Lanyard gave no sign, but his heart sank. He had exhausted his last resource to gain time, he was now at his wits" ends. Only his star could save him now....
Monk turned the keys, but all at once forgot his purpose, and with hands stayed upon the lid of the box paused and c.o.c.ked his ears attentively to rumours of excitement and confusion on the deck. The instinct of the seafaring man uppermost, Monk stiffened, grew rigid from head to foot.
One heard hurried feet, outcries, a sudden jangle of the engine-room telegraph...
"Monsieur! monsieur!" Liane implored. "Open that box!"
The words were on her lips when she was thrown off her feet by a frightful shock which stopped the Sybarite dead in full career, before the screw, reversed in obedience to the telegraph, could grip the water and lessen her momentum. The woman cannoned against Monk, shouldering him bodily aside. Instinctively s.n.a.t.c.hing at the box, Monk succeeded only in dragging it to the edge of the desk before a second shock, accompanied by a grinding crash of steel and timbers, seemed to make the yacht leap like a live thing stricken mortally. She heeled heavily to starboard, the despatch-box went to the floor with a thump lost in the greater din, Liane Delorme was propelled headlong into a corner, Monk thrown to his knees, Phinuit lifted out of his chair and flung sprawling into the arms of Lanyard, who, pinned down by the other"s weight in his own chair, felt this last slide backwards to starboard and bring up against a part.i.tion with a bang that drove the breath out of him in one enormous gust.
He retained, however, sufficient presence of mind neatly to disarm Phinuit before that one guessed what he was about.
After that second blow, the Sybarite remained at a standstill, but the continued beating of her engines caused her to quiver painfully from trucks to keelson, as if in agonies of death such as those which had marked the end of Popinot. Of a sudden the engines ceased, and there was no more movement of any sort, only an appalling repose with silence more dreadful still.
Lanyard had no means to measure how long that dumb suspense lasted which was imposed by the stunned faculties of all on board. It seemed interminable. Eventually he saw Monk pick himself up and, making strange moaning noises, like a wounded animal, throw himself upon the door, jerk it open, and dash out.
As if he had only needed that vision of action to animate him, Lanyard threw Phinuit off, so that he staggered across the slanting floor toward the door. When he brought himself up by catching hold of its frame, he was under the threat of his own pistol in Lanyard"s hands. He lingered for a moment, showing Lanyard a distraught and vacant face, then apparently realising his danger faded away into the saloon.
With a roughness dictated by the desperate extremity, Lanyard strode over to Liane Delorme, where she still crouched in her corner, staring witlessly, caught her by one arm, fairly jerked her to her feet, and thrust her stumbling out into the saloon. Closing the door behind her, he shot its bolts.
He went to work swiftly then, in a fever of haste. In his ears the clamour of the shipwrecked men upon the decks was only a distant droning, hardly recognised for what it was by him who had not one thought other than to make all possible advantage of every precious instant; and so with the roar of steam from the escape-valves.
Stripping off coat and waistcoat, he took from the pocket of the latter the wallet that held his papers, then ripped open his shirt and unbuckled the money belt round his waist. Its pockets were ample and fitted with trustworthy fastenings; and all but one, that held a few English sovereigns, were empty. The jewels of Madame de Montalais went into them as rapidly as his fingers could move.
Thus engaged, he heard a pistol explode in the saloon, and saw the polished writing-bed of the captain"s desk scored by a bullet. His gaze shifting to the door, he discovered a neat round hole in one of its rosewood panels. At the same time, to the tune of another report, a second hole appeared, and the bullet, winging above the desk, buried itself in the after-bulkhead, between the dead-lights. A stream of bullets followed, one after another boring the stout panels as if their consistency had been that of cheese.
Lanyard stepped out of their path and hugged the part.i.tion while he finished stuffing the jewels into the belt and, placing the thin wallet beneath it, strapped it tightly round him once more....
That would be Phinuit out there, no doubt, disdaining to waste time breaking in the door, or perhaps fearing his reception once it was down. An innocent and harmless amus.e.m.e.nt, if he enjoyed it, that it seemed a pity to interrupt. At the same time it grew annoying. The door was taking on the look of a sieve, and the neighbourhood of the deadlights, Lanyard"s sole avenue of escape, was being well peppered.
Something would have to be done about it...
Lanyard completed his preparations by kicking off his shoes and taking up another notch in the belt that supported his trousers. If the swim before him proved a long one, he could get rid of his garments in the water readily enough; if on the other hand the sh.o.r.e proved to be close at hand, it would be more convenable to land at least half clothed.
Then--the fusillade continuing without intermission save when the man outside stopped long enough to extract an empty clip and replace it with one loaded--Lanyard edged along the part.i.tion to the door, calculated the stand of the lunatic in the saloon from the angle at which the bullets were coming through, and emptied the pistol he had taken from Phinuit at the panels as fast as he could pull trigger.
There was no more firing...
He tossed aside the empty weapon, made sure of Popinot"s on his hip, approached one of the deadlights, placed a chair, climbed upon it, and with infinite pains managed to wriggle and squirm head and shoulders through the opening. It was very fortunate for him indeed that the Sybarite happened to have been built for pleasure yachting, with deadlights uncommonly large for the sake of air and light, else he would have been obliged to run the risk of opening the door to the saloon and fighting his way out and up to the deck.
