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Title: Alias The Lone Wolf

Author: Louis Joseph Vance

Release Date: November 29, 2003 [EBook #10327]

Language: English

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[Illustration: "And who would ever believe anybody else guilty who knew
your guest was Michael Lanyard, alias 'The Lone Wolf'?"]





ALIAS


THE LONE WOLF


BY

LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE


[Illustration: FRUCTUS QUAM FOLIA ]






1921




TO

ROBERT AITKEN SWAN

WHOSE FRIENDSHIP I HAVE TRIED

IN MANY OTHER WAYS, THIS

YARN WITH DIFFIDENCE IS

DEDICATED


NOTE: This is the fourth of the Lone Wolf stories. Its predecessors
were, in chronological sequence, "The Lone Wolf," "The False Faces,"
"Red Masquerade."

Each story, however, is entirely self-contained and independent of the
others.

If it matters....


LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

Westport--9 September, 1921.



CONTENTS


CHAPTER

I WALKING PAPERS

II ONE WALKS

III MEETING BY MOONLIGHT

IV EVE

V PHINUIT & CO

VI VISITATION

VII TURN ABOUT

VIII IN RE AMOR ET AL

IX BLIND MAN'S BUFF

X BUT AS A MUSTARD SEED

XI AU REVOIR

XII TRAVELS WITH AN ASSASSIN

XIII ATHENAIS

XIV DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND

XV ADIEU

XVI THE HOUSE OF LILITH

XVII CHEZ LIANE

XVIII BROTHER AND SISTER

XIX SIX BOTTLES OF CHAMPAGNE

XX THE SYBARITES

XXI SOUNDINGS

XXII OUT OF SOUNDINGS

XXIII THE CIGARETTE

XXIV HISTORIC REPETITION

XXV THE MALCONTENT

XXVI THE BINNACLE

XXVII ÇA VA BIEN!

XXVIII FINALE



ALIAS

THE LONE WOLF




I

WALKING PAPERS


Through the suave, warm radiance of that afternoon of Spring in England
a gentleman of modest and commonly amiable deportment bore a rueful
countenance down Piccadilly and into Halfmoon street, where presently
he introduced it to one whom he found awaiting him in his lodgings,
much at ease in his easiest chair, making free with his whiskey and
tobacco, and reading a slender brown volume selected from his shelves.

This dégagé person was patently an Englishman, though there were traces
of Oriental ancestry in his cast. The other, he of the doleful habit,
was as unmistakably of Gallic pattern, though he dressed and carried
himself in a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon fashion, and even seemed a trace
intrigued when greeted by a name distinctively French.

For the Englishman, rousing from his appropriated ease, dropped his
book to the floor beside the chair, uprose and extended a cordial hand,
exclaiming: "H'are ye, Monsieur Duchemin?"

To this the other responded, after a slight pause, obscurely enough:
"Oh! ancient history, eh? Well, for the matter of that: How are you,
Mister Wertheimer?"

Their hands fell apart, and Monsieur Duchemin proceeded to do away his
hat and stick and chamois gloves; while his friend, straddling in front
of a cold grate and extending his hands to an imaginary blaze, covered
with a mild complaint the curiosity excited by a brief study of that
face of melancholy.

"Pretty way you've got of making your friends wait on your pleasure.
Here I've wasted upwards of two hours of His Majesty's time..."

"How was I to know you'd have the cheek to force your way in here in my
absence and help yourself to my few poor consolations?" Duchemin
retorted, helping himself to them in turn. "But then one never does
know what fresh indignity Fate has in store..."

"After you with that whiskey, by your leave. I say: I'd give something
to know where you ignorant furriners come by this precious pre-War
stuff." But without waiting to be denied this information, Mr.
Wertheimer continued: "Going on the evidence of your looks and temper,
you've been down to Tilbury Docks this afternoon to see Karslake and
Sonia off."

"A few such flashes of intelligence applied professionally, my friend,
should carry you far."

"And the experience has left you feeling a bit down, what?"

"I imagine even you do not esteem parting with those whom one loves an
exhilarating pastime."

"But when it's so obviously for their own good..."

"Oh, I know!" Duchemin agreed without enthusiasm. "If anything should
happen to Karslake now, it would break Sonia's heart, but..."

"And after the part he played in that Vassilyevski show his lease of
life wouldn't be apt to be prolonged by staying on in England."

"I agree; but still--!" sighed Duchemin, throwing himself heavily into
a chair.

"Which," Wertheimer continued, standing, "is why we arranged to give
him that billet with the British Legation in Peking."

"Didn't know you had a hand in that," observed Duchemin, after
favouring the other with a morose stare.

"Oh, you can't trust me! When you get to know me better you'll find I'm
always like that--forever flitting hither and yon, bestowing benefits
and boons on the ungrateful, like any other giddy Providence."

"But one is not ungrateful," Duchemin insisted. "God knows I would
gladly have sped Karslake's emigration with Sonia to Van Dieman's Land
or Patagonia or where you will, if it promised to keep him out of the
way long enough for the Smolny Institute to forget him."

"Since the said Smolny inconsiderately persists in failing to collapse,
as per the daily predictions of the hopeful."

"Just so."

"But aren't you forgetting you yourself have given that Smolny lot the
same and quite as much reason for holding your name anathema?"

"Ah!" Duchemin growled--"as for me, I can take care of myself, thank
you. My trouble is, I want somebody else to take care of. I had a
daughter once, for a few weeks, long enough to make me strangely fond
of the responsibilities of a father; and then Karslake took her away,
leaving me nothing to do with my life but twiddle futile thumbs and
contemplate the approach of middle age." "Middle age? Why flatter
yourself? With a daughter married, too!"

"Sonia's only eighteen..."

"She was born when you were twenty. That makes you nearly forty, and
that's next door to second childhood, Man!" the Englishman declared
solemnly--"you're superannuated."

"I know; and so long as I feel my years, even you can abuse me with
impunity."

But Wertheimer would not hear him. "Odd," he mused, "I never thought of
it before, that you were growing old. And I've been wondering, too,
what it was that has been making you so precious slow and cautious and
cranky of late. You're just doddering--and I thought you were simply
tired out and needed a holiday."

"Perhaps I am and do," said Duchemin patiently. "One feels one has
earned a holiday, if ever anybody did in your blessed S. S."

"Ah! You think so?"

"You'd think so if you'd been mucking round the East End all Winter
with your life in your hands."

"Still--at your age--I'd be thinking about retiring instead of asking
for a rest."

Although Duchemin knew very well that he was merely being ragged in
that way of deadly seriousness which so often amuses the English, he
chose to suggest sourly: "My resignation is at your disposal any time
you wish it."

"Accepted," said Wertheimer airily, "to take effect at once."

To this Duchemin merely grunted, as who should say he didn't consider
this turn of conversation desperately amusing. And Wertheimer resuming
his chair, the two remained for some moments in silence, a silence so
doggedly maintained on both sides that Duchemin was presently aware of
dull gnawings of curiosity. It occurred to him that his caller should
have found plenty to do in his bureau in the War Office....

"And to what," he enquired with the tedious irony of ennui, "is one
indebted for this unexpected honour on the part of the First
Under-Secretary of the British Secret Service? Or whatever your
high-sounding official title is..."

"Oh!" Wertheimer replied lazily--and knocked out his pipe--"I merely
dropped in to say good-bye."

Duchemin discovered symptoms of more animation.

"Hello! Where are you off to?"

"Nowhere--worse luck! I mean I'm here to bid you farewell and Godspeed
and what not on the eve of your departure from the British Isles."

"And where, pray, am I going?"

"That's for you to say."

Monsieur Duchemin meditated briefly. "I see," he announced: "I'm to
have a roving commission."

"Worse than that: none at all."

Duchemin opened his eyes wide.

"'The wind bloweth where it listeth,'" Wertheimer affirmed. "How do I
know whither you'll blow, now you're a free agent again, entirely on
your own? I've got no control over your movements."

"The S. S. has."

"Never no more. Didn't you tender me your resignation a moment ago?
Wasn't it promptly accepted?"

"Look here: What the devil----!"

"Well, if you must know," the Englishman interrupted hastily, "my
instructions were to give you your walking papers if you refused to
resign. So your connection with the S. S. is from this hour severed.
And if you ain't out of England within twenty-four hours, we'll jolly
well deport you. And that's that."

"One perceives one has served England not wisely but too well."

"Shrewd lad!" Wertheimer laughed. "You see, old soul, we admire you no
end, and we're determined to save your life. Word has leaked through
from Petrograd that your name has been triple-starred on the Smolny's
Index Expurgatorius. Karslake's too. An honour legitimately earned by
your pernicious collaboration in the Vassilyevski bust. Karslake's
already taken care of, but you're still in the limelight, and that
makes you a public nuisance. If you linger here much longer the verdict
will undoubtedly be: Violent death at the hands of some person or
persons unknown. So here are passports and a goodish bit of money. If
you run through all of it before this blows over, we'll find a way, of
course, to get more to you. You understand: No price too high that buys
good riddance of you. And there will be a destroyer waiting at
Portsmouth to-night with instructions to put ashore secretly anywhere
you like across the Channel. After that--as far as the British Empire
is concerned--your blood be on your own head."

The other nodded, investigating the envelope which his late chief had
handed him, then from his letter of credit and passports looked up with
a reminiscent smile.

"It isn't the first time you've vouched for me by this style.
Remember?"

"Well, you've earned as fair title to the name of Duchemin as I ever
did to that of Wertheimer."

But the smile was fading from the eyes of the man whom England
preferred to recognize as André Duchemin.

"But where on earth is one to go?" "Don't ask me," the Englishman
protested. "And above all, don't tell me. I don't want to know. Since
I've been on this job, I've learned to believe in telepathy and mind
reading and witchcraft and all manner of unholy rot. And I don't want
you to come to a sudden end through somebody's establishing illicit
intercourse with my subconscious mind."

He took his leave shortly after that; and Monsieur Duchemin settled
down in the chair which his guest had quitted to grapple with his
problem: where under Heaven to go?

After a wasted while, he picked up in abstraction the book which
Wertheimer had been reading--and wondered if, by any chance, he had
left it there on purpose, so strong seemed the hint. It was Stevenson's
'Travels with a Donkey.' Duchemin was familiar enough with the work,
and had no need to dip anew into its pages to know it offered one fair
solution to his quandary.

If--he assured himself--there were any place in Europe where one might
count on being reasonably secure from the solicitous attentions of the
grudge-bearing Bolsheviki, it was the Cévennes, those little-known
hills in the south of France, well inland from the sea.




II

ONE WALKS


A little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley
fifteen miles from Le Puy ... notable for the making of lace, for
drunkenness, for freedom of language, and for unparalleled political
dissension was Mr. Stevenson's point of departure on his Travels with a
Donkey. Monsieur Duchemin made it his as well; and on the fourth
morning of his hegira from England set out from Le Monastier afoot, a
volume of Montaigne in his pocket, a stout stick in his fist--the fat
rucksack strapped to his shoulders enabling this latter-day traveller
to dispense with the society of another donkey.

The weather was fine, his heart high, he was happy to be out of harness
and again his own man. More than once he laughed a little to think of
the vain question of his whereabouts which was being mooted in the
underworld of Europe, where (as well he knew) men and women spat when
they named him. For his route from the Channel coast to Le Monastier
had been sufficiently discreet and devious to persuade him that his
escape had been as cleanly executed as it was timely instigated.

Thus for upwards of a fortnight he fared southward in the footsteps of
Mr. Stevenson; and much good profit had he of the adventure. For it was
his common practice to go to bed with the birds and rise with the sun;
and more often than not he lodged in the inn of the silver moon, with
moss for a couch, leafy boughs for a canopy and the stars for
night-lights--accommodations infinitely more agreeable than those
afforded by the grubby and malodorous auberge of the wayside average.
And between sun and sun he punished his boots famously.

Constant exercise tuned up muscles gone slack and soft with easy
living, upland winds cleansed the man of the reek of cities and made
his appetite a thing appalling. A keen sun darkened his face and hands,
brushed up in his cheeks a warmer glow than they had shown in many a
year, and faded out the heavier lines with which Time had marked his
countenance. Moreover, because this was France, where one may affect a
whisker without losing face, he neglected his razors; and though this
was not his first thought, a fair disguise it proved. For when, toward
the end of the second week, he submitted that wanton luxuriance to be
tamed by a barber of Florac, he hardly knew the trimly bearded mask of
bronze that looked back at him from a mirror.

Not that it mattered to Monsieur Duchemin. From the first he met few of
any sort and none at all whom a lively and exacting distrust reckoned a
likely factor in his affairs. It was a wild, bold land he traversed,
and thinly peopled; at pains to avoid the larger towns, he sought by
choice the loneliest paths that looped its quiet hills; such as passed
the time of day with him were few and for the most part peasants, a
dull, dour lot, taciturn to a degree that pleased him well. So that he
soon forgot to be forever alert for the crack of an ambushed pistol or
the pattering footfalls of an assassin with a knife.

It was at Florac, on the Tarnon, that he parted company with the trail
of Stevenson. Here that one had turned east to Alais, whereas Duchemin
had been lost to the world not nearly long enough, he was minded to
wander on till weary. The weather held, there was sunshine in golden
floods, and by night moonlight like molten silver. Between beetling
ramparts of stone, terraced, crenellated and battlemented in motley
strata of pink and brown and yellow and black, the river Tarn had
gouged out for itself a canyon through which its waters swept and
tumbled, as green as translucent jade in sunlight, profound emerald in
shadow, cream white in churning rapids. The lofty profiles of its
cliffs were fringed with stunted growths of pine and ash, a ragged
stubble, while here and there châteaux, forsaken as a rule, and
crumbling, reared ruined silhouettes against the blue. Eighteen hundred
feet below, it might be more, the Tarn threaded lush bottom-lands,
tilled fields, goodly orchards, plantations of walnut and Spanish
chestnut, and infrequent, tiny villages that clung to precarious
footholds between cliffs and water.

