The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “What are you thinking of, monsieur?”

  “But naturally of ridding you of an embarrassing and perhaps dangerous companion.”

  “If you mean you’re planning to jump down and run for it,” Athenais replied, “you’re a fool. You’ll not get far with a motor car pursuing you and sergents de ville abnormally on the qui vive because the crime wave that followed demobilisation as yet shows no signs of subsiding.”

  “But, mademoiselle, it makes me so unhappy to have any shadow but my own.”

  “Then rest tranquil here with me. It isn’t much farther to my apartment.”

  “Possibly it would be better to drop you there first—”

  “Nothing of the sort; but positively the contrary.”

  “My dear child! if I were to do as you wish they would think—”

  “My dear Paul, I don’t give a damn what they think. Remember I am specially charged with the preservation of your life while in Paris. Besides, my apartment is the most discreet little rez-de-chaussée one could wish. There is more than one way in and out. And once they think you are placed for the night, it’s more than likely they won’t even set a watch, but will trot off to report. Then you can slip away when you will.…” He stared, knowing a moment of doubt to which a hard little laugh put a period.

  “Oh, you needn’t be so thoughtful of my reputation! If this were the worst that could be said of me—”

  Lanyard laughed in turn, quietly tolerant, and squeezed her hand again.

  “You are a dear,” he said, “but you need to be a far better actress to deceive me about such matters.”

  “Don’t be stupid!” her sulky voice retorted.

  “I’m not.”

  He bent forward again, folding his arms on the ledge of the apron, studying the streets and consulting an astonishingly accurate mental map of Paris which more than once had stood him in good stead in other times.

  After a little the girl’s hand crept along his arm, took possession of his hand and used it as a lever to swing him back to face her.

  In the stronger lighting of the Boulevard Haussmann her face seemed oddly childlike, oddly luminous with appeal.

  “Please, petit Monsieur Paul! I ask it of you, I wish it.… To please me?”

  “O Lord!” Lanyard sighed—“how is one to resist when you plead so prettily to be compromised?”

  “Since that’s settled”—of a sudden the imploring child was replaced by self-possessed Mademoiselle Athenais Reneaux—“you may have your hand back again. I assure you I have no more use for it.”

  The hansom turned off the boulevard, affording Lanyard an opportunity to look back through the side window.

  “Still on the trail,” he announced. “But they’ve got the lights on now.”

  With a profound sigh from the heart the horse stopped in front of a corner apartment building and later, with a groan almost human, responded to the whip and jingled the hansom away, leaving Lanyard the poorer by the exorbitant fare he had promised and something more.

  Athenais was already at the main entrance, ringing for the concierge. Lanyard hastened to join her, but before he could cross the sidewalk a motor-car poked its nose round the corner of the Boulevard Haussmann, a short block away, and bore swiftly their way, seeming to search the street suspiciously with its blank, lidless eyes of glare.

  “Peste!” breathed the girl. “I have a private entrance and my own key. We could have used that had I imagined this sacred pig of a concierge—!”

  The latch clicked. She thrust the door open and slipped into dense darkness. Lanyard lingered another instant. The car was slowing down, and the street lamp on the corner revealed plainly a masculine arm resting on its window-sill; but the spying face above the arm was only a blur.

  “Come, monsieur!”

  Lanyard stepped in and shut the door. A hand with which he was beginning to feel fairly well acquainted found his and led him through the dead obscurity to another pause. A key grated in a lock, the hand drew him on again, a second door closed behind him.

  “We are chez moi,” said a voice in the dark.

  “One could do with a light.”

  “Wait. This way.”

  The hand guided him across a room of moderate size, avoiding its furniture with almost uncanny ease, then again brought him to a halt. Brass rings clashed softly on a pole, a gap opened in heavy draperies curtaining a window, a shaft of street light threw the girl’s profile into soft relief. She drew him to her till their shoulders touched.

  “You see…”

  He bent his head close to hers, conscious of a caressing tendril of hair that touched his cheek, and the sweet warmth and fragrance of her; and peering through the draperies saw their pursuing motor car at pause, not at the curb, but in the middle of the street before the house. The man’s arm still rested on the sill of the window; the pale oval of the face above it was still vague. Abruptly both disappeared, a door slammed on the far side of the car, and the car itself, after a moment’s wait, gathered way with whining gears and vanished, leaving nothing human visible in the quiet street.

  “What did that mean? Did they pick somebody up?”

  “But quite otherwise, mademoiselle.”

  “Then what has become of him?”

  “In the shadow of the door across the way: don’t you see the deeper shadow of his figure in the corner, to this side. And there… Ah, dolt!”

  The man in the doorway had moved, cautiously thrusting one hand out of the shadow far enough for the street lights to shine upon the dial of his wrist-watch. Instantly it was withdrawn; but his betrayal was accomplished.

