Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint s-4

by Leslie Charteris

  "Praise the Lord!" breathed the Saint; and meant it.

  He belayed again, and made a second trip down the falls to cast off the blocks. The cockle-shell bucked and plunged perilously in the ship's wash; but he noted with renewed satisfaction that it had sustained no damage in the launching, and was shipping no water in spite of its present maltreat­ment. Again he took a rest on the main deck on his way up and listened in silence for several seconds, but he heard no suspicious sound.

  Back on the upper deck, it was the work of a. moment to haul the falls well up and clear; and then he made his last trip down the gangway and bent his back to the hardest physical labour of the whole performance—the task of talking in the towrope until the boat was near enough to be easily reached from the grating at the bottom of the gangway. He got it done after a struggle that left every muscle aching, and left the boat less than half a fathom away, with all the slack of the tow-rope secured in a seamanlike sheep-shank. And; then he went back to the bridge.

  "Strange adventure that we're trolling:

  Modest maid and gallant groom— "

  The song came again to his lips as he turned into the wheelhouse and looked down the barrel of the girl's automatic.

  "Put it away, honey," he laughed. "I have a tender regard for my thorax, and I've seen fingers less wobbly on the trigger!"

  "But what have you been doing?"

  "Preparing our getaway. Did I make a lot of noise?"

  "I don't know—it seemed a frightful din to me—"

  Simon grinned, and took out his cigarette case.

  "It seemed the same to me, old dear," he re­marked. "But I don't think anyone else noticed it."

  With a lighted cigarette between his lips, he re­lieved her of the wheel, and told her briefly what he had done.

  "In its way, it should be a little gem of an es­cape," he said. "We bring the old tub in as near to the shore as we dare, and then we turn her round again and step off. When the next watch comes on duty they find out what's happened; but the old tub is blinding through the North Sea at its own sweet will, and they won't know whether they're coming or going. Gosh, wouldn't you give a couple of years of your life to be able to listen in on the excitement?"

  She moved away, and brought up a chair to sit beside him. Now she definitely felt that she was dreaming. Looking back, it seemed incredible that so much could have happened in such a short time—that even the present position should have come to pass.

  "When do you think we should get back?" she asked.

  "We ought to sight land in about an hour, the way I figure it out," he answered. "And then— more fun!"

  The smiling eyes rested on her face, reading there the helpless incredulity that she could not hide from her expression any more than she could dispel it from her mind; and the Saint laughed again, the soft lilting laughter of sheer boyish de­light that carried him through all the adventures that his gods were good enough to send.

  "I meant to tell you it was a great life," said the Saint, with that lazy laughter dancing like sunshine through his voice. "Here you are, Sonia—have an­other of these cigarettes and tell me your story. We've got all the time in the world!"

  CHAPTER NINE

  How Simon Templar looked for land, and proved himself a true prophet

  1

  BUT IT WAS the Saint who talked the most on that strange return voyage, standing up to the wheel, with the breeze through the open door fluttering his tie, and his shoulders sweeping wide and square against the light, and his tanned face seeming more handsome and devil-may-care and swaggeringly swift of line than ever.

  She came to know him then as otherwise she might never have come to know him. It was not that he talked pointedly of himself—he had too catholic a range of interests to aim any long speech so monotonously—and yet it would be idle to deny that his own personality impregnated every subject on which he touched, were the touch never so fleeting. It was inevitable that it should be so, for he spoke of things that he had known and un­derstood, and nothing that he said came at second­hand. He told her of outlandish places he had seen, of bad men that he had met, of forlorn ventures in which he had played his part; and yet it was nothing like a detailed autobiography that he gave her—it was a kaleidoscope, an irresponsibly shredded panorama of a weird and wonderful life, strewn extravagantly under her eyes as only the Saint himself could have strewn it, seasoned with his own unique spice of racy illusion and flippant phrase; and it was out of this squandered prodigal­ity of inconsequent reminiscence, and the gallant manner of its telling, that she put together her picture of the man.

  And, truly, he told her much of his amazing career, and even more of the ideals that had shaped it to the thing it was. And because she was no fool she gleaned from the tale a clear vision of the fantastic essence of the facts—of D'Artagnan born again without his right to a sword. . . .

  "You see," he said, "I'm mad enough to believe in romance. And I was sick of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called Life. I'm not interested to read about maundering epileptics, and silly nymphomaniacs, and anaemic artists with a Message; and I'm not interested to meet them. If I notice them at all, they make me want to vomit. There's no message in life but the message of splendid living—which doesn't mean crawling about on a dunghill yap­ping about your putrid little repressions. Nor does it mean putting your feet on the mantelpiece and a soapily beatific expression on your face, and concentrating on God in the image of a musical-comedy curate or Aimee Semple McPherson. It means the things that our forefathers were quite contented with, though their children have got so damned refined that they really believe the said forefathers would have been much 'naicer' if they'd spent their days picking over the scabs on their souls instead of going in for the noisy vulgar things they did go in for—I mean battle, murder, and sudden death, with plenty of good beer and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. The low-down shocker is a decent and clean and honest-to-God form of literature, because it does deal with things that have a right to occupy a man's mind—a primitive chivalry, and damsels in distress, and virtue triumphant, and a wholesale slaughter of villains at the end, and a real fight running through it all. It mayn't be true to life as we know it, but it ought to be true, and that's why it's the best stuff for people to read—if they must read about things instead of doing them. Only I preferred to do them. ..."

