Red Masquerade - Louis Joseph Vance
Thoughts of Karslake as her lover, recollection of her first deep joy in
his avowal and her subsequent passion of shame and regret, re-perusal of
his note, that last night had seemed so sweet a thing, precious beyond
compare--found her indifferent to-day, and left her so. Try as she would,
she failed to recapture any sense of the reality of those first raptures.
And yet, somehow, she didn't doubt he loved her or that, buried deep
beneath this inexplicable apathy, love for Karslake burned on in her heart;
but she knew no sort of comfort in such confidence, their love seemed as
remote and immaterial an issue as the menu for day after to-morrow's
dinner. Nothing mattered!
She was able even to meet Prince Victor without her customary shiver of
aversion; and when she recalled the persistence and enthusiasm with which
she had reasoned herself into believing, last night, that he might be
another than her father, she came as near to mirth as she was to come that
day; but it was mirth bitter with self-derision. Of course he was her
father, she had been a ninny ever to dream contrariwise, or that it
mattered.
Nor had she met with more success in efforts to find a cause for this drab
humour; unless, indeed, it were simply the farthest swing of the pendulum
from yesterday's emotional crises, a long swing out of sunlit spaces swept
by the brave winds of young romance into a gloomy zone of brooding torpor,
whose calm was false, surcharged with unseizable disquiet, its atmosphere
electrical with formless apprehensions, its sad twilight shot with lurid
gleams no sooner glimpsed than gone.
In this state Sofia's sensibilities were less benumbed than bound in a
palsy of suspense not wholly destitute of dread; beneath the lethargic
shallows of consciousness lay soundless deeps troubled by sinister
premonitions....
Now, retracing stage by stage the record of the day, Sofia became aware
that its most poignant moment for her was actually the present, with its
keen wonder that she had contrived to survive such exquisite tedium.
She perceived that she had moved throughout like an automaton swayed by a
will outside its own; functioning rather than living; performing appointed
business, executing prescribed gestures, uttering foreordained
observations, and making dictated responses, all without suggestion of
spontaneity, and all without meaning other than as means to bridge an empty
space of waiting.
Waiting for what?
Sofia could not guess....
She went to bed presently, hoping only to find surcease of boredom; and her
head no sooner touched the pillow than oblivion closed down upon her
faculties like a dense, dark cloud.
Discreet and well-instructed, Chou Nu turned the night-light down to a
glimmer, placed on and under a chair adjacent to the bed a robe of cashmere
that wouldn't rustle, and slippers of fine felt with soles of soft leather,
in which footfalls must be inaudible--and glided gently from the room.
For sixty minutes its deep hush was unbroken; the even respiration of the
girl made no sound, she rested without tossing, without moving a finger.
Then, sleep having held her for precisely one hour by the clock, Sofia
opened her eyes, drew in a deep breath, and at once sat up on the side of
the bed.
The memory of that hour was not to leave the girl while life was in her;
nor was the question it raised ever to be answered in a fashion
satisfactory to her intelligence. When later she heard it stated with
authority, by men reputed to be versed in psychic knowledge, that a subject
in hypnosis cannot be willed to act contrary to the instincts of his or her
better nature, she held her peace, but wondered. Was Victor right, then,
and the crime he had willed her to commit in final analysis not repugnant
to her instincts? Or was it some secret faculty of the soul, telepathy or
of its kin, that roused and sent her to keep her rendezvous with destiny?
A riddle never to be read: Sofia only knew that, finding herself awake, she
got up, donned negligee and slippers, and set her feet upon the way
appointed without its occurring to her that the way was strange, without
stopping to question why or whether.
If independent volition, sensible or subliminal, were absent, it could
hardly have been apparent. Sofia herself was not aware of its suspense or
supersession. She knew quite well what she was doing, her every action was
direct and decided, the goal alone remained obscure. She only knew that
somewhere, somehow, something was going wrong without her, and her presence
was required to set it right.
Letting herself out into the corridor, she drew the door to behind her, but
left it unlatched; with what object, she did not know. But the lateness of
the hour, the stillness of the sleeping household, made it seem quite in
order that she should pause to look cautiously this way and that and make
sure that nobody else was astir to spy upon her or challenge the purpose of
this as yet aimless nocturnal flitting.
There was nobody that she could see.
Down the corridor, then, never asking why that way, like a ghost in haste
she sped, but as she drew near to a certain door found her pace faltering.
