Within the hour thought flagged for sheer weariness of beating to no purpose against that wall of oblivion whose featureless façade sequestered seven mortal months of forfeit yesterdays, nerves grew weary of the zooming wind, incessant slap and slash of broken water streaming down the side, the tuneless crooning of the engines: Lanyard slept.
A noise of light knuckles on the door awakened him when the afternoon was old and wind and sea had both abated, as the muting of their deep diapason affirmed and that horizontal beam of rusty light which bored in through the port to flail with slow and steady strokes the dusk whose blue it strengthened.
Without waiting to receive permission, Liane Delorme turned the knob and entered.
Most adept of actresses, she carried herself now with an air of delicate audacity that would have graced a virtuous lady of a sudden turned so venturesome as to call on a man in his lodgings alone. Almost anybody else it would surely have taken in, even Lanyard found himself for a moment at loss to account for this revolutionary innovation, a change of rôle made the more confounding by the fact that Liane had gone to the length of dressing it with garments of a semi-negligée sort whose circumspection, though they were dainty and costly enough to delight any woman, was hardly akin to the spirit that sported them.
But one glimpse of Lanyard's eyes, one flash of their reclaimed intelligence, made plain the poverty of objective artifice as an aid to Liane's intentions. It indeed did more, it struck pale glints of panic from her own eyes, or something very like that emotion in the sight of one who knew as yet no reason why it should discountenance the woman to find him, whom she had sought of her own accord, awake and in his proper mind.
She held a dead wait with a hand on the door-knob behind her, the other unconsciously plucking at lace which, in this novel modesty of raiment, clothed chastely that bosom of fine fullness—dusky eyes quick in a face that wanted a shade or so of its habitually high illumination, lips a trace apart as if with a cry unsounded.
But the pause imposed by her illegible emotion was brief of life, with her next breath Liane recollected herself and, uttering a low sound of compassion crossed the room to kneel by the head of the berth.
"No, no, my friend!" She spoke in French, her arms lightly forced back to the pillow the shoulders which Lanyard was lifting. "Rest tranquil—with that poor head! Thou dost still suffer greatly, my old one?"
Lanyard mumbled a dashed negative with lips that were muffled, before he could object, by lips ardent and tender, whose clinging intimacy he escaped at length only by moving his head aside.
Happily, that movement excited only a grumble of pain, entirely bearable; he was able to muster a smile by way of redressing the rebuff.
"I say!" he remonstrated in his most British English—"we are getting on, rather—aren't we?"
The woman drew back sharply and, half-kneeling, half resting on her heels, showed a face sad with reproach. "Hast thou forgotten, then?"
"More than I guessed, going on this bit of business, my dear." Lanyard was firm in his stand against French; it was easier to be unsentimental in sound Anglo-Saxon, a tongue that enabled one to avoid using the too personal "thou" without administering an affront unpardonable. "What bothers me most is this," he proceeded in querulous vein, a self-conscious smile accounting for his neglect of the stricken eyes staring into his: "I've remembered and forgotten much too much, all at once. It's damned discouraging—you may be interested to know—to wake up from what amounted to a sound long nap and find that seven perfectly useful months have been stolen while one slept."
"It is true, then, what I feared!"
"Afraid it is, Liane, if what you feared was that a blow on the head had bumped my right mind back to its throne."
Slowly and with a bitter smile the woman repeated the English phrase: "'A blow on the head!' . . ."
"That's what did the trick for me—and I don't mind telling you it hurt like the devil."
"But what of the blow to my heart?" Her closed hand smote Liane's breast. "You complain with reason of having been robbed of seven months of memory; but what of me, who stand to lose seven months of memories?"
"Pardon?" Lanyard queried, politely dense.
"You loved me well in that time while you were your old, true self."
"Loved you, Liane? And forgot! Ah, no! you ask me to believe too much."
"You jest—and my heart is breaking!"
"It's no joke to forget an experience like that, something which one man in a million would be lucky to know once in his lifetime."
"One in a million!"
"I beg your pardon: I was counting in your unsuccessful lovers as well."
"But this is too much!"
With an abrupt movement the woman started up, to pause with face averted and hands fast laced. As promptly Lanyard tumbled out of the berth.
"Forgive me, Liane," he said contritely. "I daresay I am a bit light-headed, it would be surprising if I weren't, considering that I've experienced something of a shock today, and not by any means a physical shock merely—and am still shaken from it. You can hardly demand rational behaviour of a revenant lately spewed back into life by a psychic earthquake. That it was a strictly private earthquake doesn't make its after-effects any the less unsettling."
"True: it is you rather who have me to forgive." With a spontaneous generosity that shamed him, Liane swung back to Lanyard and caught both his hands to her bosom. "In my sadness and pain I forget you cannot understand . . ."
"Then make me understand. I've no one else to look to—and it would be unkindness to leave me in the dark."
"But give me time to consider . . ." She let go his hands and sank into the room's one chair. "It is going to hurt me to tell you, Michael, even more than it will hurt you."
