Chapter VII: Book II: The Lone Wolf’s Daughter (5)

Under her regard the goblin sphere took on with bewildering rapidity changing guises. Its rotundity was first lost, it assumed the semblance of a featureless disk of pallid light, which swiftly widened till it obscured all else, then seemed to advance upon and envelope her bodily, so that she became spiritually a part of it, an atom of identity engulfed in a limpid world of glareless light, light that had had no rays and issued from no source but was circumambient and universal. Then in its remote heart a weird glow of rose began to burn and grow, pulsing through all the colours of the spectrum and beyond. Toward this she felt herself being drawn swiftly, attracted by an irresistible magnetism, riding the wings of a great wind, whose voice boomed without ceasing, like a heavy surf thunderously reiterating one syllable, “_Sleep_!” ... And in this flight through illimitable space toward a goal unattainable, consciousness grew faint and flickered out like a candle in the wind.

Behind her chair the placid yellow face of Shaik Tsin appeared, as if materialized bodily out of the shadows. With folded arms he waited, dispassionately observant. Presently Prince Victor nodded to him over the head of the girl. Immediately the Chinaman moved round her chair and, employing both hands, in one instant switched off the hooded bulb and reilluminated the lamp of brass.

As the light died out in the crystal Sofia sighed heavily, and relaxed. Leaden eyelids closed down over her staring eyes, she sank back into the chair, simultaneously into plumbless depths....

Victor made a sound of gratification. Shaik Tsin enquired briefly:

“It is accomplished, then?”

Victor nodded. “She yielded more quickly than I had hoped—worn out emotionally, of course.”

“She sleeps—”

“In hypnosis, in absolute suspense of every faculty and function save those concerned solely with the maintenance of existence—in a state, that is, comparable only to the pre-natal life of a child.”

“It is most interesting,” Shaik Tsin admitted. “But what is the use? That is what interests me.”

“Wait and see.”

Bending close to the girl, Victor called in a strong voice of command: “Sofia! Sofia! It is I, Prince Victor, your father. Waken and attend!”

A slight spasm shook the slender body, the lips parted, respiration became hurried and broken, the long lashes fluttered on the cheeks.

“Do you hear me? I, Victor, command you: Waken and attend!”

Another struggle, more brief and sharp, ended with the opening of the eyes, which sought and remained steadfast to Victor’s, yet without intelligence or animation.

“Do you hear me, Sofia?”

A voice like a sigh rustled on the parted lips, whose stir was imperceptible:

“I hear you....”

“Then heed what I say. My will is your law. You know that?”

Faintly the voice breathed: “Yes.”

“Tell me what it is you know.”

“Your will is my law.”

“You will not resist my will, you cannot. Tell me that.”

“I will not resist your will, I cannot.”

“Good. I, Prince Victor Vassilyevski, am your father. You believe that. Do you understand? Tell me what you believe.”

“I believe that you, Prince Victor Vassilyevski, are my father.”

“You will not forget these things?”

“I shall not forget.”

“In all things.”

“I will obey you in all things.”

“Without question or faltering.”

“Without question or faltering.”

“You recall what arrangements we made this afternoon for to-morrow?”

“I remember.”

“Listen carefully. Memorize my wishes with respect to our visit to Frampton Court, remembering that I communicate my will, which you must obey.”

The girl remained silent, waiting. Victor took a moment to marshall his thoughts, then proceeded:

“After arriving at Frampton Court, you will make occasion quietly to find out how your room is situated in relation to the boudoir of Lady Randolph West. You will do this without knowing why you do it. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“At night, on going to bed, you will go promptly to sleep. After an hour you will wake up, put on a dressing gown and slippers, and proceed to Lady Randolph West’s boudoir, taking care not to be observed. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Once in the boudoir, you will proceed to the safe where Lady Randolph West keeps her jewels. It will not be locked, she is careless in such matters. Having found the safe, you will open it, take whatever jewels you find therein, and return to your room. All this you will perform with utmost circumspection, taking all pains not to make any noise. In your room you will hide the jewels in your dressing-case. Then you will go back to bed and to sleep. Have you committed all this to memory?”

The sleeping girl answered in the affirmative. Then, to the injunction, “Tell me what you are to do to-morrow night?” she repeated in a toneless voice every item of the programme outlined for her, while Victor nodded in undisguised delight, and Shaik Tsin grinned blandly over her head.

“On waking up to-morrow morning, you will remember nothing of my instructions, but you will carry them precisely as memorized in your subconciousness, and you will carry them out without thought of opposition to my will, understanding that you are without will of your own in this matter. Finally, on waking up on the morning following your abstraction of the jewels, you will remember nothing of the affair until reminded of it by me, and then only this much: That in obedience to irresistible impulse, you stole the jewels. Is that clear? Repeat ...”

Without a mistake the woman in hypnosis iterated the commands imposed upon her.

The impish grin of the latent savage broke through the habitual austerity of Victor’s countenance.

“There is no more,” he said, “but this: Sleep now, and do not waken before noon to-morrow—_sleep_!”

With a quavering sigh, the girl reclosed her eyes and instantly relapsed into the sleep of trance which was insensibly in the course of the night to merge into natural slumber.

Victor ironed out his grimace, and signed to Shaik Tsin.

“Bear her back to her room. Instruct Chou Nu to put her to bed and not to wake her up before noon.”

“Hearing is obedience.”

The Chinaman bent over, gathered the inert body into his arms, and without perceptible effort stood erect. But in the act of turning away he paused and, continuing to hold the girl as easily as if she weighed no more than a child, interrogated the man he served.

“You believe she will do all you have ordered?”

