Part 14

Her agitation was too truly rendered to seem put on for a purpose; and though he had not the least inkling of its cause, Lanyard reflected that in those seven months anything might have happened, the amplest reason might all too possibly exist for the distress of mind which Liane was so vividly portraying. Half-persuaded, he released her wrists and, stepping back, ran the hands of old cunning through his garments, locating every spot which in former days he had been accustomed to use as a temporary cache for purloined property--and drawing every one blank. Winding up with a shrug of fatigued incredulity: "There is nothing," he declared shortly. "Now be so kind--"

"Nothing!" Consternation rang in that guarded cry. "They must have it already, then, they must have searched you and found it while you slept! The doctor spoke of having given you a sleeping powder--enough, he said, to keep you quiet till morning."

"I didn't take it."

"They must have thought you had, or you wouldn't have been left unwatched, I would have found it impossible to see you. You have been asleep?" Lanyard nodded. "You have slept all afternoon, and soundly?" He confessed that he had. Liane subsided, crushed by despair, upon the cushioned transom beneath the port. "It was the same to them as if you had taken their drug--the opportunity they needed. Now they have found the necklace--you are lost!"

"But I have often been 'lost' in my life," Lanyard retorted, unmoved more than by impatience with this everlasting beating about the bush. "And at present I feel less lost than quite newly found, and so prefer to think myself--until, at least, you consent to become more coherent."

Beneath the sheer silk perfect shoulders stirred disconsolately. "There is nothing one can do now--one can only wait."

"Let me recommend you to study myself, then: to my mind, a perfect pattern of patience."

Lanyard offered the cigarettes in an unfamiliar case which he had found in his pockets, and when they were disdained philosophically helped himself, while the woman sat glowering at the door as if to wither the object of her spite, wherever he might lurk beyond those walls.

"That animal of a doctor! how dare he be so sly with me and at the same time such an imbecile?"

"Oh, very well!" said Lanyard, settling into the chair: "by all means let us begin with that good Dr. Bright. What has he done?"

"He came to me an hour ago, Michael, to put me on my guard against you."

"Considerate beggar. But do go on . . ."

"The idiot would like to make love to me. He thought he might worm into my good graces by warning me to keep an eye on my jewels, since it has transpired that you were the Lone Wolf."

"And since when has that transpired--?"

"He told me that the captain had been advised by wireless, early this morning, to keep you under observation until we arrive at Nassau; where officers will board the vessel with a warrant for your arrest."

"Something to do with the missing necklace, of course."

"You're wanted in New York for stealing it. Your last great coup, my friend--and you bungled it!"

"I did? Then I trust devoutly you are right, it was my last. From what you hint, Liane, I would seem to have been leading a busy life of late. If you would only be a little less vague . . ."

"If I hesitate to speak plainly," the woman gently reminded him, "it is because you are dear to me, Michael, I find it not easy to say anything that will give you pain."

"Console yourself by observing that I am prepared. You have told me so much already, a word here and a hint there, I could almost foretell this revelation you shrink from making." Lanyard shot a quizzical grin through cigarette smoke. "I am accused of stealing a valuable necklace and making such an unworkman-like job of it that I had to fly the States incognito. It would further appear that I wasn't very clever about making my escape, since my presence aboard this vessel is known and steps have been taken by the authorities to have me detained at her first port of call. For all of which, I presume, I have to thank that persevering hater of mine--and friend of yours--Morphew. What a memory the man must have! what a genius for bearing a grudge!"

"All that is good guesswork and substantially true"--the woman nodded regretfully--"all but your suspicions of Morphew. There you are wrong: he had nothing to do with this affair, Michael, it is all of your own contriving."

"You tell me that," Lanyard laughed--"and in the same breath that I am 'dear' to you! It's no good, Liane: you can't be Morphew's friend and mine."

"I tell you nothing but what of a certainty and my own knowledge I know. Morphew is nothing to me, you are everything; notwithstanding, your suspicions do him an injustice--he would have saved you in New York had you permitted. But you wouldn't listen to me when I prayed you to accept his offer of intervention . . ."

