The Lone Wolf Returns E-Book

Louis Joseph Vance

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This book is more a study of character than a mysterious genre by which the character is otherwise known. The book begins with the interaction of the characters with a love story, which leads to an unexpected meeting. In the end, there is a surprise involving several characters, but this should be opened by another reader.

Leseprobe

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

I

“I love you,” said Michael Lanyard.

He spoke in French; and that simple phrase, covered by the surging song of strings and woodwinds, was inaudible to other ears. Only the woman with him heard and, hearing, roused from the reverie into which she too insensibly had lapsed, turning back from the prismatic pageantry of the dance eyes whose grave regard gave never a clue to the emotions his words inspired.

Making no more acknowledgment than this, she studied him intently but kindly, touched by the wistfulness that shadowed the demeanour of unpretending dignity which she had learned to like best of all the many phases of the man their friendship had revealed.

The severity of evening dress in line and lack of colour became him well, setting off the lean, sculptured contours of his face, giving value to its even warmth of tone. Traces of silver at his temples hinted at that history, not too happy, with which she was in part acquainted. The strength with which his mouth was modelled affected her, as always, with a faint, strangely pleasant thrill of alarm, the dark, clear eyes, at once deferential and demanding, held her in a spell she had no wish to break.

“I love you,” he repeated.

Her brows took on a quaintly plaintive cast. “I know, my friend,” she replied in the same tongue and tone. “For a long time I have known... as you have known my love was all for you. And yet...” The slender shoulders lifting their fairness out of the corsage of her jetted gown sketched a shrug.

“I had to wait to tell you,” he said, “till I was sure–”

In indulgent raillery she interrupted: “Sure that you loved me?”

He smiled, but wagged his head in stubborn earnestness: “Sure of what else I must say.”

“There is more?”

“Much more.” The man leaned over the table, with an even deeper accent of sincerity in his guarded voice: “I love you so dearly, Eve, the thought of a life without you is beyond my understanding... Yet I may not ask you to be my wife.”

“May not?” Hands of consummate grace fluttered above the cloth in tragicomic impatience. “Or will not?”

“Will not because I may not.”

Eve de Montalais held a small pause of perplexity, made a small sign of frustration. “It is a riddle,” she said. “But when one speaks in riddles, one speaks playfully... as you do not. Tell me, then, my Michael! why you think you may not ask me to marry you, when between us all else has been said?”

“I love you too well–”

“Too well to make me happy?”

“Too well to let you stake your happiness on the hazards of such a life as mine.”

“You forget, if you deny me the right to share those hazards, whatever they may be, I shall have no happiness to risk.”

“You are young,” the man thoughtfully stated, “the best of your life lies before you. And you are, I think, the loveliest woman that ever lived. Many men after me will long for and love you, one of them you will find worthy...”

“Still, you forget, my heart is given.”

“Time heals all memories.”

“You believe that?” She withdrew a little, settling back in her chair, and used her fan, gazing away over its nodding plumes. “I was mistaken, then; I believed you loved me too well to hold my love the whim of a day or a month or a year. I thought you knew me too well to think my love was lightly given, or once given might be recalled.”

He winced under that reproach. “Without your help,” he pleaded, “how shall I be strong? You know what it costs me to say what I am saying, that I could not say anything to displease you if I held your happiness second to my own. It is of you alone I am thinking; you whom I love and who are not for me.”

“If you love me,” Eve de Montalais said quietly, “you will never leave me.”

“Better that; better you should learn to hold the memory of me in contempt, than I should risk your waking up too late, as some day you would surely waken, to realize you had joined your life to the life of one whom the world esteems a common thief.”

“‘The world esteems’!” Disdain touched her lips. “You are not that.”

“I was once–”

“The past is dead.”

“Or merely sleeping? Who shall say?”

“Ah no! my friend, you waste your time if you ask me to believe that.”

The music fell, and the gay rumour of voices that replaced it, as the dancers began to move back to their tables, was not enough to warrant the former sense of security from eavesdropping by inadvertence or intention. In tacit silence Madame de Montalais extended her hand, Lanyard offered his cigarette-case, then a match. But after a single inhalation the woman forgot to smoke, and permitted the tobacco to fume to waste in its jewelled holder, her attention seemingly diverted by the pomp and vanity of that sumptuous cavern wherein the folk of her world were accustomed nightly to foregather and play yet once again the time-old game whose fascination never fails, whose stake is love...

But Lanyard had eyes for his love alone.

Her beauty in his sight was like a pain in his heart, a hand at his throat. Slender and gracious and fair, with a sense, hard to define, of something more than human in that warmly human loveliness, something that made one think of a sickle of moon afloat in an azure midnight sky, of dawn-light fleeting breathlessly athwart a summer sea...

His for the asking!

