Part 18

"I'm telling you the three of us talked all that business over, I and you and Liane, half a dozen times if once, last Winter. You didn't make any bones then about admitting you'd turned that trick at Folly's while you were lit. What good do you think it's going to do you to stall about it now, try to feed the bull to me, the way you did to Liane on board that boat? Maybe she swallowed your yarn because she wanted to; but I'm no crazy woman, I'm not so dead struck on you I'll let you get away with telling me to my face you don't remember anything that went on in this Town before you went South. I'm wise, I know what you've got in mind; and that tale won't go down a little bit with yours truly."

"I see . . ."

"Well," Morphew roughly insisted: "what do you see?"

"For one thing, that one was not mistaken in assuming you had recently talked with Mademoiselle Delorme."

"Why not? She hiked right back to Town as soon as you left her flat on the Port Royal."

"And promptly reported to you of course."

"Who do you think? What other friend did her and you have, with pull enough to keep the cops off your backs while you were running that continuous performance of yours last Winter?"

"Nevertheless, your influence failed to save Liane from deportation."

"She came back all right, she's here now, isn't she? Well then: who do you suppose fixed things up for her?"

"Pardon, monsieur: I do but marvel that power so autocratic should even once have failed a friend."

"Pretending you've forgotten all about how that happened, too, eh?" An uglier sneer overcast Morphew's countenance. "I suppose you don't remember anything about how you two got to feeling your oats, after you'd been Lone Wolfing a while and making a good thing out of it with my protection, and thought you could give me the air and never miss me--"

"No! not really?"

"I suppose you don't remember how I nudged the Government into deporting Liane to teach her discipline and then, when I found you didn't handle any better with her away, let her sneak back, gave you another chance, and when _that_ didn't work made Town so hot for you both you had to take a running jump off the Battery . . . I suppose it's only natural you wouldn't remember little things like that."

"And very handsome it is of you to suppose so, and prove you do by itemizing in such minute detail all I pretend to have forgotten."

"That line of talk won't get you anywhere with me, Lanyard. Sarcastic cracks won't stop me checking up to show you where you get off trying to pull that lost memory stall on me. Why!" Morphew snorted in disgust--"you must think I'm easy."

"But no, monsieur! my memory is hardly so bad as all that."

"It's only on the blink when you want it to be, I guess."

"What it really needs now," Pagan put in with animation, "is for you to get yourself lammed over the bean again." He grasped the neck of the decanter suggestively. "I hate to do it, but for a friend . . . Just say the word, Lanyard, and I'll crown you King of Cracksmen."

"Shut up," Morphew brutally snapped.

With a little moan the sycophant applied himself anew to the soothing Scotch; and for a few moments no more was said, while Lanyard, sitting forward, bent a thoughtful frown to the rug at his feet, and Morphew studied his man with a subtile smile.

"Licked," he declared, at length: "that's what you are, Lanyard, licked to a standstill. Your nature started the job and I finished it. You'd ought to 've known better than to try to buck a combination like that."

"I'm sorry," Lanyard replied, looking up with an apologetic smile--"but if it isn't too much to ask you to be more plain-spoken . . ."

"All I mean is--there's no cure for a crook. If you were born crooked, you'll die a crook, no matter how hard you struggle. It's your nature, and it's no use any man's trying to lick his nature: you're licked before you start. God knows I don't blame you for not wanting to believe that, on account of that dame you were stuck on--"

"By your leave, monsieur!" Lanyard sharply insisted--"we will not discuss that phase of my affairs."

"Just as you like. No offense intended, none, far's I'm concerned, taken." Morphew had suddenly shifted to an amazingly conciliatory line. "I bear you no ill will, Lanyard, in spite of all you've done to sprain my patience. Why! that battle you put up against your nature and me was a classic, and a man can't help but admire you for it, even if he did know all along you never had a chance. But now you know it, too, you're too sensible to keep on kicking against the pricks. Your motto from now on is 'Make the best of it'--and the best you can make of it, if you put your back into the business, is the life of Reilly for a man who knows how to live like you do."

