Alias The Lone Wolf - Louis Joseph Vance
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"In the maternal manner appropriate to mature charms, I presume?"
"Precisely."
"What then?"
"You will--always remembering that my interest in such things is merely
academic--you will then lead me hither and yon, as your whim lists, and
show me how Paris amuses itself in these days of its nocturnal
decadence. You will dutifully pretend to drink much more champagne than
is good for you and to be enjoying yourself as you seldom have before.
If I discover an interest in people I may chance to see, you will be
good enough to tell me who they are and--other details concerning their
ways of life."
"If I know."
"But I am sure you know everyone worth knowing in Paris, Athenais."
"Then--if I am right in assuming you are looking for some person in
particular--"
"You have reason, mademoiselle."
"I run the risk of losing an entertaining evening."
"Not necessarily. Besides, there are many evenings. Are you not at my
commands for the duration of my stay in Paris?"
"True. So I will have to chance my perilous question.... I presume one
can't help being true to the traditions of one's sex."
"Inquisitive, you mean? But what else is every thinking creature, male
or female? What are men of science? What--?"
"But it was Eve who first--"
"Ah! raking up old scandal, eh? But I'll wager something it was really
Adam who--taking a purely scientific interest in the business--egged
Eve on to try a bite of apple, asserting that the domestic menu lacked
variety, telling himself if she died of it, it would only cost him
another rib to replace her, and cheap at the price."
"Paul: you are too gallant. Wait till I try to find out something about
you, directly or indirectly, and see what you will then have to say
about the curiosity of women."
"But I shouldn't mind, it would be too flattering. So dig away."
"I will. Who is it you're looking for in Paris after midnight?"
"Anyone of several people." "Perhaps I know them. It might save time if
you would give me their names."
"Now it is you who ask me to risk losing an enjoyable evening. But so
be it. Le Comte de Lorgnes?"
Mademoiselle Reneaux looked blank.
"Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes?"
The young woman shook her head.
"Both of a class sure to be conspicuous in such places as Maxim's,"
Lanyard explained. "The names, then, are probably fictitious."
"If you could describe them, perhaps--?"
"Useless, I am afraid; neither is an uncommon type. Any word picture of
either would probably fit anyone of a score of people of the same life.
Are you then acquainted with a man named Phinuit--given name
unknown--an American?"
"No."
"Mr. Whitaker Monk, of New York?"
"The millionaire?"
"That is quite possible."
"He made his money in munitions, I believe," the girl reflected--"or
perhaps it was oil."
"Then you do know him?"
"I met him one night, or rather one morning several weeks ago, with a
gay party that joined ours at breakfast at Pre-Catelan."
"And do we still drive out to Pre-Catelan to milk the cows after an
adventurous night, mademoiselle?" She nodded; and Lanyard sighed: "It
is true, then: man ages, his follies never."
"A quaint little stupid," the girl mused.
"Pardon, mademoiselle?"
"I was thinking of Whitaker Monk."
"Quaint, I grant you. But hardly little, or stupid. A tall man, as thin
as a diet, with a face like a comic mask of tragedy..."
"Paul dear," said Athenais Reneaux more in sorrow than in anger:
"somebody has been taking advantage of your trusting nature. Whitaker
Monk is short, hopelessly stout, and the most commonplace person
imaginable."
"Then it would appear," Lanyard commented ruefully, "one did wisely to
telegraph London for a keeper. Let us get hence, if you don't mind, and
endeavour to forget my shame in strong drink and the indecorous dances
of an unregenerate generation."
XIV
DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND
Lanyard and Athenais Reneaux had dawdled over dinner and coffee and
cigarettes with so much tacit deliberation that, by the time Lanyard
suggested they might move on, it was too late for a play and still a
bit too early to begin the contemplated round of all-night restaurants.
Also, it was too warm for a music-hall.
So they killed another hour at the Ambassadeurs, where they were
fortunate in getting good places and the entertainment imposed no
strain upon the attention; where, too, the audience, though
heterogeneous, was sufficiently well-dressed and well-mannered to
impart to a beautiful lady and her squire a pleasant consciousness of
being left very much to themselves in an amusing expression of a
civilisation cynical and self-sufficient.
But that was so wherever they went that night; and, in a sense, they
went everywhere. In no city in the world is the doctrine of
go-as-you-please-but-mind-your-own-business more studiously inculcated
by example than in Paris, especially in its hours of relaxation.
