The Lone Wolf by Louis Joseph Vance (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

ignored the girl deliberately. But he

didn’t dare: close at hand stood a sergent de ville, inquisitive eyes

bright beneath the dripping visor of his kepi, keenly welcoming this

diversion of a cheerless hour.

 

With at least outward semblance of resignation, Lanyard approached the

window.

 

“I have been guilty of some stupidity, perhaps?” he enquired with

lip-civility that had no echo in his heart. “But I am sorry—”

 

“The stupidity is mine,” the girl interrupted in accents tense with

agitation. “Mr. Lanyard, I—I—”

 

Her voice faltered and broke off in a short, dry sob, and she drew

back with an effect of instinctive distaste for public emotion.

Lanyard smothered an impulse to demand roughly “Well, what now?” and

came closer to the window.

 

“Something more I can do, Miss Bannon?”

 

“I don’t know…. I’ve just found it out—I came away so hurriedly I

never thought to make sure; but I’ve no money—not a franc!”

 

After a little pause he commented helpfully: “That does complicate

matters, doesn’t it?”

 

“What am I to do? I can’t go back—I won’t! Anything rather. You may

judge how desperate I am, when I prefer to throw myself on your

generosity—and already I’ve strained your patience—”

 

“Not much,” he interrupted in a soothing voice. “But—half a moment—we

must talk this over.”

 

Directing the cocher to drive to the place Pigalle, he reentered the

cab, suspicion more than ever rife in his mind. But as far as he could

see—with that confounded sergo staring!—there was nothing else for

it. He couldn’t stand there in the rain forever, gossiping with a girl

half-hysterical—or pretending to be.

 

“You see,” she explained when the fiacre was again under way, “I

thought I had a hundred-franc note in my pocketbook; and so I

have—but the pocketbook’s back there, in my room at Troyon’s.”

 

“A hundred francs wouldn’t see you far toward New York,” he observed

thoughtfully.

 

“Oh, I hope you don’t think—!”

 

She drew back into her corner with a little shudder of humiliation.

 

As if he hadn’t noticed, Lanyard turned to the window, leaned out,

and redirected the driver sharply: “Impasse Stanislas!”

 

Immediately the vehicle swerved, rounded a corner, and made back

toward the Seine with a celerity which suggested that the stables

were on the Rive Gauche.

 

“Where?” the girl demanded as Lanyard sat back. “Where are you taking

me?”

 

“I’m sorry,” Lanyard said with every appearance of sudden contrition;

“I acted impulsively—on the assumption of your complete confidence.

Which, of course, was unpardonable. But, believe me; you have only

to say no and it shall be as you wish.”

 

“But,” she persisted impatiently—“you haven’t answered me: what is

this impasse Stanislas?”

 

“The address of an artist I know—Solon, the painter. We’re going to

take possession of his studio in his absence. Don’t worry; he won’t

mind. He is under heavy obligation to me—I’ve sold several canvasses

for him; and when he’s away, as now, in the States, he leaves me the

keys. It’s a sober-minded, steady-paced neighbourhood, where we can

rest without misgivings and take our time to think things out.”

 

“But—” the girl began in an odd tone.

 

“But permit me,” he interposed hastily, “to urge the facts of the case

upon your consideration.”

 

“Well?” she said in the same tone, as he paused.

 

“To begin with—I don’t doubt you’ve good reason for running away from

your father.”

 

“A very real, a very grave reason,” she affirmed quietly.

 

“And you’d rather not go back—”

 

“That is out of the question!”—with a restrained passion that almost

won his credulity.

 

“But you’ve no friends in Paris—?”

 

“Not one!”

 

“And no money. So it seems, if you’re to elude your father, you must

find some place to hide pro tem. As for myself, I’ve not slept in

forty-eight hours and must rest before I’ll be able to think clearly

and plan ahead….And we won’t accomplish much riding round forever in

this ark. So I offer the only solution I’m capable of advancing, under

the circumstances.”

 

“You are quite right,” the girl agreed after a moment. “Please don’t

think me unappreciative. Indeed, it makes me very unhappy to think I

know no way to make amends for your trouble.”

 

“There may be a way,” Lanyard informed her quietly; “but we’ll not

discuss that until we’ve rested up a bit.”

 

“I shall be only too glad—” she began, but fell silent and, in a

silence that seemed almost apprehensive, eyed him speculatively

throughout the remainder of the journey.

 

It wasn’t a long one; in the course of the next ten minutes they drew

up at the end of a shallow pocket of a street, a scant half-block in

depth; where alighting, Lanyard helped the girl out, paid and dismissed

the cocher, and turned to an iron gate in a high stone wall crowned

with spikes.

 

The grille-work of that gate afforded glimpses of a small, dark garden

and a little house of two storeys. Blank walls of old tenements

shouldered both house and garden on either side.

 

Unlocking the gate, Lanyard refastened it very carefully, repeated the

business at the front door of the house, and when they were securely

locked and bolted within a dark reception-hall, turned on the electric

light.

 

But he granted the girl little more than time for a fugitive survey of

this anteroom to an establishment of unique artistic character.

 

“These are living-rooms, downstairs here,” he explained hurriedly.