On high again, beyond the cliffs, stretched the Causses, vast, arid and
barren plateaux, flat and featureless save for an occasional low,
rounded mound, a menhir or a dolmen, and (if such may be termed
features) great pits that opened in the earth like cold craters, which
the countryfolk termed avens. A strange, bleak land, inhospitable,
wind-harried, haunted, the home of seven howling devils of desolation...

Rain at length interned the traveller for three days in a little place
called Meyrueis, which lies sweetly in the valley of the Jonte, at its
confluence with the Butézon, long leagues remote from railroads and the
world they stitch together--that world of unrest, uncertainty and
intrigue which in those days seemed no better than a madhouse.

The break in the monotony of daily footfaring proved agreeable. It
suited one well to camp for a space in that quaint town, isolate in the
heart of an enchanted land, with which one was in turn enchanted, and
contemplate soberly the grave issues of Life and Death.

Here (said Duchemin) nothing can disturb me; and it is high time for me
to be considering what I am to make of the remainder of my days. Too
many of them have been wasted, too great a portion of my span has been
sacrificed to vanities. One must not forget one is in a fair way to
become a grandfather; it is plainly an urgent duty to reconcile oneself
to that estate and cultivate its proper gravity and decorum. Yet a
little while and one must bid adieu to that Youth which one has so
heedlessly squandered, a last adieu to Youth with its days of high
adventure, its carefree heart, its susceptibility to the infinite
seductions of Romance.

Quite seriously the adventurer entertained a premonition of his
to-morrow, a vision of himself in skull-cap and seedy clothing (the
trousers well-bagged at the knees) with rather more than a mere hint of
an equator emphasized by grease-spots on his waistcoat, presiding over
the fortunes of one of those dingy little Parisian shops wherein
debatable antiques accumulate dust till they fetch the ducats of the
credulous; and of a Sunday walking out, in a shiny frock-coat with his
ribbon of the Legion in the buttonhole, a ratty topper crowning his
placid brows, a humid grandchild adhering to his hand: a thrifty and
respectable bourgeois, the final avatar of a rolling stone!

Yes: it is amusing, but quite true; though it would need a deal of
contriving, something little short of a revolution to bring it about,
to precisely such a future as that did Duchemin most seriously propose
to dedicate himself.

But always, they say, it is God who disposes....

And for all this mood of premature resignation to the bourgeois virtues
Duchemin was glad enough when his fourth day in Meyrueis dawned fair,
and by eight was up and away, purposing a round day's tramp across the
Causse Noir to Montpellier-le-Vieux (concerning which one heard curious
tales), then on by way of the gorge of the Dourbie to Millau for the
night.

Nor would he heed the dubious head shaken by his host of Meyrueis, who
earnestly advised a guide. The Causses, he declared, were treacherous;
men sometimes lost their way upon those lofty plains and were never
heard of more. Duchemin didn't in the least mind getting lost, that is
to say failing to make his final objective; at worst he could depend
upon a good memory and an unfailing sense of direction to lead him back
the way he had come.

He was to learn there is nothing more unpalatable than the repentance
of the headstrong....

He found it a stiffish climb up out of the valley of the Jonte. By the
time he had managed it, the sun had already robbed all vegetation of
its ephemeral jewellery, the Causse itself showed few signs of a
downpour which had drenched it for seventy-two hours on end. To that
porous limestone formation water in whatever quantity is as beer to a
boche. Only, if one paused to listen on the brink of an aven, there
were odd and disturbing noises to be heard underfoot, liquid
whisperings, grim chuckles, horrible gurgles, that told of subterranean
streams in spate, coursing in darkness to destinations unknown,
unguessable.

His path (there was no trace of road) ran snakily through a dense
miniature forest of dwarfed, gnarled pines, of a peculiarly sombre
green, ever and again in some scant clearing losing itself in a web of
similar paths that converged from all points of the compass; so that
the wayfarer was fain to steer by the sun--and at one time found
himself abruptly on the brink of a ravine that gashed the earth like a
cruel wound. He worked his way to an elevation which showed him plainly
that--unless by a debatable detour of several miles--there was no way
to the farther side but through the depths of the ravine itself.

If that descent was a desperate business, the subsequent climb was
heartbreaking. He needed a long rest before he was able to plod on, now
conceiving the sun in the guise of a personal enemy. The sweat that
streamed from his face was brine upon his lips. For hours it was thus
with Duchemin, and in all that time he met never a soul. Once he saw
from a distance a lonely château overhanging another ravine; but it was
apparently only one more of the many ruins indigenous to that land, and
he took no step toward closer acquaintance.

Long after noon, sheer fool's luck led him to a hamlet whose mean
auberge served him bread and cheese with a wine singularly thin and
acid. Here he enquired for a guide, but the one able-bodied man in
evidence, a hulking, surly animal, on learning that Duchemin wished to
visit Montpellier-le-Vieux, refused with a growl to have anything to do
with him. Several times during the course of luncheon he caught the
fellow eyeing him strangely, he thought, from a window of the auberge.
In the end the peasant girl who waited on him grudgingly consented to
put him on his way.

In a rocky gorge, called the Rajol, a spot as inhumanly grotesque as a
nightmare of Gustave Doré's, with the heat of a pit in Tophet, he
laboured for hours. The hush of evening and its long shadows were on
the land when finally he scrambled out to the Causse again. Then he
lost his path another time, missed entirely the village of Maubert,
where he had thought to find a conveyance, or at least a guide, and in
the silver and purple mystery of a perfect moonlight night found
himself looking down from a hilltop upon Montpellier-le-Vieux.

Rumour had prepared him to know the place when he saw it, nothing for
its stupendous lunacy. Heaven knows what convulsion or measured process
of Nature accomplished this thing. For his part Duchemin was unable to
accept any possible scientific explanation, and will go to his grave
believing that some half-witted cyclops, back beyond the dimmest dawn
of Time, created Montpellier-le-Vieux in an hour of idleness, building
him a play city of titanic monoliths, then wandered away and forgot it
altogether.

He saw what seemed to be a city at least two miles in length, more than
half as wide, a huddle of dwellings of every shape and size, a
labyrinth of narrow, tortuous streets broken here and there by wide and
stately avenues, with public squares and vast cirques (of such
amphitheatres he counted no less than six) and walls commanded by a
citadel.

But never door or window broke the face of any building, no chimney
exhaled a breath of smoke, neither wheel nor foot disturbed these
grass-grown thoroughfares.... Montpellier-the-Old indeed! Duchemin
reflected; but rather Montpellier-the-Dead--dead with the utter
deadness of that which has never lived.

Marvelling, he went down into the city of stone and passed through its
desolate ways, shaping a course for the southern limits, where he
thought to find the road to Millau. Fatigue alone dictated this choice
of the short cut. But for that, he confesses he might have gone the
long way round; he was no more prone to childish terrors than any other
man, but to his mind there was something sinister in the portentous
immobility of the place; in its silence, its want of excuse for being,
a sense of age-old evil like an inarticulate menace.

Out of this mood he failed to laugh himself. Time and again he would
catch himself listening for he knew not what, approaching warily the
corner of the next huge monolith as if thinking to surprise behind it
some ghoulish rite, glancing apprehensively down the corridors he
passed, or overshoulder for some nameless thing that stalked him and
was never there when he looked, but ever lurked impishly just beyond
the tail of his eye.

So that, when abruptly a man moved from behind a rock some thirty or
forty paces ahead, Duchemin stopped short, with jangled nerves and a
barely smothered exclamation. Possibly a shape of spectral terror would
have been less startling; in that weird place and hour humanity seemed
more incongruous than the supernatural. It was at once apparent that
the man had neither knowledge of nor concern with the stranger. For an
instant he stood with his back to the latter, peering intently down the
aisle which Duchemin had been following, a stout body filling out too
well the uniform of a private soldier in the American Expeditionary
Forces--that most ungainly, inutile, unbecoming costume that ever
graced the form of man.

Then he half turned, beckoned hastily to one invisible to the observer,
and furtively moved on. As furtively his signal was answered by a
fellow who wore the nondescript garments of a peasant. And as suddenly
as they had come into sight, the two slipped round a rocky shoulder,
and the street of monoliths was empty.




III

MEETING BY MOONLIGHT


Now granting that a soldier should be free to spend his leave where he
will, unchallenged, it remained true that the last of the A.E.F. had
long since said farewell to the shores of France, while the Tarn
country seemed a far cry from the banks of the Rhine, in those days
still under occupation by forces of the United States Regular Army.
Then, too, it was a fact within the knowledge of Monsieur Duchemin that
the uniform of the Americans had more than frequently been used by
those ancient acquaintances of his, the Apaches of Paris, as a cloak
for their own misdoings. So it didn't need the air of stealth that
marked this business to persuade him there was mischief in the brew.

But indeed he got in motion to investigate without stopping to debate
an excuse for so doing, and several seconds before he heard the woman's
cries.

Of these the first sounded, shrill with alarm, as Duchemin turned the
corner where the prowlers had gone from sight. But a high wall of rock
alone met his vision, and he broke into a run that carried him round
still another corner and then plumped him headlong into the theatre of
villainy.

This was open ground, a breadth of turf bordering on one of the great
cirques--a rudely oval pit at a guess little less than seven hundred
feet in its narrowest diameter and something like four hundred in
depth, a vast black well against whose darkness the blue-white
moonglare etched a strange grouping of figures, seven in all.

On his one hand Duchemin saw a woman in mourning clasping to her bosom
a terrified young girl, the author of the screams; on the other, three
men close-locked in grimmest combat, one defending himself against two
with indifferent success; while in between stood a third woman with her
back to and perilously near the chasm, shrinking from the threat of a
pistol in the hands of the fourth man.

This last was the one nearest Duchemin, who was upon him so suddenly
that it would be difficult to say which was the more surprised when
Duchemin's stick struck down the pistol hand of the other with such
force as must have broken his wrist. The weapon fell, he uttered an
oath as he swung round, clutching the maimed member; and then, seeing
his assailant for the first time, he swooped down to recover the weapon
so swiftly that it was in his left hand and spitting vicious tongues of
orange flame before Duchemin was able to get in a second blow.

But there was the abrupt end of that passage. Smitten cruelly between
the eyes, the fellow grunted thickly and went over backwards like a
bundle of rags, head and shoulders jutting out over the brink of the
precipice so far that, though his body checked perceptibly as it struck
the ground, his own weight carried him on, he shot out into space and
vanished as though some unseen hand had lifted up from these dark
depths and plucked him down to annihilation.

The young girl shrieked again, the woman gave a gasp of horror,
Duchemin himself knew a sickish qualm. But he had no time to spare for
that: it was going ill with the man contending against two. The
adventurer's stick might have been bewitched that night, so magical was
its work; a single blow on the nearest head (but believe it was
selected with care!) and instantaneously that knot of contention was
resolved into its three several parts.

The smitten clapped hands to his hurt, moaning. His brother scoundrel
started back with staring eyes in which rage gave place to dismay as he
grasped the change in the situation and saw the stick swinging for his
head in turn. He ducked neatly; the stick whistled through thin air;
and before Duchemin could recover the other had turned and was running
for dear life.

Duchemin delayed a bare instant; but manifestly his assistance was no
more needed here. In a breath he who had been so recently outmatched
recollected his wits and took the initiative with admirable address.
Duchemin saw him fly furiously at his late opponent, trip and lay him
on his back; then turned and gave chase to the fugitive.

This was the masquerader in the American uniform; and an amazingly
fleet pair of heels he showed, taking into account his heaviness of
body. Already he had a fair lead; and had he maintained for long the
pace he set in the first few hundred yards he must have won away
scot-free. But whether he lacked staying powers or confidence, he made
the mistake of adopting another and less fatiguing means of locomotion.
Duchemin saw him swerve from his first course and steer for a vehicle
standing at some distance--evidently the conveyance which had brought
the sightseers to view the spectacle of Montpellier-le-Vieux by
moonlight.

Waiting in the middle of a broad avenue of misshapen obelisks, a
dilapidated barouche with a low body sagging the lower for debilitated
springs, on either side its pole drooped two sorry specimens of
crowbait. And their pained amazement was so unfeigned that Duchemin
laughed aloud when the fat rogue bounded to the box, snatched up reins
and whip and curled a cruel lash round their bony flanks. From this one
inferred that he was indifferently acquainted with the animals,
certainly not their accustomed driver. And since it took them some
moments to come to their senses and appreciate that all this was not an
evil dream, Duchemin's hands were clutching for the back of the
carriage when the horses broke suddenly into an awkward, lumbering
gallop and whisked it out of reach.

But not for long. Extending himself, Duchemin caught the folded top,
jumped, and began to clamber in.

The man on the box was tugging fretfully at something wedged in the
hip-pocket of his breeches; proof enough that he was not the original
tenant of the uniform, since it fitted too snugly to permit ready
extraction of a pistol in an emergency.

But he got no chance whatever to use the weapon; for the moment
Duchemin found his own feet in the swaying vehicle he leaped on the
shoulders of the other and dragged him backwards from the box.

What followed was not very clear to him, a mélange of impressions. The
mock-American fought like a devil unchained, cursing Duchemin fluently
in the purest and foulest argot of Belleville--which is not in the
French vocabulary of the doughboy. The animals at the pole caught fire
of this madness and ran away in good earnest, that wretched barouche
rolled and pitched like a rudderless shell in a crazy sea, the two men
floundered in its well like fish in a pail.

