It was two days later,—and they had been days of blank suspense for him,—that Durkin made his way to Frank's room, unobserved. His first resolution had been to wait for a clearer coast, but his anxiety overcame him, and he could hold off no longer.
As he opened the door and stepped noiselessly inside he caught sight of her by the window, her face ruminative and in repose. It looked, for the moment, unhappy and tired and hard. She seemed to stand before him with a mask off, a designing and disillusioned woman, no longer in love with the game of life. Or it was, he imagined, as she would look ten years later, when her age had begun to tell on her, and her still buoyant freshness was gone. It was the same feeling that had come to him on the Angiolina steps, at Abbazia. He even wondered if in the stress of the life they were now following she would lose the last of her good looks, if even her ever-resilient temperament would deaden and harden, and no longer rise supreme to the exacting moment. Or could it be that she was acting a part for him? that all this finebravadowas an attitude, a rôle, a pretense, taken on for his sake? Could it be—and the sudden thought stung him to the quick—that she was deliberately and consciously degrading herself to what she knew was a lower plane of thought and life, that the bond of their older companionship might still remain unsevered?
But, as her startled eyes caught sight of him, a welcoming light came into her relaxed face. With her first spoken word some earlier touch of moroseness seemed to slip away from her. If it required an effort to shake herself together, she gave no outward sign of it. She had promised that there should be no complaining and no hesitations from her; and Durkin knew she would adhere to that promise, to the bitter end.
She went to him, and clung to him, a little hungrily. There seemed something passionate in her very denial of passion. For when he lifted her drooping head, with all its wealth of chestnut shot through with paler gold, and gazed at her upturned face between his two hands, with a little cry of endearment, she shut her mouth hard, on a sob.
"You're back—and safe?" he asked.
She forced a smile.
"Yes, back safe and sound!"
"But tired, I know?"
"Yes—a little. But—"
She broke off, and he could see that she was rising from her momentary luxury of relaxation as a fugitive rises after a minute's breathing-spell.
"Well?" he asked anxiously.
"Pobloff has found us!" she said, in her quiet contralto.
"He's here, you mean?"
"He's in Genoa. I caught sight of him in a cab, hurrying from the French Consulate to the Cafe Jazelli. I slipped into a silversmith's shop, as he raced past, and escaped him."
"And then what?"
"Then several things happened. But first, tell me this: did you get a chance to look over Keenan's room?"
"I was bolted inside twenty minutes after you and he had left the hotel. His trunk was even unlocked; I looked through everything!"
"Which, of course, was charming work!" she interpolated, with not ungentle scorn.
He shrugged his shoulders deprecatively. "Not quite as charming as dining with your new friend!"
"I almost like him!" admitted the woman frankly, femininely rejoicing at the note of jealousy in the other's voice.
"And no worse than some of the work we've done, or may soon have to do!"
Then he went on, with rising passion: "And I'll tell you this, Frank whatever we do, and whatever we have to go through, we've got to get those securities out of Keenan! We've got to have them, now! We've got to pound at it, and dog him, and fight him, and outwit him, until we either win or lose and go under! It's a big game, and it has big risks, but we're in it too deep, now, to talk about drawing back, or to complain about the dirty work it leads to!"
"I wasn't complaining," she reproved, in her dead voice. "I only spoke a bald truth. But you don't tell me what you've found."
"I got nothing—absolutely nothing; not one shred of information even. There's nothing in the room. It stands to reason, then, as I told you from the first, that he is carrying the papers about with him!"
"That will make it harder," she murmured monotonously. "And you're sure your telegram has sent the Scotland Yard men to Como?"
"It must have, or we'd be running into them. The New Yorker is a Pinkerton man."
He started pacing back and forth in front of her, frowning with mingled irritation and impatience.
"Then what about Pobloff?" he suddenly asked.
"Five minutes after we had stepped out of the hotel he met us, face to face. With Keenan, I had no chance of getting away. So I simply faced it out. Then Pobloff shadowed us to the Riggi, watched us all through luncheon, and followed us down to the city again. And here's the strange part of it all. Keenan saw that we were being shadowed, from the first, and I could see him fretting and chafing under it, for he imagines that it's all because of what he's carrying with him. So, on the other hand, Pobloff has concluded Keenan and I are fellow-conspirators, for he let me go to the lift alone, just to keep his eye on Keenan, who told me he had business at the steamship agency."
"But why should we be afraid of Pobloff, then?"
"It's a choice of two evils, I should venture to say. But that's not all. As soon as I was free from each of them, and had left them there, carrying out that silent and ridiculous advance and retreat between them, I had to think both hard and fast. I decided that the best thing for me to do would be to slip down to Rome, at once, and make my visit to the Embassy."
"Yes, I found your note, telling me that."
"When I saw that I was being followed at the station I bought a ticket for Busalla, as a blind, and went in one door of my compartment and then out the other. Mywagon litwas standing on the next track. I didn't change from the one train to the other until the train for Rome started to move. Then I slipped out, and jumped for the moving platform, and was bundled into my right carriage by a guard, who thought I was trying to commit an Anna Karenina suicide—until I gave him ten francs. Whether I got away unnoticed or not I can't say for sure. But Pobloff will have resources here that we know nothing of. From now on, you may be sure, he will have Keenan watched by one of his agents, night and day!"
"Then, good heavens, we've got to step in and save Keenan from Pobloff!"
"It amounts to that," admitted Frank. "Yet, in some way, if we could only manage it, the two of them ought to fight our battle out for us, between themselves!"
"That's true—butdidyou get to Rome?"
"Yes, without trouble."
"And you got the money?"
"Only half of it. They hedged, and said the other half could not be paid until Pobloff's arrest. Jim, we must be on our guard against that man."
