Part 12

"I have been taught to trust nobody at times like this. More than that, everybody knows most of these resorts in and about New York that openly flout the Prohibition Amendment are actively in league with if not actually owned by bootlegging interests. I will breathe more comfortably, I promise you, when--and if--we are permitted to go our way unhindered."

"Oh, but surely you exaggerate!"

"Possibly; it's not always a bad fault, by no means so bad as under-exaggeration when one's neck is concerned. However, it can't be long now before we know."

Seeing their waiter approach, Lanyard got up and took Eve's wrap from the back of her chair. But the natural expectation of word that the brougham was at the door suffered a blight even before the man spoke, by reason of the odd look with which he saluted Lanyard.

"Excuse me, Mr. Martin," he said with--or instinct was at fault--a tinge of mockery in his supple habit--"the manager's compliments, and he'd be much obliged if you'd step into the office a minute, he'd like to have a word with you."

"Indeed? What does the good man want?"

"If it's all the same to you, sir, it'd be better if you'd kindly talk with the boss."

"About what?"

"Well, sir," the waiter stammered--"I don't want to alarm the lady--something's happened."

Lanyard looked to Eve with lifting brows. "If you will excuse me--"

"I don't think I will," Eve cheerfully replied, rising. "And I don't in the least mind being alarmed. I'm coming along."

With a formal bow of consent, Lanyard folded the wrap round her shoulders, then threw his coat over his arm and prepared to follow the waiter. But the latter was just then peremptorily hailed by the host of the remaining party with a demand for "the check"; so Lanyard and Eve proceeded to the little office unescorted, to find awaiting them a person of decent manners with an intelligent if at the moment somewhat harassed eye. There had been, he began, an unfortunate accident, he was more sorry than he could say that it had occurred in his establishment . . .

"What sort of an accident?" Lanyard with a touch of asperity cut his apologies short.

"If you and your lady don't mind stepping this way, I'll show you . . ."

Ushered out to the night, they were conducted round the corner of the building to the space where, in the chilly glimmer of a belated moon, the brougham stood parked with one other motor-car, and, near the former, two men were stooping over something that rested motionless upon the packed earth, one of them focussing upon it the beam of an electric torch.

Lanyard touched Eve's arm, recommending her to wait aside, and with the manager joined the group round the supine body of Eve's chauffeur.

The man lay in a limp sprawl, his face in that uncompromising glare a congested crimson, mouth slack and drooling, half-closed lids showing only the whites of eyes rolled back, stertorous respiration fouling the sweet smell of the night--evidently no worse than dead drunk.

"I just don't know how he worked it to get like this," the manager was protesting. "It's dead against our rules to sell hootch to chauffeurs, and I'll sack the bird responsible for this if I have to bounce the whole staff to get rid of him. But that isn't any comfort to you, I guess."

"None," Lanyard curtly agreed.

"He was all right as long's he was sittin' in the chowfers' dinin'-room," the man with the lamp volunteered--"you wouldn't have thought he'd had more'n a couple. But as soon as the cold air hit him he flopped like somebody'd crowned him. Funny . . ."

"No doubt you find it so."

"The only thing I can suggest, Mr. Martin," the manager put in, Lanyard thought too eagerly, "is to lend you somebody to drive you back to New York. Arthur here's a darn' good driver, knows all the roads like a book."

"That's very good of you," Lanyard returned, with a warning eye for Eve. "We'll be glad to make it worth Arthur's while, for neither of us can drive or has even a general idea of the roads. But first"--the toe of his boot stirred the body--"we would like to be sure this poor fool will get proper attention. I daresay you can give him a room."

"Of course, sir--and I'll 'phone for a doctor, if you say so, though I don't think that ought to be necessary. This isn't any case of wood-alcohol poisoning, there isn't a drop of bad liquor in the house--"

"I'm sure there isn't. All the same, what he had must have been wicked stuff. If you don't mind having him carried indoors, I'll make an examination myself--I have a limited amount of medical knowledge."

"You bet I will . . ."

