The Pawns Count Part 37

"Just now," he confided, "I have other work to do. It is that other work which has brought me to America."

She drew him a little closer to her. Her eyes questioned him.

"There is, perhaps, now," she asked, "a woman in your life?"

"There is," he admitted.

She made a grimace.

"But how clumsy to tell me, even though I asked," she exclaimed. "What is she like? ... But no, I do not wish to hear of her! If she is all the world to you, why did you send me that little note? Why are you here?"

"Because we were once dear friends, Sonia," he said, "because I wish to save you from great trouble."

She shrank from him a little fearfully.

"What do you mean?"

"Sonia," he continued, with a note of sternness in his tone, "during the last two years you have gone back and forth between New York and Paris, six times. I do not think that you can make that journey again."

She was standing now, with one hand gripping the edge of the table.

"John! ... John! ... What do you mean?" she demanded, and this time her own voice was hard.

"I mean," he said, "that when you leave here for Paris you will be watched day and night. The moment you set foot upon French soil you will be arrested and searched. If anything is found upon you, such as a message from your friend in Washington--well, you know what it would mean. Can't you see, you foolish child, the risk you have been running?

Would you care to be branded as a spy?--you, a daughter of France?"

She struck at him. Her lace sleeves had fallen back, and her white arm, with its little clenched fist, flashed through the twilight, aimlessly yet pa.s.sionately.

"You dare to call me a spy! You, John?" she shrieked. "But it is horrible."

"It is the work of a spy," he told her gravely, "to bring a letter from any person in a friendly capital and deliver it to an enemy. That is what you have done, Sonia, many times since the beginning of the war, so far without detection. It is because you are Sonia that I have come to save you from doing it again."

She groped her way back to the couch. She threw herself upon it with her back towards him, her head buried in her hands.

"The letters are only between friends," she faltered. "They have nothing to do with the war."

"You may have believed that," Lutchester replied gently, "but it is not true. You have been made the bearer of confidential communications from the Austrian Emba.s.sy here to certain people in Paris whom we will not name. I have pledged my word, Sonia, that this shall cease."

She sprang to her feet. All the feline joy of her languorous ease seemed to have departed. She was quivering and nervous. She stood over her writing-table.

"A telegraph blank!" she exclaimed. "Quick! I will not see Maurice again. Oh, how I have suffered! This shall end it. See, I have written 'Good-by!' He will understand. If he comes, I will not see him. Ring the bell quickly. There--it is finished!"

A page-boy appeared, and she handed him the telegram. Then she turned a little pathetically to Lutchester.

"Maurice was foolish--very often foolish," she went on unsteadily, "but he has loved me, and a woman loves love so much. Now I shall be lonely.

And yet, there is a great weight gone from my mind. Always I wondered about those letters. You will be my friend, John? You will not leave me all alone?"

He patted her hand.

"Dear Sonia," he whispered, "solitude is not the worst thing one has to bear, these days. Try and remember, won't you, that all the men who might have loved you are fighting for your country, one way or another."

"It is all so sad," she faltered, "and you--you are so stern and changed."

"It is with me only as it is with the whole world," he told her.

"To-night, though, you have relieved me of one anxiety."

Her eyes once more were for a moment frightened.

"There was danger for poor little me?"

He nodded.

"It is past," he a.s.sured her.

"And it is you who have saved me," she murmured. "Ah, Mr. John," she added, as she walked with him to the door, "if ever there comes to me a lover, not for the days only but _pour la vie,_ I hope that he may be an Englishman like you, whom all the world trusts."

He laughed and raised her fingers to his lips.

"Over-faithful, you called us once," he reminded her.

"But that was when I was a child," she said, "and in days like these we are children no longer."

CHAPTER XXVI

Lutchester left Sonia and the Ritz-Carlton a few minutes before midnight, to find a great yellow moon overhead, which seemed to have risen somewhere at the back of Central Park. The broad thoroughfare up which he turned seemed to have developed a new and unfamiliar beauty.

