"If you must know in so many words--well, I mean to keep you by me till the final curtain falls. As long as it lasts, yours will be an interesting life--I give my word."

"And you call yourself my father!"

"Oh, no! No, indeed: that's all over and done with, the farce is played out; and while I'm aware my role in it wasn't heroic, I shan't play the purblind fool in the afterpiece--pure drama--upon which the curtain is now rising. Neither need you. Oh, I'll be frank with you, if you wish, lay all my cards on the table."

A deliberate pause ended in a chuckle.

"I have at present precisely two uses for my precious little Sofia: She will serve excellently as insurance against further persecution on the part of her accomplished and energetic father--with whom I shall deal in my good leisure--and ... But need one be crudely explicit?"

Sofia answered nothing to that, for a long time she said nothing, but sat pondering....

And Victor was speedily provided with another interest which engrossed him to the exclusion of further efforts to bait a victim defenseless against his insolence.

When for the third time after that narrow sc.r.a.pe at the gates the man roused up to peer back through the rear window of the limousine, Sofia heard a harshly sibilant intake of breath between shut teeth, and surmised the discovery that the car which had so narrowly missed blocking their escape had picked up the trail, and was now in hot chase.

Even youth, however, could distill but slender hope from this. The pace was too terrific at which Victor's car was thundering through the night-bound countryside, it seemed idle to dream that another could overhaul it, even though driven with as much skill and maniacal recklessness. And Sofia returned to thoughts to which Victor's innuendo had given definite shape and colour, if with an effect far from that of his intention. Threatened, the spirit of the girl responded much as sane young flesh will to a cold plunge. She had forgotten to tremble, and though still tense-strung in every fibre was able to sit still, look steadily into the face of peril, and calculate her chances of cheating it.

Presently, in a tone so even it won begrudged admiration, she asked:

"Where are you taking me?"

"Do you really care?"

"Enough to ask."

"But why should I tell you?"

"No reason. I presume it doesn't really matter, I'll know soon enough."

"Then I don't mind enlightening you. We're bound for the Continent by way of Limehouse. A launch is waiting for us in Limehouse Reach, a yacht off Gravesend. Oh, I have forgotten nothing! By daybreak we'll be at sea."

"We?"

"You and I."

"You deceive yourself, Prince Victor. I shan't accompany you."

"How amusing! And is it a secret, how you propose to stand against my will?"

Sofia was silent for a little; then, "I can kill myself," she said, quietly.

"To be sure you can! And when I tire of you, perhaps I'll humour your morbid inclinations--if they still exist."

"You are a fool," Sofia returned, bluntly, "if you think I shall go aboard that yacht alive."

"Brava!" Victor laughed, and clapped his hands. "Brava! brava!"

He sat up for another look out of the rear window, sucked at his breath even more sharply than before, and s.n.a.t.c.hing up the speaking-tube p.r.o.nounced urgent words in Chinese.

The head of the chauffeur, in stark silhouette against the leading glow, bent toward the tube, and nodded rapidly. And to the deep-throated roar of an unm.u.f.fled exhaust, the heavy car leaped, like a spirited animal stung by whip and spur, and settled into a stride to which what had gone before was as a preliminary canter to the heartbreaking drive down to the home-stretch.

Lights began to dot the roadside. Widely s.p.a.ced at first, unbroken ranks were soon streaking past the tear-blind windows. Outskirts of London were being traversed; but neither driving sheets of rain against which human vision failed, nor the chance of encountering belated traffic, worked any slackening of the pace. Only when a corner had to be negotiated did the car slow down, and then never to the point of sanity; and the turn once rounded, its flight would again become headlong, lunatic, suicidal.

The stringed lamps wove a wavering luminous ribbon without end; a breeze laden with the wet fragrance of London drove great gusts of rain in stringing showers through the broken window. Turns and twists grew more frequent, apparently favouring the pursuit.

Victor now knelt constantly on the back seat, his face in the fitful play of light and shadow uncannily resembling that of a hunted jungle cat. On the polished steel of his pistol sinister gleams winked and faded. From his snarling lips foul oaths fell, a steady stream, black blasphemies spewed up from the darkest dives of the Orient--most of them happily couched in the tongues of their origin and so unintelligible to his one auditor. As it was, she heard and understood enough, too much.

Nevertheless, the man was not too completely absorbed in watching the shifting fortunes of the race to be unmindful of the girl. And when once she sat up to ease cramped limbs, he misread her intention and, catching her viciously by an arm, threw her back into her corner and advised her not to play the giddy little fool.

After that Sofia was at pains to stir as seldom as possible, and bided her time quietly enough, but never for an instant relaxed her watchfulness or lost heart.

The shouldering houses that hedged their course discovered a profile, ragged, black against a sky whose purple dimness held the first dull presage of dawn.

In the wild rush of a marauding tomcat the car crossed a broad public square and sped up the graded approach to a bridge. The smell of the Thames was unmistakable, the far-flung lamps of the Embankment were pearls aglow upon violet velvet.

Leaving the bridge, the limousine took a turn on two wheels, and immediately something happened, seemingly some attempt to stop it was made.

Vociferous voices hailed it, only to induce an augmented bellow of the exhaust with an instantaneous acceleration of impetus. Then something was struck and tossed aside as a bull might toss a dog--a dark shape whirling and flopping hideously; and an agonized screaming made the girl cower, sick with horror, and cover her ears with her hands.

Before she was able to forget those qualms many more minutes of frantic driving had flung to the rear many a mile of silent streets.

Of a sudden she heard an inhuman cry and, looking up, saw Victor dash the b.u.t.t of his pistol through the gla.s.s, then reversing the weapon pour through the opening a fusillade whose effect was presumably gratifying, for he laughed to himself when the pistol was empty, laughed briefly but with vicious glee.

That laugh levelled the last barrier of doubt and fear and nerved Sofia finally to test the forlorn hope she had been nursing ever since Victor had let her see a little way into his mind as to her fate.

Until he could reload, only the tradition of the s.e.xes lent him theoretical superiority; whereas he was in fact a man well on the thither side of middle-age, his virility sapped by long indulgence of unbridled appet.i.tes; while Sofia was a woman in the fullest flush of her first mature powers.

Gathering herself together, she inched forward and made ready to spring, bear him down, overpower him--by some or any means put him hors de combat long enough for her to fling a door open and herself out into the street....

With squealing brakes the car shaved an acute corner and slid on locked wheels to a dead halt so unexpected that it was Sofia who plunged floundering to the floor, while Victor only by a minor miracle escaped catapulting through the front windows.

The next instant, as Sofia struggled to her knees, the door behind her was wrenched open from without and, at a sign from Victor, rough hands laid hold of the girl and dragged her out bodily.

In a pa.s.sion of despair, she lost her senses for a time and like a madwoman fought, shrieking, biting, kicking, clawing, scratching....

With returning lucidity she found herself, panting and dishevelled, arms pinned to her sides, struggling on for all that, being hustled by some half a dozen men across a narrow sidewalk of uneven flagstones.

Simultaneously the shutter of perceptions snapped, photographing permanently upon the super-sensitized film of conscious memory the glimpsed vista of a grim, mean street whose repellent uglinesses grinned through the boding twilight like lineaments of some monstrous mask of evil.

Then she tripped on a low stone step, stumbled, and was half-carried, half-thrown into a narrow and malodorous hallway.

Between her and the sweet liberty of the rain-washed air a door crashed like the crack of doom.

XXII

THE SEVEN BRa.s.s HINGES