Lanyard had not been so long an exile as to have forgotten his way
about entirely, and with what was new since his time Mademoiselle
Reneaux was thoroughly acquainted. And if he felt himself rather a
ghost revisiting glimpses of a forgotten moon, if all the odalisques
were new to his vision and all the sultans strange, if never an eye
that scanned his face turned back for a second look in uncertain
reminiscence, he had to console him the company of a young woman whom
everybody seemed to know and admire and like. In none of the resorts
they visited did she fail to greet or be hailed by a handful of
acquaintances. Yet they were generously let alone.
As to that, Lanyard could not complain. The truth was that, despite the
dark thread of sober purpose which ran through those tolerably purple
hours, he was being excellently entertained. Not by this sad business
of scampering from one place of dubious fame to another; not by any
reckless sense of rejuvenation to be distilled from the practice of
buying champagne at each stop--and leaving every bottle barely tasted;
not by those colourful, dissolving tableaux, always much the same in
composition if set against various backgrounds, of under-dressed women
sitting with concupiscent men and swallowing cold poisons in quantities
calculated to spur them into the frenzy of semi-orgiastic dances: by
none of these, but simply by the society of a woman of a type perhaps
not unique but novel in his experience and intriguing to his
understanding.
If there were anybody or thing a girl of her age--Athenais was about
twenty-five--shouldn't know, she knew him, her or it; if there were any
place she shouldn't go, she either went or had been there; if there
were anything she shouldn't do or say or think or countenance, those
things she--within limitations--did and said and thought and accepted
or passed over as matters of fact and no consequence. And though she
observed scrupulously certain self-imposed limitations she never made
this obvious, she simply avoided what she chose to consider bad taste
with a deftness and tact that would have seemed admirable in a woman of
the great world twice her age. And with it all she preserved a sort of
champagne effervescence of youthful spirits and an easy-going
cameraderie incomprehensible when one took into consideration the
disillusioning circumstances of her life, her vocation as a paid
government spy, trusted with secrets and worthy of her trust, dedicated
to days of adventure always dangerous, generally sordid, and like at
any time to prove deadly.
Young, beautiful, admirably poised, accomplished and intelligent, she
should by rights have been wrapped up in love of some man her peer in
all these attributes. But she wasn't; or she said she wasn't in one of
those moments of gravity which served to throw into higher relief the
light-heartedness of her badinage with Lanyard; asserting an entirely
willing disposition to stand aside and play the pensive, amused,
indulgent spectator in the masque of love danced by a world mad for it,
grasping for love greedily even in its cheapest shapes and guises.
"If it comes," she sighed, "it will find me waiting, and not unwilling.
But it will have to come in another form than those I know about."
"My dear," said Lanyard, "be unafraid: it always does."
She called herself Athenais Reneaux, but she didn't pretend to Lanyard
that she had no better title to another name. Her French was of the
purest, a delight to listen to, yet she was in fact less French than
English. Her paternal forebears to the third generation had lived in
England and married Englishwomen, she said; and more than this much
about herself, nothing; perhaps deriving some gratification from
leaving such broad fields of conjecture open to the interest which an
enigmatic personality never failed to excite.
"But I think you're quite as much of a mystery as you pretend to see in
me. It's rather nice, don't you think? At least, it gives us an
interest in each other aside from sentiment. Some day, perhaps, we'll
each know All."
"Now God forbid!"
"Are you so afraid of learning my girlish secrets then? I don't believe
you. I don't believe you'd even care to hear--"
"Athenais!" Lanyard protested in a hollow voice.
"Non, mon ami." She judged him shrewdly with narrowed, smiling eyes.
"You flirt with far too much finish, you know. It can't be done to such
perfection when the heart's truly involved. But for one thing--and if
only you'd be a little more tragic about your disappointments to-night;
for you haven't yet asked me a single question about anybody we've
met--"
"No: thus far we've drawn every cover blank," he groaned; for it was
after three in the morning.
"Very well. But for this and that, I'd be tempted to think you were
sleuthing on the trail of some female fair but faithless. But you're
taking all with entirely too much resignation; there's a contented glow
in the back of your eyes--"
"I'm having a good time."
"It's pretty of you to tell me so. But that's not the reason for your
self-complacence."
"See here," Lanyard interrupted, sitting up and signalling to the
waiter for his bill: "if I let you run on the way you're heading,
you'll presently be telling me something you've found out about me and
I don't want to hear."
"Oh, very well," she sighed. "I'm sure I don't wish to embarrass you.