  “That’s enough,” said Lanyard, drawing the draperies close again. “No trouble to make a fool of that one, God has so nobly prepared the soil.” The girl said nothing. They no longer touched, and she was for the time so still that he might almost have fancied himself alone. But in that quiet room he could hear her breathing close beside him, not heavily but with a rapid accent hinting at an agitation which her voice bore out when she answered his wondering: “Mademoiselle?”

  “J’y suis, petit Monsieur Paul.”

  “Is anything the matter?”

  “No…no: there is nothing the matter.”

  “I’m afraid I have tired you out tonight.”

  “I do not deny I am a little weary.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive, not yet, petit Monsieur Paul.” A trace of hard humour crept into her tone: “It is all in the night’s work, as the saying should be in Paris.”

  “Three favours more; then I will do you one in return.”

  “Ask…”

  “Be so kind as to make a light and find me a pocket flash-lamp if you have one.”

  “I can do the latter without the former. It is better that we show no light; one stray gleam through the curtains would tell too much. Wait.”

  A noise of light footsteps muffled by a rug, high heels tapping on uncovered floor, the scrape of a drawer pulled out: and she returned to give him a little nickelled electric torch.

  “And then—?”

  “Liane’s address, if you know it.”

  The girl named a number on an avenue not far distant. Lanyard remarked this.

  “Yes; you can walk there in less than five minutes. And finally?”

  “Show me the way out.” Again she made no response. He pursued in some constraint: “Thus you will enable me to make you my only inadequate return—leave you to your rest.”

  Yet another space of silence; then a gusty little laugh. “That is a great favour, truly, petit Monsieur Paul! So give me your hand once more.” But she no longer clung to it as before; the clasp of her fingers was light, cool, impersonal to the point of indifference. Vexed, resentful of her re
sentment, Lanyard suffered her guidance through the darkness of another room, a short corridor, and then a third room, where she left him for a moment.

  He heard again the clash of curtain rings. The dim violet rectangle of a window appeared in the darkness, the figure of the woman in vague silhouette against it. A sash was lifted noiselessly, rain-sweet air breathed into the apartment. Athenais returned to his side, pressed into his palm a key.

  “That window opens on a court. The drop from the sill is no more than four feet. In the wall immediately opposite you will find a door. This key opens it. Lock the door behind you, and at your first opportunity throw away the key: I have several copies. You will find yourself in a corridor leading to the entrance of the apartment house in the rear of this, facing on the next street. Demand the cordon of the concierge as if you were a late guest leaving one of the apartments. He will make no difficulty about opening.… I think that is all.”

  “Not quite. There remains for me to attempt the impossible, to prove my gratitude, Athenais, in mere, unmeaning words.”

  “Don’t try, Paul.” The voice was softened once more, its accents broken. “Words cannot serve us, you and me! There is one way only, and that, I know, is…rue Barré!” Her sad laugh fluttered, she crept into his arms. “But still, petit Monsieur Paul, she will not care if…only once!”

  She clung to him for a long, long moment, then released his lips.

  “Men have kissed me, yes, not a few,” she whispered, resting her face on his bosom, “but you alone have known my kiss. Go now, my dear, while I have strength to let you go, and…make me one little promise…”

  “Whatever you ask, Athenais.…”

  “Never come back, unless you need me; for I shall not have so much strength another time.”

  Alone, she rested a burning forehead against the lifted window-sash, straining her vision to follow his shadow as it moved through the murk of the court below and lost itself in the deeper gloom of the opposing wall.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE HOUSE OF LILITH

  It stood four-square and massive on a corner between the avenues de Friedland et des Champs-Elysées, near their junction at the Place de l’Etoile: a solid stone pile of a town-house in the most modern mode, without architectural beauty, boasting little attempt at exterior embellishment, but smelling aloud of Money; just such a maison de ville as a decent bourgeois banker might be expected to build him when he contemplates retiring after doing the Rothschilds a wicked one in the eye.

  It was like Liane’s impudence, too. Lanyard smiled at the thought as he studied the mansion from the backwards of a dark doorway in the diagonally opposed block of dwellings. Her kind was always sure to seek, once its fortunes were on firm footing, to establish itself, as here, in the very heart of an exclusive residential district; as if thinking to absorb social sanctity through the simple act of rubbing shoulders with it; or else, as was more likely to be the case with a woman of Liane Delorme’s temper, desiring more to affront a world from which she was outcast than to lay siege to its favour.

  It seemed, however, truly deplorable that Liane should have proved so conventional-minded in this particular respect. It rendered one’s pet project much too difficult of execution. Earnestly as one desired to have a look at the inside of that house without the knowledge of its inmates, its aspect was forbidding and discouraging in the utmost extreme.

  Heavy gates of wrought bronze guarded the front doors. The single side or service-door was similarly protected if more simply. And stout grilles of bronze barred every window on the level of the street.