"And how is that?"
"Because, I think" . . . She studied him a while with troubled gaze . . . "I think you have gone back to the ways of thought that were yours seven months ago."
"And what is so deplorable in that? Ways of thought about what?"
The woman leaned forward to bend her head to his in confidence, but gave a slight start instead and drew back with a veering glance, as if disturbed by some noise unheard by Lanyard, then laid a finger to her lips, sprang up lightly, and went to the port to look out. From this, in agreeable disappointment, she crossed back to the door, inclining to it an attentive ear for some seconds before opening it furtively to peer out, and concluding the performance with an expression of alarms allayed.
"I was mistaken," she announced, shooting the bolt—"there is nobody."
"Madame la comtesse was expecting—?"
She gave her head a shake of irritation excited by his levity, and without warning whipped from the folds of her négligé an automatic pistol, which she pressed into Lanyard's hand regardless of his efforts to refuse it.
"No, take it—take it, I say, while there is time."
"But what the deuce—!"
"Take it, I tell you—you may need it soon." And then as Lanyard humoured her for the sake of peace, she proceeded with every appearance of offering a complete explanation: "That dolt of a doctor told me you were unarmed."
"Bright? But how does he know? And why should he care?"
"Your effects were searched this morning, while you were at breakfast, and the steward who picked you up after your fall took the trouble to find out that you had no weapon about you."
"Thoughtful of all hands, I'm sure!" Lanyard muttered in amazement. "But do tell me what I have done to deserve so much respect?"
"Presently," Liane promised in a hushed voice. She moved nearer and held out an open hand. "No!" she insisted, and brusquely brushed aside the pistol when he tried to return it—"the necklace! Give me that now—we can come to an explanation later. Let me hide it away before they come to put you under arrest—they may, at any moment."
"Indeed?" Impatience with all this, as it seemed, determined effort to mystify him to no end, resulted in the pistol being flirted into the berth, and peremptory imprisonment of the woman's wrists. "Now!" Lanyard demanded—"come to your senses, Liane, be intelligible if you can. Why should I be in danger of arrest? What is this necklace you are raving about?"
"Give it to me first—"
"I know nothing of any necklace."
"You have forgotten; nevertheless, you have it. You told me you would never let it leave your person, you must have it hidden somewhere about you now. Find and give it to me before it is too late."
Her agitation was too truly rendered to seem put on for a purpose; and though he had not the least inkling of its cause, Lanyard reflected that in those seven months anything might have happened, the amplest reason might all too possibly exist for the distress of mind which Liane was so vividly portraying. Half-persuaded, he released her wrists and, stepping back, ran the hands of old cunning through his garments, locating every spot which in former days he had been accustomed to use as a temporary cache for purloined property—and drawing every one blank. Winding up with a shrug of fatigued incredulity: "There is nothing," he declared shortly. "Now be so kind—"
"Nothing!" Consternation rang in that guarded cry. "They must have it already, then, they must have searched you and found it while you slept! The doctor spoke of having given you a sleeping powder—enough, he said, to keep you quiet till morning."
"I didn't take it."
"They must have thought you had, or you wouldn't have been left unwatched, I would have found it impossible to see you. You have been asleep?" Lanyard nodded. "You have slept all afternoon, and soundly?" He confessed that he had. Liane subsided, crushed by despair, upon the cushioned transom beneath the port. "It was the same to them as if you had taken their drug—the opportunity they needed. Now they have found the necklace—you are lost!"
"But I have often been 'lost' in my life," Lanyard retorted, unmoved more than by impatience with this everlasting beating about the bush. "And at present I feel less lost than quite newly found, and so prefer to think myself—until, at least, you consent to become more coherent."
Beneath the sheer silk perfect shoulders stirred disconsolately. "There is nothing one can do now—one can only wait."
"Let me recommend you to study myself, then: to my mind, a perfect pattern of patience."
Lanyard offered the cigarettes in an unfamiliar case which he had found in his pockets, and when they were disdained philosophically helped himself, while the woman sat glowering at the door as if to wither the object of her spite, wherever he might lurk beyond those walls.
"That animal of a doctor! how dare he be so sly with me and at the same time such an imbecile?"
"Oh, very well!" said Lanyard, settling into the chair: "by all means let us begin with that good Dr. Bright. What has he done?"
"He came to me an hour ago, Michael, to put me on my guard against you."
"Considerate beggar. But do go on . . ."
"The idiot would like to make love to me. He thought he might worm into my good graces by warning me to keep an eye on my jewels, since it has transpired that you were the Lone Wolf."
"And since when has that transpired—?"
"He told me that the captain had been advised by wireless, early this morning, to keep you under observation until we arrive at Nassau; where officers will board the vessel with a warrant for your arrest."
"Something to do with the missing necklace, of course."
"You're wanted in New York for stealing it. Your last great coup, my friend—and you bungled it!"
