There was no light behind him, and the gloom and intervening strips of
metal rendered his figure indistinct. Lanyard's high-keyed perceptions
had none the less been instant to remark that slight movement and the
accompanying change in the texture of the darkness barred by the gate.
Following a little wait, it swung slowly out, perhaps eighteen inches,
the man advancing with it and again halting to peer up and down the
street. Then quickly, as if alarmed, he withdrew, shut the gate, and
disappeared, closing the service-door behind him.
Listening intently, Lanyard heard no click of latch, such as should
have been audible in that dead hour of hush. Evidently the fellow had
neglected to make fast the gate. Possibly he had been similarly remiss
about fastening the door. But what was he up to? Why this furtive
appearance, why the retreat so abruptly executed?
By way of answer came the soft drone of a high-powered motor; then the
car itself rolled into view, a stately limousine coming from the
direction of the avenue de Friedland. Before the corner house it
stopped. A lackey alighted with an umbrella and ran to hold the door;
but Liane Delorme would not wait for him. The car had not stopped when
she threw the door open; on the instant when its wheels ceased to turn
she jumped down and ran toward the house, heedless of the rain.
At the same time one side of the great front doors swung inward, and a
footman ran out to open the gates. The lackey with the umbrella, though
he moved briskly, failed to catch up with Liane before she sped up the
steps. So he closed the umbrella and trotted back to his place beside
the chauffeur. The footman shut gates and door as the limousine moved
away: it had not been sixty seconds at rest. In fifteen more street and
house were both as they had been, save that a light now shone through
the plate glass of the latter's great doors. And that was soon
extinguished.
Conceiving that the man who had appeared at the service entrance was
the same who had admitted Liane, Lanyard told himself he understood:
impatient for his bed, the fellow had gone to the service gate to spy
out for signs of madame's return. Now if only it were true that he had
failed to close it securely----!
It proved so. The gate gave readily to Lanyard's pull. The knob of the
small door turned silently. He stepped across the threshold, and shut
himself into an unlighted hall, thoughtfully apeing the negligence of
the servant and leaving the door barely on the latch by way of
provision against a forced retreat.
So far, good. He felt for his pocket torch, then sharply fell back into
the nearest corner and made himself as inconspicuous as might be.
Footsteps were sounding on the other side of an unseen wall. He waited,
breathless, stirless.
A latch rattled, and at about three yards' distance a narrow door
opened, marked by a widening glow of light. A liveried footman--beyond
a doubt he who admitted the mistress of the house--entered, carrying an
electric candle, yawned with a superstitious hand before his mouth and,
looking to neither right nor left, turned away from Lanyard and trudged
wearily back to the household offices. At the far end of the long
hallway a door closed behind him--and Lanyard moved swiftly.
The door which had let the footman into the hall admitted to a spacious
foyer which set apart the entrance and--as the play of the electric
torch disclosed--a deep and richly furnished dining-room. To one side a
broad flight of stairs ascended: Lanyard went up with the activity of a
cat, making no more noise.
The second floor proved to be devoted mainly to a drawing-room, a
lounge, and a library, all furnished in a weird, inchoate sort of
magnificence, with money rather than with taste, if one might judge
fairly by the fitful and guarded beam of the torch. The taste may have
been less questionable than Lanyard thought; but the evidences of
luxurious tendencies and wealth recklessly wasted in their
gratification were irrefutable.
Lights were burning on the floor above, and a rumour of feminine voices
drifted down, interrupted by an occasional sibilant rustle of silk, or
a brief patter of high-heeled feet: noises which bore out the
conjecture that madame's maid was undressing and putting her to bed; a
ceremony apt to consume a considerable time with a woman of Liane's age
and disposition, passionately bent on preserving to the grave a
semblance of freshness in her charms. Lanyard reckoned on anything from
fifteen minutes to an hour before her couching would be accomplished
and the maid out of the way. Ten minutes more, and Liane ought to be
asleep. If it turned out otherwise--well, one would have to deal with
her awake. No need to be gravely concerned about that: to envisage the
contingency was to be prepared against it.
