The Lone Wolf by Louis Joseph Vance

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Her weary glance ranged the luxuriously appointed studio and returned
to Lanyard's face; and while he waited he fancied something moving in
those wistful eyes, so deeply shadowed with distress, perplexity, and
fatigue.

"I'm very tired indeed," she confessed--"more than I guessed. But I'm
sure I shall be comfortable.... And I count myself very fortunate, Mr.
Lanyard. You've been more kind than I deserved. Without you, I don't
like to think what might have become of me...."

"Please don't!" he pleaded and, suddenly discountenanced by
consciousness of his duplicity, turned to the stairs. "Good night,
Miss Bannon," he mumbled; and was half-way down before he heard his
valediction faintly echoed.

As he gained the lower floor, the door was closed at the top of the
stairs and its bolt shot home with a soft thud.

But turning to lock the lower door, he stayed his hand in transient
indecision.

"Damn it!" he growled uneasily--"there can't be any harm in that girl!
Impossible for eyes like hers to lie!... And yet ... And yet!... Oh,
what's the matter with me? Am I losing my grip? Why stick at ordinary
precaution against treachery on the part of a woman who's nothing to me
and of whom I know nothing that isn't conspicuously questionable?...
All because of a pretty face and an appealing manner!"

And so he secured that door, if very quietly; and having pocketed the
key and made the round of doors and windows, examining their locks, he
stumbled heavily into the bedroom of his friend the artist.

Darkness overwhelmed him then: he was stricken down by sleep as an ox
falls under the pole.

XII

AWAKENING

It was late afternoon when Lanyard wakened from sleep so deep and
dreamless that nothing could have induced it less potent than sheer
systemic exhaustion, at once nervous, muscular and mental.

A profound and stifling lethargy benumbed his senses. There was stupor
in his brain, and all his limbs ached dully. He opened dazed eyes upon
blank darkness. In his ears a vast silence pulsed.

And in that strange moment of awakening he was conscious of no
individuality: it was, for the time, as if he had passed in slumber
from one existence to another, sloughing en passant all his three-fold
personality as Marcel Troyon, Michael Lanyard, and the Lone Wolf. Had
any one of these names been uttered in his hearing just then it would
have meant nothing to him--or little more than nothing: he was for the
time being merely _himself_, a shell of sensations enclosing dull
embers of vitality.

For several minutes he lay without moving, curiously intrigued by this
riddle of identity: it was but slowly that his mind, like a blind hand
groping round a dark chamber, picked up the filaments of memory.

One by one the connections were renewed, the circuits closed....

But, singularly enough in his understanding, his first thought was of
the girl upstairs in the studio, unconsciously his prisoner and
hostage--rather than of himself, who lay there, heavy with loss of
sleep, languidly trying to realize himself.

For he was no more as he had been. Wherein the difference lay he
couldn't say, but that a difference existed he was persuaded--that he
had changed, that some strange reaction in the chemistry of his nature
had taken place during slumber. It was as if sleep had not only
repaired the ravages of fatigue upon the tissues of his brain and body,
but had mended the tissues of his soul as well. His thoughts were
fluent in fresh channels, his interests no longer the interests of the
Michael Lanyard he had known, no longer self-centred, the interests of
the absolute ego. He was concerned less for himself, even now when he
should be most gravely so, than for another, for the girl Lucia Bannon,
who was nothing to him, whom he had yet to know for twenty-four hours,
but of whom he could not cease to think if he would.

It was her plight that perturbed him, from which he sought an
outlet--never his own.

Yet his own was desperate enough....

Baffled and uneasy, he at length bethought him of his watch. But its
testimony seemed incredible: surely the hour could not be five in the
afternoon!--surely he could not have slept so close upon a full round
of the clock!

And if it were so, what of the girl? Had she, too, so sorely needed
sleep that the brief November day had dawned and waned without her
knowledge?

That question was one to rouse him: in an instant he was up and groping
his way through the gloom that enshrouded bed-chamber and dining-room
to the staircase door in the hall. He found this fast enough, its key
still safe in his pocket, and unlocking it quietly, shot the beam of
his flash-lamp up that dark well to the door at the top; which was
tight shut.

For several moments he attended to a taciturn silence broken by never a
sound to indicate that he wasn't a lonely tenant of the little
dwelling, then irresolutely lifted a foot to the first step--and
withdrew it. If she continued to sleep, why disturb her? He had much to
do in the way of thinking things out; and that was a process more
easily performed in solitude.

Leaving the door ajar, then, he turned to one of the front windows,
parted its draperies, and peered out, over the little garden and
through the iron ribs of the gate, to the street, where a single
gas-lamp, glimmering within a dull golden halo of mist, made visible
the scant length of the impasse Stanislas, empty, rain-swept, desolate.

The rain persisted with no hint of failing purpose....

Something in the dreary emptiness of that brief vista deepened the
shadow in his mood and knitted a careworn frown into his brows.

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!"

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 Sante!

"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."

"But you seemed so frightened at first when you saw me--"

"I was," she confessed simply; "I thought you were
Mr. Greggs."

"Greggs?"

"Mr. Bannon's private secretary--his right-hand man. He's about your
height and has a suit like the one you wear, and in that poor light--at
the distance I didn't notice you were clean-shaven--Greggs wears a
moustache--"

"Then it was Greggs murdered Roddy and tried to drug me! ... By George,
I'd like to know whether the police got there before Bannon, or
somebody else, discovered the substitution. It was a telegram to the
police, you know, I sent from the Bourse last night!"

In his excitement Lanyard began to pace the floor rapidly; and now that
he was no longer staring at her, the girl lifted her head and watched
him closely as he moved to and fro, talking aloud--more to himself than
to her.

"I wish I knew! ... And what a lucky thing, you did meet me! For if
you'd gone on to the Gare du Nord and waited there....Well, it isn't
likely Bannon didn't discover your flight before eight o'clock this
morning, is it?"

"I'm afraid not...."

"And they've drawn the dead-line for me round every conceivable exit
from Paris: Popinot's Apaches are picketed everywhere. And if Bannon
had found out about you in time, it would have needed only a word..."

He paused and shuddered to think what might have ensued had that word
been spoken and the girl been found waiting for her train in the Gare
du Nord.

"Mercifully, we've escaped that. And now, with any sort of luck, Bannon
ought to be busy enough, trying to get his precious Mr. Greggs out of
the Sante, to give us a chance. And a fighting chance is all I ask."

"Mr. Lanyard"--the girl bent toward him across the table with a gesture
of eager interest--"have you any idea why he--why Mr. Bannon hates you
so?"

"But does he? I don't know!"

"If he doesn't, why should he plot to cast suspicion of murder on you,
and why be so anxious to know whether you were really the Lone Wolf? I
saw his eyes light up when De Morbihan mentioned that name, after
dinner; and if ever I saw hatred in a man's face, it was in his as he
watched you, when you weren't looking."

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