AT BAY.
Honest folk give lucky winners a wide berth at the Casino railway station, lest they should be suspected of possible evil designs upon their newly got money. Hugh found, therefore, he could pick his own seat quite at will, for nobody seemed anxious to claim the dubious honor of riding alone with him. So he strolled along the tram humming a gay tune, and inspecting the carriages with an attentive eye, till he reached a certain first-class compartment not far from the front, where a single passenger was quietly seated. The single passenger made his heart throb; for it was Warren Relf alone and unprotected.
He hardly knew why, but, flushed with wine and continued good fortune, he meant to ride back in that very carriage, face to face with the baffled and defeated serpent; for Hugh had already discounted his prospective victory. Warren was looking the opposite way, and did not perceive him. Hugh waited, therefore, till the train was just about to start from the station, and then he jumped in too late for Warren, if he would, to change his carriage.
In a second, the painter turned round and recognized his companion. He gave a sudden start. At last the two men had met in earnest. A baleful light beamed in Hugh’s dark eye. His blood was up. He had run too fast through the whole diapason of passion. Roulette and champagne, love and jealousy, hatred and vindictiveness, had joined together to fire and inflame his heart. He was at white-heat of exultation and excitement now. He could hardly contain his savage joy. “Have I found thee, oh, my enemy?” he cried out half aloud. Another time, it was just the opposite way. “Hast thou found me, oh, my enemy?” he had cried to Warren with an agonized cry at their last meeting in the club in London.
Warren Relf, gazing up in surprise, answered him back never a word; he only thought to himself silently that he was not and had never been Hugh Massinger’s enemy. From the bottom of his heart, the painter pitied him: he pitied him ten thousand times more than he despised him.
They stood at gaze for a few seconds. Then, “Where have you been?” Hugh asked at last insolently. The champagne had put him almost beside himself. Drunk with wine, drunk with good fortune, he allowed his true nature to peep forth for once a little too obviously. He would make this fellow Relf know his proper place before gentlemen at last a mere ignorant upstart, half way between a painter and a common sailor.
“To Paris,” Warren answered with curt decision. He was in no humor for a hasty quarrel to-day with this halfdrunken madman.
“What for?” Hugh continued as rudely as before.
Then he added with a loud and ugly laugh: “You need tell me no lies. I know already. I’ve found you out To see my cousin Elsie across to England.”
At the word, Warren’s face fell somewhat ominously. He leaned back, half irresolute, in the corner of the carriage and played with twitching fingers at the leather window-strop. “You are right,” he answered low, in a short sharp voice. “I never lie. I went to escort Miss Challoner from you and San Remo.”
Hugh flung himself into an attitude of careless ease. This colloquy delighted him. He had the fellow at bay. He began to talk, as if to himself, in a low monologue. “Heine says somewhere,” he observed with a sardonic smile, directing his observation into blank space, as if to some invisible third person, “that he would wish to spend the evening of his days in a cottage by the sea, within sound of the waves, with his wife and children seated around him and a large tree growing just outside h is grounds, from whose branches might dangle the body of his enemy.”
Warren Relf sat still in constrained silence. For Elsie’s sake, he would allow no quarrel to arise with this madman, flown with insolence and wine. He saw at once what had happened: Massinger was drunk with luck and champagne. But he would avoid the consequences. He would change carriages when they stopped on the frontier at Ventimiglia.
The bid for an angry repartee had failed. So Hugh tried again; for he would quarrel. “A great many murders take place on this line,” he remarked casually, once more in the air. “It’s a dangerous thing, they tell me, for a winner at Monte Carlo to go home alone in a carriage by himself with one other passenger.”
Still Warren Relf held his peace, undrawn.
Hugh tried a third time. He went on to himself in a musing monologue. “Any man who travels anywhere by thousand pounds; eleven thousand pounds sterling. I’ve got the money now about me. There it is, you see, in French bank-notes. A very large sum. Eleven thousand pounds sterling.”
Still Warren said nothing, biting his lip hard, but with an abstracted air looked out of the window. Hugh was working himself up into a state of frantic excitement now, though well suppressed. Fate had delivered his enemy plump into his hands, and he meant to make the very best use of his splendid opportunity.
“A fool in Paris once called in a barber,” he went on quietly, with a studious outer air of calm determination, “and ordered him, for a joke, to shave him at once, with a pistol lying before him on the dressing-table. ‘If your hand slips and you cut my skin,’ the fool said, Til blow your brains out’ To his surprise, the barber began without a word of reply, and shaved him clean with the utmost coolness. When he’d finished, the patient paid down ten pounds, and asked the fellow how he’d managed to keep his hand from trembling. ‘Oh,’ said the barber, ‘easy enough: it didn’t matter the least in the world to me. I thought you were mad. If my hand had slipped, I knew what to do; I’d have cut your throat without one moment’s hesitation, before you had time to reach out for your pistol. I’d say it was an accident; and any jury in all Paris would, without a doubt, at once have acquitted me.’ The story’s illustrative. I hope, Mr. Relf, you see its applicability?”
“I do not,” Warren answered, surprised at last into answering back, and with an uneasy feeling that Massinger was developing dangerous lunacy. “But I must beg you will have the goodness not to address your conversation to me any farther.”
