rounded eyes of violet. Lanyard knew himself known.
So he had sacrificed for nothing his beautiful beard!
He uttered a private but heartfelt "Damn!" and bowed profoundly as the
woman, tapping Athenais on the arm with a fan crusted with diamonds,
demanded:
"Present instantly, my dear, this gentleman who tangoes as I have never
seen the tango danced before!"
Forestalling Athenais, Lanyard replied with a whimsical grimace: "Is
one, then, so unfortunate as to have been forgotten by Madame la
Comtesse de Lorgnes?"
With any other woman than Athenais Reneaux he would have hesitated to
deal so bold an offensive stroke; but his confidence in her quickness
of apprehension and her unshakable self-possession was both implicit
and well-placed. For she received this overt notification of the
success of his quest without one sign other than a look of dawning
puzzlement.
"Madame la comtesse...?" she murmured with a rising inflection.
"But monsieur is mistaken," the other stammered, biting her lip.
"Surely one cannot have been so stupid!" Lanyard apologised.
"But this is Mademoiselle Delorme," Athenais said ... "Monsieur Paul
Martin."
Liane Delorme! Those syllables were like a spoken spell to break the
power of dark enchantment which had hampered Lanyard's memory ever
since first sight of this woman in the Café de l'Univers at Nant. A
great light began to flood his understanding, but he was denied time to
advantage himself immediately of its illumination: Liane Delorme was
quick to parry and riposte.
"How strange monsieur should think he had ever known me by a name ...
What was it? But no matter! For now I look more closely, I myself
cannot get over the impression that I have known Monsieur--Martin, did
you say?--somewhere, sometime ... But Paul Martin? Not unless monsieur
has more than one name."
"Then it would seem that mademoiselle and I are both in error. The loss
is mine."
That gun spiked, Lanyard began to breathe more freely. "It is not too
late to make up that loss, monsieur." Liane Delorme was actually
chuckling in appreciation of his readiness, pleased with him even in
the moment of her own discomfiture; her eyes twinkling merrily at him
above the fan with which she hid a convulsed countenance. "Surely two
people so possessed with regret at never having known each other should
lose no time improving their acquaintance! Dear Athenais: do ask us to
sit at your table."
While the waiter fetched additional chairs, the woman made her escorts
known: Messieurs Benouville et Le Brun, two extravagantly insignificant
young men, exquisitely groomed and presumably wealthy, who were making
the bravest efforts to seem unaware that to be seen with Liane Delorme
conferred an unimpeachable cachet. Lanyard remarked, however, that
neither ventured to assume proprietorial airs; while Liane's attitude
toward them was generally indulgent, if occasionally patronising and
sometimes impatient.
Champagne frothed into fresh glasses. As soon as the band struck up
another dance, Athenais drifted away in the arms of Monsieur Le Brun.
Liane gazed round the room, acknowledged the salutations of several
friends, signalled gaily to a pair of mercenaries on the far side of
the dancing floor, and issued peremptory orders to Benouville.
"Go, Chu-chu, and ask Angele to dance with you. She is being left to
bore herself while Victor dances with Constance. Moreover, I desire to
afflict Monsieur Martin with my confidences."
With the utmost docility Benouville effaced himself.
"Eh, bien, Monsieur Duchemin!"
"Eh, bien, madame la comtesse?" Liane sipped at her champagne, making
impudent eyes at Lanyard over the brim of her glass.
"By what appears, you have at last torn yourself away from the charming
society of the Château de Montalais."
"As you see."
"That was a long visit you made at the château, my old one?"
"Madame la comtesse is well informed," Lanyard returned, phlegmatic.
"One hears what one hears."
"One had the misfortune to fall foul of an assassin," Lanyard took the
trouble to explain.
"An assassin!"
"The same Apache who attacked--with others--the party from Montalais at
Montpellier-le-Vieux."
"And you were wounded?"
Lanyard assented. The lady made a shocked face and uttered appropriate
noises. "As you know," Lanyard added.
Liane Delorme pretended not to hear that last. "And the ladies of the
château," she enquired--"they were sympathetic, one feels sure?"
"They were most kind."
"It was not serious, this wound--no?"
"Mademoiselle may judge when she knows I was unable to leave my bed for
nearly three weeks."
"But what atrocity! And this Apache--?"
"Remains at large."
