CHAPTER VII
OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY
Durkin was pacing up and down the small room in his stockinged feet,looking at her, from time to time, with a detached, but ever studiouslyalert glance. Then he came to a stop, and confronted her. The memoryof the night before, in the Promenade, with the sudden glimpse of herprofile against the floating automobile curtain, came back to his mind,with a stab of pain.
"But what has all this to do with Lady Boxspur?" he suddenly demanded,wondering how long he should be able to have faith in that inner,unshaken integrity of hers which had passed through so many trials andsurvived so many calamities. But she hurried on, as though unconsciousof both his tone and his attitude.
"That has more to do with the next-of-kin agency. I left it out, ofcourse, but if you _must_ know it now, and here, I can tell you in aword or two."
"One naturally wants to know when one's wife ascends into thearistocracy!"
"And a Mercedes touring car as well! But, oh, Jim, surely you and Idon't need to go back to all that sort of thing, at this stage of thegame," she retorted wearily. She felt wounded, weighed down with aperverse sense of injury at his treatment, of injustice at hiscoldness, even in the face of the incongruous circumstances under whichthey had met.
But she went on speaking, resolutely, as though to purge her soul, forall time, of explanation and excuse.
"That next-of-kin agency was a dingy little office up two dingy stairsin Chancery Lane. For a few days their work seemed bearable enough,though it hurt me to see that all their income was being squeezed outof miserably poor people--always the miserably poor, the submergedsouls with romantic dreams of impending good fortune, which, of course,always just escaped them. That, I could endure. But when I found thatthe agency was branching out, and was actually trying to present me forinspection as a titled heiress, in sore need of a secret and immediatemarriage, I revolted, at once. Then they calmly proposed that I embarkfor America, as some sort of bogus countess--and while they were stilltalking and debating over what mild and strictly limited extravagancesthey would stand for, and just what expenses they would allow, Ibolted! But their scheming and plotting had given me the hint, for Iknew, if the worst came to the worst, I would not be altogether underthe thumb of Lord Boxspur. So when I came South from Paris I simplyassumed the title--it simplified so many things. It both gave meopportunities and protected me. If, to gain my ends and to reconnoitremy territory, I became the occasional guest--remember, Jim, the mostdiscreet and guarded guest!--of Count Anton Szapary--who carried ahundred thousand crowns away from the Vienna Jockey Club a month or twoago--you must simply try to make the end justify the means. I wasstill trying to get in touch with you. One of his automobiles wasalways politely placed at my disposal. It was a chance, well, scarcelyto be missed. For, you see, it was my intention to meet His Highness,the Prince Ignace Slevenski Pobloff, under slightly differentcircumstances than would prevail if he and his valet should quietlystep through that door at the present moment!"
She laughed, a little bitterly, with a reckless shrug of the shoulders.Durkin, nettled by the sound of tragedy in her voice, did not like thesound of that laugh. Then, as he looked at her more critically, he sawthat she was white and worn and tired. But it was the words over whichshe had laughed which sent him abruptly hurrying into the next roomwith a lighted match, to read the hour from the little Swiss clockabove the cabinet.
"If we're after anything here we've got to get it!" he said, withconscious roughness. "It's later than I thought."
"Very well," she answered, quietly enough.
Then she turned to him, as he waited with his hand on the bedroomlight-button, before switching it off.
"You need never be afraid that I will bother you with any more of myhesitations, and scruples, and half-timid qualms, as I once did. Allthat is over and done with. I feel, now, that we're both in this sortof work from necessity, and not by accident. It has gripped andengulfed us, now, for good."
He raised a hand to stop her, stung to the quick by the misery andbitterness of her voice, still asking himself if it was not only thebitter cry of love for some neglectful love's reply. But she swept on,abandonedly.
"There's no use quibbling and fighting against it. We've got to keepat it, and wring out of it what we can, and always go back to it, andbend to it, and still keep at it, to the bitter end!"
"Frank, you mustn't say this!" he cried.
"But it's truth, pure truth. We're only going to live once. If wecan't be happy without doing the things we ought not to do--then we'llsimply _have to be criminals_. But I want my share of the joy ofliving--I want my happiness! I want _you_! I lost you once, andalmost forever, by hoping it could be the other way--but it's too late!"
"Frank!" he pleaded.
"I want you to see where we are," she said, with slow and terriblesolemnity. "If I am to be saved from it, now, or ever again, _you_must do it--_you--you_!"
She drew herself together, with a little shiver.
"Come," she said, "we've got our work to do!"
He looked at her white face for one moment, in silence, bewildered, andthen he snapped shut the button.
"We had better look through the safe at once," she went onapathetically. Something in her tone, if not her words themselves, asshe had spoken, sent a wave of what was more than startled miserythrough her husband. He once more felt, although he felt it vaguely,the note of impending tragedy which she was so premonitarily sounding.It brought to him a dim and hurried vision of that far-off butinevitable catastrophe which lay, somewhere, at the end of the roadthey were traveling. Their only hope and solace, it seemed to him,must thereafter lie in feverish and sustained activity. They must losethemselves in the dash and whirl of daring moments. And it was notfrom pleasure or from choice, now; it was to live. They must act orperish; they must plot and counterplot, or be submerged. Yet he woulddo what he could to save himself, as she, in turn, must do what shecould for herself--if they came to the end of their rope.
