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.
Bra.s.s 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 Instantly it was withdrawn; but his betrayal was accomplished.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, G.o.d has so n.o.bly 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, pet.i.t Monsieur Paul."
"Is anything the matter?"
"No ... no: there is nothing the matter."
"I"m afraid I have tired you out to-night."
"I do not deny I am a little weary."
"Forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive, not yet, pet.i.t 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 m.u.f.fled by a rug, high heels tapping on uncovered floor, the sc.r.a.pe 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 s.p.a.ce of silence; then a gusty little laugh. "That is a great favour, truly, pet.i.t 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 resentment, 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 grat.i.tude, 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 Barre!" Her sad laugh fluttered, she crept into his arms. "But still, pet.i.t 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.
XVI
THE HOUSE OF LILITH
It stood four-square and ma.s.sive on a corner between the avenues de Friedland et des Champs-Elysees, 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 sanct.i.ty 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.