IV
At eight o'clock the following evening the dowdy old lady in black, the innocent-eyed grandchild, and the uniformed nurse duly made their appearance at the door of the Palermo miniature-painter. Here they were duly admitted, and, as on the day before, disposed themselves in their various places.
Outwardly, the studio showed no signs of change. Yet on this occasion some newer and undefined spirit of tension intruded itself on that incongruous circle. The old lady with the ear-trumpet, it is true, apparently made herself quite comfortable in the arm-chair. But before doing so she moved this chair back against the farthest wall of the room.
She betrayed no active interest in the scene before her, it is equally true, yet at no time did she permit the eyes behind the amber glasses to close in slumber.
The somewhat mystified nurse no longer found relish in the pages of her Sudermann. The artist bending over the drawing-desk no longer struggled to talk in broken German with her youthful sitter. She worked on her oval of ivory with perfunctory and spasmodic haste, interrupted by brief spaces of inaction. During these interims of idleness she sat staring thoughtfully at the sloping desk-top in front of her.
The silence weighed heavily on the child in the stiff-backed chair. She moved restlessly, from time to time. Then her eyelids drooped, her head nodded sleepily forward, and she recovered her equilibrium with a start.
The woman behind the drawing-desk watched the small blonde head as it nodded again. Then she suddenly rose to her feet, turning to the nurse as she spoke.
"This child is tired," she said in the best German at her command.
"Yes," admitted the woman in the nurse's uniform.
"You will be so good as to take her back to the hotel. The pose is useless now."
"You do not need her?"
"The picture can be finished without a sitter."
And as though to close all argument, the miniature-painter crossed the room to the door and opened it. The nurse tied the child's hat-ribbons under her chin.
"I shall not need you again," Maura Lambert was repeating, with the ghost of a smile. "Only I should like to speak with the grandmother for a few minutes."
"But the grandmother is quite deaf," protested the slightly puzzled German woman.
"Notwithstanding that," was the other woman's reply in English, "we shall get on very nicely."
Kestner, at that first message of dismissal, had risen to his feet. His instincts warned him of something electric in the air, of something impending. His initial impulse was to intercept the departing couple. But on second thoughts he let them pass out through the opened door without speaking.
The calm-eyed young woman closed the door again and crossed slowly to the drawing-desk.
"Perhaps you would like to see my work as far as it has gone," she inquired, without raising her voice, "to assure yourself that it is authentic, that my vocation is not unlawful."
Kestner, in a mechanical continuation of his rôle, raised the ear-trumpet to the edge of his wig.
"That is quite unnecessary," said the woman at the drawing-desk, with a movement that seemed one of mingled contempt and impatience. "You heard perfectly well what I said!"
And still Kestner remained silent, knowing only too well that his voice would irretrievably betray him. He merely watched the woman as she crossed to the wide-topped table on which the telephone stood. There she sat down, facing him.
"The make-up is admirable, monsieur," she went on in a coerced evenness of tone. "But work such as mine demands unusual acuteness of eyesight." She leaned forward on the table. "I am Maura Lambert. And you are Lewis Kestner. I had the pleasure of recognising you when you first came into the room. So please be seated, Mr. Kestner."
The moment was not a happy one for Lewis Kestner. He found himself, in the first place, confronted by the ignominy of being beaten at his own game. He also faced the humiliation of the actor who has failed in sustaining a rôle. And he nursed the forlorn realisation, as he stared at her through the futile amber-coloured glasses, that he was both cutting a very sorry figure and that nothing was now to be gained by trying to face the thing out.
"But was it a pleasure. Miss Lambert." he inquired of her, with an effort toward coolness, as he seated himself in the arm-chair.
"Only in so far as all duties accomplished can be called a pleasure," was her acidulated response.
"Then you have done what was expected of you?" demanded the Secret Agent, parrying for his opening.
"Only partly, Mr. Kestner," was her reply, "for the most painful part of it has yet to come."