  And he told her other things, so that the vision grew even clearer in her mind—that vision of a heroic revolt against circumstance, of a huge and heroic impatience against the tawdry pusillanimity that had tried and failed to choke his spirit, of a strange creed and a challenge. . . . And with it all there was a lack of bitterness, a joyous fatalism, that lent the recital half its glamour; the champion of lost causes fought with a smile. . . .

  "Of course," he said, "it makes you an out­law—in spirit as well as in fact. But that again seems worth while to me. Isn't the outlaw one of the most popular figures in fiction? Isn't Robin Hood every schoolboy's idol? There's a reason for everything that people love, and there must be a reason for that—it must be the response of one of the most fundamental impulses of humanity. And why? For the same reason that Adam fell for the apple—because it's in the nature of man to break laws—because there's no real difference between the thrill of overthrowing a legitimate obstacle and the thrill of overthrowing a legitimate thou-shalt-not. Man was given legs to walk the earth; and therefore, out of divine cussedness of his inheri­tance, he chooses his heroes, not from the men who walk superlatively well, but from the men who trespass into the element for which they were never intended, and fly superlatively well. In the same way, man was also given moral limitations by his ancestors after God Almighty; and therefore he reserves his deepest and most secret admiration for those who defy those limitations. He would like to do it himself, but he hasn't the courage; and so he enjoys the defiance even more when it's done for
him by someone else. But compare that pleasure with the pleasure of the outlaw himself, when he chooses his outlawry because he loves it, and goes forth into the wide world to rob bigger and better orchards than he ever dreamed of when he was a grubby little urchin with a feather in his cap!"

  "Yes, but the end of it!"

  "The end?" said the Saint, with far-away eyes and a reckless smile. "Well—

  'What gifts hath Fate for all his chivalry?

  Even such as hearts heroic oftenest win:

  Honour, a friend, anguish, untimely death.'

  And yet—I don't know that that's a bad re­ward. . . . Do you remember me telling you about Norman Kent? I found his grave when I came back to England, and I had those lines carved over it. And do you know, I've often thought I should be proud to have earned them on my own." He could talk like that with fresh blood upon his hands and his heart set upon another killing! For a moment the girl felt that it could not be true — she could not be sitting there listening to him with no feeling of revulsion for such a smug hypocrisy. But it was so. And she knew, at the same time, that that charge would not have been true — his simple sincerity was as natural as the half smile that went with the words.

  So they talked. . . . And the Saint opened up for her a world of whose existence she had never known, a world of flamboyant colours and magni­ficently medieval delights. His magic made her see it as he saw it — a rich romance that depended on no cloaks or ruffles or other laboriously pic­turesque trappings for its enchantment, a play of fierce passions and grim dangers and quixotic loyalties, a tale that a man had dreamed and gone out to live. It was Gawain before the Grail, it was Bayard on the bridge of Garigliano, it was Roland at the gates of Spain; a faith that she had thought was dead went through it all, a thread of fairy gold with power to transmute all baser metals that it touched. Thus and thus he showed her glimpses of the dream; and he would have shown her more; but all at once she faltered, she who from the first had matched his stride so easily, she saw a step that he had deliberately missed, and she could not be silent. She said: "Oh, yes, but there are other things — in your own life! Even Robin Hood had to admit it!"

  "You mean Maid Marian? ' '

  "Roger told me. I asked him."

  "About Patricia?"

  "Yes."

  The Saint gazed across the tiny cabin; but he could not see beyond the windows.

  "Patricia—happened. She came in an adventure, and she stayed. She's been more to me than anyone can ever know."

  "Do you love her?"

  The Saint turned.

  "Love?" said the Saint softly. "What is love?"

  "You should know," she said.

  "I've wondered."

  Now they had been talking for a long time.

  '' Have you never been in love? " she asked.

  The Saint drew back his sleeve and looked thoughtfully at his watch.

  "We ought to be getting near land," he said. "Would you mind taking over the wheel again, old dear, while I go and snoop round the horizon?"

  2

  HE WAS GONE for several minutes; and when he came back it was like the return of a different man. And yet, in truth, he had not changed at all; if anything, he was an even more lifelike picture of himself. It was the Saint as she had first met him who came back, with a Saintly smile, and a Saintly story, and a spontaneous Saintly mischief rekindling in his eyes; but that very quintessential Saintliness somehow set him infinitely apart. Suddenly, in a heart-stopping flash of understanding, she knew why. . . .

  "Do they keep a lookout on any of your father's yachts?" he drawled. "Or don't they do any night work?"

  "A lookout? I don't know."

  "Well, they certainly stock one on this blistered buque, as they do on any properly conducted ship, but blow me if I hadn't forgotten the swine!"

  "Then he must have heard you lowering that boat!"