But I will say this: Men of your uncertain age don't go round with such
contented eyes unless they're prosperously in love."
"Oh, come along!" Lanyard growled, offering to rise. "You know too
confounded much." He waited a moment, and then as she did nothing but
sit and glimmer at him mischievously, he added: "Shall we go?"
"Where now?" she enquired without stirring.
He had a shrug of distaste. "Maxim's, I presume. Unless you can suggest
some other place, more likely and less tedious."
"No," she replied after taking thought; "I can't. We've covered Paris
pretty thoroughly to-night; all except the tourist places."
"No good wasting time on them."
"Then let's stop on here till it's time to milk the cows."
"Pre-Catelan? But there's Maxim's left--"
"Only another tourist show nowadays. And frightfully rowdy."
"Sounds like the lot I'm after. Come along."
She shook her head vigorously. "Shan't!" His eyebrows rose in mute
enquiry. "Because I don't want to," she explained with childlike
candour. "I'm tired of being dragged around and plied with drink. Do
you realise I've had as much as two and a half glasses of champagne
to-night, out of the countless bottles you've ordered? Well, I have,
and they're doing their work: I feel the spirit of independence surging
in my midst. I mutiny and defy you!" A peal of laughter rewarded the
instinctive glance with which he sought to judge how far he was
justified in taking her seriously. "Not only that, but you're
neglecting me. I want to dance, and you haven't asked me in fully half
an hour; and you're a heavenly dancer--and so am I!" She thrust back
her end of their wall table and rose. "If you please, monsieur."
One could hardly resent such charming impertinence. Lanyard drew a long
face of mock patience, sighed an heroic sigh, and followed her through
the huddled tables to the dancing floor. A bewildering look rewarded
him as they swung into the first movement of a tango.
"Do you know you are a dangerous man, Monsieur Paul Martin?"
"Oh, mademoiselle!"
"Such fortitude, such forbearance--when I ought to be
slapped--enchants, disarms, makes me remember I am a woman, foredoomed
always to yield. I abjure my boasted independence, monsieur, I submit.
It shall be as you wish: on to Maxim's--after this one dance. You know,
it's the last really good music we'll have to dance to--our last dance
together, perhaps--who knows?--forever!"
She pretended to be overcome; the lithe body in his embrace sketched a
fugitive seizure of sadness, drooping with a wistful languour well
suited to the swooning measures to which they swayed and postured.
His hand was pressed convulsively. She seemed momentarily about to
become a burden in his grasp, yet ever to recover just on the instant
of failing, buoyed up by the steely resilience of her lithe and slender
body. Impossible to say how much was pretence, how much impulsive
confession of true feeling! Perplexed, perturbed, Lanyard gazed down
into that richly tinted face which, with eyes half-curtained and lips
half-parted, seemed to betray so much, yet to his next glance was
wholly illegible and provoking. Aware that with such women man's vanity
misleads him woefully, and aware that she was equally awake to this
masculine weakness, he wondered, afraid even to guess, telling himself
he were an ass to believe, a fool to deny....
Then suddenly he saw her lashes sweep up to unveil eyes at once
mirthful and admonitory; her hungry mouth murmured incongruously an
edged warning. "Play up, Paul--play up to me! We dance too well
together not to be watched; and if I'm not mistaken, someone you're
interested in has just come in. No: don't look yet, just remember we're
madly enamoured, you and I--and don't care a rap who sees it."
Strung by her words into a spirit of emulation, Lanyard achieved an
adequate seeming of response to the passion, feigned or real, with
which the woman infused the patterned coquetry of their steps.
Between lips that stirred so little their movement must have been
indiscernible, he asked: "Who?"
In the same manner, but in accents fraught with an emotion
indecipherable but intense the reply came: "Don't talk! This is too
divine ... Just dance!"
He obeyed, deliberately shut out of his thoughts the warning she had
given him, and let himself go, body and mind, so that, a sway to the
sensuous strains of that most sensuous of dances, the girl and the man
for a space seemed one with music that throbbed of love and longing,
desire and denial, pursuit and retreat, surrender and conquest....
On a sonorous phrase it ceased. A flutter of applause ran round the
tables. Lanyard mastered a sense of daze that he saw reflected in the
opening eyes of the woman as she slipped from his arms. In an instant
they were themselves once more, two completely self-contained children
of sophistication, with superb insouciance making nothing of their
public triumph in a rare and difficult performance.
On the way to their table they were intercepted by a woman who, with
two cavaliers, had since the moment of her entrance been standing near
the door of the restaurant, apparently spellbound with admiration.