Directed by the speaker, the two underlings, with no noteworthy enthusiasm, surrendered the torch and their leisure, lifted the body of the drunkard by the legs and shoulders and, staggering with the weight of that inert lump, made crabwise progress toward the rear entrance to the inn, the manager following with the light while Lanyard turned back to Eve with a suggestion clearly articulated for the benefit of whatever ears might care to hear.

"If you'll make yourself comfortable in the car, I promise I won't keep you waiting long."

"Thank you," Eve equably returned. "I don't mind waiting, and I do want to be sure that poor boy is in no real danger."

Lanyard offered Eve a hand, but the door he unlatched was one that admitted not to the car but to the front seat of the driver's right.

"Quick!" he urged in an undertone, and when Eve was in place doubled round to the other side of the brougham.

But the manager was not napping. "Here now!" he remonstrated, jolted out of his vocational urbanity, and came running back--"thought you said you couldn't--"

The moonlight silvered something In his hand which might or might not have been the darkened torch, and which Lanyard could not afford to give the benefit of the doubt. Standing on the running-board, without the smallest compunction he planted a foot in the midriff of the man so forcibly that the latter dropped whatever it was he had been holding and, with a yelp, doubled up.

Immediately settling into place behind the wheel, Lanyard released the emergency brake, with the result that the brougham, standing on a slight down-grade, began to move of its own weight even before he could locate the starting pedal. Muttering a prayer of thankfulness, he meshed the gears in third and swung the car into the down-hill road. At the same time the two who had been carrying the chauffeur let their senseless burden drop and started in pursuit. One tripped over some inequality in the ground and plunged to his knees. The other gained the running-board in a bound and aimed a blow at Lanyard's head. It went wide, and Lanyard's fist glanced upon the fellow's jaw with sufficient weight to dislodge him. Beating the air with frantic arms, he disappeared.

Fumbling for the switch with one hand, with the other Lanyard steered for the maw of the road through the woods. For one more instant the inn, painted with pale lunar phosphorescence, stood out in bold relief against its background of blurred forest, while with the tail of his eye Lanyard saw its front door of a sudden release a stream of saffron light. Somebody shouted in profane astonishment, somebody stumbled out upon the veranda and pelted toward the parking space. Then, between two heartbeats, Lanyard solved the secret of headlights and ignition, and the brougham, momentum sharply hastened, swept on into the pillared tunnel through the pines.

At first, hands that hadn't grasped a wheel in years had all they could do to hold the lurching fabric to a sharply declivitous and twisting path. Then the grade grew more moderate, the way less tortuous, and the car, obedient to its brakes, slipped gently past the fiery sign and turned its nose southwards on the highway.

"Well done!" Eve applauded--"Oh, well done!"

"Wait!" Lanyard prayed, with the man in mind who had sprinted from the lighted doorway toward the other car--"physical fact to the contrary notwithstanding, we're not out of the woods yet."

His toe found the accelerator pedal, the motor responded with a mettlesome snort and a drumming drone that waxed apace, the car clove the night like a frightened cat . . .

After a mile or so of fast going on a road whose wendings required for safe navigation a sure hand and eye, Lanyard felt confidence confirmed in his ability to handle the brougham with fair skill and extract from its motor the best it had to give. And when, before long, a rarely long stretch of straight road made a fair trial feasible, he coaxed the speedometer by degrees up to, then past the mark 50, without feeling that he was tempting fate.

Toward the end of that dash, Eve, who had been keeping an eye on the road astern, reported it bare of pursuing headlights.

"Do you mean to try for that railroad?"

"No--not now, not since things have turned out as they have."

"I am glad," she told him coolly. "This night is too lovely to be spoiled by travelling in a stuffy train."

"Is it?" he queried in grim humour.

"Do you not find it so, my Michael?"

"I find it damnably dangerous."

"And I find it, danger and all, divine."

