The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  Abstractedly he sought the kitchen and, making a light, washed up at the tap, then foraged for breakfast. Persistence turned up a spirit-stove, a half-bottle of methylated, a packet of tea, a tin or two of biscuit, as many more of potted meats: left-overs from the artist’s stock, dismally scant and uninviting in array. With these he made the discovery that he was half-famished, and found no reason to believe that the girl would be in any better case. An expedition to the nearest charcuterie was indicated; but after he had searched for and found an old raincoat of Solon’s, Lanyard decided against leaving the girl alone. Pending her appearance, he filled the spirit-stove, put the kettle on to boil, and lighting a cigarette, sat himself down to watch the pot and excogitate his several problems.

  In a fashion uncommonly clear-headed, even for him, he assembled all the facts bearing upon their predicament, his and Lucia Bannon’s, jointly and individually, and dispassionately pondered them….

  But insensibly his thoughts reverted to their exotic phase of his awakening, drifting into such introspection as he seldom indulged, and led him far from the immediate riddle, by strange ways to a revelation altogether unpresaged and a resolve still more revolutionary.

  A look of wonder flickered in his brooding eyes; and clipped between two fingers, his cigarette grew a long ash, let it fall, and burned down to a stump so short that the coal almost scorched his flesh. He dropped it and crushed out the fire with his heel, all unwittingly.

  Slowly but irresistibly his world was turning over beneath his feet….

  The sound of a footfall recalled him as from an immeasurable remove; he looked up to see Lucia at pause upon the threshold, and rose slowly, with effort recollecting himself and marshalling his wits against the emergency foreshadowed by her attitude.

  Tense with indignation, quick with disdain, she demanded, without any preface whatever: “Why did you lock me in?”

  He stammered unhappily: “I beg your pardon—”

  “Why did you lock me in?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Why did you—”

  But she interrupted herself to stamp her foot emphatically; and he caught her up on the echo of that:

  “If you must know, because I wasn’t trusting you.”

  Her eyes darkened ominously: “Yet you insisted I should trust you!”

  “The circumstances aren’t parallel: you’re not a notorious malefactor, wanted by the police of every capital in Europe, hounded by rivals to boot—fighting for life, liberty and”—he laughed shortly—“the pursuit of happiness!”

  She caught her breath sharply—whether with dismay or mere surprise at his frankness he couldn’t tell.

  “Are you?” she demanded quickly.

  “Am I what?”

  “What you’ve just said—”

  “A crook—and all that? Miss Bannon, you know it!”

  “The Lone Wolf?”

  “You’ve known it all along. De Morbihan told you—or else your father. Or, it may be, you were shrewd enough to guess it from De Morbihan’s bragging in the restaurant. At all events, it’s plain enough, nothing but desire to find proof to identify me with the Lone Wolf took you to my room last night—whether for your personal satisfaction or at the instigation of Bannon—just as nothing less than disgust with what was going on made you run away from such intolerable associations….Though, at that, I don’t believe you even guessed how unspeakably vicious those were!”

  He paused and waited, anticipating furious denial or refutation; such would, indeed, have been the logical development of the temper in which she had come down to confront him.

  Rather than this, she seemed calmed and sobered by his charge; far from resenting it, disposed to concede its justice; anger deserted her expression, leaving it intent and grave. She came quietly into the room and faced him squarely across the table.

  “You thought all that of me—that I was capable of spying on you—yet were generous enough to believe I despised myself for doing it?”

  “Not at first…. At first, when we met back there in the corridor, I was sure you were bent on further spying. Only since waking up here, half an hour ago, did I begin to understand how impossible it would be for you to lend yourself to such villainy as last night’s.”

  “But if you thought that of me then, why did you—?”

  “It occurred to me that it would be just as well to prevent your reporting back to headquarters.”

  “But now you’ve changed your mind about me?”

  He nodded: “Quite.”

  “But why?” she demanded in a voice of amazement. “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said slowly—“I don’t know why. I can only presume it must be because—I can’t help believing in you.”

  Her glance wavered: her colour deepened. “I don’t understand…” she murmured.

  “Nor I,” he confessed in a tone as low….

  A sudden grumble from the teakettle provided welcome distraction. Lanyard lifted it off the flames and slowly poured boiling water on a measure of tea in an earthenware pot.

  “A cup of this and something to eat’ll do us no harm,” he ventured, smiling uneasily—“especially if we’re to pursue this psychological enquiry into the whereforeness of the human tendency to change one’s mind!”

  CHAPTER XIII

  CONFESSIONAL

  And then, when the girl made no response, but remained with troubled gaze focused on some remote abstraction, “You will have tea, won’t you?” he urged.

  She recalled her thoughts, nodded with the faintest of smiles—“Yes, thank you!”—and dropped into a chair.

  He began at once to make talk in effort to dissipate that constraint which stood between them like an unseen alien presence: “You must be very hungry?”

  “I am.”

  “Sorry I’ve nothing better to offer you. I’d have run out for something more substantial, only—”

  “Only—?” she prompted, coolly helping herself to biscuit and potted ham.

