Part 17

Would he ever know? Never, he told himself, from the lips of Eve. Inconceivable that she should ever again consent to see him, believing what she must believe, or even to read his letters--assuming that he could find the effrontery so to importune her. Nothing short of full exoneration could revive her faith in him; and even given that, Lanyard would hardly find it in his heart to blame her did she shrink from meeting him, being seen with him, letting her name be coupled in the public mouth with the name of one who had been singled out by the spotlight of a notoriety so shameful.

No: he must count Eve lost to him for all time and soothe that wound, if he could, with the assurance that it was better so.

But before he could become reconciled to that renunciation he must possess the truth in his own knowledge, the truth whole and unvarnished.

So now he was striking directly at the heart of darkness in which, he was satisfied, the truth lay perdu.

Ten minutes from Crane's door he came up for air from the Plaza station of the Subway, slipped into Central Park like a snake into a thicket, and was lost to human sight for more than half an hour thereafter. Then the lights of Central Park West picked him up at Seventy-seventh street; and striking diagonally across the grounds of the Museum of Natural History he threaded quiet residential streets to Riverside Drive, upon which he turned north, moving with the carefree slouch of the vagabond he so picturesquely seemed to be. A policeman on patrol, nobody else, gave him a second glance in passing, saw that he was sober, dismissed him as a figure of no potential consequence for either good or ill.

The night, seasonably intemperate, might have been compounded according to his own prescription, so excellently suited it was to his purpose. Its heat had made the parks populous with refugees from sweltering apartments; at this late hour they lingered still upon the walks, the lawns and benches in sufficient numbers to render Lanyard's restless presence equally inconspicuous with uncounted others. A tenuous haze dimmed the lustre of the sluggish flood of ink that was the Hudson River and turned distant lights into pulsing points of iridescence. The driveway proper droned wearily with its steady if diminished flow of motor traffic.

Morphew's town-house stood apart from less pretentious neighbors, a four-square lump of unlovely masonry squatting, with a singular effect of family likeness to its owner, in grounds more ample than even opulence is wont to run to for its city pieds-à-terre. Open windows and unboarded doors showed it had not been shut up for the Summer, though Morphew were, as Crane had intimated, sojourning somewhere out of Town. And the lack of illumination other than a soft night-light behind the iron grille and plate-glass of its great front doors seemed to advertise a household sensibly abed. The sharp eyes beneath the brim of that disreputable hat had marked down half a dozen avenues of easy if unconventional entrance before Lanyard, with his idlest air, turned off from the main promenade that runs with the driveway and found a soft spot on a lawn where a clump of shrubbery, standing between him and the nearest street lamps, threw a shadow black as jet.

Here, in a lazy sprawl, he rested for upwards of an hour, covert attention constant to the mansion across the Drive. In that time it gave no evidence of wakeful occupation; but as break of dawn drew near the population of the park dispersed and the tide of wheeled traffic became an intermittent trickle, lessening the risk of observation that he must chance when the time came to put his purpose into effect. In this last he went ahead unhindered by any scruple, holding Morphew solely answerable, as he did, for all the tribulations that had been visited upon him since that long ago night of their first acquaintance. Eight months of enforced submission to the wear and tear of Morphew's malevolence had brought him to the pass in which tonight found him, penniless, homeless, hungry, a hunted thing without a friend to turn to. It devolved upon Morphew, consequently, to bow to the inexorable workings of the law of compensation and stand to Lanyard now in the place of friend, willy-nilly to furnish him food and drink, shelter and change of raiment, set his mind at rest upon the matters that most distressed it, and finally put money in his pockets. Morphew could afford all that and never miss its cost to him out of the profits he must have piled up as impresario for the Lone Wolf's farewell tour.

The irony of that conceit was pleasing: Lanyard wore a grim smile beneath his beard as he addressed him to his burglarious business.

