THE LARK IN THE RUINS
It was not until Frances Durkin and her husband were installed in an
empty first-class compartment, twining and curling and speeding on
their way to Genoa, that even a comparative sense of safety came to
them. It was Durkin's suggestion that it might not be amiss for them
to give the impression of being a newly-married couple, on their
honeymoon journey; and, to this end, he had half-filled the compartment
with daffodils and jonquils, with carnations and violets and roses,
purchased with one turn of the hand from a midnight flower-vender, on
his way down from the hills for any early morning traffic that might
offer.
So as they sped toward the Italian frontier, in the white and mellow
Mediterranean moonlight, threading their way between the tranquil
violet sea bejeweled with guardian lights and the steep and silent
slopes of the huddled mountains, they lounged back on their hired
train-pillows, self-immured, and unperturbed, and quietly contented
with themselves and their surroundings. At least, so it seemed to the
eyes of each scrutinizing guard and official, who, after one sharp
glance at the flower-filled compartment and the crooning young English
lovers, passed on with a laugh and a shrug or two.
Yet, at heart, Durkin and Frank were anything but happy. As they sped
on, and his wife pointed out to him that the selfsame road they were
taking between confining rock and sea was the same narrow passage, so
time-worn and war-scarred, once taken by Greeks and Ligurians, Romans
and Saracens, it seemed to Durkin that his first fine estimate of the
life of war and adventure had been a false one. His old besetting
doubts and scruples began to awake. It was true that the life they had
plunged into would have its dash and whirl. But it would be the dash
of a moment, and the whirl of a second. Then, as it always must be,
there would come the long interval of flight and concealment, the
wearying stretch of inactivity. He felt, as he gazed out the car
window and saw town and village and hamlet left behind them, that the
same wave of excitement that cast him up would forever in turn drag him
down--and it all resulted, he told himself, in his passing distemper of
fatigue and anxiety, in a little further abrasion, in a little sterner
denudation of their tortured souls!
It was at Ventimiglia that the _capostazione_ himself appeared at the
door of their compartment, accompanied by a uniformed official. The
two fugitives, with their hearts in their mouths, leaned back on their
cushions with assumed unconcern, cooing and chattering hand in hand
among their flowers, while a volley of quick and angry questions, in
Italian, was flung in at them from the opened compartment door. To
this they paid not the slightest attention, for several moments. Frank
turned to her interrogators, smiled at them gently and impersonally,
and then shook her head impatiently, with an outthrust of the hands
which was meant to convey to them that each and every word they uttered
was quite incomprehensible to her.
The _capostazione_, who, by this time, had pushed into their
compartment, was heatedly demanding either their passports or their
tickets.
Frank, who had buried her face raptly in her armful of jonquils, looked
up at him with gentle exasperation.
"We are English," she said blankly. "English! We can't understand!"
And she returned to her flowers and her husband once more.
The two uniformed intruders conferred for a moment, while the
_conduttore_, on the platform outside, naturally enough expostulated
over the delay of the train.
"These fools--these aren't the two!" Frank heard the _capostazione_
declare, in Italian, under his breath, as they swung down on the
station platform. Then the shrill little thin-noted engine-whistle
sounded, the wheels began to turn, and they were once more speeding
through the white moonlight, deeper and deeper into Italy.
"I wonder," said Frank, after a long silence, "how often we shall be
able to do this sort of thing? I wonder how long luck--mere luck, will
be with us?"
"_Is_ it luck?" asked her husband. She was still leaning back on his
shoulder, with her hand clasping his. Accompanying her consciousness
of escape came a new lightness of spirit. There seemed to come over
her, too, a new sense of gratitude for the nearness of this sentient
and mysterious life, of this living and breathing man, that could both
command and satisfy some even more mysterious emotional hunger in her
own heart.
"Yes," she answered, as she laughed a little, almost contentedly;
"we're like the glass snake. We seem to break off at the point where
we're caught, and escape, and go on again as before. I was only
wondering how many times a glass snake can leave its tail in its
enemy's teeth, and still grow another one!"
And although she laughed again Durkin knew how thinly that covering of
facetiousness spread over her actual sobriety of character. It was
like a solitary drop of oil on quiet water--there was not much of it,
but what there was must always be on the surface.
In fact, her mood changed even as he looked down at her, troubled by
the shadow of utter weariness that rested on her colorless face.
"What would we do, Jim," she asked, after a second long and unbroken
silence, "what would we do if this thing ever brought us face to face
with MacNutt again?"
"But why should we cross that bridge before we come to it?" was
Durkin's answer.