Sofia knew that door; through it Lady Randolph West herself had introduced
the girl to her boudoir, not two hours since, when chance, or Fate, or the
smooth working out of malicious mortal machinations had moved the two women
simultaneously to seek their quarters for the night. And in the boudoir
Sofia had spent the quarter of an hour before going on to her own room and
bed, civilly attending to vapid chatter and admiring as in duty bound the
admirable jewels of the family.
Now she saw the door a few inches ajar with, beyond it, a dim glow. The
circumstance seemed singular, because--now that she remembered--when Sofia
had expressed perfunctory curiosity concerning what precautions were taken
to safeguard the jewels, Lady Randolph West had airily informed her that
she considered insurance to their appraised value plus a stout lock on the
boudoir door better than any strong-box as yet devised by the ingenuity of
man.
"There's the safe they're kept in, of course," the lady had
declared--"but, my dear, a cardboard box will do as well when any burglar
who knows his business makes up his mind to get at my trinkets. I never
even trouble to lock the thing. I'd rather lose the jewels--and collect the
insurance money--than be frightened out of my wits by hearing it blown
open. No, thanks ever so: any cracksman skillful enough to pick the lock on
the door may bag his loot and go in peace for all of me!"
Impulse, at least she called it that, moved Sofia to approach and
cautiously open the door still wider.
Upon the antique writing-desk that housed the safe burned a single lamp of
low candle-power. A door that led to the adjoining bedchamber was tightly
shut. Sofia's mistrustful eyes reconnoitred every corner of the room, and
reckoned it empty. Again obedient to undisputed impulse, she stepped inside
and shut the door. The spring-latch of the American lock found its socket
with a soft click. Thereafter, silence, no sound in the boudoir, none from
the room beyond. But to Sofia the hurried beating of her heart reverberated
on the stillness like the rolling of a drum.
Without clear appreciation of how she had got there, she found herself
standing over the writing-desk, and discovered what the indifferent light
had till now kept hidden, that a false panel in the front of the desk had
been thrust back, exposing the face of the safe, and that this last was not
even closed.
At the same time she grew conscious that her hands were shaking violently,
that her every limb, her whole body indeed, was agitated by desperate
trembling. And dully asked herself why this should be ... But didn't
hesitate.
Her actions now more than ever resembled those of an unthinking puppet,
although she knew quite well what she was doing; and her gestures might
have been the fruit of long lessoning at the hands of some master of stage
melodrama, so true were they to theatrical convention.
With furtive, frightened glances toward both doors, Sofia dropped to her
knees before the safe....
When she stood up again her hands were filled with jewellery, her two hands
held a treasure of incalculable price in precious stones.
She paused for a little, staring at them with dilate eyes dark in a pale,
rapt face. Her lips were parted, but only her quickened breathing whispered
past them. She was trembling more painfully than ever. But she seemed
unable to think of anything but the jewels, her gaze was held in
fascination by their coruscant loveliness as revealed by the light of the
little lamp.
Hers for the taking!
Then, without warning, a tremendous convulsion laid hold on her body and
soul, and she was racked and shaken by it, and at its crisis her
outstretched hands opened and showered the top of the desk with jewels,
then flew to her head and clutched her throbbing temples.
She cried out in a low voice of suffering: _"No!"_
And of a sudden she was reeling back from the desk, toward the corridor
door, repeating over and over on an ascending scale: _"No! no! no! no!
no!"_
Her quaking legs blundered against a chair, her knees gave, she tottered to
fall; strong arms caught her, held her safe, a voice she knew yet didn't
know in its guarded key muttered in her ear: "Thank God!"
She made no struggle, but her eyes of pain and terror sought the speaker's
face, and saw that he was the man Nogam. In extremity of amazement she
spoke his name. He shook his head.
"No longer Nogam," he said in the same low accents, and smiled--"but your
father, Michael Lanyard!"
XIX
UNMASKING
One more instant the girl rested passive in uncomprehending astonishment;
then abruptly she exerted herself to break free from the supporting
embrace, but found the effort wasted for lack of opposition, so that her
own violence sent her reeling away half a dozen paces, to bring up against
the desk; while Lanyard, making no move more than to drop his rejected
arms, remained where she had left him, and requited her indignant stare
with a broken smile of understanding, a smile at once tender, tolerant, and
sympathetic, with a little quirk of rueful humour for good measure.
