Then Simon met her eyes, and shrugged.
He made her sit down on the bed, and sat down himself beside her; he took a cigarette from his case and made her take one also.
“It won’t help us to get worked up about it,” he said lightly. “It’s unfortunate about Sam Stick-my-gizzard over there, but the cheerful way to look at it is to think that he makes one less of the ungodly. Let’s be cheerful…And while we’re being cheerful, tell me how you came into this mess from which I’m rescuing you at such great peril.”
“That was easy. I wasn’t expecting anything of the sort, you see. If you’d said more when you rang me up…But I fell for it like a child. There was hardly anyone on the train, and I had a compartment to myself. We must have been near Reading when a man came along the corridor and asked if I had a match. I gave him one and he gave me a cigarette…I know I was a fool to take it, but he looked a perfectly ordinary man, and I had no reason to be suspicious…”
Simon nodded.
“Until you woke up in a motor-car somewhere?”
“Yes…Tied hand and foot, with a bag over my head…We drove for a long time, and then I was brought in here. That was only about an hour before you threw stones at my window…Oh, Simon, I’m so glad you came!”
The Saint’s arm tightened about her shoulders.
“So am I,” he said.
He was looking at the door. Clearly, the efficiency of his barricade had been proved, for the attack had paused. Then Marius gave another order.
For a while there was only the murmur of conversation, and then that stopped with the sound of someone coming heavily down the corridor. And Simon Templar caught his breath, guessing that his worst forebodings were to be realised.
An instant later he was justified by a rending crash on the door that was different from all the other thunderings that had smashed upon it before.
“What is it?” asked Patricia.
“They’ve brought up the meat-axe,” said the Saint carelessly, but he did not feel careless at heart, for the noise on the door and the crack that had appeared in one panel told him that an axe was being employed that would not take very long to damage even four inches of seasoned oak.
The blow was repeated.
And again.
The edge of a blade showed through the door like a thin strip of silver at the fourth blow.
A matter of minutes, now, before a hole was cut large enough for the besiegers to fire into the room—with an aim. And when that was done…
The Saint knew that the girl’s eyes were upon him, and tried desperately to postpone the question he knew she was framing.
“Marius, little pal!”
There was a lull, and then Marius answered.
“Are you going to say,” sneered the giant, “that you will save us the trouble of breaking in the door?”
“Oh, no. I just wanted to know how you were.”
“I have nothing to complain of, Templar. And you?”
“When there are grey skies,” said the Saint, after the manner of Al Jolson, “I don’t mind the grey skies. You make them blue, sonny boy…By the way, how did you leave my friend?”
Marius’s sneering chuckle curdled through the door.
“He is still at Brook Street, in charge of Hermann. You remember Hermann, the man you knocked out?…But I am sure Hermann will be very kind to him…Is there anything else you wish to know?”
“Nothing at the moment,” said the Saint.
Marius spoke in his own language, and the axe struck again.
Then Patricia would no longer be denied. The Saint met her eyes, and saw that she understood. But she showed no fear.
Quite quietly they looked at each other, and their hands came together quite gently and steadily.
“I’m sorry,” said Simon in a low voice. “I can never tell you how sorry I am.”
“But I understand, Simon,” she said, and her voice was still the firm, clear, unfaltering voice that he loved. “The gods haven’t forgotten you, after all. Isn’t this the sort of end you’ve always prayed for?”
“It is the end of the world,” he said quietly. “Roger was my only reinforcement. If I didn’t get back to Brook Street by a certain time, he was to come after me. But, obviously, Roger can’t come now…”
“I know.”
“I won’t let you be taken alive, Pat.”
“And you?”
He laughed.
“I shall try to take Marius with me. But—oh, Pat, I’d sell my soul for you not to be in it! This is my way out, but it isn’t yours…”
“Why not? Shouldn’t I want to see the last fight through with you?”
Her hands were on his shoulders then, and he was holding her face between his hands. She was looking up at him.
“Dear,” he said, “I’m not complaining. We don’t live in a magnificent age, but I’ve done my best to make life magnificent as I see it—to live my ideal of the happy warrior. But you made that possible. You made me seek and fight for the tremendous things. Battle and sudden death—yes, but battle and sudden death in the name of peace and life and love. You know I love you, Pat…”
She knew. And if she had never given him the ultimate depth of her heart before, she gave them all to him then, with a gladness in that kiss as vivid as a shout in silence.
“Does anything matter much beside that?” she asked.
“But I’ve sacrificed you! If I’d been like other men—if I hadn’t been so fool crazy for danger—if I’d thought more about you, and what I might be letting you in for…”
She smiled.
“I wouldn’t have had you different. You’ve never apologised for yourself before: why do it now?”
He did not answer. Who could have answered such a generosity?
So they sat together, and the battering on the door went on. The great door shook and resounded to each blow, and the sound was like the booming of a muffled knell.
Presently the Saint looked up, and saw that in the door was a hole the size of a man’s hand. And suddenly a strange strength came upon him, weak and weary as he was.
