Moment after moment pa.s.sed, the squall persisting with unmitigated viciousness. If now and again it subsided momentarily, it was only into uglier growls and swiftly to rise once more to high frenzy of incoherence.
Two of the disputants appeared in the square frame of the staircase well, oddly foreshortened figures brandishing wild arms, one of them Velasco, the other a man whom Lanyard failed to identify, seemingly united in common anger directed at the head of some person invisible.
Abruptly, with a gesture of almost homicidal fury, the Brazilian darted out of sight. The other followed.
Then the object of their wrath took to the stairs, stopping at the rail of the first landing and gesticulating savagely over the heads of his audience, Velasco and the others returning amid a knot of fellows to bay round the newel post.
His voice, full-throated, cried them all down--Ekstrom"s deep and resonant voice, domineering over the uproar, hectoring one after another into sullen silence.
In the beginning employing nothing but terms and phrases of insolence and objurgation untranslatable, when he had secured a measure of attention he delivered a short address in tones of unqualified contempt.
"I will have obedience!" he stormed. "Let no one misunderstand my status here: I am come direct from His Majesty the Emperor with full power and authority to command and direct affairs which you have, individually, collectively, proved yourselves either unfit or unable to cope with. What I do, I do in my absolute discretion, with the full sanction and confidence of the Kaiser. He who questions my judgment or my actions, questions the wisdom of the All-Highest. Let it be clearly understood I am answerable to no one under G.o.d but myself and my Imperial master. Henceforth be good enough to hold your tongues or take the consequences--and be d.a.m.ned to you all!"
Briefly he stood glowering down at their upturned faces, then sneered, and turned away.
"Come along, O"Reilly," he said. "Fetch the woman, and give no more heed to swine-dogs!"
His hand slipped up the rail to the first floor, vanished.
If O"Reilly followed with the woman mentioned, both kept back from the rail and so out of Lanyard"s field of vision.
The group at the foot of the stairs moved away, grumbling profanely.
At once Lanyard began to descend, rapidly and without care to avoid detection.
One flight down he met face to face a manservant, evidently a footman, with an armful of clothing which he was conveying from one chamber to another.
The fellow stopped short, jaw dropping, eyes popping; whereupon Lanyard paused and addressed him in German with a manner of overbearing contempt, that is to say, in character.
"You"re wanted upstairs in the radio room," he said--"at once!"
The servant bleated one word of protest: "But--!"
"Be silent. Do as I bid you. It is an emergency. Drop those things and go!
Do you hear, imbecile?"
Completely cowed and cheated, the man obeyed literally, letting his burden of garments fall to the floor and bounding hurriedly up the stairs.
Another flight was negotiated without misadventure; on this floor as well servants were flitting busily to and fro, but none favoured the adventurer with the least attention.
Midway down the third flight he pulled up to one side of the landing, and reconnoitred. It was on the next floor below, the first above the street, that Ekstrom had stopped. But in what quarter thereof? The exigency forbade the risk of one false turn. If Lanyard were to take Ekstrom unawares it must be at the first cast.
From the ground floor came semi-coherent s.n.a.t.c.hes of surly comment, like growls of a thunderstorm pa.s.sing off into the distance:
"_At a time such as this_...."
"... _Secret Service snapping at our heels_ ..."
"... _base on the Vineyard discovered_ ..."
"... _Au Printemps raided, Sophie Weringrode under arrest. G.o.d knows whether she will hold her tongue_!"
"_Trust her! But this a.s.s_ ..."
"_Bringing a woman here, putting all our necks into a halter_ ..."
Immediately opposite the foot of the stairway, on the first storey, a door opened. O"Reilly came alertly forth, closed the door behind him, paused, fished in his pocket for a cigarette case, lighted and inhaled with deep appreciation, meantime eavesdropping on the utterances below with his head c.o.c.ked to one side and a malicious smile shadowing his handsome Irish face.
