IT was all done in one swift action; the outcome of a planned determination. As Gastineau turned, Herriard saw that the scoffing contemptuous coolness had gone: his expression now was more that of a feline animal on the spring. The thought uppermost in his mind now was, “Is it possible that I ever called this man my friend?” He saw a crisis had come; how his letter should have hastened and accentuated it he could not comprehend. But that was due to the slower power of perception in his own mind compared with his adversary’s.
There was a curiously set look of relentless purpose in Gastineau’s eyes as he turned; one which, among all the varying expressions he had noticed, Herriard had never seen there before. It was the look with which a Prelate of the Inquisition might have watched a victim in the torture chamber.
“A reckoning between us, Mr. Herriard, seems more pressing than I had supposed.” He spoke with tight lips just opening enough to clip out the words. Herriard said nothing; only stood watchfully expectant with, now, a thought of Martindale’s fate suggesting itself. So he waited for the other to declare the intention that was manifestly in his mind.
Gastineau stood with his hands behind him; pale, thin almost to frailness, but the very embodiment of mental boldness; the courage of the head, that can unhesitatingly attack greater strength of body.
“So,” he said slowly, “the business that kept you away from Devereux Street to-night was the writing of a letter to say you could not come.”
“Hardly that.”
“Perhaps your visitor detained you,” Gastineau continued, in a key which was the prelude of mischief, the muttering of a coming storm. “Your visitor,” he pointed to the card, “Detective—what’s his name?—Quickjohn. I do not quite understand you, Mr. Herriard. May I ask what Inspector Quickjohn came to see you about?”
“About the Vaux House business,” Herriard answered curtly.
“Ah! Why does he come to see you about it?”
“Sir Henry Ferrars sent him. He knows I am interested in the case.”
“And what had he to tell you?”
“Pardon me, Gastineau; I think we agreed that the subject should not be discussed between us.”
“Perhaps,” he replied insistently. “But my interest is now at least equal to yours, through the same source, the Countess Alexia. What did Quickjohn come to tell you?”
Evasion was difficult under the searchlight of those transfixing eyes, but the whole truth could not be told. “He came to say,” Herriard answered, “that he is following the matter up.”
“With what result?”
“No definite result at present.”
“He took the trouble to come and tell you that?” Gastineau was holding him to the point with a greater than professional tenacity.
“I had told them at Scotland Yard that they seemed inclined to let the case drop.”
Gastineau paused, but his was the silence of disbelief. He took a few sharp, impatient steps to his former position. Then spoke abruptly, his viciousness smouldering and ever ready to burst into flame. “Shall I tell you what I think of you, Geoffrey Herriard?”
Herriard shrugged. “I do not care.”
“What,” Gastineau went on, ignoring the reply, “I think of you by the light of your recent conduct towards me, the man who made you, the man who can, and will, unmake you?”
“I have nothing to reproach myself with,” Herriard said, beginning to tire of the scene.
“That,” retorted Gastineau, “shows you in a more contemptible light still.” The fire was glowing now, any instant might bring the flame. “You think yourself a clever fellow, Herriard, but your really clever man discriminates. He does not play tricks upon men cleverer than himself.”
“I am not aware that I have tried to play a trick on you, Gastineau.”
“No? What do you call the withholding your knowledge of the one man in Europe who could cure me?”
“I did not. I——”
Gastineau stopped him with a sharp, impatient gesture. “Don’t trouble to deny it. You met and knew Hallamar weeks, months, before it suited you to mention him to me. Oh, don’t protest: I have neither time nor inclination to listen to your lies. I don’t blame you. I might have done the same in your place. My being a helpless cripple, a man with both feet literally in the grave, a brain without a body, meant everything to you. You played your game, taking the risk, and lost it; lost it through a miscalculation of our respective smartness.”
“You are wrong, Gastineau, utterly,” Herriard broke in with indignation.
“Am I?” he returned, with a sneer. “I know you, Geoffrey Herriard, better, possibly, than you know yourself. You have been playing a dangerous game; are playing it still; but you have made more than one false move, and the game is lost. There only remains for you to pay.”
He stopped; shutting his lips with the suggestion that he had no more to say. The pause of that dark, evil mind, between speech and action, was like the crouching of a tiger for its spring; like the breathless hold-up which precedes the first flash of a storm. Gastineau stood facing Herriard with a world of concentrated malignity blazing in his eyes, the tokens of the fiery soul behind them. Herriard waited, nervously alert. He saw the futility of protesting against the charges; this man was his enemy, whose cue and desire it was to quarrel; a struggle, terrible, perhaps to the death, was inevitable.
