success keeping out of gaol. Uneasy about him as long as he remains at
large. Fully appreciate you cannot trust yourself alone in the dark.
Therefore cheerfully delegating preservation your virtue while in Paris
to Mlle. Athenais Reneaux, maiden lady mature charms whom I beg you
will respect as you would my sister. Wishing you enjoyable intellectual
evening--
"W."
It needed receipt of a petit-bleu, while he was dressing for dinner, to
cure Lanyard of an attack of premonitory shivers brought on by
recollection of the awful truth that one is never really safe in
trifling with an Englishman's sense of humour. "Dear monsieur
Martin:--It is too sweet of you to remember your promise to ask me to
dine the first time you came to Paris. Since you leave it to me, shall
we say the Ritz, at half past seven? In case your memory for faces is
poor--it has been a long time since we met, hasn't it?--I shall be
wearing the conventional fast black with my very best ingenue
expression; and my feather fan will be flame-coloured.
"Always to you--
"Athenais Reneaux."
Now that sounded more like ...
Only it was a bit debilitating to contemplate, as the mirror insisted
one must, the shortcomings of machine-made evening clothes, whose
obviously exorbitant cost as a post-War luxury did nothing to make
amends for their utter want of personal feeling. For one needs sympathy
in a dress-coat quite as much as cloth.
Still, it was a tolerably personable figure that suffered Lanyard's
critical inspection. And an emergency is an emergency. Those readily
serviceable clothes were of more value than the most superbly tailored
garments that could possibly have been made up for him in any
reasonable length of time. For to-morrow night it might, and as Lanyard
held surely would, be too late to accomplish what he hoped to
accomplish to-night, and for whose accomplishment evening dress was
indispensable. Since Wertheimer had passed the word on, the name of the
Comte de Lorgnes would be published to the world in the morning papers,
and by evening the birds, if they were wise, would be in full flight.
Whereas to-night, while still that poor mutilated body lay nameless in
the Morgue...
Mademoiselle Athenais Reneaux lived up in most gratifying fashion to
the tone of her note. In the very beginning she demonstrated excellent
discretion by failing to be on hand and eager when Lanyard strolled
into the Ritz on the minute of their appointment. To the contrary she
was all of twenty-five minutes late; a circumstance so consistently
feminine as to rob their meeting of any taint of the extraordinary;
they might have been simple sweethearts meeting to dine remote from
jealous or censorious eyes, rather than one of the most useful Parisian
agents of the British Secret Service under orders to put her talents at
the disposition of a man who was to her nothing more than an everyday
name.
She swept spiritedly into the lounge of the Ritz, a tall, fair girl,
very good-looking indeed and brilliantly costumed, and placed Monsieur
Paul Martin in one glance, on the instant of his calculated start of
recognition. At once her face lighted up with a charming smile--few
women could boast teeth as white and fine--and almost before Lanyard
could extricate himself from his chair she was at pause before him,
holding his hand.
"Paul!" she cried in lilting accents. "I'm so glad! It's been simply
ages.... And looking so well! I don't believe you've changed a bit."
The nicely judged pitch of her voice, neither so high nor so low as to
attract more than passing attention, won approval which Lanyard put
into the pressure of his lips upon her hand and the bow, at once
punctilious and intimate, that accompanied it.
"And you, Athenais, always exquisite, but to-day...Truly one has never
seen you looking better."
"Flattery," she commented. "But I love it!"
Meanwhile her gaze, that seemed so constant to his eyes, reviewed other
people in the lounge in one swift, searching glance, and returned to
Lanyard with a droop of the lashes, imperceptible to all but him, that
signified there was no one present likely in her esteem to prove
dangerous to their peace of mind.
"Flattery? To you? But impossible!"
He delighted her, and she showed it openly. But her lips said only:
"Have I kept you waiting a frightfully long time, poor boy?"
"Let your appetite accuse you, Athenais."
"But I am starving!"
"Then, as I take it, nothing on earth can prevent our going in to
dinner."
Lanyard had already consulted with the maître d'hôtel over the menu and
the reservation. As the two settled down at a table on the side of the
room, not conspicuously far from any other in use, and at the same time
comfortably detached, their iced melon was waiting to be served.