The point of attack he had settled on was a window with a balcony in the second storey, on the south side of the house, the farthest removed from the more exposed face which fronted on the Drive. The mouth of the tradesmen's entrance, an alley closed by a gate of iron work, made it possible to attempt the ascent in comparative darkness, and horizontal channels between the huge blocks of hewn stone furnished helpful foot and hand-holds. Only the rawest new beginner in the sodality of second-storey workers could have made any difficulty about that climb: Lanyard negotiated it with the ease of a lizard--two minutes after his subtle shadow had faded from the cross-town street into the tradesmen's entrance he had gained the level of the balcony and, plastered against those cool cheeks of stone, was inching round the corner. At the end of another minute he silently but rapidly wriggled in over the balcony rail and dropped flat to its floor, there to wait without stir, for so long that he might have been suddenly petrified by appreciation of his own temerity, till senses tuned up to the utmost of their fine efficiency assured him he had not been seen from the street or from any window looking out upon it, and that the room beyond the window at his side was as still as death; the circumstance that it was a French window with both wings folded back into its recess rendering it not necessarily idiotic to trust to his super-acute hearing.

On the inside of the recess hung open draperies of heavy stuff. Between them no light showed. Lanyard surmised a living-room beyond, a study or a dining-room: the bedchambers would be on the floor above. One quick crouching stride passed him in between the hangings, another, in the course of which he stood up, took him to the middle of the room, where he stopped short, poised tensely upon the balls of his feet, like a jungle creature scenting human flesh in the wind--galvanized by the whiff of rich cigar smoke that told him he had walked into a trap. Simultaneously the wings of the window banged to behind him, its latch rattled, curtain-rings clashed upon a tube of brass, the bleached blue oblong of the glass was blacked out, and he stood encompassed by night absolute--only the ember at the end of a cigar blinked at him from a little distance, glowing and fading by turns like an eye of basilisk spite.

With escape by the way he had entered surely blocked, and standing on unknown ground, without one clue to the location of any other exit, he had no choice but to wait for light before adventuring another step. But seconds dragged like minutes and still the darkness held unbroken: they were playing with him, giving uncertainty time to sap his nerve. In exasperation, but schooling his voice to a sulky key, he said: "Well! you've got me. Make a light."

No one answered, no light was made . . .

In a grimmer tone he spoke again: "I'll give you a count of three in which to make a light. If you don't, I'll drill a bullet through whatever happens to be twelve inches below that cigar."

The eye of fire burned a more sardonic crimson; that was all.

In sheer bravado he began to count: "One--two--"

A whistle lanced the stillness, he was sensitive to a sudden stir at his back and swung about, striking out at random and without effect; a savage blow, likewise launched at random, fell notwithstanding squarely upon his cheek, just forward of the ear; staggered, he reeled sideways and blundered into a brace of ready arms. Before he could recover and set himself to break that hold other arms found and wrapped his body round from behind, a deft foot kicked his heels from under him, and, fighting like a maniac, Lanyard took the floor with a crash that made its timbers groan, beneath a writhing mass of humanity whose weight alone was enough to crush him into breathless quiescence.

Overhead a prism chandelier blazed out like a sun-burst . . .

Pinned down by no less than five huskies, one to each arm and leg and one, inevitably the stoutest, digging hard knees into his chest, Lanyard turned his head to one side to give his eyes respite from than blinding glare above, and lay looking directly into the apathetic mask of Morphew.

XIX

Morphew was holding down a huge easy-chair without any appearance of ease: feet well apart and planted solidly, huge and bedizened paws firmly clasping each an arm of the chair as if to forestall its wickedly slipping out from under him. His face of a pale beast, with its unwinking light eyes under leaden hoods, its gash of a mouth, its flaccid jowls and wattles, was void of any readable expression; but for seepage of smoke from its nostrils and the corner of the mouth that wasn't filled by the cigar it might have passed for a devil-mask modelled by hands of decadence.

Above and somewhat behind this unholy vision, Mr. Peter Pagan, resting folded arms on the back of the chair, presented the face of a subsenile imp in familiar attendance, innocent, however, of his master's affection for the pose imperturbable--his clown's lips wide with a gleeful grin, beady eyes alive with malice.

