Red Masquerade - Louis Joseph Vance
Nevertheless, there were times, far too many of them, too, when of a sudden
Victor would forsake his occult preoccupations and, unceremoniously
upsetting whatever arrangements Sofia might have made with Mrs. Waring or
Karslake, would find other pleasures of his own invention for her to share
with him alone: long motor jaunts through the English countryside,
apparently his favourite recreation; a box all to themselves at a theatre,
where Victor would sit watching the girl with a fascination only rivalled
by her fascination with the traffic of the boards; curiously constrained
little dinners a deux in fashionable restaurants; morning rides in Rotten
Row, where it oddly appeared that Victor knew everybody, whereas not one in
five hundred seemed to know him--or to care to know him.
Sofia, indeed, was often puzzled to account for what to her appeared to be
an almost pathetic eagerness on the part of Victor, in strange accord with
his lofty pretensions, to claim acquaintanceship with and win the
recognition even of persons of the utmost inconsequence. And she remarked,
too, that his temper was apt to be raw in sequel to their excursions into
the haunts of the well-known. But it was for other reasons altogether that
she came to dread them most.
For one thing, Victor's conversation was ordinarily rather dull; at best,
the reverse of exhilarating. And in spite of her unquestioning acceptance
of him as her father, he remained to Sofia actually a new acquaintance; in
effect, a strange man. And from strangers, more than from relatives with
whose minds one is presumably on terms of close intimacy, one is warranted
in expecting something in the way of mutual stimulation through the opening
of new perspectives of experience, thought, and feeling. Whereas--with
Sofia, at least--Victor seemed unable to talk on more than two subjects,
one or the other of which was constantly uppermost in his thoughts.
He never wearied of warning Sofia against the dangers of those moral
infirmities which he asserted were hers by legitimate inheritance; and
which, if Victor were right in his contentions, she could hardly hope to
overcome without a desperate struggle. She would have to be forever on
guard, he insisted, lest the temptation of some moment, not to be foreseen,
prove too strong for her latent weakness of character, and commit her,
through some unpremeditated act of defiance to the law--most probably an
act of theft--to the life of a social outcast.
To do her justice, the girl was consciously not much impressed by this
alleged peril. She had never been aware of any failing such as Victor would
have endowed her with; so far as she could remember she had never been
tempted to commit more venial sins than inhered in lying to Mama Therese
now and then in order to escape unmerited disciplining at the heavy hands
of that industrious virago; and as for thieving, the very thought of
anything of that sort was detestable to Sofia.
But unconsciously, no doubt, the everlasting iteration of Victor's
admonitions had its purposed effect upon that sensitive and impressionable
spirit.
Then, too, by degrees, but all too soon, it became manifest that the memory
of his passionate attachment for her mother possessed Victor to the point
of monomania. It was only with an effort that he could force himself to
talk to Sofia on other subjects. He thought of nothing else while with her;
if she read his eyes aright, often glimpses of weird light flickering in
their opaque depths, like heat lightning of a murky summer's night, fairly
frightened her, and she knew a shuddering perception of the possibility
that Victor was at times in danger of confusing the daughter with the
mother.
"Never was there such resemblance," he once uttered, in a stare. "You are
more like her than she herself!"
Sofia was pardonably puzzled, and looked it.
"I mean, you re-create my vision of the woman I loved and lost--the woman I
saw in her, not the woman she was."
"Lost?" the girl murmured.
The gray countenance took on an added shade of sombre passion. "She never
understood me, she treated me badly. Once, in a fit of pique, she ran away.
I did everything--everything, I tell you!--to win her back, but--"
He choked on bitter recollections--and Sofia was painfully reminded of the
Chinese devil-masks in Victor's study. But the likeness faded even as she
saw it, under her gaze the twisted features were ironed back into their
accustomed cast of austerity.
"Before I could persuade her, you were born.... Then she died."
Sensible though she was of the ellipsis, and afraid it would never be
filled in if she interrupted, Sofia could not help uttering a sound of
regret and pity for the lot of the mother she had never seen, whose
untimely death had ended a life accounted unendurable as Victor's wife, for
reasons unknown but none the less, to the daughter, vaguely and lamentably
understandable.
For Sofia by now had passed the stage of pretending to herself that she was
not happier away from her father.
