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Title: The Lone Wolf
A Melodrama
Author: Louis Joseph Vance
Release Date: November, 2005 [EBook #9378]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on September 26, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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THE LONE WOLFBy
LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE1914
CONTENTSI. TROYON’S
II. RETURN
III. A POINT OF INTERROGATION
IV. A STRATAGEM
V. ANTICLIMAX
VI. THE PACK GIVES TONGUE
VII. L’ABBAYE
VIII. THE HIGH HAND
IX. DISASTER
X. TURN ABOUT
XI. FLIGHT
XII. AWAKENING
XIII. CONFESSIONAL
XIV. RIVE DROIT
XV. SHEER IMPUDENCE
XVI. RESTITUTION
XVII. THE FORLORN HOPE
XVIII. ENIGMA
XIX. UNMASKED
XX. WAR
XXI. APOSTATE
XXII. TRAPPED
XXIII. MADAME OMBER
XXIV. RENDEZVOUS
XXV. WINGS OF THE MORNING
XXVI. THE FLYING DEATH
XXVII. DAYBREAK
THE LONE WOLF ITROYON’S
It must have been Bourke who first said that even if you knew your way
about Paris you had to lose it in order to find it to Troyon’s. But
then Bourke was proud to be Irish.
Troyon’s occupied a corner in a jungle of side-streets, well withdrawn
from the bustle of the adjacent boulevards of St. Germain and St.
Michel, and in its day was a restaurant famous with a fame jealously
guarded by a select circle of patrons. Its cooking was the best in
Paris, its cellar second to none, its rates ridiculously reasonable;
yet Baedeker knew it not. And in the wisdom of the cognoscenti this
was well: it had been a pity to loose upon so excellent an
establishment the swarms of tourists that profaned every temple of
gastronomy on the Rive Droit.
The building was of three storeys, painted a dingy drab and trimmed
with dull green shutters. The restaurant occupied almost all of the
street front of the ground floor, a blank, non-committal double doorway
at one extreme of its plate-glass windows was seldom open and even more
seldom noticed.
This doorway was squat and broad and closed the mouth of a wide,
stone-walled passageway. In one of its two substantial wings of oak a
smaller door had been cut for the convenience of Troyon’s guests, who
by this route gained the courtyard, a semi-roofed and shadowy place,
cool on the hottest day. From the court a staircase, with an air of
leading nowhere in particular, climbed lazily to the second storey and
thereby justified its modest pretensions; for the two upper floors of
Troyon’s might have been plotted by a nightmare-ridden architect after
witnessing one of the first of the Palais Royal farces.
Above stairs, a mediaeval maze of corridors long and short, complicated
by many unexpected steps and staircases and turns and enigmatic doors,
ran every-which-way and as a rule landed one in the wrong room, linking
together, in all, some two-score bedchambers. There were no salons or
reception-rooms, there was never a bath-room, there wasn’t even running
water aside from two hallway taps, one to each storey. The honoured
guest and the exacting went to bed by lamplight: others put up with
candlesticks: gas burned only in the corridors and the restaurant—
asthmatic jets that, spluttering blue within globes obese, semi-opaque,
and yellowish, went well with furnishings and decorations of the Second
Empire to which years had lent a mellow and somehow rakish dinginess;
since nothing was ever refurbished.
With such accommodations the guests of Troyon’s were well content. They
were not many, to begin with, and they were almost all middle-aged
bourgeois, a caste that resents innovations. They took Troyon’s as they
found it: the rooms suited them admirably, and the tariff was modest.
Why do anything to disturb the perennial peace of so discreet and
confidential an establishment? One did much as one pleased there,
providing one’s bill was paid with tolerable regularity and the hand
kept supple that operated the cordon in the small hours of the night.
Papa Troyon came from a tribe of inn-keepers and was liberal-minded;
while as for Madame his wife, she cared for nothing but pieces of
gold….
To Troyon’s on a wet winter night in the year 1893 came the child who
as a man was to call himself Michael Lanyard.
He must have been four or five years old at that time: an age at which
consciousness is just beginning to recognize its individuality and
memory registers with capricious irregularity. He arrived at the hotel
in a state of excitement involving an almost abnormal sensitiveness to
impressions; but that was soon drowned deep in dreamless slumbers of
healthy exhaustion; and when he came to look back through a haze of
days, of which each had made its separate and imperative demand upon
his budding emotions, he found his store of memories strangely dulled
and disarticulate.