In his own good time he shrugged an indifferent shoulder, thrust his hands into his pockets, and sauntered coolly on down the stairs.
The moment he disappeared, Lanyard went into action, in two bounds cleared landing and stairs, in another threw himself upon the door. It opened readily. Entering, he put his back to it, with his left hand groped for, found and turned a key, his right holding ready the automatic pistol he had taken from the lockers of the U-boat.
The room was a combination of administrative bureau and study, very handsomely if somewhat over-decorated and furnished, with an atmosphere as distinctively German as that of a Bierstube, the sombreness of its colour scheme lending weight to its array of ma.s.sive desks, tables, chairs, bookcases, and lounges.
Between great draped windows and an impressive chimney-piece opposite, beside a broad, long desk, in a straight-backed chair sat a woman, gagged, bound as to her wrists, strips of cloth which had but lately bound ankles as well on the floor about her feet.
That woman was Cecelia Brooke.
Ekstrom stood behind her, in the act of loosening the knots which held the gag secure.
For a s.p.a.ce of thirty seconds, transfixed by the apparition of his enemy, he did not stir other than to raise weaponless hands in deference to the pistol trained upon his head. But the blood ebbed from his face, leaving it a ghastly mask in which shone the eyes of a man who sees certain death closing in upon him and is powerless to combat it, even to die fighting for life. And his lips curled back in a snarl neither of contempt nor of hatred but of terror.
And for as long Lanyard remained as motionless, rooted in a despondency of thwarted hopes no less profound than the despair of the Prussian, apprehending what that one could not yet guess, that once more, and now certainly for the last time, vengeance was denied him, the fulfilment of all his labours and their sole purpose s.n.a.t.c.hed from his grasp.
The instincts of a killer were not his. Barring injudicious attempt to summon aid or take the offensive, Ekstrom was safe from injury at the hands of Michael Lanyard. His cunning, his favour in the countenance of fortune, or whatever it was that had enabled him to make the girl his prisoner and bring her here, bade fair to prove his salvation.
Deep in Lanyard"s consciousness an echo stirred of half-forgotten words: "_Vengeance is mine_...."
The sense of frustration brewed a hopelessness as stark as that of a brow-beaten child. A blackness seemed to be settling down upon his faculties. A mist wavered momentarily before his eyes. He gulped convulsively, swallowing what had almost been a sob.
But he spoke in a voice positively dispa.s.sionate.
"Keep your hands up."
Lanyard removed and pocketed the key, crossed to the middle of the room without once letting his gaze waver from the face of the Prussian, pa.s.sed behind him, planted the muzzle of the pistol beneath Ekstrom"s shoulder-blade, and methodically searched him, finding and putting aside on the desk one automatic, nothing else.
"Stand aside!"
The almost puerile measure of his disappointment was betrayed in the thrust with which he shouldered Ekstrom out of the way, so forcibly that the man was sent staggering wildly half a dozen paces.
"Don"t move, a.s.sa.s.sin!... Pardon, mademoiselle: one moment," Lanyard muttered, with his one free hand undoing the gag.
He made slow work of that, fumbling while watching Ekstrom with unremitting intentness, hoping against hope that his enemy might make one false move, one only, by some infatuate endeavour to turn the tables excuse his killing.
But Ekstrom would not. Recovery of his equilibrium had been coincident with the shock administered to his hardihood and sense of security by Lanyard"s entrance. He stood now in a pose of insouciant grace, hands idly clasped before him, disdain glimmering in languid-lidded eyes, contempt in the set of his lips--an ensemble eloquent of brazen effrontery, the outgrowth of perception of the fact that Lanyard, being what he was, could neither shoot him down in cold blood nor, with the Brooke girl present, even attempt to injure him: compunctions una.s.sembled in the make-up of the Boche, therefore when discovered in men of other races at once despicable and ridiculous....
The gag came away.
"Mademoiselle has not been injured?" Lanyard enquired, solicitous.