He had loved before, but never as now, never with this tenderness, this all-possessing wish to serve and safeguard, this passionate self-abnegation...

“What is it?” he asked, seeing her start, with an almost imperceptible suggestion of aversion, as she sat looking away across the room.

“That man,” she replied–”that creature, rather, whom one never sees without shuddering. And one sees him everywhere.”

Even before he looked Lanyard had divined the occasion of this antipathy. It was true, what she had said: ever since this tide in their affairs had brought these two together in New York, no matter where they turned of an evening in quest of amusement, or rather for an excuse to be with each other, at some time in its course they seemed fated to cross the path of this personality, odd, compelling, and in some how forbidding.

One saw the man now, with a party of guests laying claim to a table on the far side of the floor, a table that had been conspicuously reserved and refused to others, though the Crystal Room was crowded and late-comers were importunate. A gross body, ponderous and slow of movement, with a heavy face of singularly immobile cast, resembling and for all its fleshiness as destitute of colour as a mask of papier-mâché, with a strange effect of transparency as if lighted by an inner glow akin to phosphorescence. Punctiliously mannered and at all times dressed with the nicest care as to the cut and propriety of his clothing, but unfailingly bedecked like a sultan with an incalculable wealth of jewellery in sets meticulously matched; yesterday with emeralds, today with diamonds, tomorrow with rubies, at another time it might be with fire-opals burning on fingers and watch chain, serving as cuff-links, waistcoat buttons, and studs for his shirt: a bizarre shape to meet in the haunts of fashion... And never alone, always surrounded by a little court of sycophants, seldom twice of the same composition, but as a rule including a few fragile beauties, apparently of the stage, and invariably one whom Lanyard took to be a paid clown, an undersized man with the face of a sage droll, the dress and deportment of a diplomat, and something in his fixed solemnity which suggested an ever-present expectation that his lightest word would win a gale of laughter–as, indeed, more often than not it seemed to.

The other sat, as by habit, taciturn and aloof in the heart of his noisy company. A dull man or a deep. Speaking seldom, eating little, drinking nothing, always smoking, holding one pose without stir for long minutes at a time: only the eyes beneath hood-like lids, eyes of a repellant pallor and surprising brightness, were restless, ranging from face to face, not only of his companions but of every person within his scope of vision, peering into each with a steadfast, imperturbable and penetrating curiosity...

Lanyard had more than once been resentfully conscious of that prying look. He was conscious of it now and rather hoped its author could read his lips, reckoning its impertinence ample provocation for the temper of what he was about to say.

“The Sultan of Loot,” he mused aloud, adding in answer to Eve’s mirthful glance: “my private nickname for the animal. If it does him injustice, he ought to take in his sign, don’t you think? I know him by sight, of course; but that is all. Some bucketeer or bootlegger, no doubt; Prohibition no less than Providence makes strange bedfellows, nowadays, in this mad country.”

“Strange,” the woman observed, “how people one doesn’t know sometimes seem to haunt one.”

“When it is strange.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why do you say that, Michael?”

“I hardly know,” he confessed with a deprecatory laugh. “More, at least, than this: that it has seldom been my fortune to be so haunted without something in the nature of a sequel.”

She made a mental shudder graphic. “In this instance, for your sake, I trust the rule will not hold good.”

“I hope so, indeed. I entertain the least inclination imaginable to better my acquaintance with that monsieur. And yet, it would surprise me not at all if I were to see much more of him before I see less.”

There was music again, a retrograde movement from tables to open floor.

“Why so mysterious, Michael?”

“Upon my word, I can’t tell you. Why did you shiver when you spoke of the fellow? Blame it, if you like, to that sixth sense, that instinct of self-preservation which serves some men as intuition serves most women–call it what you will, I have quite definitely a feeling I am no more done with that one whom I do not know than I am as yet begun with him.”

A sidelong glance discovered the personage in question indulging in one of his rare smiles, an introspective smile that might mean he had indeed been reading Lanyard’s lips, or might mean nothing of the sort. True, that he was no longer looking at Lanyard; it remained equally true that he was apparently paying no attention to the conversation of his company.

“And that is why”–a derisive shift of the woman’s eyes indicated the quarter of the room in which the subject of their speculations had established himself–”you are trying to jilt me–is it?–and excusing your ungallant conduct with vague references to the ‘hazards’ of your life!”

Lanyard shook his head, again possessed by the gravity of his purpose. “I am scarcely so childish,” he said. “But for days–for months, indeed, but especially in these last few days–I have been thinking of the life I have to offer a wife, the life of a man hunted, without fortune or position, friendless in a strange land but for you.”

“‘Hunted’?”

The echo deprecated the strength of that term, but he would not modify it. “Hunted,” he reiterated: “the life of an outlaw. Society does not forgive: it will sometimes applaud a successful transgressor, but it never has patience with the penitent.”

