Part 13

Disguising instinctive resentment, Lanyard smiled amiably up at a new face that proved a good match for the voice, the sanguine face of a young man, cleanly razored, set with hard blue eyes and an arrogant, thin nose. "Monsieur . . ." he managed to say, rousing on an elbow; but the movement caused agony to stab through his temples again and he dropped back to his pillow, groaning.

"Bad as all that, eh?" the other commented in a tone that somehow implied he wasn't being taken in. "Well! needn't punish yourself to prove it to me: I'm not fussy about fine points of etiquette, I don't insist on everybody risin' when I come into the room. Lie still now, and let me have a look."

"You are the ship's surgeon, monsieur?" Lanyard enquired with difficulty, because his teeth were set to stifle grunts as fingers deft enough but none too gentle searched out the sore spot.

"Well: I leave it to you," their owner replied in ironic patience . . . "Hmm! worse than I expected. Miracle you got off without a fracture. . . . Do you think I've been pullin' your leg about my ratin' these last few nights? Or d'you mean my luck at Bridge qualifies me in your estimation as a card-sharp first and a sea-goin' sawbones last? . . . Hold still, now, and don't try to answer: I'm goin' to sponge this noble contusion and decorate it with a becoming patch."

An interlude of intense discomfort came to an end with the announcement: "You'll do now, I fancy; but if I were you, my friend, I'd take it easy and watch my step till this hatful of wind blows itself out--which it ought to before long, goin' by the glass."

"Many thanks, monsieur . . ."

A rising inflection made that last word an open bid for the name of the person addressed; who, however, chose coolly to ignore it.

"And now, if you don't mind ownin' up," he said with a clearer note of sarcasm: "What the devil are you drivin' at? _Am_ I the ship's surgeon! Tryin' to make out a triflin' crack on the head has knocked you silly? Because it's no go, if you are: I may be the demon Bridge player of this vessel, but I'm a good enough medico besides to know that, barrin' a beautiful bump, you're as right as rain."

It was anything but easy to school oneself to stomach such superciliousness; but it had to be done if one hoped to learn the reason for it, or the inwardness of those several other matters which urgently required elucidation.

"If you would be so good as to sit down one moment, monsieur," Lanyard civilly suggested--"assuming, of course, your valuable time permits--I would be most grateful for your professional advice."

"Right-O!" The surgeon drew up a chair and settled himself in it with the manner of a man who didn't mind humouring a persistent child this once. "What's on your mind, Mr. Duchemin--more than your casualty?"

"To begin with, I should be glad to know the time of day."

"Why not consult that pretty trinket strapped on your wrist? Or was that, too, cracked by your fall?"

Indignation failed while Lanyard studied the time-piece to which his attention had thus delicately been drawn, with the more interest because, to the best of his knowledge, the watch, unmistakably a fine one, was none of his.

Through the concert of the gale three double strokes of resonant bell-metal sang and were followed by a single. "Seven bells of the forenoon watch," the surgeon interpreted of his own accord. "Does yours agree?"

"Precisely . . . Monsieur," Lanyard said earnestly: "I should like very much to consult you concerning myself in strict confidence . . ."

"Let the oath of Hippocrates comfort your misgivin's--and fire away."

"Then let me tell you something." After a brief pause Lanyard announced with a deal of true diffidence: "It is now some twelve hours, or little more, by my best reckoning, since I figured unfortunately in a motor-car accident on the Armonk Road, in Westchester County, thirty miles or so north of the city of New York."

"That's interestin'," the Englishman commented with a skeptical twitch of lips--"especially in view of the fact that we are now three days' run south of New York."

"Monsieur is not making fun of me?"

"No, thanks: that sort of thing doesn't amuse me as it does you."

"But I am entirely serious, I assure you."

"Haven't the slightest doubt of it. All the same I'd give somethin' to know what it is you're so serious about."

"Be patient with me another minute, monsieur," Lanyard devoted at least that much time to anxious thought. "Yesterday," he at length submitted, "was the third of November, Nineteen Twenty-two."

"You're going to have trouble, my friend, makin' that statement jibe with the log, which calls today the fifth of June, Twenty-three."