"I suppose," he said, as one might to a troublesome child, "you think you're smart, keeping decent, law-abiding folk up like this, till all hours!"

Lanyard reflected on this pleasantry with a weary droop of eyelids, otherwise held still and dumb.

With dramatic deliberation Morphew relaxed the hold of one hand on the chair long enough to extract the cigar from between his teeth. All in a grunt he commanded: "Frisk him."

Trained fingers turned out the pockets of the captive. "This guy's got no gat," the man on his chest reported in plaintive disappointment.

"Never thought he had," Pagan acidly commented: "Bluff is the middle name of our fair-haired lad."

"Let him up," Morphew ordered--"but stand by in case he still feels hostile."

A free man once more, Lanyard scrambled to his feet, shook himself like a dog, gave his seagoing slacks a practised hitch, the sleeves and skirts of his makeshift coat a scrupulous dusting, and smiled sunny reassurance first on the watchful circle round him (noting impenitently that one man was nursing a swollen nose while another was uttering a few loosened teeth) then, with an impudent colour of indulgence added, beamed upon the seated arbiter of the scene.

"Monsieur is needlessly alarmed," he said with an urbanity unaffected by hastened breathing. "Something tells me I were well-advised to put off our overdue accounting against a more favourable occasion."

"All the accounting that's going to be done," Morphew heavily countered, "is going to happen right here and now, before either you or me leave this room." He shifted a passionless glare to his henchmen. "Clear out and wait in the hall: I'll give a whistle if I want you again. If I give two whistles, one of you call a cop--the rest come running."

Lanyard indecorously yawned, then gave an open laugh as the battered bodyguard withdrew. Uninvited, he helped himself to an overstuffed lounge chair, and sighed in grateful relaxation.

"A policeman, my good Morphew! do my ears mislead me?"

"No," Morphew definitely replied, "they don't."

Pagan cocked a critical eye at the ears in question. "Even foreshortened," he volunteered, "they don't look like ears to mislead anybody else."

But Pagan could wait, Lanyard couldn't afford to let an antic second distract any of the attention due his principal.

"I am to understand," he persisted, addressing Morphew, "it is your intention to give me in charge?"

"That rests with you."

"Monsieur undoubtedly is pleased to be humorous . . ."

"Maybe, so, maybe not." Fixing Lanyard with an unintelligible stare, Morphew thoughtfully champed his cigar. "There's a lot of popularity lying around loose in this town, waiting to be pinned onto the hero that puts the Lone Wolf behind bars. And you ought to know whether you've had enough."

"But if you ask me," Lanyard frankly laughed--"too much!"

"All right," Morphew agreed in gloomy gratification: "That puts it up to you which you want to do now--go up the River to do a nice long stretch or stick on in Town here and take life easy."

"Not so long ago it was the Lone Wolf's boast that he never found it necessary to take life easily or otherwise . . . as you were good enough to remind me, monsieur, the last time we had the pleasure of conversing together."

"Not the last time by a long sight," Morphew bluntly contradicted; "but I know when you mean."

"Today one begins to wonder if that boast was good only because the Lone Wolf had never been given proper provocation."

Morphew took time to digest this. "You talk as crooked as you work," he concluded; "but the way I take it, that's a threat."

"It is altogether as you care to take it."

"If you don't like the way you've been handled, you've only got yourself to blame. I've given you every chance to come through like a gentleman--"

"But constituted yourself judge of whether I did or not."

The wooden set of Morphew's features became, if possible, more than ever marked, the puffed lids curtained more jealously those repellant eyes, his ruminative way with the cigar knew a momentary break.

With a vaguely innocent smile Lanyard snuggled down into luxurious upholstery and utilized the wait to look the room over with intelligent interest in the taste which had ruled its composition. A surprisingly handsome library, decorated and furnished with a dignity in no degree oppressive: all at wide odds with an environment such as one might have expected that bejewelled block of flesh to create for itself.

