“You’re as comforting and consoling a Knight Errant as one could wish to meet. The damsel in distress is greatly beholden to you. But how the—whatever you like—you managed to time the rescue is beyond my comprehension.”
“The stars guided me,” he replied, with an upward sweep of the hand. “Mortals have striven to comprehend them for thousands of years—but without success. I started out to wander about this great city—I often do for hours—I’m a born wanderer—with the vagabond’s aimlessness and trust in chance, or in the stars—and this time the stars brought me where it was decreed that I should be.”
While he was speaking she had opened the door with her latchkey and now stood, shimmering white in the gloom of the entrance. She held out her hand.
“I’m afraid I’ve been too much occupied in trying not to seem frightened and silly to thank you decently for what you’ve done. But I am grateful. You don’t know how grateful. I’ll have to tell you some other time.”
“To-morrow?” he asked eagerly.
She hesitated for a moment. “Yes, to-morrow,” she replied softly. “I shall be in all day. Goodnight.”
After the swift handshake the door closed on the enraptured young man, and the hard, characterless street, down which he seemed to dance, became transformed into a moonlit glade of fairyland.
It was four o’clock in the morning when he entered his back-bedroom at the Vanloo Hotel. But he did not sleep. He had no desire for sleep—youth resenting the veil drawn across a consciousness so exquisitely alive. Sleep, when the stars in their courses were fighting for him? Impossible, preposterous! Let him rather live, again and again, over the night’s crowded adventure. Every detail of it set his pulses throbbing. The mere glorious first recognition of her was the thrill of a lifetime. He constructed and reconstructed the immortal picture. The moonlit, silent street, its high, decorous buildings marked by the feeble gas lamps melting into an indeterminate vanishing point. The clear-cut scene. The taxi-cab. The three human figures. The stunted driver. The massive, dark man, in silk hat which reflected the moonlight, in black overcoat thrown open, revealing a patch of white shirt and waistcoat; the slender, quivering, white form draped in white fur, white gossamer, white what-not, crowned with dark glory of eyes and hair. The masculine in him exulted in his physical strength and skill—in the clean, straight, elementary yet scientific left-hander that got the hulking swine between the eyes and sent him reeling and sprawling and asking for no more punishment. And then—oh, it was a great thing to command, to impose his will. To walk in triumph off with the wonderful lady of his dreams. To feel, as she thanked him, that here was something definite that he had done for her, something with a touch of the romantic, the heroic, which, in its trivial way, justified belief in the incidents of his adventurous career which he had so modestly, yet so vividly described in the book that had brought him fame.
On this point of justification he was peculiarly sensitive. Various Englishmen, soldiers sent out on secret missions to the fringes of the areas of his activities, had questioned many of his statements, both in the book and in descriptive articles which he had written for newspapers and other periodicals, and asked for proofs. And he had replied, most cogently, that the sphere of the Russian Secret Service in which he was employed was, of necessity, beyond the ken of the secret service of any other Power in Europe, and that official proofs were lost in the social and political disintegration of Russia. One man, a great man, speaking with unquestionable authority, silenced the horde of cavillers as far as events prior to 1917 were concerned. But there were still some who barked annoyingly at his heels. Proofs, of course, he had none to give. How can a man give proofs when he is cast up, practically naked, on the coast of England? He must be believed or not. And it was the haunting terror of this sensitive boy of genius, whose face and eyes bore the ineffaceable marks of suffering, that he should lose the credit which he had gained.
At all hazards he must allow no doubts to arise in the mind of Olivia. To fight them down he would do all manner of extravagant things. He regretted the pusillanimous tameness of his late opponent. If the man had only picked himself up and given battle! If only there had been half a dozen abductors or insulters instead of one! His spirits (at seven o’clock) sank at the logical conclusion that the conventional conditions of post-war civilized life afforded a meagre probability of the recurrence of such another opportunity. He had the temperament of those whose hunger is only whetted by triumph, to whom attainment only gives vision of new heights. When, after tossing sleepless in his bed, he rose and dressed at nine, he had decided that, in knocking down a mere mass of unresisting flesh, he had played a part almost inglorious, such as any stay-at-home embusqué could have played. By not one jot or tittle did his act advance the credibility of his story. And on his story alone could he found his hopes of finding favour in her marvellous eyes. Of the touch of genius that inspired his literary work he thought little. At this stage of his career he was filled with an incredulous wonder at his possession of a knack which converted a page of scribble into a cheque upon a bank. His writing meant money. Not money, wealth, on the grand scale; but money to keep him as a modest gentleman on the social grade to which he had attained, and to save him from the detested livery of the chauffeur. The story which he was telling in the new book was but a means to this end. The story which he had told was life itself. Nay, now it was more: it was love itself; it was a girl who was more than life.