Believing he must possess his soul in patience for an indeterminable
wait, he was casting about for a place to secrete himself, when a
change in the tenor of the talk between mistress and maid was conveyed
by a sudden lift of half an octave in the latter's voice, sounding a
sharp note of protest, to be answered by Liane in accent of overbearing
anger.
One simply could not rest without knowing what that meant: Lanyard
mounted the second flight of stairs as swiftly, surely, and soundlessly
as he had the first. But just below a landing, where the staircase had
an angle, he paused, crouching low, flat to the steps, his head lifted
just enough to permit him to see, above the edge of the topmost, a
section of glowing, rose-pink wall--it would be rose-pink!
He could see nothing more; and Liane had already silenced the maid, or
rather reduced her to responses feebly submissive, and, consonant with
the nature of her kind, was rubbing it in.
"And why should you not go with me to that America if I wish it?"
Lanyard heard her say. "Is it likely I would leave you behind to spread
scandal concerning me with that gabbling tongue in your head of an
overgrown cabbage? It is some lover, then, who has inspired this folly
in you? Tell him from me, if you please, the day you leave my service
without my consent, it will be a sorry sweetheart that comes to him."
"It is well, madame. I say no more. I will go."
"I believe it well--you will go! You were mad ever to dream otherwise.
Fetch my jewel-case--the large one, of steel, with the American lock."
"Madame takes all her jewels, then?" the maid enquired, moving about
the room.
"But naturally. What do you think? That I leave them here for the
scullery-maids to give their maquereaux? I shall pack them tonight,
before I sleep."
("Damnation!"--from Lanyard, beneath his breath. More delay!)
"And we leave to-morrow, madame, at what time?"
"It matters not, so we are in Cherbourg by midnight. I may decide to
make the trip by automobile."
"And madame's packing?"
"You know well what to pack, better than I. Get my boxes up the first
thing in the morning and use your own judgment. If there are questions
to be asked, save them until I wake up. I shall sleep till noon."
"That is all, madame?"
"That is all. You may go."
"Good-night, madame."
"Good-night, Marthe."
The stairway was no place to stop. Lanyard slipped like a shadow to the
floor below, and took shelter behind a jog in the wall of the grand
salon where, standing in deep darkness, he commanded a view of the
hall.
The maid came down, carrying an electric candle like the footman's. Its
rays illumined from below one of those faces of crude comeliness common
to her class, the face of an animal not unintelligent but first and
last an animal. With a hand on the lower newel-post she hesitated,
looking up toward the room of her mistress, as if lost in thought.
Poised thus, her lifted face partly turned away from Lanyard, its
half-seen expression was hopelessly ambiguous. But some secret thought
amused the woman, a shadow deepened in the visible corner of her
full-lipped mouth. One fancied something sardonic in that covert smile.
She went on down. A latch on the ground floor clicked as the door to
the service hallway was gently closed. Lanyard came out of hiding with
a fresh enterprise abrew.
One must kill time somehow, Liane would be at least another half an
hour busy with her jewellery, and the thought presented itself that the
library, immediately beneath her room, should be worthy an
investigation. In such establishments it is a tradition that the
household safe shall be located somewhere in the library; and such
strong-boxes are apt to be naïve contrivances. Lanyard did not hope to
find the Montalais jewels stored away in such a place, Liane would
surely take better care of them than that; assuming they were in her
possession they would be under her hand, if not confused with her own
treasures; still it could do no harm to make sure.
Confident of being warned at need by his hearing, which was normally
supersensitive and, when he was engaged as now, keyed to preterhuman
acuteness, he went coolly about the business, and at his first step
found a portable reading-lamp on a long cord and coolly switched on its
hooded light.
The library was furnished with bulky old Italian pieces of carved oak,
not especially well selected, but suitable enough with one exception, a
ponderous buffet, an exquisite bit of workmanship both in design and in
detail but completely out of place in a room of that character. At
least nine feet in length, it stood out four from the wall. Three heavy
doors guarded by modern locks gave access to the body beneath its tier
of drawers. But--this drew a frowning stare--there was a key in the
lock of the middle door.
"There's such a thing as too much luck," Lanyard communed. "First the
service gate and door, and now this, ready to my hand----!"
