The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  Irrepressible, Liane’s laughter pealed; and though he couldn’t help smiling, Lanyard hastened to offer up himself on the altar of peace.

  “But—messieurs!—you interest me so much. Won’t you tell me quickly what possible value my poor talents can have found in your sight?”

  “You tell him, Monk,” Phinuit said irreverently—“I’m no tale-bearer.”

  Monk elevated his eyebrows above recognition of the impertinence, and offered Lanyard a bow of formidable courtesy.

  “They are such, monsieur,” he said with that deliberation which becomes a diplomatic personage—“your talents are such that you can, if you will, become invaluable to us.”

  Phinuit chuckled outright at Lanyard’s look of polite obtuseness.

  “Never sail a straight course—can you skipper?—when you can get there by tacking. Here: I’m a plain-spoken guy, let me act as an interpreter. Mr. Lanyard: this giddy association of malefactors here present has the honour to invite you to become a full-fledged working member and stockholder of equal interest with the rest of us, participating in all benefits of the organization, including police protection. And as added inducement we’re willing to waive initiation fee and dues. Do I make myself clear?”

  “But perfectly.”

  “It’s like this: I’ve told you how we came together, the five of us, including Jules and Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes. Now we expect this venture, our first, to pan out handsomely. There’ll be a juicy melon cut when we get to New York. There’s a lot more—I think you understand—than the Montalais plunder to whack up on. We’ll make the average get-rich-quick scheme look like playing store in the back-yard with two pins the top price for anything on the shelves. And there isn’t any sane reason why we need stop at that. In fact, we don’t mean to. The Sybarite will make more voyages, and if anything should happen to stop it, there are other means of making the U. S. Customs look foolish. Each of us contributes valuable and essential services, mademoiselle, the skipper, my kid-brother, even I—and I pull a strong oar with the New York Police Department into the bargain. But there’s a vacancy in our ranks, the opening left by the death of de Lorgnes, an opening that nobody could hope to fill so well as you. So we put it up to you squarely: If you’ll sign on and work with us, we’ll turn over to you a round fifth share of the profits of this voyage as well as everything that comes after. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?”

  “But more than fair, monsieur.”

  “Well, it’s true you’ve done nothing to earn a fifth interest in the first division…”

  “Then, too, I am here, quite helpless in your hands.”

  “Oh, we don’t look at it that way—”

  “Which,” Liane sweetly interrupted, “is the one rational gesture you have yet offered in this conference, Monsieur Phinuit.”

  “Meaning, I suppose, Mr. Lanyard is far from being what he says, helpless in our hands.”

  “Nor ever will be, my poor friend, while he breathes and thinks.”

  “But, Liane!” Lanyard deprecated, modestly casting down his eyes—“you overwhelm me.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Liane retorted coolly.

  For some moments Lanyard continued to stare reflectively at his feet. Nothing whatever of his thought was to be gathered from his countenance, though eyes more shrewd to read than those of Phinuit or Monk were watching it intently.

  “Well, Mr. Lanyard, what do you say?”

  Lanyard lifted his meditative gaze to the face of Phinuit. “But surely there is more.…” he suggested in a puzzled way.

  “More what?”

  “I find something lacking.… You have shown me but one side of the coin. What is the reverse? I appreciate the honour you do me, I comprehend fully the strong inducements I am offered. But you have neglected—an odd oversight on the part of the plain-spoken man you profess to be—you have forgotten to name the penalty which would attach to a possible refusal.”

  “I guess it’s safe to leave that to your imagination.”

  “There would be a penalty, however?”

  “Well, naturally, if you’re not with us, you’re against us. And to take that stand would oblige us, as a simple matter of self-preservation, to defend ourselves with every means at our command.”

  “Means which,” Lanyard murmured, “you prefer not to name.”

  “Well, one doesn’t like to be crude.”

  “I have my answer, monsieur—and many thanks. The parallel is complete.”

  With a dim smile playing in his eyes and twitching at the corners of his lips, Lanyard leaned back and studied the deck beams. Liane Delorme sat up with a movement of sharp uneasiness.

  “Of what, my friend, are you thinking?”

  “I am marvelling at something everybody knows—that history does repeat itself.”

  The woman made a sudden hissing sound, of breath drawn shortly between closed teeth. “I hope not!” she sighed.

  Lanyard opened his eyes wide at her. “You hope not, Liane?”

  “I hope this time history will not altogether repeat itself. You see, my friend, I think I know what is in your mind, memories of old times.…”

  “True: I am thinking of those days when the Pack hunted the Lone Wolf in Paris, ran him to earth at last, and made him much the same offer as you have made tonight.… The Pack, you should know, messieurs, was the name assumed by an association of Parisian criminals, ambitious like you, who had grown envious of the Lone Wolf’s success, and wished to persuade him to run with them.”

  “And what happened?” Phinuit enquired.

  “Why it so happened that they chose the time when I had made up my mind to be good for the rest of my days. It was all most unfortunate.”

  “What answer did you give them, then?”

  “As memory serves, I told them they could all go plumb to hell.”

  “So I hope history will not repeat, this time,” Liane interjected.

