The Hand of Peril/Part 6/Chapter 3
III
Kestner's next hour was a frantically busy one. Almost his first move was to wire Wilsnach at the Paris Office, using the familiar Service Code. "Send me Wimpffen's record quick." This was followed by hurried calls at certain Embassies and on certain Aides, followed again by a brief talk with two civic officials and a secret conference with the uniformed head of the Intelligence Department.
By the time these were over and Kestner had proved that he was not yet without friends and influence in Europe, Wilsnach's cipher wire had arrived. And the reading of that wire brought a more contented smile to Kestner's face.
It was less than half an hour later that an invalid American, much muffled up, made a circuit of the Piazza Barberini, looking for rooms. His knowledge of Italian was excellent, and while he panted up stairways and poked about passages he talked fluently of his ailments and wheezily of his dislike for dampness.
But this invalid American was not easy to suit, and many rooms were explored and many passageways investigated before his loss of strength compelled him to give up for the afternoon.
It was several hours later that a figure oddly resembling this same invalid appeared on a loggia overlooking a diminutive walled garden bathed in the soft light of an Italian moon. Having reasonably assured himself that he was unobserved, he betrayed an agility unlooked for in one of his years as he climbed over the heavy stone balustrade, swung himself to a nearby jointed iron water-pipe, and climbed nimbly down to a shuttered window. The shutters of this window he forced open with a small instrument of tempered steel taken from his pocket. Then he directed his attention towards the double sashes themselves. These were built to swing outward on heavy wrought-iron hinges and were clearly locked from the inside. A few moments' work with the same piece of tempered steel, however, had the sashes open, and the house-breaker without more ado climbed quietly and nimbly inside.
There he took out a flashlight and began a hurried but none the less methodic exploration of the small apartment. He noted the sleepy canary in a painted Swiss cage, the number of bowls and vases about the place, filled with spring flowers, Roman anemones and narcissi and daffodils and Parma violets in profusion, reminding him of the Piazza di Spagna steps and the Flower Market in the Stranger's Quarter.
When he groped his way into a narrow closet and found one wall hung with an orderly array of woman's clothing, he gathered the folds of that subtly odorous raiment in his arms, and acting on an impulse that seemed uncoördinated and instinctive, buried his face in them. For one brief moment he drank in a sublimated fragrance which seemed to leave him both light of head and heavy of heart. Then he pulled himself together and went on with his search, more guardedly than before, for the room seemed haunted with a presence which he could no longer quite divorce from it.
He deliberated for some time over a heavy teakwood desk which he found securely locked. He studied this old-fashioned piece of furniture, back and front, testing its panels and feeling about it for a possible secret spring. Then he gave his attention to the lock. He was reluctant to force that lock, easy as such an act would make his work. He looked at his watch, calculating his margin of safety as to time. Then he sat down before the desk, balanced his flashlight on the bronze base of a Roman lamp, and began to work at the lock with a small steel instrument not unlike a button-hook.
Then he suddenly paused in the midst of his work. With a movement equally abrupt he reached out for his flashlight and snapped it off. Then he sat at the desk, without moving. For distinctly there came to him the sound of a key being turned in a lock and a door being opened. And he knew it was the door of the apartment into which he himself had broken.
He sat there, screened by the desk-top, waiting for the intruder to show himself.
He heard the door close, and then the sound of a quick step. The next moment a wall-switch snapped and the room flowered into sudden light. And then he saw that the intruder was Maura Lambert.
He sat without moving, studying her as she stood there, with a japanned tin paint-box in her hand. She was looking intently down at the envelope of an unopened letter, quite unconscious of his presence. He could see the same soft oval of the ivory-tinted face, the same wealth of chestnut-brown hair under the slightly tilted hat-brim, the same shadowy light about the violet-blue eyes, the same misty rose of the slightly puckered lips. And he knew, as he gazed at her with quickening pulse, not only that she was beautiful, that she was desirable with a loveliness which left an ache in his heart, but that his life had been empty because it had been empty of her.
He still sat there as she crossed the room and placed her paint-box on a table beside the bronze bowl heaped with Parma violets. She stooped for a moment, to bury her face in the flowers. When she raised her head again, she stopped and half turned about, as though some psychic current had carried to her the warning of his presence there.
Her bewildered gaze fell on him as he leaned forward with his elbows on the desk before him. That gaze seemed to encompass him for several moments before she became actually conscious of his presence. She did not move or cry out. But she grew paler in the side-light from the small electrolier above the table. Then a slow flush mantled the ivory-like texture of her skin, making the misty rose of the mouth less marked. He could see the widened pupil of the eye darken and invade the violet-blue iris. He could hear the quick and quite involuntary intake of her breath. But otherwise there was no movement from her. And the silence prolonged itself, foolishly yet epochally, until he suddenly realised the necessity for speech.
