The Saint Meets the Tiger (5 page)

“It’ll break her heart,” said Patricia, white-faced.

“The alternative is breaking my bank.”

The girl started up, clutching the papers tensely,

“You couldn’t be such a swine!” she said hotly. “What’s a few thousand to you?”

“This,” said Bittle calmly: “it gives me the power to make terms.”

Patricia was frozen as she stood. There was a silence that ticked out a dozen sinister things in as many seconds. Then she said, in a strained^ unnaturally low voice, “What terms?”

Sir John Bittle moved one fat hand in a faint gesture of deprecation.

“Please don’t let’s be more melodramatic than we can help,” he said. “Already I feel very self-conscious and conventional.; But the fact is I should like to marry you.”

For an instant the girl was motionless. Then the last drop of blood fled from her cheeks. She held the papers in her two hands, high above her head.

“Here’s my answer, you cad!”

She tore the documents across and across and flung the pieces from her, and then stood facing the millionaire with her face as pale as death and her eyes flaming.

“Good for you, kid’” commended the Saint inaudibly.

Bittle, however, was unperturbed, and once again that throaty chuckle gurgled in his larynx without kindling any corresponding geniality in his features,

“Copies,“he said simply, and at that point the Saint thought that the conversational tension would be conveniently relieved with a little affable comment from a third party.

“You little fool!” said Bittle acidly. “Did you think I worked my way up from mud to millions without some sort of brain? And d’you imagine that a man who’s beaten the sharpest wits in London at their own game is going to be baulked by a chit of a country child? Tchah!” The millionaire’s lips twisted wryly. “Now you’ve made me lose my temper and get melodramatic, just when I asked you not to. Don’t let’s have any more nonsense, please. I’ve put it quite plainly: either you marry me or I sue your aunt for what she owes me. Choose whichever you prefer, but don’t let’s have .any hysterics.”

“No, don’t let’s,” agreed the Saint, standing just inside the room.

Neither had noticed his entrance, which had been a very slick specimen of its kind. He had slipped in through one of the open French windows, behind a curtain, and he stepped out of cover as he spoke, so that the effect was as startling as if he had materialized out of the air.

Patricia recognized him with a gasp. Bittle jumped up with an exclamation. His fat face, which had paled at first, became a deeper red. The Saint stood with his hands in his pockets and a gentle smile on his open face Bittle’s voice broke out in a harsh snarl, “Sir—”

“To you,” assented the Saint smoothly. “Evening. Evening, Pat. Hope I don’t intrude.”

And he gazed in an artlessly friendly way from face to face, as cool and self-possessed and saintly looking a six-foot-two of toughness as ever breezed into a peaceful Devonshire village. Patricia moved nearer to him instinctively, and Simon’s smile widened amiably as he offered her his hand. Bittle was struggling to master himself: he succeeded after an effort.

“I was not aware, Mr. Templar, that I had invited you to entertain us this evening,” he said thickly.

“Nor was I,” said the Saint ingenuously. “Isn’t that odd?”

Bittle choked. He was furious, and he was apprehensive of how long Templar might have been listening to the duologue; but there was another and less definite fear squirming into his consciousness. The Saint was tall, and although he was not at all massive there was a certain solid poise to his body that vouched for an excellent physique in fighting trim. And there was a mocking hell-for-leather light twinkling in the Saint’s level blue eyes, and something rather ugly about his very mildness, that tickled a cold shiver out of Bittle’s spine.

“Shall we say, as men of the world, Mr. Templar —it’s hardly necessary to beat about the bush— that your arrival was a little inopportune?” said Bittle.

The Saint wrinkled his brow.

“Shall we?” he asked vaguely, as though the question was a very difficult riddle. “I give it up.”

Bittle shrugged and went over to a side table on which stood decanter, siphon, and glasses.

“Whisky, Mr. Templar?”

“Thanks,” said the Saint, “I’ll have one when I get home. I’m very particular about the people I drink with. Once I had a friend who was terribly careless that way, and one day they fished him out of the canal in Soerabaja. I should hate Utbe fished out of anywhere.”

“To show there’s no ill-feeling…”

“If I drank your whisky, son,” said the Saint, “I’m so afraid there might be all the ill-feeling we could deal with.”