They fought by no rules, with no science, but bit and kicked and gouged
and wrenched and struck as occasion offered and each to the best of his
ability. Duchemin caught glimpses of a face like a Chinese devil-mask,
hideously distorted with working features and disfigured with smears of
soot through which insane eyeballs rolled and glared in the moonlight.
Then a hand like a vice gripped his windpipe, he was on his back, his
head overhanging the edge of the floor, a thumb was feeling for one of
his eyes. Yet it could not have been much later when he and his
opponent were standing and swaying as one, locked in an embrace of
wrestlers.

Still, Duchemin knew as many tricks of hand-to-hand fighting as the
other, perhaps a few more. And then he was, no doubt, in far better
condition. At all events the fellow was presently at his mercy, in a
hold that gave one the privilege of breaking his back at will. A man of
mistaken scruples, Duchemin failed to do so, but held the other
helpless only long enough to find his hip-pocket and rip out the
pistol--a deadly Luger. Then a thrust and a kick, which he enjoyed
infinitely, sent the brute spinning out to land on his head.

The fall should have broken his neck. At the worst it should have
stunned him. Evidently it didn't. When Duchemin had scrambled up to the
box, captured the reins and brought the nags to a stop--no great feat
that; they were quite sated with the voluptuousness of running away and
well content to heed the hand and voice of authority--and when,
finally, he swung them round and drove back toward the cirque, he saw
no sign of his Apache by the roadside.

So he congratulated himself on the forethought which had possessed him
of the pistol. Otherwise the assassin, since he had retained sufficient
wit and strength to crawl into hiding, could and assuredly would have
potted Monsieur Duchemin with neither difficulty nor compunction.

Not five figures but four only were waiting beside the cirque when,
wheeling the barouche as near the group as the lay of the ground
permitted, he climbed down. A man lay at length in the coarse grass,
his head pillowed in the lap of one woman. Another woman stood aside,
trembling and wringing aged hands. The third knelt beside the supine
man, but rose quickly as Duchemin drew near, and came to meet him.

In this one he recognised her to whose salvation Chance had first led
him, and now found time to appreciate a face of pallid loveliness,
intelligent and composed, while she addressed him quietly and directly
to the point in a voice whose timbre was, he fancied, out of character
with the excellent accent of its French. An exquisite voice,
nevertheless. English, he guessed, or possibly American, but much at
home in France....

"Monsieur d'Aubrac has been wounded, a knife thrust. It will be
necessary to get him to a surgeon as quickly as possible. I fancy there
will be none nearer than Nant. Do you know the way?"

"One can doubtless find it," said Duchemin modestly. "But I myself am
not without knowledge of wounds. Perhaps..."

"If monsieur would be so good."

Duchemin knelt beside the man, who welcomed him with open eyes and a
wry smile that was almost as faint as his voice.

"It is nothing, monsieur--a clean cut in the arm, with some loss of
blood."

"But let me see."

The young girl in whose lap rested the head of Monsieur d'Aubrac sat
back and watched Duchemin with curious, grave eyes in which traces of
moisture glimmered.

"Had the animal at my mercy, I thought," d'Aubrac apologised, "when
suddenly he drew that knife, stuck me and broke away."

"I understand," Duchemin replied. "But don't talk. You'll want all your
strength, my friend."

With his pocket-knife he laid open the sodden sleeves of coat and
shirt, exposing an upper arm stained dark with blood that welled in
ugly jets from a cut both wide and deep.

"Artery severed," he announced, and straightened up and looked about,
at a loss. "My pack--?"

One's actions in moments of excitement are apt to be largely directed
by the subconscious, he knew; still he found it hard to believe that he
could unwittingly have unshipped and dropped his rucksack while making
ready to pursue the American uniform. Nevertheless, it seemed, that was
just what he had done.

The woman who had spoken to him found and fetched it from no great
distance; and its contents enabled Duchemin to improvise a tourniquet,
and when the flow of blood was checked, a bandage. During the operation
d'Aubrac unostentatiously fainted.

The young girl caught her breath, a fluttering hiss.

"Don't be alarmed, mademoiselle," Duchemin soothed her. "He will come
round presently, he will do splendidly now till we get him to bed; and
then his convalescence will be merely the matter of a while of rest."

He slipped his arms beneath the unconscious man, gathered him up bodily
and bore him to the carriage--and, thanks to man's amusing amour
propre, made far less of the effort than it cost him. Then, with
d'Aubrac disposed as comfortably as might be on the back seat, once
again pillowed in a fashion to make any man envious, Duchemin turned to
find the other women at his elbow. To the eldest he offered a bow
suited to her condition and a hand to help her into the barouche.

"Madame ..."

Her agitation had measurably subsided. The gentle inclination of the
aged head which acknowledged his courtesy was as eloquent of her
quality as he found the name which she gave him in quavering accents.

"Madame de Sévénié, monsieur."

"With madame's permission: I am André Duchemin."

"Monsieur Duchemin has placed us all deeply in his debt. Louise ..."
The girl in the carriage looked up and bowed, murmuring. "Mademoiselle
de Montalais, monsieur: my granddaughter. And Eve ..." She turned to
the third, to her whose voice of delightful accent was not in
Duchemin's notion wholly French: "Madame de Montalais, my daughter by
adoption, widow of my grandson, who died gloriously for his country at
La Fère-Champenoise."




IV

EVE


When she had graciously permitted Duchemin to assist her to a place in
the carriage, Madame Sévénié turned immediately to comfort her
granddaughter. It was easy to divine an attachment there, between
d'Aubrac and Louise de Montalais; Duchemin fancied (and, as it turned
out, rightly) the two were betrothed.

But Madame de Montalais was claiming his attention.

"Monsieur thinks--?" she enquired in a guarded tone, taking advantage
of the diversion provided by the elder lady to delay a little before
entering the barouche.

"Monsieur d'Aubrac is in no immediate danger. Still, the services of a
good surgeon, as soon as may be ..."

"Will it be dangerous to wait till we get to Nant?"

"How far is that, madame?"

"Twelve miles."

Duchemin looked aside at the decrepit conveyance with its unhappy
horses, and summed up a conclusion in a shrug.

"Millau is nearer, is it not, madame?"

"But Nant is not far from the Château de Montalais; and at La
Roque-Sainte-Marguerite our automobile is waiting, less than two miles
below. The chauffeur advised against bringing over the road from La
Roque to Montpellier; it is too rough and very steep."

"Oh!" said Duchemin, as one who catches a glimmering of light.

"Pardon, monsieur?"

"Madame's chauffeur is waiting with the automobile, no doubt?"

"But assuredly, monsieur."

He recollected himself. "We shall see what we shall see, then, at La
Roque. With an automobile at your disposal, Nant is little more distant
than Millau, certainly. Nevertheless, let us not delay."

"Monsieur is too good."

Momentarily a hand slender and firm and cool rested in his own. Then
its owner was setting into place beside Madame de Sévénié, and Duchemin
clambering up to his on the box.

The road proved quite as rough and declivitous as its reputation. One
surmised that the Spring rains had found it in a bad way and done
nothing to better its condition. Deep ruts and a liberal sprinkling of
small boulders collaborated to keep the horses stumbling, plunging and
pitching as they strained back against the singletrees. Duchemin was
grateful for the moonlight which alone enabled him to keep the road and
avoid the worst of the going--until he remembered that without the moon
there would have been no expedition that night to view the mock ruins
of Montpellier by its unearthly light, and consequently no adventure to
entangle him.

Upon this reflection he swore softly but most fervently into his
becoming beard. He was well fed up with adventures, thank you, and
could have done very well without this latest. And especially at a time
when he desired nothing so much as to be permitted to remain the
footloose wanderer in a strange land, a bird of passage without ties or
responsibilities.

He thought it devilish hard that one may never do a service to another
without incurring a burden of irksome obligations to the served; that
bonds of interest forged in moments of unpremeditated and generous
impulse are never readily to be broken.

Now because Chance had seen fit to put him in the way of saving a
hapless party of sightseers from robbery or worse, he found himself
hopelessly committed to take a continuing interest in them. It appeared
that their home was a château somewhere in the vicinity of Nant. Well,
after their shocking experience, and with the wounded man on their
hands--and especially if La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite told the story one
confidently expected--Duchemin could hardly avoid offering to see them
safely as far as Nant. And once there he would be definitely in the
toils. He would have to stop in the town overnight; and in the morning
he would be able neither in common decency to slip away without calling
to enquire after the welfare of d'Aubrac and the tranquillity of the
ladies, nor in discretion to take himself out of the way of the civil
investigation which would inevitably follow the report of what had
happened in Montpelier.

No: having despatched a bandit to an end well-earned, it now devolved
upon André Duchemin to satisfy Society and the State that he had done
so only with the most amiable motives, on due provocation, to save his
own life and possibly the lives of others.

He had premonitions of endless delays while provincial authorities
wondered, doubted, criticised, procrastinated, investigated, reported,
and--repeated.

And then there was every chance that the story, thanks to the
prominence of the persons involved, for one made no doubt that the
names of Sévénié and Montalais and d'Aubrac ranked high in that part of
the world--the story would get into the newspapers of the larger towns
in the department. And what then of the comfortable pseudonymity of
André Duchemin? Posed in an inescapable glare of publicity, how long
might he hope to escape recognition by some acquaintance, friend or
enemy? Heaven knew he had enough of both sorts scattered widely over
the face of Europe!

It seemed hard, indeed....

But it was--of course! he assured himself grimly--all a matter of
fatality with him. Never for him the slippered ease of middle age, the
pursuit of bourgeois virtues, of which he had so fondly dreamed in
Meyrueis. Adventures were his portion, as surely as humdrum and
eventless days were many another's. Wars might come and wars might go:
but his mere presence in its neighbourhood would prove enough to turn
the Palace of Peace itself into Action Front.

Or so it seemed to him, in the bitterness of his spirit.

Nor would he for an instant grant that his lot was not without its own,
peculiar compensations.

At La Roque, a tiny hamlet huddled in the shadow of Montpellier and
living almost exclusively upon the tourists that pass that way, it was
as Duchemin had foreseen, remembering the American uniform and the face
smudged with soot--that favourite device of the French criminal of the
lower class fearing recognition. For there it appeared that, whereas
the motor car was waiting safe and sound enough, its chauffeur had
vanished into thin air. Not a soul could be found who recalled seeing
the man after the barouche Tiad left the village. Whereupon Duchemin
asked whether the chauffeur had been a stout man, and being informed
that it was so, considered the case complete. Mesdames de Sévénié et de
Montalais, he suggested, might as well then and there give up all hope
of ever again seeing that particular chauffeur--unless by some
mischance entirely out of the reckoning of the latter. The landlord of
the auberge, a surly sot, who had supplied the barouche with the man to
act as driver and guide in one, took with ill grace the charge that his
employee had been in league with the bandits. But this was true on the
word of Madame de Montalais; it was their guide, she said, whom
Duchemin had driven over the cliff. And (as Duchemin had anticipated)
her name alone proved enough to silence the landlord's virtuous
protestations. One could not always avoid being deceived, he declared;
he knew nothing of the dead man more than that he had come well
recommended. With which he said no more, but lent an efficient if
sullen hand to the task of transferring d'Aubrac to the motor car.

D'Aubrac came to, while this was being accomplished, begged feebly for
water, was given it with a little brandy to boot and, comfortably
settled in the rear seat, between Louise de Montalais and her
grandmother, relapsed once more into unconsciousness.

Learning that Madame de Montalais would drive, Duchemin dissembled a
sigh of relief and, standing beside the car, doffed his cap to say
good-bye. He was only too happy to have been of such slight service as
the circumstances had permitted; and if at any time he could do more, a
line addressed to him at Nimes, poste restante ....

"But if Monsieur Duchemin would be good enough," Madame de Sévénié
interposed in a fretful quaver--"and if it would not be taking him too
far out of his way--it is night, anything may happen, the car might
break down, and I am an old woman, monsieur, with sorely tried
nerves--"

Looking down at him from her place at the wheel, Madame de Montalais
added: "It would be an act of charity, I think, monsieur, if it does
not inconvenience you too greatly."

"On the contrary," he fabricated without blushing, "you will be
obliging a weary man by putting him several miles on his way."

He had no cause to regret his complaisance. Seated beside Madame de
Montalais, he watched her operate the car with skilful hands, making
the best of a highway none too good, if a city boulevard in comparison
with that which they had covered in the barouche.

Following the meandering Dourbie, it ran snakily from patches of
staring moonlight to patches of inky shadows, now on narrow ledges high
over the brawling stream, now dipping so low that the tyres were almost
level with the plane of broken waters.

The sweep of night air in his face was sweet and smooth, not cold--for
a marvel in that altitude--and stroked his eyelids with touches as
bland as caresses of a pretty woman's fingers. He was sensible of
drowsiness, a surrender to fatigue, to which the motion of the motor
car, swung seemingly on velvet springs, and the shifting, blending
chiaroscuro of the magic night were likewise conducive. So that there
came a lessening of the tension of resentment in his humour.

It was true that Life would never let him rest in the quiet byways of
his desire; but after all, unrest was Life; and it was good to be alive
tonight, alive and weary and not ill-content with self, in a motor car
swinging swiftly and silently along a river road in the hills of
Southern France, with a woman lovely, soignée and mysterious at the
wheel.

Perhaps instinctively sensible of the regard that dwelt, warm with
wonder, on the fair curve of her cheek, the perfect modelling of her
nose and mouth, she looked swiftly askance, after a time, surprised his
admiration, and as if not displeased smiled faintly as she returned
attention to the road.