“But, by Heaven, this isn’t going to be the end!” cried the Saint. “We’ve still so much to do, you and I!”
He was on his feet.
He couldn’t believe that it was the end. He wasn’t ready, yet, to pass out—even in a blaze of some sort of glory. He wouldn’t believe that that was his hour at last. It was true that they still had so much to do. There was Roger Conway, and Vargan, and Marius, and the peace of the world wrapped up in these two. And adventure and adventure beyond. Other things…For in that one adventure, and in that one hour, he had seen a new and wider vision of life, wider even than the ideal of the happy warrior, wider even than the fierce delight of battle and sudden death, but rather a fulfilment and a consummation of all these things—and how should he die before he had followed that vision farther?
And he looked at the door, and saw the eyes of Marius.
“I should advise you to surrender, Templar,” said the giant coldly. “If you are obstinate, you will have to be shot.”
“That’d help you, wouldn’t it, Angel Face? And then how would you find Vargan?”
“Your friend Conway might be made to speak.”
“You’ve got a hope!”
“I have my own methods of persuasion, Templar, and some of them are almost as ingenious as yours. Besides, have you thought that your death would leave Miss Holm without a protector?”
“I have,” said the Saint. “I’ve also thought that my surrender would leave her in exactly the same position. But she has a knife, and I don’t think you’ll find her helpful. Think again!”
“Besides,” said Marius in the same dispassionate tone, “you need not be killed at once. It would be possible to wound you again.”
The Saint threw back his head.
“I never surrender,” he said.
“Very well,” said Marius calmly.
He snapped out another order,
and again the axe crashed on the door. The Saint knew that the hole was being enlarged so that a man could shoot through it and know what he was shooting at, and he knew that the end could not now be long in coming.
There was no cover in the room. They might have flattened themselves against the wall in which the door was, so that they could not be seen from outside, but that would make little difference. A few well-grouped shots aimed along the wall by an automatic would be certain of scoring.
And the Saint had no weapon but the captured knife, and that, as he had said, he had given to Patricia.
The odds were impossible.
As he watched the chips flying from the gap which the axe had already made—and it was now nearly as big as a man’s head—the wild thought crossed his mind that he might challenge Marius to meet him in single combat. But immediately he discarded the thought. Dozens of men might have accepted, considering the difference in their sizes: the taunt of cowardice, the need to maintain their prestige among their followers, at least, might have forced their hand and stung them to take the challenge seriously. But Marius was above all that. He had one object in view, and it was already proved that he viewed it with a singleness of aim that was above all ordinary motives. The man who had cold-bloodedly shot a way through the body of one of his own gang—and got away with it—would not be likely to be moved by an argument the Saint could use.
Then—what?
The Saint held Patricia in his arms, and his brain seemed to reel like the spinning of a great crazy flywheel. He knew that he was rapidly weakening now. The heroic effort which had taken him to that room and barricaded it had cost him much, and the sudden access of supernatural strength and energy which had just come upon him could not last for long. It was like a transparent mask of glittering crystal, hard but brittle, and behind it and through it he could see the foundations on which it based its tenacity crumbling away.
It was a question, as it had been in other tight corners, of playing for time. And it was also the reverse. Whatever was to be done to win the time must be done quickly—before that forced blaze of vitality fizzled out and left him powerless.
The Saint passed a hand across his eyes, and felt strangely futile. If only he were whole and strong, gifted again with the blood that he had lost, with a shoulder that wasn’t spreading a numbing pain all over him, and a brain cleared of the muzzy aftermath of that all-but-knock-out swipe on the jaw, to be of some use to Patricia in her need!
“Oh, God!” he groaned. “God help me!”
But still he could see nothing useful to do—nothing but the forlorn thing that he did. He put Patricia from him and leapt to the door on to part of the barricade, covering with his body the hole that was being cut. Marius saw him.
“What is it now, Templar?” asked the giant grimly.
“Nothing, honey,” croaked the Saint, with a breathless little laugh. “Just that I’m here, and I’m carefully arranging myself so that if anyone shoots at me it will be fatal. And I know you don’t want me to die yet. So it’ll keep you busy a bit longer—won’t it?—making that hole big enough for it to be safe to shoot through…”
“You are merely being foolishly troublesome,” said Marius unemotionally, and added an order.
The man with the axe continued his work.
But it would take longer—that was all the Saint cared about. There was hope as long as there was life. The miracle might happen…might happen…
He found Patricia beside him.
“Simon—what’s the use?”
“We’ll see, darling. We’re still kicking, anyway—that’s the main thing.”
She tried to move him by force, but he held her hands away. And then she tore herself out of his grasp, and with dazed and uncomprehending eyes he watched her at the window—watched her raise the sash and look out into the night.
“Help!”
“You fool!” snarled the Saint bitterly. “Do you want them to have the last satisfaction of hearing us whine?”
He forgot everything but that—that stern point of pride—and left his place at the door. He reached her in a few lurching strides, and his hands fell roughly on her shoulders to drag her away.