As it was, the business was difficult enough. He had to work one of his arms out after his shoulders and then, twisting round, strain and claw at the smooth overhang of the stern until able to catch the outer lip of the scuppers above.
After that he had to lift and drag the rest of him out through the deadlight and, hanging by fingertips, work his way round, inch by inch, until it seemed possible to drop into the sea and escape hitting the screw.
In point of fact, he barely missed splitting himself in two on the thing, and on coming to the surface clung to it while taking such observations as one might in that befogged blackness.
Impossible to guess which way to strike out: the fog hung low upon the water, greying its smooth, gently heaving black surface, he could see nothing on either beam.
At length, however, he heard through the hissing uproar of escaping steam a mournful bell somewhere off to port, which he at first took for a buoy, then perceived to be tolling with a regularity inconsistent with the eccentric action of waves. Timed by pulsebeats, it struck once every fifteen seconds or thereabouts: undoubtedly the fog signal of some minor light-house.
In confirmation of this conclusion, Lanyard heard, from the deck above, the resonant accents of Captain Monk, clearly articulate in that riot of voices, apparently storming at hapless Mr. Swain.
"Don"t you hear that bell, you a.s.s? Doesn"t that tell you what you"ve done? You"ve piled us on the rocks off the eastern end of Plum Island.
And G.o.d in Heaven only knows how you managed to get so far off the course!"
Breathing to the night air thanks which would have driven Captain Monk mad could he have heard them, Lanyard let go the bronze blade and struck out for the melancholy bell.
Ten minutes later the fingers of one hand--he was swimming on his side--at the bottom of its stroke touched pebbles.
He lowered his feet and waded through extensive shallows to a wide and sandy beach.
XXVIII
FINALE
The window of the living-room in his suite at the Walpole, set high in cliff-like walls, commanded a southward vista of Fifth Avenue whose enchantment, clothed in ever changing guises of light and shade, was so potent that Lanyard, on the first day of his tenancy, thought it could never tire. Yet by noon of the third he was viewing it with the eyes of soul-destroying ennui, though the disfavour it had so quickly won in his sight was, he knew, due less to cloying familiarity than to the uncertainty and discontent that were eating out his heart.
Three days before, immediately on arriving in New York and installing himself in this hotel, to whose management he was well known from other days, he had cabled Eve de Montalais and Wertheimer.
The response to the latter--a cheerful request that credit be arranged for him by cable--was as prompt and satisfactory as he had expected it to be.
But from Madame de Montalais he heard nothing.
"Mission successful," he had wired--"returning France by La Savoie in five days having arranged safe transportation your property--please advise if you can meet me in Paris to receive same or your commands otherwise."
And to this, silence only!--silence to him to whom words of her dictation, however few and terse and filtered through no matter how many indifferent mediums of intelligence, would have been precious beyond expression.
So it was that, as hour followed hour and the tale of them lengthened into days, he fell into a temper of morbid brooding that was little like the man, and instead of faring abroad and seeking what amus.e.m.e.nt he might find in the most carefree city of the post-War world, shut himself up in his rooms and moped, indifferent to all things but the knocks at his door, the stridulation of the telephone bell that might announce the arrival of the desired message.
And so it was that, when the telephone did ring--at last!--towards noon of that third day, he fairly stumbled over himself in his haste to reach the instrument. But the animation with which he answered the professional voice at the other end of the wire faded very quickly, the look of weariness returned, his accents voiced an indifference fairly desolating.
"Yes?...Oh, yes...Very well...Yes, at once."
He returned to his view from the window, and was hating it with all his heart when a stout knuckling on his door announced his callers.
They filed into the room with a cheerfulness of mien in striking contrast to the weary courtesy with which Lanyard received them: Liane Delorme first, then Monk, then Phinuit, rather bleached of colour and wearing one arm in a sling; all very smart in clothes conspicuously new and as costly as the Avenue afforded, striking figures of contentment in prosperity.
"It is a pleasure indeed," Lanyard gravely acknowledged their several salutations--"not, I must confess, altogether unexpected, but a pleasure none the less."
"So you didn"t think we"d be long spotting you in the good little old town?" Phinuit enquired. "Had a notion you thought the best way to lose us would be to put up at this well-known home of the highest prices."
"No," Lanyard replied. "I never thought to be rid of you without one more meeting--"
"Then there"s good in the old bean yet," Phinuit interrupted in wasted irony.
"One cherishes that hope, monsieur....But the trail I left for you to follow! I would be an a.s.s indeed if I thought you would fail to find it. When one borrows a rowboat at Plum Island Light without asking permission--government property, too--and leaves it moored to a dock on the Greenport waterfront; when one arrives in Greenport clothed in shirt and trousers only, and has to bribe its pardonably suspicious inhabitants with handfuls of British gold--which they are the more loath to accept in view of its present depreciation--in order to secure a slopchest coat and shoes and transportation by railway to New York; when a taxicab chauffeur refuses a sovereign for his fare from the Pennsylvania Station to this hotel, and one is constrained to borrow from the management--why, I should say the trail was fairly broad and well blazed, mes amis."