"Always the most thoughtful of men," Mademoiselle Reneaux declared. "No
fussing with the carte, no thrusting it into one's hand and saying:
'See anything you'd like, my dear? I rather fancy the boeuf-à-la-mode
for myself!' That's why I'd adore dining with you, Paul, even if I
didn't adore you for yourself."
"One is well repaid when one's modest efforts are so well appreciated."
"Blague, my friend, sheer blague. You know you relish a good dinner of
your own ordering far more than anybody's appreciation, even mine."
The waiters had retired, leaving them alone in a momentary oasis of
public isolation.
"Mademoiselle," said Lanyard in more formal vein, "I am sure,
underestimates my capacity for appreciation. May one venture to
compliment mademoiselle, who is marvellous in so many bewitching ways?"
"Why not, monsieur? Was ever music sweeter?" The girl laughed; then her
eyes sobered while her features retained their appearance of complete
amusement. "Monsieur received a telegram this afternoon?"
"Yes, mademoiselle. And you?"
"It is here--since I am. May I see yours?"
With a gay gesture she handed over her telegram from London and took
his in exchange.
The ordinary cipher of the B. S. S. was as readily intelligible to both
as if the messages had been couched in open French or English.
Lanyard read:
"Kindly place yourself beginning with dinner to-night and for duration
his stay in Paris at the commands of Paul Martin, Hôtel Chatham,
lunatic but harmless and of great value to us. He seems to be at
present concerned with some affair outside our knowledge, but
presumably desperate, else he would not be interested. Please exert
best endeavours to get him out of France alive as soon as possible."
The girl was laughing as she returned Lanyard's telegram and received
her own.
"'Mature charms'!" she pouted. "'Enjoyable intellectual evening'! Oh,
how depressing! Poor Paul! but you must have felt discouraged."
"I did--at first."
"And afterwards--?"
"Disappointed."
"And are you going to obey that injunction to treat me as somebody's
sister?"
"Never in my life!"
"How then?"
"As anybody's wife." Perplexity knitted a little pucker in her
delicately lined brows.
"Paul! you couldn't speak French so well and be an Englishman!"
"I assure you, Athenais, I am--mentally--a native of France."
She sighed luxuriously. "What an amusing prospect! And this is the sort
of man at whose commands I am required to place myself."
"Not required, Athenais, requested--begged, besought!"
"I like that better. And," she enquired demurely, "may one ask what
are monsieur's commands?"
"First: you will continue to flirt with me as at
present--outrageously."
"Even when you make it so difficult?"
"And then, to waste an evening in my society."
"Must it be wasted?"
"That will be as it falls out."
"And what do we do with this evening of such questionable value?"
"We finish dinner here at our leisure; we smoke and chat a while in the
lounge, if you like, or if nothing better offers we go to a play; and
then you will take me by the hand, if you please, mademoiselle..."
"In the maternal manner appropriate to mature charms, I presume?"
"Precisely."
"What then?"
"You will--always remembering that my interest in such things is merely
academic--you will then lead me hither and yon, as your whim lists, and
show me how Paris amuses itself in these days of its nocturnal
decadence. You will dutifully pretend to drink much more champagne than
is good for you and to be enjoying yourself as you seldom have before.
If I discover an interest in people I may chance to see, you will be
good enough to tell me who they are and--other details concerning their
ways of life."
"If I know."
"But I am sure you know everyone worth knowing in Paris, Athenais."
"Then--if I am right in assuming you are looking for some person in
particular--"
"You have reason, mademoiselle."
"I run the risk of losing an entertaining evening."
"Not necessarily. Besides, there are many evenings. Are you not at my
commands for the duration of my stay in Paris?"
"True. So I will have to chance my perilous question.... I presume one
can't help being true to the traditions of one's sex."
"Inquisitive, you mean? But what else is every thinking creature, male
or female? What are men of science? What--?"
"But it was Eve who first--"
"Ah! raking up old scandal, eh? But I'll wager something it was really
Adam who--taking a purely scientific interest in the business--egged
Eve on to try a bite of apple, asserting that the domestic menu lacked
variety, telling himself if she died of it, it would only cost him
another rib to replace her, and cheap at the price."
"Paul: you are too gallant. Wait till I try to find out something about
you, directly or indirectly, and see what you will then have to say
about the curiosity of women."
"But I shouldn't mind, it would be too flattering. So dig away."
"I will. Who is it you're looking for in Paris after midnight?"
