The Saint Meets His Match (23 page)

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 mas
sive 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
bur
nished, 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 alert
ness 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 ex
pression 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 gin
gerly 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 rever
berated backwards and forwards with a wild and swelling
intensity until they almost deafened him, and then
grad
ually 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 com
pel
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.

He went forward. At the foot
of the cavern wall, between the wall and himself, ran a kind of dark stream,
about four feet wide. Standing on the edge of this, he was
able to see, in the wall opposite him, a flat square slab
like a flagstone let into the natural rock—exactly as he had
been told he would find it.

With a sigh he retired a few paces, removed his
shoes and socks, and turned up his trousers. Then he stepped delicately into
the dark, ice-cold water.

It could not have been more
than six inches deep.

Chapter VIII

HOW JILL TRELAWNEY MADE A SLIP, AND

THERE WAS
A LOT MORE PADDLING AND

GENERAL MERRIMENT

L
ORD
E
SSENDEN
shifted his feet.

More than ten minutes had passed since the
Saint had
left the room. Essenden’s arms,
wearied almost to paralysis by the strain of the position of surrender which
he had
been compelled to adopt, had
sagged lower and lower
until now they
hung straight down and aching at his
sides.

Jill Trelawney had
permitted the movement—it was
the only thing to do. Sheer
fatigue enforced it. But she
never let her eyes stray
an inch from their relentless con
centration, and the
gun she held was as unwavering as
if it had been
gripped in the hand of an automaton. And
Essenden
was too wise to attempt to put into practice any
of
the bold bids for freedom that flashed in theory
through his brain. He
knew that, so far as Jill Trelawney
was
concerned, there could be little to choose between
any of the possible excuses for rendering vacant
the bar
ony of Essenden in the county
of Oxford.

But the time passed; and
Jill Trelawney, tirelessly
watching her prisoner, was
troubled by the first stirrings
of anxiety.

She owed much to Simon
Templar. Whatever ques
tions might be asked about
her association with him,
and the various conflicting debits and credits
therein in
volved, there was one fact that
stood away above all dis
cussions or
dispute. Forty-eight hours before, he had
thrown up a new and promising career to rescue her
from under the very nose of the law. That was an
item on one side of the ledger which could hardly be can
celled by any number of contra accounts.

And still Simon Templar had
not come back.

She had no idea what could
have happened to him—if
anything had happened. But
it was not in her nature to dawdle along and hope for the best. He should have
returned by then, and he had not returned. The reason
for the
delay might be made apparent in due course; but
she was not inclined to leave it to chance.

“Essenden!”

Her voice crisped into the silence that had
fallen upon
the room with Simon Templar’s
exit; and Essenden
started.

“The Saint has been
gone a long time,” said the girl
—quietly and
sufficiently.

“He may have met with
some difficulty——
”

“Or he may have met
with some—accident.”

The sentence was an
accusation, and she was watching
Essenden closely, but his
face betrayed nothing.

“The slab in front of
the safe may have stuck——
”

“Then we’ll go and
help him to open it.”

Essenden’s eyes evaded
her searching scrutiny.

“I don’t see—”

“But I do!” She
was sure now. “Essenden, you’ll come
down
to that cellar—with me!”

A muscle twitched in the
shadow of Essenden’s droop
ing moustache; and again the girl spoke.

“You don’t want to go
down there. Exactly. There’s
” something down there
which might be dangerous… . Oh, yes, I saw it in your face! And that’s why
we’re go
ing.”

She opened the door.

“March!”

“I don’t——
”

Jill Trelawney’s eyebrows
lowered over her frosty
stare.

“I said—
March!”

Essenden opened his mouth,
and closed it again. He
went to the door.

“Get a move on.”

“It’s your own
funeral, if you insist on going down
there.”

“I do insist.
Get on!”

He obeyed. The door under
the main staircase was
open, and the light was on.
Essenden led straight to it;
and Jill followed, tensely alert for the
faintest hint of
treachery. They went down
the flight of steps. The iron-
barred
door at the far end of the wine cellar had also
been left open by the Saint in his passage.

They followed the tunnel,
with Essenden moving slow
ly and hesitantly in the
lead, hardly spurred on by the
girl’s tongue, and Jill
Trelawney keyed up to a tingling
wariness. But he went on
without an attempt at active resistance, and scrambled in front of her down
the last ten
yards of steep furrowed slope. She
descended after him,
slowly, with infinite
precautions against a false step that
might have given him
a chance to turn the tables.

“Where now?”

“This is the
cave.”

He turned the angle of the
passage, and she followed
quickly.

But not quite quickly
enough.
     
  

He had played his card
superbly—with such an inno
cent naturalness had he
vanished for one instant from
her sight. But when she
herself rounded the corner, she
could not see him.

Then he stepped out of a
dark crevice in the rock be
side her, and grappled desperately.

He had a hold on her gun
wrist before she could move.
He was not really such a
silly little man as the Saint had
called him, and he
was much too strong for her. His sud
den vicious wrench
at her wrist took her unawares, and
her automatic
clattered down to the stone.

He pushed her roughly away
and picked up the gun.

“Now look at my
cave!”

She retreated before him.
He had changed complete
ly. He was confident,
cruel, bestial, transformed. He
pointed.

“And Mr.
Templar!”

She saw Simon Templar lay
stretched out on the floor
of the cavern. He was
alive. She heard his breath come
in a long tortured gasp.
About his bare left ankle was
locked a contrivance of
shining steel, like a pair of skele
ton jaws at the end
of a length of chain which vanished
into the dark
stream beside him.

“An invention of my
own,” said Essenden, in a queerly
high-pitched
voice, “for the discouragement of poach
ers.
But it has caught something better than a poacher
to-night!”

He laughed, squeakily; and
suddenly she realized that he was mad.

“Caught!” he
babbled. “I hid it in the stream. What
ever
happened, I meant to send him down here. Then
he
would have to step into the stream to get at the safe.
Safe!
I put that slab in yesterday, myself, just to catch
him.
I knew that when he didn’t come back, you’d bring
me
down to look for him, and then I’d catch you as well.
Those
four men upstairs were only part of the surprise I
had
waiting for you. If I’d seemed too easy, you’d have
suspected
something. And didn’t you see that that was why I pretended I didn’t want to
come down here? That
was to make you all the
more determined to bring me
down. And it worked!”