Victor mistook the nature of the feeling that swayed the girl--took to
himself the sympathy excited by his revelations.
"But do not grieve on my account. Is not that which was lost restored again
to me? In you my old love lives once more ... little Sofia!"
He caught and pressed a hand that rested on the cloth between them. (They
happened that night to be dining at the Ritz.) And Sofia re-experienced
that inevitable, hateful flinching with which she was growing too familiar.
She dropped her head that her eyes might not betray her.
"People will see ..."
"What if they do? Those who know us will hardly see any wrong in my
squeezing the hand of my own daughter; and the others--not that they
matter--will only think me the luckiest dog alive--as I am!"
Chuckle and smirk both were indescribably odious, reminding Sofia of the
creature Sturm; _he_ had a laugh like that for her, on the rare occasion
when chance propinquity encouraged the Boche to begin one of his uncouth
essays in flirtation.
Sturm's attitude, in truth, perplexed Sofia to exasperation; that is to
say, as much as it offended her. For Victor the man seemed to entertain an
exaggerated yet deeply rooted respect, approaching actual awe, which he
tried his best to carry off with a swagger; for to hold anybody in any
degree of deference was, one judged, somehow deplorable, even shameful, in
the code of Sturm; but in Victor's presence the fellow's bravado would
quickly wilt into hopeless servility, he would cringe and crawl like a dog
currying the favour of a harsh master.
Nevertheless, Victor's daughter seemed to be no more than fair game, in
Sturm's understanding, and a source of supercilious amusement but thinly
veiled or not at all. Alone with the girl, Sturm put on the airs of a
Prussianized pasha condescending to a new odalisque.
Sofia held the animal in a deadly loathing which, betrayed in word or look
or gesture, animated in him only a spirit of derision. In the absence of
Victor, Sturm's eyes were ever ironic, his bows and leers mocking, his
speeches flavoured with clumsy sarcasm; from which it resulted that the
girl never quite forgot the impression which he had managed to convey in
those few moments of their first encounter, that Sturm knew something she
ought to know but didn't, and was meanly jeering at her in his sleeve.
What virtues Victor Vassilyevski perceived in the man passed comprehension.
But so did most of Victor's whims and ways. What riddle more obscure than
that portentous business which permeated the atmosphere of the
establishment with the taint of stealth and terror?--the famous "research
work" that kept Victor closeted with Sturm in his study daily for hours at
a time, often in confabulation with others of like ilk, men of furtive and
unprepossessing cast who came and went by appointment at all hours, but as
a rule late at night!
Into these conferences, Sofia observed, Karslake was never summoned. She
wondered why. He was, as she saw him, so unquestionably the better man,
everything that Sturm was not, open of countenance, fair of temper and
tongue, well-bred and well-mannered, light of heart and high spirited, and
at the same time dependable, with metal of sincerity and earnestness like
tempered steel in his character--or Sofia misread him woefully.
She had been quick to see the man behind the misleading little moustache.
And already she was beginning to count that amusement tame which Karslake
did not share.
Mrs. Waring was undeniably a dear. Sofia could hardly be grateful enough to
the happy chance which had cast that lady for the role of her chaperone;
lacking her guidance the girl must have been innocently guilty of many a
gaucherie in ways new and strange to untried, faltering feet. And it was to
her alone that Sofia owed the slow but constant widening of her social
horizon. For Sybil Waring, it seemed, quite literally "knew everybody"; and
Sofia soon learned to count it an off day when Sybil failed to present her
protegee to the notice of somebody of position and influence.
Most of these persons were women with sounding names and the solid backing
of much money conspicuously in evidence--matrons of the younger and more
giddy generation which was just then so busily engaged in providing
material for the most hectic chapters of London's post-war social history.
But Sofia was scarcely qualified to be critical or to guess that they were
climbers equally with herself, and that if their footing had been of older
establishment the name of Vassilyevski would have rung sinister echoes in
their memories, deafening them to the rich allure inherent in the title of
princess.
So she was fain to accept them all at their own valuation, and thought most
of them entirely charming. And though she had hardly had time as yet to
progress beyond the introductory stages of chance meetings and informal
little teas in public, she began clearly to descry enchanting vistas of
better days to come, when the Princess Sofia Vassilyevski would have not
only teas but dinners and dances given in her honour, and would be asked to
spend gay week-ends in the country houses of the people with whom she
contracted the stronger friendships.
