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was stained a different colour from the rest; and in spite of his jest the
Saint felt as if cold fingers crept up his spine.
Lady Valerie looked in the same direction, and her breath caught in her
throat.
"But I don't know," she cried out quiveringly. "I don't know what happened to
the negative. Simon, I don't know what you did with it!"
"That's true," said the Saint, in a voice of terrible sin-cerity. "Leave her
out of it. She doesn't know. She couldn't tell you, even if you flogged her to
death."
He might as well have appealed to a graven image. Luker was not even
interested.
"In that case I hope that your natural chivalry will induce you to spare her
any unnecessary suffering," he said. "You will of course be allowed to watch
the proceedings, so that your sympathies may be fully aroused. A word from you
at any time will save her any further discomfort." He brought his hands
together again with an air of finality. "Since I understand that you were
proposing to marry Lady Valerie, your affection for her should not encourage
you to hesitate."
Simon looked at the girl. She stared back at him, her eyes wide with terrified
entreaty.
"Oh, Simon, must I be flogged?" she said faintly.
Her face was white and terror-stricken; her lips trembled so that the words
would hardly come out. And yet in a queer way it was plain that she was only
asking him to tell her, whatever he might say.
The Saint felt that everything inside him was cold and stiff, as if the rigour
of death had already touched him. somehow he kept all weakness out of his
face.
He spoke to Marteau in French.
"Monsieur le Commandant, I ask nothing for myself. But you have ideals, and
you would wish to be called a gentle-man. Will you be proud to record the
torture of a helpless girl as the glorious beginning of the revolution in
which you believe?"
Marteau's face flushed, but the arrogant unyielding lines deepened around his
mouth.
"The individual, monsieur, is of no more importance than an ant compared with
the destiny of France." His dark eyes glowed with a mystic light.
"Tomorrow today we make history, and France takes her rightful place among the
nations of Europe. I can give way to no sentimental re-luctance to do anything
that may be necessary to safeguard the trust which is in my hands. Those who
are not with us are our enemies." The glow faded from his eyes, leaving only
the hard lines still shifting about his mouth. "As a man, I confess that I
should prefer to spare Mademoiselle; but that responsibility is yours. As a
leader, with the destiny of France in my care, my own course cannot falter."
"I see," said the Saint softly. "And if I told you what you want to know, I
suppose we should be murdered just the same, only without the trimmings."
Marteau's face grew colder and more distant.
"I should like you to understand, monsieur, that the Sons of France do not
commit murder. Although your guilt is perfectly evident, you will receive a
fair trial by court-martial ; naturally, if you are found guilty, you must
expect to suffer the due penalty."
"Exactly." Luker spoke in English and the old ironical gleam was back in his
eyes. "You'll get a fair trial by court-martial, and you'll be shot
immediately afterwards. The day after tomorrow we shall probably start
court-martialling traitors in batches of twenty. I'll try to arrange for you
both to be in the first batch. But you must agree that that will be far
preferable to the same inevitable result with the prelimi-nary addition of
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what I think you called the trimmings."
"Of course," said the Saint. "You're so generous that it brings a lump into my
throat."
But his smile was very tight and cold.
His shoulders ached with a weary hopelessness. No one except himself, not even
Luker, could guess what dregs of defeat he had to taste. Death he could have
met carelessly: he had lived with it at his elbow for so long that it was
almost a friend. He had fenced and bantered with it, and lightheartedly made
rendezvous and broken them, but never without the calm knowledge that the day
must come, how-ever distant, when they would have to sit down together and
talk business. Death with trimmings, even, would not have made him cringe; he
had faced that, too, and other men had gone through it, men many of them
forgotten and nameless now, who had endured their brief futile agony that was
swept away and obliterated like a ripple in the long river of time. But here
he was not alone. He had to sentence the girl in the acceptance of his own
fate.
And there was nothing to give it even a plausible ultimate glory. They died,
anyway. And if he died, and let the girl die, without speaking under any
torture, it achieved no more than just that. It was not a question of keeping
the photograph safe for what might be done with it. There would be no one left
to do anything with it, after Patricia and the others had been rounded up in
the morning. And even if they escaped, there would be nothing to be done. The
nega-tive would remain where it was hidden, in his fountain pen, and would
probably be destroyed along with his body and the clothes he was wearing; or
at the best someone would appropriate it, and the most likely person to
appropriate it was one of the Sons of France, and even if he found it it would
alter nothing. If the Saint was silent and it was never found, it would only
mean that Luker and Marteau would be worried about it for some time, but
nothing would hap-pen, and their anxieties would ease with every day that went
by, and soon they would be too strong to care. How could he condemn the girl
to that extra unspeakable ugliness of death for no better reason than to leave
Luker and Mar-teau with a little unnecessary trepidation, and to give his
pride the boast that they had never been able to make him talk?
But the bitterness of surrender fought against letting him speak.
He saw Luker watching him steadily, and knew that the other was following
almost every step in his inevitable thoughts. Luker's eyes were hardening with
the cold cer-tainty of triumph.
"Perhaps you would like to discuss it with your fiancee, Mr Templar," he said.
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