Duchemin was conscious of something like a shock of emotion, a sudden
surging of some hunger that had long lain dormant in his being,
unsuspected, how long he could not surmise, gaining strength in
latency, waiting to be awakened and set free by one careless, sidelong
look and smile of a strange woman.

"Eve," he whispered, unheard, "Eve de Montalais ..."

Then of a sudden he caught himself up sharply. It was natural enough
that one should be susceptible to gentler impulses, at such a time,
under circumstances so strange, so unforeseen, so romantic; but he must
not, dared not, would not yield. That way danger lay.

Not that he feared danger; for like most of mankind he loved it well.

But here the danger held potentialities if not the certainty of
pain--pain, it might be, not for one alone.

Besides, it was too absurd ....




V

PHINUIT & CO.


In the upshot, however, the necessity of his dismal forebodings had
nothing to do with the length of time devoted by Monsieur Duchemin to
kicking idle heels in the town of Nant; where the civil authorities
proved considerate in a degree that--even making allowance for the
local prestige of the house of Montalais--gratified and surprised the
confirmed Parisian. For that was just what the good man was at heart
and would be till he died, the form in which environment of younger
years had moulded him: less French than Parisian, sharing the almost
insular ignorance of life in the provinces characteristic of the native
boulevardier; to whom the sun is truly nothing more or less than a
spotlight focussed exclusively on Paris, leaving the rest of France in
a sort of crepuscular gloom, the world besides steeped in eternal
night.

The driver-guide of La Roque turned out to have been a thorough-paced
scamp, well and ill-known to the gendarmerie; the wound sustained by
Monsieur d'Aubrac bore testimony to the gravity of the affair, amply
excusing Duchemin's interference and its fatal sequel; while the
statements of Mesdames de Sévénié et de Montalais, duly becoming public
property, bade fair to exalt the local reputation of André Duchemin to
heroic stature. And, naturally, his papers were unimpeachable.

So that he found himself, before his acquaintance with Nant was
thirty-six hours of age, free once more to humour the dictates of his
own sweet will, to go on to Nimes (his professed objective) or to the
devil if he liked. A freedom which, consistent with the native
inconsistency of man, he exercised by electing to stop over in Nant for
another day or two, at least; assuring himself that he found the town
altogether charming, more so even than Meyrueis--and sometimes
believing this fiction for as much as twenty minutes at a stretch.

Besides, the weather was unsettled ....

The inn, which went by the unpretending style of the Grand Hôtel de
l'Univers, he found clean, comfortable, and as to its cuisine
praiseworthy. The windows of the cubicle in which he had been
lodged--one of ten which sufficed for the demands of the itinerant
Universe--not only overlooked the public square and its amusing life of
a minor market town, but commanded as well a splendid vista of the
valley of the Dourbie, with its piquant contrast of luxuriant alluvial
verdure and grim scarps of rock that ran up, on either side the wanton,
glimmering river, into two opposed and overshadowing pinnacles of crag,
the Roc Nantais and the Roc de Saint Alban--peaks each a rendezvous
just then for hosts of cloud that scowled forbiddingly down upon the
peaceful, sun-drenched valley.

Moreover, even from the terrasse of the café below, one needed only to
lift one's eyes to see, afar, perched high upon a smiling slope of
green, with the highway to Millau at its foot and a beetling cliff
behind, the Château de Montalais. Seated on that terrasse, late in the
afternoon of his second day in Nant, discussing a Picon and a
villainous caporal cigarette of the Régie (to whose products a rugged
constitution was growing slowly reconciled anew) Duchemin let his
vision dwell upon the distant château almost as constantly as his
thoughts.

He was to dine there that very evening. Even taking into account the
signal service Duchemin had rendered, this wasn't easy to believe when
one remembered the tradition of social conservatism among French
gentlefolk. Still, it was true: Duchemin of the open road was bidden to
dine en famille at the Château de Montalais. In his pocket lay the
invitation, penned in the crabbed antique hand of Madame de Sévénié and
fetched to the hotel by a servitor quite as crabbed and antique:
Monsieur Duchemin would confer a true pleasure by enabling the ladies
of the château to testify, even so inadequately, to their sense of
obligation, etc.; with a postscript to say that Monsieur d'Aubrac was
resting easily, his wound mending as rapidly as heart could wish.

Of course Duchemin was going, had in fact already despatched his
acceptance by the hand of the same messenger. Equally of course he knew
that he ought not to go. For a man of his years he was, as a matter of
training and habit, amazingly honest with himself. He knew quite well
what bent his inclination toward visiting the Château de Montalais just
once before effecting, what he was resolved upon, a complete
evanishment from the ken of its people. He had yet to hold one minute
of private conversation with Eve de Montalais, he had of her no sign to
warrant his thinking her anything but utterly indifferent to him; and
yet....

No; he wasn't ass enough to dream that he was in love with the woman;
to the contrary, he was wise enough, knew himself well enough, to know
that he could be, easily, and would be, given half a chance to lose his
head.

His warning had been clear beyond mistake, in that hour in the motor
car on the road from La Roque to Nant, when Nature, as she sometimes
will, incautiously had shown her hand to one whom she herself had
schooled to read shrewdly, letting him discern what was her will with
him, the snare that was laid for his feet and in which he must soon
find himself trapped beyond extrication ... always providing he lacked
the wit and resolution to fly his peril, who knew through bitterest of
learning that love was never for him.

Now he had seen Madame de Montalais another time, and had found that
she fitted to the sweetest detail of perfection his ideal of Woman.

On the previous afternoon, meeting the ladies of the château by
arrangement in the bureau of the maire, Duchemin had sat opposite and
watched and listened to Eve de Montalais for upwards of two hours--as
completely devoted to covert study of her as if she had been the one
woman in the room, as if the girl Louise, Madame de Sévénié, and the
officials and functionaries of Nant had not existed in the same world
with her. And in that tedious and constrained time of formalities he
had learned much about her, but first of all, thanks to the
uncompromising light of day that filled the cheerless room, that
moonlight had not enhanced but rather tempered the charms of person
which had the night before so stirred his pulses.

Posed with consummate grace in a comfortless chair, a figure of slender
elegance in her half-mourning, she had narrated quietly her version of
last night's misadventure, an occasional tremor of humour lightening
the moving modulations of her voice. A deep and vibrant voice,
contralto in quality, hinting at hidden treasures of strength in the
woman whose superficial mind it expressed. A fair woman, slim but
round, with brown eyes level and calm, a translucent skin of matchless
texture, hair the hue of bronze laced with intimations of gold ...

Her story told, and taken down in longhand by a withered clerk, she
supplied without reluctance or trace of embarrassment such intimate
personal information as was necessary in order that her signature to
the document might be acceptable to the State.

Her age, she said, was twenty-nine; her birthplace, the City of New
York; her parents, Edmund Anstruther, once of Bath, England, but at the
time of her birth a naturalised citizen of the United States, and Eve
Marie Anstruther, née Legendre, of Paris. Both were dead. In June 1914
she had married, in Paris, Victor Maurice de Montalais, who had been
killed in action at La Fère-Champenoise on the ninth of September
following. Her home? The Château de Montalais.

On the hand she stripped in order to sign her deposition Duchemin saw a
blue diamond of such superb water that this amateur of precious stones
caught his breath for sheer wonder at its beauty and excellence and
worth. Such jewels, he knew, were few and far to seek outside the
collections of princes.

Out of these simple elements imagination reconstructed a tragedy, a
tragedy of life singularly close to the truth as he later came to learn
it, a story not at all calculated to lessen his interest in the woman.

Such women, he knew, are the product of a cultivation seldom to be
achieved by poverty. This one had been made before, and not by, her
marriage. Her father, then, had commanded riches. And when one knew, as
Duchemin knew, what delights New York has for young women of wealth and
fashion, one perceived a radiant and many-coloured background for this
drab life of a recluse, expatriate from the high world of her
inheritance, which Eve de Montalais must lead, and for the six years of
her premature widowhood must have led, in that lonely château, buried
deep in the loneliest hills of all France, the sole companion and
comfort of her husband's bereaved sister and grandmother, chained by
sorrow to their sorrow, by an inexorable reluctance to give them pain
by seeming to slight the memory of the husband, brother and grandson
through turning her face toward the world of life and light and gaiety
of which she was so essentially a part, isolate from which she was so
inevitably a thing existing without purpose or effect.

How often, Duchemin wondered, had she in hours of solitude and
restlessness felt her spirit yearning toward Paris, the nearest gateway
to her world, and had cried out: How long, O Lord! how long?...

The mellow resonance of a two-toned automobile horn, disturbing the
early evening hush and at the same time Duchemin's meditations,
recalled him to Nant in time to see a touring car of majestic
proportions and mien which, coming from the south, from the direction
of the railroad and Nimes, was sweeping a fine curve round two sides of
the public square. Arriving in front of the Hôtel de l'Univers it
executed a full stop and stood curbed yet palpitant, purring heavily:
an impressive brute of a car, all shining silver plate and lustrous
green paint and gold, the newest model of the costliest and best
automobile manufactured in France.

Instantly, as the wheels ceased to turn, a young man in the smartest
livery imaginable, green garnished with gold, leaped smartly from the
driver's seat, with military precision opened the door of the tonneau
and, holding it, immobilised himself into the semblance of a waxwork
image with the dispassionate eye, the firm mouth, and the closely
razored, square jowls of the model chauffeur. Rustics and townsfolk
were already gathering, a gaping audience, when from the tonneau
descended first a long and painfully emaciated gentleman, whose face
was a cadaverous mask of settled melancholy and his chosen toilette for
motoring (as might be seen through the open and flapping front of his
ulster) a tightly tailored light grey cutaway coat and trousers, with a
double-breasted white waistcoat, a black satin Ascot scarf transfixed
by a single splendid pearl, and spotless white spats.

His hand, as gaunt as a skeleton's, assisted to alight a young woman
whose brilliant blonde beauty, viewed for the first time in evening
shadows, was like a shaft of sunlight in a darkened room. A well-made
creature, becomingly and modishly gowned for motoring, spirited yet
dignified in carriage, she was like a vision of, as she was palpably a
visitation from, the rue de la Paix.

Following her, a third passenger presented the well-nourished, indeed
rotund, person of a Frenchman of thirty devoted to "le Sport"; as
witness his aggressively English tweeds and the single glass screwed
into his right eye-socket. His face was chubby, pink and white, his
look was merry, he was magnificently self-conscious and débonnaire.

Like shapes from some superbly costumed pageant of High Life in the
Twentieth Century this trio drifted, rather than merely walked like
mortals, across the terrasse and into the Café de l'Univers (which
seemed suddenly to shrink in proportion as if reminded of its
comparative insignificance in the Scheme of Things) where an awed staff
of waiters, led by the overpowered propriétaires, monsieur et madame
themselves, welcomed these apparitions from Another and A Better World
with bowings and scrapings and a vast bustle and movement of chairs and
tables; while all Nant, all of it, that is, that was accustomed to
foregather in the café at this the hour of the aperitif, looked on with
awed and envious eyes.

It was all very theatrical and inspiring--to Monsieur Duchemin, too;
who, lost in the shuffle of Nant and content to be so, murmured to
himself that serviceable and comforting word of the time, "Profiteers!"
and contemplated with some satisfaction his personal superiority to
such as these.

But there was more and better to come.

There remained in the car a mere average man, undistinguished but by a
lack of especial distinction, sober of habit, economical of gesture,
dressed in a simple lounge suit such as anybody might wear, beneath a
rough and ready-made motorcoat. When the car stopped he had stood up in
his place beside the chauffeur as if meaning to get out, but rather
remained motionless, resting a hand on the windshield and thoughtfully
gazing northwards along the road that, skirting the grounds of the
Château de Montalais, disappeared from view round the sleek shoulder of
a hill.

Now as the pattern chauffeur shut the door to the tonneau with the
properly arrogant slam, the man who lingered in the car nodded gravely
to some private thought, unlatched the door, got down, and turned
toward the café, but before following his companions of more brilliant
plumage paused for a quiet word with the chauffeur.

"We dine here, Jules," he announced in English.

Settling into place behind the wheel Jules saluted with fine finish and
deference.

"Very good, Mr. Phinuit, sir," he said meekly, in the same tongue. To
this he added, coolly, without the least flicker of a glance aside,
without moving one muscle other than those involved by the act of
speech, and in precisely the tone of respect that became his livery:
"What's the awful idea, you big stiff?"

Mr. Phinuit betrayed not the slightest sense of anything untoward in
this mode of address, but looked round to the chauffeur with a slow,
not unfriendly smile.

"Why," he said pleasantly--"you misbegotten garage hound--why do you
ask?"

In the same manner Jules replied: "Can't you see it's going to rain?"

Mr. Phinuit cocked a calm, observant eye heavenwards. Involuntarily but
unobtrusively, under cover of the little tubbed trees that hedged the
terrasse apart from the square, Duchemin did likewise, and so
discovered, or for the first time appreciated, the cause of the
uncommonly early dusk that loured over Nant.

Between the sentinel peaks that towered above the valley black
battalions of storm cloud were fraternising, joining forces, coalescing
into a vast and formidable army of ominous aspect.

"So it is," Mr. Phinuit commented amiably; indeed, not without a
certain hint of satisfaction. "Blessed if you don't see everything!"

"Well, then: what about it?"

"Why, _I_ should say you'd better find a place to put the car under
cover in case it comes on to storm before we're finished--and put up
the top."

"You don't mean to go on in the rain?" Jules protested--yet studiously
in no tone of protest.

"But naturally..."