“Tell me why you say that, Michael. I have the right to know.”

“It is this, then,” Lanyard said with reluctance: “wherever I go, I am a marked man. The world wears mocking eyebrows when it hears that the Lone Wolf no longer prowls. ‘Perhaps, today,’ it says: ‘but wait. Let him prove his sincerity and fortitude against the dead drag of my indifference, let him make his way if he can, I have my own affairs to busy me.’... The police are satisfied my change of character is merely a blind. Another class, even more skeptic, is made up of those whose lot today is as mine was yesterday, creatures of envy, greed, and uncharitableness, all those qualities that make criminals. These, should they see me in rags, would say: ‘Another turn or two of the screw and he will be one of us again.’ Seeing me apparently prosperous, they say: ‘Observe that he wants for nothing: he is cunning, that one.’ Or suppose some unknown makes a famous coup; the chorus is then: ‘The Lone Wolf has done this thing!’... Society indifferent, its police distrustful, its enemies envious: one needs strength to make way against so strong a tide!”

“You have it.”

“But will it last?”

“With mine to comfort and encourage you when your strength wearies...”

“But figure to yourself a possible event: We marry. What happens? Your friends are affronted, they turn from you–”

“Did you call them friends?”

“Even friendship fails when its self-esteem is flouted.... You are left alone,” Lanyard obstinately pursued, “but for me. And for every friend you have lost, you have found an enemy–my enemies. These good haters of mine will resort to every expedient to poison your mind against me, while to me they will come saying, ‘Do as we bid you or prepare yourself to see her suffer.’ Conceive me mad enough to tell them to go to the devil: the next time we find ourselves conspicuously placed in public, a hand falls on my shoulder, I your husband am arrested on a trumped-up charge. Assume that I clear myself: still the disgrace remains, the shame. And I its cause.... No! never ask me to condemn you to a life like that.”

He sat brooding, in a silence which she respected for a little, watching him with shrewd vision all the while.

“Something has happened,” she said at length, “to make you think such things.”

“You are right.” He nodded sadly: “I have come to my senses. These months I have spent in almost daily association with you have been the happiest of my life. I have been too happy... They can’t continue: I love you too well.”

The plumed fan was arrested, the woman’s eyes grew wide and dark, her breathing quickened. “What do you propose?”

“I think you must know...”

“Tell me!”

He entreated her with haggard eyes. “Since we may not marry, what else can I do but go my way?”

“No!” she impatiently countered. “There is something more in your mind than you have told me.”

“Neither there nor in my heart.”

“You are keeping something back for fear of frightening me: some danger threatens you–!”

“Nothing.”

“Nevertheless you have reason to fear–”

“I have always to be on my guard. Misfortune visits in strange guises, and most often unannounced. For myself, I am accustomed to that; I do not greatly care. But for you–that is another matter.”

The fan resumed its weaving. After a pause Eve said: “If you must go, so be it. But ‘whither thou goest, there go I’–”

“No!”

“It matters not how far,” she nodded. “What is it to me where I live, so I am with you?”

“Can you require that of me?”

“I!” she cried, startled–”of you?”

“You are a woman of this world, Eve. Do I not know? Can I forget how you were when I found you, buried to life in that isolate château half a hundred years to the south of Paris? Can I not see what a change has come over you in these few months of your own New York?”

“Of you–”

But he would not listen. “You were born and bred to breathe this atmosphere. Can you ask me to doom you to exile in some hole or corner, some place so lost that the whisper of my ill fame will not find it? Some kraal in South Africa!–an iron hut in the Australian bush!–where else?... You would die of such a life, or live only to learn to hate me.”

“Never that. Love outweighs all.”

“So we tell ourselves, so we believe, till we are required to lay down for love even our self-respect. Could I retain that–could I forgive myself–knowing I had robbed you of all that had made life fair for you, and left you only the happiness of giving up your life for love?”

“Selfishness speaks there...”

“Vanity, the father of selfishness, is present in every human affair. It is not a pretty thought; but men and women in this world are made that way. There is my vanity, too, to be thought of.” Lanyard had a wry, apologetic smile. “Consider that you have never known a want you could not gratify out of your private means; while I am a penniless adventurer, a man living from hand to mouth, today on a modest pension, tomorrow on God knows what...”

“At last!” said Eve de Montalais: “it is that, then, your pride that stands between us.”

“A man with less is not a man whom you could love.”

She made no direct reply, but after a time sat up and began to gather round her the folds of her wrap.

“I am a little weary,” she told Lanyard. “There is more to be said than you have said, my Michael! but not now, not here... Perhaps another night... Please take me home.”