"Ah, these police!" And the lady described a sign of contempt that was
wholly unladylike. "Still, you are well recovered, by the way you
dance."
"One cannot complain."
"What an experience! Still--" Liane again buried her nose in her glass
and regarded Lanyard with a look of mysterious understanding.
Re-emerging, she resumed: "Still, not without its compensations, eh,
mon ami?"
"That is as one regards it, mademoiselle."
"Oh! oh!" There was any amount of deep significance in these
exclamations. "One may regard that in more ways than one."
"Indeed," Lanyard agreed with his most winning manner: "One may for
instance remember that I recovered speedily enough to be in Paris
to-night and meet mademoiselle without losing time."
"Monsieur wishes me to flatter myself into thinking he did me the
honour of desiring to find me to-night?"
"Or any other. Do not depreciate the potency of your charms,
mademoiselle. Who, having seen you once, could help hoping to see you
again?"
"My friend," said Liane, with a pursed, judgmatical mouth, "I think you
are much too amiable."
"But I assure you, never a day has passed, no, nor yet a night, that I
have not dwelt upon the thought of you, since you made so effective an
entrance to the château, a vision of radiant beauty, out of that night
of tempest and fury."
Liane drooped a coy head. "Monsieur compliments me too much."
"Impossible!"
"Is one, then, to understand that monsieur is making love to me?"
Lanyard pronounced coolly: "No."
That won another laugh of personal appreciation. "What then, mon ami?"
"Figure to yourself that one may often dream of the unattainable
without aspiring to possess it."
"Unattainable?" Liane repeated in a liquid voice: "What a dismal word,
monsieur!" "It means what it means, mademoiselle."
"To the contrary, monsieur, it means what you wish it to mean. You
should revise your lexicon."
"Now it is mademoiselle who is too flattering. And where is that good
Monsieur Monk to-night?"
The woman overlooked the innuendo; or, rather, buried it under a
landslide of emotional acting.
"Ah, monsieur! but I am desolated, inconsolable. He has gone away!"
"Monsieur Monk?" Lanyard opened his eyes wide.
"Who else? He has left France, he has returned to his barbarous
America, with his beautiful motor car, his kind heart, and all his
millions!"
"And the excellent Phinuit?"
"That one as well."
"How long ago?"
"A week to-morrow they did sail from Cherbourg. It is a week since
anyone has heard me laugh."
Lanyard compassionately fished a bottle out of the cooler and refilled
her glass.
"Accept, mademoiselle, every assurance of my profound sympathy."
"You have a heart, my friend," she said, and drank with the feverish
passion of the disconsolate.
"And one very truly at mademoiselle's service."
Liane sniffed mournfully and dabbed at her nose with a ridiculous
travesty of a handkerchief. "Be so kind," she said in a tearful voice,
though her eyes were quite dry and, if one looked closely,
calculating--"a cigarette."
One inferred that the storm was over. Lanyard tendered his cigarette
case, and then a match, wondering what next. What he had reason to
anticipate was sure to come, the only question was when. Not that it
mattered when; he was ready for it at any time. And there was no hurry:
Athenais, finding herself paired with an un-commonly good dancer in Le
Brun, was considerately making good use of this pretext for remaining
on the floor--there were two bands to furnish practically continuous
music--and leave Lanyard to finish uninterrupted what she perfectly
understood to be a conversation of considerable moment.
As for Benouville, he was much too well trained to dream of returning
without being bidden by Liane Delorme.
"But it is wonderful," murmured that one, pensive.
And there was that in her tone to make Lanyard mentally prick forward
his ears. He sketched a point of interrogation.
"To encounter so much understanding in one who is a complete stranger."
("'Complete'?" Lanyard considered. "I think it's coming...")
"Monsieur must not think me unappreciative."
"Ah, mademoiselle!" he protested sadly--"but you forget so easily."
"That we have met before, when I term you a complete stranger?"
"Well... yes."
"It is because I would not be in monsieur's debt!"
"Pardon?"
"I will repay sympathy with sympathy. I have already forgotten that I
ever visited the Château de Montalais. So how should I remember I met
monsieur there under the name of... but I forget."
"The name of Duchemin?"
"I never knew there was such a name--I swear!--before I saw it in type
to-day."
"In type?"
"Monsieur does not read the papers?"
"Not all of them, mademoiselle."