Through a rising clatter of tongues her voice cut clearly but not at
all unpleasantly.
"Athenais! It is I--Liane."
Inured as he was to the manners of an age which counts its women not
dressed if they are not half undressed, and with his sensibilities
further calloused by a night devoted to restaurants the entree to
which, for women, seemed to be conditioned on at least semi-nudity,
Lanyard was none the less inclined to think he had never seen, this
side of footlights, a gown quite so daring as that which revealed the
admirably turned person of the lady who named herself Liane. There was
so little of it that, he reflected, its cost must have been something
enormous. But in vain that scantiness of drapery: the white body rose
splendidly out of its ineffective wrappings only to be overwhelmed by
an incredible incrustation of jewellery: only here and there did bare
hand's-breadths of flesh unadorned succeed in making themselves
visible.
At the sound of her name Athenais turned with a perfectly indicated
start of surprise which she promptly translated into a little, joyful
cry. The living pillar of ivory, satin and precious stones ran into her
arms, embraced her ardently, and kissed both her cheeks, then releasing
her half-turned to Lanyard.
Glints of trifling malice winked behind the open interest of troubling,
rounded eyes of violet. Lanyard knew himself known.
So he had sacrificed for nothing his beautiful beard!
He uttered a private but heartfelt "Damn!" and bowed profoundly as the
woman, tapping Athenais on the arm with a fan crusted with diamonds,
demanded:
"Present instantly, my dear, this gentleman who tangoes as I have never
seen the tango danced before!"
Forestalling Athenais, Lanyard replied with a whimsical grimace: "Is
one, then, so unfortunate as to have been forgotten by Madame la
Comtesse de Lorgnes?"
With any other woman than Athenais Reneaux he would have hesitated to
deal so bold an offensive stroke; but his confidence in her quickness
of apprehension and her unshakable self-possession was both implicit
and well-placed. For she received this overt notification of the
success of his quest without one sign other than a look of dawning
puzzlement.
"Madame la comtesse...?" she murmured with a rising inflection.
"But monsieur is mistaken," the other stammered, biting her lip.
"Surely one cannot have been so stupid!" Lanyard apologised.
"But this is Mademoiselle Delorme," Athenais said ... "Monsieur Paul
Martin."
Liane Delorme! Those syllables were like a spoken spell to break the
power of dark enchantment which had hampered Lanyard's memory ever
since first sight of this woman in the Cafe de l'Univers at Nant. A
great light began to flood his understanding, but he was denied time to
advantage himself immediately of its illumination: Liane Delorme was
quick to parry and riposte.
"How strange monsieur should think he had ever known me by a name ...
What was it? But no matter! For now I look more closely, I myself
cannot get over the impression that I have known Monsieur--Martin, did
you say?--somewhere, sometime ... But Paul Martin? Not unless monsieur
has more than one name."
"Then it would seem that mademoiselle and I are both in error. The loss
is mine."
That gun spiked, Lanyard began to breathe more freely. "It is not too
late to make up that loss, monsieur." Liane Delorme was actually
chuckling in appreciation of his readiness, pleased with him even in
the moment of her own discomfiture; her eyes twinkling merrily at him
above the fan with which she hid a convulsed countenance. "Surely two
people so possessed with regret at never having known each other should
lose no time improving their acquaintance! Dear Athenais: do ask us to
sit at your table."
While the waiter fetched additional chairs, the woman made her escorts
known: Messieurs Benouville et Le Brun, two extravagantly insignificant
young men, exquisitely groomed and presumably wealthy, who were making
the bravest efforts to seem unaware that to be seen with Liane Delorme
conferred an unimpeachable cachet. Lanyard remarked, however, that
neither ventured to assume proprietorial airs; while Liane's attitude
toward them was generally indulgent, if occasionally patronising and
sometimes impatient.
Champagne frothed into fresh glasses. As soon as the band struck up
another dance, Athenais drifted away in the arms of Monsieur Le Brun.
Liane gazed round the room, acknowledged the salutations of several
friends, signalled gaily to a pair of mercenaries on the far side of
the dancing floor, and issued peremptory orders to Benouville.
"Go, Chu-chu, and ask Angele to dance with you. She is being left to
bore herself while Victor dances with Constance. Moreover, I desire to
afflict Monsieur Martin with my confidences."
With the utmost docility Benouville effaced himself.
"Eh, bien, Monsieur Duchemin!"
