If Sinners Entice Thee

“Then why marry this man, whoever he is?” he interrupted fiercely. He saw her words were uttered with an intense earnestness. There still burned in her eyes the unmistakable light of fond passion. “Because I must.”

“You must? I don’t understand.”

Her cold lips moved, but no sound came from them. In vain she tried to suppress the fierce tumult of feelings that raged within her breast. He was endeavouring to wring her secret from her! the secret of Zertho’s influence. No, he should never know. It was terrible, horrible; its very thought appalled her. To save her father from exposure, disgrace, and something worse she was compelled to renounce her love, sacrifice herself, and marry the man she despised and hated.

“I have promised to marry the Prince d’Auzac because I am compelled,” she said briefly, in a low, firm voice.

“What renders it imperative?” he demanded, his face dark and serious.

“My own decision,” she answered, struggling to remain calm.

“You have decided, then, to discard my love,” he said fiercely. “You prefer being the wife of a Prince rather than of a struggling barrister. Well, perhaps, after all your choice is but natural.”

“I do not prefer,” she declared, passionately. “Cannot you see, George, that there are circumstances which compel me to act as I am acting? Heaven knows, I have suffered enough, because you are the only man I can love.”

“Then why not remain mine, darling?” he said, more tenderly, with a slight pressure of her hand as he gazed with intense earnestness into her tear-dimmed eyes. “We love one another, therefore why should both our lives be wrecked?”

“Because it is imperative,” she answered, gloomily.

“But what motive can you have in thus ruining your future, and casting aside all chance of happiness?” he inquired, puzzled.

“It is to secure my future, not to ruin it, that I have promised to marry the Prince,” she answered.

“And for no ulterior motive?”

“Yes,” she faltered. “There is still another reason.”

“What is it? Tell me.”

“No, George,” she answered in a low, hoarse voice. “Do not ask me, for I can never tell you – never.”

“You have a hidden motive which you refuse to explain,” he observed resentfully. “I have placed faith in you; surely you can trust me, Liane!”

“With everything, save that.”

“Why?”

“It is a secret which I cannot disclose.”

“Not even to me?”

“No, not even to you,” she answered, pale to the lips. “I dare not!”

He remained silent in perplexity. A bevy of bright-faced, laughing girls passed them in high spirits, counting as they went by the coin they had won at the tables. Liane turned her face from them to hide her emotion, and stood motionless, leaning still upon the balustrade. The sun was sinking behind the great dark rock whereon was perched Monaco, and the mountains were already purple in the mystic light of evening.

“Why are you so determined that we should separate, darling?” he asked, in a low, pained voice, bending down towards her averted face. “Surely your Prince can never love you as devotedly as I have done!”

“Ah! George,” she cried, with a tender passion in her glance as she again turned to him, “do not tempt me. It is my duty, and I have given a pledge. I have never loved Prince Zertho, and I never shall. Mine will be a marriage of compulsion. In a few short weeks I shall bid farewell to hope and happiness, to life and love, for I shall become Princess d’Auzac and lose you for ever.”

“As Princess you may obtain many of the pleasures of life. Far more than if you were my wife,” he observed, in a hollow tone, as if speaking to himself.

“No, no,” she protested. “The very name is to me synonymous of all that is hateful. Ah! you do not know, George, the terrible thoughts that seem to goad me to madness. Often I find myself reflecting whether death would not be preferable to the life to which I am now condemned. Yet I am held to it immutably, forced against my will to become this man’s wife, in order that the terrible secret, which must never be disclosed, may still remain where it is, locked in the breast of the one man who, by its knowledge, holds me irrevocably in his power.”

“Then you fear this Prince Zertho?” he said slowly, with deep emphasis. She seemed quite unlike the laughing, happy girl he had known at home in their quiet rural village. Her strange attitude of abject dejection and despair held him stupefied.

“Yes,” she answered hoarsely, after a long pause, “I dare not disobey him.”

“From your words it would seem that your crime is of such a terrible nature that you dare not risk exposure. Is that so?” he hazarded in a hard voice, scarcely raised above a whisper.

“My crime!” she cried, all colour instantly dying out of her handsome face, while in her clear, grey eyes was a strange expression as if she were haunted by some fearsome spectre of the past. Her white lips quivered, her hands trembled, “What do you mean?” she gasped. “What do you know of my crime?”

