“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.”
CHAPTER 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 tonight; 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 tonight; 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 tonight, 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.
The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales Page 124
