Book: The False Faces

V >> Vance, Louis Joseph >> The False Faces




"Mademoiselle," he said mechanically, without looking at the girl, without
power to perceive aught else in the world but the white, evil face of his
enemy, "for what I am about to do, I beg you forgive me, of your charity. I
can endure no more. It is too much...."

He strode past her.

She twisted in her chair, then rose, following him with wide eyes of alarm
above her hands, whose bonds her teeth worried without rest.

Ekstrom had not stirred, though one flash of pure exultation had
transfigured his countenance on comprehension of Lanyard's purpose: thanks
to the silly scruples of this animal, one more chance for life was granted
him.

Nor would the Prussian give an inch when Lanyard paused, confronting him
squarely, within arm's length.

"Ekstrom," the adventurer began in a voice lacking perceptible inflection
... "what is between you and me needs no recounting. You know it too
well--I likewise. It is my wish and my intention to kill you with my
two hands. Nothing can prevent that, not even what you count upon, my
reluctance--to you incomprehensible--to commit an act of violence in the
presence of a woman. But because Miss Brooke is here, because you have
brought her here by force, because you are what you are and so have treated
her insolently ... before we come to our final accounting, you shall get
down upon your knees and ask her pardon."

He saw no yielding in the eyes of the Prussian, only arrogance; and when he
paused, he was answered in one phrase of the gutters of Berlin, couched in
the imagery of its lowest boozing-kens, so unspeakably vile in essence
and application that Lanyard heard it with an incredulity almost
stupefying--almost, not altogether.

It was barely spoken when those lips that framed it were crushed by a blow
of such lightning delivery that, though he must have been prepared for it,
Ekstrom's guard was still lowered as he reeled back, lost footing, and went
to his knees.

Panting, snarling, uttering teeth and blasphemy, the Prussian recoiled like
a serpent, gathered himself together and launched headlong at Lanyard, only
to be met full tilt by a second blow and a third, each more merciless than
its predecessor, beating him down once more.

This time Lanyard did not wait for him to come back for punishment, but
closed in, catching him as he strove to rise, meeting each fresh effort
with ruthless accuracy, battering him into insanity of despair, so that
Ekstrom came back again and again without thought, animated only by
frenzied brute instinct to find the throat of his tormenter, and ever and
ever failing; till at length he crumpled and lay crushed and writhing, then
subsided into insensibility, was quite still but for heaving lungs and the
spasmodic clutchings of his broken and ensanguined fingers....

With a start, a broken sigh, a slight movement of the hand interpreting a
crushing sense of the futility of human passion, Lanyard relaxed, drew back
from standing over his antagonist, abstractedly found a handkerchief and
dried his hands, of a sudden so inexpressibly shamed and degraded in his
own sight that he dared not look the girl's way, but stood with hang-dog
air, avoiding her regard.

Yet, could he have mustered up heart, he might have surprised in her eyes
a light to lift him out from this slough of humiliation, to obliterate
chagrin in a flood of wonder and--misgivings.

When, however, he did after a moment turn to her, that look was gone,
replaced by one that reflected something of his own apprehension; for a
heavy hand was hammering on the study door, and more than one voice on the
other side was calling on "Karl" to open.

Either the servant whom Lanyard had met and victimised on his way
downstairs had given the alarm, or else the noise of the encounter within
the study had brought that pack of spies to the door, wildly demanding
admission.

Steadied by one swift exchange of alarmed glances with the girl, Lanyard
hastily reviewed the room, seeking some avenue of escape. None offered but
the windows. He ran to them, tore back their draperies, and found them
closed with shutters of steel and padlocked.

Simultaneously the din at the door redoubled.

With a worried shake Lanyard crossed to the chimney-piece, ducked his head,
and stepped into its huge fireplace. One upward glance sufficed to dash his
hopes: here was no way out, arduous though feasible; immediately above the
fireplace the flue narrowed so that not even the most active man of normal
stature might hope to negotiate its ascent.

He returned with only a gesture of disconcertion to answer the girl's look
of appeal.

"Can we do nothing?" she asked, raising her voice a trifle to make it heard
above the tumult in the corridor.

"There's no help for it, I'm afraid," he said, going to the desk and taking
up the pistols--"nothing to do but shoot our way out, if we can. Take
this," he added, offering her one of the weapons, which she accepted
without spirit. "If you can't get your own consent to use it, give it to me
when I've emptied the other."

