XVIII

Confident that their interview just ended had converted an active

antagonist, the most dangerous he knew because the most intelligent and

dispassionately devoted to his duty, into at worst a passive opponent

disposed to let the benefit be his of any legitimate doubt and to adopt

a policy of hands-off in as far as Lanyard's still nebulous plans might

affect a common enemy; confident as well that the change in his

appearance insured against casual identification by any other adversary,

public or private: Lanyard on leaving Crane none the less went his way

as warily as one who walked in living dread of being ambushed at every

corner.

From the door of the building in which Crane lodged to the maw of an

underground railway station was only a step, but a step which Lanyard

took with all the furtive haste of a ghost belated at the hour of

cockcrow. The last coin that lined his pockets passed him through a

clattering turnstile to a bare platform from which, while waiting for

one of the occasional trains of the post-midnight schedule, he watched

both entrances with eyes quick in the cast shadow of a ragged hat-brim.

But not another soul followed into the station, he was able to board a

northbound train unvexed by any hint of espionage; though he reckoned

this poor compensation for a sense of quandary only aggravated by

advices which, dependable though he must hold them, coming as they had

from Crane, had paradoxically proved more benighting than otherwise with

the new light they shed upon his dark perplexities.

He knew no amazement in the discovery that Liane had lightly trifled

with the truth in her version of his seven months of lost existence; but

her capricious warping of certain facts and suppression of others only

added one more mystery to that company whose faces of empty imbecility

now mocked every waking effort to read their meaning and, when Lanyard

slept, like nightmares drifted through his dreams. Not that he found it

hard to understand that she had woven her tissue of deception hoping

thereby to fix a lien upon his gratitude. Either he had been her lover

for a time, as she asserted, and she was bent on holding him by hook or

crook, or he had not and she thought to win him by making him believe

himself bound to her in honour; wherefore the inventions of the

purloined necklace and the forced flight from New York that had been

infeasible without her friendly offices, as well as of the sanctuary and

aid that Liane claimed to have given Lanyard when he was hard pressed in

his flagrant course as the Lone Wolf redivivus.

In this last allegation there might be, no doubt there was, some

half-truth latent: Lanyard was not yet prepared to deny that the Lone

Wolf had lately prowled again in his own flesh if in his mental

dissociation; but the conflict of testimony that proved the distortion

to Liane's purposes of half the truth at least made it competent to him

to question whether her story had had any foundation in the truth

whatever. Certain it was--Crane's word for this--that Lanyard's long

absence from the city had failed to put a period to that sequence of

thievish feats which New York credited to the Lone Wolf's cunning. And,

as Lanyard had insisted, there was nothing to show that the author of

these more recent exploits had not been the author likewise of the

series which had predated his flight. Nothing forbade his hugging that

contention to his heart and getting what comfort he could of it.

As a matter of fact, he got precious little: nothing seemed of any real

moment, just then, measured by the riddle of Eve's return to France as

the report of the Hotel Walpole posed it; a statement which

circumstantially refuted Liane's account of that event, which happened

unhappily to be the only explanation Lanyard could accept without

reluctance. By the implications inherent in Liane's version, the lovers

had parted prior to the beginning of that bad new chapter in the history

of the Lone Wolf, had parted in tenderness and sadly, because of

Lanyard's set refusal to let Eve link her life with that of a reclaimed

criminal. And with all his heart Lanyard wanted to believe it had been

so. . . . But Crane asserted that the Lone Wolf had been active in New

York before Christmas, and that Liane had been deported during the month

of February, while the Hotel Walpole fixed the date of Eve's departure

on the ninth of March! Liane, then, could have had no personal

acquaintance with the reasons which had impelled Eve to leave America.

But could they have been anything else than heartbreak resulting from

failure to reanimate the spirit of the man she loved in the being of the

Lone Wolf?

Would he ever know? Never, he told himself, from the lips of Eve.

Inconceivable that she should ever again consent to see him, believing

what she must believe, or even to read his letters--assuming that he

could find the effrontery so to importune her. Nothing short of full

exoneration could revive her faith in him; and even given that, Lanyard

would hardly find it in his heart to blame her did she shrink from

meeting him, being seen with him, letting her name be coupled in the

public mouth with the name of one who had been singled out by the

spotlight of a notoriety so shameful.

No: he must count Eve lost to him for all time and soothe that wound, if

he could, with the assurance that it was better so.

But before he could become reconciled to that renunciation he must

possess the truth in his own knowledge, the truth whole and unvarnished.

So now he was striking directly at the heart of darkness in which, he

was satisfied, the truth lay perdu.

Ten minutes from Crane's door he came up for air from the Plaza station

of the Subway, slipped into Central Park like a snake into a thicket,

and was lost to human sight for more than half an hour thereafter. Then

the lights of Central Park West picked him up at Seventy-seventh street;

and striking diagonally across the grounds of the Museum of Natural

History he threaded quiet residential streets to Riverside Drive, upon

which he turned north, moving with the carefree slouch of the vagabond

he so picturesquely seemed to be. A policeman on patrol, nobody else,

gave him a second glance in passing, saw that he was sober, dismissed

him as a figure of no potential consequence for either good or ill.

