Alias The Lone Wolf - Louis Joseph Vance
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"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 Chateau 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."