  “And did they go?” Monk asked.

  “Presently, some of them, ultimately all; for some lingered a few years in French prisons, like that great Popinot, the father of monsieur who has caused us so much trouble.”

  “And you—?”

  “Why,” Lanyard laughed, “I have managed to keep out of jail, so I presume I must have kept my vow to be good.”

  “And no backsliding?” Phinuit suggested with a leer.

  “Ah! you must not ask me to tell you everything. That is a matter between me and my conscience.”

  “Well,” Phinuit hazarded with a good show of confidence, “I guess you won’t tell us to go plumb to hell, will you?”

  “No; I promise to be more original than that.”

  “Then you refuse!” Liane breathed tensely.

  “Oh, I haven’t said that! You must give me time to think this over.”

  “I knew that would be his answer,” Monk proclaimed, pride in his perspicuity shaping the set of his eyebrows. “That is why I was firm that we should wait no longer. You have four days in which to make up your mind, monsieur.”

  “I shall need them.”

  “I don’t see why,” Phinuit argued: “it’s an open and shut proposition, if ever there was one.”

  “But you are asking me to renounce something upon which I have set much store for many years, monsieur. I can’t be expected to do that in an hour or even a day.”

  You shall have your answer, I promise you, by the time we make our landfall—perhaps before.”

  “The sooner, the better.”

  “Are you sure, monsieur? But one thought it was the tortoise who won the famous race.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Captain Monk conceded generously, “to come to a sensible decision.”

  “But how good you are to me, monsieur!”r />
  CHAPTER XXV

  THE MALCONTENT

  Singular though the statement may seem, when one remembers the conditions that circumscribed his freedom of action on board the Sybarite, that he stood utterly alone in that company of conspirators and their creatures, alone and unarmed, with never a friend to guard his back or even to whisper him one word of counsel, warning or encouragement, with only his naked wits and hands to fortify and sustain his heart: it is still no exaggeration to say that Lanyard got an extraordinary amount of private diversion out of those last few days.

  From the hour when Liane Delorme, Phinuit and Captain Monk, in conclave solemnly assembled at the instance of the one last-named, communicated their collective mind in respect of his interesting self, the man was conscious of implicit confidence in a happy outcome of the business, with a conscientiousness less rational than simply felt, a sort of bubbling exhilaration in his mood that found its most intelligible expression in the phrase, which he was wont often to iterate to himself: Ça va bien—that goes well!

  That—the progressive involution of this insane imbroglio—went very well indeed, in Lanyard’s reckoning; he could hardy wish, he could not reasonably demand that it should go better.

  He knew now with what design Liane Delorme had made him a party to this sea adventure and intimate with every detail of the conspiracy; and he knew to boot why she had offered him the free gift of her love; doubt as to the one, scruples inspired by the other—that reluctance which man cannot but feel to do a hurt to a heart that holds him dear, however scanty his response to its passion—could no longer influence him to palter in dealing with the woman. The revelation had in effect stricken shackles from Lanyard’s wrists, now when he struck it would be with neither hesitation nor compunction.

  As to that stroke alone, its hour and place and fashion, he remained without decision. He had made a hundred plans for its delivery, and one of them, that seemed the wildest, he thought of seriously, as something really feasible. But single-handed! That made it difficult. If only one could devise some way to be in two places at one time and the same! An impossibility? He wouldn’t deny that. But Lanyard had never been one to be discouraged by the grim, hard face of an impossibility. He had known too many such to dissipate utterly, vanish into empty air, when subjected to a bold and resolute assault. He wouldn’t say die.

  Never that while he could lift hand or invent stratagem, never that so long as fools played their game into his hands, as this lot wished to and did. What imbecility! What an escape had been his when, in that time long since, he had made up his mind to have done with crime once and for all time! But for that moment of clear vision and high resolve he might be today even as these who had won such clear title to his contempt, who stultified themselves with vain imaginings and the everlasting concoction of schemes whose sheer intrinsic puerility foredoomed them to farcical failure.

  Lanyard trod the decks for hours at a time, searching the stars for an answer to the question: What made the Law by whose decree man may garner only punishment and disaster where he has husbanded in iniquity? That Law implacable, inexorable in its ordained and methodic workings, through which invariably it comes to pass that failure and remorse shall canker in the heart even of success ill-gained.…

  But if he moralized it was with a cheerful countenance, and his sermons were for himself alone. He kept his counsel and spoke all men fairly, giving nowhere any manner of offense: for could he tell in what unlikely guise might wait the instrument he needed wherewith to work out his unfaltering purpose?

  And all the while they were watching him and wondering what was in his mind. Well, he gave no sign. Let them watch and wonder to their heart’s content; they must wait until the time he had appointed for the rendering of his decision, when the Sybarite made her landfall.

  Winds blew and fell, the sea rose and subsided, the Sybarite trudged on into dull weather. The sky grew overcast; and Lanyard, daily scanning the very heavens for a sign, accepted this for one, and prayed it might hold. Nothing could be more calculated to nullify his efforts than to have the landfall happen on a clear, calm night of stars.