"Pobloff doesn't count!" ejaculated Durkin impatiently. "It's Keenan we have to have our fight with—he'sthe man, the offender, we want!—thatmeans only two hundred and fifty pounds!"
"But that is money honestly made!"
"And so will this be money honestly made. The one was legalized by the government authority; the other, in the end, will be recognized as—well, as detectional and punitive expediency. That's why I say Pobloff doesn't count!"
"But Pobloffdoescount," persisted Frank. "He's a vindictive and resourceful man, and he has a score against us to wipe out. Besides all that, he's a master of intrigue, and he has the entire secret service of France behind him, and he knows underground Europe as well as any spy on the Continent. He will keep at us, I tell you, until he thinks he is even!"
"Then let him—if he wants to," scoffed Durkin. "My work is with Keenan. If Pobloff tries interfering with us, the best thing we can do is to get the British Foreign Office after him.Theyought to be big enough for him!"
"It's not a matter of bigness.Hewon't fight that way. He would never fight in the open. He knows his chances, and the country, and just where to turn, and just how far to go—and where to hide, if he has to!"
"That's true enough, I suppose. But oh, if I only had him in New York, I'd fight him to a finish, and never edge away from him and keep on the run this way!"
"Of course; but, as you say, is it worth while? After all, he's only an accident in the whole affair now, though a disagreeable one. And, what's more, Pobloff will never follow us out of Europe. This is his stamping ground. He had misfortune in America, and he's afraid of it. As I said before, Pobloff and Keenan are the acid and the alkali that ought to make the neutral salts. I mean, instead of trying to save them from each other, we ought to fling them together, in some way. Let Pobloff do the hunting for us—then let us hunt Pobloff!"
"But Keenan is wary, and shrewd, and far-seeing. How is he to be caught, even by a Pobloff?"
"That only time and Pobloff can tell. It will never be by brigandage—Keenan will never go far enough afield to give him a chance for that. But I feel it in my bones—I feel that there is danger impending, for us all."
Durkin turned and looked at her, wondering if her woman's intuition was to penetrate deeper into the unknown than his own careful analysis.
"What danger?" he asked.
"Impending dangers cease to be dangers when they can be defined. It's nothing more than a feeling. But the strangest part of the whole situation is the fact that not one of us, from any corner of the triangle, dares turn to the police for one jot of protection. None of us can run crying to the arms of constituted authority when we get hurt!"
A consciousness of their lonely detachment from their kind, of their isolation, crept through Durkin's mind. He felt momentarily depressed by a sense of friendlessness. It was like reverting to primordial conditions, wherein it was ordained that each life, alone and unassisted, should protect and save itself. He wondered if primitive man, or if even wild animals, did not always walk with that vague consciousness of continual menace, where lupine viciousness seemed eternally at war with vulpine wariness.
"Then what would you suggest?" he asked the woman, who sat before him rapt in thought.
"That we watch Keenan, continuously, night and day. He has been hunted and followed now for over two months, and he is only waiting for a clear field to take to his heels. And when he goes he is going for America. That I know. If we lose sight of him, we lose our chance."
Durkin walked to the window, and looked out at the tiled roofs and the squat chimney-pots, above which he could catch a glimpse of bursting sky-rockets and the glow of Greek fire from the narrow canyons of the streets below.
"What are all the fireworks for?" he asked her casually.
"It's a Saint's Day, of some sort, they told me at the office," she explained.
He was about to turn and speak to her again, after a minute's silence, when a low knock sounded on the door. He remained both silent and motionless, and the knock was repeated.
"In a moment!" called the woman, as she motioned Durkin to the door of her clothes-closet. He drew back, with a shake of the head. He revolted momentarily against the ignominy of the movement. But she caught him by the arm and thrust him determinedly in, closing the door on him. Then she hurriedly let her wealth of chestnut hair tumble about her shoulders. Then she answered the knock, with the loosened strands of chestnut in one abashed hand.
It was Keenan himself who stood in the hall before her.
"May I speak to you a moment?" asked Keenan, taking a step nearer to her as he spoke. She seemed able, even under his quiet composure, to detect some note of alarm.
"Will you come in?" she asked, holding the door wide for him.
"If you don't mind the intrusion."
She had closed the door, and stood facing him, interrogatively.
"What I am going to ask you, Miss Allen, is something unusual. But this past week has shown me that you are an unusual woman." He hesitated, in doubt as to how to proceed.
"In America," she said, laughing a little, to widen his avenue of approach, "you would call me emancipated, wouldn't you?"
He bowed and laughed a little in return.
"But let me explain," he went on. "I am in what you might call a dilemma. For some reason or other certain persons here are watching and following me, night and day. In America—which, thank God, is a land of law and order—this sort of thing wouldn't disturb me. But here"—he gave a little shrug—"well, you know what they say about Italy!"
"Then I wasn't mistaken!" she cried, with a well-rung note of alarm.
He looked at her, narrowly.
"Ah, I suspected you'd have an inkling! But what I have here makes the case exceptional—and, perhaps, a little dangerous!"
He drew from his pocket a yellow-tinted manila envelope, of "legal" size. Frank's quick glance told her that it was by no means empty.
"It may sound theatrical, and you may laugh at me, but will you take possession of these papers for me, for a few days? No, let me explain first. They are important, I confess, for, although valueless commercially, they contain personal and private letters that are worth a good deal to me!"
"But this means a great responsibility," demurred Frank.
"Yes; but no danger—at least to you, since you are in no way under suspicion. You said that in five days you would probably be in Naples. Supposing that I arrange to meet you at, say, the Hôtel de Londres there, and then repay you for your trouble."
"But it's so unusual; so almost absurd," still demurred the acting woman. The eavesdropper from the closet felt that it was an instance of diamond cutting diamond. How hard and polished and finished, he thought, actor and actress confronted each other.