But Lanyard drove in an obsession of fatality . . . The road, a river of oxidized silver threading an upland world of purples and blacks in blended masses and ever and again opening up vistas of long valleys filled with mist like streams of milk, was a gauntlet of deadly perils. In the blue bowl of the sky it bleached the misshapen moon like a grinning devil-mask swung from side to side of the devious way. The vast stillness that dwelt upon the world beneath had a brooding effect as of beauty holding its breath in dread. Through that somehow abnormal hush the swaying bulk of the brougham bored like something wild of eye and mad with fear. The wind its flight created had an insane whine, and the incessant drum of its exhaust, echoing from hard smooth surfaces, was re-echoed by hills and woods and fields with a rumour as of tom-toms thrumming a bacchanal of death . . .

But to the woman who loved Lanyard it was all divine . . .

Summing up another survey of the road behind, she declared: "There is nothing. You have outwitted and distanced them."

"Have I?"

"Is there more to fear?"

"But everything."

"Even an open road?"

"Who can say what may lie in wait for us round the next bend?"

"What does it matter, so we go to meet it together?"

Neither daring to take his eyes from the streaming road nor knowing how to answer her, Lanyard gave only a groan.

"I fear nothing but to be parted from you. Promise we shall never part."

He could not promise . . .

"Michael!" the heartbreaking voice at his shoulder insisted--"why don't you answer me? Surely you can't still be thinking I will ever let you go?"

He contrived to say, almost explosively: "But I must."

"Ah, no, no! Michael, you couldn't hurt me so."

"Is not tonight enough to prove to you no man who loved you truly could consent to expose you to such a life? It is my fate to love you too well . . ."

What the woman said to that was lost in the blast of a tyre blown out on one of the front wheels. An instantaneous swerve toward a ditch by the roadside all but wrenched the wheel out of control and resulted in a wreck. As it was, frantic work averted that disaster by the slenderest of scrapes. With locked brakes the brougham skidded drunkenly and rolled to a halt broadside to a bluff over across from the ditch.

With amazing self-command, Lanyard suffered never a syllable of a seething vocabulary to escape his lips as he unlatched the door and leaped down. An instant later Eve on her side alighted and came round to join him. Together, they contemplated in silence the ruptured tyre and the two good spares locked in their rack--and the key in the pocket of a chauffeur sleeping off his drink in the Inn of the Green Woods, fifteen miles or more away!

From contemplation of this bad business, Lanyard turned to consider their position, and found it equally bad. The car stood, as far off the road as it could be, but nevertheless somewhat blocking its narrow width, on the waist of an S bend, with a hillside blinding the approach on one hand, a wilderness of young forest on the other. And even as the thought formed that it would be well to move on at once, headlights illuminated the curve ahead, then swung into view, and a car coming from the direction of New York bore down at nothing less than forty miles an hour.

Lanyard had barely time to catch Eve by the arm and drag her out of its path, a maneuvre which took them both to the side of the road bordered by the ditch. Simultaneously the bellow of an unmuffled exhaust told of the approach of another car from the opposite direction. When Lanyard first saw it, it was less than a hundred feet distant, moving at a terrific rate--and running without lights!

So that was why Eve had been able to detect no sign of pursuit . . .

The first car, forced by the stationary brougham to sheer to the wrong side of the road, loosed upon the night a blare of frenzy. Through this penetrated Eve's wail of terror. Lanyard swung to her like a maniac, seized the woman and, exerting every ounce of his strength, caught her up bodily and flung her off the road, into the ditch.

Too late to save himself . . .

The moon, reeling in its blanched blue field, was a scimitar of white flame. It swooped down through the firmament as might the wrath of God. The world like a bomb exploded beneath his feet; a quivering mass of agony, he was hurled far and far into an everlasting abyss of night impenetrable . . .

XV

Pain that threatened to rend his head asunder played before his eyes in blinding flashes, like ragged lightning, crimson and soundless--or the man was deaf to its thunders whose every other faculty was numb in subjugation to sense of pain intolerable, who was faint with pain, sick with it . . .

Hands clipped his body under the arm-pits, a thin, far rumour of articulate noise pronounced some stupidity which he made no attempt either to comprehend or to acknowledge. Arms wrapped round him from behind tightened, heaved, he was set upon unsteady feet, then half-carried, half-guided to an angle of some sort and propped up in it, with arms resting on two broad, plane surfaces, elbow-high. A rudely genial voice volunteered: "There you are, sir, and no 'arm done. Now you'll do nicely."

