The False Faces Part 49

"I must not keep you," Lanyard broke the silence. "I merely wished to say good-night and ... I am sorry."

"Sorry?" she echoed.

"That you had such an unhappy experience," he explained--"thanks to your thoughtfulness for me. I do not deserve so much consideration; and that only makes me feel all the more regretful."

"It was silly of me," she admitted with a shadowy, rueful smile. "I'm afraid my silliness makes too much trouble...."

He commented honestly: "I don't understand."

"If I had only been patient enough to wait for you to call me...."

"Forgive that oversight. I was pressed for time, as you may imagine."

"Oh, it all comes back to my own stupidity. I might have known you had come through all right."

"How should you?"

"Why not?--when you turn up here in New York safe and sound after being drowned on the _a.s.syrian_!--as if that were not proof enough that you bear a charmed life!"

"Charmed!" he laughed.

"And you haven't yet told me how you survived that adventure."

"You are kind to be interested, and I am unfortunate in never seeing you save under circ.u.mstances unfavourable for yarn-spinning."

"You might be more fortunate."

"Only tell me how!"

"If you cared to ask me to dine with you to-morrow--I mean, to-night--"

"You would--?"

He was distressed by consciousness that his voice had thrilled impetuously.

But perhaps she had not noticed; there was no change in the even friendliness of her tone.

"I'm as inquisitive as any woman that ever lived. Even if I wished to, I'm afraid I shouldn't be able to resist an invitation to hear your Odyssey."

"Delmonico's at eight?"

"Thank you," she said primly.

"You make me too happy. May I call for you?"

"Please." She offered a hand whose touch he found cool, steady, and impersonal. "Good morning, Mr. Ember."

He stood in a stare while she went quickly through the lobby to a waiting elevator, then roused and went back to his cab.

It was by daylight that he reentered his rooms and found them tenanted by a negro boy bound and gagged, bruised and sore, and scared beyond intelligible expression.

Freeing him and salving his injuries bodily and spiritual with a liberal douceur, Lanyard exacted an oath of silence, then turned him out.

He had approximately five hours to put in somehow before his appointment with Colonel Stanistreet at nine, and was too well versed in the lore of late hours to think of giving any part of that time to sleep. By so doing he would only insure a mutinous awakening, with mind and body sluggish and unrested. If, on the other hand, he remained awake, he would go to that interview in a state of supernormal animation exceedingly to be desired if he were to round out this adventure without discredit.

For its end was not yet. He had still a part to play whose lines were not yet written, whose business remained to be invented. He neither dared s.h.i.+rk that appointment, for reasons of policy, nor wished to, while there remained reparation to be accomplished, a wrong to be righted, justice to be done, a question to be answered.

Only when these matters had been put in order would he feel his honour discharged of its burdens, himself free once more to drop out and go in peace his lonely ways in life, ways henceforth to be both lonely and aimless.

For, when he strove to peer into the future, only an emptiness confronted him. With Ekstrom accounted for finally and forevermore, there was nothing to come but the final accounting of the Lone Wolf with that civilization which had bred and suffered him.

One way presented itself to make that reckoning even. The Foreign Legion of France asks no embarra.s.sing questions of its recruits, and enlistment in its ranks offers with anonymity a consoling certainty.

Thus alone might he find his way home to the heart of that enigma whence he had emerged, a nameless waif astray in grim Parisian by-ways....

This vision of his end contenting him, he began to scheme a campaign for the day that was simple enough in prospect: a little chicanery with Stanistreet, a personal appeal to Crane to restore the pa.s.sports of Monsieur Andre d.u.c.h.emin which must have been found on Ekstrom's body, a berth on some steamer sailing for Europe, then the last evanishment.

One detail alone troubled him, his promise to the Brooke girl that she should dine with him that night.

Reminded of this obligation, figuratively he seized Michael Lanyard by the scruff of his neck and shook him with a savage hand. What insensate folly was ever his, what want of wit and strength to keep out of temptation's ways! Why must he have fallen in so readily with her suggestion? Why this infatuate thirst for sympathy, this eagerness to violate the seals of reticence at the wish of a strange woman? Was there any reasonable explanation of the strange lack of his wonted self-sufficiency in the company of Cecelia Brooke?

No matter. If he might not contrive somehow to squirm out of that engagement, he could at all events school himself to decent reticence. He promised himself to make his account of the submarine adventure drearily bald and trite, to minimize to the last degree his part therein, above all things to refrain from painting the Lone Wolf in romantic colours.

She was much too good a sort, too straight, sincere, fair-minded, honest--the sort of girl who deserved the Thackeray sort of man, never a thief.

If she even dreamed....

Lanyard brought forth from its hiding place the necklace, weighed it in his hand, examined it minutely. Granting its marvellous perfection, he recognized no more its beauty, dispa.s.sionately reviewed in turn each stone of matchless loveliness, no more susceptible to their seductive purity, perceiving in them nothing but hard, bright, translucent pebbles, cold, soulless, cruel.

One by one they slipped through his fingers like beads of an unholy rosary.

At length, crus.h.i.+ng them together in the hollow of his palm, he stood a while in thought, then turning to his writing-desk bundled the necklace in wrappings of white tissue secured with rubber bands, counted carefully the sheaf of bills he had taken from Ekstrom, sealed the whole amount in a plain, long envelope, and put this aside in company with the necklace.

Already two hours had pa.s.sed and, since he meant to call at the house on West End Avenue well in advance of the hour when Cecelia Brooke might be there--presuming Blensop to have given her the same appointment as he had given "Mr. Ember," that is, nine o'clock--it was now time to prepare.

Returning to his bedchamber, he laid out a carefully selected change of clothing, shaved, parboiled himself in a hot bath, chilled him to the pith in one of icy coldness, and dressed with scrupulous heed to detail, studiously effacing every sign of his sleepless night.

That experience was in no way to be surmised from his appearance when he sallied forth to breakfast at the Plaza.

At eight precisely, presenting himself at the Stanistreet residence, he desired the footman to announce him as the author of a certain telegram from Edgartown.

He was obliged to wait less than a minute, the footman returning in haste to request him to step into the library.

This apartment--which he found much as he had last seen it, eight hours ago, its window shattered, the portieres down, the furniture in some disorder--was, on his introduction, occupied by two persons, one an elderly, iron-gray gentleman of untidy dress and un.o.btrusive habit in spite of a discerning cool, gray eye, the other Mr. Blensop in the neatest of one-b.u.t.ton morning-coat effects, with striped trouserings neither too smart nor too sober for that state of life unto which it had pleased G.o.d to call him, and fair white spats.

If his attire was radiant, so was the temper of the secretary sunny. He tripped forward in sprightliest fas.h.i.+on, offering cordial hands to the caller till he recognized him, and even then was discountenanced only for the briefest moment.

"My dear Mr. Ember!" he purred soothingly--"why didn't you tell me last night it was you who had sent that telegram? If I had for a moment suspected the truth you should have had your appointment with Colonel Stanistreet at any hour you might have cared to name, no matter how unG.o.dly!"

Lanyard bowed gravely. "Thank you," he said. "And Colonel Stanistreet--?"