"That at least one finds easy to believe."

"And even now he would be your friend--yours as well as mine--if you would consent: Morphew stands prepared to save you yet, if we can find a way to slip through their fingers who await you at Nassau."

"But tell me how . . ."

"The last thing before we sailed, Morphew sent Peter Pagan to promise me, if I could persuade you to go ashore at Nassau and apply to his factors there, the agents who have charge of his bootlegging interests in the Bahamas, he would have us both conveyed secretly to France, in his own yacht."

"Truly?" Lanyard laughed again, flipped his cigarette through the port, and sat up. "How charming of the man--but how strange! Who would ever suspect that rude and unlovely exterior disguised so much goodness and simplicity of heart?"

"You laugh because you do not trust me," Liane sullenly complained. "I have for months devoted myself to you--this is my reward!"

"Prove me ungrateful, my dear," Lanyard lightly offered--"prove me skeptical without sound cause and provocation--and you can ask nothing of me that I will refuse you in testimony to my penitence."

A stare of new intensity enveloped him. He saw her countenance overcast with petulance, an odd frame for eyes of singular wistfulness.

"You are wrong to tempt me with such a promise . . ."

"Why?" Lanyard parried. "Are you afraid of the test? or that I won't make good my word?"

"What makes me hesitate is fear lest you try to make your word good against your will. It's your love I want, Michael, not your duty--another name for hatred!"

"Do you truly believe you'd find me so contemptible, Liane? You should know me better than that."

"I know men better than you do, my dear friend; and when all's said, I know, you are but little different from any other; only, it is my lot to see you different . . ."

"Believe me," Lanyard began in some constraint, "I am not insensible--"

"No! say nothing now. When you have heard me out it shall be for you to say then whether or not I deserve better than mockery from you. But I prophesy you will end by forgetting the fine promise you have just now made . . ."

Impressed against his bias, Lanyard gave a nod and nothing more; and then, seeing that she still faltered as if distressed by his direct attention, he crossed to the port and stood with his lean, worn face ruddled by the sun's last rays.

It was going down in a flaming welter of rose and gold beyond a violet smudge to starboard, a blind loom of land at a distance difficult to guess, because of the glare, though its relative nearness was manifest in the moderate sea that was running in its lee, all that was left to tell of that morning's fury; for while Lanyard looked, a small schooner swam astern, midway between the steamer and that dim shore, with slatting sails all black against the glare that burned the waters . . .

"Proceed, then," Lanyard prompted at length, watching the sun dip and vanish.

The woman's voice responded in a weary key from out the shadow at his elbow: "First of all, you must know you were mistaken about Mallison. He was a wretch, I don't dispute, capable of any infamy you please; but it was not he who made away with Folly's emeralds."

"You say that, no doubt, because he contrived to establish some sort of an alibi that resulted in his acquittal."

"He was never tried, he was granted liberty under bail and disappeared."

"And you reckon that proof of his innocence? Or is one to understand you absolve the fellow on Morphew's say-so?"

"But on your own, Michael."

"Mine!"

"You can not know everything you confided to me after your accident; the many curious secrets you told me, such as that you remembered clearly having broken into Folly's and stolen her emeralds, beside yourself as you were that night with drink, and rebellious into the bargain against a social order that kept you poor and so forbade your marrying Madame de Montalais."

The brief sub-tropic twilight was ebbing fast, night was sweeping swiftly over the face of the waters to blot out the last lingering souvenir of the routed sun. Lanyard looked down as it were into a well of gloom in which a blur of spectral pallor swam, source of those accents which were enunciating proofs of an intimacy with his mind and heart that passed all believing.

"I told you that!"

A low unhappy laugh floated up to him: "But more!"

"Under what circumstances?"