"I did? Then I trust devoutly you are right, it was my last. From what you hint, Liane, I would seem to have been leading a busy life of late. If you would only be a little less vague . . ."
"If I hesitate to speak plainly," the woman gently reminded him, "it is because you are dear to me, Michael, I find it not easy to say anything that will give you pain."
"Console yourself by observing that I am prepared. You have told me so much already, a word here and a hint there, I could almost foretell this revelation you shrink from making." Lanyard shot a quizzical grin through cigarette smoke. "I am accused of stealing a valuable necklace and making such an unworkman-like job of it that I had to fly the States incognito. It would further appear that I wasn't very clever about making my escape, since my presence aboard this vessel is known and steps have been taken by the authorities to have me detained at her first port of call. For all of which, I presume, I have to thank that persevering hater of mine—and friend of yours—Morphew. What a memory the man must have! what a genius for bearing a grudge!"
"All that is good guesswork and substantially true"—the woman nodded regretfully—"all but your suspicions of Morphew. There you are wrong: he had nothing to do with this affair, Michael, it is all of your own contriving."
"You tell me that," Lanyard laughed—"and in the same breath that I am 'dear' to you! It's no good, Liane: you can't be Morphew's friend and mine."
"I tell you nothing but what of a certainty and my own knowledge I know. Morphew is nothing to me, you are everything; notwithstanding, your suspicions do him an injustice—he would have saved you in New York had you permitted. But you wouldn't listen to me when I prayed you to accept his offer of intervention . . ."
"That at least one finds easy to believe."
"And even now he would be your friend—yours as well as mine—if you would consent: Morphew stands prepared to save you yet, if we can find a way to slip through their fingers who await you at Nassau."
"But tell me how . . ."
"The last thing before we sailed, Morphew sent Peter Pagan to promise me, if I could persuade you to go ashore at Nassau and apply to his factors there, the agents who have charge of his bootlegging interests in the Bahamas, he would have us both conveyed secretly to France, in his own yacht."
"Truly?" Lanyard laughed again, flipped his cigarette through the port, and sat up. "How charming of the man—but how strange! Who would ever suspect that rude and unlovely exterior disguised so much goodness and simplicity of heart?"
"You laugh because you do not trust me," Liane sullenly complained. "I have for months devoted myself to you—this is my reward!"
"Prove me ungrateful, my dear," Lanyard lightly offered—"prove me skeptical without sound cause and provocation—and you can ask nothing of me that I will refuse you in testimony to my penitence."
A stare of new intensity enveloped him. He saw her countenance overcast with petulance, an odd frame for eyes of singular wistfulness.
"You are wrong to tempt me with such a promise . . ."
"Why?" Lanyard parried. "Are you afraid of the test? or that I won't make good my word?"
"What makes me hesitate is fear lest you try to make your word good against your will. It's your love I want, Michael, not your duty—another name for hatred!"
"Do you truly believe you'd find me so contemptible, Liane? You should know me better than that."
"I know men better than you do, my dear friend; and when all's said, I know, you are but little different from any other; only, it is my lot to see you different . . ."
"Believe me," Lanyard began in some constraint, "I am not insensible—"
"No! say nothing now. When you have heard me out it shall be for you to say then whether or not I deserve better than mockery from you. But I prophesy you will end by forgetting the fine promise you have just now made . . ."
Impressed against his bias, Lanyard gave a nod and nothing more; and then, seeing that she still faltered as if distressed by his direct attention, he crossed to the port and stood with his lean, worn face ruddled by the sun's last rays.
It was going down in a flaming welter of rose and gold beyond a violet smudge to starboard, a blind loom of land at a distance difficult to guess, because of the glare, though its relative nearness was manifest in the moderate sea that was running in its lee, all that was left to tell of that morning's fury; for while Lanyard looked, a small schooner swam astern, midway between the steamer and that dim shore, with slatting sails all black against the glare that burned the waters . . .
"Proceed, then," Lanyard prompted at length, watching the sun dip and vanish.
The woman's voice responded in a weary key from out the shadow at his elbow: "First of all, you must know you were mistaken about Mallison. He was a wretch, I don't dispute, capable of any infamy you please; but it was not he who made away with Folly's emeralds."
"You say that, no doubt, because he contrived to establish some sort of an alibi that resulted in his acquittal."
"He was never tried, he was granted liberty under bail and disappeared."
"And you reckon that proof of his innocence? Or is one to understand you absolve the fellow on Morphew's say-so?"
"But on your own, Michael."
"Mine!"
"You can not know everything you confided to me after your accident; the many curious secrets you told me, such as that you remembered clearly having broken into Folly's and stolen her emeralds, beside yourself as you were that night with drink, and rebellious into the bargain against a social order that kept you poor and so forbade your marrying Madame de Montalais."
The brief sub-tropic twilight was ebbing fast, night was sweeping swiftly over the face of the waters to blot out the last lingering souvenir of the routed sun. Lanyard looked down as it were into a well of gloom in which a blur of spectral pallor swam, source of those accents which were enunciating proofs of an intimacy with his mind and heart that passed all believing.
