasting time!”
The color was leaving the girl’s cheeks, but she sat even straighter, prouder. As for me, for one instant I experienced a blessed relief. I had been right; it was all impossible. One didn’t talk seriously of red-hot irons.
“You must think you are King John,” I laughed. “But you’re overplaying. Don’t worry, Miss Falconer; he won’t touch you. There are things that men don’t do.”
He looked at me, not angrily, not in resentment, but in pure contempt; and I remembered. There were people, hundreds of them, in the burning villages of Belgium, in the ravaged lands of northern France, who had once felt the same assurance that certain things couldn’t be done and had learned that they could. I glanced at the men who were piling wood on the hearth, at their sullen blue eyes, their air of rather stupid arrogance. I had walked, it seemed, into a nightmare; but then, so had the world.
“This isn’t a tea party, Mr. Bayne,” said Franz von Blenheim. “It is war. Those papers belong to my government and they are going back. I shall stop at nothing, nothing on earth, to get them; so if you have any influence with this young lady, you had better use it now.”
“I am not afraid.” The girl’s voice was unshaken, bless her. “I said you could kill me—and I meant it. But I will not tell.”
“And I will not kill you, Miss Falconer.” The German’s tones were level, and his eyes, as they dwelt steadily on her, were as hard and cold as steel. “I don’t want you dead; I want you living, with a tongue and using it; and you will use it. You talk bravely, but you have no conception—how should you have?—of physical pain. When that iron is red-hot, if you have not spoken, I shall hold it to your arm and press it—”
“Damn you!” The cry was wrenched out of me. “Not while I am here!”
“You will be here, Mr. Bayne, just so long as it suits me.” A sort of cold ferocity was growing in Blenheim’s tones. “And you have yourself to thank for your position, let me remind you; you would thrust yourself in. I don’t know what you are doing in the business—a ridiculous mountebank in a leather cap and coat! It’s a way you Yankees have, meddling in things that don’t concern you. You seem to think that you have special rights under Providence, that you own everything in the universe, even to the high seas. Well, we’ll settle with your country for its munitions and its notes and its driveling talk about atrocities a little later, when we have finished up the Allies. And I’ll deal with you to-night if you dare to lift a hand.”
There seemed only one answer possible, and my muscles were stiffening for it when suddenly Miss Falconer’s handkerchief, a mere wisp of linen which she had been clenching between her fingers, dropped to the floor. With a purely automatic movement, I bent to recover it for her; she leaned down to receive it. Her pale face and lovely dilated eyes were close to me for a fleeting second, and though her lips did not move, I seemed to catch the merest breath, the faintest gossamer whisper that said:
“The stairs!”
Blenheim’s gaze, full of suspicion, was upon us as we straightened, but he could not possibly have heard anything; I had barely heard myself. I racked my brains. The stairs! But the man Schwartzmann was guarding them with his revolver. I couldn’t imagine what she meant; and then suddenly I knew.
Throughout the entire scene, whenever I had glanced at her, I had noticed the steady way in which her look met mine and then turned aside. It had seemed almost like a signal or a message she was trying to give me. And which way had her eyes always gone? Why, down the hall!
I looked in that direction and felt my heart leap up exultantly. Perhaps twenty feet from us, just where the radius of the candle-light merged off into the darkness, I glimpsed what seemed the merest ghost of a circular stone staircase, carved and sculptured cunningly, like lacy foam. Up into the dusk it wound, to the gallery, and to a door. Behold our objective! I wasted no precious time in pondering the whys and the wherefores. At any rate, once inside with the bolts shot we could count on a breathing-space.
I cast a final glance at Blenheim where he lolled across the table, and at the shadowy menacing figure of the armed sentinel on the stairs. The men at the hearth had piled their wood and were bending forward to light it.
“Be ready, please!” I said to the girl, aloud.
As I spoke I bent forward, seized the table by its legs, and raised it, and concentrated all the wrath, resentment and detestation that had boiled in me for half an hour into the force with which I dashed it forward against Blenheim’s face. He grunted profoundly as it struck him. Toppling over with a crash, he rolled upon the floor. The candle, falling, extinguished itself promptly, and we were left standing in a hall as black as ink.
Simultaneously with the blow I had struck there came a spit of flame from the staircase, a sharp crack, and as I ducked hastily a bullet spurted past me, within three inches of my head. Miss Falconer was beside me. Together we retreated, while a second shot, which this time went wide, struck the wall beyond us and proved that Schwartzmann, though handicapped, was not giving up the fight.
So far things had gone better than I had dared to think was possible. Now, however, they took a sudden and most unwelcome turn. One of the men by the chimney-place must have wasted no time in leaping for me; for at this instant, quite without warning, he catapulted on me through the darkness with the force of a battering-ram.
