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

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others—they’re as keen-witted as I—certainly. Oh, you should

not have stopped on in Paris!”

 

“I couldn’t go without knowing what had become of you.”

 

“I was afraid of that,” she confessed.

 

“Then why—?”

 

“Oh, I know what you’re going to say! Why did I run away from you?”

And then, since he said nothing, she continued unhappily: “I can’t

tell you… I mean, I don’t know how to tell you!”

 

She kept her face averted, sat gazing blankly out of the window; but

when he sat on, mute and unresponsive—in point of fact not knowing

what to say—she turned to look at him, and the glare of a passing lamp

showed her countenance profoundly distressed, mouth tense, brows

knotted, eyes clouded with perplexity and appeal.

 

And of a sudden, seeing her so tormented and so piteous, his

indignation ebbed, and with it all his doubts of her were dissipated;

dimly he divined that something behind this dark fabric of mystery and

inconsistency, no matter how inexplicable to him, excused all her

apparent faithlessness and instability of character and purpose. He

could not look upon this girl and hear her voice and believe that she

was not at heart as sound and sweet, tender and loyal, as any that ever

breathed.

 

A wave of tenderness and compassion brimmed his heart; he realized that

he didn’t matter, that his amour propre was of no account—that nothing

mattered so long as she were spared one little pang of self-reproach.

 

He said, gently: “I wouldn’t have you distress yourself on my account,

Miss Shannon… I quite understand there must be things I can’t

understand—that you must have had your reasons for acting as you did.”

 

“Yes,” she said unevenly, but again with eyes averted—“I had; but

they’re not easy, they’re impossible to explain—to you.”

 

“Yet—when all’s said and done—I’ve no right to exact any explanation.”

 

“Ah, but how can you say that, remembering what we’ve been through

together?”

 

“You owe me nothing,” he insisted; “whereas I owe you everything, even

unquestioning faith. Even though I fail, I have this to thank you

for—this one not-ignoble impulse my life has known.”

 

“You mustn’t say that, you mustn’t think it. I don’t deserve it. You

wouldn’t say it—if you knew—”

 

“Perhaps I can guess enough to satisfy myself.”

 

She gave him a swift, sidelong look of challenge, instinctively on the

defensive.

 

“Why,” she almost gasped—“what do you think—?”

 

“Does it matter what I think?”

 

“It does, to me: I wish to know!”

 

“Well,” he conceded reluctantly, “I think that, when you had a chance

to consider things calmly, waiting back there in the garden, you made

up your mind it would be better to—to use your best judgment

and—extricate yourself from an embarrassing position—”

 

“You think that!” she interrupted bitterly. “You think that, after you

had confided in me; after you’d confessed—when I made you, led you on

to it—that you cared for me; after you’d told me how much my faith

meant to you—you think that, after all that, I deliberately abandoned

you because I suddenly realized you had been the Lone Wolf—!”

 

“I’m sorry if I hurt you. But what can I think?”

 

“But you are wrong!” she protested vehemently—“quite, quite wrong! I

ran away from myself—not from you—and with another motive, too, that

I can’t explain.”

 

“You ran away from yourself—not from me?” he repeated, puzzled.

 

“Don’t you understand? Why make it so hard for me? Why make me say

outright what pains me so?”

 

“Oh, I beg of you—”

 

“But if you won’t understand otherwise—I must tell you, I suppose.”

She checked, breathless, flushed, trembling. “You recall our talk after

dinner, that night—how I asked what if you found out you’d been

mistaken in me, that I had deceived you; and how I told you it would be

impossible for me ever to marry you?”

 

“I remember.”

 

“It was because of that,” she said—“I ran away; because I hadn’t been

talking idly; because you were mistaken in me, because I was

deceiving you, because I could never marry you, and because—suddenly—

I came to know that, if I didn’t go then and there, I might never find

the strength to leave you, and only suffering and unhappiness could

come of it all. I had to go, as much for your sake as for my own.”

 

“You mean me to understand, you found you were beginning to—to care a

little for me?”

 

She made an effort to speak, but in the end answered only with a dumb

inclination of her head.

 

“And ran away because love wasn’t possible between us?”

 

Again she nodded silently.

 

“Because I had been a criminal, I presume!”

 

“You’ve no right to say that—”

 

“What else can I think? You tell me you were afraid I might persuade

you to become my wife—something which, for some inexplicable reason,

you claim is impossible. What other explanation can I infer? What

other explanation is needed? It’s ample, it covers everything, and

I’ve no warrant to complain—God knows!”

 

She tried to protest, but he cut her short.

 

“There’s one thing I don’t understand at all! If that is so, if your

repugnance for criminal associations made you run away from me—why

did you go back to Bannon?”

 

She started and gave him a furtive, frightened glance.

 

“You knew that?”

 

“I saw you—last night—followed you from Viel’s to your hotel.”

 

“And you thought,” she flashed in a vibrant voice—“you thought I was

in his company of my own choice!”

 

“You didn’t seem altogether downcast,” he countered, “Do you wish me to

understand you were with him against your will?”

