"I am to be your watch-dog, am I? Your sentinel? Very well! Come, let me deserve your confidence, my friend."
The train thundered out of the tunnel and through the suburbs of Paris. Hillyard drew a letter from Fairbairn out of his pocket and read it through.
"Compartments numbers 11 and 12 on the night train from the Quai d'Orsay station to Cerbère. Good!" murmured Hillyard. "Here I am in compartments numbers 11 and 12. Now we wait until the married couple from Perpignan and the attendant are comfortably asleep."
He undressed and went to bed, but he did not sleep. He lay in the berth in the darkness, listening intently as the train rushed out of Paris across the plains of France. Once or twice, as the hours passed, he heard a stealthy footstep in the corridor outside, and once the faintest possible little click told that the latch of his door had been lifted to make sure that the bolt was still shot home in its socket. Hillyard smiled.
"You are safe, my friend," he breathed the words towards the anxious one in the corridor. "No one can get in. The door is locked. The door of the dressing-room too. Sleep in your corner in peace."
The train sped over a moonlit country, spacious, unhurt by war. It moved with a steady, rhythmical throb, like an accompaniment to a tune or a phrase, ever repeated and repeated Hillyard found himself fitting words to the pulsation of the wheels. "Berlin ... Berne ... Paris ... Cerbère ... Barcelona ... Madrid ... Aranjuez and the world"; and back again, reversing the order: "Madrid ... Barcelona ... Cerbère ... Paris ... Berne ... Berlin."
But the throb of the train set the interrogation at the end of the string of names. So that the sequence of them was like a question demanding confirmation....
Towards three in the morning, when there was no movement in the corridor and the lights were blue and dim, Hillyard silently folded back his bedclothes and rose. In the darkness he groped gently for the door of the lavatory between his compartment and the compartment of the manufacturer of Perpignan. He found the handle, and pressed it down slowly; without a creak or a whine of the hinges the door swung open towards him. Through the clatter he could hear that the manufacturer of Perpignan was snoring. But Hillyard did not put his trust in snores. He crept with bare feet across the washing-room, and, easing over the handle of the further door, locked the manufacturer out. Again there had been no sound. He shut the door of his own compartment lest the swing of the train should set it banging and arouse the sleepers. Towards the corridor there was a window of painted glass, and through this window a pale, dim light filtered in. Hillyard noticed, for the first time, that a small diamond-shaped piece of the coloured glass was missing, at about the level of a man's head. It was advisable that Martin Hillyard should be quick—or he might find the tables turned. With his ears more than ever alert, he set up the steps for the upper berth, in the lavatory, and whilst he worked his eyes watched that little aperture at the level of a man's head, which once a diamond-shaped piece of coloured glass had closed....
The door of the manufacturer was unlocked, the steps folded in their place, and Hillyard back again in his bed before two minutes had passed. And once more the throb of the train beat into a chain of towns which went backwards and forwards like a shuttle in his brain. But there was no note of interrogation now.
"Berlin ... Berne ... Paris ... Cerbère ... Barcelona ... Madrid ... Aranjuez and the world"; and with a thump the train set a firm full stop to the sequence. Across the broad plain, meadowland and plough, flower-garden and fruit the train thundered down to the Pyrenees. Paris was far away now, and the sense of desolation at quitting it quite gone from Hillyard's breast.