The earliest definite picture was that of himself, a small but vastly
important figure, nursing a heavy heart in a dark corner of a fiacre.
Beside him sat a man who swore fretfully into his moustache whenever
the whimpering of the boy threatened to develop into honest bawls: a
strange creature, with pockets full of candy and a way with little boys
in public surly and domineering, in private timid and propitiatory. It
was raining monotonously, with that melancholy persistence which is the
genius of Parisian winters; and the paving of the interminable strange
streets was as black glass shot with coloured lights. Some of the
streets roared like famished beasts, others again were silent, if with
a silence no less sinister. The rain made incessant crepitation on the
roof of the fiacre, and the windows wept without respite. Within the
cab a smell of mustiness contended feebly with the sickening reek of a
cigar which the man was forever relighting and which as often turned
cold between his teeth. Outside, unwearying hoofs were beating their
deadly rhythm, cloppetty-clop….
Back of all this lurked something formlessly alluring, something sad
and sweet and momentous, which belonged very personally to the child
but which he could never realize. Memory crept blindly toward it over
a sword-wide bridge that had no end. There had been (or the boy had
dreamed it) a long, weariful journey by railroad, the sequel to one by
boat more brief but wholly loathsome. Beyond this point memory failed
though sick with yearning. And the child gave over his instinctive but
rather inconsecutive efforts to retrace his history: his daily life at
Troyon’s furnished compelling and obliterating interests.
Madame saw to that.
It was Madame who took charge of him when the strange man dragged him
crying from the cab, through a cold, damp place gloomy with shadows,
and up stairs to a warm bright bedroom: a formidable body, this Madame,
with cold eyes and many hairy moles, who made odd noises in her throat
while she undressed the little boy with the man standing by, noises
meant to sound compassionate and maternal but, to the child at least,
hopelessly otherwise.
Then drowsiness stealing upon one over a pillow wet with tears …
oblivion….
And Madame it was who ruled with iron hand the strange
new world to which the boy awakened.
The man was gone by morning, and the child never saw him again; but
inasmuch as those about him understood no English and he no French,
it was some time before he could grasp the false assurances of Madame
that his father had gone on a journey but would presently return. The
child knew positively that the man was not his father, but when he was
able to make this correction the matter had faded into insignificance:
life had become too painful to leave time or inclination for the
adjustment of such minor and incidental questions as one’s parentage.
The little boy soon learned to know himself as Marcel, which wasn’t his
name, and before long was unaware he had ever had another. As he grew
older he passed as Marcel Troyon; but by then he had forgotten how to
speak English.
A few days after his arrival the warm, bright bedchamber was exchanged
for a cold dark closet opening off Madame’s boudoir, a cupboard
furnished with a rickety cot and a broken chair, lacking any provision
for heat or light, and ventilated solely by a transom over the door;
and inasmuch as Madame shared the French horror of draughts and so kept
her boudoir hermetically sealed nine months of the year, the transom
didn’t mend matters much. But that closet formed the boy’s sole refuge,
if a precarious one, through several years; there alone was he ever
safe from kicks and cuffs and scoldings for faults beyond his
comprehension; but he was never permitted a candle, and the darkness
and loneliness made the place one of haunted terror to the sensitive
and imaginative nature of a growing child.
He was, however, never insufficiently fed; and the luxury of forgetting
misery in sleep could not well be denied him.
By day, until of age to go to school, he played apprehensively in the
hallways with makeshift toys, a miserable, dejected little body with
his heart in his mouth at every sudden footfall, very much in the way
of femmes-de-chambre who had nothing in common with the warm-hearted,
impulsive, pitiful serving women of fiction. They complained of him to
Madame, and Madame came promptly to cuff him. He soon learned an almost
uncanny cunning in the art of effacing himself, when she was imminent,
to be as still as death and to move with the silence of a wraith. Not
infrequently his huddled immobility in a shadowy corner escaped her
notice as she passed. But it always exasperated her beyond measure to
look up, when she fancied herself alone, and become aware of the
wide-eyed, terrified stare of the transfixed boy….
That he was privileged to attend school at all was wholly due to a
great fear that obsessed Madame of doing anything to invite the
interest of the authorities. She was an honest woman, according to her
lights, an honest wife, and kept an honest house; but she feared the
gendarmerie more than the Wrath of God. And by ukase
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