Next instant she started, her lips held tight together as she drew herself up unsteadily with a sudden movement.

She knew that she had involuntarily betrayed herself to the man she loved.

Chapter Thirteen

Lip-Salve

In a room on the second floor of an old, high, dingy-looking house in one of the dingiest back streets near the flower-market in Nice sat a man and a woman. The room was lofty, with a ceiling which had once been painted but had now faded and fallen away in great flakes, while the furniture was frayed and shabby. The shutters of the two long windows were closed, and the place was lit by a cheap shaded lamp suspended in the centre, its light being too dim to sufficiently illuminate the whole apartment. Beneath the circle of light stood a table marked in squares, and in its centre a roulette-wheel.

The man, lying lazily back in an armchair, smoking a long cigar, was about thirty-five, dark, with well-cut aquiline features, in which craft and intelligence were combined, a small pointed moustache, and a pair of keen black eyes full of suspicion and cunning. His companion was old, perhaps sixty, lean, ill-attired and wizened, her face being almost brown as a toad’s back, her body bent, and her voice weak and croaking.

They sat opposite to one another, talking. Around the walls there were tacked copies of a leaflet headed, in huge black capitals, “The Agony of Monte Carlo,” which declared that the advertiser, an Englishman who offered his services to the public, had vanquished the hazard, and was the only person who could gain indefinitely at either roulette or trente-et-quarante. He had solved the puzzling problem of “How to Win.”

The French in which the circular was printed was not remarkable for its grammar or diction, but it was certainly a brilliant specimen of advertisement, and well calculated to entrap the unwary. Copies of it had for several weeks been widely distributed in the streets of Nice, flung into passing cabs, or handed to those who took their daily airing on the Promenade, and it had given rise to a good deal of comment. Among many other remarkable statements, it was alleged that the discoverer of this infallible method had gained five hundred francs an hour upon an ordinary capital of five francs, and so successful had been his play that the Administration of the Casino, in order to avert their own ruin, had denied him any further card of admission. The remarkable person declared further that so certain was he of success that he was prepared to place any stake against that of any person who doubted, and to allow the player to turn the roulette himself. To those who arranged to play under his direction the circular promised the modest gain of one million two hundred thousand francs a month! Truly the remarkable circular was aptly headed “The Agony of Monte Carlo.”

The inventor was the dark-eyed man with the cigar, and it was upon the table before him that he gave illustrations of his marvellous discovery to his clients. All the systems of Jacquard, Yaucanson, Fulton, Descartes and Copernic were declared to be mere jumbles of false principles, and held up to derision. This was actually infallible. Nice had heard of a good many methods of winning before, but never one put forward by an inventor sufficiently confident to offer to bear the losses; hence, from the hours of ten to twelve, and two to six, the foppishly-attired man who declared in his circular, “Je mis la force, parceque je suis la vérité,” was kept busy instructing amateur gamesters how to act when at Monte Carlo, and receiving substantial fees for so doing.

The clocks had chimed ten, and the street was quiet. The old woman, who with difficulty had been reading the feuilleton in the Petit Niçois yawned, flung down her paper, and glanced over at the cosmopolitan adventurer who, with his head thrown back, was staring at the ceiling, humming in a not unmusical voice the catchy refrain of Varney’s popular “Sérénade du Pave – ”

“Sois bonne, O ma chère inconnue,Pour qui j’ai si souvent chanté!Ton offrande est la bienvenue,    Fais-moi la charité!Sois bonne, O ma chère inconnue,Pour qui j’ai souvent chanté!Devant moi, devant moi    Sois la bienvenue?”

So light-hearted he seemed that possibly he had succeeded in inventing some other system whereby the pockets of the long-suffering public might be touched. Suddenly a footstep on the landing outside caused them both to start and exchange quick glances. Then the bell rang, and the conqueror of the hazard rose and opened the door.

Their visitor was Zertho. He was in evening clothes, having left the theatre early to stroll round there.

“Well, Mother Valentin,” he exclaimed in French, tossing his hat carelessly upon the table, and sinking into a chair. “Rheumatism still bad – eh?”

“Ah, yes, m’sieur,” croaked the old woman in the Provençal patois, “still very bad,” and grunting, she rose, and hobbled out of the room.