She shouted again. “Help!”
“Be quiet!” snarled the Saint bitterly.
But when he turned her round he saw that her face was calm and serene, and not at all the face that should have gone with those cries.
“You asked God to help you, old boy,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I ask the men who have come?”
And she pointed out the window.
He looked, and he saw that the gate at the end of the garden, and the drive within, were lighted up as with the light of day by the headlights of a car that had stopped in the road beyond. But for the din of the axe at the door he would have heard its approach.
And then into that pathway of light stepped a man, tall and dark and trim, and the man cupped his hands about his mouth and shouted:
“Coming, Pat!…Hullo, Simon!”
“Norman,” yelled the Saint. “Norman—my seraph—my sweet angel!”
Then he remembered the odds, and called again:
“Look out for yourself! They’re armed…”
“So are we,” said Norman Kent happily. “Inspector Teal and his merry men are all round the house. We’ve got ’em cold.”
For a moment the Saint could not speak.
Then—
“Did you say Inspector Teal?”
“Yes,” shouted Norman. And he added something. He added it brilliantly. He knew that the men in the house were foreigners—that even Marius, with his too-perfect English, was a foreigner—and that no one but the Saint and Patricia could be expected to be familiar with the more abstruse perversions and defilements possible to the well of native English. And he made the addition without a change of tone that might have hinted at his meaning. He added, “All breadcrumbs and bream-bait. Don’t bite!”
Then Simon understood the bluff.
It must have been years since the sedate and sober Norman Kent had played such irreverent slapstick with the tongue that Shakespeare spake, but the Saint could forgive the lapse.
Simon’s arm was around Patricia’s shoulders, and he had seen a light in the darkness. The miracle had happened, and the adventure went on.
And he found his voice.
“Oh, boy!” he cried, and dragged Patricia down into the temporary shelter of the barricade as the first shot from outside the smashed door smacked over their heads and sang away into the blackness beyond the open window.
14
HOW ROGER CONWAY DROVE THE HIRONDEL, AND NORMAN KENT LOOKED BACK
A second bullet snarled past the Saint’s ear and flattened itself in a silvery scar on the wall behind him, but no more shots followed. From outside the house came the rattle of other guns. Simon heard Marius speaking crisply, and then he was listening to the sound of footsteps hurrying away down the corridor. He raised his head out of cover, and saw nothing through the hole in the door.
“They’re going to try and make a dash through the cordon that isn’t there,” he divined, and so it was to prove.
He stood up, and began to tear away the barricade, the girl helping him.
They raced down the corridor together, and paused at the top of the stairs. But there was no one to be seen in the hall below.
Simon led the way downwards. Without considering where he went, he burst into the nearest room, and found that it was the room in which he had fought the opening skirmish. The window through which he had hurled himself was now open and through it drifted the sounds of a scattered fusillade.
He caught up a gun from the floor without halting in his rush to the window.
Outside, on the lawn, with the light behind him, he could see a little knot of men piling into a car. The engine started up a second later.
A smile touched the Saint’s lips—the first entirely carefree smile that had been there that night. There was something irr
esistibly entertaining about the spectacle of that death-or-glory sortie whose reckless daring was nothing but the saying of a loud “Boo” to a tame goose—if the men who made the sortie had only known. But they could not have known, and Marius was doing the only possible thing. He could not have hoped to survive a siege, but a sortie was a chance. Flimsy, but a chance. And certainly the effect of a posse shooting all round the house had been very convincingly obtained. Simon guessed that the rescue party had spared neither ammunition nor breath. They must have run themselves off their legs to maintain that impression of revolver fire coming from every quarter of the garden at once.
The car, with its frantic load, was sweeping down the drive in a moment. Simon levelled his gun and spat lead after it, but he could not tell whether he did any damage.
Then another gun poked into his ribs, and he turned.
“Put it up,” said the Saint. “Put it up, Roger, old lad!”
“Well, you old horse-thief!”
“Well, you low-down stiff!”
They shook hands.
Then Norman Kent loomed up out of the darkness.
“Where’s Pat?”
But Patricia was beside the Saint.
Norman swung her off her feet and kissed her shamelessly. Then he clapped Simon on the shoulder.
“Do we go after them?” he asked.
The Saint shook his head.
“Not now. Is Orace with you?”
“No. Just Roger and I—the old firm.”
“Even then—we’ve got to get back to Vargan. We can’t risk throwing away the advantage, and getting the whole bunch of us tied up again. And in about ten seconds more this place is going to be infested with stampeding villagers thinking the next war’s started already. We’ll beat it while the tall timber looks easy!”
“What’s that on your coat—blood?”
“Nothing.”
He led the way to the Hirondel, walking rather slowly for him. Roger went beside him. At one step, the Saint swayed, and caught at Roger’s arm.
“Sorry, son,” he murmured. “Just came all over queer, I did…”
The Saint Closes the Case (The Saint Series) Page 16