“I know she will.”

“Without error?”

“Barring accidents, without flaw from beginning to end.”

“And in event of accidents—discovery—?”

“So much the better.”

“That would please you, to have her caught?”

“Excellently.”

Shaik Tsin nodded in grave yet humorous comprehension. “Now I begin to understand. If she is caught, that gives you a power over her?”

“Precisely.”

“And if she is not, when the robbery becomes known, your power over her will be still more strong?”

“And over yet another stronger still.”

“The Lone Wolf?”

Victor inclined his head. “To what lengths will he not go to cover up his daughter’s shame, if it threatens to become public that she is a thief? I do nothing without purpose, Shaik Tsin.”

“That is to say, you have to-night taken out insurance against punishment if this other business fails.”

“If it fail, others may suffer, but if necessary the Lone Wolf himself will arrange my escape from England.”

“To serve so wise a man is an honour my unworthiness can never hope to merit.”

“As to that, Shaik Tsin,” Victor said without a smile, “our minds are one. Go now. Good-night.”

XVII THE RAISED CHEQUE

While the Princess Sofia, Sybil Waring, and Prince Victor motored down from London in the lilac dusk of that dim September day, and the maid Chou Nu accompanied them, riding in front beside a newly engaged Chinese chauffeur, the man Nogam made the journey to Frampton Court by train, and alone.

Alone, at least, in the finer shading of that adjective; aside from the usual assortment of self-contained fellow-travellers in the third-class carriage, he had no company other than his thoughts; a gray and meagre crew, if that pathetic face of middle-age furnished trustworthy reflection of his mind.... So absolute was the submergence of that ardent adventurer who, overnight, had lain awake for hours, a dictograph receiver glued to his ear, eavesdropping upon the traffic of those malevolent intelligences assembled in Prince Victor’s study, and alternately chuckling and cursing beneath his breath, aflame with indignation and chilled by inklings of atrocities unspeakable abrew!

If he surmised that he travelled alone in appearance only, it was with no evident concern or astonishment. If his mind was uneasy, oppressed by a nightmarish burden of half-knowledge, guesses, and premonition, it was not apparent to the general observer. His most eloquent gesture was when, from time to time, he tamped an ancient wooden pipe with a fingertip that wasn’t as calloused as he could have wished, philosophically sucked in strangling fumes of rankest shag and, ignoring his company in the carriage as became a British-made manservant, returned jaded, gentle eyes to those darkling vistas of autumnal landscape that were forever radiating away from the window like spokes of a gigantic wheel.

Alighting in the first dark of evening at the station for Frampton Court, he suffered himself to be herded, with a half-score more, into the omnibus provided for other bodyservants to arriving guests. Even to these compeers he found little to say: a loud lot, imbued with the rowdy spirit of the new day; whereas Nogam was hopelessly of the old school—in the new word, he dated—though his form was admittedly unimpeachable. And if because of this he was made fun of more or less openly, to an extent that added shades of resignation to his countenance, secretly he commanded considerable respect.

Neither was Victor, with all the ill-will in the world, able to find fault with Nogam’s services in his new office. The most finished of self-effacing valets, he knew just what to do and did it without being told; and when he spoke it was only because he had been spoken to or commissioned to convey a message.

Victor watched him from every angle, overt and covert, but had his trouble for his pains; Nogam, observed in a mirror, when Victor’s back was turned, went about his business with no more betrayal of personal feeling or independent mentality than when waiting upon his master face to face. Victor could have kicked him for sheer resentment of his pattern virtues. When all was said and done, it _was_ damned irritating. . . .

In the servants’ hall he religiously kept his ears open and his mouth shut. And, listening, he learned. For some things said in his hearing were distinctly not pretty, and made one wonder if Prince Victor’s deep-rooted confidence in an England mortally cankered with social discontent were not grounded in a surprising familiarity with backstairs morale. Other observations, again, were merely ribald, some were humorous, while all were enlightening.

Not a few of the company had seen domestic service in great houses before the war; they knew what was what and—more to the point—what wasn’t. One gathered that this pretentious country home fell within the latter classification. Here, it was stated, anybody could buy his way into favour: the more bounding the bounder the brighter his chances of success at Frampton Court.

War, the ironic, had caused this noble property to pass into the keeping of a distant and degenerate branch of an old and honoured house; and its present lord and lady, having failed to win the social welcome they had counted on too confidently, were doing their silly, shabby best to squander a princely fortune and dedicate a great name to lasting disrepute by fraternizing with a motley riffraff of profiteering nouveaux riches. Other than bad manners and worse morals, the one genuine thing in the whole establishment was, it seemed, the historic collection of family jewels.

This information explained away much of Nogam’s perplexity on one score.

After dinner, when the house party began to settle into its stride, he made occasion, aping the other servants, to peep in at a door of the great ballroom, where an impromptu dance had been organized; and was rewarded by sight of the Princess Sofia circling the floor in the arms of a boldly good-looking young man whose taste was as poor in flirtation as in self-adornment.

To Nogam the young girl looked wan and wistful—as if she were missing somebody. And he wondered if Mr. Karslake knew what a lucky young devil he was.

He wondered still more about the present whereabouts and welfare of Mr. Karslake. Prince Victor must have contrived some devious errand to get the young man out and away early that day; for by the time Nogam had looked for him in the morning, Karslake was nowhere to be found; neither had he returned when the party left for Frampton Court—a circumstance which Nogam regretted most bitterly. Watched as he was, it hadn’t been possible, that is to say it would have been fatally ill-advised, to have left any sort of message or to have attempted communication through secret channels; and all the while, hours heavy with, it might be, the destiny of England were wasting swiftly into history.