  He went to bed, the last night out, leaving a noisy gathering in the saloon, and read himself drowsy. Then turning out his light he slept. Sometime later he found himself instantaneously awake, and alert, with a clear head and every faculty on the qui vive—much as a man might grope for a time in a dark strange room, then find a door and step out into broad daylight.

  Only there was no light other than in the luminous clarity of his mind. Even the illumination in the saloon had been dimmed down for the night, as he could tell by the tarnished gleam beneath his stateroom door.

  Still, not everyone had gone to bed. The very manner of his waking informed him that he was not alone; for the life Lanyard had led had taught him to need no better alarm than the entrance of another person into the place where he lay sleeping. All animals are like that, whose lives hang on their vigilance.

  Able to see nothing, he still felt a presence, and knew that it waited, stirless, within arm’s-length of his head. Without much concern, he thought of Popinot, that “phantom Popinot” of Monk’s derisive naming.

  Well, if the vision Liane had seen on deck had taken material form here in his stateroom, Lanyard presumed it meant another fight, and the last, to a finish, that is to say, to a death.

  Without making a sound, he gathered himself together, ready for a trap, and as noiselessly lifted a hand toward the switch for the electric light, set in the wall near the head of the bed. But in the same breath he heard a whisper, or rather a mutter, a voice he could not place in its present pitch.

  “Awake, Monsieur Delorme?” it said. “Hush! Don’t make a row, and never mind the light.”

  His astonishment was so overpowering that instinctively his tensed muscles relaxed and his hand fell back upon the bedding.

  “Who the deuce—?”

  “Not so loud. It’s me—Mussey.”

  Lanyard echoed witlessly: “Mussey?”

  “Yes. I don’t wonder you’re surprised, but if you’ll be easy you’ll understand pretty soon why I had to have a bit of a talk with you without anybody’s catching on.”

  “Well,” Lanyard said, “I’m damned!”

  “I say!” The subdued mutter took on a note of anxiety. “It’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, you aren’t going to kick up a rumpus and spill the beans? I guess you must think I’ve got a hell of a gall, coming in on you like this, and I don’t know as I blame you, but… Well, time’s getting short, only two more days at sea, and I couldn’t wait any longer for a chance to have a few minutes’ chin with you.”

  The mutter ceased and held an expectant pause. Lanyard said nothing. But he was conscious that the speaker occupied a chair by the bed, and knew that he was bending near to catch his answer; for the air was tainted with vinous breath. Yes: one required no stronger identification, it was beyond any doubt the chief engineer of the Sybarite.

  “Say it’s all right, won’t you?” the mutter pleaded.

  “I am listening,” Lanyard replied—“as you perceive.”

  “I’ll say it’s decent of you—damned decent. Blowed if I’d take it as calm as you, if I waked up to find somebody in my room.”

  “I believe,” said Lanyard pointedly, “you stipulated for a few minutes’ chin with me. Time passes, Mr. Mussey. Get to your business, or let me go to sleep again.”

  “Sharp, you are,” commented the mutter. “I’ve noticed it in you. You’d be surprised if you knew how much notice I’ve been taking of you.”

  “And flattered, I’m sure.”

  “Look here…” The mutter stumbled. “I want to ask a personal question. Daresay you’ll think it impertinent.”

  “If I do, be sure I shan’t answer it.”

  “Well…it’s this: Is or isn’t your
right name Lanyard, Michael Lanyard?”

  This time it was Lanyard who, thinking rapidly, held the pause so long that his querist’s uneasiness could not contain itself.

  “Is that my answer? I mean, does your silence—?”

  “That’s an unusual name, Michael Lanyard,” cautiously replied its proprietor. “How did you get hold of it?”

  “They say it’s the right name of the Lone Wolf. Guess I don’t have to tell you who the Lone Wolf is.”

  “‘They say’? Who, please, are ‘they’?”

  “Oh, there’s a lot of talk going around the ship. You know how it is, a crew will gossip. And God knows they’ve got enough excuse this cruise.”

  This was constructively evasive. Lanyard wondered who had betrayed him. Phinuit? The tongue of that plain-spoken man was hinged in the middle; but one couldn’t feel certain. Liane Delorme had made much of the chief engineer; though she seemed less likely to talk too much than anyone of the ship’s company but Lanyard himself. But then (one remembered of a sudden) Monk and Mussey were by reputation old cronies; it wasn’t inconceivable that Monk might have let something slip…

  “And what, Mr. Mussey, if I should admit I am Michael Lanyard?”

  “Then I’ll have something to say to you, something I think’ll interest you.”

  “Why not run the risk of interesting me, whoever I may be?”

  Mussey breathed heavily in the stillness: the breathing of a cautious man loath to commit himself.

  “No,” he said at length, in the clearest enunciation he had thus far used. “No. If you’re not Lanyard, I’d rather say nothing more—I’ll just ask you to pardon me for intruding and clear out.”

  “But you say there is some gossip. And where there is smoke, there must be fire. It would seem safe to assume I am the man gossip says I am.”

  “Michael Lanyard?” the mutter persisted—“the Lone Wolf?”