“What is it you want?” she asked a little wildly.
“For myself I want nothing.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
“I am escorting you,” he told her again, “to a gentleman who wishes to ask you a few questions. He will probably examine the contents of your bag. They are nothing to me. Afterwards, if he is good-tempered, and he is sometimes, he may hand you over to me to escort to your home, and after that I shall not refuse a little offering.”
They were in the thoroughfare now, crossing St. James’s Street, entering St. James’s Square. She sat quietly in her place.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Not far,” he answered. “I am glad you are being wise.”
“I am not being wise at all,” she retorted with a tremor in her voice. “I am behaving like a coward. I ought to have called out at the corner of the last street.”
“Hopeless,” he assured her. “Besides—you are forgetting this.”
Elida tried to draw a little further away but the hard end of his weapon was still there pressing into her side.
“I suppose you know that you are hurting me terribly,” she complained. “I shall call out soon from sheer pain.”
“Then I shall have to shoot you,” he told her suavely. “You are not dealing with beginners, Contessa. We have two taxis following us. I can slip out of this one and into the other in a moment. You will not be able to move until the ambulance comes.”
“Where do we find this gentleman who is going to examine the contents of my bag?” she asked.
“A very short distance further. If the Contessa is nervous she can hold my free hand. It would be a great pleasure to me to feel the fingers of the Contessa clasped with mine.”
“I am growing less and less afraid of you,” she said, “but I tell you this—if you touch me I shall call out, whether you shoot me or not.”
He shuffled an inch or two nearer to her along the shiny seat. His insinuating smile became almost a leer.
“You will not, then, save perhaps your life,” he suggested, “at the expense of one small caress?”
She clenched the fist of her right hand and drew it back. He was only just in time to stop her smashing the window.
“Little fool!” he exclaimed. “You would cut those white fingers of yours all to pieces.”
“I do not care. Where are we now?”
“Our destination,” was the curt reply. “Get out!”
The taxi had come to a standstill by the kerbstone in front of a dark, gloomy-looking building. Elida looked out eagerly. The door was thrown open with a flourish. A tall commissionaire in uniform stood there saluting. She sprang out of the taxi.
“Send for a policeman,” she demanded breathlessly. “I have been brought here against my will. These men want to rob me. The one in front is not a proper driver at all. This man has been holding a revolver at me for the last ten minutes.”
Not a muscle moved on the face of the commissionaire. He stood on one side and motioned to her companion. They moved swiftly down a little passage.
“Did you hear what I said?” she called out over her shoulder.
The commissionaire turned his back. The man who had been seated by her side in the taxicab laid his hand over her mouth and gripped her by the chin.
“Contessa,” he protested, “why be foolish? Should I bring anyone so beautiful to a place where harm was likely to happen to her?”
Elida bit savagely at his hand but it was too tightly stretched over her lips. The driver, who had passed them, had rung a bell. Almost immediately, a door, skilfully camouflaged to appear like a part of the wall, swung open. She was in what seemed to be the lounge entrance to a club or small restaurant. Beyond was the vista of a bar, behind which stood a barman in a white linen coat. Her companion, who had been holding his hand over her mouth, suddenly removed it. She called out to the barman.
“Come and help me!”
He took not the slightest notice. She turned to her escort. The driver had remained outside.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“A place where you can have a very good time if you behave yourself and you can have the worst time in the world if you misbehave.”
Elida threw herself into an easy chair. Her companion made no effort to prevent her. He handed his coat and hat to a boy who had hurried out of a cloakroom.
“Come here, boy!” Elida cried.
He took no notice.
“Do you not hear what I say?”
The boy was already retreating. She called again but his head was kept obstinately turned away.
“Very sad case,” her captor confided, smiling. “Born deaf and dumb. That is one curious thing about this club,” he went on. “From the commissionaire to the maître d’hôtel every one of the servants is stone deaf and also dumb.”
“I think it is a horrible place,” she declared. “Why have you brought me here?”
“If you will mount those stairs with me,” he suggested, “you will know. You are here to meet the president. He is the gentleman I told you about who wishes to know precisely what you have in that little bag. It would save time if you mounted the stairs. I will perform the necessary introduction and I will leave you—with infinite regret, may I say?”
“I should prefer even the president of a club like this to you,” she told him. “Please to lead the way. I will follow you.”
He swung round stiffly and obeyed. Half-way up the stairs he paused and looked back.
“Well?” she asked.
“I remind myself,” he said, “that only a week ago I buy one of these English picture papers and I see photographs of the beautiful Princess Pelucchi and her even more beautiful sister. There you are all smiles and court dress and graciousness. The picture is not true. I think myself you are a very disagreeable young woman.”
“How dare you!” she exclaimed. “How dare you, when you have been sitting for so long with the muzzle of a revolver pressed to my side! I have a bruise, two bruises, in fact. When I undress to-night I shall hate you even more than I do now.”
He sighed.
