“I am not requesting,” he announced, “I am ordering.”
“But those canvases, my dear sir, represent the highest note of a master’s work!” began St. John, almost indignantly. “They are the perfection of the art of the greatest living painter, and you direct me to procure them as though they were a grocer’s staple on a shelf! Already, they are as good as sold. One does not have to peddle Marston’s canvases!”
Steele walked over to the door, and, planting his back against its panels, folded his arms. His voice was deliberate and dangerous:
“It’s not worth while to bandy lies with you. We both know that those pictures are from the brush of Robert Saxon. We both know that you have bought them at the price of a pupil’s work, and mean to sell them at the price of the master’s. I shall be in a position to prove the swindle, and to hand you over to the courts.”
St. John had at the first words stiffened with a sudden flaring of British wrath under his gray brows. As he listened, the red flush of anger faded to the coward’s pallor.
“That is not all,” went on Steele. “We both know that Mr. Saxon came to Paris a short while ago. For him to learn the truth meant your unmasking. He disappeared. We both know whose interests were served by that disappearance. You will produce those canvases, and you will produce Mr. Saxon within twenty-four hours, or you will face not only exposure for art-piracy, but prosecution for what is more serious.”
As he listened, St. John’s face betrayed not only fear, but also a slowly dawning wonder that dilated his vague pupils. Steele, keenly reading the face, as he talked, knew that the surprise was genuine.
“As God is my witness,” avowed the Englishman, earnestly, “if Mr. Saxon is in Paris, or in Europe, I know nothing of it.”
“That,” observed Steele dryly, “will be a matter for you to prove.”
“No, no!” The Englishman’s voice was charged with genuine terror, and the hand that he raised in pleading protest trembled. His carefully counterfeited sprightliness of guise dropped away, and left him an old man, much broken.