Part 11

Not long after, still another party turned up and was assigned a nearby table. Lanyard accorded its four members the same shrewd but covert study which he had already wasted on their predecessors, perceiving in these newcomers, as well, nothing to re-excite a disposition to distrust mankind in toto which was yielding rapidly to the blandishments of that delightful and devoted presence at his elbow, a dinner most admirable of its kind, and a wine finer than any a discriminating palate had relished in many a moon; influences so powerful as to compensate even his forebodings of the reckoning to come. Some acquaintance with the ways of road-houses like this, broad-minded enough to produce a bottle of sound Burgundy without so much as a gesture of deference to the law of the land, lent strength to the apprehension that, when Lanyard had settled his score, he would bear away from the Inn of the Green Woods a purse as thin as his expectation of a dull old age. And never a hope of being able to replenish it before the next quarterly remittance day, two months away!

A thought to drive a man in love distracted who had no other worries tearing at his heart. With all his might Lanyard tried to put it out of mind lest it shadow his mood too evidently to be misread. Eve must never be permitted to suspect that pride of penury had anything to do with his decision to make an end tonight of relations which, however heartrending the wrench that must sever them, love worthy of its inspiration might no longer sanction.

Either the wine or his anxiety to seem at ease loosened his tongue and enlivened his wit, Lanyard found himself talking with a humour and a verve that enabled him to ride cavalierly over awareness of the look in the eyes so constant to his, a look in which perplexity and patience too constantly found place. But all the while he was half-consciously preparing for the challenge which came when, with the room to themselves but for one other party of diners, they lingered over coffee and cigarettes before the fire.

"When are you going to tell me, Michael, what is on your mind?"

Words quietly spoken, like drops of cool water added one by one to the seething contents of a test tube, precipitating the elements of the situation between them. And he who had no small conceit in the readiness with which he was wont to deal with others, experienced now a moment of mental flurry, lost the thread of his argument, and stared helplessly into those smiling but intent eyes. She was finished, he had to recognize, with forbearance; nevertheless he could not but make one last attempt to stave off the inevitable.

"What should there be, Eve, more than you know?"

"Do you really want me to believe you have forgotten our talk, the other night at the Ritz, the discussion you yourself started and that, at my request, we didn't finish?"

"Must we recall that now?"

"It isn't like you, Michael, to palter . . . We aren't children any more, my dear; you know my mind and I know yours--at least in part. I love you and want you for my husband; but you won't ask me to marry you, of your own volition you have raised up the ghost of your dead yesterday to stand between us and"--she had a smile for the verbal extravagance--"forbid the banns! But I have refused to be frightened by bogeys. With that we left the question open, night before last; since when something has happened." She nodded gravely: "Tell me, Michael . . ."

"What makes you think--?"

"You love me too well to distress me needlessly by leaving a matter so vital in suspense. If nothing had occurred to make you hesitate, for fear of giving me pain, you wouldn't be trying so hard to talk about everything imaginable but the one thing that counts."

He gave his head a tormented shake. "Is it not enough that, the more I weigh the circumstances, the more sure I feel I am right?--the only way to be fair to you is to take myself out of your life."

"But it seems to me I am the one to say what is fair or unfair to me. After all, my happiness is at stake."

"Not more than mine."

"Much more than yours. You are selfish, Michael--not meaning to be, but because you would hurt me to my very heart to spare yourself self-reproach, if ever after our marriage anything should come out of the past to trouble us. As if anything matters to a woman who loves, so long as she is well loved in return!"

"You show me to myself in an unkind light . . ."

"I am using every weapon I can find in my fight with life for the right to be happy."

"I would break my own heart rather than cause you an instant's unhappiness . . ."

"You think so, dear. But you at least would have the memory of an act of renunciation to console you--you could say to yourself: 'I suffer, but for her sake.' For me there would be only the knowledge that I had been cheated out of my due. I have the right to claim more of life than it has given me . . ."