He swung sharply round and searched every shadow in the room with the
glare of the portable lamp; but that was work of supererogation: he had
already made sure he was alone on that floor.
Placing the lamp on the floor and adjusting its hood so that it
focussed squarely upon the middle section of the buffet, he turned the
key and discovered, behind the door, a small safe.
The run of luck did not hold in respect to this; there was no key; and
the combination dial was smug with ill-grounded confidence in its own
inviolable integrity. Still (Lanyard told it) it could hardly be
expected to know, it had yet to be dealt with by the shade of the Lone
Wolf.
Amused by the conceit, Lanyard laid hold of the knob with steady,
delicate fingertips that had not yet, in spite of years of honourable
idleness, forgotten their cunning. Then he flattened an ear to the cold
face of the safe. To his informed manipulation the dial whirled,
paused, reversed, turned all but imperceptibly, while the hidden
mechanism clicked, ground and thudded softly, speaking a living
language to his hearing. In three minutes he sat back on his heels,
grasped the T-handle, turned it, had the satisfaction of hearing the
bolts slide back into their sockets, and opened the door wide.
But the racked pigeonholes held nothing to interest him whose one aim
was the recovery of the Montalais jewels. The safe was, in fact,
dedicated simply to the storage of documents.
"Love letters!" Lanyard mused with a grimace of weariness. "And each
believed, no doubt, she cared too much for him to hold her power to
compromise him. Good Lord! what vanity is man's!"
Then the consideration offered that property of real value
might be hidden behind those sheaves of papers. He selected a
pigeonhole at hazard, and emptied it of several bundles of letters, all
neatly bound with tape or faded ribbon and clearly docketed. It held
nothing else whatever. But his eye was caught by a great name endorsed
on the face of one of the packages; and reading what else was written
there his brows rose high while his lips shaped a soundless whistle. If
an inference were fair, Liane had kept not only such documents as gave
her power over others. Lanyard wondered if it were possible he held in
his hand an instrument to bend the woman to his will....
Suddenly he put out a hand and switched off the light, a gesture quite
involuntary, simple reaction to the muffled thump of a chair overturned
on the floor above.
Sounds of scuffling followed, as if Liane were dancing to no music with
a heavy-footed partner. Then a groan....
His hands moved so rapidly and deftly that, although he seemed to rise
without a second's delay, the safe was closed and the combination
locked when he did so, the buffet door was shut and its key in his
pocket.
This time Lanyard ascended the stairs without heeding what noise he
made. Nevertheless his actions were never awkward or ill-timed; his
approach was not heard, his arrival on the upper landing was unnoticed.
In an instantaneous pause he looked into the rose-pink room and saw
Liane Delorme, in a negligee like a cobweb over a nightdress even more
sheer, kneeling and clawing at her throat, round which a heavy silk
handkerchief was slowly tightening; her face already purple with
strangulation, her eyes bulging from their sockets, her tongue
protruding between swollen lips.
A thick knee was planted between her shoulder-blades. The ends of the
handkerchief were in the sinewy hands of Albert Dupont.
XVII
CHEZ LIANE
Conceivably even a journeyman strangler may know the thrill of
professional pride in a good job well done: Dupont was grinning at his
work, and so intent upon it that his first intimation of any
interference came when Lanyard took him from behind, broke his hold
upon the woman (and lamentably failed to break his back at the same
time) whirled him round with a jerk that all but unsocketed an arm and,
before the thug could regain his balance, placed surely on the heel of
his jaw, just below the ear, a blow that, coming straight from the
shoulder and carrying all Lanyard had of weight and force and will to
punish, in spite of Dupont's heaviness fairly lifted him from his feet
and dropped him backwards across a chaise-longue, from which he slipped
senseless to the floor.
It was just like that, a crowded, breathless business....
With bruised and aching knuckles to prove that the blow had been one to
stun an ox, Lanyard believed it safe to count Dupont hors de combat,
for a time at least. In any event, the risk had to be chanced: Liane
Delorme was in a plight demanding immediate relief.