"I told you that!"
A low unhappy laugh floated up to him: "But more!"
"Under what circumstances?"
"Let me go back to the beginning. . . . The night after that rencontre of yours with Mallison, Morphew dined me at the Abbaye, another of his establishments where the maître-d'hôtel happened to be a protégé of mine from Paris of pre-War days—but Morphew knew nothing about that. He had just finished telling how you had humiliated him before Folly, and was making my blood curdle with threats to be revenged—O but you were wrong to make an enemy of that one, Michael!—when he was called to the telephone. He came back grinning hideously, and said his agents reported having traced you and Madame de Montalais to the Inn of the Green Woods. You would never, Morphew boasted, return to New York the same man. I tried to wheedle him into disclosing his mind, but he was too wary, I learned nothing; and the best I could manage was to bribe my maître-d'hôtel, as soon as Morphew's back was turned again, to try to get a warning through to you by telephone. Then I made believe to be indisposed, got rid of Morphew, and engaged an automobile I had used before. . . . Never, my friend, shall I forget that ride! not even that night of our flight to Cherbourg from Paris was its equal for wildness . . . if you remember . . ."
A hand found Lanyard's in the mirk and clasped it tightly. He suffered it, replying simply: "I remember."
"Let me tell you, Michael, when we swung wide to clear your automobile by the roadside, and that other in which Morphew's people were pursuing you came hurtling toward us like a juggernaut gone mad, I did not hope to live another minute. As it turned out, my hired car came through with a crumpled fender for all damage. It was the other cannoned off and turned turtle in the ditch. The men in it escaped somehow with their lives, though they crawled back to the road too badly shaken to be dangerous. I left them trying to fit a tyre from their wrecked car to yours, and took you and Madame de Montalais back to New York with me. She had wrenched an ankle falling into the ditch when you threw her off the road, and was unable to walk; otherwise she had come to no harm. But you—it seemed a miracle you lived . . .
"You had your right arm and two ribs broken, and a great gash in your head—you'll find the scar under your hair. The surgeons said it meant concussion of the brain, you might survive but never could be your mental self again. It was two months before you were able to talk connectedly, more than a few words at a time. I took you to my apartment from the hospital, and myself nursed you through your convalescence. As it progressed, one saw that mentally as well as bodily your recovery would be complete—it was your spirit had been wounded beyond repair. All your old vivacity was gone, Michael, you never laughed; you seemed fond of having me near you, but fonder still of being solitary, sitting all alone with your black thoughts, brooding . . .
"Madame de Montalais came to see you daily. She, too, was quick to observe the change. I never knew what passed between you, naturally; but that you were neither of you happy it was easy to perceive. One day she called when I was out; I met her, leaving, as I returned—she had been weeping. She never called again. Not long after, her name appeared in the newspapers as one of the notables sailing on the Paris for France . . ."
The voice in the darkness ran out, Lanyard's hand was freed, a long pause was filled with the throbbing of the engines, the hiss and suck of water down the side, the mellow calling of the ship's bell.
In dull abstraction Lanyard counted its strokes: seven bells, half past seven o'clock.
The port, a square of ultramarine let into a blank black wall, framed a nocturne, silken swells with dusky bosoms stung by starlight, on the nearest point of land a great red constant star following the progress of the steamer with unfriendly stare, somewhat astern another of sardonic green, far ahead, low upon the horizon, a third, more volatile, winking white and white. . . . A thought like flotsam drifted with the dark tide of despond: A long swim to either light, even for a man in his prime . . .
Lanyard heard flat metallic tones pronounce: "Continue, if you please"—and realized that he had heard himself speaking.
"You never told me what had happened, but I was soon able to guess. A day or so later—I remember, it was the first day when you were permitted to walk about a bit—you opened your heart to me in a way I hadn't looked for, and made mine very sad for you. You told me how your memory of that affair at Folly's had become clear and positive, somehow, in sequence to your accident, and had satisfied you there could be no profit for any man in contending against his nature, the arbiter of his fate. Nature, you said, had formed you a thief and an enemy of society—you had grown resigned to give over struggling to be other than as you had been made. I told you, no matter what you might do, I would always be your friend—more, if you would. You were sweet to me that night, Michael, without committing yourself to definite promises; but the next day you disappeared. I was out for the afternoon, and neither of the maids saw you leave. You took nothing with you but the clothing you wore. I neither saw nor heard from you for many weeks. But New York did . . ."
Lanyard all at once swung round, caught the seated woman roughly by her shoulders, by main strength lifted her to her feet, and with hard eyes searched the face revealed by the dull blue glimmer seeping in through the port.
"Is this the truth you are telling me, Liane?"
Pliant and passive in his hands, she answered: "The whole truth, Michael."
"You swear it?"
"By the love I bear you."
With a mutter of apology he released her, and silently, like a figure of fair marble sinking into a pool of ink, the pale shade of her subsided through the shadows, lost definition, and rested as before.
