Alias the Lone Wolf Part 42

"They're not, as a rule. But if you treat 'em right, they'll listen to reason."

The captain graphically rubbed a thumb over two fingers, donned his cap, b.u.t.toned up his tunic, and strode forth with an impressive gait.

"Still wakeful?" Phinuit hinted hopefully.

"And shall be till we drop the pilot, thanks."

"If I hadn't seen de Lorgnes make that safe sit up and speak, and didn't know you were his master, I'd be tempted to bat an eye or two.

However...." Phinuit sighed despondently. "What can I do now to entertain you, dear sir?"

"You might have pity on my benighted curiosity...."

"Meaning this outfit?" Lanyard a.s.sented, and Phinuit deliberated over the question. "I don't know as I ought in the absence of my esteemed a.s.sociates.... But what's bothering you most?"

"I have seen something of the world, monsieur, and as you are aware not a little of the underside of it; but never have I met with a combination of such peculiar elements as this possesses. Regard it, if you will, from my view-point, that of an outsider, for one moment."

Phinuit grinned. "It must give you furiously to think--as you'd say."

"But a.s.suredly! Take, for example, yourself, a man of unusual intelligence, such as one is not accustomed to find lending himself to the schemes of ordinary criminals."

"But you have just admitted that we're anything but ordinary."

"Then Mademoiselle Delorme. One knows what the world knows of her, that she has for many years meddled with high affairs, that she had been for many years more a sort of queen of the demi-monde of Paris; but now you tell me she has stopped to profit by a.s.sociation with a professional burglar."

"Profit? I'll say she did. According to my information, it was she who mapped out the campaigns for de Lorgnes; she was G.H.Q. and he merely the high private in the front line trenches; with this difference, that in this instance G.H.Q. was perfectly willing to let the man at the front cop all the glory.... She took the cash and let the credit go, nor heeded rumblings of the distant drum!"

"Then your picturesque confrere, Captain Monk; and the singular circ.u.mstance that he owns a wealthy cousin of the same name; and this beautiful little yacht which you seem so free to utilize for the furtherance of your purposes. Is it strange, then, that one's curiosity is provoked, one's imagination alternately stimulated and baffled?"

"No; I suppose not," Phinuit conceded thoughtfully. "Still, it's far simpler than you'd think."

"One has found that true of most mysteries, monsieur."

"I don't mind telling you all I feel at liberty to.... You seem to have a pretty good line on mademoiselle, and I've told you what I know about de Lorgnes. As for the skipper, he's the black sheep of a good old New England family. Ran away to sea as a boy, and was disowned, and grew up in a rough school. It would take all night to name half the jobs he's had a hand in, mostly of a shady nature, in every quarter of the seven seas: gun running, pearl poaching, what not--even a little slaving, I suspect, in his early days. He's a pompous old bluff in repose, but n.o.body's fool, and a bad actor when his mad is up. He tells me he fell in with the Delorme a long time ago, while acting as personal escort for a fugitive South American potentate who crossed the borders of his native land with the national treasury in one hand and his other in Monk's, and of course--they all do--made a bee line for Paris. That's how we came to make her acquaintance, my revered employer, Mister Monk, and I--through the skipper, I mean."

Phinuit paused to consider, and ended with a whimsical grimace.

"I'm talking too much; but it doesn't matter, seein's it's you.

Strictly between ourselves, the said revered employer is an annointed fraud. Publicly he's the pillar of the respectable house of Monk.

Privately, he's not above profiteering, foreclosing the mortgage on the old homestead, and swearing to an odoriferous income-tax return. And when he thinks he's far enough away from home--my land, how that little man do carry on!

"The War made him more money than he ever thought there was; so he bought this yacht ready-made and started on the grand tour, but never got any farther than Paris--naturally his first stop. News from home to the effect that somebody was threatening to do him out of a few nickels sent him hightailing back to put a stop to it. But before that happened, he wanted to see life with a large L; and Cousin Whitaker gave him a good start by introducing him to little ingenue Liane. And then she put the smuggling bee in his bonnet."

"Smuggling!"

Lanyard began to experience glimpses....

"Champagne. If ever all the truth comes out, I fancy it will transpire that Liane's getting a rake-off from some vintner. You see, Friend Employer was displaying a cultivated taste in vintage champagnes, but he'd been culpably negligent in not laying down a large stock for private consumption before the Great Drought set in. The Delorme found that out, then that his ancestral acres bordered on Long Island Sound, and finally that the Sybarite was loafing its head off. What could be more simple, she suggested, than that monsieur should ballast his private yacht with champagne on the homeward voyage, make his landfall some night in the dark of the moon, and put the stuff ash.o.r.e on his own property before morning. Did he fall for it? Well, I just guess he did!"

"This is all most interesting, monsieur, but...." "Where do Monk and I come in? Oh, like master, like men. Liane was too wise to crab her act by proposing anything really wicked to the Owner, and wise enough to know nothing could shock the skipper. And I was wise enough not to let him get away with anything unless I sat in on the deal.

