room alone had been cleared of litter, the best furniture of the establishment had been introduced, and on the inkstained writing-table that filled the centre of the apartment stood the remains of a fairly luxurious lunch.
Gonsalez was reading a small red book, and it may be remarked that he wore gold-rimmed spectacles; Poiccart was sketching at a corner of the table, and Manfred was smoking a long thin cigar and studying a manufacturing chemist’s price list. Thery (or as some prefer to call him Saimont) alone did nothing, sitting a brooding heap before the fire, twiddling his fingers, and staring absently at the leaping little flames in the grate.
Conversation was carried on spasmodically, as between men whose minds were occupied by different thoughts. Thery concentrated the attentions of the three by speaking to the point. Turning from his study of the fire with a sudden impulse he asked:
“How much longer am I to be kept here?”
Poiccart looked up from his drawing and remarked:
“That is the third time he has asked today.”
“Speak Spanish!” cried Thery passionately. “I am tired of this new language. I cannot understand it, any more than I can understand you.”
“You will wait till it is finished,” said Manfred, in the staccato patois of Andalusia; “we have told you that.”
Thery growled and turned his face to the grate.
“I am tired of this life,” he said sullenly. “I want to walk about without a guard — I want to go back to Jerez, where I was a free man. I am sorry I came away.”
“So am I,” said Manfred quietly; “not very sorry though — I hope for your sake I shall not be.”
“Who are you?” burst forth Thery, after a momentary silence. “What are you? Why do you wish to kill? Are you anarchists? What money do you make out of this? I want to know.”
Neither Poiccart nor Gonsalez nor Manfred showed any resentment at the peremptory demand of their recruit. Gonsalez’s cleanshaven, sharp-pointed face twitched with pleasurable excitement, and his cold blue eyes narrowed.
“Perfect! perfect!” he murmured, watching the other man’s face: “pointed nose, small forehead and — articu-lorum se ipsos torquentium sonus; gemitus, mugitusque parum explanatis — —”
The physiognomist might have continued Seneca’s picture of the Angry Man, but Thery sprang to his feet and glowered at the three.
“Who are you?” he asked slowly. “How do I know that you are not to get money for this? I want to know why you keep me a prisoner, why you will not let me see the newspapers, why you never allow me to walk alone in the street, or speak to somebody who knows my language? You are not from Spain, nor you, nor you — your Spanish is — yes, but you are not of the country I know. You want me to kill — but you will not say how — —”
Manfred rose and laid his hand on the other’s shoulder.
“Senor,” he said — and there was nothing but kindness in his eyes— “restrain your impatience, I beg of you. I again assure you that we do not kill for gain. These two gentlemen whom you see have each fortunes exceeding six million pesetas, and I am even richer; we kill and we will kill because we are each sufferers through acts of injustice, for which the law gave us no remedy. If — if — —” he hesitated, still keeping his grey eyes fixed unflinchingly on the Spaniard. Then he resumed gently: “If we kill you it will be the first act of the kind.”
Thery was on his feet, white and snarling, with his back to the wall; a wolf at bay, looking from one to the other with fierce suspicion.
“Me — me!” he breathed, “kill me?”
Neither of the three men moved save Manfred, who dropped his outstretched hand to his side.
“Yes, you.” He nodded as he spoke. “It would be new work for us, for we have never slain except for justice — and to kill you would be an unjust thing.”
Poiccart looked at Thery pityingly.
“That is why we chose you,” said Poiccart, “because there was always a fear of betrayal, and we thought — it had better be you.”
“Understand,” resumed Manfred calmly, “that not a hair of your head will be harmed if you are faithful — that you will receive a reward that will enable you to live — remember the girl at Jerez.”
Thery sat down again with a shrug of indifference but his hands were trembling as he struck a match to light his cigarette.
“We will give you more freedom — you shall go out every day. In a few days we shall all return to Spain. They called you the silent man in the prison at Granada — we shall believe that you will remain so.”
After this the conversation became Greek to the Spaniard, for the men spoke in English.
“He gives very little trouble,” said Gonsalez. “Now that we have dressed him like an Englishman, he does not attract attention. He doesn’t like shaving every day; but it is necessary, and luckily he is fair. I do not allow him to speak in the street, and this tries his temper somewhat.”
Manfred turned the talk into a more serious channel.
“I shall send two more warnings, and one of those must be delivered in his very stronghold. He is a brave man.”
“What of Garcia?” asked Poiccart.
Manfred laughed.
“I saw him on Sunday night — a fine old man, fiery, and oratorical. I sat at the back of a little hall whilst he pleaded eloquently in French for the rights of man. He was a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Mirabeau, a broad-viewed Bright, and the audience was mostly composed of Cockney youths, who had come that they might boast they had stood in the temple of Anarchism.”
Poiccart tapped the table impatiently.
“Why is it, George, that an element of bathos comes into all these things?”
Manfred laughed.
“You remember Anderson? When we had gagged him and bound him to the chair, and had told him why he had to die — when there were only the pleading eyes of the condemned, and the half-dark room with a flickering lamp, and you and Leon and poor Clarice masked and silent, and I had just sentenced him to death — you remember how there crept into the room the scent of frying onions from the kitchen below.”
“I, too, remember,” said Leon, “the case of the regicide.”
Poiccart made a motion of agreement.
“You mean the corsets,” he said, and the two nodded and laughed.
“There will always be bathos,” said Manfred; “poor Garcia with a nation’s destinies in his hand, an amusement for shopgirls — tragedy and the scent of onions — a rapier thrust and the whalebone of corsets — it is inseparable.”
And all the time Thery smoked cigarettes, looking into the fire with his head on his hands.
“Going back to this matter we have on our hands,” said Gonsalez. “I suppose that there is nothing more to be done till — the day?”
“Nothing.”
“And after?”
“There are our fine art reproductions.”
“And after,” persisted Poiccart.
“There is a case in Holland, Hermannus van der Byl, to wit; but it will be simple, and there will be no necessity to warn.”
Poiccart’s face was grave.
“I am glad you have suggested van der Byl, he should have been dealt with before — Hook of Holland or Flushing?”
“If we have time,