"I am listening . . ."
"It didn't take the newspapers long to guess the Lone Wolf was at work again. In quick succession, Michael, you consummated a series of exploits that beggared the most lurid chapters of your old Parisian days."
"How can you say it was I?"
"You confessed to me yourself—"
"Be careful, Liane!"
"I tell you only the truth as I had it from your own lips. If you are loath to hear . . ."
"Forgive me."
"You came to me in my apartment without warning one midnight; at your wits' ends, police snapping at your heels, you turned to me! That made me happy, Michael. . . . But it was no easy task to hide you, when rewards of more than fifty thousand dollars were being advertised for your arrest, and every Boy Scout in the land was carrying a copy of your photograph—"
"But I have never been photographed in my life except for passport purposes during the War; and my appearance today is not as it was then, I no longer wear a beard—"
"You nevertheless had recently been photographed by flashlight, in the act of opening a safe in the Stuyvesant Ashe home. Some ingenious member of the household, in anticipation of the Lone Wolf's visit, had rigged up a camera commanding the safe and a flashlight to be set off by electric current when the door was tampered with. You were caught at close range, facing the camera as you knelt with your ear to the safe door, listening to its mechanism. The likeness was exact and unmistakable; and all the papers reproduced it to further the hue and cry."
"You tell me that happened—and ask me to believe the Lone Wolf left that house without wrecking the camera!"
"To the contrary you destroyed a camera utterly; but there were two, the ingenuity of the inventor had been equal to that contingency—one carefully concealed, the other where you might find it without too much trouble."
Lanyard had an unpleasant laugh in his throat. "Decidedly he was right who said a reformed crook could never come back! If I was the dupe of so cheap a trick . . . But to resume: I appealed to you—to a woman!—to stand between me and the police. . . . Ask them to believe that who once hunted the Lone Wolf across Europe and back again—and failed to catch him! . . . Well and good! what then?"
"The chase struck a false scent and passed us by; but from that time on you made your home with me. It was safe, that had been proved; and I was useful to you."
"How useful?"
"You had got together a collection of jewellery difficult to dispose of without courting arrest; also, you would have found it impracticable to take care of large sums of money such as this sale realized. I saw to all that for you: through Morphew I found a way to market the jewels, and in my own name I carried your funds in a separate account with my bankers."
"And I still called myself the Lone Wolf!"
"I think you were learning to be less jealous of your loneliness, Michael. You had learned—as most men do at some stage of life—that there was one woman at least whose devotion would never fail you."
"I used to know the Lone Wolf well: a strange belief for him to hold!"
"But life had forged yet another bond between us . . ."
The vibrations of Liane's words died upon a suppliant silence. It grew long while in her hearing the pulsing of the engines aped the tempo of a funeral march. Lanyard made no move or sound. Vision tempered to the gloom and made keen by hunger saw his face, its salient lines picked out by gleams of deflected starlight, steadfast to the port, inscrutably set.
If he would not speak she must . . .
"I loved you well, and love comes of loving . . . of being loved . . ."
"You wish me to understand," Lanyard bluntly translated, "I became your lover."
"Yes."
"Yet you knew I loved Madame de Montalais—"
"You swore to me all that was finished."
"And you believed—?"
"I wanted to."
Another silence spun itself into minutes charged with emotion pent and mute. The woman felt rather than saw the sign of a hand that bade her resume. But her tongue stumbled, she was breathless with misgivings . . .
"What more do you wish me to say, Michael?"
"There is more to tell, surely, a hiatus to be filled in between that time and this." But still she faltered till he added in enforced patience: "I have yet to learn what brings us together aboard this vessel."
"Your own vanity must answer for that, Michael. . . . You had been several weeks inactive, the newspaper sensation had begun to blow over, we were planning to return to Paris—though you balked at becoming indebted to Morphew for the forged passports he offered to secure. Then, one day, the Chief of Police gave out an interview exalting himself at your expense; and in that quaint, excitable temper, which you had nursed ever since the motor accident, exasperated beyond reason, you vowed to expose the man's incompetence, and did—breaking into his home and making off with a necklace of diamonds which he had just presented to his wife. But somehow you must have blundered, or your luck had turned: you hardly escaped being caught, and left your path of flight so plainly marked it led the police to my very door. We had to fly New York between two suns, with no choice but to seek refuge in some country that did not require passports. This steamer was the first that sailed for South America; we secured passage, came aboard separately, and pretended to be strangers till that officious doctor insisted on presenting you as my fellow-countryman."
"And now"—Lanyard demanded of himself more than of the woman—"what?"
"If you would only consent to listen to me . . ."
"By what you tell me, Liane, the experience would be anything but a novel one for you."
"Morphew remains my good friend—"
"Permit me to wish you joy of him."
"And is willing for my sake to be yours."
"Unfortunately, I have the prejudice to be loved for my own blue eyes or not at all."