"Anyone of several people." "Perhaps I know them. It might save time if
you would give me their names."
"Now it is you who ask me to risk losing an enjoyable evening. But so
be it. Le Comte de Lorgnes?"
Mademoiselle Reneaux looked blank.
"Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes?"
The young woman shook her head.
"Both of a class sure to be conspicuous in such places as Maxim's,"
Lanyard explained. "The names, then, are probably fictitious."
"If you could describe them, perhaps--?"
"Useless, I am afraid; neither is an uncommon type. Any word picture of
either would probably fit anyone of a score of people of the same life.
Are you then acquainted with a man named Phinuit--given name
unknown--an American?"
"No."
"Mr. Whitaker Monk, of New York?"
"The millionaire?"
"That is quite possible."
"He made his money in munitions, I believe," the girl reflected--"or
perhaps it was oil."
"Then you do know him?"
"I met him one night, or rather one morning several weeks ago, with a
gay party that joined ours at breakfast at Pré-Catelan."
"And do we still drive out to Pré-Catelan to milk the cows after an
adventurous night, mademoiselle?" She nodded; and Lanyard sighed: "It
is true, then: man ages, his follies never."
"A quaint little stupid," the girl mused.
"Pardon, mademoiselle?"
"I was thinking of Whitaker Monk."
"Quaint, I grant you. But hardly little, or stupid. A tall man, as thin
as a diet, with a face like a comic mask of tragedy..."
"Paul dear," said Athenais Reneaux more in sorrow than in anger:
"somebody has been taking advantage of your trusting nature. Whitaker
Monk is short, hopelessly stout, and the most commonplace person
imaginable."
"Then it would appear," Lanyard commented ruefully, "one did wisely to
telegraph London for a keeper. Let us get hence, if you don't mind, and
endeavour to forget my shame in strong drink and the indecorous dances
of an unregenerate generation."
XIV
DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND
Lanyard and Athenais Reneaux had dawdled over dinner and coffee and
cigarettes with so much tacit deliberation that, by the time Lanyard
suggested they might move on, it was too late for a play and still a
bit too early to begin the contemplated round of all-night restaurants.
Also, it was too warm for a music-hall.
So they killed another hour at the Ambassadeurs, where they were
fortunate in getting good places and the entertainment imposed no
strain upon the attention; where, too, the audience, though
heterogeneous, was sufficiently well-dressed and well-mannered to
impart to a beautiful lady and her squire a pleasant consciousness of
being left very much to themselves in an amusing expression of a
civilisation cynical and self-sufficient.
But that was so wherever they went that night; and, in a sense, they
went everywhere. In no city in the world is the doctrine of
go-as-you-please-but-mind-your-own-business more studiously inculcated
by example than in Paris, especially in its hours of relaxation.
Lanyard had not been so long an exile as to have forgotten his way
about entirely, and with what was new since his time Mademoiselle
Reneaux was thoroughly acquainted. And if he felt himself rather a
ghost revisiting glimpses of a forgotten moon, if all the odalisques
were new to his vision and all the sultans strange, if never an eye
that scanned his face turned back for a second look in uncertain
reminiscence, he had to console him the company of a young woman whom
everybody seemed to know and admire and like. In none of the resorts
they visited did she fail to greet or be hailed by a handful of
acquaintances. Yet they were generously let alone.
As to that, Lanyard could not complain. The truth was that, despite the
dark thread of sober purpose which ran through those tolerably purple
hours, he was being excellently entertained. Not by this sad business
of scampering from one place of dubious fame to another; not by any
reckless sense of rejuvenation to be distilled from the practice of
buying champagne at each stop--and leaving every bottle barely tasted;
not by those colourful, dissolving tableaux, always much the same in
composition if set against various backgrounds, of under-dressed women
sitting with concupiscent men and swallowing cold poisons in quantities
calculated to spur them into the frenzy of semi-orgiastic dances: by
none of these, but simply by the society of a woman of a type perhaps
not unique but novel in his experience and intriguing to his
understanding.
