XIV

Lanyard took back to Eve by the fire the most dégagé manner he could

manage, a manner of leisured good humour that wasn't all put on at the

prompting of amour propre, that was assumed less in hope of hoodwinking

her ingenious intuitions than for the benefit of their fellow guests, if

so be it these entertained any latent interest in the reactions of

Michael Lanyard to a long distance call for "Monsieur Paul Martin," and

that dissembled better than he believed a sense of discouragement the

most devastating he had ever known--not on his account alone so much as

that he was not alone.

The quandary in which he found himself trapped, now that his eyes had

been opened by that singular admonition from out of the night, at once

cryptic and only too intelligible, was one that defied and, what was

worse, promised persistent defiance to the utmost of his resources, from

which extrication with credit to himself--or, if it came to that, with

his life--seemed out of the question. Not that he put life first: his

solicitude was nine parts unselfish, his disheartenment the fruit of

inability to hit on any pretext that conceivably would induce Eve to

part then and there with one whose company had all at once become

equivalent to a pistol trained on her heart point-blank--and with a

finger both pitiless and anonymous trembling on the trigger.

A strong statement, but one that by no means painted their predicament

an exaggerated black. His "sister" had never played her confrères false

or resorted to subterfuge so subtle to put "Monsieur Paul Martin" on his

guard against a nebulous or trifling menace. Liane owed Lanyard much on

an old score, she would have been faithless to the code of her kind had

she, having definite foreknowledge of it, permitted so good a friend to

go blindly to meet the fate prepared for him, whatever that might be;

such women are nevertheless jealous wardens of their own welfare, it had

required perception of a peril to Lanyard immediate and desperate to

work Liane up to the point of chancing the resentment of Morphew should

her treachery ever transpire. Witness the extravagant pains she had

taken to disguise her hand.

No: it would never do to underprize this proof of good will or to read

in Liane's warning any spirit but one of the most earnest anxiety. Taken

as she had unquestionably intended it, her "prenez-garde" decoded

somewhat to this effect: "You are sadly self-deluded, my friend, if you

think Morphew resigned to stomach defeat at your hands, or that you have

succeeded in keeping your movements hidden from him. He has never for an

instant lost sight either of you or of his revenge, he is playing you as

heartlessly as an angler plays a trout, gaff in hand--you must go warily

to cheat its barbs."

The dilemma thus exposed was appalling: a clean breast of all he had

been trying to hide from her was unavoidable if he hoped to make Eve

comprehend why he held it imperative for them to seek each a separate

way back to New York; whereas, once she did grasp the fact that danger

threatened him, she would surely refuse to let him risk it alone. Women

of her rare stamp are never readily dismayed or disposed to think first

of themselves if physical peril frown also upon one by whom their

affections have been engaged. . . . Regard the spirit that poised Eve

then in that juncture, awaiting his return with a countenance as

composed as it was fair, with eyes unclouded by any confession of

impatience or misgivings.

"Sorry I was so long," Lanyard said with intention to be heard across

the dining-room. "I stopped to pay the bill and order the car brought

round. If you don't mind . . ."

"It's quite time," Eve amiably agreed--"if we're to get home at any

respectable hour."

He resumed his chair before the fire and utilized his cigarette case and

a match to cover sidelong study of the four who had come in so soon

after his arrival with Eve, and who remained still at table, dawdling

with dessert. But he couldn't see that his announcement had meant

anything to these . . .

The one woman of their number was a creature of strapping comeliness

whose hail-fellow swagger was brazen that had been piquant in the

flapper she heavily aped; while the men were such as would hardly have

won a second glance on any ordinary occasion, types of the American

bourgeois case-hardened by "good business," clothed in a weirdly

uniform mode of smartness, something stale with over-feeding and

drinking and fondling, wanting stimulation yet inclined to grow

causelessly arrogant in their cups. But Lanyard was too well learned in

the ways of urban America not to know that its Apaches seldom if ever

conform to the cliché of the cinema when it turns its cyclopædic if

gullible eye on what it knows as denizens of the underworld. The gunman

of New York is blown with pride of caste; for all that he isn't keen on

bidding for the attention of the police by sporting the conventionalized

make-up of a suspicious character, he far prefers to pass in a crowd as

a simple man in the street normally addicted to the machine-made

"clothing of distinction" of the magazine advertisements. The fact,

then, that these three were apparently nobodies in particular minding

their own business, didn't necessarily mean that Lanyard could afford to

dismiss them from his calculations.

Neither did he, careful though he was to give them no excuse for

suspecting he had one thought to spare from the woman at his side.

"There is no one like you," he was saying in gallant repayment of her

steadfast and demanding attention: "the loveliest woman that ever

breathed, the most adorably patient . . ."

"How little you know me!" she calmly commented--"at least, if you expect

me to believe you think me patient. Then your message was important?"

