Through it all The Gray Phantom had maintained an elusiveness that confounded the keenest man hunters among the police and wrapped his identity in a mysterious glamour. Simple-minded people wondered whether he were a being of flesh and blood, or a shade on earthly rampage. His one arrest, back in the early stages of his career, had settled their doubts once for all, but an astonishing escape a few days later caused them to wag their heads and speak in hushed tones of a rogue whose feats and juggleries bewildered them.
The Phantom laughed quietly at their perplexity. The performances that awed and puzzled them seemed simple enough to him. He was merely unleashing his imagination and giving free sway to his boundless energies of body and mind. In another age he might have been a sea-roving viking or a builder of ancient empires. At times, when one of his softer moods was upon him, he wondered why his restless spirit and the fires within him could not have found a different and more soul-satisfying outlet. Then his thoughts would go back to dimly remembered days, with their shadowy recollections of early orphanage and the peccadilloes of street urchins, and somehow he thought he understood.
But as time passed his restless moods came back with increasing frequency, and little by little he lost taste for the life he was leading and the adventures that had made his sobriquet known from coast to coast. Then there came lapses between The Gray Phantom’s exploits, and finally they ceased altogether. The world, not knowing with what lavish hand he had flung away his spoils, supposed he had collected his treasures and gone into hiding, and the police grimly predicted that he would reappear as soon as he had squandered his ill-gotten gains. No one guessed that The Phantom had built a hermitage on a desolate hilltop where, surrounded by a few of his art treasures and a small group of faithful followers, he was trying to reconstruct his life in peace.
“Azurecrest” was the name he had given his secluded retreat, and there he had tried to destroy the links that still chained him to the past and to blot out the tantalizing visions of other days. For a time he had almost succeeded; then a restlessness had come upon him for which the desolate hilltop afforded no relief, and he felt that his mountain retreat, with its collection of relics and reminders of bygone times, was too closely associated with the things he wanted to forget. Finally he had disposed of the place through a broker and purchased a narrow strip of land by the sea. He could not analyze the obscure motives and hidden impulse that had impelled him to seek seclusion at Sea Glimpse, a slender tongue of wooded land surrounded on three sides by jagged coast line and in the rear by forest and farm land. But while at work clearing the ground for his garden he had felt a grateful remoteness from things he wished to forget, and a measure of peace and satisfaction had come to him while he put his unpracticed hands to strange tasks or wandered among the trees and listened to the murmurs of the sea. He often wondered whether he would be content to spend his life in this secluded nook of the world where, safely hidden and secure from intrusion, he could devote himself to his hobby and his books.
The question came back to him again as he closed his Paxton and got up to light the reading lamp. For months he had felt that the links connecting him with the past were snapping. The Gray Phantom had emerged from retirement only once, and then he had ventured forth in a good cause. In a little while, perhaps, he would be dead and almost forgotten. The gray orchid, if Vanardy should ever succeed in bringing it out, would be the living symbol of whatever had been good in his other self. The thought more than once had appealed to his imagination and the whimsical strain in his nature.
He turned toward the window, but he had taken only a few steps when he stopped and looked dreamily into space. Memories thronged his mind and a face appeared out of nowhere—a woman’s face. For months it had haunted him in his idle moments, inspiring him with vague and exhilarant emotions. He saw it now, softly radiant among the shadows, an enchanting embodiment of the bloom and freshness of youth that pursued him with the persistence of a delicate scent or the strain of an all-but-forgotten song.
“Helen!” he murmured.
The vision grew a little clearer. Now he could almost see her figure, slim and straight and moving with the easy swing and grace of a young antelope. Echoes of her voice came to him, clear and unaffected and vibrant with joyous vivacity, each melodious note touching an harmonious chord within him. He remembered that her face had given him a curious impression of youthful buoyancy mingling with the soberness of maturity. Her quick intuition, coupled with a strain of subtlety in her nature and a trace of precocious sophistication that was both puzzling and enchanting, had seemed to bridge the years that lay between them. The vitalic sheen and the subtle aroma of her hair had given him a foolish desire to see what sun and wind would do to it if she were to loosen it and romp in his garden.
He sighed musingly. Months had passed since he had last seen her. For a brief, unforgettable moment he had held her hand, and the contact had given him a gentle, all-pervading thrill and filled him with strange and tender emotions. Her eyes, warm and frank, but with a touch of shyness lurking in their depths, as if she were still a little afraid of him, had inspired him with a tingling ecstasy such as The Gray Phantom in his wildest triumphs had never experienced. Twice he had written her since then, once to apprise her of his removal from Azurecrest and once to inquire concerning her well-being, but he had neither expected nor received an answer. He had not forgotten that in the eyes of the world he was still an outlaw, a hunted thing.
Again he sighed. The vision was fading, and little of it remained with him save a misty picture of loveliness. The moon was rising over the tree tops, throwing a white sheen over the landscape and the narrow wedge of water visible between the birches and hemlocks. The old house, purchased by Vanardy in a dilapidated condition and with difficulty rendered habitable, was silent but for the creeping whispers of the wind. For a time the solitary figure at the window stood lost in thoughts. His deep-gray eyes, rather too narrow for perfect symmetry, which had been known to stab and sting like rapiers, were not soft and luminous. Small wrinkles radiated from the outer corners, but the eyes themselves were animated by the slow twinkling gleam that characterizes the individual who sifts all the ups and downs of life through a sieve of whimsical imagination. The sensitive nostrils and the full arch of the lips denoted a penchant for distilling the maximum of thrills and emotions from the magic of existence. Here and there his face was lined and scarred, and even in repose there was a tension about the lean, tall figure that made one think of a cocked trigger.