Tiyang, looming ape-like on his haunches in the deepening dusk, moulded and massaged the Ginseng roots, one after another. And one after another, tiny naked creatures wriggled out of his palms between his fingers and scuttled away into the herbage.
Already the dim lawn was alive with them, crawling, scurrying through the grass, creeping in among the flower-beds, little, ghostly-white things that glimmered from shade into shadow like moonbeams.
Tressa’s mouth touched her husband’s ear:
“It is for the secret of Destruction that the Yezidee seeks. But first he must learn the secret of creation. He is learning.... And he must learn no more than he has already learned.”
“That Yezidee is a living man. Shall I fire?”
“No.”
“I can kill him with the first shot.”
“Hark!” she whispered excitedly, her hand closing convulsively on her husband’s arm.
The whip-crack of a rifle-shot still crackled in their ears.
Tiyang had leaped to his feet in the dusk, a Ginseng root, half-alive, hanging from one hand and beginning to squirm.
Suddenly the first moonbeam fell across the wall. And in its lustre Tressa rose to her knees and flung up her right hand.
Then it was as though her palm caught and reflected the moon’s ray, and hurled it in one blinding shaft straight into the dark visage of Tiyang-Khan.
The Yezidee fell as though he had been pierced by a shaft of steel, and lay sprawling there on the grass in the ghastly glare.
And where his features had been there gaped only a hole into the head.
Then a dreadful thing occurred; for everywhere the grass swarmed with the little naked creatures he had made, running, scrambling, scuttling, darting into the black hole which had been the face of Tiyang-Khan.
They poured into the awful orifice, crowding, jostling one another so violently that the head jerked from side to side on the grass, a wabbling, inert, soggy mass in the moonlight.
And presently the body of Tiyang-Khan, Warden of the Rampart of Gog and Magog, and Lord of the Seventh Tower, began to burn with white fire—a low, glimmering combustion that seemed to clothe the limbs like an incandescent mist.
On the wall knelt Tressa, the glare from her lifted hand streaming over the burning form below.
Cleves stood tall and shadowy beside his wife, the useless pistol hanging in his grasp.
Then, in the silence of the woods, and very near, they heard Sansa laughing. And Selden’s anxious voice:
“Arrak is dead. The Sou-Sou hangs across a rock, head down, like a shot squirrel. Is all well with you?”
“Tiyang is on his way to his star,” said Tressa calmly. “Somewhere in the world his body has bid its mind farewell.... And so his body may live for a little, blind, in mental darkness, fed by others, and locked in all day, all night, until the end.”
Sansa, at the base of the wall, turned to Selden.
“Shall I bring my body with me, one day, my lord?” she asked demurely.
“Oh, Sansa——” he whispered, but she placed a fragrant hand across his lips and laughed at him in the moonlight.
In 1920 the whole spiritual world was trembling under the thundering shock of the Red Surf pounding the frontiers of civilisation from pole to pole.
Up out of the hell-pit of Asia had boiled the molten flood, submerging Russia, dashing in giant waves over Germany and Austria, drenching Italy, France, England with its bloody spindrift.
And now the Red Rain was sprinkling the United States from coast to coast, and the mindless administration, scared out of its stupidity at last, began a frantic attempt to drain the country of the filthy flood and throw up barriers against the threatened deluge.
In every state and city Federal agents made wholesale arrests—too late!
A million minds had already been perverted and dominated by the terrible Sect of the Assassins. A million more were sickening under the awful psychic power of the Yezidee.
Thousands of the disciples of the Yezidee devil-worshipers had already been arrested and held for deportation,—poor, wretched creatures whose minds were no longer their own, but had been stealthily surprised, seized and mastered by Mongol adepts and filled with ferocious hatred against their fellow men.
Yet, of the Eight Yezidee Assassins only two now remained alive in America,—Togrul, and Sanang, the Slayer of Souls.
Yarghouz was dead; Djamouk the Fox, Kahn of the Fifth Tower was dead; Yaddin-ed-Din, Arrak the Sou-Sou, Gutchlug, Tiyang Khan, all were dead. Six Towers had become dark and silent. From them the last evil thought, the last evil shape had sped; the last wicked prayer had been said to Erlik, Khagan of all Darkness.
But his emissary on earth, Prince Sanang, still lived. And at Sanang’s heels stole Togrul, Tougtchi to Sanang Noïane, the Slayer of Souls.
In the United States there had been a cessation of the active campaign of violence toward those in authority. Such unhappy dupes of the Yezidees as the I. W. W. and other radicals were, for the time, physically quiescent. Crude terrorism with its more brutal outrages against life and law ceased. But two million sullen eyes, in which all independent human thought had been extinguished, watched unblinking the wholesale arrests by the government—watched panic-stricken officials rushing hither and thither to execute the mandate of a miserable administration—watched and waited in dreadful silence.
In that period of ominous quiet which possessed the land, the little group of Secret Service men that surrounded the young girl who alone stood between a trembling civilisation and the threat of hell’s own chaos, became convinced that Sanang was preparing a final and terrible effort to utterly overwhelm the last vestige of civilisation in the United States.
What shape that plan would develop they could not guess.
John Recklow sent Benton to Chicago to watch that centre of infection for the appearance there of the Yezidee Togrul.
Selden went to Boston where a half-witted group of parlour-socialists at Cambridge were talking too loudly and loosely to please even the most tolerant at Harvard.
But neither Togrul nor Sanang had, so far, materialised in either city; and John Recklow prowled the purlieus of New York, haunting strange byways and obscure quarters where the dull embers of revolution always smouldered, watching for the Yezidee who was the deep-bedded, vital root of this psychic evil which menaced the minds of all mankind,—Sanang, the Slayer of Souls.
Recklow’s lodgings were tucked away in Westover Court—three bedrooms, a parlour and a kitchenette. Tressa Cleves occupied one bedroom; her husband another; Recklow the third.
And in this tiny apartment, hidden away among a group of old buildings, the very existence of which was unknown to the millions who swarmed the streets of the greatest city in the world,—here in Westover Court, a dozen paces from the roar of Broadway, was now living a young girl upon whose psychic power the only hope of the world now rested.
The afternoon had turned grey and bitter; ragged flakes still fell; a pallid twilight possessed the snowy city, through which lighted trains and taxis moved in the foggy gloom.
By three o’clock in the afternoon all shops were illuminated; the south windows of the Hotel Astor across the street spread a sickly light over the old buildings of Westover Court as John Recklow entered the tiled hallway, took the stairs to the left, and went directly to his apartment.
He unlocked the door and let himself in and stood a moment in the entry shaking the snow from his hat and overcoat.
The sitting-room lamp was unlighted but he could see a fire in the grate, and Tressa Cleves seated near, her eyes fixed on the glowing coals.