Perhaps it was nervousness bred of this anxiety that, in the end, made Nogam’s hand slip. Or perhaps the impatient nature of the man who lay so closely secret within the husk of Nogam decided him upon a desperate gamble. In either event, this befell:

About the middle of the evening Prince Victor happened to look up from an interesting tête-à-tête in the brilliant drawing-room with his handsome and liberal-minded hostess opportunely to espy Nogam staring at him from the remote recesses of the entrance hall.

It was the merest of glimpses; for Victor’s casual glance had barely identified the servant when Nogam started guiltily and in a twinkling disappeared; but a glimpse was enough for eyes and a mind alike quick with distrust, enough to assure Victor that Nogam’s face had worn an indescribably furtive and hangdog expression, most unlike its ordinary look of amiable stupidity, and widely incongruous with the veniality of his fault.

What the deuce, then, was the fellow up to, that he should glower and dodge like a sleuth in a play?

Promptly Victor became deaf, blind, and numb to the fascinations so generously paraded by Lady Randolph West; and presently excusing himself, left her and sought his rooms.

As he went up the stairs, he saw the door to his bedchamber cautiously opened far enough to permit one eye to spy out and discover his approach. Immediately then the door swung wide, and Nogam ambled into view with an envelope on a salver and an air of childlike innocence, an assumption of ease so transparent, indeed, that only the vision of a child could have been cheated by it.

“Just coming to look for you, sir,” he announced, glibly. “Telegram, sir—just harrived.”

“Thanks,” said Victor, shortly, taking the envelope and marching on into his rooms.

His manner toward his servants was always abrupt. No need to be alarmed by this manifestation of it. Blinking mildly, Nogam trotted at his heels.

Seating himself at an escritoire, Victor opened the envelope with a display of languid interest. Curiosity about the contents of a telegram is ordinarily acute. Victor, on the contrary, sat for a long moment staring thoughtfully at nothing and absently turning the envelope over and over in his hands; while Nogam with specious nonchalance found something unimportant to do in another quarter of the room.

The envelope was damp and warm to the touch. True: nightfall had brought with it a thick drizzle, and Frampton Court was more than a mile from the post-office. On the other hand, the night was as cold as charity; and an envelope recently steamed open might be expected to hold the heat for a few minutes.

Victor thumbed the flap. It lifted readily, without tearing, its gum was wet and more abundant than usual—in fact, it felt confoundedly like library paste, a pot of which, in an ornamental holder, was among the fittings of the escritoire. On the desk pad of blotting paper, too, Victor detected marks of fresh paste defining the contour of the flap.

With a countenance whose inscrutability alone was a threat, Victor took out and conned the telegraph form.

“CONSULTATION SET FOR MIDNIGHT TO-NIGHT TAKING YOUR ADVICE SHALL NOT ATTEND BUT LEAVE FOR BRIGHTON ELEVEN P.M.”

A message ostensibly so open and aboveboard that it hadn’t been thought worth while to hide its wording under the cloak of a code.

There was no signature—unless one were clever or wise enough to transpose the two final letters and take them in relation to the word immediately preceding. “Eleven, M.P.”, however, could mean nothing to anybody but Victor—except a body clever enough to hide a dictograph detector in a turnip. So Victor saw no reason to believe that Nogam, although undoubtedly guilty of the sin of prying, had been able to read the meaning below the surface of this communication.

Nevertheless, undue inquisitiveness on the part of a servant in the pay of Victor Vassilyevski could have but one reward.

“Nogam!”

“Sir?”

“Fetch me an A-B-C.”

“Very good, sir.”

With Nogam out of the way, Victor enclosed the telegram in a new envelope and addressed it simply to _“Mr. Sturm—by hand.”_ Then he took a sheet of the stamped notepaper of Frampton Court, tore it roughly, at the fold, and on the unstamped half inscribed several characters in Chinese, using a pencil with a fat, soft lead for this purpose. This message sealed into a second envelope without superscription, he lighted a cigarette and sat smiling with anticipative relish through its smoke, a smile swiftly abolished as the door re-opened; though Nogam found him in what seemed to be a mood of rare sweet temper.

Taking the railway guide, Victor ruffled its pages, and after brief study of the proper table remarked:

“Afraid I must ask you to run up to town for me to-night, Nogam. If you don’t mind ...”

“Only too glad to oblige, sir.”

“I find I have left important papers behind. Give this to Shaik Tsin”—he handed over the blank envelope—“and he will find them for you. You can catch the ten-fifteen up, and return by the twelve-three from Charing Cross.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Oh—and see that Mr. Sturm gets this, too, will you? If he isn’t in, give it to Shaik Tsin to hand to him. Say it’s urgent.”

“Quite so, sir.”

“That is all. But don’t fail to catch the twelve-three back. I must have the papers to-night.”

“I shan’t fail you, sir—D.V.”

“Deo volente? You are a religious man, Nogam?”

“I ’umbly ’ope so, sir, and do my best to be, accordin’ to my lights.”

“Glad to hear it. Now cut along, or you’ll miss the up train.”

Long after Nogam had left the memory of their talk continued to afford Victor an infinite amount of private entertainment.

“A religious man!” he would jeer to himself. “Then—may your God help you, Nogam!”

Some thought of the same sort may well have troubled Nogam’s mind as he sat in an otherwise untenanted third-class compartment blinking owlishly over the example of Victor’s command of the intricacies of Chinese writing.