"How do you get that way? Do you want us all to get soaked to our
skins?"

"My dear Jules!" Mr. Phinuit returned with a winning smile--"I don't
give a tupenny damn if we do." With that he went to join his company;
while Jules, once the other's back was turned, permitted himself, for
the sake of his own respect and the effect upon the assembled audience,
the luxury of a shrug that outrivalled words in expression of his
personal opinion of the madness that contemplated further travel on
such a night as this promised to be.

Then, like the well-trained servant that he was not, he meshed gears
silently and swung the car away to seek shelter, taking with him the
sympathy as well as the wonder of the one witness of this bit of
by-play who had been able to understand the tongue in which it was
couched; and who, knowing too well what rain in those hills could mean,
was beginning to regret that his invitation to the château had not been
for another night.

As for the somewhat unusual tone of the passage to which he had just
listened, his nimble wits could invent half a dozen plausible
explanations. It was quite possible, indeed when one judged Mr. Phinuit
by his sobriety in contrast with the gaiety of the others it seemed
quite plausible, that he was equally with Jules a paid employee of
those ostensible nouveaux riches: and that the two, the chauffeur and
the courier (or whatever Mr. Phinuit was in his subordinate social
rating) were accustomed to amuse themselves by indulging in reciprocal
abuse.

But what Duchemin could by no means fathom was the reason why Phinuit
should choose, and how he should rule the choice of his party, in the
face of such threatening weather, to stop in Nant for an early
dinner--with Millau only an hour away and the chances fair that before
the storm broke the automobile would reach the latter city with its
superior hotel and restaurant accommodations.

But it was after all none of the business of André Duchemin. He lighted
another cigarette, observing the group of strangers in Nant with an
open inquisitiveness wholly Gallic, therefore inconspicuous. The entire
clientèle of the Café de l'Univers was doing the same; Mr. Phinuit's
party was the focal point of between twenty and thirty pair of staring
eyes, and was enduring this with much equanimity.

Mr. Phinuit was conferring earnestly over the menu with madame la
propriétaire. The others were ordering aperitifs of a waiter. Through
the clatter of tongues that filled the café one caught the phrase
"veeskysoda" uttered by the monsieur in tweeds. Then the tall man
consulted the beautiful lady as to her preference, and Duchemin caught
the words "madame la comtesse" spoken in the rasping nasal drawl of an
American.

Evidently a person of rich humour, the speaker: "madame la comtesse"
was abruptly convulsed with laughter; the chubby gentleman roared; Mr.
Phinuit looked up from the carte with an enquiring, receptive smile;
the waiter grinned broadly. But the cause of all this merriment wore
only an expression of slightly pained bewilderment on his death-mask of
a face.

At that moment arrived the calèche which Duchemin had commanded to
drive him to the château; and with a ride of two miles before him and
rain imminent, he had no more time to waste.




VI

VISITATION


Dinner was served in a vast and sombre hall whose darkly panelled walls
and high-beamed ceiling bred a multitude of shadows that danced about
the table a weird, spasmodic saraband, without meaning or end,
restlessly advancing and retreating as the candles flickered, failed
and flared in the gusty draughts.

There was (Duchemin learned) no other means of illumination but by
candle-light in the entire château. The time-old structure had been
thoroughly renovated and modernised in most respects, it was furnished
with taste and reverence (one could guess whose the taste and purse)
but Madame de Sévénié remained its undisputed chatelaine, a belated
spirit of the ancien régime, stubbornly set against the conveniences of
this degenerate age. Electric lighting she would never countenance. The
telephone she esteemed a convenience for tradespeople and vulgarians in
general, beneath the dignity of leisured quality. The motor car she
disapproved yet tolerated because, for all her years, she was of a
brisk and active turn and liked to get about, whereas since the War
good horseflesh was difficult to find in France and men to care for it
more scarce still.

So much, and more besides, she communicated to Duchemin at intervals
during the meal, comporting herself toward him with graciousness not
altogether innocent of a certain faded coquetry. Having spoken of
herself as one born too late for her time, she paused and eyed him
keenly, a gleam of light malice in her bright old eyes.

"And you, too, monsieur," she added suddenly. "But you, I think, belong
to an even earlier day..."

"I, madame? And why do you say that?"

"I should have been guillotined under the Terror; but you, monsieur,
you should have been hanged long before that--hanged for a buccaneer on
the Spanish Main."

"Madame may be right," said Duchemin, amused. "And quite possibly I
was, you know."

Then he wondered a little, and began to cultivate some respect for the
shrewdness of her intuitions.

He sat on her left, the place of honour going by custom immemorial to
monsieur le curé of Nant. For all that, Duchemin declined to feel
slighted. Was he not on the right of Eve de Montalais?

The girl Louise was placed between the curé and her sister-in-law.
Duchemia could not have been guilty of the offence of ignoring her; but
the truth is that, save when courtesy demanded that he pay her some
attention, he hardly saw her. She was pretty enough, but very quiet and
self-absorbed, a slender, nervous creature with that pathetically eager
look peculiar to her age and caste in France, starving for the life she
might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and
ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow
against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare
exotic flower set before a screen of lustreless black velvet. And like
a flower to the sun she responded to the homage of his admiration
--which he was none the less studious to preserve from the sin
of obviousness. For he was well aware that her response was
impersonal; it was not his but any admiration that she craved as a
parched land wants rain.

Less than three months a wife, more than five years a widow, still
young and ardent, nearing the noontide of her womanhood, and immolated
in this house of perennial mourning, making vain oblation of her youth,
her beauty, the rich wine of life that coursed so lustily through her
being, upon the altar of a memory whose high priestess was only an old,
old woman....

He perceived that it would be quite possible for him, did he yield to
the bent of his sympathies, to dislike Madame de Sévénié most
intensely.

Not that he was apt to have much opportunity to encourage such a
gratuitous aversion: to-morrow would see him on the road again, his
back forever turned to the Château de Montalais....

Or, if not to-morrow, then as soon as the storm abated.

It was raging now as if it would never weaken and had the will to raze
the château though it were the task of a thousand years. From time to
time the shock of some great blast of air would seem to rock upon its
foundations even that ancient pile, those heavy walls of hewn stone
builded in times of honest workmanship by forgotten Sieurs de Montalais
who had meant their home to outlast the ages.

Rain in sheets sluiced the windows without rest. Round turrets and
gables the wind raved and moaned like a famished wild thing denied its
kill. Occasionally a venturesome gust with the spirit of a minor demon
would find its way down the chimney to the drawing-room fire and send
sparks in volleys against the screen, with thin puffs of wood smoke
that lingered in the air like acrid ghosts.

At such times the curé, sitting at piquet with Madame de Sévénié, after
dinner, would cough distressingly and, reminded that he had a bed to
reach somehow through all this welter, anathematise the elements, help
himself to a pinch of snuff, and proceed with his play.

Duchemin sat at a little distance, talking with Madame de Montalais
over their cigarettes. To smoking, curiously enough, Madame de Sévénié
offered no objection. Women had not smoked in her day, and she for her
part would never. But Eve might: it was "done"; even in those circles
of hidebound conservatism, the society of the Faubourg St. Germain,
ladies of this day smoked unrebuked.

Louise had excused herself--to sit, Duchemin had no doubt, by the
bedside of d'Aubrac, under the duenna-like eye of an old nurse of the
family.

Being duly encouraged, Duchemin talked about himself, of his wanderings
and adventures, all with discretion, with the neatest expurgations, and
with an object, leading cunningly round to the subject of New York.

At mention of it he saw a new light kindle in Eve's eyes. Her breath
came more quickly, gentle emotion agitated her bosom.

Monsieur knew New York?

But well: he had been there as a boy, again as a young man; and then
later, in the year when America entered the Great War; not since ...

"It is my home," said Eve de Montalais softly, looking away.

(One noted that she said "is"--not "was.")

So Duchemin had understood. Madame had not visited her home recently?

Not in many years; not in fact since nineteen-thirteen. She assumed the
city must have changed greatly.

Duchemin thought it was never the same, but forever changing itself
overnight, so to speak; and yet always itself, always like no other
city in the world, fascinating....

"Fascinating? But irresistible! How I long for it!" She was distrait
for an instant. "My New York! Monsieur--would you believe?--I dream of
it!"

He had found a key to one chamber in the mansion of her confidence. As
much to herself as to him, unconsciously dropping into English, she
began to talk of her life "at home"....

Her father had been a partner in a great jewellery house, Cottier's, of
Paris, London, and New York. (So that explained it! She was wearing the
blue diamond again tonight, with other jewels worth, in the judgment of
a keen connoisseur, a king's ransom.) Schooled at an exclusive
establishment for the daughters of people of fashion, Eve at an early
age had made her début; but within the year her father died, and her
mother, whose heart had always been in the city of her nativity, closed
the house on East Fifty-seventh street and removed with her daughter to
Paris. There Eve had met her future husband. Shortly after, her mother
died. Eve returned to New York to attend to some business in connection
with her estate, remaining only a few weeks, leaving almost
reluctantly; but the new love was very sweet, she had looked forward
joyfully to the final transplanting of her affections.

And then the War, the short month of long, long days in the apartment
on the avenue des Champs-Elysées, waiting, waiting, while the earth
trembled to the tramp of armed men and the tireless rumbling of
caissons and camions, and the air was vibrant with the savage dialogue
of cannon, ever louder, daily more near....

She fell silent, sitting with bowed head and gaze remote.

From the splendid jewels that adorned the fingers twisting together in
her lap, the firelight struck coruscant gleams.

"Now I hate Paris, I wish never to see it again."

Duchemin uttered a sympathetic murmur.

"But New York--?"

"Ah, but sometimes I think I would give anything to be there once
more!"

The animation with which this confession was delivered proved
transient.

"Then I remind myself I have no one there--a few friends, yes,
acquaintances; but no family ties, no one dear to me."

"But--pardon--you stay here?"

"It is beautiful here, monsieur."

"But such solitude, such isolation--for you, madame!"

"I know. Still, I am fond of the life here; it was here I found myself
again, after my grief. And I am fond of my adopted mother and Louise,
too, and they of me. Indeed, I am all they have left. Louise, of
course, will marry before long, Georges"--she used d'Aubrac's given
name--"will take her away, then Madame de Sévénié will have nobody but
me. And at her age, it would be too sad..."

Across the drawing-room that lady looked up from her cards and sharply
interrogated a manservant who had silently presented himself to her
attention.

"What is it you want, Jean?"

The servant mumbled his justification: An automobile had broken down on
the highroad near the château, the chauffeur was unable to move the car
or make any repairs in the storm, a gentleman had come to the door to
ask....

He moved aside, indicating the doorway to the entrance hall, beyond
which Mr. Phinuit was to be seen, standing with cap in hand, tiny
rivulets running from the folds of his motor-coat and forming pools on
the polished flooring. As in concerted movement Madame de Sévénié, Eve
de Montalais, the curé and Duchemin approached, his cool, intelligent,
good-humoured glance surveyed them swiftly, each in turn, and with
unerring instinct settled on the first as the one to whom he must
address himself.

But the bow with which he also acknowledged the presence of Eve was
hardly less profound; Duchemin himself, at his best, could hardly have
bettered it. His manner, in fact, left nothing to be desired; and the
French in which immediately he begged a thousand pardons for the
intrusion was so admirable that it seemed hard to believe he was the
same man who had, only a few hours earlier, composedly traded the slang
of the States with a chauffeur in front of the Café de l'Univers.

Mr. Phinuit was desolated to think he might be imposing on madame's
good nature, but the accident was positive, the night truly inclement,
madame la comtesse was already suffering from the cold, and if one
might beg shelter for her and the gentlemen of the party while one
telephoned or sent to Nant for another automobile....

But monsieur might feel very sure Madame de Sévénié would never forgive
herself if the hospitality of the Château de Montalais failed at such a
time. She would send servants to the car at once with lights, wraps,
umbrellas....

There was no necessity for that. The remainder of the party had, it
seemed, presumed upon her courtesy in anticipation, and was not far
from the heels of its ambassador. Even while madame was speaking, Jean
was opening the great front doors to those who proved--formal
introductions being duly effect by Mr. Phinuit--to be Madame la
Comtesse de Lorgnes, monsieur le comte, her husband (this was the
well-fed body in tweeds) and Mr. Whitaker Monk, of New York.

These personages were really not at all in a bad way. Their wraps were
well peppered with rain, they were chilly, the footgear of madame la
comtesse was wet and needed changing. But that was the worst of their
plight. And when Mr. Phinuit, learning that there was no telephone, had
accepted an offer of the Montalais motor car to tow the other under
cover and so enable Jules to make repairs, and Eve de Montalais had
carried madame la comtesse off to her own apartment to change her shoes
and stockings, the gentlemen trooped to the drawing-room fire, at the
instance of Madame de Sévénié, and grew quite cheerful under the
combined influence of warmth and wine and biscuits; Duchemin standing
by with a half-rejected doubt to preoccupy him, vaguely disturbed by
the oddness of this rencontre considered in relation to that
injudicious stop for dinner at Nant in the face of the impending storm,
and with Mr. Phinuit's declaration that he didn't give a tupenny damn
if they did all get soaked to their skins.

It seemed far-fetched and ridiculous to imagine that people of their
intelligence--and they were most of them unusually intelligent and
alert, if demeanour and utterances might be taken as criterion--should
adopt any such elaborate machinery of mystification and duplicity in
order to gain an introduction to the Château de Montalais. With what
possible motive...?

But there was the devil of having a mind like Duchemin's: once it
conceived a notion like that, it was all but impossible for him to
dislodge it unless or until something happened to persuade him of his
stupidity.