She put out one hand, as he rose to his feet, and steadied herself by resting her finger-tips against the edge of the table beside her. His own hand, he noticed, was not as controlled as it ought to be.
"I'm sorry," he began, and the very inadequacy of such a beginning brought him up short. He stood there, groping vacantly for the right word, for some reasonable phrase of explanation.
"I thought you were not to follow me!"
She spoke quietly, but he could see that it was costing her an effort. And her wondering gaze was still encompassing him, studying him with an impersonal intentness which did not add to his peace of mind.
"There was nothing else for me to do," he finally found the wit to exclaim.
She did not seem to understand him. There was still something more than a mild reproof in her eyes as she stared at him. She seemed mystified by the fact that he could have gained admission to her rooms without her knowledge. And when she spoke there was a touch of bitterness in her voice.
"This is history repeating itself."
"That," replied Kestner, "is a habit history has!"
Her eyes narrowed, almost in a wince, as though his words carried a sting which had struck home.
"You should not have come here," she finally exclaimed.
"I had to come."
"Why?" she demanded.
"Because you are in danger."
His words did not disturb her. She could even afford to smile a little at their solemnity.
"I have been making it my life study to avoid danger," she quietly explained. "There was too much of that in the past."
"Precisely. And that past is reaching out a hand to threaten you, when you least expect it."
She sank into a chair facing him.
"What have I done?" she asked him.
"It's nothing you've done. It's something you may be compelled to do."
"Compelled by whom?" was her quick inquiry.
"By Watchel," was his answer. She looked up, as though the name had startled her.
"Who told you this?"
"Isn't it enough that I know? Can't you ever learn to trust me?"
"But you haven't told me what you know," she replied, and the familiar tremolo of the full-noted contralto voice stirred him until his own voice shook.
"There's only one thing I know," he suddenly found himself saying as he sat facing her in the softened light, oppressed by the futility of all further fencing over trivialities.
"Only one thing?" she echoed with a timorous movement of her white hand. He knew the time was wrong, and the place was wrong, but he could not keep back the words.
"The only thing I know is that I love you, that I've loved you from the first day I saw you. I've known that through every hour of the time I've had to act as your enemy, and now that I've found you I know it more than ever."
His voice was quite steady by this time, but the colour had gone from his face until it was almost as pale as that of the Ivory-browed woman before him. She did not move as she sat there; yet he could see the quickened rise and fall of her bosom.
"You should not say these things," she said, struggling to achieve a calm as complete as his own.
"But I've got to say them," he contended. "I've followed you half way round the world to say them."
She had clasped together the hands that lay in her lap and then unclasped them, with a small gesture of hopelessness. Yet somewhere deep in the shadowy eyes was a light which made them less rebellious, less combative.
"But what good can it do?" she cried out to him.
"I love you, and I want you," was his simple rejoinder.
"You can't! You can't!" she said with a little shudder of self-abasement. She was on her feet by this time, staring down at him with almost frightened eyes.
"Are you ashamed of me, of what I've been?" he asked as he stood confronting her.
"I am ashamed of myself, of all my life."
"But all your life's still before you," he contended. "We've both got to begin over again."
"If I only could!" she said with a half-mournful little gasp.
Hope surged through him at the sound of those words. He stepped quickly over to where she stood between the bowl of Parma violets and an Etruscan vase filled with anemones. She did not shrink away from him. But the look in her eyes was almost one of commiseration.
"Oh, you should never have come here!" she mourned.
"Can't you give me a shred of hope?" he pleaded as he caught her passive hand in his. Yet its possession brought him no sense of triumph. She stared down at it as it lay limp and listless between his fingers, as though in it lay epitomised all that was abhorrent in her past life. She was moving her head slowly from side to side.
"There's nothing to give now, not even hope!"
Her mournful eyes were studying his face. It was not their beauty that barbed his body with sudden arrows of fire. It was the look of wordless pleading in them, of pleading touched with vague pity and regret for something which he could not comprehend. It awoke in him the dormant energy which had made his life what it was, the quick and instinctive revolt against surrender, against quiescence and hesitation in moments of crisis.
"Then I don't ask for hope," was his sudden cry. "Can't you see that all I want is you—you!"
She wavered mistily for a moment before his eyes. Then his hungering arms went out and she seemed to melt into them and he stood holding her sobbing body against his own. He could feel each quick and capitulating catch of the breath as he held her there without resistance. And she seemed something flower-like and precious, something to be always cherished and sheltered, as she lifted her face and looked into his eyes.
"Oh, it's no use," she said with a little child-like wail. "I can't help it! I love you! I do! I do!"
He could feel the arms that had seemed so impassive suddenly lift themselves about his shoulder and cling there. He could feel the warmth of her body close against his own. He could see the misty red of the mouth and the perfect line of the up-poised chin. He was conscious only of an infinite want, as he leaned closer to that mingled warmth and fragrance. His lips met hers, and all thought of time and place and the world slipped away from them.