"Very," the man admitted: the time was by when fencing were anything but

waste of time. "I am worried about getting you back to Town . . ."

"So it was Mademoiselle Delorme!"

"That only goes to show," Lanyard obliquely remarked, "one should never

tell you anything one expects you to forget."

"I have forgotten nothing you have ever told me about yourself--nothing,

least of all, that had to do with another woman's affection for you."

"Yet you are incapable of jealousy."

"Still, I am very greedy, I don't like sharing even the least of your

thoughts with any other woman."

"Oh!" he laughed--"but Liane isn't a woman, except professionally."

"You are tantalizing me all the same when you don't tell me what she had

to say--and how in Heaven's name she guessed you were dining here--and

why she resurrected that old nom de guerre instead of calling for you by

your right name."

"I'm afraid Liane didn't guess, I suspect somebody told her we had

stopped here to dine--"

The teasing half-smile with which Eve had been regarding her lover was

erased. "You think we were followed--!"

"How else could they have known?"

"'They'?"

"Who informed Liane."

"But why should she have harked back to 'Paul Martin'?"

"I fancy her reason for that is implicit in Liane's message, a brief

one--delivered, if it matters, by a stranger's tongue--'prenez garde'."

Eve nodded thoughtful confirmation of a private conjecture. "You are in

some danger?" Not at all deceived by the shrug that sought to depreciate

the weight of that term, she glanced quickly to and from the little

party that was, just then, noisily making merry at its table across the

room. In response, another movement of Lanyard's shoulders disclaimed

intelligence: "Perhaps . . . Who knows?"

"You must tell me everything . . ."

"I know; but it's a fairish yarn, and the car ought to be here any

minute--I'll hardly have time before we leave. So let me first of all

throw myself upon your mercy, Eve, beg you to trust me."

"But you know I do, in every way."

"I mean: trust me to know what is best . . ."

Analysis of this ambiguity knitted a speculative frown. "You're going to

ask something of me I won't want to do."

"It is dangerous for us to attempt the journey back to New York

together."

"Dangerous," Eve objected, "isn't definite enough."

"It would appear that one whom I have recently been obliged to humiliate

plans to pay me out tonight. He will fail--trust me for that--but I

shall be more free to make him see the error of his ways if I can feel

sure the harm meant for me can't by mischance be visited upon you

instead."

"Ah, no, my friend! you don't seriously think I will consent . . ."

"You would not hesitate if I could only make it clear how much better my

chances would be."

"I'm afraid it's a hopeless task, but"--she made her smile

provoking--"suppose you try."

"Conceive, then"--Lanyard spoke deliberately in an endeavour to put the

business in a nutshell--"that after leaving you night before last I was

thrown in with one who chose to declare war on me for his own ends--"

"The Sultan of Loot!"

"Why try to keep anything from you?"

"You forget, I too had a premonition concerning that creature. Who is

he?"

"I can more easily tell you what he is. He styles himself Morphew and

the Tenderloin calls him King of the Bootleggers--justly, one is told.

In addition, he nurses a penchant for having a finger in every lawless

pie. To discipline me, that night, he caused the loot of a burglary to

be hidden in my pockets while I lay in a stupor, drugged by his

direction, then saw to it that I was suspected of having committed the

theft."

"Oh, no!" the woman interrupted involuntarily, revolted by the bare

suggestion of such enormity.

"Or else--I must believe I stole the jewels myself, in instinctive

reversion to old ways, drink having abolished the inhibitions of the

new."

"Never!"

"I do not know," Lanyard confessed with a wry face. "There are

circumstances which make me uneasy . . . I do not know!"

"How can you even suggest such a thing?"

"Let me tell you . . . Last night I visited--or revisited!--the house

from which the jewels had been stolen, meaning secretly to restore them.

This I managed. I was even more fortunate in being able to bring about

the arrest of one of Morphew's lot as the burglar of fact--which the

fellow may well have been. Finally, to confuse pursuit, I quitted the

house by the way the burglar had taken the night before--let myself out

of a window to the roof of an extension, dropped down to a backyard,

scaled a board fence, and stole through an excavation for a new building

to the street beyond. Eve . . ."

Lanyard faltered and worked his hands together, his features wrung,

haunted eyes reflecting the enigma of the embers which held their stare.

And with a gesture of quick sympathy, the woman sat forward to screen

him. But these others seemed to be completely preoccupied with their own

hilarious concerns; and the racket of congenial voices they raised must

have prevented their overhearing anything of Lanyard's confession when

at length he resumed.

"Up to that time," he said slowly, "I had hardly questioned the

assumption that Morphew deliberately had schemed to victimize me . . .

But then, while I was creeping away from that house, quite literally

like a thief in the night--once upon the roof, again when I stood in the

kitchen-yard, looking back at the blank rear windows, and yet again

while stumbling through that foundation pit beyond the fence--at every

stage of that journey I knew a feeling as of doing something I had done

before, repeating the identical moves I had made at another time, upon

an occasion strangely forgotten . . ."