If there were anybody or thing a girl of her age--Athenais was about
twenty-five--shouldn't know, she knew him, her or it; if there were any
place she shouldn't go, she either went or had been there; if there
were anything she shouldn't do or say or think or countenance, those
things she--within limitations--did and said and thought and accepted
or passed over as matters of fact and no consequence. And though she
observed scrupulously certain self-imposed limitations she never made
this obvious, she simply avoided what she chose to consider bad taste
with a deftness and tact that would have seemed admirable in a woman of
the great world twice her age. And with it all she preserved a sort of
champagne effervescence of youthful spirits and an easy-going
cameraderie incomprehensible when one took into consideration the
disillusioning circumstances of her life, her vocation as a paid
government spy, trusted with secrets and worthy of her trust, dedicated
to days of adventure always dangerous, generally sordid, and like at
any time to prove deadly.
Young, beautiful, admirably poised, accomplished and intelligent, she
should by rights have been wrapped up in love of some man her peer in
all these attributes. But she wasn't; or she said she wasn't in one of
those moments of gravity which served to throw into higher relief the
light-heartedness of her badinage with Lanyard; asserting an entirely
willing disposition to stand aside and play the pensive, amused,
indulgent spectator in the masque of love danced by a world mad for it,
grasping for love greedily even in its cheapest shapes and guises.
"If it comes," she sighed, "it will find me waiting, and not unwilling.
But it will have to come in another form than those I know about."
"My dear," said Lanyard, "be unafraid: it always does."
She called herself Athenais Reneaux, but she didn't pretend to Lanyard
that she had no better title to another name. Her French was of the
purest, a delight to listen to, yet she was in fact less French than
English. Her paternal forebears to the third generation had lived in
England and married Englishwomen, she said; and more than this much
about herself, nothing; perhaps deriving some gratification from
leaving such broad fields of conjecture open to the interest which an
enigmatic personality never failed to excite.
"But I think you're quite as much of a mystery as you pretend to see in
me. It's rather nice, don't you think? At least, it gives us an
interest in each other aside from sentiment. Some day, perhaps, we'll
each know All."
"Now God forbid!"
"Are you so afraid of learning my girlish secrets then? I don't believe
you. I don't believe you'd even care to hear--"
"Athenais!" Lanyard protested in a hollow voice.
"Non, mon ami." She judged him shrewdly with narrowed, smiling eyes.
"You flirt with far too much finish, you know. It can't be done to such
perfection when the heart's truly involved. But for one thing--and if
only you'd be a little more tragic about your disappointments to-night;
for you haven't yet asked me a single question about anybody we've
met--"
"No: thus far we've drawn every cover blank," he groaned; for it was
after three in the morning.
"Very well. But for this and that, I'd be tempted to think you were
sleuthing on the trail of some female fair but faithless. But you're
taking all with entirely too much resignation; there's a contented glow
in the back of your eyes--"
"I'm having a good time."
"It's pretty of you to tell me so. But that's not the reason for your
self-complacence."
"See here," Lanyard interrupted, sitting up and signalling to the
waiter for his bill: "if I let you run on the way you're heading,
you'll presently be telling me something you've found out about me and
I don't want to hear."
"Oh, very well," she sighed. "I'm sure I don't wish to embarrass you.
But I will say this: Men of your uncertain age don't go round with such
contented eyes unless they're prosperously in love."
"Oh, come along!" Lanyard growled, offering to rise. "You know too
confounded much." He waited a moment, and then as she did nothing but
sit and glimmer at him mischievously, he added: "Shall we go?"
"Where now?" she enquired without stirring.
He had a shrug of distaste. "Maxim's, I presume. Unless you can suggest
some other place, more likely and less tedious."
"No," she replied after taking thought; "I can't. We've covered Paris
pretty thoroughly to-night; all except the tourist places."
"No good wasting time on them."
"Then let's stop on here till it's time to milk the cows."
"Pré-Catelan? But there's Maxim's left--"
"Only another tourist show nowadays. And frightfully rowdy."
"Sounds like the lot I'm after. Come along."
She shook her head vigorously. "Shan't!" His eyebrows rose in mute
enquiry. "Because I don't want to," she explained with childlike
candour. "I'm tired of being dragged around and plied with drink. Do
you realise I've had as much as two and a half glasses of champagne
to-night, out of the countless bottles you've ordered? Well, I have,
and they're doing their work: I feel the spirit of independence surging
in my midst. I mutiny and defy you!" A peal of laughter rewarded the
instinctive glance with which he sought to judge how far he was
justified in taking her seriously. "Not only that, but you're
neglecting me. I want to dance, and you haven't asked me in fully half
an hour; and you're a heavenly dancer--and so am I!" She thrust back
her end of their wall table and rose. "If you please, monsieur."
