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Ebook has 1772 lines and 80936 words, and 36 pages

Illustrator: James Montgomery Flagg

THE VANISHING POINT

"The Garden Without Walls," etc.

New York

"When you gaze up a railroad track," said Varensky, "there's always a point in the infinite distance where, just before they vanish, the parallel rails seem, to join. If a train were ever to reach that point it would mean death.

"Life's like that--a track along which we travel on the parallel rails of possibility and desire. The lure of the idealist is to overtake the illusion, where possibility and desire seem to merge, and the safety of the journey ends."

THE VANISHING POINT

PRINCE ROGOVICH! Prince Rogovich!"

Staring up at the clammy wall of the liner, blanched by searchlights, against which the little tug bumped and jostled, Philip Hindwood could hear the Prince's name being shouted in staterooms, along decks and passageways.

"Prince Rogovich! Prince Rogovich!"

The cries were becoming more insistent and impatient. They broke on the stillness with the monotony of despair. To judge by the sound, every soul aboard the liner had taken up the search, from the firemen in the stoke-hole to the Marconi men on the top deck. Even the thud of the engines seemed ominous, like the pounding of a heart stifled with foreboding. Across the velvety expanse of water, as though they had a secret they were trying to communicate, shore lights winked and twinkled. They seemed to be signaling the information that, no matter how long the search was maintained, Prince Rogovich would not be found that night.

He had gone aboard her in an unsociable frame of mind, determined to talk to nobody; the success of his errand depended on his silence. He believed that he was half a year ahead of the times. When his rivals had caught up to where he was at present, he would have made himself a world power and dictator.

But the dullness of the ship's company had exceeded expectations. Because of this he had broken his compact and allowed his privacy to be invaded by two vivid personalities. The first had been Prince Rogovich--the second, Santa Gorlof.

Prince Rogovich had evidently boarded the ship with precisely the same intentions as himself. All his meals had been served in his stateroom; it had not been until the evening of the third day that he had appeared on deck. He was a man of commanding height, lean of hip and contemptuous of eye, with the disquieting, haughty reticence of an inscrutable Pharaoh. There was something alluring and oriental about the man, at once sinister and charming. Behind his silky black beard he hid a face which was deathly white; its pallor was not of ill-health, but of passion. It was easy to believe all the rumors about him, both as regarded his diabolical cleverness and his sensual cruelty. His enemies were legion. Even among his countrymen he could count few friends, although he was reckoned their greatest patriot. In Poland he was suspected as much as he was admired, and was accused of intriguing in order that he might set up a throne for himself. The object of his flying visit to America had been to consult financial magnates on the advisability of floating an international loan in the interests of Poland. There were men the world over and in Russia especially, who would have paid a king's ransom for advance information as to what answer the financiers had returned.

Though Hindwood would not have claimed as much, he and the Prince were two of a kind, equally magnificent in their dreams, equally relentless in their means of realization, and equally insatiable in their instinct for conquest. Their difference lay in the fact that the Polish aristocrat had already attained the goal toward which the self-made American was no more than striving.

Their first meeting had happened in the early hours of the morning. Hindwood, being unable to sleep, had partly dressed and gone on deck. There, in the grayness of the dawn, he had espied a tall figure slowly pacing, accompanied by a snow-white Russian wolfhound. It was the remarkable grace of the man that had first held him, his faculty for stillness, his spectral paleness, his padded tread. But the moment he had approached him, the sense of his grace had been obscured by an atmosphere of menace. So sinister was his beauty that it had required an effort to pass him twice. Secretly Hindwood had observed him. He was like his hound, treacherously languid, insolently fastidious, and bred to the point of emaciation. But his languor was the disguise of a hidden fierceness, which betrayed itself in his red, curved lips and the marble coldness of his stare. It was at the third time of passing, when he had all but gone by him, that he had heard his name spoken.

"Mr. Hindwood." Then, as he had turned, "You're the famous railroad expert. Am I right? It's fortunate we should have met. I missed you in America. So you, too, are among the sleepless!"

