The False Faces Part 8

Thus swiftly the scene suffered disillusioning transition. The pretty fiction of lovers meeting in secret was no more. Remained a man annoyed to the verge of anger, a woman desperately importunate.

The wind, sweeping aft, carried broken s.n.a.t.c.hes of their communications:

"... _all I have ... could not let you go_...."

"_Insanity_!"

"_I was desperate_...."

"... _drive me mad with your nonsense_...."

Lanyard sat up, sc.r.a.ping his chair harshly on the deck. Stricken mute, the pair at the rail moved only to turn his way the pallid ovals of their faces.

Heedless of the prohibition, he struck a vesta, cupped its flame in his hands, bending his face close and deliberately lighting a cigarette.

Appreciably longer than necessary he permitted the flare to reveal his features. Then he blew it out, rose, sauntered to the rail, cast the cigarette into the sea, went aft and so below, satisfied that the girl must have recognised him and so knew that her secret was safe.

But it was in an oddly disgruntled humour that he turned in--he who had been so ready to twit Crane with his fantastic speculations concerning the English girl, who had himself been the readiest to endue her with the romantic attributes becoming a heroine of her country's Secret Service!

What if he must now esteem her in the merciless light of to-night's exposure, as the most pitiable of all human spectacles, a poor lovesick thing sans dignity, sans pride, sans heed for the world's respect, a woman pursuing a man weary of her?

He resented unreasonably the unreasonable resentment which the affair inspired in him.

What was it to him? He who had struck off all fettering bonds of common human interests, who had renounced all common human emotions, who had set his hand against all mankind that stood between him and that vengeful purpose to which he had dedicated his life! He, the Lone Wolf, the heartless, soulless, pitiless beast of prey!

G.o.d in Heaven! what was any woman to him?

V

ON THE BANKS

Unaccountably enough in his esteem, and more and more to Lanyard's exasperation, the evil flavour of that overnight incident lasted; it tinctured distastefully his first waking thoughts; and through all that fourth day at sea his mood was dark with irrational depression.

And the fifth day and the sixth were like unto the fourth.

Constantly he caught himself on watch for the young woman, wondering how she would comport herself toward him, unwilling witness though he had been to that shabby scene.

But, save distantly at meal times, he saw nothing of her.

And though he knew that she was much on deck after midnight, he was studious to keep out of her way. The tedium of stopping in a stuffy stateroom, when the spell of restlessness was on him, waiting for the sounds of his neighbour's return before he might venture forth, was nothing; anything were preferable to figuring as the innocent bystander at another encounter between the Brooke girl and her reluctant lover....

Then that happened which lent the business another complexion altogether.

Its second phase, of close development, drew toward an end. Subtle underlying forces began to stir in their portentous latency.

The rapiers which thus far had merely touched, s.h.i.+vering lightly against each other, measuring each its opponent's strength, feeling out his skill, fell apart, then re-engaged in sharp and deadly play. Steel met steel and, clas.h.i.+ng, struck off sparks whose fugitive glimmerings lightened measurably the murk....

On the sixth night out, at eleven o'clock as a matter of routine, the smoking room was closed for the night, terminating an uncommonly protracted and, in Lanyard's esteem, irksome sitting at cards. Well tired, he went immediately to his quarters, undressed, stretched out in his berth, and switched off the light.

Incontinently he found himself bedevilled by thoughts that would not rest.

For upward of an hour he lay moveless, seeking oblivion in that very effort to preserve immobility, while the _a.s.syrian_, lunging heavily on her way, moaned and muttered tedious accompaniment to the chant of the working engines.

Despairing at length, and fretted by the closeness of his quarters, he got up, dressed sketchily, and was shrugging into his fur-lined coat when he heard the door to the adjoining stateroom open and close, stealth in the sound of it.

At that he hung up his overcoat, and threw himself down with a book on the lounge seat beneath the port. The novel was dull enough in all conscience; for that matter no tale within the compa.s.s of the cunningest weaver of words could have enthralled his temper at that time.

He read and read again page after page, but without intelligence.

Between his eyes and the type-blackened paper mirages of the past trembled and wavered; old faces, old scenes, old illusions took unsubstantial form, dissolved, blended, faded away: a saddening show of shadows.

