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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Alias The Lone Wolf, by Louis Joseph Vance
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Alias The Lone Wolf
+
+Author: Louis Joseph Vance
+
+Release Date: November 29, 2003 [EBook #10327]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALIAS THE LONE WOLF ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Jayam Subramanian, Mary Ann Fink and PG
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "And who would ever believe anybody else guilty who knew
+your guest was Michael Lanyard, alias 'The Lone Wolf'?"]
+
+
+
+
+
+ALIAS
+
+
+THE LONE WOLF
+
+
+BY
+
+LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+
+[Illustration: FRUCTUS QUAM FOLIA ]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+1921
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+ROBERT AITKEN SWAN
+
+WHOSE FRIENDSHIP I HAVE TRIED
+
+IN MANY OTHER WAYS, THIS
+
+YARN WITH DIFFIDENCE IS
+
+DEDICATED
+
+
+NOTE: This is the fourth of the Lone Wolf stories. Its predecessors
+were, in chronological sequence, "The Lone Wolf," "The False Faces,"
+"Red Masquerade."
+
+Each story, however, is entirely self-contained and independent of the
+others.
+
+If it matters....
+
+
+LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+Westport--9 September, 1921.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I WALKING PAPERS
+
+II ONE WALKS
+
+III MEETING BY MOONLIGHT
+
+IV EVE
+
+V PHINUIT & CO
+
+VI VISITATION
+
+VII TURN ABOUT
+
+VIII IN RE AMOR ET AL
+
+IX BLIND MAN'S BUFF
+
+X BUT AS A MUSTARD SEED
+
+XI AU REVOIR
+
+XII TRAVELS WITH AN ASSASSIN
+
+XIII ATHENAIS
+
+XIV DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND
+
+XV ADIEU
+
+XVI THE HOUSE OF LILITH
+
+XVII CHEZ LIANE
+
+XVIII BROTHER AND SISTER
+
+XIX SIX BOTTLES OF CHAMPAGNE
+
+XX THE SYBARITES
+
+XXI SOUNDINGS
+
+XXII OUT OF SOUNDINGS
+
+XXIII THE CIGARETTE
+
+XXIV HISTORIC REPETITION
+
+XXV THE MALCONTENT
+
+XXVI THE BINNACLE
+
+XXVII ÇA VA BIEN!
+
+XXVIII FINALE
+
+
+
+ALIAS
+
+THE LONE WOLF
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+WALKING PAPERS
+
+
+Through the suave, warm radiance of that afternoon of Spring in England
+a gentleman of modest and commonly amiable deportment bore a rueful
+countenance down Piccadilly and into Halfmoon street, where presently
+he introduced it to one whom he found awaiting him in his lodgings,
+much at ease in his easiest chair, making free with his whiskey and
+tobacco, and reading a slender brown volume selected from his shelves.
+
+This dégagé person was patently an Englishman, though there were traces
+of Oriental ancestry in his cast. The other, he of the doleful habit,
+was as unmistakably of Gallic pattern, though he dressed and carried
+himself in a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon fashion, and even seemed a trace
+intrigued when greeted by a name distinctively French.
+
+For the Englishman, rousing from his appropriated ease, dropped his
+book to the floor beside the chair, uprose and extended a cordial hand,
+exclaiming: "H'are ye, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+To this the other responded, after a slight pause, obscurely enough:
+"Oh! ancient history, eh? Well, for the matter of that: How are you,
+Mister Wertheimer?"
+
+Their hands fell apart, and Monsieur Duchemin proceeded to do away his
+hat and stick and chamois gloves; while his friend, straddling in front
+of a cold grate and extending his hands to an imaginary blaze, covered
+with a mild complaint the curiosity excited by a brief study of that
+face of melancholy.
+
+"Pretty way you've got of making your friends wait on your pleasure.
+Here I've wasted upwards of two hours of His Majesty's time..."
+
+"How was I to know you'd have the cheek to force your way in here in my
+absence and help yourself to my few poor consolations?" Duchemin
+retorted, helping himself to them in turn. "But then one never does
+know what fresh indignity Fate has in store..."
+
+"After you with that whiskey, by your leave. I say: I'd give something
+to know where you ignorant furriners come by this precious pre-War
+stuff." But without waiting to be denied this information, Mr.
+Wertheimer continued: "Going on the evidence of your looks and temper,
+you've been down to Tilbury Docks this afternoon to see Karslake and
+Sonia off."
+
+"A few such flashes of intelligence applied professionally, my friend,
+should carry you far."
+
+"And the experience has left you feeling a bit down, what?"
+
+"I imagine even you do not esteem parting with those whom one loves an
+exhilarating pastime."
+
+"But when it's so obviously for their own good..."
+
+"Oh, I know!" Duchemin agreed without enthusiasm. "If anything should
+happen to Karslake now, it would break Sonia's heart, but..."
+
+"And after the part he played in that Vassilyevski show his lease of
+life wouldn't be apt to be prolonged by staying on in England."
+
+"I agree; but still--!" sighed Duchemin, throwing himself heavily into
+a chair.
+
+"Which," Wertheimer continued, standing, "is why we arranged to give
+him that billet with the British Legation in Peking."
+
+"Didn't know you had a hand in that," observed Duchemin, after
+favouring the other with a morose stare.
+
+"Oh, you can't trust me! When you get to know me better you'll find I'm
+always like that--forever flitting hither and yon, bestowing benefits
+and boons on the ungrateful, like any other giddy Providence."
+
+"But one is not ungrateful," Duchemin insisted. "God knows I would
+gladly have sped Karslake's emigration with Sonia to Van Dieman's Land
+or Patagonia or where you will, if it promised to keep him out of the
+way long enough for the Smolny Institute to forget him."
+
+"Since the said Smolny inconsiderately persists in failing to collapse,
+as per the daily predictions of the hopeful."
+
+"Just so."
+
+"But aren't you forgetting you yourself have given that Smolny lot the
+same and quite as much reason for holding your name anathema?"
+
+"Ah!" Duchemin growled--"as for me, I can take care of myself, thank
+you. My trouble is, I want somebody else to take care of. I had a
+daughter once, for a few weeks, long enough to make me strangely fond
+of the responsibilities of a father; and then Karslake took her away,
+leaving me nothing to do with my life but twiddle futile thumbs and
+contemplate the approach of middle age." "Middle age? Why flatter
+yourself? With a daughter married, too!"
+
+"Sonia's only eighteen..."
+
+"She was born when you were twenty. That makes you nearly forty, and
+that's next door to second childhood, Man!" the Englishman declared
+solemnly--"you're superannuated."
+
+"I know; and so long as I feel my years, even you can abuse me with
+impunity."
+
+But Wertheimer would not hear him. "Odd," he mused, "I never thought of
+it before, that you were growing old. And I've been wondering, too,
+what it was that has been making you so precious slow and cautious and
+cranky of late. You're just doddering--and I thought you were simply
+tired out and needed a holiday."
+
+"Perhaps I am and do," said Duchemin patiently. "One feels one has
+earned a holiday, if ever anybody did in your blessed S. S."
+
+"Ah! You think so?"
+
+"You'd think so if you'd been mucking round the East End all Winter
+with your life in your hands."
+
+"Still--at your age--I'd be thinking about retiring instead of asking
+for a rest."
+
+Although Duchemin knew very well that he was merely being ragged in
+that way of deadly seriousness which so often amuses the English, he
+chose to suggest sourly: "My resignation is at your disposal any time
+you wish it."
+
+"Accepted," said Wertheimer airily, "to take effect at once."
+
+To this Duchemin merely grunted, as who should say he didn't consider
+this turn of conversation desperately amusing. And Wertheimer resuming
+his chair, the two remained for some moments in silence, a silence so
+doggedly maintained on both sides that Duchemin was presently aware of
+dull gnawings of curiosity. It occurred to him that his caller should
+have found plenty to do in his bureau in the War Office....
+
+"And to what," he enquired with the tedious irony of ennui, "is one
+indebted for this unexpected honour on the part of the First
+Under-Secretary of the British Secret Service? Or whatever your
+high-sounding official title is..."
+
+"Oh!" Wertheimer replied lazily--and knocked out his pipe--"I merely
+dropped in to say good-bye."
+
+Duchemin discovered symptoms of more animation.
+
+"Hello! Where are you off to?"
+
+"Nowhere--worse luck! I mean I'm here to bid you farewell and Godspeed
+and what not on the eve of your departure from the British Isles."
+
+"And where, pray, am I going?"
+
+"That's for you to say."
+
+Monsieur Duchemin meditated briefly. "I see," he announced: "I'm to
+have a roving commission."
+
+"Worse than that: none at all."
+
+Duchemin opened his eyes wide.
+
+"'The wind bloweth where it listeth,'" Wertheimer affirmed. "How do I
+know whither you'll blow, now you're a free agent again, entirely on
+your own? I've got no control over your movements."
+
+"The S. S. has."
+
+"Never no more. Didn't you tender me your resignation a moment ago?
+Wasn't it promptly accepted?"
+
+"Look here: What the devil----!"
+
+"Well, if you must know," the Englishman interrupted hastily, "my
+instructions were to give you your walking papers if you refused to
+resign. So your connection with the S. S. is from this hour severed.
+And if you ain't out of England within twenty-four hours, we'll jolly
+well deport you. And that's that."
+
+"One perceives one has served England not wisely but too well."
+
+"Shrewd lad!" Wertheimer laughed. "You see, old soul, we admire you no
+end, and we're determined to save your life. Word has leaked through
+from Petrograd that your name has been triple-starred on the Smolny's
+Index Expurgatorius. Karslake's too. An honour legitimately earned by
+your pernicious collaboration in the Vassilyevski bust. Karslake's
+already taken care of, but you're still in the limelight, and that
+makes you a public nuisance. If you linger here much longer the verdict
+will undoubtedly be: Violent death at the hands of some person or
+persons unknown. So here are passports and a goodish bit of money. If
+you run through all of it before this blows over, we'll find a way, of
+course, to get more to you. You understand: No price too high that buys
+good riddance of you. And there will be a destroyer waiting at
+Portsmouth to-night with instructions to put ashore secretly anywhere
+you like across the Channel. After that--as far as the British Empire
+is concerned--your blood be on your own head."
+
+The other nodded, investigating the envelope which his late chief had
+handed him, then from his letter of credit and passports looked up with
+a reminiscent smile.
+
+"It isn't the first time you've vouched for me by this style.
+Remember?"
+
+"Well, you've earned as fair title to the name of Duchemin as I ever
+did to that of Wertheimer."
+
+But the smile was fading from the eyes of the man whom England
+preferred to recognize as André Duchemin.
+
+"But where on earth is one to go?" "Don't ask me," the Englishman
+protested. "And above all, don't tell me. I don't want to know. Since
+I've been on this job, I've learned to believe in telepathy and mind
+reading and witchcraft and all manner of unholy rot. And I don't want
+you to come to a sudden end through somebody's establishing illicit
+intercourse with my subconscious mind."
+
+He took his leave shortly after that; and Monsieur Duchemin settled
+down in the chair which his guest had quitted to grapple with his
+problem: where under Heaven to go?
+
+After a wasted while, he picked up in abstraction the book which
+Wertheimer had been reading--and wondered if, by any chance, he had
+left it there on purpose, so strong seemed the hint. It was Stevenson's
+'Travels with a Donkey.' Duchemin was familiar enough with the work,
+and had no need to dip anew into its pages to know it offered one fair
+solution to his quandary.
+
+If--he assured himself--there were any place in Europe where one might
+count on being reasonably secure from the solicitous attentions of the
+grudge-bearing Bolsheviki, it was the Cévennes, those little-known
+hills in the south of France, well inland from the sea.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ONE WALKS
+
+
+A little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley
+fifteen miles from Le Puy ... notable for the making of lace, for
+drunkenness, for freedom of language, and for unparalleled political
+dissension was Mr. Stevenson's point of departure on his Travels with a
+Donkey. Monsieur Duchemin made it his as well; and on the fourth
+morning of his hegira from England set out from Le Monastier afoot, a
+volume of Montaigne in his pocket, a stout stick in his fist--the fat
+rucksack strapped to his shoulders enabling this latter-day traveller
+to dispense with the society of another donkey.
+
+The weather was fine, his heart high, he was happy to be out of harness
+and again his own man. More than once he laughed a little to think of
+the vain question of his whereabouts which was being mooted in the
+underworld of Europe, where (as well he knew) men and women spat when
+they named him. For his route from the Channel coast to Le Monastier
+had been sufficiently discreet and devious to persuade him that his
+escape had been as cleanly executed as it was timely instigated.
+
+Thus for upwards of a fortnight he fared southward in the footsteps of
+Mr. Stevenson; and much good profit had he of the adventure. For it was
+his common practice to go to bed with the birds and rise with the sun;
+and more often than not he lodged in the inn of the silver moon, with
+moss for a couch, leafy boughs for a canopy and the stars for
+night-lights--accommodations infinitely more agreeable than those
+afforded by the grubby and malodorous auberge of the wayside average.
+And between sun and sun he punished his boots famously.
+
+Constant exercise tuned up muscles gone slack and soft with easy
+living, upland winds cleansed the man of the reek of cities and made
+his appetite a thing appalling. A keen sun darkened his face and hands,
+brushed up in his cheeks a warmer glow than they had shown in many a
+year, and faded out the heavier lines with which Time had marked his
+countenance. Moreover, because this was France, where one may affect a
+whisker without losing face, he neglected his razors; and though this
+was not his first thought, a fair disguise it proved. For when, toward
+the end of the second week, he submitted that wanton luxuriance to be
+tamed by a barber of Florac, he hardly knew the trimly bearded mask of
+bronze that looked back at him from a mirror.
+
+Not that it mattered to Monsieur Duchemin. From the first he met few of
+any sort and none at all whom a lively and exacting distrust reckoned a
+likely factor in his affairs. It was a wild, bold land he traversed,
+and thinly peopled; at pains to avoid the larger towns, he sought by
+choice the loneliest paths that looped its quiet hills; such as passed
+the time of day with him were few and for the most part peasants, a
+dull, dour lot, taciturn to a degree that pleased him well. So that he
+soon forgot to be forever alert for the crack of an ambushed pistol or
+the pattering footfalls of an assassin with a knife.
+
+It was at Florac, on the Tarnon, that he parted company with the trail
+of Stevenson. Here that one had turned east to Alais, whereas Duchemin
+had been lost to the world not nearly long enough, he was minded to
+wander on till weary. The weather held, there was sunshine in golden
+floods, and by night moonlight like molten silver. Between beetling
+ramparts of stone, terraced, crenellated and battlemented in motley
+strata of pink and brown and yellow and black, the river Tarn had
+gouged out for itself a canyon through which its waters swept and
+tumbled, as green as translucent jade in sunlight, profound emerald in
+shadow, cream white in churning rapids. The lofty profiles of its
+cliffs were fringed with stunted growths of pine and ash, a ragged
+stubble, while here and there châteaux, forsaken as a rule, and
+crumbling, reared ruined silhouettes against the blue. Eighteen hundred
+feet below, it might be more, the Tarn threaded lush bottom-lands,
+tilled fields, goodly orchards, plantations of walnut and Spanish
+chestnut, and infrequent, tiny villages that clung to precarious
+footholds between cliffs and water.
+
+On high again, beyond the cliffs, stretched the Causses, vast, arid and
+barren plateaux, flat and featureless save for an occasional low,
+rounded mound, a menhir or a dolmen, and (if such may be termed
+features) great pits that opened in the earth like cold craters, which
+the countryfolk termed avens. A strange, bleak land, inhospitable,
+wind-harried, haunted, the home of seven howling devils of desolation...
+
+Rain at length interned the traveller for three days in a little place
+called Meyrueis, which lies sweetly in the valley of the Jonte, at its
+confluence with the Butézon, long leagues remote from railroads and the
+world they stitch together--that world of unrest, uncertainty and
+intrigue which in those days seemed no better than a madhouse.
+
+The break in the monotony of daily footfaring proved agreeable. It
+suited one well to camp for a space in that quaint town, isolate in the
+heart of an enchanted land, with which one was in turn enchanted, and
+contemplate soberly the grave issues of Life and Death.
+
+Here (said Duchemin) nothing can disturb me; and it is high time for me
+to be considering what I am to make of the remainder of my days. Too
+many of them have been wasted, too great a portion of my span has been
+sacrificed to vanities. One must not forget one is in a fair way to
+become a grandfather; it is plainly an urgent duty to reconcile oneself
+to that estate and cultivate its proper gravity and decorum. Yet a
+little while and one must bid adieu to that Youth which one has so
+heedlessly squandered, a last adieu to Youth with its days of high
+adventure, its carefree heart, its susceptibility to the infinite
+seductions of Romance.
+
+Quite seriously the adventurer entertained a premonition of his
+to-morrow, a vision of himself in skull-cap and seedy clothing (the
+trousers well-bagged at the knees) with rather more than a mere hint of
+an equator emphasized by grease-spots on his waistcoat, presiding over
+the fortunes of one of those dingy little Parisian shops wherein
+debatable antiques accumulate dust till they fetch the ducats of the
+credulous; and of a Sunday walking out, in a shiny frock-coat with his
+ribbon of the Legion in the buttonhole, a ratty topper crowning his
+placid brows, a humid grandchild adhering to his hand: a thrifty and
+respectable bourgeois, the final avatar of a rolling stone!
+
+Yes: it is amusing, but quite true; though it would need a deal of
+contriving, something little short of a revolution to bring it about,
+to precisely such a future as that did Duchemin most seriously propose
+to dedicate himself.
+
+But always, they say, it is God who disposes....
+
+And for all this mood of premature resignation to the bourgeois virtues
+Duchemin was glad enough when his fourth day in Meyrueis dawned fair,
+and by eight was up and away, purposing a round day's tramp across the
+Causse Noir to Montpellier-le-Vieux (concerning which one heard curious
+tales), then on by way of the gorge of the Dourbie to Millau for the
+night.
+
+Nor would he heed the dubious head shaken by his host of Meyrueis, who
+earnestly advised a guide. The Causses, he declared, were treacherous;
+men sometimes lost their way upon those lofty plains and were never
+heard of more. Duchemin didn't in the least mind getting lost, that is
+to say failing to make his final objective; at worst he could depend
+upon a good memory and an unfailing sense of direction to lead him back
+the way he had come.
+
+He was to learn there is nothing more unpalatable than the repentance
+of the headstrong....
+
+He found it a stiffish climb up out of the valley of the Jonte. By the
+time he had managed it, the sun had already robbed all vegetation of
+its ephemeral jewellery, the Causse itself showed few signs of a
+downpour which had drenched it for seventy-two hours on end. To that
+porous limestone formation water in whatever quantity is as beer to a
+boche. Only, if one paused to listen on the brink of an aven, there
+were odd and disturbing noises to be heard underfoot, liquid
+whisperings, grim chuckles, horrible gurgles, that told of subterranean
+streams in spate, coursing in darkness to destinations unknown,
+unguessable.
+
+His path (there was no trace of road) ran snakily through a dense
+miniature forest of dwarfed, gnarled pines, of a peculiarly sombre
+green, ever and again in some scant clearing losing itself in a web of
+similar paths that converged from all points of the compass; so that
+the wayfarer was fain to steer by the sun--and at one time found
+himself abruptly on the brink of a ravine that gashed the earth like a
+cruel wound. He worked his way to an elevation which showed him plainly
+that--unless by a debatable detour of several miles--there was no way
+to the farther side but through the depths of the ravine itself.
+
+If that descent was a desperate business, the subsequent climb was
+heartbreaking. He needed a long rest before he was able to plod on, now
+conceiving the sun in the guise of a personal enemy. The sweat that
+streamed from his face was brine upon his lips. For hours it was thus
+with Duchemin, and in all that time he met never a soul. Once he saw
+from a distance a lonely château overhanging another ravine; but it was
+apparently only one more of the many ruins indigenous to that land, and
+he took no step toward closer acquaintance.
+
+Long after noon, sheer fool's luck led him to a hamlet whose mean
+auberge served him bread and cheese with a wine singularly thin and
+acid. Here he enquired for a guide, but the one able-bodied man in
+evidence, a hulking, surly animal, on learning that Duchemin wished to
+visit Montpellier-le-Vieux, refused with a growl to have anything to do
+with him. Several times during the course of luncheon he caught the
+fellow eyeing him strangely, he thought, from a window of the auberge.
+In the end the peasant girl who waited on him grudgingly consented to
+put him on his way.
+
+In a rocky gorge, called the Rajol, a spot as inhumanly grotesque as a
+nightmare of Gustave Doré's, with the heat of a pit in Tophet, he
+laboured for hours. The hush of evening and its long shadows were on
+the land when finally he scrambled out to the Causse again. Then he
+lost his path another time, missed entirely the village of Maubert,
+where he had thought to find a conveyance, or at least a guide, and in
+the silver and purple mystery of a perfect moonlight night found
+himself looking down from a hilltop upon Montpellier-le-Vieux.
+
+Rumour had prepared him to know the place when he saw it, nothing for
+its stupendous lunacy. Heaven knows what convulsion or measured process
+of Nature accomplished this thing. For his part Duchemin was unable to
+accept any possible scientific explanation, and will go to his grave
+believing that some half-witted cyclops, back beyond the dimmest dawn
+of Time, created Montpellier-le-Vieux in an hour of idleness, building
+him a play city of titanic monoliths, then wandered away and forgot it
+altogether.
+
+He saw what seemed to be a city at least two miles in length, more than
+half as wide, a huddle of dwellings of every shape and size, a
+labyrinth of narrow, tortuous streets broken here and there by wide and
+stately avenues, with public squares and vast cirques (of such
+amphitheatres he counted no less than six) and walls commanded by a
+citadel.
+
+But never door or window broke the face of any building, no chimney
+exhaled a breath of smoke, neither wheel nor foot disturbed these
+grass-grown thoroughfares.... Montpellier-the-Old indeed! Duchemin
+reflected; but rather Montpellier-the-Dead--dead with the utter
+deadness of that which has never lived.
+
+Marvelling, he went down into the city of stone and passed through its
+desolate ways, shaping a course for the southern limits, where he
+thought to find the road to Millau. Fatigue alone dictated this choice
+of the short cut. But for that, he confesses he might have gone the
+long way round; he was no more prone to childish terrors than any other
+man, but to his mind there was something sinister in the portentous
+immobility of the place; in its silence, its want of excuse for being,
+a sense of age-old evil like an inarticulate menace.
+
+Out of this mood he failed to laugh himself. Time and again he would
+catch himself listening for he knew not what, approaching warily the
+corner of the next huge monolith as if thinking to surprise behind it
+some ghoulish rite, glancing apprehensively down the corridors he
+passed, or overshoulder for some nameless thing that stalked him and
+was never there when he looked, but ever lurked impishly just beyond
+the tail of his eye.
+
+So that, when abruptly a man moved from behind a rock some thirty or
+forty paces ahead, Duchemin stopped short, with jangled nerves and a
+barely smothered exclamation. Possibly a shape of spectral terror would
+have been less startling; in that weird place and hour humanity seemed
+more incongruous than the supernatural. It was at once apparent that
+the man had neither knowledge of nor concern with the stranger. For an
+instant he stood with his back to the latter, peering intently down the
+aisle which Duchemin had been following, a stout body filling out too
+well the uniform of a private soldier in the American Expeditionary
+Forces--that most ungainly, inutile, unbecoming costume that ever
+graced the form of man.
+
+Then he half turned, beckoned hastily to one invisible to the observer,
+and furtively moved on. As furtively his signal was answered by a
+fellow who wore the nondescript garments of a peasant. And as suddenly
+as they had come into sight, the two slipped round a rocky shoulder,
+and the street of monoliths was empty.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MEETING BY MOONLIGHT
+
+
+Now granting that a soldier should be free to spend his leave where he
+will, unchallenged, it remained true that the last of the A.E.F. had
+long since said farewell to the shores of France, while the Tarn
+country seemed a far cry from the banks of the Rhine, in those days
+still under occupation by forces of the United States Regular Army.
+Then, too, it was a fact within the knowledge of Monsieur Duchemin that
+the uniform of the Americans had more than frequently been used by
+those ancient acquaintances of his, the Apaches of Paris, as a cloak
+for their own misdoings. So it didn't need the air of stealth that
+marked this business to persuade him there was mischief in the brew.
+
+But indeed he got in motion to investigate without stopping to debate
+an excuse for so doing, and several seconds before he heard the woman's
+cries.
+
+Of these the first sounded, shrill with alarm, as Duchemin turned the
+corner where the prowlers had gone from sight. But a high wall of rock
+alone met his vision, and he broke into a run that carried him round
+still another corner and then plumped him headlong into the theatre of
+villainy.
+
+This was open ground, a breadth of turf bordering on one of the great
+cirques--a rudely oval pit at a guess little less than seven hundred
+feet in its narrowest diameter and something like four hundred in
+depth, a vast black well against whose darkness the blue-white
+moonglare etched a strange grouping of figures, seven in all.
+
+On his one hand Duchemin saw a woman in mourning clasping to her bosom
+a terrified young girl, the author of the screams; on the other, three
+men close-locked in grimmest combat, one defending himself against two
+with indifferent success; while in between stood a third woman with her
+back to and perilously near the chasm, shrinking from the threat of a
+pistol in the hands of the fourth man.
+
+This last was the one nearest Duchemin, who was upon him so suddenly
+that it would be difficult to say which was the more surprised when
+Duchemin's stick struck down the pistol hand of the other with such
+force as must have broken his wrist. The weapon fell, he uttered an
+oath as he swung round, clutching the maimed member; and then, seeing
+his assailant for the first time, he swooped down to recover the weapon
+so swiftly that it was in his left hand and spitting vicious tongues of
+orange flame before Duchemin was able to get in a second blow.
+
+But there was the abrupt end of that passage. Smitten cruelly between
+the eyes, the fellow grunted thickly and went over backwards like a
+bundle of rags, head and shoulders jutting out over the brink of the
+precipice so far that, though his body checked perceptibly as it struck
+the ground, his own weight carried him on, he shot out into space and
+vanished as though some unseen hand had lifted up from these dark
+depths and plucked him down to annihilation.
+
+The young girl shrieked again, the woman gave a gasp of horror,
+Duchemin himself knew a sickish qualm. But he had no time to spare for
+that: it was going ill with the man contending against two. The
+adventurer's stick might have been bewitched that night, so magical was
+its work; a single blow on the nearest head (but believe it was
+selected with care!) and instantaneously that knot of contention was
+resolved into its three several parts.
+
+The smitten clapped hands to his hurt, moaning. His brother scoundrel
+started back with staring eyes in which rage gave place to dismay as he
+grasped the change in the situation and saw the stick swinging for his
+head in turn. He ducked neatly; the stick whistled through thin air;
+and before Duchemin could recover the other had turned and was running
+for dear life.
+
+Duchemin delayed a bare instant; but manifestly his assistance was no
+more needed here. In a breath he who had been so recently outmatched
+recollected his wits and took the initiative with admirable address.
+Duchemin saw him fly furiously at his late opponent, trip and lay him
+on his back; then turned and gave chase to the fugitive.
+
+This was the masquerader in the American uniform; and an amazingly
+fleet pair of heels he showed, taking into account his heaviness of
+body. Already he had a fair lead; and had he maintained for long the
+pace he set in the first few hundred yards he must have won away
+scot-free. But whether he lacked staying powers or confidence, he made
+the mistake of adopting another and less fatiguing means of locomotion.
+Duchemin saw him swerve from his first course and steer for a vehicle
+standing at some distance--evidently the conveyance which had brought
+the sightseers to view the spectacle of Montpellier-le-Vieux by
+moonlight.
+
+Waiting in the middle of a broad avenue of misshapen obelisks, a
+dilapidated barouche with a low body sagging the lower for debilitated
+springs, on either side its pole drooped two sorry specimens of
+crowbait. And their pained amazement was so unfeigned that Duchemin
+laughed aloud when the fat rogue bounded to the box, snatched up reins
+and whip and curled a cruel lash round their bony flanks. From this one
+inferred that he was indifferently acquainted with the animals,
+certainly not their accustomed driver. And since it took them some
+moments to come to their senses and appreciate that all this was not an
+evil dream, Duchemin's hands were clutching for the back of the
+carriage when the horses broke suddenly into an awkward, lumbering
+gallop and whisked it out of reach.
+
+But not for long. Extending himself, Duchemin caught the folded top,
+jumped, and began to clamber in.
+
+The man on the box was tugging fretfully at something wedged in the
+hip-pocket of his breeches; proof enough that he was not the original
+tenant of the uniform, since it fitted too snugly to permit ready
+extraction of a pistol in an emergency.
+
+But he got no chance whatever to use the weapon; for the moment
+Duchemin found his own feet in the swaying vehicle he leaped on the
+shoulders of the other and dragged him backwards from the box.
+
+What followed was not very clear to him, a mélange of impressions. The
+mock-American fought like a devil unchained, cursing Duchemin fluently
+in the purest and foulest argot of Belleville--which is not in the
+French vocabulary of the doughboy. The animals at the pole caught fire
+of this madness and ran away in good earnest, that wretched barouche
+rolled and pitched like a rudderless shell in a crazy sea, the two men
+floundered in its well like fish in a pail.
+
+They fought by no rules, with no science, but bit and kicked and gouged
+and wrenched and struck as occasion offered and each to the best of his
+ability. Duchemin caught glimpses of a face like a Chinese devil-mask,
+hideously distorted with working features and disfigured with smears of
+soot through which insane eyeballs rolled and glared in the moonlight.
+Then a hand like a vice gripped his windpipe, he was on his back, his
+head overhanging the edge of the floor, a thumb was feeling for one of
+his eyes. Yet it could not have been much later when he and his
+opponent were standing and swaying as one, locked in an embrace of
+wrestlers.
+
+Still, Duchemin knew as many tricks of hand-to-hand fighting as the
+other, perhaps a few more. And then he was, no doubt, in far better
+condition. At all events the fellow was presently at his mercy, in a
+hold that gave one the privilege of breaking his back at will. A man of
+mistaken scruples, Duchemin failed to do so, but held the other
+helpless only long enough to find his hip-pocket and rip out the
+pistol--a deadly Luger. Then a thrust and a kick, which he enjoyed
+infinitely, sent the brute spinning out to land on his head.
+
+The fall should have broken his neck. At the worst it should have
+stunned him. Evidently it didn't. When Duchemin had scrambled up to the
+box, captured the reins and brought the nags to a stop--no great feat
+that; they were quite sated with the voluptuousness of running away and
+well content to heed the hand and voice of authority--and when,
+finally, he swung them round and drove back toward the cirque, he saw
+no sign of his Apache by the roadside.
+
+So he congratulated himself on the forethought which had possessed him
+of the pistol. Otherwise the assassin, since he had retained sufficient
+wit and strength to crawl into hiding, could and assuredly would have
+potted Monsieur Duchemin with neither difficulty nor compunction.
+
+Not five figures but four only were waiting beside the cirque when,
+wheeling the barouche as near the group as the lay of the ground
+permitted, he climbed down. A man lay at length in the coarse grass,
+his head pillowed in the lap of one woman. Another woman stood aside,
+trembling and wringing aged hands. The third knelt beside the supine
+man, but rose quickly as Duchemin drew near, and came to meet him.
+
+In this one he recognised her to whose salvation Chance had first led
+him, and now found time to appreciate a face of pallid loveliness,
+intelligent and composed, while she addressed him quietly and directly
+to the point in a voice whose timbre was, he fancied, out of character
+with the excellent accent of its French. An exquisite voice,
+nevertheless. English, he guessed, or possibly American, but much at
+home in France....
+
+"Monsieur d'Aubrac has been wounded, a knife thrust. It will be
+necessary to get him to a surgeon as quickly as possible. I fancy there
+will be none nearer than Nant. Do you know the way?"
+
+"One can doubtless find it," said Duchemin modestly. "But I myself am
+not without knowledge of wounds. Perhaps..."
+
+"If monsieur would be so good."
+
+Duchemin knelt beside the man, who welcomed him with open eyes and a
+wry smile that was almost as faint as his voice.
+
+"It is nothing, monsieur--a clean cut in the arm, with some loss of
+blood."
+
+"But let me see."
+
+The young girl in whose lap rested the head of Monsieur d'Aubrac sat
+back and watched Duchemin with curious, grave eyes in which traces of
+moisture glimmered.
+
+"Had the animal at my mercy, I thought," d'Aubrac apologised, "when
+suddenly he drew that knife, stuck me and broke away."
+
+"I understand," Duchemin replied. "But don't talk. You'll want all your
+strength, my friend."
+
+With his pocket-knife he laid open the sodden sleeves of coat and
+shirt, exposing an upper arm stained dark with blood that welled in
+ugly jets from a cut both wide and deep.
+
+"Artery severed," he announced, and straightened up and looked about,
+at a loss. "My pack--?"
+
+One's actions in moments of excitement are apt to be largely directed
+by the subconscious, he knew; still he found it hard to believe that he
+could unwittingly have unshipped and dropped his rucksack while making
+ready to pursue the American uniform. Nevertheless, it seemed, that was
+just what he had done.
+
+The woman who had spoken to him found and fetched it from no great
+distance; and its contents enabled Duchemin to improvise a tourniquet,
+and when the flow of blood was checked, a bandage. During the operation
+d'Aubrac unostentatiously fainted.
+
+The young girl caught her breath, a fluttering hiss.
+
+"Don't be alarmed, mademoiselle," Duchemin soothed her. "He will come
+round presently, he will do splendidly now till we get him to bed; and
+then his convalescence will be merely the matter of a while of rest."
+
+He slipped his arms beneath the unconscious man, gathered him up bodily
+and bore him to the carriage--and, thanks to man's amusing amour
+propre, made far less of the effort than it cost him. Then, with
+d'Aubrac disposed as comfortably as might be on the back seat, once
+again pillowed in a fashion to make any man envious, Duchemin turned to
+find the other women at his elbow. To the eldest he offered a bow
+suited to her condition and a hand to help her into the barouche.
+
+"Madame ..."
+
+Her agitation had measurably subsided. The gentle inclination of the
+aged head which acknowledged his courtesy was as eloquent of her
+quality as he found the name which she gave him in quavering accents.
+
+"Madame de Sévénié, monsieur."
+
+"With madame's permission: I am André Duchemin."
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin has placed us all deeply in his debt. Louise ..."
+The girl in the carriage looked up and bowed, murmuring. "Mademoiselle
+de Montalais, monsieur: my granddaughter. And Eve ..." She turned to
+the third, to her whose voice of delightful accent was not in
+Duchemin's notion wholly French: "Madame de Montalais, my daughter by
+adoption, widow of my grandson, who died gloriously for his country at
+La Fère-Champenoise."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+EVE
+
+
+When she had graciously permitted Duchemin to assist her to a place in
+the carriage, Madame Sévénié turned immediately to comfort her
+granddaughter. It was easy to divine an attachment there, between
+d'Aubrac and Louise de Montalais; Duchemin fancied (and, as it turned
+out, rightly) the two were betrothed.
+
+But Madame de Montalais was claiming his attention.
+
+"Monsieur thinks--?" she enquired in a guarded tone, taking advantage
+of the diversion provided by the elder lady to delay a little before
+entering the barouche.
+
+"Monsieur d'Aubrac is in no immediate danger. Still, the services of a
+good surgeon, as soon as may be ..."
+
+"Will it be dangerous to wait till we get to Nant?"
+
+"How far is that, madame?"
+
+"Twelve miles."
+
+Duchemin looked aside at the decrepit conveyance with its unhappy
+horses, and summed up a conclusion in a shrug.
+
+"Millau is nearer, is it not, madame?"
+
+"But Nant is not far from the Château de Montalais; and at La
+Roque-Sainte-Marguerite our automobile is waiting, less than two miles
+below. The chauffeur advised against bringing over the road from La
+Roque to Montpellier; it is too rough and very steep."
+
+"Oh!" said Duchemin, as one who catches a glimmering of light.
+
+"Pardon, monsieur?"
+
+"Madame's chauffeur is waiting with the automobile, no doubt?"
+
+"But assuredly, monsieur."
+
+He recollected himself. "We shall see what we shall see, then, at La
+Roque. With an automobile at your disposal, Nant is little more distant
+than Millau, certainly. Nevertheless, let us not delay."
+
+"Monsieur is too good."
+
+Momentarily a hand slender and firm and cool rested in his own. Then
+its owner was setting into place beside Madame de Sévénié, and Duchemin
+clambering up to his on the box.
+
+The road proved quite as rough and declivitous as its reputation. One
+surmised that the Spring rains had found it in a bad way and done
+nothing to better its condition. Deep ruts and a liberal sprinkling of
+small boulders collaborated to keep the horses stumbling, plunging and
+pitching as they strained back against the singletrees. Duchemin was
+grateful for the moonlight which alone enabled him to keep the road and
+avoid the worst of the going--until he remembered that without the moon
+there would have been no expedition that night to view the mock ruins
+of Montpellier by its unearthly light, and consequently no adventure to
+entangle him.
+
+Upon this reflection he swore softly but most fervently into his
+becoming beard. He was well fed up with adventures, thank you, and
+could have done very well without this latest. And especially at a time
+when he desired nothing so much as to be permitted to remain the
+footloose wanderer in a strange land, a bird of passage without ties or
+responsibilities.
+
+He thought it devilish hard that one may never do a service to another
+without incurring a burden of irksome obligations to the served; that
+bonds of interest forged in moments of unpremeditated and generous
+impulse are never readily to be broken.
+
+Now because Chance had seen fit to put him in the way of saving a
+hapless party of sightseers from robbery or worse, he found himself
+hopelessly committed to take a continuing interest in them. It appeared
+that their home was a château somewhere in the vicinity of Nant. Well,
+after their shocking experience, and with the wounded man on their
+hands--and especially if La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite told the story one
+confidently expected--Duchemin could hardly avoid offering to see them
+safely as far as Nant. And once there he would be definitely in the
+toils. He would have to stop in the town overnight; and in the morning
+he would be able neither in common decency to slip away without calling
+to enquire after the welfare of d'Aubrac and the tranquillity of the
+ladies, nor in discretion to take himself out of the way of the civil
+investigation which would inevitably follow the report of what had
+happened in Montpelier.
+
+No: having despatched a bandit to an end well-earned, it now devolved
+upon André Duchemin to satisfy Society and the State that he had done
+so only with the most amiable motives, on due provocation, to save his
+own life and possibly the lives of others.
+
+He had premonitions of endless delays while provincial authorities
+wondered, doubted, criticised, procrastinated, investigated, reported,
+and--repeated.
+
+And then there was every chance that the story, thanks to the
+prominence of the persons involved, for one made no doubt that the
+names of Sévénié and Montalais and d'Aubrac ranked high in that part of
+the world--the story would get into the newspapers of the larger towns
+in the department. And what then of the comfortable pseudonymity of
+André Duchemin? Posed in an inescapable glare of publicity, how long
+might he hope to escape recognition by some acquaintance, friend or
+enemy? Heaven knew he had enough of both sorts scattered widely over
+the face of Europe!
+
+It seemed hard, indeed....
+
+But it was--of course! he assured himself grimly--all a matter of
+fatality with him. Never for him the slippered ease of middle age, the
+pursuit of bourgeois virtues, of which he had so fondly dreamed in
+Meyrueis. Adventures were his portion, as surely as humdrum and
+eventless days were many another's. Wars might come and wars might go:
+but his mere presence in its neighbourhood would prove enough to turn
+the Palace of Peace itself into Action Front.
+
+Or so it seemed to him, in the bitterness of his spirit.
+
+Nor would he for an instant grant that his lot was not without its own,
+peculiar compensations.
+
+At La Roque, a tiny hamlet huddled in the shadow of Montpellier and
+living almost exclusively upon the tourists that pass that way, it was
+as Duchemin had foreseen, remembering the American uniform and the face
+smudged with soot--that favourite device of the French criminal of the
+lower class fearing recognition. For there it appeared that, whereas
+the motor car was waiting safe and sound enough, its chauffeur had
+vanished into thin air. Not a soul could be found who recalled seeing
+the man after the barouche Tiad left the village. Whereupon Duchemin
+asked whether the chauffeur had been a stout man, and being informed
+that it was so, considered the case complete. Mesdames de Sévénié et de
+Montalais, he suggested, might as well then and there give up all hope
+of ever again seeing that particular chauffeur--unless by some
+mischance entirely out of the reckoning of the latter. The landlord of
+the auberge, a surly sot, who had supplied the barouche with the man to
+act as driver and guide in one, took with ill grace the charge that his
+employee had been in league with the bandits. But this was true on the
+word of Madame de Montalais; it was their guide, she said, whom
+Duchemin had driven over the cliff. And (as Duchemin had anticipated)
+her name alone proved enough to silence the landlord's virtuous
+protestations. One could not always avoid being deceived, he declared;
+he knew nothing of the dead man more than that he had come well
+recommended. With which he said no more, but lent an efficient if
+sullen hand to the task of transferring d'Aubrac to the motor car.
+
+D'Aubrac came to, while this was being accomplished, begged feebly for
+water, was given it with a little brandy to boot and, comfortably
+settled in the rear seat, between Louise de Montalais and her
+grandmother, relapsed once more into unconsciousness.
+
+Learning that Madame de Montalais would drive, Duchemin dissembled a
+sigh of relief and, standing beside the car, doffed his cap to say
+good-bye. He was only too happy to have been of such slight service as
+the circumstances had permitted; and if at any time he could do more, a
+line addressed to him at Nimes, poste restante ....
+
+"But if Monsieur Duchemin would be good enough," Madame de Sévénié
+interposed in a fretful quaver--"and if it would not be taking him too
+far out of his way--it is night, anything may happen, the car might
+break down, and I am an old woman, monsieur, with sorely tried
+nerves--"
+
+Looking down at him from her place at the wheel, Madame de Montalais
+added: "It would be an act of charity, I think, monsieur, if it does
+not inconvenience you too greatly."
+
+"On the contrary," he fabricated without blushing, "you will be
+obliging a weary man by putting him several miles on his way."
+
+He had no cause to regret his complaisance. Seated beside Madame de
+Montalais, he watched her operate the car with skilful hands, making
+the best of a highway none too good, if a city boulevard in comparison
+with that which they had covered in the barouche.
+
+Following the meandering Dourbie, it ran snakily from patches of
+staring moonlight to patches of inky shadows, now on narrow ledges high
+over the brawling stream, now dipping so low that the tyres were almost
+level with the plane of broken waters.
+
+The sweep of night air in his face was sweet and smooth, not cold--for
+a marvel in that altitude--and stroked his eyelids with touches as
+bland as caresses of a pretty woman's fingers. He was sensible of
+drowsiness, a surrender to fatigue, to which the motion of the motor
+car, swung seemingly on velvet springs, and the shifting, blending
+chiaroscuro of the magic night were likewise conducive. So that there
+came a lessening of the tension of resentment in his humour.
+
+It was true that Life would never let him rest in the quiet byways of
+his desire; but after all, unrest was Life; and it was good to be alive
+tonight, alive and weary and not ill-content with self, in a motor car
+swinging swiftly and silently along a river road in the hills of
+Southern France, with a woman lovely, soignée and mysterious at the
+wheel.
+
+Perhaps instinctively sensible of the regard that dwelt, warm with
+wonder, on the fair curve of her cheek, the perfect modelling of her
+nose and mouth, she looked swiftly askance, after a time, surprised his
+admiration, and as if not displeased smiled faintly as she returned
+attention to the road.
+
+Duchemin was conscious of something like a shock of emotion, a sudden
+surging of some hunger that had long lain dormant in his being,
+unsuspected, how long he could not surmise, gaining strength in
+latency, waiting to be awakened and set free by one careless, sidelong
+look and smile of a strange woman.
+
+"Eve," he whispered, unheard, "Eve de Montalais ..."
+
+Then of a sudden he caught himself up sharply. It was natural enough
+that one should be susceptible to gentler impulses, at such a time,
+under circumstances so strange, so unforeseen, so romantic; but he must
+not, dared not, would not yield. That way danger lay.
+
+Not that he feared danger; for like most of mankind he loved it well.
+
+But here the danger held potentialities if not the certainty of
+pain--pain, it might be, not for one alone.
+
+Besides, it was too absurd ....
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+PHINUIT & CO.
+
+
+In the upshot, however, the necessity of his dismal forebodings had
+nothing to do with the length of time devoted by Monsieur Duchemin to
+kicking idle heels in the town of Nant; where the civil authorities
+proved considerate in a degree that--even making allowance for the
+local prestige of the house of Montalais--gratified and surprised the
+confirmed Parisian. For that was just what the good man was at heart
+and would be till he died, the form in which environment of younger
+years had moulded him: less French than Parisian, sharing the almost
+insular ignorance of life in the provinces characteristic of the native
+boulevardier; to whom the sun is truly nothing more or less than a
+spotlight focussed exclusively on Paris, leaving the rest of France in
+a sort of crepuscular gloom, the world besides steeped in eternal
+night.
+
+The driver-guide of La Roque turned out to have been a thorough-paced
+scamp, well and ill-known to the gendarmerie; the wound sustained by
+Monsieur d'Aubrac bore testimony to the gravity of the affair, amply
+excusing Duchemin's interference and its fatal sequel; while the
+statements of Mesdames de Sévénié et de Montalais, duly becoming public
+property, bade fair to exalt the local reputation of André Duchemin to
+heroic stature. And, naturally, his papers were unimpeachable.
+
+So that he found himself, before his acquaintance with Nant was
+thirty-six hours of age, free once more to humour the dictates of his
+own sweet will, to go on to Nimes (his professed objective) or to the
+devil if he liked. A freedom which, consistent with the native
+inconsistency of man, he exercised by electing to stop over in Nant for
+another day or two, at least; assuring himself that he found the town
+altogether charming, more so even than Meyrueis--and sometimes
+believing this fiction for as much as twenty minutes at a stretch.
+
+Besides, the weather was unsettled ....
+
+The inn, which went by the unpretending style of the Grand Hôtel de
+l'Univers, he found clean, comfortable, and as to its cuisine
+praiseworthy. The windows of the cubicle in which he had been
+lodged--one of ten which sufficed for the demands of the itinerant
+Universe--not only overlooked the public square and its amusing life of
+a minor market town, but commanded as well a splendid vista of the
+valley of the Dourbie, with its piquant contrast of luxuriant alluvial
+verdure and grim scarps of rock that ran up, on either side the wanton,
+glimmering river, into two opposed and overshadowing pinnacles of crag,
+the Roc Nantais and the Roc de Saint Alban--peaks each a rendezvous
+just then for hosts of cloud that scowled forbiddingly down upon the
+peaceful, sun-drenched valley.
+
+Moreover, even from the terrasse of the café below, one needed only to
+lift one's eyes to see, afar, perched high upon a smiling slope of
+green, with the highway to Millau at its foot and a beetling cliff
+behind, the Château de Montalais. Seated on that terrasse, late in the
+afternoon of his second day in Nant, discussing a Picon and a
+villainous caporal cigarette of the Régie (to whose products a rugged
+constitution was growing slowly reconciled anew) Duchemin let his
+vision dwell upon the distant château almost as constantly as his
+thoughts.
+
+He was to dine there that very evening. Even taking into account the
+signal service Duchemin had rendered, this wasn't easy to believe when
+one remembered the tradition of social conservatism among French
+gentlefolk. Still, it was true: Duchemin of the open road was bidden to
+dine en famille at the Château de Montalais. In his pocket lay the
+invitation, penned in the crabbed antique hand of Madame de Sévénié and
+fetched to the hotel by a servitor quite as crabbed and antique:
+Monsieur Duchemin would confer a true pleasure by enabling the ladies
+of the château to testify, even so inadequately, to their sense of
+obligation, etc.; with a postscript to say that Monsieur d'Aubrac was
+resting easily, his wound mending as rapidly as heart could wish.
+
+Of course Duchemin was going, had in fact already despatched his
+acceptance by the hand of the same messenger. Equally of course he knew
+that he ought not to go. For a man of his years he was, as a matter of
+training and habit, amazingly honest with himself. He knew quite well
+what bent his inclination toward visiting the Château de Montalais just
+once before effecting, what he was resolved upon, a complete
+evanishment from the ken of its people. He had yet to hold one minute
+of private conversation with Eve de Montalais, he had of her no sign to
+warrant his thinking her anything but utterly indifferent to him; and
+yet....
+
+No; he wasn't ass enough to dream that he was in love with the woman;
+to the contrary, he was wise enough, knew himself well enough, to know
+that he could be, easily, and would be, given half a chance to lose his
+head.
+
+His warning had been clear beyond mistake, in that hour in the motor
+car on the road from La Roque to Nant, when Nature, as she sometimes
+will, incautiously had shown her hand to one whom she herself had
+schooled to read shrewdly, letting him discern what was her will with
+him, the snare that was laid for his feet and in which he must soon
+find himself trapped beyond extrication ... always providing he lacked
+the wit and resolution to fly his peril, who knew through bitterest of
+learning that love was never for him.
+
+Now he had seen Madame de Montalais another time, and had found that
+she fitted to the sweetest detail of perfection his ideal of Woman.
+
+On the previous afternoon, meeting the ladies of the château by
+arrangement in the bureau of the maire, Duchemin had sat opposite and
+watched and listened to Eve de Montalais for upwards of two hours--as
+completely devoted to covert study of her as if she had been the one
+woman in the room, as if the girl Louise, Madame de Sévénié, and the
+officials and functionaries of Nant had not existed in the same world
+with her. And in that tedious and constrained time of formalities he
+had learned much about her, but first of all, thanks to the
+uncompromising light of day that filled the cheerless room, that
+moonlight had not enhanced but rather tempered the charms of person
+which had the night before so stirred his pulses.
+
+Posed with consummate grace in a comfortless chair, a figure of slender
+elegance in her half-mourning, she had narrated quietly her version of
+last night's misadventure, an occasional tremor of humour lightening
+the moving modulations of her voice. A deep and vibrant voice,
+contralto in quality, hinting at hidden treasures of strength in the
+woman whose superficial mind it expressed. A fair woman, slim but
+round, with brown eyes level and calm, a translucent skin of matchless
+texture, hair the hue of bronze laced with intimations of gold ...
+
+Her story told, and taken down in longhand by a withered clerk, she
+supplied without reluctance or trace of embarrassment such intimate
+personal information as was necessary in order that her signature to
+the document might be acceptable to the State.
+
+Her age, she said, was twenty-nine; her birthplace, the City of New
+York; her parents, Edmund Anstruther, once of Bath, England, but at the
+time of her birth a naturalised citizen of the United States, and Eve
+Marie Anstruther, née Legendre, of Paris. Both were dead. In June 1914
+she had married, in Paris, Victor Maurice de Montalais, who had been
+killed in action at La Fère-Champenoise on the ninth of September
+following. Her home? The Château de Montalais.
+
+On the hand she stripped in order to sign her deposition Duchemin saw a
+blue diamond of such superb water that this amateur of precious stones
+caught his breath for sheer wonder at its beauty and excellence and
+worth. Such jewels, he knew, were few and far to seek outside the
+collections of princes.
+
+Out of these simple elements imagination reconstructed a tragedy, a
+tragedy of life singularly close to the truth as he later came to learn
+it, a story not at all calculated to lessen his interest in the woman.
+
+Such women, he knew, are the product of a cultivation seldom to be
+achieved by poverty. This one had been made before, and not by, her
+marriage. Her father, then, had commanded riches. And when one knew, as
+Duchemin knew, what delights New York has for young women of wealth and
+fashion, one perceived a radiant and many-coloured background for this
+drab life of a recluse, expatriate from the high world of her
+inheritance, which Eve de Montalais must lead, and for the six years of
+her premature widowhood must have led, in that lonely château, buried
+deep in the loneliest hills of all France, the sole companion and
+comfort of her husband's bereaved sister and grandmother, chained by
+sorrow to their sorrow, by an inexorable reluctance to give them pain
+by seeming to slight the memory of the husband, brother and grandson
+through turning her face toward the world of life and light and gaiety
+of which she was so essentially a part, isolate from which she was so
+inevitably a thing existing without purpose or effect.
+
+How often, Duchemin wondered, had she in hours of solitude and
+restlessness felt her spirit yearning toward Paris, the nearest gateway
+to her world, and had cried out: How long, O Lord! how long?...
+
+The mellow resonance of a two-toned automobile horn, disturbing the
+early evening hush and at the same time Duchemin's meditations,
+recalled him to Nant in time to see a touring car of majestic
+proportions and mien which, coming from the south, from the direction
+of the railroad and Nimes, was sweeping a fine curve round two sides of
+the public square. Arriving in front of the Hôtel de l'Univers it
+executed a full stop and stood curbed yet palpitant, purring heavily:
+an impressive brute of a car, all shining silver plate and lustrous
+green paint and gold, the newest model of the costliest and best
+automobile manufactured in France.
+
+Instantly, as the wheels ceased to turn, a young man in the smartest
+livery imaginable, green garnished with gold, leaped smartly from the
+driver's seat, with military precision opened the door of the tonneau
+and, holding it, immobilised himself into the semblance of a waxwork
+image with the dispassionate eye, the firm mouth, and the closely
+razored, square jowls of the model chauffeur. Rustics and townsfolk
+were already gathering, a gaping audience, when from the tonneau
+descended first a long and painfully emaciated gentleman, whose face
+was a cadaverous mask of settled melancholy and his chosen toilette for
+motoring (as might be seen through the open and flapping front of his
+ulster) a tightly tailored light grey cutaway coat and trousers, with a
+double-breasted white waistcoat, a black satin Ascot scarf transfixed
+by a single splendid pearl, and spotless white spats.
+
+His hand, as gaunt as a skeleton's, assisted to alight a young woman
+whose brilliant blonde beauty, viewed for the first time in evening
+shadows, was like a shaft of sunlight in a darkened room. A well-made
+creature, becomingly and modishly gowned for motoring, spirited yet
+dignified in carriage, she was like a vision of, as she was palpably a
+visitation from, the rue de la Paix.
+
+Following her, a third passenger presented the well-nourished, indeed
+rotund, person of a Frenchman of thirty devoted to "le Sport"; as
+witness his aggressively English tweeds and the single glass screwed
+into his right eye-socket. His face was chubby, pink and white, his
+look was merry, he was magnificently self-conscious and débonnaire.
+
+Like shapes from some superbly costumed pageant of High Life in the
+Twentieth Century this trio drifted, rather than merely walked like
+mortals, across the terrasse and into the Café de l'Univers (which
+seemed suddenly to shrink in proportion as if reminded of its
+comparative insignificance in the Scheme of Things) where an awed staff
+of waiters, led by the overpowered propriétaires, monsieur et madame
+themselves, welcomed these apparitions from Another and A Better World
+with bowings and scrapings and a vast bustle and movement of chairs and
+tables; while all Nant, all of it, that is, that was accustomed to
+foregather in the café at this the hour of the aperitif, looked on with
+awed and envious eyes.
+
+It was all very theatrical and inspiring--to Monsieur Duchemin, too;
+who, lost in the shuffle of Nant and content to be so, murmured to
+himself that serviceable and comforting word of the time, "Profiteers!"
+and contemplated with some satisfaction his personal superiority to
+such as these.
+
+But there was more and better to come.
+
+There remained in the car a mere average man, undistinguished but by a
+lack of especial distinction, sober of habit, economical of gesture,
+dressed in a simple lounge suit such as anybody might wear, beneath a
+rough and ready-made motorcoat. When the car stopped he had stood up in
+his place beside the chauffeur as if meaning to get out, but rather
+remained motionless, resting a hand on the windshield and thoughtfully
+gazing northwards along the road that, skirting the grounds of the
+Château de Montalais, disappeared from view round the sleek shoulder of
+a hill.
+
+Now as the pattern chauffeur shut the door to the tonneau with the
+properly arrogant slam, the man who lingered in the car nodded gravely
+to some private thought, unlatched the door, got down, and turned
+toward the café, but before following his companions of more brilliant
+plumage paused for a quiet word with the chauffeur.
+
+"We dine here, Jules," he announced in English.
+
+Settling into place behind the wheel Jules saluted with fine finish and
+deference.
+
+"Very good, Mr. Phinuit, sir," he said meekly, in the same tongue. To
+this he added, coolly, without the least flicker of a glance aside,
+without moving one muscle other than those involved by the act of
+speech, and in precisely the tone of respect that became his livery:
+"What's the awful idea, you big stiff?"
+
+Mr. Phinuit betrayed not the slightest sense of anything untoward in
+this mode of address, but looked round to the chauffeur with a slow,
+not unfriendly smile.
+
+"Why," he said pleasantly--"you misbegotten garage hound--why do you
+ask?"
+
+In the same manner Jules replied: "Can't you see it's going to rain?"
+
+Mr. Phinuit cocked a calm, observant eye heavenwards. Involuntarily but
+unobtrusively, under cover of the little tubbed trees that hedged the
+terrasse apart from the square, Duchemin did likewise, and so
+discovered, or for the first time appreciated, the cause of the
+uncommonly early dusk that loured over Nant.
+
+Between the sentinel peaks that towered above the valley black
+battalions of storm cloud were fraternising, joining forces, coalescing
+into a vast and formidable army of ominous aspect.
+
+"So it is," Mr. Phinuit commented amiably; indeed, not without a
+certain hint of satisfaction. "Blessed if you don't see everything!"
+
+"Well, then: what about it?"
+
+"Why, _I_ should say you'd better find a place to put the car under
+cover in case it comes on to storm before we're finished--and put up
+the top."
+
+"You don't mean to go on in the rain?" Jules protested--yet studiously
+in no tone of protest.
+
+"But naturally..."
+
+"How do you get that way? Do you want us all to get soaked to our
+skins?"
+
+"My dear Jules!" Mr. Phinuit returned with a winning smile--"I don't
+give a tupenny damn if we do." With that he went to join his company;
+while Jules, once the other's back was turned, permitted himself, for
+the sake of his own respect and the effect upon the assembled audience,
+the luxury of a shrug that outrivalled words in expression of his
+personal opinion of the madness that contemplated further travel on
+such a night as this promised to be.
+
+Then, like the well-trained servant that he was not, he meshed gears
+silently and swung the car away to seek shelter, taking with him the
+sympathy as well as the wonder of the one witness of this bit of
+by-play who had been able to understand the tongue in which it was
+couched; and who, knowing too well what rain in those hills could mean,
+was beginning to regret that his invitation to the château had not been
+for another night.
+
+As for the somewhat unusual tone of the passage to which he had just
+listened, his nimble wits could invent half a dozen plausible
+explanations. It was quite possible, indeed when one judged Mr. Phinuit
+by his sobriety in contrast with the gaiety of the others it seemed
+quite plausible, that he was equally with Jules a paid employee of
+those ostensible nouveaux riches: and that the two, the chauffeur and
+the courier (or whatever Mr. Phinuit was in his subordinate social
+rating) were accustomed to amuse themselves by indulging in reciprocal
+abuse.
+
+But what Duchemin could by no means fathom was the reason why Phinuit
+should choose, and how he should rule the choice of his party, in the
+face of such threatening weather, to stop in Nant for an early
+dinner--with Millau only an hour away and the chances fair that before
+the storm broke the automobile would reach the latter city with its
+superior hotel and restaurant accommodations.
+
+But it was after all none of the business of André Duchemin. He lighted
+another cigarette, observing the group of strangers in Nant with an
+open inquisitiveness wholly Gallic, therefore inconspicuous. The entire
+clientèle of the Café de l'Univers was doing the same; Mr. Phinuit's
+party was the focal point of between twenty and thirty pair of staring
+eyes, and was enduring this with much equanimity.
+
+Mr. Phinuit was conferring earnestly over the menu with madame la
+propriétaire. The others were ordering aperitifs of a waiter. Through
+the clatter of tongues that filled the café one caught the phrase
+"veeskysoda" uttered by the monsieur in tweeds. Then the tall man
+consulted the beautiful lady as to her preference, and Duchemin caught
+the words "madame la comtesse" spoken in the rasping nasal drawl of an
+American.
+
+Evidently a person of rich humour, the speaker: "madame la comtesse"
+was abruptly convulsed with laughter; the chubby gentleman roared; Mr.
+Phinuit looked up from the carte with an enquiring, receptive smile;
+the waiter grinned broadly. But the cause of all this merriment wore
+only an expression of slightly pained bewilderment on his death-mask of
+a face.
+
+At that moment arrived the calèche which Duchemin had commanded to
+drive him to the château; and with a ride of two miles before him and
+rain imminent, he had no more time to waste.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+VISITATION
+
+
+Dinner was served in a vast and sombre hall whose darkly panelled walls
+and high-beamed ceiling bred a multitude of shadows that danced about
+the table a weird, spasmodic saraband, without meaning or end,
+restlessly advancing and retreating as the candles flickered, failed
+and flared in the gusty draughts.
+
+There was (Duchemin learned) no other means of illumination but by
+candle-light in the entire château. The time-old structure had been
+thoroughly renovated and modernised in most respects, it was furnished
+with taste and reverence (one could guess whose the taste and purse)
+but Madame de Sévénié remained its undisputed chatelaine, a belated
+spirit of the ancien régime, stubbornly set against the conveniences of
+this degenerate age. Electric lighting she would never countenance. The
+telephone she esteemed a convenience for tradespeople and vulgarians in
+general, beneath the dignity of leisured quality. The motor car she
+disapproved yet tolerated because, for all her years, she was of a
+brisk and active turn and liked to get about, whereas since the War
+good horseflesh was difficult to find in France and men to care for it
+more scarce still.
