The False Faces Part 2

"Your wife ... I mean to say, you married, didn't you?"

Lanyard nodded. "Lucy stuck by me till ... the end.... She had a little money of her own. It financed our flight from the States. We made a round-about journey of it, to elude surveillance--and, I think, succeeded."

"You returned to Paris?"

"No: France, like England, was barred to the Lone Wolf.... We settled down in Belgium, Lucy and I and our boy. He was three months old. We found a quiet little home in Louvain--"

The officer interrupted with a low cry of apprehension, Lanyard checked him with a sombre gesture. "Let me tell you....

"We might have been happy. None knew us. We were sufficient unto ourselves.

But I was without occupation; it occurred to me that my memoirs might make good reading--for Paris; my friends the French are as fond of their criminals as you English of your actors. On the second of August I journeyed to Paris to negotiate with a publisher. While I was away the Boche invaded Belgium. Before I could get back Louvain had been occupied, sacked...."

He sat for a time in brooding silence; the officer made no attempt to rouse him, but the gaze he bent upon the man's lowered head was grave and pitiful. Abruptly, in a level and toneless voice, Lanyard resumed:

"In order to regain my home I had to go round by way of England and Holland. I crossed the Dutch frontier disguised as a Belgian peasant. When I reentered Louvain it was to find ... But all the world knows what the blond beast did in Louvain. My wife and little son had vanished utterly. I searched three months before I found trace of either. Then ... Lucy died in my arms in a wretched hovel near Aerschot. She had seen our child butchered before her eyes. She herself...."

Lanyard's hand, that rested on the table, clenched and whitened beneath its begrimed skin. His eyes fathomed distances immeasurably removed beyond the confines of that grim cellar. But he presently continued:

"Ekstrom had accompanied the army of invasion, had seen and recognized Lucy in pa.s.sing through Louvain. Therefore she and my son were among the first to be sacrificed.... When I stood over her grave I dedicated my life to the extermination of Ekstrom and all his breed. I have since done things I do not like to think about. But the Prussian spy system is the weaker for my work....

"But Ekstrom I could never find. It was as if he knew I hunted him. He was seldom twenty-four hours ahead of me, yet I never caught up with him but once; and then he was too closely guarded.... I pursued him to Berlin, to Potsdam, three times to the western front, to Serbia, once to Constantinople, twice to Petrograd."

The officer uttered an exclamation of astonishment. Lanyard looked his way with a depreciatory air.

"Nothing strange about that. To one of my early training that was easy--everything was easy but the end I sought.... En pa.s.sant I collected information concerning the workings of the Prussian spy system. From time to time I found means to communicate somewhat of this to the Surete in Paris. I believe France and England have already profited a little through my efforts. They shall profit more, and quickly, when I have told all that I have to tell....

"Of a sudden Ekstrom vanished. Overnight he disappeared from Germany. A false lead brought me back to this front. Two days ago I learned he had been sent to America on a secret mission. Knowing that the States have severed diplomatic relations with Berlin and tremble on the verge of a declaration of war, we can surmise something of the nature of his mission.

I mean to see that he fails.... To follow him to America, making my way out through Belgium and Holland, pursuing such furtive ways as I must in territory dominated by the Boche, meant much time lost. So I came through the lines to-night. Fortune was kind in throwing me into your hands: I count upon your a.s.sistance. As an ex-agent of the Secret Service you are in a position to make smooth my path; as an Englishman, you will advance the interests of a prospective ally of England if you help me to the limit of your ability; for what I mean to do in America will serve that country, by exposing the conspiracies of the Boche across the water, as much as it will serve my private ends."

The officer's hand fell across the table and closed upon the knotted fist of the Lone Wolf.

"As an Englishman," he said simply--"of course. But no less as your friend."

II

FROM A BRITISH PORT

"And one man in his time plays many parts": few more than this same Lanyard. In no way to be identified with the hunted creature who crept into the British lines out of No Man's Land was the Monsieur d.u.c.h.emin who, ten days after that wintry midnight, took pa.s.sage for New York from "a British port," aboard the steamship _a.s.syrian_.

Andre d.u.c.h.emin was the name inscribed in the credentials furnished him in recognition of signal a.s.sistance rendered the British Secret Service in its task of scotching the Prussian spy system. And the personality he chose to a.s.sume suited well the name. A man of modest and amiable deportment, viewing the world with eyes intelligent and curious, his temper reacting from its ways in terms of grave humour, Monsieur d.u.c.h.emin pa.s.sed peaceably on his lawful occasions, took life as he found it, made the best of irksome circ.u.mstances.

This last idiosyncrasy stood him in good stead. For the _a.s.syrian_ failed to clear upon her proposed sailing date and for a livelong week thereafter chafed alongside her landing stage, steam up, cargo laden and stowed, nothing lacking but the Admiralty's permission to begin her westbound voyage--a permission inscrutably withheld, giving rise to a common discontent which the pa.s.sengers dissembled to the various best of their abilities, that is to say, in most cases thinly or not at all.

Yet they were none of them unreasonable beings. They had come aboard one and all keyed up to a high nervous pitch, pardonable in such as must commit their lives to the dread adventure of the barred zone, wanting nothing so much as to get it over with, whatever its upshot. And everlasting procrastination required them day after day to steel their hearts anew against that Terror which followed its furtive ways beneath the leaden waters of the Channel!