He bade her good evening in a low voice; she turned her charming head and nodded, and he drew a chair to the fender and stretched out his wet shoes to the warmth.
“Is Victor still out?” he inquired.
She said that her husband had not yet returned. Her eyes were on the fire, Recklow’s rested on her shadowy face.
“Benton got his man in Chicago,” he said. “It was not Togrul Kahn.”
“Who was it?”
“Only a Swami fakir who’d been preaching sedition to a little group of greasy Bengalese from Seattle.... I’ve heard from Selden, too.”
She nodded listlessly and lifted her eyes.
“Neither Sanang nor Togrul have appeared in Boston,” he said. “I think they’re here in New York.”
The girl said nothing.
After a silence:
“Are you worried about your husband?” he asked abruptly.
“I am always uneasy when he is absent,” she said quietly.
“Of course.... But I don’t suppose he knows that.”
“I suppose not.”
Recklow leaned over, took a coal in the tongs and lighted a cigar. Leaning back in his armchair, he said in a musing voice:
“No, I suppose your husband does not realise that you are so deeply concerned over his welfare.”
The girl remained silent.
“I suppose,” said Recklow softly, “he doesn’t dream you are in love with him.”
Tressa Cleves did not stir a muscle. After a long silence she said in her even voice:
“Do you think I am in love with my husband, Mr. Recklow?”
“I think you fell in love with him the first evening you met him.”
“I did.”
Neither of them spoke again for some minutes. Recklow’s cigar went wrong; he rose and found another and returned to the fire, but did not light it.
“It’s a rotten day, isn’t it?” he said with a shiver, and dumped a scuttle of coal on the fire.
They watched the blue flames playing over the grate.
Tressa said: “I could no more help falling in love with him than I could stop my heart beating.... But I did not dream that anybody knew.”
“Don’t you think he ought to know?”
“Why? He is not in love with me.”
“Are you sure, Mrs. Cleves?”
“Yes. He is wonderfully sweet and kind. But he could not fall in love with a girl who has been what I have been.”
Recklow smiled. “What have you been, Tressa Norne?”
“You know.”
“A temple-girl at Yian?”
“And at the Lake of the Ghosts,” she said in a low voice.
“What of it?”
“I can not tell you, Mr. Recklow.... Only that I lost my soul in the Yezidee Temple——”
“That is untrue!”
“I wish it were untrue.... My husband tells me that nothing can really harm the soul. I try to believe him.... But Erlik lives. And when my soul at last shall escape my body, it shall not escape the Slayer of Souls.”
“That is monstrously untrue——”
“No. I tell you that Prince Sanang slew my soul. And my soul’s ghost belongs to Erlik. How can any man fall in love with such a girl?”
“Why do you say that Sanang slew your soul?” asked Recklow, peering at her averted face through the reddening firelight.
She lay still in her chair for a moment, then turned suddenly on him:
“Hedidslay it! He came to the Lake of the Ghosts as my lover; he meant to have done it there; but I would not have him—would not listen, nor suffer his touch!—I mocked at him and his passion. I laughed at his Tchortchas. They were afraid of me!—”
She half rose from her chair, grasped the arms, then seated herself again, her eyes ablaze with the memory of wrongs.
“How dare I show my dear lord that I am in love with him when Sanang’s soul caught my soul out of my body one day—surprised my soul while my body lay asleep in the Yezidee Temple!—and bore it in his arms to the very gates of hell!”
“Good God,” whispered Recklow, “what do you mean? Such things can’t happen.”
“Why not? They do happen. I was caught unawares.... It was one golden afternoon, and Yulan and Sansa and I were eating oranges by the fountain in the inner shrine. And I lay down by the pool andmade the effort—you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. My soul left my body asleep and I went out over the tops of the flowers—idly, without aim or intent—as the winds blow in summer.... It was in the Wood of the White Moth that I saw Sanang’s soul flash downward like a streak of fire and wrap my soul in flame!... And, in a flash, we were at the gates of hell before I could free myself from his embrace.... Then, by the Temple pool, among the oranges, I cried out asleep; and my terrified body sat up sobbing and trembling in Yulun’s arms. But the Slayer of Souls had slain mine in the Wood of the White Moth—slain it as he caught me in his flaming arms.... And now you know why such a woman as I dare not bend to kiss the dust from my dear Lord’s feet—Aie-a! Aie-a! I who have lost my girl’s soul to him who slew it in the Wood of the White Moth!”
She sat rocking in her chair in the red firelight, her hands framing her lovely face, her eyes staring straight ahead as though they saw opening before them through the sombre shadows of that room all the dread magic of the East where the dancing flame of Sanang’s blazing soul lighted their path to hell through the enchanted forest.
Recklow had grown pale, but his voice was steady.
“I see no reason,” he said, “why your husband should not love you.”
“I tell you my girl’s soul belonged to Sanang—was part of his, for an instant.”
“It is burned pure of dross.”
“It isburned.”
Recklow remained silent. Tressa lay deep in her armchair, twisting her white fingers.
“What makes him so late?” she said.... “I sent my soul out twice to look for him, and could not find him.”
“Send it again,” said Recklow, fearfully.
For ten minutes the girl lay as though asleep, then her eyes unclosed and she said drowsily: “I can not find him.”
“Did—did you learn anything while—while you were—away?” asked Recklow cautiously.
“Nothing. There is a thick darkness out there—I mean a darkness gathering over the whole land. It is like a black fog. When the damned pray to Erlik there is a darkness that gathers like a brown mist——”
Her voice ceased; her hands tightened on the arms of her chair.
“Thatis what Sanang is doing!” she said in a breathless voice.
“What?” demanded Recklow.
“Praying!That is what he is doing! A million perverted minds which he has seized and obsessed are being concentrated on blasphemous prayers to Erlik! Sanang is directing them. Do you understand the terrible power of a million minds allwilling, in unison, the destruction of good and the triumph of evil? A million human minds! More! For that is what he is doing. That is the thick darkness that is gathering over the entire Western world. It is the terrific materialisation of evil power from evil minds, all focussed upon the single thought that evil must triumph and good die!”
She sat, gripping the arms of her chair, pale, rigid, terribly alert, dreadfully enlightened, now, concerning the awful and new menace threatening the sanity of mankind.
She said in her steady, emotionless voice: “When the Yezidee Sorcerers desire to overwhelm a nomad people—some yort perhaps that has resisted the Sheiks of the Eight Towers, then the Slayer of Souls rides with his Black Banners to the Namaz-Ga or Place of Prayer.
