He smiled, but wagged his head in stubborn earnestness: "Sure of what
else I must say."
"There is more?"
"Much more." The man leaned over the table, with an even deeper accent
of sincerity in his guarded voice: "I love you so dearly, Eve, the
thought of a life without you is beyond my understanding . . . Yet I may
not ask you to be my wife."
"May not?" Hands of consummate grace fluttered above the cloth in
tragicomic impatience. "Or will not?"
"Will not because I may not."
Eve de Montalais held a small pause of perplexity, made a small sign of
frustration. "It is a riddle," she said. "But when one speaks in
riddles, one speaks playfully . . . as you do not. Tell me, then, my
Michael! why you think you may not ask me to marry you, when between us
all else has been said?"
"I love you too well--"
"Too well to make me happy?"
"Too well to let you stake your happiness on the hazards of such a life
as mine."
"You forget, if you deny me the right to share those hazards, whatever
they may be, I shall have no happiness to risk."
"You are young," the man thoughtfully stated, "the best of your life
lies before you. And you are, I think, the loveliest woman that ever
lived. Many men after me will long for and love you, one of them you
will find worthy . . ."
"Still, you forget, my heart is given."
"Time heals all memories."
"You believe that?" She withdrew a little, settling back in her chair,
and used her fan, gazing away over its nodding plumes. "I was mistaken,
then; I believed you loved me too well to hold my love the whim of a day
or a month or a year. I thought you knew me too well to think my love
was lightly given, or once given might be recalled."
He winced under that reproach. "Without your help," he pleaded, "how
shall I be strong? You know what it costs me to say what I am saying,
that I could not say anything to displease you if I held your happiness
second to my own. It is of you alone I am thinking; you whom I love and
who are not for me."
"If you love me," Eve de Montalais said quietly, "you will never leave
me."
"Better that; better you should learn to hold the memory of me in
contempt, than I should risk your waking up too late, as some day you
would surely waken, to realize you had joined your life to the life of
one whom the world esteems a common thief."
"'The world esteems'!" Disdain touched her lips. "You are not that."
"I was once--"
"The past is dead."
"Or merely sleeping? Who shall say?"
"Ah no! my friend, you waste your time if you ask me to believe that."
The music fell, and the gay rumour of voices that replaced it, as the
dancers began to move back to their tables, was not enough to warrant
the former sense of security from eavesdropping by inadvertence or
intention. In tacit silence Madame de Montalais extended her hand,
Lanyard offered his cigarette-case, then a match. But after a single
inhalation the woman forgot to smoke, and permitted the tobacco to fume
to waste in its jewelled holder, her attention seemingly diverted by the
pomp and vanity of that sumptuous cavern wherein the folk of her world
were accustomed nightly to foregather and play yet once again the
time-old game whose fascination never fails, whose stake is love . . .
But Lanyard had eyes for his love alone.
Her beauty in his sight was like a pain in his heart, a hand at his
throat. Slender and gracious and fair, with a sense, hard to define, of
something more than human in that warmly human loveliness, something
that made one think of a sickle of moon afloat in an azure midnight sky,
of dawn-light fleeting breathlessly athwart a summer sea . . .
His for the asking!
He had loved before, but never as now, never with this tenderness, this
all-possessing wish to serve and safeguard, this passionate
self-abnegation . . .
"What is it?" he asked, seeing her start, with an almost imperceptible
suggestion of aversion, as she sat looking away across the room.
"That man," she replied--"that creature, rather, whom one never sees
without shuddering. And one sees him everywhere."
Even before he looked Lanyard had divined the occasion of this
antipathy. It was true, what she had said: ever since this tide in their
affairs had brought these two together in New York, no matter where they
turned of an evening in quest of amusement, or rather for an excuse to
be with each other, at some time in its course they seemed fated to
cross the path of this personality, odd, compelling, and in some how
forbidding.
One saw the man now, with a party of guests laying claim to a table on
the far side of the floor, a table that had been conspicuously reserved
and refused to others, though the Crystal Room was crowded and
late-comers were importunate. A gross body, ponderous and slow of
movement, with a heavy face of singularly immobile cast, resembling and
for all its fleshiness as destitute of colour as a mask of papier-mâché,
with a strange effect of transparency as if lighted by an inner glow
akin to phosphorescence. Punctiliously mannered and at all times dressed
with the nicest care as to the cut and propriety of his clothing, but
unfailingly bedecked like a sultan with an incalculable wealth of
jewellery in sets meticulously matched; yesterday with emeralds, today
with diamonds, tomorrow with rubies, at another time it might be with
fire-opals burning on fingers and watch chain, serving as cuff-links,
waistcoat buttons, and studs for his shirt: a bizarre shape to meet in
the haunts of fashion . . . And never alone, always surrounded by a
little court of sycophants, seldom twice of the same composition, but as
a rule including a few fragile beauties, apparently of the stage, and
invariably one whom Lanyard took to be a paid clown, an undersized man
with the face of a sage droll, the dress and deportment of a diplomat,
and something in his fixed solemnity which suggested an ever-present
expectation that his lightest word would win a gale of laughter--as,
indeed, more often than not it seemed to.
The other sat, as by habit, taciturn and aloof in the heart of his noisy
company. A dull man or a deep. Speaking seldom, eating little, drinking
nothing, always smoking, holding one pose without stir for long minutes
at a time: only the eyes beneath hood-like lids, eyes of a repellant
pallor and surprising brightness, were restless, ranging from face to
face, not only of his companions but of every person within his scope of
vision, peering into each with a steadfast, imperturbable and
penetrating curiosity . . .
Lanyard had more than once been resentfully conscious of that prying
look. He was conscious of it now and rather hoped its author could read
his lips, reckoning its impertinence ample provocation for the temper of
what he was about to say.
"The Sultan of Loot," he mused aloud, adding in answer to Eve's mirthful
glance: "my private nickname for the animal. If it does him injustice,
he ought to take in his sign, don't you think? I know him by sight, of
course; but that is all. Some bucketeer or bootlegger, no doubt;
Prohibition no less than Providence makes strange bedfellows, nowadays,
in this mad country."
"Strange," the woman observed, "how people one doesn't know sometimes
seem to haunt one."
"When it _is_ strange."