"My father!" Sofia repeated in a gasp of disdain--"_you!_"
He gave a slight shrug.
"Such, it appears, is your sad fortune."
"A servant!"
"And not the proud prince you were promised? Rather a come down, one must
admit." Lanyard laughed low, and moved nearer. "I'm sorry, I mean I might
be (for myself, too) if Nogam were less a fraud than that pretentious
mountebank, Prince Victor--or for the matter of that, if you were as poor
of spirit as you would seem on your own valuation, if you were not at heart
your mother's daughter, and mine, my child by a woman whom I loved well,
and who long ago loved me!"
He paused deliberately to let her grasp the full sense of his words, then
pursued:
"It may help you get your bearings to know that I am truly the Michael
Lanyard to whom Messieurs Secretan & Sypher addressed their
advertisement--you remember--as this should prove."
He offered a slip of paper, and after another moment of dumb staring, the
girl took it and read aloud the message which Victor had dictated following
Sofia's flight to him from the Cafe des Exiles.
_"'To Michael Lanyard, Intelligence Division, the War Office,
Whitehall--'"_
"That is to say," Lanyard interpreted, "of the British Secret Service."
"You!"
He bowed in light irony. "One regrets one is at present unable to offer
better social standing. To-morrow, it may be ... But who knows?"
Sofia shook her head impatiently, and in a murmur of deepening amazement
resumed her reading of the note:
_"'Your daughter Sofia is now with me.. Your own intelligence must tell you
nothing could be more fatal than an attempt to communicate with her'"_
To the interrogation eloquent in her eyes Lanyard replied:
"Dictated by Victor to Karslake, who passed it on to me, the night he
brought you to the house from the Cafe des Exiles."
"You knew--you, who claim to be my father--yet permitted him--?"
"You were in the house before I knew I had a daughter; Karslake had no
chance to consult me before fetching you. Furthermore, if he had hesitated
to carry out Victor's orders just then, not only would he have nullified
all our preparations to secure evidence enough to convict the man, or at
least run him out of England--"
"Prince Victor? What was he doing, that you should--?"
"Dabbling in all manner of infamy, from financing a thieves' fence to
organizing an association of common criminals to bring it business; from
maintaining a corps of agitators to foment social discontent to fostering
this last, most imbecile scheme of all, which comes to naught to-night, an
attempt to overthrow the British Empire and set up in its stead a Soviet
England, with Victor Vassilyevski in the dual role of Trotsky and Lenine!"
The girl made a sign of bewilderment and incredulity.
"What are you telling me? Are you mad?"
"No--but Victor is, mad with lust for power, insane with illusions of
personal aggrandizement. You don't believe? Listen to me, then, appreciate
to what demoniac lengths he was prepared to go to flatter his insane
ambitions:"
"Sturm has invented a new poison gas, odourless, colourless, the most
deadly known, and easily manufactured in vast quantities by adding simple
ingredients to ordinary illuminating gas. Fanatic Bolshevist that he was,
Sturm offered his formula to Victor, to be used to clear the way for social
revolution; and Victor jumped at the offer--has spent vast sums preparing
to employ it. His money paid for the recent strike at the Westminster works
of the Gas Light and Coke Company, by means of which Victor was able to
smuggle a round number of his creatures into its service. His money has
corrupted servants employed in Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, in
the homes of the nobility, even in Buckingham Palace itself, men ready at a
given signal secretly to turn on gas jets in remote corners and flood the
buildings with the very breath of Death itself. And that signal was to have
been given to-night. Well, it will not be."
"But could any scheme be more grotesquely diabolical? Do you ask more proof
of the man's madness? Do you require more excuse for my permitting you to
be deceived by Victor for a few weeks, rather than wreck our plans to
frustrate his, when all the while Karslake and I were near you, watching
over you, learning to love you--he in his fashion, I as your father--and
both ready at all times to die in your protection, if it had ever come to
that?"
Lanyard had drawn so near that only a few inches separated them, and had
his voice in such control that at three paces' distance a vague and
inarticulate murmur at most might have been heard; but in Sofia's hearing
his accents rang with passionate sincerity, persuading her against the
reason which would have rejected his indictment of Victor as too fantastic,
too imaginative, and too hopelessly overdrawn to be given credence. She
believed him, knowing in her heart that he believed his statements to the
last word; and knowing more, that he was surely what he represented himself
to be, her father.