“Two marble bridges lead to it. There are fourteen hundred mosques there. Then come the Eight, each with his shroud, chanting the prayers for those dead in hell. And there the Yezidees pray blasphemously, all their minds in ferocious unison.... And I have seen a little yort full of Broad Faces with their slanting eyes and sparse beards, sicken and die, and turn black in the sun as though the plague had breathed on them. And I have seen the Long Noses and bushy beards of walled towns wither and perish in the blast and blight from the Namaz-Ga where the Slayer of Souls sat his saddle and prayed to Erlik, and half a million Yezidees prayed in blasphemous unison.”
Recklow’s head rested on his left hand. The other, unconsciously, had crept toward his pistol—the weapon which had become so useless in this awful struggle between this girl and the loosened forces of hell.
“Is that what you think Sanang is about?” he asked heavily.
“Yes. I know it. He has seized the minds of a million men in America. Every anarchist is to-day concentrating in one evil and supreme mental effort, under Sanang’s direction, to will the triumph of evil and the doom of civilisation.... I wish my husband would come home.”
“Tressa?”
She turned her pallid face in the firelight: “If Sanang has appointed a Place of Prayer,” she said, “he himself will pray on that spot. That will be the Namaz-Ga for the last two Yezidee Sorcerers still alive in the Western World.”
“That’s what I wished to ask you,” said Recklow softly. “Will you try once more, Tressa?”
“Yes. I will send out my soul again to look for the Namaz-Ga.”
She lay back in her armchair and closed her eyes.
“Only,” she added, as though to herself, “I wish my dear lord were safe in this room beside me.... May God’s warriors be his escort. And surely they are well armed, and can prevail over demons. Aie-a! I wish my lord would come home out of the darkness.... Mr. Recklow?”
“Yes, Tressa.”
“I thought I heard him on the stairs.”
“Not yet.”
“Aie-a!” she sighed and closed her eyes again.
She lay like one dead. There was no sound in the room save the soft purr of the fire.
Suddenly from the sleeping girl a frightened voice burst: “Yulun! Yulun! Where is that yellow maid of the Baroulass?... What is she doing? That sleek young thing belongs to Togrul Kahn? Yulun! I am afraid of her! Tell Sansa to watch that she does not stir from the Lake of the Ghosts!... Warn that young Baroulass Sorceress that if she stirs I slay her. And know how to do it in spite of Sanang and all the prayers from the Namaz-Ga! Yulun! Sansa! Watch her, follow her, hearts of flame! My soul be ransom for yours! Tokhta!”
The girl’s eyes unclosed. Presently she stirred slightly, passed one hand across her forehead, turned her head toward Recklow.
“I could not discover the Namaz-Ga,” she said wearily. “I wish my husband would return.”
Her husband called her on the telephone a few minutes later:
“Fifty-three, Six-twenty-six speaking! Who is this?”
“V-sixty-nine,” replied his young wife happily. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Is M. H. 2479 there?”
“He is here.”
“Very well. An hour ago I saw Togrul Khan in a limousine and chased him in a taxi. His car got away in the fog but it was possible to make out the number. An empty Cadillac limousine bearing that number is now waiting outside the 44th Street entrance to the Hotel Astor. The doorman will hold it until I finish telephoning. Tell M. H. 2479 to send men to cover this matter——”
“Victor!”
“Be careful! Yes, what is it?”
“I beg you not to stir in this affair until I can join you——”
“Hurry then. It’s just across the street from Westover Court——” His voice ceased; she heard another voice, faintly, and an exclamation from her husband; then his hurried voice over the wire: “The doorman just sent word to hurry. The car number is N. Y.015 F 0379! I’ve got to run! Good-b——”
He left the booth at the end of Peacock Alley, ran down the marble steps to the left and out to the snowy sidewalk, passing on his way a young girl swathed to the eyes in chinchilla who was hurrying into the hotel. As he came to where the limousine was standing, he saw that it was still empty although the door stood open and the engine was running. Around the chauffeur stood the gold laced doorman, the gorgeously uniformed carriage porter and a mounted policeman.
“Hey!” said the latter when he saw Cleves,—“what’s the matter here? What are you holding up this car for?”
Cleves beckoned him, whispered, then turned to the doorman.
“Why did you send for me? Was the chauffeur trying to pull out?”
“Yes, sir. A lady come hurrying out an’ she jumps in, and the shawfur he starts her humming——”
“A lady! Where did she go?”
“It was that young lady in chinchilla fur. The one you just met when you run out. Yessir! Why, as soon as I held up the car and called this here cop, she opens the door and out she jumps and beats it into the hotel again——”
“Hold that car, Officer!” interrupted Cleves. “Keep it standing here and arrest anybody who gets into it! I’ll be back again——”
He turned and hurried into the hotel, traversed Peacock Alley scanning every woman he passed, searching for a slim shape swathed in chinchilla. There were no chinchilla wraps in Peacock Alley; none in the dining-room where people already were beginning to gather and the orchestra was now playing; no young girl in chinchilla in the waiting room, or in the north dining-room.
Then, suddenly, far across the crowded lobby, he saw a slender, bare-headed girl in a chinchilla cloak turn hurriedly away from the room-clerk’s desk, holding a key in her white gloved hand.
Before he could take two steps in her direction she had disappeared in the crowd.
He made his way through the packed lobby as best he could amid throngs of people dressed for dinner, theatre, or other gaiety awaiting them somewhere out there in the light-smeared winter fog; but when he arrived at the room clerk’s desk he looked for a chinchilla wrap in vain.
Then he leaned over the desk and said to the clerk in a low voice: “I am a Federal agent from the Department of Justice. Here are my credentials. Now, who was that young woman in chinchilla furs to whom you gave her door key a moment ago?”
The clerk leaned over his counter and, dropping his voice, answered that the lady in question had arrived only that morning from San Francisco; had registered as Madame Aoula Baroulass; and had been given a suite on the fourth floor numbered from 408 to 414.
“Do you mean to arrest her?” added the clerk in a weird whisper.
“I don’t know. Possibly. Have you the master-key?”
The clerk handed it to him without a word; and Cleves hurried to the elevator.
On the fourth floor the matron on duty halted him, but when he murmured an explanation she nodded and laid a finger on her lips.
“Madame has gone to her apartment,” she whispered.
“Has she a servant? Or friends with her?”
“No, sir.... I did see her speak to two foreign looking gentlemen in the elevator when she arrived this morning.”
Cleves nodded; the matron pointed out the direction in silence, and he went rapidly down the carpeted corridor, until he came to a door numbered 408.
For a second only he hesitated, then swiftly fitted the master-key and opened the door.
The room—a bedroom—was brightly lighted; but there was nobody there. The other rooms—dressing closet, bath-room and parlour, all were brilliantly lighted by ceiling fixtures and wall brackets; but there was not a person to be seen in any of the rooms—nor, save for the illumination, was there any visible sign that anybody inhabited the apartment.