But for the immediate present, and especially in the paramount business of
having a good time, Karslake was fairly a necessity. He thought of
everything and forgot nothing, was ever fertile of fresh expedient if the
pastime of a moment began to pall, and was capable of sustained fits of
irresponsible gaiety which enchanted Sofia, so well did they chime with her
own eagerness for sheer fun.
Decidedly she would have been lost without Sybil Waring; but without
Karslake she would have been forlorn.
XI
HEARTBREAK
Not yet prepared to admit it even to herself, in her heart Sofia knew she
prized the companionship of Karslake for something more than the mere
amusement it afforded her: there was a deeper feeling she would not name.
For all that, her times of solitude knew dreams quick and warm with the
thought of Karslake, his words and ways, the gracious little attentions he
had accustomed her to expect of him and which his manner subtly invested
with a personal flavour inexpressibly delightful, indispensably sweet.
Nor did she ever quite forget how long he had worshipped with
unostentatious devotion at her lowly shrine of the caisse in the Cafe des
Exiles, and how shabbily she had rewarded his admiration--never once, in
those many months, with so much as a smile--and how unresentful had been
his acceptance of her half-feigned, half-real indifference to his
existence.
But whenever her reflections took that back-turning she would recall the
man who had talked to Karslake in the cafe, that day so long ago, of his
own humble past as a 'bus-boy in Troyon's in Paris, and who on leaving had
given Sofia herself that odd look of half-recognition tempered by
bewilderment.
She tried once to draw Karslake about this acquaintance of his, but
Karslake's memory proved unusually sluggish.
"No-o," he drawled after a tolerably long pause for thought--"can't say I
place the chap you mean, can't seem somehow to think back that far, you
know. One meets such a lot of people, first and last, they talk such a lot
of tosh--"
"But it couldn't have been only tosh you were talking," the girl persisted,
"because--_I_ remember--you were so keen about keeping what you said
secret, you spoke the strangest language together most of the time. I could
hear every word"--she had already explained about the freak acoustics of
the Cafe des Exiles--"and not one meant anything to me."
"Stupid of me, but I simply can't think what it could have been."
"I can--now."
Karslake looked askance at Sofia.
"Since I've heard so much Chinese spoken by the servants--now I come to
think of it"--Sofia's eyes grew bright with triumph--"I'm sure it must have
been Chinese you were speaking to the man I mean."
"Impossible," Karslake pronounced calmly.
"But you do know Chinese, don't you?"
"Not a syllable."
Sofia opened her lips to protest, but delayed to study Karslake's face
intently. He didn't try to escape her scrutiny, he even seemed to court it;
but there was a curious, quizzical look in his eyes, those half-smiling
lips had a whimsical droop.
"Mr. Karslake!" Sofia announced, severely, "you're fibbing."
"Nice thing to say to me."
"You do speak Chinese--confess."
"My dear Princess Sofia," Karslake protested: "if I had known one word of
Chinese I could never have landed my job with your father."
"Why not?"
"He expressly stipulated that I should be ignorant of that language."
"What a silly condition to make!"
"Still, I daresay Prince Victor had his reasons."
"I can't imagine what ..."
"Possibly preferred a secretary who couldn't understand everything he said
to the servants. I've never pretended to know all Prince Victor's secrets,
you know."
After a little pause Sofia asked gently: "Did you really need the job so
badly, Mr. Karslake?"
"To get it meant more to me than I can tell you--almost as much as to hold
on to it does to-day."
Sofia turned her eyes away at this, and for the rest of the ride--they were
homeward bound from a matinee, having dropped Sybil Waring at her flat in
Mayfair--kept her thoughts to herself.
Only the most perfunctory civilities passed between them, in fact, until
they had been ushered into the study by Nogam, who advised them that Prince
Victor had ordered tea to be served there and had promised to be home in
good time for it.
The tea service was already set out on a little table beside the fireplace
in that room of secrets, whose normal atmosphere of brooding gloom was now
the darker for the deepening dusk. Only the tea itself remained to be
served, a special rite never performed in that household by hands more
profane than those of the major-domo, Shaik Tsin himself. And this last
could be counted upon not to put in appearance until Nogam took him word
that Victor was waiting.
