Alias the Lone Wolf Part 44

Mr. Mussey put up a stiffer fight than Mr. Swain, since an avowed cynic is necessarily a Man Who Knows About Women. He gave Liane flatly to understand that he saw through her and couldn't be taken in by all her blandishments. At the end of twenty-four hours, however, the conviction seemed somehow to have insidiously penetrated that only a man of his ripe wisdom and disillusionment could possibly have any appeal to a woman like Liane Delorme. It wasn't long after that the engine room was illuminated by Liane's pretty ankles and Mr. Mussey was beginning to comprehend that there was in this world one woman at least who could take an intelligent interest in machinery.

Mr. Collison succ.u.mbed without a struggle. True to the tradition of Southern chivalry, he ambled up to the block, laid his head upon it, and asked for the axe. Nor was he kept long waiting...

On the seventh day the course p.r.i.c.ked on the chart placed the Sybarite's position at noon as approximately in mid-Atlantic.

Contemplating a prospect of seven days more of such emptiness, Lanyard's very soul yawned.

And nothing could induce Captain Monk to hasten the pa.s.sage. Mr. Mussey a.s.serted that his engines could at a pinch deliver twenty knots an hour; yet day in and day out the Sybarite poked along at little better than half that speed. It was no secret that Liane Delorme's panic flight from Popinot had hurried the yacht out of Cherbourg harbour four days earlier than her proposed sailing date, whereas the Sybarite had a rendezvous to keep with her owner at a certain hour of a certain night, an appointment carefully calculated with consideration for the phase of the moon and the height of the tide, therefore not readily to be altered.

After dinner on that seventh day, a meal much too long drawn out for Lanyard's liking, and marked to boot by the consumption of much too much champagne, he left the main saloon the arena of an impromptu poker party, repaired to the quarterdeck, and finding a wicker lounge chair by the taffrail subsided into it with a sigh of grat.i.tude for this fragrant solitude of night, so soothing and serene.

The Sybarite, making easy way through a slight sea, with what wind there was--not much--on the port bow, rolled but slightly, and her deliberate and graceful fore-and-aft motion, as she swung from crest to crest of the endless head-on swells, caused the stars to stream above her mast-heads, a boundless river of broken light. The pulsing of the engines, unhasting, unresting, ran through her fabric in ceaseless succession of gentle tremors, while the rumble of their revolutions resembled the refrain of an old, quiet song. The mechanism of the patent log hummed and clicked more obtrusively. Directly underfoot the screw churned a softly clashing wake. From the saloon companionway drifted intermittently a confusion of voices, Liane's light laughter, muted clatter of chips, now and then the sound of a popping cork.

Forward the ship's bell sounded two double strokes, then a single, followed by a wail in minor key: "Five bells and all's well!" ... And of a sudden Lanyard suffered the melancholy oppression of knowing his littleness of body and soul, the relative insignificance even of the ship, that impertinent atom of human organization which traversed with unabashed effrontery the waters of the ages, beneath the shining constellations of eternity. In profound psychical enervation he perceived with bitterness and despair the enormous futility of all things mortal, the hopelessness of effort, the certain black defeat that waits upon even what men term success.

He felt crushed, spiritually invertebrate, dest.i.tute of object in existence, bereft of all hope. What mattered it whether he won or lost in this stupid contest whose prize was possession of a few trinkets set with bits of glittering stone? If he won, of what avail? What could it profit his soul to make good a vain boast to Eve de Montalais? Would it matter to her what success or failure meant to him? Lanyard doubted it, he doubted her, himself, all things within the compa.s.s of his understanding, and knew appalling glimpses of that everlasting truth, too pa.s.sionless to be cynical, that the hopes of man and his fears, his loves and hates, his strivings and pa.s.sivity, are all one in the measured and immutable processes of Time....

The pressure of a hand upon his own roused him to discover the Liane Delorme had seated herself beside him, in a chair that looked the other way, so that her face was not far from his; and he could scarcely be unaware of its hinted beauty, now wan and glimmering in starlight, enigmatic with soft, close shadows.

"I must have been dreaming," he said, apologetic. "You startled me."