Swiftly he searched the apartment from end to end. There was no baggage to be seen, no garments, no toilet articles, no flowers in the vases, no magazines or books, not one article of feminine apparel or of personal bric-a-brac visible in the entire place.
Nor had the bed even been turned down—nor any preparation for the night’s comfort been attempted. And, except for the blazing lights, it was as though the apartment had not been entered by anybody for a month.
All the windows were closed, all shades lowered and curtains drawn. The air, though apparently pure enough, had that vague flatness which one associates with an unused guest-chamber when opened for an airing.
Now, deliberately, Cleves began a more thorough search of the apartment, looking behind curtains, under beds, into clothes presses, behind sofas.
Then he searched the bureau drawers, dressers, desks for any sign or clew of the girl in the chinchillas. There was no dust anywhere,—the hotel management evidently was particular—but there was not even a pin to be found.
Presently he went out into the corridor and looked again at the number on the door. He had made no mistake.
Then he turned and sped down the long corridor to where the matron was standing beside her desk preparing to go off duty as soon as the other matron arrived to relieve her.
To his impatient question she replied positively that she had seen the girl in chinchillas unlock 408 and enter the apartment less than five minutes before he had arrived in pursuit.
“And I saw her lights go on as soon as she went in,” added the matron, pointing to the distant illuminated transom.
“Then she went out through into the next apartment,” insisted Cleves.
“The fire-tower is on one side of her; the scullery closet on the other,” said the matron. “She could not have left that apartment without coming out into the corridor. And if she had come out I should have seen her.”
“I tell you she isn’t in those rooms!” protested Cleves.
“She must be there, sir. I saw her go in a few seconds before you came up.”
At that moment the other matron arrived. There was no use arguing. He left the explanation of the situation to the woman who was going off duty, and, hastening his steps, he returned to apartment 408.
The door, which he had left open, had swung shut. Again he fitted the master-key, entered, paused on the threshold, looked around nervously, his nostrils suddenly filled with a puff of perfume.
And there on the table by the bed he saw a glass bowl filled with a mass of Chinese orchids—great odorous clusters of orange and snow-white bloom that saturated all the room with their freshening scent.
So astounded was he that he stood stock still, one hand still on the door-knob; then in a trice he had closed and locked the door from inside.
Somebodywas in that apartment. There could be no doubt about it. He dropped his right hand into his overcoat pocket and took hold of his automatic pistol.
For ten minutes he stood so, listening, peering about the room from bed to curtains, and out into the parlour. There was not a sound in the place. Nothing stirred.
Now, grasping his pistol but not drawing it, he began another stealthy tour of the apartment, exploring every nook and cranny. And, at the end, had discovered nothing new.
When at length he realised that, as far as he could discover, there was not a living thing in the place excepting himself, a very faint chill grew along his neck and shoulders, and he caught his breath suddenly, deeply.
He had come back to the bedroom, now. The perfume of the orchids saturated the still air.
And, as he stood staring at them, all of a sudden he saw, where their twisted stalks rested in the transparent bowl of water, something moving—something brilliant as a live ember gliding out from among the mass of submerged stems—a living fish glowing in scarlet hues and winnowing the water with grotesquely trailing fins as delicate as filaments of scarlet lace.
To and fro swam the fish among the maze of orchid stalks. Even its eyes were hot and red as molten rubies; and as its crimson gills swelled and relaxed and swelled, tints of cherry-fire waxed and waned over its fat and glowing body.
And vaguely, now, in the perfume saturated air, Cleves seemed to sense a subtle taint of evil,—something sinister in the intense stillness of the place—in the jewelled fish gliding so silently in and out among the pallid convolutions of the drowned stems.
As he stood staring at the fish, the drugged odour of the orchids heavy in his throat and lungs, something stirred very lightly in the room.
Chills crawling over every limb, he looked around across his shoulder.
There was a figure seated cross-legged in the middle of the bed!
Then, in the perfumed silence, the girl laughed.
For a full minute neither of them moved. No sound had echoed her low laughter save the deadened pulsations of his own heart. But now there grew a faint ripple of water in the bowl where the scarlet fish, suddenly restless, was swimming hither and thither as though pursued by an invisible hand.
With the slight noise of splashing water in his ears, Cleves stood staring at the figure on the bed. Under her chinchilla the girl seemed to be all a pale golden tint—hair, skin, eyes. The scant shred of an evening gown she wore, the jewels at her throat and breast, all were yellow and amber and saffron-gold.
And now, looking him in the eyes, she leisurely disengaged the robe of silver fur from her naked shoulders and let it fall around her on the bed. For a second the lithe, willowy golden thing gathered there as gracefully as a coiled snake filled him with swift loathing. Then, almost instantly, the beauty of the lissome creature fascinated him.
She leaned forward and set her elbows on her two knees, and rested her face between her hands—like a gold rose-bud between two ivory petals, he thought, dismayed by this young thing’s beauty, shaken by the dull confusion of his own heart battering his breast like the blows of a rising tide.
“What do you wish?” she inquired in her soft young voice. “Why have you come secretly into my rooms to search—and clasping in your hand a loaded pistol deep within your pocket?”
“Why have you hidden yourself until now?” he retorted in a dull and laboured voice.
“I have been here.”
“Where?”
“Here!... Looking at you.... And watching my scarlet fish. His name is Dzelim. He is nearly a thousand years old and as wise as a magician. Look upon him, my lord! See how rapidly he darts around his tiny crystal world!—like a comet through outer star-dust, running the eternal race with Time.... And—yonder is a chair. Will my lord be seated—at his new servant’s feet?”
A strange, physical weariness seemed to weight his limbs and shoulders. He seated himself near the bed, never taking his heavy gaze from the smiling, golden thing which squatted there watching him so intently.
“Whose limousine was that which you entered and then left so abruptly?” he asked.
“My own.”
“What was the Yezidee Togrul Kahn doing in it?”
“Did you see anybody in my car?” she asked, veiling her eyes a little with their tawny lashes.
“I saw a man with a thick beard dyed red with henna, and the bony face and slant eyes of Togrul the Yezidee.”
“May my soul be ransom for yours, my lord, but you lie!” she said softly. Her lips parted in a smile; but her half-veiled eyes were brilliant as two topazes.
“Is that your answer?”
She lifted one hand and with her forefinger made signs from right to left and then downward as though writing in Turkish and in Chinese characters.
“It is written,” she said in a low voice, “that we belong to God and we return to him. Look out what you are about, my lord!”
He drew his pistol from his overcoat and, holding it, rested his hand on his knee.