His heavy eyelids drooped; slumber's drowsy vestments trailed lazily athwart the sea of consciousness....

A slight noise startled him, either the shutting of the door to Stateroom 27, or the sound of the book dropping from his relaxed grasp. He sat up and consulted his watch. The hour was half after twelve.

The s.h.i.+p's bell sounded remotely a single, doleful stroke.

He might have dozed five minutes or fifteen--long enough at least to leave its tantalising effect of sleep desperately desirable, mockingly elusive, almost grasped, whisked beyond grasping. And with this he was aware of something even less tangible, a sense of something amiss, of something vaguely wrong, as of an evil spirit stalking furtively through the darkened labyrinth of the s.h.i.+p ... as impalpable and ineluctable as miasmic exhalations of a mora.s.s....

Lanyard pa.s.sed a hand across his forehead. Had he been dreaming, then? Was this merely the reaction from some bitter nightmare? He could not remember.

On sheer impulse he stood up, extinguished the light, opened the door. As he did this he noted that a light burned in Stateroom 27, visible through the ventilating grille. So the girl must have returned while he slept. Or had she neglected to turn the switch when she went out? He could not be certain.

On the threshold he paused a little, attentive to the familiar rumour of the s.h.i.+p by night: the prolonged sloughing of riven waters down the side, gnas.h.i.+ng of swells hurled back by the bows, sibilance of draughts in alleyways, groaning of frames, a thin metallic rattle of indeterminate origin, the crunching grind of the steering gear, the everlasting deep-throated diapason of the engines, somewhere aft in that tier of staterooms a persistent human snore ... nothing unusual, no alarming discordance....

Yet the feeling that mischief was afoot would not be still.

Lanyard moved down to the junction of the thwarts.h.i.+p pa.s.sage with the fore-and-aft alleyway.

Here he commanded a view of the promenade-deck landing and the main companionway, all in darkness but for a feeble glimmer of reflected starlight through the open deck port on the far side of the vessel. Beyond this the rail was stencilled against the dull face of the sea with its far lifting and falling horizon; within, no more was visible than the dimmed whiteness of the forward part.i.tion, the dense, indefinite ma.s.s of bal.u.s.ters winding up to the boat-deck, and the flat plane of the tiled landing.

On this last, near the mouth of the port alleyway, half obscured by the intervening bal.u.s.ters, something moved, something huge, black, and formless swayed and writhed strangely, and in the strangest silence, like a dumb, tormented misshapen brute transfixed to one spot from which its most anguished efforts might not avail to budge it.

Lanyard ran forward, rounded the well of the companionway, and pulled up.

Now the nature of the thing was revealed. Blackly silhouetted against the square of the doorway two human figures were close-locked and struggling desperately, straining, resisting, thrusting, giving, recovering ... and all with never a sound more than the deadened thump of a s.h.i.+fting foot or the rasp of hard-won breathing.

For several seconds the spectator could not distinguish one contestant from the other. Then a change in the fortunes of war enabled him to make out that one was a woman, the other, and momentarily more successful, a man.

Slender and youthful and strong, she fought with the indomitable fury of a pantheress. He on his part had won this much temporary advantage--had broken the woman's clutch upon his throat and was bending her back over his hip, one hand fumbling at her windpipe, the other imprisoning her two wrists.

Yet she was far from being vanquished. Even as Lanyard moved toward the pair, she drove a savage knee into the man's middle and, as he checked instantaneously with a grunt of pained surprise, regained her footing and planted both elbows against his chest, striving frantically to free her hands.

Simultaneously Lanyard took the fellow from behind, wound an arm around his neck, jerked his head sharply back, twisted his forearm till he released the woman's wrists, and threw him with a force that must have jarred his every bone.

The woman staggered back against the part.i.tion, panting and sobbing beneath her breath. The man rebounded from his fall with astonis.h.i.+ng agility, and flew back at Lanyard. An object in his right hand gave off the dull gleam of polished steel.

Lanyard, his automatic in his stateroom, in the pocket of the overcoat where he had deposited it when meaning to go out on deck, lacked any means of defense other than his two hands; but his one-time fame as an amateur pugilist had been second only to his fame as a connaisseur d'art; and to one whose youth had been pa.s.sed in a.s.sociation with the Apaches of Paris, some mastery of la savate was an inevitable accomplishment.