II

The breath of that November night was soft and warm, its dim sky distilled a pensive rain with frequent lulls. Burnished by the daily traffic of eighty thousand tires the wet pave of the Avenue resembled a broad channel of black marble veined with pulsing gold. Over churning tides of after-theatre travel the police towers watched like great gaunt goblins, stabbing the misty mirk with angry eyes, ruby, emerald, and amber.

The brougham drifted sedately with the northbound press; its pace all too swift notwithstanding, its journey too quickly accomplished. Yet neither of the lovers had spoken since leaving the Ritz. Only when the grey palisades of the Hotel Walpole loomed ahead, spangled with the gilt of a thousand windows, the woman stirred in her corner and sat forward, peering with fond concern into the face of the man, giving him her hands.

“Be patient with me, Michael,” she said. “It isn’t that I can’t read your heart–I know, my dear, I know!... All you said just now was true enough; but all the truth has not yet been said. Neither are my wits as ready as yours. You must give me time to think. You will, I know.”

“I am altogether yours,” he answered. “Your happiness is all that matters.”

“Not all, not my happiness alone, but yours as well–ours!”

She swayed into his arms; for the first time Lanyard knew her lips...

He came to himself, after a fashion, standing bare of head beneath a lamp-fringed canopy of bronze and glass, formally touching her fingers and mouthing polite phrases as to a woman he barely knew... Absurd!

And on her part only enriched colour and a heightened radiance in her eyes betrayed the revolutionary work of those too few moments.

“Tomorrow,” he heard Eve saying... “No: not tomorrow; I’m dining with the Druces. The day after. Call for me early, Michael: we’ll have a long drive and a little dinner somewhere in the country.”

Her look said so much more, he had no certain knowledge of what he stammered in response. But presumably the phrases served. She nodded gayly, ran up the steps. He watched her whisk through the revolving door and fade away from view in the hot illumination of the foyer before it occurred to him to cover his head. And his stare was vacant when her chauffeur delayed him with a respectful query; to which, after a moment, Lanyard replied, many thanks, but he felt more in the humour for a stroll than to be motored to his rooms; he wouldn’t mind the drizzle.

The goblin eyes blinking from red to green, he profited by the interruption of up-and-down-town travel to cross to the west side of the Avenue before settling into stride for a walk of a mile to his modest lodgings; in a mood of exaltation too rare to countenance return of those misgivings to which he had that night for the first time given voice, those doubts and fears by which his lonelier hours of late had none the less been ridden, ever since he had learned that his love for Eve de Montalais had grown to be a passion passing his strength to withstand.

He had done his best but had essayed the impossible tonight, in attempting to make her see that marriage between them were for her a madness. He admitted that, now he knew of her own confession that she loved him. Now with the music of her incomparable voice still chiming that assurance in his memory, now with the fragrance of her lips lingering on his own, Lanyard knew that whether he had fought well or ill to save her from himself, the fight was lost; one course alone remained to him: to do away with every hindrance to the firm establishment of Eve’s happiness, to reorganize his life so that every objection to their union might be compromised, every echo of the past silenced, every embarrassment of the present compensated.

A task to tax the wits and heart of a superman, contemplation of it in that hour affected Lanyard with no dismay: armoured in and inspired by her love he could not fail.

In this ecstatic temper only subconsciously aware of his surroundings, the man was measuring off a round four miles an hour, southbound on the sidewalk over across from the Cathedral, when that occurred which brought his head down from the clouds: the semaphores signalled for another suspension of traffic on the Avenue, and an instant later a taxicab inexpertly driven at unlawful speed passed Lanyard crabwise, skidding wildly on the greasy asphaltum as its chauffeur threw out clutch and applied brakes to avoid crashing into a file of cars debouching from West Fiftieth street.

An old-fashioned, gloomy contraption, of that high-chested hobbledehoy type now fast becoming extinct, the cab performed two complete revolutions like a skittish monstrosity chasing its tail, and toppled perilously as if minded to try a somersault as well, before it brought up, rocking and growling, broadside to the curb.

From its black pocket of a body noises of embittered expostulation were issuing in a woman’s voice and a foreign tongue; neither the voice of a gentlewoman nor language such as one would employ with whatever provocation. It was to Lanyard, indeed, like a souvenir of younger years to hear that broadside of vituperation couched in the argot of the thieves’-kitchens of Paris. And at a discreet distance he paused, diverted, humanly hoping for the worst.

At the same time a badly rattled driver, comprehending no word of the abuse cascading upon his head but sensitive enough to its tone, tumbled off his box and made for the door, vainly seeking to make an authentic brogue audible. But his hand was no sooner lifted to its latch than the door flew open in his face and a lovely lady in resplendent attire and a towering fury bounced out and–a figure of flaming colour in the blue-blacks of the nocturnal scheme–addressed herself to the man with gesticulation so vividly adequate to her temper that instinctively he lifted both arms to guard his features and, stumbling over his own heels in panic retreat, sat down with suddenness and shocking force.