“Now,” he said hoarsely, “while we await the coming of Togrul Kahn, you shall remain exactly where you are, and you shall tell me exactly who you are in order that I may decide whether to arrest you as an alien enemy inciting my countrymen to murder, or to let you go as a foreigner who is able to prove her honesty and innocence.”
The girl laughed:
“Be careful,” she said. “My danger lies in your youth and mine—somewhere between your lips and mine lies my only danger from you, my lord.”
A dull flush mounted to his temples and burned there.
“I am the golden comrade to Heavenly-Azure,” she said, still smiling. “I am the Third Immaum in the necklace Keuke wears where Yulun hangs as a rose-pearl, and Sansa as a pearl on fire.
“Look upon me, my lord!”
There was a golden light in his eyes which seemed to stiffen the muscles and confuse his vision. He heard her voice again as though very far away:
“It is written that we shall love, my lord—thou and I—this night—this night. Listen attentively. I am thy slave. My lips shall touch thy feet. Look upon me, my lord!”
There was a dazzling blindness in his eyes and in his brain. He swayed a little still striving to fix her with his failing gaze. His pistol hand slipped sideways from his knee, fell limply, and the weapon dropped to the thick carpet. He could still see the glimmering golden shape of her, still hear her distant voice:
“It is written that we belong to God.... Tokhta!...”
Over his knees was settling a snow-white sheet; on it, in his lap, lay a naked knife. There was not a sound in the room save the rushing and splashing of the scarlet fish in its crystal bowl.
Bending nearer, the girl fixed her yellow eyes on the man who looked back at her with dying gaze, sitting upright and knee deep in his shroud.
Then, noiselessly she uncoiled her supple golden body, extending her right arm toward the knife.
“Throw back thy head, my lord, and stretch thy throat to the knife’s sweet edge,” she whispered caressingly. “No!—do not close your eyes. Look upon me. Look into my eyes. I am Aoula, temple girl of the Baroulass! I am mistress to the Slayer of Souls! I am a golden plaything to Sanang Noïane, Prince of the Yezidees. Look upon me attentively, my lord!”
Her smooth little hand closed on the hilt; the scarlet fish splashed furiously in the bowl, dislodging a blossom or two which fell to the carpet and slowly faded into mist.
Now she grasped the knife, and she slipped from the bed to the floor and stood before the dazed man.
“This is the Namaz-Ga,” she said in her silky voice. “Behold, this is the appointed Place of Prayer. Gaze around you, my lord. These are the shadows of mighty men who come here to see you die in the Place of Prayer.”
Cleves’s head had fallen back, but his eyes were open. The Baroulass girl took his head in both hands and turned it hither and thither. And his glazing eyes seemed to sweep a throng of shadowy white-robed men crowding the room. And he saw the bloodless, symmetrical visage of Sanang among them, and the great red beard of Togrul; and his stiffening lips parted in an uttered cry, and sagged open, flaccid and soundless.
The Baroulass sorceress lifted the shroud from his knees and spread it on the carpet, moving with leisurely grace about her business and softly intoning the Prayers for the Dead.
Then, having made her arrangements, she took her knife into her right hand again and came back to the half-conscious man, and stood close in front of him, bending near and looking curiously into his dimmed eyes.
“Ayah!” she said smilingly. “This is the Place of Prayer. And you shall add your prayer to ours before I use my knife. So! I give you back your power of speech. Pronounce the name of Erlik!”
Very slowly his dry lips moved and his dry tongue trembled. The word they formed was,
“Tressa!”
Instantly the girl’s yellow eyes grew incandescent and her lovely mouth became distorted. With her left hand she caught his chin, forced his head back, exposing his throat, and using all her strength drew the knife’s edge across it.
But it was only her clenched fingers that swept the taut throat—clenched and empty fingers in which the knife had vanished.
And when the Baroulass girl saw that her clenched hand was empty, felt her own pointed nails cutting into the tender flesh of her own palm, she stared at her blood-stained fingers in sudden terror—stared, spread them, shrieked where she stood, and writhed there trembling and screaming as though gripped in an invisible trap.
But she fell silent when the door of the room opened noiselessly behind her;—and it was as though she dared not turn her head to face the end of all things which had entered the room and was drawing nearer in utter silence.
Suddenly she saw its shadow on the wall; and her voice burst from her lips in a last shuddering scream.
Then the end came slowly, without a sound, and she sank at the knees, gently, to a kneeling posture, then backward, extending her supple golden shape across the shroud; and lay there limp as a dead snake.
Tressa went to the bowl of water and drew from it every blossom. The scarlet fish was now thrashing the water to an iridescent spume; and Tressa plunged in her hands and seized it and flung it out—squirming and wheezing crimson foam—on the shroud beside the golden girl of the Baroulass. Then, very slowly, she drew the shroud over the dying things; stepped back to the chair where her husband lay unconscious; knelt down beside him and took his head on her shoulder, gazing, all the while, at the outline of the dead girl under the snowy shroud.
After a long while Cleves stirred and opened his eyes. Presently he turned his head sideways on her shoulder.
“Tressa,” he whispered.
“Hush,” she whispered, “all is well now.” But she did not move her eyes from the shroud, which now outlined the still shapes oftwohuman figures.
“John Recklow!” she called in a low voice.
Recklow entered noiselessly with drawn pistol. She motioned to him; he bent and lifted the edge of the shroud, cautiously. A bushy red beard protruded.
“Togrul!” he exclaimed.... “But who is this young creature lying dead beside him?”
Then Tressa caught the collar of her tunic in her left hand and flung back her lovely face looking upward out of eyes like sapphires wet with rain:
“In the name of the one and only God,” she sobbed—“if there be no resurrection for dead souls, then I have slain this night in vain!
“For what does it profit a girl if her soul be lost to a lover and her body be saved for her husband?”
She rose from her knees, the tears still falling, and went and looked down at the outlined shapes beneath the shroud.
Recklow had gone to the telephone to summon his own men and an ambulance. Now, turning toward Tressa from his chair:
“God knows what we’d do without you, Mrs. Cleves. I believe this accounts for all the Yezidees except Sanang.”
“Excepting Prince Sanang,” she said drearily. Then she went slowly to where her husband lay in his armchair, and sank down on the floor, and laid her cheek across his feet.
In that great blizzard which, on the 4th of February, struck the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine, John Recklow and his men hunted Sanang, the last of the Yezidees.
And Sanang clung like a demon to the country which he had doomed to destruction, imbedding each claw again as it was torn loose, battling for the supremacy of evil with all his dreadful psychic power, striving still to seize, cripple, and slay the bodies and souls of a hundred million Americans.
Again he scattered the uncounted myriads of germs of the Black Plague which he and his Yezidees had brought out of Mongolia a year before; and once more the plague swept over the country, and thousands on thousands died.
