Saint Overboard (32 page)

Her eyes widened in a kind of blind horror.
Why, she could
never
have said. She had seen death before, had faced it herself
only a little while ago, had lived with it; had
stood pale and
silent on that same
deck while Professor Yule died. But not until
then had she felt the same frozen clutch on her heart, the same
dumb stab of anguish, the same reckless
annihilation of her re
straint. She
didn’t know what she was doing, didn’t think, made
no conscious movement; and yet suddenly, somehow,
in another
instant of time, she was
beside Vogel, grasping his wrist and arm,
tearing his hand away. She heard someone sobbing: “No! No!
Not that!”—and realised in a dazed sort of
way that she was
hearing her own
voice.

“No! No!”

“My dear Loretta!”

He had straightened up, was looking down at
her with his
hooked waxen face cold and contemptuously critical. She
became
aware that she was breathing as if she had just run to him from
a great
distance, that her heart was pounding against her ribs
like a deliriously
wielded hammer, that there must have been a
wild stupidity in
her gaze. And she realised at the same time that
the winch had
stopped again.

“Why have you done that?” she
gasped.

“Done what?”

She was shaking his arm unconsciously.

“Stopped bringing them up.”

“My dear girl!” His tone was bland
and patronising. “That is the normal process. When a man has been working
for three
quarters of an hour at the depth where they have been,
his blood
becomes saturated with nitrogen. If he was brought up
quickly
and the
pressure was suddenly taken off, the gas would form
bubbles in his blood like it does in champagne when the cork is
drawn.
He would get a painful attack of diver’s paralysis. The pressure has to be
relieved gradually-—there is a regular time
table
for it. Our divers have been stopped at thirty feet. They
will rest there for five minutes; then for ten
minutes at twenty
feet; then for
fifteen minutes——
”

She knew that he was trying to make her feel foolish, but she
was too sure of her knowledge to care.

“That’s not all you were doing,”
she said.

“What else?”

“You were going to take one of those
airlines off the pump.”

“My dear——”

“Weren’t you?”

He looked at her impassively, as if he was
playing with the
possible answers at his disposal, deliberating their
probable effect
on
her rather than their accuracy. She shrugged bitterly.

“Oh, I know. You don’t need to lie. You
were going to kill
him.”

A faint flicker of expression, the gleam of
passionless calculat
ing cruelty which she had seen before, passed
over his face.

“And if I was? How deeply will his
death hurt you?”

“I should be hurt in a way you couldn’t understand.”

He waited. She had an uncanny spine-chilling
feeling that he
was not sane—that he was giving rein to the solitary
sadistic
megalomania that was branded on all his actions, playing
with
her like a cat and savouring the lustful pleasure of watching her
agony.
Searching for his eyes under the heavy shadow of his brows, she suddenly found
them devouring her with a weird
rigidity that struck her cold. She found
herself speaking disjointedly
, breathlessly again, trying to drown the
new horror in a
babble
of words that she would never be able to utter unless she
let them pour blindly out.

“I know why he went down. I know why he
opened that
strong-room
for you. He wouldn’t have done that to save his life
—not his own life. He wouldn’t have believed you. He tried to
tell me that that was why he was going to do it,
but couldn’t
make me believe it. He
knew you meant to kill him as soon as it
was done. He wasn’t afraid. I saw him. I talked to him. He lied
to me. He was splendid. But I knew. You offered
him something
that he could believe.
You made him do it for me!”

“Really, my dear Loretta, this is so dramatic. I must have
misunderstood our friend Templar. So he becomes
the perfect
gentle knight, dying to
save a lady’s honour——
”

“Yes. I told you that you wouldn’t understand.”

He gave a short harsh exhalation of breath
that could not
have been called a laugh.

“You little fool! He never did anything of the kind.”

Then she remembered.

“No. But I told him that I should like to
live. He did it to
save my life.”

“The perfect knight again!”

“Something that you could never
understand. I know now.
That’s the truth, isn’t it? You made that
bargain with him. My
life against his—and a little work. Didn’t
you?”

He sighed.

“It would have been such a pity not to give such a classical
chivalry its chance,” he said.

The sneer brought the blood to her cheeks.
She felt a disgust
that was almost petrifying. The mask which he had worn
since
she had first known him was gone altogether now. The smooth
imperturbability
of his face was no longer the veneer of impenetrable self-possession—it was
the fixed grimace of a demon gloat
ing over its own inhumanity. Now she had seen his eyes…
.

“He never had any right to bargain for
me,” she said, and
tried not to let her voice tremble. “I
didn’t ask him for any sacrifice—I wouldn’t take any. I’m here, and I can make
my own
bargain. The Saint’s done all you wanted him to. Why not let
him
go?”

“To come back presently and interfere
with me again?”

“You could make it a condition that he
said nothing—that he
forgot everything he knew. He’d keep his
word.”

