The False Faces Part 41

No need to lead her, no need for more than the least of pressures upon her yielding waist, no need for anything but absolute surrender to the magic of the moment....

Effortless, like creatures of the music adrift upon its sounding tides, they circled the floor once, twice, and again, before reluctantly Lanyard brought himself to shatter the spell of that enchantment.

Looking down with an apologetic smile, he asked:

"Mademoiselle, do you know you can be an excellent actress?"

As if in resentment the girl glanced upward sharply, with clouded eyes.

"So can most women, in emergency."

"I mean ... I have something serious to say; n.o.body must guess your thoughts."

She said simply: "I will do my best."

"You must--you must appear quite charmed. Also, should you catch me smirking like an infatuated ninny, remember I am only doing my own indifferent best to act."

Laughter trembled deliciously in her voice: "I promise faithfully to bear in mind your heartlessness!"

"I am an a.s.s," he enunciated with the humility of conviction. "But that can't be helped. Attend to me, if you please--and do not start. This place turns out to be a nest of Prussian spies. I was brought here by a trick. I understand the order is I may not leave alive."

Playing her part so well as almost to embarra.s.s Lanyard himself, the girl smiled daringly into his eyes.

"Because of that packet?" she breathed.

"Because of that, mademoiselle."

"Where is it?"

For an instant Lanyard lost countenance absolutely. Through sheer good fortune the girl was now dancing with face averted, her head so nearly touching his shoulder that it seemed to rest upon it.

Nevertheless, it was at cost of an heroic struggle that he fought down all signs of that shock with which it had been borne in upon him that he dared not a.s.sure the girl her packet was in safe hands.

If he had failed in his efforts to restore the thing to her, that she might consign it as she saw fit and so discharge her personal trust, till now Lanyard had solaced himself with a hazy notion that she would in turn be comforted when she learned the doc.u.ment was in the keeping of her country's Secret Service.

Impossible to tell her that: his own act had rendered it impossible, that act the outcome of wilful trifling with his infirmity, his itch for thieving.

Of a sudden the pilfered necklace secreted in an inner pocket of his waistcoat, above his heart, seemed to have gained the weight of so much lead. The hideous consciousness of the thing stung like the bite of live coals.

This woman was in distress; he yearned to lighten her burden; he could do that with half a dozen words; his guilt prohibited.

A thief!

Now indeed the Lone Wolf tasted shame and realized its bitterness....

Puzzled by his constraint, the girl's eyes again sought his; and warned in time by the movement of her head, he mustered impudence to meet their question with the look of tenderness that went with the role she suffered him to play.

"What is the matter?"

"I am ashamed that I have failed you...."

"Don't think of that. I know you did your best. Only tell me what became of it."

"It was stolen; when I returned to my stateroom that night I was held up and robbed. The thief shot at me, killed his confederate, decamped by way of the port. I pursued. Another aided him to overpower and cast me overboard."

"Yet you escaped...!"

Strange she should seem more intrigued by that than concerned about her loss!

"I escaped, no matter how...."

"You don't know who stole the packet?"

"I don't recall the man among the pa.s.sengers, but he may have been in one of the boats, a fellow of about my stature, with a flowing beard...."

He sketched broadly Ekstrom as he had seen him in the Stanistreet library.

Her eyes quickened.

"One such escaped in our boat, the second steward; I think his name was Anderson."

"Doubtless the same."

"Then it is gone!"

For once in his acquaintance with her, that brave spirit seemed to falter: she became a burden, bereft for a little of all grace and spontaneity.

He was constrained to swing her forcibly into time.

Almost instantly she recollected herself, covered her lapse with a little laugh innocent of any hint of its forced falsity, and showed him and the room as well a radiant countenance: all with such address and art that the incident might well have escaped notice, otherwise have pa.s.sed for a bit of natural by-play.

Yet distress was too eloquent in the broken query: "What _am_ I to do?"

Heartsick, self-sick to boot, he essayed to suggest that she consult Colonel Stanistreet, but lacking so much effrontery, stammered and fell silent.

Perhaps misinterpreting, she cried in quick contrition: "I am forgetting!

Forgive me. I should have said: what are you to do?"

He whipped his wits together.

"Look down, turn your face aside, smile.... I have a plan, a desperate remedy, but the best I can contrive. When next the lift comes up, we must try to be near it. There is one row of tables which we must break through by main force. Leave that to me, follow as I clear a way, go straight into the lift. If anything happens, run down the stairway on the left. The ground floor is two flights below. If I am any way detained, don't stop--go on, get your wraps, take the first taxi you see, return directly to the Knickerbocker. I will telephone you later."

"If you live," she breathed.

"Never fear for me...."

"But if I do? Do you imagine I could rest if I thought you had sacrificed yourself for me?"