A minute later they were bending together over the contents of thedismantled safe. He was striking matches. By this time they were bothon their knees.
"You run through these papers, while I see what can be done with thedespatch box," he whispered to her. Then he put the little package ofvestas between them, so they might work by their own light. From timeto time the soft spurt of the lighting match broke the silence, asFrank hurriedly ran her eye over the different packets, and ashurriedly flung them back into the safe.
It was a relief to Durkin to think that he at least had someone besidehim who could read French. Busy as he was, he incongruously recalledto his mind how he once used to study the little printed announcementsin his hotel rooms, wondering, ruefully, if the delphic text meant thatlights and fires were extra, and if baths must be paid for, and vainlytrying to discover what his last basket of wood might cost.
Yes, he told himself, he was a hunter out of his domain. He wouldalways feel intimidated and insecure in this land of aliens andunknowns. He even sympathetically wondered who it was that had said:"Foreigners are fools!" Then a sudden, irrational, inconsequentialsense of gratitude took possession of him, as he felt and heard thewoman at work so close beside him. There was a feeling ofcompanionship about it that made the double risk worth while.
"There's nothing here!" Frank was saying, under her breath.
"Then it _must_ be the box!" he told her.
Durkin knew it was already too late to file and fit a skeleton key.His first impulse was to bury the box under a muffling pile of beddingand send a bullet or two through the lock. But his wandering eyecaught sight of a Morocco sheath-knife above them on the wall, and amoment later he had the point of it under the steel-bound lid, and ashe pried it flew open with a snap.
He waited, listening, and lighting matches, while Frank went throughthe papers, with nervous and agile fingers, mumbling the inscriptionsas she hurriedly read and cast them away from her.
&nbs
p; "I thought so!" she said at last, crisply.
The packet held half a dozen blueprints, together with some twelve orfourteen sheets of plans and specifications, on tinted "flimsy."Durkin noticed they were drawn up in red and black ink, and that at thebottom of each document were paragraphs of finely-penned,scholarly-looking writing. One glance was enough for them both.
Frank refolded them and caught them together with a rubber band. Thenshe thrust them into the bosom of her dress. Both rose to their feet,for both were filled with the selfsame sudden passion to get into theopen once more.
"That must go back, now!" whispered Frank, for Durkin was stooping downagain, over the leather bag that held the napoleons.
"Thank heaven," he answered gratefully, "it's not _that_!"
"Not _yet_!" she whispered back, bitterly, as she heard the chink andrattle of metal in the darkness. But some day it might be.
Then she heard another sound, which caused her to catch quickly atDurkin's arm. It was the sound of a key turning in the lock, followedby an impatient little French oath, and the weight of a man's bodyagainst the resisting door. Then the oath was repeated, and a secondkey was turned, this time in the nearer door.
"It's Pobloff!" she whispered.
She had felt the almost galvanic, precautionary response of Durkin'sbody; now she could hear his whispered ejaculation as he clutched ather and thrust her back.
"_You_ must get away, quick, whatever happens," he said hurriedly.There was a second tremor and rattle of the door; it might come in atany moment.
"Don't think of me," she whispered. "It's _you_!"
"But, my God, how'll you get out of this?" he demanded, in a quickwhisper. He was trying to force her back into the little anteroom.
"No, no; don't!" she answered him. "I can manage it--more easily thanyou!"
"But how?"
He was still crowding and elbowing her back, as though mere retreatmeant more assured safety.
"No, _no_!" she expostulated, under her breath. "I can shift formyself. It's _you_--you must get away!"
She was forcing the packet from her bosom into his hands.
"Take care of these, quick! Now here's the window ready. Oh, Jim, getaway while you've got the chance!"
"I can't do it!" he protested.
"You _must_, I tell you. I wouldn't lie to you! On my honor, Ipromise you I'll come out of this room, unharmed and free! But quick,or we'll both lose!"
Even in that moment of peril the thought that she was still ready toface this much for him filled his shaken body with a glow that was morekeenly exhilarating than wine itself. There was no time for words ordemonstration: the action carried its own eloquence.
He was already halfway through the opened window, but he turned back.
"Do you care, then?" he panted.
He could hear the quick catch of her breath.
"Good or bad, I love you, Jim! You know that! Now, hurry, oh, hurry!"
He caught her hand in his--that was all there was time for--while withhis free hand Durkin thrust the packet down into his pocket.
"If it turns out wrong--I mean if anything should happen to me, gostraight to the Embassy with them, in Rome. Good-bye!"
"Ah, then you _do_ expect danger!" he retorted, already back at thewindow again.
"No--no!" she whispered, resolutely, barring his ingress. "Hurry!Good-bye!"
"Good-bye," he whispered, as he slipped down on his hands and knees andcrawled along the balcony, like a cat, through the darkness.
Then the woman closed the window, and waited.
Phantom Wires: A Novel Page 7