The table, which I still held clutched with a view to emergencies, broke the force of his onslaught. He reeled, stumbled, and collapsed on his knees. However, he was lacking neither in Teutonic efficiency nor in resource. Putting out a prompt hand, he seized my ankle and jerked my foot from under me; the table dropped from my grasp with a splintering uproar, and I fell.
Before I could recover myself my enemy had rolled on top of me, and I felt his fingers at my throat as he clamored in German for a light. He was a heavy man; his bulk was paralyzing; but I stiffened every muscle. With a mighty heave I turned half over, rose on my elbow, and delivered a blow at what, I fondly hoped, might prove the point of his chin.
Dark as it was, I had made no miscalculation. He dropped on me once again, but this time as an inert mass. Burrowing out from under him, I sprang to my feet aglow with triumph—and found myself in the clutch of the second gentleman from the chimney-place, who apparently had come hotfoot to his comrade’s aid.
I was fairly caught. His arms went round me like steel girders, pinioning mine to my sides before I knew what he was about. In sheer desperation I summoned all the strength I possessed and a little more. Ah! I had wrenched my right arm loose; now we should see! I raised it and managed, despite the close quarters at which we were contending, to plant a series of crashing blows on my adversary’s face.
The fellow, I must say, bore up pluckily beneath the punishment. He hung on. There would be a light in a moment, he was doubtless thinking, and when once that came to pass, it would be all over with me. But at my fifth blow he wavered groggily, and at my sixth, endurance failed him. He groaned softly. Then his grasp relaxed, and he collapsed quietly on the floor.
Throughout the swift march of these events we had heard nothing of Herr von Blenheim, a fact from which I deduced with thankfulness that he was temporarily stunned. Unluckily, he now recovered. As I stood victorious, but breathless, my cap lost in the scuffle and my coat torn, I heard him stirring, and an instant later he pulled himself to his feet and flashed on an electric torch.
By its weird beam I saw that Miss Falconer was close beside me. Good heavens! Why, I though in anguish, wasn’t she already upstairs? But I knew only too well; she wouldn’t desert her champion. It was probably too late now. Blenheim, much congested as to countenance, seemed on the point of springing; his battered aids were struggling up in menacing, if unsteady, fashion; and Mr. Schwartzmann, at length provided with the light he wanted, was aiming at me with ominous deliberation from his coign of vantage above.
However, we were at the circular staircase. Again I caught up the table and held it before us as a shield while we climbed upward, side by side. In the distance my friend Schwartzmann was hopefully potting at us. A bullet, with a sharp ping, embedded itself in the thick wood in harmless fashion; another struck the shaft beside me, splintering its stone. We were at the last turn—but our pursuers were climbing also. I bent forward and let them have the table, hurling it with all possible force.
As it catapulted down upon them it knocked Blenheim off his balance, and he in his unforeseen descent swept the others from their feet. A swearing, groaning mass, a conglomeration of helplessly waving arms and legs, they rolled downward. Victory! I was about to join Miss Falconer in the doorway when there came a final flash from the opposite staircase, and I felt a stinging sensation across my forehead and a spurt of blood into my eyes.
The pain of the slight wound promptly altered my intentions. Instead of leaving the gallery, I sprang forward to the balustrade. Whipping my revolver out at last, I aimed deliberately and fired; whereupon I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Schwartzmann rock, struggle, apparently regain his equilibrium, and then suddenly crumple up and pitch headlong down the stairs.
Below, Blenheim and his friend were extricating themselves from that blessed table. I passed through the door and thrust it shut and shot the bolts. We were safe for the present. I could not see Miss Falconer, nor did she speak to me; but her hand groped for my arm and rested there, and I covered it with one of mine.
Then, as we stood contentedly drawing breath, we heard steps mounting the staircase. Some one struck a vicious blow against the heavy door. Blenheim’s voice, hoarse and muffled, reached us through the panels.
“Can you hear me there?” it asked.
If tones could kill! I summoned breath enough to answer with cheerful coolness.
“Every syllable,” I responded. “What did you wish to say?”
“Just this.” He was panting, either with exhaustion or fury, and there were slow, labored pauses between his words. “I will give you half an hour, exactly, to come out—with the papers. After that we will break the door down. And then you can say your prayers.”
The sanctuary into which we had stumbled was as black as Erebus save for one dimly grayish patch, which, I surmised, meant a window. When those heavy feet had clumped down the staircase, silence enveloped us again, beatific silence. Instantly I banished the late Mr. Van Blarcom from my consciousness. With a good stout door between us what importance had his threats?