Then and there had started the first of those amazing conversations, which had held Hindwood fascinated for the remainder of the voyage. It had made no difference that in his heart he had almost hated the man--hated his ruthlessness, his subtlety, his polished immorality; the moment he commenced to talk, he surrendered to his spell. Their encounters had taken place for the most part between midnight and sunrise. To be his companion was like eavesdropping on the intimate counsels of all the cabinets of Europe or like reading your daily paper a year before it was published for the rest of mankind. On matters which did not concern him the Prince could be brilliantly confessional; indiscretion was the bait with which he lured his victims to reveal themselves. The secrets which were his own he kept. Never once did he drop a hint that would indicate the success or failure of his recent mission. The single time that, Santa Gorlof had asked him point-blank, his dark eyes had become focusless as opals, and his white face, under its silky covering of beard, unnoticing and sphinx-like. It was then that Hindwood had recognized the resemblance to Pharaoh in his tyrannic immobility and silence.

And Santa Gorlof! There was a woman--mysterious, exotic, well-nigh mythical! Compared with her the Prince was an open book. From the start she had made no attempt to explain herself, had referred neither to her past nor her future, had offered no credentials. She had imposed herself on Hind-wood like a goddess who expected to be worshiped. She had swept him off his feet, beaten aside his caution, and reached his heart before he was aware.

But was it his heart? How often, in the past few days, he had asked himself that question! He didn't want to believe that it was his heart. He was a man who rode alone; his aloneness was the reason for his swiftness. He had been tricked once by a woman. That was when he was a boy; now he was a man nearing forty. She had cheated him so cruelly that, though she had been dead many years, the bitterness still rankled. Behind the beauty of all women his skepticism detected the shallow loveliness of the one false woman who had stolen his idealism, that she might trample on it.

Hindwood was at a loss to account for these signs of a secret understanding. It had been he who had introduced them. It had been Santa who had confessed to curiosity about the Prince and had begged for the introduction. The moment he had made them acquainted, they had seemed to become delighted with each other's company--so delighted that there had been times when he himself had felt excluded. A half-humorous rivalry for Santa's favors had sprung up between the Prince and himself. This atmosphere of jealousy had been accentuated by the behavior of the wolfhound; Santa's mere approach had been sufficient to rouse him into fury. He had become so dangerous that he had had to be sent below whenever she was present.

And yet, despite her manifest efforts to hold the Prince enchanted, behind his back she had expressed the most vigorous aversion. She had spoken of his reputation for treachery and the whispers that went the rounds of his heartlessness toward women. During the final days of the voyage she had partly atoned for this inconsistency by appealing to Hindwood to protect her against the Prince's far too pressing attention. She had declared herself to be in some kind of danger--though what kind, whether moral or physical, she had left him to conjecture. She had rather flattered him by her appeal; nevertheless, he had been considerably surprised to observe how little interest she had still displayed in protecting herself. During the whole of that last day, while they had been approaching the white line of Cornish coast, she had scarcely devoted to him a glance or a word; every minute she had spent with His Highness, whom she professed to regard with so much terror. She had created the impression of employing every trick at her disposal in a frantic attempt to secure him as her conquest.

If, as many of the passengers had asserted, the presence of Santa Gorlof and the Prince on the same boat had been no accident, then what had been the object of their elaborately planned deception? Were they lovers who had chosen this secret method of traveling in order to avoid a scandal? Or was she one of the many women whom he was reported to have abandoned, who had seized the leisure of an Atlantic voyage as an opportunity for reinstating herself in his affection?

As Hindwood listened in the darkness to the Prince's name being shouted and waited for the tug to cast off, the surmise strengthened into certainty that he had been the dupe of a piece of play-acting, the purpose of which he could not fathom.

Philip!"

He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that he had not noticed how she had stolen up behind him. Without removing his arms from the rail, he turned slowly and surveyed her.