No national spirit is so exquisitively responsive as that of the French to comedy of physical misadventure. When the chauffeur coming into contact with the sidewalk gave up his breath in one vast “Ouf!„ his fare forgot to be angry, bit a blistering epithet in two, and incontinently passed into such spasms of mirth that she was fain to lean her finery against the dripping side of the cab lest her limbs refuse to sustain her. And while she shook and held her sides and uttered peal upon peal of laughter–heedlessly permitting her wrap to fall open and expose to the inclement air the most cynical of decolletages framing flesh quite literally crusted with jewels–the chauffeur was scrambling to his feet in a rage that threatened to rival her own late transports, and a crowd was beginning to gather, too, as crowds will in New York, upon any provocation, in any street, at any hour of any day or night. On which accounts Lanyard reckoned in time to interfere.

Hurriedly consulting the taximeter, he stepped between the two, fished a bill from his pocket, and thrust it into the palm of the chauffeur before this last comprehended what was happening.

“None of that!” he enjoined, raising a peremptory voice to drown the snarl with which the man was tuning up to repay abuse and derision with the drippings of his own vocabulary. “You’ve got your fare, so clear out before this officer whom I see approaching hands you a summons for careless driving. D’you hear?–not another word!”

And as the chauffeur, cowed by this appearance of authority, shut a gaping mouth and stumbled to his seat, Lanyard turned to the woman and caught her arm in a firm grasp. “Come, Liane! compose yourself. I’ll find you another cab.”

The woman responded with a moment of stupefied silence during which her eyes incredulously rounded, then with a squeal of rapture–”Lanyarrrrd!”–and an impulsive offer to enfold him to that generous bosom, which only clever footwork foiled.

“Michael!” she cried in French–”my Michael! Of all men living the one whom I most have longed to find!”

“Observe that the lost is now found,” he advised in the same language, smiling. “But be so amiable as not to keep me waiting here in the rain. Pull yourself together, Liane–your wrap as well, if you don’t want to catch cold in your chest–in most of it, at least.” In a more urgent voice he added: “Can you not understand your danger? Cover yourself, Liane–you are mad to expose such treasure on a public street at night!”

“What flattery!” the woman demurely responded. Nevertheless she did as he bade, clipping her cloak at the throat with one hand while the other slipped beneath his arm. “I am so overjoyed to find you again, my dear friend, I do not believe any evil could affect me. But come...”

She tugged him out of the grinning ring that had begun to form, and away from the kerb, where the grumbling chauffeur was settling into place behind his wheel, and where Lanyard had been preparing to beckon in the first vacant cab.

“But you want another taxi–”

“Not I, monsieur. It is but a step, where I am going. As for this rain, it is nothing”–she held out a hand–”already it has ceased. And surely I can count upon your gallantry...”

He consented with entire good-nature–”As ever, irresistible, Liane!”–and found himself with the woman on his arm rounding the corner and moving toward Sixth avenue. “New York, by what appears, has the honour of entertaining you once again...”

“Again? But still, if you please.”

“Proving the weakness of deductive reasoning,” he observed. “When one saw you in a hired cab, one inferred you were merely a bird of passage.”

“But I have never been away, monsieur, never since that luckless voyage landed us here last Spring. I find it amusing, this great town; as Paris is no more, alas! thanks to the War and the poor health of the franc.... As for that infamous taxicab, I ask you: what is one to do when one’s own car is, as these quaint Americans put it, laid out?”

“Laid up.”

“Laid out or laid up–it is all the same.”

“I believe you,” Lanyard chuckled–”at my age, Liane.”

He was aware, but seemed not to be, of sidelong scrutiny, keenly inquisitive.

“Is it that you begin to find yourself bored with this America, Michael?”

“Ah!” he parried–”I must not complain.”

“The old life calls, eh?” (So she construed that equivoque as confirming her surmise; which argued an anxiety to do so. But why?) “You miss something, my friend, in this land where more things are verboten than in Germany before the War?”

“I miss my youth,” Lanyard admitted with a rueful laugh–”those misspent years!”

“You would have them back?” she inquisitively demanded. “What for? To misspend them all over again?” He smiled illegibly; she laughed in impish glee. “I felt sure of it, when I thought of you today, Michael, I said to myself: By this time he will be well weary of this country of atrocious cookery, ice-water, and virtue with the indigestion.”

“You, then, knew I was still here?”

“One was so informed.”

“One has, it seems, friends of whose kind interest one was unaware.”

“It was a little bird that told me.”

“An idle little bird, if it finds no better gossip to twitter than the tale of my dull days.”

“It is truly as I said!” She squeezed his arm. “You are bored. So, then! a little patience and you will call it, as I do, a happy chance that threw me in your way tonight.”