But the ominous pause was beginning to irk Pagan's nerves. He moved restlessly from his station at Morphew's back and laid hands upon a decanter which, with glasses and a siphon bottle, occupied a tray on one end of the library table.

"How about a little snifter, what?" he suggested with a leer overshoulder.

"Thank you," Lanyard returned politely--"but one recalls too well your black art as a bar-tender, monsieur; one hesitates to risk another waking up to find oneself accused of--it might well be--murder."

As if involuntarily, but without moving a superficial muscle, Morphew permitted a meditative rumble to escape him: "Murder . . ." And in a startled movement not wholly affected Lanyard sat up.

"Pardon, monsieur! one ought to keep a better guard upon one's tongue lest one put ideas into your head."

"Oh I say now! cut it out, can't you?" Pagan hastily remonstrated. "Why not be a sport, call that little skirmish of ours the fortunes of war, and let it go at that? No end of water has flowed down the Hudson since that night when you cut up so nasty--about nothing at all, practically--Morph here had to give you a taste of the whip. Not that he wanted to, but you asked for it, Lanyard--and you know you did!"

"But truly, monsieur, this grows fatiguing . . ."

"Everything's so different tonight," Pagan brightly argued. "We've all been through so much, we know one another heaps better--there isn't any sense at all in our keeping on at loggerheads."

"There is not?"

"Why! if the last half year has proved anything it's that we're all travelling one road, aiming at the same mark . . . Or shall we say marks, so long as the dear American people ain't listening in? . . . And now we've all made our mistakes and are ready to admit and profit by them--you're going to cut out all this running round in circles and frothing at the mouth, going to come in and lie down under the table and be a good dog."

"I am?"

"Sure thing. Ask Morph: he knows. And you will, too, before long, if you don't now. And then we'll all be just like this"--Pagan illustrated by lacing his fingers--"just girls together, you know, all out for a good time. So why not begin the peace conference with just one friendly little hooter? It'll do us both good: you've had a hard day of it, and you've given us a hard night."

"It desolates me, monsieur, to think I have been, however unwittingly, the agent of your martyrdom to insomnia."

"Well: what _did_ you think?" Giving up the ungrateful work of trying to seduce Lanyard into tippling, Pagan philosophically mixed himself a lonely solace. "Didn't suppose we'd be able to sleep a wink, did you, when you'd got us all excited up?"

"I! but how?"

"Pulling off this pussyfoot return of the prodigal."

"It is true," Lanyard thoughtfully considered: "by what appears, you did know of my return."

"If we hadn't, there wouldn't have been any sense in our staging this swell reception in your honour."

"I presume it seems stupid of me to be surprised--"

"Dear man!" Pagan benignly advised him--"we _brought_ you back."

"I am afraid I am incurably stupid . . ."

"It was one of my boats you came north on from Rum Cay," Morphew brusquely explained. "If I hadn't given the boys down there the word by wireless, when they reported you'd turned up, you'd be there still, high and dry on the beach."

"Stupid," Lanyard insisted, "is too weak a term for my imbecility. And I never guessed--!"

"Never struck you it was funny," Morphew enquired in ponderous contempt, "a bootlegging outfit would let a total stranger get the low-down on the way the game was worked, and then give him free transportation North and turn him loose to tell all he knew to the enforcement gang?"

"One must confess one thought those fine fellows strangely trustful."

"You likely charged it all up to your winning little ways," Pagan sweetly observed over the rim of his tumbler. "Not that I want to rub it in . . ."

"But do go on. It is really a consolation to hear your wit improvise so brilliantly upon the theme of my infirmity--when I myself am at a loss for words."

"Like hell you are!" Pagan complained with an anguished grimace--"not so's anybody'd notice it."

"But still I find myself so feeble-minded," Lanyard confessed, "nothing yet gives me to understand why--"

Pagan started vivaciously to pursue the advantage which Lanyard conceded; but a baleful glance from Morphew reined his tongue in time, and drove him to bury a snubbed nose silently in strong drink.