  “I didn’t think it wise to leave you alone.”

  “Was that before or after you’d made up your mind about me—the latest phase, I mean?” she persisted with a trace of malice.

  “Before,” he returned calmly—“likewise, afterwards. Either way you care to take it, it wouldn’t have been wise to leave you here. Suppose you had waked up to find me gone, yourself alone in this strange house—”

  “I’ve been awake several hours,” she interposed—“found myself locked in, and heard no sound to indicate that you were still here.”

  “I’m sorry: I was overtired and slept like a log…. But assuming the case: you would have gone out, alone, penniless—”

  “Through a locked door, Mr. Lanyard?”

  “I shouldn’t have left it locked,” he explained patiently…. “You would have found yourself friendless and without resources in a city to which you are a stranger.”

  She nodded: “True. But what of that?”

  “In desperation you might have been forced to go back—”

  “And report the outcome of my investigation!”

  “Pressure might have been brought to induce admissions damaging to me,” Lanyard submitted pleasantly. “Whether or no, you’d have been obliged to renew associations you’re well rid of.”

  “You feel sure of that?”

  “But naturally.”

  “How can you be?” she challenged. “You’ve yet to know me twenty-four hours.”

  “But perhaps I know the associations better. In point of fact, I do.

  Even though you may have stooped to play the spy last night, Miss

  Bannon—you couldn’t keep it up. You had to fly further contamination

  from that pack of jackals.”

  “Not
—you feel sure—merely to keep you under observation?”

  “I do feel sure of that. I have your word for it.”

  The girl deliberately finished her tea, and sat back, regarding him steadily beneath level brows. Then she said with an odd laugh: “You have your own way of putting one on honour!”

  “I don’t need to—with you.”

  She analyzed this with gathering perplexity. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, I don’t need to put you on your honour—because I’m sure of you. Even were I not, still I’d refrain from exacting any pledge, or attempting to.” He paused and shrugged before continuing: “If I thought you were still to be distrusted, Miss Bannon, I’d say: ‘There’s a free door; go when you like, back to the Pack, turn in your report, and let them act as they see fit.’… Do you think I care for them? Do you imagine for one instant that I fear any one—or all—of that gang?”

  “That rings suspiciously of egoism!”

  “Let it,” he retorted. “It’s pride of caste, if you must know. I hold myself a grade better than such cattle; I’ve intelligence, at least….I can take care of myself!”

  If he might read her countenance, it expressed more than anything else distress and disappointment.

  “Why do you boast like this—to me?”

  “Less through self-satisfaction than in contempt for a pack of murderous mongrels—impatience that I have to consider such creatures as Popinot, Wertheimer, De Morbiban and—all their crew.”

  “And Bannon,” she corrected calmly—“you meant to say!”

  “Wel-l—” he stammered, discountenanced.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she assured him. “I quite understand, and strange as it may sound, I’ve very little feeling in the matter.” And then she acknowledged his stupefied stare with a weary smile. “I know what I know,” she added, with obscure significance….

  “I’d give a good deal to know how much you know,” he muttered in his confusion.

  “But what do you know?” she caught him up—“against Mr. Bannon—against my father, that is—that makes you so ready to suspect both him and me?”

  “Nothing,” he confessed—“I know nothing; but I suspect everything and everybody…. And the more I think of it, the more closely I examine that brutal business of last night, the more I seem to sense his will behind it all—as one might glimpse a face in darkness through a lighted lattice…. Oh, laugh if you like! It sounds high-flown, I know. But that’s the effect I get…. What took you to my room, if not his orders? Why does he train with De Morbihan, if he’s not blood-kin to that breed? Why are you running away from him if not because you’ve found out his part in that conspiracy?”

  His pause and questioning look evoked no answer; the girl sat moveless and intent, meeting his gaze inscrutably. And something in her impassive attitude worked a little exasperation into his temper.

  “Why,” he declared hotly—“if I dare trust to intuition—forgive me if

  I pain you—”

  She interrupted with impatience: “I’ve already begged you not to consider my feelings, Mr. Lanyard! If you dared trust to your intuition—what then?”

  “Why, then, I could believe that Mr. Bannon, your father … I could believe it was his order that killed poor Roddy!”

  There could be no doubting her horrified and half-incredulous surprise.

  “Roddy?” she iterated in a whisper almost inaudible, with face fast blanching. “Roddy—!”

  “Inspector Roddy of Scotland Yard,” he told her mercilessly, “was murdered in his sleep last night at Troyon’s. The murderer broke into his room by way of mine—the two adjoin. He used my razor, wore my dressing-gown to shield his clothing, did everything he could think of to cast suspicion on me, and when I came in assaulted me, meaning to drug and leave me insensible to be found by the police. Fortunately—I was beforehand with him. I had just left him drugged, insensible in my place, when I met you in the corridor…. You didn’t know?”

  “How can you ask?” the girl moaned.

  Bending forward, an elbow on the table, she worked her hands together until their knuckles shone white through the skin—but not as white as the face from which her eyes sought his with a look of dumb horror, dazed, pitiful, imploring.