"Will you take the risk?" the man was asking.
She looked from him to the packet and then back to him again.
"Yes, if you insist—if it is really helping you out!" she replied, with still simulated bewilderment.
He thanked her with something more than his professional, placid crispness, and put the packet in her outstretched hand.
"Is that all?"
"Yes, everything."
"In Naples, in five days?"
"Yes; the Hôtel de Londres. And now I must leave you."
He startled her by taking her hand and wringing it. She was still looking down at the packet as he withdrew, and the door closed behind him.
She listened for a moment, and then turned the key in the lock. Durkin, stepping from his place of concealment, confronted her. They stood gazing at each other in blank astonishment.
Frank's first impulse was to tear open the envelope. But on second thoughts she flew to her alcohol tea-lamp and lighted the flame. It was only a minute or two before a jet of steam came from the tiny kettle spout. Over this she shifted and held the gummed envelope-flap, until the mucilage softened and dissolved. Then, holding her breath, she peeled back the flap, and from the envelope drew three soiled but carefully folded copies of the LondonDaily Chronicle. The envelope held nothing more.
A little cry of disappointment escaped Durkin, while Frank turned the papers over in her fingers, in speechless amazement. The very audacity of the man swept her off her feet.
It was both a warning and a challenge, grim with its suggestiveness, eloquent with careless defiance. That was her first thought.
"The fool—he's making fun of you!" said Durkin, with a second passionate oath.
Frank was slowly refolding the papers, and replacing them in the envelope.
"I don't believe that's it," she said, meditatively. "I believe he is trying me—making this a test!"
She carefully moistened the gum and resealed the envelope, so that it bore no trace of having revealed its contents. She stood gazing at her husband with studious and unseeing eyes.
"If he comes back I'll know that I am right," she cried, with sudden conviction. "If he finds that I am still here, and that his packet is still intact and safe, he'll do what he wants to do. And that is, he'll trust me with the whole of his securities!"
She quenched the alcohol flame and replaced the lamp in its case.
"If he comes back," mocked Durkin. "Do you know what you and I ought to be doing, at this moment? We ought to be following that man every step he takes."
"But where?" She shook her head, slowly, in dissent.
"That's for us to find out. But can't you feel that he's left us in the lurch, that we're shut up here, while he's giving us the laugh and getting away?"
"Jim, listen to me. During this past week I've seen more of Keenan than you have."
"Yes, a vast sight more!" he interjected, heatedly.
"And I feel sure," she went on evenly, "that he is more frightened and worried than he pretends to be. He is, after all, only a tricky and ferrety Irish lawyer, who is afraid of every power outside his own little circuit of experience. He's afraid of Italy. I suppose he has nightmares aboutbrigantaggio, even! He's afraid of foreigners—afraid of this sort of conspiracy of silence that seems surrounding him. He's even afraid to take his precious documents and put them in a safe-deposit vault in any one of the regularly established institutions here in Genoa. There are plenty of them, but he isn't big and bold enough to do his business that way. He's been a fugitive so long his only way of warfare now is flight. And besides, he can never forget that his work is underground and illicit. That is why he carries his documents about with him, on him, in his pockets, like a sneak thief with a pocketful of stolen goods. I don't mean to say that he isn't smooth and crafty, and that he won't fight like a rat when he's cornered! But I do believe that if he and Penfield could get in touch today, here in Genoa, he would hand over every dollar of those securities, and give up the job, and get back to his familiar old lairs among the New York poolrooms and wardheelers and petty criminals where he knows his enemies and his friends!"
Durkin strode toward the door impatiently. He hesitated for a moment, but had already stretched out his hand to turn the key when he drew back, silently, step by step.
For a second time, on the panel, without, the low knock was sounding.
Frank watched the closet door draw to and close on Durkin; then she called out, with assumed and cheery unconcern, "Come in."
She did not look up for a moment, for she was still busy with her hair.
The door opened and closed.
"I trust I do not intrude?"
Frank's brush fell from her hand, before she even slowly wheeled and looked, for it was the suave and well-modulated baritone of Pobloff.
"What does this mean?" she demanded vacantly, retreating before his steady and scornful gaze.
"Simply, madam, that you and I seem seldom able to anticipate each other's calls!"
She made a pretense of going to the electric signal.
"It is quite useless," explained the Russian quietly. "The wires are disconnected."
He took out his watch and glanced at it. "Indeed, as a demonstration that others enjoy privileges which you sometimes exert, in two minutes every light in this room will be cut off!"
The woman was panting a little by this time, for her thoughts were of Durkin and his danger, as much as of herself. She struggled desperately to regain her self-possession, for there was no mistaking the quiet but grim determination written on the Russian's pallid face. And she knew he was not alone in whatever plot he had laid.
She would have spoken, only the sudden flood of blackness that submerged her startled her into silence. The lights had gone out.
She demanded of herself quickly, what should be her first move.
While she stood in momentary suspense, a knock sounded still once more on her door.
"Come in," she called out quickly, loudly, now alert and alive to every movement.
It was Keenan who stepped in from the half-lighted hall. He would have paused, in involuntary amazement, at the utter darkness that greeted him, only footsteps approaching and passing compelled him to act quickly.
He stepped inside and closed and locked the door.
She had not been mistaken. Hehadcome back.
There flashed through Frances Durkin's mind, in the momentary silence that fell over that strange company, the consciousness that the triangle was completed; that there, in one room, through a fortuitousness that seemed to her more factitious than actual, stood the three contending and opposing forces. The thought came and went like a flash, for it was not a time for meditation, but for hurried and desperate action. The sense of something vast and ominous seemed to hang over the darkness, where, for a second or two, the silence of absolute surprise reigned.