The truth was that my blood was singing through my veins and my spirits were soaring. I would gladly have stood there forever, triumphant in the dark, with Miss Falconer’s soft, warm fingers trembling a little, but lying in contented, almost cosy, fashion under mine. Had there ever been such a girl, at once so sweet and so daring? To think how she had waited for me all through that battle below!
A little breathless murmur came to me through the darkness.
“Oh, Mr. Bayne! You were so wonderful! How am I ever going to thank you?” was what it said.
“You needn’t. Let me thank you for letting me in on it!” I exulted happily. “I give you my word, I haven’t enjoyed anything so much in years. It was all a hallucination, of course; but it was jolly while it lasted. I was only worried every instant for fear the hall and the men would vanish, like an Arabian Nights’ palace or the Great Horn Spoon or Aladdin’s jinn!”
Very gently she withdrew her fingers, and my mood toppled ludicrously. Why had I been rejoicing? We were in the deuce of a mess! So far I had simply won a half hour’s respite to be followed by the deluge; for if Blenheim had been ruthless before, what were his probable intentions now?
“We have lost our candle in the fracas,” I muttered lamely.
“It doesn’t matter. I have another,” she answered in a soft, unsteady voice.
As she coaxed the light into being, I made a rapid survey. We were in a room of gray stone, of no great size and quite bare of furnishing, save for a few stone benches built into alcoves in the wall. The bareness of the scene emphasized our lack of resources. As a sole ray of hope, I perceived a possible line of retreat if things should grow too warm for us, a door facing the one by which we had come in.
With all the excitement, I had forgotten Mr. Schwartzmann’s bullet, which, I have no doubt, had left me a gory spectacle. At any rate, I frightened Miss Falconer when the candle-light revealed me. In an instant she was bending over me, forcing me gently down upon a particularly cold, hard bench.
“They shot you!” she was exclaiming. Her voice was low, but it held an astonishing protective fierceness. “They—they dared to hurt you! Oh, why didn’t you tell me? Is it very bad?”
“No! no!” I protested, dabbing futilely at my forehead. “It isn’t of the least importance. I assure you it is only a scratch. In fact,” I groaned, “nobody could hurt my head; it is too solid. It must be ivory. If I had had a vestige of intelligence, an iota of it, the palest glimmer, I should have known from the beginning exactly who these fellows were!”
She was sitting beside me now, bending forward, all consoling eagerness.
“That is ridiculous!” she declared. “How could you guess?”
“Easily enough,” I murmured. “I had all the clues at Gibraltar. Why, yesterday, on my way to your house in the rue St.-Dominique, I went over the whole case in the taxi, and still I didn’t see. I let the fellow confide in me on the ship and warn me on the train and give me a final solemn ultimatum at the inn last night and come on here to frighten you and threaten you—when just a word to the police would have settled him forever. By George, I can’t believe it! I should take a prize at an idiot show.”
She laughed unsteadily.
“I don’t see that,” she answered. “Why should you have suspected him when even the authorities didn’t guess? You are not a detective. You are a—a very brave, generous gentleman, who trusted a girl against all the evidence and helped her and protected her and risked your life for hers. Isn’t that enough? And about their frightening me downstairs—they didn’t. You see, Mr. Bayne—you were there.”
A wisp of red-brown hair had come loose across her forehead. Her face, flushed and royally grateful, was smiling into mine. Till that moment I had never dreamed that eyes could be so dazzling. I thrust my hands deep into my pockets; I felt they were safer so.
“What is it?” she faltered, a little startled, as I rose.
“Nothing—now,” I replied firmly. “I’ll tell you later, to-morrow maybe, when we have seen this thing through. And in the meantime, whatever happens, I don’t want you to give a thought to it. The German doesn’t live who can get the better of me—not after what you have said.”
The situation suddenly presented itself in rosy colors. I saw how strong the door was, what a lot of breaking it would take. And if they did force a way in, then I could try some sharp-shooting. But Miss Falconer was getting up slowly.
“Now the papers, Mr. Bayne,” said she.
To be sure, the papers! I had temporarily forgotten them.
“They can’t be here,” I said blankly, gazing about the room.
“No, not here. In there.” She motioned toward the inner door. “This is the old suite of the lords of Prezelay. We are in the room of the guards, where the armed retainers used to lie all night before the fire, watching. Then comes the antechamber and then the room of the squires and then the bedchamber of the lord.” Her voice had fallen now as if she thought that the walls were listening. “In the lord’s room there is a secret hiding-place behind a panel; and if the papers are at Prezelay, they will be there.”
I took the candle from her, turned to the door, and opened it.
“I hope they are,” I said. “Let us go and see.”