He was perversely conscious of the fact that he wished to talk to her, to hear her voice, to await some accidental sounding of a note that would not be impersonal, to break through the mists which were making her personality such an elusive one.
"And that part is?" he prompted.
"That I cannot tell you." She was silent for a moment or two, staring down at the table in front of her. "I helped you once, and gained nothing by it. This time I must think of myself."
An inapposite impression of her bodily fineness, of a wayward delicacy of line and colouring, crept over him, even in that moment of tension.
"But are you thinking of yourself?" he demanded.
Only once before, he remembered, had this personal note been struck between them and that for not more than a breath or two. Once only had there been anything more than a hand-grope through the vague draperies of reserve shutting her off from his world. And it astonished Kestner to find himself confronting her with emotions which, however mixed, were still actual and disturbing.
"What do you mean by that?" she countered.
He knew she was a woman of spirit. He could see that by the quickened colour, by the full under-lip of a mouth that was warm but not yielding, by the immediate and open challenge of the translucent eye. But he decided, now that the chance he had been waiting for had come, to tell her what he felt it his duty to tell her.
"You can't go on with this work," he said, quite simply.
She looked at him with wonder in her quiet stare.
"I'm compelled to go on with this work," she retorted, speaking as quietly as he had spoken.
"How can you?" he inquired. He felt that he must be very foolish-looking, in the transparencies of his outlandish make-up. He was conscious of being at a disadvantage, of having suffered a loss of dignity, of standing a sorry figure for the utterance of the things he most wanted to say.
"How can you?" he repeated.
Her face suddenly grew quite white; she sat arrested in a pose where some new thought had struck her. Then she reached down and opened one of the drawers at her side.
Kestner could not see what she held in her hand. He arrived at his own conclusions. But he did not change his position.
"I could shoot you!" she said, with the same even calmness with which she had spoken before.
He noticed that her right hand moved forward. But he did not change his position. He merely decided that he knew his woman.
"On the contrary, you are altogether afraid to," was his tranquil-noted rejoinder.
They faced each other, with glances locked, for several seconds of embattled silence.
"It would simplify matters," she said. She was speaking more to herself than to him.
"Again on the contrary, it would sadly complicate them," was Kestner's reply.
"Why?" she asked. But that dangerous look of appraisal, of hesitation between two possible ends, was still in her eyes.
"Because you're fighting something bigger than I am," he told her. "Because in two minutes another would take my place, and another his place, and still another, and then still another, if need be."
There was something nettling in the half-wearied indifferency of her smile. He knew that he was not making an impressive stand against her. And it did not add to his peace of mind to remember that Wilsnach at the other end of his dictograph wires was an auditor of every spoken word.
"That's a very pretty play-actor speech, monsieur," the woman at the table was saying. "But your trade is as full of tricks and deceits as mine. That, at least, you have already proved to me."
"Then I'll prove something else," said Kestner.
"What?" she demanded.
"Lift that receiver at your elbow, and ask if you are watched—watched at this moment. Speak just those three words into it: 'Am I watched?'"
She sat studying his face intently, her mind still occupied with some inward debate. Then with her left hand she lifted the transmitter closer to where she sat. With the same hand she took the receiver from its hook. Her right hand, he noticed, still held the unseen thing which had been lifted from the table drawer.
"Am I watched?" she said into the transmitter, with the clear and reedy voice which had first reminded Kestner of a clarionet.
He could not hear what answer came back to her over the wire. But he knew that Wilsnach was there with the field-transmitter in front of him and he knew that Wilsnach would not fail him.
She did not raise her eyes to her enemy as she slowly hung up the receiver. But that enemy knew, by the look of troubled thought clouding her brow, that the expected message had come in to her.
When she spoke, she did so with a slow impersonality which gave an added barb to her words.
"The situation," she quietly announced, "is not without its novelty. For I am compelled to acknowledge that you too are being watched!"