Much was about to happen to John and Helen, and to this subtle foe who was bent on the destruction of the one, and who, besides, was fully determined that the other should be made to serve his will. Ten days passed, however, without a hint of the cards that destiny was about to play. In the Office things went on as usual. Saul Hartz was inclined to believe—like the Iron Duke he was in a situation much exposed to fools he always said—that the mandate from the Council of Seven was a hoax and that there would be no developments, when the time came to keep his week-end engagement at Doe Hill.
XXIII
ON Saturday afternoon Saul Hartz left London by the 3:20 from Paddington. It was a long and full train and the Colossus whose habit was to travel en prince whenever possible, had, in spite of all that his equerry could do, to share a carriage with other passengers. Slight attention was paid to these. Acutely observant on occasion of the world around him he could also be the reverse. And now as he entered the compartment and took the seat that had been retained for him in the corner next the door, he gave to his fellow travelers, of whom there were three, a glance so perfunctory that it told nothing. He proceeded to immerse himself in a memoir of a publicist lately dead whom he had intimately known. It amused him to compare his own estimate of the man with that presented to the world in this official biography.
When the train stopped at Slough, two of the other occupants of the carriage got out, leaving the one who remained in the corner farthest from Saul Hartz. At first, the Colossus paid him no more attention than before, but as the train began to move out of the station, he chanced to look up from the book whose naïveté had palled already, and suddenly caught the eye of his fellow traveler.
It was the eye of John Endor.
The two men had a nodding acquaintance with each other. All the personalities of the time were known to Saul Hartz. He went everywhere, he rubbed shoulders continually with the celebrated, the notorious, in fact with all the members of that heterogeneous body who from whatever cause are large in the public eye. John Endor was not yet forty but he was a figure already in the life of the time.
The Colossus never forgot a face. And he never forgot any material fact that was involved in the process of recognition. His glance was held at once, less by John Endor than by an ugly bruise above the right eye. Seeing it, he gave a slight start. Involuntarily his gaze fell to the eyes beneath, and again he started, this time, at their look of open, implacable enmity.
Saul Hartz smiled. On all occasions his power of recovery was automatic. As became one who saw himself as a modern dictator, he allowed nothing to come between the wind and his nobility.
The eyes of John Endor would have quelled a lesser man. They merely goaded the Colossus into action.
“I wonder if we are going to the same place.” Hartz’s voice, which seldom rose above a husky wheeze and yet had the power of carrying a great distance, had a note of half insolent bonhomie. It had, too, the complacence of one who does not disguise that he has sized up all things in the visible universe. Not for him the irritating reserves, the conventional glosses of “the English gentleman.” Sublime faith in himself and a stupendous power of will enabled him to ride straight at every obstacle in his path. He knew that he could and would surmount it.