Phantom Wires Part 10

"But I've lived abroad so much!" she added.

"Then you must know Italy pretty well, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes; I've traveled here, winter after winter."

She picked out a card from her pocket-book, on which was inscribed, in Spencerian definiteness of black and white, "Miss Barbara Allen." It had been the card of Lady Boxspur's eminently respectable maid--and Frances Durkin had saved it for just such a contingency.

He read the name, slowly, and then placed the card in his vest pocket.

If he noticed her smile, he gave no sign of it.

"And you like Genoa? I mean, _is_ there anything to like in this place?" he asked companionably. "I'll be hanged if I've seen anything but a few million mementoes of Christopher Columbus!"

"There's the Palazzo Bianco, and the Palazzo Rosso, and, of course, there's the Campo Santo!"

"But who cares for graveyards?"

"All Europe is a graveyard, of its past!" she answered lightly. "That was what I thought you Americans always came to see!"

He laughed a little, in turn, and she both liked him better for it and found it easier to go on. She felt, from his silences, that no great span of his life had been spent in talking with women. And she was glad of it.

"I like the Riggi," she added pregnantly.

"The Riggi--what's that, please?"

"That's the restaurant up on the hill." She hesitated and turned back, before unlocking her door. "It's charming!"

He was on the point, she knew, of making the plunge and asking if they might not see the Riggi together, when something in her glance, some precautionary chilliness of look, checked him. For she had seen that even now things might advance too hurriedly. It would be wiser, and in the long run it would pay, she warned herself, to draw in--for as she still lingered and chatted with him she more and more felt that she was face to face with a resourceful and strong-willed opponent. She noticed, through all the outward Celtic gentleness, the grim and pa.s.sionate mouth, the keenness of the s.h.i.+fty yet penetrating hazel-gray eyes, the touch of almost bull-dog tenaciousness about the loose-jointed, high-shouldered figure, and, above all, the audacity of the careless Irish-American smile. That smile, she felt, trailed like a flippant and fluttering tail to the kite of his racial solemnity and stubbornness of purpose, enabling it to rise higher even while seeming to weigh it down.

"And you always travel alone?" he finally asked, shaking off the last of his reserve.

"Oh, I'm a bit of a globe-trotter--that's what you'd call me on your side of the ocean, isn't it? You see, I go about Southern Europe picking up things for a London art firm!"

"And where do you go next?"

"Oh, perhaps to Milan, perhaps to Naples; it may even be to Rome, or it might turn out to be Syracuse or Taormina. With me, everything depends, first on the weather, and, next, on what instructions are sent on."

She inwardly marveled at the glibness and spontaneity with which the words fell from her tongue. She even took a sort of secret joy in the dramatic values which that scene of play-acting presented to her.

"And do you ever go to New York?"

"Yes, such a thing might happen, any time."

It was as well, she told herself, to leave the way well paved.

"_That's_ the city for you!" he declared, with a commending shake of the head.

Of the truth of that fact Frances Durkin was only too well aware; but this was a conviction to which she did not give utterance.

As they stood chatting together in the deserted hallway, a man, turning the corner, brushed by them. He merely gave them one casual glance of inquiry, and then looked away, apparently at the room-numbers on the lintels.

The young woman chanced to be tapping half-carelessly, half-nervously, with her key on the panel of her door. It meant nothing to her comrade, but to the pa.s.sing man it resolved itself into an intelligible and coherent message. For it was in Morse, and to his trained and adept ear it read: "This--is--Keenan--keep--away!"

CHAPTER XI

THE INTOXICATION OF WAR

It was two days later,--and they had been days of blank suspense for him,--that Durkin made his way to Frank's room, un.o.bserved. His first resolution had been to wait for a clearer coast, but his anxiety overcame him, and he could hold off no longer.

As he opened the door and stepped noiselessly inside he caught sight of her by the window, her face ruminative and in repose. It looked, for the moment, unhappy and tired and hard. She seemed to stand before him with a mask off, a designing and disillusioned woman, no longer in love with the game of life. Or it was, he imagined, as she would look ten years later, when her age had begun to tell on her, and her still buoyant freshness was gone. It was the same feeling that had come to him on the Angiolina steps, at Abbazia. He even wondered if in the stress of the life they were now following she would lose the last of her good looks, if even her ever-resilient temperament would deaden and harden, and no longer rise supreme to the exacting moment. Or could it be that she was acting a part for him? that all this fine _bravado_ was an att.i.tude, a role, a pretense, taken on for his sake? Could it be--and the sudden thought stung him to the quick--that she was deliberately and consciously degrading herself to what she knew was a lower plane of thought and life, that the bond of their older companions.h.i.+p might still remain unsevered?

But, as her startled eyes caught sight of him, a welcoming light came into her relaxed face. With her first spoken word some earlier touch of moroseness seemed to slip away from her. If it required an effort to shake herself together, she gave no outward sign of it. She had promised that there should be no complaining and no hesitations from her; and Durkin knew she would adhere to that promise, to the bitter end.

She went to him, and clung to him, a little hungrily. There seemed something pa.s.sionate in her very denial of pa.s.sion. For when he lifted her drooping head, with all its wealth of chestnut shot through with paler gold, and gazed at her upturned face between his two hands, with a little cry of endearment, she shut her mouth hard, on a sob.

"You're back--and safe?" he asked.

She forced a smile.

"Yes, back safe and sound!"

"But tired, I know?"

"Yes--a little. But--"

She broke off, and he could see that she was rising from her momentary luxury of relaxation as a fugitive rises after a minute's breathing-spell.

"Well?" he asked anxiously.

"_Pobloff has found us_!" she said, in her quiet contralto.

"He's here, you mean?"

"He's in Genoa. I caught sight of him in a cab, hurrying from the French Consulate to the Cafe Jazelli. I slipped into a silversmith's shop, as he raced past, and escaped him."

"And then what?"

"Then several things happened. But first, tell me this: did you get a chance to look over Keenan's room?"

"I was bolted inside twenty minutes after you and he had left the hotel.

His trunk was even unlocked; I looked through everything!"

"Which, of course, was charming work!" she interpolated, with not ungentle scorn.

He shrugged his shoulders deprecatively. "Not quite as charming as dining with your new friend!"

"I almost like him!" admitted the woman frankly, femininely rejoicing at the note of jealousy in the other's voice.