He was happily free of surveillance for the first time in his waking hours of many days. The Chinese chauffeur had driven him to the station, and had furthermore lingered to see that Nogam did not fail to board it. And Nogam felt reasonably safe in assuming that he would not approach the house near Queen Anne’s Gate without seeing (for the mere trouble of looking) a second and an entirely gratuitous shadow attach itself to him with the intention of sticking as tenaciously as that which God had given him. But the next hour was all his own.

His study of the Chinese phonograms at length resulted in the transformation of his careworn face by a slowly dawning smile, the gleeful smile of a mischief-loving child. And when he had worked for a while on the message, touching up the skillfully drawn characters with a pencil the mate to that which Victor had used, he sat back and laughed aloud over the result of his labours, with some appreciation of the glow that warms the cockles of the artist’s heart when his deft pen has raised a cheque from tens to thousands, and he reviews a good job well done.

The torn envelope which had held the message to Shaik Tsin lay at his feet. Nogam had not bothered to worry it open so carefully that it might be resealed without inviting comment; though that need not have been a difficult matter, thanks to the dampness of the night air.

Of the envelope addressed to Sturm, however, he was more considerate; to violate its integrity and seal it up again was an undertaking that required the nicest handling. Nor was it accomplished much before the train drew into Charing Cross.

Outside the station taxis were few and drivers arrogant; and all the ’buses were packed to the guards with law-abiding Londoners homeward bound from theatres and halls. So Nogam dived into the Underground, to come to the surface again at St. James’s Park station, whence he trotted all the way to Queen Anne’s Gate, arriving at his destination in a phase of semi-prostration which a person of advancing years and doddering habits might have anticipated.

Such fidelity in characterization deserved good reward, and had in it a rare stroke of fortune; for as he drew up to it, the door opened, and Sturm came out, saw Nogam, and stopped short.

“Thank ’Eaven, sir, I got ’ere in time,” the butler panted. “If I’d missed you, Prince Victor wouldn’t ’ave been in ’arf a wax. ’E told me I must find you to-night if I ’ad to turn all Lunnon inside out.”

Pressing the message into Sturm’s hand, he rested wearily against the casing of the door, his body shaken by laboured breathing, and—while Sturm, with an exclamation of excitement, ripped open the envelope—surveyed the dark and rain-wet street out of the corners of his eyes.

Across the way a slinking shadow left the sidewalk and blended indistinguishably with the crowded shadows of an areaway.

In a voice more than commonly rich with accent, Sturm demanded sharply:

“What is this? I do not understand!”

He shook in Nogam’s face the half-sheet of notepaper on which the Chinese phonograms were drawn.

“Sorry, sir, but I ’aven’t any hidea. Prince Victor didn’t tell me anything except there would be no answer, and I was to ’urry right back to Frampton Court.” Nogam peered myopically at the paper. “It might be ’Ebrew, sir,” he hazarded, helpfully—“by the looks of it, I mean. I suppose some private message, ’e thought you’d understand.”

“Hebrew, you fool! Damn your impudence! Do you take me for a Jew?”

“Beg pardon, sir—no ’arm meant.”

“No,” Sturm declared, “it’s Chinese.”

“Then likely Prince Victor meant you to ask Shaik Tsin to translate it for you, sir.”

“Probably,” Sturm muttered. “I’ll see.”

“Yes, sir. Good-night, sir.”

Without acknowledging this civility, Sturm turned back into the house and slammed the door. Nogam lingered another moment, then shuffled wearily down the steps and toward the nearest corner.

Across the street the voluntary shadow detached itself from cover in the areaway, and skulked after him. He paid no heed. But when the shadow rounded the corner, it saw only a dark and empty street, and pulled up with a grunt of doubt. Simultaneously something not unlike a thunderbolt for force and fury was launched, from the dark shelter of a doorway near by, at its devoted head. And as if by magic the shadow took on form and substance to receive the onslaught. A fist, that carried twelve stone of bone and sinew jubilant with realization of the hour for action so long deferred, found shrewdly the heel of a jawbone, just beneath the ear. Its victim dropped without a cry, but the impact of the blow was loud in the nocturnal stillness of that bystreet, and was echoed in magnified volume by the crack of a skull in collision with a convenient lamppost.

Followed a swift patter of fugitive feet.

Tempered by veils of mist, the lamplight fell upon a face upturned from a murmurous gutter, a yellow face, wide and flat, with lips grinning back from locked teeth and eyes frozen in a staring question to which no living man has ever known the answer.

The pattering footsteps grew faint in distance and died away, the street was still once more, as still as Death....

In the study of Prince Victor Vassilyevski the man Sturm put an impatient question:

“Well? What you make of it—hein?”

Shaik Tsin looked up from a paper which he had been silently examining by the light of the brazen lamp.

“Number One says,” he reported, smiling sweetly, while his yellow forefinger moved from symbol to symbol of the picturesque writing: _‘“The blow falls to-night. Proceed at once to the gas works and do that which you know is to be done.’”_

“At last!” The voice of the Prussian was full and vibrant with exultancy. He threw back his head with a loud laugh, and his arm described a wild, dramatic gesture.

“At last—der Tag! To-night the Fatherland shall be avenged!”

Shaik Tsin beamed with friendliest sympathy Sturm turned to go, took three hurried steps toward the door, and felt himself jerked back by a silken cord which, descending from nowhere, looped his lean neck between chin and Adam’s apple. His cry of protest was the last articulate sound he uttered. And the last sounds he heard, as he lay with face hideously congested and empurpled, eyeballs starting from their deep sockets, and swollen tongue protruding, were words spoken by Shaik Tsin as that one knelt over him, one hand holding fast the ends of the bowstring that had cut off forever the blessed breath of life, the other flourishing a half-sheet of notepaper.