Bittle came back to the table and crushed the stump of his cigar into an ash tray. He looked at the Saint, and something about the Saint’s quietness sent that draughty shiver prickling again up Bittle’s vertebrae. The Saint was still exactly where he had stood when he emerged from behind the curtain; the Saint did not seem at all embarrassed; and the Saint seemed to have all the time in the world to kill. The Saint, in short, looked as though he was waiting for something and in no particular hurry about it, and Bittle was beginning to get worried.

“Hardly conduct befitting a gentleman, shall we say, Mr. Templar?” Bittle temporized.

“No,” said the Saint fervently. “Thank the Lord I’m not a gentleman. Gentlemen are such snobs. All the gentlemen around here, for instance, refuse to know you—at least, that’s what I’m told—but I don’t mind it in the least. I hope we shall get on excellently together, and that this meeting will be but the prelude to a long and enjoyable acquaintance, to mutual satisfaction and profit. Yours faithfully.”

“You leave me very little choice, Mr. Templar,” said Bittle, and touched the bell.

The Saint remained where he was, still smiling, until there was a knock on the door and a butler who looked like a retired prize fighter came in.

“Show Mr. Templar the door,” said Bittle.

“But how hospitable!” exclaimed the Saint, and then, to the surprise of everyone, he walked coolly across the room and followed the butler into the passage.

The millionaire stood by the table, almost gaping with astonishment at the ease with which he had broken down such an apparently impregnable defence.

“I know these bluffers,” he remarked with ill-concealed relief,

His satisfaction was of very short duration, for the end of his little speech coincided with the sounds of a slight scuffle outside and the slamming of a door. While Bittle stared, the Saint walked in again through the window, and his cheery “Well, well, well brought the millionaire’s head round with a jerk as the door burst open and the butler returned.

“Nice door,” murmured the Saint.

He was breathing a little faster, but not a hair of his sleek head was out of place. The pugilistic butler, on the other hand, was not a little dishevelled, and appeared to have just finished banging his nose on to something hard. The butler had a trickle of blood running down from his nostrils to his mouth, and the look in his eyes was not one of peace on earth or goodwill toward men.

“Home again,” drawled the Saint. “This is a peach of a round game, what?—as dear Algy would say. Now can I see the offices? House agents always end up their advertisements by saying that their desirable property is equipped with the usual offices, but I’ve never seen one of the same yet.”

“Let me attim,” uttered the butler, shifting round the table.

The Saint smiled, his hands in his pockets.

“You try to drop-kick me down the front steps, and you get welted on the boko,” said Simon speculatively, adapting style to audience. “Now you want to whang into my prow—and I wonder where you get blipped this time?”

Bittle stepped between the two men, and in one comprehensive glance summed up their prospects in a rough-house. Then he looked at the butler and motioned toward the door.

The ex-pug went out reluctantly, muttering profane and offensive things, and the millionaire faced round again.

“Suppose you explain yourself?”

“Just suppose!” agreed Templar enthusiasticalty. Bittle glowered.

“Well, Mr. Templar?”

“Quite, thanks. How’s yourself?”

“Need you waste time playing the fool?” demanded Bittle shortly.

“Now I come to think of it— no,” answered the Saint amiably. “But granny always said I was a terrible tease… Well, sonny, taken all round I don’t think your hospitality comes up to standard; and that being so I’ll see Miss Holm back to the old roof tree. S’long.”

And he took Patricia’s arm and led her towards the French window, while Bittle stood watching them in silence, completely nonplussed. It was just as he seemed about to pass out of the house without further parley that the Saint stopped and turned, as though struck by a minor afterthought.

“By the way, Bittle,” he said, “I was forgetting— you were going to pass over a few documents, weren’t you?”

Bittle did not answer, and the Saint added:

“All about your side line in usury. Hand over the stuff and I’ll write you a check now for the full amount.”

“I refuse,” snapped the millionaire.

“Please yourself,” said the Saint. “My knowledge of Law is pretty scrappy, but I don’t think you can do that without cancelling the debt. Anyway, I’ll tell my solicitor to send you a check, and we’ll see what happens.”