Inscrutable the processes of human hearts: even as from the very first
Sofia had instinctively yet unconsciously recognized the intrinsic falsity
of Victor's pretensions, so now she perceived the integral honesty that
informed Lanyard's every word and nuance of expression, and accepted him
without further inquisition.
To his insistent "Have I made you understand?" she returned a wan wraith of
a smile, pitiful with entreaty, while one of her hands found the way to
his.
"I think so," she replied in halting apology--"at least, I believe you. But
be a little patient with me. It is all so new and strange, what you tell
me, it's hard at first to grasp, there's so much I must accept on faith
alone, so much I don't understand ..."
"I know." Lanyard pressed her hand gently.
"But try to have faith; I promise you it shall be fairly rewarded. Only a
little longer now, an hour or two at most, and Karslake will be here to
prove the truth of all I have asserted. You will believe him, at least."
"Of course," the girl said, simply. "I love him. You knew that?"
"I guessed, and I am glad, glad for both of you."
"But he is safe?" Sofia demanded in sudden access of alarm so strong that
her voice rose above the pitch of discretion.
"Quietly. Yes, he is safe enough."
"You know that for a fact? How do you know--?"
"I've seen him to-night, talked with him--not two hours since."
"You have been in London?" she questioned--"to-night?"
"Rather! Victor sent me." Lanyard laughed lightly. "You didn't know, of
course, but--well, I gave him reason to suspect me, so he sent me up to be
assassinated by Shaik Tsin. As it turned out, however, Herr Sturm most
obligingly understudied for me.... Before coming back, I looked Karslake
up. He'd been busy, playing a lone hand, ever since Victor trumped up an
errand to keep him out of your way all day. No need to go into tedious
details; I found Karslake had matters well in hand: the gas works
surrounded by a cordon of troops, the house under close watch, and--best
of all--a sworn confession from an Irish Member of Parliament whom Victor
had managed to buy with a promise to free Ireland once Soviet England was
an accomplished fact. So I left Karslake to wind up loose ends in London,
and posted back with my heart in my mouth for fear I'd be too late."
"Too late?" Sofia queried with arching brows.
"Need I remind you where we are?"
A sweep of Lanyard's hand indicated the boudoir; and Sofia started sharply
in perplexity and alarm.
"Where we are!" she echoed in a frightened whisper.
Of a sudden memory returned of what had passed in that room before Lanyard
had revealed himself to her, and knowledge of her peril so narrowly escaped
drove home like a knife to her heart.
"What am I doing here?" she breathed in horror. "What have I done?"
"Nothing more dreadful than prove yourself as true as you are fine, by
revolting in the end against the most powerful force known to man, the
force of suggestion implanted in hypnotism. You couldn't know that it was
hypnotic not natural sleep you passed into last night, when Victor tricked
you with that damned crystal, or that, while you slept, he willed you to do
here to-night what, when it came to the final test, your nature would not
let you do."
"But he so often told me I had the instincts of a thief--!"
"So often--_I_ know--that you were, against your will and reason, by dint
of the very iteration of it, coming to accept that lie as a truth whose
power there was no contesting. That is why, that you might prove yourself
by your own acts, I had to let you undergo your ordeal here to-night, only
standing by to make sure no ill came of it. Otherwise you might have
carried to your grave the fear instilled into your soul by that blackguard.
But now you know he lied, and will never doubt again--or reproach your
father for the dark record of his younger years."
He checked, lifting hands of desolate appeal, then let them fall.
"Dear, if you knew you would not judge me harshly. If only you could know
what I have fought up from, a foundling without a name abandoned in a
third-rate Parisian hotel, reared a scullion, butt and scapegoat, with
associates only of the lowest, scullions, beggars, pickpockets, Apaches,
and worse--!"
"As if that mattered!"
The girl turned a softly suffused face with shining eyes to Lanyard's. Now
at last she knew him, now the romance of her dreams of yesterday came true:
through the mean masquerade of Nogam the man emerged, identifying himself
in her sight unmistakably with that splendid stranger whom she had never
quite forgotten since that old-time afternoon when he had met Karslake in
the Cafe des Exiles and talked so intimately of his antecedents, hinting
at a history of youthful years strangely analogous with her own.
Involuntarily her arms lifted and settled upon his shoulders.