“And how’s business?” Zertho inquired of the other.

“Pretty fair. Lots of mugs in the town just now,” he smiled, speaking in Cockney English.

“That handbill of yours is about the cheekiest bit of literature I’ve ever come across,” he said, nodding towards one of the remarkable documents tacked upon the wall.

“It has drawn ’em like honey draws flies,” said the other, smiling and regarding it with pride. “The offer to pay the losses does it. You can always make a lie truth by lying large enough.”

He had resumed his seat, and was puffing contentedly at his cigar.

“It’s a really marvellous specimen of bluff,” Zertho observed, in a tone of admiration. “When I first saw it I feared that you had been a bit too extravagant in your promises.”

“The bigger your promise the greater your success. I’ve always found it the same with all the wheezes I’ve worked,” he replied. “I saw you driving with Brooker’s daughter a few days ago. You seem to be having an uncommonly good time of it,” he added.

“Can’t complain,” Zertho said, leaning back with a self-complacent air. “Patrician life suits me after being so many years an outsider.”

“No doubt it is pleasant,” his companion answered with a meaning look, “if one can completely bury the past.”

“I have buried it,” Zertho answered quickly.

Max Richards, the inventor of “The Agony of Monte Carlo,” regarded the man before him with a supercilious smile. “And you pay me to prevent its exhumation – eh?”

“I thought we had agreed not to mention the matter again,” Zertho exclaimed, darting at his crafty-looking fellow-adventurer a look of annoyance and suspicion.

“My dear fellow,” answered the other quite calmly, “I have no desire to refer to it. If you are completely without regret, and your mind is perfectly at ease, well, I’m only too happy to hear it. I have sincere admiration, I assure you, for a man who can forget at will. I wish I could.”

“I do not forget,” Zertho snapped. “Your confounded demands will never allow me to forget.”

The thin-faced man smiled, lazily watching the smoke ascend from an unusually good weed.

“It is merely payment for services rendered,” he observed. “I’m not the lucky heir to an estate, therefore I can’t afford to give people assistance gratis.”

“No,” cried Zertho in a tumult of anger at the remembrance of recent occurrences. “No, you’re an infernal blackmailer!”

Richards smiled, quite undisturbed by his visitor’s sudden ebullition of wrath, and, turning to him said, —

“My dear fellow, whatever can you gain by blackguarding me? Why, every word you utter is in self-condemnation.”

Zertho was silent. Yes, it was the truth what this man said. He was a fool to allow his anger to get the better of him. Was it not Napoleon who boasted that the success of all his great schemes was due to the fact that he never permitted his anger to rise above his throat?

His face relaxed into a sickly smile.

“I’m weary of your constant begging and threatening,” he said at last. “I was a fool in the first instance. If I had allowed you to speak no one would have believed you. Instead of that, I generously gave you the money you wanted.”

“I’m glad you say ‘generously’,” his companion observed, smiling. “Generosity isn’t one of your most engaging characteristics.”

“Well, I’ve been generous to you – too generous, for you have now increased your demands exorbitantly.”

“I’m poor – while you can afford to pay.”

“I can’t – I won’t afford,” retorted Zertho, determinedly. “When men grow wealthy they are always imposed upon by men such as you,” he added. “I admit that the service you rendered deserved payment. Well, I liquidated the debt honourably. Then you immediately levied blackmail, and have ever since continued to send me constant applications for money.”

“A man who can afford to forget his past can afford to be reminded of the debt he owes,” answered the man, still smoking with imperturbable coolness.

“But I tell you I won’t stand it any longer. You’ve strained the cord until it must now snap.”

“Very well, my dear fellow,” answered the other, with an air of impudent nonchalance. “You know your own business best. Act as you think fit.”

“I shall. This is my last visit here.”

“No doubt. My present wheeze is getting about played out. A good thing like this can’t run for any length of time. In a week, for obvious reasons, I shall lock up the doors and depart with Mother Valentin, leaving the landlord looking for his rent and my clients thirsting for my vitals. Yes, you are right, my dear Zertho, when you say this will be your last visit here. But if the mountain will not come to Mahomet, the latter must go to the mountain. I may, perhaps, call upon you, my dear Zertho.”

“No, you sha’n’t. I shall give orders that you are not to be admitted.”