The voice of melancholy music faltered, then resumed: "The War took my husband from me before I was old enough to know what love could mean. Now, long after, I have found a greater love--and I am required to give it up solely because you are afraid somebody may some day tell me what I already knew, that once upon a time you were a little lower than the angels!"

To avoid the accusation of her look, Lanyard stared blindly into the fire.

"I am not good enough for such a love as yours, Eve."

"Perhaps no one of us is good enough for Love. Yet we can try to be, by serving . . ."

Lanyard hung his head; and in accents of quiet conviction Eve de Montalais pursued: "Something _has_ happened. I thought so, from your manner this afternoon, now I am sure. It isn't that you have ceased to care for me--"

"You know it is not that."

"What, then? It must be something quite as serious, you couldn't hold out against me as you do if it were anything less. Michael: you can't refuse to tell me now."

He made a sign of submission combined with a plea for time in which to assort his thoughts. Indisputably nothing less than the truth would satisfy her; but it might be that something less than the whole truth, so sure to terrify the woman, would serve.

And while he sat turning the matter over in his mind, their waiter approached.

"Monsieur Paul Martin?" the man enquired, with an execrable attempt to give the words a French inflexion.

In his abstraction, Lanyard signified an impatient negative, but Eve de Montalais was less thick-witted.

"What name?" she quickly enquired.

"Paul Martin, ma'm. He's wanted on the telephone--a long distance call."

"From New York?"

"I don't know, ma'm, the party didn't say, just asked for Monsieur Paul Martin--party with a sort of a foreign accent, French, I guess."

Eve looked sharply to Lanyard: "It is for you--you must answer it." He responded with a puzzled nod, though his memory needed no more jogging. But was it possible? he wondered, letting the waiter lead to the telephone booth in the office of the inn; aside from Eve and himself, that alias of a day long past was known to but three people in the world; and of these one was in London and one at last accounts in Paris, the third alone was in New York . . .

But if Liane knew where he was dining, so far away from Town, she must have been informed by somebody who had followed him without his knowledge!

Not the voice of Liane, but a man's saluted him above the humming of the long distance wire, a man's voice with, as the waiter had indicated, a strong tinge of nasal French.

"Monsieur Paul Martin?"

"Yes. Who wants him?"

"I am spikin' for 'is sister. Ees this Monsieur Martin spikin'?"

It was Liane who for her own ends had nominated herself the sister of Monsieur Paul Martin, one day in Paris long ago.

Lanyard answered "Yes."

"Pardon, monsieur: your sister ees too beesy now to telephone you 'erself. She have ask' me to geev you a message."

"Monsieur is most amiable," Lanyard replied in French. "What is the message, please?"

"Prenez garde."

"What do you say?"

"Bon soir, monsieur."

"Hello! hello!"

But Lanyard worried the hook in vain: the other had hung up, the wire was closed. . . .

_Prenez garde--take care!_

XIV

Lanyard took back to Eve by the fire the most dégagé manner he could manage, a manner of leisured good humour that wasn't all put on at the prompting of amour propre, that was assumed less in hope of hoodwinking her ingenious intuitions than for the benefit of their fellow guests, if so be it these entertained any latent interest in the reactions of Michael Lanyard to a long distance call for "Monsieur Paul Martin," and that dissembled better than he believed a sense of discouragement the most devastating he had ever known--not on his account alone so much as that he was not alone.

The quandary in which he found himself trapped, now that his eyes had been opened by that singular admonition from out of the night, at once cryptic and only too intelligible, was one that defied and, what was worse, promised persistent defiance to the utmost of his resources, from which extrication with credit to himself--or, if it came to that, with his life--seemed out of the question. Not that he put life first: his solicitude was nine parts unselfish, his disheartenment the fruit of inability to hit on any pretext that conceivably would induce Eve to part then and there with one whose company had all at once become equivalent to a pistol trained on her heart point-blank--and with a finger both pitiless and anonymous trembling on the trigger.