An enviable woman! And her age? Perhaps thirty. She was probably a Slav--either Russian or Polish. Her face was smooth as marble, high cheekboned and golden in complexion. Her eyes were almond-shaped, heavy-lidded, and of the palest gray. Her lips were passionate and always a little parted, revealing a line of perfect whiteness like a streak of snow between the curling edges of two rose-petals. But it was her hair that was her glory--abundant as night, blue-black as steel, and polished as metal. She wore it simply, gathered back from her forehead and caught in a loose knot, low against her neck. There was an air of indefinable aristocracy about her; perhaps it was the slightness of her figure and the alert composure of her carriage. And then there was a touch of the exotic, wistfully sad, yet exceedingly mocking. Like so many Slavs, behind the European there lurked a hint of the Asiatic. If her eyes had been darker, she might easily have passed for a Hindoo princess.

Her fascination, quite apart from her beauty, lay in the fact that she was so ravishingly feminine. To be a woman was her proud profession--and in this again she was Asiatic. What hours she must have spent over pampering her body! She was sleek and groomed as a race-horse. Physically she was the last word in feminine perfection. Her string of pearls was worth more than most men earn in a lifetime. Her sables represented the year's income of a millionaire. There was no item of her attire that was not sumptuous and that had not been acquired regardless of expense. To have achieved her luxuriance of beauty must have dissipated a fortune. Whose fortune? Surely, not hers!

His mind was haunted by misgivings as he watched her. He had so nearly allowed himself to care for her. It was only her lightness and willful inconsiderateness that had prevented. But now that he had been prevented, her employment of his Christian name struck him as singularly inappropriate. It made him suspect a trap. It put him in a mood to interpret any tenderness on her part as strategy, as a signal that something was wanted.

While he eyed her in silence, she drew nearer and leaned across the rail. Her shoulder pressed him. He was aware of the tingling sensation of her warmth, like a little hand caressing. He caught her fragrance, secret and somnolent as the magic of hidden rose-gardens in Damascus.

She spoke. Her voice was deep and foreign; it seemed too deep to be pent in so slight a body. It was harsh in many of its tones, as though there had been times when it had been parched with thirst. It conjured visions of caravans creeping across molten deserts. It was hypnotic, barbaric. In listening to it, he lost sight of the exquisite sophistication of her appearance. His imagination reclothed her, loosening her hair, veiling her face, shrouding her in a robe of gold and saffron, slipping sandals on her feet and making her ankles tinkle with many bangles.

"You don't like me any more. Is it not so?" she questioned softly. "My master is offended."

He shook himself irritably, as though he were flinging off the yoke of her attraction. "I'm not offended. I was thinking."

"About what?"

"Prince Rogovich."

"And why should my master be thinking of Prince Rogovich?"

He leaned still further across the rail in an instinctive effort to avoid her. There was seduction in the feigned humility with which she addressed him, as though he were a Pasha and she a slave-girl.

"Because," he said, "it would be indecent for me to be thinking of anything else. He may be dead. There's no knowing. This time last night I could walk and talk and laugh with him. He was full of plans. He was something real that I could touch. To-night he has vanished."

"Vanished!" She repeated the word with a sigh which was almost of contentment.

"I was wondering," he continued, and then halted. "You were wondering?" she prompted.

Drawing himself erect, he faced her. Her bantering tone had roused his indignation. Yet, even in his revulsion, he thrilled to the sweetness of her luring eyes, glinting at him palely through the shadows.

"He was more your friend, much more your friend, than mine," he reproached her. "There's probably been a tragedy. Yet you don't seem to care. One might even believe you were glad."

"Not glad. Not exactly." She spoke smilingly, averting her eyes. "But as for caring--why should I?"

He laughed quietly. "Yes, why should you? Why should you care what happens to any man?"

"But I hated him," she protested. "He had given me cause to hate him."

"You had a strange way of showing it. You made yourself most amazingly charming. He could never have guessed--no one could ever have guessed who watched you with him, that you--"

"Ah, no. Only you and I--we knew. It wasn't our business to let everybody guess."

Suddenly she seemed to divine what was troubling him. Darting out her hand, she seized his wrist in a grip of steel. That such strength lay hidden in so frail a hand was unexpected. Her attitude instantly changed to one of coaxing.

"You're jealous. Don't be jealous. It had to be, and it's ended. In a sense it was for your sake that it had to happen."

Leisurely he freed himself, bending back her fingers and taking pleasure in demonstrating that his strength was the greater.

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