+
+So much, and more besides, she communicated to Duchemin at intervals
+during the meal, comporting herself toward him with graciousness not
+altogether innocent of a certain faded coquetry. Having spoken of
+herself as one born too late for her time, she paused and eyed him
+keenly, a gleam of light malice in her bright old eyes.
+
+"And you, too, monsieur," she added suddenly. "But you, I think, belong
+to an even earlier day..."
+
+"I, madame? And why do you say that?"
+
+"I should have been guillotined under the Terror; but you, monsieur,
+you should have been hanged long before that--hanged for a buccaneer on
+the Spanish Main."
+
+"Madame may be right," said Duchemin, amused. "And quite possibly I
+was, you know."
+
+Then he wondered a little, and began to cultivate some respect for the
+shrewdness of her intuitions.
+
+He sat on her left, the place of honour going by custom immemorial to
+monsieur le curé of Nant. For all that, Duchemin declined to feel
+slighted. Was he not on the right of Eve de Montalais?
+
+The girl Louise was placed between the curé and her sister-in-law.
+Duchemia could not have been guilty of the offence of ignoring her; but
+the truth is that, save when courtesy demanded that he pay her some
+attention, he hardly saw her. She was pretty enough, but very quiet and
+self-absorbed, a slender, nervous creature with that pathetically eager
+look peculiar to her age and caste in France, starving for the life she
+might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and
+ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow
+against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare
+exotic flower set before a screen of lustreless black velvet. And like
+a flower to the sun she responded to the homage of his admiration
+--which he was none the less studious to preserve from the sin
+of obviousness. For he was well aware that her response was
+impersonal; it was not his but any admiration that she craved as a
+parched land wants rain.
+
+Less than three months a wife, more than five years a widow, still
+young and ardent, nearing the noontide of her womanhood, and immolated
+in this house of perennial mourning, making vain oblation of her youth,
+her beauty, the rich wine of life that coursed so lustily through her
+being, upon the altar of a memory whose high priestess was only an old,
+old woman....
+
+He perceived that it would be quite possible for him, did he yield to
+the bent of his sympathies, to dislike Madame de Sévénié most
+intensely.
+
+Not that he was apt to have much opportunity to encourage such a
+gratuitous aversion: to-morrow would see him on the road again, his
+back forever turned to the Château de Montalais....
+
+Or, if not to-morrow, then as soon as the storm abated.
+
+It was raging now as if it would never weaken and had the will to raze
+the château though it were the task of a thousand years. From time to
+time the shock of some great blast of air would seem to rock upon its
+foundations even that ancient pile, those heavy walls of hewn stone
+builded in times of honest workmanship by forgotten Sieurs de Montalais
+who had meant their home to outlast the ages.
+
+Rain in sheets sluiced the windows without rest. Round turrets and
+gables the wind raved and moaned like a famished wild thing denied its
+kill. Occasionally a venturesome gust with the spirit of a minor demon
+would find its way down the chimney to the drawing-room fire and send
+sparks in volleys against the screen, with thin puffs of wood smoke
+that lingered in the air like acrid ghosts.
+
+At such times the curé, sitting at piquet with Madame de Sévénié, after
+dinner, would cough distressingly and, reminded that he had a bed to
+reach somehow through all this welter, anathematise the elements, help
+himself to a pinch of snuff, and proceed with his play.
+
+Duchemin sat at a little distance, talking with Madame de Montalais
+over their cigarettes. To smoking, curiously enough, Madame de Sévénié
+offered no objection. Women had not smoked in her day, and she for her
+part would never. But Eve might: it was "done"; even in those circles
+of hidebound conservatism, the society of the Faubourg St. Germain,
+ladies of this day smoked unrebuked.
+
+Louise had excused herself--to sit, Duchemin had no doubt, by the
+bedside of d'Aubrac, under the duenna-like eye of an old nurse of the
+family.
+
+Being duly encouraged, Duchemin talked about himself, of his wanderings
+and adventures, all with discretion, with the neatest expurgations, and
+with an object, leading cunningly round to the subject of New York.
+
+At mention of it he saw a new light kindle in Eve's eyes. Her breath
+came more quickly, gentle emotion agitated her bosom.
+
+Monsieur knew New York?
+
+But well: he had been there as a boy, again as a young man; and then
+later, in the year when America entered the Great War; not since ...
+
+"It is my home," said Eve de Montalais softly, looking away.
+
+(One noted that she said "is"--not "was.")
+
+So Duchemin had understood. Madame had not visited her home recently?
+
+Not in many years; not in fact since nineteen-thirteen. She assumed the
+city must have changed greatly.
+
+Duchemin thought it was never the same, but forever changing itself
+overnight, so to speak; and yet always itself, always like no other
+city in the world, fascinating....
+
+"Fascinating? But irresistible! How I long for it!" She was distrait
+for an instant. "My New York! Monsieur--would you believe?--I dream of
+it!"
+
+He had found a key to one chamber in the mansion of her confidence. As
+much to herself as to him, unconsciously dropping into English, she
+began to talk of her life "at home"....
+
+Her father had been a partner in a great jewellery house, Cottier's, of
+Paris, London, and New York. (So that explained it! She was wearing the
+blue diamond again tonight, with other jewels worth, in the judgment of
+a keen connoisseur, a king's ransom.) Schooled at an exclusive
+establishment for the daughters of people of fashion, Eve at an early
+age had made her début; but within the year her father died, and her
+mother, whose heart had always been in the city of her nativity, closed
+the house on East Fifty-seventh street and removed with her daughter to
+Paris. There Eve had met her future husband. Shortly after, her mother
+died. Eve returned to New York to attend to some business in connection
+with her estate, remaining only a few weeks, leaving almost
+reluctantly; but the new love was very sweet, she had looked forward
+joyfully to the final transplanting of her affections.
+
+And then the War, the short month of long, long days in the apartment
+on the avenue des Champs-Elysées, waiting, waiting, while the earth
+trembled to the tramp of armed men and the tireless rumbling of
+caissons and camions, and the air was vibrant with the savage dialogue
+of cannon, ever louder, daily more near....
+
+She fell silent, sitting with bowed head and gaze remote.
+
+From the splendid jewels that adorned the fingers twisting together in
+her lap, the firelight struck coruscant gleams.
+
+"Now I hate Paris, I wish never to see it again."
+
+Duchemin uttered a sympathetic murmur.
+
+"But New York--?"
+
+"Ah, but sometimes I think I would give anything to be there once
+more!"
+
+The animation with which this confession was delivered proved
+transient.
+
+"Then I remind myself I have no one there--a few friends, yes,
+acquaintances; but no family ties, no one dear to me."
+
+"But--pardon--you stay here?"
+
+"It is beautiful here, monsieur."
+
+"But such solitude, such isolation--for you, madame!"
+
+"I know. Still, I am fond of the life here; it was here I found myself
+again, after my grief. And I am fond of my adopted mother and Louise,
+too, and they of me. Indeed, I am all they have left. Louise, of
+course, will marry before long, Georges"--she used d'Aubrac's given
+name--"will take her away, then Madame de Sévénié will have nobody but
+me. And at her age, it would be too sad..."
+
+Across the drawing-room that lady looked up from her cards and sharply
+interrogated a manservant who had silently presented himself to her
+attention.
+
+"What is it you want, Jean?"
+
+The servant mumbled his justification: An automobile had broken down on
+the highroad near the château, the chauffeur was unable to move the car
+or make any repairs in the storm, a gentleman had come to the door to
+ask....
+
+He moved aside, indicating the doorway to the entrance hall, beyond
+which Mr. Phinuit was to be seen, standing with cap in hand, tiny
+rivulets running from the folds of his motor-coat and forming pools on
+the polished flooring. As in concerted movement Madame de Sévénié, Eve
+de Montalais, the curé and Duchemin approached, his cool, intelligent,
+good-humoured glance surveyed them swiftly, each in turn, and with
+unerring instinct settled on the first as the one to whom he must
+address himself.
+
+But the bow with which he also acknowledged the presence of Eve was
+hardly less profound; Duchemin himself, at his best, could hardly have
+bettered it. His manner, in fact, left nothing to be desired; and the
+French in which immediately he begged a thousand pardons for the
+intrusion was so admirable that it seemed hard to believe he was the
+same man who had, only a few hours earlier, composedly traded the slang
+of the States with a chauffeur in front of the Café de l'Univers.
+
+Mr. Phinuit was desolated to think he might be imposing on madame's
+good nature, but the accident was positive, the night truly inclement,
+madame la comtesse was already suffering from the cold, and if one
+might beg shelter for her and the gentlemen of the party while one
+telephoned or sent to Nant for another automobile....
+
+But monsieur might feel very sure Madame de Sévénié would never forgive
+herself if the hospitality of the Château de Montalais failed at such a
+time. She would send servants to the car at once with lights, wraps,
+umbrellas....
+
+There was no necessity for that. The remainder of the party had, it
+seemed, presumed upon her courtesy in anticipation, and was not far
+from the heels of its ambassador. Even while madame was speaking, Jean
+was opening the great front doors to those who proved--formal
+introductions being duly effect by Mr. Phinuit--to be Madame la
+Comtesse de Lorgnes, monsieur le comte, her husband (this was the
+well-fed body in tweeds) and Mr. Whitaker Monk, of New York.
+
+These personages were really not at all in a bad way. Their wraps were
+well peppered with rain, they were chilly, the footgear of madame la
+comtesse was wet and needed changing. But that was the worst of their
+plight. And when Mr. Phinuit, learning that there was no telephone, had
+accepted an offer of the Montalais motor car to tow the other under
+cover and so enable Jules to make repairs, and Eve de Montalais had
+carried madame la comtesse off to her own apartment to change her shoes
+and stockings, the gentlemen trooped to the drawing-room fire, at the
+instance of Madame de Sévénié, and grew quite cheerful under the
+combined influence of warmth and wine and biscuits; Duchemin standing
+by with a half-rejected doubt to preoccupy him, vaguely disturbed by
+the oddness of this rencontre considered in relation to that
+injudicious stop for dinner at Nant in the face of the impending storm,
+and with Mr. Phinuit's declaration that he didn't give a tupenny damn
+if they did all get soaked to their skins.
+
+It seemed far-fetched and ridiculous to imagine that people of their
+intelligence--and they were most of them unusually intelligent and
+alert, if demeanour and utterances might be taken as criterion--should
+adopt any such elaborate machinery of mystification and duplicity in
+order to gain an introduction to the Château de Montalais. With what
+possible motive...?
+
+But there was the devil of having a mind like Duchemin's: once it
+conceived a notion like that, it was all but impossible for him to
+dislodge it unless or until something happened to persuade him of his
+stupidity.
+
+Now to make his suspicions seem at all reasonable, a motive was
+lacking. And that worried the man hugely. He desired most earnestly to
+justify his captiousness; and to this end exercised a power of
+conscientious observation on his new acquaintances.
+
+Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes he was disposed to pass at face value, as
+an innocuous being, good natured enough but none too brilliant, with
+much of the disposition of an overgrown boy and a rather boyish
+tendency to admire and imitate in others qualities which he did not
+himself possess.
+
+Mr. Phinuit had not returned, so there was no present opportunity to
+take further note of him; though Duchemin first inferred from Mr.
+Monk's manner, and later learned through a chance remark of his, that
+Phinuit was his secretary.
+
+Upon this Mr. Monk Duchemin concentrated close attention, satisfied
+that he had here to do with an extraordinary personality, if not one
+unique.
+
+Mr. Whitaker Monk might have been any age between thirty-five and
+fifty-five, so non-committal was that lantern-jawed countenance of a
+droll, with its heavy, black, eloquent eyebrows, its high and narrow
+forehead merging into an extensive bald spot fringed with greyish hair,
+its rather small, blue, illegible eyes, its high-bridged nose and
+prominent nostrils, its wide and thin-lipped mouth, its rather
+startling pallor. Taller by a head than anybody in the room except
+Duchemin, his figure was remarkably thin, yet not ill-proportioned.
+Neither was Mr. Monk ill at ease or ungraceful in his actions. Clothed
+in that extravagantly correct costume--correct, at least, for a
+drawing-room, if never for motoring--he had all the appearance of a
+comedian fresh from the hands of his dresser. One naturally expected of
+him mere grotesqueries--and found simply the courteous demeanour of a
+gentleman of the world. So much for externals. But what more? Nature
+herself had cast Mr. Monk in the very mould of a masquerader. What
+manner of man was hidden behind the mask? His words and deeds alone
+would tell; Duchemin could only weigh the one and await the other.
+
+In the meantime Mr. Monk was sketching rapidly for the benefit of
+Madame de Sévénié the excuse for his present plight.
+
+A chance meeting at Monte Carlo, he said, with his old friends, the
+Comte et Comtesse de Lorgnes, had resulted in their yielding to his
+insistence that they tour with him back to Paris by this roundabout
+way.
+
+"A whim of my age, madame." Somehow the nasal intonation of the
+American suited singularly well his fluent French; he seemed to have
+less trouble with his R's than most Anglo-Saxons. "As a young man--a
+younger man--ah, well, in Ninety-four, then--I explored this country on
+a walking tour, inspired by Stevenson. You know, perhaps, his diverting
+Travels with a Donkey? But I daresay its spirit would hardly have
+survived translation.... At all events, I had the whim to revisit some
+of those well-remembered scenes. I say some, for naturally it would be
+impossible, even with the vastly improved roads of to-day, for my
+automobile to penetrate everywhere I wandered afoot. Nor would I wish
+it to; a few disappointments, a few failures to recapture something of
+that first fine careless rapture, would instill a lyric melancholy; but
+too many would make one morbid.... Well, then: at Nant, in those old
+days, I once had a famous dinner; and naturally, returning, I must try
+to duplicate it, even though it meant going on to Millau in the rain.
+But alas! the Café de l'Univers is no more what it was--or I am grown
+over critical."
+
+What now of Duchemin's doubts? To tell the sad truth, they were just as
+strong as ever. The man was somehow prejudiced: he found Monk's story
+entirely too glib, and knew a mean sense of gratification when the curé
+interposed a gentle correction.
+
+"But in Ninety-four, monsieur, there was no Café de l'Univers in Nant."
+
+Astonished eyebrows climbed the forehead of Mr. Monk.
+
+"No, monsieur le curé? Truly not? Then it must have been another. How
+one's memory will play one false!"
+
+"How strange, then, is coincidence," Madame de Sévénié suggested. "You
+who made a walking tour of this country so long ago, monsieur, regard
+there that good Monsieur Duchemin, himself engaged upon just such an
+undertaking."
+
+Duchemin acknowledged with a humorous little nod Mr. Monk's look of
+moderate amazement at this so strange coincidence.
+
+"A whim of my age, monsieur," he said--"a project I have entertained
+since youth but always, till of late, lacked leisure to put into
+execution."
+
+"But is there anything more wonderful than the workings of the good
+God?" madame pursued. "Observe that, if Monsieur Duchemin had been
+suffered to indulge his inclination in youth, we should all, I, my
+daughter, my grand-daughter, even poor Georges d'Aubrac, would quite
+probably be lying dead at the bottom of a cirque at Montpellier-le-Vieux."
+
+Naturally the strangers required to know about that, and Madame de
+Sévénié would talk, in fact doted on telling the tale of that great
+adventure. Duchemin made a face of resignation, and heard himself
+extolled as a paladin for strength, address and valour; the truth being
+that he was not at all resigned and would infinitely liefer have been
+left out of the limelight. The more he was represented as a person of
+consequence, the less fair his chance to study these others at his
+leisure, in the comfortable obscurity of their indifference.
+
+Now the enigmatic eyes of Monk were boring into him, seeking to search
+his soul, with a question in their stare which he could not read and,
+quite likely, would have declined to answer if he could. Also the eyes
+of Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes were very round and constant to him.
+And before Madame de Sévénié was finished, Phinuit strolled in and
+heard enough to make him subject Duchemin to a not unfriendly, steady
+and open inspection.
+
+And when the trumpets had been flourished finally for Duchemin, and he
+had dutifully assured madame that she was too generous and had
+acknowledged congratulations on his exploit, Phinuit strolled over and
+offered a hand.
+
+"Good work," he said in English. "Seen you before, haven't I,
+somewhere, Mr. Duchemin?"
+
+Under other circumstances Duchemin, not at all hoodwinked by this too
+obvious stratagem, would have taken mean pleasure in looking blank and
+begging monsieur to interpret himself in French. But, with or without
+cunning, Phinuit's question was well-timed: Eve de Montalais was at
+that moment entering the drawing-room with Madame la Comtesse de
+Lorgnes, and she knew very well that Duchemin's English was quite as
+good as his French.
+
+"At the Café de l'Univers, this afternoon," he replied frankly.
+
+"I remember. You drove away, just before the storm broke, in a
+ramshackle rig that must have come out of the Ark."
+
+"To come here, Mr. Phinuit."
+
+"Funny," said Phinuit, with hesitation, "your being there, and then our
+turning up here."
+
+Duchemin thought he knew what was on the other's mind. "I was immensely
+entertained--do you mind my saying so?--to hear the way your chauffeur
+talked to you, monsieur. Tell me: Is it the custom in your country--?"
+
+"Oh, Jules!" said Phinuit, and laughed. "Jules is my younger brother.
+When he was demobilised his job was gone, back home, and I wished him
+on Mr. Monk as a chauffeur. We're always kidding each other like that."
+
+Now what could be more reasonable? Duchemin wondered, and concluded
+that, if anything, it would be the truth. But he did not pretend to
+himself that he wasn't, quite illogically and with no provocation
+whatsoever, most vilely prejudiced against the lot of them.
+
+"But you must know America, to speak the language as well as you do."
+
+Duchemin nodded: "But very slightly, monsieur."
+
+"I was wondering ... Somehow I can't get it out of my head I've seen
+you somewhere before to-day."
+
+"It is quite possible: when one moves about the world, one is
+visible--n'est-ce pas, monsieur? But my home," Duchemin added, "is
+Paris."
+
+"I guess," said Phinuit in a tone of singular disappointment, "it must
+have been there I saw you."
+
+Duchemin's bow signified that he was content to let it go at that.
+Moreover, Monk was signalling to Phinuit with his expressive eyebrows.
+
+"What about the car, Phin?"
+
+Examining his wrist watch, Phinuit drew near his employer. "Jules
+should not need more than half an hour now, monsieur."
+
+Was there, in this employment of French to respond to a question
+couched in English, the suggestion of a subtle correction? From employé
+to employer? If not, why must Duchemin have thought so? If so, why did
+Monk, without betraying a sign of feeling the reproof, continue in
+French?
+
+"Did Jules say half an hour?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+"My God!" Monk addressed the company: "If I were pressed for time, I
+would rather have one of Jules' half-hours than anybody else's hour and
+a half."
+
+"Let us hope, however," the Comtesse de Lorgnes interposed sweetly, "by
+that time this so dreadful tempest will have moderated."
+
+"One has that hope," her husband uttered in a sepulchral voice.
+
+"But, if the storm continue," Madame de Sévénié said, "you must not
+think of travelling farther--on such a night. The château is large,
+there is ample accommodation for all..."
+
+There was a negligible pause, during which Duchemin saw the long lashes
+of the Comtesse de Lorgnes curtain momentarily her disastrous violet
+eyes: it was a sign of assent. Immediately it was followed by the least
+of negative movements of her head. She was looking directly at Phinuit,
+who, so far as Duchemin could see, made no sign of any sort, who
+neither spoke nor acted on the signals which, indubitably, he had
+received. On the other hand, it was Monk who acknowledged the proffered
+courtesy.
+
+"Madame de Sévénié is too good, but we could not dream of imposing ...
+No, but truly, madame, I am obliged to ask my guests to proceed with me
+to Millau to-night regardless of the weather. Important despatches
+concerning my business await me there; I must consider them and reply
+by cable to-night without fail. It is really of the most pressing
+necessity. Otherwise we should be honoured..."
+
+Madame de Sévénié inclined her head. "It must be as monsieur thinks
+best."
+
+"But Monsieur Monk!" madame la comtesse exclaimed with vivacity: "do
+you know what I have just discovered? You and Madame de Montalais are
+compatriots. She is of your New York. You must know each other."
+
+"I have been wondering," Monk admitted, bowing to Eve, "if it were
+possible I could be misled by a strong resemblance."
+
+Eve turned to him with a look of surprise. "Yes, monsieur?"
+
+"It is many years ago, you were a young girl then, if it was truly you,
+madame; but I have a keen eye for beauty, I do not soon forget it ... I
+was in the private office of my friend, Edmund Anstruther, of
+Cottier's, one afternoon, selecting a trinket with his advice, and--"
+
+"That was my father, monsieur."
+
+"Then it was you, madame; I felt sure of it. You came in unannounced,
+to see your father. He made me known to you as a friend of his, and
+requested you to wait in an adjoining office. But that was not
+necessary, I had already made up my mind, I left almost immediately. Do
+you by any chance remember?"
+
+The effort of the memory knitted Eve's brows; but in the end she shook
+her head. "I am sorry, monsieur--"
+
+"But why should you be? Why should you have remembered me? You were a
+young girl, then, as I say, and I already a man of middle age. You saw
+me once, for perhaps two minutes. It would have been a miracle had I
+remained in your memory for as long as a single day. Nevertheless, _I_
+remembered."
+
+"I am so glad to meet a friend of my father's, monsieur."
+
+"And I to recall myself to his daughter. I have often wondered ...
+Would you mind telling me something, Madame de Montalais?"
+
+"If I can..."
+
+"Your father and I entertained one passion in common, one which he was
+better able than I to gratify, for good diamonds and emeralds. I have
+often wondered what became of his collection. He had some superb
+stones."
+
+"I inherited them, monsieur."
+
+"They did not find their way into Cottier's stock, then?"
+
+The Comtesse de Lorgnes gave a gesture of excitement. "But what a
+fortunate woman! You truly have those magnificent emeralds, those
+almost matchless diamonds, of which one has heard--the Anstruther
+collection?"
+
+"I have them, Madame la Comtesse," said Eve with a smiling nod--"yes."
+
+"But, one presumes, in Paris, in some impregnable strong-box."
+
+"No, madame, here."
+
+"But not here, Madame de Montalais!" To this Eve gave another nod and
+smile. "But are you not afraid--?"
+
+"Of what, madame? That they will be stolen? No. They have been in my
+possession for years--indeed, I should be unhappy otherwise, for I have
+inherited my father's fondness for them--and nobody has ever even
+attempted to steal them."
+
+"But what of the affair at Montpellier the other night?" enquired the
+Comte de Lorgnes--"that terrible attack upon you of which Madame de
+Sévénié has just told us? Surely you would call that an attempt to
+steal."
+
+"Simple highway robbery, if you like, monsieur le comte. But even had
+it proved successful, I had very few jewels with me. All that mattered,
+all that I would have minded losing, were here, in a safe place."
+
+"Nevertheless," said Monk--"if you will permit me to offer a word of
+advice--I think you are very unwise."
+
+"It may be, monsieur."
+
+"Nonsense!" Madame de Sévénié declared. "Who would dare attempt to
+burglarise the Château de Montalais? Such a thing was never heard of."
+
+"There is always the first time for everything, Madame," Monk suggested
+gently. "I fancy it was your first experience of the sort, at
+Montpellier."
+
+"A rascally chauffeur from Paris, a few low characters of the
+department. Since the war things are not as they were."
+
+"That is the very reason why I suggest, madame--"
+
+"But, monsieur, I assure you all my life I have lived at Montalais.
+Monsieur le curé will tell you I know every face hereabouts. And I know
+that these poor country-folk, these good-natured dolts of peasants have
+not the imagination, much less the courage--"
+
+"But what of criminals from outside, from the great cities, from London
+and Paris and Berlin? They have the imagination, the courage, the
+skill; and if they ever get wind of the fortune Madame de Montalais
+keeps locked up here..."
+
+"What of the Lone Wolf?" the Comtesse de Lorgnes added. "I have heard
+that one is once more in France."
+
+Duchemin blinked incredulously at the speaker. "But when did you hear
+that, madame la comtesse?"
+
+"Quite recently, monsieur."
+
+"I had understood that the monsieur in question had long since
+retired."
+
+"Only for the duration of the war, monsieur, I am afraid."
+
+"It is true, according to all reports," the Comte de Lorgnes said:
+"Monsieur Lanyard--that was the name, was it not?"
+
+"If memory serves, monsieur le comte," Duchemin agreed.
+
+"Yes." The count screwed his chubby features into a laughable mask of
+gravity. "Now one remembers quite well. He passed as a collector of
+objets d'art, especially of fine paintings, in Paris, for years before
+the War--this Monsieur Michael Lanyard. Then he disappeared. It was
+rumoured that he was of good service to the Allies as a spy, acting
+independently; and after the Armistice, I have heard, he did well for
+England in the matter of a Bolshevist conspiracy over there. But not
+long ago, according to my information, Monsieur the Lone Wolf resigned
+from the British Secret Service and returned to France--doubtless to
+resume his old practices."
+
+"Perhaps not," Duchemin suggested. "Possibly his reformation was
+genuine and lasting."
+
+The Comtesse de Lorgnes laughed that laugh of light derision which is
+almost exclusively the laugh of the Parisienne of a certain class.
+Remarking this, Duchemin eyed her mildly.
+
+"Madame la Comtesse does not believe that. Well--who knows?--perhaps
+she is right. Possibly she knows more of the nature and habits of the
+criminal classes than we, sharing as she does, no doubt, the apparently
+accurate and precise sources of information of monsieur le comte."
+
+"At all events," Phinuit put in promptly, "I know what I would do if I
+possessed a little fortune in jewels, and learned that a thief of the
+ability of this Lone Wolf was at large in France: I would charter an
+armoured train to convey the loot to the strongest safe deposit vault
+in Paris."
+
+"Thereby advertising to the Lone Wolf the exact location of the jewels,
+monsieur, so that he might at his leisure make his plans perfect to
+burglarise the vaults?"
+
+"Is that likely?" Phinuit jeered.
+
+Duchemin gave a slight shrug.
+
+"One has heard that the fellow had real ability," he said.
+
+The servant Jean came in, caught the eye of Madame de Sévénié, and
+announced:
+
+"The chauffeur of Monsieur Monk wishes me to say he has completed
+repairs on the automobile, and the rain has ceased."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+TURN ABOUT
+
+
+Duchemin took back with him to Nant, that night, not only monsieur le
+curé in the hired calèche, but food in plenty for thought, together
+with a nebulous notion, which by the time he woke up next morning had
+taken shape as a fixed conviction, that he had better resign himself to
+stop on indefinitely at the Grand Hôtel de l'Univers and ... see what
+he should see.
+
+That fatality on which he had so bitterly reflected when; acting as
+emergency coachman en route from Montpellier-le-Vieux to La
+Roque-Sainte-Marguerite, had him now fairly by the heels, as it were
+his very shadow, something as tenacious, as inescapable. Or he had been
+given every excuse for believing that such was the case.
+Impossible--and the more so the longer he pondered it--to credit to
+mere coincidence the innuendoes uttered at the château by Mr. Monk and
+his party.
+
+No: there had been malice in that, Duchemin was satisfied, if not some
+darker purpose which perplexed the most patient scrutiny.
+
+Now malice without incentive is unthinkable. But Duchemin searched his
+memory in vain for anything he could have said or done to make anybody
+desire to discredit him in the sight of the ladies of the Château de
+Montalais. Still the attempt so to do had been unmistakable: the Lone
+Wolf had been lugged into the conversation literally by his legendary
+ears.
+
+Surely, one would think, that nocturnal prowler of pre-War Paris had
+been so long dead and buried even the most ghoulish gossip should
+respect his poor remains and not disinter them merely to demonstrate
+that the Past can never wholly die!
+
+Had he, then, some enemy of old hidden under one of those sleek
+surfaces?
+
+An excellent visual memory reviewed successively the physical
+characteristics of Messieurs Monk, Phinuit and de Lorgnes, and their
+chauffeur Jules; with the upshot that Duchemin could have sworn that he
+had never before known any of these.
+
+And Madame la Comtesse? In respect of that one memory again drew a
+blank, but remained unsatisfied. When one thought of her some remote,
+faint chord of reminiscence thrilled and hummed, but never
+recognisably. Not that there was anything remarkable in this: if one
+cared to look for them, the world was thronged with women such as she,
+handsome, spirited, well-groomed animals endued with some little
+distinction of manner, native or acquired, with every appeal to the
+senses and more or less, generally spurious, to the intelligence. They
+made the theatre possible in France, leavened the social life of the
+half-world, fluttered conspicuously and often disastrously through
+circles of more sedate society, had their portraits in every Salon,
+their photographs in every issue of the fashionable journals. Some made
+history, others fiction: either would be insufferably dull lacking
+their influence. But they were as much alike as so many peas, out of
+their several shells, and the man who saw one inevitably remembered
+all.
+
+Setting aside then the theory of positive personal animus, what other
+reason could there be for the effort to fasten upon Duchemin suspicion
+of identity with the late Lone Wolf?
+
+A sinister consideration, if any, and one, Duchemin suspected, not
+unconnected with the much-talked-about jewels of Madame de Montalais...
+
+But it was absurd to believe that persons fostering a design of such
+nature would so deliberately and obviously advertise their purpose!
+
+Cheerfully admitting that he was an imbecile to think of such a thing,
+Duchemin set his mental alarm for six the following morning, rose at
+that hour, and by eight had tramped the five miles between Nant and the
+nearest railway station, Combe-Redonde; where he despatched a code
+telegram to London, requesting any information it might have or be able
+to obtain concerning Mr. Whitaker Monk of New York and the several
+members of his party; the said information to be forwarded in code to
+await the arrival of Andre Duchemin at the Hôtel du Commerce, Millau.
+
+And then, partly to kill time, partly to get himself in trim for
+to-morrow's trip, which he meant to make strictly in character as the
+pedestrian tourist, he walked round three sides of a square in
+returning to Nant--by way, that is, of Sauclières and the upper valley
+of the Dourbie.
+
+In the rich sunshine that fell from a cloudless sky--even the twin
+peaks that stood sentinel over Nant had shamelessly put off their
+yashmaks for the day--the rain-fresh world was sweet to see; and
+Duchemin found himself consuming leagues with heels strangely light; or
+he thought their lightness strange until he discovered the buoyance of
+his heart, which wasn't strange at all. He knew too well the cause of
+that; and had given over fretting about the inevitable. The sum of his
+philosophy was now: _What must be, must_ .It would have been difficult
+to be unhappy in the knowledge that one retained still the capacity to
+love generously, honourably, expecting nothing, exacting nothing,
+regretting nothing, not even in anticipation of the ultimate,
+inevitable heartache.
+
+Toward mid-afternoon a solitary mischance threw a passing shadow upon
+his content. As he trudged along the river road, on the last lap of his
+journey--Nant almost in sight--he heard a curious, intermittent rumble
+on a steep hillside whose foot was skirted by the road, and sought its
+cause barely in time to leap for life out of the path of a great
+boulder that, dislodged from its bed, possibly by last night's deluge,
+was hurtling downhill with such momentum that it must have crushed
+Duchemin to a pulp had he been less alert.
+
+Striking the road with an impact that left a deep, saucer-shaped dent,
+with one final bound the huge stone, amid vast splashings, found its
+last resting place in the river.
+
+Duchemin moved out of the way of the miniature avalanche that followed,
+and for some minutes stood reviewing with a truculent eye the face of
+the hillside. But nothing moved thereon, it was quite bare of good
+cover, little more than a slant of naked earth and shale, dotted
+manywhere with boulders, cousins to that which sought his life--none,
+however, so large. If human agency had moved it, the stone had come
+from the high skyline of the hill; and by the time one could climb to
+this last, Duchemin was sure, there would be nobody there to find.
+
+The remainder of the afternoon was wasted utterly on the terrasse of
+the Café de l'Univers, with the château ever in view, wishing it were
+convenable to make one's duty call without more delay. But it wasn't;
+not to wait a decent interval would be self-betraying, since Duchemin
+had no longer any immediate intention of moving on from Nant; finally,
+he rather hoped to get news at Millau that would strengthen a prayer to
+Eve de Montalais to be sensible and remove her jewels to a place of
+safe-keeping before it was too late.
+
+Millau, however, disappointed. At the end of a twenty-mile walk on a
+day of suffocating heat, Duchemin plodded wearily into the Hôtel du
+Commerce, engaged a room for the night, and was given a telegram from
+London which rewarded decoding to some such effect as this:
+
+"MONK AMERICAN INDEPENDENT MEANS GOOD REPUTE NO INFORMATION AS TO
+OTHERS HAVE ASKED SURÉTÉ CONCERNING LORGNES WOULD GIVE SOMETHING TO
+KNOW WHAT MISCHIEF YOU ARE MEDDLING WITH THIS TRIP AND WHY THE DEUCE
+YOU MUST."
+
+Few things are better calculated to curdle the milk of human kindness
+than to find that one's fellow-man has meanly contrived to keep his
+reputation fair when one is satisfied it should be otherwise. Duchemin
+used bitter language in strict confidence with himself, disliked his
+dinner and, after conscientiously loathing the sights of Millau for an
+hour or two, sought his bed in the devil's own humour.
+
+Though he waited till eleven of the following forenoon, there was no
+supplementary telegram: London evidently meant him to understand that
+the Surété in Paris had communicated nothing to the discredit of
+Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes and his consort.
+
+Enquiry of the administration of the Hôtel de Commerce elicited the
+information that the Monk party had stopped there on the night of the
+storm, doubled back in the morning to visit Montpellier-le-Vieux,
+returning for midday déjeuner, and had then proceeded for Paris, just
+like any other well-behaved company of tourists.
+
+There was nothing more to be done but go back to Nant and--what made it
+even more disgusting--nothing to be done there except ... wait...
+
+Thoroughly disgruntled, more than half persuaded he had staked a claim
+for a mare's-nest, he took the road in the heat of a day even more
+oppressive than its yesterday. In the valley of the Dourbie the air was
+stagnant, lifeless. After eight miles of it Duchemin was guilty of two
+mistakes of desperation.
+
+In the first instance he paused in La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite and,
+tormented by thirst, refreshed himself at the auberge where the
+barouche and guide had been hired to convey the party from Montalais on
+to Montpellier. The landlord remembered Duchemin and made believe he
+didn't, serving the wayfarer with a surly grace the only drink he would
+admit he had to sell, an atrociously acid cider fit to render the last
+stage of thirst worse than the first.
+
+Duchemin, however, thought it safer than the water of the place, when
+he had spied out the associations of the well.
+
+He drank sitting on a bench outside the door of the auberge. He could
+hear the voice of the landlord inside, grumbling and growling, to what
+purport he couldn't determine. But it wasn't difficult to guess; and
+before Duchemin was finished he had testimony to the rightness of his
+surmise, finding himself the cynosure of more than a few pair of eyes
+set in the ill-favoured faces of natives of La Roque.
+
+One gathered that the dead guide had enjoyed a fair amount of local
+popularity.
+
+While Duchemin drank and smoked and pored over a pocket-map of the
+department, a lout of a lad shambled out of the auberge wearing a fixed
+scowl in no degree mitigated by the sight of the customer. In the
+dooryard, which was also the stableyard, the boy caught and saddled a
+dreary animal, apparently a horse designed by a Gothic architect,
+mounted, and rode off in the direction of Nant.
+
+Then Duchemin committed his second error of judgment, which consisted
+in thinking to find better and cooler air on the heights of the Causse
+Larzac, across the river, together with a shorter way to
+Nant--indicated on the pocket-map as a by-road running in a tolerably
+direct line across the plateau--than that which followed the windings
+of the stream.
+
+Accordingly he crossed the Dourbie, toiled up a zig-zag path cut in the
+face of the frowning cliff, reached the top in a bath of sweat, and sat
+down to cool and breathe himself.
+
+The view was splendid, almost worth the climb. Duchemin could see for
+miles up and down the valley, a panorama wildly picturesque and limned
+like a rainbow. Across the way La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite stood out
+prominently and with such definition in that clear air that Duchemin
+identified the figure of the landlord, standing in the door of the
+auberge with arms raised and elbows thrust out on a level with his
+eyes: the pose of a man using field-glasses.
+
+Duchemin wondered if he ought to feel complimented. Then he looked up
+the valley and saw, far off, a tiny cloud of dust kicked up by the
+heels of the horse ridden by the boy from the auberge, making good time
+on the highway to Nant. And again Duchemin wondered...
+
+Having rested, he picked himself up, found his road, a mere trail of
+wagon tracks, and mindful of the cooling drinks to be had in the Café
+de l'Univers, put his best foot foremost.
+
+After a time something, call it instinct, impelled him to look back the
+way he had come. Half a mile distant he saw the figure of a peasant
+following the same road. Duchemin stopped and waited for the other to
+come up, thinking to get a better look at him, perhaps some definite
+information about the road and in particular as to his chances of
+finding drinkable water. But when he stopped the man stopped, sat him
+down upon a rock, filled a pipe, and conspicuously rested.
+
+Duchemin gave an impatient gesture and moved on. After another mile he
+glanced overshoulder again. The same peasant occupied the same relative
+distance from him.
+
+But if the fellow were following him with a purpose, he could readily
+lose himself in that wild land before Duchemin could run him down; and
+if, on the contrary, he proved to be only a peaceable wayfarer, he was
+bound to be a dull companion on the road, and an unsavory one to boot.
+So Duchemin did nothing to discourage his voluntary shadow; but looking
+back from time to time, never failed to see that squat,
+round-shouldered figure in the middle distance of the landscape,
+following him with the doggedness of Fate. Toward evening, however, of
+a sudden--between two glances--the fellow disappeared as completely and
+mysteriously as if he had fallen or dived into an aven.
+
+Thus definite mental irritation was added to the physical discomforts
+he suffered. For if anything it was hotter on the high causse than it
+had been in the valley. An intermittent breeze imitated to vicious
+perfection draughts from a furnace. And if this were a short cut to
+Nant, Duchemin's judgment was gravely at fault.
+
+Otherwise the journey was not unlike an exaggerated version of his walk
+from Meyrueis to Montpellier-le-Vieux, except that the road was clearly
+marked and he found less climbing to do. He saw neither hamlets nor
+farmsteads, and found no water. By the middle of the afternoon his
+thirst had become sheer torture.
+
+In dusk of evening he stumbled down into the valley again and struck
+the river road about midway between the Château de Montalais and Nant.
+At this junction several dwellings clustered, in that fading light dark
+masses on either side of the road. Duchemin noticed a few shadowy
+shapes loitering about, but was too far gone in fatigue and thirst to
+pay them any heed. He had no thought but to stop at the first house and
+beg a cup of water. As he lifted a hand to knuckle the door he was
+attacked.
+
+With no more warning than a cry, the signal for the onslaught, and the
+sudden scuffling noise of several pair of feet, he wheeled, found
+himself already closely pressed by a number of men, and struck out at
+random. His stick landed on somebody's head with a resounding thump
+followed by a yell of pain. Then three men were grappling with him, two
+more seeking to aid them, and another lay in the roadway clutching a
+fractured skull and spitting oaths and groans.
+
+His stick was seized and wrenched away, he was over-whelmed by numbers.
+The knot of struggling figures toppled and went to the dust, Duchemin
+underneath, so weighed down that he could not for the moment move a
+hand toward his pistol.
+
+Half-stifled by the reek of unwashed flesh, he heard broken phrases
+growled in voices hoarse with effort and excitement:
+
+"The knife!" ... "Hold him!" ... "Stand clear and let me--!" ... "The
+knife!"
+
+Struggling madly, he worked a leg free and kicked with all his might.
+One of his assailants howled aloud and fell back to nurse a broken
+shin. Two others scrambled out of the way, leaving one to pin him down
+with knees upon his chest, another to wield the knife.
+
+Staring eyes caught a warning gleam on descending steel. Duchemin
+squirmed frantically to one side, and felt cold metal kiss the skin
+over his ribs as the blade penetrated his clothing, close under the
+armpit.
+
+Before the man with the knife could strike again, Duchemin, roused to a
+mightier effort, threw off the ruffian on his chest, got on his knees
+and, raining blows right and left as the others closed in again,
+somehow managed to scramble to his feet.
+
+Fist-work told. For an instant he stood quite free, the centre of a
+circle of uncertain assassins whose cowardice gave him time to whip out
+his pistol. But before he could level it a man was on his back, his
+wrist was seized and the weapon twisted from his grasp.
+
+A cry of triumph was echoed by exclamations of alarm as, disarmed,
+Duchemin was again left free, the thugs standing back to let the pistol
+do its work. In that instant a broad sword of light swung round a
+nearby corner and smote the group: the twin, glaring eyes of a motor
+car flooded with blue-white radiance that tableau of one man at bay in
+the middle of the road, in a ring of merciless enemies.
+
+Duchemin's cry for help was uttered only an instant before his pistol
+exploded in alien hands. The headlights showed him distinctly the face
+of the man who fired, the same face of fat features black with soot
+that he had seen by moonlight at Montpellier-le-Vieux.
+
+But the bullet went wild, and the automobile did not stop, but drove
+directly at the group and so swiftly that the flash of the shot was
+still vivid in Duchemin's vision when the car swept between him and
+those others, scattering them like chickens.
+
+Simultaneously the brakes were set, the dark bulk began to slide with
+locked wheels to a stop, and a voice cried: "Quickly, monsieur,
+quickly!"--the voice of Eve de Montalais.
+
+In two bounds Duchemin overtook the car and before it had come to a
+standstill leaped upon the running-board and grasped the side. He had
+one glimpse of the set white face of Eve, en profile, as she bent
+forward, manipulating the gear-shift. Then the pistol spat again, its
+bullet struck him a blow of sickening agony in the side.
+
+Aware that he was dangerously wounded, he put all that he had left of
+strength and will into one final effort, throwing his body across the
+door. As he fell sprawling into the tonneau consciousness departed like
+a light withdrawn.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+IN RE AMOR ET AL.
+
+
+In the course of two weeks or so Duchemin was able to navigate a
+wheeled chair, bask on the little balcony outside his bedchamber
+windows in the Château de Montalais, and even--strictly against
+orders--take experimental strolls.
+
+The wound in his side still hurt like the very deuce at every
+ill-considered movement; but Duchemin was ever the least patient of men
+unless the will that coerced him was his own; constraint to another's,
+however reasonable, irked him to exasperation; so that these falterings
+in forbidden ways were really (as he assured Eve de Montalais when, one
+day, she caught him creeping round his room, one hand pressed against
+the wall for support, the other to his side) in the nature of a sop to
+his self-respect.
+
+"You've only got to tell me not to do a thing often enough," he
+commented as she led him back to his chair, "to fill me with unholy
+desire to do it if I die in the attempt."
+
+"Isn't that a rather common human failing?" she asked, wheeling the
+invalid chair through one of the french windows to the balcony.
+
+"That's what makes it all seem so unfair."
+
+Smiling, the woman turned the back of the chair to the brightest glare
+of sunshine, draped a light rug over the invalid's knees, and seated
+herself in a wicker chair, facing him.
+
+"Makes all what seem so unfair?"
+
+"The indignity of being born human." He accepted a cigarette and waxed
+didactic: "The one thing that the ego can find to reconcile it with
+existence is belief in its own uniquity."
+
+"I don't think," she interrupted with a severe face belied by amused
+eyes, "that sounds quite nice."
+
+"Uniquity? Because it sounds like iniquity? They are not unrelated.
+What makes iniquity seem attractive is as a rule its departure from the
+commonplace."
+
+"But you were saying--?"
+
+"Merely it's our personal belief that our emotions and sensations and
+ways of thought are peculiar to ourselves, individually, that sometimes
+makes the game seem worth the scandal."
+
+"Yes: one presumes we all do think that..."
+
+"But no sooner does one get firmly established in that particular phase
+of self-complacence than along comes Life, grinning like a gamin, and
+kicks over our pretty house of cards--shows us up to ourselves by
+revealing our pet, exclusive idiosyncrasies as simple infirmities all
+mortal flesh is heir to."
+
+"Monsieur is cynic..."
+
+"Madame means obvious. Well: if I patter platitudes it is to conceal a
+sense of gratification." Eve arched her eyebrows. "I mean, you have
+shown me that I share at least one quality with you: instinctive
+resentment of the voice of reason."
+
+She pronounced a plaintive "Mon Dieu!" and appealing to Heaven for
+compassion declared: "He means again to wrestle spiritually with me
+about the proper disposition of my jewels."
+
+"No, madame: pardon. I am contemplating a long series of exhaustive
+arguments designed to prove it your duty to leave your jewels where
+they are, in all their noble insecurity. This in the firm belief that
+to plead with you long enough to adopt this course will result in your
+going and doing otherwise out of sheer..."
+
+"Perversity, monsieur?"
+
+"Humanity, madame!"
+
+Eve de Montalais laughed the charming, low-keyed laugh of a happily
+diverted woman.
+
+"But spare yourself, monsieur. I surrender at discretion: I will do as
+you wish."
+
+"Truly? Rather than listen to my discourse, you actually agree to
+remove your jewels to a safe place?"
+
+"Even so, monsieur. As soon as you are able to get about, and the
+Château de Montalais lacks a guest, I will leave Louise to take care of
+madame ma mère for a few days while I journey to Paris--"
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"But naturally."
+
+"Taking your jewels with you?"
+
+"Why else do I go?"
+
+"But, madame, you must not--"
+
+"And why?"
+
+"You, a woman! travel alone to Paris with a treasure in jewels? Ah, no!
+I should say not!"
+
+"Monsieur is emphatic," Eve suggested demurely.
+
+"Monsieur means to be. Rather than let you run such a risk I would
+steal the jewels myself, convey them to Paris, put them in safe
+keeping, and send you the receipt."
+
+"What a lot of trouble monsieur would save me, if he would only be so
+kind as to do as he threatens."
+
+"And how amusing if he were arrested en route," Duchemin supplemented
+with a wry smile.
+
+"I am quite confident of your ability to elude the police, monsieur."
+
+"Do I hear you compliment me?"
+
+"If you take it so..."
+
+"But suppose you were not confident of my good will?"
+
+"Impossible."
+
+"Madame is too flattering; one is sure she is too wise to put so great
+a temptation in the way of any man."
+
+"Monsieur is the reverse of flattering; he implies that one does not
+know where one can repose trust."
+
+"I must warn madame there are those in this world who would call her
+faith misplaced."
+
+"Doubtless. But what of that? Am I to distrust you because others might
+who do not know you so well?"
+
+"But--madame--you can hardly claim to know me well.
+
+"Listen, my friend." Eve de Montalais flicked away her cigarette and
+sat forward, elbows on knees, hands laced, her level gaze holding his.
+"It is true, our acquaintance is barely three weeks old; but you do
+injustice to my insight if you assume I have learned nothing about you
+in all that time. You have not been secretive with me. The mask you
+hold between yourself and the world, lest it pry into what does not
+concern it, has been lowered when you have talked with me; and I have
+had eyes to see what was revealed--"
+
+"Ah, madame!"
+
+"--the nature of a man of honour, monsieur, simple of heart and
+generous, as faithful as he is brave."
+
+Eve had spoken impulsively, with warmth of feeling unrealised until too
+late. Now slow colour mantled her cheeks. But her eyes remained
+steadfast, candid, unashamed. It was Duchemin who dropped his gaze,
+abashed.
+
+And though nothing had any sense in his understanding other than the
+words which he had just heard from the lips of the woman who held his
+love--as he had known now these many days--some freak of dual
+consciousness made him see, for the first time, in that moment, how
+oddly bleached and wasted seemed the powerful, nervous, brown hands
+that rested on his knees. And he thought: It will be long before I am
+strong again.
+
+With a troubled smile he said: "I would give much to be worthy of what
+you think of me, madame. And I would be a poor thing indeed if I failed
+to try to live up to your faith."
+
+"You will not fail," she replied. "What you are, you were before my
+faith was, and will be afterwards, when..."
+
+She did not finish, but of a sudden recollected herself, lounged back
+in her chair, and laughed quietly, with humorous appeal to his
+sympathy.
+
+"So, that is settled: I am not to be permitted to take my jewels to
+Paris alone. What then, monsieur?"
+
+"I would suggest you write your bankers," said Duchemin seriously, "and
+tell them that you contemplate bringing to Paris some valuables to
+entrust to their care. Say that you prefer not to travel without
+protection, and request them to send you two trusted men--detectives,
+they may call them--to guard you on the way. They will do so without
+hesitation, and you may then feel entirely at ease."
+
+"Not otherwise, you think?"
+
+"Not otherwise, I feel sure."
+
+"But why? You have been so persistent about this matter, monsieur. Ever
+since that night when those curious people stopped here in the rain....
+Can it be that you suspect them of evil designs upon my trinkets?"
+Duchemin shrugged. "Who knows, madame, what they were? You call them
+'curious'; for my part I find the adjective apt."
+
+"I fancy I know what you thought about them..."
+
+"And that is--?"
+
+"That they rather led the conversation to the subject of my jewels."
+
+"Such was my thought, indeed."
+
+"Perhaps you were right. If so, they learned all they needed to know."
+
+"Except possibly the precise location of your strong box."
+
+"They may have learned even that."
+
+"How, madame?"
+
+"I don't know; but if they were what you suspect they were, they were
+clever people, far more clever than poor provincials like us." She took
+a moment for thought. "But I am puzzled by their harping on the subject
+of--I think they called him the Lone Wolf. Now why should they do
+that?"
+
+Duchemin was constrained to take refuge in another shrug. "Who knows?"
+he iterated. "If they were as clever as we assume, doubtless they were
+clever enough to have a motive even for that."
+
+"He really existed, this Lone Wolf? He was more than a creature of
+fable?"
+
+"Assuredly, madame. For years he was the nightmare and the scourge of
+people of wealth in every capital of Europe."
+
+"Why did they call him the Lone Wolf, do you know?"
+
+"I believe some imaginative Parisian journalist fixed that sobriquet on
+him, in recognition of the theory upon which, apparently, he operated."
+
+"And that was--?"
+
+"That a criminal, at least a thief, to be successful must be absolutely
+anonymous and friendless; in which case nobody can betray him. As
+madame probably understands, criminals above a certain level of
+intelligence are seldom caught by the police except through the
+treachery of accomplices. The Lone Wolf seems to have exercised a fair
+amount of ingenuity and prudence in making his coups; and inasmuch as
+he had no confederates, not a living soul in his confidence, there was
+no one who could sell him to the authorities."
+
+"Still, in the end--?"
+
+"Oh, no, madame. He was never caught. He simply ceased to thieve."
+
+"I wonder why..."
+
+"I believe because he fell in love and considered good faith with the
+object of his affections incompatible with a career of crime."
+
+"So he gave up crime. How romantic! And the woman: did she appreciate
+the sacrifice?"
+
+"While she lived, yes, madame. Or so they say. Unfortunately, she
+died."
+
+"And then--?"
+
+"So far as is known the converted enemy to Society did not backslide;
+the Lone Wolf never prowled again."
+
+"An extraordinary story."
+
+"But is not every story that has to do with the workings of the human
+soul? What one of us has not buried in him a story quite as strange?
+Even you--"
+
+"Monsieur deceives himself. I am simply--what you see."
+
+"But what I see is not simple, but complex and intriguing beyond
+expression. A woman of your sort walling herself up in a wilderness,
+renouncing the world, renouncing life itself in its very heyday--!"
+
+"But hardly that, monsieur."
+
+"Then I am stupid..."
+
+"I will explain." The sleekly coiffured brown head bent low over hands
+that played absently with their jewels. "To a woman of my sort,
+monsieur, life is not life without love. I lived once for a little
+time, then love was taken out of my life. When my sorrow had spent
+itself, I knew that I must find love again if I were to go on living.
+What was I to do? I knew that love is not found through seeking. So I
+waited..."
+
+"Such philosophy is rare, madame."
+
+"Philosophy? No: I will not call it that. It was knowledge--the heart
+wise in its own wisdom, surpassing mine, telling me that if I would but
+be patient love would one day seek me out again, wherever I might wait,
+and give me once more--life."
+
+She rose and went to the window, paused there, turning back to Duchemin
+a face composed but fairer for a deepened flush.
+
+"But this is not writing to my bankers, monsieur," she said in a
+changed but steady voice. "I must do that at once if I am to get the
+letter in to-day's post."
+
+"If madame will accept the advice of one not without some
+experience..."
+
+"What else does monsieur imagine I am doing?"
+
+"Then you will write privately and burn your blotting paper; after
+which you will post the letter with your own hands, letting nobody see
+the address."
+
+"And when shall I say I will make the journey?"
+
+"As soon as your bankers can send their people to the Château de
+Montalais."
+
+"That will be in three days..."
+
+"Or less."
+
+"As soon as your bankers can send their people to the Château de
+Montalais."
+
+"That will be in three days..."
+
+"Or less." "But you will not be strong enough to leave us within
+another week."
+
+"What has that to do--?"
+
+"This: that I refuse positively to go away while you are our guest,
+monsieur. Somebody must watch over you and see that you come to no
+harm."
+
+"But madame--!"
+
+"No: I am quite resolved. Monsieur has too rare a genius for getting in
+the way of danger. I shall not leave the château before you do. So I
+shall set this day week for the date of my journey."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+BLIND MAN'S BUFF
+
+
+In short, Monsieur Duchemin considered convalescence at the Chateau de
+Montalais one of the most agreeable of human estates, and counted the
+cost of admission thereunto by no means dear; and with all his grousing
+(in respect of which he was conscientious, holding it at once a duty
+and a perquisite of his disability) he was at heart in no haste
+whatever to be discharged as whole and hale. The plain truth is, the
+man malingered shamelessly and even took a certain pride in the low
+cunning which enabled him to pose on as the impatient patient when he
+was so very well content to take his ease, be waited on and catered to,
+and listen for the footsteps of Eve de Montalais and the accents of her
+delightful voice.
+
+These last he heard not often enough by half. Still, he seldom lacked
+company in the long hours when Eve was busy with the petty duties of
+her days, and left him lorn. Madame de Sévénié had taken a flattering
+fancy to him, and frequently came to gossip beside his bed or chair. He
+found her tremendously entertaining, endowed as she was with an
+excellent and well-stored memory, a gift of caustic characterization
+and a pretty taste in the scandal of her bygone day and generation, as
+well as with a mind still active and better informed on the affairs of
+to-day than that of many a Parisienne of the haute monde and half her
+age.
+
+During the first bedridden week, Georges d'Aubrac visited Duchemin at
+least once each day to compare wounds and opinions concerning the
+inefficiency of the local gendarmerie. For that body accomplished
+nothing toward laying by the heels the authors of the attacks on
+d'Aubrac and Duchemin, but (for all Duchemin can say to the contrary)
+is still following "clues" with the fruitless diligence of so many
+American police detectives on the trail of a bank messenger accused of
+stealing bonds.
+
+A decent, likable chap, this d'Aubrac, as reticent as any Englishman
+concerning his part in the Great War. Duchemin had to talk round the
+subject for days before d'Aubrac confessed that his record in the
+French air service had won him the title of Ace; and this only when
+Duchemin found out that d'Aubrac was at present, in his civilian
+capacity, managing director of an establishment manufacturing
+airplanes.
+
+At the end of that week he left to go back to his business; and Louise
+de Montalais replaced him at Duchemin's side, where she would sit by
+the hour reading aloud to him in a voice as colourless as her unformed
+personality. Nevertheless Duchemin was grateful, and with the young
+girl as guide for the _nth_ time sailed with d'Artagnan to Newcastle
+and rode with him toward Belle Isle, with him frustrated the
+machinations of overweening Aramis and yawned over the insufferable
+virtues of that most precious prig of all Romance, Raoul, Vicomte de
+Bragelonne.
+
+But the third week found Duchemin mending all too rapidly; the time
+came too soon when the word "to-morrow" held for him all the dread
+significance, he assured himself, that it holds for a condemned man on
+the eve of execution.
+
+To-morrow the detectives commissioned by Madame de Montalais's bankers
+would arrive. To-morrow Eve would set out on her journey to Paris.
+To-morrow André Duchemin must walk forth from the Château de Montalais
+and turn his back on all that was most dear to him in life.
+
+On that last day he saw even less of Eve than usual. She was naturally
+busy with preparations for her trip, a trifle excited, too; it would be
+only the third time she had left the château for as long as overnight
+since returning to it after her husband's death. When Duchemin did see
+her, she seemed at once exhilarated and subdued, and he thought to
+detect in her attitude toward him a trace of apprehensiveness.
+
+She knew, of course; Duchemin at thirty-eight was too well versed in
+lore of women to dream he had succeeded in keeping his secret from the
+fine intuition of one of thirty. But--he told himself a bit
+bitterly--she ought to know him well enough by this time to know more,
+that she need not fear he would ever speak his heart to her. The social
+gulf that set their lives apart was all too wide to be spanned but by a
+miracle of love requited; and he had too much humility and naivété of
+soul to presume that such a thing could ever come to pass. And even if
+it should, there remained the insuperable barrier of her fortune, in
+the face of which the pretensions of a penniless adventurer could only
+seem silly....
+
+He was permitted to be about the house in the afternoon and to dine
+with Eve and Louise in the draughty, shadow-haunted dining hall. Madame
+de Sévénié was indisposed and kept to her room; she suffered from time
+to time from an affection of the heart, nothing remarkable in one of
+her advanced age and so no excuse for unusual misgivings. But the
+presence of the young girl in some measure, and the emotions of the
+others in greater, lent the conversation a constraint against which
+Duchemin's attempts at levity could not prevail. The talk languished
+and revived fitfully only when some indifferent, impersonal topic
+offered itself. The weather, for example, enjoyed unwonted vogue. It
+happened to be drizzling; Eve was afraid of a rainy morrow. She
+confessed to a minor superstition, she did not really like to start a
+journey in the rain...
+
+She smoked only one cigarette with Duchemin in the drawing-room after
+dinner, then excused herself to wait on Madame de Sévénié and finish
+her packing. It was time, too, for Duchemin to remember he was still an
+invalid and subject to a régime prescribed by his surgeon: he must go
+early to his bed.
+
+"I am sorry, mon ami," the woman said, hesitating after she had left
+her chair before the fire; whose play of broken light was, perhaps,
+responsible for some of the softness of her eyes as she faced Duchemin
+and gave him her hand--"sorry our last evening together must be so
+brief. I am in the mood to sit and talk with you for hours to-night..."
+
+"If you could only manage even one, madame!" She shook her head gently,
+with a wistful smile. "There will never be another night..."
+
+"I know, I know; and the knowledge makes me very sad. I have enjoyed
+knowing you, monsieur, even under such distressing circumstances..."
+
+"My wound? You tempt me to seek another!"
+
+"Don't be absurd." He was still holding her hand, and she made no move
+to free it, but seeming forgetful of it altogether, lingered on. "I
+shall miss you, monsieur. The château will seem lonely when I return, I
+shall feel its loneliness more than I have ever felt it."
+
+"And the world, madame," said Duchemin--"the world into which I must
+go--it, too, will seem a lonely place,--a desert, haunted..."
+
+"You will soon forget ... Château de Montalais."
+
+"Forget! when all I shall have will be my memories--!"
+
+"Yes," she said, "we shall both have memories..." And suddenly the
+rich, deep voice quoted in English: "'Memories like almighty wine.'"
+
+She offered to disengage her hand, but Duchemin tightened gently the
+pressure of his fingers, bowing over it and, as he looked up for her
+answer, murmuring: "With permission?" She gave the slightest
+inclination of her head. His lips touched her hand for a moment; then
+he released it. She went swiftly to the door, faltered, turned.
+
+"We shall see each other in the morning--to say au revoir. With us,
+monsieur, it must never be adieu."
+
+She was gone; but she had left Duchemin with a singing heart that would
+not let him sleep when he had gone to bed, stared blankly at the last
+chapter of Bragelonne for an hour, and put out his candle.
+
+Till long after midnight he tossed restlessly, bedevilled alternately
+by melancholy and exhilaration, or lay staring blindly into the
+darkness, striving to focus his thoughts upon the abstract, a hopeless
+effort; trying to think where to go to-morrow, whither to turn his feet
+when the gates of Paradise had closed behind him, and knowing it did
+not matter, he did not care, that hereafter one place and another would
+be the same to him, so that they were not the place of her abode.
+
+The château was as still as any castle of enchantment; only an old
+clock in the drawing room, two floors below, tolled the slow hours; and
+through the open windows came the mournful murmur of the river, a voice
+of utter desolation in the night.
+
+He heard the clock strike two, and shortly after, in a fit of
+exasperation, thinking to discipline his mind with reading, lighted the
+candle on the bedside stand, found his book, and fumbled vainly in the
+little silver casket beside the candlestick for a cigarette.
+
+Now a sincere smoker can do without smoking for hours on end, as long
+as the deprivation is voluntary. But let him be without the wherewithal
+to smoke if he have the mind to, and he must procure it instantly
+though the heavens fall. It was so then with Duchemin. And what greater
+folly could there be than to want a cigarette and do without one when
+there were plenty in the drawing-room, to be had for the taking?
+
+He rose, girdled about him his dressing-gown, took up the candlestick,
+opened his door. The hallway was as empty and silent as he had expected
+to find it. He had no fear of disturbing the household, for his
+slippers were of felt and silent and the stairs were of stone and
+creakless.