A strong statement, but one that by no means painted their predicament an exaggerated black. His "sister" had never played her confrères false or resorted to subterfuge so subtle to put "Monsieur Paul Martin" on his guard against a nebulous or trifling menace. Liane owed Lanyard much on an old score, she would have been faithless to the code of her kind had she, having definite foreknowledge of it, permitted so good a friend to go blindly to meet the fate prepared for him, whatever that might be; such women are nevertheless jealous wardens of their own welfare, it had required perception of a peril to Lanyard immediate and desperate to work Liane up to the point of chancing the resentment of Morphew should her treachery ever transpire. Witness the extravagant pains she had taken to disguise her hand.

No: it would never do to underprize this proof of good will or to read in Liane's warning any spirit but one of the most earnest anxiety. Taken as she had unquestionably intended it, her "prenez-garde" decoded somewhat to this effect: "You are sadly self-deluded, my friend, if you think Morphew resigned to stomach defeat at your hands, or that you have succeeded in keeping your movements hidden from him. He has never for an instant lost sight either of you or of his revenge, he is playing you as heartlessly as an angler plays a trout, gaff in hand--you must go warily to cheat its barbs."

The dilemma thus exposed was appalling: a clean breast of all he had been trying to hide from her was unavoidable if he hoped to make Eve comprehend why he held it imperative for them to seek each a separate way back to New York; whereas, once she did grasp the fact that danger threatened him, she would surely refuse to let him risk it alone. Women of her rare stamp are never readily dismayed or disposed to think first of themselves if physical peril frown also upon one by whom their affections have been engaged. . . . Regard the spirit that poised Eve then in that juncture, awaiting his return with a countenance as composed as it was fair, with eyes unclouded by any confession of impatience or misgivings.

"Sorry I was so long," Lanyard said with intention to be heard across the dining-room. "I stopped to pay the bill and order the car brought round. If you don't mind . . ."

"It's quite time," Eve amiably agreed--"if we're to get home at any respectable hour."

He resumed his chair before the fire and utilized his cigarette case and a match to cover sidelong study of the four who had come in so soon after his arrival with Eve, and who remained still at table, dawdling with dessert. But he couldn't see that his announcement had meant anything to these . . .

The one woman of their number was a creature of strapping comeliness whose hail-fellow swagger was brazen that had been piquant in the flapper she heavily aped; while the men were such as would hardly have won a second glance on any ordinary occasion, types of the American bourgeois case-hardened by "good business," clothed in a weirdly uniform mode of smartness, something stale with over-feeding and drinking and fondling, wanting stimulation yet inclined to grow causelessly arrogant in their cups. But Lanyard was too well learned in the ways of urban America not to know that its Apaches seldom if ever conform to the cliché of the cinema when it turns its cyclopædic if gullible eye on what it knows as denizens of the underworld. The gunman of New York is blown with pride of caste; for all that he isn't keen on bidding for the attention of the police by sporting the conventionalized make-up of a suspicious character, he far prefers to pass in a crowd as a simple man in the street normally addicted to the machine-made "clothing of distinction" of the magazine advertisements. The fact, then, that these three were apparently nobodies in particular minding their own business, didn't necessarily mean that Lanyard could afford to dismiss them from his calculations.

Neither did he, careful though he was to give them no excuse for suspecting he had one thought to spare from the woman at his side.

"There is no one like you," he was saying in gallant repayment of her steadfast and demanding attention: "the loveliest woman that ever breathed, the most adorably patient . . ."

"How little you know me!" she calmly commented--"at least, if you expect me to believe you think me patient. Then your message was important?"

"Very," the man admitted: the time was by when fencing were anything but waste of time. "I am worried about getting you back to Town . . ."

"So it was Mademoiselle Delorme!"

"That only goes to show," Lanyard obliquely remarked, "one should never tell you anything one expects you to forget."

"I have forgotten nothing you have ever told me about yourself--nothing, least of all, that had to do with another woman's affection for you."

"Yet you are incapable of jealousy."