“Fool! Look, fool, and read what vengeance visits a fool who is fool enough to play the spy!”

He brandished the papers before those glazing eyeballs.

In an eldritch cackle he translated:

_“‘He who bears this message is a Prussian dog, police trained, a spy. Let his death be a dog’s, cruel and swift.—Number One.’”_

XVIII ORDEAL

Reviewing the day, as she undressed and prepared for bed, Sofia told herself she had never yet lived through one so wearing, and thought the history of its irksome hours all too legible in the lack-lustre face that looked back from the mirror when Chou Nu uncoifed her hair and brushed its burnished tresses.

Though she had slept late, in fact till noon and something after, her sleep had been queerly haunted and unhappy, she could not remember how or why, and she had awakened already ennuyé, with a mind incoherently oppressed, without relish for the promise of the day—in a mood altogether as drear as the daylight that waited upon her unclosing eyes.

Main strength of will had not availed to dispel these vapours, neither did their melancholy yield to the distraction provided by first acquaintance with ways of a world unique alike in Sofia’s esteem and her experience.

She who had theretofore known only in day-dreams the life of light frivolity and fashion which found feverish and trumpery reflection at Frampton Court, was neither equipped nor disposed to be hypercritical in the first hours of her début there; and at any other time, in any other temper, she knew, she must have been swept off her feet by its exciting appeal to her innate love of luxury and sensation. But the sad truth was, it all seemed to her unillusioned vision an elaborate sham built up of tinsel, paste, and paint; and the warmth of her welcome at the hands, indeed in the very arms, of Lady Randolph West, and the success her youth and beauty scored for her—commanding in all envy, admiration, cupidity, or jealousy, according to age, sex, and temporal state of servitude—did nothing to mitigate the harshness of those first impressions.

If anything her depression grew more perversely morbid the more she was catered to, courted, flattered, and cajoled. Something had happened, she could never guess what, perhaps some mysterious reaction effected through the chemistry of last night’s slumber, to turn her vivid zest in life to ashes in her mouth, so that nothing seemed to matter any more.

Thoughts of Karslake as her lover, recollection of her first deep joy in his avowal and her subsequent passion of shame and regret, re-perusal of his note, that last night had seemed so sweet a thing, precious beyond compare—found her indifferent to-day, and left her so. Try as she would, she failed to recapture any sense of the reality of those first raptures. And yet, somehow, she didn’t doubt he loved her or that, buried deep beneath this inexplicable apathy, love for Karslake burned on in her heart; but she knew no sort of comfort in such confidence, their love seemed as remote and immaterial an issue as the menu for day after to-morrow’s dinner. Nothing mattered!

She was able even to meet Prince Victor without her customary shiver of aversion; and when she recalled the persistence and enthusiasm with which she had reasoned herself into believing, last night, that he might be another than her father, she came as near to mirth as she was to come that day; but it was mirth bitter with self-derision. Of course he was her father, she had been a ninny ever to dream contrariwise, or that it mattered.

Nor had she met with more success in efforts to find a cause for this drab humour; unless, indeed, it were simply the farthest swing of the pendulum from yesterday’s emotional crises, a long swing out of sunlit spaces swept by the brave winds of young romance into a gloomy zone of brooding torpor, whose calm was false, surcharged with unseizable disquiet, its atmosphere electrical with formless apprehensions, its sad twilight shot with lurid gleams no sooner glimpsed than gone.

In this state Sofia’s sensibilities were less benumbed than bound in a palsy of suspense not wholly destitute of dread; beneath the lethargic shallows of consciousness lay soundless deeps troubled by sinister premonitions....

Now, retracing stage by stage the record of the day, Sofia became aware that its most poignant moment for her was actually the present, with its keen wonder that she had contrived to survive such exquisite tedium.

She perceived that she had moved throughout like an automaton swayed by a will outside its own; functioning rather than living; performing appointed business, executing prescribed gestures, uttering foreordained observations, and making dictated responses, all without suggestion of spontaneity, and all without meaning other than as means to bridge an empty space of waiting.

Waiting for what?

Sofia could not guess....

She went to bed presently, hoping only to find surcease of boredom; and her head no sooner touched the pillow than oblivion closed down upon her faculties like a dense, dark cloud.

Discreet and well-instructed, Chou Nu turned the night-light down to a glimmer, placed on and under a chair adjacent to the bed a robe of cashmere that wouldn’t rustle, and slippers of fine felt with soles of soft leather, in which footfalls must be inaudible—and glided gently from the room.

For sixty minutes its deep hush was unbroken; the even respiration of the girl made no sound, she rested without tossing, without moving a finger.

Then, sleep having held her for precisely one hour by the clock, Sofia opened her eyes, drew in a deep breath, and at once sat up on the side of the bed.

The memory of that hour was not to leave the girl while life was in her; nor was the question it raised ever to be answered in a fashion satisfactory to her intelligence. When later she heard it stated with authority, by men reputed to be versed in psychic knowledge, that a subject in hypnosis cannot be willed to act contrary to the instincts of his or her better nature, she held her peace, but wondered. Was Victor right, then, and the crime he had willed her to commit in final analysis not repugnant to her instincts? Or was it some secret faculty of the soul, telepathy or of its kin, that roused and sent her to keep her rendezvous with destiny?

A riddle never to be read: Sofia only knew that, finding herself awake, she got up, donned négligée and slippers, and set her feet upon the way appointed without its occurring to her that the way was strange, without stopping to question why or whether.