"You advise me, then--?"

"I leave it to your good sense, seeing where you stand today, what's the only sensible way for you to go."

In a subdued voice, with thoughtful gaze constant to Morphew's, Lanyard repeated: "Where I stand today!"

"Well: where do you? You've got to live somehow, and you only know one way to make a decent living. It's no good your pulling out for Paris or London again. They read the papers over there, too--they'll never let the Lone Wolf land from any steamer."

"But if they believe me drowned in the Bahamas--"

"Don't count on it," Morphew earnestly counselled. "If you try to shift your scene of operations, somebody over here that maybe doesn't think you've treated him right would be sure to tip off Scotland Yard and the Surétè. See what I mean?"

"You make it all so clear . . ."

"Now on this side you've got everything in your favour. You're back in Town, and nobody knows it but Pagan here and me; all you've got to do is lay low a while, take things easy, and go ahead when you get good and ready . . . providing you're ready to come to terms with me."

"Terms such as--?"

"The same as last Winter; you do the heavy lifting and I take care of the high finance; we split the proceeds fifty-fifty, and you get full protection thrown in for nothing."

"But what of this plagiarist of my methods who has been so active in my absence?"

"Don't let him worry you. I've got a good line on that bird, he won't stand in your light twenty-four hours after I switch on the stop signal."

Over the head which Lanyard bowed in pondering, Pagan shot Morphew a grin of cynical congratulation, to which Morphew returned a quick nod and sign of caution.

"Take your time, think it over," he advised, not unkindly; "I don't want to hurry you. But it's only fair to tell you, after all that's passed between us, Lanyard, I'd think myself a born sap to take you back on the old terms without conditions."

"It might be well to name them," Lanyard suggested without looking up.

"To begin with, from now on the Delorme is out, I and you will work without any go-between. And then--you'll admit it's only fair I should want some proof of good faith from you."

"For example--?"

"I want the say-so about your first few jobs. You'll have to tackle them under conditions that'll satisfy me you mean to play the game on the level."

"But I fancy you will find it hard to invent such conditions--"

"Oh!" Morphew almost genially laughed--"it's proof of good will I'm after more than anything else. If it comes to that, you won't double-cross me, once you've committed yourself, unless you want to spend the rest of your born days in Sing-Sing or . . ."

The short laugh that filled in the ellipsis brought Lanyard's eyes up to Morphew's once more. "Or--?" he prompted with interest.

"There are some things I don't like to say, when we seem to be hitting it off so nice and easy. I was only thinking--I guess you realize you wouldn't get a great ways with your life if you tried to sell me out again. For instance: Say we should fall out here tonight; know what I'd do?"

"How should I?"

"I'd call in the boys waiting out there in the hall, have 'em give you a full shave, and turn you loose at Forty-second and Fifth Avenue, while I sat on the steps of the Public Library and split my sides laughing."

"Very ingenious," Lanyard gravely applauded. "But assuming, purely for the sake of the argument, that by means of some equally ingenious shift I should escape unshorn . . ."

"Remember how long you lasted in November, after you'd told me to roll my hoop? Must have been all of twenty-four hours."

"Decidedly," Lanyard observed, "I was unwise to mention murder in your hearing--or would have been, had I seriously entertained any notion of holding out against you, monsieur."

Exultation flickered in Morphew's eyes like northern lights in a moon-blanched sky.

"Then it's a bargain?"

"You would not have wasted time offering it had you thought me insane enough to reject it." Lanyard lifted a hand to plead for silence, while the mellow music of a clock in the hall sang through the early morning stillness. "Five o'clock," he said, rising. "Since we are to be so closely associated henceforth, monsieur, I trust it isn't too much to beg the favour of a bed. It has indeed been a long day for me, my head at present is so dull with drowsiness I am hardly in a condition to go further into this new arrangement . . ."