But now the National, State and City governments were fighting, with physicians, nurses, and police, this gruesome epidemic which had come into the world from they knew not where. And National, State and City governments, aroused at last, were fighting the more terrible plague of anarchy.
Nation-wide raids were made from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to the Lakes. Thousands of terrorists of all shades and stripes whose minds had been seized and poisoned by the Yezidees were being arrested. Deportations had begun; government agents were everywhere swarming to clean out the foulness that had struck deeper into the body of the Republic than any one had supposed.
And it seemed, at last, as though the Red Plague, too, was about to be stamped out along with the Black Death called Influenza.
But only a small group of Secret Service men knew that a resurgence of these horrors was inevitable unless Sanang, the Slayer of Souls, was destroyed. And they knew, too, that only one person in America could hope to destroy Sanang, the last of the Yezidees, and that was Tressa Cleves.
Only by the sudden onset of the plague in various cities of the land had Recklow any clew concerning the whereabouts of Sanang.
In Boston, then Washington, then Kansas City, and then New York the epidemic suddenly blazed up. And in these places of death the Secret Service men always found a clew, and there they hunted Sanang, the Yezidee, to kill him without mercy where they might find him.
But they never found Sanang Noïane; only the ghastly marks of his poisoned claws on the body of the sickened nation—only minds diseased by the Red Plague and bodies dying of the Black Death—civil and social centres disorganized, disrupted, depraved, dying.
When the blizzard burst upon New York, struggling in the throes of the plague, and paralysed the metropolis for a week, John Recklow sent out a special alarm, and New York swarmed with Secret Service men searching the snow-buried city for a graceful, slender, dark young man whose eyes slanted a trifle in his amber-tinted face; who dressed fashionably, lived fastidiously, and spoke English perfectly in a delightfully modulated voice.
And to New York, thrice stricken by anarchy, by plague, and now by God, hurried, from all parts of the nation, thousands of secret agents who had been hunting Sanang in distant cities or who had been raiding the traitorous and secret gatherings of his mental dupes.
Agent ZB-303, who was volunteer agent James Benton, came from Boston with his new bride who had just arrived by way of England—a young girl named Yulun who landed swathed in sables, and stretched out both lovely little hands to Benton the instant she caught sight of him on the pier. Whereupon he took the slim figure in furs into his arms, which was interesting because they had never before met in the flesh.
So,—their honeymoon scarce begun, Benton and Yulun came from Boston in answer to Recklow’s emergency call.
And all the way across from San Francisco came volunteer agent XLY-371, otherwise Alek Selden, bringing with him a girl named Sansa whom he had gone to the coast to meet, and whom he had immediately married after she had landed from the Japanese steamerNan-yang Maru. Which, also, was remarkable, because, although they recognised each other instantly, and their hands and lips clung as they met, neither had ever before beheld the living body of the other.
The third man who came to New York at Recklow’s summons was volunteer agent 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves.
His young wife, suffering from nervous shock after the deaths of Togrul Khan and of the Baroulass girl, Aoula, had been convalescing in a private sanitarium in Westchester.
Until the summons came to her husband from Recklow, she had seen him only for a few moments every day. But the call to duty seemed to have effected a miraculous cure in the slender, blue-eyed girl who had lain all day long, day after day, in her still, sunny room scarcely unclosing her eyes at all save only when her husband was permitted to enter for the few minutes allowed them every day.
The physician had just left, after admitting that Mrs. Cleves seemed to be well enough to travel if she insisted; and she and her maid had already begun to pack when her husband came into her room.
She looked around over her shoulder, then rose from her knees, flung an armful of clothing into the trunk before which she had been kneeling, and came across the room to him. Then she dismissed her maid from the room. And when the girl had gone:
“I am well, Victor,” she said in a low voice. “Why are you troubled?”
“I can’t bear to have you drawn into this horrible affair once more.”
“Who else is there to discover and overcome Sanang?” she asked calmly.
He remained silent.
So, for a few moments they stood confronting each other there in the still, sunny chamber—husband and wife who had never even exchanged the first kiss—two young creatures more vitally and intimately bound together than any two on earth—yet utterly separated body and soul from each other—two solitary spirits which had never merged; two bodies virginal and inviolate.
Tressa spoke first: “I must go. That was our bargain.”
The word made him wince as though it had been a sudden blow. Then his face flushed red.
“Bargain or no bargain,” he said, “I don’t want you to go because I’m afraid you can not endure another shock like the last one.... And every time you have thrown your own mind and body between this Nation and destruction you have nearly died of it.”
“And if I die?” she said in a low voice.
What answer she awaited—perhaps hoped for—was not the one he made. He said: “If you die in what you believe to be your line of duty, then it will be I who have killed you.”
“That would not be true. It is you who have saved me.”
“I have not. I have done nothing except to lead you into danger of death since I first met you. If you mean spiritually, that also is untrue. You have saved yourself—if that indeed were necessary. You have redeemed yourself—if it is true you needed redemption—which I never believed——”
“Oh,” she sighed swiftly, “Sanang surprised my soul when it was free of my body—followed my soul into the Wood of the White Moth—caught it there all alone—and—slew it!”
His lips and throat had gone dry as he watched the pallid terror grow in her face.
Presently he recovered his voice: “You call that Yezidee the Slayer of Souls,” he said, “but I tell you there is no such creature, no such power!
“I suppose I—I know what you mean—having seen what we call souls dissociated from their physical bodies—but that this Yezidee could do you any spiritual damage I do not for one instant believe. The idea is monstrous, I tell you——”
“I—I fought him—soul battling against soul——” she stammered, breathing faster and irregularly. “I struggled with Sanang there in the Wood of the White Moth. I called on God! I called on my two great dogs, Bars and Alaga! I recited the Fatha with all my strength—fighting convulsively whenever his soul seized mine; I cried out the name of Khidr, begging for wisdom! I called on the Ten Imaums, on Ali the Lion, on the Blessed Companions. Then I tore my spirit out of the grasp of his soul—but there was no escape!—no escape,” she wailed. “For on every side I saw the cloud-topped rampart of Gog and Magog, and the woods rang with Erlik’s laughter—the dissonant mirth of hell——”
She began to shudder and sway a little, then with an effort she controlled herself in a measure.
“There never has been,” she began again with lips that quivered in spite of her—“there never has been one moment in our married lives when my soul dared forget the Wood of the White Moth—dared seek yours.... God lives. But so does Erlik. There are angels; but there are as many demons.... My soul is ashamed.... And very lonely ... very lonely ... but no fit companion—for yours——”
Her hands dropped listlessly beside her and her chin sank.
“So you believe that Yezidee devil caught your soul when it was wandering somewhere out of your body, and destroyed it,” he said.