"Still, I am very greedy, I don't like sharing even the least of your thoughts with any other woman."

"Oh!" he laughed--"but Liane isn't a woman, except professionally."

"You are tantalizing me all the same when you don't tell me what she had to say--and how in Heaven's name she guessed you were dining here--and why she resurrected that old nom de guerre instead of calling for you by your right name."

"I'm afraid Liane didn't guess, I suspect somebody told her we had stopped here to dine--"

The teasing half-smile with which Eve had been regarding her lover was erased. "You think we were followed--!"

"How else could they have known?"

"'They'?"

"Who informed Liane."

"But why should she have harked back to 'Paul Martin'?"

"I fancy her reason for that is implicit in Liane's message, a brief one--delivered, if it matters, by a stranger's tongue--'prenez garde'."

Eve nodded thoughtful confirmation of a private conjecture. "You are in some danger?" Not at all deceived by the shrug that sought to depreciate the weight of that term, she glanced quickly to and from the little party that was, just then, noisily making merry at its table across the room. In response, another movement of Lanyard's shoulders disclaimed intelligence: "Perhaps . . . Who knows?"

"You must tell me everything . . ."

"I know; but it's a fairish yarn, and the car ought to be here any minute--I'll hardly have time before we leave. So let me first of all throw myself upon your mercy, Eve, beg you to trust me."

"But you know I do, in every way."

"I mean: trust me to know what is best . . ."

Analysis of this ambiguity knitted a speculative frown. "You're going to ask something of me I won't want to do."

"It is dangerous for us to attempt the journey back to New York together."

"Dangerous," Eve objected, "isn't definite enough."

"It would appear that one whom I have recently been obliged to humiliate plans to pay me out tonight. He will fail--trust me for that--but I shall be more free to make him see the error of his ways if I can feel sure the harm meant for me can't by mischance be visited upon you instead."

"Ah, no, my friend! you don't seriously think I will consent . . ."

"You would not hesitate if I could only make it clear how much better my chances would be."

"I'm afraid it's a hopeless task, but"--she made her smile provoking--"suppose you try."

"Conceive, then"--Lanyard spoke deliberately in an endeavour to put the business in a nutshell--"that after leaving you night before last I was thrown in with one who chose to declare war on me for his own ends--"

"The Sultan of Loot!"

"Why try to keep anything from you?"

"You forget, I too had a premonition concerning that creature. Who is he?"

"I can more easily tell you what he is. He styles himself Morphew and the Tenderloin calls him King of the Bootleggers--justly, one is told. In addition, he nurses a penchant for having a finger in every lawless pie. To discipline me, that night, he caused the loot of a burglary to be hidden in my pockets while I lay in a stupor, drugged by his direction, then saw to it that I was suspected of having committed the theft."

"Oh, no!" the woman interrupted involuntarily, revolted by the bare suggestion of such enormity.

"Or else--I must believe I stole the jewels myself, in instinctive reversion to old ways, drink having abolished the inhibitions of the new."

"Never!"

"I do not know," Lanyard confessed with a wry face. "There are circumstances which make me uneasy . . . I do not know!"

"How can you even suggest such a thing?"

"Let me tell you . . . Last night I visited--or revisited!--the house from which the jewels had been stolen, meaning secretly to restore them. This I managed. I was even more fortunate in being able to bring about the arrest of one of Morphew's lot as the burglar of fact--which the fellow may well have been. Finally, to confuse pursuit, I quitted the house by the way the burglar had taken the night before--let myself out of a window to the roof of an extension, dropped down to a backyard, scaled a board fence, and stole through an excavation for a new building to the street beyond. Eve . . ."

Lanyard faltered and worked his hands together, his features wrung, haunted eyes reflecting the enigma of the embers which held their stare. And with a gesture of quick sympathy, the woman sat forward to screen him. But these others seemed to be completely preoccupied with their own hilarious concerns; and the racket of congenial voices they raised must have prevented their overhearing anything of Lanyard's confession when at length he resumed.