"Let me go back to the beginning. . . . The night after that rencontre of yours with Mallison, Morphew dined me at the Abbaye, another of his establishments where the maître-d'hôtel happened to be a protégé of mine from Paris of pre-War days--but Morphew knew nothing about that. He had just finished telling how you had humiliated him before Folly, and was making my blood curdle with threats to be revenged--O but you were wrong to make an enemy of that one, Michael!--when he was called to the telephone. He came back grinning hideously, and said his agents reported having traced you and Madame de Montalais to the Inn of the Green Woods. You would never, Morphew boasted, return to New York the same man. I tried to wheedle him into disclosing his mind, but he was too wary, I learned nothing; and the best I could manage was to bribe my maître-d'hôtel, as soon as Morphew's back was turned again, to try to get a warning through to you by telephone. Then I made believe to be indisposed, got rid of Morphew, and engaged an automobile I had used before. . . . Never, my friend, shall I forget that ride! not even that night of our flight to Cherbourg from Paris was its equal for wildness . . . if you remember . . ."

A hand found Lanyard's in the mirk and clasped it tightly. He suffered it, replying simply: "I remember."

"Let me tell you, Michael, when we swung wide to clear your automobile by the roadside, and that other in which Morphew's people were pursuing you came hurtling toward us like a juggernaut gone mad, I did not hope to live another minute. As it turned out, my hired car came through with a crumpled fender for all damage. It was the other cannoned off and turned turtle in the ditch. The men in it escaped somehow with their lives, though they crawled back to the road too badly shaken to be dangerous. I left them trying to fit a tyre from their wrecked car to yours, and took you and Madame de Montalais back to New York with me. She had wrenched an ankle falling into the ditch when you threw her off the road, and was unable to walk; otherwise she had come to no harm. But you--it seemed a miracle you lived . . .

"You had your right arm and two ribs broken, and a great gash in your head--you'll find the scar under your hair. The surgeons said it meant concussion of the brain, you might survive but never could be your mental self again. It was two months before you were able to talk connectedly, more than a few words at a time. I took you to my apartment from the hospital, and myself nursed you through your convalescence. As it progressed, one saw that mentally as well as bodily your recovery would be complete--it was your spirit had been wounded beyond repair. All your old vivacity was gone, Michael, you never laughed; you seemed fond of having me near you, but fonder still of being solitary, sitting all alone with your black thoughts, brooding . . .

"Madame de Montalais came to see you daily. She, too, was quick to observe the change. I never knew what passed between you, naturally; but that you were neither of you happy it was easy to perceive. One day she called when I was out; I met her, leaving, as I returned--she had been weeping. She never called again. Not long after, her name appeared in the newspapers as one of the notables sailing on the Paris for France . . ."

The voice in the darkness ran out, Lanyard's hand was freed, a long pause was filled with the throbbing of the engines, the hiss and suck of water down the side, the mellow calling of the ship's bell.

In dull abstraction Lanyard counted its strokes: seven bells, half past seven o'clock.

The port, a square of ultramarine let into a blank black wall, framed a nocturne, silken swells with dusky bosoms stung by starlight, on the nearest point of land a great red constant star following the progress of the steamer with unfriendly stare, somewhat astern another of sardonic green, far ahead, low upon the horizon, a third, more volatile, winking white and white. . . . A thought like flotsam drifted with the dark tide of despond: A long swim to either light, even for a man in his prime . . .

Lanyard heard flat metallic tones pronounce: "Continue, if you please"--and realized that he had heard himself speaking.

"You never told me what had happened, but I was soon able to guess. A day or so later--I remember, it was the first day when you were permitted to walk about a bit--you opened your heart to me in a way I hadn't looked for, and made mine very sad for you. You told me how your memory of that affair at Folly's had become clear and positive, somehow, in sequence to your accident, and had satisfied you there could be no profit for any man in contending against his nature, the arbiter of his fate. Nature, you said, had formed you a thief and an enemy of society--you had grown resigned to give over struggling to be other than as you had been made. I told you, no matter what you might do, I would always be your friend--more, if you would. You were sweet to me that night, Michael, without committing yourself to definite promises; but the next day you disappeared. I was out for the afternoon, and neither of the maids saw you leave. You took nothing with you but the clothing you wore. I neither saw nor heard from you for many weeks. But New York did . . ."