The Saint turned away again, and in so doing almost collided with Patricia, who had preceded him into the garden. The girl was caught in his arms for a moment to save a fall, and the Saint was surprised to see that she was gasping with suppressed terror. A moment later the reason was given him by a ferocious baying of great hounds in the darkness.

In one swift movement Simon had the girl inside the room, and had slammed the French windows shut. Then he stood with his back to the wall, half covering Patricia in the shelter of his wide shoulders, his hands on his hips, and a very saintly meekness overspreading his face.

“‘Um—as Orace would say in the circumstances,” murmured the Saint. “Bigger than Barnums. Do you mind playing the Clown while I open the Unique Mexican Knifethrowing Act?”

And Bittle, with a tiny automatic in his hand, was treated to a warning glimpse of the fine steel blade that lay along Simon Templar’s palm.

Chapter IV

A SOCIAL EVENING

“No,” said the Saint, shaking his head sadly, “it can’t be done. It can’t really. For one thing, we’re getting all melodramatic, and I know how you hate that. For another thing, we’ve got the set all wrong. You’ve got to get into training for looking evil-just now, you’re as harmless looking a blackguard as I’ve ever met. I’m strong for getting the atmosphere right. What do’you say to adjourning, and we can arrange to meet in Limehouse in about two months, which’ll give you time to grow a beard and develop a cast in one eye and employ a few tame thugs by way of local colour….”

The Saint rambled on in his free-and-easy manner, while his brain dealt rapidy with the situation. Bittle had not raised his automatic. It pointed innocuously into the carpet, held as loosely as it could be without falling, for Simon’s eyes were narrowed down to glinting chips of steel that missed nothing, and Sir John Bittle had an uncomfortable feeling that those eyes were keen enough to note the slightest tightening of a muscle. The Saint was giving an admirable imitation of a man pretending to be off his guard, but the millionaire knew that the sight of the least threatening movement would telegraph an instant message to the hand that played with that slim little knife—and the Saint’s general manner suggested that he felt calmly confident of being able to reproduce any and every stunt in any and every Mexican Knifethrowing Act that ever was, with a few variations and trimmings of his own.

“You are not conversational, Bittle,” said the Saint, and Bittle smiled.

“My style is, to say the least of it, cramped,” replied the millionaire. “If I move, what are the chances of my being pricked with your pretty toy?”

“Depends how you move,” answered the Saint. “If, for instance, you relaxed the right hand, so as to allow the ugly toy now reposing there to descend upon the carpet with what is known to journalists as a sickening thud—then, I might say that the chances are about one thousand to one against.”

Bittle opened his hand, and the gun dropped. He stepped to one side, and the Saint, with a swift sweeping glide, picked up the weapon and dropped it into his pocket. At the same time he replaced his own weapon in its concealed sheath.

“Now we can be matey again,” remarked Simon with satisfaction. “What’s the next move? Taking things in a broad way, I can’t credit your bunch with much brilliance so far. Dear old Spittle, why on earth must you make such an appalling bloomer? Don’t you know that according to the rules of this game you ought to remain shrouded in mystery until Chapter Thirty? Now you’ve been and gone and spoiled my holiday,” complained the Saint bitterly, “and I don’t know how I shall be able to forgive you.”

“You are a very extraordinary man, Mr. Templar.”

The Saint smiled.

“True, O King. But you’re quite as strange a specimen as ever went into the Old Bailey. For a retired grocer, your command of the Oxford language is astonishing.”

Bittle did not answer, and the Saint gazed genially around and seemed almost surprised to see Patricia standing a little behind him. The girl had not known what to make of most of the conversation, but she had recovered from her immediate fear. There was a large assurance about everything the Saint did and said which inspired her with uncomprehending courage—even as it inspired Bittle with uncomprehending anxiety.

“Hope we haven’t bored you,” murmured Simon solicitously. “Would you like to go home?”

She nodded, and Templar looked at the millionaire.

“She would like to go home,” Templar said in his most winning voice.

A thin smile touched Bittle’s mouth.

“Just when we’re getting matey?” he queried.

“I’m sure Miss Holm didn’t mean to offend you,” protested Simon. He looked at the girl, who stared blankly at him, and turned to Bittle with an air of engaging frankness. “You see? It’s only that she’s rather tired.”