"Mademoiselle played all her cards face upwards with us. She and de Lorgnes, she said, were losing money by disposing of their loot this side, especially with European currency at its present stage of depreciation. And so long as the owner was doing a little dirty work, why shouldn't we get together and do something for ourselves on the side? If champagne could be so easily smuggled into the States, why not diamonds? We formed a joint-stock company on the spot."

"And made your first coup at the Chateau de Montalais!"

"Not the first, but the biggest. De Lorgnes' mouth had been watering for the Montalais stuff for a long time, it seems. My boss had private business of a nature we won't enter into, in London, and gave me a week off and the use of his car. We made up the party, toured down the Rhone valley, and then back by way of the Cevennes, just to get the lay of the land. I don't think there can be much more you need to know."

"Monsieur is too modest."

"Oh, about me? Why, I guess I'm not an uncommon phenomenon of the times. I was a good citizen before the War, law-abiding and everything.

If you'd told me then I'd be in this galley to-day, I'd probably have knocked you for a goal. I had a flourishing young business of my own and was engaged to be married... When I got back from h.e.l.l over here, I found my girl married to another man, my business wrecked, what was left of it crippled by extortionate taxation to support a government that was wasting money like a drunken sailor and too cynical to keep its solemn promises to the men who had fought for it. I had to take a job as secretary to a man I couldn't respect, and now... Well, if I can get a bit of my own back by defrauding the government or cla.s.sing myself with the unorganised leeches on Society, nothing I know is going to stop my doing it!"

Phinuit knocked the ashes out of a cold pipe at which he had been sucking for some time, rose, and stretched.

"The worst of it is," he said in a serious turn--"I mean, looking at the thing from my bourgeois viewpoint of 1914--the War, but more particularly the antics of the various governments after the War, turned out several million of men in my frame of mind the world over.

We went into the thing deluded by patriotic bunk and the promise that it was a war to end war; we came out to find the old men more firmly entrenched in the seats of the mighty than ever and stubbornly bent on perpetuating precisely the same rotten conditions that make wars inevitable. What Germany did to the treaty that guaranteed Belgium's neutrality was child's-play compared to what the governments of the warring nations have done to their covenants with their own people. And if anybody should ask you, you can safely promise them that several million soreheads like myself are what the politicians call 'a menace to the established social order'."

Clear daylight filled the ports. The traffic on deck nearly deserved the name of din. Commands and calls were being bawled in English, French, and polyglot profanity. A donkey-engine was rumbling, a winch clattering, a capstan-pawl clanking. Alongside a tug was panting hoa.r.s.ely. The engine room telegraph jangled furiously, the fabric of the Sybarite shuddered and gathered way.

"We're off," yawned Phinuit. "Now will you be reasonable and go to bed?"

"You may, monsieur," said Lanyard, getting up. "For my part, I shall go on deck, if you don't mind, and stop there till the pilot leaves us."

"Fair enough!"

"But one moment more. You have been extraordinarily frank, but you have forgotten one element, to me of some importance: you have not told me what my part is in this insane adventure."

"That's not my business to tell you," Phinuit replied promptly. "When anything as important as that comes out, it won't be through my babbling. Anyhow, Liane may have changed her mind since last reports.

And so, as far as I'm concerned, your present status is simply that of her pet protege. What it is to be hereafter you'll learn from her, I suppose, soon enough.... Le's go!"

XXII

OUT OF SOUNDINGS

When finally Lanyard did consent to seek his stateroom--with the pilot dropped and the Sybarite footing it featly over Channel waters to airs piped by a freshening breeze--it was to sleep once round the clock and something more; for it was nearly six in the afternoon when he came on deck again.

The quarterdeck, a place of Epicurean ease for idle pa.s.sengers, was deserted but for a couple of deckhands engaged in furling the awning.

Lanyard lounged on the rail, revelling in a sense of perfect physical refreshment intensified by the gracious motion of the vessel, the friendly, rhythmic chant of her engines, the sweeping ocean air and the song it sang in the rigging, the vision of blue seas snow-plumed and mirroring in a myriad facets the red gold of the westering sun, and the lift and dip of a far horizon whose banks of violet mist were the fading sh.o.r.es of France.

In these circ.u.mstances of the sea he loved so well there was certain anodyne for those twinges of chagrin which he must suffer when reminded of the sorry figure he had cut overnight.

Still there were compensations--of a more material nature, too, than this delight which he had of being once again at sea. To have cheapened himself in the estimation of Liane Delorme and Phinuit and Monk was really to his advantage; for to persuade an adversary to under-estimate one is to make him almost an ally. Also, Lanyard now had no more need to question the fate of the Montalais jewels, no more blank s.p.a.ces remained to be filled in his hypothetical explanation of the intrigues which had enmeshed the Chateau de Montalais, its lady and his honour.

He knew now all he needed to know, he could put his hand on the jewels when he would; and he had a fair fortnight (the probable duration of their voyage, according to Monk) in which to revolve plans for making away with them at minimum cost to himself in exertion and exposure to reprisals.