Читать книгу The Lone Wolf Returns - Louis Joseph Vance - Страница 6

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"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."