She seemed unable, however, to bar back from her mind some disturbing
and unwelcome vision of that meeting. She felt, in a way, that she
possessed one faculty which the rapid and impetuous nature of her
husband could not claim. It was almost a weakness in him, she told
herself, the subsidiary indiscretion of a fecund and grimly resourceful
mind. Like a river in flood, it had its strange and incongruous back
currents, born of its very oneness of too hurrying purpose. It
considered too deeply the imminent and not the remoter and seemingly
more trivial contingency.
"But can't you see, Jim, that the further we follow this up the closer
and closer it's bringing us to MacNutt?"
"MacNutt is ancient history to us now! We're over and done with him,
for all time!"
"You are wrong there, Jim. You misjudge the situation, and you
misjudge the man. That is one fact we have to face, one hard fact;
MacNutt is not over and done _with us_!"
"But haven't you made a sort of myth of him? Isn't he only a fable to
us now? And haven't we got real facts to face?"
"Ah," she said protestingly, "there is just the trouble. You always
refuse to look _this_ fact in the face!"
"Well, what are the facts?" he asked conciliatingly, coercing his
attention, and demanding of himself what allowance he must make for
that morbid perversion of view which came of a too fatigued body and
mind.
"The facts are these," she began, with a solemnity of tone that
startled him into keener attentiveness. "You found me in MacNutt's
office when he was planning and plotting and preparing for the biggest
wire-tapping _coup_ in all his career. You were dragged into that plot
against your will, almost, just as I had been. But MacNutt gave us our
parts, and we worked together there. Then--then you made love to
me--don't deny it, Jim, for, after all, it was the happiest part of all
my life!--and we both saw how wrong we were, and we both wanted to
fight for our freedom. So I followed you when you revolted against
MacNutt and his leadership."
"No, Frank, it was _you_ who led--if it hadn't been for you there would
never have been any revolt!" he broke in.
"We fought together, then, tooth and nail, and in the end we
surrendered everything but our own liberty--just to start over with
free hands. But it wasn't our mere escape to freedom that maddened
MacNutt; it was the thought that we had beaten him at his own game,
that we had stalked him while he was so busy stalking Penfield. Then
he trapped us, for a moment, and it was sheer good luck that he didn't
kill me that afternoon in his dismantled operating-room, before Doogan
and his men attacked the house. But, as you know, he kept after us,
and he cornered you again, and you would have killed _him_, in turn, if
I hadn't saved you from the sin of it, and the disgrace of it. Then we
thought we were safe, just because the world was big and wide; because
we had made our escape to Europe we thought that we were out of his
circuit, that we were beyond his key-call--but here we are being led
and dragged back to him, through Keenan. But now, just because there
is still an ocean between us, you begin to believe that he has given up
every thought of getting even!"
"Well, isn't it about time he did? We've beaten him twice, at his own
game, and I see no reason why we shouldn't do it again!"
"But how often can we be the glass snake? I mean, how many times can
we afford to leave something behind, and break away, and hope to grow
whole and sound again? And when will MacNutt get us where we can't
break away? I tell you, Jim, you don't know this man as I know him!
You haven't understood yet what a cruelly designing and artful and
vindictive and long-waiting enemy he can be. You haven't seen him
break and crush people, as I once did. It's the memory of that makes
me so afraid of him!"
"There's just the trouble, Frank," cried Durkin. "The man has
terrified and intimidated you, until you think he is the only enemy you
have. I don't deny he isn't dangerous, but so is Pobloff, and so is
Doogan, for that matter, and this man Keenan as well!"
"But they would never crush and smash you, as MacNutt will, if the
chance comes!" she persisted passionately. "You don't see and
understand it, because you are so close to it and so deep in it. It's
like traveling along this little Riviera railway. It's so crooked and
tunneled and close under the mountains that even though we went up and
down it, for a year, from Nice to Nervi, we could never say that we had
seen the Riviera!"
Durkin looked out at the terraced hills, at the undulating fields and
the heaped masses of blue mountains under the white Italian moonlight,
and did not speak for several seconds.
He had always carried, while with her, the vague but sustained sense of
being shielded. Until then her hand had always seemed to guard him,
impersonally, as the hand of a busy seeker guards and shelters a
candle. Now, for some mysterious reason, he felt her brooding
guardianship to be something less passive, to be something more
immediate and personal. He knew--and he knew it with a full
appreciation of the irony that lurked in the situation--that her very
timorousness was now endowing him with a new and reckless courage. So
he took her hand, gratefully, before he spoke again.
"Well, whatever happens, we are now in this, not from choice, as you
said before, but from necessity. If it has dangers, Frank, we must
face them."
"It is nothing _but_ danger!"
"Then we must grin and bear it. But as I said, I see no reason why we
should cross our bridges before we come to them. And we'll soon have a
bridge to cross, and a hard one."
"What bridge?"
"I mean Keenan, and everything that will happen in Genoa!"