She breathed a dismayed "Yes ..." and wonderingly consulted his face, since
he did not stir other than thoughtfully to replace his pistol on the desk,
then stood staring at his soot-smeared palms.

"What is it?" she demanded nervously. "Why do you hesitate?"

As one fretted by inconsequential questions, he merely shook his head,
glancing sidelong once at the unconscious Prussian, again with calculation
toward the door.

This he saw quivering under repeated blows.

With brusque decision he said: "Get a chair--brace it beneath the
door-knob, please!"--and leaving her without more explanation turned back
to the fireplace.

Motionless, in dumb confusion, the girl stood staring after him till roused
by a blow of such splintering force as to suggest that an axe had been
brought into play upon the door, then ran to a ponderous club chair and
with considerable exertion managed to trundle it to the door and tip it
over, wedging its back beneath the knob.

By this time it had become indisputably patent that an axe was battering
the panels. But the door, in character with the room, was a substantial
piece of workmanship and needed more than a few blows, even of an axe, to
break down its barrier of solid oak.

She looked round to discover Lanyard kneeling beside Ekstrom, insanely--so
it seemed to the girl--engaged in blackening the upper half of the man's
face with a handful of soot.

Unconsciously uttering a little cry of distress she sped to his side and
caught his shoulder with an importunate hand.

"In Heaven's name, Monsieur Duchemin, what are you doing? Is this a time
for childishness--?"

He responded with a smile of boyish mischief so genuine that her doubts of
his reason seemed all too well confirmed.

"Making up my understudy," he said simply. And brushing his hands over the
rug to rid them of superfluous soot, Lanyard rose. "Please go back and
stand by the door--on the side of the hinges. I'll be with you in one
minute."

Resigned to humour this lunatic whim--what else could she do?--the girl
retreated to the position designated, and watched with ever darker doubts
of his sanity, while Lanyard hurriedly drew the shells from his automatic
and carefully placed its butt in the slack grasp of Ekstrom's fingers.

Then, lifting from a near-by table a great cut-glass bowl of flowers, the
adventurer inverted it over Ekstrom's body.

Expending its full force upon the man's chest, that miniature deluge
splashed widely, wetting his face, half filling his open mouth. Some of
the soot was washed away, but not a great deal: enough stuck fast to suit
Lanyard's purpose.

Roused by that cool shock, half strangled as well, Ekstrom coughed
violently, squirmed, spat out a mouthful of water, and lifted on an elbow,
still more than half dazed.

Joining the girl by the door, Lanyard saw the Prussian sit up and glare
blankly round the room, a figure of tragic fun, drenched, woefully
disfigured, eyes rolling wildly in the wide spaces round them which Lanyard
had left unblackened.

Swinging the club chair away from the door, the adventurer placed it with
its back to the room.

"Get down behind that," he indicated shortly, and drew the key from his
pocket. "Don't show yourself for your life. And let me have that pistol,
please."

A bright triangular wedge of steel broke through one of the panels as he
fitted and turned the key in the lock.

His wits clearing, Ekstrom saw him and with a howl of fury staggered to his
feet, clutching the unloaded pistol and endeavouring to level it for steady
aim.

Simultaneously Lanyard turned the knob and let the door fly open, remaining
beside the chair that hid the girl.

A knot of spies, O'Reilly and Velasco among them, whirled into the room,
pulled up at sight of that strange, grim figure, disguised beyond all
recognition by its half-mask of black, facing and menacing them with a
pistol.

O'Reilly fired in the next breath, his shot echoed by half a dozen so
closely bunched as to resemble the rattle of a mitrailleuse.

At the first report the pistol dropped from Ekstrom's grasp. He carried a
hand vaguely to his throat, staggered a single step, uttered a strangled
moan, and fell forward, his body fairly riddled, his death little short of
instantaneous.

While the fusillade was still resounding Lanyard, seizing the girl's wrist,
unceremoniously dragged her from behind the chair and thrust her through
the door, retreating after her with his face to the roomfull, his pistol
ready.

None of that lot paid him any heed, the attention of all wholly absorbed by
the tragedy their violent hands had wrought. Velasco, the first to stir,
ran forward and dropped to his knees beside the dead man. Others followed.

Gently Lanyard drew the door to, locked it on the outside, and at the sound
of a choking cry from Cecelia Brooke, whirled smartly round, prepared if
need be to make good his promise to clear with gun-play a way to the street
though opposed by every inmate of the establishment.

But the first face he saw was Crane's.