XX

The sleepiness that Lanyard alleged was no mere subterfuge to end a wearing conversation, the fatigue he felt was all too real, harvest of many toilful days and nights of broken rest, so real that, once he ceased to stave off its creeping paralysis with inflexible resistance, it overwhelmed him of a sudden altogether. It was with something very like the carriage of a somnambulist that he permitted the still sprightly Peter Pagan to lead him from the library, through a maze of corridors and stairs apprehended as in dream, and leave him at last in a lordly bedchamber.

Here by early dawn-light he undressed like an automaton, fell across the bed rather than laid him down upon it, and in a trice was sleeping heavily. . . .

The sun grew so old its level rays struck in at length beneath the window awning and burned his face with a crimson glare till Lanyard started up, bemused, out of a nightmare of stokehold drudgery--only to fancy himself, with that ruddy beam boring through blue shadow to lend colour to the illusion, back in his stateroom on the Port Royal, waiting for the pretty person of Liane Delorme to justify her knuckling of the door.

But nobody had knocked, the band of raw red gold was stationary that barred the dusk, it was a bed that held him, not a berth, the spacious sleeping quarters of a pampered landlubber were his instead of cramped and bare accomodations aboard an ocean-going boat; and he was quickening to apprehensions of a plight more exigent even than that which Liane had come to tell him of upon that other nightfall, in the Bahamas, weeks ago; by courtesy a guest in the town-house of a new-found ally, in fact no better than a prisoner in the stronghold of his most embittered enemy . . .

Fagged though he had been all through that parley of the small hours, Lanyard had likewise been far too thoroughly alive to its vital bearing upon the issue of whether or not this life of his were worth the struggle, to have slighted any innuendo in Morphew's attitude, however trivial in seeming or elusive. And now recalling, weighing and minutely searching every spoken word and unsaid implication, he perceived no reason for reconsidering his verdict on their consequence, that Morphew's proposal of an alliance had been as treacherous as his own complaisance toward it. . . . A memory the cause of corroding chagrin, to him who had never before met offer of oppression with less than flat defiance, to whom the bare thought of compromise with an overbearing and corrupt antagonist was one to sicken over. He had sour comfort of the saying that it's fair to fight the devil with fire, he would liever have known himself surely the poor thing they pictured him, uncontrollably subject to criminal lapses, than to remember he had been reduced to trafficing with cattle such as Morphew--and on terms of Morphew's choice!

Yet it had been that or worse--a knife in his back, very likely, before he could find out the truth for himself about those latterday prowlings of the Lone Wolf that enemy and friend alike attributed to Michael Lanyard, that the friendliest guesses ascribed to the cropping out of ingrained criminal proclivities which the best will in the world might neither eradicate nor hope to hold in check.

God knew it might be true! and if it were, then it was time indeed to let Society rid itself of such a menace. But first all doubts must be resolved . . .

Morphew had had the best of him from the outset, had chosen the ground, forced the fighting, outgeneralled him in every skirmish, beaten him down at last to his knees, forced him to stomach quarter on conditions unspeakably humiliating. But better to bow to such abasement than forfeit every chance to clear his scutcheon or, failing, tear him down whose malevolence had been the first cause of its smirching, down from the strong place he had set up to be his refuge, and bury him deep in its ruins--though these bury not Morphew alone.

To compass an end so just, to avenge society as he revenged himself, was the one way Lanyard could conjecture to make amends for being as life had made him; to this he dedicated himself without any reservation whatever, renouncing every cherished prejudice against unfaith and double-dealing, holding no sacrifice whether of scruples or of life itself too heavy a price to pay for its accomplishment, refusing to know any depth of degradation to which he would not gladly descend with the promise that at the bottom he would find Morphew's throat defenseless.

