Phantom Wires Part 18

"_A man's soul is at stake_!" was the answering cry that rang through the quiet room.

The Captain of the Port smiled a little cynically, scarcely understanding.

Yet something almost fatherly about his sad and wistful face steeled her to still further persistence, and she afterward remembered, always a little shamefaced, that she had wept and clung to his arm and wept still again, before she melted and bent him from his official determination. She saw, through blurred and misty eyes, his hand go out and touch an electric b.u.t.ton at his side. She saw him write three lines on a sheet of paper, an attendant appear, and heard an order briefly and succinctly given. She had gained her end.

The Captain of the Port rose as she turned to go from the room.

"Good night, and also good-bye, _signorina_!" he said quietly, with his stately, old-world bow.

She paused at the door, wordlessly demeaned, momentarily ashamed of herself. She felt, in some way, how miserable and low and self-seeking she stood beneath him, how high and firm he stood above her, with his calm and disinterested kindliness.

She turned back to him once more.

"Good-bye," she said inadequately, in her tearful and tremulous contralto. "Good-bye, and thank you, again and again!"

He bowed from where he stood in the center of his quiet and sheltered office, seeming, to her, a strangely old-time and courtly figure, a proud yet unpretentious student of life at peace with his own soul.

The years would come and go, the years that would so age and wear and torture _her_, but he would reign on in that quiet office unchanged, contented, still at peace with himself and all his world. "Good-bye,"

she said for the third time, from the doorway.

Then she hurried down to her waiting carriage and raced for the quay.

There she took an almost malicious delight in the bustle and perturbation to which her return gave sudden rise. The sleepy and sullen crew were stirred out, signals were clanged, ropes were cast off; and down in her little narrow cabin, securely shut off from the driving spray, she could feel and hear the boat lurch and pound through the waves. Then came shrill calls of the whistle above, the sound of gruff voices, the rasp and sc.r.a.pe of heaving woodwork against woodwork, the grind of the ladder against the boat-fenders, the cry of the officer telling her to hurry.

She walked up the _Slavonia's_ ladder steadily, demurely, for under the lights of the promenade deck she could see the cl.u.s.tering, inquisitive heads, where a dozen crowding pa.s.sengers tried to ascertain just who could be coming aboard with such ceremony.

Leaning over the rail, with a cigar in his mouth, she caught sight of her husband. As she pa.s.sed him, at the head of the ladder, he spoke one short sentence to her, under his breath.

It was a commonplace enough little sentence, but as the purport of it filtered through her tired mind it stung her into both a new wariness of att.i.tude and thought and a new gratefulness of heart.

For as she pa.s.sed him, without one betraying emotion or one glance aside, he had whispered to her, under his breath:

"_Keenan is here, on board. Be careful!_"

CHAPTER XVI

BROKEN INSULATION

The _Slavonia_ was well down the Adriatic before Keenan was seen on deck. Both Frank and Durkin, by that time, had met in secret more than once, and had talked over their predicament and decided on a plan of action.

"Whatever you do," Durkin warned her, "don't let Keenan suspect who I am! Don't let him get a glimpse of you with me. My part now has got to be what you'd call 'armed neutrality.' If anything unforeseen turns up--and that can only be at Palermo or Gibraltar--I'll be watching near by to come to your help in some way--but, whatever you do, don't let Keenan suspect this!"

"You mean that we mustn't even look at each other?" she cried, in mock dismay.

"Precisely," he continued.

"What if an officer should introduce you to me?" She laughed a little.

The untimeliness of her laughter disturbed him. More and more often, during the last few weeks, he had beheld the signs of some callousing and hardening process going on within her.

"Oh, in that case," he answered, "you'll find me very glum and uncongenial. You'll probably be only too glad to leave me alone!"

She nodded her head in meditative a.s.sent. Her problem was a difficult one.

"Jim," she said suddenly, "why should we play this waiting and retreating game during the next two weeks? Here we have Keenan on board, with nothing to interfere with our operations. Why can't we work a little harder to win his confidence?"

"We?" asked the other.

"Well, why couldn't _I_? All along, during those days in Genoa, I had the feeling that he would have believed in me, if some little outside accident had only confirmed his faith in me. We can't tell, of course, just what he found out after that Pobloff affair, or just how he interpreted it, or whether he is as much in the dark as ever. If that is the case, we may stand just where we were before with Keenan!"

"But I thought you wanted to get away from this sort of thing?"

"I do--when the time comes," she evaded, tortured by the thought that she had withheld anything from him. "I do--but are we to let Keenan go, when we have him so close to us?"

"Then go ahead and both capture and captivate him!" said Durkin, with a voice that was gruff only because it was indifferent. Still again he was oppressed by the feeling that she was pa.s.sing beyond his power.

"But see, Jim--I'm getting so old and ugly!" And again she laughed, with her own show of indifference, though her husband knew, by the wistfulness of her face, that she was struggling to hold back some deeper and stronger current of feeling. So he thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and refused to meet her eyes for a second time.

"I don't see why we should be afraid of either Palermo or Gibraltar,"

Durkin went on at last, with a half-impatient business-is-business glance about him. "Keenan is alone in this. He has no agents over here, that we know of, and he daren't put anything in the hands of the authorities. He's a runaway, a fugitive with the district-attorney's office after him, and he has to move just as quietly as we do. Mark my words, where he will make his first move, and do anything he's going to do, will be in New York!"

"Then why can't I prepare the ground for the New York situation, whatever it may be?" she demanded.

"You mean by standing pat with Keenan?"

"Precisely."

"Then how will you begin?"

"By sending him a note at once, telling him how I slipped away from Genoa to Venice, and asking him the meaning of the Pobloff attack--in other words, by appearing so actively suspicious of _him_ that he'll forget to be suspicious of _me_."

"And what do you imagine he will answer?"

"I think he will send me back word to say absolutely nothing about the Genoa episode--he may even claim that it's quite beyond his comprehension. That will give us a chance to meet more naturally, and then we can talk things over more minutely, at our leisure."

Durkin wheeled on her, half-angrily. Through all their career, he had remained strangely unschooled to any such concession as this. It was an affront to his dormant and masculine spirit of guardianship; it seemed a blow in the teeth of his nurturing instinct, an overriding of his prerogatives of a man and a husband.

"While you're making love to him on the bridge-deck, on moonlight nights!" he flung back at her, bitterly.

"Do you think I could?" she murmured, with a ghost of a sigh.

Durkin emitted a little impatient oath.

"Don't swear, Jim!" she reproved him.

The vague prescience that some day he should lose her, that in some time yet to be she should pa.s.s beyond his reach and control, still again filtered through his consciousness, like a dark and corroding seepage. He caught her by the arm roughly, and looked into her face, for one silent and scrutinizing minute.

"Do you care?" she asked, and it seemed to him there was a tremor of happiness in her tone.