The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  On the seventh day the course pricked on the chart placed the Sybarite’s position at noon as approximately in mid-Atlantic. Contemplating a prospect of seven days more of such emptiness, Lanyard’s very soul yawned.

  And nothing could induce Captain Monk to hasten the passage. Mr. Mussey asserted that his engines could at a pinch deliver twenty knots an hour; yet day in and day out the Sybarite poked along at little better than half that speed. It was no secret that Liane Delorme’s panic flight from Popinot had hurried the yacht out of Cherbourg harbour four days earlier than her proposed sailing date, whereas the Sybarite had a rendezvous to keep with her owner at a certain hour of a certain night, an appointment carefully calculated with consideration for the phase of the moon and the height of the tide, therefore not readily to be altered.

  After dinner on that seventh day, a meal much too long drawn out for Lanyard’s liking, and marked to boot by the consumption of much too much champagne, he left the main saloon the arena of an impromptu poker party, repaired to the quarterdeck, and finding a wicker lounge chair by the taffrail subsided into it with a sigh of gratitude for this fragrant solitude of night, so soothing and serene.

  The Sybarite, making easy way through a slight sea, with what wind there was—not much—on the port bow, rolled but slightly, and her deliberate and graceful fore-and-aft motion, as she swung from crest to crest of the endless head-on swells, caused the stars to stream above her mast-heads, a boundless river of broken light. The pulsing of the engines, unhasting, unresting, ran through her fabric in ceaseless succession of gentle tremors, while the rumble of their revolutions resembled the refrain of an old, quiet song. The mechanism of the patent log hummed and clicked more obtrusively. Directly underfoot the screw churned a softly clashing wake. From the saloon companionway drifted intermittently a confusion of voices, Liane’s light laughter, muted clatter of chips, now and then the sound of a popping cork. Forward the ship’s bell sounded two double strokes, then a single, followed by a wail in minor key: “Five bells and all’s well!”… And of a sudden Lanyard suffered the melancholy oppression of knowing his littleness of body and soul, the relative insignificance even of the ship, that impertinent atom of human organization which traversed with unabashed effrontery the waters of the ages, beneath the shining constellations of eternity. In profound psychical enervation he perceived with bitterness and despair the enormous futility of all things mortal, the hopelessness of effort, the certain black defeat that waits upon even what men term success.

  He felt crushed, spiritually invertebrate, destitute of object in existence, bereft of all hope. What mattered it whether he won or lost in this stupid contest whose prize was possession of a few trinkets set with bits of glittering stone? If he won, of what avail? What could it profit his soul to make good a vain boast to Eve de Montalais? Would it matter to her what success or failure meant to him? Lanyard doubted it, he doubted her, himself, all things within the compass of his understanding, and knew appalling glimpses of that everlasting truth, too passionless to be cynical, that the hopes of man and his fears, his loves and hates, his strivings and passivity, are all one in the measured and immutable processes of Time.…

  The pressure of a hand upon his own roused him to discover the Liane Delorme had seated herself beside him, in a chair that looked the other way, so that her face was not far from his; and he could scarcely be unaware of its hinted beauty, now wan and glimmering in starlight, enigmatic with soft, close shadows.

  “I must have been dreaming,” he said, apologetic. “You startled me.”

  “One could see that, my friend.”

  The woman spoke in quiet accents and let her hand linger upon his with its insistent reminder of the warm, living presence whose rich colouring was disguised by the gloom that encompassed both.

  Four strokes in duplicate on the ship’s bell, then the call: “Eight bells and a-a-all’s well!”

  Lanyard muttered: “No idea it was so late.”

  A slender white shape, Mr. Collison emerged from his quarters in the deck-house beneath the bridge and ran up the ladder to relieve Mr. Swain. At the same time a seaman came from forward and ascended by the other ladder. Later Mr. Swain and the man whose trick at the wheel was ended left the bridge, the latter to go forward to his rest, Mr. Swain to turn into his room in the deck-house.

  The hot glow of the saloon skylights became a dim refulgence, aside from which, and its glimmer in the mouth of the companionway, no lights were visible in the whole length of the ship except the shuttered window of Mr. Swain’s room, which presently was darkened, and odd glimpses of the binnacle light to be had when the helmsman shifted his stand.

  A profound hush closed down upon the ship, whose progress across the face of the waters seemed to acquire a new significance of stealth, so that the two seated by the taffrail, above the throbbing screws and rushing torrent of the wake, talked in lowered accents without thinking why.

  “It is that one grows bored, eh, cher ami?”

  “Perhaps, Liane.”

  “Or perhaps that one’s thought are constantly with one’s heart, elsewhere?”

  “You think so?”

  “At the Château de Montalais, conceivably.”

  “It amuses you, then, to shoot arrows into the air?”

  “But naturally, I seek the reason, when I see you distrait and am conscious of your neglect.”

  “I think it is for me to complain of that!”

  “How can you say such things?”

  “One has seen what one has seen, these last few days. I think you are what that original Phinuit would call ‘a fast worker,’ Liane.”

  “What stupidity! If I seek to make myself liked, you know well it is with a purpose.”