In all likelihood she had lost consciousness some moments before
Lanyard's intervention. Released, she had fallen positively inert, and
lay semi-prostrate on a shoulder, with limbs grotesquely slack and
awry, as if in unpleasant mimicry of a broken doll. Only the whites of
bloodshot eyes showed in her livid and distorted countenance. Arms and
legs twitched spasmodically, the ample torso was violently shaken by
labouring lungs.
The twisted handkerchief round her throat had loosened, but not enough
to give relief. Lanyard removed it, turned her over so that she lay
supine, wedged silken pillows from the chaise-longue beneath her head
and shoulders, then reached across her body, took from her dressing
table a toilet-water flask of lovely Italian glass, and drenched her
face and bosom with its pungent contents.
She gasped, started convulsively, and began to breathe with less
effort. That dreadful rattling in her throat was stilled. Heavy lids
curtained her eyes.
Lanyard continued to apply the scented water with a lavish hand. In
time the woman shuddered, sighed profoundly, and looked up with a
witless stare.
Man is measurably a creature of gestures stereotyped when the world was
young: Lanyard patted the woman's hand as one might comfort an abused
child. "It is all right now, Liane," he said in a reassuring voice.
"Rest tranquilly. You will soon be yourself again. But wait: I will
find you a drink."
She said nothing, her look continued cloudy; but the dazed eyes
followed him as he got up and cast about for a glass of water.
But then he remembered Dupont, and decided that Liane could wait
another minute while he made it impossible for the Apache to do more
mischief.
He moved round the chaise-longue and paused, looking down thoughtfully.
Since his fall Dupont had made neither moan nor stir. No crescent
irides showed beneath the half-shut lids. He was so motionless, he
seemed scarcely to breathe. Lanyard dug the toe of a boot into his ribs
none too gently, but without satisfaction of any doubts. The fellow
gave no sign of sensibility, but lay utterly relaxed, with the look of
one dead.
Lanyard frowned uneasily. He had seen men drop dead from blows less
powerful than his, and though this one had well earned a death swift
and merciless, Lanyard experienced a twinge of horror at the thought.
Often enough it had been his lot in times of peace and war to be forced
to fight for life, and more than once to kill in defence of it; but
that had never happened, never could happen, without his suffering the
bitterest regret. Even now, in the case of this bloody-handed butcher,
this ruthless garroter....
Dropping to his knees, Lanyard bent over the body to search for
symptoms of animation. He perceived them instantly. With inconceivable
suddenness Dupont demonstrated that he was very much alive. An arm like
the flexible limb of a tree wound itself affectionately round Lanyard's
neck, clipped his head to Dupont's yearning bosom, ground his face into
the flannel folds of a foul-scented shirt. Simultaneously the huge body
heaved prodigiously, and after a brief interval of fantastic floppings,
like a young mountain fell on top of Lanyard.
But that was the full measure of Dupont's success in this stratagem. If
hopelessly victimized and taken by surprise, Lanyard should have been
better remembered by the man who had fought him at Montpellier-le-Vieux
and again, with others assisting, on the road to Nant; though it is
quite possible, of course, that Dupont failed to recognise his ancient
enemy in clean-shaven Monsieur Paul Martin of the damp and bedraggled
evening clothes.
However that may have been, in the question of brute courage Dupont had
yet to prove lacking. His every instinct was an Apache's: left to
himself he would strike always from behind, and run like a cur to
cover. But cornered, or exasperated by opposition to his vast
powers--something which he seemed quite unable to understand--he could
fight like a maniac. He was hardly better now, when he found himself
thrown off and attacked in turn at a time when he believed his
antagonist to be pinned down, helpless, at the mercy of the weapon for
which he was fumbling. And the murderous fury which animated him then
more than made up for want of science, cool-headedness and imagination.
They fought for their most deeply-rooted passions, he to kill, Lanyard
to live, Dupont to batter Lanyard into conceding a moment of respite in
which a weapon might be used, Lanyard to prevent that very thing from
happening. Even as animals in a pit they fought, now on their knees
straining each to break the other's hold, now wallowing together on the
floor, now on their feet, slogging like bruisers of the old school.
Dupont took punishment in heroic doses, and asked for more. Shedding
frightful blows with only an angry shake of his head, he would lower it
and charge as a wild boar charges, while his huge arms flew like
lunatic connecting-rods. The cleverest footwork could not always elude
his tremendous rushes, the coolest ducking and dodging could not wholly
escape that frantic shower of fists.