Intuition gave one gleam of hope. Making no claim to the ability to read Morphew's mind, Lanyard assumed with confidence to assay his manner; and recreating this to his mental vision, as it had been manifest in last night's rencontre, estimated every facet of it false. Morphew only too possibly might have been sincere in all he had asserted concerning the recrudesence of the Lone Wolf in the flesh of Michael Lanyard; but his honest scorn, paraded for what he professed to consider disingenuous efforts to hide behind a claim of lost memory, had been in Lanyard's judgment sheerest sham, paste indignation donned for the occasion and, by that token, for some sly purpose. Morphew had taken too much humbling at Lanyard's hands to spare him without some compensating end in view, not conceivably a sordid one alone. If in actual need of money he was little likely to reject it unless Lanyard and none other, operating as a burglar, earned it for him. Power such as he pretended to, intelligently exerted, could hardly have failed to bring to heel that enterprising understudy of the Lone Wolf, who had been so busy all the while that Lanyard had been becalmed in the Bahamas, and bend him to Morphew's purposes as Morphew now proposed to bend Lanyard. So it seemed not unreasonable to assume that the use which Morphew had for Lanyard was another than he avowed, some end that Lanyard alone of all men could serve, therefore not an end of simple avarice--in short, nothing but the satisfaction of some all-absorbing private passion.

Morphew knew, and knew that Lanyard knew--must have known, or was a denser dunce than Lanyard thought him--that last night's compact had been a farce, that neither of them meant to abide by it one moment longer than suited his convenience, and finally that so long as Lanyard lived and had his liberty Morphew's own liberty if not his very life was in jeopardy. Yet he had preferred that risk . . .

A man so ruled by his passions was surely vulnerable: it remained to bide one's time with every wit wide awake to catch and profit by the first clue that Morphew might let fall, then strike with all the shrewdness one could muster at the weak spot so exposed. Lanyard would hardly have to school himself to patience very long . . .

Arrived at this conclusion, scarcely one to content him, nevertheless the one with which he must for the time being be content, Lanyard permitted considerations of more material sort to assert their claims, with the promptly resultant discovery that he was both sticky and hungry, in sore need of a bath and breakfast. And sitting up, he made another discovery, that his privacy had not been respected while he slept. His weatherbeaten wardrobe had vanished from the chair over which he had thrown it on going to bed; in its place he found a flowered dressing-gown of thinnest silk and a pair of bedroom slippers--a costume supremely suited to such sultry weather, as long as one remained indoors. He perceived himself to be indeed a prisoner.

In the bathroom still a third discovery awaited him when, having turned on the hot-water tap in the tub, he had his first look at himself in the mirror above the washstand. Mirrors had been rare furniture of the scenes in which his life had been staged of late, and he was interested to view the effect of a six weeks' untamed growth of beard, had been rather looking forward to revising it, as soon as he could lay hands on a sharp pair of scissors, into a neat Van Dyke, a style calculated to be more becoming and hardly less disguising. But one glance showed him that Morphew or another had been beforehand with him, had played Delilah to his Samson while he slept; that wanton luxuriance had been edited already and in such vandal spirit that nothing could now be done for it but shave it off entirely.

Scissors had been left on the glass shelf below the mirror, together with a razor, soap and a brush. In resignation Lanyard clipped and shaved, telling himself that it wouldn't do to resent the impertinence--not yet--it was just Morphew's delicate way of serving notice that Lanyard must not count on any liberty of action unhandicapped by constant danger of being identified with the original of that confounded flashlight, in other words, that any attempt to elude his watchful care would be extremely impolitic.

Later, while he wallowed in hot water, Lanyard heard footfalls in the bedchamber, then a discreet voice just outside the bathroom door.

"I beg pardon, sir, but I thought I heard you moving about. Mr. Morphew's compliments, and you'll be dining out of Town tonight with him and Mr. Pagan; the car is ordered for seven o'clock."

"That's very interesting--thank you. What time is it now?"

"Just on six, sir. I've laid out your dinner clothes, and now, if you wish, I'll fetch your coffee. Perhaps you'd care for grapefruit, too, and a bit of toast."

"I'm sure I would, thanks, especially if I'm in for anything of a drive."

"That I can't tell you, sir--Mr. Morphew didn't say."

