"Under what circumstances?"
"Let me go back to the beginning. . . . The night after that rencontre
of yours with Mallison, Morphew dined me at the Abbaye, another of his
establishments where the maître-d'hôtel happened to be a protégé of
mine from Paris of pre-War days--but Morphew knew nothing about that. He
had just finished telling how you had humiliated him before Folly, and
was making my blood curdle with threats to be revenged--O but you were
wrong to make an enemy of that one, Michael!--when he was called to the
telephone. He came back grinning hideously, and said his agents reported
having traced you and Madame de Montalais to the Inn of the Green Woods.
You would never, Morphew boasted, return to New York the same man. I
tried to wheedle him into disclosing his mind, but he was too wary, I
learned nothing; and the best I could manage was to bribe my
maître-d'hôtel, as soon as Morphew's back was turned again, to try to
get a warning through to you by telephone. Then I made believe to be
indisposed, got rid of Morphew, and engaged an automobile I had used
before. . . . Never, my friend, shall I forget that ride! not even that
night of our flight to Cherbourg from Paris was its equal for
wildness . . . if you remember . . ."
A hand found Lanyard's in the mirk and clasped it tightly. He suffered
it, replying simply: "I remember."
"Let me tell you, Michael, when we swung wide to clear your automobile
by the roadside, and that other in which Morphew's people were pursuing
you came hurtling toward us like a juggernaut gone mad, I did not hope
to live another minute. As it turned out, my hired car came through with
a crumpled fender for all damage. It was the other cannoned off and
turned turtle in the ditch. The men in it escaped somehow with their
lives, though they crawled back to the road too badly shaken to be
dangerous. I left them trying to fit a tyre from their wrecked car to
yours, and took you and Madame de Montalais back to New York with me.
She had wrenched an ankle falling into the ditch when you threw her off
the road, and was unable to walk; otherwise she had come to no harm. But
you--it seemed a miracle you lived . . .
"You had your right arm and two ribs broken, and a great gash in your
head--you'll find the scar under your hair. The surgeons said it meant
concussion of the brain, you might survive but never could be your
mental self again. It was two months before you were able to talk
connectedly, more than a few words at a time. I took you to my apartment
from the hospital, and myself nursed you through your convalescence. As
it progressed, one saw that mentally as well as bodily your recovery
would be complete--it was your spirit had been wounded beyond repair.
All your old vivacity was gone, Michael, you never laughed; you seemed
fond of having me near you, but fonder still of being solitary, sitting
all alone with your black thoughts, brooding . . .
"Madame de Montalais came to see you daily. She, too, was quick to
observe the change. I never knew what passed between you, naturally; but
that you were neither of you happy it was easy to perceive. One day she
called when I was out; I met her, leaving, as I returned--she had been
weeping. She never called again. Not long after, her name appeared in
the newspapers as one of the notables sailing on the Paris for
France . . ."
The voice in the darkness ran out, Lanyard's hand was freed, a long
pause was filled with the throbbing of the engines, the hiss and suck of
water down the side, the mellow calling of the ship's bell.
In dull abstraction Lanyard counted its strokes: seven bells, half past
seven o'clock.
The port, a square of ultramarine let into a blank black wall, framed a
nocturne, silken swells with dusky bosoms stung by starlight, on the
nearest point of land a great red constant star following the progress
of the steamer with unfriendly stare, somewhat astern another of
sardonic green, far ahead, low upon the horizon, a third, more volatile,
winking white and white. . . . A thought like flotsam drifted with the
dark tide of despond: A long swim to either light, even for a man in his
prime . . .
Lanyard heard flat metallic tones pronounce: "Continue, if you
please"--and realized that he had heard himself speaking.
"You never told me what had happened, but I was soon able to guess. A
day or so later--I remember, it was the first day when you were
permitted to walk about a bit--you opened your heart to me in a way I
hadn't looked for, and made mine very sad for you. You told me how your
memory of that affair at Folly's had become clear and positive, somehow,
in sequence to your accident, and had satisfied you there could be no
profit for any man in contending against his nature, the arbiter of his
fate. Nature, you said, had formed you a thief and an enemy of
society--you had grown resigned to give over struggling to be other than
as you had been made. I told you, no matter what you might do, I would
always be your friend--more, if you would. You were sweet to me that
night, Michael, without committing yourself to definite promises; but
the next day you disappeared. I was out for the afternoon, and neither
of the maids saw you leave. You took nothing with you but the clothing
you wore. I neither saw nor heard from you for many weeks. But New York
did . . ."