The last-comer, too, seemed to feel this sense of something impending, for a moment later his voice rang out, clear and unhesitating, with a touch of challenge in it.
"Miss Allen, are you here? And is anything wrong?"
"Stand where you are!" the voice of the woman answered, through the darkness, firm and clear. "Yes. I am here. But there is another person in this room. He is a man who means harm, I believe, to both of us!"
"Ah!" said the voice near the door.
The woman was speaking again, her voice high and nervous, from the continued suspense of that darkness and silence combined, a dual mystery from which any bolt might strike.
"Above all things," she warned him, "you must watch that door!"
Her straining ears heard a quiet click-click; she had learned of old the meaning of that pregnant sound. It was the trigger of a revolver being cocked.
"All right—I'm ready," said the man at the door, grimly. Then he laughed, perhaps a little uneasily. "But why are we all in darkness this way?"
"The wires have been cut—that is a part of his plan!"
Keenan took a step into the room and addressed the black emptiness before him.
"Will the gentleman speak up and explain?"
No answer came out of the darkness. Frank knew, by this time, that Keenan would make no move to desert her.
"Have you a lamp, or a light of any kind, Miss Allen?" was the next curt, businesslike question.
"Oh, be careful, sir!" she warned him, now in blind and unreasoning terror.
"Have you a light?" repeated Keenan authoritatively.
"I have only an alcohol lamp; it gives scarcely any light—it is for boiling a teapot!"
"Then light it, please!"
"Oh, I dare not!" she cried, for now she was possessed of the unreasoning fear that one step in any direction would bring her in contact with death itself.
"Light it, please!" commanded Keenan. "Nothing will happen. I have in my hand here, where I stand, a thirty-eight calibre revolver, loaded and cocked. If there is one movement from the gentleman you speak of, I will empty it into him!"
Both Keenan and Frank started, and peered through the blackness. For a careless and half-derisive, half-contemptuous laugh sounded through the room. Pobloff, obviously, had never moved from where he stood.
Frank slowly groped to the wall of her room, and felt with blind and exploring hands until she came to her bureau. Then sounded the clink of nickel as the lamp was withdrawn from its case and the dry rattle of German safety-matches. Then the listeners heard the quick scrape and flash of the match against the side of the little paper box, and the puff of the wavering blue flame as the match-end came in contact with the alcohol.
After all, it was good to have a light! Incongruously it flashed through her mind, as wayward thoughts and ideas would at such moments, how relieved primitive man amid his primitive night must have been at the blessed gift of the first fire.
The wavering blue flame widened and heightened. In a moment the inky room was pallidly suffused with its trembling half-light. Outside, through the night, sounded muffled street noises, and the boom and hiss and spurt of fireworks.
The two peering faces turned slowly, until their range of vision had swept the entire room. Then they paused, for motionless against the west wall, between the closet door and the corner, stood Pobloff. His arms were folded, and he was laughing a little.
Frank drew nearer Keenan, instinctively, wondering what the next movement would be.
It was Pobloff's voice that first broke the silence.
"This woman lies," he said, in his suavely scoffing baritone. "This woman——"
"Why don't you say something—why don't you do something!" cried Frank, hysterically, turning to Keenan.
"Ring the bell!" commanded Keenan.
"It's useless—the wires are cut," she panted. She could see that, above and beyond all his craftiness, his latent Irish fighting-blood was aroused.
"Then, by God, I'll put him out myself. If there's any fight between him and me "—he turned on Pobloff—"we won't drag a woman into it!"
The tall, gaunt Russian against the wall was no longer laughing.
"Pardon me," he said, advancing a step. "This woman has in her possession a packet of papers—of personal and private papers, which concern neither you nor her!"
"But what if itdoesconcern me?" demanded Keenan.
"The gentleman is talking nonsense," said Pobloff, unperturbed. Yet he leaned forward and studied him more closely, through the half-light, studied him as the deliberating terrier might study the captured rat that had dared to bite back at him. "This woman, I repeat, has certain papers about her!"
"And what of that?" cried Keenan blindly. Frank saw, to her joy, that he was misled.
"Simply this: that if the lady I speak of hands those papers to me, here, the matter is closed, for all time!"
"And if she doesn't?"
"Then she will do so later!"
A grunt of sheer rage broke from Keenan's lips. But he checked it, suddenly, and wheeled on the woman.
"Give him the package," he ordered. She hesitated, for at the moment the thought of Keenan's trust had passed from her mind.
"Do as I say," he repeated curtly.
Frank, remembering, drew the yellow manila envelope from her bosom, and with out-stretched arm handed it to Pobloff.
The Russian took it in silence. Then with a few quick strides he advanced to the alcohol lamp. As he did so both Keenan and Frank noticed for the first time the blunt little gun-metal revolver he held in his right hand.
"Again you will pardon me," said Pobloff, with his ever-scoffing courtliness. "A mere glance will be necessary, to make sure that we are not—mistaken!"
He tore open the envelope with one long forefinger, and stooped to draw forth the contents.
It was then that Keenan sprang at him. Frank at the moment, was marveling at the unbroken continuity of evidence linking her with her uncomprehending opponent.
The sudden leap and cry of Keenan sent a tingle of apprehension up and down her body. She asked herself, vaguely, if all the rest of her life was to be made up of this brawling and fighting in unlighted chambers of horror; if, now that they were in the more turgid currents for which they had longed, there were to come no moments of peace amid all their tumult and struggling.
Then she drew in her breath with a little gasp, for she saw Pobloff, with a quick writhe of his thin body, free his imprisoned right arm, and strike with the metal butt of his revolver.
He struck twice, three times, and the sound of the metal on the unprotected head was sickening to the listening woman. She staggered to the closet door as the man fell to the floor, stunned.