Lanyard wanted to tell the speaker he was a fool, it was impossible for one to have come through that motor wreck, impossible for any mortal to have been caught between two heavy cars meeting head-on in headlong flight, without incurring desperate if not deadly injuries. How reasonable and true that was this pain proved that racked him from head to foot, but more particularly his head, and made him want to retch, pain so acute it paralyzed the very instinct to complain . . .

His tongue temporarily refusing its office, Lanyard contented himself with a grunt through locked teeth; and because his knees were as water, hung on with both hands to the rounded surfaces that met behind his back to form the angle, till presently the pain grew less, the feeling of nausea passed off, his senses renewed contact with their environment and flashed strange tidings to his brain in respect of conditions they could neither grasp nor accomodate themselves to.

Some moron (he inferred) had taken to amusing himself with the headlights of one of the motor-cars, switching them on and off while they stared Lanyard full in the face at such close range that he was conscious of the heat they generated between the spaces of darkness. Furthermore, a storm of sorts had evidently sprung up out of that clear midnight sky: he remembered well how cloudless it had been just before the collision, how bright with mockery the gibbous moon; the boding calm which had bound everything in Nature he recalled distinctly, too. But now a great wind was shrieking like a warlock, gusts of warm rain spattered the flesh of his face, the very earth beneath him was convulsed, bucking and rocking like a wild mustang, and the keen, sweet smell of the inland night had given place to the salt breath of the sea . . .

Lanyard opened his eyes, only to close them tight the next instant and shut out what indisputably was the delusion of a mind deranged; yet a vision so vividly coloured and in every particular so circumstantial, stamping the retinas with an impression of so much brilliance and animation, that he could not refrain from looking again, if only to convince himself of the sheer wonder of it--but half expecting his sight, on this occasion, to be greeted by another illusion and a different, if one quite as impossibly unreal.

He saw, however, precisely what he had seen, and rejected, before . . .

A length of steamer deck, looking forward from the angle in which he stood at the after end of the superstructure, with deck-chairs all folded and lashed to the inner rail and window-ports all fast; its scoured planking now blue with shadow cast by the deck overhead, now flooded with sun glare from end to end, as the vessel rolled in a rough seaway. Beyond the rail a bright blue sky without a cloud, a horizon unbroken by any loom of land, a sea of incredible ultramarine creaming under the lash of a full gale, the sleek hollow bellies of its charging waves a-dazzle with the sun's spilled gold, its flying spindrift sprays of diamond-dust . . .

Forward, opposite the entrance to the saloon companionway, a girl clinging to the rail, bobbed blonde hair fluffed out by the wind, filmy yellow sweater and brief sports-skirt of white silk moulded to her slender young contours, intent eyes turned aft to Lanyard. In the dark mouth of the door a cluster of men and women, likewise staring. Nearer and a little to the left a lithe young man of British stamp, wearing a look of cheerful concern and the white-duck jacket of a steward, with long legs well apart balancing to the motion of the vessel while he watched Lanyard.

Finding himself the target of the latter's bemused regard, the man grinned broadly. "Nahsty tumble, sir," he cried in the penetrating pitch of a seafarer schooled to talk against the wind, and with an inflexion that suited precisely his racial type--"and a wicked crack it did give your 'ead and no mistike. Like a pistol shot it sounded. Thought for a minute it 'ad done you in for fair, but it didn't take long to mike sure you 'adn't broke' no bones. 'Ow do you feel now, sir?"

"What . . ." Lanyard's voice in his hearing was attenuated and strange. His tongue felt unwieldy. "What? . . ."

The figure in the white jacket waved a hand toward the foot of a ladder nearby. "You was comin' down from the bridge-deck, sir--don't you remember?--when a sea 'it us and knocked you clean off your pins. 'Ad to 'ang on to the rail to keep from bein' knocked abaht myself."

Lanyard replied with a sign of exorcism, releasing the rail with one hand to describe it. At the same time he shut his eyes fast and made a determined effort to shake off the bondage of this fantastic dream. But when he looked again nothing had changed, the hallucination remained as definite and bright as ever, perfect to its last least detail.