Now to make his suspicions seem at all reasonable, a motive was
lacking. And that worried the man hugely. He desired most earnestly to
justify his captiousness; and to this end exercised a power of
conscientious observation on his new acquaintances.

Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes he was disposed to pass at face value, as
an innocuous being, good natured enough but none too brilliant, with
much of the disposition of an overgrown boy and a rather boyish
tendency to admire and imitate in others qualities which he did not
himself possess.

Mr. Phinuit had not returned, so there was no present opportunity to
take further note of him; though Duchemin first inferred from Mr.
Monk's manner, and later learned through a chance remark of his, that
Phinuit was his secretary.

Upon this Mr. Monk Duchemin concentrated close attention, satisfied
that he had here to do with an extraordinary personality, if not one
unique.

Mr. Whitaker Monk might have been any age between thirty-five and
fifty-five, so non-committal was that lantern-jawed countenance of a
droll, with its heavy, black, eloquent eyebrows, its high and narrow
forehead merging into an extensive bald spot fringed with greyish hair,
its rather small, blue, illegible eyes, its high-bridged nose and
prominent nostrils, its wide and thin-lipped mouth, its rather
startling pallor. Taller by a head than anybody in the room except
Duchemin, his figure was remarkably thin, yet not ill-proportioned.
Neither was Mr. Monk ill at ease or ungraceful in his actions. Clothed
in that extravagantly correct costume--correct, at least, for a
drawing-room, if never for motoring--he had all the appearance of a
comedian fresh from the hands of his dresser. One naturally expected of
him mere grotesqueries--and found simply the courteous demeanour of a
gentleman of the world. So much for externals. But what more? Nature
herself had cast Mr. Monk in the very mould of a masquerader. What
manner of man was hidden behind the mask? His words and deeds alone
would tell; Duchemin could only weigh the one and await the other.

In the meantime Mr. Monk was sketching rapidly for the benefit of
Madame de Sévénié the excuse for his present plight.

A chance meeting at Monte Carlo, he said, with his old friends, the
Comte et Comtesse de Lorgnes, had resulted in their yielding to his
insistence that they tour with him back to Paris by this roundabout
way.

"A whim of my age, madame." Somehow the nasal intonation of the
American suited singularly well his fluent French; he seemed to have
less trouble with his R's than most Anglo-Saxons. "As a young man--a
younger man--ah, well, in Ninety-four, then--I explored this country on
a walking tour, inspired by Stevenson. You know, perhaps, his diverting
Travels with a Donkey? But I daresay its spirit would hardly have
survived translation.... At all events, I had the whim to revisit some
of those well-remembered scenes. I say some, for naturally it would be
impossible, even with the vastly improved roads of to-day, for my
automobile to penetrate everywhere I wandered afoot. Nor would I wish
it to; a few disappointments, a few failures to recapture something of
that first fine careless rapture, would instill a lyric melancholy; but
too many would make one morbid.... Well, then: at Nant, in those old
days, I once had a famous dinner; and naturally, returning, I must try
to duplicate it, even though it meant going on to Millau in the rain.
But alas! the Café de l'Univers is no more what it was--or I am grown
over critical."

What now of Duchemin's doubts? To tell the sad truth, they were just as
strong as ever. The man was somehow prejudiced: he found Monk's story
entirely too glib, and knew a mean sense of gratification when the curé
interposed a gentle correction.

"But in Ninety-four, monsieur, there was no Café de l'Univers in Nant."

Astonished eyebrows climbed the forehead of Mr. Monk.

"No, monsieur le curé? Truly not? Then it must have been another. How
one's memory will play one false!"

"How strange, then, is coincidence," Madame de Sévénié suggested. "You
who made a walking tour of this country so long ago, monsieur, regard
there that good Monsieur Duchemin, himself engaged upon just such an
undertaking."

Duchemin acknowledged with a humorous little nod Mr. Monk's look of
moderate amazement at this so strange coincidence.

"A whim of my age, monsieur," he said--"a project I have entertained
since youth but always, till of late, lacked leisure to put into
execution."

"But is there anything more wonderful than the workings of the good
God?" madame pursued. "Observe that, if Monsieur Duchemin had been
suffered to indulge his inclination in youth, we should all, I, my
daughter, my grand-daughter, even poor Georges d'Aubrac, would quite
probably be lying dead at the bottom of a cirque at Montpellier-le-Vieux."

Naturally the strangers required to know about that, and Madame de
Sévénié would talk, in fact doted on telling the tale of that great
adventure. Duchemin made a face of resignation, and heard himself
extolled as a paladin for strength, address and valour; the truth being
that he was not at all resigned and would infinitely liefer have been
left out of the limelight. The more he was represented as a person of
consequence, the less fair his chance to study these others at his
leisure, in the comfortable obscurity of their indifference.

Now the enigmatic eyes of Monk were boring into him, seeking to search
his soul, with a question in their stare which he could not read and,
quite likely, would have declined to answer if he could. Also the eyes
of Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes were very round and constant to him.
And before Madame de Sévénié was finished, Phinuit strolled in and
heard enough to make him subject Duchemin to a not unfriendly, steady
and open inspection.

And when the trumpets had been flourished finally for Duchemin, and he
had dutifully assured madame that she was too generous and had
acknowledged congratulations on his exploit, Phinuit strolled over and
offered a hand.

"Good work," he said in English. "Seen you before, haven't I,
somewhere, Mr. Duchemin?"

Under other circumstances Duchemin, not at all hoodwinked by this too
obvious stratagem, would have taken mean pleasure in looking blank and
begging monsieur to interpret himself in French. But, with or without
cunning, Phinuit's question was well-timed: Eve de Montalais was at
that moment entering the drawing-room with Madame la Comtesse de
Lorgnes, and she knew very well that Duchemin's English was quite as
good as his French.

"At the Café de l'Univers, this afternoon," he replied frankly.

"I remember. You drove away, just before the storm broke, in a
ramshackle rig that must have come out of the Ark."

"To come here, Mr. Phinuit."

"Funny," said Phinuit, with hesitation, "your being there, and then our
turning up here."

Duchemin thought he knew what was on the other's mind. "I was immensely
entertained--do you mind my saying so?--to hear the way your chauffeur
talked to you, monsieur. Tell me: Is it the custom in your country--?"

"Oh, Jules!" said Phinuit, and laughed. "Jules is my younger brother.
When he was demobilised his job was gone, back home, and I wished him
on Mr. Monk as a chauffeur. We're always kidding each other like that."

Now what could be more reasonable? Duchemin wondered, and concluded
that, if anything, it would be the truth. But he did not pretend to
himself that he wasn't, quite illogically and with no provocation
whatsoever, most vilely prejudiced against the lot of them.

"But you must know America, to speak the language as well as you do."

Duchemin nodded: "But very slightly, monsieur."

"I was wondering ... Somehow I can't get it out of my head I've seen
you somewhere before to-day."

"It is quite possible: when one moves about the world, one is
visible--n'est-ce pas, monsieur? But my home," Duchemin added, "is
Paris."

"I guess," said Phinuit in a tone of singular disappointment, "it must
have been there I saw you."

Duchemin's bow signified that he was content to let it go at that.
Moreover, Monk was signalling to Phinuit with his expressive eyebrows.

"What about the car, Phin?"

Examining his wrist watch, Phinuit drew near his employer. "Jules
should not need more than half an hour now, monsieur."

Was there, in this employment of French to respond to a question
couched in English, the suggestion of a subtle correction? From employé
to employer? If not, why must Duchemin have thought so? If so, why did
Monk, without betraying a sign of feeling the reproof, continue in
French?

"Did Jules say half an hour?"

"Yes, monsieur."

"My God!" Monk addressed the company: "If I were pressed for time, I
would rather have one of Jules' half-hours than anybody else's hour and
a half."

"Let us hope, however," the Comtesse de Lorgnes interposed sweetly, "by
that time this so dreadful tempest will have moderated."

"One has that hope," her husband uttered in a sepulchral voice.

"But, if the storm continue," Madame de Sévénié said, "you must not
think of travelling farther--on such a night. The château is large,
there is ample accommodation for all..."

There was a negligible pause, during which Duchemin saw the long lashes
of the Comtesse de Lorgnes curtain momentarily her disastrous violet
eyes: it was a sign of assent. Immediately it was followed by the least
of negative movements of her head. She was looking directly at Phinuit,
who, so far as Duchemin could see, made no sign of any sort, who
neither spoke nor acted on the signals which, indubitably, he had
received. On the other hand, it was Monk who acknowledged the proffered
courtesy.

"Madame de Sévénié is too good, but we could not dream of imposing ...
No, but truly, madame, I am obliged to ask my guests to proceed with me
to Millau to-night regardless of the weather. Important despatches
concerning my business await me there; I must consider them and reply
by cable to-night without fail. It is really of the most pressing
necessity. Otherwise we should be honoured..."

Madame de Sévénié inclined her head. "It must be as monsieur thinks
best."

"But Monsieur Monk!" madame la comtesse exclaimed with vivacity: "do
you know what I have just discovered? You and Madame de Montalais are
compatriots. She is of your New York. You must know each other."

"I have been wondering," Monk admitted, bowing to Eve, "if it were
possible I could be misled by a strong resemblance."

Eve turned to him with a look of surprise. "Yes, monsieur?"

"It is many years ago, you were a young girl then, if it was truly you,
madame; but I have a keen eye for beauty, I do not soon forget it ... I
was in the private office of my friend, Edmund Anstruther, of
Cottier's, one afternoon, selecting a trinket with his advice, and--"

"That was my father, monsieur."

"Then it was you, madame; I felt sure of it. You came in unannounced,
to see your father. He made me known to you as a friend of his, and
requested you to wait in an adjoining office. But that was not
necessary, I had already made up my mind, I left almost immediately. Do
you by any chance remember?"

The effort of the memory knitted Eve's brows; but in the end she shook
her head. "I am sorry, monsieur--"

"But why should you be? Why should you have remembered me? You were a
young girl, then, as I say, and I already a man of middle age. You saw
me once, for perhaps two minutes. It would have been a miracle had I
remained in your memory for as long as a single day. Nevertheless, _I_
remembered."

"I am so glad to meet a friend of my father's, monsieur."

"And I to recall myself to his daughter. I have often wondered ...
Would you mind telling me something, Madame de Montalais?"

"If I can..."

"Your father and I entertained one passion in common, one which he was
better able than I to gratify, for good diamonds and emeralds. I have
often wondered what became of his collection. He had some superb
stones."

"I inherited them, monsieur."

"They did not find their way into Cottier's stock, then?"

The Comtesse de Lorgnes gave a gesture of excitement. "But what a
fortunate woman! You truly have those magnificent emeralds, those
almost matchless diamonds, of which one has heard--the Anstruther
collection?"

"I have them, Madame la Comtesse," said Eve with a smiling nod--"yes."

"But, one presumes, in Paris, in some impregnable strong-box."

"No, madame, here."

"But not here, Madame de Montalais!" To this Eve gave another nod and
smile. "But are you not afraid--?"

"Of what, madame? That they will be stolen? No. They have been in my
possession for years--indeed, I should be unhappy otherwise, for I have
inherited my father's fondness for them--and nobody has ever even
attempted to steal them."

"But what of the affair at Montpellier the other night?" enquired the
Comte de Lorgnes--"that terrible attack upon you of which Madame de
Sévénié has just told us? Surely you would call that an attempt to
steal."

"Simple highway robbery, if you like, monsieur le comte. But even had
it proved successful, I had very few jewels with me. All that mattered,
all that I would have minded losing, were here, in a safe place."

"Nevertheless," said Monk--"if you will permit me to offer a word of
advice--I think you are very unwise."

"It may be, monsieur."

"Nonsense!" Madame de Sévénié declared. "Who would dare attempt to
burglarise the Château de Montalais? Such a thing was never heard of."

"There is always the first time for everything, Madame," Monk suggested
gently. "I fancy it was your first experience of the sort, at
Montpellier."

"A rascally chauffeur from Paris, a few low characters of the
department. Since the war things are not as they were."

"That is the very reason why I suggest, madame--"

"But, monsieur, I assure you all my life I have lived at Montalais.
Monsieur le curé will tell you I know every face hereabouts. And I know
that these poor country-folk, these good-natured dolts of peasants have
not the imagination, much less the courage--"

"But what of criminals from outside, from the great cities, from London
and Paris and Berlin? They have the imagination, the courage, the
skill; and if they ever get wind of the fortune Madame de Montalais
keeps locked up here..."

"What of the Lone Wolf?" the Comtesse de Lorgnes added. "I have heard
that one is once more in France."

Duchemin blinked incredulously at the speaker. "But when did you hear
that, madame la comtesse?"

"Quite recently, monsieur."

"I had understood that the monsieur in question had long since
retired."

"Only for the duration of the war, monsieur, I am afraid."

"It is true, according to all reports," the Comte de Lorgnes said:
"Monsieur Lanyard--that was the name, was it not?"

"If memory serves, monsieur le comte," Duchemin agreed.

"Yes." The count screwed his chubby features into a laughable mask of
gravity. "Now one remembers quite well. He passed as a collector of
objets d'art, especially of fine paintings, in Paris, for years before
the War--this Monsieur Michael Lanyard. Then he disappeared. It was
rumoured that he was of good service to the Allies as a spy, acting
independently; and after the Armistice, I have heard, he did well for
England in the matter of a Bolshevist conspiracy over there. But not
long ago, according to my information, Monsieur the Lone Wolf resigned
from the British Secret Service and returned to France--doubtless to
resume his old practices."

"Perhaps not," Duchemin suggested. "Possibly his reformation was
genuine and lasting."