“Solon’s unmarried, and lives quite alone—his studio-devil and

femme-de-m�nage come in by the day only—and so he avoids that pest a

concierge. With your permission, I’ll assign you to the studio—up

here.”

 

And leading the way up a narrow flight of steps, he made a light in the

huge room that was the upper storey.

 

“I believe you’ll be comfortable,” he said—“that divan yonder is as

easy a couch as one could wish—and there’s this door you can lock at

the head of the staircase; while I, of course, will be on guard

below…. And now, Miss Bannon… unless there’s something more I can

do—?”

 

The girl answered with a wan smile and a little broken sigh. Almost

involuntarily, in the heaviness of her fatigue, she had surrendered to

the hospitable arms of a huge lounge-chair.

 

Her weary glance ranged the luxuriously appointed studio and returned

to Lanyard’s face; and while he waited he fancied something moving in

those wistful eyes, so deeply shadowed with distress, perplexity, and

fatigue.

 

“I’m very tired indeed,” she confessed—“more than I guessed. But I’m

sure I shall be comfortable…. And I count myself very fortunate, Mr.

Lanyard. You’ve been more kind than I deserved. Without you, I don’t

like to think what might have become of me….”

 

“Please don’t!” he pleaded and, suddenly discountenanced by

consciousness of his duplicity, turned to the stairs. “Good night,

Miss Bannon,” he mumbled; and was half-way down before he heard his

valediction faintly echoed.

 

As he gained the lower floor, the door was closed at the top of the

stairs and its bolt shot home with a soft thud.

 

But turning to lock the lower door, he stayed his hand in transient

indecision.

 

“Damn it!” he growled uneasily—“there can’t be any harm in that girl!

Impossible for eyes like hers to lie!… And yet … And yet!… Oh,

what’s the matter with me? Am I losing my grip? Why stick at ordinary

precaution against treachery on the part of a woman who’s nothing to me

and of whom I know nothing that isn’t conspicuously questionable?…

All because of a pretty face and an appealing manner!”

 

And so he secured that door, if very quietly; and having pocketed the

key and made the round of doors and windows, examining their locks, he

stumbled heavily into the bedroom of his friend the artist.

 

Darkness overwhelmed him then: he was stricken down by sleep as an ox

falls under the pole.

XII AWAKENING

It was late afternoon when Lanyard wakened from sleep so deep and

dreamless that nothing could have induced it less potent than sheer

systemic exhaustion, at once nervous, muscular and mental.

 

A profound and stifling lethargy benumbed his senses. There was stupor

in his brain, and all his limbs ached dully. He opened dazed eyes upon

blank darkness. In his ears a vast silence pulsed.

 

And in that strange moment of awakening he was conscious of no

individuality: it was, for the time, as if he had passed in slumber

from one existence to another, sloughing en passant all his threefold

personality as Marcel Troyon, Michael Lanyard, and the Lone Wolf. Had

any one of these names been uttered in his hearing just then it would

have meant nothing to him—or little more than nothing: he was for the

time being merely himself, a shell of sensations enclosing dull

embers of vitality.

 

For several minutes he lay without moving, curiously intrigued by this

riddle of identity: it was but slowly that his mind, like a blind hand

groping round a dark chamber, picked up the filaments of memory.

 

One by one the connections were renewed, the circuits closed….

 

But, singularly enough in his understanding, his first thought was of

the girl upstairs in the studio, unconsciously his prisoner and

hostage—rather than of himself, who lay there, heavy with loss of

sleep, languidly trying to realize himself.

 

For he was no more as he had been. Wherein the difference lay he

couldn’t say, but that a difference existed he was persuaded—that he

had changed, that some strange reaction in the chemistry of his nature

had taken place during slumber. It was as if sleep had not only

repaired the ravages of fatigue upon the tissues of his brain and body,

but had mended the tissues of his soul as well. His thoughts were

fluent in fresh channels, his interests no longer the interests of the

Michael Lanyard he had known, no longer self-centred, the interests of

the absolute ego. He was concerned less for himself, even now when he

should be most gravely so, than for another, for the girl Lucia Bannon,

who was nothing to him, whom he had yet to know for twenty-four hours,

but of whom he could not cease to think if he would.

 

It was her plight that perturbed him, from which he sought an

outlet—never his own.

 

Yet his own was desperate enough….

 

Baffled and uneasy, he at length bethought him of his watch. But its

testimony seemed incredible: surely the hour could not be five in the

afternoon!—surely he could not have slept so close upon a full round

of the clock!

 

And if it were so, what of the girl? Had she, too, so sorely needed

sleep that the brief November day had dawned and waned without her

knowledge?

 

That question was one to rouse him: in an instant he was up and groping

his way through the gloom that enshrouded bedchamber and dining-room

to the staircase door in the hall. He found this fast enough, its key

still safe in his pocket, and unlocking it quietly, shot the beam of

his flash-lamp up that dark well to the door at the top; which was

tight shut.

 

For several moments he attended to a taciturn silence broken by never a

sound to indicate that he wasn’t a lonely tenant of the little

dwelling, then irresolutely lifted a foot to the first step—and

withdrew it. If she continued to sleep, why disturb her? He had much to

do in the way of thinking things out; and that was a process more

easily performed in solitude.

 

Leaving the door ajar, then, he turned to one of the front