"It appeared in Le Matin to-day, this quaint name Duchemin, in a
despatch from Millau stating that a person of that name, a guest of the
Château de Montalais, had disappeared without taking formal leave of
his hosts."
"One gathers that he took something else?"
"Nothing less than the world-known Anstruther collection of jewels, the
property of Madame de Montalais née Anstruther."
"But I am recently from the Château de Montalais, and in a position to
assure mademoiselle that this poor fellow, Duchemin, is unjustly
accused."
"Oh, ho, ho!"
He heard again that laugh of broad derision which had seemed so out of
character with a great lady when he had heard it first, that night now
nearly a month old.
"Mademoiselle does not believe?"
"I think monsieur must be a good friend to this Monsieur Duchemin."
"I confess I entertain a sneaking fondness for his memory."
"You can hardly call yourself an impartial judge--"
"It is nevertheless true he did not steal the jewels."
"Then tell me who did take them."
"Unfortunately for Duchemin, that remains a mystery."
"Rather, I should say, fortunately for him."
"You would wrong him, then."
"But why, if innocent, did he run away?"
"I imagine, because he knew he would surely be accused, in which case
ancient history would be revived to prove him guilty beyond a question
in the mind of any sane court."
"Does one understand he had a history?"
"I have heard it intimated such was the case."
"But I remain in the dark. The theft presumably was not discovered till
after his disappearance. Yet, according to your contention, he must
have known of it in advance. How do you account for that?"
"Mademoiselle would make a famous juge d'instruction."
"That does not answer my argument."
"How is one to answer it? Who knows how Duchemin discovered the theft
before the ladies of the château did?"
"Do you know what you make me think? That he was not as innocent as you
assert."
"Mademoiselle will explain?"
"I have a suspicion that this Monsieur Duchemin was guilty in
intention; but when it came to put his intention into execution, he
found he had been anticipated."
"Mademoiselle is too clever for me. Now I should never have thought of
that."
"He would have been wiser to stay and fight it out. The very fact of
his flight confesses his guilt."
"Perhaps he did not remember that until too late."
"And now nothing can clear him. How sad for him! A chance meeting with
one who is not his friend, a whispered word to the Préfecture, or the
nearest agent de police, and within an hour he finds himself in the
Santé."
"Poor chap!" said Lanyard with a doleful shake of the head.
"I, too, pity him," the woman declared. "Monsieur: against my
prejudice, your faith in Duchemin has persuaded me. I am convinced that
he is innocent."
"How good you are!" "It makes me glad I have so well forgotten ever
meeting him. I do not believe I should know him if I found him here, in
this very restaurant, even seated by my side."
"It is mademoiselle now whose heart is great and kind."
"You may believe it well."
"And does mademoiselle's forgetfulness, perhaps, extend even farther
into the so dead past?"
"But, monsieur, I was a mere child when I first came to Paris, before
the War. How could anyone reasonably expect my memory of those innocent
girlish days to be exact? Regard that, even then, I met people by
hundreds, as a young girl studying for the stage must. Is it likely one
face would stand out in my memory more than another?"
"Quite, if you ask me," said Lanyard dryly--"quite likely, if any
circumstance connected with that face were at all memorable."
"But I assure you I was in those days much too self-absorbed to pay
much attention to others. It is that way, you know, in maiden days."
"Mademoiselle does injustice to her memory," Lanyard insisted in polite
astonishment. "In some ways it is wonderful."
The woman looked suddenly aside, so that he could not see her face; but
he perceived, with an astonishment which he made no attempt to hide,
that she was quaking bodily with some unconfessed emotion. And when she
faced again his unbroken look of grave bewilderment, he discovered that
she was really capable of tears.
"Monsieur," she gasped, "believe it or not, never before have I met one
with whom I was so completely en rapport. And instantaneously! It is
priceless, this! We must see more of one another."
"Much more," Lanyard assented gravely. "A great deal more," she
supplemented with significance. "I am sure we shall get along together
famously."
"Mademoiselle offers me great honour--"
"Nothing less than my friendship."
"I would be indeed an ingrate to refuse it. But a question: Will not
people talk?"
"What!" Amusement shook her again. "How talk? What more can they say
about Liane Delorme?"
"Ah!" said Lanyard--"but about Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes..."
"My friend: that was a good joke once; but now you must forget that
name as utterly as I have forgotten another."
"Impossible."
