Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

'After all,' said Roger, 'you can't go round kidnapping Steel Princesses without something happening.'

Simon helped himself to marmalade.

'True, O King,' he murmured. 'Though that's hardly likely to be the charge. If Heinrich had sung a song about a stolen Steel Princess they'd have wanted to know what she was doing in his house. . . . Curse Sunday! On any other day I could have bought an evening paper and found out exactly what psalm he warbled. As it is, I shall have to go round and inquire in person.'

'You'll have to what?' spluttered Roger.

'Make personal inquiries,' said the Saint. 'Disguised as a gentleman, I shall interview Prince Rudolf at the Ritz Hotel, and hear all the news.'

He pushed back his chair and reached for the cigarette box.

'It may not have occurred to your mildewed intellect,' he remarked pleasantly, 'that the problems of international intrigue can usually be reduced to quite simple terms. Let's reduce Rudolf. A, wishing to look important, desires to smite B on the nose. But B, unfortunately, is a bigger man than A. C comes along and offers A a gun, wherewith B can be potted from a safe distance. But we destroyed that gun. C then suggests a means of wangling an alliance between A and D, whereby the disgusting superiority of B may be overcome. C, of course, is sitting on the fence, waiting to take them into his very expensive nursing-home when they've all half killed each other. Is that clear?'

'Like mud,' said Roger.

'Well,'  said the Saint,  unmoved,  'if you wanted to find out exactly how the alliance was to be wangled, mightn't it be helpful to ask A?'

'And, naturally, he'd tell you at once.'

Simon shook his head sadly.

'There are subtleties in this game,' he said, 'which are lost upon you, Roger. But they may be explained to you later. Meanwhile...'

The Saint leaned back, with a glance at his watch, and looked across the table at the girl. The bantering manner which he wore with such an ease slipped from his shoulders like a cloak; and he studied her face soberly, reading what he could in the deep brown eyes. She had been watching him ever since he came into the room; and he knew that the fate of his plan was already sealed—one way or the other.

'Your parole has still more than four hours to run,' he said, 'but I give it back to you now.'

She could thank him coldly, and go. She could thank him nicely, rather puzzledly—and go. And if she had made the least move to do either of those things, he would not have said another word. It would be no use, unless she delayed of her own free will. And only one thing could so bend her will—a thing that he hardly dared to contem­plate. ...

'Why do you do that? 'she asked simply.

3

'Why do you do that?' . . . 'I'll give you my parole.' ... He turned over those forthright sentences in his mind. And the way in which they had been spoken. The way in which everything he had heard her say had been spoken. Her superb simplicity...

'America's Loveliest Lady,' the Bystander caption had called her; and the Saint reflected how little meaning was left in that last word. And yet it was the only word for her. There was something about her that one had to meet to understand. If he had had to describe it, he could only have done so in flowery phrases—and a flowery phrase would have robbed the thing of all its fresh naturalness, would have tarnished it, might even have made it seem pretentious. And it was the most unpretending thing he had ever known. It was so innocent that it awed him; and yet it made his heart leap with a fantastic hope.

'I did my thinking last night, as I said I would,' he answered her quietly.

Still she did not move.

She prompted him: 'And you made your plan?'

'Yes.'

'I wonder if it was the same as mine?'

Simon raised his eyebrows.

''The same as yours?''

She smiled.

'I can think, too, Mr.—Saint,' she said. 'I've been taught to. And last night I thought a lot. I thought of everything you'd said, and everything I'd heard about you. And I believed what you'd told me. So—I knew there was only one thing to do.'

'Namely?'

'Didn't you call me—Marius's battle-axe? I think you were right. And that's something for us to know. But there's so much else that we don't know—how the axe is to be used, and what other weapons there are to reinforce it. You've taken the axe away, but that's all. Marius still means to bring down the tree. Once before you've thought he was beaten; but you were wrong. This time, if you just take away his axe, you'll know he isn't beaten. He's already undermined the tree. Even now it may fall before the next natural storm. It may be hard enough to prop it up now, until the roots grow down again—without leaving Marius free to strike at it again. And to make sure that he won't strike again, you've got to break his arm.'

'Or his neck,' said the Saint grimly.

Again she smiled.

'Haven't I read your thoughts?'

'Perfectly.'

'And what was your plan?'

Simon met her eyes.

'I meant,' he said deliberately, 'to ask you to go back—to Heinrich Dussel.'

'That was what I meant to suggest.'

In that moment Roger Conway felt utterly off the map. The Saint had told him nothing. The Saint had merely sung continuously in his bath— which, with the Saint, was a sure sign of peace of mind. And, in the circumstances, Roger Conway had wondered. . . . But Simon had donned his disguise and departed in the car without a word in explanation of his high spirits; and Roger had been left to wonder. . . . And then—this. He saw the long, deliberate glance which the other two ex­changed, and felt that they were moving and speaking in another world—a world to which he could never aspire. And like a man in a dream he heard them discussing the impossible thing.

He knew the Saint, and the thunderbolts of dazzling audacity which the Saint could launch, as no other man could have claimed to know them; and yet this detonation alone would have reeled him momentarily off his balance. But it didn't stand alone. It was matched—without a second's pause. They were of the same breed, those two. Though their feet were set on different roads, they walked in the same country—a country that or­dinary people could never reach. And it was then that Roger Conway, who had always believed that no one in all the world could walk shoulder to shoulder with the Saint in that country, began to understand many things.

He heard them, in his dream—level question and answer, the quiet, crisp words. He would have been less at sea if either of them had said any of the things that he might have expected, in any way that he might have expected; but there was none of that. Those things did not exist in their language. Their calm, staccato utterances plunged into his brain like clear-cut gems falling through an infinite darkness.

'You've considered the dangers?'

'To myself?'

'Yes.'

'I'm never safe—at any time.'

'The destinies we're playing with, then. I might fail you. That would mean we'd given Marius the game.'

'You might not fail.'

'Have we the right?' asked the Saint.

And then Roger saw him again—the new Saint to whom he had still to grow accustomed. Simon Templar, with the old careless swashbuckling days behind him, more stern and sober, playing bigger games than he had ever touched before—yet with the light of all the old ideals in blue eyes that would never grow old, and all the old laughing hell-for-leather recklessness waiting for his need.