"I am not suspected, it would be a simple matter for me to send a wireless, in a code which Morphew gave me, to his factors at Nassau. They might easily manage some mishap for the men who wait there for you; or failing that, arrange an escape for you subsequent to your arrest—"
"Make your mind at ease on that account, Liane: I don't mean to be arrested."
"So much the better. Morphew maintains a secret base on one of the outlying cays of the Bahamas, where his boats rendezvous with those that fetch the liquor from overseas. With the aid of his factors, it should be an easy matter to smuggle you out to that base and on board some British vessel homeward bound."
"Many thanks! but I shall earn my salvation without the aid of Morphew's lot, or never. Moreover, I have no wish to see England again till I am able to go there openly and disembark in the sunlight, wearing my own face and name—Michael Lanyard."
"But that can never be!"
"In that event, I must end my days in America."
"But are you truly mad enough to imagine there could be any way—?"
"There is but one course possible for me: I must find my way back to New York—under my own power, as the saying runs—and make reparation for the evil I have done—"
"Nothing of that was done by you in your right mind, Michael."
"Pardon: but it seems a nice question, which mind of mine, today's or yesterday's, is 'right'. Neither do I think Society will be disposed to split hairs concerning my liability for acts committed whilst my intelligence was—constructively, at least—under a cloud. Nor, for that matter, am I: if I may not clear the name of Michael Lanyard or wipe out the score against him, I have little use—no, none—for the liberty of André Duchemin."
In uncontrollable disquietude, the woman rose. "What do you propose, then?"
"I have made no plan."
"If you won't have Morphew's help—"
"My dear Liane: that 'if' of yours is downright, voluptuous redundancy."
"But we are due at Nassau at dawn, the police will board us with the pilot boat—!"
"Eight bells just sounded; it should be daybreak by four o'clock, at this season. In other words, I command eight hours of darkness. And the Lone Wolf that lives on in Michael Lanyard, let me tell you, is hardly the half-witted cur you have sketched for me, who cowered behind a woman's skirts in terror of American police."
Discovering Liane's arms about him, her face strained up to him, Lanyard caught himself up sharply, shrugged, and wagged a long-suffering head: "My dear Liane!"
She said in a sob: "You do not mean it—"
"But very truly, my dear."
"Yesterday your dear, today less than the dust—!"
"You are mistaken. I owe you too much—"
"You will never repay it now. Did I not foretell that, when I had told you everything, you would forget your pledge to me? 'Prove me ungrateful'—out of your own mouth, Michael!—'and you can ask nothing of me I will refuse to do in testimony to my penitence.'"
Still unresisting in her embrace, he asked: "And I am already proved ungrateful in your sight?"
"Do you not mean to forsake me, put me by now I am of no more use?"
"I have not said so."
"What else do you intend, when you tell me of your determination to go back to New York?"
"One must first pay one's debts—"
"Then the debt you owe my love and devotion stands second to the debt you owe self-love?"
"Say, rather, self-respect; wanting that, no man can claim to deserve any woman's love. Let me first of all settle my reckoning with Society—"
"There will be nothing of you left for me!"
"In one breath you urge me to hold myself blameless for wrongs done to others that I don't remember, in the next you call me to account for obligations to you incurred under the same conditions."
"I am not concerned with consistency, Michael, but with love. You have made yourself too dear to me, even though you didn't know what you were doing—I can't go on without you now. You hold your dream of honesty dear; do not deny me my dream of decency. Back there in New York we joined our lives, outlaw and outcast; we must go on together or forego all hope for all time. Give me at least the fair chance you ask for yourself . . ."
Her prayers ran out in a mumble under a hand which gently closed her mouth; ears not deaf to them had been quick none the less to pick up footfalls in the passageway. Now in the hush that fell the knob of the stateroom door rattled, the door itself creaked to the pressure of a shoulder, someone swore indignantly beyond it, and immediately a knock weighted with authority resounded on its panels.
In the panting bosom pressed to his Lanyard felt the heart leap and flutter wildly. To a whisper of dismay, "They have come for you already!" he returned with calm: "Never fear—they shan't get me."
The summons was repeated.
"What can you do?" Liane breathed.
"Nothing so long as I am not free to move."
Her arms fell away, but her hands lingered upon his shoulders. In the passage several men were confabulating in mutters dulled by the intervening door. One became articulate in vexation: "I tell you, he didn't get enough dope in that powder to make him sleep like this!"
Again Liane's whisper: "What shall we do?"
Lanyard considered: "We can't keep them out . . . may as well let them in."
"But you said you wouldn't give yourself up—"
"No more do I mean to."
The knuckles of authority drummed on for a moment. When they ceased Lanyard was hailed right cheerily: "I say, Mr. Duchemin wake up, let me in! It's I, Dr. Bright. Don't you hear me?"
"But Michael!" the whisper implored him—"you can't stand off the whole ship!"
"Why did you bring me that pistol, then?"
