VII
So these were the rewards of knight-errantry! In his anger he was glad to be rid of her. He was free at last. She'd been nothing but an embarrassment. If she were to attempt a reconciliation, he would turn his back on her. It wasn't likely that he'd put his neck into the same noose twice.
Little by little from resenting her, he began to suspect her. Had she been using him as a cat's-paw in a deeper game? Every man with whom she had ever associated, she had destroyed; could she be expected, to show more mercy to a man by whom she had been rejected? Her husband's words came back: “When she has added you to her list of victims, if she gives you time before she kills you, remember that I warned you.”
Everything to do with her became distorted when interpreted in the light of treachery. The pathos of her unrequited affection had been a mask; her humanitarianism had been a cloak for her designs. When he retraced his relations with her, it seemed glaringly probable that from the start she had been the agent of his financial rivals, placed by them on board the Ryndam with the definite intention of accomplishing his ruin. Except for her final error in tactics, she would have attained her object. He had escaped by the narrowest of margins.
But the other people who had come upon the scene, where did they stand? Were they her puppets, jumping whichever way she pulled the wires, or were they her active co-conspirators? Varensky and the Little Grandmother were undoubtedly her puppets; she employed their enthusiasms to serve her purposes. Anna was her victim—a woman wronged and cheated, infinitely dear to him and tragic. It was Captain Lajos who troubled him. The more he thought about him, the more certain he became that the Captain and Santa were hand in glove. The farce which they had enacted on the train had been prearranged with a view to intimidating him. His most unnerving information, concerning the menace of starving millions, had come from the Captain. And there was a further fact, which had been disquieting him all morning: it was Captain Lajos who had tried Santa's door last night.
What did they think to gain by their plotting? Having pondered the conundrum, he decided that their object was to thwart his schemes for grasping world-power, and that the means they had chosen were to compel him to give for nothing the hoards of food which he had intended that Europe should buy.
Well aware that this theory was far from covering all the facts, he was still feeling his way through a quagmire of surmise, when a visitor was announced. In the foyer he found an officer, resplendently uniformed, waiting to escort him to his audience at the Royal Palace. He was whizzed away in a handsome car. As he traveled, his companion entertained him with anecdotes, grimly humorous, of Bela Kun's reign of terror.
“Experiments of that sort soon disprove themselves,” he said cheerfully. “We live through them and go on again.”
“And your country is going on again?” Hindwood inquired.
“Emphatically. Signs of revival are already apparent.”