The False Faces Part 35

Blows thundered on the hallway door. Neither heeded. The spy was staring into Lanyard's face, his eyes starting with horror and affright.

"Lanyard!" he gasped. "Good G.o.d! will you never die?"

"Never by your hand--" Lanyard began, but stopped sharply.

For a moment he glared incredulously, and in that moment knew his enemy.

"Ekstrom!" he cried; and the man at his mercy winced and quailed.

The din in the hallway grew louder. Voices cried out for the key. Somebody threw himself against the door so heavily that it shook.

The emergency forced itself upon Lanyard's consciousness, would not be denied. Its dilemma seemed calculated to unseat his reason. If he lingered, he was lost. Either he must grant this creature new lease of life, or be caught and pay the penalty of murder for an execution as surely just as any in the history of mankind.

It was bitter, too bitter to have come to this his hour so long desired, so long deferred, so arduously sought, and have the fruits of it s.n.a.t.c.hed from his craving grasp.

He could not bring himself to this renunciation; slowly his fingers tightened on the other's throat.

Driven to desperation by the light of madness that began to flicker in Lanyard's eyes, the Prussian abruptly put all he had of might and fury into one final effort, threw Lanyard off, and in turn attacked him, fighting like a lunatic for footroom, for s.p.a.ce enough to turn and make for the windows.

In spite of all he could do Lanyard saw the man work away from the wall and manoeuvre his back toward the windows; then he flew at him with redoubled fury, driving home blow after blow that beat down Ekstrom's guard and sent him staggering helplessly, till an uppercut, swinging in under his uplifted forearms, put an end to the combat. Ekstrom shot backward half a dozen feet, stumbled over the prostrate body of the watchman, and crashed headlong into the windows, going down in a shower of shattered gla.s.s.

In one and the same instant Lanyard darted back and dropped upon his knees in the shadow of the club lounge, and the door to the hallway slammed open.

A knot of men, to the number of half a dozen, tumbling into the library, saw that figure floundering amid the ruins of the window, and made for it, pa.s.sing on the other side of the lounge, between it and the fireplace.

Unseen, Lanyard rose, ran crouching across the room; found the side door, opened it just far enough to permit the pa.s.sage of his body, and drew it to behind him.

Ninety-fifth Street was a lonely lane of midnight quiet. He sped across it like the shadow of a cloud wind-hunted.

XVI

AU PRINTEMPS

In those days New York nights were long; this was still young when Lanyard sauntered sedately from a side street and stopped on a corner of Broadway in the Nineties; he had not long to wait ere a southbound taxicab hove in sight and sheered over to the curb in answer to his signal.

It was still something short of one o'clock when he was set down at his door.

Wearily he let himself in by the private entrance, made a light, and without troubling even to discard his overcoat threw himself into a chair.

Leaden depression weighed down his heart, and the flavour of failure was as aloes in his mouth. Thrice within an hour he had fallen short of his promises, to Cecelia Brooke, to himself, to his _idee fixe_. His three chances, to redeem his word to the girl, to measure up to his queer criterion of honour, to rid his world of Ekstrom, all had slipped through fingers seemingly too infirm to profit by them.

He felt of a sudden old; old, and tired, and lonely.

The uses of his world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlec.o.c.k, the helpless sport of his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the shameful habiliments of a felon self-condemned.

What had prevented his dealing out to Ekstrom the punishment he had so well earned? That insatiable l.u.s.t for loot of his. But for that d.a.m.ning evidence against him of the stolen necklace in his pocket he might have had his will of Ekstrom, and justified himself when discovered by proving that he had merely done justice to a thief who sold what he had stolen and stole back to steal again what he had sold.

Self-contempt attacked self-conceit like an acid. He saw Michael Lanyard a sorry figure, sitting stultified with self-pity ... crying over spilt milk....

Impatiently he shook himself. What though he had to-night forfeited his chances? He could, nay, would, make others. He must....

To what end? Would life be sweeter if one found a way to restore to Cecelia Brooke her precious doc.u.ment and to smuggle back to Mrs. Arden her pilfered diamonds? Would this deadly ache of loneliness be less poignant with Ekstrom dead?

With lack-l.u.s.tre eyes he looked round that cheerless room, reckoning its perfunctory pretense of comfort the forlornest mockery. To lodgings such as this he was condemned for life, to an interminable sequence of transient quarters, sordid or splendid, rich or mean, alike in this common quality of hollow loneliness....

His aimless gaze wandered toward the door opening on the public hallway, and became fixed upon a triangular shape of white paper, the half of an envelope tucked between door and sill.

Presently he rose and got the thing, not until he touched it quite persuaded he was not the victim of an optical hallucination.

A square envelope of creamy paper, it was superscribed simply in a hand strange to him, _Anthony Ember, Esq_., with the address of his apartment house.

Tearing the envelope he found within a double sheet of plain notepaper bearing a message of five words penned hastily:

"_Au Printemps_-- "_one o'clock_-- "_Please_!"

Nothing else, not another word or pen-scratch....

Opening the door Lanyard hailed the hall-attendant, a sleepy and not over-intelligent negro.

"When did this come for me?"

"'Bout anour ago, Mistuh Embuh."

"Who brought it?"

"A messenger boy done fotch it, suh--look lak th' same boy."

"What same boy?"

"Same as come in when you do, 'bout 'leven o'clock--remembuh?"

Lanyard nodded, recalling that on his way up the street from Sixth Avenue he had been subconsciously irritated by the shrill, untuneful whistling of a loutish youth in Western Union uniform, who had followed him into the house and become engaged in some minor altercation with the attendants while Lanyard was unlocking the door to his apartment.

"What of him?"

"Why, he bulge in heah an' say we done send a call, an' we tell him we don'

know nuffin' 'bout no call, an' he sweah an' carry on, an' aftuh you done gone in he ast whut is yo' name, an' somebody tell him an' he go away. An'

then 'bout haffanour aftuhwuds he come back with that theah lettuh--say to stick it undeh yo' do, ef yo' ain't home. Leastways he look to me lak th'

same boy. Ah dunno fo' suah."

Repeated efforts failing to extract more enlightenment from this source, Lanyard again shut himself in with the puzzle.

Somebody had set a messenger boy to dog him and find out his name and address. Not Crane: Lanyard had seen that one disappear in the elevator of the Knickerbocker and had thereafter moved too quickly to permit of Crane's returning to the lobby, calling a messenger boy, and pointing out Lanyard.

For that matter, Lanyard was prepared to swear n.o.body had followed him from the Knickerbocker to the Biltmore.

Vaguely he seemed to recall a first impression of the boy at the time when he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the display of a catch-penny corn cure.