“Impossible that one should esteem it otherwise.”

Lanyard smiled down at the woman, openly taking advantage of the illumination of a street lamp to study her.

In her day reputed the most beautiful demi-mondaine in Paris and the most dangerous, the old allure of her charms, by this tricky light at least, seemed unimpaired; while that she was still dangerous one had memories of events by no means stale to prove. And now what diablerie was she fostering behind that mask of fair, seductive flesh? what mischief had she in mind that required his co-operation?

An innate flair for anything in the nature of an intrigue stirred in its sleep, lifted its head, sniffed the wind with eager nostrils...

They came to Sixth avenue, where the hand under his arm gently led him south again, in the shadow of the Elevated.

“A long ‘step’ to this rendezvous of yours, Liane.”

“Patience: we are nearly there. Or is it that your soul has grown so deeply ennuied even I–?”

“To the contrary, as you see, I am coming along quite peaceably. I have but one regret.”

“And that?”

“It desolates me to know we must part so soon.”

“This way, impostor.” Guiding him across the Avenue, the woman held on toward Broadway. “What hour is it, do you know?”

“A quarter to one,” Lanyard reported on the advice of his watch.

“Then I am fifteen minutes beforehand–”

“That is to say, practically unsexed.”

“Furthermore, my friends are never on time. Why not keep me company while I wait, and enjoy a little raking over of old scandals?”

“It would be a pleasure, Liane; but are you sure–?”

“We are arrived.”

The woman was diverging toward a dwelling which wore an aspect of too much decorum; a modest establishment with just two windows on the street level diffusing a benign, domestic glow through heavy draperies behind stout bars of iron, and a tight-lipped look about the solid door at the back of its mildly lighted vestibule.

Coupling the atmosphere of its environment, which was both tawdry and rowdy, with certain rumours that had come to his attention, the reticent expression of the house with the rank of private cars that lined the kerb before it, Lanyard hazarded with an accent of distaste: “The Clique Club, eh?”

“You are acquainted?”

“With its reputation only. One hears that the percentage of mortality resulting from indulgence in its bootliquor is unusually low.”

“Do you suspect me of luring you here to poison you, Michael?”

“Not while you remain incontestibly the mistress of weapons so much more deadly than moonshine. Moreover, it is written in my horoscope, curiosity will be the death of me.”

Liane giggled, planting a finger on a push-button which, Lanyard remarked, she located without looking. By way of response a horizontal slit opened in the upper half of the door, and through this a pair of anonymous eyes appraised them, Lanyard without favour, but otherwise in respect of the woman. Then with an impressive clanking and thumping of chains and bolts the door swung wide, disclosing an entry, the habitat of a good actor in the make-up of a movie gangster, functioning as Cerberus to this institution of post-Prohibition New York. And passing through a second and less formidable door, Lanyard and the woman entered a reception-hall of voluptuous embellishment and devilishly subtle illumination.

Here, in a chair before an ardent grate, a youthful odalisque was lounging with crossed knees, a waspy young blood of the town was holding a pose of elegance, with elbow on the mantel, and both were engaging in conversation an overmannered person distinguished by ornate evening dress and the beak and bald head of a bird of prey; a scene that might readily have passed for one in a private home but for wild squalls of jazz drifting down the broad staircase and the vibration of the floor above with the rhythmical shuffle and stamp of many feet.

At sight of the newcomers the hairless Wonder with a perfect bow excused himself to his gossips, and glided forward, smirking, shaping deferential shoulders, giving his bleached talons a good air-wash.

“Mademoiselle Delorme!” he uttered in accents of intense gratification.

“Good evening, Theodore,” Liane gave him in French, with friendly nonchalance. “Monsieur Morphew is here so soon, no?”

“Not yet, mademoiselle. But before long, beyond doubt...”

“The usual room? We will go up and wait... But I believe you do not know Monsieur Lanyard, Theodore.”

“The Clique Club is so unfortunate,” Theodore deplored, saluting Lanyard profoundly, “as not to number monsieur among its members.”

“And very stupid of it, if you ask me,” Liane retorted. “See that he gets a card, will you.”

“You are much too gracious, Liane; I shall have so little use for a guest-card–”

“What are you talking about, Michael? Guest-card! I should say not. I am proposing you for membership. It costs nothing when one is properly introduced. Eh, Theodore?”

“As mademoiselle says... If Monsieur Lanyard will be so kind as to let me have his address...”

With a shrug, Lanyard gave in. After all, it didn’t matter.... And when he had duly been entered in the club register, Theodore escorted the newly fledged member to the foot of the stairs, upon which Liane Delorme was picturesquely waiting, and there turned both over to the guidance of a highly polished sub-altern.