“I regret more than I can tell you that I shall not be present.”
“Show me the way to this president of yours,” she cried furiously.
At the topmost step he knocked at a heavy mahogany door and beckoned her to precede him. A man, seated before a desk, looked up at their entrance.
“This,” her companion announced, “is the young lady whom I was instructed to meet in the Jermyn Street Mews and conduct here.”
The other nodded. He bowed slightly to Elida, then pointed to the door.
“You can go,” he ordered the man. “Contessa, I should be glad of a few minutes’ conversation with you.”
He tapped the chair by his side. She looked at him in amazement.
“What is your name?” she demanded.
“Horace Florestan,” he replied. “It may not be known to you but it will be known soon to all the world.”
CHAPTER XVIII
Table of Contents
There was a moment of speechlessness. It was a room which seemed to have been built for silence. In it there were no signs of any windows save something that might have been a skylight at the top. All sounds which might have penetrated from the neighbouring streets were muffled. The music from the club below was inaudible. Elida fought against the feeling that she was afraid. The man seated by her side, with his measured tone, his hard bony face, his somewhat protuberant eyes and incomprehensible smile, was in a sense terrifying. She hated, too, the firm rigidity of his features, which it seemed no shock on earth could disturb.
“I owe you apologies, Contessa,” Florestan said, “for this crude method of obtaining speech with you. Our spheres of life are so far apart that I had lost hope of meeting you under ordinary conditions.”
“What do you want with me? Who are you?”
“I am an ardent sympathiser with your country,” he answered
evasively.
“I cannot think what you want with me, but was it necessary to have me forced into a taxicab and brought here against my will?” she demanded.
“Only against your will, Contessa, because you did not understand,” he remonstrated. “I am quite sure that my friend Marius Ludini would only have used force as a last extremity.”
“I do not wish to discuss your friend Marius Ludini,” she retorted coldly. “I would only say that I have never been brought into contact with a more objectionable person. You say that you are an ardent sympathiser with my country,” she continued. “If so, what are you doing here in London?”
“I am engaged in the same fashion as you are engaged,” he replied. “I am a professor of espionage.”
“What good do you expect to do by dragging me here?” she repeated. “Is it not always understood that people who are engaged in that sort of work should remain outwardly strangers to one another? If we are found here alone and one of us is suspected, the other one, too, is brought to trouble.”
“If we were discovered that would be true,” he admitted, “but why should we be discovered? I have three homes in London and two secret exits by means of which I can leave the country at any moment. I am living here carrying on vast operations and I am unsuspected. You have valuable friends in the British Navy with whom you have—dealings. Are you suspected? I think not. Am I? Well, I may have to protect myself sometimes but I still continue my work.”
“What do you want with me?” she protested. “I do not know what work you are doing. I do not ask. Why interfere with me? It is not your affair. The agents of our government with whom I have correspondence and dealings will bitterly resent it. They have probably never heard of you.”
“That is going too far,” he objected, shaking his head solemnly. “Everyone has heard of Horace Florestan. The only thing is that just as I have all these abodes in England—also in France—so I have just as many personalities, just as many occupations. The real Florestan very few people know of.”
“If they catch only one of you,” Elida retorted, “it seems to me the others might be in trouble.”
His smile was benevolent, almost saintlike.
“Must you assume,” he asked gently, “that I am a bungler at my profession? Florestan, the merchant prince, is a very different man from the Florestan who perhaps might be accounted a gangster working in higher circles. The personality of one might be destroyed, but the other would remain. No indeed, I am not a bungler. My doubles and I, all working towards one end, are amazingly elusive.”
“You are, no doubt,” Elida scoffed, “a remarkable man. I hope that you are, as you say, a good son of my country. I am a Pelucchi, however, and there is no one of my country who should dare to treat me as you have. I wish to leave this place and be left alone to carry on the work I am doing.”
“It is better, Contessa,” he assured her, “that we work as allies and not as enemies. I may come from the class of our country-people from which the Dictator himself comes, and you may be, as I know you are, the daughter of a very proud line, but far above both of us comes our native land.”
“I am willing,” she said a little wearily, “to take you for granted. I propose that you continue your work, whatever it may be, and I continue mine in my own fashion.”
“There is no reason whatever,” he replied, “why we should not do so, only, Contessa, a curious fact has been disclosed to me. A week or so ago your sister was meeting secretly a Naval officer attached to that very dangerous organisation known as the XYZ Secret Service of the British Navy. That Naval Officer has recently committed suicide. Well, we expected the work upon which he was engaged to be carried on by another officer, his name—let me see—his name is Ronald Hincks. That officer seems to be living in complete retirement, one might almost say under arrest.”
“Well?”
“So,” he went on, “neither you nor your sister meet these two any longer. You meet, instead, another man.”
More than ever Elida realised the sinister nature of this profound silence by which she was encompassed, the suppressed fire in those unprepossessing eyes of his now fixed upon hers.