  “One hardly questions that.”

  “You judge harshly… Michael.”

  Lanyard spent a look of astonishment on the darkness. He could not remember that Liane had ever before called him by that name.

  “Do I? Sorry.…” His tone was listless. “But does it matter?”

  “You know that to me nothing else matters.”

  Lanyard checked off on his fingers: “Swain, Collison, Mussey. Who next? Why not I, as well as another?”

  “Do you imagine for an instant that I class you with such riffraff?”

  “Why, if you really want to know what I think, Liane: it seems to me that all men in your sight are much the same, good for one thing only, to be used to serve your ends. And who am I that you should hold me in higher rating than any other man?”

  “You should know I do,” the woman breathed, so low he barely caught the words and uttered an involuntary “Pardon?” before he knew he had understood. So that she iterated in a clearer tone of protest: “You should know I do—that I do esteem you as something more than other men. Think what I owe to you, Michael; and then consider this, that of all men whom I have known you alone have never asked for love.”

  He gave a quiet laugh. “There is too much humility in my heart.”

  “No,” she said in a dull voice—“but you despise me. Do not deny it!” She shifted impatiently in her chair. “I know what I know. I am no fool, whatever you think of me.… No,” she went on with emotion under restraint: “I am a creature of fatality, me—I cannot hope to escape my fate!”

  He was silent a little in perplexed consideration of this. What did she wish him to believe?

  “But one imagines nobody can escape his fate.”

  “Men can, some of them; men such as you, rare as you are, know how to cheat destiny; but women never. It is the fate of all women that each shall some time love some man to desperation, and be despised. It is my fate to have learned too late to love you, Michael—”

  “Ah, Liane, Liane!”

  “But you hold me in too much contempt to be willing to recognise the truth.”
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  “On the contrary, I admire you extremely, I think you are an incomparable actress.”

  “You see!” She offered a despairing gesture to the stars. “It is not true what I say? I lay bare my heart to him, and he tells me that I act!”

  “But my dear girl! surely you do not expect me to think otherwise?”

  “I was a fool to expect anything from you,” she returned bitterly—“you know too much about me. I cannot find it in my heart to blame you, since I am what I am, what the life you saved me to so long ago has made me. Why should you believe in me? Why should you credit the sincerity of this confession, which costs me so much humiliation? That would be too good for me, too much to ask of life!”

  “I think you cannot fairly complain of life, Liane. What have you asked of it that you have failed to get? Success, money, power, adulation—”

  “Never love.”

  “The world would find it difficult to believe that.”

  “Ah, love of a sort, yes: the love that is the desire to possess and that possession satisfies.”

  “Have you asked for any other sort?”

  “I ask it now. I know what the love is that longs to give, to give and give again, asking no return but kindness, understanding, even toleration merely. It is such love as this I bear you, Michael. But you do not believe.…”

  Divided between annoyance and distaste, he was silent. And all at once she threw herself half across the joined arms of their chairs, catching his shoulders with her hands, so that her half-clothed body rested on his bosom, and its scented warmth assailed his senses with the seduction whose power she knew so well.

  “Ah, Michael, my Michael!” she cried—“if you but knew, if only you could believe! It is so real to me, so true, so overwhelming, the greatest thing of all! How can it be otherwise to you?… No: do not think I complain, do not think I blame you or have room in my heart for any resentment. But, oh my dear! were I only able to make you understand, think what life could be to us, to you and me. What could it withhold that we desired? You with your wit, your strength, your skill, your poise—I with my great love to inspire and sustain you—what a pair we should make! what happiness would be ours! Think, Michael—think!”

  “I have thought, Liane,” he returned in accents as kind as the hands that held her. “I have thought well…”

  “Yes?” She lifted her face so near that their breaths mingled, and he was conscious of the allure of tremulous and parted lips. “You have thought and.… Tell me your thought, my Michael.”

  “Why, I think two things,” said Lanyard: “First, that you deserve to be soundly kissed.” He kissed her, but with discretion, and firmly put her from him. “Then”—his tone took on a note of earnestness—“that if what you have said is true, it is a pity, and I am sorry, Liane, very sorry. And, if it is not true, that the comedy was well played. Shall we let it rest at that, my dear?”

  Half lifting her, he helped her back into her chair, and as she turned her face away, struggling for mastery of her emotion, true or feigned, he sat back, found his cigarette case, and clipping a cigarette between his lips, cast about for a match.

  He had none in his pockets, but knew that there was a stand on one of the wicker tables nearby. Rising, he found it, and as he struck the light heard a sudden, soft swish of draperies as the woman rose.

  Moving toward the saloon companionway, she passed him swiftly, without a word, her head bended, a hand pressing a handkerchief to her lips. Forgetful, he followed her swaying figure with puzzled gaze till admonished by the flame that crept toward his fingertips. Then dropping the match he struck another and put it to his cigarette. At the second puff he heard a choking gasp, and looked up again.

  The woman stood alone, en silhouette against the glow of the companionway, her arms thrust out as if to ward off some threatened danger. A second cry broke from her lips, shrill with terror, she tottered and fell as, dropping his cigarette, Lanyard ran to her.