+
+Shielding the candle flame with his hand, and somewhat dazzled by the
+light thus cast into his face, he passed the floor on which the three
+ladies of the château had each her separate suite of rooms, and gained
+the drawing-room as noiselessly as any ghost.
+
+The fire had died down till only embers glowed, faint under films of
+ash, like an old anger growing cold with age.
+
+The cigarettes were not where he had expected to find them, near one
+end of a certain table. Duchemin put down the candlestick and moved
+toward the other end, discovering the box he sought as soon as his back
+was turned to the light. In the same breath this last went out.
+
+He stood for a moment transfixed in astonishment. There were no windows
+open, no draughts that he could feel, nothing to account for the flame
+expiring as it had, suddenly, without one flicker of warning. An insane
+thing to happen to one, at such an hour, in such a place...
+
+Involuntarily memory harked back to the night of his first dinner in
+the château, when the shadows had danced so weirdly, and the strange
+notion had come to him that they were like famished spectres, greedy of
+the lights, yearning to spring and snatch and feed upon them, as wolves
+might snatch at chops.
+
+A mad fancy...
+
+When he turned hack to relight the candle, it was gone.
+
+At least he must have been mistaken as to the exact spot where he had
+placed it. Perplexed, he pawed over all that end of the table. But no
+candlestick was there.
+
+He straightened up sharply, and stood quite still, listening. No sound...
+
+His vision spent itself fruitlessly against the blackness, which the
+closed window draperies rendered absolute but for those dull, sardonic
+eyes of dying embers.
+
+In spite of himself he knew a moment when flesh crawled and the hair
+seemed to stir upon the scalp; for Duchemin knew he was not alone;
+there was something else in the room with him, something nameless,
+stealthy, silent, sinister; having knowledge of him, where he stood and
+what he was, while he knew nothing of it, only that it was there,
+keeping surveillance over him, itself unseen in its cloak of darkness.
+
+Then with a resolute effort of will he mastered his imagination,
+reminding himself that spirits gifted in the matter of moving material
+objects such as candlesticks, frequent only the booths of seance
+mediums.
+
+Without a sound he stepped back one pace, then two to one side, away
+from the table. They were long strides; when he paused he was well away
+from the spot where he had stood when the light was extinguished and
+where, consequently, a hostile move might be expected to develop.
+Otherwise his plight was little bettered; he did not quite know where
+he was in relation to the doors and the pieces which furnished the
+room. That old-time habit of memorising the arrangement of furniture in
+a room immediately on entering it had failed through disuse in course
+of years. He was acquainted with the plot of this drawing-room in a
+general way but by no means with such accuracy as was needed to serve
+him now.
+
+So he waited, straining to cheat that opaque pall of night of one
+little hint as to his whereabouts who had removed the light.
+Resurrecting another old trick, he measured time by pulse-beats, and
+stood unstirring and all but breathless for three full minutes. But
+perceptions stimulated to extra sensibility by apprehension of danger
+detected nothing. And his hearing was so keen, he told himself, no
+breath could have been drawn in that time without his having knowledge
+of it. Still, he knew he was not alone. Somewhere in that encompassing
+murk an alien and inimical intelligence skulked.
+
+Baffled by powers of patience and immobility that mocked his own, he
+moved again, edging toward the entrance-hall, a progress so gradual he
+could have sworn it must be imperceptible. Yet he had a feeling, a
+suspicion, perhaps merely a fear, that he did not stir a finger without
+the other's knowledge.
+
+A hand extended about a foot encountered the back of an upholstered
+chair, which he identified by touch. Assuming the chair to be occupying
+its usual position, he need only continue in a line parallel with the
+line of its back to find the entrance-hall in about six paces.
+
+Within three he stopped dead, as if paralysed by sudden instinctive
+perception of that other presence close by.
+
+Whether he had drawn near to it, inch by inch, or whether it, seeing
+him about to make good his escape, had crept up on him, he could not
+say. He only knew that it was there, within arm's-length, waiting,
+tense, prepared, and somehow deadly in its animosity.
+
+Digging the nails deep into the palms of his hands, until the pain
+relieved his nervous tension, he waited once more, one minute, two,
+three.
+
+But nothing ...
+
+Then very slowly he lifted an arm, and swept it before him right and
+left. At one point of the arc, a trifle to his left, his finger-tips
+brushed something. He thought he detected a stir in the darkness, a
+stifled sound, stepped forward quickly, clawing the air, and caught
+between his fingers a wisp of some material, like silk, sheer and
+glacé, a portion of some garment.
+
+Simultaneously he heard a smothered cry, of anger or alarm, and the
+night seemed to split and be rent into fragments by a thousand shooting
+needles of coloured flame.
+
+Smitten brutally on the point of the jaw, his head jerked back, he
+reeled and fell against a chair, which went to the floor with a muffled
+crash.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+BUT AS A MUSTARD SEED...
+
+
+Duchemin woke up in his bed, glare of sunlight in his eyes.
+
+From the latter circumstance he reckoned, rather groggily, it must be
+about the middle of the forenoon; for not till about that time did the
+sun work round to the windows.
+
+Still heavy with lees of slumber, his wits occupied themselves
+sluggishly with questions concerning the enervation that oppressed him,
+the reason for his oversleeping, why he had not been called. Then,
+reminded that noon was the hour set for Eve's departure, fear lest she
+get away without his bon voyage brought him sharply up in a sitting
+position.
+
+He groaned aloud and with both hands clutched temples that promised to
+split with pain that crashed between them, stroke upon stroke, like
+blows of a mighty hammer.
+
+A neatly fastened bandage held in place, above one ear, a wad of cotton
+once saturated with arnica, now dry. Duchemin removed these and with
+gingerly fingers explored, discovering a noble swelling on the side of
+his head, where the cotton had been placed.
+
+Also, his jaw was stiff, and developed a protesting ache whenever he
+opened his mouth.
+
+Then Duchemin remembered ... That is to say, he recalled clearly all
+that had led up to that vicious blow from out of the darkness which had
+found his jaw with such surprising accuracy; and he was visited by one
+or two rather indefinite memories of subsequent events.
+
+He remembered labouring up the stairs, half walking, half supported by
+the strong arms of the footman, Jean, who was in shirt, trousers and
+slippers only, while in front of them moved the shape of Madame de
+Montalais en négligée, carrying a lighted candle and constantly looking
+back.
+
+Then he had an impression of being lifted into his bed by Jean, and of
+having his head and shoulders raised by the same arms some time later,
+so that he might drink a draught of some concoction with a pleasant
+aromatic taste and odour, in a glass held to his lips by Eve de
+Montalais.
+
+And then (Duchemin had a faint smile of appreciation for a mental
+parallel to the technique of the cinema) a singularly vivid and
+disturbing memory of her face of loveliness, exquisitely tender and
+compassionate, bended so near to his, faded away into a dense blank of
+sleep ...
+
+Somewhat to his surprise he found the watch on his wrist ticking away
+as callously as though its owner had not experienced a prolonged lapse
+of consciousness. It told him that Eve would leave the château within
+another hour.
+
+He got up hastily, grunting a bit--though his headache was no longer so
+acute; or else he was growing accustomed to it--and ringing for the
+valet-de-chambre ordered his petit déjeuner. Before this was served he
+spent several thrilling minutes under an icy shower and emerged feeling
+more on terms with himself and the world.
+
+The valet-de-chambre brought with his tray the announcement that Madame
+de Montalais presented her compliments and would be glad to see
+monsieur at his convenience in the grand salon. So Duchemin made short
+work of his dressing, his café-au-lait and half a roll, and hurried
+down to the drawing-room.
+
+Seated in an easy chair, in the tempered light of an awninged window
+which stood open on the terrasse, nothing in her pose--she was waiting
+quietly, hands folded in her lap--and nothing in her countenance, in
+the un-lined brow, the grave, serene eyes, lent any colour to his
+apprehensions. And yet in his heart he had known that he would find her
+thus, and alone, no matter what had happened....
+
+Her profound reverie disturbed by his approach, she rose quickly,
+advancing to meet Duchemin with both hands offered in sympathy.
+
+"My dear friend! You are suffering--?"
+
+He met this with a smiling denial. "Not now; at first, yes; but since
+my bath and coffee, I'm as right as a trivet. And you, madame?"
+
+"A little weary, monsieur, otherwise quite well."
+
+She resumed her chair, signing to Duchemin to take one nearby. He drew
+it closer before sitting down.
+
+"But madame is not dressed for her journey!"
+
+"No, monsieur. I have postponed it--" a slight pause prefaced one more
+word--"indefinitely."
+
+At this confirmation of the fears which had been haunting him, Duchemin
+nodded slightly.
+
+"But the men sent here by your bankers--?"
+
+"They have not yet arrived; we may expect them at any moment now."
+
+"I see," said Duchemin thoughtfully; and then--"May I suggest that we
+continue our conversation in English. One never knows who may
+overhear..."
+
+Her eyebrows lifted a little, but she adopted the suggestion without
+other demur.
+
+"The servants?"
+
+He nodded: "Or anybody."
+
+"Then you have guessed--?"
+
+"Broadly speaking, everything, I fancy. Not in any detail, naturally.
+But one puts two and two together ... I may as well tell you to begin
+with: I was wakeful last night, and finding no cigarettes in my room,
+came down here to get some. I left my candle on the table--there. As
+soon as my back was turned, somebody took it away and put it out. A few
+minutes later, while I was trying to steal out of the room, I ran into
+a fist..."
+
+"Yes," she said thoughtfully; and with some hesitation added: "I, too,
+found it not easy to sleep. But I heard nothing till that chair
+crashed. Then I got up to investigate ... and found you lying there,
+senseless. In falling your head must have struck the leg of the table."
+
+"You came down here--alone?"
+
+"I listened first, heard no sound, saw no light; but I had to know what
+the noise meant..."
+
+"Still, you came downstairs alone!"
+
+"But naturally, monsieur."
+
+"I don't believe," said Duchemin sincerely, "the world holds a woman
+your peer for courage."
+
+"Or curiosity?" she laughed. "At all events, I found you, but could do
+nothing to rouse you. So I called Jean, and he helped me get you
+upstairs again."
+
+"Where does Jean sleep?"
+
+"In the servants' quarters, on the third floor, in the rear of the
+house."
+
+"It must have taken you some time..."
+
+"Several minutes, I fancy. Jean sleeps soundly."
+
+"When you came back with him--or at any time--did you see or hear--?"
+
+"Nothing out of the normal--nobody. Indeed, I at first believed you had
+somehow managed to overexert yourself and had fainted--or had tripped
+on something and, falling, hurt your head."
+
+"Later, then, you found reason to revise that theory?"
+
+"Not till early this morning."
+
+"Please tell me..."
+
+"Well, you see ... It all seemed so strange, I couldn't sleep when I
+went back to bed, I lay awake, puzzled, uneasy. It was broad daylight
+before I noticed that the screen which stands in front of my safe was
+out of place. The safe is built into the solid wall, you know. I got up
+then, and found the safe door an inch or so ajar. Whoever opened it
+last night, closed it hastily and neglected to shoot the bolts."
+
+"And your jewels, of course--?"
+
+She pronounced with unbroken composure: "They have left me nothing,
+monsieur."
+
+Duchemin groaned and hung his head. "I knew it!" he declared. "No
+credit to me, however. Naturally, whoever stole my candle and knocked
+me out didn't break into the house for the fun of it ... I imagine
+that, what with finding me insensible, waking Jean up, and getting me
+back in my room, you must have been away from yours fully half an
+hour."
+
+"Quite that long."
+
+"It couldn't have been better arranged for the thieves," he declared.
+"If only I had stayed in my room--!"
+
+"If you had, it might possibly have been worse--mightn't it? The
+burglar--or burglars--knew precisely the location of the safe. They
+were coming to my room, and if they had found me awake ... I think it
+quite possible, my friend, that your appetite for cigarettes may have
+saved my life."
+
+"There's consolation in that," he confessed--"if it's any to you, who
+have lost so much."
+
+"But perhaps I shall get my jewellery back."
+
+"What makes you think that?"
+
+"There's always the chance, isn't there? And I believe I have a clue,
+as they call it, an indefinite one but something to work from,
+perhaps."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"It seems to me it must have been what the police at home call 'an
+inside job'; because whoever it was apparently knew the combination of
+the safe."
+
+"You mean it wasn't broken open. That signifies nothing. I've never
+seen yours, but I know something about safes, and I'll undertake to
+open it without the combination within ten minutes."
+
+"You, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+He nodded gloomily. "It's no great trick, once one knows it; with an
+ordinary safe, that is, such as you're apt to find in a private home.
+Have you looked for finger-prints?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"Have you any idea how the thieves broke in?"
+
+"Through this very window, I imagine. You see, I was up early and, in
+my agitation, dressed hurriedly and came downstairs hours before I
+usually do. The servants were already up, but hadn't opened the living
+rooms for the day. I myself found this window unlatched. The fastening
+is insecure, you see; it has been out of order for some time."
+
+Duchemin was on his feet, examining the latch. "True," he said; "but
+might not the wind--?"
+
+"There was no wind to speak of last night, monsieur, and what there was
+didn't blow from that quarter." She added as Duchemin stepped out
+through the window: "Where are you going?"
+
+"To look for footprints on the tiling. It was misting when I went to
+bed, and with the mud--"
+
+"But there was a heavy shower just before daybreak. If the thieves had
+left any tracks on the terrasse, the rain must have washed them clean
+away. I have already looked."
+
+With a baffled gesture, Duchemin turned back to her side.
+
+"You have communicated with the police, of course."
+
+She interrupted with an accent almost of impatience: "I have told
+nobody but you, monsieur, not even my mother and Louise."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"I wanted to consult you first, and..." She broke off sharply to ask:
+"Yes, Jean: what is it?"
+
+The footman had entered to bring her cards over which Eve de Montalais
+arched her brows.
+
+"Show the gentlemen in, please."
+
+The servant retired.
+
+"The men from Paris, madame?"
+
+"Yes. You will excuse me--?"
+
+Duchemin bowed. "But one word: You can hardly do better than put the
+case in the hands of these gentlemen. They are apt to be of a good
+order of intelligence when selected to serve bankers, you know."
+
+"I understand," she replied in her cool, sweet voice.
+
+She went to meet the men in the middle of the room. Duchemin turned
+back to the window, where, standing in the recess, with the light
+behind him, he could watch and reflect without his interest or
+emotions, becoming too apparent. And he was grateful for that moment of
+respite in which to compose and prepare himself. Within an hour, he
+knew, within a day or so at most, he must be under arrest, charged with
+the theft of the Montalais jewels, damned by his yesterday as much as
+by every turn of circumstantial evidence....
+
+The men whom Jean ushered in proved to be, outwardly, what Duchemin had
+expected: of a class only too well-known to him, plain men of the
+people, unassuming, well-trained and informed, sceptical; not
+improbably shrewd hands in the game of thief-taking.
+
+Saluting Madame de Montalais with calculated ceremony, one acting as
+spokesman offered to present their credentials. Duchemin had a start of
+surprise to dissemble when he saw the woman wave these aside.
+
+"It is not necessary, messieurs," she said. "I regret very much to have
+inconvenienced you, although of course it will make no difference in
+your bill; but I have brought you here to no purpose. The necessity for
+my contemplated journey no longer exists."
+
+There were expressions of surprise to which she put an end with the
+words, accompanied by a charming smile: "Frankly, messieurs, I am
+afraid you will have to make allowances for the traditional
+inconsistency of my sex: I have simply changed my mind."
+
+There was nothing more to be said. Openly more than a little mystified,
+the men withdrew.
+
+The smile with which she dismissed them lingered, delightful and
+enigmatic, as Eve recognised the stupefaction with which Duchemin moved
+to remonstrate with her.
+
+"Madame!" he cried in a low voice of wonder and protest--"why did you
+do that? Why let them go without telling them--?"
+
+"I must have had a reason, don't you think, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+"I don't understand you, madame. You treat the loss of jewels as if it
+must be a secret private to ourselves, to you and to me!"
+
+"Possibly that is my wish, monsieur." He gave a gesture of
+bewilderment. "Perhaps," she continued, meeting his blank stare with
+eyes in which amusement gave place to a look almost apologetic yet
+utterly kind--"perhaps I have more faith in you..."
+
+Duchemin bowed his head over hands so tightly knitted that the knuckles
+were white with strain.
+
+"You would not have faith," he said in a low voice, "if you knew--"
+
+She interrupted in a gentle voice: "Are you sure?"
+
+"--What I must tell you!"
+
+"My friend," she said: "tell me nothing that would distress you."
+
+He did not immediately reply; the struggle going on within him was only
+too plainly betrayed by engorged veins upon his forehead and exceeding
+pallor of countenance.
+
+"If you had told those detectives," he said at length, without looking
+up, "you must have known very soon. They must have found me out without
+too much delay. And who in the world would ever believe anybody else
+guilty when they learned that André Duchemin, your guest for three
+weeks, was only an alias for Michael Lanyard, otherwise the Lone Wolf?"
+
+"But you are wrong, monsieur," she replied, without the long pause of
+surprise he had anticipated. "I should not have believed you guilty."
+
+Dumb with wonder, he showed her a haggard face. And she had for him, in
+the agony and the abasement of his soul, still quivering from the rack
+of emotion that alone could have extorted his confession--she had for
+him the half-smile, tender and compassionate, that it is given to most
+men to see but once in a lifetime on the lips and in the eyes of the
+woman beloved. "Then you knew--!"
+
+"I suspected."
+
+"How long--?"
+
+"Since the night those strange people were here and tried to make you
+unhappy with their stupid talk of the Lone Wolf. I suspected, then; and
+when I came to know you better, I felt quite sure..."
+
+"And now you _know_--yet hesitate to turn me over to the police!"
+
+"No such thought has ever entered my head. You see--I'm afraid you
+don't quite understand me--I have faith in you."
+
+"But why?"
+
+She shook her head. "You mustn't ask me that."
+
+At the end of a long moment he said in a broken voice: "Very well: I
+won't ... Not yet awhile ... But this great gift of faith in me--I
+can't accept that without trying to repay it."
+
+"If you accept, my friend, you repay."
+
+"No," said Michael Lanyard--"that's not enough. Your jewels must come
+back to you, if I go to the ends of the earth to find them. And"--man's
+undying vanity would out--"if there's anyone living who can find them
+for you, it is I."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+AU REVOIR
+
+
+Early in the afternoon Eve de Montalais made it possible for Lanyard to
+examine the safe in her boudoir without exciting comment in the
+household. He was nearly an hour thus engaged, but brought back to the
+drawing-room, in addition to the heavy magnifying glass which he had
+requisitioned to eke out his eyesight, only a face of disappointment.
+
+"Nothing," he retorted to Eve. "Evidently a gentleman of rigidly formal
+habits, our friend of last night--wouldn't dream of calling at any hour
+without his gloves on.... I've been over every inch of the safe,
+outside and in, and the frame of the screen too, but--nothing. However,
+I've been thinking a bit as well, I hope to some purpose."
+
+The woman nodded intently as he drew up his chair and sat down.
+
+"You have made a plan," she stated rather than enquired.
+
+"I won't call it that, not yet. We've got too little to go on. But one
+or two things seem fairly obvious, therefore must not be left out of
+consideration. Assuming for the sake of argument that Mr. Whitaker Monk
+and his lot had a hand in this--"
+
+"Ah! you think that?"
+
+"I admit I'm unfair. But first they quarrel with my sense of the normal
+by being too confoundedly picturesque, too rich and brilliant, too
+sharp and smart and glib, too--well!--theatrical; like characters from
+the cast of what your American theatre calls a crook melodrama. And
+then, if their intentions were so blessed pure and praiseworthy, what
+right had they to make so many ambiguous gestures?"
+
+"Leading the talk up to my jewels, you mean?"
+
+"I mean every move they made: all too suspiciously smooth, too well
+rehearsed in effect. That stop to dine in Nant with the storm coming
+on, when they could easily have made Millau before it broke: what else
+was that for but to stage a 'break-down' at your door at a time when it
+would be reasonable to beg the shelter and hospitality of your roof?
+Then Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes--whoever _she_ is--must get her feet
+wet, an excellent excuse for asking to be introduced to your boudoir,
+so she may change her shoes and stockings and incidentally spy out the
+precise location of your safe. And when their ear is hauled into the
+garage, Mr. Phinuit must go to help, which gives him a chance to stroll
+at leisure through the lower part of the house and note every easy way
+of breaking in. Mr. Monk casually notes your likeness to the little
+girl he once met, _he_ says, in your father's office; something you
+tell me you don't recall at all. And that places you as the veritable
+owner of the Anstruther jewels, and no mistake. Then--Madame de Lorgnes
+guiding the conversation by secret signals which I intercept--somebody
+recognises me as the Lone Wolf, in spite of the work of years and a
+new-grown beard; and you are obliquely warned that, if your jewels
+should happen to disappear it's more than likely the Lone Wolf will
+prove to be the guilty party. At any rate, they will be ever so much
+obliged if you'll believe he is, it'll save so much trouble all around.
+Finally: when your ex-chauffeur--what's his name--?" "Albert Dupont."
+
+"A name as unique in France as John Smith is in England ... When Albert
+Dupont tries to take my life, as a simple and natural act of
+vendetta--"
+
+"You really think it was that?"
+
+"I recognised the beast when he let off that pistol at my head. I was
+in his way here, and he owed me one besides for my interference at
+Montpellier that night.... When Dupont half murders me and I'm laid up
+on your hands for nearly a month, our friends with designs on your
+jewels thoughtfully wait before they strike till I am able to be up and
+about, consequently in a position to be accused of a crime which no one
+would put past the Lone Wolf. Oh, I think we can fairly count Mr. Monk
+and his friends in on this coup!"
+
+"I am sure of it," said Eve de Montalais. "But Albert: is he one of
+them, their employee or confrère?"
+
+"Dupont? I fancy not. I may be wrong, but I believe he is entirely on
+his own--quite independent of the Monk party."
+
+"But his attack on us at Montpellier, and later on you here, coming at
+about the same time as their visit--"
+
+"Coincidence, if you ask me. The weight of probability is against any
+collusion between the two parties."
+
+"Please explain..."
+
+"Dupont is an Apache of Paris. The language he used to me when we
+fought in that carriage at Montpellier was the slang of the lowest
+order of Parisian criminal, used spontaneously, under stress of great
+excitement, with no intent to mislead. These other people were--if
+anything but poor misjudged lambs--swell mobsmen, the élite of the
+criminal world. The two castes never work together because they can't
+trust each other. The swell mobsman works with his head and only kills
+when cornered. The Apache kills first, as a matter of instinct, and
+then thinks--to the best of his ability. The Apache knows the swell
+mobsman can outwit him. The swell mobsman knows the Apache will
+assassinate him at the first hint of a suspicion of his good faith. So
+they rarely if ever make use of each other."
+
+"You say 'rarely.' But possibly in this instance?"
+
+"I think not. Dupont was employed as your chauffeur, you've told me,
+upwards of a month. He had ample opportunity to familiarise himself
+with the premises and pass the information on, if acting in connivance
+with those others. But we know he didn't, or they would never have
+shown themselves here in order to secure information they couldn't have
+got otherwise."
+
+"I see, monsieur," said the woman. "Then you think the thief may have
+been any one of the Monk party--"
+
+"Or several of them acting in concert," Lanyard interrupted, smiling.
+
+"Or Albert."
+
+"Not Dupont. Unless I underestimate him gravely he is incapable of such
+finesse. He is a thug first, a thief afterwards. He would have killed
+me out of hand if it had been he who had me at his mercy, down here, in
+the dark. Nor would he have been able to open the safe without using an
+explosive. That, indeed, is why, as I understand him, Dupont attacked
+you at Montpellier. If he could have disposed of you there, he would
+have returned here to work upon the safe and blow it at his leisure,
+fobbing the servants off with some yarn, or if they proved too
+troublesome intimidating them, killing one or two if necessary."
+
+"But why has he made no other attempt--?"
+
+"You forget the police have been making the neighbourhood fairly warm
+for him. Besides, he wanted me out of the way before he tried
+housebreaking. If he had succeeded in murdering me that night, I don't
+doubt he would have burglarised the château soon after. But he failed;
+the police were stirred up to renewed activity; and if Monsieur Dupont
+is not now safely back in Paris, hiding in some warren of Montmartre or
+Belleville, I am much mistaken in the man--a type I know well."
+
+"Eliminating Albert then--"
+
+"There remains the Monk lot."
+
+"You are satisfied that one or all of its members committed the theft
+last night?"
+
+"Not less than two, probably; say Phinuit, at a venture, and his
+alleged brother, Jules, the chauffeur, both Americans, adventurous,
+intelligent and resourceful. Yes; I believe that."
+
+"And your plan of campaign is based on this conclusion?"
+
+"That's a big name"--Lanyard's smile was diffident, a plea for
+suspended judgment on his lack of inventiveness--"for a lame idea. I
+believe our only course is to let them believe they have been
+successful in every way, and so lull them into carelessness with a
+false sense of security."
+
+A wrinkle appeared between the woman's eyebrows. "How do you propose to
+accomplish that?" she asked in a voice that betrayed ready antagonism
+to what her intuition foresaw.
+
+"Very simply. They hoped to shift suspicion on to my shoulders. Well,
+let them believe they have done so."
+
+The waiting hostility developed in a sharp negative: "Ah, no!"
+
+"But yes," Lanyard insisted. "It's so simple. Nobody here knows as yet
+that your jewels have been stolen, only you and I. Very well: you will
+not discover your loss and announce it till to-morrow morning. By that
+time André Duchemin will have disappeared mysteriously. The room to
+which he will retire to-night will be found vacant in the morning, his
+bed unslept in. Obviously the scoundrel would not fly the château
+between two suns without a motive. Inform the police of the fact and
+let them draw their own conclusions: before evening all France will
+know that André Duchemin is suspected of stealing the Montalais jewels,
+and is a fugitive from justice."
+
+"No, monsieur," the woman iterated decidedly.
+
+"You will observe," he continued, lightly persuasive, "it is André
+Duchemin who will be accused, madame, not Michael Lanyard, never the
+Lone Wolf! The heart of man is in truth a dark forest, and vanity the
+only light to guide us through its mazes. I confess I am jealous of my
+reputation as a reformed character. But André Duchemin is merely a
+name, a nom de guerre; you may saddle him with all the crimes in the
+calendar if you like, and welcome. For when I say he will disappear
+to-night, I mean it quite literally: André Duchemin will nevermore be
+heard of in this world."
+
+She had a smile quivering on her lips, yet shook her head.
+
+"Monsieur forgets I learned to know him under the name of Duchemin."
+
+"Ah, madame! do not make me think too kindly of the poor fellow; for
+whether we like it or not, he is doomed. And if madame, in her charity,
+means to continue to know me, it must be Michael Lanyard whom she
+suffers to claim a little portion of her friendship."
+
+Her smile grew wistful, with a tenderness he had the grace not to
+recognise. Abashed, incredulous, he turned aside his gaze. Then without
+warning he found her hand at rest in his. "More than a little,
+monsieur, more than a little friendship only!"
+
+He closed the hand in both his own.
+
+"Then be kind to me, madame, be still more kind; give me this chance to
+find and restore your jewels. It is the only way, this plan of mine. If
+we adopt it no one will suffer, only an old alias that is no longer
+useful. If we do not adopt it, I may not succeed, for the true authors
+of this crime may prove too wary for me; and the end will be that my
+best friends will believe the worst of me; even you, madame, even you
+will not be sure your faith was not misplaced."
+
+"Enough!" the woman begged in a stifled voice. "It shall be as you
+wish--if you will have it so."
+
+She sought to take away her hand; but Lanyard kissed it before he let
+it go. And immediately she rose with a murmured, half articulate
+excuse, and went from the room, leaving him to struggle with himself
+and that which was in him which was stronger than himself, his hunger
+for her love, to deny stubbornly the evidence of his senses and end by
+persuading himself against his will that he was nothing to her more
+than an object of common kindness such as she would extend to anyone in
+similar plight.
+
+Because he never could be more....
+
+Those few last hours in the château passed swiftly enough, most of them
+in making plans for his "escape," something which demanded a deal of
+puzzling over maps and railway guides in the seclusion of his room.
+Since the next noon must find André Duchemin a criminal published and
+proscribed, he had need to utilise every shred of cunning at his
+command if he were to reach Paris without being arrested and without
+undue loss of time.
+
+To take a train at Millau would be simply to invite pursuit; for that
+was the likeliest point an escaping criminal would strike for, a
+stopping place for all trains north and southbound. Telegraphic advices
+would cause every such train to be searched to a certainty.
+Furthermore, Lanyard had no desire to enter Paris by the direct route
+from Millau. Not the police alone, but others, enemies even more
+dangerous, might be expecting him by that route.
+
+On the other hand, the nearest railway station, Combe-Redonde, was
+equally out of the question, since to gain it one must pass through
+Nant, where André Duchemin was known, and risk being seen, while at
+Combe-Redonde itself the station people would be apt to remember the
+monsieur who had recently created a sensation by despatching a code
+telegram to London.
+
+There was nothing for it, then, but a twenty-mile walk due west across
+the Causse Larzac by night to Tournemire, where one could get trains in
+any one of four directions.
+
+Constraint marked that last dinner with Eve de Montalais. They were
+alone. Louise was dining by the bedside of Madame de Sévénié, who
+remained indisposed, a shade more so than yesterday. The ill health of
+this poor lady, indeed, was the excuse Eve had given for putting off
+her trip to Paris.
+
+Their talk was framed in stilted phrases, inconsecutive. They dared not
+converse naturally, each fearing to say too little or too much. For the
+memory of that surge of emotion, transient though it had been, in which
+their discussion had culminated, that afternoon, stood between them
+like a warning ghost, an implacable finger sealing its lips and theirs
+with the sign of silence.
+
+But talk they must, for the benefit of the servants, and talk they did
+after an uneasy fashion, making specious arrangements for Lanyard's
+departure on the morrow, when Eve was to drive him to Millau to catch
+the afternoon rapide for Paris.
+
+Nor was it much better after dinner in the drawing-room. Consciousness
+of each other and consciousness of self, as each fought to master the
+emotions inspired by thoughts of their near parting, drove both into
+the refuge of a dry, insincere, cool impersonality. Lanyard
+communicated nothing of his plans, though aware his failure to do so
+might be misconstrued, instil an instinctive if possibly unconscious
+resentment to render the situation still more difficult. The truth was,
+he could barely trust himself to speak lest mere words work on his
+guard like tiny streams that sap the strength of the dike till it
+breaks and looses the pent and devastating seas.
+
+At half past nine, ending a long silence, Lanyard sat forward in his
+chair, hesitated, and covered his hesitation by lighting a cigarette.
+
+"I must go now," he said, puffing out the match.
+
+He was aware of her almost imperceptible start of surprise.
+
+"So soon?" she breathed.
+
+"The moon rises not long after ten, and I want to get away without
+being seen either by the servants or by--anybody who might happen to be
+passing. You understand."
+
+She nodded. He lingered, frowning at his cigarette.
+
+"With permission, I will write..."
+
+"Please."
+
+"When I have anything to report."
+
+She turned her head full face to him, letting him see her fluttering,
+indulgent smile.
+
+"You must wait for that?"
+
+"Perhaps," he faltered--"at least, I hope--it won't be long."
+
+"You must wait for that?"
+
+"Perhaps," he faltered--"at least, I hope--it won't be long." "I shall
+be waiting," she told him simply--"watching every post for word from
+you. I shan't worry, only for you."
+
+He got up slowly from his chair, and stood half choking with
+unutterable words.
+
+"I know no way to thank you," he managed to say at last.
+
+"For what?"
+
+"For everything--kindness, charity, sympathy--"
+
+"What are those things?" she demanded with a nervous little laugh.
+"Words! Just words that you and I use to hide behind, like timid
+children..." She rose suddenly and offered him her hand. "But I don't
+think it's any use, my friend, I'm quite sure that neither of us is
+deceived. No: say nothing more; the time is not yet and--we both can
+wait. Only know I understand ... Go now"--her fingers tightened round
+his--"but don't stay away any longer than you must, don't be influenced
+by silly traditions, false and foolish standards when you think of me.
+Go now"--she freed her hand and turned away--"but oh, come safely back
+to me, my dear!"
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+TRAVELS WITH AN ASSASSIN
+
+
+Under a sky whose misty silver pulsed with waves of violet light and
+dim glimmerings of gold, Lanyard, grey with the dust and weariness of
+twenty leagues of heavy walking, trudged into the sleeping streets of
+the town of Tournemire.
+
+In the railway station--whose buvette served him such listless
+refreshment as one may find at railway lunch-counters and nowhere else
+the world over--a train was waiting with an apathetic crew and a
+sprinkling of sleepy passengers, for the most part farm and village
+folk of the department. There was nowhere in evidence any figure
+resembling that of an agent de police.
+
+Lanyard made enquiry, found that the train was destined for Le Vigan,
+on the eastern slope of the Cévennes, and purchased a ticket for that
+point.
+
+Making himself as comfortable as might be in a depressingly third-rate
+second-class compartment (there was no first class, and the third was
+far too richly flavoured for his stomach) he cultivated a doze as the
+train pulled out. But, driven as provincial trains habitually are, in a
+high spirit of devil-may-care, its first stop woke him up with a series
+of savage, back-breaking jolts which were translated into jerks when it
+started on again and fiendishly reiterated at every suspicion of a
+way-station on the course. So that he presently abandoned all hope of
+sleep and sought solace in tobacco and the shifting views afforded by
+the windows. Penetrating the upper valley of the Cernon, the railroad
+skirted the southern boundary of the Causse Larzac, then laboriously
+climbed up to the plateau itself; and Lanyard roused to the fact that
+he was approaching familiar ground from a new angle: the next stop
+would be Combe-Redonde.
+
+The day was still in its infancy when that halt was made. Aside from
+the station agent, not a soul waited upon the platform. But one or two
+passengers were set down and, as the engine began to snort anew, a man
+darted from behind the tiny structure that housed ticket-office and
+waiting-room, galloped heavily across the platform, and with nothing to
+spare threw himself into the compartment immediately behind that
+wherein Lanyard sat alone.
+
+This manoeuvre was performed so briskly and unexpectedly that Lanyard
+caught barely a glimpse of the fellow; but one glimpse was enough to
+convince him he had been wrong in assuming that Monsieur Albert Dupont
+had sneaked back to Paris to hide from the authorities after failing to
+assassinate André Duchemin more than three weeks ago.
+
+But why--assuming one were not misled by a chance likeness to that
+heavy but athletic figure so well-remembered--why had Dupont lingered
+so long in the neighbourhood, in hourly peril of arrest? And why this
+sudden departure in the chill break of dawn, a move so timed and
+executed that it wore every sign of haste and fear?
+
+No reasonable explanation offered in solution of either of these
+riddles; unless, indeed, it were reasonable to believe that lust for
+vengeance was the ruling passion in the Dupont nature, that the
+creature had hung about the château in hope of getting another chance
+at Duchemin, and had decided to give it up only on discovering
+--inexplicably, at this hour--that the latter had stolen
+away under cover of night. But Lanyard didn't believe that. Neither did
+he believe that Dupont had had any hand in the robbery of night before
+last, and was now in tardy flight. In truth, he didn't know what to
+think, and the wildest flights of an imagination provoked by this
+mystery were tame and timid in contrast with the truth as he was later
+to learn it.
+
+To an amateur in sensations there was true piquancy in the thought that
+one was travelling in company with a thug who had already had two tries
+for one's life and would not hesitate to essay a third; in the same
+coach, separated only by the thin partition between the compartments,
+safe only in the thug's unconsciousness of one's proximity! And this
+without the privilege of denouncing the man to the police; for to do so
+now would be to enmesh in the toils of the law not only Albert Dupont,
+would-be assassin, but André Duchemin, charged with stealing the
+Montalais jewels.
+
+Lanyard would have given something for a peep-hole in the partition, to
+be able to study the countenance of Dupont unaware that he was under
+scrutiny. But he had to content himself with keeping vigil at the
+windows, making sure that Dupont did not drop off at some one of those
+many way-stations which the train was so scrupulous never to slight.
+
+Monsieur Dupont, however, did not budge a foot out of his compartment
+before the end of the run; and then Lanyard, purposely delaying, saw
+Dupont get down from the compartment astern and make for the
+booking-office at Le Vigan without a glance to right or
+left--evidencing not the remotest interest in his late company on the
+train, but rather a complete indifference, an absolute assurance that
+he had nothing now to fear, and with this a preoccupation of mind so
+thoroughgoing that Lanyard was able to edge up behind him, when he
+paused at the guichet, and eavesdrop on his consultation with the clerk
+of the ticket bureau.
+
+Dupont desired ardently to proceed to Lyons with the least avoidable
+delay. Under such conditions, according to the Indicateur des Chemins
+de Fer, his best available route was via Nimes, where the next express
+from Le Vigan made close connection with a northbound train rapide, due
+to arrive in Lyons late in the afternoon.
+
+There was, however, this drawback; or so the clerk declared after a
+dubious summing up of the disreputable Dupont ensemble: whereas one
+might travel any class as far as Nimes, the rapide for Lyons carried
+only passengers of the first class.
+
+But, said Dupont, with other blasphemy, all the world knew that the
+sacred rapides had no sacred accommodations for sacred passengers of
+the second and third class. Was he not the peer of any sacred
+first-class pig that ever travelled by train in France? If not, he
+proved the contrary to his own satisfaction by paying for his ticket
+from an imposing accumulation of French bank-notes.
+
+Then, with half an hour to wait, he lumbered into the buvette and
+gorged, while Lanyard--having secured his own transportation for Lyons
+by the some route--skulked in the offing and kept a close eye on the
+gourmand.
+
+Having eaten ferociously, Dupont came out, slouched into a seat on a
+bench and, his thick limbs a-sprawl, consumed cigarette after cigarette
+in most absolute abstraction of mind.
+
+Observed thus, off his guard and at tolerably close range, with his
+face clean of soot, he projected a personality so forbidding that
+Lanyard marvelled at the guilelessness which must have influenced the
+ladies of Château de Montalais to accept the man at his own valuation
+and give him a place in their household.
+
+The face of fat features was of porcine cast; the forehead low and
+slanted sharply back into bristles of black hair, the snout long and
+blunt, the lips flabby, the chin retreating, the jowls pendulous; the
+eyes a pig's, little, cunning, and predaceous; the complexion sallow
+and pimply from unholy living, with an incongruous over-layer of
+sunburn. A type to inspire distrust, one would think, at sight; a
+nature as repellant as a snake's, and ten times as deadly; in every
+line and lineament, in every move and gesture, an Apache of the
+Apaches...
+
+As for the baleful reflections with which Dupont was patently concerned
+to the exclusion of all considerations of either surveillance or
+environment, Lanyard found himself so inquisitive that he had never a
+thought but to follow and study the fellow till he surprised his
+secret, if possible--at least so long as it might seem safe to do so.
+
+Moreover, nothing could have suited his own purpose better than to
+proceed to Paris by way of Lyons.
+
+Nothing hindered the carrying out of his design. Still lost in thought
+and inattentive, Dupont entrained for Nimes and at that station changed
+to the rapide for Lyons, where duly at four o'clock--with Lanyard still
+a discreet shadow--he alighted in the Gare de Perrache.
+
+Here again fortune favoured the voluntary sleuth. The station was well
+thronged, a circumstance which enabled him to keep inconspicuously
+close to his victim. Furthermore, Dupont was obviously looking for
+somebody, and so distracted. Presently a shabby, furtive little rat of
+a man nudged his elbow, and Dupont followed him to a corner, where they
+confabulated in undertones for many minutes; while Lanyard loitered
+just outside their normal range of vision. An unnecessary precaution:
+they were unafraid of observation, interested only in their private
+concerns. The little man did most of the talking; Dupont seeming
+content with a listening rôle, and gratified by what he heard. He
+nodded frequently, and once or twice a grim smile enhanced the ugliness
+of his mouth, a smile terrible in its contained savagery, fit to make
+one's blood run cold, that cruelly relished in anticipation the success
+of some evil scheme.
+
+Not to be able to hear a word was exasperating to a degree....
+
+The smaller villain produced something--a slip of paper--from a
+waistcoat pocket, and handed it to Dupont, who examined it with
+disfavour, shaking his head repeatedly to the other's recommendations.
+Of a sudden he ended the argument by thrusting the slip back into the
+hands of the jackal, growled a few words of imperative instruction,
+jerked his thumb toward the ticket bureau, and without more ado turned
+and strode from the terminus.
+
+Alone, the little man rolled appealing eyes heavenward. Then he
+shrugged in resignation, and trotted over to the guichet. Lanyard, now
+with no fear of being recognised, ranged alongside and listened openly.
+
+It seemed that, booked for Paris on the rapide to leave at one-twelve
+in the morning, this lesser rascal had been assigned a certain
+sleeping-car berth. Business of displaying the ticket: identified by
+Lanyard as the object over which the conference had split. Now,
+however, it appeared that a friend was to journey to Paris by the same
+train, but in another sleeping-car. It was greatly desired by both that
+they be separated no farther than necessity might dictate, that this
+reservation might be exchanged for another in the same carriage with
+the friend.
+
+Thus far without interruption from the clerk of the ticket bureau. But
+here ensued inevitably the violent French altercation between the two
+human beings on either side of the guichet. Then, as suddenly as it had
+arisen, the squall blew over, an amicable settlement was arrived at,
+the exchange of reservation was effected, the small scoundrel, with ten
+thousand thanks and profuse assurances of deathless esteem, departed
+grinning.
+
+Lanyard secured the rejected berth and went about his business
+profoundly mystified, but not downhearted. Beyond shadow of fair doubt
+Dupont was up to some new devilment, but Lanyard would be surprised if
+its nature failed to develop on the train or at latest upon its arrival
+in Paris the next morning. For the present he was weary of the sight of
+the fat Apache, glad to believe he had seen the last of him for some
+hours; he had much to do on his own part, nothing less in fact than
+utterly to obliterate from human ken the personality of André Duchemin.
+
+This affair involved several purchases; for he was travelling light
+indeed, having left even his rucksack at the Château de Montalais.
+Nevertheless it was no later than seven in the evening when he left a
+room which he had engaged in a hotel so pretentious and heavily
+patronised that he was lost in its ebb and flow of life, an
+inconsiderable and unconsidered bit of flotsam--and left it a changed
+man.
+
+The pointed beard of Monsieur Duchemin was no more; and a little stain,
+artfully applied, had toned the newly exposed flesh to match the tan of
+the rest. The rough tweed walking-suit had been replaced by a modest
+and commonplace blue serge, the cap and heavy brown boots by a straw
+boater and plain black shoes, the loose-throated flannel shirt by one
+of plain linen with stiff cuffs and a fold collar and neat foulard tie.
+So easily was Madame de Sévénié's buccaneer metamorphosed into the
+semblance of a Government clerk!
+
+But this was by no means all. The papers of André Duchemin were crisp
+black ashes in the fireplace of the room which Lanyard had just
+quitted, all but the letter of credit; and this last was enclosed in an
+envelope, to be sent to London by registered post with a covering note
+to request that the unpaid balance be forwarded in French bank-notes to
+Monsieur Paul Martin, poste restante, Paris; Paul Martin being the name
+which appeared on an entirely new set of papers of identification which
+Lanyard had thoughtfully secreted in the lining of the tweed coat
+before leaving London.
+
+If Lanyard wanted better testimony than that supplied by his bedroom
+mirror to the thoroughness of the transformation in his looks, he had
+it unsought, and that twice within an hour.
+
+The first time was when, leaving the hotel to seek the post office and
+despatch his letter to London, he found himself suddenly face to face
+with Dupont, who was seated at a café table near the hotel entrance and
+narrowly scrutinising all who passed in and out; covering this
+occupation with affected interest in the gossip of his companion, the
+little rat man of the Gare de Perrache.
+
+At this rencontre Lanyard knew a momentary shock of doubt; perhaps he
+hadn't been so clever as he had thought himself in trailing Dupont all
+the way from Combe-Re-donde to Lyons. But the beady little eyes of a
+pig comprehended him in a glance, and rejected him as of positively no
+interest to Albert Dupont, a complete stranger and a cheap one at that.
+So he fared serenely on his way, and Dupont gave him never another
+thought.
+
+Returning, Lanyard was favoured with even less attention; an error in
+judgment which enabled him to remark that Dupont was in an ugly temper,
+sullen and snappy, it might be because of a disappointment of some
+sort, possibly in consequence of the liberal potations indicated by the
+tall stack of little saucers at his elbow. As for the lesser villain,
+he was already silly with drink.
+
+One would have been glad of a chance to eavesdrop again upon those two;
+but there was no vacant place within earshot of their table. Besides
+Lanyard wanted his dinner. So he re-entered the hotel and sought its
+restaurant, where the untiring Long Arm of Coincidence took him by the
+hand and led him to a table immediately adjoining one occupied
+exclusively by Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes.
+
+And this one in turn looked Lanyard up and down but, detecting in him
+not the remotest flavour of reminiscence, returned divided attention to
+a soup and the door of the restaurant, which he was watching just as
+closely and impatiently as Dupont, outside, was watching the main
+entrance, and apparently with as little reward for his pains.
+
+But now, Lanyard told himself, one knew what had dragged Dupont in such
+hot haste to Lyons. Somehow word had reached him, probably by
+telegraph, that monsieur le comte was waiting there to keep a
+rendezvous. And if you asked him, Lanyard would confess his firm
+conviction that the other party to the rendezvous would prove to be the
+person (or persons) who had effected the burglary at Château de
+Montalais.
+
+So he settled to keep an eye on monsieur le comte, and promised himself
+an interesting evening.
+
+But as time passed it became evident that there had been a hitch
+somewhere; de Lorgnes was only human, he couldn't rendezvous all by
+himself alone, and nobody turned up to help him out. He was fretting
+when Lanyard first saw him; before his dinner was half served his nerve
+was giving way. Continually his distracted gaze sought the door only to
+turn back in disappointment to his plate. Everlastingly he consulted
+his watch. His appetite failed, the hand that too often carried a glass
+to his lips shook so that drops of wine spattered the cloth like blood;
+he could not even keep a cigarette alive, but burned more matches than
+tobacco. A heavy sweat bedewed his forehead; the ruddy colour of that
+plump countenance grew sadly faded, the good-natured features drawn and
+pinched with worry. By nine o'clock the man was hag-ridden by fear of
+the unknown, by terror of learning what fault had developed in the
+calculations of his confrères.
+
+Efforts to fix his mind on an evening newspaper failed miserably. And
+this was not for lack of interest in the news it published to the
+citizens of Lyons. For Lanyard had a copy of the same sheet, and knew
+that Eve had loyally kept her promise; a brief despatch from Millau
+told of the simultaneous disappearance of one André Duchemin and the
+jewels of Madame de Montalais, and added that the police were already
+active in the case.
+
+At length, unable longer to endure the growing tension of anxiety and
+keep up a pretence of eating, de Lorgnes called for his addition and
+fled the restaurant. Lanyard finished his own meal in haste, and
+arrived in the foyer of the hotel in time to see de Lorgnes settle his
+account at the bureau and hear him instruct a porter to have his
+luggage ready for the one-twelve rapide for Paris. In the meantime,
+anybody who might enquire for Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes should be
+directed to seek him in the café.
+
+Thither Lanyard dutifully repaired; and wasted the rest of that
+evening, which he had thought would prove so amusing, watching Dupont
+and company watch de Lorgnes, to whom Dupont's barely dissembled
+interest plainly meant nothing at all, but whose mental anguish grew to
+be all but unbearable. Nor did the quantities of veeskysoda consumed by
+the unhappy nobleman help him bear it, though undoubtedly he assured
+himself it did. By midnight he was more than half-fuddled and wholly in
+despair. Half an hour later he finished his eighth veeskysoda and wove
+an unsteady but most dignified way back to the foyer of the hotel.
+
+Immediately Dupont and his fellow, both markedly the worse for wear,
+paid and left the café.
+
+Lanyard returned to his room to get a new-bought travelling bag, and
+started for the train afoot, a neat brown paper parcel under one arm.
+On the way he made occasion to cross the Saône by one of its dozen
+bridges, and paused in the middle of the span to meditate upon the
+witchery of the night. When he moved on the brown paper parcel was
+bearing merrily downstream the mortal remains of André Duchemin, that
+is to say his discarded clothing.
+
+In the Gare de Perrache Lanyard witnessed an affecting farewell scene
+between the little man and Dupont. Not much to his surprise he
+discovered that the former was not travelling to Paris that night,
+after all; it was on Dupont's account alone that he had taken so much
+trouble to secure the change of reservation.
+
+And when Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes had wavered through the gateway
+in tow of a luggage-laden porter; and Dupont had torn himself away from
+his fond familiar and lurched after the count; and Lanyard, after a
+little wait, had followed in turn: he was able to see for himself that
+Dupont had contrived to be berthed in the same carriage with de
+Lorgnes; proving that he did not mean to let the count out of sight,
+day or night.
+
+Well weary, Lanyard proceeded to his own compartment, in the car ahead,
+and turned in. A busy day, and not altogether unprofitable; whatever
+expectations had been thwarted in this mild outcome, one had learned
+much; and to-morrow one would resume the chase anew and, one rather
+fancied, learn a deal more.
+
+But he was not of those who sleep well on trains. In spite of his
+extreme fatigue he woke up every time the rapide stopped. He was awake
+at Dijon, at four in the morning, and again at Laroche, about a quarter
+after six. There, peering out of the window to identify the station, he
+was startled to see the broad, round-shouldered back of Albert Dupont
+making away across the rails--leaving the train!
+
+It was not feasible to dress and pursue, even had it been wise. And
+Lanyard was vexed. Dupont, he felt, was hardly playing fair, after
+giving one every reason to believe he meant to go through to Paris. And
+what under heaven did the brute think to accomplish in Laroche? Was he
+still after the Comte de Lorgnes? Then the latter must likewise have
+fled the train! Or else ...
+
+Something sinister in the slant of the Dupont shoulders, as he
+vanished, something indescribably evil in his furtive yet heavy tread
+of a beast of prey, struck a thrill of horror into the mind of Lanyard.
+He shuddered, and warned himself he must learn to hold his imagination
+in better check.
+
+The newspapers of Paris, that day, had a sensation that crushed into
+insignificance the news from Château de Montalais: in a compartment
+which he had occupied alone on the night rapide from Lyons, a man had
+been found with his throat cut, his clothing ripped to rags, even his
+luggage slashed to ribbons.
+
+Whether through chance or intention, every possible clue to the
+victim's identity was missing.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+ATHENAIS
+
+
+In London, about noon of that day, a gentleman whom Lanyard most often
+thought of by the name of Wertheimer deciphered a code message whose
+contempt for customary telegraphic brevity was quite characteristic of
+the sender, indeed a better voucher for his bona fides than the
+initials appended in place of a signature. With some editing in the
+way of punctuation, it follows:
+
+"Dear old bean:--Please advise Prefecture de Police without revealing
+your source of information, unidentified man found murdered on rapide
+arriving Gare de Lyon eight-thirty this morning stopped yesterday Hôtel
+Terminus, Lyons, under name of Comte de Lorgnes. During entire evening
+before entraining he was shadowed by two Apaches, one of whom, passing
+as Albert Dupont--probably recent and temporary alias--booked through
+to Paris occupying berth in same carriage with Lorgnes, but detrained
+Laroche six-fifteen, murder remaining undiscovered till arrival in
+Paris. [An admirably succinct sketch of the physical Dupont is here
+deleted.] 'In return for gift of this opportunity to place Préfecture
+under obligations, please do me a service. As stranger in Paris I crave
+passionately to review Night Life of Great City but am naturally timid
+about going about alone after dark. Only society of beautiful,
+accomplished, well-informed and agreeable lady of proved discretion can
+put me thoroughly at ease. If you can recommend one such to me by
+telegraph, stipulating her amiability must begin to function this
+evening, you may depend on my not hesitating to ask further favours as
+occasion may arise. Presume you have heard your old friend Duchemin,
+now missing, is suspected of looting jewels of Madame de Montalais,
+Château de Montalais, near Millau. He counts on your discretion to
+preserve secret of his innocence pending further advices. Paul Martin
+here stopping Hotel Chatham. Toodle-oo.
+
+"M. L."
+
+A telegram from London addressed to M. Paul Martin, Hotel Chatham,
+Paris, was delivered late in the afternoon:
+
+"Préfecture tipped off. Many thanks. Heartfelt regrets poor Duchemin's
+success keeping out of gaol. Uneasy about him as long as he remains at
+large. Fully appreciate you cannot trust yourself alone in the dark.
+Therefore cheerfully delegating preservation your virtue while in Paris
+to Mlle. Athenais Reneaux, maiden lady mature charms whom I beg you
+will respect as you would my sister. Wishing you enjoyable intellectual
+evening--
+
+"W."
+
+It needed receipt of a petit-bleu, while he was dressing for dinner, to
+cure Lanyard of an attack of premonitory shivers brought on by
+recollection of the awful truth that one is never really safe in
+trifling with an Englishman's sense of humour. "Dear monsieur
+Martin:--It is too sweet of you to remember your promise to ask me to
+dine the first time you came to Paris. Since you leave it to me, shall
+we say the Ritz, at half past seven? In case your memory for faces is
+poor--it has been a long time since we met, hasn't it?--I shall be
+wearing the conventional fast black with my very best ingenue
+expression; and my feather fan will be flame-coloured.
+
+"Always to you--
+
+"Athenais Reneaux."
+
+Now that sounded more like ...
+
+Only it was a bit debilitating to contemplate, as the mirror insisted
+one must, the shortcomings of machine-made evening clothes, whose
+obviously exorbitant cost as a post-War luxury did nothing to make
+amends for their utter want of personal feeling. For one needs sympathy
+in a dress-coat quite as much as cloth.
+
+Still, it was a tolerably personable figure that suffered Lanyard's
+critical inspection. And an emergency is an emergency. Those readily
+serviceable clothes were of more value than the most superbly tailored
+garments that could possibly have been made up for him in any
+reasonable length of time. For to-morrow night it might, and as Lanyard
+held surely would, be too late to accomplish what he hoped to
+accomplish to-night, and for whose accomplishment evening dress was
+indispensable. Since Wertheimer had passed the word on, the name of the
+Comte de Lorgnes would be published to the world in the morning papers,
+and by evening the birds, if they were wise, would be in full flight.
+Whereas to-night, while still that poor mutilated body lay nameless in
+the Morgue...
+
+Mademoiselle Athenais Reneaux lived up in most gratifying fashion to
+the tone of her note. In the very beginning she demonstrated excellent
+discretion by failing to be on hand and eager when Lanyard strolled
+into the Ritz on the minute of their appointment. To the contrary she
+was all of twenty-five minutes late; a circumstance so consistently
+feminine as to rob their meeting of any taint of the extraordinary;
+they might have been simple sweethearts meeting to dine remote from
+jealous or censorious eyes, rather than one of the most useful Parisian
+agents of the British Secret Service under orders to put her talents at
+the disposition of a man who was to her nothing more than an everyday
+name.
+
+She swept spiritedly into the lounge of the Ritz, a tall, fair girl,
+very good-looking indeed and brilliantly costumed, and placed Monsieur
+Paul Martin in one glance, on the instant of his calculated start of
+recognition. At once her face lighted up with a charming smile--few
+women could boast teeth as white and fine--and almost before Lanyard
+could extricate himself from his chair she was at pause before him,
+holding his hand.
+
+"Paul!" she cried in lilting accents. "I'm so glad! It's been simply
+ages.... And looking so well! I don't believe you've changed a bit."
+
+The nicely judged pitch of her voice, neither so high nor so low as to
+attract more than passing attention, won approval which Lanyard put
+into the pressure of his lips upon her hand and the bow, at once
+punctilious and intimate, that accompanied it.
+
+"And you, Athenais, always exquisite, but to-day...Truly one has never
+seen you looking better."
+
+"Flattery," she commented. "But I love it!"
+
+Meanwhile her gaze, that seemed so constant to his eyes, reviewed other
+people in the lounge in one swift, searching glance, and returned to
+Lanyard with a droop of the lashes, imperceptible to all but him, that
+signified there was no one present likely in her esteem to prove
+dangerous to their peace of mind.
+
+"Flattery? To you? But impossible!"
+
+He delighted her, and she showed it openly. But her lips said only:
+"Have I kept you waiting a frightfully long time, poor boy?"
+
+"Let your appetite accuse you, Athenais."
+
+"But I am starving!"
+
+"Then, as I take it, nothing on earth can prevent our going in to
+dinner."
+
+Lanyard had already consulted with the maître d'hôtel over the menu and
+the reservation. As the two settled down at a table on the side of the
+room, not conspicuously far from any other in use, and at the same time
+comfortably detached, their iced melon was waiting to be served.
+
+"Always the most thoughtful of men," Mademoiselle Reneaux declared. "No
+fussing with the carte, no thrusting it into one's hand and saying:
+'See anything you'd like, my dear? I rather fancy the boeuf-à-la-mode
+for myself!' That's why I'd adore dining with you, Paul, even if I
+didn't adore you for yourself."
+
+"One is well repaid when one's modest efforts are so well appreciated."
+
+"Blague, my friend, sheer blague. You know you relish a good dinner of
+your own ordering far more than anybody's appreciation, even mine."
+
+The waiters had retired, leaving them alone in a momentary oasis of
+public isolation.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Lanyard in more formal vein, "I am sure,
+underestimates my capacity for appreciation. May one venture to
+compliment mademoiselle, who is marvellous in so many bewitching ways?"
+
+"Why not, monsieur? Was ever music sweeter?" The girl laughed; then her
+eyes sobered while her features retained their appearance of complete
+amusement. "Monsieur received a telegram this afternoon?"
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle. And you?"
+
+"It is here--since I am. May I see yours?"
+
+With a gay gesture she handed over her telegram from London and took
+his in exchange.
+
+The ordinary cipher of the B. S. S. was as readily intelligible to both
+as if the messages had been couched in open French or English.
+
+Lanyard read:
+
+"Kindly place yourself beginning with dinner to-night and for duration
+his stay in Paris at the commands of Paul Martin, Hôtel Chatham,
+lunatic but harmless and of great value to us. He seems to be at
+present concerned with some affair outside our knowledge, but
+presumably desperate, else he would not be interested. Please exert
+best endeavours to get him out of France alive as soon as possible."
+
+The girl was laughing as she returned Lanyard's telegram and received
+her own.
+
+"'Mature charms'!" she pouted. "'Enjoyable intellectual evening'! Oh,
+how depressing! Poor Paul! but you must have felt discouraged."
+
+"I did--at first."
+
+"And afterwards--?"
+
+"Disappointed."
+
+"And are you going to obey that injunction to treat me as somebody's
+sister?"
+
+"Never in my life!"
+
+"How then?"
+
+"As anybody's wife." Perplexity knitted a little pucker in her
+delicately lined brows.
+
+"Paul! you couldn't speak French so well and be an Englishman!"
+
+"I assure you, Athenais, I am--mentally--a native of France."
+
+She sighed luxuriously. "What an amusing prospect! And this is the sort
+of man at whose commands I am required to place myself."
+
+"Not required, Athenais, requested--begged, besought!"
+
+"I like that better. And," she enquired demurely, "may one ask what
+are monsieur's commands?"
+
+"First: you will continue to flirt with me as at
+present--outrageously."
+
+"Even when you make it so difficult?"
+
+"And then, to waste an evening in my society."
+
+"Must it be wasted?"
+
+"That will be as it falls out."
+
+"And what do we do with this evening of such questionable value?"
+
+"We finish dinner here at our leisure; we smoke and chat a while in the
+lounge, if you like, or if nothing better offers we go to a play; and
+then you will take me by the hand, if you please, mademoiselle..."
+
+"In the maternal manner appropriate to mature charms, I presume?"
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"You will--always remembering that my interest in such things is merely
+academic--you will then lead me hither and yon, as your whim lists, and
+show me how Paris amuses itself in these days of its nocturnal
+decadence. You will dutifully pretend to drink much more champagne than
+is good for you and to be enjoying yourself as you seldom have before.
+If I discover an interest in people I may chance to see, you will be
+good enough to tell me who they are and--other details concerning their
+ways of life."
+
+"If I know."
+
+"But I am sure you know everyone worth knowing in Paris, Athenais."
+
+"Then--if I am right in assuming you are looking for some person in
+particular--"
+
+"You have reason, mademoiselle."
+
+"I run the risk of losing an entertaining evening."
+
+"Not necessarily. Besides, there are many evenings. Are you not at my
+commands for the duration of my stay in Paris?"
+
+"True. So I will have to chance my perilous question.... I presume one
+can't help being true to the traditions of one's sex."
+
+"Inquisitive, you mean? But what else is every thinking creature, male
+or female? What are men of science? What--?"
+
+"But it was Eve who first--"
+
+"Ah! raking up old scandal, eh? But I'll wager something it was really
+Adam who--taking a purely scientific interest in the business--egged
+Eve on to try a bite of apple, asserting that the domestic menu lacked
+variety, telling himself if she died of it, it would only cost him
+another rib to replace her, and cheap at the price."
+
+"Paul: you are too gallant. Wait till I try to find out something about
+you, directly or indirectly, and see what you will then have to say
+about the curiosity of women."
+
+"But I shouldn't mind, it would be too flattering. So dig away."
+
+"I will. Who is it you're looking for in Paris after midnight?"