“Another man altogether,” he continued. “It would be kind of you, Contessa, if you relieved some slight anxiety which I, on behalf of my country, feel in this matter. Tell me what arts you used to seduce a man who stands so high in the councils of England as Admiral Guy Cheshire.”
“How do you know that I meet him?” she demanded.
“You met him to-night secretly at Machinka’s Restaurant in Jermyn Street,” Florestan replied. “You have papers in your bag there, soon, I suppose, to be forwarded to one of our friends in the Embassy. You must forgive me if I feel curiosity as to the nature of those documents—I and some others who work with me also in the cause of our country.”
“I do not see that it is your affair,” Elida protested, fighting against that sickening fear which was slowly paralysing her thoughts and words. “You work in your way. I work in mine. Our methods are different. Only the end is the same. It is not your business to interfere in what I do, even if you are the important person you say you are.”
Florestan’s long fingers played for a moment upon the desk, tapping the pad of blotting paper slowly and thoughtfully. She watched them fascinated. They seemed to have something of the same tendency towards tightly drawn skin and lack of flesh as his face. He suddenly pushed back his hair—neatly brushed and neatly arranged. It was unexpectedly thin, however, and it disclosed his shiny scalp. There was something inhuman about his baldness. His eyes were now fixed mercilessly upon her.
“Anything that concerns our country,” he said calmly, “is my business. If you doubt what I have told you, you will not doubt my credentials.”
He slipped a watch, a thin, large gold watch, from his waistcoat pocket, opened it with a spring and showed her an inscription inside the gold case:
Horace Florestan is one of my trusted band of patriots. He is to receive obedience from all the Sons and Daughters of our Country. B. M.
Elida stared at the engraved words incredulously. They seemed to grow larger before her eyes.
“The watch was a gift,” Florestan went on. “There are only two others similarly inscribed in the world, and one of those is in America. Will you explain to me, if you please, Contessa, the new conditions under which you are working? I ask you again—how did you succeed in corrupting the incorruptible? You see how chivalrously I treat you. Your bag is there. Its contents are at my disposal. They might tell me all that I wish to know. I would rather hear it from your lips, and prove it afterwards if I doubted you.”
She fought her battle in silence, but the colour had left her cheeks. With both hands she gripped her bag. He rose slowly to his feet and leaned over her closer and closer. A fear greater than any she had yet felt parted her faltering lips.
“Go away!” she cried. “I am suffocating. I cannot talk when you are so near.”
His hand rested upon her shoulder. The tips of his fingers touched her cheek for a moment. She could hear the fierce beating of her heart.
“Contessa Elida,” he said, “you are very beautiful. The world says you are not so beautiful as your sister. I find you the loveliest woman I have ever seen and you are of my country. We should work together. We might accomplish great things.”
He listened to her cry, as she shrank away, with a faint smile of contempt. She had the despairing feeling that she was completely and absolutely trapped; that in another moment, struggle as fiercely as she might, she would be in his embrace.
“You must not touch me!” she cried, although the effort of speech hurt her.
“You little fool,” he murmured. “Of what are you afraid?”
“Of you,” she faltered, and again the words seemed to blister her dry throat.
“Do you not realise,” he said, and now she felt the distance between them becoming only a matter of inches, and herself suffocating, “do you not realise that i
t is not you I want? I desire you to give me, of your own free will, that bag. If not, I must take it. I must see for myself whether this, the only Englishman whom our Naval chiefs fear, has really fallen. Afterwards—well, Contessa—we shall see.”
There was nothing hurried, nothing passionate in his movement, yet she felt that his hand was seeking hers, the arm upon her shoulder was holding her in a grip of iron. Then there came a whirlwind change. The sudden relaxing of his fingers astonished her. He was standing upright, stiff and taut, listening. She, too, was conscious of the first sound she had heard since she had entered the room. From some hidden place near the desk came the soft ringing of a bell. From another hidden place in the wall, curiously brilliant in the dimly lit room, came the glow of a red light behind a small bulb. She felt the burning in her throat lessening, the paralysis of speech and movement passing.
“What is it?” she cried.
He made no answer. It seemed to her that he had become invisible. Then she realised what had happened. The room was in darkness. The lights in the ceiling, the two or three around the walls, the shaded one upon his desk, had gone. At first she was terribly and mortally afraid. She cried out feebly, shrank back in her chair, felt herself surrounded with horrors. Nothing happened. There was a sense of emptiness around her. She stood up, stumbled towards the desk, filled the room with her cries. There was no reply. Gradually she realised that she was alone.
Elida was never really sure whether she lost consciousness or not. It seemed to her that there was a blank interval but she had no measure of time which could reveal it. She was back in her chair when the door appeared suddenly to be miraculously open. There were half a dozen men in the room. The torches they carried seemed like pin pricks of fire, but their voices were gruff and reassuring. The lamp flamed out upon the desk. A friendly voice sounded in her ear. A middle-aged man in plain dark clothes was standing by her side.
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