"Yes. No! What about him?'
"The mercy and tact of our Prison Commission," cried Dr. Laurier, "are beyond praise. That picture of Our Saviour on the Cross is truly moving."
"Hessler, Ruth, managed to smuggle potassium cyanide into this room. He used it—"
‘To k-kill himself?"
"No. On the guards. In cups of cocoa. When they staggered and tried to shout, he made a break.
My History of the Penal System is very discreet Undoubtedly they knew how he did it but they won't say. In some fashion he got from here into the garden between this wing and the next He had a rope thrown over a spike in the wall. They winged him with a revolver as he was climbing, and he fell back into a flower-bed. Hessler…"
"listen, old boy," Ricky's voice hissed in Martin's ear. He seized his companion's wrist, and twisted it "Over there! To the right!" A pause. "Well, damn me to perdition if…"
Ricky's exclamation drew round the slightly glazed eyes of the others.
"Afterwards," continued Stannard, "the prison governor insisted an alarm-bell be installed here. Idiot! Prize, thundering idiot! Look at that hanging rope over there! As if…"
But the others were not listening. They saw what seemed a crowning incongruity.
In the far corner, grimy but only a few touched with rust lay a much smaller but better collection of rapiers and daggers than Martin had seen at Willaby's on Friday.
The rapiers were flung down in a heap, as they had lain for many years. The white lamp-beam played over cup-hilts, swept-hilts, ring-hilts, both the pointed and the double-edged. Ricky's eyes were fixed on a little ivory tag attached to one handle. Behind the rapiers stood a row of ancient dusty medicine-bottles, corked, and several empty bottles of whisky.
"Either I've got hallucinations," snapped Ricky, "or those swords belonged to my father."
"Your father?" exclaimed Ruth.
"Ages ago," Ricky tugged at his collar, "my father had a collection. Did you know that?" (Sir Henry Merrivale, had he been present would have growled assent). "He got tired of 'em; Grandmother Brayle said he gave the stuff away; he put up those old guns you can see in the Green Room. But I could swear, from that writing on the tags…’
He hurried over, catching his own reflection in a dust-furred mirror where so many of the despairing must have looked, and bent down.
"You remember, Dr. Laurier?" he added.
Dr. Laurier, for a moment hypnotized, uttered what for anybody else would have been a cry of delight He darted over to the rapiers, pulling at one so that others rattled and tumbled down.
"Surely," he cried, "this is a…"
"It's damn funny," said Ricky. "How did this stuff get here? Why?"
Up went the influences or vibrations, up and upl Stannard inflated his thick chest and laughed.
"Are you a swordsman, Mr. Fleet?"
‘No," said Ricky, standing up. "1 never liked it. It seems— Dago, somehow. Like sticking a man with a knife. But" and sheer vanity bubbled out of him, "there was a time when I couldn't fly a plane, either. Fencing? I could learn it as easy as winkingl"
"Indeed?" mocked Stannard, showing teeth against the red face. "When I saw you, you were such a very little pious boy." Ricky whipped round, his grey eyes wide open in the dazzle of cross-light
"I may have been no giant then," he said. "But I could put-the-weight twenty-seven feet three inches when I was eleven years old, and I've got a cup to prove it How would you like to try a little strength-test now?"
"Thank you. But I have another kind of test in about ten minutes."
"Unquestionably," declared Dr. Laurier, "a Toledo blade. Note also the ‘Christus Imperat’ engraved on the blade near the hilt and the beautifully, wrought pattern on the cup-hilt itself. I must have more light Excuse me."
And he almost ran out of the room into the passage.
Martin too, having handed his lamp to Ricky, had drawn out a rapier to his taste. Like Laurier's, it was no clumsy double-edge blade; like Laurier's it was thin and tapering, for play with the point It had a large plain cup-hilt with broad quillons, so finely balanced in the hand that it seemed to bear its own weight
"Excuse, me," Martin said — and also hurried out of the room.
It wasn't he told himself, that he felt fear. But he felt shut up in there. The condemned cell, twenty feet square, with its flowered peeling wallpaper, boiled with hatred and despair. He could have sworn (though he knew this for an illusion) that the rocking-chair swung a little.
But one touch of panic, real or only half-real, acts on human beings as on animals. Ruth, Stannard, and Ricky crowded after him.
At the far end of the passage, where the lamp stood slightly tilted on the floor, Dr. Laurier was bending over the thin Spanish blade to examine it For some reason, his prim pince-nez and iron grey hair and hollowed cheeks looked grotesque above the sports costume, like a clergyman's head on a clown. He was trembling. He straightened up, with a flash of pince-nez, when he saw Martin with the other cup-hilt
"Captain Drake!'' he said eagerly. "Do you fence?"
"Yes. Most rapier-collectors do."
"Ah!" said Dr. Hugh Laurier.
He advanced slowly, silhouetted against the eye of the lantern, its white glow spreading round and behind him. Turning his body sideways, he bent his knees tentatively and swept out the still-sharp point in insinuating challenge. His wrist turned in that short semi-circular movement, engage and disengage, by which fencers feel, as though by antennae, for an opening.
Insinuating, insinuating, moving forward..
Martin, without any sense of incongruity in time or place, instantly crossed points.
All of them, now, were far from normal.
"This is good," Ricky threw at Martin. "Give him hell, old boy!"
"Take your pleasure, gentlemen!" said Stannard. "Stop it!" cried Ruth.
Her voice was not loud, but it pierced and begged. She had dodged round to the door of the execution shed. If anyone had looked at her then (nobody did) that person would have seen Ruth was far more terrified of these sharpened points than of any forces in Pentecost Prison.
"Look here, Ruth, we're only playing!" said Martin. "Ricky!"
"Yes, old boy?"
"Put that lamp of yours at the other end, against the iron door. Propped up behind me just as the other one is behind him."
Tick-ting went the blades, circling and feeling round each other.
The two facing lights sprang up, silhouetting both fencers
and somewhat clouding each other's right Tick-ting, tick-ting.
Of course, Martin knew, this was only playing. Feint-lunges, as harmless as the hop of insects; much threatening and scrape of feet; cats darting with sheathed claws. Yet he could feel his own heated excitement and feel through the thin blades the tensity of Dr. Lauder's arm.
"Only playing!", cried the latter, in a kind of ecstasy. Tick-ting. His eyes never moved from Martin's through the crossing-line of the points. "Only playing!" He made a feint of darting in.
"For God's sake stop," shrilled Ruth. "I can't bear swords! I can't stand it! I—" Then, in horror, she pressed one hand over her mouth.
The tick-ting ended abruptly. Dr. Laurier disengaged and lunged.
It was a full lunge, with stamp of foot on asphalt Martin saw the glint on the blade; his wrist snapped two inches in parry; the point scarcely rasping above a whisper, flicked past his right sleeve.
Hugh Laurier, slow and clumsy on return, stood wide open to a riposte that would have skewered him like a fowl. Movements are automatic, as in boxing; Martin checked his lunge in time, he felt the sweat start out on his body, and then stood staring at the Doctor, who had lowered his point