The Secret Service man stood within a yard. To him as to a rock of refuge
Cecelia Brooke had flown, to his hand she was clinging like a frightened
child, trying to speak, failing because she choked on sobs and gasps of
horror.

Behind him, on the landing at the head of the staircase, running up from
below, ascending to the upper storeys, were a score' or more of men of
sturdy and business-like bearing and indubitably American stamp. Of
these two were herding into a corner a little group of frightened German
servants.

Lanyard's stare of astonishment was met by Crane's twisted smile.

"My friend," he said, as quietly as anyone could with his accent of a
quizzical buzz-saw, "I sure got to hand it to you. Every time I try to pull
anything off on the dead quiet you beat me to it clean. Everywhere I think
you ain't and can't be, that's just where you are. But I ain't complaining;
I got to admit, if you hadn't staged your act to occupy the minds of those
gents in there, we might've had a lot more difficulty raiding this joint."

Quickly he wound an arm round the waist of Cecelia Brooke when, without
warning, she swayed blindly and would have fallen.

"Here, now!" he protested. "That's no way to do.... Why, she's flickered
out! Well, Monsieur Duchemin-Lanyard-Ember, to a man up a tree this looks
like your job. You take this little lady off my hands and see her home, and
I'll just naturally try and finish what I started--or what you did. For,
son, I got to give you credit: you sure are one grand li'l trouble-hound!"




XXI

QUESTION


Through the breathing hush of that dark hour which foreruns the dawn, that
hour in which the head that knows a wakeful pillow is prone to sudden
and disquieting apprehension of its insignificance and it's soul's dread
isolation, the cab sped swiftly south upon the Avenue, shadowed reaches of
the park upon its right, upon its left the dull, tired faces of those homes
whose tenants lay wrapped in the cotton-wool of riches.

The rain had ceased. A little wind was blowing up. There was a fresh
smell in the air. Sidewalks began to be maculated with spreading areas of
dryness, but the roadway was still wet and shining, the wide black mirror
of a myriad lights.

Through the windows of the speeding cab an orderly procession of street
lamps, marching past, threw each its fugitive and pallid glimmer. Periods
of modified darkness intervened, when the face of the girl in her corner
seemed a vision subtle and wraithlike. But ever the recurrent lights
revealed her sweetly incarnate if deep in enervation of crushing weariness.

Once she stirred and sighed profoundly; and Lanyard, bending toward her,
asked if he could be in any way of service.

She replied in an undertone scarcely better than a whisper: "Thank you, I
am quite comfortable.... Please--what time is it?"

The cab was passing Sixtieth Street. Lanyard caught a fleeting glimpse of a
street clock with a dial like a little golden moon.

"It's just four."

"Thank you...."

"Very tired?"

"Very...."

He had the maddest notion that her head inclined to droop toward his
shoulder. Perhaps the motion of the cab.... If so, she recovered easily.

"Can I do anything?"

"No, thank you, only ..." An ungloved hand stirred from her lap and for
the merest instant rested lightly above his own, or hovered rather, barely
touching it with a touch tenuous and elusive, no sooner realised than gone.
"I mean," she murmured, "I am a bit too overwrought, too tired, to talk."

"I quite understand," he said. "Please forget I'm here; just rest."

Perhaps she smiled drowsily. Or was that, too, a freak of his imagination?
Lanyard assured himself it was, in excess of consideration even tried to
persuade himself he had dreamed that ghost of a caress upon his hand. It
seemed so little like her.

Not that anything had happened more than a gesture of transient
inadvertence due to fatigue. It could not have been intentional, that act
of intimacy, when the girl was altogether engrossed in young Thackeray.

There was something one must not forget, something that gave the lie flatly
to that innuendo of the Weringrode's. Ignorant of the circumstances the
intrigante had leaped blindly at conclusions, after the habit of her kind.

True, Sophie had not implied that this girl cared for him, but vice versa:
either supposition, however, was as absurd as the other. As if Lanyard
could love a woman who loved another! As if the name of love meant aught
to him but the memory of a sweetness like a vagrant air of Spring that had
breathed fitfully for a season upon the Winter of his heart!

A corner of Lanyard's mouth lifted in a sneer. That precious heart of
his! the heart of a thief upon which even now the fruits of his thieving
weighed....

Irritated, he wrenched his thoughts into another channel, and began to
piece together inconsecutive snatches of information gained from Crane
in the confusion of the quarter hour just past, while the Secret Service
operatives were busy rounding up the inmates of that spy-fold and searching
for evidences of their impudent activities.