"What do you say?" She frowned a little. "Is it possible you
misunderstood? De Lorgnes was nothing to me."
"I never thought he was."
"You had reason. Because we were thrown together, and our names were
something alike in sound, it amused us--not the two of us alone, but
all our party--to pretend I was madame la comtesse."
"He was really a count?"
"Who knows? It was the style by which he had always passed with us."
"Alas!" sighed Lanyard, and bent a sombre gaze upon his glass.
Without looking he was aware of a questioning gesture of the woman's
head. He said no more, but shook his own.
"What is this?" she asked sharply. "You know something about de
Lorgnes?"
"Had you not heard?" he countered, looking up in surprise.
"Heard--?" He saw her eyes stabbed by fear, and knew himself justified
of his surmises. All day she had been expecting de Lorgnes, or word
from him, all day and all this night. One could imagine the hourly
augmented strain of care and foreboding; indeed its evidence were only
too clearly betrayed in her face and manner of that moment: she was on
the rack.
But there was no pity in Lanyard's heart. He knew her of old, what she
was, what evil she had done; and in his hearing still sounded the
echoes of those words with which, obliquely enough but without
misunderstanding on the part of either, she had threatened to expose
him to the police unless he consented to some sort of an alliance with
her, a collaboration whose nature could not but be dishonourable if it
were nothing more than a simple conspiracy of mutual silence.
And purposely he delayed his answer till her patience gave way and she
was clutching his arm with frantic hands.
"What is the matter? Why do you look at me like that? Why don't you
tell me--if there is anything to tell--?"
"I was hesitating to shock you, Liane."
"Never mind me. What has happened to de Lorgnes?"
"It is in all the evening newspapers--the murder mystery of the Lyons
rapide."
"De Lorgnes--?"
Lanyard inclined his head. The woman breathed an invocation to the
Deity and sank back against the wall, her face ghastly beneath its
paint.
"You know this?"
"I was a passenger aboard the rapide, and saw the body before it was
removed."
Liane Delorme made an effort to speak, but only her breath rustled
harshly on her dry lips. She swallowed convulsively, turned to her
glass, and found it empty. Lanyard hastened to refill it. She took the
wine at a gulp, muttered a word of thanks, and offered the glass to be
filled anew; but when this had been done sat unconscious of it, staring
witlessly at nothing, so lost to her surroundings that all the muscles
of her face relaxed and her years peered out through that mask of
artifice which alone preserved for her the illusion and repute of
beauty.
Thus the face of an evil woman of middle-age, debauched beyond hope of
redemption, was hideously revealed. Lanyard knew a qualm at seeing it,
and looked hastily away.
Beyond the rank of tables which stood between him and the dancing floor
he saw Athenais Reneaux with Le Brun sweeping past in the suave
movement of a waltz. The girl's face wore a startled expression, her
gaze was direct to the woman at Lanyard's side; then it shifted
enquiringly to him. With a look Lanyard warned her to compose herself,
then lifted an eyebrow and glanced meaningly toward the doors. The
least of nods answered him before Le Brun swung Athenais toward the
middle of the floor and other couples intervened.
Liane Delorme stirred abruptly.
"The assassin?" she demanded--"is there any clue?"
"I believe he is known by description, but missing."
"But you, my friend--what do you know?"
"As much as anybody, I fancy--except the author of the murder."
"Tell me."
Quietly, briefly, Lanyard told her of seeing the Comte de Lorgnes at
dinner in Lyons; of the uneasiness he manifested, and the cumulative
feeling of frustration and failure he so plainly betrayed as the last
hours of his life wore on; of the Apaches who watched de Lorgnes in the
café and the fact that one of them had contrived to secure a berth in
the same carriage with his victim; of seeing the presumptive murderer
slinking away from the train at Laroche; and of the discovery of the
body, on the arrival of the rapide at the Gare de Lyon.
Absorbed, with eyes abstracted and intent, and a mouth whose essential
selfishness and cruelty was unconsciously stressed by the compression
of her lips: the woman heard him as he might have been a disembodied
voice. Now and again, however, she nodded intently and, when he
finished, had a pertinent question ready.
"You say a description of this assassin exists?"
"Have I not communicated it to you?"
"But to the police--?"
"Is it likely?" The woman gave him a blank stare.
"Pardon, mademoiselle: but is it likely that the late André Duchemin
would have more to do with the police than he could avoid?"