+
+"Anyone of several people." "Perhaps I know them. It might save time if
+you would give me their names."
+
+"Now it is you who ask me to risk losing an enjoyable evening. But so
+be it. Le Comte de Lorgnes?"
+
+Mademoiselle Reneaux looked blank.
+
+"Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes?"
+
+The young woman shook her head.
+
+"Both of a class sure to be conspicuous in such places as Maxim's,"
+Lanyard explained. "The names, then, are probably fictitious."
+
+"If you could describe them, perhaps--?"
+
+"Useless, I am afraid; neither is an uncommon type. Any word picture of
+either would probably fit anyone of a score of people of the same life.
+Are you then acquainted with a man named Phinuit--given name
+unknown--an American?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Mr. Whitaker Monk, of New York?"
+
+"The millionaire?"
+
+"That is quite possible."
+
+"He made his money in munitions, I believe," the girl reflected--"or
+perhaps it was oil."
+
+"Then you do know him?"
+
+"I met him one night, or rather one morning several weeks ago, with a
+gay party that joined ours at breakfast at Pré-Catelan."
+
+"And do we still drive out to Pré-Catelan to milk the cows after an
+adventurous night, mademoiselle?" She nodded; and Lanyard sighed: "It
+is true, then: man ages, his follies never."
+
+"A quaint little stupid," the girl mused.
+
+"Pardon, mademoiselle?"
+
+"I was thinking of Whitaker Monk."
+
+"Quaint, I grant you. But hardly little, or stupid. A tall man, as thin
+as a diet, with a face like a comic mask of tragedy..."
+
+"Paul dear," said Athenais Reneaux more in sorrow than in anger:
+"somebody has been taking advantage of your trusting nature. Whitaker
+Monk is short, hopelessly stout, and the most commonplace person
+imaginable."
+
+"Then it would appear," Lanyard commented ruefully, "one did wisely to
+telegraph London for a keeper. Let us get hence, if you don't mind, and
+endeavour to forget my shame in strong drink and the indecorous dances
+of an unregenerate generation."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND
+
+
+Lanyard and Athenais Reneaux had dawdled over dinner and coffee and
+cigarettes with so much tacit deliberation that, by the time Lanyard
+suggested they might move on, it was too late for a play and still a
+bit too early to begin the contemplated round of all-night restaurants.
+Also, it was too warm for a music-hall.
+
+So they killed another hour at the Ambassadeurs, where they were
+fortunate in getting good places and the entertainment imposed no
+strain upon the attention; where, too, the audience, though
+heterogeneous, was sufficiently well-dressed and well-mannered to
+impart to a beautiful lady and her squire a pleasant consciousness of
+being left very much to themselves in an amusing expression of a
+civilisation cynical and self-sufficient.
+
+But that was so wherever they went that night; and, in a sense, they
+went everywhere. In no city in the world is the doctrine of
+go-as-you-please-but-mind-your-own-business more studiously inculcated
+by example than in Paris, especially in its hours of relaxation.
+Lanyard had not been so long an exile as to have forgotten his way
+about entirely, and with what was new since his time Mademoiselle
+Reneaux was thoroughly acquainted. And if he felt himself rather a
+ghost revisiting glimpses of a forgotten moon, if all the odalisques
+were new to his vision and all the sultans strange, if never an eye
+that scanned his face turned back for a second look in uncertain
+reminiscence, he had to console him the company of a young woman whom
+everybody seemed to know and admire and like. In none of the resorts
+they visited did she fail to greet or be hailed by a handful of
+acquaintances. Yet they were generously let alone.
+
+As to that, Lanyard could not complain. The truth was that, despite the
+dark thread of sober purpose which ran through those tolerably purple
+hours, he was being excellently entertained. Not by this sad business
+of scampering from one place of dubious fame to another; not by any
+reckless sense of rejuvenation to be distilled from the practice of
+buying champagne at each stop--and leaving every bottle barely tasted;
+not by those colourful, dissolving tableaux, always much the same in
+composition if set against various backgrounds, of under-dressed women
+sitting with concupiscent men and swallowing cold poisons in quantities
+calculated to spur them into the frenzy of semi-orgiastic dances: by
+none of these, but simply by the society of a woman of a type perhaps
+not unique but novel in his experience and intriguing to his
+understanding.
+
+If there were anybody or thing a girl of her age--Athenais was about
+twenty-five--shouldn't know, she knew him, her or it; if there were any
+place she shouldn't go, she either went or had been there; if there
+were anything she shouldn't do or say or think or countenance, those
+things she--within limitations--did and said and thought and accepted
+or passed over as matters of fact and no consequence. And though she
+observed scrupulously certain self-imposed limitations she never made
+this obvious, she simply avoided what she chose to consider bad taste
+with a deftness and tact that would have seemed admirable in a woman of
+the great world twice her age. And with it all she preserved a sort of
+champagne effervescence of youthful spirits and an easy-going
+cameraderie incomprehensible when one took into consideration the
+disillusioning circumstances of her life, her vocation as a paid
+government spy, trusted with secrets and worthy of her trust, dedicated
+to days of adventure always dangerous, generally sordid, and like at
+any time to prove deadly.
+
+Young, beautiful, admirably poised, accomplished and intelligent, she
+should by rights have been wrapped up in love of some man her peer in
+all these attributes. But she wasn't; or she said she wasn't in one of
+those moments of gravity which served to throw into higher relief the
+light-heartedness of her badinage with Lanyard; asserting an entirely
+willing disposition to stand aside and play the pensive, amused,
+indulgent spectator in the masque of love danced by a world mad for it,
+grasping for love greedily even in its cheapest shapes and guises.
+
+"If it comes," she sighed, "it will find me waiting, and not unwilling.
+But it will have to come in another form than those I know about."
+
+"My dear," said Lanyard, "be unafraid: it always does."
+
+She called herself Athenais Reneaux, but she didn't pretend to Lanyard
+that she had no better title to another name. Her French was of the
+purest, a delight to listen to, yet she was in fact less French than
+English. Her paternal forebears to the third generation had lived in
+England and married Englishwomen, she said; and more than this much
+about herself, nothing; perhaps deriving some gratification from
+leaving such broad fields of conjecture open to the interest which an
+enigmatic personality never failed to excite.
+
+"But I think you're quite as much of a mystery as you pretend to see in
+me. It's rather nice, don't you think? At least, it gives us an
+interest in each other aside from sentiment. Some day, perhaps, we'll
+each know All."
+
+"Now God forbid!"
+
+"Are you so afraid of learning my girlish secrets then? I don't believe
+you. I don't believe you'd even care to hear--"
+
+"Athenais!" Lanyard protested in a hollow voice.
+
+"Non, mon ami." She judged him shrewdly with narrowed, smiling eyes.
+"You flirt with far too much finish, you know. It can't be done to such
+perfection when the heart's truly involved. But for one thing--and if
+only you'd be a little more tragic about your disappointments to-night;
+for you haven't yet asked me a single question about anybody we've
+met--"
+
+"No: thus far we've drawn every cover blank," he groaned; for it was
+after three in the morning.
+
+"Very well. But for this and that, I'd be tempted to think you were
+sleuthing on the trail of some female fair but faithless. But you're
+taking all with entirely too much resignation; there's a contented glow
+in the back of your eyes--"
+
+"I'm having a good time."
+
+"It's pretty of you to tell me so. But that's not the reason for your
+self-complacence."
+
+"See here," Lanyard interrupted, sitting up and signalling to the
+waiter for his bill: "if I let you run on the way you're heading,
+you'll presently be telling me something you've found out about me and
+I don't want to hear."
+
+"Oh, very well," she sighed. "I'm sure I don't wish to embarrass you.
+But I will say this: Men of your uncertain age don't go round with such
+contented eyes unless they're prosperously in love."
+
+"Oh, come along!" Lanyard growled, offering to rise. "You know too
+confounded much." He waited a moment, and then as she did nothing but
+sit and glimmer at him mischievously, he added: "Shall we go?"
+
+"Where now?" she enquired without stirring.
+
+He had a shrug of distaste. "Maxim's, I presume. Unless you can suggest
+some other place, more likely and less tedious."
+
+"No," she replied after taking thought; "I can't. We've covered Paris
+pretty thoroughly to-night; all except the tourist places."
+
+"No good wasting time on them."
+
+"Then let's stop on here till it's time to milk the cows."
+
+"Pré-Catelan? But there's Maxim's left--"
+
+"Only another tourist show nowadays. And frightfully rowdy."
+
+"Sounds like the lot I'm after. Come along."
+
+She shook her head vigorously. "Shan't!" His eyebrows rose in mute
+enquiry. "Because I don't want to," she explained with childlike
+candour. "I'm tired of being dragged around and plied with drink. Do
+you realise I've had as much as two and a half glasses of champagne
+to-night, out of the countless bottles you've ordered? Well, I have,
+and they're doing their work: I feel the spirit of independence surging
+in my midst. I mutiny and defy you!" A peal of laughter rewarded the
+instinctive glance with which he sought to judge how far he was
+justified in taking her seriously. "Not only that, but you're
+neglecting me. I want to dance, and you haven't asked me in fully half
+an hour; and you're a heavenly dancer--and so am I!" She thrust back
+her end of their wall table and rose. "If you please, monsieur."
+
+One could hardly resent such charming impertinence. Lanyard drew a long
+face of mock patience, sighed an heroic sigh, and followed her through
+the huddled tables to the dancing floor. A bewildering look rewarded
+him as they swung into the first movement of a tango.
+
+"Do you know you are a dangerous man, Monsieur Paul Martin?"
+
+"Oh, mademoiselle!"
+
+"Such fortitude, such forbearance--when I ought to be
+slapped--enchants, disarms, makes me remember I am a woman, foredoomed
+always to yield. I abjure my boasted independence, monsieur, I submit.
+It shall be as you wish: on to Maxim's--after this one dance. You know,
+it's the last really good music we'll have to dance to--our last dance
+together, perhaps--who knows?--forever!"
+
+She pretended to be overcome; the lithe body in his embrace sketched a
+fugitive seizure of sadness, drooping with a wistful languour well
+suited to the swooning measures to which they swayed and postured.
+
+His hand was pressed convulsively. She seemed momentarily about to
+become a burden in his grasp, yet ever to recover just on the instant
+of failing, buoyed up by the steely resilience of her lithe and slender
+body. Impossible to say how much was pretence, how much impulsive
+confession of true feeling! Perplexed, perturbed, Lanyard gazed down
+into that richly tinted face which, with eyes half-curtained and lips
+half-parted, seemed to betray so much, yet to his next glance was
+wholly illegible and provoking. Aware that with such women man's vanity
+misleads him woefully, and aware that she was equally awake to this
+masculine weakness, he wondered, afraid even to guess, telling himself
+he were an ass to believe, a fool to deny....
+
+Then suddenly he saw her lashes sweep up to unveil eyes at once
+mirthful and admonitory; her hungry mouth murmured incongruously an
+edged warning. "Play up, Paul--play up to me! We dance too well
+together not to be watched; and if I'm not mistaken, someone you're
+interested in has just come in. No: don't look yet, just remember we're
+madly enamoured, you and I--and don't care a rap who sees it."
+
+Strung by her words into a spirit of emulation, Lanyard achieved an
+adequate seeming of response to the passion, feigned or real, with
+which the woman infused the patterned coquetry of their steps.
+
+Between lips that stirred so little their movement must have been
+indiscernible, he asked: "Who?"
+
+In the same manner, but in accents fraught with an emotion
+indecipherable but intense the reply came: "Don't talk! This is too
+divine ... Just dance!"
+
+He obeyed, deliberately shut out of his thoughts the warning she had
+given him, and let himself go, body and mind, so that, a sway to the
+sensuous strains of that most sensuous of dances, the girl and the man
+for a space seemed one with music that throbbed of love and longing,
+desire and denial, pursuit and retreat, surrender and conquest....
+
+On a sonorous phrase it ceased. A flutter of applause ran round the
+tables. Lanyard mastered a sense of daze that he saw reflected in the
+opening eyes of the woman as she slipped from his arms. In an instant
+they were themselves once more, two completely self-contained children
+of sophistication, with superb insouciance making nothing of their
+public triumph in a rare and difficult performance.
+
+On the way to their table they were intercepted by a woman who, with
+two cavaliers, had since the moment of her entrance been standing near
+the door of the restaurant, apparently spellbound with admiration.
+Through a rising clatter of tongues her voice cut clearly but not at
+all unpleasantly.
+
+"Athenais! It is I--Liane."
+
+Inured as he was to the manners of an age which counts its women not
+dressed if they are not half undressed, and with his sensibilities
+further calloused by a night devoted to restaurants the entrée to
+which, for women, seemed to be conditioned on at least semi-nudity,
+Lanyard was none the less inclined to think he had never seen, this
+side of footlights, a gown quite so daring as that which revealed the
+admirably turned person of the lady who named herself Liane. There was
+so little of it that, he reflected, its cost must have been something
+enormous. But in vain that scantiness of drapery: the white body rose
+splendidly out of its ineffective wrappings only to be overwhelmed by
+an incredible incrustation of jewellery: only here and there did bare
+hand's-breadths of flesh unadorned succeed in making themselves
+visible.
+
+At the sound of her name Athenais turned with a perfectly indicated
+start of surprise which she promptly translated into a little, joyful
+cry. The living pillar of ivory, satin and precious stones ran into her
+arms, embraced her ardently, and kissed both her cheeks, then releasing
+her half-turned to Lanyard.
+
+Glints of trifling malice winked behind the open interest of troubling,
+rounded eyes of violet. Lanyard knew himself known.
+
+So he had sacrificed for nothing his beautiful beard!
+
+He uttered a private but heartfelt "Damn!" and bowed profoundly as the
+woman, tapping Athenais on the arm with a fan crusted with diamonds,
+demanded:
+
+"Present instantly, my dear, this gentleman who tangoes as I have never
+seen the tango danced before!"
+
+Forestalling Athenais, Lanyard replied with a whimsical grimace: "Is
+one, then, so unfortunate as to have been forgotten by Madame la
+Comtesse de Lorgnes?"
+
+With any other woman than Athenais Reneaux he would have hesitated to
+deal so bold an offensive stroke; but his confidence in her quickness
+of apprehension and her unshakable self-possession was both implicit
+and well-placed. For she received this overt notification of the
+success of his quest without one sign other than a look of dawning
+puzzlement.
+
+"Madame la comtesse...?" she murmured with a rising inflection.
+
+"But monsieur is mistaken," the other stammered, biting her lip.
+
+"Surely one cannot have been so stupid!" Lanyard apologised.
+
+"But this is Mademoiselle Delorme," Athenais said ... "Monsieur Paul
+Martin."
+
+Liane Delorme! Those syllables were like a spoken spell to break the
+power of dark enchantment which had hampered Lanyard's memory ever
+since first sight of this woman in the Café de l'Univers at Nant. A
+great light began to flood his understanding, but he was denied time to
+advantage himself immediately of its illumination: Liane Delorme was
+quick to parry and riposte.
+
+"How strange monsieur should think he had ever known me by a name ...
+What was it? But no matter! For now I look more closely, I myself
+cannot get over the impression that I have known Monsieur--Martin, did
+you say?--somewhere, sometime ... But Paul Martin? Not unless monsieur
+has more than one name."
+
+"Then it would seem that mademoiselle and I are both in error. The loss
+is mine."
+
+That gun spiked, Lanyard began to breathe more freely. "It is not too
+late to make up that loss, monsieur." Liane Delorme was actually
+chuckling in appreciation of his readiness, pleased with him even in
+the moment of her own discomfiture; her eyes twinkling merrily at him
+above the fan with which she hid a convulsed countenance. "Surely two
+people so possessed with regret at never having known each other should
+lose no time improving their acquaintance! Dear Athenais: do ask us to
+sit at your table."
+
+While the waiter fetched additional chairs, the woman made her escorts
+known: Messieurs Benouville et Le Brun, two extravagantly insignificant
+young men, exquisitely groomed and presumably wealthy, who were making
+the bravest efforts to seem unaware that to be seen with Liane Delorme
+conferred an unimpeachable cachet. Lanyard remarked, however, that
+neither ventured to assume proprietorial airs; while Liane's attitude
+toward them was generally indulgent, if occasionally patronising and
+sometimes impatient.
+
+Champagne frothed into fresh glasses. As soon as the band struck up
+another dance, Athenais drifted away in the arms of Monsieur Le Brun.
+Liane gazed round the room, acknowledged the salutations of several
+friends, signalled gaily to a pair of mercenaries on the far side of
+the dancing floor, and issued peremptory orders to Benouville.
+
+"Go, Chu-chu, and ask Angele to dance with you. She is being left to
+bore herself while Victor dances with Constance. Moreover, I desire to
+afflict Monsieur Martin with my confidences."
+
+With the utmost docility Benouville effaced himself.
+
+"Eh, bien, Monsieur Duchemin!"
+
+"Eh, bien, madame la comtesse?" Liane sipped at her champagne, making
+impudent eyes at Lanyard over the brim of her glass.
+
+"By what appears, you have at last torn yourself away from the charming
+society of the Château de Montalais."
+
+"As you see."
+
+"That was a long visit you made at the château, my old one?"
+
+"Madame la comtesse is well informed," Lanyard returned, phlegmatic.
+
+"One hears what one hears."
+
+"One had the misfortune to fall foul of an assassin," Lanyard took the
+trouble to explain.
+
+"An assassin!"
+
+"The same Apache who attacked--with others--the party from Montalais at
+Montpellier-le-Vieux."
+
+"And you were wounded?"
+
+Lanyard assented. The lady made a shocked face and uttered appropriate
+noises. "As you know," Lanyard added.
+
+Liane Delorme pretended not to hear that last. "And the ladies of the
+château," she enquired--"they were sympathetic, one feels sure?"
+
+"They were most kind."
+
+"It was not serious, this wound--no?"
+
+"Mademoiselle may judge when she knows I was unable to leave my bed for
+nearly three weeks."
+
+"But what atrocity! And this Apache--?"
+
+"Remains at large."
+
+"Ah, these police!" And the lady described a sign of contempt that was
+wholly unladylike. "Still, you are well recovered, by the way you
+dance."
+
+"One cannot complain."
+
+"What an experience! Still--" Liane again buried her nose in her glass
+and regarded Lanyard with a look of mysterious understanding.
+Re-emerging, she resumed: "Still, not without its compensations, eh,
+mon ami?"
+
+"That is as one regards it, mademoiselle."
+
+"Oh! oh!" There was any amount of deep significance in these
+exclamations. "One may regard that in more ways than one."
+
+"Indeed," Lanyard agreed with his most winning manner: "One may for
+instance remember that I recovered speedily enough to be in Paris
+to-night and meet mademoiselle without losing time."
+
+"Monsieur wishes me to flatter myself into thinking he did me the
+honour of desiring to find me to-night?"
+
+"Or any other. Do not depreciate the potency of your charms,
+mademoiselle. Who, having seen you once, could help hoping to see you
+again?"
+
+"My friend," said Liane, with a pursed, judgmatical mouth, "I think you
+are much too amiable."
+
+"But I assure you, never a day has passed, no, nor yet a night, that I
+have not dwelt upon the thought of you, since you made so effective an
+entrance to the château, a vision of radiant beauty, out of that night
+of tempest and fury."
+
+Liane drooped a coy head. "Monsieur compliments me too much."
+
+"Impossible!"
+
+"Is one, then, to understand that monsieur is making love to me?"
+
+Lanyard pronounced coolly: "No."
+
+That won another laugh of personal appreciation. "What then, mon ami?"
+
+"Figure to yourself that one may often dream of the unattainable
+without aspiring to possess it."
+
+"Unattainable?" Liane repeated in a liquid voice: "What a dismal word,
+monsieur!" "It means what it means, mademoiselle."
+
+"To the contrary, monsieur, it means what you wish it to mean. You
+should revise your lexicon."
+
+"Now it is mademoiselle who is too flattering. And where is that good
+Monsieur Monk to-night?"
+
+The woman overlooked the innuendo; or, rather, buried it under a
+landslide of emotional acting.
+
+"Ah, monsieur! but I am desolated, inconsolable. He has gone away!"
+
+"Monsieur Monk?" Lanyard opened his eyes wide.
+
+"Who else? He has left France, he has returned to his barbarous
+America, with his beautiful motor car, his kind heart, and all his
+millions!"
+
+"And the excellent Phinuit?"
+
+"That one as well."
+
+"How long ago?"
+
+"A week to-morrow they did sail from Cherbourg. It is a week since
+anyone has heard me laugh."
+
+Lanyard compassionately fished a bottle out of the cooler and refilled
+her glass.
+
+"Accept, mademoiselle, every assurance of my profound sympathy."
+
+"You have a heart, my friend," she said, and drank with the feverish
+passion of the disconsolate.
+
+"And one very truly at mademoiselle's service."
+
+Liane sniffed mournfully and dabbed at her nose with a ridiculous
+travesty of a handkerchief. "Be so kind," she said in a tearful voice,
+though her eyes were quite dry and, if one looked closely,
+calculating--"a cigarette."
+
+One inferred that the storm was over. Lanyard tendered his cigarette
+case, and then a match, wondering what next. What he had reason to
+anticipate was sure to come, the only question was when. Not that it
+mattered when; he was ready for it at any time. And there was no hurry:
+Athenais, finding herself paired with an un-commonly good dancer in Le
+Brun, was considerately making good use of this pretext for remaining
+on the floor--there were two bands to furnish practically continuous
+music--and leave Lanyard to finish uninterrupted what she perfectly
+understood to be a conversation of considerable moment.
+
+As for Benouville, he was much too well trained to dream of returning
+without being bidden by Liane Delorme.
+
+"But it is wonderful," murmured that one, pensive.
+
+And there was that in her tone to make Lanyard mentally prick forward
+his ears. He sketched a point of interrogation.
+
+"To encounter so much understanding in one who is a complete stranger."
+
+("'Complete'?" Lanyard considered. "I think it's coming...")
+
+"Monsieur must not think me unappreciative."
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle!" he protested sadly--"but you forget so easily."
+
+"That we have met before, when I term you a complete stranger?"
+
+"Well... yes."
+
+"It is because I would not be in monsieur's debt!"
+
+"Pardon?"
+
+"I will repay sympathy with sympathy. I have already forgotten that I
+ever visited the Château de Montalais. So how should I remember I met
+monsieur there under the name of... but I forget."
+
+"The name of Duchemin?"
+
+"I never knew there was such a name--I swear!--before I saw it in type
+to-day."
+
+"In type?"
+
+"Monsieur does not read the papers?"
+
+"Not all of them, mademoiselle."
+
+"It appeared in Le Matin to-day, this quaint name Duchemin, in a
+despatch from Millau stating that a person of that name, a guest of the
+Château de Montalais, had disappeared without taking formal leave of
+his hosts."
+
+"One gathers that he took something else?"
+
+"Nothing less than the world-known Anstruther collection of jewels, the
+property of Madame de Montalais née Anstruther."
+
+"But I am recently from the Château de Montalais, and in a position to
+assure mademoiselle that this poor fellow, Duchemin, is unjustly
+accused."
+
+"Oh, ho, ho!"
+
+He heard again that laugh of broad derision which had seemed so out of
+character with a great lady when he had heard it first, that night now
+nearly a month old.
+
+"Mademoiselle does not believe?"
+
+"I think monsieur must be a good friend to this Monsieur Duchemin."
+
+"I confess I entertain a sneaking fondness for his memory."
+
+"You can hardly call yourself an impartial judge--"
+
+"It is nevertheless true he did not steal the jewels."
+
+"Then tell me who did take them."
+
+"Unfortunately for Duchemin, that remains a mystery."
+
+"Rather, I should say, fortunately for him."
+
+"You would wrong him, then."
+
+"But why, if innocent, did he run away?"
+
+"I imagine, because he knew he would surely be accused, in which case
+ancient history would be revived to prove him guilty beyond a question
+in the mind of any sane court."
+
+"Does one understand he had a history?"
+
+"I have heard it intimated such was the case."
+
+"But I remain in the dark. The theft presumably was not discovered till
+after his disappearance. Yet, according to your contention, he must
+have known of it in advance. How do you account for that?"
+
+"Mademoiselle would make a famous juge d'instruction."
+
+"That does not answer my argument."
+
+"How is one to answer it? Who knows how Duchemin discovered the theft
+before the ladies of the château did?"
+
+"Do you know what you make me think? That he was not as innocent as you
+assert."
+
+"Mademoiselle will explain?"
+
+"I have a suspicion that this Monsieur Duchemin was guilty in
+intention; but when it came to put his intention into execution, he
+found he had been anticipated."
+
+"Mademoiselle is too clever for me. Now I should never have thought of
+that."
+
+"He would have been wiser to stay and fight it out. The very fact of
+his flight confesses his guilt."
+
+"Perhaps he did not remember that until too late."
+
+"And now nothing can clear him. How sad for him! A chance meeting with
+one who is not his friend, a whispered word to the Préfecture, or the
+nearest agent de police, and within an hour he finds himself in the
+Santé."
+
+"Poor chap!" said Lanyard with a doleful shake of the head.
+
+"I, too, pity him," the woman declared. "Monsieur: against my
+prejudice, your faith in Duchemin has persuaded me. I am convinced that
+he is innocent."
+
+"How good you are!" "It makes me glad I have so well forgotten ever
+meeting him. I do not believe I should know him if I found him here, in
+this very restaurant, even seated by my side."
+
+"It is mademoiselle now whose heart is great and kind."
+
+"You may believe it well."
+
+"And does mademoiselle's forgetfulness, perhaps, extend even farther
+into the so dead past?"
+
+"But, monsieur, I was a mere child when I first came to Paris, before
+the War. How could anyone reasonably expect my memory of those innocent
+girlish days to be exact? Regard that, even then, I met people by
+hundreds, as a young girl studying for the stage must. Is it likely one
+face would stand out in my memory more than another?"
+
+"Quite, if you ask me," said Lanyard dryly--"quite likely, if any
+circumstance connected with that face were at all memorable."
+
+"But I assure you I was in those days much too self-absorbed to pay
+much attention to others. It is that way, you know, in maiden days."
+
+"Mademoiselle does injustice to her memory," Lanyard insisted in polite
+astonishment. "In some ways it is wonderful."
+
+The woman looked suddenly aside, so that he could not see her face; but
+he perceived, with an astonishment which he made no attempt to hide,
+that she was quaking bodily with some unconfessed emotion. And when she
+faced again his unbroken look of grave bewilderment, he discovered that
+she was really capable of tears.
+
+"Monsieur," she gasped, "believe it or not, never before have I met one
+with whom I was so completely en rapport. And instantaneously! It is
+priceless, this! We must see more of one another."
+
+"Much more," Lanyard assented gravely. "A great deal more," she
+supplemented with significance. "I am sure we shall get along together
+famously."
+
+"Mademoiselle offers me great honour--"
+
+"Nothing less than my friendship."
+
+"I would be indeed an ingrate to refuse it. But a question: Will not
+people talk?"
+
+"What!" Amusement shook her again. "How talk? What more can they say
+about Liane Delorme?"
+
+"Ah!" said Lanyard--"but about Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes..."
+
+"My friend: that was a good joke once; but now you must forget that
+name as utterly as I have forgotten another."
+
+"Impossible."
+
+"What do you say?" She frowned a little. "Is it possible you
+misunderstood? De Lorgnes was nothing to me."
+
+"I never thought he was."
+
+"You had reason. Because we were thrown together, and our names were
+something alike in sound, it amused us--not the two of us alone, but
+all our party--to pretend I was madame la comtesse."
+
+"He was really a count?"
+
+"Who knows? It was the style by which he had always passed with us."
+
+"Alas!" sighed Lanyard, and bent a sombre gaze upon his glass.
+
+Without looking he was aware of a questioning gesture of the woman's
+head. He said no more, but shook his own.
+
+"What is this?" she asked sharply. "You know something about de
+Lorgnes?"
+
+"Had you not heard?" he countered, looking up in surprise.
+
+"Heard--?" He saw her eyes stabbed by fear, and knew himself justified
+of his surmises. All day she had been expecting de Lorgnes, or word
+from him, all day and all this night. One could imagine the hourly
+augmented strain of care and foreboding; indeed its evidence were only
+too clearly betrayed in her face and manner of that moment: she was on
+the rack.
+
+But there was no pity in Lanyard's heart. He knew her of old, what she
+was, what evil she had done; and in his hearing still sounded the
+echoes of those words with which, obliquely enough but without
+misunderstanding on the part of either, she had threatened to expose
+him to the police unless he consented to some sort of an alliance with
+her, a collaboration whose nature could not but be dishonourable if it
+were nothing more than a simple conspiracy of mutual silence.
+
+And purposely he delayed his answer till her patience gave way and she
+was clutching his arm with frantic hands.
+
+"What is the matter? Why do you look at me like that? Why don't you
+tell me--if there is anything to tell--?"
+
+"I was hesitating to shock you, Liane."
+
+"Never mind me. What has happened to de Lorgnes?"
+
+"It is in all the evening newspapers--the murder mystery of the Lyons
+rapide."
+
+"De Lorgnes--?"
+
+Lanyard inclined his head. The woman breathed an invocation to the
+Deity and sank back against the wall, her face ghastly beneath its
+paint.
+
+"You know this?"
+
+"I was a passenger aboard the rapide, and saw the body before it was
+removed."
+
+Liane Delorme made an effort to speak, but only her breath rustled
+harshly on her dry lips. She swallowed convulsively, turned to her
+glass, and found it empty. Lanyard hastened to refill it. She took the
+wine at a gulp, muttered a word of thanks, and offered the glass to be
+filled anew; but when this had been done sat unconscious of it, staring
+witlessly at nothing, so lost to her surroundings that all the muscles
+of her face relaxed and her years peered out through that mask of
+artifice which alone preserved for her the illusion and repute of
+beauty.
+
+Thus the face of an evil woman of middle-age, debauched beyond hope of
+redemption, was hideously revealed. Lanyard knew a qualm at seeing it,
+and looked hastily away.
+
+Beyond the rank of tables which stood between him and the dancing floor
+he saw Athenais Reneaux with Le Brun sweeping past in the suave
+movement of a waltz. The girl's face wore a startled expression, her
+gaze was direct to the woman at Lanyard's side; then it shifted
+enquiringly to him. With a look Lanyard warned her to compose herself,
+then lifted an eyebrow and glanced meaningly toward the doors. The
+least of nods answered him before Le Brun swung Athenais toward the
+middle of the floor and other couples intervened.
+
+Liane Delorme stirred abruptly.
+
+"The assassin?" she demanded--"is there any clue?"
+
+"I believe he is known by description, but missing."
+
+"But you, my friend--what do you know?"
+
+"As much as anybody, I fancy--except the author of the murder."
+
+"Tell me."
+
+Quietly, briefly, Lanyard told her of seeing the Comte de Lorgnes at
+dinner in Lyons; of the uneasiness he manifested, and the cumulative
+feeling of frustration and failure he so plainly betrayed as the last
+hours of his life wore on; of the Apaches who watched de Lorgnes in the
+café and the fact that one of them had contrived to secure a berth in
+the same carriage with his victim; of seeing the presumptive murderer
+slinking away from the train at Laroche; and of the discovery of the
+body, on the arrival of the rapide at the Gare de Lyon.
+
+Absorbed, with eyes abstracted and intent, and a mouth whose essential
+selfishness and cruelty was unconsciously stressed by the compression
+of her lips: the woman heard him as he might have been a disembodied
+voice. Now and again, however, she nodded intently and, when he
+finished, had a pertinent question ready.
+
+"You say a description of this assassin exists?"
+
+"Have I not communicated it to you?"
+
+"But to the police--?"
+
+"Is it likely?" The woman gave him a blank stare.
+
+"Pardon, mademoiselle: but is it likely that the late André Duchemin
+would have more to do with the police than he could avoid?"
+
+"You would see a cold-blooded crime go unavenged--?"
+
+"Rather than dedicate the remainder of my days to seeing the world
+through prison bars? I should say yes!--seeing that this assassination
+does not concern me, and I am guiltless of the crime with which I
+myself am charged. But you who were a friend to de Lorgnes know the
+facts, and nothing hinders your communicating them to the
+Préfecture.... Though I will confess it would be gracious of you to
+keep my name out of the affair."
+
+But Lanyard was not dicing with Chance when he made this suggestion: he
+knew very well Liane Delorme would not go to the police.
+
+"That for the Préfecture!" She clicked a finger-nail against her teeth.
+"What does it know? What does it do when it knows anything?"
+
+"I agree with mademoiselle entirely."
+
+"Ah!" she mused bitterly--"if only we knew the name of that sale
+cochon!"
+
+"We do."
+
+"We--monsieur?"
+
+"I, at least, know one of the many names doubtless employed by the
+assassin."
+
+"And you hesitate to tell me!"
+
+"Why should I? No, but an effort of memory..." Lanyard measured a
+silence, seeming lost in thought, in reality timing the blow and
+preparing to note its effect. Then, snapping his fingers as one who
+says: I have it!--"Albert Dupont," he announced abruptly.
+
+Unquestionably the name meant nothing to the woman. She curled a lip:
+"But that is any name!" Then thoughtfully: "You heard his companion of
+the café call him that?"
+
+"No, mademoiselle. But I recognised the animal as Albert Dupont when he
+boarded the train at Combe-Rendonde that morning and, unnoticed by him,
+travelled with him all the way to Lyons."
+
+"You recognised him?"
+
+"I believe it well."
+
+"When had you known him?"
+
+"First when I fought with him at Montpellier-le-Vieux, later when he
+sought to do me in on the outskirts of Nant. He was the fugitive
+chauffeur of the Château de Montalais."
+
+"But--name of a sacred name!--what had that one to do with de Lorgnes?"
+
+"If you will tell me that, there will be no more mystery in this sad
+affair."
+
+The woman brooded heavily for a moment. "But if it had been you he was
+after, I might understand..." He caught the sidelong glimmer of her eye
+upon him, dark with an unuttered question.
+
+But the waltz was at an end, Athenais and Le Brun were threading their
+way through the intervening tables.
+
+The interruption could not have been better timed; Lanyard was keen to
+get away. He had learned all that he could reasonably have hoped to
+learn from Liane Delorme in one night. He knew that she and de Lorgnes
+had been mutually interested in the business that took the latter to
+Lyons. He had the testimony of his own perceptions to prove that news
+of the murder had come as a great shock to her. On that same testimony
+he was prepared to swear that, whatever the part, if any, she had
+played in the robbery, she knew nothing of "Albert Dupont," at least by
+that name, and nothing of his activities as chauffeur at the Château de
+Montalais.
+
+Yet one thing more Lanyard knew: that Liane suspected him of knowing
+more than he had told her. But he wasn't sorry she should think that;
+it gave him a continuing claim upon her interest. Henceforth she might
+be wary of him, but she would never lose touch with him if she could
+help it.
+
+Now Athenais was pausing beside the table, and saying with a smile as
+weary as it was charming:
+
+"Come, Monsieur Paul, if you please, and take me home! I've danced till
+I'm ready to drop."
+
+Annoyed by the prospect of being obliged to let Lanyard out of her
+sight so soon, before she had time to mature her plans with respect to
+him, Liane Delorme pulled herself together.
+
+"Go home?" she protested with a vivacity so forced it drew a curious
+stare even from the empty Le Brun. "So early! My dear! what are you
+thinking of?" "I've been on the go all day long," Athenais explained
+sweetly; "and now I've got nothing left to keep up on."
+
+"Zut!" the Delorme insisted. "Have more champagne and--"
+
+"Thank you, no, dearest. My head is swimming with it already. I really
+must go. Surely you don't mind?"
+
+But Liane did mind, and the wine she had drunk had left her only a
+remnant of sobriety, not enough for good control of her temper.
+
+"Mind?" she echoed rudely. "Why should I mind whether you stay or go?
+It's your affair, not mine." She made a scornful mouth; and the look
+with which she coupled Lanyard and Athenais in innuendo was in itself
+almost actionable. "But me," she pursued with shrill vivacity--"I
+shan't go yet, I'm not drunk enough by half. Get more champagne,
+Fred"--this to Le Brun as she turned a gleaming shoulder to the
+others--"quantities of it--and tell Chu-chu to bring Angele over, and
+Constance and Victor, too. Thanks to the good God, they at least know
+they are still alive!"
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+ADIEU
+
+
+Ever since the fall of evening, whose clear gloaming had seemed to
+promise a fair night of moonlight, the skies had been thickening slowly
+over Paris. While still at the Ambassadeurs Lanyard had noticed that
+the moon was being blotted out. By midnight its paling disk had become
+totally eclipsed, the clouds hung low over the city, a dense blanket
+imprisoning heat which was oppressive even in the open and stifling in
+the ill-ventilated restaurants.
+
+Now from the shelter of the café canopy Lanyard and Athenais Reneaux
+looked out upon a pave like a river of jet ribboned with gently glowing
+lights and running between the low banks of sidewalks no less black:
+both deserted but for a few belated prowlers lurching homeward through
+the drizzle, and a rank of private cars waiting near the entrance.
+
+The bedizened porter whistled fatuously at a passing taxicab, which
+though fareless held steadfast to its way, while the driver
+acknowledged the signal only with jeers and disgraceful gestures, after
+the manner of his kind. So that Lanyard, remembering how frequently
+similar experiences had befallen him in pre-War Paris, reflected sadly
+that the great conflict had, after all, worked little change in human
+hearts--charitably assuming the bosoms of French taxi-bandits to be so
+furnished.
+
+Presently, however, the persistent whistle conjured from round a corner
+a rakish hansom that--like the creature between its shafts and the
+driver on its lofty box, with his face in full bloom and his bleary
+eyes, his double-breasted box-coat and high hat of oilcloth--had
+doubtless been brisk with young ambition in the golden time of the
+Nineteen-Naughties.
+
+But unmistakably of the vintage of the Nineteen-Twenties was the
+avarice of the driver. For when he had been given the address of the
+Athenais' apartment, he announced with vinous truculence that his whim
+inclined to precisely the opposite direction, gathered up the reins,
+clucked in peremptory fashion to the nag (which sagely paid no
+attention to him whatsoever) and consented only to change his mind when
+promised a fabulous fare.
+
+Even then he grumbled profanely while Lanyard helped Athenais to climb
+in and took the place by her side.
+
+The rue Pigalle was as dark and still as any street in a deserted
+village. From its gloomy walls the halting clatter of hoofs struck
+empty echoes that rang in Lanyard's heart like a refrain from some old
+song. To that very tune had the gay world gone about its affaires in
+younger years, when the Lone Wolf was a living fact and not a fading
+memory in the minds of men...
+
+He sighed heavily.
+
+"Monsieur is sentimental," commented Athenais Reneaux lightly. "Beware!
+Sentimentalists come always to some sad end."
+
+"One has found that true ... But you are young to know it, Athenais."
+
+"A woman is never young--after a certain age--save when she loves, my
+friend."
+
+"That, too, is true. But still you are overyoung to have learned it."
+
+"One learns life's lessons not in any fixed and predetermined order,
+Paul, with no sort of sequence whatever, but as and when Life chooses
+to teach them."
+
+"Quel dommage!" Lanyard murmured, and subsided into another silence.
+
+The girl grew restive. "But tell me, my dear Don Juan," she protested:
+"Do all your conquests affect you in this morbid fashion?"
+
+"Conquests?"
+
+"You seemed to get on very well with Liane Delorme."
+
+"Pardon. If I am sentimental, it is because old memories have been
+awakened to-night, memories of forfeit days when one thought well of
+oneself, here in Paris."
+
+"Days in which, no doubt, Liane played a part?"
+
+"A very minor rôle, Athenais ... But are you doing me the honour to be
+jealous?"
+
+"Perhaps, petit Monsieur Paul..."
+
+In the broken light of passing lamps her quiet smile was as illegible
+as her shadowed eyes.
+
+After a moment Lanyard laughed a little, caught up her hand, patted it
+indulgently, and with gentle decision replaced it in her lap.
+
+"It isn't fair, my dear, to be putting foolish notions into elderly
+heads merely because you know you can do it. Show a little respect for
+my grey hairs, of which there are far too many."
+
+"They're most becoming," said Athenais Reneaux demurely. "But tell me
+about Liane, if it isn't a secret."
+
+"Oh! that was so long ago and such a trifling thing, one wonders at
+remembering it at all.... I happened, one night, to be where I had no
+right to be. That was rather a habit of mine, I'm afraid. And so I
+discovered, in another man's apartment, a young woman, hardly more than
+a child, trying to commit suicide. You may believe I put a stop to
+that.... Later, for in those days I had some little influence in
+certain quarters, I got her place in the chorus at the Variétés. She
+made up a name for the stage: Liane Delorme. And that is all. You see,
+it was very simple."
+
+"And she was grateful?"
+
+"Not oppressively. She was quite normal about it all."
+
+"Still, she has not forgotten."
+
+"But remind yourself that the chemistry of years is such that
+inevitably a sense of obligation in due course turns into a grudge. It
+is true, Liane has not forgotten, but I am by no means sure she has
+forgiven me for saving her to life."
+
+"There may be something in that, seeing what she has made of her life."
+
+"Now there is where you can instruct me. I have been long in exile."
+
+"But you know how Liane graduated from the chorus of the Variétés,
+became first a principal there, then the rage of all the music halls
+with her way of singing rhymed indecencies."
+
+"One has heard something of that."
+
+"On the peak of her success she retired, saying she had worked long
+enough, made enough money. That, too, knows itself. But Liane retired
+only from the stage... You understand?"
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"She continued to make many dear friends, some of them among the
+greatest personages of Europe. So that gradually she became what she is
+to-day," Athenais Reneaux pronounced soberly: "as I think, the most
+dangerous woman on the Continent."
+
+"How--'dangerous'?"
+
+"Covetous, grasping, utterly unscrupulous and corrupt, and weirdly
+powerful. She has a strange influence in the highest places."
+
+"Blackmail?"
+
+"God knows! It was, at all events, strong enough to save her from being
+shot during the war. I was assigned to watch her then. There was a
+suspicion in England that she was in communication with the enemy. I
+found it to be quite true. She knew Bolo Pasha intimately, Caillaux,
+too. Other women, many of them, fled the country, or went to St. Lazare
+for the duration of the war, or faced firing squads at dawn for doing
+infinitely less than she did to betray France and her Allies; but Liane
+Delorme got off scot-free. I happen to know that England made the
+strongest representations to the French government about her. I know
+personally of two young French officers who had been on friendly terms
+with Liane, and who shot themselves, one dramatically on her very
+doorstep. And why did they do that, if not in remorse for betraying to
+her secrets which afterwards somehow found their way to the enemy?...
+But nothing was ever done about it, she was never in the least
+molested, and nightly you might see her at Maxim's or L'Abbaye, making
+love to officers, while at the Front men were being slaughtered by the
+hundreds, thanks to her treachery.... Ah, monsieur, I tell you I know
+that woman too well!"
+
+The girl's voice quavered with indignation.
+
+"So that was how you came to know her," Lanyard commented as if he had
+found nothing else of interest. "I wondered..."
+
+"Yes: we were bosom friends--almost--for a time. It wasn't nice, but
+the job had to be done. Then Liane grew suspicious, and our friendship
+cooled. One night I had a narrow escape from some Apaches. I recognised
+Liane's hand in that. She was afraid I knew something. So I did. But
+she didn't dream how much I knew. If she had there would have been a
+second attempt of that sort minus the escape. Then the armistice came
+to cool our passions, and Liane found other things to think about ...
+God knows what other mischief to do in time of peace!"
+
+"I think," Lanyard suggested, recalling that conversation in the grand
+salon of the Château de Montalais, "you had better look to yourself,
+Athenais, as far as Liane is concerned, after to-night. She only needed
+to see you with me to have confirmed any suspicions she may previously
+have had concerning your relations with the B. S. S."
+
+"I will remember that," the girl said calmly. "Many thanks, dear
+friend.... But what is it you are doing all the time? What is it you
+see?"
+
+As the hansom swung round the dark pile of the Trinité, Lanyard had for
+the third time twisted round in his seat, to peep back up the rue
+Pigalle through the little window in the rear.
+
+"As I thought!" He let the leather flap fall over the peep-hole and sat
+back. "Liane doesn't trust me," he sighed, disconsolate.
+
+"We are followed?"
+
+"By a motor-car of some sort, creeping along without lights, probably
+one of the private cars that were waiting when we came out."
+
+"I have a pistol, if you need one," Athenais offered, matter-of-fact.
+
+"Then you were more sensible than I."
+
+Lanyard held a thoughtful silence for some minutes, while the cab
+jogged sedately down the rue St. Lazare, then had another look back
+through the little window.
+
+"No mistake about that," he reported; and bending forward began to peer
+intently right and left into the dark throats of several minor streets
+they passed after leaving the Hôtel Terminus behind and heading down
+the rue de la Pépinière. "The deuce of it is," he complained, "this
+inhuman loneliness! If there were only something like a crowd in the
+streets as there must have been earlier in the evening..."
+
+"What are you thinking of, monsieur?"
+
+"But naturally of ridding you of an embarrassing and perhaps dangerous
+companion."
+
+"If you mean you're planning to jump down and run for it," Athenais
+replied, "you're a fool. You'll not get far with a motor car pursuing
+you and sergents de ville abnormally on the qui vive because the crime
+wave that followed demobilisation as yet shows no signs of subsiding."
+
+"But, mademoiselle, it makes me so unhappy to have any shadow but my
+own."
+
+"Then rest tranquil here with me. It isn't much farther to my
+apartment."
+
+"Possibly it would be better to drop you there first--"
+
+"Nothing of the sort; but positively the contrary."
+
+"My dear child! if I were to do as you wish they would think--"
+
+"My dear Paul, I don't give a damn what they think. Remember I am
+specially charged with the preservation of your life while in Paris.
+Besides, my apartment is the most discreet little rez-de-chaussée one
+could wish. There is more than one way in and out. And once they think
+you are placed for the night, it's more than likely they won't even set
+a watch, but will trot off to report. Then you can slip away when you
+will...." He stared, knowing a moment of doubt to which a hard little
+laugh put a period.
+
+"Oh, you needn't be so thoughtful of my reputation! If this were the
+worst that could be said of me--"
+
+Lanyard laughed in turn, quietly tolerant, and squeezed her hand again.
+
+"You are a dear," he said, "but you need to be a far better actress to
+deceive me about such matters."
+
+"Don't be stupid!" her sulky voice retorted.
+
+"I'm not."
+
+He bent forward again, folding his arms on the ledge of the apron,
+studying the streets and consulting an astonishingly accurate mental
+map of Paris which more than once had stood him in good stead in other
+times.
+
+After a little the girl's hand crept along his arm, took possession of
+his hand and used it as a lever to swing him back to face her.
+
+In the stronger lighting of the Boulevard Haussmann her face seemed
+oddly childlike, oddly luminous with appeal.
+
+"Please, petit Monsieur Paul! I ask it of you, I wish it.... To please
+me?"
+
+"O Lord!" Lanyard sighed--"how is one to resist when you plead so
+prettily to be compromised?"
+
+"Since that's settled"--of a sudden the imploring child was replaced by
+self-possessed Mademoiselle Athenais Reneaux--"you may have your hand
+back again. I assure you I have no more use for it."
+
+The hansom turned off the boulevard, affording Lanyard an opportunity
+to look back through the side window.
+
+"Still on the trail," he announced. "But they've got the lights on
+now."
+
+With a profound sigh from the heart the horse stopped in front of a
+corner apartment building and later, with a groan almost human,
+responded to the whip and jingled the hansom away, leaving Lanyard the
+poorer by the exorbitant fare he had promised and something more.
+
+Athenais was already at the main entrance, ringing for the concierge.
+Lanyard hastened to join her, but before he could cross the sidewalk a
+motor-car poked its nose round the corner of the Boulevard Haussmann, a
+short block away, and bore swiftly their way, seeming to search the
+street suspiciously with its blank, lidless eyes of glare.
+
+"Peste!" breathed the girl. "I have a private entrance and my own key.
+We could have used that had I imagined this sacred pig of a
+concierge--!"
+
+The latch clicked. She thrust the door open and slipped into dense
+darkness. Lanyard lingered another instant. The car was slowing down,
+and the street lamp on the corner revealed plainly a masculine arm
+resting on its window-sill; but the spying face above the arm was only
+a blur.
+
+"Come, monsieur!"
+
+Lanyard stepped in and shut the door. A hand with which he was
+beginning to feel fairly well acquainted found his and led him through
+the dead obscurity to another pause. A key grated in a lock, the hand
+drew him on again, a second door closed behind him.
+
+"We are chez moi," said a voice in the dark.
+
+"One could do with a light."
+
+"Wait. This way."
+
+The hand guided him across a room of moderate size, avoiding its
+furniture with almost uncanny ease, then again brought him to a halt.
+Brass rings clashed softly on a pole, a gap opened in heavy draperies
+curtaining a window, a shaft of street light threw the girl's profile
+into soft relief. She drew him to her till their shoulders touched.
+
+"You see..."
+
+He bent his head close to hers, conscious of a caressing tendril of
+hair that touched his cheek, and the sweet warmth and fragrance of her;
+and peering through the draperies saw their pursuing motor car at
+pause, not at the curb, but in the middle of the street before the
+house. The man's arm still rested on the sill of the window; the pale
+oval of the face above it was still vague. Abruptly both disappeared, a
+door slammed on the far side of the car, and the car itself, after a
+moment's wait, gathered way with whining gears and vanished, leaving
+nothing human visible in the quiet street.
+
+"What did that mean? Did they pick somebody up?"
+
+"But quite otherwise, mademoiselle."
+
+"Then what has become of him?"
+
+"In the shadow of the door across the way: don't you see the deeper
+shadow of his figure in the corner, to this side. And there ... Ah,
+dolt!"
+
+The man in the doorway had moved, cautiously thrusting one hand out of
+the shadow far enough for the street lights to shine upon the dial of
+his wrist-watch. Instantly it was withdrawn; but his betrayal was
+accomplished.
+
+"That's enough," said Lanyard, drawing the draperies close again. "No
+trouble to make a fool of that one, God has so nobly prepared the
+soil." The girl said nothing. They no longer touched, and she was for
+the time so still that he might almost have fancied himself alone. But
+in that quiet room he could hear her breathing close beside him, not
+heavily but with a rapid accent hinting at an agitation which her voice
+bore out when she answered his wondering: "Mademoiselle?" "J'y suis,
+petit Monsieur Paul."
+
+"Is anything the matter?"
+
+"No ... no: there is nothing the matter."
+
+"I'm afraid I have tired you out to-night."
+
+"I do not deny I am a little weary."
+
+"Forgive me."
+
+"There is nothing to forgive, not yet, petit Monsieur Paul." A trace of
+hard humour crept into her tone: "It is all in the night's work, as the
+saying should be in Paris."
+
+"Three favours more; then I will do you one in return."
+
+"Ask..."
+
+"Be so kind as to make a light and find me a pocket flash-lamp if you
+have one."
+
+"I can do the latter without the former. It is better that we show no
+light; one stray gleam through the curtains would tell too much. Wait."
+
+A noise of light footsteps muffled by a rug, high heels tapping on
+uncovered floor, the scrape of a drawer pulled out: and she returned to
+give him a little nickelled electric torch.
+
+"And then--?"
+
+"Liane's address, if you know it."
+
+The girl named a number on an avenue not far distant. Lanyard remarked
+this.
+
+"Yes; you can walk there in less than five minutes. And finally?"
+
+"Show me the way out." Again she made no response. He pursued in some
+constraint: "Thus you will enable me to make you my only inadequate
+return--leave you to your rest."
+
+Yet another space of silence; then a gusty little laugh. "That is a
+great favour, truly, petit Monsieur Paul! So give me your hand once
+more." But she no longer clung to it as before; the clasp of her
+fingers was light, cool, impersonal to the point of indifference.
+Vexed, resentful of her resentment, Lanyard suffered her guidance
+through the darkness of another room, a short corridor, and then a
+third room, where she left him for a moment.
+
+He heard again the clash of curtain rings. The dim violet rectangle of
+a window appeared in the darkness, the figure of the woman in vague
+silhouette against it. A sash was lifted noiselessly, rain-sweet air
+breathed into the apartment. Athenais returned to his side, pressed
+into his palm a key.
+
+"That window opens on a court. The drop from the sill is no more than
+four feet. In the wall immediately opposite you will find a door. This
+key opens it. Lock the door behind you, and at your first opportunity
+throw away the key: I have several copies. You will find yourself in a
+corridor leading to the entrance of the apartment house in the rear of
+this, facing on the next street. Demand the cordon of the concierge as
+if you were a late guest leaving one of the apartments. He will make no
+difficulty about opening.... I think that is all."
+
+"Not quite. There remains for me to attempt the impossible, to prove my
+gratitude, Athenais, in mere, unmeaning words."
+
+"Don't try, Paul." The voice was softened once more, its accents
+broken. "Words cannot serve us, you and me! There is one way only, and
+that, I know, is ... rue Barré!" Her sad laugh fluttered, she crept
+into his arms. "But still, petit Monsieur Paul, _she_ will not care
+if ... only once!"
+
+She clung to him for a long, long moment, then released his lips.
+
+"Men have kissed me, yes, not a few," she whispered, resting her face
+on his bosom, "but you alone have known my kiss. Go now, my dear, while
+I have strength to let you go, and ... make me one little promise..."
+
+"Whatever you ask, Athenais...."
+
+"Never come back, unless you need me; for I shall not have so much
+strength another time."
+
+Alone, she rested a burning forehead against the lifted window-sash,
+straining her vision to follow his shadow as it moved through the murk
+of the court below and lost itself in the deeper gloom of the opposing
+wall.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THE HOUSE OF LILITH
+
+
+It stood four-square and massive on a corner between the avenues de
+Friedland et des Champs-Elysées, near their junction at the Place de
+l'Etoile: a solid stone pile of a town-house in the most modern mode,
+without architectural beauty, boasting little attempt at exterior
+embellishment, but smelling aloud of Money; just such a maison de ville
+as a decent bourgeois banker might be expected to build him when he
+contemplates retiring after doing the Rothschilds a wicked one in the
+eye.
+
+It was like Liane's impudence, too. Lanyard smiled at the thought as he
+studied the mansion from the backwards of a dark doorway in the
+diagonally opposed block of dwellings. Her kind was always sure to
+seek, once its fortunes were on firm footing, to establish itself, as
+here, in the very heart of an exclusive residential district; as if
+thinking to absorb social sanctity through the simple act of rubbing
+shoulders with it; or else, as was more likely to be the case with a
+woman of Liane Delorme's temper, desiring more to affront a world from
+which she was outcast than to lay siege to its favour.
+
+It seemed, however, truly deplorable that Liane should have proved so
+conventional-minded in this particular respect. It rendered one's pet
+project much too difficult of execution. Earnestly as one desired to
+have a look at the inside of that house without the knowledge of its
+inmates, its aspect was forbidding and discouraging in the utmost
+extreme.
+
+Heavy gates of wrought bronze guarded the front doors. The single side
+or service-door was similarly protected if more simply. And stout
+grilles of bronze barred every window on the level of the street.
+
+Now none of these could have withstood the attack of a man of ingenuity
+with a little time at his disposal. But Lanyard could count on only the
+few remaining minutes of true night. Retarded though it might be by
+shrouded skies, dawn must come all too soon for his comfort. Yet he was
+conscious of no choice in the matter: he must and in spite of
+everything would know to-night what was going on behind that blank
+screen of stone. To-morrow night would be too late. Tonight, if there
+were any warrant for his suspicions, the jewels of Eve de Montalais lay
+in the dwelling of Liane Delorme; or if they were not there, the secret
+of their hiding was. But to-morrow both, and more than likely Liane as
+well, would be on the wing; or Lanyard had been sorely mistaken in
+seeing in her as badly frightened a woman as he had ever known, when
+she had learned of the assassination of de Lorgnes.
+
+It was possible, he thought it extremely probable, that Liane Delorme
+was as powerful as Athenais Reneaux had asserted; influential, that is,
+with the State, with the dealers in its laws and the dispensers of its
+protection. But now she had not to reckon with such as these, but with
+enemies of her own sort, with an antagonism as reckless of law and
+order as she herself. And she was afraid of that, infinitely more
+disturbed in mind and spirit than she would have been in the face of
+any threat on the part of the police. The Préfecture was a known and
+measured force, an engine that ran as it were on mapped lines of rail;
+its moves might be forecast, guarded against, watched, evaded. But this
+other force worked in the dark, this hostile power personified in the
+creature who had called himself Albert Dupont; the very composition of
+its being was cloaked in a secrecy impenetrable and terrifying, its
+intentions and its workings could not be surmised or opposed until it
+struck and the success or failure of the stroke revealed its origin and
+aim.
+
+Liane--or one misjudged her--would never sit still and wait for the
+blow to fall. She was too high-strung, too much in love with life. She
+must either strike first in self-defence--and, in such case, strike at
+what?--or remove beyond the range of the enemy's malice. Lanyard was
+confident she would choose the latter course.
+
+But confidence was not knowledge....
+
+He transferred his attention from the formidable defences of the lower
+storey to the second. Here all the windows were of the type called
+french, and opened inward from shallow balconies with wrought bronze
+railings. Lanyard was acquainted with every form of fastening used for
+such windows; all were simple, none could resist his persuasions,
+provided he stood upon one of those balconies. Nor did he count it a
+difficult matter for a man of his activity and strength to scale the
+front of the house as far as the second storey; its walls were builded
+of heavy blocks of dressed stone with deep horizontal channels between
+each tier. These grooves would be greasy with rain; otherwise one could
+hardly ask for better footholds. A climb of some twelve or fifteen feet
+to the balcony: one should be able to make that within two minutes,
+granted freedom from interruption. The rub was there; the quarter
+seemed quite fast asleep; in the five minutes which had elapsed since
+Lanyard had ensconced himself in the doorway no motor car had passed,
+not a footfall had disturbed the stillness, never a sound of any sort
+had come to his attention other than one distant blare of a two-toned
+automobile horn from the neighbourhood of the Arc de Triomphe. But one
+dared not count on long continuance of such conditions. Already the sky
+showed a lighter shade above the profile of the roofs. And one wakeful
+watcher at a nearby window would spell ruin.
+
+Nevertheless he must adventure the consequences....
+
+Poised to leave his shelter and dart across the street, with his point
+of attack already selected, his thoughts already busy with
+consideration of steps to follow--he checked and fell still farther
+back into the shadow. Something was happening in the house across the
+way.
+
+A man had opened the service-door and paused behind the bronze gate.
+There was no light behind him, and the gloom and intervening strips of
+metal rendered his figure indistinct. Lanyard's high-keyed perceptions
+had none the less been instant to remark that slight movement and the
+accompanying change in the texture of the darkness barred by the gate.
+
+Following a little wait, it swung slowly out, perhaps eighteen inches,
+the man advancing with it and again halting to peer up and down the
+street. Then quickly, as if alarmed, he withdrew, shut the gate, and
+disappeared, closing the service-door behind him.
+
+Listening intently, Lanyard heard no click of latch, such as should
+have been audible in that dead hour of hush. Evidently the fellow had
+neglected to make fast the gate. Possibly he had been similarly remiss
+about fastening the door. But what was he up to? Why this furtive
+appearance, why the retreat so abruptly executed?
+
+By way of answer came the soft drone of a high-powered motor; then the
+car itself rolled into view, a stately limousine coming from the
+direction of the avenue de Friedland. Before the corner house it
+stopped. A lackey alighted with an umbrella and ran to hold the door;
+but Liane Delorme would not wait for him. The car had not stopped when
+she threw the door open; on the instant when its wheels ceased to turn
+she jumped down and ran toward the house, heedless of the rain.
+
+At the same time one side of the great front doors swung inward, and a
+footman ran out to open the gates. The lackey with the umbrella, though
+he moved briskly, failed to catch up with Liane before she sped up the
+steps. So he closed the umbrella and trotted back to his place beside
+the chauffeur. The footman shut gates and door as the limousine moved
+away: it had not been sixty seconds at rest. In fifteen more street and
+house were both as they had been, save that a light now shone through
+the plate glass of the latter's great doors. And that was soon
+extinguished.
+
+Conceiving that the man who had appeared at the service entrance was
+the same who had admitted Liane, Lanyard told himself he understood:
+impatient for his bed, the fellow had gone to the service gate to spy
+out for signs of madame's return. Now if only it were true that he had
+failed to close it securely----!
+
+It proved so. The gate gave readily to Lanyard's pull. The knob of the
+small door turned silently. He stepped across the threshold, and shut
+himself into an unlighted hall, thoughtfully apeing the negligence of
+the servant and leaving the door barely on the latch by way of
+provision against a forced retreat.
+
+So far, good. He felt for his pocket torch, then sharply fell back into
+the nearest corner and made himself as inconspicuous as might be.
+Footsteps were sounding on the other side of an unseen wall. He waited,
+breathless, stirless.
+
+A latch rattled, and at about three yards' distance a narrow door
+opened, marked by a widening glow of light. A liveried footman--beyond
+a doubt he who admitted the mistress of the house--entered, carrying an
+electric candle, yawned with a superstitious hand before his mouth and,
+looking to neither right nor left, turned away from Lanyard and trudged
+wearily back to the household offices. At the far end of the long
+hallway a door closed behind him--and Lanyard moved swiftly.