"One could see that, my friend."

The woman spoke in quiet accents and let her hand linger upon his with its insistent reminder of the warm, living presence whose rich colouring was disguised by the gloom that encompa.s.sed both.

Four strokes in duplicate on the ship's bell, then the call: "_Eight bells and a-a-all's well_!"

Lanyard muttered: "No idea it was so late."

A slender white shape, Mr. Collison emerged from his quarters in the deck-house beneath the bridge and ran up the ladder to relieve Mr.

Swain. At the same time a seaman came from forward and ascended by the other ladder. Later Mr. Swain and the man whose trick at the wheel was ended left the bridge, the latter to go forward to his rest, Mr. Swain to turn into his room in the deck-house.

The hot glow of the saloon skylights became a dim refulgence, aside from which, and its glimmer in the mouth of the companionway, no lights were visible in the whole length of the ship except the shuttered window of Mr. Swain's room, which presently was darkened, and odd glimpses of the binnacle light to be had when the helmsman shifted his stand.

A profound hush closed down upon the ship, whose progress across the face of the waters seemed to acquire a new significance of stealth, so that the two seated by the taffrail, above the throbbing screws and rushing torrent of the wake, talked in lowered accents without thinking why.

"It is that one grows bored, eh, cher ami?"

"Perhaps, Liane."

"Or perhaps that one's thought are constantly with one's heart, elsewhere?"

"You think so?"

"At the Chateau de Montalais, conceivably."

"It amuses you, then, to shoot arrows into the air?"

"But naturally, I seek the reason, when I see you distrait and am conscious of your neglect."

"I think it is for me to complain of that!"

"How can you say such things?"

"One has seen what one has seen, these last few days. I think you are what that original Phinuit would call 'a fast worker,' Liane."

"What stupidity! If I seek to make myself liked, you know well it is with a purpose."

"One hardly questions that."

"You judge harshly ... Michael."

Lanyard spent a look of astonishment on the darkness. He could not remember that Liane had ever before called him by that name.

"Do I? Sorry...." His tone was listless. "But does it matter?"

"You know that to me nothing else matters."

Lanyard checked off on his fingers: "Swain, Collison, Mussey. Who next?

Why not I, as well as another?"

"Do you imagine for an instant that I cla.s.s you with such riffraff?"

"Why, if you really want to know what I think, Liane: it seems to me that all men in your sight are much the same, good for one thing only, to be used to serve your ends. And who am I that you should hold me in higher rating than any other man?"

"You should know I do," the woman breathed, so low he barely caught the words and uttered an involuntary "Pardon?" before he knew he had understood. So that she iterated in a clearer tone of protest: "You should know I do--that I do esteem you as something more than other men. Think what I owe to you, Michael; and then consider this, that of all men whom I have known you alone have never asked for love."

He gave a quiet laugh. "There is too much humility in my heart."

"No," she said in a dull voice--"but you despise me. Do not deny it!"

She shifted impatiently in her chair. "I know what I know. I am no fool, whatever you think of me.... No," she went on with emotion under restraint: "I am a creature of fatality, me--I cannot hope to escape my fate!"

He was silent a little in perplexed consideration of this. What did she wish him to believe?

"But one imagines n.o.body can escape his fate."

"Men can, some of them; men such as you, rare as you are, know how to cheat destiny; but women never. It is the fate of all women that each shall some time love some man to desperation, and be despised. It is my fate to have learned too late to love you, Michael----"

"Ah, Liane, Liane!"

"But you hold me in too much contempt to be willing to recognise the truth."

"On the contrary, I admire you extremely, I think you are an incomparable actress."

"You see!" She offered a despairing gesture to the stars. "It is not true what I say? I lay bare my heart to him, and he tells me that I act!"

"But my dear girl! surely you do not expect me to think otherwise?"

"I was a fool to expect anything from you," she returned bitterly--"you know too much about me. I cannot find it in my heart to blame you, since I am what I am, what the life you saved me to so long ago has made me. Why should you believe in me? Why should you credit the sincerity of this confession, which costs me so much humiliation? That would be too good for me, too much to ask of life!"