"Jim! Oh, Jim, quick!—he's killing him!—I tell you he's killing him!"
Durkin said "'Ssssh!" under his breath, and waited.
For in the dim half-light they could see that the Russian had ripped open Keenan's coat and vest, and from a double-buttoned pocket on the inside of the inner garment was drawing out a yellow manila envelope, the fellow to that which had already been thrust into his hands. It was then that Durkin sprang forward.
Pobloff saw him advance. He had only time to reverse his hold on the little gun-metal revolver and fire two shots.
The first shot went wide, tearing deep into the plastered wall. The second cut through the flap of his assailant's coat-pocket, just over the left hip, scattering little flecks of woollen cloth about. But there was no time for a third shot.
It seemed brutal to Frank, but she allowed herself time for neither thought nor scruples. All she remembered was that it was necessary—though once again she asked herself if all her life, from that day on, was to be made up of brawling and fighting.
For Durkin had brought down on the half-turned head the up-poised bedroom chair with all his force. Pobloff, with a little inarticulate cry that was almost a grunt, buckled and pitched forward.
"That settlesyou!" the stooping man said, heartlessly, as he watched him relax and half roll on his side.
Frank watched him, too, but with no sense of triumph or success, with no emotion but slowly awakening disgust, against which she found it useless to struggle. She watched him with a sense of detachment and aloofness, as if looking down on him from a great height, while he tore upon the manila envelope and gave vent to a little cry of satisfaction. They at last possessed the Penfield securities. Then she went over and replenished the waning flame in the alcohol lamp.
"We've got to get away from here now," said Durkin quickly. "And the sooner the better!"
She looked about her, a little helplessly. Then she glanced at Keenan. "See, he's coming to!"
"Are you ready?" Durkin demanded sharply.
"Yes," she answered, in her dead and resigned voice, as she took up her hat and coat. "But where are we going?"
"I'll tell you on the way down. Only you must get what you want, and hurry!"
"But is it safe now?" she demurred, "and foryou?"
He thought for a moment, with his hand on the doorknob. Then he turned back.
"You'd better keep this, then, until I find what we have to face, outside here!"
He passed into her hand the manila envelope, and stepped out into the hall.
A moment later she had secreted the packet, along with Pobloff's revolver, which she picked up from the floor. Then she ran to the door, and locked it. She would fight like a hornet, now, she inwardly vowed, for what she held.
Then she caught her breath, behind the locked door, for the sounds that crept in from the hallway told her that her fear had not been groundless.
She heard Durkin's little choked cry of pain and surprise, for he had been seized, she knew, and pinned back against the door. It was Pobloff's men, she told herself. They had him by the throat, she knew by the sound of the guttural oaths which they were trying to choke back. She could hear the kick and scrape of feet, the movement of his writhing and twisting body against the door, as on a sounding-board. She surmised that they had his arms held, otherwise he would surely have used his revolver. She was conscious of a sort of wild joy at the thought that he could not, for they were going through him, from the quieted sounds, pocket by pocket, and she knew he would have shot them if he could.
"There's nothing here!" said a voice in French. Frank, listening so close to them, could hear the three men breathe and pant.
"Then the woman has it!" answered the other voice, likewise in French.
"Shut up! She'll get on!" And Frank could hear them tear and haul at Durkin as they dragged him down the hall—just where, she could not distinguish.
She ran over to Keenan and shook him roughly. He looked at her a little stupidly, but did not seem able to respond to her entreaties.
"Quick!" she whispered, "or it will be too late!"
She flung her pitcher of water in his face and over his head, and poured brandy from her little leather-covered pocket-flask down his throat.
That seemed to revive him, for he sat up on the carpeted floor, mumblingly, and glowered at her. Then he remembered; and as she bathed his bruised head with a wet towel he caught at her hand foolishly.
"Have we lost them?" he asked huskily, childishly.
"No, they are here! See, intact, and safe. But you must take them back. Neither of us can go through that hall with them!"
"Why not?"
"We're watched—we're prisoners here!"
"Then what'll we do?" he asked weakly, for he was not yet himself.
"You must take them, and get out of this room. There is only one way!"
"What is it?"
"You see this rope. It's meant for a fire-escape. You must let yourself down by it. You'll find yourself in a court, filled with empty barrels. That leads into a bake-shop—you can see the oven lights and smell the bread. Give the man tenlira, and he's sure to let you pass. Can you do it? Do you understand?"
"Yes," he said, still a little bewildered. "But where will I meet you?"
She pondered a moment.
"In Trieste, a week from tomorrow. But can you manage the rope?"
He laughed a little. "I ought to! I've been through a poolroom raid or two, over home!"
"In Trieste then, a week from morrow!"
She handed him her brandy-flask.
"You may need it," she explained. He was on his feet by this time, struggling to pull himself together.
"But you can't face that alone," he remonstrated, with a thumb-jerk toward the hall. "I won't see you touched by those damned rats!"
"'Ssssh!" she warned him. "They can't do anything to me now, except search me for those papers!"
"But even that!"
"I'll wait until I see you're safely down, then I'll run for the stairs. They've shut off all the lights outside, in this wing, but if they in any way attempt to ill-treat me, before I get to the main corridor, I'll scream for help!"
"But even to search you"—began Keenan again.
"Yes, I know!" she answered evenly. "It's not pleasant. But I'll face it"—she turned her eyes full upon him—"for you!"
They listened for a moment together at the opened window. The red lights were still burning here and there about the city in the streets below, and the carnival-like cries and noises still filled the air.
And she watched him anxiously as he and his packet of documents went down the dangling hemp rope, reached the stone paving of the little court, and disappeared in the square of light framed by the bake-shop window.