She did not answer, did not even lift her eyes until he had stepped close to her—closer than he had ever come. Then she looked up at him, but closed her eyes as he swept her into his arms and crushed her face and body against his own.
Now her red lips were on his; now her face and heart and limbs and breast melted into his—her breath, her pulse, her strength flowed into his and became part of their single being and single pulse and breath. And she felt their two souls flame and fuse together, and burn together in one heavenly blaze—felt the swift conflagration mount, overwhelm, and sweep her clean of the last lingering taint; felt her soul, unafraid, clasp her husband’s spirit in its white embrace—clung to him, uplifted out of hell, rising into the blinding light of Paradise.
Far—far away she heard her own voice in singing whispers—heard her lips pronounceThe Name—“Ata—Ata! Allahou——”
Her blue eyes unclosed; through a mist, in which she saw her husband’s face, grew a vast metallic clamour in her ears.
Her husband kissed her, long, silently; then, retaining her hand, he turned and lifted the receiver from the clamouring telephone.
“Yes! Yes, this is 53-6-26. Yes, V-69 is with me.... When?... To-day?... Very well.... Yes, we’ll come at once.... Yes, we can get a train in a few minutes.... All right. Good-bye.”
He took his wife into his arms again.
“Dearest of all in the world,” he said, “Sanang is cornered in a row of houses near the East River, and Recklow has flung a cordon around the entire block. Good God! Ican’ttake you there!”
Then Tressa smiled, drew his head down, looked into his face till the clear blue splendour of her gaze stilled the tumult in his brain.
“I alone know how to deal with Prince Sanang,” she said quietly. “And if John Recklow, or you, or Mr. Benton or Mr. Selden should kill him with your pistols, it would be only his body you slay, not the evil thing that would escape you and return to Erlik.”
“Mustyou do this thing, Tressa?”
“Yes, I must do it.”
“But—if our pistols cannot kill this sorcerer, how are you going to deal with him?”
“I know how.”
“Have you the strength?”
“Yes—the bodily and the spiritual. Don’t you know that I am already part of you?”
“We shall be nearer still,” he murmured.
She flushed but met his gaze.
“Yes.... We shall be but one being.... Utterly.... For already our hearts and souls are one. And we shall become of one mind and one body.
“I am no longer afraid of Sanang Noïane!”
“No longer afraid to slay him?” he asked quietly.
A blue light flashed in her eyes and her face grew still and white and terrible.
“Death to the body? That is nothing, my lord!” she said, in a hard, sweet voice. “It is written that we belong to God and that we return to Him. All living things must die, Heart of the World! It is only the death of souls that matters. And it has arrived at a time in the history of mankind, I think, when the Slayer of Souls shall slay no more.”
She looked at him, flushed, withdrew her hand and went slowly across the room to the big bay window where potted flowers were in bloom.
From a window-box she took a pinch of dry soil and dropped it into the bosom of her gown.
Then, facing the East, with lowered arms and palms turned outward:
“There is no god but God,” she whispered—“the merciful, the long-suffering, the compassionate, the just.
“For it is written that when the heavens are rolled together like a scroll, every soul shall know what it hath wrought.
“And those souls that are dead in Jehannum shall arise from the dead, and shall have their day in court. Nor shall Erlik stay them till all has been said.
“And on that day the soul of a girl that hath been put to death shall ask for what reason it was slain.
“Thus it has been written.”
Then Tressa dropped to her knees, touched the carpet with her forehead, straightened her lithe body and, looking over her shoulder, clapped her hands together sharply.
Her maid opened the door. “Hasten with my lord’s luggage!” she cried happily; and, still kneeling, lifted her head to her husband and laughed up into his eyes.
“You should call the porter for we are nearly ready. Shall we go to the station in a sleigh? Oh, wonderful!”
She leaped to her feet, extended her hand and caught his.
“Horses for the lord of the Yiort!” she cried, laughingly. “Kosh! Take me out into this new white world that has been born to-day of the ten purities and the ten thousand felicities! It has been made anew for you and me who also have been born this day!”
He scarcely knew this sparkling, laughing girl with her quick grace and her thousand swift little moods and gaieties.
Porters came to take his luggage from his own room; and then her trunk and bags were ready, and were taken away.
The baggage sleigh drove off. Their own jingling sleigh followed; and Tressa, buried in furs, looked out upon a dazzling, unblemished world, lying silvery white under a sky as azure as her eyes.
“Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure,” he whispered close to her crimsoned cheek, “do you know how I have loved you—always—always?”
“No, I did not know that,” she said.
“Nor I, in the beginning. Yet it happened, also, from the beginning when I first saw you.”
“That is a delicious thing to be told. Within me a most heavenly glow is spreading.... Unglove your hand.”
She slipped the glove from her own white fingers and felt for his under the furs.
“Aie,” she sighed, “you are more beautiful than Ali; more wonderful than the Flaming Pearl. Out of ice and fire a new world has been made for us.”
“Heavenly Azure—my darling!”
“Oh-h,” she sighed, “your words are sweeter than the breeze in Yian! I shall be a bride to you such as there never has been since the days of the Blessed Companions—may their names be perfumed and sweet-scented!... Shall I truly be one with you, my lord?”
“Mind, soul, and body, one being, you and I, little Heavenly Azure.”
“Between your two hands you hold me like a burning rose, my lord.”
“Your sweetness and fire penetrate my soul.”
“We shall burn together then till the sky-carpet be rolled up. Kosh! We shall be one, and on that day I shall not be afraid.”
The sleigh came to a clashing, jingling halt; the train plowed into the depot buried in vast clouds of snowy steam.
But when they had taken the places reserved for them, and the train was moving swifter and more swiftly toward New York, fear suddenly overwhelmed Victor Cleves, and his face grew grey with the menacing tumult of his thoughts.
The girl seemed to comprehend him, too, and her own features became still and serious as she leaned forward in her chair.
“It is in God’s hands, Heart of the World,” she said in a low voice. “We are one, thou and I,—or nearly so. Nothing can harm my soul.”
“No.... But the danger—to your life——”
“I fear no Yezidee.”
“The beast will surely try to kill you. And what can I do? You say my pistol is useless.”
“Yes.... But I want you near me.”
“Do you imagine I’d leave you for a second? Good God,” he added in a strangled voice, “isn’t there any way I can kill this wild beast? With my naked hands——?”
“You must leave him to me, Victor.”
“And you believe you can slay him?Doyou?”
She remained silent for a long while, bent forward in her armchair, and her hands clasped tightly on her knees.
“My husband,” she said at last, “what your astronomers have but just begun to suspect is true, and has long, long been known to the Sheiks-el-Djebel.