Lanyard all at once swung round, caught the seated woman roughly by her shoulders, by main strength lifted her to her feet, and with hard eyes searched the face revealed by the dull blue glimmer seeping in through the port.

"Is this the truth you are telling me, Liane?"

Pliant and passive in his hands, she answered: "The whole truth, Michael."

"You swear it?"

"By the love I bear you."

With a mutter of apology he released her, and silently, like a figure of fair marble sinking into a pool of ink, the pale shade of her subsided through the shadows, lost definition, and rested as before.

"I am listening . . ."

"It didn't take the newspapers long to guess the Lone Wolf was at work again. In quick succession, Michael, you consummated a series of exploits that beggared the most lurid chapters of your old Parisian days."

"How can you say it was I?"

"You confessed to me yourself--"

"Be careful, Liane!"

"I tell you only the truth as I had it from your own lips. If you are loath to hear . . ."

"Forgive me."

"You came to me in my apartment without warning one midnight; at your wits' ends, police snapping at your heels, you turned to me! That made me happy, Michael. . . . But it was no easy task to hide you, when rewards of more than fifty thousand dollars were being advertised for your arrest, and every Boy Scout in the land was carrying a copy of your photograph--"

"But I have never been photographed in my life except for passport purposes during the War; and my appearance today is not as it was then, I no longer wear a beard--"

"You nevertheless had recently been photographed by flashlight, in the act of opening a safe in the Stuyvesant Ashe home. Some ingenious member of the household, in anticipation of the Lone Wolf's visit, had rigged up a camera commanding the safe and a flashlight to be set off by electric current when the door was tampered with. You were caught at close range, facing the camera as you knelt with your ear to the safe door, listening to its mechanism. The likeness was exact and unmistakable; and all the papers reproduced it to further the hue and cry."

"You tell me that happened--and ask me to believe the Lone Wolf left that house without wrecking the camera!"

"To the contrary you destroyed a camera utterly; but there were two, the ingenuity of the inventor had been equal to that contingency--one carefully concealed, the other where you might find it without too much trouble."

Lanyard had an unpleasant laugh in his throat. "Decidedly he was right who said a reformed crook could never come back! If I was the dupe of so cheap a trick . . . But to resume: I appealed to you--to a woman!--to stand between me and the police. . . . Ask them to believe that who once hunted the Lone Wolf across Europe and back again--and failed to catch him! . . . Well and good! what then?"

"The chase struck a false scent and passed us by; but from that time on you made your home with me. It was safe, that had been proved; and I was useful to you."

"How useful?"

"You had got together a collection of jewellery difficult to dispose of without courting arrest; also, you would have found it impracticable to take care of large sums of money such as this sale realized. I saw to all that for you: through Morphew I found a way to market the jewels, and in my own name I carried your funds in a separate account with my bankers."

"And I still called myself the Lone Wolf!"

"I think you were learning to be less jealous of your loneliness, Michael. You had learned--as most men do at some stage of life--that there was one woman at least whose devotion would never fail you."

"I used to know the Lone Wolf well: a strange belief for him to hold!"

"But life had forged yet another bond between us . . ."

The vibrations of Liane's words died upon a suppliant silence. It grew long while in her hearing the pulsing of the engines aped the tempo of a funeral march. Lanyard made no move or sound. Vision tempered to the gloom and made keen by hunger saw his face, its salient lines picked out by gleams of deflected starlight, steadfast to the port, inscrutably set.

If he would not speak she must . . .

"I loved you well, and love comes of loving . . . of being loved . . ."

"You wish me to understand," Lanyard bluntly translated, "I became your lover."

"Yes."

"Yet you knew I loved Madame de Montalais--"

"You swore to me all that was finished."

"And you believed--?"

"I wanted to."

