Part 18 (1/2)
But he granted the girl little more than time for a fugitive survey of this ante-room to an establishment of unique artistic character.
”These are living-rooms, downstairs here,” he explained hurriedly.
”Solon's unmarried, and lives quite alone--his studio-devil and femme-de-menage come in by the day only--and so he avoids that pest a concierge. With your permission, I'll a.s.sign you to the studio--up here.”
And leading the way up a narrow flight of steps, he made a light in the huge room that was the upper storey.
”I believe you'll be comfortable,” he said--”that divan yonder is as easy a couch as one could wish--and there's this door you can lock at the head of the staircase; while I, of course, will be on guard below.... And now, Miss Bannon... unless there's something more I can do--?”
The girl answered with a wan smile and a little broken sigh. Almost involuntarily, in the heaviness of her fatigue, she had surrendered to the hospitable arms of a huge lounge-chair.
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.
”d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sed in slumber from one existence to another, sloughing en pa.s.sant 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 sh.e.l.l of sensations enclosing dull embers of vitality.
For several minutes he lay without moving, curiously intrigued by this riddle of ident.i.ty: 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.