+
+The door which had let the footman into the hall admitted to a spacious
+foyer which set apart the entrance and--as the play of the electric
+torch disclosed--a deep and richly furnished dining-room. To one side a
+broad flight of stairs ascended: Lanyard went up with the activity of a
+cat, making no more noise.
+
+The second floor proved to be devoted mainly to a drawing-room, a
+lounge, and a library, all furnished in a weird, inchoate sort of
+magnificence, with money rather than with taste, if one might judge
+fairly by the fitful and guarded beam of the torch. The taste may have
+been less questionable than Lanyard thought; but the evidences of
+luxurious tendencies and wealth recklessly wasted in their
+gratification were irrefutable.
+
+Lights were burning on the floor above, and a rumour of feminine voices
+drifted down, interrupted by an occasional sibilant rustle of silk, or
+a brief patter of high-heeled feet: noises which bore out the
+conjecture that madame's maid was undressing and putting her to bed; a
+ceremony apt to consume a considerable time with a woman of Liane's age
+and disposition, passionately bent on preserving to the grave a
+semblance of freshness in her charms. Lanyard reckoned on anything from
+fifteen minutes to an hour before her couching would be accomplished
+and the maid out of the way. Ten minutes more, and Liane ought to be
+asleep. If it turned out otherwise--well, one would have to deal with
+her awake. No need to be gravely concerned about that: to envisage the
+contingency was to be prepared against it.
+
+Believing he must possess his soul in patience for an indeterminable
+wait, he was casting about for a place to secrete himself, when a
+change in the tenor of the talk between mistress and maid was conveyed
+by a sudden lift of half an octave in the latter's voice, sounding a
+sharp note of protest, to be answered by Liane in accent of overbearing
+anger.
+
+One simply could not rest without knowing what that meant: Lanyard
+mounted the second flight of stairs as swiftly, surely, and soundlessly
+as he had the first. But just below a landing, where the staircase had
+an angle, he paused, crouching low, flat to the steps, his head lifted
+just enough to permit him to see, above the edge of the topmost, a
+section of glowing, rose-pink wall--it would be rose-pink!
+
+He could see nothing more; and Liane had already silenced the maid, or
+rather reduced her to responses feebly submissive, and, consonant with
+the nature of her kind, was rubbing it in.
+
+"And why should you not go with me to that America if I wish it?"
+Lanyard heard her say. "Is it likely I would leave you behind to spread
+scandal concerning me with that gabbling tongue in your head of an
+overgrown cabbage? It is some lover, then, who has inspired this folly
+in you? Tell him from me, if you please, the day you leave my service
+without my consent, it will be a sorry sweetheart that comes to him."
+
+"It is well, madame. I say no more. I will go."
+
+"I believe it well--you will go! You were mad ever to dream otherwise.
+Fetch my jewel-case--the large one, of steel, with the American lock."
+
+"Madame takes all her jewels, then?" the maid enquired, moving about
+the room.
+
+"But naturally. What do you think? That I leave them here for the
+scullery-maids to give their maquereaux? I shall pack them tonight,
+before I sleep."
+
+("Damnation!"--from Lanyard, beneath his breath. More delay!)
+
+"And we leave to-morrow, madame, at what time?"
+
+"It matters not, so we are in Cherbourg by midnight. I may decide to
+make the trip by automobile."
+
+"And madame's packing?"
+
+"You know well what to pack, better than I. Get my boxes up the first
+thing in the morning and use your own judgment. If there are questions
+to be asked, save them until I wake up. I shall sleep till noon."
+
+"That is all, madame?"
+
+"That is all. You may go."
+
+"Good-night, madame."
+
+"Good-night, Marthe."
+
+The stairway was no place to stop. Lanyard slipped like a shadow to the
+floor below, and took shelter behind a jog in the wall of the grand
+salon where, standing in deep darkness, he commanded a view of the
+hall.
+
+The maid came down, carrying an electric candle like the footman's. Its
+rays illumined from below one of those faces of crude comeliness common
+to her class, the face of an animal not unintelligent but first and
+last an animal. With a hand on the lower newel-post she hesitated,
+looking up toward the room of her mistress, as if lost in thought.
+Poised thus, her lifted face partly turned away from Lanyard, its
+half-seen expression was hopelessly ambiguous. But some secret thought
+amused the woman, a shadow deepened in the visible corner of her
+full-lipped mouth. One fancied something sardonic in that covert smile.
+
+She went on down. A latch on the ground floor clicked as the door to
+the service hallway was gently closed. Lanyard came out of hiding with
+a fresh enterprise abrew.
+
+One must kill time somehow, Liane would be at least another half an
+hour busy with her jewellery, and the thought presented itself that the
+library, immediately beneath her room, should be worthy an
+investigation. In such establishments it is a tradition that the
+household safe shall be located somewhere in the library; and such
+strong-boxes are apt to be naïve contrivances. Lanyard did not hope to
+find the Montalais jewels stored away in such a place, Liane would
+surely take better care of them than that; assuming they were in her
+possession they would be under her hand, if not confused with her own
+treasures; still it could do no harm to make sure.
+
+Confident of being warned at need by his hearing, which was normally
+supersensitive and, when he was engaged as now, keyed to preterhuman
+acuteness, he went coolly about the business, and at his first step
+found a portable reading-lamp on a long cord and coolly switched on its
+hooded light.
+
+The library was furnished with bulky old Italian pieces of carved oak,
+not especially well selected, but suitable enough with one exception, a
+ponderous buffet, an exquisite bit of workmanship both in design and in
+detail but completely out of place in a room of that character. At
+least nine feet in length, it stood out four from the wall. Three heavy
+doors guarded by modern locks gave access to the body beneath its tier
+of drawers. But--this drew a frowning stare--there was a key in the
+lock of the middle door.
+
+"There's such a thing as too much luck," Lanyard communed. "First the
+service gate and door, and now this, ready to my hand----!"
+
+He swung sharply round and searched every shadow in the room with the
+glare of the portable lamp; but that was work of supererogation: he had
+already made sure he was alone on that floor.
+
+Placing the lamp on the floor and adjusting its hood so that it
+focussed squarely upon the middle section of the buffet, he turned the
+key and discovered, behind the door, a small safe.
+
+The run of luck did not hold in respect to this; there was no key; and
+the combination dial was smug with ill-grounded confidence in its own
+inviolable integrity. Still (Lanyard told it) it could hardly be
+expected to know, it had yet to be dealt with by the shade of the Lone
+Wolf.
+
+Amused by the conceit, Lanyard laid hold of the knob with steady,
+delicate fingertips that had not yet, in spite of years of honourable
+idleness, forgotten their cunning. Then he flattened an ear to the cold
+face of the safe. To his informed manipulation the dial whirled,
+paused, reversed, turned all but imperceptibly, while the hidden
+mechanism clicked, ground and thudded softly, speaking a living
+language to his hearing. In three minutes he sat back on his heels,
+grasped the T-handle, turned it, had the satisfaction of hearing the
+bolts slide back into their sockets, and opened the door wide.
+
+But the racked pigeonholes held nothing to interest him whose one aim
+was the recovery of the Montalais jewels. The safe was, in fact,
+dedicated simply to the storage of documents.
+
+"Love letters!" Lanyard mused with a grimace of weariness. "And each
+believed, no doubt, she cared too much for him to hold her power to
+compromise him. Good Lord! what vanity is man's!"
+
+Then the consideration offered that property of real value
+might be hidden behind those sheaves of papers. He selected a
+pigeonhole at hazard, and emptied it of several bundles of letters, all
+neatly bound with tape or faded ribbon and clearly docketed. It held
+nothing else whatever. But his eye was caught by a great name endorsed
+on the face of one of the packages; and reading what else was written
+there his brows rose high while his lips shaped a soundless whistle. If
+an inference were fair, Liane had kept not only such documents as gave
+her power over others. Lanyard wondered if it were possible he held in
+his hand an instrument to bend the woman to his will....
+
+Suddenly he put out a hand and switched off the light, a gesture quite
+involuntary, simple reaction to the muffled thump of a chair overturned
+on the floor above.
+
+Sounds of scuffling followed, as if Liane were dancing to no music with
+a heavy-footed partner. Then a groan....
+
+His hands moved so rapidly and deftly that, although he seemed to rise
+without a second's delay, the safe was closed and the combination
+locked when he did so, the buffet door was shut and its key in his
+pocket.
+
+This time Lanyard ascended the stairs without heeding what noise he
+made. Nevertheless his actions were never awkward or ill-timed; his
+approach was not heard, his arrival on the upper landing was unnoticed.
+
+In an instantaneous pause he looked into the rose-pink room and saw
+Liane Delorme, in a negligee like a cobweb over a nightdress even more
+sheer, kneeling and clawing at her throat, round which a heavy silk
+handkerchief was slowly tightening; her face already purple with
+strangulation, her eyes bulging from their sockets, her tongue
+protruding between swollen lips.
+
+A thick knee was planted between her shoulder-blades. The ends of the
+handkerchief were in the sinewy hands of Albert Dupont.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+CHEZ LIANE
+
+
+Conceivably even a journeyman strangler may know the thrill of
+professional pride in a good job well done: Dupont was grinning at his
+work, and so intent upon it that his first intimation of any
+interference came when Lanyard took him from behind, broke his hold
+upon the woman (and lamentably failed to break his back at the same
+time) whirled him round with a jerk that all but unsocketed an arm and,
+before the thug could regain his balance, placed surely on the heel of
+his jaw, just below the ear, a blow that, coming straight from the
+shoulder and carrying all Lanyard had of weight and force and will to
+punish, in spite of Dupont's heaviness fairly lifted him from his feet
+and dropped him backwards across a chaise-longue, from which he slipped
+senseless to the floor.
+
+It was just like that, a crowded, breathless business....
+
+With bruised and aching knuckles to prove that the blow had been one to
+stun an ox, Lanyard believed it safe to count Dupont hors de combat,
+for a time at least. In any event, the risk had to be chanced: Liane
+Delorme was in a plight demanding immediate relief.
+
+In all likelihood she had lost consciousness some moments before
+Lanyard's intervention. Released, she had fallen positively inert, and
+lay semi-prostrate on a shoulder, with limbs grotesquely slack and
+awry, as if in unpleasant mimicry of a broken doll. Only the whites of
+bloodshot eyes showed in her livid and distorted countenance. Arms and
+legs twitched spasmodically, the ample torso was violently shaken by
+labouring lungs.
+
+The twisted handkerchief round her throat had loosened, but not enough
+to give relief. Lanyard removed it, turned her over so that she lay
+supine, wedged silken pillows from the chaise-longue beneath her head
+and shoulders, then reached across her body, took from her dressing
+table a toilet-water flask of lovely Italian glass, and drenched her
+face and bosom with its pungent contents.
+
+She gasped, started convulsively, and began to breathe with less
+effort. That dreadful rattling in her throat was stilled. Heavy lids
+curtained her eyes.
+
+Lanyard continued to apply the scented water with a lavish hand. In
+time the woman shuddered, sighed profoundly, and looked up with a
+witless stare.
+
+Man is measurably a creature of gestures stereotyped when the world was
+young: Lanyard patted the woman's hand as one might comfort an abused
+child. "It is all right now, Liane," he said in a reassuring voice.
+"Rest tranquilly. You will soon be yourself again. But wait: I will
+find you a drink."
+
+She said nothing, her look continued cloudy; but the dazed eyes
+followed him as he got up and cast about for a glass of water.
+
+But then he remembered Dupont, and decided that Liane could wait
+another minute while he made it impossible for the Apache to do more
+mischief.
+
+He moved round the chaise-longue and paused, looking down thoughtfully.
+Since his fall Dupont had made neither moan nor stir. No crescent
+irides showed beneath the half-shut lids. He was so motionless, he
+seemed scarcely to breathe. Lanyard dug the toe of a boot into his ribs
+none too gently, but without satisfaction of any doubts. The fellow
+gave no sign of sensibility, but lay utterly relaxed, with the look of
+one dead.
+
+Lanyard frowned uneasily. He had seen men drop dead from blows less
+powerful than his, and though this one had well earned a death swift
+and merciless, Lanyard experienced a twinge of horror at the thought.
+Often enough it had been his lot in times of peace and war to be forced
+to fight for life, and more than once to kill in defence of it; but
+that had never happened, never could happen, without his suffering the
+bitterest regret. Even now, in the case of this bloody-handed butcher,
+this ruthless garroter....
+
+Dropping to his knees, Lanyard bent over the body to search for
+symptoms of animation. He perceived them instantly. With inconceivable
+suddenness Dupont demonstrated that he was very much alive. An arm like
+the flexible limb of a tree wound itself affectionately round Lanyard's
+neck, clipped his head to Dupont's yearning bosom, ground his face into
+the flannel folds of a foul-scented shirt. Simultaneously the huge body
+heaved prodigiously, and after a brief interval of fantastic floppings,
+like a young mountain fell on top of Lanyard.
+
+But that was the full measure of Dupont's success in this stratagem. If
+hopelessly victimized and taken by surprise, Lanyard should have been
+better remembered by the man who had fought him at Montpellier-le-Vieux
+and again, with others assisting, on the road to Nant; though it is
+quite possible, of course, that Dupont failed to recognise his ancient
+enemy in clean-shaven Monsieur Paul Martin of the damp and bedraggled
+evening clothes.
+
+However that may have been, in the question of brute courage Dupont had
+yet to prove lacking. His every instinct was an Apache's: left to
+himself he would strike always from behind, and run like a cur to
+cover. But cornered, or exasperated by opposition to his vast
+powers--something which he seemed quite unable to understand--he could
+fight like a maniac. He was hardly better now, when he found himself
+thrown off and attacked in turn at a time when he believed his
+antagonist to be pinned down, helpless, at the mercy of the weapon for
+which he was fumbling. And the murderous fury which animated him then
+more than made up for want of science, cool-headedness and imagination.
+
+They fought for their most deeply-rooted passions, he to kill, Lanyard
+to live, Dupont to batter Lanyard into conceding a moment of respite in
+which a weapon might be used, Lanyard to prevent that very thing from
+happening. Even as animals in a pit they fought, now on their knees
+straining each to break the other's hold, now wallowing together on the
+floor, now on their feet, slogging like bruisers of the old school.
+
+Dupont took punishment in heroic doses, and asked for more. Shedding
+frightful blows with only an angry shake of his head, he would lower it
+and charge as a wild boar charges, while his huge arms flew like
+lunatic connecting-rods. The cleverest footwork could not always elude
+his tremendous rushes, the coolest ducking and dodging could not wholly
+escape that frantic shower of fists.
+
+Time and again Lanyard suffered blows that jarred him to his heels,
+time and again was fain to give ground to an onslaught that drove him
+back till his shoulders touched a wall. And more than once toward the
+end he felt his knees buckle beneath him and saw his shrewdest efforts
+fail for want of force. The sweat of his brows stung and dimmed his
+eyes, his dry tongue tasted its salt. He staggered in the drunkenness
+of fatigue, and suffered agonies of pain; for his exertions had
+strained the newly knitted tissues of the wound in his side, and the
+hurt of this was wholly hellish.
+
+But always he contrived somehow, strangely to him, to escape
+annihilation and find enough in reserve to fly back at Dupont's throat
+upon the first indication of desire on the part of the latter to yield
+the offensive. To do less were to permit him to find and use his
+weapon, whatever it might be--whether knife or pistol was besides the
+issue.
+
+Chairs, the chaise-longue, tables were overturned and kicked about.
+Priceless bits of porcelain and glass, lamps, vases, the fittings of
+the dressing-table were cast down in fragments to the floor.
+
+Constrained to look to herself or be trampled underfoot, and galvanized
+with terror, the woman struggled up and tottered hither and yon like a
+bewildered child, in the beginning too bemused to be able to keep out
+of the way of the combatants. If she crouched against a wall, battling
+bodies brushed her away from it. Did she take refuge in a corner she
+must abandon it else be crushed. Once she stumbled between the two, and
+before Lanyard could thrust her aside Dupont had fallen back half a
+dozen feet and worried a pistol out of his clothing.
+
+He fired first from the hip, and the shot shattered the mirror of the
+dressing-table. Trying for better aim, he lifted and levelled the
+weapon with a trembling arm which he sought to steady by cupping the
+elbow in his left hand. But the second bullet ploughed into the ceiling
+as Lanyard in desperation executed a coup de pied in la savate, and
+narrowly succeeded in kicking the pistol from Dupont's grasp.
+
+Bereft thus of his last hope--they were too evenly matched, and both
+too far spent for either to force a victory with his naked hands--the
+Apache swung round and ran, at the same time throwing a heavy chair
+over on its back in the path of pursuit. Unable to avoid it, Lanyard
+tried to hurdle it, caught a foot on one of its legs and, as Dupont
+threw himself headlong down the stairs, crashed to the floor with an
+impact that shook its beams.
+
+Main will-power lifted him to his knees before he collapsed, his last
+ounce of endurance wasted. Then the woman, with flying draperies, a
+figure like a fury, sped to the banister rail and leaning over emptied
+the several shots remaining in Dupont's automatic down the well of the
+staircase. It is doubtful if she saw anything to aim at or accomplished
+more than to wing the Apache's flight. Dupont had gained the second
+storey while Lanyard was still fighting up from his fall. The last
+report and the crash of the front door slammed behind Dupont were as
+one heartbeat to the next.
+
+Lanyard pillowed his head on a forearm and lay sobbing for breath.
+Liane Delorme turned and ran to the front of the house.
+
+Presently she came back drooping, sank into a chair and with lacklustre
+eyes regarded the man at her feet.
+
+"He got away," she said superfluously, in a faint voice. "I saw him in
+the street ... staggering like a sot..."
+
+At that moment Lanyard could not have mustered a show of interest had
+he been told Dupont was returning at the head of a horde. He closed his
+tired eyes and envied the lucky dead whose rest was independent of
+bruised flesh and aching bones. Neither, he supposed, were dreams
+poisoned by chagrin when what was mortal no longer mattered.... Three
+times had he come to grips with Dupont and, though he had been
+outnumbered on the road to Nant, in Lanyard's sight the honours were
+far from easy. Neither would they be while yet the other lived or was
+at large...
+
+The bitterness of failure and defeat had so rank a flavour in his
+thoughts that nothing else in life concerned him now. He had forgotten
+Liane Delorme for minutes when her arm passed beneath his shoulders and
+tried to lift them from the floor. He looked up then with listless
+eyes, and saw her on one knee by his side, giving him in his turn that
+confident and reassuring smile with which he had greeted her reviving
+senses ... a long, long time ago, it seemed.
+
+"Come!" she said--"sit up, monsieur, and take this drink. It will lend
+you strength. You need it."
+
+God knew he did! His throat was like a furnace flue, his mouth held the
+taste of leather. But for that thirst, indeed, he could hardly have
+found the energy to aid her efforts and lurch upon an elbow. A
+white-hot lancet pierced his wound, and though he locked his teeth
+against it a groan forced out between them. The woman cried out at the
+rapid ebb of colour from his face.
+
+"But you are suffering!"
+
+He forced a grey smile. "It is nothing," he whispered hoarsely--"it
+will pass. If you please--that drink----"
+
+She put a knee behind his shoulders for support, and he rested his head
+back upon it and drank deep from the glass which she held to his lips.
+Nectar of Olympus was never more divine than that deep draught of
+brandy and soda. He thought he quaffed Life itself in its distilled
+quintessence, its pure elixir. His look of gratitude had almost the
+spirit and the vigour of himself renewed.
+
+"My thanks, mademoiselle..."
+
+"Your thanks!"--she laughed with indulgent scorn--"your thanks to me!"
+
+He offered to rise, but was restrained by kindly hands.
+
+"No: rest there a little longer, give yourself a little time before you
+try to get up."
+
+"But I shall tire you..."
+
+"No. And if you did, what of that? It seems to me, my friend, I owe to
+you my life."
+
+"To me it seems you do," he agreed. "But such a debt is always the
+first to be forgotten, is it not?"
+
+"You reproach me?"
+
+"No, mademoiselle; not you, but the hearts of men... We are all very
+much alike, I think."
+
+"No," the woman insisted: "you do reproach me. In your heart you have
+said: 'She has forgotten that, but for me, she would have been dead
+long years ago. This service, too, she will presently forget.' But you
+are wrong, my friend. It is true, the years between had made that other
+time a little vague with old remoteness in my memory; but to-night has
+brought it all back and--a renewed memory never fades."
+
+"So one is told. But trust self-interest at need to black it out."
+
+"You have no faith in me!" she said bitterly.
+
+Lanyard gave her a weary smile. "Why should I not? And as for that: Why
+should I have faith in you, Liane? Our ways run leagues apart."
+
+"They can be one."
+
+She met his perplexed stare with an emphatic nod, with eyes that he
+could have sworn were abrim with tenderness. He shook his head as if to
+shake off a ridiculous plaguing notion, and grinned broadly. "That was
+a drink!" he declared. "I assure you, it was too much for my elderly
+head. Let me up."
+
+The cruel agony stabbed his side again and again as he--not
+unaided--got upon his feet; and though he managed to gulp down his
+groans, no grinding of his teeth could mitigate his recurrent pallor or
+the pained contractions of his eyes. Furthermore, he wavered when he
+tried to walk, and was glad to subside into a chair to which the woman
+guided him. Then she fetched him another brandy and soda, put a lighted
+cigarette between his lips, picked up a chair for herself, and sat
+down, so close to him that their elbows almost touched.
+
+"It is better, that pain, monsieur?"
+
+He replied with an uncertain nod, pressing a careful hand to his side.
+"... wound that animal gave me a month ago."
+
+"Which animal?"
+
+"Monsieur of the garotte, Liane; recently the assassin of de Lorgnes;
+before that the ex-chauffeur of the Château de Montalais."
+
+"Albert Dupont?"
+
+"As you say, it is not a name."
+
+"The same?" Her old terror revived. "My God! what have I ever done to
+that one that he should seek my life?"
+
+"What had de Lorgnes?"
+
+Her eyes turned away, she sat for a moment in silent thought, started
+suddenly to speak but checked the words before one passed her lips,
+and--as Lanyard saw quite plainly--hastened to substitute others.
+
+"No: I do not understand at all! What do you think?"
+
+Lanyard indicated a shrug with sufficient clearness, meaning to say,
+she probably knew as much as if not more than he.
+
+"But how did he get in? I had not one suspicion I was not alone until
+that handkerchief----"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"And you, my friend?"
+
+"I saw him enter, and followed."
+
+This was strictly within the truth: Lanyard had now no doubt Dupont and
+the man who had reconnoitered from the service-door were one. But it
+was no part of his mind to tell the whole truth to Liane. She might be
+as grateful as she ought to be, but she was still ... Liane Delorme ...
+a woman to be tested rather than trusted.
+
+"I must tell you. But perhaps you knew there were agents de police in
+the restaurant to-night?"
+
+Liane's head described a negative; her violet eyes were limpid pools of
+candour.
+
+"I am so much a stranger in Paris," Lanyard pursued, "I would not know
+them. But I thought you, perhaps----"
+
+"No, no, my friend, I have nothing to do with the police, I know little
+about them. Not only that, but I was so interested in our talk, and
+then inexpressibly shocked, I paid attention to nothing else."
+
+"I understand. Otherwise you must have noticed who followed me."
+
+"You were followed?"
+
+And she had found the effrontery to chide him for lack of faith in her!
+He was in pain: for all that, the moment seemed amusing.
+
+"We are followed, I assure you," Lanyard replied gravely. "One man or
+two--I don't know how many--in a town-car."
+
+"But you are sure?"
+
+"All we could get was a hansom drawn by a snail. The automobile,
+running without lights, went no faster, kept a certain distance behind
+us all the way from the Place Pigalle to the apartment of Mademoiselle
+Reneaux. What have you to say to that? Furthermore, when Mademoiselle
+Reneaux had persuaded me to take refuge in her apartment--who knew what
+they designed?--one man left the automobile as it passed her door and
+stood on watch across the way. Could one require proof that one was
+followed?"
+
+"Then you think somebody of the Préfecture recognized Duchemin in you?"
+
+"Who knows? I know I was followed, watched. If you ask me, I think
+Paris is not a healthy place for me."
+
+"But all that," Liane objected, "does not bring you here!"
+
+"Patience: I am well on my way."
+
+Lanyard paused to sip his brandy and soda, and, under cover of that,
+summon ingenuity to the fore; here a little hand-made fabrication was
+indicated.
+
+"We waited till about half an hour ago. So did the spy. Mademoiselle
+Reneaux then let me out by a private way. I started to walk to my
+hotel, the Chatham. There wasn't a taxi to be had, you understand.
+Presently I looked back and saw I was being followed again. To make
+sure, I ran--and the spy ran after me. I twisted and doubled all
+through this quarter, and at last succeeded in shaking him off. Then I
+turned down this street, hoping to pick up a cab in the Champ-Élysées.
+Of a sudden I see Dupont. He is crossing the street toward this house.
+He does not know me, but quickens his pace, and hastily lets himself in
+at the service entrance.... Incidentally, if I were you, Liane, I would
+give my staff of servants a bad quarter of an hour in the morning. The
+door and gate were not locked; I am sure Dupont used no key. Some
+person of this establishment was careless or--worse."
+
+"Trust me to look into that."
+
+"Enfin! in his haste, Dupont leaves the door as he found it. I take a
+moment's thought; it is plain he is here for no good purpose. I follow
+him in... The state of this room tells the rest."
+
+"It is no matter." The woman reviewed the ruins of her boudoir with an
+apathetic glance which was, however, anything but apathetic when she
+turned it back to Lanyard's face. Bending forward, she closed a hand
+upon his arm. Emotion troubled her accents. "My friend, my dear friend:
+tell me what I can do to repay you?"
+
+"Help me," said Lanyard simply, holding her eyes.
+
+"How is that--help you?"
+
+"To make my honour clear." Speaking rapidly and with unfeigned feeling,
+he threw himself upon her generosity: "You know I am no more what I was
+once, in this Paris--when you first knew me. You know I have given up
+all that. For years I have fought an uphill fight to live down that
+evil fame in which I once rejoiced. Now I stand accused of two crimes."
+
+"Two!"
+
+"Two in one, I hardly know which is the greater: that of stealing, or
+that of violating the hospitality and confidence of those good ladies
+of the Château de Montalais. I cannot rest while they think me
+guilty... and not they alone, but all my friends, and I have made good
+friends, in France and England. So, if you think you owe me anything,
+Liane, help me to find and restore the Montalais jewels."
+
+Liane Delorme sat back, her hand lifted from his arm and fell with a
+helpless gesture. Her eyes mirrored no more guile than a child's. Yet
+her accent was that of one who remonstrates, but with forbearance,
+against unreasonable demands.
+
+"How can I do that?"
+
+And she had protested her gratitude to him! He knew that she was lying.
+Anger welled in Lanyard's heart, but he was able to hold it in leash
+and let no sign of it show in manner or expression.
+
+"You have much influence," he suggested, "here in Paris, with people of
+many classes. A word from you here, a question there, pressure exerted
+in certain quarters, will help me more than all the powers of
+Préfecture and Surété combined. You know that."
+
+"Let me think." She was staring at the floor. "You must give me time.
+I will do what I can, I promise you that. Perhaps"--she met his gaze
+again, but he saw something crafty in her smile--"I have a scheme
+already in mind. We will discuss that in the morning, when I have slept
+on it."
+
+"You give me new hope." Lanyard finished his drink and made as if to
+rise, but relapsed, a spasm of pain knotting his face. "Afraid I must
+have a cab," he said in a low voice. "And if you could lend me a coat
+of some sort to cover these rags...."
+
+And indeed his ready-made evening clothes had fared badly in their
+first social adventure.
+
+"But if you think I dream of letting you leave this house--in pain and
+perhaps to run into the arms of the police--you little know me,
+Monsieur Michael Lanyard!"
+
+"Paul Martin, if you don't mind."
+
+"The guest rooms are there." She waved a hand to indicate the front
+part of the house on that floor. "You will find everything you need to
+make you comfortable for to-night, and in the morning I will send to
+the Chatham for your things.... Or perhaps it would be wiser to wait
+till we are sure the police are not watching there for your return. But
+if they are, it will be a simple matter to find suitable clothing for
+you. Meanwhile we will have arrived at an understanding.... You
+comprehend, monsieur, I am resolved, this affair is now arranged?"
+
+"I am well content, Liane."
+
+And that was true enough; whatever she had in mind for him, she was
+only playing into his hands when she proposed to keep him near her. He
+managed to get out of the chair, and accepted the offer of her arm, but
+held back for a moment.
+
+"But your servants..."
+
+"Well, monsieur, what of them?"
+
+"For one thing, they sleep sincerely."
+
+"There are sound-proof walls between their part of the house and this.
+More than that, they are forbidden to intrude, no matter what may
+happen, unless I summon them."
+
+"But in the morning, Liane, when they regard this wreckage... I am
+afraid they will think me a tempestuous lover!"
+
+"They will find me a tempestuous mistress," promised Liane Delorme,
+"when I question them about that open door."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+BROTHER AND SISTER
+
+
+The storm had passed off, an ardent noonday sun was collaborating with
+a coquettish breeze to make gay the window awnings of the chamber where
+Lanyard, in borrowed pyjamas and dressing-gown of silk, lay luxuriously
+bedded, listening to the purr of wide-awake Paris and, with an
+excellent cigar to chew on, ruminating upon the problematic issue of
+his latest turn of fortune, and not in the least downhearted about it.
+
+Before turning in he had soaked and steamed most of the ache out of
+bone and muscle in the hottest water his flesh would suffer; and six
+hours unbroken slumber had done wonders toward lessening the distress
+his exertions last night had occasioned in the frail new tissues of his
+wound. Now, fresh from a cold shower following a second hot bath, and
+further comforted by a petit déjeuner served in bed, he felt measurably
+sane again, and sound in wind and limb as well, barring a few deep
+bruises whose soreness would need several days to heal.
+
+A pleasant languour, like a light opiate, infused his consciousness;
+yet he was by no means mentally inactive.
+
+The morning papers were scattered over the counterpane. Lanyard had
+diligently scanned all the stories that told of the identification of
+the murdered man of the Lyons rapide as the Comte de Lorgnes; and
+inasmuch as these were of one voice in praising the Préfecture for that
+famous feat of detective work, and not one line suggested that it did
+not deserve undivided credit, Lanyard had nothing to complain of there.
+
+As for the Montalais robbery it was not even mentioned. The restricted
+size imposed upon French newspapers by the paper shortage of those days
+crowded out of their columns everything but news in true sense, and
+there could be none of that in connection with the Montalais affair
+until either André Duchemin had been arrested or the jewels recovered
+from the real thief or thieves. And Lanyard was human enough to be
+almost as willing to have the first happen as the last, if it were not
+given to him to be the prime factor in their restoration.
+
+For the time being--if he must confess the truth--he was actually
+rather enjoying himself, rather exhilarated than otherwise by the
+swiftly shifting scenes and characters of his unfolding investigations
+and by the brisk sword-play of wits in which he was called upon
+constantly to engage; both essential ingredients of the wine of life
+according to the one recipe he knew.
+
+And then a review of recent events seemed to warrant the belief that,
+all things considered, he had thus far made fair progress toward his
+goal.
+
+While it was true he did not as yet know what had become of the
+Montalais jewels, he had gathered together an accumulation of evidence
+which, however circumstantial and hypothetical, established acceptably
+to his intelligence a number of interesting inferences, to wit:
+
+That Dupont had not left the neighbourhood of the Château de Montalais,
+after haunting it for upwards of a month, without definite knowledge
+that he would gain nothing by staying on, or without an equally
+definite objective, some motive more inspiring than such simple
+sensuousness as he might find in assassinating inoffensive folk
+indiscriminately.
+
+That his attempt upon the life of Liane Delorme within twenty-four
+hours of the murder of de Lorgnes indicated conviction on his part that
+the two were coupled in some enterprise inimical to his personal
+interests.
+
+That in spite of his mask of a stupid pig Dumont was proving himself
+mentally as well as physically an adversary worthy of all respect, and
+was--what was worse--still to be reckoned with.
+
+That, as Lanyard had suspected all along, the Monk party had been
+visited upon the Château de Montalais through no vagary of chance
+whatever but as part of a deliberate design whose ulterior motive had
+transpired only with the disappearance of the jewels--to Dupont's vast
+but understandable vexation of spirit.
+
+That the several members of the Monk party had been working in entire
+accord, as a close corporation; in which case the person whom the Comte
+de Lorgnes had expected to meet in Lyons must have been Monk Phinuit or
+Jules.
+
+Consequently that at least one of the three last named had been the
+actual perpetrator of the robbery; and by the same token, that Liane
+had lied in asserting that Monk and retinue had sailed for America
+nearly a week prior to its commission.
+
+That Liane herself had not so suddenly decided to leave France, where
+she was after a fashion somebody, and journey to America, where she
+would be nobody, except in stress of mortal fear lest the fate that
+had befallen de Lorgnes befall her in turn--as would surely have been
+the case last night but for Lanyard.
+
+That she must therefore have had a tolerably accurate knowledge either
+of Dupont's identity or of the opposition interests which that one so
+ably represented; and thus was better informed than poor de Lorgnes, to
+whom Dupont had been unknown; which argued that Liane's rôle in the
+intrigue was that of a principal, whereas de Lorgnes had figured only
+as a subordinate.
+
+That even if the woman did mean well toward Lanyard she was bound by
+stronger ties to others, whom she must consider first, and who were
+hardly likely to prove so well disposed; that her protestations of
+friendship and gratitude must be valued accordingly.
+
+Summing up, Lanyard told himself he could hardly be said to have let
+grass grow under his feet since leaving Château de Montalais.
+
+Now he found himself with a solitary care to nurse, the question: What
+had her pillow advised Liane Delorme?
+
+He was going to be exceedingly interested to learn what she, in the
+maturity of her judgement, had decided to do about this man who
+ingenuously suggested that she requite him for saving her life by
+helping him recover the Montalais jewels.
+
+On the other hand, since Lanyard had quite decided what he meant to do
+about Liane in any event, her decision really didn't matter much; and
+he refused to fret himself trying to forecast it. Whatever it might
+turn out to be, it would find him prepared, he couldn't be surprised.
+There Lanyard was wrong. Liane was amply able to surprise him, and did.
+Ultimately he felt constrained to concede a touch to genius in the
+woman; her methods were her own and never poor in boldness and
+imagination.
+
+It was without ceremony that she walked in on him at length, having
+kept him waiting so long that he had begun to wonder if she meant to
+try on anything as crude as abandoning him, and posting off to
+Cherbourg without a word to seek fancied immunity in New York, while he
+remained in an empty house without money, papers of identification, or
+even fit clothing for the street; for, on coming out of his bath,
+Lanyard had found all of these things missing, the valet de chambre
+presumably having made off with his evening clothes, to have them
+pressed and repaired.
+
+Liane was dressed for travelling, becomingly if with a sobriety that
+went oddly with her cultivated beauté du diable, and wore besides a
+habit of preoccupation which, one was left to assume, excused the
+informality of her unannounced entrance.
+
+"Well, my dear friend!" she said gravely, halting by the bedside.
+
+"It's about time," Lanyard retorted.
+
+"I was afraid you might be growing impatient," she confessed. "I have
+had so much to do..."
+
+"No doubt. But if you had neglected me much longer I should have come
+to look for you regardless of consequences."
+
+"How is that?" she enquired with knitted brows--"regardless of what
+consequences?"
+
+"Any damage one might do to the morale of your ménage by toddling about
+in the voluptuous déshabillé in which you behold me--my sole present
+apology for a wardrobe."
+
+She found only the shadow of a smile for such frivolity. "I have sent
+for clothing for you," she said absently. "It should be here any minute
+now. We only wait for that."
+
+"You mean you have sent to the Chatham for my things?"
+
+"But certainly not, monsieur!" Liane Delorme lied without perceptible
+effort. "That would have been too injudicious. It appears you were not
+mistaken in thinking you were recognized as André Duchemin last night.
+Agents of the Préfecture have been all day watching at the Chatham,
+awaiting your return."
+
+"How sad for them!" In as much as he had every reason to believe this
+to be outright falsehood, Lanyard didn't feel called upon to seem
+downcast. "But if my clothing there is unavailable, I hardly see..."
+
+"But naturally I have commissioned a person of good judgement to outfit
+you from the shops. Your dress clothes--which seemed to suit you very
+well last night--gave us your measurements. The rest is simplicity; my
+orders were to get you everything you could possibly require."
+
+"It's awfully sporting of you," Lanyard insisted. "Although it makes
+one feel--you know--not quite respectable. However, if you will be so
+gracious as to suggest that your valet de chambre return my pocketbook
+and passports..."
+
+"I have them here." The woman turned over the missing articles. "But,"
+she demanded with an interest which was undissembled if tardy in
+finding expression, "how are you feeling to-day?"
+
+"Oh, quite fit, thank you."
+
+"In good spirits, I know. But that wound--?"
+
+Lanyard chose to make more of that than it deserved; one couldn't tell
+when an interesting disability might prove useful. "I have to be a bit
+careful," he confessed, covering the seat of injury with a tender hand,
+"but it's nothing like so troublesome as it was last night."
+
+"I am glad. You feel able to travel?"
+
+"Travel?" Lanyard made a face of dismay. "But one is so delightfully at
+ease here, and since the Prefecture cannot possibly suspect... Are you
+then in such haste to be rid of me, Liane?"
+
+"Not at all. It is my wish and intention to accompany you."
+
+"Well, let us trust the world will be broad-minded about it.
+And--pardon my not rising--won't you sit down and tell me what it is
+all about."
+
+"I have so little time, so many things to attend to."
+
+Nevertheless, Liane found herself a chair and accepted a cigarette.
+
+"Does one infer that we start on our travels to-day?"
+
+"Within the hour; in fact, as soon as you are decently clothed."
+
+"And where do we go, mademoiselle?"
+
+"To Cherbourg, there to take steamer for New York."
+
+Fortunately it was Lanyard's cue to register shock; it would have cost
+him something to have kept secret his stupefaction. He sank back upon
+his pillows and waggled feeble hands, while his respect for Liane grew
+by bounds. She had succeeded in startling and mystifying him beyond
+expression.
+
+What dodge was this that cloaked itself in such anomalous semblance of
+good faith? She had not known he was acquainted with her plan to leave
+France; he had discounted a hundred devices to keep it from his
+knowledge. And now she not only confessed it openly, but invited him to
+go with her! In the name of unreason--why? She knew, for he had owned,
+his possessing purpose. He did not for an instant believe Liane Delorme
+would fly France and leave behind the Montalais jewels. Did she think
+he did not suspect her of knowing more about them than she had chosen
+to admit? Did she imagine that he was one of those who can see only
+that which is in the distance? Did she do him the injustice to believe
+him incapable of actually smelling out the jewels if ever he got within
+range of them?
+
+But conjecture was too idle, Liane was too deep for him; her intent
+would declare itself when she willed it, not before, unless he could
+lull her into a false sense of faith in him, trick her into betraying
+herself by inadvertence.
+
+"But, my dear friend, why America?"
+
+"You recall asking me to help you last night? Did I not promise to do
+what I could? Well, I am not one to forget my promise. I know
+something, monsieur."
+
+"I believe you do!"
+
+"You gave me credit for having some little influence in this world of
+Paris. I have used it. What I have learned--I shall not tell you how,
+specifically--enables me to assure you that the Montalais jewels are on
+their way to America."
+
+"And I am to believe you make this journey to help me regain them?"
+
+"What do you think, then?"
+
+"I do not know what to think, mademoiselle. I am overwhelmed--abashed
+and humbled by contemplation of such generosity."
+
+"You see, you do not know me, monsieur. But you shall know me better
+before we are finished."
+
+"One does not question that." Nor did one! "But if I am to sail for
+America to-day--"
+
+"To-morrow, from Cherbourg, at eight in the morning."
+
+"Well, to-morrow, then: but how am I to get my passport vised?"
+
+"I have seen to that. If you will look over your papers, monsieur, you
+will see that you are no longer Paul Martin alias André Duchemin, but
+Paul Delorme, my invalid brother, still suffering from honourable
+wounds sustained in the Great War and ordered abroad for his health."
+
+To this Lanyard, hastily verifying her statement by running an eye
+through the passport, found nothing more appropriate than a wondering
+"Mon dieu!"
+
+"So you see, everything is arranged. What have you to say?"
+
+"Only that mademoiselle sweeps one off one's feet."
+
+"Do you complain about that? You no longer doubt my devotion, my
+gratitude?"
+
+"Do not believe me capable of such stupidity!"
+
+"That is very well, then. Now I must run." Liane Delorme threw away her
+cigarette and rose. "I have a thousand things to do.... And, you
+understand, we leave as soon as you are dressed?"
+
+"Perfectly. By what train?"
+
+"By no train. Don't you know there is a strike to-day? What have you
+been reading in those newspapers? It is necessary that we motor to
+Cherbourg."
+
+"That is no little journey, dear sister."
+
+"Three hundred and seventy kilometres?" Liane Delorme held this
+equivalent of two-hundred and thirty English miles in supreme contempt.
+"We shall make it in eight hours. We leave at four at latest, possibly
+earlier; at midnight we are in Cherbourg. You shall see."
+
+"If I survive..."
+
+"Have no fear. My chauffeur drives superbly."
+
+She was at the door when Lanyard stayed her with "One moment, Liane!"
+With fingers resting lightly on the knob she turned.
+
+"Speak English," he requested briefly. "What about Dupont?"
+
+Simple mention of the man was enough to make the woman wince and lose
+colour. Before she replied Lanyard saw the tip of her tongue furtively
+moisten her lips.
+
+"Well, and what of him?"
+
+"Do you imagine he has had enough?"
+
+"Who knows? I for one shall feel safe from him only when I knew he is
+in the Santé or his grave."
+
+"Suppose he tries to follow us to Cherbourg or to stop us on the
+way..."
+
+"How should he know?"
+
+"Tell me who left the doors open for him last night, and I will answer
+that question." The woman looked more than ever frightened, but shook
+her head. "You didn't fail to question the servants this morning, yet
+learned nothing?"
+
+"It was impossible to fix the blame..."
+
+"Have you used all your intelligence, I wonder?"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Have you reflected that, since Dupont got in after you came home, his
+accomplice in your household is most probably one of those who were up
+at that hour. Who were they?"
+
+"Only two. The footman, Leon..."
+
+"You trust him?"
+
+"Not altogether. Now you make me think, I shall discharge him when I
+leave, without notice."
+
+"Wait. Who else?"
+
+"Marthe, my maid."
+
+"You have confidence in her loyalty?"
+
+"Implicit. She has been with me for years."
+
+Lanyard said "Open that door!" in a tone sharp with such authority that
+Liane Delorme instinctively obeyed, and the woman whom Lanyard had seen
+that morning coming down the stairs with the lighted candle entered
+rather precipitately, carrying over one arm an evening wrap of gold
+brocade and fur.
+
+"Pardon, madame," she murmured, and paused. Aside from the awkwardness
+of her entrance, she betrayed no confusion. "I was about to knock and
+ask if madame wished me to pack this..."
+
+"You know very well I shall need it," Liane said ominously. A look from
+Lanyard checked a tirade, or more exactly compressed it into a single
+word: "Imbécile!"
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+Marthe hinted at rather than executed a courtesy and withdrew. Liane
+shut the door behind her, and reapproached the bed, trembling with an
+anger that rendered her forgetful, so that she relapsed into French.
+
+"You think she was listening?"
+
+"English, please!" To this Lanyard added a slight shrug..
+
+"It is hard to believe," Liane averred unhappily. "After all these
+years... I have been kind to that one, too!"
+
+"Ah, well! At least you know now she will bear watching. You mean to
+take her with you?"
+
+"I did, until this happened. We quarrelled about it, last night. I
+think she has a lover here in Paris and doesn't want to leave him."
+
+"And now will you tell me that Dupont knows nothing of your intention
+to motor to Cherbourg today?"
+
+"No..." Disconsolate, Liane sank down into the chair and, resting an
+elbow on the arm, clipped her chin in one hand. "Now I dare not go,"
+she mused aloud. "Yet I must!... What am I to do?"
+
+"Courage, little sister! It is I who have an idea." Liane lifted a gaze
+of mute enquiry. "I think we are now agreed it rests between Marthe and
+the footman Leon, this treachery." She assented. "Very well. Then let
+them run the risks any further disloyalty may have prepared for us."
+
+"I do not understand..."
+
+"What automobile are you using for our trip this afternoon?"
+
+"My limousine for you and me."
+
+"And Marthe: how is she to make the journey?"
+
+"In the touring car, which follows us with our luggage."
+
+"It is fast, this touring car?"
+
+"The best money can buy."
+
+"Now tell me what you know about the chauffeur who drives the
+limousine?"
+
+"He is absolutely to be trusted."
+
+"You have had him long in your employ?"
+
+The woman hesitated, looked aside, bit her lip.
+
+"As a matter of fact, monsieur," she said hastily, trying to cover her
+loss of countenance with rapid speech--"it is the boy who drove us
+through the Cévennes. Monsieur Monk asked me to keep him pending his
+return to France, You understand, he is not to be away long--Monsieur
+Monk--only a few weeks; so it would have been extravagant to take Jules
+back to America for that little time. You see?"
+
+Lanyard had the grace to keep a straight face. He nodded gravely.
+
+"You make it all perfectly clear, little sister. And the driver of the
+touring car: are you sure of him?"
+
+"I think so. But you do not tell me what you have in mind."
+
+"Simply this: At the last moment you will decide to take Leon with you.
+Give him no more time than he needs to pack a handbag. Trump up some
+excuse and let him follow with Marthe..."
+
+"No difficulty about that. He is an excellent driver, Leon; he served
+me as chauffeur--and made a good one, too--for a year before I took him
+into the house, at his request; he said he was tired of driving. But if
+the man I had meant to use is indisposed--trust me to see that he is--I
+can call on Leon to take care of Marthe and our luggage in the touring
+car."
+
+"Excellent. Now presuming Dupont to be well informed, we may safely
+bank on his attempting nothing before nightfall. Road traps can be too
+easily perceived at a distance by daylight. Toward evening then, we
+will let the touring car catch up. You will express a desire to
+continue in it, because--because of any excuse that comes into your
+head. At all events, we will exchange cars with Marthe and Leon,
+leaving the latter to bring on the limousine while Jules drives for us.
+Whatever happens then, we may feel sure the touring car will get off
+lightly; for whether they're involved with Dupont or not, Leon and
+Marthe are small fry, not the fish he's angling for."
+
+"But will not Leon and Marthe suspect and refuse to follow?"
+
+"Perhaps they may suspect, but they will follow out of curiosity, to
+see how we fare, if for nothing else. You may lose a limousine, but you
+can afford to risk that as long as you are not in it--eh, little
+long-lost sister?"
+
+"My dear brother!" Liane cried, deeply moved. She leaned forward and
+caressed Lanyard's hand with sisterly warmth, in her admiration and
+gratification loosing upon him the full candle-power of the violet eyes
+in their most disastrous smile. "What a head to have in the family!"
+
+"Take care!" Lanyard admonished. "I admit it's not half bad at times,
+but if this battered old headpiece of mine is to be of any further
+service to us, Liane, you must be careful not to turn it!"
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+SIX BOTTLES OF CHAMPAGNE
+
+
+Once decided upon a course of action, Liane Delorme demonstrated that
+she could move with energy and decision uncommon in her kind. Under her
+masterly supervision, preparations accomplished themselves, as it were,
+by magic.
+
+It was, for example, nearer three than four o'clock when the expedition
+for Cherbourg left the door of her town-house and Paris by way of the
+Porte de Neuilly; the limousine leading with that polished pattern of a
+chauffeur, Jules, at its wheel, as spick and span, firm of jaw and
+imperturbable of eye as when Lanyard had first noticed him in Nant; the
+touring car trailing, with the footman Leon as driver, and not at all
+happy to find himself drafted in that capacity, if one might judge by a
+sullen sort of uneasiness in his look.
+
+Nothing was to be expected in the streets or suburbs, neither speed nor
+any indication of the intentions (if any) of Dupont. Lanyard spared
+himself the thankless trouble of watching to see if they were
+followed--having little doubt they were--and took his ease by the side
+of Liane Delorme.
+
+Chatting of old times, or sitting in grateful silence when Liane
+relapsed into abstraction--something which she did with a frequency
+which testified to the heavy pressure of her thoughts--he kept an
+appreciative eye on Jules, conceding at length that Liane's adjective,
+superb, had been fitly applied to his driving. So long as he remained
+at the wheel, they were not only in safe hands but might be sure of
+losing nothing on the road.
+
+It was in St. Germain-en-Laye that Lanyard first noticed the grey
+touring car. But for mental selection of St. Germain as the likeliest
+spot for Dupont to lay in waiting, and thanks also to an error of
+judgment on the part of that one, he must have missed it; for there was
+nothing strikingly sinister in the aspect of that long-bodied grey car
+with the capacious hood betokening a motor of great power. But it stood
+incongruously round the corner, in a mean side street, as if anxious to
+escape observation; its juxtaposition to the door of a wine shop of the
+lowest class was noticeable in a car of such high caste; and, what was
+finally damning, the rat-faced man of Lyons was lounging in the door of
+the wine shop, sucking at a cigarette and watching the traffic with an
+all too listless eye shaded by the visor of a shabby cap.
+
+Lanyard said nothing at the time, but later, when a long stretch of
+straight road gave him the chance, verified his suspicions by looking
+back to see the grey car lurking not less than a mile and a half
+astern; the Delorme touring car driven by Leon keeping a quarter of a
+mile in the rear of the limousine.
+
+These relative positions remained approximately unchanged during most
+of the light hours of that long evening, despite the terrific pace
+which Jules set in the open country. Lanyard, keeping an eye on the
+indicator, saw its hand register the equivalent of sixty English miles
+an hour more frequently than not. It seldom dropped below fifty except
+when passing through towns or villages. And more often than he liked
+Lanyard watched it creep up to and past the mark seventy.
+
+With such driving he was quite willing to believe that they would see
+Cherbourg or Heaven by midnight if not before; always, of course,
+providing...
+
+For the first three hours Leon stood the pace well. Then nerves or
+physical endurance began to fail, he dropped back, and the Delorme
+touring car was thereafter seldom visible.
+
+No more, for that matter, was the grey shadow. Lanyard's forecast
+seemed to be borne out by its conduct: Dupont was biding his time and
+would undoubtedly attempt nothing before nightfall. In the meantime he
+was making no effort to do more than keep step with the limousine, but
+at a decent distance. Only occasionally when, for this reason or that,
+Jules was obliged to run at reduced speed for several minutes on end,
+the grey car would draw into sight, always, however, about a mile
+behind the Delorme touring car.
+
+At about seven they dined on the wing, from the hamper which, with
+Liane's jewel case in its leather disguise of a simple travelling bag,
+constituted all the limousine's load of luggage. Lanyard passed
+sandwiches through the front window to Jules, who munched them while
+driving like a speed maniac, and with the same appalling nonchalance
+washed them down with a tumbler of champagne. Then he discovered some
+manner of sorcerous power over matches in the wind, lighted a
+cigarette, and signalised his sense of refreshment by smoothly edging
+the indicator needle up toward the eighty notch, where he held it
+stationary until Lanyard and Liane with one accord begged him to
+consider their appetites.
+
+At eight o'clock they were passing through Lisieux, one hundred and
+eighteen miles from Paris.
+
+Lanyard made mental calculations.
+
+"The light will hold till after nine," he informed Liane. "By that time
+we shall have left Caen behind."
+
+"I understand," she said coolly; "it will be, then, after Caen."
+
+"Presumably."
+
+"Another hour of peace of mind!" She yawned delicately. "I think--I am
+bored by this speed--I think I shall have a nap."
+
+Composedly she arranged pillows, put her pretty feet upon the jewel
+case and, turning her face from Lanyard, dozed.
+
+"I think," he reflected, "that the world is more rich in remarkable
+women than in remarkable men!"
+
+A luminous lilac twilight vied with the street lamps of Caen when the
+limousine rolled through the city at moderate speed. Lanyard utilized
+this occasion to confer with Jules through the window.
+
+"Beyond the town," he said, "you will stop just round the first
+suitable turning, so that we can't be seen before the corner is turned.
+Draw off to the side of the road and--I think it would be advisable to
+have a little engine trouble."
+
+"Very good, sir," said Jules without looking round. Then he added in a
+voice of complete respect: "Pardon, sir, but--madame's orders?"
+
+"If they are not"--Lanyard was nettled--"she will countermand them."
+
+"Quite so, sir. And--if you don't mind my asking--what's the idea?"
+
+"I presume you set some value on your skin?"
+
+"Plumb crazy about it."
+
+"Mademoiselle Delorme and I are afflicted with the same idiosyncrasy.
+We want to save our lives, and we don't mind saving yours at the same
+time."
+
+"That's more than fair with me. But is that all I'm to know?"
+
+"If the information is any comfort to you: in a grey car which has been
+following us ever since we left St. Germain, is the man who--I
+believe--murdered Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes on the Lyons rapide, and
+who--I know--tried last night to murder Mademoiselle Delorme."
+
+"And I suppose that, in his big-hearted, wholesaler's way, he wouldn't
+mind making a bag of the lot of us tonight."
+
+"I'm afraid you have reason..."
+
+"If you're planning to put a crimp in his ambitions, sir, I've got a
+pistol I know how to use."
+
+"Better have it handy, though I don't think we'll need it yet. Our
+present plan is merely to change cars with Leon and Marthe; the grey
+car will pass and go on ahead before we make the shift; then you,
+mademoiselle and I follow in the touring car, the others in the
+limousine. If there's a trap, as we have every reason to anticipate
+there will, the touring car will get through--or we'll hope so."
+
+"Ah-h!" Jules used the tone of one who perceives enlightenment as a
+blinding flash. "Marthe and Leon are in on the dirty work too, eh?"
+
+"What makes you think that?"
+
+"Putting two and two together--what you've just told me with what I've
+been noticing and wondering about."
+
+"Then you think those two--"
+
+"Marthe and Leon," Jules pronounced with deliberation, "are two very
+bad eggs, if you ask me. I shan't shed a solitary tear if something sad
+happens to them in this 'bus to-night."
+
+There was no time then to delve into his reasons for this statement of
+feeling. The outskirts of Caen were dropping behind. Providentially,
+the first bend in the road to Bayeux afforded good cover on the side
+toward the town. Jules shut off the power as he made the turn, and
+braked to a dead stop in lee of a row of outhouses. Lanyard was on the
+ground as soon as the wheels ceased to turn, Jules almost as quickly.
+
+"Now for your engine trouble," Lanyard instructed. "Nothing serious,
+you understand--simply an adjustment to excuse a few minutes' delay and
+lend colour to our impatience."
+
+"Got you the first time," Jules replied, unlatching and raising one
+wing of the hood.
+
+Lanyard moved toward the middle of the road and flagged the Delorme
+touring car as it rounded the turn, a few seconds later, at such speed
+that Leon was put to it to stop the car fifty yards beyond the
+limousine. The man jumped down and, followed by the maid, ran back, but
+before he reached the limousine was obliged to jump aside to escape the
+grey car which, tooled by a crack racing hand, took the corner on two
+wheels, then straightened out and tore past in a smother of dust, with
+its muffler cut out and the exhaust bellowing like a machine-gun.
+
+Lanyard counted four figures, two on the front seat, two in the
+tonneau. More than this, the headlong speed and the failing light
+rendered it impossible to see--though had the one been less and the
+other stronger, he could have gained little more information from
+inspection of those four shapes shrouded in dust coats and masked with
+goggles.
+
+Watching its rear light dwindle, he fancied that the grey shadow was
+slowing down; but one could not be sure about that.
+
+"There is something wrong, monsieur?"
+
+The man Leon was at his elbow. Lanyard replied with the curt nod of a
+disgruntled motorist.
+
+"Something--Jules can tell you," he said shortly.
+
+"Meanwhile, Mademoiselle Delorme and I have decided not to wait. We've
+got no time to spare. We will take your car and go on."
+
+"But, monsieur, I--" Leon began to expostulate.
+
+The icy accents of Liane Delorme cut it: "Well, Leon: what is your
+objection?"
+
+"Objection, madame?" the fellow faltered. "Pardon--but it is not for
+me to object. I--I was merely startled."
+
+"Then get over that at once," he was advised; "and bring my
+jewelcase--Marthe will point it out to you--to the touring-car."
+
+"Yes, madame, immediately."
+
+"Also the lunch-hamper, if you please."
+
+"Assuredly, monsieur."
+
+Leon departed hastily for the limousine, where Marthe joined him, while
+Lanyard and Liane Delorme proceeded to the touring car.
+
+"But what on earth do you want with that hamper, monsieur?"
+
+"Hush, little sister, not so loud! Brother thinks he has another idea."
+
+"Then Heaven forbid that I should interfere!"
+
+Staggering under its weight, Leon shouldered the jewelcase and carried
+it to the touring car, where Liane superintended its disposal in the
+luggage-jammed tonneau. A second trip, less laborious, brought them the
+hamper. Liane uttered perfunctory thanks and called to Jules, who was
+still tinkering at the limousine engine with the aid of an electric
+torch.
+
+"Come, Jules! Leave Leon to attend to what is required there."
+
+"Very good, madame."
+
+Jules strolled over to the touring car and settled down at the wheel.
+Liane Delorme had the seat beside him.
+
+Lanyard had established himself in a debatable space in the tonneau to
+which his right was disputed by bags and boxes of every shape, size and
+description.
+
+"How long, Jules, will Leon need--?"
+
+"Five minutes, madame, if he takes his time about it."
+
+"Then let us hasten."
+
+They drew away from the limousine so quickly that in thirty seconds its
+headlights were all that marked its stand.
+
+Lanyard studied the phosphorescent dial of his wristwatch. From first
+to last the transaction had consumed little more than three minutes.
+
+Liane slewed round to talk over the back of the seat.
+
+"What time is it, monsieur?"
+
+"Ten after nine. In an hour precisely the moon will rise."
+
+"It will be in this hour of darkness, then..."
+
+A bend in the road blotted out the stationary lights of the limousine.
+There was no tail-light visible on the road before them. Lanyard
+touched Jules on the shoulder.
+
+"Switch off your lights," he said--"all of them. Then find a place
+where we can turn off and wait till Leon and Marthe pass us."
+
+In sudden blindness the car moved on slowly, groping its way for a few
+hundred yards. Then Jules picked out the mouth of a narrow lane,
+overshadowed by dense foliage, ran past, stopped, and backed into it.
+
+In four minutes by Lanyard's watch the pulse of the limousine began to
+beat upon the stillness of that sleepy countryside. A blue-white glare
+like naked and hungry steel leapt quivering past the bend, swept in a
+wide arc as the lamps themselves became visible, and lay horizontal
+with the road as the car bored past.
+
+"Evidently Leon feels quite lost without us," Lanyard commented.
+"Shoot, Jules--follow his rear lamp, and _don't_ cut out your muffler.
+Can you manage without headlights for a while?"
+
+"I drove an ambulance for four years, sir."
+
+The car swung out into the main highway. Far ahead the red sardonic eye
+in the rear of the limousine leered as if mocking their hopes of
+keeping it in sight. Jules, however, proved unresentful; and he was
+marvellously competent.
+
+"To anybody who's ever piloted a load of casualties through eighteen
+inches of mud, dodging shell holes and shells on their way to make new
+holes, in a black rainstorm at midnight--this sort of thing," Jules
+announced--"a hard, smooth road under a clear sky--is simple pie."
+
+So it may have seemed to him. But to Lanyard and Liane Delorme, hurled
+along a road they could not see at anywhere from forty to sixty miles
+an hour, with no manner of guidance other than an elusive tail-lamp
+which was forever whisking round corners and remaining invisible till
+Jules found his way round in turn, by instinct or second sight or
+intuition--whatever it was, it proved unfailing--it was a nervous
+time.
+
+And there was half an hour of it...
+
+They were swooping down a long grade with a sharp turn at the bottom,
+as they knew from the fact that the red eye had just winked out,
+somewhere on ahead, there sounded a grinding crash, the noise of a
+stout fabric rent and crushed with the clash and clatter of shivered
+glass.
+
+"Easy," Lanyard cautioned--"and ready with the lights!"
+
+Both warnings were superfluous. Jules had already disengaged the gears.
+Gravity carried the car round the curve, slowly, smoothly, silently;
+under constraint of its brakes it slid to a pause on a steep though
+brief descent, and hung there like an animal poised to spring, purring
+softly.
+
+Below, at the foot of the hill, the headlights of another car, standing
+at some distance and to the right of the road, furnished lurid
+illumination to the theatre of disaster.
+
+Something, its nature just then mysterious, had apparently caused Leon
+to lose control of the heavy car, so that it had skidded into a ditch
+and capsized. Four men, crude shapes of nightmare in enveloping
+dust-coats and disfiguring goggles, were swarming round the wreck. Two
+were helping the driver out, two others having their gallantry in
+performing like service for the maid rewarded by a torrent of
+vituperative denunciation, half hysterical and wholly infuriated.
+
+By the freedom of her gestures, which was rivalled only by that of her
+language, the dishevelled, storming figure of Marthe was manifestly
+uninjured. And in another moment it was seen, as Leon found his feet
+and limped toward the others, that he had suffered only slight damage
+at the worst.
+
+Lanyard drew attention to a dark serpentine line that lay like a dead
+snake upon the lighted surface of the road. Jules grunted in token of
+comprehension. Liane Delorme breathlessly demanded: "What is it?"