The Comtesse de Lorgnes laughed that laugh of light derision which is
almost exclusively the laugh of the Parisienne of a certain class.
Remarking this, Duchemin eyed her mildly.

"Madame la Comtesse does not believe that. Well--who knows?--perhaps
she is right. Possibly she knows more of the nature and habits of the
criminal classes than we, sharing as she does, no doubt, the apparently
accurate and precise sources of information of monsieur le comte."

"At all events," Phinuit put in promptly, "I know what I would do if I
possessed a little fortune in jewels, and learned that a thief of the
ability of this Lone Wolf was at large in France: I would charter an
armoured train to convey the loot to the strongest safe deposit vault
in Paris."

"Thereby advertising to the Lone Wolf the exact location of the jewels,
monsieur, so that he might at his leisure make his plans perfect to
burglarise the vaults?"

"Is that likely?" Phinuit jeered.

Duchemin gave a slight shrug.

"One has heard that the fellow had real ability," he said.

The servant Jean came in, caught the eye of Madame de Sévénié, and
announced:

"The chauffeur of Monsieur Monk wishes me to say he has completed
repairs on the automobile, and the rain has ceased."




VII

TURN ABOUT


Duchemin took back with him to Nant, that night, not only monsieur le
curé in the hired calèche, but food in plenty for thought, together
with a nebulous notion, which by the time he woke up next morning had
taken shape as a fixed conviction, that he had better resign himself to
stop on indefinitely at the Grand Hôtel de l'Univers and ... see what
he should see.

That fatality on which he had so bitterly reflected when; acting as
emergency coachman en route from Montpellier-le-Vieux to La
Roque-Sainte-Marguerite, had him now fairly by the heels, as it were
his very shadow, something as tenacious, as inescapable. Or he had been
given every excuse for believing that such was the case.
Impossible--and the more so the longer he pondered it--to credit to
mere coincidence the innuendoes uttered at the château by Mr. Monk and
his party.

No: there had been malice in that, Duchemin was satisfied, if not some
darker purpose which perplexed the most patient scrutiny.

Now malice without incentive is unthinkable. But Duchemin searched his
memory in vain for anything he could have said or done to make anybody
desire to discredit him in the sight of the ladies of the Château de
Montalais. Still the attempt so to do had been unmistakable: the Lone
Wolf had been lugged into the conversation literally by his legendary
ears.

Surely, one would think, that nocturnal prowler of pre-War Paris had
been so long dead and buried even the most ghoulish gossip should
respect his poor remains and not disinter them merely to demonstrate
that the Past can never wholly die!

Had he, then, some enemy of old hidden under one of those sleek
surfaces?

An excellent visual memory reviewed successively the physical
characteristics of Messieurs Monk, Phinuit and de Lorgnes, and their
chauffeur Jules; with the upshot that Duchemin could have sworn that he
had never before known any of these.

And Madame la Comtesse? In respect of that one memory again drew a
blank, but remained unsatisfied. When one thought of her some remote,
faint chord of reminiscence thrilled and hummed, but never
recognisably. Not that there was anything remarkable in this: if one
cared to look for them, the world was thronged with women such as she,
handsome, spirited, well-groomed animals endued with some little
distinction of manner, native or acquired, with every appeal to the
senses and more or less, generally spurious, to the intelligence. They
made the theatre possible in France, leavened the social life of the
half-world, fluttered conspicuously and often disastrously through
circles of more sedate society, had their portraits in every Salon,
their photographs in every issue of the fashionable journals. Some made
history, others fiction: either would be insufferably dull lacking
their influence. But they were as much alike as so many peas, out of
their several shells, and the man who saw one inevitably remembered
all.

Setting aside then the theory of positive personal animus, what other
reason could there be for the effort to fasten upon Duchemin suspicion
of identity with the late Lone Wolf?

A sinister consideration, if any, and one, Duchemin suspected, not
unconnected with the much-talked-about jewels of Madame de Montalais...

But it was absurd to believe that persons fostering a design of such
nature would so deliberately and obviously advertise their purpose!

Cheerfully admitting that he was an imbecile to think of such a thing,
Duchemin set his mental alarm for six the following morning, rose at
that hour, and by eight had tramped the five miles between Nant and the
nearest railway station, Combe-Redonde; where he despatched a code
telegram to London, requesting any information it might have or be able
to obtain concerning Mr. Whitaker Monk of New York and the several
members of his party; the said information to be forwarded in code to
await the arrival of Andre Duchemin at the Hôtel du Commerce, Millau.

And then, partly to kill time, partly to get himself in trim for
to-morrow's trip, which he meant to make strictly in character as the
pedestrian tourist, he walked round three sides of a square in
returning to Nant--by way, that is, of Sauclières and the upper valley
of the Dourbie.

In the rich sunshine that fell from a cloudless sky--even the twin
peaks that stood sentinel over Nant had shamelessly put off their
yashmaks for the day--the rain-fresh world was sweet to see; and
Duchemin found himself consuming leagues with heels strangely light; or
he thought their lightness strange until he discovered the buoyance of
his heart, which wasn't strange at all. He knew too well the cause of
that; and had given over fretting about the inevitable. The sum of his
philosophy was now: _What must be, must_ .It would have been difficult
to be unhappy in the knowledge that one retained still the capacity to
love generously, honourably, expecting nothing, exacting nothing,
regretting nothing, not even in anticipation of the ultimate,
inevitable heartache.

Toward mid-afternoon a solitary mischance threw a passing shadow upon
his content. As he trudged along the river road, on the last lap of his
journey--Nant almost in sight--he heard a curious, intermittent rumble
on a steep hillside whose foot was skirted by the road, and sought its
cause barely in time to leap for life out of the path of a great
boulder that, dislodged from its bed, possibly by last night's deluge,
was hurtling downhill with such momentum that it must have crushed
Duchemin to a pulp had he been less alert.

Striking the road with an impact that left a deep, saucer-shaped dent,
with one final bound the huge stone, amid vast splashings, found its
last resting place in the river.

Duchemin moved out of the way of the miniature avalanche that followed,
and for some minutes stood reviewing with a truculent eye the face of
the hillside. But nothing moved thereon, it was quite bare of good
cover, little more than a slant of naked earth and shale, dotted
manywhere with boulders, cousins to that which sought his life--none,
however, so large. If human agency had moved it, the stone had come
from the high skyline of the hill; and by the time one could climb to
this last, Duchemin was sure, there would be nobody there to find.

The remainder of the afternoon was wasted utterly on the terrasse of
the Café de l'Univers, with the château ever in view, wishing it were
convenable to make one's duty call without more delay. But it wasn't;
not to wait a decent interval would be self-betraying, since Duchemin
had no longer any immediate intention of moving on from Nant; finally,
he rather hoped to get news at Millau that would strengthen a prayer to
Eve de Montalais to be sensible and remove her jewels to a place of
safe-keeping before it was too late.

Millau, however, disappointed. At the end of a twenty-mile walk on a
day of suffocating heat, Duchemin plodded wearily into the Hôtel du
Commerce, engaged a room for the night, and was given a telegram from
London which rewarded decoding to some such effect as this:

"MONK AMERICAN INDEPENDENT MEANS GOOD REPUTE NO INFORMATION AS TO
OTHERS HAVE ASKED SURÉTÉ CONCERNING LORGNES WOULD GIVE SOMETHING TO
KNOW WHAT MISCHIEF YOU ARE MEDDLING WITH THIS TRIP AND WHY THE DEUCE
YOU MUST."

Few things are better calculated to curdle the milk of human kindness
than to find that one's fellow-man has meanly contrived to keep his
reputation fair when one is satisfied it should be otherwise. Duchemin
used bitter language in strict confidence with himself, disliked his
dinner and, after conscientiously loathing the sights of Millau for an
hour or two, sought his bed in the devil's own humour.

Though he waited till eleven of the following forenoon, there was no
supplementary telegram: London evidently meant him to understand that
the Surété in Paris had communicated nothing to the discredit of
Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes and his consort.

Enquiry of the administration of the Hôtel de Commerce elicited the
information that the Monk party had stopped there on the night of the
storm, doubled back in the morning to visit Montpellier-le-Vieux,
returning for midday déjeuner, and had then proceeded for Paris, just
like any other well-behaved company of tourists.

There was nothing more to be done but go back to Nant and--what made it
even more disgusting--nothing to be done there except ... wait...

Thoroughly disgruntled, more than half persuaded he had staked a claim
for a mare's-nest, he took the road in the heat of a day even more
oppressive than its yesterday. In the valley of the Dourbie the air was
stagnant, lifeless. After eight miles of it Duchemin was guilty of two
mistakes of desperation.

In the first instance he paused in La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite and,
tormented by thirst, refreshed himself at the auberge where the
barouche and guide had been hired to convey the party from Montalais on
to Montpellier. The landlord remembered Duchemin and made believe he
didn't, serving the wayfarer with a surly grace the only drink he would
admit he had to sell, an atrociously acid cider fit to render the last
stage of thirst worse than the first.

Duchemin, however, thought it safer than the water of the place, when
he had spied out the associations of the well.

He drank sitting on a bench outside the door of the auberge. He could
hear the voice of the landlord inside, grumbling and growling, to what
purport he couldn't determine. But it wasn't difficult to guess; and
before Duchemin was finished he had testimony to the rightness of his
surmise, finding himself the cynosure of more than a few pair of eyes
set in the ill-favoured faces of natives of La Roque.

One gathered that the dead guide had enjoyed a fair amount of local
popularity.

While Duchemin drank and smoked and pored over a pocket-map of the
department, a lout of a lad shambled out of the auberge wearing a fixed
scowl in no degree mitigated by the sight of the customer. In the
dooryard, which was also the stableyard, the boy caught and saddled a
dreary animal, apparently a horse designed by a Gothic architect,
mounted, and rode off in the direction of Nant.

Then Duchemin committed his second error of judgment, which consisted
in thinking to find better and cooler air on the heights of the Causse
Larzac, across the river, together with a shorter way to
Nant--indicated on the pocket-map as a by-road running in a tolerably
direct line across the plateau--than that which followed the windings
of the stream.

Accordingly he crossed the Dourbie, toiled up a zig-zag path cut in the
face of the frowning cliff, reached the top in a bath of sweat, and sat
down to cool and breathe himself.

The view was splendid, almost worth the climb. Duchemin could see for
miles up and down the valley, a panorama wildly picturesque and limned
like a rainbow. Across the way La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite stood out
prominently and with such definition in that clear air that Duchemin
identified the figure of the landlord, standing in the door of the
auberge with arms raised and elbows thrust out on a level with his
eyes: the pose of a man using field-glasses.

Duchemin wondered if he ought to feel complimented. Then he looked up
the valley and saw, far off, a tiny cloud of dust kicked up by the
heels of the horse ridden by the boy from the auberge, making good time
on the highway to Nant. And again Duchemin wondered...

Having rested, he picked himself up, found his road, a mere trail of
wagon tracks, and mindful of the cooling drinks to be had in the Café
de l'Univers, put his best foot foremost.

After a time something, call it instinct, impelled him to look back the
way he had come. Half a mile distant he saw the figure of a peasant
following the same road. Duchemin stopped and waited for the other to
come up, thinking to get a better look at him, perhaps some definite
information about the road and in particular as to his chances of
finding drinkable water. But when he stopped the man stopped, sat him
down upon a rock, filled a pipe, and conspicuously rested.

Duchemin gave an impatient gesture and moved on. After another mile he
glanced overshoulder again. The same peasant occupied the same relative
distance from him.

But if the fellow were following him with a purpose, he could readily
lose himself in that wild land before Duchemin could run him down; and
if, on the contrary, he proved to be only a peaceable wayfarer, he was
bound to be a dull companion on the road, and an unsavory one to boot.
So Duchemin did nothing to discourage his voluntary shadow; but looking
back from time to time, never failed to see that squat,
round-shouldered figure in the middle distance of the landscape,
following him with the doggedness of Fate. Toward evening, however, of
a sudden--between two glances--the fellow disappeared as completely and
mysteriously as if he had fallen or dived into an aven.

Thus definite mental irritation was added to the physical discomforts
he suffered. For if anything it was hotter on the high causse than it
had been in the valley. An intermittent breeze imitated to vicious
perfection draughts from a furnace. And if this were a short cut to
Nant, Duchemin's judgment was gravely at fault.

Otherwise the journey was not unlike an exaggerated version of his walk
from Meyrueis to Montpellier-le-Vieux, except that the road was clearly
marked and he found less climbing to do. He saw neither hamlets nor
farmsteads, and found no water. By the middle of the afternoon his
thirst had become sheer torture.

In dusk of evening he stumbled down into the valley again and struck
the river road about midway between the Château de Montalais and Nant.
At this junction several dwellings clustered, in that fading light dark
masses on either side of the road. Duchemin noticed a few shadowy
shapes loitering about, but was too far gone in fatigue and thirst to
pay them any heed. He had no thought but to stop at the first house and
beg a cup of water. As he lifted a hand to knuckle the door he was
attacked.

With no more warning than a cry, the signal for the onslaught, and the
sudden scuffling noise of several pair of feet, he wheeled, found
himself already closely pressed by a number of men, and struck out at
random. His stick landed on somebody's head with a resounding thump
followed by a yell of pain. Then three men were grappling with him, two
more seeking to aid them, and another lay in the roadway clutching a
fractured skull and spitting oaths and groans.

His stick was seized and wrenched away, he was over-whelmed by numbers.
The knot of struggling figures toppled and went to the dust, Duchemin
underneath, so weighed down that he could not for the moment move a
hand toward his pistol.