"It's like this," Morphew began with consequence, but paused to clear his throat when Lanyard turned on him a look of bright attention. "I'm a hard guy to cross," he stated with the simplicity of a strong plain man--"a damned hard guy to cross, if you don't know it. What I make up my mind I want, I get"--a pause lent the next word weight--"always. Maybe I have to wait a while sometimes, but in the end I always get what I go after. Always."

"Spoken like a one-hundred per-cent he-citizen, monsieur, of this land of bred-in-the-bone go-getters."

"All right," Morphew replied, mysteriously tolerant. "I don't mind your funny cracks at me, if they amuse you. That's your line, and I'll say your right bright at it, too. It isn't mine, and maybe that's my misfortune: a person can't have everything in this world, that's sure . . . But somehow I notice, no matter how many laughs I miss when they're being handed around--somehow I always manage to bag the last one. I've let you get away with a lot of rough stuff at my expense, Lanyard, but I'm not done with you yet. If you'd only lay off being a comedian long enough to think things over, it ought to teach you something and make it easier for us to understand each other."

"But continue, I beg you, monsieur," Lanyard replied with a speciously straight face: "I am all attention, as you see."

Morphew darkly chewed his cigar for another moment . . . "I let my boys fetch you back to New York because I figured out maybe you'd had knocks enough to bring you round to a more docile frame of mind than you were in when you high-tailed it for South America." A side alley of self-revelation proved too tempting: "That's the way I am, you see: when a man I want bucks on me, I make it a rule to give him all the rope he wants to wind himself up in good and tight before I start hauling in the slack. That night we first met, now . . . I made you a plain, open-and-shut business proposition, take it or leave it. If you hadn't r'ared back, showed your teeth and the whites of your eyes, and made such a fuss altogether about your lovely virtue, I and you wouldn't 've ever had any trouble. If there's one thing I despise worse than poison it's phony righteousness. And the way you carried on that night showed me plain enough kind treatment wasn't ever going to gentle you. So I laid off and let you perform. What happened?"

"Must we go into that? See: you're embarrassing Mr. Pagan here frightfully."

Morphew gave his head a shake, as one pestered by a buzzing insect. "What happened?" he obstinately iterated. "You went off and got loaded on a thimbleful of liquor, forgot all about being nature's nobleman, and pulled off one of the rawest jobs of second-storey stuff ever."

"But surely you are dealing unfairly now by the talents of that poor but willing creature Mallison."

"Mallison!"

A passion of indignation exploded in that snort, such as Morphew had never before betrayed capacity for feeling; and seeming to choke on a rush of words, he was temporarily unable to resume; while Lanyard, forbearing to question or comment, continued in a wide stare of a sudden grown genuine. Unmistakably his mention of Mallison had touched a spot so sore that the iron rule of stolidity had been unseated. But for an instant only; quick to pull himself together, Morphew resumed his level drone of habit.

"Get that idea out of your head--if it's in it. Mally's a crooked little damn' fool if there ever was one, but he never in his best days had the guts to tackle big business."

"But, if memory serves, you were of another mind when we met at Mrs. McFee's--"

"You had me at a disadvantage--"

"How generous an admission!"

"It was your word against mine; and what chance did I have of proving you had everything all wrong, with the little McFee daft about you, ready to believe black was white if you told her so?"

"It isn't fair to confuse me with compliments. Pardon a slight digression: I am interested to know what became of Mallison."

"I don't know," Morphew admitted, louring. "But I will before long . . ."

He gave a minute to savage brooding. "If that boy had only had sense enough to trust me . . . But he got panicky for fear we'd fall down trying to alibi him, and blew without so much as good night."

"And you have not see him since?"

"Fat chance. He knows enough to steer clear of me after jumping the bail I put up for him."

"Still, one is hardly convinced that Mallison is the simple innocent you make him out to be."

"I suppose"--Morphew's manner was irritating by intention--"what you want me to believe is you don't remember owning up you done that job yourself."

"Ah!" Light from yet another angle promised now to illuminate the darker recesses of Liane's duplicity. "You have been talking with Mademoiselle Delorme--"

"With both of you."

"Pardon?"