“The application of my remark,” Hugh went on to himself, groping with his hand in his pocket for his revolver, and withdrawing it again as soon as he felt quite reassured that the deadly weapon was safely there, “ought at once to be obvious to the meanest understanding. There are some occasions where homicide is so natural that everybody jumps at once to a particular conclusion. Observe my argument. It concerns you closely. Many murders have taken place on this line murders of heavy winners at Monte Carlo. Many travelers have committed murderous assaults on the persons of winners with large sums of money about them. Now follow me closely. I give you fair warning. If a winner with eleven thousand pounds in his pocket were to get by accident into a carriage with one other person, and a quarrel were by chance to arise between them, and the winner in self-defense were to fire at and kill that other person do you think any jury in all the world would convict him for protecting his life from the aggressor? No, indeed, my good sir! In such a case, the other person’s life would be wholly at the offended winner’s mercy. Do you follow my thought? Do you understand me now? Aha, I expected so! Warren Relf, I’ve got you in my power. I can shoot you like a dog; I can do as I like with you.”
With a sudden start, Warren Relf woke up all at once to a consciousness of the real and near danger that thus unexpectedly and closely confronted him. It was all true; and all possible! Hugh was mad or maddened at least with play and drink: he deliberately meant to take his enemy’s life, and trust to the authorities accepting his plausible story that he was forced to do so in self-defense or in defense of his money.
“You blackguard!” the painter cried, as the truth came home to him in all its naked ugliness, facing Hugh in his righteous indignation like a lion. “How dare you venture on such a cowardly scheme? How dare you concoct such a vile plot? How dare you confess to me you mean to put it into execution?”
“I’m a gentleman,” Hugh answered, smiling across at him still with a hideous smile of pure drunken devilry, and fingering once more the revolver in his pocket. “I’ll shoot no man without due explanation and reason given. I’ll tell you why. You’ve tried to keep Elsie out of my way all these long years for your own vile and designing purposes to beguile and entrap that innocent girl into marrying you such a creature as you are; and by your base machinations you’ve succeeded at last in gaining her consent to your wretched advances. How she was so lost to all sense of shame and self-respectshe, a Massinger on her mother’s side as to give her consent such a degrading engagement, I can’t imagine. But yot extorted it somehow by alternate threats and cringing, I suppose by scolding her and cajoling her by lies and by slanders by frightening her and libeling me till the poor terrified girl, tortured out of her wits, decided to accept you, at last, out of pure weariness. A man would be ashamed, I say, to act as you have done; but a thing like you pah there it revolts me even to talk to you!”
Warren Relf s face was livid crimson with fiery indignation; but he would not do this drunken madman the honor of contradicting or arguing with him. Elsie to him was far too sacred and holy a subject to brawl over with a half-tipsy fool in a public conveyance. He clutched his hands hard and kept his temper; he preferred to sit still and take no outer notice.
Hugh mistook his enforced calm for cowardice and panic. “Aha!” he cried again, “so you see, my fine friend, you’ve been found out! You’ve been exposed and discredited. You’ve got no defense for your mean secretiveness. Going and hiding away a poor terrified, friendless, homeless girl from her only relations and natural protectors working upon her feelings by your base vile tricks setting your own wretched womankind to bully and badger her by day and by night, till she gives her consent at last out of pure disgust and weariness, no doubt to your miserable proposals. The sin and the shame of it! But you forgot you had a man to deal with as well! You’re brought to book now. I’ve found you out in the nick of time, and I mean to take the natural and proper advantage of my fortunate discovery. Listen here to me, now you infernal sneak; before I shoot you, I propose to make you know my plans. I shall have my legitimate triumph out of you first. I shall tell you all; and then, you coward I’ll shoot you like a dog, and nobody on earth will ever be one penny the wiser.”
Warren saw the man had fairly reached the final stage of dangerous lunacy. He was simply raving with success and excitement. His blood was up, and he meant murder. But the painter fortunately kept his head cool. He didn’t attempt to disarm or disable him as yet; he waited to see whether Hugh had or had not a pistol in hl pocket. Perhaps Hugh, with still deeper cunning, was only trying to egg him on into a vain quarrel, that he might disgrace him in the end by a horribly plausible and vindictive charge of attempted robbery.
“I’ve won eleven thousand pounds,” Hugh went on distinctly, with marked emphasis, in short sharp sentences. “My wife’s dead, and I’ve inherited Whitestrand. I mean to marry Elsie Challoner. I can keep her now as she ought to be kept; I can make her the wife of a man of property. You alone stand in my way. And I mean to shoot you, just to get rid of you offhand. Sit still there and listen: don’t budge an inch or, by Heaven, I’ll fire at once and blow your brains out. Lift hand or foot and you’re a dead man. Warren Relf, I mean to shoot you. No good praying and cringing for your life, like the coward that you are, for I won’t listen. Even if you were to renounce your miserable claim to my Elsie this moment, I wouldn’t spare you; I’d shoot you still. You shall be punished for your presumption a creature like you; and when you’re dead and buried, I shall marry Elsie. Think of me, you cringing miserable cur when you’re dead and gone, enjoying myself forever with Elsie. Yes, I mean to make you drink it, down to the very dregs. Hear me out. You shall die like a dog; and I shall marry Elsie.”
Warren Relf’s eye was fixed upon him hard, watching him close, as a cat watches, ready to spring, by an open mousehole. This dangerous madman must be disarmed at all hazards, the moment he showed his deadly weapon. For Elsie’s sake, he would gladly have spared him that final exposure. But the man, in his insolent drunken bravado, made parley useless and mercy impossible. It was a life-and-death struggle between them now. Warren must disarm him; nothing else was feasible.
As he watched and waited, Hugh dived with his hand into his pocket for his revolver, and drew it forth, exultant, with maniac eagerness. For a single second, he brandished it, loaded, in Warren’s face, laughing aloud i his drunken joy; then he pointed it straight with deadly resolve at the painter’s forehead.