Lanyard all at once swung round, caught the seated woman roughly by her
shoulders, by main strength lifted her to her feet, and with hard eyes
searched the face revealed by the dull blue glimmer seeping in through
the port.
"Is this the truth you are telling me, Liane?"
Pliant and passive in his hands, she answered: "The whole truth,
Michael."
"You swear it?"
"By the love I bear you."
With a mutter of apology he released her, and silently, like a figure of
fair marble sinking into a pool of ink, the pale shade of her subsided
through the shadows, lost definition, and rested as before.
"I am listening . . ."
"It didn't take the newspapers long to guess the Lone Wolf was at work
again. In quick succession, Michael, you consummated a series of
exploits that beggared the most lurid chapters of your old Parisian
days."
"How can you say it was I?"
"You confessed to me yourself--"
"Be careful, Liane!"
"I tell you only the truth as I had it from your own lips. If you are
loath to hear . . ."
"Forgive me."
"You came to me in my apartment without warning one midnight; at your
wits' ends, police snapping at your heels, you turned to me! That made
me happy, Michael. . . . But it was no easy task to hide you, when
rewards of more than fifty thousand dollars were being advertised for
your arrest, and every Boy Scout in the land was carrying a copy of your
photograph--"
"But I have never been photographed in my life except for passport
purposes during the War; and my appearance today is not as it was then,
I no longer wear a beard--"
"You nevertheless had recently been photographed by flashlight, in the
act of opening a safe in the Stuyvesant Ashe home. Some ingenious member
of the household, in anticipation of the Lone Wolf's visit, had rigged
up a camera commanding the safe and a flashlight to be set off by
electric current when the door was tampered with. You were caught at
close range, facing the camera as you knelt with your ear to the safe
door, listening to its mechanism. The likeness was exact and
unmistakable; and all the papers reproduced it to further the hue and
cry."
"You tell me that happened--and ask me to believe the Lone Wolf left
that house without wrecking the camera!"
"To the contrary you destroyed a camera utterly; but there were two, the
ingenuity of the inventor had been equal to that contingency--one
carefully concealed, the other where you might find it without too much
trouble."
Lanyard had an unpleasant laugh in his throat. "Decidedly he was right
who said a reformed crook could never come back! If I was the dupe of so
cheap a trick . . . But to resume: I appealed to you--to a woman!--to
stand between me and the police. . . . Ask them to believe that who once
hunted the Lone Wolf across Europe and back again--and failed to catch
him! . . . Well and good! what then?"
"The chase struck a false scent and passed us by; but from that time on
you made your home with me. It was safe, that had been proved; and I was
useful to you."
"How useful?"
"You had got together a collection of jewellery difficult to dispose of
without courting arrest; also, you would have found it impracticable to
take care of large sums of money such as this sale realized. I saw to
all that for you: through Morphew I found a way to market the jewels,
and in my own name I carried your funds in a separate account with my
bankers."
"And I still called myself the Lone Wolf!"
"I think you were learning to be less jealous of your loneliness,
Michael. You had learned--as most men do at some stage of life--that
there was one woman at least whose devotion would never fail you."
"I used to know the Lone Wolf well: a strange belief for him to hold!"
"But life had forged yet another bond between us . . ."
The vibrations of Liane's words died upon a suppliant silence. It grew
long while in her hearing the pulsing of the engines aped the tempo of a
funeral march. Lanyard made no move or sound. Vision tempered to the
gloom and made keen by hunger saw his face, its salient lines picked out
by gleams of deflected starlight, steadfast to the port, inscrutably
set.
If he would not speak she must . . .
"I loved you well, and love comes of loving . . . of being loved . . ."
"You wish me to understand," Lanyard bluntly translated, "I became your
lover."