Wide doorways on the first landing disclosed a chain of rooms dedicated to the rites of jazz, liquid, instrumental, terpsichorean. Calculated to remind a crusading clergyman of Belshazzar’s Feast, they reminded Lanyard of almost any Broadway restaurant at midnight.

On the second landing, however, a break in the dance music below made audible the heartless laughter of an ivory ball coquetting with a roulette wheel behind one closed door, while a waiter emerging from another room permitted a glimpse of a private supper party at the peak of its lead, an interior tolerably Hogarthian.

Lanyard exchanged amused glances with Liane. “Busy little club,” he commented, “but wants rechristening–Clique’s far too conservative–should be known as the Liberal.”

At the rear end of the hall another door admitted to a prettily furnished supper room, where a table was being laid and, in coolers on a side-table, several bottles of champagne were enjoying their last rest. Requesting the waiter in attendance to open one of these, Liane shrugged out of her wrap–which Lanyard took, though he kept his overcoat on by way of pointing an intention to stop for a few minutes only–and having made herself at ease upon the club fender of an open fire, clinked her glass to Lanyard’s.

“To you, my too-long lost friend, and to me–to a friendship that has known too many interruptions and must henceforth know fewer.”

He toasted with cool ambiguity: “To a rapport more complete.”

With professional ease the waiter faded from their knowledge; and the woman dimpled bewitchingly, patting the broad seat of the fender.

“Come, sit by my side, Michael: let us talk.”

“With all the pleasure in life,” he assented, placing himself at a discreeter distance than she had designated–”on one condition, my dear Liane: none of your artfulness.”

“Michael!” she reproached, delighted–”you don’t trust me?”

“Really, you read one’s mind.”

“Don’t be alarmed, my old one.” She made a face to match her tone of mocking reassurance. “I was mad about you once, I don’t deny; but that was long ago. Besides, you little know me if you think it likely I would lay myself open to be scorned another time.”

“I little know you,” Lanyard conceded, “whatever I may think; and I’ve got the quaintest notion, Liane, that the less I learn about you the more likely I am to enjoy ordinary peace of mind. Be a good child, now; treat me as you would a father, not as you might a prospective papa. Tell me: what the deuce is your little game?”

“‘Game’?” she repeated, petulant. “Michael, my dear! your manners aren’t as good as they were when your morals were worse.”

“Admit that you didn’t ask me up here to amuse yourself with innocent flirtation.”

“That is true.”

“Admit, then, I am pardonably curious.”

“Well! if you will have the truth... When I got over being foolish about you, Michael... How long ago it seems!”

“A good half-year.”

“I found I was still fond of you. When all’s said about that sad affair, you know, it was I who was rather a devil, and you who were rather a dear. I owe you for more than one good turn I never did anything to deserve.”

“I wish I might think your associates in that adventure had come out of it as well disposed.”

“That absurd Monk, that clown Phinuit! Why bother your head about such canaille?”

“And what has become of the precious pair?”

Plump but pretty shoulders described a gesture of indifference. “I know nothing of them since that day when last you saw us all together. I was out of patience with them then–as I think you guessed. When you dismissed us, I sent them packing. And you?” Lanyard, smiling, shook his head, and the woman cheerfully consigned reminiscences to the grave of those dead yesterdays where they belonged. “Tell me now about yourself.”

“What is there to tell?”

“Much, monsieur. You are a mystery.”

“I am flattered...”

“That’s all blague,” the woman scoffed. “You know I’m interested in all you do. I’ve just told you so, and why.” She endured his quizzical scrutiny with a frank and friendly countenance, more entertained than irritated by his mistrust. “Surely, my dear! you’ve not been misbehaving so badly you need hesitate to confide in me.”

“But a little while ago you were telling me my life was dull.”

“You don’t find it so?”

“You might the tale of it. Tastes differ.”

“One is to infer your conduct has been good?”

“Irreproachable–by certain standards.”

“Mine?” Liane twinkled–”or yours?”

“Yours certainly, since I hesitate to bore you.”

“But you are provoking! And not at all polite.” Lanyard looked apologetic and said nothing. “Very well, then! if you won’t answer when I ask you prettily, I presume I shall have to tell you all I know about yourself.”

Lanyard pricked up his ears. “The little bird again?”

She solemnly nodded. “It is industrious; every day it brings me news of this and that.”

“And it tells you what of this?”

“Enough to make you what I styled you a moment ago: a mystery.”

“Is it permitted to ask, how a mystery?”

“Assuredly. To begin with: It is now six months since you settled down, apparently to vegetate in this dry climate.”

“You distrust appearance?”

“Always when so far out of character. It is not like Michael Lanyard to become static all at once. But here you live quietly, in the cheapest decent lodgings, you have no callers, you write few letters, you see no friends–but one–and spend no money on yourself; only when you are seen in public with Madame de Montalais you seem indifferent to expense. You see–?”

