The False Faces Part 7

It was never this man's fault to underrate an enemy, least of all an unknown; and he entertained wholesome respect for Secret Service operators--picked men, as a rule, the meanest no mean antagonist. And this business, he fancied, had all the flavour of Secret Service work--one of those blind duels, desperate and grim affairs of masked combatants feinting, thrusting, guarding in the dark, each with the other's sword ever feeling for his throat, fighting for life itself and making his own rules as the contest swayed.

But what was this Brooke girl doing in that galley? What conceivable motive induced her to dabble those slender hands in the muck and blood of Secret Service work?

Lanyard was fain to let that question rest. After all, it was no concern of his. There she was, up to her pretty eyebrows in some dark, bad business; and it was not for him to play the gratuitous a.s.s, rush in unasked, and seek to extricate her....

Through endless hours he sat brooding, vision blindly focussed upon the misty, shimmering mystery of that night.

Ekstrom!... Slowly in his understanding intuition shaped the conviction that it was Ekstrom whom he was fighting now, Ekstrom in the guise of one of his creatures, some agent of the Prussian spy system who had contrived to smuggle himself aboard this British steamship.

Out of those nine in the smoking room the previous night, then, he must beware of one primarily, perhaps of more.

Four he was disposed, with reservations, to reckon negligible: Baron von Harden, head of a Netherlands banking house, a silent body whose acute mental processes went on behind a pallid screen of flabby features; Julius Becker, a theatrical manager of New York, whose right name ended in ski; Bartlett Putnam, late charge d'affaires of the American emba.s.sy in Madrid; Edmund O'Reilly, naturalized citizen of the United States, interested in the manufacture of motor tractors somewhere in Michigan.

Of the other five, two were English: Lieutenant Thackeray, a civilly reticent gentleman whose right arm rested in a black silk sling, making a flying trip to visit a married sister in New York; Archer Bartholomew, Esq., solicitor, a red-cheeked, bright-eyed, white-haired, brisk little c.o.c.kney, beyond the military age.

There remained Dressier, the stout, self-satisfied Swiss, whose fawning manner was possibly accounted for by his statement that he journeyed to New York to engage in the trade of restaurateur in partnership with his brother; Crane, long and awkward and homely, of saturnine cast, slow of gesture and negligent as to dress, his humorous sense clouding a power of shrewd intelligence; and Senor Arturo Velasco, of Buenos Aires, middle-aged, apparently extremely well-to-do, a thoughtful type, more self-contained than most of his countrymen.

One of these probably ... But which?...

Nor must he permit himself to forget that the _a.s.syrian_ carried fifty-nine other male pa.s.sengers, in addition to her complement of officers, crew, and stewards, that any one of these might prove to be Potsdam's cat's-paw.

Awesome pallor tinged the eastern horizon, gaining strength, spread in imperceptible yet rapid gradations toward the zenith. Stars faded, winked out, vanished. Silver and purple in the sea gave place to livid gray.

Almost visibly the routed night rolled back over the western rim of the world. Shafts of supernal radiance lanced the formless void between sky and sea. Swollen and angry, the sun lifted up its enormous, ensanguined portent. And the discountenanced moon withdrew hastily into the immeasurable fastnessness of a cloudless firmament, yet failed therein to find complete concealment. Keen, sweet airs of dawn raked the decks, now to port, now to starboard, as the _a.s.syrian_ twisted and writhed on her corkscrew way.

Pa.s.sengers whose fears had become sufficiently numb to permit them to drowse, stirred in their chairs, roused blinking and blear-eyed, arose and stretched cramped, cold bodies. Others lay listless, enervated by the sleepless misery of that night. Crane found Lanyard awake and marched him off for coffee and cigarettes in the smoking room.

Later, starting out for a turn around the decks, they pa.s.sed a deck-chair sheltered in a jog where the engine-room ventilating shaft joined the forward deck-house, in which Miss Brooke lay coc.o.o.ned in wraps and furs, her profile, turned aside from the sea, exquisitely etched against the rich blackness of a fox stole. She slept as quietly as the most carefree, a shadowy smile touching her lips.

Crane's stride faltered. He whistled low.

"In the name of all things wonderful! how did that get on board?"

Lanyard mentioned the girl's name. "She has the stateroom next to mine--came off that tender, night before last."

"And me sore on that darn' li'l boat because it brought aboard all the nosey Johnnies! Ain't it the truth, you never know your luck?"

The American ruminated in silence till another lap of their walk took them past the girl again.

"Funny," he mused, "if that's why they held us up...."

"Comment, monsieur?"

"Oh, I was just wondering if it was on that young lady's account they kept us kicking our heels back there so long."

"I am still stupid," Lanyard confessed.

"Why, she might be a special messenger, you know--something like that--the British Government wanted to smuggle out of the country without anybody suspecting."

"Monsieur is a romantic."

"You can't trust me," Crane averred unblushingly.

When they pa.s.sed the chair again it was empty.

At breakfast Lanyard saw the girl from a distance: their places were separated by the width of the saloon. She had no neighbours at her table, did not look up when Lanyard entered, finished her meal some time before he did, and retired immediately to her stateroom, in whose seclusion she remained for the rest of the day.

That second day was altogether innocent of untoward incident. At least superficially the life of the ship settled into the groove of "business as usual." Only the company of the _a.s.syrian's_ faithful convoys was an ever-present reminder of peril.

And in the middle of the afternoon she pa.s.sed close by a derelict, a torpedoed tramp, deep down by the stern, her bows helplessly high in air and crimson with rust, the melancholy haunt of a great mult.i.tude of gulls.

