The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

'I'm not wasting time,' said Essenden.

The Saint looked at him. He had a dim suspicion that there was something in Essenden's eyes that should not have been there; but he could not be sure. And yet—what could the trick possibly be? Not more than a device to get rid of the man, in the hope that the woman would be easier to deal with.

Regarded in that way, the idea became ludicrous— to anyone with a scrap of imagination and the slightest knowledge of Jill Trelawney. Yet Simon turned in the doorway and spoke a ridiculous warning.

'Jill,' he said, 'it's just possible that he's expecting to do something clever when he's got you alone. But the dangerous four are safely trussed up, and Marmaduke's a very silly little man and not at all necessary to the cause of Empire Free Trade—so if he does raise up on his hind legs——'

'You should worry,' said the girl. 'That's just what I'm waiting for. I've got both eyes on his lordship, and they're not blinking till you come back.'

'Good enough, baby,' said the Saint, and drifted out.

He went down the hall and found the door under the main staircase without any difficulty. Opening it, he found a switch, and went down a long flight of stone stairs, finding the wine cellar at the bottom, as he had been told he would. By his side, at the foot of the stairs, he found another switch, and with this he was able to light up the cellar. The door at the far end was of mas­sive and ancient wood, heavily barred, and studded with iron. He would have expected such a door to be heavily dusted and cobwebbed; but a faint trace of oil about the hinges was enough to tell his keen eyes that he would not be the first person to penetrate into the passage.

He took down the key. It was bright and newly bur­nished, and the lock turned easily. Beyond the door, when he had opened it, he found another switch, and this lighted up a row of frosted bulbs along the tunnel that faced him.

A breath of damp, musty air struck his face. He went on cautiously, and with a faint feeling of illogical alert­ness tingling up his spine—a feeling almost amounting to apprehension. He scowled at the feeling. There was no reason for it—no basis beyond the fact that he had imag­ined he had caught in Essenden's eye a flicker of an ex­pression whose interpretation had baffled him. But he went on, calling himself every manner of fool, and kept his hand on his gun.

The passage sloped steeply downwards, and the last ten yards were almost precipitous. He descended them gin­gerly by the aid of well-worn crevices in the stone paving that must once have been another flight of steps, before they had been worn away into mere ridges in a steep slope.

The roof of the passage, which had been low at the beginning, did not descend with the slope. It remained at its old level, so that the space above his head became loftier as he went down. At the foot of the slope the passage took a sharp turn. He rounded the corner and found himself suddenly in the place that Essenden had described as 'a sort of cave.' It was certainly a sort of cave, but of a sort that the Saint had never expected to find in such a place. Where he entered it the roof was not very high, and the light from the last of the row of bulbs which had led him there illuminated it. But of the extent of the cavern he could not judge. It stretched away be­yond the rough semicircle of illumination, its ultimate depths of darkness dwarfing the light at that one end. He spoke a few pointless words with some idea of testing the dimensions of the cave, and the echoes of his voice rever­berated backwards and forwards with a wild and swelling intensity until they almost deafened him, and then gradually rolled and rattled away into the bowels of the earth. And when the echoes had stopped, in the utter silence and loneliness of the place, he had no inclination to burst into tears because his instructions did not com­pel him to penetrate any farther into that gigantic crypt.

He turned. The aperture through which he had come seemed now, in perspective with the rest of the place, to have a puny and insignificant appearance, like a mouse hole in a cathedral wall; but on the right of the entrance he found what he had been told to look for. In the centre of the wall of the cave, about a dozen feet apart, were two sets of chains hanging from iron staples cemented into the rock. He was to look between these.