Then she turned back into the room, startled by a weak and wavering groan from Pobloff. She went to him, and tried to lift him up on the bed, but he was too heavy for her overtaxed strength. She wondered, as she slipped a pillow under his head, why she should be afraid of him in that comatose and helpless state—why even his white and passive face looked so vindictive and sinister in the dim light of the room.
But as he moved a little she started back, and caught up what things she could fling into her Gladstone bag, and put out the light, and groped her way across the room once more.
Then she flung open the door and stepped out into the hall, with a feeling that her heart was in her mouth, choking her.
She ceased running as she came to the bend in the hall, for she heard the sound of voices, and the light grew stronger. She would have dodged back, but it was too late.
Then she saw that it was Durkin, beside three jabbering and gesticulating Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza.
"Oh, there you are!" said his equable and tranquil voice, as he removed his hat.
She did not speak, accepting silence as safer.
"I brought these gentlemen, for someone told me there was a drunken Englishman in the halls, annoying you, and I was afraid we might miss our train!"
She looked at thegendarmesand then on to the excited servants at their heels, in bewilderment. She was to escape, then, in safety!
"Explain to these gentlemen just what it was," she heard the warningly suave voice of her husband saying to her, "while I hurry down and order the carriage!"
She was nervous and excited and incoherent, yet as they followed at her side down the broad marble staircase she made them understand dimly that their protection was now unnecessary. No, she had not been insulted; not directly. But she had been affronted. It was nothing—only the shock of seeing a drunken quarrel; it had alarmed and upset her. She paused, caught at the balustrade, then wavered a little; and three solicitous arms in dark cloth and metal buttons were thrust out to support her. She thanked them, in her soft contralto, gratefully. The drive through the open air, she assured them, would restore her completely.
But all the while she was thinking how needlessly and blindly and foolishly she had surrendered and lost a fortune. Her path of escape had been an open one.
* * * * * *
"Won't they find out, and everything be known, before we can get to the station?" she asked, as the fresh night air fanned her throbbing face and brow.
"Of course they will!" said Durkin. "But we're not going to the station. We're going to the waterfront, and from there out to our steamer!"
"For where?" she asked.
"I scarcely know—but anywhere away from Genoa!"
Frances Durkin's memory of that hurried flight from Genoa always remained with her a confusion of incongruous and quickly changing pictures. She had a recollection of stepping from her cab into a crowded sailors'café chantant, of pushing past chairs and tables and hurrying out through a side door, of a high wind tearing at her hair and hat, as she and Durkin still hurried down narrow, stone-paved streets, of catching the smell of salt water and the musky odor of shipping, of a sharp altercation with an obdurate customs officer in blue uniform and tall peaked cap, who stubbornly barred their way with a bare and glittering bayonet against her husband's breast, while she glibly and perseveringly lied to him, first in French, and then in English, and then in Italian.
She remembered her sense of escape when he at last reluctantly allowed them to pass, while they stumbled over railway tracks, and the rough stones of the quay pavement, and the bundles of merchandise lying scattered about them. Then she heard the impatient lapping of water, and the outside roar of the waves, and saw the harbor lights twinkling and dancing, and caught sight of the three great white shafts of light that fingered so inquisitively and restlessly along the shipping and the city front and the widening bay, as three great gloomy Italian men-of-war played and swung their electric searchlights across the night.
Then came a brief and passionate scene with a harbor ferryman, who scorned the idea of taking his boat out in such a sea, who eloquently waved his arms and told of accidents and deaths and disasters already befallen the bay that night, who flung down his cap and danced on it, in an ecstasy of passionate argumentation. She had a memory of Durkin almost as excited as the dancing harbor orator himself, raging up and down the quay with a handful of Italian paper money between his fingers, until the boatman relented. Then came a memory of tossing up and down in a black and windy sea, of creeping under a great shadow stippled with yellow lights, of grating and pounding against a ship's ladder, of an officer in rubber boots running down to her assistance, of more blinking lights, and then of the quiet and grateful privacy of her own cabin, smelling of white-lead paint and disinfectants.
She slept that night, long and heavily, and it was not until the next morning when the sun was high and they were well down the coast, that she learned they were on board the British coasting steamerLaminian, of the Gallaway & Papyani Line. They were to skirt the entire coast of Italy, stopping at Naples and then at Bari, and then make their way up the Adriatic to Trieste. These stops, Durkin had found, would be brief, and the danger would be small, for theLaminianwas primarily known as a freighter, carrying out blue-stone and salt fish, and on her return cruise picking up miscellaneous cargoes of fruit. So her passenger list, which included, outside of Frank and Durkin, only a consumptive Welsh school-teacher and a broken-down clergyman from Birmingham, who kept always to his cabin, was in danger of no over-close scrutiny, either from the Neapolitan Guardie Municipali on the one hand, or from any private agents of Keenan and Penfield on the other.
Even one short day of unbroken idleness, indeed, seemed to make life over for both Frank and Durkin. Steeping themselves in that comfortable sense of security, they drew natural and easy breath once more. They knew it was but a momentary truce, an interregnum of indolence; but it was all they asked for. They could no longer nurse any illusions as to the trend of their way or the endlessness of their quest. They must now always keep moving. They might alter the manner of their progression, they might change their stroke, but the continuity of effort on their part could no more be broken than could that of a swimmer at sea. They must keep on, or go down.
So, in the meantime, they plucked the day, with a touch of wistfulness born of their very distrust of the morrow.