Half-stifled by the reek of unwashed flesh, he heard broken phrases
growled in voices hoarse with effort and excitement:

"The knife!" ... "Hold him!" ... "Stand clear and let me--!" ... "The
knife!"

Struggling madly, he worked a leg free and kicked with all his might.
One of his assailants howled aloud and fell back to nurse a broken
shin. Two others scrambled out of the way, leaving one to pin him down
with knees upon his chest, another to wield the knife.

Staring eyes caught a warning gleam on descending steel. Duchemin
squirmed frantically to one side, and felt cold metal kiss the skin
over his ribs as the blade penetrated his clothing, close under the
armpit.

Before the man with the knife could strike again, Duchemin, roused to a
mightier effort, threw off the ruffian on his chest, got on his knees
and, raining blows right and left as the others closed in again,
somehow managed to scramble to his feet.

Fist-work told. For an instant he stood quite free, the centre of a
circle of uncertain assassins whose cowardice gave him time to whip out
his pistol. But before he could level it a man was on his back, his
wrist was seized and the weapon twisted from his grasp.

A cry of triumph was echoed by exclamations of alarm as, disarmed,
Duchemin was again left free, the thugs standing back to let the pistol
do its work. In that instant a broad sword of light swung round a
nearby corner and smote the group: the twin, glaring eyes of a motor
car flooded with blue-white radiance that tableau of one man at bay in
the middle of the road, in a ring of merciless enemies.

Duchemin's cry for help was uttered only an instant before his pistol
exploded in alien hands. The headlights showed him distinctly the face
of the man who fired, the same face of fat features black with soot
that he had seen by moonlight at Montpellier-le-Vieux.

But the bullet went wild, and the automobile did not stop, but drove
directly at the group and so swiftly that the flash of the shot was
still vivid in Duchemin's vision when the car swept between him and
those others, scattering them like chickens.

Simultaneously the brakes were set, the dark bulk began to slide with
locked wheels to a stop, and a voice cried: "Quickly, monsieur,
quickly!"--the voice of Eve de Montalais.

In two bounds Duchemin overtook the car and before it had come to a
standstill leaped upon the running-board and grasped the side. He had
one glimpse of the set white face of Eve, en profile, as she bent
forward, manipulating the gear-shift. Then the pistol spat again, its
bullet struck him a blow of sickening agony in the side.

Aware that he was dangerously wounded, he put all that he had left of
strength and will into one final effort, throwing his body across the
door. As he fell sprawling into the tonneau consciousness departed like
a light withdrawn.




VIII

IN RE AMOR ET AL.


In the course of two weeks or so Duchemin was able to navigate a
wheeled chair, bask on the little balcony outside his bedchamber
windows in the Château de Montalais, and even--strictly against
orders--take experimental strolls.

The wound in his side still hurt like the very deuce at every
ill-considered movement; but Duchemin was ever the least patient of men
unless the will that coerced him was his own; constraint to another's,
however reasonable, irked him to exasperation; so that these falterings
in forbidden ways were really (as he assured Eve de Montalais when, one
day, she caught him creeping round his room, one hand pressed against
the wall for support, the other to his side) in the nature of a sop to
his self-respect.

"You've only got to tell me not to do a thing often enough," he
commented as she led him back to his chair, "to fill me with unholy
desire to do it if I die in the attempt."

"Isn't that a rather common human failing?" she asked, wheeling the
invalid chair through one of the french windows to the balcony.

"That's what makes it all seem so unfair."

Smiling, the woman turned the back of the chair to the brightest glare
of sunshine, draped a light rug over the invalid's knees, and seated
herself in a wicker chair, facing him.

"Makes all what seem so unfair?"

"The indignity of being born human." He accepted a cigarette and waxed
didactic: "The one thing that the ego can find to reconcile it with
existence is belief in its own uniquity."

"I don't think," she interrupted with a severe face belied by amused
eyes, "that sounds quite nice."

"Uniquity? Because it sounds like iniquity? They are not unrelated.
What makes iniquity seem attractive is as a rule its departure from the
commonplace."

"But you were saying--?"

"Merely it's our personal belief that our emotions and sensations and
ways of thought are peculiar to ourselves, individually, that sometimes
makes the game seem worth the scandal."

"Yes: one presumes we all do think that..."

"But no sooner does one get firmly established in that particular phase
of self-complacence than along comes Life, grinning like a gamin, and
kicks over our pretty house of cards--shows us up to ourselves by
revealing our pet, exclusive idiosyncrasies as simple infirmities all
mortal flesh is heir to."

"Monsieur is cynic..."

"Madame means obvious. Well: if I patter platitudes it is to conceal a
sense of gratification." Eve arched her eyebrows. "I mean, you have
shown me that I share at least one quality with you: instinctive
resentment of the voice of reason."

She pronounced a plaintive "Mon Dieu!" and appealing to Heaven for
compassion declared: "He means again to wrestle spiritually with me
about the proper disposition of my jewels."

"No, madame: pardon. I am contemplating a long series of exhaustive
arguments designed to prove it your duty to leave your jewels where
they are, in all their noble insecurity. This in the firm belief that
to plead with you long enough to adopt this course will result in your
going and doing otherwise out of sheer..."

"Perversity, monsieur?"

"Humanity, madame!"

Eve de Montalais laughed the charming, low-keyed laugh of a happily
diverted woman.

"But spare yourself, monsieur. I surrender at discretion: I will do as
you wish."

"Truly? Rather than listen to my discourse, you actually agree to
remove your jewels to a safe place?"

"Even so, monsieur. As soon as you are able to get about, and the
Château de Montalais lacks a guest, I will leave Louise to take care of
madame ma mère for a few days while I journey to Paris--"

"Alone?"

"But naturally."

"Taking your jewels with you?"

"Why else do I go?"

"But, madame, you must not--"

"And why?"

"You, a woman! travel alone to Paris with a treasure in jewels? Ah, no!
I should say not!"

"Monsieur is emphatic," Eve suggested demurely.

"Monsieur means to be. Rather than let you run such a risk I would
steal the jewels myself, convey them to Paris, put them in safe
keeping, and send you the receipt."

"What a lot of trouble monsieur would save me, if he would only be so
kind as to do as he threatens."

"And how amusing if he were arrested en route," Duchemin supplemented
with a wry smile.

"I am quite confident of your ability to elude the police, monsieur."

"Do I hear you compliment me?"

"If you take it so..."

"But suppose you were not confident of my good will?"

"Impossible."

"Madame is too flattering; one is sure she is too wise to put so great
a temptation in the way of any man."

"Monsieur is the reverse of flattering; he implies that one does not
know where one can repose trust."

"I must warn madame there are those in this world who would call her
faith misplaced."

"Doubtless. But what of that? Am I to distrust you because others might
who do not know you so well?"

"But--madame--you can hardly claim to know me well.

"Listen, my friend." Eve de Montalais flicked away her cigarette and
sat forward, elbows on knees, hands laced, her level gaze holding his.
"It is true, our acquaintance is barely three weeks old; but you do
injustice to my insight if you assume I have learned nothing about you
in all that time. You have not been secretive with me. The mask you
hold between yourself and the world, lest it pry into what does not
concern it, has been lowered when you have talked with me; and I have
had eyes to see what was revealed--"

"Ah, madame!"

"--the nature of a man of honour, monsieur, simple of heart and
generous, as faithful as he is brave."

Eve had spoken impulsively, with warmth of feeling unrealised until too
late. Now slow colour mantled her cheeks. But her eyes remained
steadfast, candid, unashamed. It was Duchemin who dropped his gaze,
abashed.

And though nothing had any sense in his understanding other than the
words which he had just heard from the lips of the woman who held his
love--as he had known now these many days--some freak of dual
consciousness made him see, for the first time, in that moment, how
oddly bleached and wasted seemed the powerful, nervous, brown hands
that rested on his knees. And he thought: It will be long before I am
strong again.

With a troubled smile he said: "I would give much to be worthy of what
you think of me, madame. And I would be a poor thing indeed if I failed
to try to live up to your faith."

"You will not fail," she replied. "What you are, you were before my
faith was, and will be afterwards, when..."

She did not finish, but of a sudden recollected herself, lounged back
in her chair, and laughed quietly, with humorous appeal to his
sympathy.

"So, that is settled: I am not to be permitted to take my jewels to
Paris alone. What then, monsieur?"

"I would suggest you write your bankers," said Duchemin seriously, "and
tell them that you contemplate bringing to Paris some valuables to
entrust to their care. Say that you prefer not to travel without
protection, and request them to send you two trusted men--detectives,
they may call them--to guard you on the way. They will do so without
hesitation, and you may then feel entirely at ease."

"Not otherwise, you think?"

"Not otherwise, I feel sure."

"But why? You have been so persistent about this matter, monsieur. Ever
since that night when those curious people stopped here in the rain....
Can it be that you suspect them of evil designs upon my trinkets?"
Duchemin shrugged. "Who knows, madame, what they were? You call them
'curious'; for my part I find the adjective apt."

"I fancy I know what you thought about them..."

"And that is--?"

"That they rather led the conversation to the subject of my jewels."

"Such was my thought, indeed."

"Perhaps you were right. If so, they learned all they needed to know."

"Except possibly the precise location of your strong box."

"They may have learned even that."

"How, madame?"

"I don't know; but if they were what you suspect they were, they were
clever people, far more clever than poor provincials like us." She took
a moment for thought. "But I am puzzled by their harping on the subject
of--I think they called him the Lone Wolf. Now why should they do
that?"

Duchemin was constrained to take refuge in another shrug. "Who knows?"
he iterated. "If they were as clever as we assume, doubtless they were
clever enough to have a motive even for that."

"He really existed, this Lone Wolf? He was more than a creature of
fable?"

"Assuredly, madame. For years he was the nightmare and the scourge of
people of wealth in every capital of Europe."

"Why did they call him the Lone Wolf, do you know?"

"I believe some imaginative Parisian journalist fixed that sobriquet on
him, in recognition of the theory upon which, apparently, he operated."

"And that was--?"

"That a criminal, at least a thief, to be successful must be absolutely
anonymous and friendless; in which case nobody can betray him. As
madame probably understands, criminals above a certain level of
intelligence are seldom caught by the police except through the
treachery of accomplices. The Lone Wolf seems to have exercised a fair
amount of ingenuity and prudence in making his coups; and inasmuch as
he had no confederates, not a living soul in his confidence, there was
no one who could sell him to the authorities."

"Still, in the end--?"

"Oh, no, madame. He was never caught. He simply ceased to thieve."

"I wonder why..."

"I believe because he fell in love and considered good faith with the
object of his affections incompatible with a career of crime."

"So he gave up crime. How romantic! And the woman: did she appreciate
the sacrifice?"

"While she lived, yes, madame. Or so they say. Unfortunately, she
died."

"And then--?"

"So far as is known the converted enemy to Society did not backslide;
the Lone Wolf never prowled again."

"An extraordinary story."

"But is not every story that has to do with the workings of the human
soul? What one of us has not buried in him a story quite as strange?
Even you--"

"Monsieur deceives himself. I am simply--what you see."

"But what I see is not simple, but complex and intriguing beyond
expression. A woman of your sort walling herself up in a wilderness,
renouncing the world, renouncing life itself in its very heyday--!"

"But hardly that, monsieur."

"Then I am stupid..."

"I will explain." The sleekly coiffured brown head bent low over hands
that played absently with their jewels. "To a woman of my sort,
monsieur, life is not life without love. I lived once for a little
time, then love was taken out of my life. When my sorrow had spent
itself, I knew that I must find love again if I were to go on living.
What was I to do? I knew that love is not found through seeking. So I
waited..."

"Such philosophy is rare, madame."

"Philosophy? No: I will not call it that. It was knowledge--the heart
wise in its own wisdom, surpassing mine, telling me that if I would but
be patient love would one day seek me out again, wherever I might wait,
and give me once more--life."

She rose and went to the window, paused there, turning back to Duchemin
a face composed but fairer for a deepened flush.

"But this is not writing to my bankers, monsieur," she said in a
changed but steady voice. "I must do that at once if I am to get the
letter in to-day's post."

"If madame will accept the advice of one not without some
experience..."

"What else does monsieur imagine I am doing?"

"Then you will write privately and burn your blotting paper; after
which you will post the letter with your own hands, letting nobody see
the address."

"And when shall I say I will make the journey?"

"As soon as your bankers can send their people to the Château de
Montalais."

"That will be in three days..."

"Or less."

"As soon as your bankers can send their people to the Château de
Montalais."

"That will be in three days..."

"Or less." "But you will not be strong enough to leave us within
another week."

"What has that to do--?"

"This: that I refuse positively to go away while you are our guest,
monsieur. Somebody must watch over you and see that you come to no
harm."

"But madame--!"

"No: I am quite resolved. Monsieur has too rare a genius for getting in
the way of danger. I shall not leave the château before you do. So I
shall set this day week for the date of my journey."




IX

BLIND MAN'S BUFF


In short, Monsieur Duchemin considered convalescence at the Chateau de
Montalais one of the most agreeable of human estates, and counted the
cost of admission thereunto by no means dear; and with all his grousing
(in respect of which he was conscientious, holding it at once a duty
and a perquisite of his disability) he was at heart in no haste
whatever to be discharged as whole and hale. The plain truth is, the
man malingered shamelessly and even took a certain pride in the low
cunning which enabled him to pose on as the impatient patient when he
was so very well content to take his ease, be waited on and catered to,
and listen for the footsteps of Eve de Montalais and the accents of her
delightful voice.

These last he heard not often enough by half. Still, he seldom lacked
company in the long hours when Eve was busy with the petty duties of
her days, and left him lorn. Madame de Sévénié had taken a flattering
fancy to him, and frequently came to