A wilder spirit now ruled the night: the freshening wind blew with zest
more constant, with briefer and less frequent lulls, the trees it
worried fought back in bootless fury, with thrashing limbs and lows of
torment, a heavier wrack coursed the skies, the blinded stars found
fewer rifts through which to wash the world with their troubled and
misleading light. Lanyard, traversing an unknown terrain, with nothing
but impatient memories of Morphew's rough sketch-map to guide him, threw
caution to the very wind whose wanton spirit shouted down his noisy
flounderings, and shouldered headlong through hedges, coppices and
thickets, reckless whether or not he were heard or seen and followed.
His prayer, indeed, was not so much that he might give Morphew and his
crew the slip, as that chance might throw him into direct personal
collision with his enemy.
From that moment, when, after dinner, Morphew had first broached his
mind on this foray and Lanyard had taken the tacit implication that he
might refuse to play his part appointed only by dedicating himself to an
early and a wasted end, he had been determined to find some means--and
the fouler the fitter--of coercing Morphew into keeping him company step
by step and sharing whatever fate would be his in the outcome.
From the moment when his hand had closed upon the grip of the pistol
which he had talked Morphew into trusting him with, he had felt fondly
confident, not that he would escape with his life, but that Morphew
shouldn't.
Now to find his plan of campaign anticipated, and with a readiness and
thoroughness to warrant the belief that his most secret thoughts were
not safe from Morphew's acumen, infected Lanyard with a phase of
madness, with an actual mania: he was a man-killer in intention as he
blundered through the dark, he had fixed in mind a solitary thought, to
be in time to abort the proposed burglary by taking Morphew's life. The
penalty for that would be so little to pay for vindication of himself to
himself--to Eve: the tale would surely find its way to her, some day,
wherever she might be; some day she would learn how and why he had died,
would understand . . .
He found himself finally at check on the fringe of a black spinney,
peering across a hundred yards of lawn at a pale, columned façade that
loomed against the confused sky with a certain stateliness of line and
mass.
The dwelling seemed to be fast asleep. In the intervening open nothing
human moved: only the bystanding trees tossed their arms and lamented as
they looked on, like a grouped chorus morbidly curious.
If Morphew and his lot were about, they were keeping to good cover.
The Lone Wolf in his day would have rendered such discretion tribute of
slavish flattery, would have picked his way toward the house from
shadow to shadow, taking profit of the shelter afforded by every bush
and hole between him and his objective, like an Indian stalking his
kill: the Lanyard of that night struck straight away across the lawns at
the top of his speed. The worst that could reward such audacity would be
an attempt to overhaul or intercept him, in which event there would be
gun-play, Lanyard could promise that, a fusillade sure to give the
alarm: better the hazard of that than to lose precious minutes trying to
avoid being seen, thereby granting the thief in the house the time he
needed, if he knew his business, to consummate his purpose and escape.
For the thief was in the house already: Lanyard's first cast across the
lawns at the wing that held the library--with whose location Morphew's
ground plan of the dwelling had made him acquainted--had been repaid by
discovery of a lancing play of light in the dark beyond the windows, the
thin, broken and restless, blue-white blade of an electric torch in
hands either cynically indifferent to detection, or absurdly amateurish.
He would be in time--perhaps. If so, with none to spare. He pelted madly
toward the veranda, took its steps at a stride and, with calculated
intent to make all the noise he could and bring the household down about
his ears and that other's, battered a shoulder like a ram against the
joint in the middle of the nearest window.
It gave with an ease he hadn't discounted, its wings flew open with a
sounding crash; and tripping on the sill Lanyard tumbled in on all
fours, while the walls bellowed with the report of a pistol, and broken
glass showered about him, tinkling and clashing.
Instantly he reared up on his knees, as a man will when mortally hit,
flopped to one side, out of that too exposed position in front of the
window, and lay very still, his own pistol ready, his vision probing the
obscurity for some sign of stir.
The electric torch defeated that effort. It had been dropped with switch
set, at the instant of Lanyard's violent entrance, and now lay at some
distance in from the windows, its beam steadfast to the front of an
opened safe; manufacturing a wide patch of vivid colour that made the
encompassing mirk more dense, too dense for penetration by merely mortal
eyes. Lanyard, at least, could see nothing else; and though he
distinctly heard the pile of a rug whisper to a movement of sly feet, it
passed his perceptions to determine the quarter in which that rustle had
its rise. It ceased of a sudden, and he heard nothing more, other than
the swish and flap of the curtain bellying in from the shattered window.
The burglar hadn't left by way of any window, he was certain; therefore
was still in the room, waiting like Lanyard for some incautious sign to
guide his aim. But to play a waiting game with him would be intolerable,
and too apt, as well, to end in precisely that which Lanyard was bent on
preventing, the intrusion of some member of the household to draw the
marauder's fire. The raving of the wind in the trees made it impossible
to distinguish lesser sounds from beyond those four walls; but it was
hardly conceivable that the rending crash with which the window had
admitted Lanyard, the shot that had followed, and that loud rain of
splintered glass, should have failed to alarm every inmate of the house.
Lanyard conjured up to the eye of his mind the plot of the library he
had studied at Morphew's instance. According to it--as memory
served--the window he had broken through was the one nearest a wall in
which (close by Lanyard's head it ought to be) a double doorway opened
in from the main hall of the house, with a switch for the ceiling light
conveniently at hand.
Gathering himself together, Lanyard rose in a reckless bound and lunged
blindly toward the door, found it where he had thought it ought to be,
and began to grope for the switch.