Lanyard lifted a hand to beg for grace, and did the sum in his head while the Englishman sat watching him with what all but insufferably seemed to be contemptuous amusement. But one couldn't afford to resent that yet.

A double line deepened between Lanyard's brows. His first guess had evidently been a poor one: the elapsed time proved that Morphew hadn't picked him up unconscious after the crash, hurried him in that condition back to New York, and caused him forthwith to be shanghaied.

"Seven months to be accounted for," he mused aloud--"seven months lost out of life!"

"Oh?"

None but a Briton could have infused so much cynic incredulity into one lonely syllable. In spite of himself Lanyard flushed.

"Oblige me, monsieur, by believing that, between losing consciousness in that motor crash of November fifth, and regaining it after being thrown from a ladder half an hour ago, I remember nothing."

"Astonishin'."

"Even so, not--I believe--a case without precedent."

"Quite so."

"One is misled, then"--Lanyard's tone was as cold as his eye--"by an impression you give--no doubt without intention--of disbelief in my sincerity?"

The eyes of the Englishman winced, he coloured in his turn, but with anger more than with mortification to find his unmannerly attitude so directly challenged.

"My dear Mr. Duchemin!" he uncomfortably protested: "When you consider that one has seen a good deal of you in the last few days, talked with you, dined with you, played cards with you for hours at a time, and found you always a man of entirely collected mind, no different from the man one is conversin' with at this moment, perhaps you'll agree there's some excuse for one's bogglin' at a pretty tall tale on the face of it."

"It makes me very happy to accept your apology, monsieur." Gravely Lanyard watched the face of the surgeon burn a deeper red. "And on my part I am truly sorry to think I have put too great a strain upon your charity. Yet--you must let me assure you again--what I am telling you is the simple truth about conditions which I find profoundly disconcerting. I am afraid I shall need time to get my bearings, and I would be vastly grateful for assistance."

"By all means," the other said in a stifled voice--"'m sure."

"It would help measurably to know what vessel this is . . ."

"The Port Royal--Monon Line."

"Ah! a fruit steamer, I take it?"

"Right: you took it for Nassau, Havana, Kingston, the Canal Zone, and Costa Rica."

"I think you said we were three days out? Then we ought to be not far from Nassau now."

"This gale has held us back a bit, but we ought to make port by daybreak tomorrow."

"One can send a cable there, of course . . ."

Either a mistrustful mind deceived Lanyard or the Englishman wasn't happy in his efforts to disguise a thrill of keen inquisitiveness.

"Of course; but why wait? Mean to say, there's our wireless at your service if you're keen to get some message off your mind, Mr. Duchemin."

"How stupid of me to forget." Lanyard's smile could be as charming as he chose, and he chose it to be entirely so just then, intent as he was on disarming one whom he had reason enough to think curiously hostile to him, in whose manner it was impossible to ignore an undercurrent of inexplicable animus. "But then you will be indulgent, remembering the circumstances. One question more, Doctor--?"

"Bright!" that person snapped curtly.

"Thank you. I am wondering . . . No doubt you saw me when or soon after I embarked?"

"Happened to be standin' by the head of the gang-plank when you came aboard, in point of fact."

"If you could tell me whether that event was marked by any unusual circumstances, such as might possibly shed light upon the riddle of why I came aboard at all--?"

"Sorry," the surgeon answered; "but you seemed to be quite peaceable."

"Nothing to lead you to suspect I wasn't in full command of my faculties?"

"Rather not."

"I was--alone?"

"Quite."

"Nobody to bid me bon voyage?"

"At least, I saw nobody."

"And my subsequent behaviour has been, I trust, discreet?"

"To the letter of the word. If you mean your smokin'-room habits, they've been above reproach--more than one can say of most Americans since the 'greatest country on God's green footstool' dried up."

"But I am not an American--"

"Never thought you were, Mr. Duchemin." Dr. Bright's sprained self-esteem was now convalescent. The eyes he bent on Lanyard were lambent with secret satisfaction, as if he knew something that Lanyard didn't, and found this proof of his superiority gratifying. "There's your name, for one thing. And then no American ever spoke such French. Saw enough service in France to know the true Parisian accent when I hear it."

