I shook with self-control and heard myself saying:
“I have a right to know with whom I must deal. Your identity matters no longer.”
“The Vicomte de Saint Sabas.”
I knew the name — and on one point more intimately than the historians who watch down the centuries the inevitable and unruly appearance of a St. Sabas whenever the nobles of France are trumpeting defiance to the King of England or their own.
“You have a son?” I asked.
“I have.”
“My conscience is easier.”
“You are impertinent!”
“No, sir. The first St. Sabas was a steward of the Dennims and ennobled by us. So I did not wish to end the family. I cannot help the disgrace.”
“Disgrace?”
The word stung him a lot more than my medieval absurdity — which, anyway, he knew to be true. I explained it.
“You murdered an innocent postman, St. Sabas. Was that an execution too? Chicago style?”
“An accident!” he exploded. “How the devil could I foresee it?”
His right arm began to move. Slightly quicker the barrel of the Mauser was over the edge of the table. Both weapons returned to the lap.
I told him the true story of my war. It was fair that the man should be given a chance to believe. But the facts seemed to make no impression at all on those impatient and contemptuous eyes. How could they? If he had accepted them, he would have had to face his own guilt.
“My reply to that is that you are a liar and a coward,” he said. “Not even Dickfuss thought of claiming to be a British agent.”
I finished my drink and disregarded the minor insult. I remarked — though, as I say, it wasn’t a self I knew which was speaking — that it was difficult to arrange conditions between a liar and a madman, but that I would make a suggestion.
I was well aware of the suicidal folly of what this damned Graf von Dennim was about to propose. But I could see no other way out. I refused to kill St. Sabas in cold blood. And if I made the slightest move from that table towards the back door of the pub or towards Nur Jehan, St. Sabas would kill me. At least our ancestors could get us out of the stalemate when nothing else could.
“I give you no conditions,” he said.
“Then you may accept mine. You know the barn in its clump of trees. We will ride towards it together but out of pistol shot. We will halt three hundred yards from it.
“I shall stay where I am, giving you time to examine the barn thoroughly since I know it and you do not.
You will then retire to a distance of three hundred yards on the other side. We shall still be in sight of each other and can know if the terms are observed.”
“How do I know you will not ride off and hide in a police station?”
“How do I know you won’t vanish? Savarin has a lot of practice in changing his name and appearance.”
“You know it because I intend to kill you. I am impatient, von Dennim.”
His voice rose a little above its usual cold tone. He was savagely impatient.
That was my motive, too, I said. I did not intend to spend the rest of my life examining my food and parcels.
He still refused to accept. He had no fear of dying, only of dying before he could kill. I knew that, but I accused him of being afraid. He was quite unmoved.
“Yes,” he said. “I am afraid you will run.”
This was getting beyond endurance. I felt an appalling nervous desire to laugh. The Graf von Dennim and the zoologist were each finding the other ridiculous, with the result that both were near hysteria.
“You spat in my face,” I said. “Shall I put it this way for you? That even if a von Dennim is a Gestapo officer and a St. Sabas murders postmen, each has a tradition in spite of it.”
He looked at me with less assurance, or at any rate with less intensity of hatred. He was human again — the deliberate, discriminating judge of what his victim was likely to do.
“You are different from the rest,” he said. “I will agree to your conditions.”
I stood up with my back to the windows of the inn and slipped the Mauser into its holster. St. Sabas wavered, and I had a clear view of his weapon. It was a .45 automatic. The Dennim family held his eyes contemptuously for me while the familiar self disapproved in abject panic of this highly dangerous theater. He put on the safety catch and dropped the pistol into his outside pocket.
We walked side by side to our horses without a word. The atmosphere of formality seemed to be working. The few horsy villagers who watched us must, I am sure, have assumed that the two beautifully mounted middle-aged men were old friends who chose to be silent.
When we were alone and back on the green road which led to the hilltop, we separated. Each kept close to the fence on his own side with twenty yards of turf and ruts between the horses. Nur Jehan strongly objected.
“There is no reason to fight your horse,” St. Sabas said. “What little beauty is in this world has already suffered enough from you. I will give you my word of honor that you may safely ride by my side, and I will accept yours.”
I thanked him, and added:
“The light is going fast.”
“It was too clear this evening. It looks like rain.”
“Not before midnight, I should say.”
“It has certainly been a remarkable June.”
“Yes. We have both been fortunate in our weather.”
“It would interest me to know one thing. All along you invited this meeting, von Dennim?”
“I did.”
“No police at all in it?”
There was a limit to confidence. I was not going to tell him that.
“What they are doing you probably know as well as I do, St. Sabas.”
“My French blood tells,” he said with a harsh laugh. “At one moment I am overwhelmed by the cunning of the British. At the next I am certain that all the cunning is invented by myself.”
The hilltop was now bare and dismal under the overcast sky. There was just enough wind to sing faintly in the telephone wires which marched up the hill along with us and ended at the last house. The barn and the wide clump of trees were no longer sinister as they had been in sunlight. Set in the greater loneliness of the uplands, they suggested shelter and a roof.
“I doubt if we shall be able to see each other at six hundred yards,” I said.
“I will signal to you with a torch when I am in position.”
“Mine, I am afraid, is in my rucksack at the barn.”
“It works?” he asked.
“Yes, very well.”
“Take this, then! I will pick up yours when I examine the barn.”
St. Sabas handed over his torch, and with a slight inclination of the head, rode forward to the clump of trees.
I returned his bow. It is possible that the exchange of torches was as near as he could bring himself to a salute. Religious maniacs — if I am right in my fanciful explanation of him — can be very pleasant people so long as the subject of damnation does not come up. But at the time I was divided between admiration of his manners and suspicion that he intended to tamper with my rucksack. I dismissed it. Whatever century we were in, both of us were in it. And in any case the time for assassination by drugs or explosives had passed.
Dusk and the trees swallowed up St. Sabas. I dismounted and thought over what my tactics were going to be. There could be no more doubts whether I had a moral right to kill him. I had not a dog’s chance of living if I didn’t, and it was pointless even to worry about my legal position. I was empty of anger and mercy alike. If it had just been a question of losing my own life, I might still have had some trouble with conscience; but it was my future with Benita which was at stake, and that was a very different matter from my future with squirrels. The first shot must deliver us from any more fear, and no damned nonsense about it.