The glimmering sapphire seas were almost motionless, the days and nights were without wind, and the equable, balmy air was like that of an American mid-summer, so that all of the day and much of the night they spent on deck, where the Welsh schoolmaster eyed them covertly, as a honeymoon couple engulfed in the selfish contentment of their own great happiness. It reminded Frank of earlier and older days, for, with the dropping away of his professional preoccupations, Durkin seemed to relapse into some more intimate and personal relationship with her. It was the first time since their flight from America, she felt, that his affection had borne out the promise of its earlier ardor. And it taught her two things. One was that her woman's natural hunger for love was not so dead as she had at times imagined. The other was that Durkin, during the last months, had drifted much further away from her than she had dreamed. It stung her into a passionate and remorseful self-promise to keep closer to him, to make herself always essential to him, to turn and bend as he might bend and turn, but always to be with him. It would lead her downward and still further downward, she told herself. But she caught solace from some blind belief that all women, through some vague operation of their affectional powers, could invade the darkest mires of life, if only it were done for love, and carry away no stain. In fact, what would be a blemish in time would almost prove a thing of joy and pride. And in the meantime she was glad enough to be as happy as she was, and to be near Durkin. It was not the happiness she had once looked for, but it sufficed.
They caught sight of a corner of Corsica, and on the following night could see the glow of the iron-smelting fires on Elba, and the twinkle of the island shore-lights. From the bridge, too, through one of the officers' glasses, Frank could see, far inland across the Pontine Marshes, the gilded dome of St. Peter's, glimmering in the pellucid morning sunlight.
She called Durkin, and pointed it out to him.
"See, it's Rome!" she cried, with strangely mingled feelings. "It's St. Peter's!"
"I wish it was the Statue of Liberty and New York," he said, moodily.
She realized, then, that he was not quite so happy as he had pretended to be. And she herself, from that hour forward, shared in his secret unrest. For as time slipped away and her eye followed the heightening line of the Apennines, she knew that tranquil Tyrrhenian Sea would not long be left to her.
It was evening when they rounded the terraced vineyards of Ischia. A low red moon shone above the belching pinnacle of Vesuvius. Frank and Durkin leaned over the rail together, as they drifted slowly up the bay, the most beautiful bay in all the world, with its twilight sounds of shipping, its rattle of anchor chains, its far-off cries and echoes, and its watery, pungent Southern odors.
They watched the ship's officer put ashore to obtainpratique, and the yellow flag come down, and heard the signal-bells of the engine-room, as the officer returned, with a great cigar in one corner of his bearded mouth.
There was nothing amiss. There were neither Carabinieri nor Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza to come on board with papers and cross-questions. Before the break of day their discharged cargo would be in the lighters and they would be steaming southward for the Straits of Messina.
That night, on the deserted deck, at anchor between the city and the sea, they watched the glimmering lights of Naples, rising tier after tier from theImmacolatella Nuovaand its ship lamps to thePalazzo di Capodimonteand its near-byOsservatorio. And when the lights of the city thinned out and the crowning haze of gold melted from its hillsides, with the advancing night, Frank and Durkin sat back in their steamer-chairs and looked up at the stars, talking of Home, and of the future.
Yet the beauty of that balmy and tranquil night seemed to bring little peace of mind to Durkin. There were reasons, of late, when moments of meditation were not always moments of contentment to him. His wife had noticed that ever-increasing trouble of soul, and although she said nothing of it, she had watched him narrowly and not altogether despondently. For she knew that whatever the tumult or contest that might be taking place within the high-walled arena of his own Ego, it was a clash of forces of which she must remain merely a spectator. So she went below, leaving him in that hour of passive yet troubled thought, to stare up at the tranquil southern stars, as he meditated on life, and the meaning of life, and what lay beyond it all. She knew men and the world too well to look for any sudden and sweeping reorganization of Durkin's disturbed and restless mind. But she nursed the secret hope that out of that spiritual ferment would come some ultimate clearness of vision.
It was late when he called her up on deck again, ostensibly to catch a glimpse of Vesuvius breaking and bursting into flame, aboveBarraandPortici. She knew, however, that slumbering and subterranean fires other than Vesuvius had erupted into light and life. She could see it by the new misery on his moonlit face, as she sat beside him. Yet she sat there in silence; there was so little that she could say.
"Do you know, you've changed, Frank, these last few months!" he at last essayed.
"Haven't there been reasons enough for it?" she asked, making no effort to conceal the bitterness of her tone.
"You're not happy, are you?"
"Areyou?" she asked, in turn.
"Who can be happy, and think?"
She waited, passively, for him to go on again.
"You said you didn't much care what happened, so long as it kept us together, and left us satisfied."
"Isn't that enough?" she broke in, hotly, yet thrilling with the thought that he was about to tear away the mockery behind which she had tried to mask herself.
"No, it isn't enough! And now we're out of the dust of it, these last few days, I can see that it never can be enough. I've just been wondering where it leads to, and what it amounts to. I've had a feeling, for days, now, that there's something between us. What is it?"
"Ourselves!" she answered, at last.
"Exactly! And that is what makes me think you're wrong when you cry that you'll stoop every time I stoop. Every single crime that seems to be bringing us together is only keeping us apart. It's making you hate yourself, and because of that, hate me as well!"
"I couldn't dothat!" she protested, catching at his hands.
"But I can see it with my own eyes, whether you want to or not. It can't be helped. It's beginning to frighten me, this very willingness of yours to do the things we oughtn't to. Why, I'd be happier, even, if you did them under protest!"
"But what is the difference, if I stilldothem?"
"It would show me that you weren't as bad as I am—that you hadn't altogether given up."
"I couldn't altogether give up, and live!" she cried, with sudden passion.
"But you told me as much, that night in Monte Carlo?"
"I didn'tmeanit. I was tired out that night; I was embittered, and insane, if you like! Iwantto be good! No woman wants sin and wrongdoing! But, O Jim, can't you see, it's you, you, I want, before everything else!"
He smote the palms of his hands together, in a little gesture of impotent misery.
"That's just it—you tried to make me save myself for my own sake,—and it couldn't be done. It was a failure. And now you're trying to make me save myself for your sake——"
"It's not your salvation I want—it'syou!"