  “You’re not deceiving me? But no—why should you?” she faltered. “But how terrible, how unspeakably awful! …”

  “I’m sorry,” Lanyard mumbled—“I’d have held my tongue if I hadn’t thought you knew—”

  “You thought I knew—and didn’t lift a finger to save the man?” She jumped up with a blazing face. “Oh, how could you?”

  “No—not that—I never thought that. But, meeting you then and there, so opportunely—I couldn’t ignore the coincidence; and when you admitted you were running away from your father, considering all the circumstances, I was surely justified in thinking it was realization, in part at least, of what had happened that was driving you away.” She shook her head slowly, her indignation ebbing as quickly as it had risen. “I understand,” she said; “you had some excuse, but you were mistaken. I ran away—yes—but not because of that. I never dreamed …”

  She fell silent, sitting with bowed head and twisting her hands together in a manner he found it painful to watch.

  “But please,” he implored, “don’t take it so much to heart, Miss

  Bannon. If you knew nothing, you couldn’t have prevented it.”

  “No,” she said brokenly—“I could have done nothing … But I didn’t know. It isn’t that—it’s the horror and pity of it. And that you could think—!”

  “But I didn’t!” he protested—“truly I did not. And for what I did think, for the injustice I did do you, believe me, I’m truly sorry.”

  “You were quite justified,” she said—“not only by circumstantial evidence but to a degree in fact. You must know … now I must tell you…”

  “Nothing you don’t wish to!” he interrupted. “The fact that I practically kidnapped you under pretence of doing you a service, and suspected you of being in the pay of that Pack, gives me no title to your confidence.”

  “Can I blame you for thinking what you did?” She went on slowly, without looking up—gaze steadfast to her interlaced fingers: “Now for my own sake I want you to know what otherwise, perhaps, I shouldn’t have told you—not yet, at all events. I’m no more Bannon’s daughter than you’re his son. Our names sound alike—people frequently make the same mistake. My name is Shannon—Lucy Shannon. Mr. Bannon called me Lucia because he knew I didn’t like it, to tease me; for the same reason he always kept up the pretence that I was his daughter when people misunderstood.”

  “But—if that is so—then what—?”

  “Why—it’s very simple.” Still she didn’t look up. “I’m a trained nurse. Mr. Bannon is consumptive—so far gone, it’s a wonder he didn’t die years ago: for months I’ve been haunted by the thought that it’s only the evil in him keeps him alive. It wasn’t long after I took the assignment to nurse him that I found out something about him…. He’d had a haemorrhage at his desk; and while he lay in coma, and I was waiting for the doctor, I happened to notice one of the papers he’d been working over when he fell. And then, just as I began to appreciate the sort of man I was employed by, he came to, and saw—and knew. I found him watching me with those dreadful eyes of his, and though he was unable to speak, knew my life wasn’t safe if ever I breathed a word of what I had read. I would have left him then, but he was too cunning for me, and when in time I found a chance to escape—I was afraid I’d not live long if ever I left him. He went about it deliberately; to keep me frightened, and though he never mentioned the matter directly, let me know plainly, in a hundred ways, what his power was and what would happen if I whispered a word of what I knew. It’s nearly a year now—nearly a year of endless terror and…
”

  Her voice fell; she was trembling with the recrudescent suffering of that year-long servitude. And for a little Lanyard felt too profoundly moved to trust himself to speak; he stood aghast, staring down at this woman, so intrinsically and gently feminine, so strangely strong and courageous; and vaguely envisaging what anguish must have been hers in enforced association with a creature of Bannon’s ruthless stamp, he was rent with compassion and swore to himself he’d stand by her and see her through and free and happy if he died for it—or ended in the Santé!

  “Poor child!” he heard himself murmuring—“poor child!”

  “Don’t pity me!” she insisted, still with face averted. “I don’t deserve it. If I had the spirit of a mouse, I’d have defied him; it needed only courage enough to say one word to the police—”

  “But who is he, then?” Lanyard demanded. “What is he, I mean?”

  “I hardly know how to tell you. And I hardly dare: I feel as if these walls would betray me if I did…. But to me he’s the incarnation of all things evil….” She shook herself with a nervous laugh. “But why be silly about it? I don’t really know what or who he is: I only suspect and believe that he is a man whose life is devoted to planning evil and ordering its execution through his lieutenants. When the papers at home speak of ‘The Man Higher Up’ they mean Archer Bannon, though they don’t know it—or else I’m merely a hysterical woman exaggerating the impressions of a morbid imagination…. And that’s all I know of him that matters.”

  “But why, if you believe all this—how did you at length find courage—?”

  “Because I no longer had courage to endure; because I was more afraid to stay than to go—afraid that my own soul would be forfeit. And then, last night, he ordered me to go to your room and search it for evidence that you were the Lone Wolf. It was the first time he’d ever asked anything like that of me. I was afraid, and though I obeyed, I was glad when you interrupted—glad even though I had to lie the way I did….And all that worked on me, after I’d gone back to my room, until I felt I could stand it no longer; and after a long time, when the house seemed all still, I got up, dressed quietly and … That is how I came to meet you—quite by accident.”