His first fumblings were wide of their mark, but he persevered, heart in
mouth, expecting every moment to see the black backwards of the room
stabbed by a jet of crimson and orange flame--perhaps to be lucky enough
to hear the accompanying blast But the other held his fire, no doubt
shrewdly guessing what Lanyard was up to and reckoning it the part of
wisdom to wait for the light to make his aim sure; the advantage would
be all to him when it came, for he would know approximately where to
look for Lanyard, whereas the latter had no clue whatsoever to the
whereabouts of his adversary.
His fingers at length hit on the switch, a great central chandelier
sprayed the room with radiance.
Lanyard occupied it alone, at least seemed to: the library was
over-furnished with huge, old-fashioned pieces, any one of which might
easily have been serving the safe-breaker as a temporary screen, from
behind any one of which Lanyard had to look for his coup-de-grâce to
come at any instant. . . . Or, he dared not be unmindful, that might
come through one of the windows. Doubt of his temper could now no longer
exist in Morphew's intelligence. The one slender chance Lanyard had of
eluding a bullet from either the outlaw in the room or the assassins
outside lay in keeping constantly on the move.
He quartered the library with swift strides, bent almost double,
zig-zagging from the shelter of one article of furniture to that of the
next, and finding the other man nowhere. In this manner he circled a
massive table of old oak that occupied the middle of the floor and was
passing the violated safe when the toe of one boot struck something that
incontinently, in effect, came to life, and slithered away across the
hardwood like a serpent of light.
Involuntarily Lanyard pulled up, stooped lower, and retrieved the thing:
a diamond necklace of all but incalculable worth.
His breath stuck in his throat, his heart stood still, his consciousness
was in an instant sponged clear of every other thought than this: he
knew that necklace, knew it almost as well as he knew the palm of his
hand, and knew it had no business being where he found it, three
thousand miles and more from the home of its owner in the south of
France.
Like a man in hypnosis measuring his actions in obedience to the will of
another, without taking his eyes from the necklace Lanyard stood up, put
his pistol down upon the table, and used both hands to straighten out
the string of blue-white stones and held them to the light.
Veritably Eve's . . .
Unaware of any noise of warning, again like the subject of a hypnotist,
he slowly turned his head, and saw Eve standing in the doorway, a vision
of loveliness unflawed by any fault, supremely gracious of line and warm
of colour in that austere frame, beauty stricken by sorrow posed against
a tall black panel.
One hand held the door-knob, the other at her bosom clutched together
folds of a gossamer robe she had thrown over her shoulders on getting
out of bed. Her lips, barely parted, were silent, her unswerving look
was dark with amazement and reproach.
Twenty seconds tolled by thunders wore out of Lanyard's ken: he
remained, like Eve, transfixed, his eyes mirroring in some small part
his mind's stark disarray . . . reading in hers sick contempt to see him
standing there, caught red-handed at the Lone Wolf's base business, the
man she had given all her trust and love to surprised in the act of
thieving the jewels of the woman he had professed to adore . . .
And then wonderfully she moved, advanced a pace or two out of the
doorway, and lifted to him hands of charity and suppliance, her
countenance mild and kind for him, that voice of sweetness incomparable
tenderly fluting one word of entreaty, his name:
"Michael!"
Existing then only in her love and in the love he bore her, forgetting
all else in life, Lanyard came to himself in trembling, and stumbled
toward her hands . . .
It was the swift change of her expression that halted him, the startled
dread that afflicted her as something at his back drew her attention.
Galvanized by that hint of peril to his beloved, Lanyard whirled on a
heel. But the cry of angry challenge that rose to his lips was audible
only as a broken rattle, he was instantaneously stricken to futility to
find himself confronted by Michael Lanyard his living apparition.
It was like a trick of delirium, a phantom parody of Lanyard
materialized from behind a huge wing-chair beyond the far end of the
table: his counterfeit in every particular of dress and feature, his
facsimile grotesquely forged.
One look recognized the likeness and its fraudulence; that is to say,
assured Lanyard that he wasn't confronting a mirror. A gleam of grim joy
shone on his features. He covered in a leap half the distance between
them, saw a pistol in the grasp of the impostor swing level with his
head, ducked before it spat. His own weapon was out of reach, but the
string of diamonds in his hand licked out from it like a whiplash of
white flame, and fell squarely across the other's eyes. A second shot
went wild as the man's head jerked back from the stinging impact of the
stones. And then Lanyard was at his throat . . .
The sheer fury of his onslaught bore both back to the wing-chair and
over its legs as it toppled and fell on its side. The pinned wrist of
the hand that held the pistol was twisted with such cunning that the
fingers relaxed, the weapon described a flashing arc through the air,
dropped to the polished floor, and slid a dozen feet away from the
combatants. Even more to the purpose, when that writhing tangle of
bodies resolved itself, Lanyard was on top. But the under dog rallied
with the fury of one fighting for his very life, and rained brutal blows
on Lanyard's face. Indifferent to these, Lanyard dug both thumbs into
the fellow's throat and slowly but savagely choked him into
semi-strangulation.
He lay still at length, gagging and wheezing, tongue protruding, eyes
starting from their sockets. And Lanyard released his pressure on the
windpipe only to twine vindictive fingers into the hair of his victim
and tug for glory and the Saints--till a wig and false forehead en bloc
came away in his grasp.
After that it was the work of half a minute to snatch a handkerchief
from a breast-pocket, scrub off most of that mask of grease-paint, and
bring to light glimpses of the ruined beauty of the dancing yegg.
Eve's shadow fell athwart the two, and Lanyard, for all the labouring of
his lungs, had an irrepressible chuckle as he looked up into her
bewildered face.
"Permit me to introduce the Lone Wolf's last incarnation!" he cried, and
jumped up, brandishing the scalp he had taken--"known to the police and
social circles of the cabarets as Henry Mallison--Mally for short!"