"Indeed? So I have found occasion to speak French about this vessel?"

"Rather. You've been at it daily, and a good part of every day, with the attentions you've been payin' the pretty lady."

Lanyard's eyebrows went up alertly, and he didn't count the twinge that form of comment cost him. "'Pretty lady'?"

"Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes. At all events, that's her style on the passenger-list. Most fascinatin' and highly finished piece of work this tub has ever carried."

"Good to look at, you mean, monsieur?"

"Good to look at is a feeble way to put it. Every unattached male on board is balmy about her; and the attached ones aren't what one might call unconscious when she's in sight. And every man-jack loathes you like fun because the pretty lady has a hospitable eye and you haven't given anybody else a ghost of a look in."

"Beautiful and--shall we say--not ingénue, eh?"

"Look here," the Englishman knowingly laughed: "if you keep on guessin' so closely, I'll have to suspect your memory isn't as poor as you claim."

"It is true," Lanyard admitted with an air of perplexity, "that name, de Lorgnes, seems not unfamiliar. One wonders where, or when, one has heard it before, if possibly this lady is some friend of younger years . . ."

"Not this Comtesse de Lorgnes," Dr. Bright asserted in another turn of impertinence--"that is, unless the two of you have been playin' a game with me."

"Impossible, monsieur."

"Then you'll have to take my word for it--just as I took yours--you never met the lady before the first day out, when I had the honour of presentin' you--at her request."

"It must be an echo," Lanyard speculated--"that name--from some forgotten yesterday. I recall now--it is odd, I think--the number of this stateroom fell spontaneously from my lips when the steward who picked me up asked for it."

"Not really?" The surgeon had the laugh of one hugely entertained. "There's another point you've overlooked, I fancy--your name, Duchemin. Feel quite at home with that, don't you? You answer to it readily enough."

"But naturally," Lanyard returned with the utmost naïveté. "Why should I not, seeing it is my name?"

"Well! there you are. Cases of submerged identity always go by another name while their first personality is under the cloud. But you came aboard as André Duchemin, you admit you're André Duchemin now; and I daresay you were André Duchemin at the time of that motor crash, what?"

"Monsieur is quite right."

"That settles it, as I see it." Conceit restored encouraged anew an attitude of exasperating patronage. "You'll find it will all come back to you, everythin' you've forgotten, bit by bit as the shock of your tumble wears off. It would be a damned interestin' thing from a professional view point if this should turn out to be a true case of mislaid identity; but I'm afraid you needn't hope for that."

"Hope, monsieur!"

"Mean to say, you'll find it's somethin' much more simple and elementary with you. You've had a bad fall and a rap on the head that recalls a similar mishap several months old, and for the time being everythin' that happened in between seems to have been wiped out. But I'll go bail it will all come back to you inside of twenty-four hours."

"Why twenty-four hours?"

"As soon as you've had a sound sleep, that is--same thing. Let me send you in a powder, and by dinner time you'll be ready to apologize for tryin' to take advantage of my innocent and trustin' nature. What do you say?"

Lanyard said that monsieur was too kind . . . "But a favour, my dear doctor," he added with a tolerably crest-fallen air. "We won't find it necessary to tell our fellow passengers what a sorry fraud I am, will we?"

"Oh! I won't be the one to expose you," Bright replied with vast pleasure in his ambiguity. "And you won't have a chance to tell on yourself before the sea goes down a bit. Meanin' to say, madam la comtesse is a poor sailor. But, you see, your anxiety not to be made a laughin' stock to her proves that your memory is improvin' every minute."

"One wastes time trying to deceive you," Lanyard admitted with humility. "But there is one thing, I believe, that might aid my recovery: a look at the passenger-list. Do you think you could by any chance find a copy for me?"

Contentment with his great cunning sustained this shock with poor grace: the surgeon frowned a frown of impatience mixed with mystification. Was it possible this chap still imagined he had found an easy dupe? However, one had to be diplomatic . . .

"Oh! very well," the surgeon said shortly. "I'll have the steward bring you one with your sleeping powder. Though I must admit I don't quite see . . ."