  Now none of these could have withstood the attack of a man of ingenuity with a little time at his disposal. But Lanyard could count on only the few remaining minutes of true night. Retarded though it might be by shrouded skies, dawn must come all too soon for his comfort. Yet he was conscious of no choice in the matter: he must and in spite of everything would know tonight what was going on behind that blank screen of stone. Tomorrow night would be too late. Tonight, if there were any warrant for his suspicions, the jewels of Eve de Montalais lay in the dwelling of Liane Delorme; or if they were not there, the secret of their hiding was. But tomorrow both, and more than likely Liane as well, would be on the wing; or Lanyard had been sorely mistaken in seeing in her as badly frightened a woman as he had ever known, when she had learned of the assassination of de Lorgnes.

  It was possible, he thought it extremely probable, that Liane Delorme was as powerful as Athenais Reneaux had asserted; influential, that is, with the State, with the dealers in its laws and the dispensers of its protection. But now she had not to reckon with such as these, but with enemies of her own sort, with an antagonism as reckless of law and order as she herself. And she was afraid of that, infinitely more disturbed in mind and spirit than she would have been in the face of any threat on the part of the police. The Préfecture was a known and measured force, an engine that ran as it were on mapped lines of rail; its moves might be forecast, guarded against, watched, evaded. But this other force worked in the dark, this hostile power personified in the creature who had called himself Albert Dupont; the very composition of its being was cloaked in a secrecy impenetrable and terrifying, its intentions and its workings could not be surmised or opposed until it struck and the success or failure of the stroke revealed its origin and aim.

  Liane—or one misjudged her—would never sit still and wait for the blow to fall. She was too high-strung, too much in love with life. She must either strike first in self-defence—and, in such case, strike at what?—or remove beyond the range of the enemy’s malice. Lanyard was confident she would choose the latter course.

  But confidence was not knowledge.…

  He transferred his attention from the formidable defences of the lower storey to the second. Here all the windows were of the type called french, and opened inward from shallow balconies with wrought bronze railings. Lanyard was acquainted with every form of fastening used for such windows; all were simple, none could resist his persuasions, provided he stood upon one of those balconies. Nor did he count it a difficult matter for a man of his activity and strength to scale the front of the house as far as the second storey; its walls were builded of heavy blocks of dressed stone with deep horizontal channels between each tier. These grooves would be greasy with rain; otherwise one could hardly ask for better footholds. A climb of some twelve or fifteen feet to the balcony: one should be able to make that within two minutes, granted freedom from interruption. The rub was there; the quarter seemed quite fast asleep; in the five minutes which had elapsed since Lanyard had ensconced himself in the doorway no motor car had passed, not a footfall had disturbed the stillness, never a sound of any sort had come to his attention other than one distant blare of a two-toned automobile horn from the neighbourhood of the Arc de Triomphe. But one dared not count on long continuance of such conditions. Already the sky showed a lighter shade above the profile of the roofs. And one wakeful watcher at a nearby window would spell ruin.

  Nevertheless he must adventure the consequences.…

  Poised to leave his shelter and dart across the street, with his point of attack already selected, his thoughts already busy with consideration of steps to follow—he checked and fell still farther back into the shadow. Something was happening in the house across the way.

  A man had opened the service-door and paused behind the bronze gate. There was no light behind him, and the gloom and intervening strips of metal rendered his figure indistinct. Lanyard’s high-keyed perceptions had none the less been instant to remark that slight movement and the accompanying change in the texture of the darkness barred by the gate.

  Following a little wait, it swung slowly out, perhaps eighteen inches, the man advancing with it and again halting to peer up and down the street. Then quickly, as if alarmed, he withdrew, shut the gate, and disappeared, closing the service-door behind him.
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  Listening intently, Lanyard heard no click of latch, such as should have been audible in that dead hour of hush. Evidently the fellow had neglected to make fast the gate. Possibly he had been similarly remiss about fastening the door. But what was he up to? Why this furtive appearance, why the retreat so abruptly executed?

  By way of answer came the soft drone of a high-powered motor; then the car itself rolled into view, a stately limousine coming from the direction of the avenue de Friedland. Before the corner house it stopped. A lackey alighted with an umbrella and ran to hold the door; but Liane Delorme would not wait for him. The car had not stopped when she threw the door open; on the instant when its wheels ceased to turn she jumped down and ran toward the house, heedless of the rain.

  At the same time one side of the great front doors swung inward, and a footman ran out to open the gates. The lackey with the umbrella, though he moved briskly, failed to catch up with Liane before she sped up the steps. So he closed the umbrella and trotted back to his place beside the chauffeur. The footman shut gates and door as the limousine moved away: it had not been sixty seconds at rest. In fifteen more street and house were both as they had been, save that a light now shone through the plate glass of the latter’s great doors. And that was soon extinguished.

  Conceiving that the man who had appeared at the service entrance was the same who had admitted Liane, Lanyard told himself he understood: impatient for his bed, the fellow had gone to the service gate to spy out for signs of madame’s return. Now if only it were true that he had failed to close it securely—!

  It proved so. The gate gave readily to Lanyard’s pull. The knob of the small door turned silently. He stepped across the threshold, and shut himself into an unlighted hall, thoughtfully apeing the negligence of the servant and leaving the door barely on the latch by way of provision against a forced retreat.