Another silence spun itself into minutes charged with emotion pent and mute. The woman felt rather than saw the sign of a hand that bade her resume. But her tongue stumbled, she was breathless with misgivings . . .

"What more do you wish me to say, Michael?"

"There is more to tell, surely, a hiatus to be filled in between that time and this." But still she faltered till he added in enforced patience: "I have yet to learn what brings us together aboard this vessel."

"Your own vanity must answer for that, Michael. . . . You had been several weeks inactive, the newspaper sensation had begun to blow over, we were planning to return to Paris--though you balked at becoming indebted to Morphew for the forged passports he offered to secure. Then, one day, the Chief of Police gave out an interview exalting himself at your expense; and in that quaint, excitable temper, which you had nursed ever since the motor accident, exasperated beyond reason, you vowed to expose the man's incompetence, and did--breaking into his home and making off with a necklace of diamonds which he had just presented to his wife. But somehow you must have blundered, or your luck had turned: you hardly escaped being caught, and left your path of flight so plainly marked it led the police to my very door. We had to fly New York between two suns, with no choice but to seek refuge in some country that did not require passports. This steamer was the first that sailed for South America; we secured passage, came aboard separately, and pretended to be strangers till that officious doctor insisted on presenting you as my fellow-countryman."

"And now"--Lanyard demanded of himself more than of the woman--"what?"

"If you would only consent to listen to me . . ."

"By what you tell me, Liane, the experience would be anything but a novel one for you."

"Morphew remains my good friend--"

"Permit me to wish you joy of him."

"And is willing for my sake to be yours."

"Unfortunately, I have the prejudice to be loved for my own blue eyes or not at all."

"I am not suspected, it would be a simple matter for me to send a wireless, in a code which Morphew gave me, to his factors at Nassau. They might easily manage some mishap for the men who wait there for you; or failing that, arrange an escape for you subsequent to your arrest--"

"Make your mind at ease on that account, Liane: I don't mean to be arrested."

"So much the better. Morphew maintains a secret base on one of the outlying cays of the Bahamas, where his boats rendezvous with those that fetch the liquor from overseas. With the aid of his factors, it should be an easy matter to smuggle you out to that base and on board some British vessel homeward bound."

"Many thanks! but I shall earn my salvation without the aid of Morphew's lot, or never. Moreover, I have no wish to see England again till I am able to go there openly and disembark in the sunlight, wearing my own face and name--Michael Lanyard."

"But that can never be!"

"In that event, I must end my days in America."

"But are you truly mad enough to imagine there could be any way--?"

"There is but one course possible for me: I must find my way back to New York--under my own power, as the saying runs--and make reparation for the evil I have done--"

"Nothing of that was done by you in your right mind, Michael."

"Pardon: but it seems a nice question, which mind of mine, today's or yesterday's, is 'right'. Neither do I think Society will be disposed to split hairs concerning my liability for acts committed whilst my intelligence was--constructively, at least--under a cloud. Nor, for that matter, am I: if I may not clear the name of Michael Lanyard or wipe out the score against him, I have little use--no, none--for the liberty of André Duchemin."

In uncontrollable disquietude, the woman rose. "What do you propose, then?"

"I have made no plan."

"If you won't have Morphew's help--"

"My dear Liane: that 'if' of yours is downright, voluptuous redundancy."

"But we are due at Nassau at dawn, the police will board us with the pilot boat--!"

"Eight bells just sounded; it should be daybreak by four o'clock, at this season. In other words, I command eight hours of darkness. And the Lone Wolf that lives on in Michael Lanyard, let me tell you, is hardly the half-witted cur you have sketched for me, who cowered behind a woman's skirts in terror of American police."

Discovering Liane's arms about him, her face strained up to him, Lanyard caught himself up sharply, shrugged, and wagged a long-suffering head: "My dear Liane!"

She said in a sob: "You do not mean it--"

"But very truly, my dear."

"Yesterday your dear, today less than the dust--!"

"You are mistaken. I owe you too much--"