+
+"An old trick," Lanyard explained: "A wire cable stretched between
+trees diagonally across the road, about as high as the middle of the
+windshield. The impetus of the limousine broke it, but not before it
+had slewed the car off toward the ditch, wrenching the wheel out of the
+driver's hands."
+
+He fondled the pistol which Jules had handed him, slipped the safety
+catch, and said: "Now before they wake up, Jules--give her all she's
+got!"
+
+Jules released the brakes and, as the car gathered way, noiselessly
+slipped the gear shift into the fourth speed and bore heavily on the
+accelerator. They were making forty miles an hour when they struck the
+level and thundered past the group.
+
+A glimpse of startled faces, the scream of a man who had strayed
+incautiously into the roadway and stopped there, apparently petrified
+by the peril that bore down upon him without lights or any other
+warning, until one of the forward fenders struck and hurled him aside
+like a straw--and only the night of the open road lay before them.
+Jules touched the headlight switch and opened the exhaust. Above the
+roaring of the latter Lanyard fancied he could hear a faint rattling
+sound. He looked back and smiled grimly. Sharp, short flames of orange
+and scarlet were stabbing the darkness. Somebody had opened fire with
+an automatic pistol.... Sheer waste of ammunition!
+
+The pace waxed terrific on a road, like so many roads of France,
+apparently interminable and straight. On either hand endless ranks of
+poplars rattled like loose palings of some tremendous picket fence. And
+yet, long before the road turned, Lanyard, staring astern as he knelt
+on the rear seat with arms crossed on the folded top, saw the two white
+eyes of the grey car swing into view and start in pursuit. Quick work,
+he called it.
+
+He crawled forward and communicated his news, shouting to make himself
+heard.
+
+"Don't ease up unless you have to," he counselled; "don't think we dare
+give them an inch."
+
+Back at his post of observation, he watched, hoping against hope, while
+the car lunged and tore like a mad thing through the night, snoring up
+grades, screaming down them, drumming across the levels, clattering
+wildly through villages and hamlets; while the moon rose and gathered
+strength and made the road a streaming river of milk and ink; while his
+heart sank as minute succeeded minute, mile followed mile, and ever the
+lights of the pursuing car, lost to sight from time to time, reappeared
+with a brighter, fiercer glow, and conviction forced itself home that
+they were being gradually but surely overhauled.
+
+He took this intelligence to the ear of Jules. The chauffeur answered
+only with a worried shake of his head that said too plainly he was
+doing his best, extracting every ounce of power from the engine.
+
+Ill luck ambushed them in the streets of a sizable town, its name
+unknown to Lanyard, where another car, driven inexpertly, rolled out of
+a side street and stalled in their path. The emergency brake saved them
+a collision; but there were not six inches between the two when the
+touring car stopped dead; and minutes were lost before the other got
+under way and they were able to proceed.
+
+Less than three hundred yards separated pursued and pursuer as they
+raced out through open fields once more. And foot by foot this lead was
+being inexorably cut down.
+
+In the seat beside the driver of the grey car a man rose and, steadying
+himself by holding onto the windshield, poured out the contents of an
+automatic, presumably hoping to puncture the tires of the quarry. A
+bullet bored a neat hole through the windshield between the heads of
+Liane Delorme and Jules. The woman slipped down upon the floor and
+Jules crouched over the wheel. Lanyard fingered his automatic but held
+its fire against a moment when he could be more sure of his arm.
+
+Instead, he turned to the lunch hamper and opened it. Liane's
+provisioning had been ample for a party thrice their number. In the
+bottom of the basket lay six pint bottles of champagne, four of them
+unopened. Lanyard took them to the rear seat--and found the grey car
+had drawn up to within fifty yards of its prey. Making a pace better
+than seventy miles per hour, it would not dare swerve.
+
+The first empty bottle broke to one side, the second squarely between
+the front wheels. He grasped the first full bottle by the neck and felt
+that its weight promised more accuracy, but ducked before attempting to
+throw it as a volley of shots sought to discourage him. At the first
+lull he rose and cast the bottle with the overhand action employed in
+grenade throwing. It crashed fairly beneath the nearer forward wheel of
+the grey car, but without effect, other than to draw another volley in
+retaliation. This he risked; the emergency had grown too desperate for
+more paltering; the lead had been abridged to thirty yards; in two
+minutes more it would be nothing.
+
+The fourth bottle went wild, but the fifth exploded six inches in front
+of the offside wheel and its jagged fragments ripped out the heart of
+the tire. On the instant of the accompanying blow-out the grey car
+shied like a frightened horse and swerved off the road, hurtling
+headlong into a clump of trees. The subsequent crash was like the
+detonation of a great bomb. Deep shadows masked that tragedy beneath
+the trees. Lanyard saw the beam of the headlights lift and drill
+perpendicularly into the zenith before it was blacked out.
+
+He turned and yelled in the ear of Jules: "Slow down! Take your time!
+They've quit!"
+
+Liane Delorme rose from her cramped position on the floor, and stared
+incredulously back along the empty, moonlit road.
+
+"What has become of them?"
+
+Lanyard offered a vague gesture."... tried to climb a tree," he replied
+wearily, and dropping back on the rear seat began to worry the cork out
+of the last pint bottle of champagne.
+
+He reckoned he had earned a drink if anybody ever had.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+THE SYBARITES
+
+
+Without disclaiming any credit that was rightly his due for making the
+performance possible, Lanyard felt obliged to concede that Liane's
+Delorme's confidence had been well reposed in the ability of Jules to
+drive by the clock. For when the touring car made, on a quayside of
+Cherbourg's avant port, what was for its passengers its last stop of
+the night, the hour of eight bells was being sounded aboard the
+countless vessels that shouldered one another in the twin basins of the
+commercial harbour or rode at anchor between its granite jetties and
+the distant bulwark of the Digue.
+
+Nor was Jules disposed to deny himself well-earned applause. Receiving
+none immediately when he got down from his seat and indulged in one
+luxurious stretch, "I'll disseminate the information to the terrestrial
+universe," he volunteered, "that was travelling!"
+
+"And now that you have done so," Liane Delorme suggested, "perhaps you
+will be good enough to let the stewards know we are waiting."
+
+If the grin was impudent, the salute she got in acknowledgment was
+perfection; Jules faced about like a military automaton, strode off
+briskly, stopped at some distance to light a cigarette, and in effect
+faded out with the flame of the match.
+
+Lanyard didn't try to keep track of his going. Committed as he stood to
+follow the lead of Liane Delorme to the end of this chapter of intrigue
+(and with his mind at ease as to Monsieur Dupont, for the time being at
+least) he was largely indifferent to intervening developments.
+
+He had asked no questions of Liane, and his knowledge of Cherbourg was
+limited to a memory of passing through the place as a boy, with a
+case-hardened criminal as guide and police at their heels. But assuming
+that Liane had booked passages for New York by a Cunarder, a White Star
+or American Line Boat--all three touched regularly at Cherbourg, west
+bound from Southampton--he expected presently to go aboard a tender and
+be ferried out to one of the steamers whose riding lights were to be
+seen in the roadstead. Meanwhile he was lazily content....
+
+Mellow voices of bell metal swelled and died on the midnight air while,
+lounging against the motor car--with Liane at his side registering more
+impatience than he thought the occasion called for--Lanyard listened,
+stared, wondered, the breath of the sea sweet in his nostrils, its
+flavour in his throat, his vision lost in the tangled web of masts and
+cordage and funnels that stencilled the moon-pale sky: the witching
+glamour of salt water binding all his senses with its time-old spell.
+
+It was quiet there upon the quay. Somewhere a winch rattled drowsily
+and weary tackle whined; more near at hand, funnels were snoring and
+pumps chugging with a constant, monotonous noise of splashing. On the
+landward side, from wine shops across the way, came blurred gusts of
+laughter and the wailing of an accordeon. The footfalls of a watchman,
+or perhaps a sergent de ville, had lonely echoes. The high electric
+arcs were motionless, and the shadows cast by their steel-blue glare
+lay on the pave as if painted in lampblack.
+
+Dupont, the road to Paris, seemed figments of some dream dreamed long
+ago...
+
+The tip of a pretty slipper, tapping restlessly, continued to betray
+Liane's temper. But she said nothing. Privately Lanyard yawned. Then
+Jules, tagged by three men with the fair white jackets and shuffling
+gait of stewards, sauntered into view from behind two mountains of
+freight, and announced: "All ready, madame." Liane nodded curtly,
+lingered to watch the stewards attack the jumble of luggage, saw her
+jewel case shouldered, and followed the bearer, Lanyard at her elbow,
+Jules remaining with the car.
+
+The steward trotted through winding aisles of bales and crates, turned
+a corner, darted up a gangplank to the main-deck of a small steam
+vessel, so excessively neat and smart with shining brightwork that
+Lanyard thought it one uncommon tender indeed, and surmised a martinet
+in command. It seemed curious that there were not more passengers on
+the tender's deck; but perhaps he and Liane were among the first to
+come aboard; after all, they were not to sail before morning, according
+to the women. He apprehended a tedious time of waiting before he gained
+his berth. He noticed, too, a life ring lettered SYBARITE, and thought
+this an odd name for a vessel of commercial utility. Then he found
+himself descending a wide companionway to one of the handsomest saloons
+he had ever entered, a living room that, aside from its concessions to
+marine architecture, might have graced a residence on Park Lane or on
+Fifth avenue in the Sixties.
+
+Lanyard stopped short with his hand on the mahogany handrail.
+
+"I say, Liane! haven't we stumbled into the wrong pew?"
+
+"Wrong pew?" The woman subsided gracefully into a cushioned arm-chair,
+crossed her knees, and smiled at his perplexity. "But I do not know
+what is that 'wrong pew.'"
+
+"I mean to say... this is no tender, and it unquestionably isn't an
+Atlantic liner."
+
+"I should hope not. Did I promise you a--what do you say?--tender or
+Atlantic liner? But no: I do not think I told you what sort of vessel
+we would sail upon for that America. You did not ask."
+
+"True, little sister. But you might have prepared me. This is a private
+yacht."
+
+"Are you disappointed?"
+
+"I won't say that..."
+
+"It is the little ship of a dear friend, monsieur, who generously
+permits... But patience! very soon you shall know."
+
+To himself Lanyard commented: "I believe it well!" A door had opened in
+the after partition, two men had entered. Above a lank, well-poised
+body clothed in the white tunic and trousers of a ship's officer, he
+recognised the tragicomic mask of the soi-disant Mr. Whitaker Monk. At
+his shoulder shone the bland, intelligent countenance of Mr. Phinuit,
+who seemed much at home in the blue serge and white flannels of the
+average amateur yachtsman.
+
+From this last Lanyard received a good-natured nod, while Monk, with a
+great deal of empressement, proceeded directly to Liane Delorme and
+bowed low over the hand which she languidly lifted to be saluted.
+
+"My dear friend!" he said in his sonorous voice. "In another hour I
+should have begun to grow anxious about you."
+
+"You would have had good reason, monsieur. It is not two hours since
+one has escaped death--and that for the second time in a single day--by
+the slenderest margin, and thanks solely to this gentleman here."
+
+Monk consented to see Lanyard, and immediately offered him a profound
+salute, which was punctiliously returned. His eyebrows mounted to the
+roots of his hair.
+
+"Ah! that good Monsieur Duchemin."
+
+"But no!" Liane laughed. "It is true, the resemblance is striking; I do
+not say that, if Paul would consent to grow a beard, it would not be
+extraordinary. But--permit me, Captain Monk, to present my brother,
+Paul Delorme."
+
+"Your brother, mademoiselle?" The educated eyebrows expressed any
+number of emotions. Monk's hand was cordially extended. "But I am
+enchanted, Monsieur Delorme, to welcome on board the Sybarite the
+brother of your charming sister."
+
+Lanyard resigned limp fingers to his clasp.
+
+"And most public-spirited of you, I'm sure, Captain Monk... I believe I
+understood Liane to say Captain Monk?" The captain bowed. "Captain
+Whitaker Monk?" Another bow. Lanyard looked to Liane: "Forgive me if I
+seem confused, but I thought you told me Mister Whitaker Monk had
+sailed for America a week ago."
+
+"And so he did," the captain agreed blandly, while Liane confirmed his
+statement with many rapid and emphatic nods. "Mr. Monk, the owner, is
+my first cousin. Fortune has been less kind to me in a worldly way;
+consequently you see in me merely the skipper of my wealthy kinsman's
+yacht."
+
+"And your two names are the same--yours and your cousin's? You're both
+Whitaker Monks?"
+
+"It is a favourite name in our family, monsieur."
+
+Lanyard wagged his head in solemn admiration.
+
+Phinuit had come to his side, and was offering his hand in turn.
+
+"It's all gospel, Mr. Lanyard," he declared, with a cheerful
+informality which Lanyard found more engaging than Monk's sometimes
+laboured mannerisms. "He's sure-enough Captain Whitaker Monk, skipper
+of the good ship Sybarite, Mister Whitaker Monk, owner. And my name is
+really Phinuit, and I'm honest-to-goodness secretary to Mr. Monk. You
+see, the owner got a hurry call from New York, last week, and sailed
+from Southampton, leaving us to bring his pretty ship safely home."
+
+"That makes it all so clear!"
+
+"Well, anyway, I'm glad to meet you to your bare face. I've heard a lot
+about you, and--if it matters to you--thought a lot more."
+
+"If it comes to that, Mr. Phinuit, I have devoted some thought to you."
+
+"Oh, daresay. And now--if mademoiselle is agreeable--suppose we
+adjourn to the skipper's quarters, where we can improve one another's
+acquaintance without some snooping steward getting an unwelcome earful.
+We need to know many things you alone can tell us--and I'll wager you
+could do with a drink. What?"
+
+"But I assure you, monsieur, I find your reception sufficiently
+refreshing."
+
+"Well," said Phinuit, momentarily but very slightly
+discountenanced--"you've been uncommon' damn' useful, you know... I
+mean, according to mademoiselle."
+
+"Useful?" Lanyard enquired politely.
+
+"He calls it that," Liane Delorme exclaimed, "when I tell him you have
+saved my life!" She swept indignantly through the door by which Monk
+and Phinuit had come to greet them. Two ceremonious bows induced
+Lanyard to follow her. Monk and Phinuit brought up the rear. "Yes," the
+woman pursued--"twice he has saved it!"
+
+"In the same place?" Phinuit enquired innocently, shutting the door.
+
+"But no! Once in my home in Paris, this morning, and again to-night on
+the road to Cherbourg. The last time he saved his life, too, and
+Jules's."
+
+"It was nothing," said the modest hero.
+
+"It was nothing!" Liane echoed tragically. "You save my life twice, and
+he calls it 'useful,' and you call it 'nothing!' My God! I tell you, I
+find this English a funny language!"
+
+"But if you will tell us about it..." Monk suggested, placing a chair
+for her at one end of a small table on which was spread an appetising
+cold supper.
+
+Lanyard remarked that there were places laid for four. He had been
+expected, then. Or had the fourth place been meant for Jules? One
+inclined to credit the first theory. It seemed highly probable that
+Liane should have telegraphed her intentions before leaving Paris.
+Indeed, there was every evidence that she had. Neither Monk nor Phinuit
+had betrayed the least surprise on seeing Lanyard; and Phinuit had not
+even troubled to recognise the fiction which Liane had uttered in
+accounting for him. It was very much as if he had said: That long-lost
+brother stuff is all very well for the authorities, for entry in the
+ship's papers if necessary; but it's wasted between ourselves, we
+understand one another; so let's get down to brass tacks... An
+encouraging symptom; though one had already used the better word,
+refreshing....
+
+Spacious, furnished in a way of rich sobriety, tasteful in every
+appointment, the captain's quarters were quite as sybaritic as the
+saloon of the Sybarite. A bedroom and private bath adjoined, and the
+open door enabled one to perceive that this rude old sea dog slept
+in a real bed of massive brass. His sitting-room, or private office,
+had a studious atmosphere. Its built-in-bookcases were stocked with
+handsome bindings. The panels were, like those in the saloon,
+sea-scapes from the hands of modern masters: Lanyard knew good
+painting when he saw it. The captain's desk was a substantial affair in
+mahogany. Most of the chairs were of the overstuffed lounge sort. The
+rug was a Persian of rare lustre.
+
+Monk was following with a twinkle the journeys of Lanyard's observant
+eye.
+
+"Do myself pretty well, don't you think?" he observed quietly, in a
+break in Liane's dramatic narrative; perforce the lady must now and
+again pause for breath.
+
+Lanyard smiled in return. "I can't see you've much to complain of."
+
+The captain nodded, but permitted a shade of gravity to become visible
+in his expression. He sighed a philosophic sigh:
+
+"But man is never satisfied..."
+
+Liane had got her second wind and was playing variations on the theme
+of the famous six bottles of champagne. Lanyard lounged in his easy
+chair and let his bored thoughts wander. He was weary of being talked
+about, wanted one thing only, fulfillment of the promise that had been
+implicit in Phinuit's manner. He was aware of Phinuit's sympathetic
+eye.
+
+The woman sent the grey car crashing again into the tree, repeated
+Lanyard's quaint report of the business, and launched into a vein of
+panegyric.
+
+"Regard him, then, sitting there, making nothing of it all--!"
+
+"Sheer swank," Phinuit commented. "He's just letting on; privately he
+thinks he's a heluva fellow. Don't you, Lanyard?"
+
+"But naturally," Lanyard gave Phinuit a grateful look. "That is
+understood. But what really interests me, at present, is the question:
+Who is Dupont, and why?"
+
+"If you're asking me," Monk replied, "I'll say--going on mademoiselle's
+story--Monsieur Dupont is by now a ghost."
+
+"One would be glad to be sure of that," Lanyard murmured.
+
+"By all accounts," said Phinuit, "he takes a deal of killing."
+
+"But all this begs my question," Lanyard objected. "Who is Dupont, and
+why?"
+
+"I think I can answer that question, monsieur." This was Liane Delorme.
+"But first, I would ask Captain Monk to set guards to see that nobody
+comes aboard this ship before she sails."
+
+"Pity you didn't think of that sooner," Phinuit observed in friendly
+sarcasm. "Better late than never, of course, but still--!"
+
+The woman appealed to Monk directly, since he did not move. "But I
+assure you, monsieur, I am afraid, I am terrified of that one! I shall
+not sleep until I am sure he has not succeeded in smuggling himself on
+board--"
+
+"Be tranquil, mademoiselle," Monk begged. "What you ask is already
+done. I gave the orders you ask as soon as I received your telegram,
+this morning. You need not fear that even a rat has found his way
+aboard since then, or can before we sail, without my knowledge."
+
+"Thank God!" Liane breathed--and instantly found a new question to fret
+about. "But your men, Captain Monk--your officers and crew--can you be
+sure of them?"
+
+"Absolutely."
+
+"You haven't signed on any new men here in Cherbourg?" Lanyard asked.
+
+Monk worked his eyebrows to signify that the question was ridiculous.
+"No such fool, thanks," he added.
+
+"Yet they may have been corrupted while here in port," Liane insisted.
+
+"No fear."
+
+"That is what I would have said of my maid and footman, twenty-four
+hours ago. Yet I now know better."
+
+"I tell you only what I know, mademoiselle. If any of my officers and
+crew have been tampered with, I don't know anything about it, and can't
+and won't until the truth comes out."
+
+"And you sit there calmly to tell me that!" Liane rolled her lovely
+eyes in appeal to the deck beams overhead. "But you are impossible!"
+
+"But, my dear lady," Monk protested, "I am perfectly willing to go into
+hysterics if you think it will do any good. As it happens, I don't. I
+haven't been idle or fatuous in that matter, I have taken every
+possible precaution against miscarriage of our plans. If anything goes
+wrong now, it can't be charged to my discredit."
+
+"It will be an act of God," Phinuit declared: "one of the unavoidable
+risks of the business."
+
+"The business!" Liane echoed with scorn. "I assure you I wish I were
+well out of 'the business'!"
+
+"And so say we all of us," Phinuit assured her patiently; and Monk
+intoned a fervent "Amen!"
+
+"But who is Dupont?" Lanyard reiterated stubbornly.
+
+"An Apache, monsieur," Liane responded sulkily--"a leader of Apaches."
+
+"Thank you for nothing."
+
+"Patience: I am telling you all I know. I recognised him this morning,
+when you were struggling with him. His name is Popinot."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Why do you say 'Ah!' monsieur?"
+
+"There was a Popinot in Paris in my day; they nicknamed him the Prince
+of the Apaches. But he was an older man, and died by the guillotine.
+This Popinot who calls himself Dupont, then, must be his son."
+
+"That is true, monsieur."
+
+"Well, then, if he has inherited his father's power--!"
+
+"It is not so bad as all that. I have heard that the elder Popinot was
+a true prince, in his way, I mean as to his power with the Apaches. His
+son is hardly that; he has a following, but new powers were established
+with his father's death, and they remain stronger than he."
+
+"All of which brings us to the second part of my question, Liane: Why
+Dupont?"
+
+Liane shrugged and studied her bedizened fingers. The heavy black brows
+circumflexed Monk's eyes, and he drew down the corners of his wide
+mouth. Phinuit fixed an amused gaze on a distant corner of the room and
+chewed his cigar.
+
+"Why did Dupont--or Popinot," Lanyard persisted--"murder de Lorgnes?
+Why did he try to murder Mademoiselle Delorme? Why did he seek to
+prevent our reaching Cherbourg?"
+
+"Give you three guesses," Phinuit offered amiably. "But I warn you if
+you use more than one you'll forfeit my respect forever. And just to
+show what a good sport I am, I'll ask you a few leading questions. Why
+did Popinot pull off that little affair at Montpellier-le-Vieux? Why
+did he try to put you out of his way a few days later?"
+
+"Because he wanted to steal the jewels of Madame de Montalais,
+naturally."
+
+"I knew you'd guess it."
+
+"You admit, then, you have the jewels?"
+
+"Why not?" Phinuit enquired coolly. "We took trouble enough to get
+them, don't you think? You're taking trouble enough to get them away
+from us, aren't you? You don't want us to think you so stupid as to be
+wasting your time, do you?"
+
+His imperturbable effrontery was so amusing that Lanyard laughed
+outright. Then, turning to Liane, he offered her a grateful inclination
+of the head.
+
+"Mademoiselle, you have kept your promise. Many thanks."
+
+"Hello!" cried Phinuit. "What promise?"
+
+"Monsieur Lanyard desired a favour of me," Liane explained, her good
+humour restored; "in return for saving me from assassination by Popinot
+this morning, he begged me to help him find the jewels of Madame de
+Montalais. It appears that he--or Andre Duchemin--is accused of having
+stolen those jewels; so it becomes a point of honour with him to find
+and restore them to Madame de Montalais."
+
+"He told you that?" Monk queried, studiously eliminating from his tone
+the jeer implied by the words alone.
+
+"But surely. And what could I do? He spoke so earnestly, I was touched.
+Regard, moreover, how deeply I am indebted to him. So I promised I
+would do my best. Et voila! I have brought him to the jewels; the rest
+is--how do you say--up to him. Are you satisfied with the way I keep
+my word, monsieur?"
+
+"It's hard to see how he can have any kick coming," Phinuit commented
+with some acidity.
+
+Lanyard addressed himself to Liane: "Do I understand the jewels are on
+this vessel?"
+
+"In this room."
+
+Lanyard sat up and took intelligent notice of the room. Phinuit
+chuckled, and consulted Monk in the tone of one reasonable man to his
+peer.
+
+"I say, skipper: don't you think we ought to be liberal with Monsieur
+Lanyard? He's an awfully good sort--and look't all the services he has
+done us."
+
+Monk set the eyebrows to consider the proposition.
+
+"I am emphatically of your mind, Phin," he pronounced at length,
+oracular.
+
+"It's plain to be seen he wants those jewels--means to have 'em. Do you
+know any way we can keep them from him?"
+
+Monk moved his head slowly from side to side: "None."
+
+"Then you agree with me, it would save us all a heap of trouble to let
+him have them without any more stalling?"
+
+By way of answer Monk bent over and quietly opened a false door, made
+to resemble the fronts of three drawers, in a pedestal of his desk.
+Lanyard couldn't see the face of the built-in safe, but he could hear
+the spinning of the combination manipulated by Monk's long and bony
+fingers. And presently he saw Monk straighten up with a sizable steel
+dispatch-box in his hands, place this upon the desk, and unlock it with
+a key on his pocket ring.
+
+"There," he announced with an easy gesture.
+
+Lanyard rose and stood over the desk, investigating the contents of the
+dispatch-box. The collection of magnificent stones seemed to tally
+accurately with his mental memoranda of the descriptions furnished by
+Eve de Montalais.
+
+"This seems to be right," he said quietly, and closed the box. The
+automatic lock snapped fast.
+
+"Now what do you say, brother dear?"
+
+"Your debt to me is fully discharged, Liane. But, messieurs, one
+question: Knowing I am determined to restore these jewels to their
+owner, why this open handedness?"
+
+"Cards on the table," said Phinuit. "It's the only way to deal with the
+likes of you."
+
+"In other words," Monk interpreted: "you have under your hand proof of
+our bona fides."
+
+"And what is to prevent me from going ashore with these at once?"
+
+"Nothing," said Phinuit.
+
+"But this is too much!"
+
+"Nothing," Phinuit elaborated, "but your own good sense."
+
+"Ah!" said Lanyard--"ah!"--and looked from face to face.
+
+Monk adjusted his eyebrows to an angle of earnestness and sincerity.
+
+"The difficulty is, Mr. Lanyard," he said persuasively, "they have cost
+us so much, those jewels, in time and money and exertion, we can hardly
+be expected to sit still and see you walk off with them and say never a
+word in protection of our own interests. Therefore I must warn you, in
+the most friendly spirit: if you succeed in making your escape from the
+Sybarite with the jewels, as you quite possibly may, it will be my duty
+as a law-abiding man to inform the police that André Duchemin is at
+large with his loot from the Château de Montalais. And I don't think
+you'd get very far, then, or that your fantastic story about meaning to
+return them would gain much credence. D'ye see?"
+
+"But distinctly! If, however, I leave the jewels and lay an information
+against you with the police----?"
+
+"To do that you would have to go ashore...."
+
+"Do I understand I am to consider myself your prisoner?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no!" said Captain Monk, inexpressibly pained by such
+crudity. "But I do wish you'd consider favourably an invitation to be
+our honoured guest on the voyage to New York. You won't? It would be so
+agreeable of you."
+
+"Sorry I must decline. A prior engagement...."
+
+"But you see, Lanyard," Phinuit urged earnestly, "we've taken no end of
+a fancy to you. We like you, really, for yourself alone. And with that
+feeling the outgrowth of our very abbreviated acquaintance--think what
+a friendship might come of a real opportunity to get to know one
+another well."
+
+"Some other time, messieurs...."
+
+"But please!" Phinuit persisted--"just think for one moment--and do
+forget that pistol I know you've got in a handy pocket. We're all
+unarmed here, Mademoiselle Delorme, the skipper and I. We can't stop
+your going, if you insist, and we know too much to try. But there are
+those aboard who might. Jules, for instance: if he saw you making a
+getaway and knew it might mean a term in a French prison for him....
+And if I do say it as shouldn't of my kid brother, Jules is a dead
+shot. Then there are others. There'd surely be a scrimmage on the
+decks; and how could we explain that to the police, who, I am able to
+assure you from personal observation, are within hail? Why, that you
+had been caught trying to stow away with your loot, which you dropped
+in making your escape. D'ye see how bad it would look for you?"
+
+To this there was no immediate response. Sitting with bowed head and
+sombre eyes, Lanyard thought the matter over a little, indifferent to
+the looks of triumph being exchanged above his head.
+
+"Obviously, it would seem, you have not gone to all this trouble--lured
+me aboard this yacht--merely to amuse yourselves at my expense and then
+knock me on the head."
+
+"Absurd!" Liane declared indignantly. "As if I would permit such a
+thing, who owe you so much!"
+
+"Or look at it this way, monsieur," Monk put in with a courtly gesture:
+"When one has an adversary whom one respects, one wisely prefers to
+have him where one can watch him."
+
+"That's just it," Phinuit amended: "Out of our sight, you'd be on our
+nerves, forever pulling the Popinot stunt, springing some dirty
+surprise on us. But here, as our guest--!"
+
+"More than that," said Liane with her most killing glance for Lanyard:
+"a dear friend."
+
+But Lanyard was not to be put off by fair words and flattery.
+
+"No," he said gravely: "but there is some deeper motive..."
+
+He sought Phinuit's eyes, and Phinuit unexpectedly gave him an open-faced
+return.
+
+"There is," he stated frankly.
+
+"Then why not tell me--?"
+
+"All in good time. And there'll be plenty of that; the Sybarite is no
+Mauretania. When you know us better and have learned to like us..."
+
+"I make no promises."
+
+"We ask none. Only your pistol..."
+
+"Well, monsieur: my pistol?"
+
+"It makes our association seem so formal--don't you think?--so
+constrained. Come, Mr. Lanyard! be reasonable. What is a pistol between
+friends?"
+
+Lanyard shrugged, sighed, and produced the weapon.
+
+"Really!" he said, handing it over to Monk--"how could anyone resist
+such disarming expressions?"
+
+The captain thanked him solemnly and put the weapon away in his safe,
+together with the steel despatch-box and Liane Delorme's personal
+treasure of precious stones.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+SOUNDINGS
+
+
+With characteristic abruptness Liane Delorme announced that she was
+sleepy, it had been for her a most fatiguing day. Captain Monk rang for
+the stewardess and gallantly escorted the lady to her door. Lanyard got
+up with Phinuit to bow her out, but instead of following her suit
+helped himself to a long whiskey and soda, with loving deliberation
+selected, trimmed and lighted a cigar, and settled down into his chair
+as one prepared to make a night of it.
+
+"You never sleep, no?" Phinuit enquired in a spirit of civil
+solicitude.
+
+"Desolated if I discommode you, monsieur," Lanyard replied with entire
+amiability--"but not to-night, not at least until I know those jewels
+have no more chance to go ashore without me."
+
+He tasted his drink with open relish. "Prime Scotch," he judged. "One
+grows momentarily more reconciled to the prospect of a long voyage."
+
+"Make the most of it," Phinuit counselled. "Remember our next port of
+call is the Great American Desert. After all, the despised camel seems
+to have had the right idea all along."
+
+He gaped enormously behind a superstitious hand. Monk, returning,
+published an elaborate if silent superciliary comment on the tableau.
+
+"He has no faith at all in our good intentions," Phinuit explained,
+eyeing Lanyard with mild reproach. "It's most discouraging."
+
+"Monsieur suffers from insomnia?" Monk asked in his turn.
+
+"Under certain circumstances."
+
+"Ever take anything for it?"
+
+"To-night it would require nothing less than possession of the
+Montalais jewels to put me to sleep."
+
+"Well, if you manage to lay hands on them without our consent," Phinuit
+promised genially, "you'll be put to sleep all right."
+
+"But don't let me keep you up, messieurs."
+
+Captain Monk consulted the chronometer. "It's not worth while turning
+in," he said: "we sail soon after day-break."
+
+"Far be it from me to play the giddy crab, then." Phinuit busied
+himself with the decanter, glasses and siphon. "Let's make it a regular
+party; we'll have all to-morrow to sleep it off in. If I try to hop on
+your shoulder and sing, call a steward and have him lead me to my
+innocent white cot; but take a fool's advice, Lanyard, and don't try to
+drink the skipper under the table. On the word of one who's tried and
+repented, it can not be done."
+
+"But it is I who would go under the table," Lanyard said. "I have a
+poor head for whiskey."
+
+"Thanks for the tip."
+
+"Pardon?"
+
+"I mean to say," Phinuit explained, "I'm glad to have another weakness
+of yours to bear in mind."
+
+"You are interested in the weaknesses of others, monsieur?"
+
+"They're my hobby."
+
+"Knowledge," Monk quoted, sententious, "is power."
+
+"May I ask what other entries you have made in my dossier, Mr.
+Phinuit?"
+
+"You won't get shirty?"
+
+"But surely not."
+
+"Well ... can't be positive till I know you better.... I'm afraid
+you've got a tendency to overestimate the gullibility of people in
+general. It's either that, or.... No: I don't believe you're
+intentionally hypocritical, or self-deceived, either."
+
+"But I don't understand...."
+
+"Remember your promise.... But you seem to think it easy to put it over
+on us, mademoiselle, the skipper and me."
+
+"But I assure you I have never had any such thought."
+
+"Then why this funny story of yours--told with a straight face,
+too!--about wanting to get hold of the Montalais loot simply to slip it
+back to its owner?"
+
+Lanyard felt with a spasm of anger constrict his throat; and knew that
+the restraint he imposed upon his temper was betrayed in a reddened
+face. Nevertheless his courteous smile persisted, his polite
+conversational tone was unchanged.
+
+"Now you remind me of something. I presume, Captain Monk, it's not too
+late to send a note ashore to be posted?"
+
+"Oh!" Monk's eyebrows protested violently--"a note!"
+
+"On plain paper, in a plain envelope--and I don't in the least mind
+your reading it."
+
+The eyebrows appealed to Phinuit, and that worthy ruled: "Under those
+conditions, I don't see we can possibly object."
+
+Monk shrugged his brows back into place, found paper of the sort
+desired, even went so far as to dip the pen for Lanyard.
+
+"You will sit at my desk, monsieur?"
+
+"Many thanks."
+
+Under no more heading than the date, Lanyard wrote:
+
+"Dear Madame de Montalais:"
+
+"I have not forgotten my promise, but my days have been full since I
+left the château. And even now I must be brief: within an hour I sail
+for America, within a fortnight you may look for telegraphic advices
+from me, stating that your jewels are in my possession, and when I hope
+to be able to restore them to you."
+
+"Believe me, dear madame,"
+
+"Devotedly your servant,
+
+"Michael Lanyard."
+
+Monk read and in silence passed this communication over to Phinuit,
+while Lanyard addressed the envelope.
+
+"Quite in order," was Phinuit's verdict, accompanied by a yawn.
+
+Lanyard folded the note, sealed it in the envelope, and affixed a stamp
+supplied by Monk, who meanwhile rang for a steward.
+
+"Take this ashore and post it at once," he told the man who answered
+his summons.
+
+"But seriously, Lanyard!" Phinuit protested with a pained
+expression.... "No: I don't get you at all. What's the use?"
+
+"I have not deceived you, then?"
+
+"Not so's you'd notice it."
+
+"Alas!"--Lanyard affected a sigh--"for misspent effort!"
+
+"Oh, all's fair outside the law. We don't blame you for trying it on.
+Only we value your respect too much to let you go on thinking we have
+fallen for that hokum."
+
+"You see," Monk expounded--solemn ass that he was beneath his thin
+veneer of pretentiousness--"when we know how the British Government
+kicked you out of its Secret Service as soon as it had no further use
+for you, we can understand and sympathise with your natural reaction to
+such treatment at the hands of Society."
+
+"But one didn't know you knew so much, monsieur le capitaine."
+
+"And then," said Phinuit, "when we know you steered a direct course
+from London for the Château de Montalais, and made yourself persona
+grata there--Oh, persona very much grata, if I'm any judge!--you can
+hardly ask us to believe you didn't mean to do it, it all just happened
+so."
+
+"Monsieur sees too clearly...."
+
+"Why, if it comes to that--what were you up to that night, pussyfooting
+about the château at two in the morning?"
+
+"But this is positively uncanny! Monsieur knows everything."
+
+"Why shouldn't I know about that?" Vanity rang in Phinuit's
+self-conscious chuckle. "Who'd you think laid you out that night?"
+
+"Monsieur is not telling me----!"
+
+"I guess I owe you an apology," Phinuit admitted. "But you'll admit
+that in our situation there was nothing else for it. I'd have given
+anything if we'd been able to get by any other way; but you're such an
+unexpected customer.... Well! when I felt you catch hold of my shirt
+sleeve, that night, I thought we were done for and struck out blindly.
+It was a lucky blow, no credit to me. Hope I didn't jar you too much."
+
+"No," said Lanyard, reflective--"no, I was quite all right in the
+morning. But I think I owe you one."
+
+"Afraid you do; and it's going to be my duty and pleasure to cheat you
+out of your revenge if fast footwork will do it."
+
+"But where was Captain Monk all the while?"
+
+"Right here," Monk answered for himself; "sitting tight and saying
+nothing, and duly grateful that the blue prints and specifications of
+the Great Architect didn't design me for second-storey work."
+
+"Then it was Jules----?"
+
+"No; Jules doesn't know enough. It was de Lorgnes, of course. I thought
+you'd guess that."
+
+"How should I?"
+
+"Didn't you know he was the premier cracksman of France? That is, going
+on Mademoiselle Delorme's account of him; she says there was never
+anybody like that poor devil for putting the comether on a
+safe--barring yourself, Monsieur le Loup Seul, in your palmy days. And
+she ought to know; those two have been working together since the Lord
+knows when. A sound, conservative bird, de Lorgnes; very discreet,
+tight-mouthed even when drunk--which was too often."
+
+"But--this is most interesting--how did you get separated, you and de
+Lorgnes?"
+
+"Bad luck, a black night, and--I guess there's no more question about
+this--your friend, Popinot-Dupont. I'll say this for that blighter: as
+a self-made spoil-sport, he sure did give service!"
+
+Phinuit gave his whiskey and soda a reminiscent grin.
+
+"And we thought we were being bright, at that! We'd figured every move
+to the third decimal point. The only uncertain factor in our
+calculations, as we thought, was you. But with you disposed of, dead to
+the world, and Madame de Montalais off in another part of the château
+calling the servants to help, leaving her rooms wide open to us--the
+job didn't take five minutes. The way de Lorgnes made that safe give up
+all its secrets, you'd have thought he had raised it by hand! We
+stuffed the loot into a grip I'd brought for the purpose, and beat
+it--slipped out through the drawing-room window one second before
+Madame de Montalais came back with that doddering footman of hers. But
+they never even looked our way. I bet they never knew there'd been a
+robbery till the next morning. Do I lose?"
+
+"No, monsieur; you are quite right."
+
+"Well, then: We had left our machine--we had driven over from
+Millau--just over the brow of the hill, standing on the down-grade,
+headed for Nant, with the gears meshed in third, so she would start
+without a sound as soon as we released the emergency brake. But when we
+got there, it wasn't. The frantic way we looked for it made me think of
+you pawing that table for your candle, after de Lorgnes had lifted it
+behind your back. And then of a sudden they jumped us, Popinot and his
+crew; though we didn't know who in hell; it might have been the château
+people. In fact, at first I thought it was....
+
+"I lost de Lorgnes in the shuffle immediately, never did know what had
+become of him till we got Liane's wire this morning. I was having all I
+could do to take care of myself, thank you. I happened to be carrying
+the grip, and that helped a bit. Somebody's head got in the way of its
+swings, and I guess the guy hasn't forgotten it yet. Then I slipped
+through their fingers--I'll never tell you how; it was black as pitch,
+that night--and beat it blind. I'd lost my flashlamp and had no more
+idea where I was heading than an owl at noon of a sunny day. But
+they--the Popinot outfit--seemed to be able to see in the dark all
+right; or else I was looney with fright. Every once in a while somebody
+or something would make a pass at me in the night, and I'd duck and
+double and run another way.
+
+"After a while I found myself climbing a steep, rocky slope, and
+guessed it must be the cliff behind the château. It was a sort of
+zig-zag path, which I couldn't see, only guess at. I was scared stiff;
+but they were still after me, or I thought they were, so I floundered
+on. The path, if it was a path, was slimy with mud, and about every
+third step I'd slip and go sprawling. I can't tell you how many times I
+felt my legs shoot out into nothing, and dug my fingers into the muck,
+or broke my nails on rocks and caught clumps of grass with my teeth, to
+keep from going over ... and all the while that all-gone feeling in the
+pit of my stomach....
+
+"However, I got to the top in the end, and crawled into a hollow and
+lay down behind some bushes, and panted as if my heart would break, and
+hoped I'd die and get over with it. But nobody came to bother me, so I
+got up when the first streak of light showed in the sky--there'd been a
+young cloud-burst just before that, and I was soaked to my skin--and
+struck off across the cause for God-knew-where. De Lorgnes and I had
+fixed that, if anything did happen to separate us, we'd each strike for
+Lyons and the one who got there first would wait for the other at the
+Hôtel Terminus. But before I could do that, I had to find a railroad,
+and I didn't dare go Millau-way, I thought, because the chances were
+the gendarmes would be waiting there to nab the first bird that blew in
+all covered with mud and carrying a bag full of diamonds.
+
+"I'd managed to hold onto the grip through it all, you see; but before
+that day was done I wished I'd lost it. The damned thing got heavier
+and heavier till it must have weighed a gross ton. It galled my hands
+and rubbed my legs till they were sore.... I was sore all over, anyway,
+inside and out....
+
+"Sometime during the morning I climbed one of those bum mounds they
+call couronnes to see if I could sight any place to get food and drink,
+preferably drink. The sun had dried my clothes on my back and then gone
+on to make it a good job by soaking up all the moisture in my system. I
+figured I was losing eleven pounds an hour by evaporation alone, and
+expected to arrive wherever I did arrive, if I ever arrived anywhere
+looking like an Early Egyptian prune....
+
+"The view from the couronne didn't show me anything I wanted to see,
+only a number of men in the distance, spread out over the face of the
+causse and quartering it like beagles. I reckoned I knew what sort of
+game they were hunting, and slid down from that couronne and travelled.
+But they'd seen me, and somebody sounded the view-halloo. It was grand
+exercise for me and great sport for them. When I couldn't totter
+another yard I fell into a hole into the ground--one of those
+avens--and crawled into a sort of little cave, and lay there listening,
+to the suck and gurgle of millions of gallons of nice cool water
+running to waste under my feet, and me dying the death of a dog with
+thirst.
+
+"After a while I couldn't stand it any longer. I crawled out, prepared
+to surrender, give up the plunder, and lick the boots of any man who'd
+slip me a cup of water. But for some reason they'd given up the chase.
+I saw no more of them, whoever they were. And a little later I found a
+peasant's hut, and watered myself till I swelled up like a poisoned
+pup. They gave me a brush-down, there, and something to eat besides,
+and put me on my way to Millau. It seemed that I was a hundred miles
+from anywhere else, so it was Millau for mine if it meant a life
+sentence in a French prison.
+
+"I sneaked into the town after dark, and took the first train north.
+Nobody took any notice of me. I couldn't see the use of going all round
+Robin Hood's barn, as I'd have had to in order to make Lyons. By the
+time I'd got there, de Lorgnes would have given up and gone on to
+Paris."
+
+Phinuit finished his drink. "I'll say it was a gay young party. The
+next time I feel the call to crime, believe me! I'm going out and
+snatch nursing bottles from kids asleep in their prams.... But they
+_must_ be asleep."
+
+Monk lifted himself by sections from his chair.
+
+"It was a good yarn first time I heard it," he mused aloud. "But now, I
+notice, even the Sybarite is getting restless."
+
+In the course of Phinuit's narrative the black disks of night framed by
+the polished brass circles of the stern ports had faded out into dusky
+violet, then into a lighter lilac, finally into a warm yet tender blue.
+Now the main deck overhead was a sounding-board for thumps and rustle
+of many hurried feet.
+
+"Pilot come aboard, you think?" Phinuit enquired; and added, as Monk
+nodded and cast about for the visored white cap of his office: "Didn't
+know pilots were such early birds."
+
+"They're not, as a rule. But if you treat 'em right, they'll listen to
+reason."
+
+The captain graphically rubbed a thumb over two fingers, donned his
+cap, buttoned up his tunic, and strode forth with an impressive gait.
+
+"Still wakeful?" Phinuit hinted hopefully.
+
+"And shall be till we drop the pilot, thanks."
+
+"If I hadn't seen de Lorgnes make that safe sit up and speak, and didn't
+know you were his master, I'd be tempted to bat an eye or two.
+However...." Phinuit sighed despondently. "What can I do now to entertain
+you, dear sir?"
+
+"You might have pity on my benighted curiosity...."
+
+"Meaning this outfit?" Lanyard assented, and Phinuit deliberated over
+the question. "I don't know as I ought in the absence of my esteemed
+associates.... But what's bothering you most?"
+
+"I have seen something of the world, monsieur, and as you are aware not
+a little of the underside of it; but never have I met with a
+combination of such peculiar elements as this possesses. Regard it, if
+you will, from my view-point, that of an outsider, for one moment."
+
+Phinuit grinned. "It must give you furiously to think--as you'd say."
+
+"But assuredly! Take, for example, yourself, a man of unusual
+intelligence, such as one is not accustomed to find lending himself to
+the schemes of ordinary criminals."
+
+"But you have just admitted that we're anything but ordinary."
+
+"Then Mademoiselle Delorme. One knows what the world knows of her, that
+she has for many years meddled with high affairs, that she had been for
+many years more a sort of queen of the demi-monde of Paris; but now you
+tell me she has stopped to profit by association with a professional
+burglar."
+
+"Profit? I'll say she did. According to my information, it was she who
+mapped out the campaigns for de Lorgnes; she was G.H.Q. and he merely
+the high private in the front line trenches; with this difference, that
+in this instance G.H.Q. was perfectly willing to let the man at the
+front cop all the glory.... She took the cash and let the credit go,
+nor heeded rumblings of the distant drum!"
+
+"Then your picturesque confrère, Captain Monk; and the singular
+circumstance that he owns a wealthy cousin of the same name; and this
+beautiful little yacht which you seem so free to utilize for the
+furtherance of your purposes. Is it strange, then, that one's curiosity
+is provoked, one's imagination alternately stimulated and baffled?"
+
+"No; I suppose not," Phinuit conceded thoughtfully. "Still, it's far
+simpler than you'd think."
+
+"One has found that true of most mysteries, monsieur."
+
+"I don't mind telling you all I feel at liberty to.... You seem to have
+a pretty good line on mademoiselle, and I've told you what I know about
+de Lorgnes. As for the skipper, he's the black sheep of a good old New
+England family. Ran away to sea as a boy, and was disowned, and grew up
+in a rough school. It would take all night to name half the jobs he's
+had a hand in, mostly of a shady nature, in every quarter of the seven
+seas: gun running, pearl poaching, what not--even a little slaving, I
+suspect, in his early days. He's a pompous old bluff in repose, but
+nobody's fool, and a bad actor when his mad is up. He tells me he fell
+in with the Delorme a long time ago, while acting as personal escort
+for a fugitive South American potentate who crossed the borders of his
+native land with the national treasury in one hand and his other in
+Monk's, and of course--they all do--made a bee line for Paris. That's
+how we came to make her acquaintance, my revered employer, Mister Monk,
+and I--through the skipper, I mean."
+
+Phinuit paused to consider, and ended with a whimsical grimace.
+
+"I'm talking too much; but it doesn't matter, seein's it's you.
+Strictly between ourselves, the said revered employer is an annointed
+fraud. Publicly he's the pillar of the respectable house of Monk.
+Privately, he's not above profiteering, foreclosing the mortgage on the
+old homestead, and swearing to an odoriferous income-tax return. And
+when he thinks he's far enough away from home--my land, how that little
+man do carry on!
+
+"The War made him more money than he ever thought there was; so he
+bought this yacht ready-made and started on the grand tour, but never
+got any farther than Paris--naturally his first stop. News from home to
+the effect that somebody was threatening to do him out of a few nickels
+sent him hightailing back to put a stop to it. But before that
+happened, he wanted to see life with a large L; and Cousin Whitaker
+gave him a good start by introducing him to little ingénue Liane. And
+then she put the smuggling bee in his bonnet."
+
+"Smuggling!"
+
+Lanyard began to experience glimpses....
+
+"Champagne. If ever all the truth comes out, I fancy it will transpire
+that Liane's getting a rake-off from some vintner. You see, Friend
+Employer was displaying a cultivated taste in vintage champagnes, but
+he'd been culpably negligent in not laying down a large stock for
+private consumption before the Great Drought set in. The Delorme found
+that out, then that his ancestral acres bordered on Long Island Sound,
+and finally that the Sybarite was loafing its head off. What could be
+more simple, she suggested, than that monsieur should ballast his
+private yacht with champagne on the homeward voyage, make his landfall
+some night in the dark of the moon, and put the stuff ashore on his own
+property before morning. Did he fall for it? Well, I just guess he
+did!"
+
+"This is all most interesting, monsieur, but...." "Where do Monk and I
+come in? Oh, like master, like men. Liane was too wise to crab her act
+by proposing anything really wicked to the Owner, and wise enough to
+know nothing could shock the skipper. And I was wise enough not to let
+him get away with anything unless I sat in on the deal.
+
+"Mademoiselle played all her cards face upwards with us. She and de
+Lorgnes, she said, were losing money by disposing of their loot this
+side, especially with European currency at its present stage of
+depreciation. And so long as the owner was doing a little dirty work,
+why shouldn't we get together and do something for ourselves on the
+side? If champagne could be so easily smuggled into the States, why not
+diamonds? We formed a joint-stock company on the spot."
+
+"And made your first coup at the Château de Montalais!"
+
+"Not the first, but the biggest. De Lorgnes' mouth had been watering
+for the Montalais stuff for a long time, it seems. My boss had private
+business of a nature we won't enter into, in London, and gave me a week
+off and the use of his car. We made up the party, toured down the Rhone
+valley, and then back by way of the Cévennes, just to get the lay of
+the land. I don't think there can be much more you need to know."
+
+"Monsieur is too modest."
+
+"Oh, about me? Why, I guess I'm not an uncommon phenomenon of the
+times. I was a good citizen before the War, law-abiding and everything.
+If you'd told me then I'd be in this galley to-day, I'd probably have
+knocked you for a goal. I had a flourishing young business of my own
+and was engaged to be married... When I got back from hell over here, I
+found my girl married to another man, my business wrecked, what was
+left of it crippled by extortionate taxation to support a government
+that was wasting money like a drunken sailor and too cynical to keep
+its solemn promises to the men who had fought for it. I had to take a
+job as secretary to a man I couldn't respect, and now... Well, if I can
+get a bit of my own back by defrauding the government or classing
+myself with the unorganised leeches on Society, nothing I know is going
+to stop my doing it!"
+
+Phinuit knocked the ashes out of a cold pipe at which he had been
+sucking for some time, rose, and stretched.
+
+"The worst of it is," he said in a serious turn--"I mean, looking at
+the thing from my bourgeois viewpoint of 1914--the War, but more
+particularly the antics of the various governments after the War,
+turned out several million of men in my frame of mind the world over.
+We went into the thing deluded by patriotic bunk and the promise that
+it was a war to end war; we came out to find the old men more firmly
+entrenched in the seats of the mighty than ever and stubbornly bent on
+perpetuating precisely the same rotten conditions that make wars
+inevitable. What Germany did to the treaty that guaranteed Belgium's
+neutrality was child's-play compared to what the governments of the
+warring nations have done to their covenants with their own people. And
+if anybody should ask you, you can safely promise them that several
+million soreheads like myself are what the politicians call 'a menace
+to the established social order'."
+
+Clear daylight filled the ports. The traffic on deck nearly deserved
+the name of din. Commands and calls were being bawled in English,
+French, and polyglot profanity. A donkey-engine was rumbling, a winch
+clattering, a capstan-pawl clanking. Alongside a tug was panting
+hoarsely. The engine room telegraph jangled furiously, the fabric of
+the Sybarite shuddered and gathered way.
+
+"We're off," yawned Phinuit. "Now will you be reasonable and go to
+bed?"
+
+"You may, monsieur," said Lanyard, getting up. "For my part, I shall go
+on deck, if you don't mind, and stop there till the pilot leaves us."
+
+"Fair enough!"
+
+"But one moment more. You have been extraordinarily frank, but you have
+forgotten one element, to me of some importance: you have not told me
+what my part is in this insane adventure."
+
+"That's not my business to tell you," Phinuit replied promptly. "When
+anything as important as that comes out, it won't be through my
+babbling. Anyhow, Liane may have changed her mind since last reports.
+And so, as far as I'm concerned, your present status is simply that of
+her pet protégé. What it is to be hereafter you'll learn from her, I
+suppose, soon enough.... Le's go!"
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+OUT OF SOUNDINGS
+
+
+When finally Lanyard did consent to seek his stateroom--with the pilot
+dropped and the Sybarite footing it featly over Channel waters to airs
+piped by a freshening breeze--it was to sleep once round the clock and
+something more; for it was nearly six in the afternoon when he came on
+deck again.
+
+The quarterdeck, a place of Epicurean ease for idle passengers, was
+deserted but for a couple of deckhands engaged in furling the awning.
+Lanyard lounged on the rail, revelling in a sense of perfect physical
+refreshment intensified by the gracious motion of the vessel, the
+friendly, rhythmic chant of her engines, the sweeping ocean air and the
+song it sang in the rigging, the vision of blue seas snow-plumed and
+mirroring in a myriad facets the red gold of the westering sun, and the
+lift and dip of a far horizon whose banks of violet mist were the
+fading shores of France.
+
+In these circumstances of the sea he loved so well there was certain
+anodyne for those twinges of chagrin which he must suffer when reminded
+of the sorry figure he had cut overnight.
+
+Still there were compensations--of a more material nature, too, than
+this delight which he had of being once again at sea. To have cheapened
+himself in the estimation of Liane Delorme and Phinuit and Monk was
+really to his advantage; for to persuade an adversary to under-estimate
+one is to make him almost an ally. Also, Lanyard now had no more need
+to question the fate of the Montalais jewels, no more blank spaces
+remained to be filled in his hypothetical explanation of the intrigues
+which had enmeshed the Château de Montalais, its lady and his honour.
+
+He knew now all he needed to know, he could put his hand on the jewels
+when he would; and he had a fair fortnight (the probable duration of
+their voyage, according to Monk) in which to revolve plans for making
+away with them at minimum cost to himself in exertion and exposure to
+reprisals.
+
+Plans? He had none as yet, he would begin to formulate and ponder them
+only when he had better acquaintance with the ship and her company and
+had learned more about that ambiguous landfall which she was to make
+(as Phinuit had put it) "in the dark of the moon."
+
+Not that he made the mistake of despising those two social malcontents,
+Phinuit and Jules, that rogue adventurer Monk, that grasping courtesan
+Liane Delorme.
+
+Individually and collectively Lanyard accounted that quartet uncommonly
+clever, resourceful, audacious, unscrupulous, and potentially ruthless,
+utterly callous to compunctions when their interests were jeopardised.
+But it was inconceivable that he should fail to outwit and frustrate
+them, who had the love and faith of Eve de Montalais to honour,
+cherish, and requite.
+
+Growing insight into the idiosyncrasies of the men left him undismayed.
+He perceived the steel of inflexible purpose beneath the windy egotism
+of Phinuit. The pompous histrionism of Monk, he knew, was merely a
+shell for the cold, calculating, undeviating selfishness that too
+frequently comes with advancing years. Nevertheless these two were
+factors whose functionings might be predicted.
+
+It was Liane Delorme who provided the erratic equation. Her woman's
+mind was not only the directing intelligence, it was as eccentric as
+quicksilver, infinitely supple and corrupt, Oriental in its
+trickishness and impenetrability. Already it had conceived some project
+involving him which he could by no means divine or even guess at
+without a sense of wasting time.
+
+Trying to put himself in her place, Lanyard believed that he would
+never have neglected the opportunity that, so far as she knew, had been
+hers, to steal away from Paris while he slept and leave an enemy in his
+way quite as dangerous as "Dupont" to gnaw his nails in the
+mortification of defeat. Why she had not done so, why she had permitted
+Monk and Phinuit to play their comedy of offering him the jewels,
+passed understanding.
+
+But of one thing Lanyard felt reasonably assured: now that she had him
+to all intents and purposes her foiled and harmless captive aboard the
+Sybarite, Liane would not keep him waiting long for enlightenment as to
+her intentions.
+
+He had to wait, however, that night and the next three before the woman
+showed herself. She was reported ill with mal-de-mer. Lanyard thought
+it quite likely that she was; before she was out of the Channel the
+Sybarite was contesting a moderate gale from the Southwest. On the
+other hand, he imagined that Liane might sensibly be making seasickness
+an excuse to get thoroughly rested and settled in her mind as to her
+course with him.
+
+So he schooled himself to be patient, and put in his time to good
+profit taking the measures of his shipmates and learning his way about
+ship.
+
+The Sybarite seemed unnecessarily large for a pleasure boat. Captain
+Monk had designated her a ship of nine hundred tons. Certainly she had
+room and to spare on deck as well as below for the accommodation of
+many guests in addition to the crew of thirty required for her
+navigation and their comfort. A good all-weather boat, very steady in a
+seaway, her lines were nevertheless fine, nothing in her appearance in
+the least suggested a vessel of commercial character--"all yacht" was
+what Monk called her.
+
+The first mate, a Mr. Swain, was a sturdy Britisher with a very red
+face and cool blue eyes, not easily impressed; if Lanyard were not in
+error, Mr. Swain entertained a private opinion of the lot of them,
+Captain Monk included, decidedly uncomplimentary. But he was a civil
+sort, though deficient in sense of humour and inclined to be a bit
+abrupt in a preoccupied fashion.
+
+Mr. Collison, the second mate, was another kind entirely, an American
+with the drawl of the South in his voice, a dark, slender man with eyes
+quick and shrewd. His manners were excellent, his reserve notable,
+though he seemed to derive considerable amusement from what he saw of
+the passengers, going on his habit of indulging quiet smiles as he
+listened to their communications. He talked very little and played an
+excellent game of poker.
+
+The chief engineer was a Mr. Mussey, stout, affable, and cynic, a heavy
+drinker, untidy about his person and exacting about his engine-room, a
+veteran of his trade and--it was said--an ancient croney of Monk's.
+There was, at all events, a complete understanding evident between
+these two, though now and again, especially at table, when Monk was
+putting on something more than his customary amount of side, Lanyard
+would observe Mussey's eyes fixed in contemplation upon his superior
+officer, with a look in them that wanted reading. He was nobody's fool,
+certainly not Monk's, and at such times Lanyard would have given more
+than a penny for Mussey's thoughts.
+
+Existing in daily contact, more or less close, with these gentlemen,
+observing them as they went to and fro upon their lawful occasions,
+Lanyard often speculated as to their attitude toward this lawless
+errand of the Sybarite's, of which they could hardly be unsuspicious
+even if they were not intimate with its true nature. And remembering
+what penalties attach to apprehension in the act of smuggling, even
+though it be only a few cases of champagne, he thought it a wild risk
+for them to run for the sake of their daily wage.
+
+Something to this effect he intimated to Phinuit.
+
+"Don't worry about this lot," that one replied. "They're wise birds,
+tough as they make 'em, ready for anything; hand-picked down to the
+last coal-passer. The skipper isn't a man to take fool chances, and
+when he recruited this crew, he took nobody he couldn't answer for.
+They're more than well paid, and they'll do as they're told and keep
+their traps as tight as clams'."
+
+"But, I take it, they were signed on before this present voyage was
+thought of; while you seem to imply that Captain Monk anticipated
+having to depend upon these good fellows in unlawful enterprises."
+
+"Maybe he did, at that," Phinuit promptly surmised, with a bland eye.
+"I wouldn't put it past him. The skipper's deep, and I'll never tell
+you what he had in the back of his mind when he let Friend Boss
+persuade him to take command of a pleasure yacht. Because I don't know.
+If it comes to that, the owner himself never confided in me just what
+the large idea was in buying this ark for a plaything. Yachting for fun
+is one thing; running a young floating hotel is something else again."
+
+"Then you don't believe the grandiose illusions due to sudden wealth
+were alone responsible?"
+
+"I don't know. That little man has a mind of his own, and even if I do
+figure on his payroll as confidential secretary, he doesn't tell me
+everything he knows."
+
+"Still," said Lanyard drily, "one cannot think you can complain that he
+has hesitated to repose his trust in you."
+
+To this Phinuit made no reply other than a non-committal grunt; and
+presently Lanyard added:
+
+"It is hardly possible--eh?--that the officers and crew know nothing of
+what is intended with all the champagne you have recently taken
+aboard."
+
+"They're no fools. They know there's enough of the stuff on board to do
+a Cunarder for the next ten years, and they know, too, there's no
+lawful way of getting it into the States."
+
+"So, then! They know that. How much more may they not know?"
+
+Phinuit turned a startled face to him. "What's that?" he demanded
+sharply.
+
+"May they not have exercised their wits as well on the subject of your
+secret project, my friend?"
+
+"What are you getting at?"
+
+"One is wondering what these 'wise birds, as tough as they make them'
+would do if they thought you were--as you say--getting away with
+something at their expense as well as the owner's."
+
+"What have you seen or heard?"
+
+"Positively nothing. This is merely idle speculation."
+
+"Well!" Phinuit sighed sibilantly and relaxed. "Let's hope they never
+find out."
+
+By dawn of the fourth day the gale had spent its greatest strength;
+what was left of it subsided steadily till, as the seafaring phrase has
+it, the wind went down with the sun. Calm ensued. Lanyard woke up the
+next morning to view from his stateroom deadlights vistas illimitable
+of flat blue flawed by hardly a wrinkle; only by watching the horizon
+was one aware of the slow swell of the sea, its sole perceptible
+motion. And all day long the Sybarite trudged on an even keel with only
+the wind of her way to flutter the gay awnings of the quarterdeck,
+while the waters sheared by her stem ran down her sides hissing
+resentment of this violation of their absolute tranquillity.