"I am so proud to think--"
A shrill scream drowned out her words, a woman's voice ranging swiftly the
staccato gamut of terror and cracking discordantly on its most piercing
note.
Then with a bang that shook the flooring and must have been heard in the
farthest corners of the house, the bedchamber door was slammed behind their
backs. But beyond it the screaming went on in volume imperceptibly muffled
by its barrier, one ear-splitting caterwaul following another with such
continuity that the wonder was where Lady Randolph West found breath to
keep up that atrocious row, and whether any dozen women of average
lung-power could have rivalled it.
In one sharp movement Lanyard and Sofia disengaged and fell apart, their
eyes consulting, hers in dismay, his in mixed exasperation and remorse.
"I ought to be shot," he declared, bitterly--"who knew better!--to have
delayed here, exposing you to this danger--!"
"It couldn't be helped," Sofia insisted; "you had to make me understand.
Besides, if I hurry back--"
In quick strides Lanyard crossed to the corridor door, unlatched and opened
it an inch, peered out, and gave the sum of what he saw in a gesture of
finality, then leaving the door ajar turned swiftly back to the girl.
"Too late," he said: "they're swarming out into the hall like bees. In
another minute ..."
Of a sudden he closed with Sofia, roughly clasping her body to him.
"Struggle with me!" he pleaded--"get me by the throat, throw me back across
the desk--"
"What do you mean? Let me go!"
In answer to her efforts to wrench away, Lanyard only tightened his hold
and swung her toward the desk.
"Do as I bid you! It's the only way out. Let them think you heard a noise,
got up to investigate, found me here, rifling the safe--"
"No," she insisted--"no! Why should I save myself at your expense?--betray
you--my father--!"
"Then give me the obedience of a daughter ... or let Victor succeed in
branding you a thief, the daughter of a thief!"
He stilled the protest she would have uttered by placing fingers over her
lips.
"Listen!"
In the corridor an angry rumour of voices, alarmed calls and cries, with
thumps and scuffles of hasty feet, in the bedchamber the shrieks persisting
without the least hint of failing: as a damned soul might bawl upon its bed
of coals ...
"Sofia, I implore you!"
Still she hesitated.
"But you--?"
"Never fear for me, remember that I am of the Secret Service: two minutes
after I see the inside of the nearest police station, I shall be free--and
happy in the assurance that your name is without stain. Then Karslake will
come for you, bring you to me ... Now!"
Lanyard caught the girl's two wrists together and, throwing himself bodily
backward across the desk, carried her hands to his throat.
With a simultaneous crash the door was flung back to the wall. Led by
Victor Vassilyevski a dozen men, guests and servants, in various stages of
dishabille, streamed into the room.
XX
THE DEVIL TO PAY
When it was all over, when the gravelled drive no longer crunched to wheels
that bore away the man Nogam to answer for his misdeeds, when the household
had quieted down and the most indefatigable sensation-monger had wearied of
singing the praises of the Princess Sofia and, tossing off a final
whiskey-and-soda, had paddled sleepily back to bed, lights burned on
brightly in two parts only of Frampton Court, in the bedchambers tenanted
respectively by Prince Victor Vassilyevski and his reputed daughter.
Alone, Prince Victor sat at the desk where he had, four hours earlier,
inscribed those characters which should have hurried Nogam into a premature
grave. That they had failed of their mission was something that fretted
Victor Vassilyevski, his mind and nerves, to a pitch of exacerbation all
but unendurable.
What had become of that sentence to death? And what of that other, the
telegram which, forwarded by Nogam's hand to Sturm, should long since have
set in motion the organized machinery of murder and demolition?
Had Nogam, as he had meekly insisted on being questioned subsequent to his
subjugation, truly delivered the two messages as directed and, miraculously
escaping his fate decreed, returned to Frampton Court by the twelve-three,
likewise in strict conformance with instructions?
This statement Nogam had neglected to amplify, and Victor had been chary of
too close questioning, lest it elicit too much in the hearing of others.
Once overpowered, Nogam had been philosophic about his bad luck; but the
eyes in his face of a stoic had held a gleam that Victor didn't altogether
like, a light that seemed suspiciously malicious, a suggestion of spirited
humour deplorable to say the least in a self-confessed sneak-thief caught
in the very act, deplorable and disturbing; in Victor's sight a look
constructively indicative of more knowledge than Nogam had any right to
possess. Take it any way you pleased, something to think about ...