By the time Lanyard had finished towelling, his breakfast was waiting. He consumed it in a thoughtful turn, eyeing the array of clothing provided for him, hoping that the tailor who presumably had taken his measure while he slept had been a better man at his trade than the barber who had operated on his beard. But misgivings were groundless; the dinner-coat, most ungainly of garments when it isn't just right, turned out to be a very tolerable fit, and he could not complain of a shortage of anything he required to make him feel entirely at ease--barring money. Even a cigarette-case and a wafer-thin watch with chain of platinum had been fitted into the waistcoat pockets.

Finding himself dressed with twenty minutes to spare, he had the curiosity to try the door. It wasn't locked. He went down the stairs deliberately, expecting at every step to encounter Morphew or Pagan or else discover some servant spying on him. But nothing of the sort: everything was being done to beguile him into believing he was entirely at liberty on his own recognizance. He knew too much, however, to act on any such rash assumption.

He met nobody, for that matter, either in the halls or in the living-rooms, and was twirling lonesome thumbs in the library of mortifying associations when the clock chimed the hour, and promptly the servant who had waited on him upstairs put in appearance, bringing a hat of black felt and a slender stick of ebony, ivory-capped.

"The car is waiting, sir, if you are quite ready."

"Quite--thanks. But Mr. Morphew and Mr. Pagan?"

"They are neither of them at home, sir. I believe it is their intention to meet you wherever it is you are to dine--the chauffeur will know."

"Then I'm to make the trip alone?"

"Yes, sir."

A certain quality of cheek in the way Morphew had made his arrangements won an ungrudged laugh as Lanyard accepted the hat and stick.

The Rolls-Royce landaulet at the door was so brightly blue and sleek it might have been making its first run from the show-room floor. The liveried footman who held its door with all the rare poise of his kind, saluted smartly as Lanyard got in, and smartly doubled round the car to hop up to the chauffeur's side: the vehicle began to move almost before he was formally posed in his place with folded arms. But Lanyard remarked that the rear-view mirror above the wheel was so tilted as to afford the driver a view of the tonneau; and knew by this that to discover symptoms of intending unceremoniously to leave the car would be unwise.

At the same time he inclined to dispute the wisdom that had provided a progress of so much state and ostentation for one so badly wanted; for while it was true enough that the police in uniform were far too busy supervising the traffic of the Drive to have room in their heads for thoughts of the Lone Wolf, it was equally true that plain-clothes men were presumed to be aboard and on the qui vive, it wasn't an extravagant flight of fancy that supposed a chance crossing of trails, a casual look into the car fixing on the features of its passenger and kindling with recognition . . .

But when furtive reconnaissance astern, at intervals in the course of the first twenty minutes, had satisfied him that the landaulet was being discreetly dogged by another car, an unpretentious affair in sober paint occupied by three men of competent presence, compact bodies who rode with eyes alert, and looked quite capable, jointly and severally, of giving a good account of themselves in action, he concluded that it wasn't worth his while to worry about adventitious interference on the part of the police, who, if inspired to such an attempt, would stand about as much chance of stopping the Rolls-Royce and arresting its tenant as the latter would of winning his freedom by means of a flying leap. One might as profitably occupy one's leisure trying to guess one's destination: and the next hour satisfied Lanyard that the route had been mapped with intent to confuse him. For after following main-travelled ways to White Plains, the landaulet and its satellite struck off into a bewildering tangle of back-country roads in which, as night closed down, it was easy to lose one's sense of direction. Lanyard could only surmise that they were describing a circuitous course to the North and East of Greenwich.

It was hilly countryside they traversed, for the most part thinly settled. Long stretches of lonely road spaced infrequent clusters of farm buildings and crossroad communities. Few other vehicles were encountered. The Rolls-Royce seldom slowed down to forty miles an hour, while the following car closed up till its headlamps lighted brilliantly both sides of the landaulet, rendering it out of the question as well as foolhardy to seek to leave the latter unobserved by a sudden dive into the dark.