+
+Also, the sun made itself felt, electric fans buzzed everywhere, and
+perspiring in utter indolence beneath the awnings, one thought in
+sympathy of those damned souls below, in the hell of the stoke-hole.
+
+At luncheon Liane Delorme appeared in a summery toilette that would
+have made its mark on the beach of Deauville.
+
+Voluntary or enforced, her period of retreat had done her good. Making
+every allowance for the aid of art, the woman looked years younger than
+when Lanyard had last seen her. Nobody would ever have believed her a
+day older than twenty-five, no one, that is to say, who had not watched
+youth ebb from her face and leave it grey and waste with premature
+winter, as Lanyard had that morning when he told her of the death of de
+Lorgnes in the restaurant of the Buttes Montmartre.
+
+Liane herself had long since put quite out of mind that mauvais quart
+d'heure. Her present serenity was as flawless as the sea's, though,
+unlike the sea, she sparkled. She was as gay as any school-girl--though
+any school-girl guilty, or even capable, of a scintilla of the amusing
+impropriety of her badinage would have merited and won instant
+expulsion.
+
+She inaugurated without any delay a campaign of conquest extremely
+diverting to observe. To Lanyard it seemed that her methods were crude
+and obvious enough; but it did something toward mitigating the
+long-drawn boredom of the cruise to watch them work out, as they seemed
+to invariably, with entire success; and then remark the insouciance
+with which, another raw scalp dangling from her belt, Liane would
+address herself to the next victim.
+
+Mr. Swain was the first to fall, mainly because he happened to be
+present at luncheon, it being Mr. Collison's watch on the bridge. Under
+the warmth of violet eyes which sought his constantly, drawn by what
+one was left to infer was an irresistible attraction, his reserve
+melted rapidly, his remote blue stare grew infinitely less distant; and
+though he blushed furiously at some of the more audacious of Liane's
+sallies, he was quick to take his cue when she expressed curiosity
+concerning the duties of the officer of the watch. And coming up at
+about two bells for a turn round the deck and a few breaths of fresh
+air before dressing for dinner, Lanyard saw them on the bridge, their
+heads together over the binnacle--to the open disgust of the man at the
+wheel.
+
+Liane hailed him, with vivacious gestures commanded his attendance. As
+a brother in good standing, one could hardly do less than humour her
+gracefully; so Lanyard trotted up to the companion ladder, and Liane,
+resting a hand of sisterly affection upon his arm, besought him to make
+clear to her feminine stupidity Swain's hopelessly technical
+explanation of the compass and binnacle.
+
+Obligingly Mr. Swain repeated his lecture, and Lanyard, learning for
+himself with considerable surprise what a highly complicated instrument
+of precision is the modern compass, and that the binnacle has essential
+functions entirely aside from supporting the compass and housing it
+from the weather, could hardly blame his sister for being confused.
+
+Indeed, he grew so interested in Swain's exposition of deviation and
+variation and magnetic attraction and the various devices employed to
+counteract these influences, the Flinders bars, the soft-iron spheres,
+and the system of adjustable magnets located in the pedestal of the
+binnacle, that he had to be reminded by a mild exhibition of sisterly
+temper that she hadn't summoned him to the bridge for his private
+edification.
+
+"So then!" he said after due show of contrition--"it is like this: the
+magnetic needle is susceptible to many attractions aside from that of
+the pole; it is influenced by juxtaposition to other pieces or masses
+of magnetized metal. The iron ship itself, for example, is one great
+magnet. Then there are dissociated masses of iron within the ship, each
+possessing an individual power of magnetism sufficient to drag the
+needle far from its normal fidelity to the pole. So the scientific
+mariner, when he installs a compass on board his ship, measures these
+several forces, their influence upon the needle, and installs others to
+correct them--on the principle of like cures like.
+
+"Let us put it in a figure: The compass is the husband, the pole the
+wife. Now it is well known that husbands are for all that human beings,
+able to perceive attractions in persons other than those to whom they
+are married. The wise wife, then, studies the charms of mind or person
+which in others appeal to her husband, and makes them her own; or if
+that is impossible cultivates other qualities quite as potent to
+distract him. It results from this, that the wise wife becomes, as they
+say 'all women to one man.' Now here the binnacle represents the arts
+by which that wise wife, the pole, keeps her husband true by
+surrounding him with charms and qualities--these magnets--sufficiently
+powerful to counteract the attractions of others. Do I make myself
+clear?"
+
+"But perfectly!" Liane nodded emphatically. "What a mind to have in the
+family!" she appealed to Mr. Swain. "Do you know, monsieur, it happens
+often to me to wonder how I should have so clever a brother?"
+
+"It is like that with me, too," Lanyard insisted warmly.
+
+He made an early excuse to get away, having something new to think
+about.
+
+Mr. Mussey put up a stiffer fight than Mr. Swain, since an avowed cynic
+is necessarily a Man Who Knows About Women. He gave Liane flatly to
+understand that he saw through her and couldn't be taken in by all her
+blandishments. At the end of twenty-four hours, however, the conviction
+seemed somehow to have insidiously penetrated that only a man of his
+ripe wisdom and disillusionment could possibly have any appeal to a
+woman like Liane Delorme. It wasn't long after that the engine room was
+illuminated by Liane's pretty ankles and Mr. Mussey was beginning to
+comprehend that there was in this world one woman at least who could
+take an intelligent interest in machinery.
+
+Mr. Collison succumbed without a struggle. True to the tradition of
+Southern chivalry, he ambled up to the block, laid his head upon it,
+and asked for the axe. Nor was he kept long waiting...
+
+On the seventh day the course pricked on the chart placed the
+Sybarite's position at noon as approximately in mid-Atlantic.
+Contemplating a prospect of seven days more of such emptiness,
+Lanyard's very soul yawned.
+
+And nothing could induce Captain Monk to hasten the passage. Mr. Mussey
+asserted that his engines could at a pinch deliver twenty knots an
+hour; yet day in and day out the Sybarite poked along at little better
+than half that speed. It was no secret that Liane Delorme's panic
+flight from Popinot had hurried the yacht out of Cherbourg harbour four
+days earlier than her proposed sailing date, whereas the Sybarite had a
+rendezvous to keep with her owner at a certain hour of a certain night,
+an appointment carefully calculated with consideration for the phase of
+the moon and the height of the tide, therefore not readily to be
+altered.
+
+After dinner on that seventh day, a meal much too long drawn out for
+Lanyard's liking, and marked to boot by the consumption of much too
+much champagne, he left the main saloon the arena of an impromptu poker
+party, repaired to the quarterdeck, and finding a wicker lounge chair
+by the taffrail subsided into it with a sigh of gratitude for this
+fragrant solitude of night, so soothing and serene.
+
+The Sybarite, making easy way through a slight sea, with what wind
+there was--not much--on the port bow, rolled but slightly, and her
+deliberate and graceful fore-and-aft motion, as she swung from crest to
+crest of the endless head-on swells, caused the stars to stream above
+her mast-heads, a boundless river of broken light. The pulsing of the
+engines, unhasting, unresting, ran through her fabric in ceaseless
+succession of gentle tremors, while the rumble of their revolutions
+resembled the refrain of an old, quiet song. The mechanism of the
+patent log hummed and clicked more obtrusively. Directly underfoot the
+screw churned a softly clashing wake. From the saloon companionway
+drifted intermittently a confusion of voices, Liane's light laughter,
+muted clatter of chips, now and then the sound of a popping cork.
+Forward the ship's bell sounded two double strokes, then a single,
+followed by a wail in minor key: "Five bells and all's well!" ... And
+of a sudden Lanyard suffered the melancholy oppression of knowing his
+littleness of body and soul, the relative insignificance even of the
+ship, that impertinent atom of human organization which traversed with
+unabashed effrontery the waters of the ages, beneath the shining
+constellations of eternity. In profound psychical enervation he
+perceived with bitterness and despair the enormous futility of all
+things mortal, the hopelessness of effort, the certain black defeat
+that waits upon even what men term success.
+
+He felt crushed, spiritually invertebrate, destitute of object in
+existence, bereft of all hope. What mattered it whether he won or lost
+in this stupid contest whose prize was possession of a few trinkets set
+with bits of glittering stone? If he won, of what avail? What could it
+profit his soul to make good a vain boast to Eve de Montalais? Would it
+matter to her what success or failure meant to him? Lanyard doubted it,
+he doubted her, himself, all things within the compass of his
+understanding, and knew appalling glimpses of that everlasting truth,
+too passionless to be cynical, that the hopes of man and his fears, his
+loves and hates, his strivings and passivity, are all one in the
+measured and immutable processes of Time....
+
+The pressure of a hand upon his own roused him to discover the Liane
+Delorme had seated herself beside him, in a chair that looked the other
+way, so that her face was not far from his; and he could scarcely be
+unaware of its hinted beauty, now wan and glimmering in starlight,
+enigmatic with soft, close shadows.
+
+"I must have been dreaming," he said, apologetic. "You startled me."
+
+"One could see that, my friend."
+
+The woman spoke in quiet accents and let her hand linger upon his with
+its insistent reminder of the warm, living presence whose rich
+colouring was disguised by the gloom that encompassed both.
+
+Four strokes in duplicate on the ship's bell, then the call: "_Eight
+bells and a-a-all's well_!"
+
+Lanyard muttered: "No idea it was so late."
+
+A slender white shape, Mr. Collison emerged from his quarters in the
+deck-house beneath the bridge and ran up the ladder to relieve Mr.
+Swain. At the same time a seaman came from forward and ascended by the
+other ladder. Later Mr. Swain and the man whose trick at the wheel was
+ended left the bridge, the latter to go forward to his rest, Mr. Swain
+to turn into his room in the deck-house.
+
+The hot glow of the saloon skylights became a dim refulgence, aside
+from which, and its glimmer in the mouth of the companionway, no lights
+were visible in the whole length of the ship except the shuttered
+window of Mr. Swain's room, which presently was darkened, and odd
+glimpses of the binnacle light to be had when the helmsman shifted his
+stand.
+
+A profound hush closed down upon the ship, whose progress across the
+face of the waters seemed to acquire a new significance of stealth, so
+that the two seated by the taffrail, above the throbbing screws and
+rushing torrent of the wake, talked in lowered accents without thinking
+why.
+
+"It is that one grows bored, eh, cher ami?"
+
+"Perhaps, Liane."
+
+"Or perhaps that one's thought are constantly with one's heart,
+elsewhere?"
+
+"You think so?"
+
+"At the Château de Montalais, conceivably."
+
+"It amuses you, then, to shoot arrows into the air?"
+
+"But naturally, I seek the reason, when I see you distrait and am
+conscious of your neglect."
+
+"I think it is for me to complain of that!"
+
+"How can you say such things?"
+
+"One has seen what one has seen, these last few days. I think you are
+what that original Phinuit would call 'a fast worker,' Liane."
+
+"What stupidity! If I seek to make myself liked, you know well it is
+with a purpose."
+
+"One hardly questions that."
+
+"You judge harshly ... Michael."
+
+Lanyard spent a look of astonishment on the darkness. He could not
+remember that Liane had ever before called him by that name.
+
+"Do I? Sorry...." His tone was listless. "But does it matter?"
+
+"You know that to me nothing else matters."
+
+Lanyard checked off on his fingers: "Swain, Collison, Mussey. Who next?
+Why not I, as well as another?"
+
+"Do you imagine for an instant that I class you with such riffraff?"
+
+"Why, if you really want to know what I think, Liane: it seems to me
+that all men in your sight are much the same, good for one thing only,
+to be used to serve your ends. And who am I that you should hold me in
+higher rating than any other man?"
+
+"You should know I do," the woman breathed, so low he barely caught the
+words and uttered an involuntary "Pardon?" before he knew he had
+understood. So that she iterated in a clearer tone of protest: "You
+should know I do--that I do esteem you as something more than other
+men. Think what I owe to you, Michael; and then consider this, that of
+all men whom I have known you alone have never asked for love."
+
+He gave a quiet laugh. "There is too much humility in my heart."
+
+"No," she said in a dull voice--"but you despise me. Do not deny it!"
+She shifted impatiently in her chair. "I know what I know. I am no
+fool, whatever you think of me.... No," she went on with emotion under
+restraint: "I am a creature of fatality, me--I cannot hope to escape my
+fate!"
+
+He was silent a little in perplexed consideration of this. What did she
+wish him to believe?
+
+"But one imagines nobody can escape his fate."
+
+"Men can, some of them; men such as you, rare as you are, know how to
+cheat destiny; but women never. It is the fate of all women that each
+shall some time love some man to desperation, and be despised. It is my
+fate to have learned too late to love you, Michael----"
+
+"Ah, Liane, Liane!"
+
+"But you hold me in too much contempt to be willing to recognise the
+truth."
+
+"On the contrary, I admire you extremely, I think you are an
+incomparable actress."
+
+"You see!" She offered a despairing gesture to the stars. "It is not
+true what I say? I lay bare my heart to him, and he tells me that I
+act!"
+
+"But my dear girl! surely you do not expect me to think otherwise?"
+
+"I was a fool to expect anything from you," she returned bitterly--"you
+know too much about me. I cannot find it in my heart to blame you,
+since I am what I am, what the life you saved me to so long ago has
+made me. Why should you believe in me? Why should you credit the
+sincerity of this confession, which costs me so much humiliation? That
+would be too good for me, too much to ask of life!"
+
+"I think you cannot fairly complain of life, Liane. What have you asked
+of it that you have failed to get? Success, money, power,
+adulation----"
+
+"Never love."
+
+"The world would find it difficult to believe that."
+
+"Ah, love of a sort, yes: the love that is the desire to possess and
+that possession satisfies."
+
+"Have you asked for any other sort?"
+
+"I ask it now. I know what the love is that longs to give, to give and
+give again, asking no return but kindness, understanding, even
+toleration merely. It is such love as this I bear you, Michael. But you
+do not believe...."
+
+Divided between annoyance and distaste, he was silent. And all at once
+she threw herself half across the joined arms of their chairs, catching
+his shoulders with her hands, so that her half-clothed body rested on
+his bosom, and its scented warmth assailed his senses with the
+seduction whose power she knew so well.
+
+"Ah, Michael, my Michael!" she cried--"if you but knew, if only you
+could believe! It is so real to me, so true, so overwhelming, the
+greatest thing of all! How can it be otherwise to you?... No: do not
+think I complain, do not think I blame you or have room in my heart for
+any resentment. But, oh my dear! were I only able to make you
+understand, think what life could be to us, to you and me. What could
+it withhold that we desired? You with your wit, your strength, your
+skill, your poise--I with my great love to inspire and sustain
+you--what a pair we should make! what happiness would be ours! Think,
+Michael--think!"
+
+"I have thought, Liane," he returned in accents as kind as the hands
+that held her. "I have thought well..."
+
+"Yes?" She lifted her face so near that their breaths mingled, and he
+was conscious of the allure of tremulous and parted lips. "You have
+thought and.... Tell me your thought, my Michael."
+
+"Why, I think two things," said Lanyard: "First, that you deserve to be
+soundly kissed." He kissed her, but with discretion, and firmly put her
+from him. "Then"--his tone took on a note of earnestness--"that if what
+you have said is true, it is a pity, and I am sorry, Liane, very sorry.
+And, if it is not true, that the comedy was well played. Shall we let
+it rest at that, my dear?"
+
+Half lifting her, he helped her back into her chair, and as she turned
+her face away, struggling for mastery of her emotion, true or feigned,
+he sat back, found his cigarette case, and clipping a cigarette between
+his lips, cast about for a match.
+
+He had none in his pockets, but knew that there was a stand on one of
+the wicker tables nearby. Rising, he found it, and as he struck the
+light heard a sudden, soft swish of draperies as the woman rose.
+
+Moving toward the saloon companionway, she passed him swiftly, without
+a word, her head bended, a hand pressing a handkerchief to her lips.
+Forgetful, he followed her swaying figure with puzzled gaze till
+admonished by the flame that crept toward his fingertips. Then dropping
+the match he struck another and put it to his cigarette. At the second
+puff he heard a choking gasp, and looked up again.
+
+The woman stood alone, en silhouette against the glow of the
+companionway, her arms thrust out as if to ward off some threatened
+danger. A second cry broke from her lips, shrill with terror, she
+tottered and fell as, dropping his cigarette, Lanyard ran to her.
+
+His vision dazzled by the flame of the match, he sought in vain for any
+cause for her apparent fright. For all he could see, the deck was as
+empty as he had presumed it to be all through their conversation.
+
+He found her in a faint unmistakably unaffected. Footfalls sounded on
+the deck as he knelt, making superficial examination. Collison had
+heard her cries and witnessed her fall from the bridge and was coming
+to investigate.
+
+"What in blazes----!"
+
+Lanyard replied with a gesture of bewilderment: "She was just going
+below. I'd stopped to light a cigarette, saw nothing to account for
+this. Wait: I'll fetch water."
+
+He darted down the companionway, filled a glass from a silver thermos
+carafe, and hurried back. As he arrived at the top of steps, Collison
+announced: "It's all right. She's coming to."
+
+Supported in the arms of the second mate, Liane was beginning to
+breathe deeply and looking round with dazed eyes. Lanyard dropped on a
+knee and set the glass to her lips. She gulped twice, mechanically, her
+gaze fixed to his face. Then suddenly memory cleared, and she uttered a
+bubbling gasp of returning dread.
+
+"Popinot!" she cried, as Lanyard hastily took the glass away.
+"Popinot--he was there--I saw him--standing there!"
+
+A trembling arm indicated the starboard deck just forward of the
+companion housing. But of course, when Lanyard looked, there was no one
+there ... if there had ever been....
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+THE CIGARETTE
+
+
+Lanyard found himself exchanging looks of mystification with Collison,
+and heard his own voice make the flat statement: "But there is
+nobody...." Collison muttered words which he took to be: No, and never
+was. "But you must have seen him from the bridge," Lanyard insisted
+blankly, "if...."
+
+"I looked around as soon as I heard her call out," Collison replied;
+"but I didn't see anybody, only mademoiselle here--and you, of course,
+with that match."
+
+"Please help me up," Liane Delorme asked in a faint voice. Collison
+lent a hand. In the support and shelter of Lanyard's arm the woman's
+body quivered like that of a frightened child. "I must go to my
+stateroom," she sighed uncertainly. "But I am afraid..."
+
+"Do not be. Remember Mr. Collison and I... Besides, you know, there was
+nobody..."
+
+The assertion seemed to exasperate her; her voice discovered new
+strength and violence.
+
+"But I am telling you I saw ... that assassin!"--she shuddered
+again--"standing there, in the shadow, glaring at me as if I had
+surprised him and he did not know what next to do. I think he must have
+been spying down through the skylight; it was the glow from it that
+showed me his red, dirty face of a pig."
+
+"You came aft on the port side, didn't you?" Lanyard enquired of the
+second mate.
+
+Collison nodded. "Running," he said--"couldn't imagine what was up."
+
+"It is easy not to see what one is not looking for," Lanyard mused,
+staring forward along the starboard side. "If a man had dropped flat
+and squirmed along until in the shelter of the engine-room ventilators,
+he could have run forward--bending low, you know--without your seeing
+him."
+
+"But you were standing here, to starboard!"
+
+"I tell you, that match was blinding me," Lanyard affirmed irritably.
+"Besides, I wasn't looking--except at my sister--wondering what was the
+matter."
+
+Collison started. "Excuse me," he said, reminded--"if mademoiselle's
+all right, I ought to get back to the bridge."
+
+"Take me below," Liane begged. "I must speak with Captain Monk."
+
+Monk and Phinuit were taking their ease plus nightcaps in the captain's
+sitting-room. A knock brought a prompt invitation to "Come in!" Lanyard
+thrust the door open and curtly addressed Monk: "Mademoiselle Delorme
+wishes to see you." The eloquent eyebrows indicated surprise and
+resignation, and Monk got up and inserted himself into his white linen
+tunic. Phinuit, more sensitive to the accent of something amiss,
+hurried out in unceremonious shirt sleeves. "What's up?" he demanded,
+looking from Lanyard's grave face to Liane's face of pallor and
+distress. Lanyard informed him in a few words.
+
+"Impossible!" Phinuit commented.
+
+"Nonsense," Monk added, speaking directly to Liane. "You imagined it
+all."
+
+She had recovered much of her composure, enough to enable her to shrug
+her disdain of such stupidity.
+
+"I tell you only what my two eyes saw."
+
+"To be sure," Monk agreed with a specious air of being wide open to
+conviction. "What became of him, then?"
+
+"You ask me that, knowing that in stress of terror I fainted!"
+
+The eyebrows achieved an effect of studied weariness. "And you saw
+nobody, monsieur? And Collison didn't, either?"
+
+Lanyard shook his head to each question. "Still, it is possible----."
+
+Monk cut him short impatiently. "All gammon--all in her eye! No man
+bigger than a cockroach could have smuggled himself aboard this yacht
+without my being told. I know my ship, I know my men, I know what I'm
+talking about."
+
+"Presently," Liane prophesied darkly, "you may be talking about
+nothing."
+
+At a loss, Monk muttered: "Don't get you...."
+
+"When you find yourself, some fine morning, with your throat cut in
+your sleep, like poor de Lorgnes--or garroted, as I might have been."
+
+"I'm not going to lose any sleep....." Monk began.
+
+"Lose none before you have the vessel searched," Liane pleaded, with a
+change of tone. "You know, messieurs, I am not a woman given to
+hallucinations. I _saw_ ... And I tell you, while that assassin is at
+liberty aboard this yacht, not one of our lives is worth a sou--no, not
+one!"
+
+"Oh, you shall have your search." Monk gave in as one who indulges a
+childish whim. "But I can tell you now what we'll find--or won't."
+
+"Then Heaven help us all!" Liane went swiftly to the door of her room,
+but there hesitated, looking back in appeal to Lanyard. "I am
+afraid...."
+
+"Let me have a look round first."
+
+And when Lanyard had satisfied himself there was nobody concealed in
+any part of Liane's suite, and had been rewarded with a glance of
+gratitude--"I shall lock myself in, of course," the woman said from the
+threshold--"and I have my pistol, too."
+
+"But I assure you," Monk commented in heavy sarcasm, "our intentions
+are those of honourable men."
+
+The door slammed, and the sound of the key turning in the lock
+followed. Monk trained the eyebrows into a look of long-suffering
+patience.
+
+"A glass too much... Seein' things!"
+
+"No," Lanyard voiced shortly his belief; "you are wrong. Liane saw
+something."
+
+"Nobody questions that," Phinuit yawned. "What one does question is
+whether she saw a man or a figment of her imagination--some effect of
+the shadows that momentarily suggested a man."
+
+"Shadows do play queer tricks at night, at sea," Monk agreed. "I
+remember once--"
+
+"Then let us look the ground over and see if we can make that
+explanation acceptable to our own intelligences," Lanyard cut in.
+
+"No harm in that."
+
+Phinuit fetched a pocket flash-lamp, and the three reconnoitred
+exhaustively the quarters of the deck in which the apparition had
+manifested itself to the woman. By no strain of credulity could the
+imagination be made to accept the effect of shadows at the designated
+spot as the shape of somebody standing there. On the other hand, when
+Phinuit obligingly posed himself between the mouth of the companionway
+and the skylight, it had to be admitted that the glow from either side
+provided fairly good cover for one who might wish to linger there,
+observing and unobserved.
+
+"Still, I don't believe she saw anything," Monk persisted--"a phantom
+Popinot, if anything."
+
+"But wait. What is it we have here?"
+
+Lanyard, scrutinising the deck with the flashlamp, stooped, picked up
+something, and offered it on an outspread palm upon which he trained
+the clear electric beam.
+
+"Cigarette stub?" Monk said, and sniffed. "That's a famous find!"
+
+"A cigarette manufactured by the French Régie."
+
+"And well stepped on, too," Phinuit observed. "Well, what about it?"
+
+"Who that uses this part of the deck would be apt to insult his palate
+with such a cigarette? No one of us--hardly any one of the officers or
+stewards."
+
+"Some deck-hand might have sneaked aft for a look-see, expecting to
+find the quarterdeck deserted at this hour."
+
+"Even ordinary seamen avoid, when they can, what the Régie sells under
+the name of tobacco. Nor is it likely such a one would risk the
+consequences of defying Captain Monk's celebrated discipline."
+
+"Then you believe it was Popinot, too?"
+
+"I believe you would do well to make the search you have promised
+thorough and immediate."
+
+"Plenty of time," Monk replied wearily. "I'll turn this old tub inside
+out, if you insist, in the morning."
+
+"But why, monsieur, do you remain so obstinately incredulous?"
+
+"Well," Monk drawled, "I've known the pretty lady a number of years,
+and if you ask me she's quite up to playing little games all her own."
+
+"Pretending, you mean--for private ends?"
+
+The eyebrows offered a gesture urbane and sceptical.
+
+Whether or not sleep brought Monk better counsel, the morning's
+ransacking of the vessel and the examination of her crew proved more
+painstaking than Lanyard had expected. And the upshot was precisely as
+Monk had foretold, precisely negative. He reported drily to this effect
+at an informal conference in his quarters after luncheon. He himself
+had supervised the entire search and had made a good part of it in
+person, he said. No nook or cranny of the yacht had been overlooked.
+
+"I trust mademoiselle is satisfied," he concluded with a mockingly
+civil movement of eyebrows toward Liane.
+
+His reply was the slightest of shrugs executed by perfect shoulders
+beneath a gown of cynical transparency. Lanyard was aware that the
+violet eyes, large with apprehension, flashed transiently his way, as
+if in hope that he might submit some helpful suggestion. But he had
+none to offer. If the manner in which the search had been conducted
+were open to criticism, that would have to be made by a mind better
+informed than his in respect of things maritime. And he avoided
+acknowledging that glance by even so much as seeming aware of it. And
+in point of fact, coldly reviewed in dispassionate daylight, the thing
+seemed preposterous to him, to be asked to believe that Popinot had
+contrived to secrete himself beyond finding on board the Sybarite.
+
+Without his participation the discussion continued.
+
+He heard Phinuit's voice utter in accents of malicious amusement:
+"Barring, of course, the possibility of connivance on the part of
+officers or crew."
+
+"Don't be an ass!" Monk snapped.
+
+"Don't be unreasonable: I am simply as God made me."
+
+"Well, it was a nasty job of work."
+
+"Now, listen." Phinuit rose to leave, as one considering the conference
+at an end. "If you persist in picking on me, skipper, I'll ravish you
+of those magnificent eyebrows with a safety razor, some time when
+you're asleep, and leave you as dumb as a Wop peddler who's lost both
+arms."
+
+Liane followed him out in silence, but her carriage was that of a queen
+of tragedy. Lanyard got up in turn, and to his amazement found the
+eyebrows signalling confidentially to him.
+
+"What the devil!" he exclaimed, in an open stare.
+
+Immediately the eyebrows became conciliatory.
+
+"Well, monsieur, and what is your opinion?"
+
+"Why, to me it would seem there might be something in the suggestion of
+Monsieur Phinuit."
+
+"Ridiculous!" Monk dismissed it finally. "Do you know, I rather fancy
+my own.... Liane's up to something," he added, explanatory; and then,
+as Lanyard said nothing--"You haven't told me yet what she was talking
+to you about last night just before her--alleged fright."
+
+Lanyard contrived a successful offensive with his own eyebrows.
+
+"Oh?" he said, "haven't I?" and walked out.
+
+Here was a new angle to consider. Monk's attitude hinted at a possible
+rift in the entente cordiale of the conspirators. Why else should he
+mistrust Liane's sincerity in asserting that she had seen Popinot?
+Aside from the question of what he imagined she could possibly gain by
+making a scene out of nothing--a riddle unreadable--one wondered
+consumedly what had happened to render Monk suspicious of her good
+faith.
+
+The explanation, when it was finally revealed to Lanyard by the most
+trivial of incidents, made even his own blindness seem laughable.
+
+For three more days the life of the ship followed in unruffled
+tranquillity its ordered course. Liane Delorme was afflicted with no
+more visions, as the captain would have called them; though by common
+consent the subject had been dropped upon the failure of the search,
+and to all seeming was rapidly fading from the minds of everybody but
+Liane herself and Lanyard. This last continued to plague himself with
+the mystery and, maintaining always an open mind, was prepared at any
+time to be shockingly enlightened; that is, to discover that Liane had
+not cried wolf without substantial reason. For he had learned this much
+at least of life, that everything is always possible.
+
+As for Liane, she made no secret of her unabated timidity, yet suffered
+it with such fortitude as could not fail to win admiration. If she was
+a bit more subdued, a trifle less high-spirited than was her habit, if
+she refused positively to sit with her back to any door or to retire
+for the night until her quarters had been examined, if (as Lanyard
+suspected) she was never unarmed for a moment, day or night, she
+permitted no signs of mental strain to mar the serenity of her
+countenance or betray the studied graciousness of her gestures.
+
+Toward Lanyard she bore herself precisely as though nothing had
+happened to disturb the even adjustment of their personal relations;
+or, perhaps, as if she considered everything had happened, so that
+their rapport had become absolute; at all events, with a pleasing
+absence of constraint. He really couldn't make her out. Sometimes he
+thought she wished him to believe she was not as other women and could
+make rational allowance for his poor response to her naïve overtures.
+But that seemed so abnormal, he felt forced to fall back on the theory
+that her declaration had been nothing more than a minor gambit in
+whatever game she was playing, and that consequently she bore no malice
+because of its failure. No matter which explanation was the true one,
+no matter which keyed her temper toward him, Lanyard found himself
+liking the woman better, not as a woman but as another human being,
+than he had ever thought to. Say what you liked, in this humour she was
+charming.
+
+But he never for an instant imagined she was meekly accepting defeat at
+his hands instead of biding her time to resume the attack from a new
+quarter. So he wasn't at all surprised when, one evening, quite early
+after dinner, she contrived another tête-à-tête, and with good
+conversational generalship led their talk presently into a channel of
+amiable personalities.
+
+"And have you been thinking about what we said--or what I said, my
+friend--that night--so long ago it seems!--three nights ago?"
+
+"But inevitably, Liane."
+
+"You have not forgotten my stupidity, then."
+
+"I have forgotten nothing."
+
+She made a pretty mouth of doubt. "Would it not have been more kind to
+forget?"
+
+"Such compliments are not easily forgotten."
+
+"You are sure, quite sure it was a compliment?"
+
+"No-o; by no means sure. Still, I am a man, and I am giving you the
+full benefit of every doubt."
+
+She laughed, not ill-pleased. "But what a man! how blessed of the gods
+to be able to laugh at yourself as well as at me."
+
+"Undeceive yourself: I could never laugh at you, Liane. Even if one did
+not believe you to be a great natural comedienne at will, one would
+always wonder what your purpose was--oh yes! with deep respect one
+would wonder about that."
+
+"And you have been wondering these last three days? Well, tell me what
+you think my purpose was in abandoning all maidenly reserve and
+throwing myself at your head."
+
+"Why," said Lanyard with a look of childlike candour, "you might, you
+know, have been uncontrollably swayed by some passionate impulses of
+the heart."
+
+"But otherwise--?" she prompted, hugely amused.
+
+"Oh, if you had a low motive in trying to make a fool of me, you know
+too well how to hide your motive from such a fool."
+
+In a fugitive seizure of thoughtfulness the violet eyes lost all their
+impishness. She sighed, the bright head drooped a little toward the
+gleaming bosom, a hand stole out to rest lightly upon his once again.
+
+"It was not acting, Michael--I tell you that frankly--at least, not all
+acting."
+
+"Meaning, I take it, you know love too well to make it artlessly."
+
+"I'm afraid so, my dear," said Liane Delorme with another sigh. "You
+know: I am afraid of you. You see everything so clearly..."
+
+"It's a vast pity. I wish I could outgrow it. One misses so many
+amusing emotions when one sees too clearly."
+
+During another brief pause, Lanyard saw Monk come on deck, pause, and
+search them out, in the chairs they occupied near the taffrail, much as
+on that other historic night. Not that he experienced any difficulty in
+locating them; for this time the decklights were burning clearly.
+Nevertheless, Captain Monk confessed emotion at sight of those two in a
+quite perceptible start; and Lanyard saw the eyebrows tremendously
+agitated as their manipulator moved aft.
+
+Unconscious of all this, Liane ended her pensive moment by leaning
+toward Lanyard and making demoralizing eyes, while the hand left his
+and stole with a caressing gesture up his forearm.
+
+"Is love, then, distasteful to you unless it be truly artless,
+Michael?"
+
+"There's so much to be said about that, Liane," he evaded.
+
+Monk was standing over them, a towering figure in white with the most
+forbidding eyebrows Lanyard had ever seen.
+
+"Might one suggest," he did suggest in iced accents, "that the
+quarter-deck is a fairly conspicuous place for this exhibition of
+family affection?"
+
+Liane Delorme turned up an enquiring look, tinged slightly with an
+impatience which all at once proved too much for her.
+
+"Oh, go to the devil!" she snapped in that harsh voice of the sidewalks
+which she was able to use and discard at will.
+
+For a moment Monk made no reply; and Lanyard remarked a curious
+quivering of that excessively tall, excessively attenuated body, a real
+trembling, and suddenly understood that the absurd creature was being
+shaken by jealousy, by an enormous passion of jealousy, quite beyond
+his control, that shook him very much as a cat might shake a mouse.
+
+It was too funny to be laughable, it was comic in a way to make one
+want to weep. So that Lanyard, who refused to weep in public, could
+merely gape in speechless and transfixed rapture. And perhaps this was
+fortunate; otherwise Monk must have seen that his idiotic secret was
+out, the sport of ribald mirth, and the situation must have been
+precipitated with a vengeance and an outcome impossible to predict. As
+it was, absorbed in his inner torment, Monk was insensible to the peril
+that threatened his stilted but precious dignity, which he proceeded to
+parade, as it were underlining it with the eyebrows, to lend emphasis
+to his words.
+
+"So long as this entertaining fiction of brother-and-sister is thought
+worth while," he said with infuriated condescension, "it might be
+judicious not to indulge in inconsistent and unseemly demonstrations of
+affection within view of my officers and crew. Suppose we..." He choked
+a little. "In short, I came to invite you to a little conference in my
+rooms, with Mr. Phinuit."
+
+"Conference?" Liane enquired coolly, without stirring. "I know nothing
+of this conference."
+
+"Mr. Phinuit and I are agreed that Monsieur Lanyard is entitled to know
+more about our intentions while he has time to weigh them carefully. We
+have only four more days at sea..."
+
+Unable longer to contain himself, Lanyard left his chair with alacrity.
+"But this is so delightful! You've no idea, really, monsieur, how I
+have looked forward to this moment." And to Liane: "Do come, and see
+how I take it, this revelation of my preordained fate. It will be, I
+trust sincerely, like a man."
+
+With momentary hesitation, and in a temper precluding any sympathy,
+with his humour, the woman rose and silently followed with him that
+long-legged figure whose stalk held so much dramatic significance as he
+led to the companionway.
+
+After that it was refreshing to find unromantic Mr. Phinuit lounging
+beside the captain's desk with crossed feet overhanging one corner of
+it and mind intent on the prosaic business of paring his fingernails.
+Lanyard nodded to him with great good temper and--while Phinuit lowered
+his feet and put away his penknife--considerately placed a chair for
+Liane in the position in which she preferred to sit, with her face
+turned a little from the light. Nor would his appreciation of the
+formality which seemed demanded by Monk's solemn manner, permit him to
+sit before the captain had taken his own chair behind the desk.
+
+Then, however, he discovered the engaging spontaneity of a schoolboy at
+a pantomime, and drawing up a chair sat on the edge of it and addressed
+himself with unaffected eagerness to the most portentous eyebrows in
+captivity.
+
+"Now," he announced with a little bow, "for what, one imagines, Mr.
+Phinuit would term the Elaborate Idea!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+HISTORIC REPETITION
+
+
+Phinuit grinned, then smothered a little yawn. Liane Delorme gave a
+small, disdainful movement of shoulders, and posed herself becomingly,
+resting an elbow on the arm of her chair and inclining her cheek upon
+two fingers of a jewelled hand. Thus she sat somewhat turned from Monk
+and Phinuit, but facing Lanyard, to whom her grave but friendly eyes
+gave undivided heed, for all the world as if there were no others
+present: she seemed to wait to hear him speak again rather than to care
+in the least what Monk would find to say.
+
+Captain Monk filled in that pause with an impressive arrangement of
+eyebrows. Then, fixing his gaze, not upon Lanyard, but upon the point
+of a pencil with which his incredibly thin fingers traced elaborate but
+empty designs upon the blotter, he opened his lips, hemmed in warning
+that he was about to speak, and seemed tremendously upset to find that
+Liane was inconsiderately forestalling him.
+
+Her voice was at its most musical pitch, rather low for her, fluting,
+infinitely disarming and seductive.
+
+"Let me say to you, mon ami, that--naturally I know what is coming--I
+disapprove absolutely of this method of treating with you."
+
+"But it is such an honour to be considered important enough to be
+treated with at all!"
+
+"You have the true gift for sarcasm: a pity to waste it on an audience
+two-thirds incapable of appreciation."
+
+"Oh, you're wrong!" Phinuit declared earnestly. "I'm appreciative, I
+think the dear man's immense."
+
+"Might I suggest"--the unctuous tones of Captain Monk issued from under
+mildly wounded eyebrows--"if any one of us were unappreciative of
+Monsieur Lanyard's undoubted talents, he would not be with us tonight."
+
+"You might suggest it," Phinuit assented, "but that wouldn't make it
+so, it is to mademoiselle's appreciation that you and I owe this treat,
+and you know it. Now quit cocking those automatic eyebrows at me;
+you've been doing that ever since we met, and they haven't gone off
+yet, not once."
+
+Irrepressible, Liane's laughter pealed; and though he couldn't help
+smiling, Lanyard hastened to offer up himself on the altar of peace.
+
+"But--messieurs!--you interest me so much. Won't you tell me quickly
+what possible value my poor talents can have found in your sight?"
+
+"You tell him, Monk," Phinuit said irreverently--"I'm no tale-bearer."
+
+Monk elevated his eyebrows above recognition of the impertinence, and
+offered Lanyard a bow of formidable courtesy.
+
+"They are such, monsieur," he said with that deliberation which becomes
+a diplomatic personage--"your talents are such that you can, if you
+will, become invaluable to us."
+
+Phinuit chuckled outright at Lanyard's look of polite obtuseness.
+
+"Never sail a straight course--can you skipper?--when you can get there
+by tacking. Here: I'm a plain-spoken guy, let me act as an interpreter.
+Mr. Lanyard: this giddy association of malefactors here present has the
+honour to invite you to become a full-fledged working member and
+stockholder of equal interest with the rest of us, participating in all
+benefits of the organization, including police protection. And as added
+inducement we're willing to waive initiation fee and dues. Do I make
+myself clear?"
+
+"But perfectly."
+
+"It's like this: I've told you how we came together, the five of us,
+including Jules and Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes. Now we expect this
+venture, our first, to pan out handsomely. There'll be a juicy melon
+cut when we get to New York. There's a lot more--I think you
+understand--than the Montalais plunder to whack up on. We'll make the
+average get-rich-quick scheme look like playing store in the back-yard
+with two pins the top price for anything on the shelves. And there
+isn't any sane reason why we need stop at that. In fact, we don't mean
+to. The Sybarite will make more voyages, and if anything should happen
+to stop it, there are other means of making the U. S. Customs look
+foolish. Each of us contributes valuable and essential services,
+mademoiselle, the skipper, my kid-brother, even I--and I pull a strong
+oar with the New York Police Department into the bargain. But there's a
+vacancy in our ranks, the opening left by the death of de Lorgnes, an
+opening that nobody could hope to fill so well as you. So we put it up
+to you squarely: If you'll sign on and work with us, we'll turn over to
+you a round fifth share of the profits of this voyage as well as
+everything that comes after. That's fair enough, isn't it?"
+
+"But more than fair, monsieur."
+
+"Well, it's true you've done nothing to earn a fifth interest in the
+first division..."
+
+"Then, too, I am here, quite helpless in your hands."
+
+"Oh, we don't look at it that way----"
+
+"Which," Liane sweetly interrupted, "is the one rational gesture you
+have yet offered in this conference, Monsieur Phinuit."
+
+"Meaning, I suppose, Mr. Lanyard is far from being what he says,
+helpless in our hands."
+
+"Nor ever will be, my poor friend, while he breathes and thinks."
+
+"But, Liane!" Lanyard deprecated, modestly casting down his eyes--"you
+overwhelm me."
+
+"I don't believe you," Liane retorted coolly.
+
+For some moments Lanyard continued to stare reflectively at his feet.
+Nothing whatever of his thought was to be gathered from his
+countenance, though eyes more shrewd to read than those of Phinuit or
+Monk were watching it intently.
+
+"Well, Mr. Lanyard, what do you say?"
+
+Lanyard lifted his meditative gaze to the face of Phinuit. "But surely
+there is more...." he suggested in a puzzled way.
+
+"More what?"
+
+"I find something lacking.... You have shown me but one side of the
+coin. What is the reverse? I appreciate the honour you do me, I
+comprehend fully the strong inducements I am offered. But you have
+neglected--an odd oversight on the part of the plain-spoken man you
+profess to be--you have forgotten to name the penalty which would
+attach to a possible refusal."
+
+"I guess it's safe to leave that to your imagination."
+
+"There would be a penalty, however?"
+
+"Well, naturally, if you're not with us, you're against us. And to take
+that stand would oblige us, as a simple matter of self-preservation, to
+defend ourselves with every means at our command."
+
+"Means which," Lanyard murmured, "you prefer not to name."
+
+"Well, one doesn't like to be crude."
+
+"I have my answer, monsieur--and many thanks. The parallel is
+complete."
+
+With a dim smile playing in his eyes and twitching at the corners of
+his lips, Lanyard leaned back and studied the deck beams. Liane Delorme
+sat up with a movement of sharp uneasiness.
+
+"Of what, my friend, are you thinking?"
+
+"I am marvelling at something everybody knows--that history does repeat
+itself."
+
+The woman made a sudden hissing sound, of breath drawn shortly between
+closed teeth. "I hope not!" she sighed.
+
+Lanyard opened his eyes wide at her. "You hope not, Liane?"
+
+"I hope this time history will not altogether repeat itself. You see,
+my friend, I think I know what is in your mind, memories of old
+times...."
+
+"True: I am thinking of those days when the Pack hunted the Lone Wolf
+in Paris, ran him to earth at last, and made him much the same offer as
+you have made to-night.... The Pack, you should know, messieurs, was
+the name assumed by an association of Parisian criminals, ambitious
+like you, who had grown envious of the Lone Wolf's success, and wished
+to persuade him to run with them."
+
+"And what happened?" Phinuit enquired.
+
+"Why it so happened that they chose the time when I had made up my mind
+to be good for the rest of my days. It was all most unfortunate."
+
+"What answer did you give them, then?"
+
+"As memory serves, I told them they could all go plumb to hell."
+
+"So I hope history will not repeat, this time," Liane interjected.
+
+"And did they go?" Monk asked.
+
+"Presently, some of them, ultimately all; for some lingered a few years
+in French prisons, like that great Popinot, the father of monsieur who
+has caused us so much trouble."
+
+"And you----?"
+
+"Why," Lanyard laughed, "I have managed to keep out of jail, so I
+presume I must have kept my vow to be good."
+
+"And no backsliding?" Phinuit suggested with a leer.
+
+"Ah! you must not ask me to tell you everything. That is a matter
+between me and my conscience."
+
+"Well," Phinuit hazarded with a good show of confidence, "I guess you
+won't tell us to go plumb to hell, will you?"
+
+"No; I promise to be more original than that."
+
+"Then you refuse!" Liane breathed tensely.
+
+"Oh, I haven't said that! You must give me time to think this over."
+
+"I knew that would be his answer," Monk proclaimed, pride in his
+perspicuity shaping the set of his eyebrows. "That is why I was firm
+that we should wait no longer. You have four days in which to make up
+your mind, monsieur."
+
+"I shall need them."
+
+"I don't see why," Phinuit argued: "it's an open and shut proposition,
+if ever there was one."
+
+"But you are asking me to renounce something upon which I have set much
+store for many years, monsieur. I can't be expected to do that in an
+hour or even a day."
+
+You shall have your answer, I promise you, by the time we make our
+landfall--perhaps before."
+
+"The sooner, the better."
+
+"Are you sure, monsieur? But one thought it was the tortoise who won
+the famous race."
+
+"Take all the time you need," Captain Monk conceded generously, "to
+come to a sensible decision."
+
+"But how good you are to me, monsieur!"
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+THE MALCONTENT
+
+
+Singular though the statement may seem, when one remembers the
+conditions that circumscribed his freedom of action on board the
+Sybarite, that he stood utterly alone in that company of conspirators
+and their creatures, alone and unarmed, with never a friend to guard
+his back or even to whisper him one word of counsel, warning or
+encouragement, with only his naked wits and hands to fortify and
+sustain his heart: it is still no exaggeration to say that Lanyard got
+an extraordinary amount of private diversion out of those last few
+days.
+
+From the hour when Liane Delorme, Phinuit and Captain Monk, in conclave
+solemnly assembled at the instance of the one last-named, communicated
+their collective mind in respect of his interesting self, the man was
+conscious of implicit confidence in a happy outcome of the business,
+with a conscientiousness less rational than simply felt, a sort of
+bubbling exhilaration in his mood that found its most intelligible
+expression in the phrase, which he was wont often to iterate to
+himself: Ça va bien--that goes well!
+
+That--the progressive involution of this insane imbroglio--went very
+well indeed, in Lanyard's reckoning; he could hardy wish, he could not
+reasonably demand that it should go better.
+
+He knew now with what design Liane Delorme had made him a party to this
+sea adventure and intimate with every detail of the conspiracy; and he
+knew to boot why she had offered him the free gift of her love; doubt
+as to the one, scruples inspired by the other--that reluctance which
+man cannot but feel to do a hurt to a heart that holds him dear,
+however scanty his response to its passion--could no longer influence
+him to palter in dealing with the woman. The revelation had in effect
+stricken shackles from Lanyard's wrists, now when he struck it would be
+with neither hesitation nor compunction.
+
+As to that stroke alone, its hour and place and fashion, he remained
+without decision. He had made a hundred plans for its delivery, and one
+of them, that seemed the wildest, he thought of seriously, as something
+really feasible. But single-handed! That made it difficult. If only one
+could devise some way to be in two places at one time and the same! An
+impossibility? He wouldn't deny that. But Lanyard had never been one to
+be discouraged by the grim, hard face of an impossibility. He had known
+too many such to dissipate utterly, vanish into empty air, when
+subjected to a bold and resolute assault. He wouldn't say die.
+
+Never that while he could lift hand or invent stratagem, never that so
+long as fools played their game into his hands, as this lot wished to
+and did. What imbecility! What an escape had been his when, in that
+time long since, he had made up his mind to have done with crime once
+and for all time! But for that moment of clear vision and high resolve
+he might be to-day even as these who had won such clear title to his
+contempt, who stultified themselves with vain imaginings and the
+everlasting concoction of schemes whose sheer intrinsic puerility
+foredoomed them to farcical failure.
+
+Lanyard trod the decks for hours at a time, searching the stars for an
+answer to the question: What made the Law by whose decree man may
+garner only punishment and disaster where he has husbanded in iniquity?
+That Law implacable, inexorable in its ordained and methodic workings,
+through which invariably it comes to pass that failure and remorse
+shall canker in the heart even of success ill-gained....
+
+But if he moralized it was with a cheerful countenance, and his sermons
+were for himself alone. He kept his counsel and spoke all men fairly,
+giving nowhere any manner of offense: for could he tell in what
+unlikely guise might wait the instrument he needed wherewith to work
+out his unfaltering purpose?
+
+And all the while they were watching him and wondering what was in his
+mind. Well, he gave no sign. Let them watch and wonder to their heart's
+content; they must wait until the time he had appointed for the
+rendering of his decision, when the Sybarite made her landfall.
+
+Winds blew and fell, the sea rose and subsided, the Sybarite trudged on
+into dull weather. The sky grew overcast; and Lanyard, daily scanning
+the very heavens for a sign, accepted this for one, and prayed it might
+hold. Nothing could be more calculated to nullify his efforts than to
+have the landfall happen on a clear, calm night of stars.
+
+He went to bed, the last night out, leaving a noisy gathering in the
+saloon, and read himself drowsy. Then turning out his light he slept.
+Sometime later he found himself instantaneously awake, and alert, with
+a clear head and every faculty on the qui vive--much as a man might
+grope for a time in a dark strange room, then find a door and step out
+into broad daylight.
+
+Only there was no light other than in the luminous clarity of his mind.
+Even the illumination in the saloon had been dimmed down for the night,
+as he could tell by the tarnished gleam beneath his stateroom door.
+
+Still, not everyone had gone to bed. The very manner of his waking
+informed him that he was not alone; for the life Lanyard had led had
+taught him to need no better alarm than the entrance of another person
+into the place where he lay sleeping. All animals are like that, whose
+lives hang on their vigilance.
+
+Able to see nothing, he still felt a presence, and knew that it waited,
+stirless, within arm's-length of his head. Without much concern, he
+thought of Popinot, that "phantom Popinot" of Monk's derisive naming.
+
+Well, if the vision Liane had seen on deck had taken material form here
+in his stateroom, Lanyard presumed it meant another fight, and the
+last, to a finish, that is to say, to a death.
+
+Without making a sound, he gathered himself together, ready for a trap,
+and as noiselessly lifted a hand toward the switch for the electric
+light, set in the wall near the head of the bed. But in the same breath
+he heard a whisper, or rather a mutter, a voice he could not place in
+its present pitch.
+
+"Awake, Monsieur Delorme?" it said. "Hush! Don't make a row, and never
+mind the light."
+
+His astonishment was so overpowering that instinctively his tensed
+muscles relaxed and his hand fell back upon the bedding.
+
+"Who the deuce----?"
+
+"Not so loud. It's me--Mussey."
+
+Lanyard echoed witlessly: "Mussey?"
+
+"Yes. I don't wonder you're surprised, but if you'll be easy you'll
+understand pretty soon why I had to have a bit of a talk with you
+without anybody's catching on."
+
+"Well," Lanyard said, "I'm damned!"
+
+"I say!" The subdued mutter took on a note of anxiety. "It's all right,
+isn't it? I mean, you aren't going to kick up a rumpus and spill the
+beans? I guess you must think I've got a hell of a gall, coming in on
+you like this, and I don't know as I blame you, but... Well, time's
+getting short, only two more days at sea, and I couldn't wait any
+longer for a chance to have a few minutes' chin with you."
+
+The mutter ceased and held an expectant pause. Lanyard said nothing.
+But he was conscious that the speaker occupied a chair by the bed, and
+knew that he was bending near to catch his answer; for the air was
+tainted with vinous breath. Yes: one required no stronger
+identification, it was beyond any doubt the chief engineer of the
+Sybarite.
+
+"Say it's all right, won't you?" the mutter pleaded.
+
+"I am listening," Lanyard replied--"as you perceive."
+
+"I'll say it's decent of you--damned decent. Blowed if I'd take it as
+calm as you, if I waked up to find somebody in my room."
+
+"I believe," said Lanyard pointedly, "you stipulated for a few minutes'
+chin with me. Time passes, Mr. Mussey. Get to your business, or let me
+go to sleep again."
+
+"Sharp, you are," commented the mutter. "I've noticed it in you. You'd
+be surprised if you knew how much notice I've been taking of you."
+
+"And flattered, I'm sure."
+
+"Look here..." The mutter stumbled. "I want to ask a personal question.
+Daresay you'll think it impertinent."
+
+"If I do, be sure I shan't answer it."
+
+"Well... it's this: Is or isn't your right name Lanyard, Michael
+Lanyard?"
+
+This time it was Lanyard who, thinking rapidly, held the pause so long
+that his querist's uneasiness could not contain itself.
+
+"Is that my answer? I mean, does your silence--?"
+
+"That's an unusual name, Michael Lanyard," cautiously replied its
+proprietor. "How did you get hold of it?"
+
+"They say it's the right name of the Lone Wolf. Guess I don't have to
+tell you who the Lone Wolf is."
+
+"'They say'? Who, please, are 'they'?"
+
+"Oh, there's a lot of talk going around the ship. You know how it is, a
+crew will gossip. And God knows they've got enough excuse this cruise."
+
+This was constructively evasive. Lanyard wondered who had betrayed him.
+Phinuit? The tongue of that plain-spoken man was hinged in the middle;
+but one couldn't feel certain. Liane Delorme had made much of the chief
+engineer; though she seemed less likely to talk too much than anyone of
+the ship's company but Lanyard himself. But then (one remembered of a
+sudden) Monk and Mussey were by reputation old cronies; it wasn't
+inconceivable that Monk might have let something slip...
+
+"And what, Mr. Mussey, if I should admit I am Michael Lanyard?"
+
+"Then I'll have something to say to you, something I think'll interest
+you."
+
+"Why not run the risk of interesting me, whoever I may be?"
+
+Mussey breathed heavily in the stillness: the breathing of a cautious
+man loath to commit himself.
+
+"No," he said at length, in the clearest enunciation he had thus far
+used. "No. If you're not Lanyard, I'd rather say nothing more--I'll
+just ask you to pardon me for intruding and clear out."
+
+"But you say there is some gossip. And where there is smoke, there must
+be fire. It would seem safe to assume I am the man gossip says I am."
+
+"Michael Lanyard?" the mutter persisted--"the Lone Wolf?"
+
+"Yes, yes! What then?"
+
+"I suppose the best way's to put it to you straight..."
+
+"I warn you, you'll gain nothing if you don't."
+
+"Then... to begin at the beginning... I've known Whit Monk a good long
+time. Years I've known him. We've sailed together off and on ever since
+we took to the sea; we've gone through some nasty scrapes together, and
+done things that don't bear telling, and always shared the thick and
+the thin of everything. Before this, if anybody had ever told me Whit
+Monk would do a pal dirt, I'd've punched his head and thought no more
+about it. But now..."
+
+The mutter faltered. Lanyard preserved a sympathetic silence--a
+silence, at least, which he hoped would pass as sympathetic. In
+reality, he was struggling to suppress any betrayal of the exultation
+that was beginning to take hold of him. Premature this might prove to
+be, but it seemed impossible to misunderstand the emotion under which
+the chief engineer was labouring or to underestimate its potential
+value to Lanyard. Surely it would seem that his faith in his star had
+been well-placed: was it not now--or all signs failed--delivering into
+his hand the forged tool he had so desperately needed, for which he had
+so earnestly prayed?
+
+A heavy sigh issued upon the stillness, freighted with a deep and
+desolating melancholy. For, it appeared, like all cynics, Mr. Mussey
+was a sentimentalist at heart. And in the darkness that disembodied
+voice took up its tale anew.
+
+"I don't have to tell you what's going on between Whit and that lot
+he's so thick with nowadays. You know, or you wouldn't be here."
+
+"Isn't that conclusion what you Americans would call a little
+previous?"
+
+"Previous?" The mutter took a moment to con the full significance of
+that adjective. "No: I wouldn't call it that. You see, on a voyage like
+this--well, talk goes on, things get about, things are said aloud that
+shouldn't be and get overheard and passed along; and the man who sits
+back and listens and sifts what he hears is pretty likely to get a
+tolerably good line on what's what. Of course there's never been any
+secret about what the owner means to do with all this wine he's
+shipped. We all know we're playing a risky game, but we're for the
+owner--he isn't a bad sort, when you get to know him--and we'll go
+through with it and take what's coming to us win or lose. Partly, of
+course, because it'll mean something handsome for every man if we make
+it without getting caught. But if you want to know what I think... I'll
+tell you something..."
+
+"But truly I am all attention."
+
+"I think Whit Monk and Phinuit and mam'selle have framed the owner
+between them."
+
+"Can't say I quite follow..."
+
+"I think they cooked up this smuggling business and kidded him into it
+just to get the use of his yacht for their own purposes and at the same
+time get him where he can't put up a howl if he finds out the truth.
+Suppose he does..." The mutter became momentarily a deep-throated
+chuckle of malice. "He's in so deep on the booze smuggling side he
+dassent say a word, and that puts him in worse yet, makes him accessory
+before the fact of criminal practices that'd made his hair stand on
+end. Then, suppose they want to go on with the game, looting in Europe
+and sneaking the goods into America with the use of his yacht: what's
+he going to say, how's he going to stop them?"
+
+Accepting these questions as purely rhetorical, Lanyard offered no
+comment. After a moment the mutter resumed:
+
+"Well, what do you think? Am I right or am I wrong?"
+
+"Who knows, Mr. Mussey? One can only say, you seem to know something."
+
+"I'll say I know something! A sight more than Whit Monk dreams I
+know--as he'll find out to his sorrow before he's finished with Tom
+Mussey."
+
+"But"--obliquely Lanyard struck again at the heart of the mystery which
+he found so baffling--"you seem so well satisfied with the bona fides
+of your informant?"
+
+There was a sound of stertorous breathing as the intelligence behind
+the mutter grappled with this utterance. Then, as if the hint had
+proved too fine--"I'm playing my hand face up with you, Mr. Lanyard. I
+guess you can tell I know what I'm talking about."
+
+"But what I cannot see is why you should talk about it to me,
+monsieur."
+
+"Why, because I and you are both in the same boat, in a manner of
+speaking. We're both on the outside--shut out--looking in."
+
+In a sort of mental aside, Lanyard reflected that mixed bathing for
+metaphors was apparently countenanced under the code of cynics.
+
+"Does one gather that you feel aggrieved with Captain Monk for not
+making you a partner in his new associations?"
+
+"For trying to put one over on me, an old pal... stood by him through
+thick and thin... would've gone through fire for Whit Monk, and in my
+way I have, many's the time. And now he hooks up with Phinuit and this
+Delorme woman, and leaves me to shuffle my feet on the doormat... and
+thinks I'll let him get away with it."
+
+The voice in the dark gave a grunt of infinite contempt: "Like hell..."
+
+"I understand your feelings, monsieur; and I ask you to believe in my
+sympathy. But you said--if I remember--that we were in the same boat,
+you and I; whereas I assure you Captain Monk has not abused my
+friendship, since he has never had it."
+
+"I know that well enough," said the mutter. "I don't mean you've got my
+reasons for feeling sore; but I do mean you've got reason enough of
+your own--"
+
+"On what grounds do you say that?"
+
+Another deliberate pause prefaced the reply: "You said a while ago I
+knew something. Well--you said it. I and you've both been frozen out of
+this deal and we're both meaning to take a hand whether they like it or
+not. If that don't put us in the same boat I don't know..."
+
+Perceiving he would get no more satisfaction, Lanyard schooled himself
+to be politic for the time being.
+
+"Say it is so, then... But I think you have something to propose."
+
+"It's simple enough: When two people find themselves in the same boat
+they've got to pull together if they want to get anywhere."
+
+"You propose, then, an alliance?"
+
+"That's the answer. Without you I can't do anything but kick over the
+applecart for Whit Monk; and that sort of revenge is mighty
+unsatisfactory. Without me--well: what can you do? I know you can get
+that tin safe of Whit's open, when you feel like it, get the jewels and
+all; but what show do you stand to get away with them? That is, unless
+you've got somebody working in with you on board the ship. See here..."
+
+The mutter sank into a husky whisper, and in order to be heard the
+speaker bent so low over Lanyard that fumes of whiskey almost
+suffocated the poor man in his bed.
+
+"You've got a head, you've had experience, you know how... Well, go to
+it: make your plans, consult with me, get everything fixed, lift the
+loot; I'll stand by, fix up everything so's your work will go through
+slick, see that you don't get hurt, stow the jewels where they won't be
+found; and when it's all over, we'll split fifty-fifty. What d'you say?"
+
+"Extremely ingenious, monsieur, but unfortunately impracticable."
+
+"That's the last thing," stated the disappointed whisper, "I ever
+thought a man like you would say."
+
+"But it is obvious. We do not know each other."
+
+"You mean, you can't trust me?"
+
+"For that matter: how can you be sure you can trust me?"
+
+"Oh, I guess I can size up a square guy when I see him."
+
+"Many thanks. But why should I trust you, when you will not even be
+quite frank with me?"
+
+"How's that? Haven't I----"
+
+"One moment: you refuse to name the source of your astonishingly
+detailed information concerning this affair--myself included. You wish
+me to believe you simply assume I am at odds with Captain Monk and his
+friends. I admit it is true. But how should you know it? Ah, no, my
+friend! either you will tell me how you learned this secret, or I must
+beg you to let me get my sleep."
+
+"That's easy. I heard Whit and Phinuit talking about you the other
+night, on deck, when they didn't think anybody was listening."
+
+Lanyard smiled into the darkness: no need to fret about fair play
+toward this one! The truth was not in him, and by the same token the
+traditional honour that obtains among thieves could not be.
+
+He said, as if content, in the manner of a practical man dismissing all
+immaterial considerations:
+
+"As you say, the time is brief..."
+
+"It'll have to be pulled off to-morrow night or not at all," the mutter
+urged with an eager accent.
+
+"My thought, precisely. For then we come to land, do we not?"
+
+"Yes, and it'll have to be not long after dark. We ought to drop the
+hook at midnight. Then"--the mutter was broken with hopeful
+anxiety--"then you've decided you'll stand in with me, Mr. Lanyard?"