Time and again Lanyard suffered blows that jarred him to his heels,
time and again was fain to give ground to an onslaught that drove him
back till his shoulders touched a wall. And more than once toward the
end he felt his knees buckle beneath him and saw his shrewdest efforts
fail for want of force. The sweat of his brows stung and dimmed his
eyes, his dry tongue tasted its salt. He staggered in the drunkenness
of fatigue, and suffered agonies of pain; for his exertions had
strained the newly knitted tissues of the wound in his side, and the
hurt of this was wholly hellish.
But always he contrived somehow, strangely to him, to escape
annihilation and find enough in reserve to fly back at Dupont's throat
upon the first indication of desire on the part of the latter to yield
the offensive. To do less were to permit him to find and use his
weapon, whatever it might be--whether knife or pistol was besides the
issue.
Chairs, the chaise-longue, tables were overturned and kicked about.
Priceless bits of porcelain and glass, lamps, vases, the fittings of
the dressing-table were cast down in fragments to the floor.
Constrained to look to herself or be trampled underfoot, and galvanized
with terror, the woman struggled up and tottered hither and yon like a
bewildered child, in the beginning too bemused to be able to keep out
of the way of the combatants. If she crouched against a wall, battling
bodies brushed her away from it. Did she take refuge in a corner she
must abandon it else be crushed. Once she stumbled between the two, and
before Lanyard could thrust her aside Dupont had fallen back half a
dozen feet and worried a pistol out of his clothing.
He fired first from the hip, and the shot shattered the mirror of the
dressing-table. Trying for better aim, he lifted and levelled the
weapon with a trembling arm which he sought to steady by cupping the
elbow in his left hand. But the second bullet ploughed into the ceiling
as Lanyard in desperation executed a coup de pied in la savate, and
narrowly succeeded in kicking the pistol from Dupont's grasp.
Bereft thus of his last hope--they were too evenly matched, and both
too far spent for either to force a victory with his naked hands--the
Apache swung round and ran, at the same time throwing a heavy chair
over on its back in the path of pursuit. Unable to avoid it, Lanyard
tried to hurdle it, caught a foot on one of its legs and, as Dupont
threw himself headlong down the stairs, crashed to the floor with an
impact that shook its beams.
Main will-power lifted him to his knees before he collapsed, his last
ounce of endurance wasted. Then the woman, with flying draperies, a
figure like a fury, sped to the banister rail and leaning over emptied
the several shots remaining in Dupont's automatic down the well of the
staircase. It is doubtful if she saw anything to aim at or accomplished
more than to wing the Apache's flight. Dupont had gained the second
storey while Lanyard was still fighting up from his fall. The last
report and the crash of the front door slammed behind Dupont were as
one heartbeat to the next.
Lanyard pillowed his head on a forearm and lay sobbing for breath.
Liane Delorme turned and ran to the front of the house.
Presently she came back drooping, sank into a chair and with lacklustre
eyes regarded the man at her feet.
"He got away," she said superfluously, in a faint voice. "I saw him in
the street ... staggering like a sot..."
At that moment Lanyard could not have mustered a show of interest had
he been told Dupont was returning at the head of a horde. He closed his
tired eyes and envied the lucky dead whose rest was independent of
bruised flesh and aching bones. Neither, he supposed, were dreams
poisoned by chagrin when what was mortal no longer mattered.... Three
times had he come to grips with Dupont and, though he had been
outnumbered on the road to Nant, in Lanyard's sight the honours were
far from easy. Neither would they be while yet the other lived or was
at large...
The bitterness of failure and defeat had so rank a flavour in his
thoughts that nothing else in life concerned him now. He had forgotten
Liane Delorme for minutes when her arm passed beneath his shoulders and
tried to lift them from the floor. He looked up then with listless
eyes, and saw her on one knee by his side, giving him in his turn that
confident and reassuring smile with which he had greeted her reviving
senses ... a long, long time ago, it seemed.
"Come!" she said--"sit up, monsieur, and take this drink. It will lend
you strength. You need it."