For some moments the two men watched each other, the one seeming to cast about for an opening for attack, the other apprehensively strung for defence. Surely that keen, active brain would not need to wait long. No. Gastineau’s lips parted, showing the white teeth, still set as he spoke through them, spoke as with a purpose of making an end quickly.
“You were writing that letter to me”—he pointed to it—“after your interview with Quickjohn. Why?”
“I had no time to write before.”
“But you were coming—don’t fence, it is waste of time—you were coming to my house this evening, or you would have telegraphed earlier.”
“No,” Herriard replied watchfully. “I had my doubts as to whether it would serve any good purpose, and meant to have written before.”
“I wish you would understand,” Gastineau said cuttingly, “that there is nothing gained by lying to me. Accepting your statement for what it may be worth, Quickjohn told you something that clenched your decision?”
Each man’s eyes were fixed on the other’s; Herriard’s held to Gastineau’s by the fascination of the evil and danger they signalled.
“Did he? did he?” The question came hissed out with sharp insistence. For Herriard, posed by the direct challenge, hesitated, at a loss for the moment as to the course he should take.
“You believe nothing I say; I will say nothing.”
“Pouf!” It was a poor evasion, and the strong man blew it aside with a contemptuous exclamation. “Just realize the position, Herriard,” he said; “the position in which you stand. I am a dead man; a man with no known or legally recognized existence. As such, I am all-powerful, and, with my brains, intangible.”
“So long,” Herriard found courage to retort, “as I do not proclaim your existence.”
“Precisely.” The look on Gastineau’s face, as he nodded a ready acquiescence, told Herriard he had spoken rashly. “So long. And the longer the better for me. In short, it would be to my interest that your silence should last till the Day of Judgment.”
“I have no intention of breaking it,” Herriard said, as coolly as his nerves allowed.
“I might doubt that,” Gastineau returned, “when I find you and the celebrated Inspector Quickjohn putting your heads together. They say two heads are better than one, but that depends upon the heads. I think I will back mine against yours and Quickjohn’s. Now, if you hope to leave this room alive, which is entirely my affair, just say what that fellow told you about me.”
He looked at his watch, and coolly replaced it. Herriard found himself asking whether, after all, he was not being made the victim of a transcendent piece of bluff. Gastineau’s acuteness and penetration were manifest enough; but his power? Had not he himself the whip hand, if only he would not let it be paralyzed by the stronger brain? His enemy was but a head-fighter, a tongue duellist; there was a clever suggestion of something more; but if it came to that, to physical force, the advantage would be the other way.
“Quickjohn knows nothing about you,” he said shortly, throwing off the vague fear that had possessed him. “He is as ignorant as the rest of the world that you are alive. Now, may I ask you to go? I have had enough of these recriminations, and do not mean to allow myself to be terrorized over by you. Threatening is a game that two can play at, and the odds are scarcely on your side.”
He took a step towards the door; then remembered that it was locked.
“It is a recoiling threat on your part.”
Herriard heard the significant rejoinder, but paid no heed to it. He was sick of the scene, and the evil presence in his room was repugnant to him. “Give me the key,” he demanded, turning.
Gastineau’s right hand was in his coat pocket. As he took a swift step forward, he withdrew it, his eyes fixed with a peculiar mesmeric gaze upon Herriard’s. Something in the look warned Herriard; it was not that of one who is simply giving up a key on demand. But the one man’s eyes seemed to hold the other’s; only, they drove him, instinctively, to take a step backwards. It was well. For as Herriard put out his hand, Gastineau struck at him, at his heart, and the backward movement caused the blow to fall short by perhaps half an inch. Next instant Herriard with a cry of indignation seized the striking arm and closed with him.
“Ah, murderer!”
Herriard felt a sharp prick at his breast and struggled desperately to keep the deadly hand away. He could not have believed that Gastineau was so strong: his arms, wrists, fingers were like joints of steel; while the spirit that governed their movement, their efforts, with deadly purpose, seemed ten times stronger than his own incentive to self-preservation.
