Part 31 (1/2)
But she was no more there: the bench was vacant, the garden deserted, the gateway yawning on the street.
With a low, stifled cry, Lanyard turned from the bench and stumbled out to the junction of the cross-street. But nowhere in their several perspectives could he see anything that moved.
After some time he returned to the garden and quartered it with the thoroughness of a pointer beating a covert. But he did this hopelessly, bitterly aware that the outcome would be precisely what it eventually was, that is to say, nothing....
He was kneeling beside the bench--scrutinizing the turf with microscopic attention by aid of his flash-lamp, seeking some sign of struggle to prove she had not left him willingly, and finding none--when a voice brought him momentarily out of his distraction.
He looked up wildly, to discover Ducroy standing over him, his stout person chastely swathed in a quilted dressing-gown and trousers, his expression one of stupefaction.
”Well, monsieur--well?” the Minister of War demanded irritably.
”What--I repeat--what are you doing there?”
Lanyard essayed response, choked up, and gulped. He rose and stood swaying, showing a stricken face.
”Eh?” Ducroy insisted with an accent of exasperation. ”Why do you stand glaring at me like that--eh? Come, monsieur: what ails you? I have arranged everything, I say. Where is mademoiselle?”
Lanyard made a broken gesture.
”Gone!” he muttered forlornly.
Instantly the countenance of the stout Frenchman was lightened with a gleam of eager interest--inveterate romantic that he was!--and he stepped nearer, peering closely into the face of the adventurer.
”Gone?” he echoed. ”Mademoiselle? Your sweetheart, eh?”
Lanyard a.s.sented with a disconsolate nod and sigh. Impatiently Ducroy caught him by the sleeve.
”Come!” he insisted, tugging--”but come at once into the house. Now, monsieur--now at length you enlist all one's sympathies! Come, I say!
Is it your desire that I catch my death of cold?”
Indifferently Lanyard suffered himself to be led away.
He was, indeed, barely conscious of what was happening. All his being was possessed by the thought that she had forsaken him. And he could well guess why: impossible for such an one as she to contemplate without a shudder a.s.sociation with the man who had been what he had been! Infatuate!--to have dreamed that she would tolerate the devotion of a criminal, that she could ever forget his ident.i.ty with the Lone Wolf. Inevitably--soon or late--she must have fled that ignominious thought in dread and horror, daring whatever consequences to escape and forget both it and him. And better now, perhaps, than later....
XVIII
ENIGMA
He found no reason to believe she had left him other than voluntarily, or that their adventures since the escape from the impa.s.se Stanislas had been attended upon by spies of the Pack. He could have sworn they hadn't been followed either to or from the rue des Acacias; their way had been too long and purposely too roundabout, his vigilance too lively, for any sort of surveillance to have been practised without his remarking some indication thereof, at one time or another.
On the other hand (he told himself) there was every reason to believe she hadn't left him to go back to Bannon; concerning whom she had expressed herself too forcibly to excuse a surmise that she had preferred his protection to the Lone Wolf's.
Reasoning thus, he admitted, one couldn't blame her. He could readily see how, illuded at first by a certain romantic glamour, she had not, until left to herself in the garden, come to clear perception of the fact that she was casting her lot with a common criminal's. Then, horror overmastering her of a sudden she had fled--wildly, blindly, he didn't doubt. But whither? He looked in vain for her at their agreed rendezvous, the Sacre Coeur. She had neither money nor friends in Paris.
True: she had mentioned some personal jewellery she planned to hypothecate. Her first move, then, would be to seek the mont-de-piete--not to force himself again upon her, but to follow at a distance and ward off interference on Bannon's part.
The Government p.a.w.n-shop had its invitation for Lanyard himself: he was there before the doors were open for the day; and fortified by loans negotiated on his watch, cigarette-case, and a ring or two, retired to a cafe commanding a view of the entrance on the rue des Blancs-Manteaux, and settled himself against a day-long vigil.
It wasn't easy; drowsiness buzzed in his brain and weighted his eyelids; now and again, involuntarily, he nodded over his gla.s.s of black coffee. And when evening came and the mont-de-piete closed for the night, he rose and stumbled off, wondering if possibly he had napped a little without his knowledge and so missed her visit.