One could hardly resent such charming impertinence. Lanyard drew a long
face of mock patience, sighed an heroic sigh, and followed her through
the huddled tables to the dancing floor. A bewildering look rewarded
him as they swung into the first movement of a tango.
"Do you know you are a dangerous man, Monsieur Paul Martin?"
"Oh, mademoiselle!"
"Such fortitude, such forbearance--when I ought to be
slapped--enchants, disarms, makes me remember I am a woman, foredoomed
always to yield. I abjure my boasted independence, monsieur, I submit.
It shall be as you wish: on to Maxim's--after this one dance. You know,
it's the last really good music we'll have to dance to--our last dance
together, perhaps--who knows?--forever!"
She pretended to be overcome; the lithe body in his embrace sketched a
fugitive seizure of sadness, drooping with a wistful languour well
suited to the swooning measures to which they swayed and postured.
His hand was pressed convulsively. She seemed momentarily about to
become a burden in his grasp, yet ever to recover just on the instant
of failing, buoyed up by the steely resilience of her lithe and slender
body. Impossible to say how much was pretence, how much impulsive
confession of true feeling! Perplexed, perturbed, Lanyard gazed down
into that richly tinted face which, with eyes half-curtained and lips
half-parted, seemed to betray so much, yet to his next glance was
wholly illegible and provoking. Aware that with such women man's vanity
misleads him woefully, and aware that she was equally awake to this
masculine weakness, he wondered, afraid even to guess, telling himself
he were an ass to believe, a fool to deny....
Then suddenly he saw her lashes sweep up to unveil eyes at once
mirthful and admonitory; her hungry mouth murmured incongruously an
edged warning. "Play up, Paul--play up to me! We dance too well
together not to be watched; and if I'm not mistaken, someone you're
interested in has just come in. No: don't look yet, just remember we're
madly enamoured, you and I--and don't care a rap who sees it."
Strung by her words into a spirit of emulation, Lanyard achieved an
adequate seeming of response to the passion, feigned or real, with
which the woman infused the patterned coquetry of their steps.
Between lips that stirred so little their movement must have been
indiscernible, he asked: "Who?"
In the same manner, but in accents fraught with an emotion
indecipherable but intense the reply came: "Don't talk! This is too
divine ... Just dance!"
He obeyed, deliberately shut out of his thoughts the warning she had
given him, and let himself go, body and mind, so that, a sway to the
sensuous strains of that most sensuous of dances, the girl and the man
for a space seemed one with music that throbbed of love and longing,
desire and denial, pursuit and retreat, surrender and conquest....
On a sonorous phrase it ceased. A flutter of applause ran round the
tables. Lanyard mastered a sense of daze that he saw reflected in the
opening eyes of the woman as she slipped from his arms. In an instant
they were themselves once more, two completely self-contained children
of sophistication, with superb insouciance making nothing of their
public triumph in a rare and difficult performance.
On the way to their table they were intercepted by a woman who, with
two cavaliers, had since the moment of her entrance been standing near
the door of the restaurant, apparently spellbound with admiration.
Through a rising clatter of tongues her voice cut clearly but not at
all unpleasantly.
"Athenais! It is I--Liane."
Inured as he was to the manners of an age which counts its women not
dressed if they are not half undressed, and with his sensibilities
further calloused by a night devoted to restaurants the entrée to
which, for women, seemed to be conditioned on at least semi-nudity,
Lanyard was none the less inclined to think he had never seen, this
side of footlights, a gown quite so daring as that which revealed the
admirably turned person of the lady who named herself Liane. There was
so little of it that, he reflected, its cost must have been something
enormous. But in vain that scantiness of drapery: the white body rose
splendidly out of its ineffective wrappings only to be overwhelmed by
an incredible incrustation of jewellery: only here and there did bare
hand's-breadths of flesh unadorned succeed in making themselves
visible.
At the sound of her name Athenais turned with a perfectly indicated
start of surprise which she promptly translated into a little, joyful
cry. The living pillar of ivory, satin and precious stones ran into her
arms, embraced her ardently, and kissed both her cheeks, then releasing
her half-turned to Lanyard.