  His vision dazzled by the flame of the match, he sought in vain for any cause for her apparent fright. For all he could see, the deck was as empty as he had presumed it to be all through their conversation.

  He found her in a faint unmistakably unaffected. Footfalls sounded on the deck as he knelt, making superficial examination. Collison had heard her cries and witnessed her fall from the bridge and was coming to investigate.

  “What in blazes—!”

  Lanyard replied with a gesture of bewilderment: “She was just going below. I’d stopped to light a cigarette, saw nothing to account for this. Wait: I’ll fetch water.”

  He darted down the companionway, filled a glass from a silver thermos carafe, and hurried back. As he arrived at the top of steps, Collison announced: “It’s all right. She’s coming to.”

  Supported in the arms of the second mate, Liane was beginning to breathe deeply and looking round with dazed eyes. Lanyard dropped on a knee and set the glass to her lips. She gulped twice, mechanically, her gaze fixed to his face. Then suddenly memory cleared, and she uttered a bubbling gasp of returning dread.

  “Popinot!” she cried, as Lanyard hastily took the glass away. “Popinot—he was there—I saw him—standing there!”

  A trembling arm indicated the starboard deck just forward of the companion housing. But of course, when Lanyard looked, there was no one there…if there had ever been.…

  CHAPTER XXIII

  THE CIGARETTE

  Lanyard found himself exchanging looks of mystification with Collison, and heard his own voice make the flat statement: “But there is nobody.…” Collison muttered words which he took to be: No, and never was. “But you must have seen him from the bridge,” Lanyard insisted blankly, “if.…”

  “I looked around as soon as I heard her call out,” Collison replied; “but I didn’t see anybody, only mademoiselle here—and you, of course, with that match.”

  “Please help me up,” Liane Delorme asked in a faint voice. Collison lent a hand. In the support and shelter of Lanyard’s arm the woman’s body quivered like that of a frightened child. “I must go to my stateroom,” she sighed uncertainly. “But I am afraid…”

  “Do not be. Remember Mr. Collison and I… Besides, you know, there was nobody…”

  The assertion seemed to exasperate her; her voice discovered new strength and violence.

  “But I am telling you I saw…that assassin!”—she shuddered again—“standing there, in the shadow, glaring at me as if I had surprised him and he did not know what next to do. I think he must have been spying down through the skylight; it was the glow from it that showed me his red, dirty face of a pig.”

  “You came aft on the port side, didn’t you?” Lanyard enquired of the second mate.

  Collison nodded. “Running,” he said—“couldn’t imagine what was up.”

  “It is easy not to see what one is not looking for,” Lanyard mused, staring forward along the starboard side. “If a man had dropped flat and squirmed along until in the shelter of the engine-room ventilators, he could have run forward—bending low, you know—without your seeing him.”

  “But you were standing here, to starboard!”

  “I tell you, that match was blinding me,” Lanyard affirmed irritably. “Besides, I wasn’t looking—except at my sister—wondering what was the matter.”

  Collison started. “Excuse me,” he said, reminded—“if mademoiselle’s all right, I ought to get back to the bridge.”

  “Take me below,” Liane begged. “I must speak with Captain Monk.”

  Monk and Phinuit were taking their ease plus nightcaps in the captain’s sitting-room. A knock brought a prompt invitation to “Come in!” Lanyard thrust the door open and curtly addressed Monk: “Mademoiselle Delorme wishes to see you.” The eloquent eyebrows indicated surprise and resignation, and Monk got up and inserted himse
lf into his white linen tunic. Phinuit, more sensitive to the accent of something amiss, hurried out in unceremonious shirt sleeves. “What’s up?” he demanded, looking from Lanyard’s grave face to Liane’s face of pallor and distress. Lanyard informed him in a few words.

  “Impossible!” Phinuit commented.

  “Nonsense,” Monk added, speaking directly to Liane. “You imagined it all.”

  She had recovered much of her composure, enough to enable her to shrug her disdain of such stupidity.

  “I tell you only what my two eyes saw.”

  “To be sure,” Monk agreed with a specious air of being wide open to conviction. “What became of him, then?”

  “You ask me that, knowing that in stress of terror I fainted!”

  The eyebrows achieved an effect of studied weariness. “And you saw nobody, monsieur? And Collison didn’t, either?”

  Lanyard shook his head to each question. “Still, it is possible—.”

  Monk cut him short impatiently. “All gammon—all in her eye! No man bigger than a cockroach could have smuggled himself aboard this yacht without my being told. I know my ship, I know my men, I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Presently,” Liane prophesied darkly, “you may be talking about nothing.”

  At a loss, Monk muttered: “Don’t get you.…”

  “When you find yourself, some fine morning, with your throat cut in your sleep, like poor de Lorgnes—or garroted, as I might have been.”

  “I’m not going to lose any sleep.…” Monk began.

  “Lose none before you have the vessel searched,” Liane pleaded, with a change of tone. “You know, messieurs, I am not a woman given to hallucinations. I saw… And I tell you, while that assassin is at liberty aboard this yacht, not one of our lives is worth a sou—no, not one!”