Alone among them this Monsieur d.u.c.h.emin paraded successfully a false face of resignation, protesting no predilection whatsoever for a watery grave, no infatuate haste to challenge the Hun upon his chosen hunting-ground. In the fullness of time it would be permitted to him to go down to the sea in this ship. Meanwhile he found it apparently pleasant and restful to explore the winding cobbled ways of that antiquated waterside community, made over by the hand of War into a bustling seaport, or to tramp the sunken lanes that seamed those green old Cornish hills which embosomed the wide harbour waters, or to lounge about the broad white decks of the _a.s.syrian_ watching the diurnal traffic of the haven--a restless, warlike pageant.

Daily, in earliest dusk of dawn, the wakeful might watch the faring forth of a weirdly a.s.sorted fleet of small craft, the day patrol, to relieve a night patrol as weirdly heterogeneous. Daily, at all hours, mine-sweepers came and went, by twos and twos, in flocks, in schools; and daily bellowing offsh.o.r.e detonations advertised their success in garnering those horned black seeds of death which the Hun and his kin were sedulous to sow in the fairways. While daily battleships both great and small rolled in wearily to refit and dress their wounds, or took swift departure on grim and secret errands.

There was, moreover, the not-infrequent spectacle of some minor ship of war--a truculent, gray destroyer as like as not--shepherding in a sleek submarine, like a felon whale armoured and strangely caparisoned in gray-brown steel, to be moored in chains with a considerable company of its fellows on the far side of the roadstead, while its crew was taken ash.o.r.e and consigned to some dark limbo of oblivion.

And once, with a light cruiser snapping at her heels, a drab Norwegian tramp plodded sullenly into port, a mine-layer caught red-handed, plying its a.s.sa.s.sin's trade beneath a neutral flag.

Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in the town gaol-yard.

One of a group of three idling on the promenade deck of the _a.s.syrian_, Lanyard turned sharply and stared through narrowed eyelids into the quarter whence the sounds reverberated.

The man at his side, a loose-jointed American of the commercial caste, paused momentarily in his task of masticating a fat dark cigar.

"This way out," he commented thoughtfully.

Lanyard nodded; but the third, a plumply ingratiative native of Geneva, known to the ship as Emil Dressier, frowned in puzzlement.

"Pardon, Monsieur Crane, but what is that you say--'this way out'?"

"Simply," Crane explained, "I take the firing to mean the execution of our nootral friends from Norway."

The Swiss shuddered. "It is most terrible!"

"Well, I don't know about that. They done their d.a.m.nedest to fix it for us to drown somewhere out there in the nice, cold English Channel. I'm just as satisfied it's them, instead, with their backs to a stone wall in the warm sunlight, getting their needin's. That's only justice. Eh, Monsieur d.u.c.h.emin?"

"It is war," said Lanyard with a shrug.

"And war is ... No: Sherman was all wrong. h.e.l.l's got perfectly good grounds for a libel suit against William Tec.u.mseh for what he up and said about it and war, all in the same breath."

Lanyard smiled faintly, but Dressler pondered this obscure reference with patent distress. Crane champed his cigar reflectively.

"What's more to our purpose," he said presently: "I shouldn't be surprised if this meant the wind-up of our rest-cure here. That's the third mine-layer they've collected this week--two subs, and now this benevolent nootral. Am I right, Monsieur d.u.c.h.emin?"

"Who knows?" Lanyard replied with a smile. "Even now the mine-sweeping flotilla is coming home, as you see; which means, the neighbouring waters have been cleared. It is altogether a possibility that we may be permitted to depart this night."

Even so the event: as that day's sun declined amid a portentous welter of crimson and purple and gold, the moorings were cast off and the _a.s.syrian_ warped out into mid-channel and anch.o.r.ed there for the night.

Inasmuch as she was to sail as the tide served, some time before sunrise, the pa.s.sengers were advised to seek their berths at an early hour. Thirty minutes before the steamship entered the danger zone (as she would soon after leaving the harbour) they would be roused and were expected promptly to a.s.semble on deck, with life-preservers, and station themselves near the boats to which they were individually a.s.signed.

For their further comforting they were treated, in the ebb of the chill blue twilight, to boat-drill and final instructions in the right adjustment of life-belts.

A preoccupied company a.s.sembled in the dining saloon for what might be its last meal. In the shadow of the general apprehension, conversation languished; expressions of relief on the part of those who had been loudest in complaining at the delays were notably unheard; even Crane, Lanyard's nearest neighbour at table, was abnormally subdued. Reviewing that array of sobered and anxious faces, Lanyard remarked--not for the first time, but with renewed grat.i.tude--that in all the roster of pa.s.sengers none were children and but two were women: the American widow of an English officer and her very English daughter, an angular and superior spinster.

Avoiding the customary post-prandial symposium in the smoking room, Lanyard slipped away with his cigar for a lonely turn on deck.

Beneath a sky heavily canopied, the night was stark black and loud with clashing waters. A fitful wind played in gusts now grim, now groping, like a lost thing blundering blindly about in that deep darkness. Ash.o.r.e a few wan lights, widely s.p.a.ced, winked uncertainly, withdrawn in vast remoteness; those near at hand, of the anch.o.r.ed shipping, skipped and swayed and flickered in mad mazes of goblin dance. To him who paced those vacant, darkened decks, the sense of dissociation from all the common, kindly phenomena of civilization was something intimate and inescapable.

Melancholy as well rode upon that black-winged wind.

At pause beneath the bridge, the adventurer rested elbows upon the teakwood rail and with importunate eyes searched the masked face of his destiny.