"Feel a bit shiken up, don't you, sir?" The steward moved to Lanyard's side. "I don't wonder. But if you'll just tike it easy a while, I think you'll find you aren't much 'urt."

Dumbfoundered, Lanyard wagged his head, bringing about recurrence of its splitting ache, which none the less led to the discovery that, barring a bruised shoulder and elbow, a well-battered head was all his damage. But this too he laid to delirium, as being a manifest physical inconsistency in one who had just taken part in a motor smash of the first magnitude. And wondering if exertion of will would bring this lunatic scramble of a world round to its right guise of reality, he fixed the steward with an exacting eye, the eye of a man who had made up his mind to stand for no more nonsense.

"Madame de Montalais?" he enunciated distinctly--"is she all right?"

But demonstrably this wasn't the requisite magic formula, enunciation of it failed to do away with those unbelievably factual circumstances of a summer gale at sea and set up in their stead an autumnal nocturne of moonlit hills and vales. Its only effect, indeed, was to light a flicker of real solicitude in the steward's eyes.

"Beg pardon, sir: what was that you said?"

"The lady with me--was she injured?"

"But there wasn't any lidy with you, sir--you was quite alone, arf w'y down the ladder, when the sea 'it us. I 'appened to be watchin' you, sir, though not 'andy enough to save you the fall, I'm sorry to s'y. But per'aps you feel strong enough now to let me 'elp you to your berth and fetch the doctor to give you a look over."

Lanyard in despair resigned himself: the world had gone stark staring mad and he was the maddest madman in it. Weakly he suffered the steward to take his arm in a respectful yet persuasive hold.

"Let me see, now, sir: what was the number of your stiteroom?"

In unbounded amazement Lanyard heard himself reply without any hesitation: "Thirty-nine."

"Quite so, sir. This w'y, if you please, and lean on me as 'eavy as you like: I won't let you tike another tumble, never fear."

A door in the after wall of the superstructure admitted to a passage by way of which it was only a step to Stateroom 39. Here the steward considerately removed the passenger's coat and shoes and made him comfortable in a berth wedged with pillows, then hurried away to call the ship's surgeon, leaving Lanyard to nurse a temper of dull indignation, satisfied that he was being somehow sold by his ingrate senses, but quite incapable of understanding how. His head still hurt like hell--there was a cruel swelling above one ear--and seemed to be utterly of no service other than as a container for pain-impregnated cotton wool that stiffled every essay of his wits to seize the meaning of his present plight. After a while he gave up trying to think and lay looking round the room with resentful eyes; to move these in their orbits made them ache intolerably, but there was nothing else to do . . .

The stateroom had been designed and fitted to accomodate three people without crowding. Nevertheless it had every appearance of dedication to the uses of a single tenant. A solitary dressing-gown and one suit of pyjamas hung on hooks behind the door. One collection of shaving implements and other masculine toilet articles cluttered the shelves above the washstand. A lonely kit-bag, obviously on its first voyage out of the shop, displayed the monogram A. D. None of these was Lanyard able to identify as property of his. If you asked him, he could swear he had never laid eyes on them before. But neither was he on terms of visual acquaintance with the coat which the steward had stripped from his shoulders and which was now oscillating like some uncouth and eccentric pendulum from a hook at the foot of the berth. A garment fashioned of the smokiest of Scotch tweed but with an incurably American accent, it gave circumstantial contradiction to the feeling that one had no business to pose as the rightful tenant of that stateroom; for quite as apparently one had had no business posing as the rightful tenant of that coat.

But the affair as a whole was past puzzling out by a head whose buzzing mocked every attempt at ordered thought; and with a sigh Lanyard gave it up for the time being, and shut his eyes to screen out refracted sun-glare wavering like a prismatic cobweb on the white paint overhead . . .

Consciousness was on the point of lapsing when the door-latch rattled and the inimitable cadences of a British public school voice hailed him with an affectation of friendliness whose falsity was more elusive, and yet somehow less successful, than it commonly is in the bedside geniality of the general practitioner.

"Ah, Mr. Duchemin! been tryin' to butt a hole through the promenade deck, have you?"