So, having laid aside her furs and satisfied herself, by a seemingly
aimless but in fact exacting survey, that the abominable Sturm was not
skulking anywhere in the shadows, Sofia established herself on a lounge
that faced the fireplace, while Karslake stood before the fire, looking
down with an expectant smile of which she was but half aware.
"Aren't you going to forgive me?" he asked, quietly, after a time.
Sofia withdrew a pensive gaze from the ruddy bed of coals.
"For what?"
"You were kind enough to call it merely fibbing."
"I'm still thinking about that."
In fact, she had been thinking of nothing else. There was so much to be
considered. Imprimis, that Karslake had been guilty of practising a
deception upon her father. Deceit in itself was one form of treachery. And
how often had Victor stressed to her the dangers of his position,
surrounded by nameless but implacable enemies who would stick at no infamy
to compass his ruin!
But if she told him that Karslake understood Chinese she would lose her
friend forever--no question about that. Victor would not hesitate an
instant--indeed, Sofia felt sure he was only waiting for some such pretext
to get rid of his secretary. She was anything but unobserving, this child
of Soho, whose wits had been sharpened in the sophisticated atmosphere of a
French restaurant; and more than once she had seen Victor's face duplicate
the expression Papa Dupont's had so often assumed on his discovering that
some patron of the cafe was taking too personal an interest in the pretty
young dame du comptoir. A look of insensate jealousy ...
To risk forfeiting the comradeship that had grown to be so dear? Or to be
constructively derelict in her duty as a daughter?
A difficult choice to make; but Sofia made it honestly. In point of fact,
she assured herself, coldly, there was no choice, there was only one thing
she could do under the circumstances. And she hardened her heart and eyes
as she rose to face Karslake on more equal terms.
But when she saw him waiting patiently, with that friendly smile of his she
knew so well, she hesitated long enough to permit his anticipating her with
a quiet question:
"Well, Princess Sofia?"
And then, amazingly, her tongue betrayed her, the phrases she had framed so
carefully vanished utterly from out her mind; and she heard herself saying
in rather tremulous accents:
"It's all right. I shan't tell."
"About my understanding Chinese?"
"Yes--about that."
"Then you do care--?"
She was panicky with knowledge that somehow her emotions had managed to
slip their moorings and get beyond her handling. It didn't help or mend
matters much to hear her own voice stammering:
"Yes, of course, I--I don't want you to--to have to go away--"
Oh, the vanity of trying to hoodwink him who knew so well what she was now
for the first time realizing!
"Because you like me a little, Princess Sofia?"
"Why--yes--of course I do--"
"Because you know I love you, dear."
And then she found herself clinging to Karslake; and his lips were warm
upon her hands ...
So suddenly and at long last it came to Sofia, that Love for which all her
days had been one long weariness of waiting, Love that brimmed with
raptures what had been only aching emptiness and made the desert places to
blossom as the rose. And the joy of it proved overmastering, sweeping her
off her feet and dazing her, leaving her breathless and thoughtless but for
the all-obscuring thought--at length she loved, and the one whom she loved
loved her!
And for a space she existed in an iridescent dream of happiness, without
sense of relation to a material world, forgetful of the flight of time,
lost to everything but her lover's arms and voice and lips.
It might have been five minutes, it might have been sixty, before she
became aware that Karslake was gently disengaging her hands. "Dearest,
dearest!" she heard him say. "We must be sensible. That was the front door,
I'm afraid."
The meaning in his insistence presently began to penetrate, if vaguely, and
she suffered him to go from her a pace or two. But, still a little blind
with the beauty of the revelation that had been granted unto her, nothing
that met her gaze seemed to be in true focus except her lover's face: even
the countenance of Victor swam into her ken as if blurred by veils of mist,
its dour, forbidding look had no significance to her intelligence. Victor
himself, for that matter, was a figure without real consequence other than
as a symbol of the old order, the tedious old ways of the world from which
she had magically escaped.
A ring of sarcastic apology provided the only clue she got to the import
of Victor's words. Sobered a trifle, her mental processes somewhat less
incoherent, still she knew she would hardly regain her poise until she was
alone. And breathing an excuse, she left the room with such dignity as she
could muster.
In the hall, with the closed door behind her, she paused to collect
herself. Then she missed furs and gloves and handbag and, remembering that
she had left them in the study, for some obscure reason imagined she must
have them before proceeding to her room.