“Of course—the perfect knight… . How
ridiculous you
are!”

“Did you always think that?”

He stopped short, with his head on one side.
Then his cold
reptilian hand went up and slowly touched her face.

“You know what I think of you, my dear. I
told you, once.
You were trying to deceive me. You tried to destroy me
with
your beauty,
but you would have given me nothing. And yet for
you I took risks—I placed myself in fantastic danger—I gam
bled everything—to keep you beside me and see how
treacherous you could be. But!”—his hand suddenly dropped on her arm in a
grasp so brutal that she almost cried out—“I
had my own idea about how treacherous I would allow you to be, and how you
would make amends for it later.”

He dragged her up against him and ravished her
mouth,
briefly,
cold-bloodedly. She stood unresisting and still as death
until he thrust her away.

“Now,” he said, “you are not
in a position to make bargains.”

He stooped over the air-line again. She tore
at his hand, and
he stood up.

“If you are going to be a nuisance,”
he said in his supercilious
expiring voice, “I shall have you taken
away.”

“You can’t do it!” she panted.
“You haven’t everything you
want yet. If you kill him, you could never
have it.”

“I have you.”

“Only as a prisoner. You can do what you
like with me, I sup
pose. What you want, you can take by force. If that’s all
you
want——
”

“It will be enough.”

“But I could give …”

“What?”

He was staring at her, seized with a new
stillness. There was a
thread of moisture on his thin lips, and the
high glaze on his
cheekbones shone with a dull white lustre. His eyes
squinted
slightly, smouldering like dark coals. His soft clammy
hands
gripped her shoulders.

“What?” he repeated.

She could not look at him, or her courage
would not be
enough. Already she felt denied, shuddering at the dank
chill of
his touch. She closed her eyes.

“If you let him go I will stay with you
willingly—I will be to
you anything that you like.”

4

Altogether they took over forty minutes to
come up—nearly
as long as they had spent on the bottom. It was a
wearisome
business going through the gradual decompression,
hanging sus
pended in the green void through the lengthening pauses,
rising a
little
further and halting for another interregnum of blank inac
tivity. The Saint felt no ill effects from his long
submersion
other than a growing
fatigue, which had become almost over
powering in the last ten minutes
when they had been breaking
through the glass
dome above the stairway. He had never real
ised that the resistance of the water which had to be overcome
with every smallest movement could eat up so much
strength; fit
and strong as he was, he
had a dull ache in every limb and a nervous hunger for unhampered movement in
all his muscles
which made the
exasperatingly slow ascent harder to endure than
anything that had preceded it. He would have given half the
millions which he had uncovered down there for a
cigarette, but
even that solace was
unattainable.

He realised at the same time that he was
lucky to be able to
experience discomfort. When he stood back from the open
door
of the strong-room and announced the completion of his work
into the
microphone beside his mouth, he had waited for the
quick blotting out of all sensation. He
did not know exactly how
it would come, but
he believed that it would be swift and certain.
He had done all that Vogel required of him; and, beyond that,
he survived only as a potential menace, to be
logically obliter
ated as soon as
possible, before he could do any further damage.
Like Loretta, he felt that it must be infuriating to die, leaving so
much unfinished, down there in the lonely dark,
with none of the
drunken exaltation of
battle to give it a persuasive glory; but
that was what he had gone down to do. When he still lived, he wondered
what could have happened to bring him the reprieve.

Had Vogel changed his mind? That was more than the Saint
could make himself believe. Or had Vogel begun to
wonder
whether it would be safe to kill him, when he must be presumed
to have associates somewhere who knew as much as
he knew and
knew also where he had
gone, who would make inquiries and
take
action when he didn’t come back? The Saint could see prac
tical difficulties in the way of casually bumping
himself off which
might have made
even Kurt Vogel stop to think; and yet he
couldn’t quite convince
himself that Vogel’s strategic talents had
at
last been baffled.

He was alive without knowing why—without
knowing how
long
that delicious surprise could last, but believing that it could
not possibly last for long. And yet the instinct
of life is so strong
that he was more
occupied with wondering how he would turn
the reprieve to the most profit. Even when he was working down
there on the strong-room door, believing that he
had no hope of
seeing the light
again, that same queer instinct of survival had
made him prepare for the impossible chance. Now, when he
moved
his arm, he could feel a wet discomfort in his sleeve that
was more than compensated by the small steel
instrument which slithered against his wrist—an instrument which he had not pos
sessed
when he left the deck of the
Falkenberg,
which might yet
be worth more to him than all the gold of the
Chalfont
Cas
tle… .

The water above his head thinned and
lightened, became a
mere
film which broke against his helmet. The weight on his
shoulders became real again, and the massive boots dragged at
his feet. Then expert hands unlocked the helmet
and detached it
from the breastplate,
and he filled his lungs with the clean sea air
and felt the breath of the sea on his face.