The electric lamps shone with a pale and almost unnatural glow. The flashing lights of the automobiles pa.s.sing up and down were almost whimsically unnecessary. Lutchester walked slowly up Fifth Avenue in the direction of his hotel.

Something--the beauty of the night, perhaps, or some faint aftermath of sentimentality born of Sonia's emotion--tempted him during those few moments to relax. He threw aside his mask and breathed the freer for it. Once more he was a human being, treading the streets of a real city, his feet very much upon the earth, his heart full of the simplest things. All the scheming of the last few days was forgotten, the great issues, the fine yet devious way to be steered amidst the rocks which beset him; even the depression of the calamitous news from the North Sea pa.s.sed away. He was a very simple human being, and he was in love.

It was all so unpractical, so illusionary, and yet so real. Events, actual happenings--he thrust all thoughts of these away from his mind.

What she might be thinking of him at the moment he ignored. He was content to let his thoughts rest upon her, to walk through the moonlit street, his brain and heart revelling in that subtle facility of the imagination which brought her so easily to his presence. It was such a vividly real Pamela, too, who spoke and walked and moved by his side.

His memory failed him nowhere, followed faithfully the kaleidoscopic changes in her face and tone, showed him even that long, grateful, searching glance when their eyes had met in Von Teyl's sitting-room.

There had been times when she had shown clearly enough that she was anxious to understand, anxious to believe in him. He clung to the memory of these; pushed into the background that faint impression he had had of her at the roof-garden, serene and proud, yet with a faint look of something like pain in her startled eyes.

A large limousine pa.s.sed him slowly, crawling up Fifth Avenue.

Lutchester, with all his gifts of observation dormant, took no notice of its occupant, who leaned forward, raised the speaking-tube to his lips, and talked for a moment to his chauffeur. The car glided round a side street and came to a standstill against the curb. Its solitary pa.s.senger stepped quietly out and entered a restaurant. The chauffeur backed the car a little, slipped from his place, and followed Lutchester.

By chance the little throng of people here became thicker for a few moments and then ceased. Lutchester drew a little sigh of relief as he saw before him almost an empty pavement. Then, just as he was relapsing once more into thought, some part of his subconscious instinct suddenly leaped into warning life. Without any actual perception of what it might mean, he felt the thrill of imminent danger, connected it with that soft footfall behind him, and swung round in time to seize a deadly uplifted hand which seemed to end in a shimmer of dull steel.

His a.s.sailant flung himself upon Lutchester with the lithe ferocity of a cat, clinging to his body, twisting and turning his arm to wrest it free. It was a matter of seconds only before his intended victim, with a fierce backward twist, broke the man's wrist and, wrenching himself free from the knees which clung around him, flung him forcibly against the railings which bordered the pavement. Lutchester paused for a moment to recover his breath and looked around. A man from the other side of the street was running towards them, but no one else seemed to have noticed the struggle which had begun and finished in less than thirty seconds. The man, who was half-way across the thoroughfare, suddenly stopped short. He shouted a warning to Lutchester, who swung around. His late a.s.sailant, who had been lying motionless, had raised himself slightly, with a revolver clenched in his left hand.

Lutchester's spring on one side saved his life, for the bullet pa.s.sed so close to his cheek that he felt the rush and heat of the air. The man in the center of the road was busy shouting an alarm vociferously, and other people on both sides of the thoroughfare were running up.

Lutchester's eyes now never left the dark, doubled-up figure upon the pavement. His whole body was tense. He was prepared at the slightest movement to spring in upon his would-be murderer. The man's eyes seemed to be burning in his white face. He called out to Lutchester hoa.r.s.ely.

"Don't move or I shall shoot!"

He looked up and down the street. One of the nearest of the hastening figures was a policeman. He turned the revolver against his own temple and pulled the trigger....