"Well?" the woman in cool amusement asked.

"Well!"--his smile sketched a wistful expression of bewilderment--"I do

not know, perhaps it was true, perhaps . . ."

Careless whether they were observed, the woman leaned forward and

lightly covered one of his hands with her own. "Poor dear!" she cried,

with a thrill of fond laughter--"to let himself be so tormented by a

sensation such as everybody has at times."

"Everybody?" he iterated in a stare.

"It happens to us all--has it never happened to you before?--a

phenomenon so common the psychologists have a special name for it. What

_do_ they call it? reflex memory? Something of the sort, I forget . . .

One only needs a new scene and a mood especially susceptible to

impressions of strangeness or beauty--and all at once one feels quite

sure one has visited that very spot in some previous existence.

Precisely that happened to you, last night, my Michael, in your

super-excited state of mind, worried by ignorance of the truth about the

stolen property in your possession. . . . Take my word for it."

"You believe that?" he insisted--"truly?"

"Truly, my dear."

"You don't think I could possibly--?"

"Never--I know you better than you do yourself." Eve gave his hand a

comforting pressure, and sat back. "If you let anything so absurd fret

you another instant I shall be cross with you."

"You make me happy," Lanyard said. "It costs me something to tell

you . . ."

"I know!"

[Illustration: A DIABOLICAL SHADOW HERALDS THE APPROACH OF MORPHEW, KING

OF LOOT.]

"I don't deserve such faith."

"But I don't consider you a good judge of your own worth, dear. And now

that I understand the situation--you've made a fool and an enemy of this

man Morphew, and he's conspiring to be revenged--tell me, what is it you

have to propose about returning to Town?"

"I want you to let me find my way back alone. I have consulted road-maps

and time-tables posted in the office here. There's a train for New York

from the nearest station"--Lanyard glanced at the watch on his

wrist--"in about half an hour. . . . Which reminds me, your driver is

taking his time."

"Patience. He's always tinkering with the motor--he'll be ready any

minute. You were saying--?"

"I want you to let me drop you at the railroad and take the train back

to Town, with your chauffeur for protection, while I go on in the car."

Undisguised derision honoured this proposal. "But why should I, when it

is you, not I, the Sultan of Loot is after? If the train can be

considered safe, surely you're the one--"

"You forget, Morphew's people will aim at your motor-car, believing me

to be in it whether I am or not. If I should succeed in leaving it

unobserved, they would still pursue the car. You can't ask me to expose

you to a danger from which I turn tail."

"Then why shouldn't we both take the train?"

"It is what you American call an accomodation--stops at every station.

If we should abandon your car to be found near the railroad, it would be

too simple to have the train anticipated by telephone, boarded

somewhere between here and New York, and the two of us kept so closely

watched we would have no chance . . ."

The woman's head described a sign of flat rejection----Lanyard's rueful

recognition of an outcome foreseen.

"Impossible, my friend. I couldn't dream of leaving you to shift for

yourself."

"But how else--?"

"I have a saner scheme. Why not stop here for the night? The inn must

have accomodations. . . . You see!" Eve cried in laughing triumph--"you

are trying to get rid of me when the truth is, you need me. Two heads

are better than one . . . But why shake yours so dourly?"

"I am afraid of your plan for more reasons than one. Daylight for our

return will hardly be the same thing as accident insurance. If you give

me my choice, I like darkness better."

"And your other reasons--?"

"If I stop here overnight, where I am beyond much doubt under

surveillance even now, I remain placed and give Morphew just so much

more time to close his net round me. And nothing I know of makes this

inn a sanctuary or guarantees the bona fides of the management."

"You don't mean to say you think the people who run this place--!"

"I have been taught to trust nobody at times like this. More than that,

everybody knows most of these resorts in and about New York that openly

flout the Prohibition Amendment are actively in league with if not

actually owned by bootlegging interests. I will breathe more

comfortably, I promise you, when--and if--we are permitted to go our way

unhindered."

"Oh, but surely you exaggerate!"

"Possibly; it's not always a bad fault, by no means so bad as

under-exaggeration when one's neck is concerned. However, it can't be

long now before we know."

Seeing their waiter approach, Lanyard got up and took Eve's wrap from

the back of her chair. But the natural expectation of word that the

brougham was at the door suffered a blight even before the man spoke, by

reason of the odd look with which he saluted Lanyard.

"Excuse me, Mr. Martin," he said with--or instinct was at fault--a tinge

of mockery in his supple habit--"the manager's compliments, and he'd be

much obliged if you'd step into the office a minute, he'd like to have a

word with you."

"Indeed? What does the good man want?"

"If it's all the same to you, sir, it'd be better if you'd kindly talk

with the boss."

"About what?"

"Well, sir," the waiter stammered--"I don't want to alarm the

lady--something's happened."