"You would see a cold-blooded crime go unavenged--?"
"Rather than dedicate the remainder of my days to seeing the world
through prison bars? I should say yes!--seeing that this assassination
does not concern me, and I am guiltless of the crime with which I
myself am charged. But you who were a friend to de Lorgnes know the
facts, and nothing hinders your communicating them to the
Préfecture.... Though I will confess it would be gracious of you to
keep my name out of the affair."
But Lanyard was not dicing with Chance when he made this suggestion: he
knew very well Liane Delorme would not go to the police.
"That for the Préfecture!" She clicked a finger-nail against her teeth.
"What does it know? What does it do when it knows anything?"
"I agree with mademoiselle entirely."
"Ah!" she mused bitterly--"if only we knew the name of that sale
cochon!"
"We do."
"We--monsieur?"
"I, at least, know one of the many names doubtless employed by the
assassin."
"And you hesitate to tell me!"
"Why should I? No, but an effort of memory..." Lanyard measured a
silence, seeming lost in thought, in reality timing the blow and
preparing to note its effect. Then, snapping his fingers as one who
says: I have it!--"Albert Dupont," he announced abruptly.
Unquestionably the name meant nothing to the woman. She curled a lip:
"But that is any name!" Then thoughtfully: "You heard his companion of
the café call him that?"
"No, mademoiselle. But I recognised the animal as Albert Dupont when he
boarded the train at Combe-Rendonde that morning and, unnoticed by him,
travelled with him all the way to Lyons."
"You recognised him?"
"I believe it well."
"When had you known him?"
"First when I fought with him at Montpellier-le-Vieux, later when he
sought to do me in on the outskirts of Nant. He was the fugitive
chauffeur of the Château de Montalais."
"But--name of a sacred name!--what had that one to do with de Lorgnes?"
"If you will tell me that, there will be no more mystery in this sad
affair."
The woman brooded heavily for a moment. "But if it had been you he was
after, I might understand..." He caught the sidelong glimmer of her eye
upon him, dark with an unuttered question.
But the waltz was at an end, Athenais and Le Brun were threading their
way through the intervening tables.
The interruption could not have been better timed; Lanyard was keen to
get away. He had learned all that he could reasonably have hoped to
learn from Liane Delorme in one night. He knew that she and de Lorgnes
had been mutually interested in the business that took the latter to
Lyons. He had the testimony of his own perceptions to prove that news
of the murder had come as a great shock to her. On that same testimony
he was prepared to swear that, whatever the part, if any, she had
played in the robbery, she knew nothing of "Albert Dupont," at least by
that name, and nothing of his activities as chauffeur at the Château de
Montalais.
Yet one thing more Lanyard knew: that Liane suspected him of knowing
more than he had told her. But he wasn't sorry she should think that;
it gave him a continuing claim upon her interest. Henceforth she might
be wary of him, but she would never lose touch with him if she could
help it.
Now Athenais was pausing beside the table, and saying with a smile as
weary as it was charming:
"Come, Monsieur Paul, if you please, and take me home! I've danced till
I'm ready to drop."
Annoyed by the prospect of being obliged to let Lanyard out of her
sight so soon, before she had time to mature her plans with respect to
him, Liane Delorme pulled herself together.
"Go home?" she protested with a vivacity so forced it drew a curious
stare even from the empty Le Brun. "So early! My dear! what are you
thinking of?" "I've been on the go all day long," Athenais explained
sweetly; "and now I've got nothing left to keep up on."
"Zut!" the Delorme insisted. "Have more champagne and--"
"Thank you, no, dearest. My head is swimming with it already. I really
must go. Surely you don't mind?"
But Liane did mind, and the wine she had drunk had left her only a
remnant of sobriety, not enough for good control of her temper.
"Mind?" she echoed rudely. "Why should I mind whether you stay or go?
It's your affair, not mine." She made a scornful mouth; and the look
with which she coupled Lanyard and Athenais in innuendo was in itself
almost actionable. "But me," she pursued with shrill vivacity--"I
shan't go yet, I'm not drunk enough by half. Get more champagne,
Fred"--this to Le Brun as she turned a gleaming shoulder to the
others--"quantities of it--and tell Chu-chu to bring Angele over, and
Constance and Victor, too. Thanks to the good God, they at least know
they are still alive!"
XV
ADIEU