Much more mistress of herself by now, it never occurred to Sofia that there
could be any reason why she should hesitate about returning or feel
embarrassed before Victor. True, he had surprised them, Sofia was not at
all sure he hadn't actually seen her in Karslake's arms. But what of that?
Love like hers was nothing to be ashamed of; and that Victor could
reasonably object to her giving her heart to one of his secretaries was
something far from her thought just then.
She put a hand to the knob, turned it, and swung the door open--all on
impulse--then faltered, transfixed by the tableau before the fireplace.
The door was silent on its hinges, and Karslake's back was to her. Victor,
on the other hand, facing both Karslake and the door, unquestionably saw
Sofia, but pretended not to, and had his say out with Karslake in a manner
bitterly cynical.
"... sadly in error if you flatter yourself I pay you a wage to make love
to Sofia behind my back."
"Sorry, sir." Karslake's tone was level, respectful but firm. "Your
instructions were, I believe, to win her confidence. Well--I have always
found love the one sure key to a woman's confidence. Of course, if I had
understood you cared one way or the other--"
Sofia heard no more: unconsciously she had closed the door, at one and the
same time shutting from her sight Victor's exultant sneer and from her
hearing the words with which the man whom she loved had damned himself
irretrievably and dashed her spirit from radiant pinnacles of ecstasy into
the profoundest black abyss of shame and despair.
Primitive instinct bade the stricken girl seek her room and hide her
suffering there; but the shock had stunned her to the point of physical
weakness. Already a hand was pressed above her heart, that ached cruelly;
and as she moved to cross to the foot of the staircase her knees gave under
her. She clutched the newel-post for support, waiting to find strength for
the ascent.
From the shadowed back part of the hall the man Nogam moved hastily into
view, his features twisted in a grimace of concern as he recognized the
bleak misery of Sofia's face. His voice sounded strangely thin and remote.
"Is there anything the matter, miss?--anything I can do?"
She contrived to shake her head slightly and utter an inarticulate sound
of negation, then began slowly to mount the stairs.
Below, Nogam stood watching, in a pose of indecision, as if tempted to
follow and offer the support of an arm lest she fall, restrained only by
fear of a rebuff. But Sofia's leaden limbs carried her safely to the upper
landing, then on to the blessed shelter of her room, where she collapsed
upon a chaise-longue and there lay in a stirless huddle, dry of eye but
deaf to the plaintive entreaties of Chou Nu and numb to all sensation but
the anguish of her humiliated heart.
XII
SUSPECT
Toward mid-evening the man Victor Vassilyevski and his creature Sturm sat
where the lamp of hand-wrought brass made the top of the teakwood table an
oasis of light amid a waste of shadows, their heads together over a vast
glut of books and papers--maps printed and sketched, curious diagrams,
works of reference, documents all dark with columns of figures and
cabalistic writings intelligible only to initiated eyes.
They had the study all to themselves. Nevertheless, when they spoke it was
in the discreet pitch of those who deal in fatal secrets. At a distance of
two paces only a lip-reader could have caught the substance of their
communications, and even such a one must have failed unless equally at home
in German and in English.
Aside from these occasional and circumspect voices, and the busy rustle of
a steel pen in the hand of Sturm, the quiet of the room had a tolerably
constant background of sound in a subdued whisper punctuated by muffled
clicks, emanating from the bronze casket that housed the telautographic
apparatus.
From time to time, as this noise temporarily suspended, Victor would get
up, read what the mechanical stylus had inscribed, tear off the paper, and
return to his chair.
Some of the messages thus received he made known to Sturm, who invariably
acknowledged this courtesy with effusive gratitude, sometimes adding a few
words of contented comment. Other messages Victor chose to keep to himself,
silently setting fire to them and adding their brittle ashes to those of
their predecessors on the brazen tray provided for the purpose. At such
times Sturm would bend lower over his work. But Victor was well able to
guess what resentment glimmered in the eyes so studiously averted; and his
cold, sardonic smile more than once commented, unknown to Sturm, upon the
accuracy with which he read the mean workings of his "secretary's" mind.
The buzz of a muted bell presently interrupted the even tenor of their
industry, causing Sturm to start sharply, drop his pen, and slue round in
his chair, turning to Victor a livid face in which his dark eyes of a
fanatic were live embers of excitement.