"But it's only through being honest that I can hold and keep you; can't you see that? If I can't trust myself, I can't possibly trustyou!"
"Couldn't we try—once more?" Her voice was little more than a whisper.
He looked up at the soft and velvet stars that peered down so voluptuously from a soft and velvet sky. He looked at them for many moments, before he spoke again.
"If I got back to my work again, my right and honest work, Icouldbe honest!" he declared, vehemently.
"But wearegoing back," she assuaged.
"Yes, but see what we have to go through, first!"
"I know," she admitted, unhappily. "But even then, we could say that it was to be for the last time."
"As we said before—and failed!"
"But this time we needn't fail. Think what it will mean if you have your work on your transmitting camera waiting for you—months and years of hard and honest work—work that you love, work that will lead to bigger things, and give you the time, yes, and the money, you need to perfect your amplifier. But outside of that, even to have your work—surely that's enough!"
"I'd have to have you, as well!" he said, out of the silence that had fallen upon them.
"You always will, Jim, you know that!"
"But I'm afraid of myself! I'm afraid of my moods—I'm afraid of my own distrust. I have a feeling that it may hurt you, sometime, almost beyond forgiveness!"
"I'll try to understand!" she murmured. And again silence fell over them.
"I'm afraid of making promises," he said, half whimsically, half weakly, after many minutes of thought.
"I don't want you to promise—onlytry!" she pleaded, swept by a wave of gratitude that seemed to fling her more intimately than ever before into her husband's arms. Yet it was a wave, and nothing more. For it receded as it came, leaving her, a moment later, chilled and apprehensive before their over-troubled future. With a little muffled cry of emotion, almost animal-like in its inarticulate intensity, she turned to her husband, and strained him in her arms, in her human and unhappy and unsatisfied arms.
"Oh, love me!" she pleaded, brokenly. "Love me! Love me—for I need it!"
They seemed strangely nearer to each other, after that night, and the peacefulness of their cruise to Bari remained uninterrupted. And once clear of that port Durkin's nervousness somewhat lightened, for he had figured out that they would be able to connect with one of the Cunard liners at Trieste. From there, if only they escaped attention and detection in the harbor, they would be turning homeward in two days.
One thing, and one thing only, lay between Frank and her husband: She had not yet found courage to tell him of the loss of the Penfield papers. And the more she thought of it, the more she dreaded it, teased and mocked by the very irony of the situation, disquieted and humiliated at the memory of her own pleadings for honesty while she herself was so far astray from the paths she was pointing out.
That sacrifice of scrupulosity on the altar of expediency, trivial as it was, was the heritage of her past life, she told herself. And she felt, vaguely, that in some form or another it would be paid for, and dearly paid for, as she had paid for everything.
It was only as they steamed into the harbor of Trieste, in the teeth of aboraand a high-running sea, that this woman who longed to be altogether honest allowed herself any fleeting moment of self-pity. For as she gazed up at the bald and sterile hills behind that clean and wind-swept Austrian city, she remembered they had been thus denuded that their timbers might make a foundation for Venice. She felt, in that passing mood, that her own life had been denuded, that all its softening and shrouding beauties had been cut out and carried away, that from now on she was to be torn by winds and scorched by open suns—while the best of her slept submerged, beyond the reach of her unhappy hands.
But Durkin, at her side, through the driving spray and rain, pointed out to her the huge rolling bulk and the red funnels of the Cunarder.
"Thank heaven!" he said, with a sigh of relief, "we'll be in time to catch her!"
TheLaminiandropped anchor to the windward of the liner, and as dusk settled down over the harbor Frank took a wordless pleasure in studying the shadowy hulk which was to carry her back to America, to her old life and her old associations. But she was wondering how she should tell him of the loss of the Penfield securities. It was true that the very crimes that should have bound them together were keeping them apart!
Suddenly she ran to the companionway and called down to her husband.
"Look!" she said, under her breath, as he came to the rail, "they're talking with their wireless!"
She pointed to the masthead of the Cunarder, where, through the twilight, she could "spell" the spark, signal by signal and letter by letter, as the current broke from the head of the installation wires to the hollow metal mast, from which ran the taut-strung wires connecting, in turn, with the operating office just aft and above the engine-rooms.
"Listen," she said, for in the lull of the wind they could hear the short, crisp spit of the spark as it spelt out its mysterious messages.
Durkin caught her arm, and listened, intently, watching the little appearing and disappearing green spark, spelling off the words with narrowing eyes.
"They're talking with the station up on the mainland. Do you hear what it is? Can't you make it out?"
It was, of course, the Continental, and not the Morse, code, and it was not quite the same as stooping over and listening to the crisp, incisive pulsations of a "sounder." But Frank heard and saw and pieced together enough of the message to clutch, in turn, at Durkin's arm, and wait with quickened breath for the answering spark-play.
"No—such—persons—on—board—send—fuller—description."
There was a silence of a minute or two, and then the mysterious Hertzian voice lisped out once more.
"Description—not—forwarded—by—Embassy—man—and—wife—are wanted— for robbery—at—Monte—Carlo—also—at—Genoa—name—Durgin—or— Durkin."
The listening man and woman looked at each other, and still waited.
"Oh, thisisluck!" said the listener, fervently, as he drew a deep breath. "Thisisluck!"
"Listen, they're answering again!" cried Frank.
"Why—not—confer—with—Trieste—authorities—will—you—please— telephone—our—agents—to—send—out—tender—to take—off—Admiral— Stuart."
Then came the silence again.
"Yes," sounded the minute electric tongue from the mountain-top, so many miles away. "Good—night!"
"Good—night!" replied the articulate mass of heaving steel, swinging at her anchor chains.