"Up to that time," he said slowly, "I had hardly questioned the assumption that Morphew deliberately had schemed to victimize me . . . But then, while I was creeping away from that house, quite literally like a thief in the night--once upon the roof, again when I stood in the kitchen-yard, looking back at the blank rear windows, and yet again while stumbling through that foundation pit beyond the fence--at every stage of that journey I knew a feeling as of doing something I had done before, repeating the identical moves I had made at another time, upon an occasion strangely forgotten . . ."

"Well?" the woman in cool amusement asked.

"Well!"--his smile sketched a wistful expression of bewilderment--"I do not know, perhaps it was true, perhaps . . ."

Careless whether they were observed, the woman leaned forward and lightly covered one of his hands with her own. "Poor dear!" she cried, with a thrill of fond laughter--"to let himself be so tormented by a sensation such as everybody has at times."

"Everybody?" he iterated in a stare.

"It happens to us all--has it never happened to you before?--a phenomenon so common the psychologists have a special name for it. What _do_ they call it? reflex memory? Something of the sort, I forget . . . One only needs a new scene and a mood especially susceptible to impressions of strangeness or beauty--and all at once one feels quite sure one has visited that very spot in some previous existence. Precisely that happened to you, last night, my Michael, in your super-excited state of mind, worried by ignorance of the truth about the stolen property in your possession. . . . Take my word for it."

"You believe that?" he insisted--"truly?"

"Truly, my dear."

"You don't think I could possibly--?"

"Never--I know you better than you do yourself." Eve gave his hand a comforting pressure, and sat back. "If you let anything so absurd fret you another instant I shall be cross with you."

"You make me happy," Lanyard said. "It costs me something to tell you . . ."

"I know!"

"I don't deserve such faith."

"But I don't consider you a good judge of your own worth, dear. And now that I understand the situation--you've made a fool and an enemy of this man Morphew, and he's conspiring to be revenged--tell me, what is it you have to propose about returning to Town?"

"I want you to let me find my way back alone. I have consulted road-maps and time-tables posted in the office here. There's a train for New York from the nearest station"--Lanyard glanced at the watch on his wrist--"in about half an hour. . . . Which reminds me, your driver is taking his time."

"Patience. He's always tinkering with the motor--he'll be ready any minute. You were saying--?"

"I want you to let me drop you at the railroad and take the train back to Town, with your chauffeur for protection, while I go on in the car."

Undisguised derision honoured this proposal. "But why should I, when it is you, not I, the Sultan of Loot is after? If the train can be considered safe, surely you're the one--"

"You forget, Morphew's people will aim at your motor-car, believing me to be in it whether I am or not. If I should succeed in leaving it unobserved, they would still pursue the car. You can't ask me to expose you to a danger from which I turn tail."

"Then why shouldn't we both take the train?"

"It is what you American call an accomodation--stops at every station. If we should abandon your car to be found near the railroad, it would be too simple to have the train anticipated by telephone, boarded somewhere between here and New York, and the two of us kept so closely watched we would have no chance . . ."

The woman's head described a sign of flat rejection----Lanyard's rueful recognition of an outcome foreseen.

"Impossible, my friend. I couldn't dream of leaving you to shift for yourself."

"But how else--?"

"I have a saner scheme. Why not stop here for the night? The inn must have accomodations. . . . You see!" Eve cried in laughing triumph--"you are trying to get rid of me when the truth is, you need me. Two heads are better than one . . . But why shake yours so dourly?"

"I am afraid of your plan for more reasons than one. Daylight for our return will hardly be the same thing as accident insurance. If you give me my choice, I like darkness better."

"And your other reasons--?"

"If I stop here overnight, where I am beyond much doubt under surveillance even now, I remain placed and give Morphew just so much more time to close his net round me. And nothing I know of makes this inn a sanctuary or guarantees the bona fides of the management."

"You don't mean to say you think the people who run this place--!"