+
+"But of course! What else can one do? As you have so fairly pointed
+out: what is either of us without the other?"
+
+"And it's understood: you're to lift the stuff, I'm to take care of it
+till we can slip ashore, we're to make our getaway together--and the
+split's to be fifty-fifty, fair and square?"
+
+"I ask nothing better."
+
+"Where's your hand?"
+
+Two hands found each other blindly and exchanged a firm and inspiring
+clasp--while Lanyard gave thanks for the night that saved his face from
+betraying his mind.
+
+Another deep sigh sounded a note of apprehensions at an end. A gruff
+chuckle followed.
+
+"Whit Monk! He'll learn something about the way to treat old friends."
+And all at once the mutter merged into a vindictive hiss: "Him with his
+airs and graces, his fine clothes and greasy manners, putting on the
+lah-de-dah over them that's stood by him when he hadn't a red and was
+glad to cadge drinks off spiggoties in hells like the Colonel's at
+Colon--him!"
+
+But Lanyard had been listening only with his ears; he hadn't the
+slightest interest in Mr. Mussey's resentment of the affectations of
+Captain Monk. For now his mad scheme had suddenly assumed a complexion
+of comparative simplicity; given the co-operation of the chief
+engineer, all Lanyard would need to contribute would be a little
+headwork, a little physical exertion, a little daring--and complete
+indifference, which was both well warranted and already his, to abusing
+the confidence of Mr. Mussey.
+
+"But about this affair to-morrow night," he interrupted impatiently:
+"attend to me a little, if you please, my friend. Can you give me any
+idea where we are, or will, approximately, at midnight to-night?"
+
+"What's that go to do----?"
+
+"Perhaps I ask only for my own information. But it may be that I have a
+plan. If we are to work together harmoniously, Mr. Mussey, you must
+learn to have a little confidence in me."
+
+"Beg your pardon," said an humble mutter. "We ought to be somewhere off
+Nantucket Shoals Lightship."
+
+"And the weather: have you sufficient acquaintance with these latitudes
+to foretell it, even roughly?"
+
+"Born and brought up in Edgartown, made my first voyage on a tramp out
+of New Bedford: guess I know something about the weather in these
+latitudes! The wind's been hauling round from sou'west to south all
+day. If it goes on to sou'east, it'll likely be thick to-morrow, with
+little wind, no sea to speak of, and either rain or fog."
+
+"So! Now to do what I will have to do, I must have ten minutes of
+absolute darkness. Can that be arranged?"
+
+"Absolute darkness?" The mutter had a rising inflexion of dubiety. "How
+d'you mean?"
+
+"Complete extinguishing of every light on the ship."
+
+"My God!" the mutter protested. "Do you know what that means? No lights
+at night, under way, in main-travelled waters! Why, by nightfall we ought
+to be off Block Island, in traffic as heavy as on Fifth Avenue! No: that's
+too much."
+
+"Too bad," Lanyard uttered, philosophic. "And the thing could have been
+done."
+
+"Isn't there some other way?"
+
+"Not with lights to hamper my operations. But if some temporary
+accident were to put the dynamoes out of commission--figure to yourself
+what would happen."
+
+"There'd be hell to pay."
+
+"Ah! but what else?"
+
+"The engines would have to be slowed down so as to give no more than
+steerage-way until oil lamps could be substituted for the binnacle,
+masthead, and side-lights, also for the engine room."
+
+"And there would be excitement and confusion, eh? Everybody would make
+for the deck, even the captain would leave his cabin unguarded long
+enough..."
+
+"I get you"--with a sigh. "It's wrong, all wrong, but--well, I suppose
+it's got to be done."
+
+Lanyard treated himself to a smile of triumph, there in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+THE BINNACLE
+
+
+It would have been ungrateful (Lanyard reflected over his breakfast) to
+complain of a life so replete with experiences of piquant contrast.
+
+It happened to one to lie for hours in a cubicle of blinding night,
+hearkening to a voice like that of some nightmare weirdly become
+articulate, a ghostly mutter that rose and fell and droned, broken by
+sighs, grunts, stifled oaths, mean chuckles, with intervals of husky
+whispering and lapses filled with a noise of wheezing respiration, all
+wheedling and cajoling, lying, intimating and evading, complaining,
+snarling, rambling, threatening, protesting, promising, and in the end
+proposing an unholy compact for treachery and evil-doing--a voice that
+might have issued out of some damned soul escaped for a little space of
+time from the Pits of Torment, so utterly inhuman it sounded, so
+completely discarnate and divorced from all relationship to any mortal
+personality that even that reek of whiskey in the air, even that one
+contact with a hard, hot hand, could not make it seem real.
+
+And then it ceased and was no more but as a thing of dream that had
+passed. And one came awake to a light and wholesome world furnished
+with such solidly comforting facts as soaps and razors and hot and cold
+saltwater taps; and subsequently one left one's stateroom to see, at
+the breakfast table, leaden-eyed and flushed of countenance, an
+amorphous lump of humid flesh in shapeless garments of soiled white
+duck, the author of that mutter in the dark; who, lounging over a plate
+of broken food and lifting a coffee cup in the tremulous hand of an
+alcoholic, looked up with lacklustre gaze, gave a surly nod, and
+mumbled the customary matutinal greeting:
+
+"'Morning, Monseer Delorme."
+
+It was all too weird....
+
+To add to this, the chief engineer paid Lanyard no further heed at all,
+though they were alone at table, and having noisily consumed his
+coffee, rubbed his stubbled lips and chin with an egg-stained napkin,
+rose, and without word or glance rolled heavily up the companionway.
+
+The conduct of a careful man, accustomed to mind his eye. And
+indisputably correct. One never knew who might be watching, what
+slightest sign of secret understanding might not be seized upon and
+read. Furthermore, Mr. Mussey had not stilled his mutter in the night
+until their joint and individual lines of action had been elaborately
+mapped out and agreed upon down to the smallest detail. It now remained
+only for Lanyard to fill in somehow the waste time that lay between
+breakfast and the hour appointed, then take due advantage of the
+opportunity promised him.
+
+He found the day making good Mr. Mussey's forecast. Under a dull, thick
+sky the sea ran in heavy swells, greasy and grey. The wind was in the
+south, and light and shifty. The horizon was vague. Captain Monk,
+encountered on the quarterdeck, had an uneasy eye, and cursed the
+weather roundly when Lanyard made civil enquiry as to the outlook. Ça
+va bien!
+
+Lanyard killed an hour or two in the chartroom, acquainting himself
+with the coast they were approaching and tracing the Sybarite's
+probable course toward the spot selected from the smuggling
+transaction. His notion of the precise location of the owner's estate
+was rather indefinite; he had gathered from gossip that it was on the
+Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound, between New London and New
+Haven, where a group of small islands--also the property of Mister
+Whitaker Monk--provided fair anchorage between Sound and shore as well
+as a good screen from offshore observation.
+
+It was not vital to know more: Lanyard had neither hope nor fear of
+ever seeing that harbour. It was the approach alone that interested
+him; and when he had puzzled out that there were only two practicable
+courses for the Sybarite to take--both bearing in a general
+north-westerly direction from Nantucket Shoals Light Vessel, one
+entering Block Island Sound from the east, between Point Judith and
+Block Island, the other entering the same body of water from the south,
+between Block Island and Montauk Point--and had satisfied himself that
+manifold perils to navigation hedged about both courses, more
+especially their prolongation into Long Island Sound by way of The
+Race: Lanyard told himself it would be strange indeed if his plans
+miscarried ... always providing that Mr. Mussey could be trusted to
+hold to his overnight agreement.
+
+But as to that, one entertained few fears. One felt quite sure that Mr.
+Mussey would perform duly to the letter of his covenant. It had
+required only an hour of weighing and analysing with a clear head his
+overtures and utterances as a whole, to persuade Lanyard that he
+himself, no less than the chief engineer, in the phrase of the latter's
+boast, "knew something."
+
+It seemed unbelievably stupid and childish, what he imagined was behind
+the gratuitous intermeddling of Mr. Mussey; but then, he reminded
+himself, if there is anything more stupid than to plot a criminal act,
+it is to permit oneself to be influenced by that criminal stupidity
+whose other name is jealousy.
+
+Well, whether he were right or wrong, the night would declare it; and
+in any event there was no excuse whatever for refusing to profit by the
+stupidity of men whose minds are bent on vicious mischief....
+
+The weather thickened as the day grew older. Towards noon the wind, as
+if weary and discouraged with vain endeavour to make up its mind to
+blow from this quarter or that, died away altogether. At the same time
+the horizon appeared to close in perceptibly; what little definition it
+had had in earlier hours was erased; and the Sybarite, shearing the
+oily and lifeless waters of a dead calm, seemed less to make progress
+than to struggle sullenly in a pool of quicksilver at the bottom of a
+slowly revolving sphere of clouded glass, mutinously aware that all her
+labouring wrought no sort of gain.
+
+After an hour of this, Captain Monk, on the bridge with Mr. Swain,
+arrived at a decision of exasperation. Through the engine-room
+ventilators a long jingle of the telegraph was heard; and directly the
+Sybarite's pulses began to beat in quicker tempo, while darker volutes
+of smoke rolled in dense volume from her funnel and streamed away
+astern, resting low and preserving their individuality as long as
+visible, like a streak of oxidization on a field of frosted silver. For
+the first time since she had left the harbour of Cherbourg the yacht
+was doing herself something like justice in the matter of speed--and
+this contrary to all ethics of seamanship, on such a day.
+
+At the luncheon table, Phinuit ventured a light-headed comment on this
+dangerous procedure; whereupon Monk turned on him in a cold fury.
+
+"As long as I'm master of this vessel, sir, I'll sail her according to
+the counsels of my own discretion--and thank you to keep your
+animadversions to yourself!"
+
+"Animadversions!" Phinuit echoed, and made round, shocked eyes. "Oh, I
+never! At least, I didn't mean anything naughty, skipper dear."
+
+Monk snorted, and grumbled over his food throughout the remainder of
+the meal; but later, coming upon a group composed of Liane Delorme,
+Lanyard and Phinuit, in the saloon, he paused, looked this way and that
+to make sure none of the stewards was within eavesdropping distance,
+and graciously unbent a little.
+
+"I'm making the best time we can while we can see at all," he
+volunteered. "No telling when this misbegotten fog will close in and
+force us to slow down to half-speed or less--in crowded waters, too!"
+
+"And very sensible, I'm sure," Phinuit agreed heartily. "Whatever
+happens, we musn't be late for our date with Friend Boss, must we?"
+
+"We'll keep it," Monk promised grimly, "if we have to feel every inch
+of our way in with the lead. I don't mind telling you, this fog may
+save our skins at that. Wireless has been picking up chatter all
+morning between a regular school of revenue cutters patrolling this
+coast on the lookout for just such idiots as we are. So we'll carry on
+and trust to luck till we make Monk Harbour or break our fool necks."
+
+Liane Delorme gave a start of dismay.
+
+"There is danger, then?"
+
+"Only if we run afoul of a cutter, Liane." Monk tried to speak
+reassuringly. "And that's not likely in this weather. As for the fog,
+it's a dirty nuisance to any navigator but, as I said, may quite
+possibly prove our salvation. I know these waters like a book, I've
+sailed them ever since I was old enough to tell a tiller from a
+mainsheet. I can smell my way in, if it comes to that, through the
+blindest fog the Atlantic ever brewed."
+
+"Then you do things with your nostrils, too?" Phinuit enquired
+innocently. "I've often wondered if all the intellect was located in
+the eyebrows."
+
+Monk glared, growled, and hastily sought the air of the deck. Liane
+Delorme eyed Phinuit with amused reproach.
+
+"Really, my young friend!"
+
+"I can't help it, mademoiselle," Phinuit asserted sulkily. "Too much is
+enough. I've watched him making faces with the top of his head so long
+I dream of geometrical diagrams laid out in eyebrows--and wake up
+screaming. And they call this a pleasure craft!"
+
+With an aggrieved air he sucked at his pipe for a few minutes.
+"Besides," he added suddenly, "somebody's got to be comic relief, and I
+don't notice anybody else in a sweat to be the Life and Soul of the
+ship."
+
+He favoured Lanyard with a morose stare. "Why don't you ever put your
+shoulder to the wheel, Lanyard? Why leave it all to me? Come on; be a
+sport, cut a caper, crack a wheeze, do something to get a giggle!"
+
+"But I am by no means sure you do not laugh at me too much, as it is."
+
+"Rot!... Tell you what." Phinuit sat up with a gleaming eye of
+inspiration. "You can entertain mademoiselle and me no end, if you
+like. Spill the glad tidings."
+
+"Glad tidings?"
+
+"Now don't monkey with the eyebrows--_please!_ It gives me the
+willies... I merely mean to point out, to-day's the day you promised to
+come through with the awful decision. And there's no use waiting for
+Monk to join us; he's too much worried about his nice little ship. Tell
+mademoiselle and me now."
+
+Lanyard shook his head, smiling. "But the time I set was when we made
+our landfall."
+
+"Well, what's the matter with Martha's Vineyard over there? You could
+see if it was a clear day."
+
+"But it is not a clear day."
+
+"Suppose it gets thicker, a sure-enough fog? We may not see land before
+midnight."
+
+"Then till midnight we must wait. No, Monsieur Phinuit, I will not be
+hurried. I have been thinking, I am still thinking, and there is still
+much to be said before I can come to any decision that will be fair to
+you, mademoiselle, the captain on the one hand, myself on the other."
+
+"But at midnight, if the skipper's promise holds good, we'll be going
+ashore."
+
+"The objection is well taken. My answer will be communicated when we
+see land or at eleven o'clock to-night, whichever is the earlier
+event."
+
+Some further effort at either persuasion or impudence--nobody but
+Phinuit ever knew which--was drowned out by the first heart-broken
+bellow of the whistle sounding the fog signal.
+
+Liane Delorme bounded out of her chair, clapping hands to ears, and
+uttered an unheard cry of protest; and when, the noise suspending
+temporarily, she learned that it was to be repeated at intervals of two
+minutes as long as the fog lasted and the yacht was under way, she flung
+up piteous hands to an uncompassionate heaven and fled to her stateroom,
+slamming the door as if she thought thereby to shut out the offending din.
+
+One fancied something inhumanly derisive in the prolonged hoot which
+replied.
+
+Rather than languish under the burden of Mr. Phinuit's spirited
+conversation for the rest of the afternoon, Lanyard imitated Liane's
+example, and wasted the next hour and a half flat on his bed, with eyes
+closed but mind very much alive. Now and again he consulted his watch,
+as one might with an important appointment to keep. At two minutes to
+four he left his stateroom, and as the first stroke of eight bells rang
+out--in one of the measured intervals between blasts of the
+whistle--ending the afternoon watch, he stepped out on deck, and paused
+for a survey of the weather conditions.
+
+There was no perceptible motion in the air, witnessing that the wind
+had come in from astern, that is to say approximately from the
+southeast, and was blowing at about the speed made by the yacht itself.
+The fog clung about the vessel, Lanyard thought, like dull grey cotton
+wool. Yet, if the shuddering of her fabric were fair criterion, the
+pace of the Sybarite was unabated, she was ploughing headlong through
+that dense obscurity using the utmost power of her engines. From time
+to time, when the whistle was still, the calls of seamen operating the
+sounding machine could be heard; but their reports were monotonously
+uniform, the waters were not yet shoal enough for the lead to find
+bottom at that pace.
+
+The watch was being changed as Lanyard started forward, with the tail
+of an eye on the bridge. Mr. Collison relieved Mr. Swain, and the
+latter came down the companion-ladder just in time to save Lanyard a
+nasty spill as his feet slipped on planking greasy with globules of
+fog. There's no telling how bad a fall he might not have suffered had
+not Mr. Swain been there for him to catch at; and for a moment or two
+Lanyard was, as Mr. Swain put it with great good-nature, all over him,
+clinging to the first officer in a most demonstrative manner; and it
+was with some difficulty that he at length recovered his equilibrium.
+Then, however, he laid hold of the rail for insurance against further
+mishaps, thanked Mr. Swain heartily, added his apologies, and the two
+parted with expressions of mutual esteem.
+
+The incident seemed to have dampened Lanyard's ardour for exercise. He
+made a rather gingerly way back to the quarterdeck, loafed restlessly
+in a deck-chair for a little while, then went below once more.
+
+Some time after, supine again upon his bed, he heard Mr. Swain in the
+saloon querulously interrogating one of the stewards. It appeared that
+Mr. Swain had unaccountably mislaid his keys, and he wanted to know if
+the steward had seen anything of them. The steward hadn't, he said; and
+Lanyard for one knew that he spake sooth, since at that moment the
+missing keys were resting on the bottom of the sea several miles
+astern--all but one.
+
+There was no dressing for dinner that night. Liane Delorme, her nerves
+rasped almost beyond endurance by the relentless fog signal, preferred
+the seclusion of her stateroom. Lanyard wasn't really sorry; the bosom
+of a white shirt is calculated to make some impression upon the human
+retina even on the darkest night; whereas his plain lounge suit of blue
+serge was sure to prove entirely inconspicuous. So, if he missed the
+feminine influence at table, he bore up with good fortitude.
+
+And after dinner he segregated himself as usual in his favourite chair
+near the taffrail. The fog, if anything denser than before,
+manufactured an early dusk of a peculiarly depressing violet shade.
+Nevertheless, evenings are long in that season of the year, and to
+Lanyard it seemed that the twilight would never quite fade out
+completely, true night would never come.
+
+Long before it did, speed was slackened: the yacht was at last in
+soundings; the calls of the leadsmen were as monotonous as the whistle
+blasts, and almost as frequent. Lanyard could have done without both,
+if the ship could not. He remarked a steadily intensified exacerbation
+of nerves, and told himself he was growing old and no mistake. He could
+remember the time when he could have endured a strain of waiting
+comparable to that which he must suffer now, and have turned never a
+hair.
+
+How long ago it seemed!...
+
+Another sign that the Sybarite had entered what are technically
+classified as inland waters, where special rules of the road apply, was
+to be remarked in the fact that the fog signal was now roaring once
+each minute, whereas Lanyard had grown accustomed to timing the
+intervals between the sounding of the ship's bell, upon which all his
+interest hung, at the rate of fifteen blasts to the half hour.
+
+If you asked him, once a minute seemed rather too much of a good thing,
+even in busy lanes of sea traffic. Still, it was better perhaps than
+unpremeditated disaster; one was not keen about having the Sybarite
+ground on a sandbank, pile up on a rock, or dash her brains out against
+the bulk of another vessel--before eleven o'clock at earliest.
+
+In retrospect he counted those two hours between dinner and ten-thirty
+longer than the fortnight which had prefaced them. So is the heart of
+man ever impatient when the journey's-end draws near, though that end
+be but the beginning, as well, of that longer journey which men call
+Death.
+
+Lest he betray his impatience by keeping the tips of his cigarette too
+bright (one never knows when one is not watched) he smoked sparingly.
+But on the twenty-eighth blare of the whistle after the ringing of four
+bells, he drew out his cigarette case and, as the thirtieth raved out,
+synchronous with two double strokes and a single on brazen metal, he
+placed a cigarette between his lips.
+
+At the same time he saw Captain Monk, who had been on the bridge with
+the officer of the watch for several hours, come aft with weary
+shoulders sagging, and go below by the saloon companionway. And Lanyard
+smiled knowingly and assured himself that went well--ça va bien!--his
+star held still in the ascendant.
+
+There remained on the bridge only Mr. Collison and the man at the
+wheel.
+
+At the fourth blast after five bells Lanyard put a match to his
+cigarette. But he did not puff more than to get the tobacco well
+alight. He even held his breath, and felt his body shaken by the
+pulsations of his anxious heart precisely as the body of the Sybarite
+was shaken by the pulsations of her engines.
+
+With the next succeeding fog signal darkness absolute descended upon
+the vessel, shrouding it from stem to stern like a vast blanket of
+blackness.
+
+Mr. Mussey had not failed to keep his pact of treachery.
+
+Lanyard was out of his chair before the first call of excited
+remonstrance rang out on deck--to be echoed in clamour. His cigarette
+stopped behind, on the taffrail, carefully placed at precisely the
+height of his head, its little glowing tip the only spot of light on
+the decks. No matter whether or not it were noted; no precaution is too
+insignificant to be important when life and death are at issue.
+
+There was nothing of that afternoon's unsureness of foot in the way
+Lanyard moved forward. Passing the engine-room ventilators he heard the
+telegraph give a single stroke; Mr. Collison had only then recovered
+from, his astonishment sufficiently to signal to slow down. A squeal of
+the speaking-tube whistle followed instantly; and Lanyard set foot upon
+the bridge in time to hear Mr. Collison demanding to know what the
+sanguinary hades had happened down there. Whatever reply he got seemed
+to exasperate him into incoherence. He stuttered with rage, gasped, and
+addressed the man at the wheel.
+
+"I've got a flash-lamp in my cabin. That'll show us the compass card at
+least. Stand by while I run down and get it."
+
+The man mumbled an "Aye, aye, sir." Retreating footsteps were just
+audible.
+
+Neither speaker had been visible to Lanyard. By putting out a hand he
+could have touched the helmsman, but his body made not even the shadow
+of a silhouette against the sky. The fog was rendering the night the
+simple and unqualified negation of light.
+
+And in that time of Stygian gloom violence was done swiftly, surely,
+and without mercy; with pity, yes, and with regret. Lanyard was sorry
+for the man at the wheel. But what was to be done could not be done in
+any other way.
+
+The surprise aided him, for the fellow offered barely a show of
+opposition. His astounded faculties had no more than recognised the
+call for resistance when he was powerless in Lanyard's hands. Swung
+bodily away from the wheel, he went over the rail to the forward deck
+like a bag of sugar. Immediately Lanyard turned to the binnacle.
+
+Sensitive fingers located the key-hole in the pedestal, the one key
+saved from the ring which Mr. Swain had so unfortunately and
+unaccountably lost opened the door--the key, of course, that Mr. Swain
+had used under Lanyard's eyes when demonstrating the functions of the
+binnacle to Liane Delorme.
+
+Thrusting a hand into the opening, Lanyard groped for the adjustable
+magnets in their racks, and one by one removed and dropped them to the
+grating at the foot of the binnacle.
+
+He worked with hands amazingly nimble and sure, and was closing and
+relocking the door when Mr. Collison tumbled up the ladder with his
+flash-light. So when the second mate arrived upon the bridge, Lanyard
+was waiting for him; and in consequence of a second act of deplorable
+violence, Mr. Collison returned to the deck backwards and lay quite
+still while Lanyard returned to the wheel.
+
+Collecting the abstracted magnets he carried them to the rail, cast
+them into the sea and threw in the key to the little door to keep them
+company. Then, back at the binnacle, he unscrewed the brass caps of the
+cylindrical brass tube which housed the Flinders bar, removed that
+also, replaced the caps, and consigned the bar to the sea in its turn.
+
+By choice he would have made a good job of it and abolished the
+quadrantal correctors as well; but he judged he had done mischief
+enough to secure his ends, as it was. The compass ought now to be just
+as constant to the magnetic pole as a humming-bird to one especial
+rose.
+
+Guiding himself by a hand that lightly touched the rail, Lanyard
+regained his chair, carefully composing himself in the position in
+which he had been resting when the lights went out. His cigarette was
+still aglow; good Turkish has this virtue among many others, that left
+to itself it will burn on to the end of its roll.
+
+The next instant, however, he was on his feet again. A beam of light
+had swept across the saloon skylight, coming from below, the beam of a
+portable electric torch. It might have been the signal for the first
+piercing scream of Liane Delorme. A pistol shot with a vicious accent
+cut short the scream. After a brief pause several more shots rippled in
+the saloon. A man shouted angrily. Then the torch-light found and
+steadied upon the mouth of the companionway. Against that glare, a
+burly figure was instantaneously relieved, running up to the deck. As
+it gained the topmost step a final report sounded in the saloon, and
+the figure checked, revolved slowly on a heel, tottered, and plunged
+headforemost down the steps again.
+
+A moment later (incredible that the stipulated ten minutes should have
+passed so swiftly!) the lights came on, and with a still-fuming stump
+of cigarette between his fingers Lanyard went below.
+
+His bewildered gaze discovered first Liane Delorme, drawn up
+rigidly--she seemed for some reason to be standing tiptoe--against the
+starboard partition, near her stateroom door. Her fingers were clawing
+her cheeks, her eyes widely dilate with horror and fright, her mouth
+was agape, and from it issued, as by some mechanical impulse, shriek
+upon hollow shriek--cries wholly flat and meaningless, having no
+character of any sort, mere automatic reflexes of hysteria.
+
+On the opposite side of the saloon, not far from the door to his own
+quarters, Monk lay semi-prone with a purple face and protruding
+eyeballs, far gone toward death through strangulation. Phinuit, on his
+knees, was removing a silk handkerchief that had been twisted about
+that scrawney throat.
+
+At the foot of the companionway steps, Popinot, no phantom but the
+veritable Apache himself, was writhing and heaving convulsively; and
+even as Lanyard looked, the huge body of the creature lifted from the
+floor in one last, heroic spasm, then collapsed, and moved no more.
+
+Viewing this hideous tableau, appreciating what it meant--that
+Popinot, forearmed with advice from a trusted quarter, had stationed
+himself outside the door to Monk's stateroom, to waylay and garotte the
+man whom he expected to emerge therefrom laden with the plunder of
+Monk's safe--Lanyard appreciated further that he had done Mr. Mussey a
+great wrong.
+
+For he had all the time believed that the chief engineer was laying a
+trap for him on behalf of his ancient shipmate, that unhappy victim of
+groundless jealousy, Captain Whitaker Monk.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+ÇA VA BIEN!
+
+
+Fearful lest, left to herself, Liane Delorme would do an injury to his
+eardrums as well as to her own vocal chords, Lanyard stepped across the
+dead bulk of the Apache and planted himself squarely in front of the
+woman. Seizing her forearms with his two hands, he used force to drag
+them down to the level of her waist, and purposely made his grasp so
+strong that his fingers sank deep into the soft flesh. At the same
+time, staring fixedly into her vacant eyes, he smiled his most winning
+smile, but with the muscles of his mouth alone, and said quietly:
+
+"Shut up, Liane! Stop making a fool of yourself! Shut up--do you hear?"
+
+The incongruity of his brutal grasp with his smile, added to the
+incongruity of an ordinary conversational tone with his peremptory and
+savage phrases had the expected effect.
+
+Sanity began to inform the violet eyes, a shrill, empty scream was cut
+sharply in two, the woman stared for an instant with a look of
+confusion; then her lashes drooped, her body relaxed, she fell limply
+against the partition and was quiet save for fits of trembling that
+shook her body from head to foot; still, each successive seizure was
+sensibly less severe. Lanyard let go her wrists.
+
+"There!" he said--"that's over, Liane. The beast is done for--no more
+to fear from him. Now forget him--brace up, and realise the debt you
+owe good Monsieur Phinuit."
+
+With a grin, that gentleman looked up from his efforts to revive
+Captain Monk.
+
+"I'm a shy, retiring violet," he stated somewhat superfluously, "but if
+the world will kindly lend its ears, I'll inform it coyly that was
+_some_ shootin'. Have a look, will you, Lanyard, like a good fellow,
+and make sure our little friend over there isn't playing 'possum on us.
+Seems to me I've heard of his doing something like that before--maybe
+you remember. And, mademoiselle, if you'll be kind enough to fetch me
+that carafe of ice water, I'll see if we can't bring the skipper to his
+senses, such as they are."
+
+His tone was sufficiently urgent to rouse Liane out of the lassitude
+into which reaction from terror had let her slip. She passed a hand
+over still dazed eyes, looked uncertainly about, then with perceptible
+exertion of will power collected herself, stood away from the partition
+and picked up the carafe.
+
+Lanyard adopted the sensible suggestion of Phinuit, dropping on a knee
+to rest his hand above the heart of Popinot. To his complete
+satisfaction, if not at all to his surprise, no least flutter of life
+was to be detected in that barrel-like chest.
+
+A moment longer he lingered, looking the corpse over with inquisitive
+eyes. No sign that he could see suggested that Popinot had suffered
+hardship during his two weeks of close sequestration; he seemed to have
+fared well as to food and drink, and his clothing, if nothing to boast
+of in respect of cut or cloth, and though wrinkled and stretched with
+constant wear, was tolerably clean--unstained by bilge, grease, or coal
+smuts, as it must have been had the man been hiding in the hold or
+bunkers, those traditional refuges of your simon-pure stowaway.
+
+No: Monsieur Popinot had been well taken care of--and Lanyard could
+name an officer of prestige ponderable enough to secure his quarters,
+wherein presumably Popinot had lain perdu, against search when the
+yacht has been "turned inside out," according to its commander.
+
+So this was the source of Mr. Mussey's exact understanding of the
+business!
+
+As to the question of how the Apache had been smuggled aboard, and
+when, Lanyard never learned the truth. Circumstances were to prevent
+his interrogating Mr. Mussey, and he could only assume that--since
+Popinot could hardly have been in the motor car wrecked on the road
+from Paris--he must have left that pursuit to trusted confrères, and,
+anticipating their possible failure, have hurried on to Cherbourg by
+another route to make precautionary arrangements with Mr. Mussey.
+
+Ah, well! no fault could be found with the fellow for lack of
+determination and tenacity. On the point of rising, Lanyard
+reconsidered and, bending over the body, ran clever hands rapidly
+through the clothing, turning out every pocket and heaping the
+miscellany of rubbish thus brought to light upon the floor--with a
+single exception; Popinot had possessed a pistol, an excellent
+automatic. Why he hadn't used it to protect himself, Heaven only knew.
+Presumably he had been too thoroughly engrossed in the exercise of his
+favourite sport to think of the weapon up to the time when Phinuit had
+opened fire on him; and then, thrown into panic, he had been able to
+entertain one thought only, that of escape.
+
+Lanyard entertained for a moment a vivid imaginary picture of the scene
+in the saloon when Phinuit had surprised the Apache in the act of
+strangling Monk; a picture that Phinuit subsequently confirmed
+substantially in every detail....
+
+One saw the garroter creeping through the blackness of the saloon from
+his hiding place, forward in the cabin of the chief engineer;
+stationing himself at the door to Monk's quarters, with his chosen
+weapon, that deadly handkerchief of his trade, ready for the throat of
+the Lone Wolf when he should emerge, in accordance with his agreement
+with Mr. Mussey, the spoils of the captain's safe in his hands. Then
+one saw Monk, alarmed by the sudden failure of the lights, hurrying out
+to return to the bridge, the pantherish spring upon the victim's back,
+the swift, dextrous noosing of the handkerchief about his windpipe, the
+merciless tightening of it--all abruptly illuminated by the white glare
+of Phinuit's electric torch. And then the truncated crimson of the
+first pistol flash, the frantic effort to escape, the hunting of that
+gross shape of flesh by the beam of light and the bullets as Popinot
+doubled and twisted round the saloon like a rat in a pit, the last mad
+plunge for the companionway, the flight up its steps that had by the
+narrowest margin failed to save him...
+
+Phinuit and Liane Delorme were too busy to heed; quietly Lanyard
+slipped the pistol into a pocket and got to his feet. Then Swain came
+charging down the steps to find out what all the row was about, and to
+report--which he did as soon as Monk was sufficiently recovered to
+understand--those outrageous and darkly mysterious assaults upon the
+helmsman and Mr. Collison. Both men, he stated, were unfit for further
+duty that night, though neither (Lanyard was happy to learn) had
+suffered any permanent injury.
+
+But what--in the name of insanity!--could have inspired such a
+meaningless atrocity? What could its perpetrator have hoped to gain?
+What--!
+
+Monk, stretched out upon a leather couch in his sitting-room, levelled
+eyebrows of suspicion at Lanyard, who countered with a guilelessness so
+perfect as to make it appear that he did not even comprehend the
+insinuation.
+
+"If I may offer a suggestion..." he said with becoming diffidence.
+
+"Well?" Monk demanded with a snap, despite his languors. "What's on
+your mind?"
+
+"It would seem to a benevolent neutral like myself... You understand I
+was in my deck-chair by the taffrail throughout all this affair. The
+men at the sounding machine nearby can tell you I did not move before
+the shots in the saloon----"
+
+"How the devil could they know that in the dark?"
+
+"I was smoking, monsieur; they must, if they looked, have seen the fire
+of my cigarette... As I was about to suggest: It would seem to me that
+there must be some obscure but not necessarily unfathomable connection
+between the three events; else how should they synchronise so
+perfectly? How did Popinot know the lights would go out a few minutes
+after five bells? He was prepared, he lost no time. How did the other
+miscreant, whoever he was, know it would be safe to commit that
+wickedness, whatever its purpose, upon the bridge at precisely that
+time? For plainly he, too, was prepared to act upon the instant--that
+is, if I understand Mr. Swain's report correctly. And how did it happen
+that the dynamo went out of commission just then? What _did_ happen in
+the engine-room? Does anybody know? I think, messieurs, if you find out
+the answer to that last question you will have gone some way toward
+solving your mystery."
+
+Captain Monk addressed Mr. Swain curtly: "It's the chief's watch in the
+engine-room?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"I'll have a talk with him presently, and go further into this affair.
+In the meantime, how does she stand?"
+
+"Under steerage way only"--Mr. Swain consulted the tell-tale compass
+affixed to the deck-beam overhead--"sou'west-by-south, sir."
+
+"Must've swung off during that cursed dark spell. When I came below,
+two or three minutes before, we were heading into The Race,
+west-nor'west, having left Cerberus Shoal whistling buoy to port about
+fifteen minutes earlier. Get her back on that course, if you please,
+Mr. Swain, and proceed at half-speed. Don't neglect your soundings.
+I'll join you as soon as I feel fit."
+
+"Very good, sir."
+
+Mr. Swain withdrew. Captain Monk let his head sink back on its pillows
+and shut his eyes. Liane Delorme solicitously stroked his forehead. The
+captain opened his eyes long enough to register adoration with the able
+assistance of the eyebrows. Liane smiled down upon him divinely.
+Lanyard thought that affection was a beautiful thing, but preserved a
+duly concerned countenance.
+
+"I could do with a whiskey and soda," Monk confessed feebly. "No, not
+you, please"--as Liane offered to withdraw the compassionate
+hand--"Phin isn't busy."
+
+Mr. Phinuit hastened to make himself useful.
+
+A muted echo of the engine-room telegraph was audible then, and the
+engines took up again their tireless chant. Lanyard cocked a sly eye at
+the tell-tale; it designated their course as west-by-north a quarter
+west. He was cheered to think that his labours at the binnacle were
+bearing fruit, and grateful that Monk was so busy being an invalid
+waited upon and pitied by a beautiful volunteer nurse that he was
+willing to trust the navigation to Mr. Swain and had no time to observe
+by the tell-tale whether or not the course he had prescribed was being
+followed.
+
+Liane's exquisite and tender arm supported the suffering head of
+Captain Monk as he absorbed the nourishment served by Phinuit. The
+eyebrows made an affectingly faint try at a gesture of gratitude. The
+eyes closed, once more Monk's head reposed upon the pillow. He sighed
+like a weary child.
+
+From the saloon came sounds of shuffling feet and mumbling voices as
+seamen carried away all that was mortal of Monsieur Popinot.
+
+Between roars of the fog signal, six bells vibrated on the air. Phinuit
+cocked his head intelligently to one side, ransacked his memory, and
+looked brightly to Lanyard.
+
+"Ar-har!" he murmured--"the fatal hour!"
+
+Lanyard gave him a gracious smile.
+
+In attenuated accents Captain Monk, without opening his eyes or
+stirring under the caresses of that lovely hand, enquired:
+
+"What say, Phin?"
+
+"I was just reminding Monsieur Lanyard the fatal hour has struck, old
+thing."
+
+The eyebrows knitted in painful effort to understand. When one has
+narrowly escaped death by strangulation one may be pardoned some slight
+mental haziness. Besides, it makes to retain sympathy, not to be too
+confoundedly clear-headed.
+
+"Fatal hour?"
+
+"The dear man promised to turn in his answer to our unselfish little
+proposition at six bells to-night and not later."
+
+"Really?" The voice was interested, and so were the eyebrows; but Monk
+was at pains not to move. "And has he?"
+
+"Not yet, old egg."
+
+Monk opened expectant eyes and fixed them upon Lanyard's face, the
+eyebrows acquiring a slant of amiable enquiry.
+
+"There is much to be said," Lanyard temporised. "That is, if you feel
+strong enough..."
+
+"Oh, quite," Monk assured him in tones barely audible.
+
+"Must it be a blow to the poor dear?" Phinuit enquired.
+
+"I hope not, very truly."
+
+(The tell-tale now betrayed a course northwest-by-north. Had the
+binnacle compass, then, gone out of its head altogether, on finding
+itself bereft of its accustomed court of counter-attractions?)
+
+"Well, here we all are, sitting forward on the edges of our chairs,
+holding onto the seats with both hands, ears pricked forward, eyes
+shining... The suspense," Phinuit avowed, "is something fierce!"
+
+"I am sorry."
+
+"What d'you mean, you're sorry? You're not going to back out?"
+
+"Having never walked into the arrangement you propose, it would be
+difficult to back out--would it not?"
+
+Monk forgot that he was suffering acutely, forgot even the beautiful
+and precious hand that was soothing his fevered brow, and rudely
+shaking it off, sat up suddenly. The eyebrows were distinctly minatory
+above eyes that loosed ugly gleams.
+
+"You refuse?"
+
+Lanyard slowly inclined his head: "I regret I must beg to be excused."
+
+"You damned fool!"
+
+"Pardon, monsieur?"
+
+A look of fury convulsed Liane's face. Phinuit, too, was glaring, no
+longer a humourist. Monk's mouth was working, and his eyebrows had got
+out of hand altogether.
+
+"I said you were a damned fool--"
+
+"But is not that a matter of personal viewpoint? At least, the question
+would seem to be open to debate."
+
+"If you think arguments will satisfy us--!"
+
+"But, my dear Captain Monk, I am really not at all concerned to satisfy
+you. However, if you wish to know my reasons for declining the honour
+you would thrust upon me, they are at your service."
+
+"I'll be glad to hear them," said Monk grimly.
+
+"One, I fancy, will do as well as a dozen. It is, then, my considered
+judgment that, were I in the least inclined to resume the evil ways of
+my past--as I am not--I would be, as you so vividly put it, a damned
+fool to associate myself with people of a low grade of intelligence,
+wanting even enough to hold fast that which they have thieved!"
+
+"By God!" Monk brought down a thumping fist. "What are you getting at?"
+
+"Your hopeless inefficiency, monsieur.... Forgive my bluntness."
+
+"Come through," Phinuit advised in a dangerous voice. "Just what do you
+mean?"
+
+"I mean that you, knowing I have but one object in submitting to
+association with you in any way, to wit, the recovery of the jewels of
+Madame de Montalais and their restoration to that lady, have not had
+sufficient wit to prevent my securing those jewels under your very
+noses."
+
+"You mean to say you've stolen them?"
+
+Lanyard nodded. "They are at present in my possession--if that
+confesses an act of theft."
+
+Monk laughed discordantly. "Then I say you're a liar, Monsieur the Lone
+Wolf, as well as a fool!" His fist smote the desk again. "The Montalais
+jewels are here."
+
+Lanyard shrugged.
+
+"When did you lift them?" Phinuit demanded with sarcasm. "Tell us
+that!"
+
+Lanyard smiled an exasperating smile, lounged low in his chair, and
+looked at the deck beams--taking occasion to note that the tell-tale
+had swung to true northwest. Ça va bien!
+
+"Why, you insane impostor!" Monk stormed--"I had that box in my own
+hands no later than this afternoon."
+
+Without moving, Lanyard directed his voice toward the ceiling.
+
+"Did you by any chance open it and see what was inside?"
+
+There was no answer, and though he was careful not to betray any
+interest by watching them, he was well aware that looks of alarm and
+suspicion were being exchanged by those three. So much for enjoying the
+prestige of a stupendously successful criminal past! A single thought
+was in the mind of Liane Delorme, Captain Monk, and Mr. Phinuit: With
+the Lone Wolf, nothing was impossible.
+
+Liane Delorme said abruptly, in a choking voice: "Open the safe,
+please, Captain Monk."
+
+"I'll do nothing of the sort."
+
+"Go on," Phinuit advised--"make sure. If it's true, we get them back,
+don't we? If it isn't, we show him up for a pitiful bluff."
+
+"It's a dodge," Monk declared, "to get the jewels where he can lay
+hands on them. The safe stays shut."
+
+"Open it, I beg you!" Liane implored in tremulous accents.
+
+"No--"
+
+"Why not?" Phinuit argued. "What can he do? I've got him covered."
+
+"And I," Lanyard interjected softly, "as you all know, am unarmed."
+
+"Please!" Liane insisted.
+
+There was a pause which ended in a sullen grunt from Monk. Lanyard
+smiled cheerfully and sat up in his chair, watching the captain while
+he unlocked the door in the pedestal and with shaking fingers
+manipulated the combination dial. Liane Delorme left her chair to stand
+nearby, in undissembled anxiety. Only Phinuit remained as he had been,
+lounging back and watching Lanyard narrowly, his automatic pistol
+dangling between his knees.
+
+Lanyard offered him a pleasant smile. Phinuit scowled forbiddingly in
+response.
+
+Monk swung open the safe-door, seized the metal despatch-box by the
+handle, and set it upon the desk with a bang. Then, extracting his
+pocket key-ring, he selected the proper key and made several attempts
+to insert it in the slot of the lock. But his confidence was so shaken,
+his morale so impaired by Lanyard's sublime effrontery added to his
+recent shocking experience, that the gaunt hands trembled beyond his
+control, and it was several seconds before he succeeded.
+
+Lanyard gave no sign, but his heart sank. He had exhausted his last
+resource to gain time, he was now at his wits' ends. Only his star
+could save him now....
+
+Monk turned the keys, but all at once forgot his purpose, and with
+hands stayed upon the lid of the box paused and cocked his ears
+attentively to rumours of excitement and confusion on the deck. The
+instinct of the seafaring man uppermost, Monk stiffened, grew rigid
+from head to foot.
+
+One heard hurried feet, outcries, a sudden jangle of the engine-room
+telegraph...
+
+"Monsieur! monsieur!" Liane implored. "Open that box!"
+
+The words were on her lips when she was thrown off her feet by a
+frightful shock which stopped the Sybarite dead in full career, before
+the screw, reversed in obedience to the telegraph, could grip the water
+and lessen her momentum. The woman cannoned against Monk, shouldering
+him bodily aside. Instinctively snatching at the box, Monk succeeded
+only in dragging it to the edge of the desk before a second shock,
+accompanied by a grinding crash of steel and timbers, seemed to make
+the yacht leap like a live thing stricken mortally. She heeled heavily
+to starboard, the despatch-box went to the floor with a thump lost in
+the greater din, Liane Delorme was propelled headlong into a corner,
+Monk thrown to his knees, Phinuit lifted out of his chair and flung
+sprawling into the arms of Lanyard, who, pinned down by the other's
+weight in his own chair, felt this last slide backwards to starboard
+and bring up against a partition with a bang that drove the breath out
+of him in one enormous gust.
+
+He retained, however, sufficient presence of mind neatly to disarm
+Phinuit before that one guessed what he was about.
+
+After that second blow, the Sybarite remained at a standstill, but the
+continued beating of her engines caused her to quiver painfully from
+trucks to keelson, as if in agonies of death such as those which had
+marked the end of Popinot. Of a sudden the engines ceased, and there
+was no more movement of any sort, only an appalling repose with silence
+more dreadful still.
+
+Lanyard had no means to measure how long that dumb suspense lasted
+which was imposed by the stunned faculties of all on board. It seemed
+interminable. Eventually he saw Monk pick himself up and, making
+strange moaning noises, like a wounded animal, throw himself upon the
+door, jerk it open, and dash out.
+
+As if he had only needed that vision of action to animate him, Lanyard
+threw Phinuit off, so that he staggered across the slanting floor
+toward the door. When he brought himself up by catching hold of its
+frame, he was under the threat of his own pistol in Lanyard's hands. He
+lingered for a moment, showing Lanyard a distraught and vacant face,
+then apparently realising his danger faded away into the saloon.
+
+With a roughness dictated by the desperate extremity, Lanyard strode
+over to Liane Delorme, where she still crouched in her corner, staring
+witlessly, caught her by one arm, fairly jerked her to her feet, and
+thrust her stumbling out into the saloon. Closing the door behind her,
+he shot its bolts.
+
+He went to work swiftly then, in a fever of haste. In his ears the
+clamour of the shipwrecked men upon the decks was only a distant
+droning, hardly recognised for what it was by him who had not
+one thought other than to make all possible advantage of every precious
+instant; and so with the roar of steam from the escape-valves.
+
+Stripping off coat and waistcoat, he took from the pocket of the latter
+the wallet that held his papers, then ripped open his shirt and
+unbuckled the money belt round his waist. Its pockets were ample and
+fitted with trustworthy fastenings; and all but one, that held a few
+English sovereigns, were empty. The jewels of Madame de Montalais went
+into them as rapidly as his fingers could move.
+
+Thus engaged, he heard a pistol explode in the saloon, and saw the
+polished writing-bed of the captain's desk scored by a bullet. His gaze
+shifting to the door, he discovered a neat round hole in one of its
+rosewood panels. At the same time, to the tune of another report, a
+second hole appeared, and the bullet, winging above the desk, buried
+itself in the after-bulkhead, between the dead-lights. A stream of
+bullets followed, one after another boring the stout panels as if their
+consistency had been that of cheese.
+
+Lanyard stepped out of their path and hugged the partition while he
+finished stuffing the jewels into the belt and, placing the thin wallet
+beneath it, strapped it tightly round him once more....
+
+That would be Phinuit out there, no doubt, disdaining to waste time
+breaking in the door, or perhaps fearing his reception once it was
+down. An innocent and harmless amusement, if he enjoyed it, that it
+seemed a pity to interrupt. At the same time it grew annoying. The door
+was taking on the look of a sieve, and the neighbourhood of the
+deadlights, Lanyard's sole avenue of escape, was being well peppered.
+Something would have to be done about it...
+
+Lanyard completed his preparations by kicking off his shoes and taking
+up another notch in the belt that supported his trousers. If the swim
+before him proved a long one, he could get rid of his garments in the
+water readily enough; if on the other hand the shore proved to be close
+at hand, it would be more convenable to land at least half clothed.
+
+Then--the fusillade continuing without intermission save when the man
+outside stopped long enough to extract an empty clip and replace it
+with one loaded--Lanyard edged along the partition to the door,
+calculated the stand of the lunatic in the saloon from the angle at
+which the bullets were coming through, and emptied the pistol he had
+taken from Phinuit at the panels as fast as he could pull trigger.
+
+There was no more firing...
+
+He tossed aside the empty weapon, made sure of Popinot's on his hip,
+approached one of the deadlights, placed a chair, climbed upon it, and
+with infinite pains managed to wriggle and squirm head and shoulders
+through the opening. It was very fortunate for him indeed that the
+Sybarite happened to have been built for pleasure yachting, with
+deadlights uncommonly large for the sake of air and light, else he
+would have been obliged to run the risk of opening the door to the
+saloon and fighting his way out and up to the deck.
+
+As it was, the business was difficult enough. He had to work one of his
+arms out after his shoulders and then, twisting round, strain and claw
+at the smooth overhang of the stern until able to catch the outer lip
+of the scuppers above.
+
+After that he had to lift and drag the rest of him out through the
+deadlight and, hanging by fingertips, work his way round, inch by inch,
+until it seemed possible to drop into the sea and escape hitting the
+screw.
+
+In point of fact, he barely missed splitting himself in two on the
+thing, and on coming to the surface clung to it while taking such
+observations as one might in that befogged blackness.
+
+Impossible to guess which way to strike out: the fog hung low upon the
+water, greying its smooth, gently heaving black surface, he could see
+nothing on either beam.
+
+At length, however, he heard through the hissing uproar of escaping
+steam a mournful bell somewhere off to port, which he at first took for
+a buoy, then perceived to be tolling with a regularity inconsistent
+with the eccentric action of waves. Timed by pulsebeats, it struck once
+every fifteen seconds or thereabouts: undoubtedly the fog signal of some
+minor light-house.
+
+In confirmation of this conclusion, Lanyard heard, from the deck above,
+the resonant accents of Captain Monk, clearly articulate in that riot
+of voices, apparently storming at hapless Mr. Swain.
+
+"Don't you hear that bell, you ass? Doesn't that tell you what you've
+done? You've piled us on the rocks off the eastern end of Plum Island.
+And God in Heaven only knows how you managed to get so far off the
+course!"
+
+Breathing to the night air thanks which would have driven Captain Monk
+mad could he have heard them, Lanyard let go the bronze blade and
+struck out for the melancholy bell.
+
+Ten minutes later the fingers of one hand--he was swimming on his
+side--at the bottom of its stroke touched pebbles.
+
+He lowered his feet and waded through extensive shallows to a wide and
+sandy beach.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+FINALE
+
+
+The window of the living-room in his suite at the Walpole, set high in
+cliff-like walls, commanded a southward vista of Fifth Avenue whose
+enchantment, clothed in ever changing guises of light and shade, was so
+potent that Lanyard, on the first day of his tenancy, thought it could
+never tire. Yet by noon of the third he was viewing it with the eyes of
+soul-destroying ennui, though the disfavour it had so quickly won in
+his sight was, he knew, due less to cloying familiarity than to the
+uncertainty and discontent that were eating out his heart.
+
+Three days before, immediately on arriving in New York and installing
+himself in this hotel, to whose management he was well known from other
+days, he had cabled Eve de Montalais and Wertheimer.
+
+The response to the latter--a cheerful request that credit be arranged
+for him by cable--was as prompt and satisfactory as he had expected it
+to be.
+
+But from Madame de Montalais he heard nothing.
+
+"Mission successful," he had wired--"returning France by La Savoie in
+five days having arranged safe transportation your property--please
+advise if you can meet me in Paris to receive same or your commands
+otherwise."
+
+And to this, silence only!--silence to him to whom words of her
+dictation, however few and terse and filtered through no matter how
+many indifferent mediums of intelligence, would have been precious
+beyond expression.
+
+So it was that, as hour followed hour and the tale of them lengthened
+into days, he fell into a temper of morbid brooding that was little
+like the man, and instead of faring abroad and seeking what amusement
+he might find in the most carefree city of the post-War world, shut
+himself up in his rooms and moped, indifferent to all things but the
+knocks at his door, the stridulation of the telephone bell that might
+announce the arrival of the desired message.
+
+And so it was that, when the telephone did ring--at last!--towards noon
+of that third day, he fairly stumbled over himself in his haste to
+reach the instrument. But the animation with which he answered the
+professional voice at the other end of the wire faded very quickly, the
+look of weariness returned, his accents voiced an indifference fairly
+desolating.
+
+"Yes?...Oh, yes...Very well...Yes, at once."
+
+He returned to his view from the window, and was hating it with all his
+heart when a stout knuckling on his door announced his callers.
+
+They filed into the room with a cheerfulness of mien in striking
+contrast to the weary courtesy with which Lanyard received them: Liane
+Delorme first, then Monk, then Phinuit, rather bleached of colour and
+wearing one arm in a sling; all very smart in clothes conspicuously new
+and as costly as the Avenue afforded, striking figures of contentment
+in prosperity.
+
+"It is a pleasure indeed," Lanyard gravely acknowledged their several
+salutations--"not, I must confess, altogether unexpected, but a
+pleasure none the less."
+
+"So you didn't think we'd be long spotting you in the good little old
+town?" Phinuit enquired. "Had a notion you thought the best way to lose
+us would be to put up at this well-known home of the highest prices."
+
+"No," Lanyard replied. "I never thought to be rid of you without one
+more meeting--"
+
+"Then there's good in the old bean yet," Phinuit interrupted in wasted
+irony.
+
+"One cherishes that hope, monsieur....But the trail I left for you to
+follow! I would be an ass indeed if I thought you would fail to find
+it. When one borrows a rowboat at Plum Island Light without asking
+permission--government property, too--and leaves it moored to a dock
+on the Greenport waterfront; when one arrives in Greenport clothed in
+shirt and trousers only, and has to bribe its pardonably suspicious
+inhabitants with handfuls of British gold--which they are the more
+loath to accept in view of its present depreciation--in order to secure
+a slopchest coat and shoes and transportation by railway to New York;
+when a taxicab chauffeur refuses a sovereign for his fare from the
+Pennsylvania Station to this hotel, and one is constrained to borrow
+from the management--why, I should say the trail was fairly broad and
+well blazed, mes amis."
+
+"Be that as it may," said Phinuit--"here in a manner of speaking we all
+are, at least, the happy family reunited and ready to talk business."
+
+"And no hard feelings, Monsieur Phinuit?"
+
+"There will be none"--Monk's eyebrows were at once sardonic and
+self-satisfied; which speaks volumes for their versatility--"at least,
+none on our side--when we are finished."
+
+"That makes me more happy still. And you, Liane?"
+
+The woman gave a negligent movement of pretty shoulders.
+
+"One begins to see how very right you are, Michael," she said
+wearily--"and always were, for that matter. If one wishes to do wrong,
+one should do it all alone... and escape being bored to death by the...
+Oh! the unpardonable stupidity of associates.
+
+"But no, messieurs!" she insisted with temper as Monk and Phinuit
+simultaneously flew signals of resentment. "I mean what I say. I wish I
+had never seen any of you, I am sick of you all! What did I tell you
+when you insisted on coming here to see Monsieur Lanyard? That you
+would gain nothing and perhaps lose much. But you would not listen to
+me, you found it impossible to believe there could be in all the world
+a man who keeps his word, not only to others but to himself. You are so
+lost in admiration of your own cleverness in backing that poor little
+ship off the rocks and letting her fill and sink, so that there could
+be no evidence of wrong-doing against you, that you must try to prove
+your wits once more where they have always failed"--she illustrated
+with a dramatic gesture--"against his! You say to yourselves: Since we
+are wrong, he must be wrong; and since that is now clearly proved, that
+he is as wrong in every way as we, then it follows naturally that he
+will heed our threats and surrender to us those jewels...Those jewels!"
+she declared bitterly, "which we would have been fortunate never to
+have heard of!"
+
+She threw herself back in her chair and showed them a scornful
+shoulder, compressing indignant lips to a straight, unlovely line, and
+beating out the devil's tattoo with her slipper.
+
+Lanyard watched her with a puzzled smile. How much of this was acting?
+How much, if anything, an expression of true feeling? Was she actually
+persuaded it was waste of time to contend against him? Or was she
+shrewdly playing upon his not unfriendly disposition toward her in the
+hope that it would spare her in the hour of the grand débâcle?
+
+He could be sure of one thing only: since she was a woman, he would
+never know...
+
+Monk had been making ominous motions with the eyebrows, but Phinuit
+made haste to be beforehand with him.
+
+"You said one thing, mademoiselle, one thing anyway that meant
+something: that Monsieur Lanyard would give up those jewels to us.
+That's all arranged."
+
+Lanyard turned to him with genuine amusement. "Indeed, monsieur?"
+
+"Indeed and everything! We don't want to pull any rough stuff on you,
+Lanyard, and we won't unless you force us to--"
+
+"Rough stuff, monsieur? You mean, physical force?"
+
+"Not exactly. But I think you'll recall my telling you I stand in well
+with the Police Department in the old home town. Maybe you thought that
+was swank. Likely you did. But it wasn't. I've got a couple of friends
+of mine from Headquarters waiting downstairs this very minute, ready
+and willing to cop out the honour of putting the Lone Wolf under arrest
+for stealing the Montalais jewels."
+
+"But is it possible," Lanyard protested, "you still do not understand
+me? Is it possible you still believe I am a thief at heart and
+interested in those jewels only to turn them to my own profit?"
+
+He stared unbelievingly at the frosty eyes of Monk beneath their
+fatuously stubborn brows, at the hard, unyielding eyes of Phinuit.
+
+"You said it," this last replied with brevity.
+
+"It was a good bluff while it lasted, Monsieur Lanyard," Monk added;
+"but it couldn't last forever. You can't get away with it. Why not give
+in gracefully, admit you're licked for once, be a good fellow?"
+
+"My God!" Lanyard pronounced in comic despair--"it passes
+understanding! It is true, then--and true especially of such as you are
+to-day, as I was in my yesterday--that 'Whom Fortune wishes to destroy
+she first makes mad'! For, I give you my word of honour, you seem to me
+quite mad, messieurs, too mad to be allowed at large. And in proof of
+my sincerity, I propose that you shall not longer remain at large."
+
+"What's that?" Monk demanded, startled.
+
+"Why, you have not hesitated to threaten me with the police. So now I,
+in my turn, have the honour to inform you that, anticipating this call,
+I have had relays of detectives waiting in this hotel day and night,
+with instructions to guard the doors as soon as you were shown up to my
+rooms. Be advised, Mr. Phinuit, and forget your pistol. Even to show it
+in this city would make matters infinitely worse for you than they
+are."
+
+"He's lying," Monk insisted, putting a restraining hand on Phinuit's
+arm as that one started from his chair in rage and panic. "He wouldn't
+dare."
+
+"Would I not? Then, since you believe nothing till it is proved to you,
+messieurs, permit me..."
+
+Lanyard crossed rapidly to the hall door and flung it open--and fell
+back a pace with a cry of amazement.
+
+At the threshold stood, not the detective whom he had expected to see,
+but a woman with a cable message form in one hand, the other lifted to
+knock.
+
+"Madame!" Lanyard gasped--"Madame de Montalais!"
+
+The cable-form fluttered to the floor as she entered with a gladness
+in her face that was carried out by the impulsive gesture with which
+she gave him her hands.
+
+"My dear friend!" she cried happily--"I am so glad! And to think we
+have been guests of the same hotel for three livelong days and never
+knew it. I arrived by La Touraine Saturday, but your message,
+telegraphed back from Combe-Redonde, reached me not five minutes ago. I
+telephoned the desk, they told me the number of your room and--here I
+am!"
+
+"But I cannot believe my senses!"
+
+With unanimous consent Jules, Phinuit and Monk uprose and made for the
+door, only to find it blocked by the substantial form of a plain
+citizen with his hands in his pockets and understanding in his eyes.
+
+"Steady, gents!" he counselled coolly. "Orders are to let everybody in
+and nobody out without Mr. Lanyard says so."
+
+For a moment they hung in doubt and consternation, consulting one
+another with dismayed stares. Then Phinuit made as if to shoulder the
+man aside. But for the sake of the moral effect the latter casually
+exhibited a pistol; and the moral effect of that was stupendous. Mr.
+Phinuit disconsolately slouched back into the room.
+
+Grasping the situation, Eve de Montalais turned to the quartet eyes
+that glimmered in a face otherwise quite composed.
+
+"But how surprising!" she declared. "Madame la Comtesse de
+Lorgnes--Monsieur Monk--Mr. Phinuit--how delightful to see you all
+again!"
+
+The civility met with inadequate appreciation.
+
+"Nothing could be more opportune," Lanyard declared; "for it is to this
+lady, Madame de Montalais, and to these gentlemen that you owe the
+recovery of your jewels."
+
+"Truly?"
+
+"As I am telling you. But for them, their charming hospitality in
+inviting me to cruise aboard their yacht, but for the assistance they
+lent me, though sometimes unconsciously, I admit--I should never have
+been able to say to you to-day: Your jewels are in a safe place,
+madame, immediately at your disposal."
+
+"But how can I thank them?"
+
+"Well," said Lanyard, "if you ask me, I think we have detained them
+long enough, I believe they would be most grateful to be permitted to
+leave and keep their numerous and pressing appointments elsewhere."
+
+"I am entirely of your mind, monsieur."
+
+Lanyard nodded to the man in the doorway--"All right, Mr. Murray"--and
+he stood indifferently aside.
+
+In silence the three men moved to the door and out, Phinuit with a
+brazen swagger, Jules without emotion visible, Monk with eyebrows
+adroop and flapping.
+
+But Lanyard interposed when Liane Delorme would have followed.
+
+"A moment, Liane, if you will be so good."
+
+She paused, regarding him with a sombre and inscrutable face while he
+produced from his coat-pocket a fat envelope without endorsement.
+
+"This is yours."
+
+The woman murmured blankly: "Mine?"
+
+He said in a guarded voice: "Papers I found in the safe in your
+library, that night. I had to take them for use in event of need.
+Now...they are useless. But you are unwise to keep such papers, Liane.
+Good-bye."
+
+The envelope was unsealed. Lifting the flap, the woman half withdrew
+the enclosure, recognised it at a glance, and crushed it in a
+convulsive grasp, while the blood, ebbing swiftly from her face, threw
+her rouge into livid relief. For an instant she seemed about to speak,
+then bowed her head in dumb acknowledgment, and left the room.
+
+Lanyard nodded to Mr. Murray, who amiably closed the door, keeping
+himself on the outside of it.
+
+Eve de Montalais was eyeing him with an indulgent and amused glance. As
+he turned to her, she shook her head slowly in mockery of reproof.
+
+"That woman loves you, monsieur," she stated quietly.
+
+He succeeded admirably in looking as if the thought was strange to him.
+
+"One is sure madame must be mistaken."
+
+"Ah, but I am not!" said Eve de Montalais. "Who should know better the
+signs that tell of woman's love for you, my dear?"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Alias The Lone Wolf, by Louis Joseph Vance
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