"Yes."
"Yet you knew I loved Madame de Montalais--"
"You swore to me all that was finished."
"And you believed--?"
"I wanted to."
Another silence spun itself into minutes charged with emotion pent and
mute. The woman felt rather than saw the sign of a hand that bade her
resume. But her tongue stumbled, she was breathless with
misgivings . . .
"What more do you wish me to say, Michael?"
"There is more to tell, surely, a hiatus to be filled in between that
time and this." But still she faltered till he added in enforced
patience: "I have yet to learn what brings us together aboard this
vessel."
"Your own vanity must answer for that, Michael. . . . You had been
several weeks inactive, the newspaper sensation had begun to blow over,
we were planning to return to Paris--though you balked at becoming
indebted to Morphew for the forged passports he offered to secure. Then,
one day, the Chief of Police gave out an interview exalting himself at
your expense; and in that quaint, excitable temper, which you had nursed
ever since the motor accident, exasperated beyond reason, you vowed to
expose the man's incompetence, and did--breaking into his home and
making off with a necklace of diamonds which he had just presented to
his wife. But somehow you must have blundered, or your luck had turned:
you hardly escaped being caught, and left your path of flight so plainly
marked it led the police to my very door. We had to fly New York between
two suns, with no choice but to seek refuge in some country that did not
require passports. This steamer was the first that sailed for South
America; we secured passage, came aboard separately, and pretended to be
strangers till that officious doctor insisted on presenting you as my
fellow-countryman."
"And now"--Lanyard demanded of himself more than of the woman--"what?"
"If you would only consent to listen to me . . ."
"By what you tell me, Liane, the experience would be anything but a
novel one for you."
"Morphew remains my good friend--"
"Permit me to wish you joy of him."
"And is willing for my sake to be yours."
"Unfortunately, I have the prejudice to be loved for my own blue eyes or
not at all."
"I am not suspected, it would be a simple matter for me to send a
wireless, in a code which Morphew gave me, to his factors at Nassau.
They might easily manage some mishap for the men who wait there for you;
or failing that, arrange an escape for you subsequent to your arrest--"
"Make your mind at ease on that account, Liane: I don't mean to be
arrested."
"So much the better. Morphew maintains a secret base on one of the
outlying cays of the Bahamas, where his boats rendezvous with those that
fetch the liquor from overseas. With the aid of his factors, it should
be an easy matter to smuggle you out to that base and on board some
British vessel homeward bound."
"Many thanks! but I shall earn my salvation without the aid of Morphew's
lot, or never. Moreover, I have no wish to see England again till I am
able to go there openly and disembark in the sunlight, wearing my own
face and name--Michael Lanyard."
"But that can never be!"
"In that event, I must end my days in America."
"But are you truly mad enough to imagine there could be any way--?"
"There is but one course possible for me: I must find my way back to New
York--under my own power, as the saying runs--and make reparation for
the evil I have done--"
"Nothing of that was done by you in your right mind, Michael."
"Pardon: but it seems a nice question, which mind of mine, today's or
yesterday's, is 'right'. Neither do I think Society will be disposed to
split hairs concerning my liability for acts committed whilst my
intelligence was--constructively, at least--under a cloud. Nor, for that
matter, am I: if I may not clear the name of Michael Lanyard or wipe out
the score against him, I have little use--no, none--for the liberty of
André Duchemin."
In uncontrollable disquietude, the woman rose. "What do you propose,
then?"
"I have made no plan."
"If you won't have Morphew's help--"
"My dear Liane: that 'if' of yours is downright, voluptuous redundancy."
"But we are due at Nassau at dawn, the police will board us with the
pilot boat--!"
"Eight bells just sounded; it should be daybreak by four o'clock, at
this season. In other words, I command eight hours of darkness. And the
Lone Wolf that lives on in Michael Lanyard, let me tell you, is hardly
the half-witted cur you have sketched for me, who cowered behind a
woman's skirts in terror of American police."
Discovering Liane's arms about him, her face strained up to him, Lanyard
caught himself up sharply, shrugged, and wagged a long-suffering head:
"My dear Liane!"