If independent volition, sensible or subliminal, were absent, it could hardly have been apparent. Sofia herself was not aware of its suspense or supersession. She knew quite well what she was doing, her every action was direct and decided, the goal alone remained obscure. She only knew that somewhere, somehow, something was going wrong without her, and her presence was required to set it right.

Letting herself out into the corridor, she drew the door to behind her, but left it unlatched; with what object, she did not know. But the lateness of the hour, the stillness of the sleeping household, made it seem quite in order that she should pause to look cautiously this way and that and make sure that nobody else was astir to spy upon her or challenge the purpose of this as yet aimless nocturnal flitting.

There was nobody that she could see.

Down the corridor, then, never asking why that way, like a ghost in haste she sped, but as she drew near to a certain door found her pace faltering. Sofia knew that door; through it Lady Randolph West herself had introduced the girl to her boudoir, not two hours since, when chance, or Fate, or the smooth working out of malicious mortal machinations had moved the two women simultaneously to seek their quarters for the night. And in the boudoir Sofia had spent the quarter of an hour before going on to her own room and bed, civilly attending to vapid chatter and admiring as in duty bound the admirable jewels of the family.

Now she saw the door a few inches ajar with, beyond it, a dim glow. The circumstance seemed singular, because—now that she remembered—when Sofia had expressed perfunctory curiosity concerning what precautions were taken to safeguard the jewels, Lady Randolph West had airily informed her that she considered insurance to their appraised value plus a stout lock on the boudoir door better than any strong-box as yet devised by the ingenuity of man.

“There’s the safe they’re kept in, of course,” the lady had declared—“but, my dear, a cardboard box will do as well when any burglar who knows his business makes up his mind to get at my trinkets. I never even trouble to lock the thing. I’d rather lose the jewels—and collect the insurance money—than be frightened out of my wits by hearing it blown open. No, thanks ever so: any cracksman skillful enough to pick the lock on the door may bag his loot and go in peace for all of me!”

Impulse, at least she called it that, moved Sofia to approach and cautiously open the door still wider.

Upon the antique writing-desk that housed the safe burned a single lamp of low candle-power. A door that led to the adjoining bedchamber was tightly shut. Sofia’s mistrustful eyes reconnoitred every corner of the room, and reckoned it empty. Again obedient to undisputed impulse, she stepped inside and shut the door. The spring-latch of the American lock found its socket with a soft click. Thereafter, silence, no sound in the boudoir, none from the room beyond. But to Sofia the hurried beating of her heart reverberated on the stillness like the rolling of a drum.

Without clear appreciation of how she had got there, she found herself standing over the writing-desk, and discovered what the indifferent light had till now kept hidden, that a false panel in the front of the desk had been thrust back, exposing the face of the safe, and that this last was not even closed.

At the same time she grew conscious that her hands were shaking violently, that her every limb, her whole body indeed, was agitated by desperate trembling. And dully asked herself why this should be ... But didn’t hesitate.

Her actions now more than ever resembled those of an unthinking puppet, although she knew quite well what she was doing; and her gestures might have been the fruit of long lessoning at the hands of some master of stage melodrama, so true were they to theatrical convention.

With furtive, frightened glances toward both doors, Sofia dropped to her knees before the safe....

When she stood up again her hands were filled with jewellery, her two hands held a treasure of incalculable price in precious stones.

She paused for a little, staring at them with dilate eyes dark in a pale, rapt face. Her lips were parted, but only her quickened breathing whispered past them. She was trembling more painfully than ever. But she seemed unable to think of anything but the jewels, her gaze was held in fascination by their coruscant loveliness as revealed by the light of the little lamp.

Hers for the taking!

Then, without warning, a tremendous convulsion laid hold on her body and soul, and she was racked and shaken by it, and at its crisis her outstretched hands opened and showered the top of the desk with jewels, then flew to her head and clutched her throbbing temples.

She cried out in a low voice of suffering: _“No!”_

And of a sudden she was reeling back from the desk, toward the corridor door, repeating over and over on an ascending scale: _“No! no! no! no! no!”_

Her quaking legs blundered against a chair, her knees gave, she tottered to fall; strong arms caught her, held her safe, a voice she knew yet didn’t know in its guarded key muttered in her ear: “Thank God!”

She made no struggle, but her eyes of pain and terror sought the speaker’s face, and saw that he was the man Nogam. In extremity of amazement she spoke his name. He shook his head.

“No longer Nogam,” he said in the same low accents, and smiled—“but your father, Michael Lanyard!”

XIX UNMASKING

One more instant the girl rested passive in uncomprehending astonishment; then abruptly she exerted herself to break free from the supporting embrace, but found the effort wasted for lack of opposition, so that her own violence sent her reeling away half a dozen paces, to bring up against the desk; while Lanyard, making no move more than to drop his rejected arms, remained where she had left him, and requited her indignant stare with a broken smile of understanding, a smile at once tender, tolerant, and sympathetic, with a little quirk of rueful humour for good measure.

“My father!” Sofia repeated in a gasp of disdain—“_you!_”

He gave a slight shrug.

“Such, it appears, is your sad fortune.”

“A servant!”

“And not the proud prince you were promised? Rather a come down, one must admit.” Lanyard laughed low, and moved nearer. “I’m sorry, I mean I might be (for myself, too) if Nogam were less a fraud than that pretentious mountebank, Prince Victor—or for the matter of that, if you were as poor of spirit as you would seem on your own valuation, if you were not at heart your mother’s daughter, and mine, my child by a woman whom I loved well, and who long ago loved me!”

He paused deliberately to let her grasp the full sense of his words, then pursued:

“It may help you get your bearings to know that I am truly the Michael Lanyard to whom Messieurs Secretan & Sypher addressed their advertisement—you remember—as this should prove.”

