THE COMPLETE FOUR JUST MEN SERIES (6 Detective Thrillers in One Edition). Edgar WallaceЧитать онлайн книгу.
came back to the door and gently turned the handle, beckoning the others. It seemed to him that the handle turned itself, or that somebody on the other side was turning at the same time.
That this was so he discovered, for the door suddenly jerked open, sending him staggering backward, and a man stood on the threshold.
With the drawn blind, the room was in semi-darkness, and the intruder, standing motionless in the doorway, could see nothing but the shadowy figures of the inmates.
As he waited he was joined by three others, and he spoke rapidly in a language that Starque, himself no mean linguist, could not understand. One of his companions opened the door of the student’s room and brought out something that he handed to the watcher on the threshold.
Then the man entered the room alone and closed the door behind him, not quite close, for he had trailed what looked like a thick cord behind him and this prevented the shutting of the door.
Starque found his voice.
‘What do you want?’ he asked, quietly.
‘I want Bartholomew, who came into this room half an hour ago,’ replied the intruder.
‘He has left,’ said Starque, and in the darkness he felt at his feet for the dead man — he needed the knife.
‘That is a lie,’ said the stranger coolly; ‘neither he nor you, Rudolph Starque, nor the Woman of Gratz, nor the murderer Francois has left.’
‘Monsieur knows too much,’ said Starque evenly, and lurched forward, swinging his knife.
‘Keep your distance,’ warned the stranger, and at that moment Starque and the silent Francois sprang forward and struck…
The exquisite agony of the shock that met them paralysed them for the moment. The sprayed threads of the ‘live’ wire the man held before him like a shield jerked the knife from Starque’s hands, and he heard Francois groan as he fell.
‘You are foolish,’ said the voice again, ‘and you, madame, do not move, I beg — tell me what has become of Bartholomew.’
A silence, then:
‘He is dead,’ said the Woman of Gratz.
She heard the man move.
‘He was a traitor — so we killed him,’ she continued calmly enough. ‘What will you do — you, who stand as a self-constituted judge?’
He made no reply, and she heard the soft rustle of his fingers on the wall.
‘You are seeking the light — as we all seek it,’ she said, unmoved, and she switched on the light.
He saw her standing near the body of the man she had lured to his death, scornful, defiant, and strangely aloof from the sordidness of the tragedy she had all but instigated.
She saw a tanned man of thirty-five, with deep, grave eyes, a broad forehead, and a trim, pointed beard. A man of inches, with strength in every line of his fine figure, and strength in every feature of his face.
She stared at him insolently, uncaring, but before the mastery of his eyes, she lowered her lids.
It seemed the other actors in the drama were so inconsiderate as to be unworthy of notice. The dead man in his grotesque posture, the unconscious murderer at his feet, and Starque, dazed and stunned, crouching by the wall.
‘Here is the light you want,’ she went on, ‘not so easily do we of the Red Hundred illuminate the gloom of despair and oppression—’
‘Spare me your speechmaking,’ said Manfred coldly, and the scorn in his voice struck her like the lash of a whip. For the first time the colour came to her face and her eyes lit with anger.
‘You have bad counsellors,’ Manfred went on, ‘you, who talk of autocrats and corrupt kingship — what are you but a puppet living on flattery? It is your whim that you should be regarded as a conspirator — a Corday. And when you are acclaimed Princess Revolutionary, it is satisfactory to your vanity — more satisfactory than your title to be hailed Princess Beautiful.’
He chose his words nicely.
‘Yet men — such men as these,’ he indicated Starque, ‘think only of the Princess Beautiful — not the lady of the Inspiring Platitudes; not the frail, heroic Patriot of the Flaming Words, but the warm flesh and blood woman, lovable and adorable.’
He spoke in German, and there were finer shades of meaning in his speech than can be exactly or literally translated. He spoke of a purpose, evenly and without emotion. He intended to wound, and wound deeply, and he knew he had succeeded.
He saw the rapid rise and fall of her bosom as she strove to regain control of herself, and he saw, too, the blood on her lips where her sharp white teeth bit.
‘I shall know you again,’ she said with an intensity of passion that made her voice tremble. ‘I shall look for you and find you, and be it the Princess Revolutionary or the Princess Beautiful who brings about your punishment, be sure I shall strike hard.’
He bowed.
‘That is as it may be,’ he said calmly; ‘for the moment you are powerless, if I willed it you would be powerless forever — for the moment it is my wish that you should go.’
He stepped aside and opened the door.
The magnetism in his eyes drew her forward.
‘There is your road,’ he said when she hesitated. She was helpless; the humiliation was maddening.
‘My friends—’ she began, as she hesitated on the threshold.
‘Your friends will meet the fate that one day awaits you,’ he said calmly.
White with passion, she turned on him.
‘You! — threaten me! a brave man indeed to threaten a woman!’
She could have bitten her tongue at the slip she made. She as a woman had appealed to him as a man! This was the greatest humiliation of all.
There is your road,’ he said again, courteously but uncompromisingly.
She was scarcely a foot from him, and she turned and faced him, her lips parted and the black devil of hate in her eyes.
‘One day — one day,’ she gasped, ‘I will repay you!’ Then she turned quickly and disappeared through the door, and Manfred waited until her footsteps had died away before he stooped to the half-conscious Starque and jerked him to his feet.
Chapter VII
The Government and Mr. Jessen
In recording the events that followed the reappearance of the Four Just Men, I have confined myself to those which I know to have been the direct outcome of the Red Hundred propaganda and the counter-activity of the Four Just Men.
Thus I make no reference to the explosion at Woolwich Arsenal, which was credited to the Red Hundred, knowing, as I do, that the calamity was due to the carelessness of a workman. Nor to the blowing up of the main in Oxford Street, which was a much more simple explanation than the fantastic theories of the Megaphone would have you imagine. This was not the first time that a fused wire and a leaking gas main brought about the upheaval of a public thoroughfare, and the elaborate plot with which organized anarchy was credited was without existence.
I think the most conscientiously accurate history of the Red Hundred movement is that set forth in the series of ten articles contributed to the Morning Leader by Harold Ashton under the title of ‘Forty Days of Terrorism’, and, whilst I think the author frequently fails from lack of sympathy for the Four Just Men to thoroughly appreciate the single-mindedness of this extraordinary band of men, yet I shall always