“For, near to this world we live in, are other worlds—planets that do not reflect light. And there is a dark world called Yrimid, close to the earth—a planet wrapped in darkness—a black star.... And upon it Erlik dwells.... And it is peopled by demons.... And from it comes sickness and evil——”
She moistened her lips; sat for a while gazing vaguely straight before her.
“From this black planet comes all evil upon earth,” she resumed in a hushed voice. “For it is very near to the earth. It is not a hundred miles away. All strange phenomena for which our scientists can not account are due to this invisible planet,—all new and sudden pestilences; all convulsions of nature; the newly noticed radio disturbances; the new, so-called inter-planetary signals—all—all have their hidden causes within that black and demon-haunted planet long known to the Yezidees, and by them called Yrimid, or Erlik’s World. And—it is to this black planet that I shall send Sanang, Slayer of Souls. I shall tear him from this earth, though he cling to it with every claw; and I shall fling his soul into darkness—out across the gulf—drive his soul forth—hurl it toward Erlik like a swift rocket charred and falling from the sky into endless night.
“So shall I strive to deal with Prince Sanang, Sorcerer of Mount Alamout, the last of the Assassins, Sheik-el-Djebel, and Slayer of Souls.... May God remember him in hell.”
Already their train was rolling into the great terminal.
Recklow was awaiting them. He took Tressa’s hands in his and gazed earnestly into her face.
“Have you come to show us how to conclude this murderous business?” he asked grimly.
“I shall try,” she said calmly. “Where have you cornered Sanang?”
“Could you and Victor come at once?”
“Yes.” She turned and looked at her husband, who had become quite pale.
Recklow saw the look they exchanged. There could be no misunderstanding what had happened to these two. Their tragedy had ended. They were united at last. He understood it instantly,—realised how terrible was this new and tragic situation for them both.
Yet, he knew also that the salvation of civilisation itself now depended upon this girl. She must face Sanang. There was nothing else possible.
“The streets are choked with snow,” he said, “but I have a coupé and two strong horses waiting.”
He nodded to one of his men standing near. Cleves gave him the hand luggage and checks.
“All right,” he said in a low voice to Recklow; and passed one arm through Tressa’s.
The coupé was waiting on Forty-second Street, guarded by a policeman. When they had entered and were seated, two mounted policemen rode ahead of the lurching vehicle, picking a way amid the monstrous snow-drifts, and headed for the East River.
“We’ve got him somewhere in a wretched row of empty houses not far from East River Park. I’m taking you there. I’ve drawn a cordon of my men around the entire block. He can’t get away. But I dared take no chances with this Yezidee sorcerer—dared not let one of my men go in to look for him—go anywhere near him,—until I could lay the situation before you, Mrs. Cleves.”
“Yes,” she said calmly, “it was the only way, Mr. Recklow. There would have been no use shooting him—no use taking him prisoner. A prisoner, he remains as deadly as ever; dead, his mind still lives and breeds evil. You are quite right; it is for me to deal with Sanang.”
Recklow shuddered in spite of himself. “Can you tear his claws from the vitals of the world, and free the sick brains of a million people from the slavery of this monster’s mind?”
The girl said seriously:
“Even Satan was stoned. It is so written. And was cast out. And dwells forever and ever in Abaddon. No star lights that Pit. None lights the Black Planet, Yrimid. It is where evil dwells. And there Sanang Noïane belongs.”
And now, beyond the dirty edges of the snow-smothered city, under an icy mist they caught sight of the river where ships lay blockaded by frozen floes.
Gulls circled over it; ghostly factory chimneys on the further shore loomed up gigantic, ranged like minarettes.
The coupé, jolting along behind the mounted policemen, struggled up toward the sidewalk and stopped. The two horses stood steaming, knee deep in snow. Recklow sprang out; Tressa gave him one hand and stepped lithely to the sidewalk. Then Cleves got out and came and took hold of his wife’s arm again.
“Well,” he said harshly to Recklow, “where is this damned Yezidee hidden?”
Recklow pointed in silence, but he and Tressa had already lifted their gaze to the stark, shabby row of abandoned three-story houses where every dirty blind was closed.
“They’re to be demolished and model tenements built,” he said briefly.
A man muffled in a fur overcoat came up and took Tressa’s hand and kissed it.
She smiled palely at Benton, spoke of Yulun, wished him happiness. While she was yet speaking Selden approached and bent over her gloved hand. She spoke to him very sweetly of Sansa, expressing pleasure at the prospect of seeing her again in the body.
“The Seldens and ourselves have adjoining apartments at the Ritz,” said Benton. “We have reserved a third suite for you and Victor.”
She inclined her lovely head, gravely, then turned to Recklow, saying that she was ready.
“It makes no difference which front door I unlock,” he said. “All these tenements are connected by human rat-holes and hidden runways leading from one house to another.... How many men do you want?”
“I want you four men,—nobody else.”
Recklow led the way up a snow-covered stoop, drew a key from his pocket, fitted it, and pulled open the door.
A musty chill struck their faces as they entered the darkened and empty hallway. Involuntarily every man drew his pistol.
“I must ask you to do exactly what I tell you to do,” she said calmly.
“Certainly,” said Recklow, caressing his white moustache and striving to pierce the gloom with his keen eyes.
Then Tressa took her husband’s hand. “Come,” she said. They mounted the stairway together; and the three others followed with pistols lifted.
There was a vague grey light on the second floor; the broken rear shutters let it in.
As though she seemed to know her way, the girl led them forward, opened a door in the wall, and disclosed a bare, dusty room in the next house.
Through this she stepped; the others crept after her with weapons ready. She opened a second door, turned to the four men.
“Wait here for me. Come only when I call,” she whispered.
“For God’s sake take me with you,” burst out Cleves.
“In God’s name stay where you are till you hear me call your name!” she said almost breathlessly.
Then, suddenly she turned, swiftly retracing her steps; and they saw her pass through the first door and disappear into the first house they had entered.
A terrible silence fell among them. The sound of her steps on the bare boards had died away. There was not a sound in the chilly dusk.
Minute after minute dragged by. One by one the men peered fearfully at Cleves. His visage was ghastly and they could see his pistol-hand trembling.
Twice Recklow looked at his wrist watch. The third time he said, unsteadily: “She has been gone three-quarters of an hour.”
Then, far away, they heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Nearer and nearer came the footsteps. Every pistol was levelled at the first door as a man’s bulky form darkened it.
“It’s one of my men,” said Recklow in a voice like a low groan. “Where on earth is Mrs. Cleves?”
“I came to tell you,” said the agent, “Mrs. Cleves came out of the first house nearly an hour ago. She got into the coupé and told the driver to go to the Ritz.”
“What!” gasped Recklow.
“She’s gone to the Ritz,” repeated the agent. “No one else has come out. And I began to worry—hearing nothing of you, Mr. Recklow. So I stepped in to see——”