Lanyard forgot to offer any explanation; and when the passenger-list had duly been delivered and scrutinized was obliged to confess that he had exerted himself to no purpose. "Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes" was much too transparent an incognita for Liane Delorme; and the discovery that she was a fellow passenger had been excuse enough for the surmise that others of their common acquaintance might be keeping them company en voyage. But if such were the case, the printed list gave no clue, no other name that figured in it proved in the least degree stimulating, none suggested a likely alias for Morphew, or Pagan, or Mallison, or . . . Mrs. Folliott McFee . . .

Neither did anything reward his eager search for a name whose music was like an old song singing in one's heart.

The list slipped from his grasp and joined the surgeon's rejected sleeping powder on the floor. Lanyard lay with a face that mirrored pain more real than that which racked his head, blindly studying the play of rainbow gleams upon the painted ceiling.

Seven months lost beyond recall . . .

And Eve?

XVI

Within the hour thought flagged for sheer weariness of beating to no purpose against that wall of oblivion whose featureless façade sequestered seven mortal months of forfeit yesterdays, nerves grew weary of the zooming wind, incessant slap and slash of broken water streaming down the side, the tuneless crooning of the engines: Lanyard slept.

A noise of light knuckles on the door awakened him when the afternoon was old and wind and sea had both abated, as the muting of their deep diapason affirmed and that horizontal beam of rusty light which bored in through the port to flail with slow and steady strokes the dusk whose blue it strengthened.

Without waiting to receive permission, Liane Delorme turned the knob and entered.

Most adept of actresses, she carried herself now with an air of delicate audacity that would have graced a virtuous lady of a sudden turned so venturesome as to call on a man in his lodgings alone. Almost anybody else it would surely have taken in, even Lanyard found himself for a moment at loss to account for this revolutionary innovation, a change of rôle made the more confounding by the fact that Liane had gone to the length of dressing it with garments of a semi-negligée sort whose circumspection, though they were dainty and costly enough to delight any woman, was hardly akin to the spirit that sported them.

But one glimpse of Lanyard's eyes, one flash of their reclaimed intelligence, made plain the poverty of objective artifice as an aid to Liane's intentions. It indeed did more, it struck pale glints of panic from her own eyes, or something very like that emotion in the sight of one who knew as yet no reason why it should discountenance the woman to find him, whom she had sought of her own accord, awake and in his proper mind.

She held a dead wait with a hand on the door-knob behind her, the other unconsciously plucking at lace which, in this novel modesty of raiment, clothed chastely that bosom of fine fullness--dusky eyes quick in a face that wanted a shade or so of its habitually high illumination, lips a trace apart as if with a cry unsounded.

But the pause imposed by her illegible emotion was brief of life, with her next breath Liane recollected herself and, uttering a low sound of compassion crossed the room to kneel by the head of the berth.

"No, no, my friend!" She spoke in French, her arms lightly forced back to the pillow the shoulders which Lanyard was lifting. "Rest tranquil--with that poor head! Thou dost still suffer greatly, my old one?"

Lanyard mumbled a dashed negative with lips that were muffled, before he could object, by lips ardent and tender, whose clinging intimacy he escaped at length only by moving his head aside.

Happily, that movement excited only a grumble of pain, entirely bearable; he was able to muster a smile by way of redressing the rebuff.

"I say!" he remonstrated in his most British English--"we are getting on, rather--aren't we?"

The woman drew back sharply and, half-kneeling, half resting on her heels, showed a face sad with reproach. "Hast thou forgotten, then?"

"More than I guessed, going on this bit of business, my dear." Lanyard was firm in his stand against French; it was easier to be unsentimental in sound Anglo-Saxon, a tongue that enabled one to avoid using the too personal "thou" without administering an affront unpardonable. "What bothers me most is this," he proceeded in querulous vein, a self-conscious smile accounting for his neglect of the stricken eyes staring into his: "I've remembered and forgotten much too much, all at once. It's damned discouraging--you may be interested to know--to wake up from what amounted to a sound long nap and find that seven perfectly useful months have been stolen while one slept."

"It is true, then, what I feared!"