It was that fierce vigour of mind that made the struggle equal; the body that for years had lain half dead a match now for a younger man who had never known ill-health. And to Herriard the wrestle was complicated by reason of the sharp weapon that each man was trying to force in an opposite direction; all Gastineau’s vicious energy was concentrated towards getting his right hand free to strike. It was a strange encounter, carried on, fierce as it was, almost without noise: indeed there was none, save the heavy breathing of the two adversaries. By sheer weight Gastineau had been forced to the wall, against which he was held struggling quietly with a planned reason for every movement he made. With him was no waste of energy; only against Herriard’s greater strength he could not work his will. But on Herriard’s part the struggle, fierce in its terrible intensity, was but a mechanical effort at self-defence. What was to be the end of it? What did it, must it, portend? If, that was, he got the better of his enemy; if it went the other way, the end was certain enough. In a few minutes he would be a dead man, and no soul on earth the wiser as to whence his death-blow had come. There were but the muscles of his arm between him and extinction. The thought nerved him; he tightened his grip on Gastineau, casting about for an effectual means of wresting from him the weapon, a long, tapering stiletto, used for piercing documents, which had lain on the writing table. It seemed as though, if he tried, he could turn it and drive it into the evil heart, to the world’s advantage. If it came to that——
Suddenly Gastineau seemed to collapse, the tension of his muscles relaxed, his legs gave way, Herriard was supporting rather than restraining him now. There was a strange, fixed, unfathomable expression in Gastineau’s eyes as he hung forwards, helplessly, it seemed: only held up by Herriard’s grip. He could have sent him out of the world then; and just because he realized how easy it would be, he put away the intention. Indeed, as Gastineau’s limp weight lurched forward against him, his head hanging down, Herriard asked himself whether nature were not about to take a desirable, if unpleasant, task, out of human hands.
So he let Gastineau slip to the floor, and, as he lay, tried once more to take the deadly point from him. But the grasp of the fingers round it was as rigid as that of a dead hand. Still holding the wrist, Herriard paused in perplexity. What was he to do? how was this affair to end?
“Gastineau,” he exclaimed, “let go; give up this thing.”
The words were futile; the white face on the floor gave no sign that they were heard; the fist remained clenched tightly as ever round the weapon’s handle. Gastineau was breathing heavily, peculiarly, at considerable intervals, sighing rather than simply breathing: his eyes, half-closed, seemed to see nothing. In a tense, horrible silence, broken only by an occasional deep breath from Gastineau, the moments passed without bringing relief to Herriard’s situation, or suggesting an end to the affair, save one. Was the man dying? It seemed almost like it. His breathing, to Herriard’s untrained ear, seemed stertorous; and now and again there came a catch and a rattle in the throat. The man was dying. His patched-up strength had evidently given way under the strain: the mind had urged on the body beyond its half-recovered powers, and the result was the collapse before him.
“Gastineau!”
For a moment Herriard forgot his enemy’s diabolical nature in the feeling of almost awe-struck sorrow for the man who had led him to success. That the end of it all should have come thus swiftly and awfully filled him with a vague terror.
“Gastineau!”
The body before him quivered; he thought the thin lips, almost set, murmured something. Changing his position, he bent over, and set himself to raise the fallen head. As he did so, a rigor seemed to seize and shake Gastineau; he groaned feebly and caught his breath: it seemed as though the end was near. Near? Herriard, relaxing something of his grasp, bent down to hear what the lips seemed to murmur. Then he found an arm holding his neck like in a vice, his head was pulled down, the wrist which he gripped was jerked free, and, with a convulsive, concentrated muscular effort, Gastineau raised himself and held him down. The relative positions of the two men had in a moment become reversed, and Herriard was looking up into the face set over him full of the triumph of a diabolical cunning.
“My good Herriard,” said the scoffing voice through the curl of those hateful lips, “you are hopelessly stupid. What did you think? That you could snuff out Paul Gastineau by holding him against the wall?” He laughed. Herriard saw the glint of the steel raised to strike. He had no breath to struggle; the tense, cruel fingers gripped his throat mercilessly, the weight of Gastineau’s body was on his chest.
“Gastineau, for God’s sake——” he gasped, and all the reply was a laugh.
“So you know I did for Martindale,” he heard the words through the buzzing of the compressed blood in his ears. “Dangerous knowledge. Too dangerous to live.”
Gastineau moved slightly backward to strike. Herriard gave a stifled cry in the agony of death. Then through the rooms there sounded the startling noise of a sharp knocking at the outer door.
With every sense strung to its acutest point, Herriard heard it and made a desperate effort to call out; but the hand on his throat tightened, and the cry was abortive. Then, for a few seconds, dead silence followed. Gastineau was thinking, planning with that swift brain of his; determining which course to take of the urgent choice before him. Life and death were in the wavering balance, and Herriard lay watching the cruel face as the indicator of which side the scale of his existence dropped. Then came another knocking, and Herriard with a tremendous effort partially freed himself and sent forth a great half-strangled cry. Next instant he was released, for Gastineau had sprung to his feet, and stood for the moment irresolute. Herriard rose now, and shouted; what he knew not. But the shout seemed to determine Gastineau. He took the key from his pocket, unlocked the door and went out. Herriard, steadying himself, followed warily into the lobby. Gastineau was not to be seen. The outer door stood ajar. It opened wider now to admit a man’s form. Herriard sprang forward with a cry, and, to his inexpressible relief, found himself confronted by Count Prosper von Rohnburg.