He offered a slip of paper, and after another moment of dumb staring, the girl took it and read aloud the message which Victor had dictated following Sofia’s flight to him from the Café des Exiles.

_“‘To Michael Lanyard, Intelligence Division, the War Office, Whitehall—’”_

“That is to say,” Lanyard interpreted, “of the British Secret Service.”

“You!”

He bowed in light irony. “One regrets one is at present unable to offer better social standing. To-morrow, it may be ... But who knows?”

Sofia shook her head impatiently, and in a murmur of deepening amazement resumed her reading of the note:

_“‘Your daughter Sofia is now with me.. Your own intelligence must tell you nothing could be more fatal than an attempt to communicate with her’”_

To the interrogation eloquent in her eyes Lanyard replied:

“Dictated by Victor to Karslake, who passed it on to me, the night he brought you to the house from the Café des Exiles.”

“You knew—you, who claim to be my father—yet permitted him—?”

“You were in the house before I knew I had a daughter; Karslake had no chance to consult me before fetching you. Furthermore, if he had hesitated to carry out Victor’s orders just then, not only would he have nullified all our preparations to secure evidence enough to convict the man, or at least run him out of England—”

“Prince Victor? What was he doing, that you should—?”

“Dabbling in all manner of infamy, from financing a thieves’ fence to organizing an association of common criminals to bring it business; from maintaining a corps of agitators to foment social discontent to fostering this last, most imbecile scheme of all, which comes to naught to-night, an attempt to overthrow the British Empire and set up in its stead a Soviet England, with Victor Vassilyevski in the dual rôle of Trotsky and Lenine!”

The girl made a sign of bewilderment and incredulity.

“What are you telling me? Are you mad?”

“No—but Victor is, mad with lust for power, insane with illusions of personal aggrandizement. You don’t believe? Listen to me, then, appreciate to what demoniac lengths he was prepared to go to flatter his insane ambitions:”

“Sturm has invented a new poison gas, odourless, colourless, the most deadly known, and easily manufactured in vast quantities by adding simple ingredients to ordinary illuminating gas. Fanatic Bolshevist that he was, Sturm offered his formula to Victor, to be used to clear the way for social revolution; and Victor jumped at the offer—has spent vast sums preparing to employ it. His money paid for the recent strike at the Westminster works of the Gas Light and Coke Company, by means of which Victor was able to smuggle a round number of his creatures into its service. His money has corrupted servants employed in Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, in the homes of the nobility, even in Buckingham Palace itself, men ready at a given signal secretly to turn on gas jets in remote corners and flood the buildings with the very breath of Death itself. And that signal was to have been given to-night. Well, it will not be.”

“But could any scheme be more grotesquely diabolical? Do you ask more proof of the man’s madness? Do you require more excuse for my permitting you to be deceived by Victor for a few weeks, rather than wreck our plans to frustrate his, when all the while Karslake and I were near you, watching over you, learning to love you—he in his fashion, I as your father—and both ready at all times to die in your protection, if it had ever come to that?”

Lanyard had drawn so near that only a few inches separated them, and had his voice in such control that at three paces’ distance a vague and inarticulate murmur at most might have been heard; but in Sofia’s hearing his accents rang with passionate sincerity, persuading her against the reason which would have rejected his indictment of Victor as too fantastic, too imaginative, and too hopelessly overdrawn to be given credence. She believed him, knowing in her heart that he believed his statements to the last word; and knowing more, that he was surely what he represented himself to be, her father.

Inscrutable the processes of human hearts: even as from the very first Sofia had instinctively yet unconsciously recognized the intrinsic falsity of Victor’s pretensions, so now she perceived the integral honesty that informed Lanyard’s every word and nuance of expression, and accepted him without further inquisition.

To his insistent “Have I made you understand?” she returned a wan wraith of a smile, pitiful with entreaty, while one of her hands found the way to his.

“I think so,” she replied in halting apology—“at least, I believe you. But be a little patient with me. It is all so new and strange, what you tell me, it’s hard at first to grasp, there’s so much I must accept on faith alone, so much I don’t understand ...”

“I know.” Lanyard pressed her hand gently.

“But try to have faith; I promise you it shall be fairly rewarded. Only a little longer now, an hour or two at most, and Karslake will be here to prove the truth of all I have asserted. You will believe him, at least.”

“Of course,” the girl said, simply. “I love him. You knew that?”

“I guessed, and I am glad, glad for both of you.”

“But he is safe?” Sofia demanded in sudden access of alarm so strong that her voice rose above the pitch of discretion.

“Quietly. Yes, he is safe enough.”

“You know that for a fact? How do you know—?”

“I’ve seen him to-night, talked with him—not two hours since.”

“You have been in London?” she questioned—“to-night?”

“Rather! Victor sent me.” Lanyard laughed lightly. “You didn’t know, of course, but—well, I gave him reason to suspect me, so he sent me up to be assassinated by Shaik Tsin. As it turned out, however, Herr Sturm most obligingly understudied for me.... Before coming back, I looked Karslake up. He’d been busy, playing a lone hand, ever since Victor trumped up an errand to keep him out of your way all day. No need to go into tedious details; I found Karslake had matters well in hand: the gas works surrounded by a cordon of troops, the house under close watch, and—best of all—a sworn confession from an Irish Member of Parliament whom Victor had managed to buy with a promise to free Ireland once Soviet England was an accomplished fact. So I left Karslake to wind up loose ends in London, and posted back with my heart in my mouth for fear I’d be too late.”

“Too late?” Sofia queried with arching brows.