It appeared that Washington had at length, however tardily, roused out of
its inertia and at midnight had telegraphed instructions to arrest out
of hand every enemy alien in the land against whom there was evidence of
conspiracy or even a ponderable suspicion.

So unexpected was this order that Crane had volunteered to show Cecelia
Brooke that midnight rendezvous of the Prussian spy system without the
least notion that he might be required before morning to lead a raiding
force against the establishment; and even when a messenger stopped him as
he turned to enter Au Printemps, he was not advised concerning the cause of
this demand for his immediate presence at headquarters.

The first cast of what Crane aptly termed the dragnet had brought in the
management and service staff to a man, with a number of the restaurant's
habitues, including Sophie Weringrode and her errand-boy, the exquisite Mr.
Revel.

Velasco, however, had somehow mysteriously managed to slip through the
meshes and had straightway hastened to spread the alarm.

As for O'Reilly and Dressier, they had left with Ekstrom in pursuit of
Lanyard less than five minutes before, and so had escaped not only arrest
but all knowledge of the raid prior to their return to Seventy-ninth
Street.

The second cast of the net had been made at the latter place as soon as
the watchers were able to assure Crane that Ekstrom and O'Reilly had
returned--Dressier having anticipated them there by something like half an
hour.

By daybreak, then, these gentry would be interned on Ellis Island....

And break of day impended visibly in grayish shades that stole westward
through the cross-town streets like clouds of secret agents spying out the
city against invasion by the serried lances of the sun.

A garish twilight washed Forty-second Street from wall to wall by the time
the car swung round in front of the Knickerbocker. As yet, however, there
was little evidence that the town was growing restive in its sleep with
premonition of the ardour of another day.

Lanyard stepped down and offered the girl a hand in whose palm her slender
fingers rested lightly for an instant ere she passed on, while he turned to
bid the driver wait. Following, he overtook her in the entrance, where by
tacit consent both paused and lingered in an odd constraint. There was so
much to be said that was impossible to say just then.

Visibly the woman drooped, betraying physical exhaustion in every line of
her pose, seeming scarcely strong enough to lift the silken lashes that
trembled upon cheeks a little drawn and pale, with the faintest of bluish
rings beneath the eyes.

"I must not keep you," Lanyard broke the silence. "I merely wished to say
good-night and ... I am sorry."

"Sorry?" she echoed.

"That you had such an unhappy experience," he explained--"thanks to your
thoughtfulness for me. I do not deserve so much consideration; and that
only makes me feel all the more regretful."

"It was silly of me," she admitted with a shadowy, rueful smile. "I'm
afraid my silliness makes too much trouble...."

He commented honestly: "I don't understand."

"If I had only been patient enough to wait for you to call me...."

"Forgive that oversight. I was pressed for time, as you may imagine."

"Oh, it all comes back to my own stupidity. I might have known you had come
through all right."

"How should you?"

"Why not?--when you turn up here in New York safe and sound after being
drowned on the _Assyrian_!--as if that were not proof enough that you bear
a charmed life!"

"Charmed!" he laughed.

"And you haven't yet told me how you survived that adventure."

"You are kind to be interested, and I am unfortunate in never seeing you
save under circumstances unfavourable for yarn-spinning."

"You might be more fortunate."

"Only tell me how!"

"If you cared to ask me to dine with you to-morrow--I mean, to-night--"

"You would--?"

He was distressed by consciousness that his voice had thrilled impetuously.
But perhaps she had not noticed; there was no change in the even
friendliness of her tone.

"I'm as inquisitive as any woman that ever lived. Even if I wished to, I'm
afraid I shouldn't be able to resist an invitation to hear your Odyssey."

"Delmonico's at eight?"

"Thank you," she said primly.

"You make me too happy. May I call for you?"

"Please." She offered a hand whose touch he found cool, steady, and
impersonal. "Good morning, Mr. Ember."

He stood in a stare while she went quickly through the lobby to a waiting
elevator, then roused and went back to his cab.

It was by daylight that he reentered his rooms and found them tenanted by
a negro boy bound and gagged, bruised and sore, and scared beyond
intelligible expression.

Freeing him and salving his injuries bodily and spiritual with a liberal
douceur, Lanyard exacted an oath of silence, then turned him out.