"Not in anticipation of anything like this—"
"Don't worry: I shan't use it. I've a better plan. I count on you: stand by to draw the bolt when I give the word."
Lanyard watched the dim shape of Liane fall back to the door. Bright was yapping with a Judas tongue, bidding him open in the sacred name of fellowship. With the thick enunciation of one just wakened from the deep sweet sleep of an innocent Lanyard responded: "Half a minute! What's the row?" Then more quietly—"Ready, Liane?"
"Yes, but—"
"Fall back behind the door when you open it."
No time-wasting preparations to make, only a dressing gown to shrug out of: he stood in shirt and trousers, shoeless.
"Now!"
As the bolt grated, Lanyard set a foot upon the transom, a hand to the sill of the window-port, and lifted himself nimbly through that narrow outlet, dropping to the deck on feet as furtive as a cat's.
For an instant he stood glancing alertly forward, aft, and over the rail. The deck was deserted, a solitary coast light abeam blinked forlornly, a minute spark lost beyond a measureless waste of grim black water. Dubiously Lanyard considered it: a pull to daunt the heart of the boldest swimmer . . .
The dark port behind him turned into a square of staring amber. Through it broke a din of voices blasphemous in anger and disappointment. Lanyard darted aft.
The watch on the afterdeck witnessed the plunge of a dark body from the rail of the promenade deck down over the side. A man who appeared at the same rail an instant later lifted up a voice of authentic seafaring whine:
"Man oo-verboard!"
The watch took up the cry.
Sea-wise Bahaman corespondents of American press services were of one mind concerning Lanyard's disappearance from the Port Royal, arguing that the known conditions of time and tide ruled it out of all consideration as a sane attempt at escape. The stories they cabled North were accordingly published, for the most part, under headlines something in this sense:
LONE WOLF SUICIDES AT SEA
Lanyard, these reports related, had gone overboard, rather than submit to arrest, after dark of a moonless night, when the Port Royal was standing into Northeast Providence Channel, her position being approximately midway between its jaws. Thus, if he dreamed to win to land either in the North, where Hole-in-the-Wall Lighthouse sentinels the southernmost point of Great Abaco Island, or in South, where Egg Island Light warns of the perils lying off the northerly tip of Eleuthera, the fugitive had undertaken a ten-mile pull against the drag of the strong offshore current which was setting through the channel at the time; a task which must have thwarted the stoutest effort of the strongest swimmer, even assuming that the sharks with which those waters swarm had been content to let him pass unmolested. Something which, the consensus maintained, in the case of Lanyard, the sharks indisputably hadn't.
That cry of "Man overboard!" had brought the Port Royal to a prompt and a dead halt; the waters roundabout had been lavishly sown with ring-buoys as well as with floating flares, guided by whose weird illumination a life-boat quartered the theatre of the mystery for upwards of an hour before the steamer called it in and proceeded. Nevertheless the authorities who boarded her at Nassau, in their disappointment indisposed to accept the suicide theory, insisted on a thorough rummage of the vessel which accomplished little toward hushing the murmurs of dissatisfaction with which, at length and empty-handed, they took themselves ashore.
These doubters had at least one confrère of weathered judgment in New York, who gave free tongue to his conviction that the Lone Wolf was one wise bird and a tough fish to drown. And the faith of this one in the will-to-live animating the hybrid monstrosity of his figure had good justification in the outcome, when, one night more than a month after the event of the alleged suicide, a glare beating directly into his face roused him from the slumbers of an honest man to find that some marauder had added the cool insolence of switching on the bedside lamp to the felonious injury of housebreaking.
One who in his time had done much to make life a misery to men of wicked ways, and more than once had figured as the target of an assassin's weapon, the householder had long been accustomed to sleep with a pistol ready to his hand. But his instinctive fumble for it drew a blank this time; so, with such composure as he could command, he turned attention to the agent of its confiscation.
This person had cheekily drawn up a chair to the bedside and made himself at home in it, one of the detective's cigars between his teeth and a highball of the detective's precious pre-Prohibition Scotch in his hand testifying to amiable readiness to be sociable, provided his host had no real objection to advance.
A semi-blinded stare was met by a smile that flashed teeth of notable whiteness in a face deeply bronzed where it didn't boast a lush overgrowth of beard. This last was sparely shot with grey, and so was hair that also wanted shearing; but the rich complexion of the miscreant was clear, his eyes were luminous with vitality, he had in every particular the look of one who had consorted long and profitably with Nature in her least sophisticated phases. As for his costume, it was altogether shocking, comprising simply a cotton singlet, a coat without much definite shape or colour, a pair of ragged trousers belted with an end of rope, and foot-gear that would have kindled the envy of a slapstick clown of the cinema.
"Well!" the detective summed up his scrutiny—"if that front didn't make you the spit of the devil, I'd lay long odds you were none other than my poor dear pal, the late Mike Angelo Lanyardi."
"It isn't sporting to bet on a certainty," the guest severely pointed out. "And I'm sorry you think I'm late, my good Crane; but I'd rather far be that than never."
