Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

'Once,' she said, 'I had a dog called Alexis. It's a nice name—for a dog.'

He laughed, sharply.

'And in a few moments,' he said, 'you will have a husband of the same name. So are you an­swered.'

He pushed a chair across to the couch where she sat, and settled himself, facing her, his hands clasped over his knees. Through his thick spec­tacles a pair of pale blue eyes regarded her fixedly.

'You are beautiful,' he remarked presently. 'I am glad. It was promised me that you would be beautiful.'

When he spoke it was like some weird Oriental chant; his voice rose and fell monotonously with out reference to context, and remained horribly dispassionate. For the first time the girl felt a qualm of panic, that still was not strong enough to shake her bleak inertia.

She cleared her throat.

'And who made this promise?' she inquired calmly.

'Ah, you would like to know!'

'I'm just naturally interested.'

'It was an old friend of me.' He nodded ruminatively, still staring, like a bearded man­darin. 'Yess—I think Sir Isaac Lessing will be sorry to have lost you....'

Then the nodding slowed up and stopped abruptly, and the stare went on.

'You love him—Sir Isaac?'

'Does that matter? I don't see what difference it makes—now.'

'It makes a difference.'

'The only difference I can see is that Sir Isaac Lessing had a few gentlemanly instincts. For in­stance, he did take the trouble to ask my per­mission before he arranged to marry me.'

'Ah!' Vassiloff bent forward. 'You think Sir Isaac is a gentleman? Yet he is an enemy of me. This'—he spread out one hand and returned it to his knee—'has been done because he is an enemy.'

Sonia shrugged, returning the man's stare coldly. Her composed indifference seemed to in­furiate Vassiloff. He leaned further forward, so that his face was close to hers, and a pale flame glinted over his eyes.

'You are ice, yess? But listen. I will melt you. And first I tell you why I do it.'

He put his hand on her shoulder; and she recoiled from the touch; but he took no notice.

'Once,' he said, in that crooning voice, 'there was a very poor young man in London. He went to ask for work of a rich man. He was starving. He could not see the rich man at his office, so he went to the rich man's house, and there he see him. The rich man strike in his face, like he was dirt. And then, for fear the young man should strike him back, he call his servants, and say, 'Throw him out in the street.' I was that young man. The rich man is Sir Isaac Lessing.'

'I should call that one of the most com­mendable things Lessing ever did,' said the girl gently.

He ignored her interruption.

'Years go by. I go back to Russia, and there are revolutions. I am with them. I see many rich men die—men like Lessing. Some of them I kill myself. But always I remember Lessing, who strike in my face. I promoted myself —I have power—but always I remember.'

Overhead, on the bridge, could be heard the regular pacing of the officer of the watch; but in that brightly lighted cabin Sonia felt as if there was no one but Alexis Vassiloff on the ship. His presence filled her eyes; his sing-song accents filled her ears.

'Lessing makes money with the oil. I, also, make control of the oil. He does not remember me, but still he try to strike in my face—but this time it is in the oil. I, too, try to fight him, but I cannot. There are great ones with him. And then I meet a great one, and he becomes a friend of me, and I tell him my story. And he make the plan. First, he will take you away from Lessing and give you to me. He show me your picture, and I say— yess. That will make Lessing hurt. It is for the strike in the face he once give me. But that is not enough. I must make to ruin Lessing. And my friend make another plan. He say that when he tell Lessing you are with me, Lessing will try to make war. 'Now,' he say, 'I will make Lessing think that when he make war against you he will have all Europe with him; but when the war come he will find all the big countries fight among themselves, and they cannot take notice of the little country Lessing will use to make his war against you.' All this my friend can do, because he is a great one. He is greater than Lessing. He is Rayt Marius. You know him?'

'I've heard of him.'

'You have heard of him? Then you know he can do it. Behind him there are other great ones, greater than there are behind Lessing. He show me his plans. He will send out spies, and make the big countries hate each other. Then, when we have take you, he send men to kill someone—the French President, perhaps—and there is the war. It is easy. It is just another Serajevo. But it is enough. And I have my revenge—I, Vassiloff—for the strike in the face. I will have Sir Isaac Lessing crawl to my feet, but I will not be merciful. And our Russia will be great also. The big countries will fight each other, and they will be tired; and when we have finished one little country we will conquer another, and we shall be victorious over all Europe, we of the Revolution....'

The Russian's voice had risen to a higher pitch as he spoke, and the light of madness burned in his eyes.

Sonia watched him, listening, hypnotized. At no time before, even when she had heard and incredulously accepted the Saint's inspired deductions, had she fully grasped the immensity of the plot in which she had been made a pawn. And now she saw it in a blinding flash, and the vision appalled her.

As Vassiloff went on, the hideously solid facts on which his insanity was balanced showed up with greater and greater definition through his raving. It was here—all the machinery of which the Saint had spoken was there, and strains and stresses and counter-actions measured and calculated and balanced, every cog in the hole ghastly engine cut and ground and trued-up ready for Marius to play with as he chose. How the mechanism would be put together did not matter—whether Marius had lied to Vassiloff, or meant to lie to Lessing. The rocks had been drilled in their most vital parts, the charges loaded and tamped in, the fuses laid; the tremendous fact was that the Saint had been right—right in every prophecy, vague only in the merest details. The axe had been laid to the root of the tree....

She saw the conspiracy then as the Saint himself had seen it, months before: intrigue and counter-plot, deception and deception again, and the fiend­ish forces that had been disentombed for this devil's sleight-of-hand. And she saw in imagina­tion the unleashing of those forces—the tapping drums and the blast of bugles, the steady tramp of marching feet, the sonorous drone of the war birds snarling through the sky. Almost she could hear the earth-shaking reverberations of the guns, the crisp clatter of rifle fire; and she saw the swirling mists of gas, and men reeling and stumbling through hell; she had seen and heard these things for a dollar's worth of evening entertainment, in a comfortably upholstered chair. But the men there had been only actors, fighting again the battles of a generation that was already left behind; the men she saw in her vision were of her own age, men she knew....

She hardly heard Vassiloff any more. She was thinking, instead, of that morning. 'Have we the right?' Simon Templar had asked. . . . And she saw once again the sickening sway and plunge of the figure in the motorboat. . . . Roger Conway— where had he been? What had happened to him. He should have been somewhere around; but she had not seen him. And if he were not to be counted in it meant that no power on earth could prevent her vision coming true. . . . 'That'd mean we'd given Marius the game....'

Slowly, grotesquely, the presence of Alexis Vassiloff drifted in again upon her tempestuous thought.

His voice had sunk back to that eerie crooning note to which it had been tuned before.

'But you—you will not be like the others. You will stand beside me, and we will make a new empire together, you and I. You will like that?'

She started up.

'I'll see you damned first!'

'So you are still cold .....'

His arms went round her, drawing her to him. With her hands still securely bound behind her back she was at his mercy—and she knew what that mercy would be. She kicked at his legs, but he bore her down upon the couch; she felt his hot breath on her face....

'' Let me go—you swine —''

'You are cold, but I will melt you. I will teach you how to be warm—soft—loving. So —'

Savagely she butted her head into his face, but he only laughed. His lips stung her neck, and an uncontrollable shudder went through her. His hands clawed at her dress....