 

“No,” she said slowly…. “No: I returned to him voluntarily, knowing

perfectly what I was about.”

 

“Through fear of him—?”

 

“No. I can’t claim that.”

 

“Rather than me—?”

 

“You’ll never understand,” she told him a little wearily—“never. It

was a matter of duty. I had to go back—I had to!”

 

Her voice trailed off into a broken little sob. But as, moved beyond

his strength to resist, Lanyard put forth a hand to take the

white-gloved one resting on the cushion beside her, she withdrew it

with a swift gesture of denial.

 

“No!” she cried. “Please! You mustn’t do that… You only make it

harder…”

 

“But you love me!”

 

“I can’t. It’s impossible. I would—but I may not!”

 

“Why?”

 

“I can’t tell you.”

 

“If you love me, you must tell me.”

 

She was silent, the white hands working nervously with her

handkerchief.

 

“Lucy!” he insisted—“you must say what stands between you and my love.

It’s true, I’ve no right to ask, as I had no right to speak to you of

love. But when we’ve said as much as we have said—we can’t stop there.

You will tell me, dear?”

 

She shook her head: “It—it’s impossible.”

 

“But you can’t ask me to be content with that answer!”

 

“Oh!” she cried—”how can I make you understand?… When you said

what you did, that night—it seemed as if a new day were dawning in my

life. You made me believe it was because of me. You put me above

you—where I’d no right to be; but the fact that you thought me worthy

to be there, made me proud and happy: and for a little, in my blindness,

I believed I could be worthy of your love and your respect. I thought

that, if I could be as strong as you during that year you asked in

which to prove your strength, I might listen to you, tell you

everything, and be forgiven…. But I was wrong, how wrong I soon

learned…. So I had to leave you at whatever cost!”

 

She ceased to speak, and for several minutes there was silence. But for

her quick, convulsive breathing, the girl sat like a woman of stone,

staring dry-eyed out of the window. And Lanyard sat as moveless, the

heart in his bosom as heavy and cold as a stone.

 

At length, lifting his head, “You leave me no alternative,” he said in a

voice dull and hollow even in his own hearing: “I can only think one

thing…”

 

“Think what you must,” she said lifelessly: “it doesn’t matter, so long

as you renounce me, put me out of your heart and—leave me.”

 

Without other response, he leaned forward and tapped the glass; and as

the cab swung in toward the curb, he laid hold of the door-latch.

 

“Lucy,” he pleaded, “don’t let me go believing—”

 

She seemed suddenly infused with implacable hostility. “I tell you,”

she said cruelly—“I don’t care what you think, so long as you go!”

 

The face she now showed him was ashen; its mouth was hard; her eyes

shone feverishly.

 

And then, as still he hesitated, the cab pulled up and the driver,

leaning back, unlatched the door and threw it open. With a curt,

resigned nod, Lanyard rose and got out.

 

Immediately the girl bent forward and grasped the speaking-tube; the

door slammed; the cab drew away and left him standing with the pose,

with the gesture of one who has just heard his sentence of death

pronounced.

 

When he roused to know his surroundings, he found himself standing on a

corner of the avenue du Bois.

 

It was bitter cold in the wind sweeping down from the west, and it had

grown very dark. Only in the sky above the Bois a long reef of crimson

light hung motionless, against which leafless trees lifted gnarled,

weird silhouettes.

 

While he watched, the pushing crimson ebbed swiftly and gave way to

mauve, to violet, to black.

XIX UNMASKED

When there was no more light in the sky, a profound sigh escaped

Lanyard’s lips; and with the gesture of one signifying submission to an

omen, he turned and tramped heavily back across-town.

 

More automaton than sentient being, he plodded on along the second

enceinte of flaring, noisy boulevards, now and again narrowly escaping

annihilation beneath the wheels of some coursing motor-cab or ponderous,

grinding omnibus.

 

Barely conscious of such escapes, he was altogether indifferent to them:

it would have required a mortal hurt to match the dumb, sick anguish of

his soul; more than merely a sunset sky had turned black for him within

that hour.

 

The cold was now intense, and he none too warmly clothed; yet there was

sweat upon his brows.

 

Dully there recurred to him a figure he had employed in one of his talks

with Lucy Shannon: that, lacking his faith in her, there would be only

emptiness beneath his feet.

 

And now that faith was wanting in him, had been taken from him for all

his struggles to retain it; and now indeed he danced on emptiness, the

rope of temptation tightening round his neck, the weight of criminal

instincts pulling it taut—strangling every right aspiration in him,

robbing him of the very breath of that new life to which he had thought

to give himself.

 

If she were not worthy, of what worth the fight?…

 

At one stage of his journey, he turned aside and, more through habit

than desire or design, entered a cheap eating-place and consumed his

customary evening meal without the slightest comprehension of what he

ate or whether the food were good or poor.

 

When he had finished, he hurried away like a haunted man. There was

little room in his mood for sustained thought: his wits were fathoming

a bottomless pit of black despair. He felt like a man born blind,

through skilful surgery given the