The night, seasonably intemperate, might have been compounded according

to his own prescription, so excellently suited it was to his purpose.

Its heat had made the parks populous with refugees from sweltering

apartments; at this late hour they lingered still upon the walks, the

lawns and benches in sufficient numbers to render Lanyard's restless

presence equally inconspicuous with uncounted others. A tenuous haze

dimmed the lustre of the sluggish flood of ink that was the Hudson River

and turned distant lights into pulsing points of iridescence. The

driveway proper droned wearily with its steady if diminished flow of

motor traffic.

Morphew's town-house stood apart from less pretentious neighbors, a

four-square lump of unlovely masonry squatting, with a singular effect

of family likeness to its owner, in grounds more ample than even

opulence is wont to run to for its city pieds-à-terre. Open windows and

unboarded doors showed it had not been shut up for the Summer, though

Morphew were, as Crane had intimated, sojourning somewhere out of Town.

And the lack of illumination other than a soft night-light behind the

iron grille and plate-glass of its great front doors seemed to advertise

a household sensibly abed. The sharp eyes beneath the brim of that

disreputable hat had marked down half a dozen avenues of easy if

unconventional entrance before Lanyard, with his idlest air, turned off

from the main promenade that runs with the driveway and found a soft

spot on a lawn where a clump of shrubbery, standing between him and the

nearest street lamps, threw a shadow black as jet.

Here, in a lazy sprawl, he rested for upwards of an hour, covert

attention constant to the mansion across the Drive. In that time it gave

no evidence of wakeful occupation; but as break of dawn drew near the

population of the park dispersed and the tide of wheeled traffic became

an intermittent trickle, lessening the risk of observation that he must

chance when the time came to put his purpose into effect. In this last

he went ahead unhindered by any scruple, holding Morphew solely

answerable, as he did, for all the tribulations that had been visited

upon him since that long ago night of their first acquaintance. Eight

months of enforced submission to the wear and tear of Morphew's

malevolence had brought him to the pass in which tonight found him,

penniless, homeless, hungry, a hunted thing without a friend to turn to.

It devolved upon Morphew, consequently, to bow to the inexorable

workings of the law of compensation and stand to Lanyard now in the

place of friend, willy-nilly to furnish him food and drink, shelter and

change of raiment, set his mind at rest upon the matters that most

distressed it, and finally put money in his pockets. Morphew could

afford all that and never miss its cost to him out of the profits he

must have piled up as impresario for the Lone Wolf's farewell tour.

The irony of that conceit was pleasing: Lanyard wore a grim smile

beneath his beard as he addressed him to his burglarious business.

The point of attack he had settled on was a window with a balcony in the

second storey, on the south side of the house, the farthest removed from

the more exposed face which fronted on the Drive. The mouth of the

tradesmen's entrance, an alley closed by a gate of iron work, made it

possible to attempt the ascent in comparative darkness, and horizontal

channels between the huge blocks of hewn stone furnished helpful foot

and hand-holds. Only the rawest new beginner in the sodality of

second-storey workers could have made any difficulty about that climb:

Lanyard negotiated it with the ease of a lizard--two minutes after his

subtle shadow had faded from the cross-town street into the tradesmen's

entrance he had gained the level of the balcony and, plastered against

those cool cheeks of stone, was inching round the corner. At the end of

another minute he silently but rapidly wriggled in over the balcony rail

and dropped flat to its floor, there to wait without stir, for so long

that he might have been suddenly petrified by appreciation of his own

temerity, till senses tuned up to the utmost of their fine efficiency

assured him he had not been seen from the street or from any window

looking out upon it, and that the room beyond the window at his side was

as still as death; the circumstance that it was a French window with

both wings folded back into its recess rendering it not necessarily

idiotic to trust to his super-acute hearing.

On the inside of the recess hung open draperies of heavy stuff. Between

them no light showed. Lanyard surmised a living-room beyond, a study or

a dining-room: the bedchambers would be on the floor above. One quick

crouching stride passed him in between the hangings, another, in the

course of which he stood up, took him to the middle of the room, where

he stopped short, poised tensely upon the balls of his feet, like a

jungle creature scenting human flesh in the wind--galvanized by the

whiff of rich cigar smoke that told him he had walked into a trap.

Simultaneously the wings of the window banged to behind him, its latch

rattled, curtain-rings clashed upon a tube of brass, the bleached blue

oblong of the glass was blacked out, and he stood encompassed by night

absolute--only the ember at the end of a cigar blinked at him from a

little distance, glowing and fading by turns like an eye of basilisk

spite.

With escape by the way he had entered surely blocked, and standing on

unknown ground, without one clue to the location of any other exit, he

had no choice but to wait for light before adventuring another step. But

seconds dragged like minutes and still the darkness held unbroken: they

were playing with him, giving uncertainty time to sap his nerve. In

exasperation, but schooling his voice to a sulky key, he said: "Well!

you've got me. Make a light."

No one answered, no light was made . . .

In a grimmer tone he spoke again: "I'll give you a count of three in

which to make a light. If you don't, I'll drill a bullet through

whatever happens to be twelve inches below that cigar."

The eye of fire burned a more sardonic crimson; that was all.