More than slightly to Lanyard's surprise he received no quiet invitation to the captain's quarters to be interrogated concerning the burglary in Stateroom 27. Apparently, the young woman had contented herself with reporting merely that the communicating door had carelessly been left unfastened.

For his own part, neither seeking nor avoiding individual members of the smoking-room group, Lanyard permitted himself to be drawn into their company, and sat among them amiably receptive. But this profited him scantily; there was no further talk of the Lone Wolf; he was not again aware of that covert surveillance.

But when--the evening chill driving him below to don a fur-lined topcoat--the Brooke girl, coming up the companionway, acknowledged his look of recognition with the most distant of nods, he accepted the apparent rebuff without resentment. He understood. She was playing the game. The enemy was watching, listening. After that he was studious to refrain from seeming either to avoid or to seek her neighbourhood; and if he did keep a sharp eye on her, it was so circ.u.mspectly as to mock detection. To the best of his observation she found no friends on board, contracted no new acquaintances, kept herself to herself within walls of inexorable reserve.

Dawn, ending the second night at sea, found the _a.s.syrian_ pursuing a course still devious, and now alone; the destroyers had turned back during the night. The western boundary of the barred zone lay astern. Ahead, at the end of a brief interval of time, the ivory towers of New York loomed, a-shimmer with endless sunlight, glorious in golden promise. Accordingly, the spirits of the pa.s.sengers were exalted. The very ship seemed to grin in self-complacence; she had won safely through.

Unremitting vigilance was none the less maintained. No hour of the twenty-four found either gun, forward or aft, wanting a full working crew on the keen qui vive. The life boats remained on outswung davits; boat drills for pa.s.sengers as well as crew were features of the daily programme.

Regulations concerning light and smoking on deck after dark were rigidly enforced. Fuel was never spared in the effort to widen the blue gulf between the steamship and those waters wherein she had so nearly met her end. By day a hunted thing, racing frantically toward a port of refuge in the West, all her stout fabric labouring with t.i.tanic pulsations, shying in panic from the faintest suspicion of smoke upon the horizon, the _a.s.syrian_ slipped into the grateful obscurity of night like a snake into a thicket, made herself akin to its densest shadows, strained hopelessly not to be outdistanced by its fugitive mantle.

And the benison of unseasonably clement weather was hers; day after shining day, night after placid night, the Atlantic revealed a singularly gracious humour, mirrored the changeful panorama of the heavens in a surface little flawed. So that the most squeamish voyagers, as well as those most beset with fears, slept sweetly in the comfort of their berths.

Lanyard, however, never went to bed without first securing his door so that it might be opened by force alone; and never slept without a pistol beneath his pillow.

But the truth is, he slept little. For the first time in his history he learned what it meant to will sleep to come and have his will defied. He lay for hours staring wide-eyed into darkness, hearkening to the steady throbbing of the engines, unable to dismiss the thought that their every revolution brought him so much nearer to America, so much the nearer to his hour with Ekstrom. In vain he sought to fatigue his senses by over-indulgence in his weakness for gambling. Day-long sessions at poker and auction in the smoking room--where he found formidable antagonists, princ.i.p.ally in the persons of Crane, Bartlett Putnam, Velasco, Bartholomew, Julius Becker and Baron von Harden--served only to forward his financial fortunes; his luck was phenomenal; he multiplied many times that slender store of English banknotes with which he had embarked upon this adventure.

But he left each exhausting sitting only to toss upon a wakeful pillow or to roam uneasily the dark and desolate decks, a man haunted by ghosts of his own raising, hagridden by pa.s.sions of his own nurturing....

About two o'clock on the third night (the first outside the danger zone, when every other pa.s.senger might reasonably be expected to be in his berth) Lanyard lay in a deck-chair deep in shadows, wondering if it was worthwhile to go below and woo sleep in his stateroom. By way of experiment he shut his eyes. When after a moment he opened them again he was no longer alone.

Some distance away, at the rail, the woman of Stateroom 27 was standing with her back to Lanyard, looking intently forward, unquestionably ignorant of his presence.

Without moving, he watched in listless incuriosity till he saw her straighten and stand away from the rail as if bracing herself against some crisis.

A man was coming aft from the entrance to the main companionway, impatience in his stride--a tall man, of good carriage, m.u.f.fled almost to the heels in a heavy ulster, a steamer-cap well forward over his eyes. But the light was poor, the pale shine of the aged moon blending trickily with the swaying shadows; Lanyard was unable to place him among the pa.s.sengers. There was a suggestion of Lieutenant Thackeray--but that one was handicapped by one sh.e.l.l-shattered arm, whereas this man had the use of both.

He demonstrated that promptly, taking the girl into them. She yielded herself gladly, with a hushed little cry, hiding her face in the bosom of his ulster, clinging to him.

This, then, was an a.s.signation prearranged! Miss Cecelia Brooke had a lover aboard the _a.s.syrian_, a lover whom she denied by day but met in stealth by night!

And yet, after that first, swift embrace, their conduct became oddly unloverlike. The man released her of his own initiative, held her by the shoulders at arm's length. There was irritation in his manner. He seemed tempted to shake the young woman.

"Celia! what madness!"

So much, at least, Lanyard overheard; the rest was a mumble into the hand which the girl placed over the man's lips. She cried breathlessly: "Hush!

not so loud!"

And then she remembered to guard her own voice. In an undertone she spoke pa.s.sionately for a moment. The man interrupted in a tone of profound vexation. She drew away, as if hurt, caught him up as he hesitated for a word, returned, clung to the lapels of his coat, her accents rapid and pitiful, eloquent of explanation, entreaty, determination. The man lifted his hands to her wrists, broke her grasp, cut her brusquely short, put her forcibly from him. She sobbed softly....