“You will scarcely do that, I think,” he answered, still smiling. The whole bearing of the man betrayed confidence in his position.

“But I tell you I will. I have come here to-night in fulfilment of your demand. It is, however, the last time that we shall meet.”

“I hope so.”

“Why?”

“I hope that you’ll pay me a sum sufficient to obviate the necessity of us meeting again. I assure you that the pleasure of your company is not unmixed with dislike.”

“It is mutual,” Zertho snapped, annoyed at the man’s unmitigated insolence. “I’ll pay you nothing more than what you demanded in your letter yesterday,” and taking from his pocket a wallet of dark-green leather with silver mountings, he counted out four five-hundred-franc notes, and tossed them angrily upon the table, saying, “Make the best of them, for you won’t get another sou from me.”

The man addressed stretched out his hand, took the notes, smoothed them out carefully, and slowly placed them in his pocket.

“Then we are enemies?” he observed at last, after a long pause. He looked straight into Zertho’s face.

“Enemies or friends, it makes no difference to me. It does not alter my decision.”

His companion slowly knocked the ash from his cigar, then continued smoking in silence.

“Well, you don’t speak,” exclaimed Zertho, impatiently, at last, twirling his dark moustache. “What is your intention?”

“I never show my hand to my opponent, my dear fellow,” was the quick retort. “And I know you are never unwise enough to do so.”

Zertho had his match in this chevalier d’industrie, and was aware of it.

“You think I’m still in fear?” he said.

“I don’t know; neither do I care,” the other answered. “If you don’t pay me there are others who no doubt will.”

Zertho sprang quickly from his chair with a look of murderous hatred in his dark face and flashing eyes. “You would still threaten me!” he said between his teeth. “You taunt me because you believe I am entirely in your hands.”

“I do not believe,” the other replied with cool indifference. “I know.”

“You are an infernal scoundrel!”

“I might pass a similar compliment,” he said. “But I see no reason why the pot should comment unfavourably upon the blackness of the kettle. I’m merely assisting you to obtain a pretty wife – a wife, by Heaven, too pure and good and beautiful for any such as you, and – ”

“What do you mean?” Zertho interrupted with a start. This man evidently knew more than he had suspected. “You are not assisting me in the least.”

But Richards laughed aloud, and with a deprecatory wave of the hand, replied, —

“It’s no good to bluff me. I know it is your intention to marry Liane Brooker, whose beauty is so admired everywhere, and who is as good as she’s pretty. I happen to know something of her – more, perhaps, than you think. Well, only by my assistance can you obtain her. Therefore, you won’t be such an idiot as to quarrel with me.”

“I do not quarrel,” Zertho answered in a much more conciliatory tone. “I only protest against your infernal taunts and insolence.”

“Then the matter resolves itself into a simple one – a mere question of price.”

“I refuse to treat with you.”

“Then you will not marry Liane. She will be spared the misery of becoming Princess d’Auzac.”

“Misery!” he echoed. “I can give her wealth, position – everything which makes a woman happy.”

“I doubt whether any woman can be happy with a man whose conscience is overshadowed, like yours,” his companion observed. “Why, her face would remind you hourly of that which you must be ever striving to forget.”

“What does it matter to you?” he snarled. “I shall marry her.”

“Then before doing so you will pay me for my services. Your stroke is a bold one, Zertho, but remember that you can marry her only through me. It is worth a good sum to obtain such a beautiful wife.”

“Whatever it may be worth, you’ll never get it,” d’Auzac declared determinedly.

The two men faced each other.

“In which case she will be enabled to release herself,” observed the inventor of the infallible system.

“Who will suffer, then? Why you, yourself.” Zertho stood leaning upon the back of the armchair in which he had been sitting. He well knew by this man’s attitude that he meant to “squeeze” him. Nevertheless, he treated his remarks with derision, laughing disdainfully.

“You appear to fancy that because you are now wealthy no words of mine can injure you,” the thin-faced man said. “Well, you are welcome to that opinion. The ostrich buries its head in the sand when pursued. You bury yours in the millions which have unexpectedly come to you.”

“It is sufficient for you to know that I’ll never part with another sou,” Zertho answered with impatience.

“Very well, my dear friend, we shall see. Of all men you in the past have been among the most discreet, and none have ever accused you of the folly of impatience; but I tell you plainly that you shall never marry Liane Brooker,” he said distinctly, without the slightest undue warmth.