He had approximately five hours to put in somehow before his appointment
with Colonel Stanistreet at nine, and was too well versed in the lore of
late hours to think of giving any part of that time to sleep. By so doing
he would only insure a mutinous awakening, with mind and body sluggish and
unrested. If, on the other hand, he remained awake, he would go to that
interview in a state of supernormal animation exceedingly to be desired if
he were to round out this adventure without discredit.

For its end was not yet. He had still a part to play whose lines were not
yet written, whose business remained to be invented. He neither dared
shirk that appointment, for reasons of policy, nor wished to, while there
remained reparation to be accomplished, a wrong to be righted, justice to
be done, a question to be answered.

Only when these matters had been put in order would he feel his honour
discharged of its burdens, himself free once more to drop out and go in
peace his lonely ways in life, ways henceforth to be both lonely and
aimless.

For, when he strove to peer into the future, only an emptiness confronted
him. With Ekstrom accounted for finally and forevermore, there was nothing
to come but the final accounting of the Lone Wolf with that civilization
which had bred and suffered him.

One way presented itself to make that reckoning even. The Foreign Legion of
France asks no embarrassing questions of its recruits, and enlistment in
its ranks offers with anonymity a consoling certainty.

Thus alone might he find his way home to the heart of that enigma whence he
had emerged, a nameless waif astray in grim Parisian by-ways....

This vision of his end contenting him, he began to scheme a campaign
for the day that was simple enough in prospect: a little chicanery with
Stanistreet, a personal appeal to Crane to restore the passports of
Monsieur André Duchemin which must have been found on Ekstrom's body, a
berth on some steamer sailing for Europe, then the last evanishment.

One detail alone troubled him, his promise to the Brooke girl that she
should dine with him that night.

Reminded of this obligation, figuratively he seized Michael Lanyard by the
scruff of his neck and shook him with a savage hand. What insensate folly
was ever his, what want of wit and strength to keep out of temptation's
ways! Why must he have fallen in so readily with her suggestion? Why this
infatuate thirst for sympathy, this eagerness to violate the seals of
reticence at the wish of a strange woman? Was there any reasonable
explanation of the strange lack of his wonted self-sufficiency in the
company of Cecelia Brooke?

No matter. If he might not contrive somehow to squirm out of that
engagement, he could at all events school himself to decent reticence. He
promised himself to make his account of the submarine adventure drearily
bald and trite, to minimize to the last degree his part therein, above all
things to refrain from painting the Lone Wolf in romantic colours.

She was much too good a sort, too straight, sincere, fair-minded,
honest--the sort of girl who deserved the Thackeray sort of man, never a
thief.

If she even dreamed....

Lanyard brought forth from its hiding place the necklace, weighed it in
his hand, examined it minutely. Granting its marvellous perfection, he
recognized no more its beauty, dispassionately reviewed in turn each stone
of matchless loveliness, no more susceptible to their seductive purity,
perceiving in them nothing but hard, bright, translucent pebbles, cold,
soulless, cruel.

One by one they slipped through his fingers like beads of an unholy rosary.

At length, crushing them together in the hollow of his palm, he stood a
while in thought, then turning to his writing-desk bundled the necklace in
wrappings of white tissue secured with rubber bands, counted carefully the
sheaf of bills he had taken from Ekstrom, sealed the whole amount in a
plain, long envelope, and put this aside in company with the necklace.

Already two hours had passed and, since he meant to call at the house on
West End Avenue well in advance of the hour when Cecelia Brooke might be
there--presuming Blensop to have given her the same appointment as he had
given "Mr. Ember," that is, nine o'clock--it was now time to prepare.

Returning to his bedchamber, he laid out a carefully selected change of
clothing, shaved, parboiled himself in a hot bath, chilled him to the
pith in one of icy coldness, and dressed with scrupulous heed to detail,
studiously effacing every sign of his sleepless night.

That experience was in no way to be surmised from his appearance when he
sallied forth to breakfast at the Plaza.

At eight precisely, presenting himself at the Stanistreet residence, he
desired the footman to announce him as the author of a certain telegram
from Edgartown.

He was obliged to wait less than a minute, the footman returning in haste
to request him to step into the library.

This apartment--which he found much as he had last seen it, eight hours
ago, its window shattered, the portières down, the furniture in some
disorder--was, on his introduction, occupied by two persons, one an
elderly, iron-gray gentleman of untidy dress and unobtrusive habit in spite
of a discerning cool, gray eye, the other Mr. Blensop in the neatest of
one-button morning-coat effects, with striped trouserings neither too smart
nor too sober for that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call
him, and fair white spats.

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