“I see one thing plainly: that it were well to put salt on the tail of that little bird and wring its damned neck.”

“But you do not see that this is, in one of your history, questionable conduct? It is too much like reversion to your old days, when you lived solitary and worked alone, making the name of the Lone Wolf famous in Europe by following out your theory that a thief to be successful should have no friends to betray him.”

“But today!” Lanyard remonstrated–”the source of this astonishingly detailed and accurate information about my modest habits can hardly have failed to assure itself that they are all well within the law.”

“On the surface. As were those of Michael Lanyard, the world-known Parisian connoisseur of art before the War. But the cunning that made it possible for the Lone Wolf to maintain that disguise, unsuspected by the keenest criminal investigators of the Continent, has not necessarily failed with years. To the contrary: what you did once you should be able to do again, with even greater success, since you are now older, less hot-headed, more astute. Let me tell you, my dear friend!” the woman concluded with an unmistakable note of earnestness: “they have great respect for your abilities, those who are interested in you today.”

“It seems, then,” said Lanyard after a reflective pause, “I have to thank you for a warning.”

“I would be an ungrateful wretch did I fail to give it, who owe you my life twice over at least.”

“I think we may call that debt cancelled if you’ll answer one question.”

“No questions!” A jewelled hand flashed a sign of refusal. “I have said more than was wise as it is.”

He persisted: “You won’t tell me–?”

“Ask me nothing, my friend,” Liane Delorme begged. “But use your wits; they will tell you more than I dare, perhaps–fond as I am of you, Michael–they are more to be trusted. Remember, with women like me self-interest is ever at work. Perhaps it may be that the pleasure of seeing you tonight has made me for once self-forgetful, another time may find me less indiscreet.”

“I will be careful,” Lanyard said gravely, “not to expect too much...”

With equal gravity she responded: “Then you will be wise.”

“And now,” he concluded, rising, “your friends can’t be much longer; I mustn’t put them to the trouble of kicking me out.”

Liane put out a hand and caught his. “But I wish you to stay. I promise you will be welcome. My friends will be delighted. One of them in especial I am anxious you should know. You will find him well worth your while, one of the most interesting men in New York, quite a social power in his way.”

“In his way–?”

“A quiet way, my friend, but a very real one.”

There was more meaning in her eyes than in her words. Lanyard hung in doubt. Impossible to misread the sincerity of her desire to have him stay on. But her motive?

He had delayed too long. Voices sounded in the hallway, the gay accents of a woman predominating. Then the door opened; five people entered.

III

The first was a pretty young thing, piquantly fair and petite, with glowing face and merry eyes, at sight of whom Lanyard felt warranted in breathing an invocation to his prophetic soul. For now, it seemed, chance or predestination was making good that presentiment to which he had confessed during supper at the Ritz.

This brilliant little shape of life in the dark rectangle of the doorway had been conspicuously one of that party whose forbidding host had excited the aversion of Eve de Montalais and, in himself, half-formed forebodings. The man at whom she was so gayly gurgling over her shoulder, who wore both topper and grin at the doggish slant which becomes the author of an amusingly improper wheeze, was the little chap of the weazened wise mask whom Lanyard privately reckoned court jester to the Sultan of Loot. The latter in very person bulked in the shadowy background provided by the corridor, a presence vast but vague, betrayed by the baleful burning of fire opals as a thunderhead on a summer’s night may remain more sensed than seen till a glimmer of lightning lends definition to its loom. Behind lurked a fourth, a figure still more indefinite. And in the rear a gleam picked out the hairless poll of Theodore, inclined at a servile angle.

Discovering Liane Delorme all at once, the lady on the threshold registered rapture, then ran to her with glad hands extended, her slight little body bearing an extravagant wrap of Russian sables with a grace as dainty as a fay’s. Lips that didn’t need paint to point their pretty contours bubbling joyously–”Darling Liane! You luscious thing! How we’ve missed you!”–she precipitated herself into Liane’s arms and printed inconsiderate kisses upon that studiously composed complexion. When she permitted Liane to disengage and present Lanyard, he received an almost disconcertingly cordial smile and a tiny hand on which blazed in insolent beauty what he rated at first glance the most exquisite emeralds he had ever seen, who in his day had been somewhat an amateur of emeralds.

“Mr. Lanyard!”–Liane’s introduction had been effected in English–”I am so glad to know you. It seems to me Liane knows all the interesting people–and nobody else.”

“One trusts very truly you will not find need tonight to revise that recommendation,” Lanyard returned, bowing low over the little hand. He added with an enquiring inflexion, because he wasn’t sure of having caught the name aright: “Mrs. McFee...”

“Mrs. Folliott McFee,” Liane supplied with an accent on the Folliott that supplemented something to this sense: ‘Surely you must know that magic name!’

All the same, Lanyard didn’t.