“I intend to marry her,” Zertho answered. “In a month she will be my wife.”

“You dare not act like that.”

“But I shall.”

“Then you defy me? Very good. We now understand one another.”

“No, I do not defy you,” Zertho exclaimed quickly. “But in this matter I shall follow my own inclination entirely. I intend to marry Brooker’s daughter.”

“Without my sanction?”

“Don’t you intend to give it? It surely is no affair of yours?”

“No, I shall not give it,” he answered carelessly tossing his dead cigar-end into the ash-tray. “Liane shall never become your wife.”

“What! you would tell her?” Zertho gasped, his face suddenly pale and anxious.

“I have already told you that I’m not in the habit of showing my opponent my hand.”

“I love Liane. I must marry her,” he blurted forth.

“Love! Fancy you, Zertho d’Auzac, declaring that you love a woman!” the man exclaimed, laughing heartily in derision. “The thing’s too absurd. I know you too well.”

Zertho bit his lip. If any other man had spoken thus he would have knocked him down; but, truth to tell, he was afraid of this dark-faced, crafty-eyed Englishman. Since first he had known him, in the days when he was down on his luck, he had always felt an antipathy towards him, because he treated everything and everybody with such amazingly cool indifference. He saw that money only would appease him. He calculated roughly how much he had already paid him, and the reflection caused him to knit his brows.

“A few minutes ago you said it was a question of price,” he said at length. “Well, what are your views?”

“Since then they have changed.”

“Changed! How?”

“You say that I have received from you all that you intend I shall receive. Well, let it remain so. You will not marry her.”

Zertho regarded him with a puzzled expression.

“I asked you to name your price,” he said. “What is it?”

Max Richards, lying back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head, turned towards his visitor and answered, —

“I have offered to treat with you, but you refused. My offer is therefore withdrawn. I have enough money at present. When I want more I shall come to you.”

“But, my dear fellow,” exclaimed Zertho, dismayed, “you cannot mean that you refuse to accept anything further for the slight service you have, up to the present, rendered me?”

“Our compact is at an end,” the man answered coldly. “No word will pass my lips on one condition, namely, that you release Liane, and – ”

“I will never do that!” he cried in fierce determination. “She shall be my wife. Come, name your own terms.”

“Ah! I thought you would not be so unwise as to utterly defy me!” exclaimed the man, smiling in triumph. “The prize is too great to relinquish, eh?”

Zertho nodded.

“Come, don’t name a figure too exorbitant. Let it be within reason,” he said.

“It will be entirely within reason,” the other answered, fixing his dark eyes intently upon Zertho’s.

“Well?”

“Nothing!” he laughed.

“Nothing? I don’t understand.”

“I want nothing,” he repeated, rousing himself, and bending forward in the lamplight, his eyes still fixed upon the man he was addressing.

“You refuse?”

“Yes, I refuse,” he said in a deep intense voice. “I have, it is true, bought and sold many things in my brief and not unblameworthy career, but I have never yet sold a pure woman’s life, and by Heaven! I never will!”

Zertho stood in abject dismay. He had been utterly unprepared for this. Anger consumed him when he recognised how completely he had been misled, and how suddenly all his plans were checkmated by this man’s unexpected caprice.

“You’ve suddenly withdrawn into the paths of rectitude,” he observed with a sickly smile when at last he found voice. “It will be a new and interesting experience, no doubt.”

“Possibly.”

“Come, Richards,” Zertho exclaimed, after a brief pause, “it’s useless to prevaricate any longer. Let us settle the business. I intend marrying Liane, but I am ready to admit that this is possible only with your assistance. For the latter I am prepared to continue to pay as I have already done. Name the amount, and the thing can be settled at once.”

“I will name no amount. I decline to barter away Liane’s happiness.”

“You wish me to name a sum – eh? Well, what do you say to five hundred pounds down? Recollect how much you’ve already had off me.”

The other’s lip curled contemptuously, as he shook his head.

“Well, I’ll double it. A thousand.”

Their gaze met. Max Richards again shook his head.

Zertho, with a sudden movement, pulled his wallet from his pocket, withdrew his cheque-book, and taking up a pen from the table, scribbled out a draft upon the Credit Lyonnais, and filled it in for fifty thousand francs.