“Need I remind you where we are?”

A sweep of Lanyard’s hand indicated the boudoir; and Sofia started sharply in perplexity and alarm.

“Where we are!” she echoed in a frightened whisper.

Of a sudden memory returned of what had passed in that room before Lanyard had revealed himself to her, and knowledge of her peril so narrowly escaped drove home like a knife to her heart.

“What am I doing here?” she breathed in horror. “What have I done?”

“Nothing more dreadful than prove yourself as true as you are fine, by revolting in the end against the most powerful force known to man, the force of suggestion implanted in hypnotism. You couldn’t know that it was hypnotic not natural sleep you passed into last night, when Victor tricked you with that damned crystal, or that, while you slept, he willed you to do here to-night what, when it came to the final test, your nature would not let you do.”

“But he so often told me I had the instincts of a thief—!”

“So often—_I_ know—that you were, against your will and reason, by dint of the very iteration of it, coming to accept that lie as a truth whose power there was no contesting. That is why, that you might prove yourself by your own acts, I had to let you undergo your ordeal here to-night, only standing by to make sure no ill came of it. Otherwise you might have carried to your grave the fear instilled into your soul by that blackguard. But now you know he lied, and will never doubt again—or reproach your father for the dark record of his younger years.”

He checked, lifting hands of desolate appeal, then let them fall.

“Dear, if you knew you would not judge me harshly. If only you could know what I have fought up from, a foundling without a name abandoned in a third-rate Parisian hotel, reared a scullion, butt and scapegoat, with associates only of the lowest, scullions, beggars, pickpockets, Apaches, and worse—!”

“As if that mattered!”

The girl turned a softly suffused face with shining eyes to Lanyard’s. Now at last she knew him, now the romance of her dreams of yesterday came true: through the mean masquerade of Nogam the man emerged, identifying himself in her sight unmistakably with that splendid stranger whom she had never quite forgotten since that old-time afternoon when he had met Karslake in the Café des Exiles and talked so intimately of his antecedents, hinting at a history of youthful years strangely analogous with her own.

Involuntarily her arms lifted and settled upon his shoulders.

“I am so proud to think—”

A shrill scream drowned out her words, a woman’s voice ranging swiftly the staccato gamut of terror and cracking discordantly on its most piercing note.

Then with a bang that shook the flooring and must have been heard in the farthest corners of the house, the bedchamber door was slammed behind their backs. But beyond it the screaming went on in volume imperceptibly muffled by its barrier, one ear-splitting caterwaul following another with such continuity that the wonder was where Lady Randolph West found breath to keep up that atrocious row, and whether any dozen women of average lung-power could have rivalled it.

In one sharp movement Lanyard and Sofia disengaged and fell apart, their eyes consulting, hers in dismay, his in mixed exasperation and remorse.

“I ought to be shot,” he declared, bitterly—“who knew better!—to have delayed here, exposing you to this danger—!”

“It couldn’t be helped,” Sofia insisted; “you had to make me understand. Besides, if I hurry back—”

In quick strides Lanyard crossed to the corridor door, unlatched and opened it an inch, peered out, and gave the sum of what he saw in a gesture of finality, then leaving the door ajar turned swiftly back to the girl.

“Too late,” he said: “they’re swarming out into the hall like bees. In another minute ...”

Of a sudden he closed with Sofia, roughly clasping her body to him.

“Struggle with me!” he pleaded—“get me by the throat, throw me back across the desk—”

“What do you mean? Let me go!”

In answer to her efforts to wrench away, Lanyard only tightened his hold and swung her toward the desk.

“Do as I bid you! It’s the only way out. Let them think you heard a noise, got up to investigate, found me here, rifling the safe—”

“No,” she insisted—“no! Why should I save myself at your expense?—betray you—my father—!”

“Then give me the obedience of a daughter ... or let Victor succeed in branding you a thief, the daughter of a thief!”

He stilled the protest she would have uttered by placing fingers over her lips.

“Listen!”

In the corridor an angry rumour of voices, alarmed calls and cries, with thumps and scuffles of hasty feet, in the bedchamber the shrieks persisting without the least hint of failing: as a damned soul might bawl upon its bed of coals ...

“Sofia, I implore you!”

Still she hesitated.

“But you—?”

“Never fear for me, remember that I am of the Secret Service: two minutes after I see the inside of the nearest police station, I shall be free—and happy in the assurance that your name is without stain. Then Karslake will come for you, bring you to me ... Now!”

Lanyard caught the girl’s two wrists together and, throwing himself bodily backward across the desk, carried her hands to his throat.

With a simultaneous crash the door was flung back to the wall. Led by Victor Vassilyevski a dozen men, guests and servants, in various stages of dishabille, streamed into the room.

XX THE DEVIL TO PAY

When it was all over, when the gravelled drive no longer crunched to wheels that bore away the man Nogam to answer for his misdeeds, when the household had quieted down and the most indefatigable sensation-monger had wearied of singing the praises of the Princess Sofia and, tossing off a final whiskey-and-soda, had paddled sleepily back to bed, lights burned on brightly in two parts only of Frampton Court, in the bedchambers tenanted respectively by Prince Victor Vassilyevski and his reputed daughter.

Alone, Prince Victor sat at the desk where he had, four hours earlier, inscribed those characters which should have hurried Nogam into a premature grave. That they had failed of their mission was something that fretted Victor Vassilyevski, his mind and nerves, to a pitch of exacerbation all but unendurable.

What had become of that sentence to death? And what of that other, the telegram which, forwarded by Nogam’s hand to Sturm, should long since have set in motion the organized machinery of murder and demolition?