  The Saint shook his head. His smile was ridiculously happy.

  "Not he! That's just one more point we can chalk up to ourselves for the slovenliness of this bunch of Port Mahon sodgers. He must have been fast asleep—if he hadn't, we'd have known all about him before now. But he woke up later, by the same token—I saw him lighting a cigarette up in the bows when I went out on the bridge. And it was just as well for us that he did take the idea of smoking a cigarette at that moment, for there was land on the starboard bow as plain as the hump on a camel, and in another few minutes he couldn't have helped noticing it."

  "But what shall we do?"

  Simon laughed.

  "It's done, old darling," he answered cheer­fully, and she did not have to ask another ques­tion.

  He lounged against the binnacle, a fresh white cylinder between his lips, his lighter flaring in his hand. The adventure had swept him up again: she could mark all the signs. The incident of which he had returned to speak so airily was a slight thing in itself, as he would have seen it; but it had turned a subtle scale. Though he lounged there so lazily relaxed, so easy and debonair, it was a dynamic and turbulent repose. There was nothing about it of permanence or even pause: it was the calm of a couched panther. And she saw the mocking curve of the eager fighting lips, the set of the finely chiselled jaw, the glimmer of laughter in the clear eyes half-sheathed by languid lids; and she read his destiny again in that moment's silence.

  Then he straightened up; and it was like the uncoiling of tempered steel. His hand fell on her shoulder.

  "Come and have a look," he said.

  She secured the wheel amidships and followed him outside.

  The wind touched her hair, cool and sweet as a sea nymph's breath; it whispered in the rigging, a muted chant to the rustle and throb of the ship's passage. Somewhere astern, between the bridge and the frayed white feather of their wake, the rattle and swish of a donkey engine shifting clinker jarred into the softness of the night. The sky was a translucent veil of purple, spangled with silver dust, a gossamer canopy flung high above the star-spearing topmasts, with a silver moon riding be­tween yardarm and water. And away ahead and to her right, as the Saint had prophesied, a dark line of land was rising half a hand's-breath from the sea. ...

  She heard the Saint speaking, with a faint tremor of reckless rapture in his voice.

  "Only a little while now and then the balloon! ... I wonder if they've all gone to bed, to dream about my obituary notice in the morning papers. . . . You know, that'd make the reunion too perishingly perfect for words—to have Angel Face trying to do his stuff in a suit of violently striped pajamas and pink moccasins. I'm sure Angel Face is the sort of man who would wear striped pajamas, "said the Saint judicially. . . .

  It did not occur to her to ask why the Saint should take the striping of pajamas as such an axiomatic index of villainy; but she remembered, absurdly, that Sir Isaac Lessing had a delirious taste in stripes. They had been members of the same house party at Ascot that summer, and she had met him on his way back from his bath. . . . And Sonia said abruptly: "Aren't you worried about Roger?"

  "In a way .... But he's a great lad. I trained him myself."

  "Did he—think the same as you?"

  "About the life?"

  "Yes."

  Simon leaned on the rail gazing out to the slowly rising land.

  "I don't know," he said. "I'm damned if I know. ... I led him on, of course, but he wasn't too hard to lead. It gave him something to do. Then he got tied up with a girl one time, and that ought to have been the end of him; but she let him down rather badly. After that—maybe you'll understand—he was as keen as knives. And I can't honestly say I was sorry to have him back."

  "Do you think he'll stay?"

  "I've never asked him, old dear. There's no contract—if that's what you mean. But I do know that nothing short of dynamite would shift him out of this particular party, and that's another reason why I'm not fretting myself too much about him tonight. You see, he and I and Norman were the original Musketeers, and—well, I guess Roger wants to meet Rayt Marius again as much as I
do ...."

  "And you mean to kill Marius?" said the girl quietly.

  The Saint's cigarette end glowed brighter to a long, steady inhalation, and she met the wide, bland stare of Saintly eyes.

  "But of course," he said simply. "Why not?"

  And Sonia Delmar made no answer, turning her face again towards the shore. Words blazed through her brain; they should have come pelting—but her tongue was tied. He had shown her the warning, made it so plain that only a swivel-eyed half-wit could have missed it: "NO ENTRY—ONE WAY STREET," it said. And not once, but twice, he had edged her gently off the forbidding road, before her own unmannered obstinacy had pricked him to the snub direct. Yet he had broken the strain as easily and forthrightly as he had broken the spell; by now the entire circumstance had probably slipped away to the spacious background of his mind. He was as innocent of resentment as he was innocent of restraint; he pointed her retreat for the third time with no whit less of gentle grace; and she could not find the hardihood to breach the peace again. .

  3

  THE SHIP ploughed on through a slow swell of dark shining steel; and the Saint's lighter gritted and flared again in the gloom. His soft chuckle scarcely rose above the sigh of the breeze.

  "If you want to powder your nose or anything, Sonia," he murmured, "this is your chance. I guess we'll be decanting ourselves in a few minutes now. We don't want to drive this gondola right up to the front door—I've no idea what the coast is like around here, and it might be infernally awkward to run aground at the critical moment."