"It would be a whole lot healthier for you to be never, in this neck-o'-the-woods. If you haven't got sense enough to stay put in your watery grave—"
"How shall an unquiet spirit withstand the temptation thus to revisit these glimpses of the moonshine?" Lanyard sipped his drink with unaffected relish. "Prime stuff, my friend! and I will be glad to fetch you its fellow if you'll only be nice and forget for a time you're a limb of the law whose sworn duty it is to pinch out of hand revisitants, like me, from another and a wetter world."
"The devil himself couldn't twist the King's English into such ornery knots," Crane declared. "I'm convinced: it is indeed the Lone Wolf who lurks behind those lovely whiskers."
"You may be right," Lanyard admitted. "Unhappily, I for one can't altogether share your certainty."
Crane made nothing of that, so let it pass. "Such behind the case," he pursued, "a man-size slug of Scotch would be some solace to my conscience."
"On your promise to be peaceable?" Lanyard stipulated, rising.
"Speaking as one who has seen you act up when your sense of self-preservation was hitting on all six, I don't mind passing you my word, you're in no danger of my starting any rukus without a gun."
"Or with one, I trust very truly."
"If you'd had the common decency to trust me at all, I wouldn't be missing my gat this minute."
"Common decency not being the same thing, one takes it, as common sense?"
"You don't have to worry," Crane insisted with an air of some aggrievance. "If I can't round you up without a gun, you can run loose and wild for all of me."
"On that understanding, then . . ." Lanyard tossed the weapon back to the bed. "Forgive a simple precaution not inspired by any real doubt of your good disposition toward an old friend, or your sporting attitude toward a professional antagonist . . ."
The broad of his back was a shining mark for Crane as he strode away to an adjoining room, where he made a light, and from which he presently returned with a box of cigars and a musical glass.
Crane had not stirred. The pistol rested where it had fallen. Lanyard tendered the drink and the open box.
"Astonishing," he mused, "what a sound taste in cigars one finds prevalent among members of a venal and brutalized constabulary!"
He remarked in pained astonishment that the bed was quaking with Crane's silent mirth.
"Don't mind me!" the detective protested: "it's myself I'm giving the laugh, not you. I've been figuring for some time now, you were about due to stage a gaudy resurrection; but this beats my craziest notions of what the show would be like. I'm a pretty old mule of a dick, and a tough audience for trick stuff, but I've got to hand it to you, Lanyard: I've never yet been able to dope out what your next dodge would be nor how you'd pull it. So, whenever you get all set to explain what the hell you mean by sitting there and looking like that—well, you needn't be afraid I'll walk out on you."
"You don't like my make-up?" Lanyard drew a long face over his vestments. "Do you know? I rather fancied it. These jibs seem so appropriate to my newly adopted calling. Behold in me, if you please, my dear Crane, a seafaring man fully three weeks of age."
"That leaves a couple to be accounted for, then, since the night you took to the big drink."
"There were two weeks before I became what I am," Lanyard confessed, "when, not to put too fine a point on it, I was purely and beautifully a beachcomber in those enchanting Bahamas."
"I've got a hunch this is going to be good." Crane grinned luxuriously through cigar-smoke. "At least, I don't imagine you've got the crust to think you stand any show of getting whatever it is you want out of me, without coming through with a full account of yourself from then right up to now."
"A stipulation of quid pro quo is always reasonable and in order," Lanyard agreed. "Yet I am afraid you may find my story a poor exchange for what I wish to learn from you, my friend . . ."
"It's your risk. Shoot."
"You are wondering how I eluded the authorities at Nassau? That was elementary. . . . On the other hand, one must admit one was dealing, aboard the Port Royal, with gentry of small experience and less imagination. . . . When I left my stateroom by way of its window, I found myself with scant stomach for a long swim in black water: it needs the hot blood of youth to contemplate without a qualm adventures like that. There was a deck-chair nearby, and in it somebody's steamer-rug; I folded up the one in the other, and cast them overboard. In the darkness they passed for the shape of a man to startled eyes on the main deck below; nobody questioned the alarm I raised of 'Man overboard!' There was much excitement then; but other than the ship's officers, nobody knew the unfortunate was a notorious criminal trying to evade arrest, nobody else was looking for André Duchemin—and I was careful enough to make myself insignificant. When the boat was lowered to scour the seas for me, all hands honoured the performance with undivided attention, it was easy to take refuge in one of the life-boats swung inboard on its davits on the opposite side of the deck; I wormed my way in under the canvas cover and lay snug till the Port Royal took the pilot aboard outside Nassau and with him the police agents. It was still quite dark; and as the blood-hounds swarmed up one side, the Lone Wolf dropped down the opposite, unseen. There were a number of vessels riding at anchor in the roadstead, and when I had put a good distance between myself and the Port Royal I picked out a little schooner of unkempt appearance, climbed aboard her while the anchor-watch snored, and hid myself in her hold."