“If you lay a finger on Miss Falconer,” I heard myself saying slowly, “I swear I’ll kill you.”
Then through the crimson mist that enveloped me I saw Blenheim laugh.
“Come, Mr. Bayne,” he taunted me, “remember our friend Schwartzmann. This is your business, Miss Falconer, I take it. What are you going to do?”
The girl flung her head back, and her eyes blazed as she answered him.
“You can torture me,” she said scornfully. “You can kill me. But I will never give you the papers; you may be sure of that.”
CHAPTER XXI
IN THE DARK
I thought of a number of things in the ensuing thirty seconds, but they all narrowed down swiftly to a mere thankfulness that I had been born. Suppose I hadn’t; or suppose I had not happened to stop at the St. Ives Hotel and sail on the Re d’Italia; or that I had remained in Rome with Jack Herriott instead of hurrying on to Paris; or had let my quest of the girl end in the rue St.-Dominique instead of trailing her to Bleau. If one of these links had been omitted, the chain of circumstance would have been broken, and Miss Falconer would have sat here confronting these four men alone.
It was extremely hard for me to believe that the scene was genuine. The dark hall, the one wavering, flickering candle lighting only the immediate area of our conference, the bound woman in the chair, the watchful attitude of our captors. Mr. Schwartzmann’s ready weapon—all were the sort of thing that does not happen to people in our prosaic day and age. It was like an old-time romantic drama; I felt inadequate, cast for the hero. I might have been Francois Villon, or some such Sothern-like incarnation, for all the civilized resources that I could summon. There were no bells here to be rung for servants, no telephones to be utilized, no police station round the corner from which to commandeer prompt aid.