The antechamber, the room of the squires, the bedchamber of the lord. Such terms were fascinating; they called up before me a whole picture of feudal life. Thanks to the attentions of the Germans, the rooms were mere empty shells, however, though they must have been rather splendid when decked out with furniture and portraits and tapestries before the war.
Our steps echoed on the stone as we traversed the antechamber, a quaint round place, lined with bull’s-eye windows and presided over by the statues of four armed men. Another door gave us entrance to the quarter of the squires. We started across it, but in the center of the floor I stopped. In all the other rooms of the castle dust had lain thick, but there was none here. Elsewhere the windows had been closed and the air heavy and musty, but here the soft night breeze was drifting in. On a table, in odd conjunction, stood the remains of a meal, a roll of bandages, and a half-burned candle; and finally, against the wall lay a bed of a sort, a mattress piled with tumbled sheets.
Were these Marie-Jeanne’s quarters? I did not know, but I doubted. I turned to the girl.
“Miss Falconer,” I said, attempting naturalness, “will you go back to the guard-room and wait there a few minutes, please? I think—that is, it seems just possible that some one is hiding in yonder. I’d prefer to investigate alone if you don’t mind.”
I broke off, suddenly aware of the look she was casting round her. It did not mean fear; it could mean nothing but an incredulous, dawning hope. These signs of occupancy suggested to her something so wonderful, so desirable that she simply dared not credit them; she was dreading that they might slip through her fingers and fade away! I made a valiant effort at understanding.
“Perhaps,” I said, “you’re expecting some one. Did you think that a—a friend of yours might have arrived here before we came?” She did not glance at me, but she bent her head, assenting. All her attention was focused raptly on that bed beside the wall.
“Yes,” she whispered; “a long time before us. A month ago at least.” Her eyes had begun to shine. “Oh, I don’t dare to believe it; I’ve hardly dared to hope for it. But if it is true, I am going to be happier than I ever thought I could be again.”
She made a swift movement toward the door, but I forestalled her. Whatever that room held, I must have a look at it before she went. I flung the door open, blocked her passage, and stopped in my tracks, for the best of reasons. A young man was sitting on a battered oak chest beneath a window, facing me, and in his right hand, propped on his knees, there glittered a revolver that was pointed straight at my heart.
I stood petrified, measuring him. He was lightly built and slender. He had a manner as glittering as his weapon, and a pair of remarkably cool and clear gray eyes. His picturesqueness seemed wasted on mere flesh and blood it was so perfect. Coatless, but wearing a shirt of the finest linen, he looked like some old French duelist and ought, I felt, to be gazing at me, rapier in hand, from a gilt-framed canvas on the wall.
In the brief pause before he spoke I gathered some further data. He was a sick man and he had recently been wounded; at present he was keeping up by sheer courage, not by strength. His lips were pressed in a straight line, his eyes were shadowed, and his pallor was ghastly. Finally, he was wearing his left arm in a sling across his breast.
“Monsieur,” he now enunciated clearly, “will raise both hands and keep them lifted. Monsieur sees, doubtless, that I am in no state for a wrestling-match. For that very reason he must take all pains not to forget himself—for should he stir, however slightly, I grieve to say that I must shoot.”
The casualness of his tones made Blenheim’s menaces seem childish and futile. I had not the slightest doubt that he would keep his word. Yet, without any reason whatever, I liked him and I had no fear of him; I did not feel for a single instant that Miss Falconer was in danger; she was as safe with him, I knew instinctively, as she was with me.
I opened my lips to parley, but found myself interrupted. A cry came from behind me, a low, utterly rapturous cry. I was thrust aside, and saw the girl spring past me. An instant later she was by the stranger, kneeling, with her arms about him and her bright head against his cheek.
“Jean! Dear Jean!” she was crying between tears and laughter. “We thought you were dead! We thought you were never coming back to Raincy-la-Tour!”
It seemed to me that some one had struck my head a stunning blow. For an interval I stood dazed; then, painfully, my brain stirred. Things went dancing across it like sharp, stabbing little flames, guesses, memories, scraps of talk I had heard, items I had read; but they were scattered, without cohesion; like will-o’-the-wisps, they could not be seized.
There was a young man, a noble of France, who had been a hero. I had read of him in a certain extra, as my steamer left New York. He had disappeared. Certain papers had vanished with him. He had been suspected, because it was known that the Germans wanted those special documents. All the world, I thought dully, seemed to be hunting papers; the French, the Germans, Miss Falconer, and I.
Once more I looked at the man on the chest. He had dropped his pistol and was clasping the girl to him, soothing her, stroking her hair. My brain began to work more rapidly. The little flashes of light seemed to run together, to crystallize into a whole. I knew.
Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier, the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour, the Firefly of France.