"Eh, bien, madame la comtesse?" Liane sipped at her champagne, making
impudent eyes at Lanyard over the brim of her glass.
"By what appears, you have at last torn yourself away from the charming
society of the Chateau de Montalais."
"As you see."
"That was a long visit you made at the chateau, my old one?"
"Madame la comtesse is well informed," Lanyard returned, phlegmatic.
"One hears what one hears."
"One had the misfortune to fall foul of an assassin," Lanyard took the
trouble to explain.
"An assassin!"
"The same Apache who attacked--with others--the party from Montalais at
Montpellier-le-Vieux."
"And you were wounded?"
Lanyard assented. The lady made a shocked face and uttered appropriate
noises. "As you know," Lanyard added.
Liane Delorme pretended not to hear that last. "And the ladies of the
chateau," she enquired--"they were sympathetic, one feels sure?"
"They were most kind."
"It was not serious, this wound--no?"
"Mademoiselle may judge when she knows I was unable to leave my bed for
nearly three weeks."
"But what atrocity! And this Apache--?"
"Remains at large."
"Ah, these police!" And the lady described a sign of contempt that was
wholly unladylike. "Still, you are well recovered, by the way you
dance."
"One cannot complain."
"What an experience! Still--" Liane again buried her nose in her glass
and regarded Lanyard with a look of mysterious understanding.
Re-emerging, she resumed: "Still, not without its compensations, eh,
mon ami?"
"That is as one regards it, mademoiselle."
"Oh! oh!" There was any amount of deep significance in these
exclamations. "One may regard that in more ways than one."
"Indeed," Lanyard agreed with his most winning manner: "One may for
instance remember that I recovered speedily enough to be in Paris
to-night and meet mademoiselle without losing time."
"Monsieur wishes me to flatter myself into thinking he did me the
honour of desiring to find me to-night?"
"Or any other. Do not depreciate the potency of your charms,
mademoiselle. Who, having seen you once, could help hoping to see you
again?"
"My friend," said Liane, with a pursed, judgmatical mouth, "I think you
are much too amiable."
"But I assure you, never a day has passed, no, nor yet a night, that I
have not dwelt upon the thought of you, since you made so effective an
entrance to the chateau, a vision of radiant beauty, out of that night
of tempest and fury."
Liane drooped a coy head. "Monsieur compliments me too much."
"Impossible!"
"Is one, then, to understand that monsieur is making love to me?"
Lanyard pronounced coolly: "No."
That won another laugh of personal appreciation. "What then, mon ami?"
"Figure to yourself that one may often dream of the unattainable
without aspiring to possess it."
"Unattainable?" Liane repeated in a liquid voice: "What a dismal word,
monsieur!" "It means what it means, mademoiselle."
"To the contrary, monsieur, it means what you wish it to mean. You
should revise your lexicon."
"Now it is mademoiselle who is too flattering. And where is that good
Monsieur Monk to-night?"
The woman overlooked the innuendo; or, rather, buried it under a
landslide of emotional acting.
"Ah, monsieur! but I am desolated, inconsolable. He has gone away!"
"Monsieur Monk?" Lanyard opened his eyes wide.
"Who else? He has left France, he has returned to his barbarous
America, with his beautiful motor car, his kind heart, and all his
millions!"
"And the excellent Phinuit?"
"That one as well."
"How long ago?"
"A week to-morrow they did sail from Cherbourg. It is a week since
anyone has heard me laugh."
Lanyard compassionately fished a bottle out of the cooler and refilled
her glass.
"Accept, mademoiselle, every assurance of my profound sympathy."
"You have a heart, my friend," she said, and drank with the feverish
passion of the disconsolate.
"And one very truly at mademoiselle's service."
Liane sniffed mournfully and dabbed at her nose with a ridiculous
travesty of a handkerchief. "Be so kind," she said in a tearful voice,
though her eyes were quite dry and, if one looked closely,
calculating--"a cigarette."
One inferred that the storm was over. Lanyard tendered his cigarette
case, and then a match, wondering what next. What he had reason to
anticipate was sure to come, the only question was when. Not that it
mattered when; he was ready for it at any time. And there was no hurry:
Athenais, finding herself paired with an un-commonly good dancer in Le
Brun, was considerately making good use of this pretext for remaining
on the floor--there were two bands to furnish practically continuous
music--and leave Lanyard to finish uninterrupted what she perfectly
understood to be a conversation of considerable moment.
As for Benouville, he was much too well trained to dream of returning
without being bidden by Liane Delorme.