"Afraid it is, Liane, if what you feared was that a blow on the head had bumped my right mind back to its throne."

Slowly and with a bitter smile the woman repeated the English phrase: "'A blow on the head!' . . ."

"That's what did the trick for me--and I don't mind telling you it hurt like the devil."

"But what of the blow to my heart?" Her closed hand smote Liane's breast. "You complain with reason of having been robbed of seven months of memory; but what of me, who stand to lose seven months of memories?"

"Pardon?" Lanyard queried, politely dense.

"You loved me well in that time while you were your old, true self."

"Loved you, Liane? And forgot! Ah, no! you ask me to believe too much."

"You jest--and my heart is breaking!"

"It's no joke to forget an experience like that, something which one man in a million would be lucky to know once in his lifetime."

"One in a million!"

"I beg your pardon: I was counting in your unsuccessful lovers as well."

"But this is too much!"

With an abrupt movement the woman started up, to pause with face averted and hands fast laced. As promptly Lanyard tumbled out of the berth.

"Forgive me, Liane," he said contritely. "I daresay I am a bit light-headed, it would be surprising if I weren't, considering that I've experienced something of a shock today, and not by any means a physical shock merely--and am still shaken from it. You can hardly demand rational behaviour of a revenant lately spewed back into life by a psychic earthquake. That it was a strictly private earthquake doesn't make its after-effects any the less unsettling."

"True: it is you rather who have me to forgive." With a spontaneous generosity that shamed him, Liane swung back to Lanyard and caught both his hands to her bosom. "In my sadness and pain I forget you cannot understand . . ."

"Then make me understand. I've no one else to look to--and it would be unkindness to leave me in the dark."

"But give me time to consider . . ." She let go his hands and sank into the room's one chair. "It is going to hurt me to tell you, Michael, even more than it will hurt you."

"And how is that?"

"Because, I think" . . . She studied him a while with troubled gaze . . . "I think you have gone back to the ways of thought that were yours seven months ago."

"And what is so deplorable in that? Ways of thought about what?"

The woman leaned forward to bend her head to his in confidence, but gave a slight start instead and drew back with a veering glance, as if disturbed by some noise unheard by Lanyard, then laid a finger to her lips, sprang up lightly, and went to the port to look out. From this, in agreeable disappointment, she crossed back to the door, inclining to it an attentive ear for some seconds before opening it furtively to peer out, and concluding the performance with an expression of alarms allayed.

"I was mistaken," she announced, shooting the bolt--"there is nobody."

"Madame la comtesse was expecting--?"

She gave her head a shake of irritation excited by his levity, and without warning whipped from the folds of her négligé an automatic pistol, which she pressed into Lanyard's hand regardless of his efforts to refuse it.

"No, take it--take it, I say, while there is time."

"But what the deuce--!"

"Take it, I tell you--you may need it soon." And then as Lanyard humoured her for the sake of peace, she proceeded with every appearance of offering a complete explanation: "That dolt of a doctor told me you were unarmed."

"Bright? But how does he know? And why should he care?"

"Your effects were searched this morning, while you were at breakfast, and the steward who picked you up after your fall took the trouble to find out that you had no weapon about you."

"Thoughtful of all hands, I'm sure!" Lanyard muttered in amazement. "But do tell me what I have done to deserve so much respect?"

"Presently," Liane promised in a hushed voice. She moved nearer and held out an open hand. "No!" she insisted, and brusquely brushed aside the pistol when he tried to return it--"the necklace! Give me that now--we can come to an explanation later. Let me hide it away before they come to put you under arrest--they may, at any moment."

"Indeed?" Impatience with all this, as it seemed, determined effort to mystify him to no end, resulted in the pistol being flirted into the berth, and peremptory imprisonment of the woman's wrists. "Now!" Lanyard demanded--"come to your senses, Liane, be intelligible if you can. Why should I be in danger of arrest? What is this necklace you are raving about?"

"Give it to me first--"

"I know nothing of any necklace."

"You have forgotten; nevertheless, you have it. You told me you would never let it leave your person, you must have it hidden somewhere about you now. Find and give it to me before it is too late."