Alias the Lone Wolf Part 5

Evidently a person of rich humour, the speaker: "madame la comtesse"

was abruptly convulsed with laughter; the chubby gentleman roared; Mr.

Phinuit looked up from the carte with an enquiring, receptive smile; the waiter grinned broadly. But the cause of all this merriment wore only an expression of slightly pained bewilderment on his death-mask of a face.

At that moment arrived the caleche which d.u.c.h.emin had commanded to drive him to the chateau; and with a ride of two miles before him and rain imminent, he had no more time to waste.

VI

VISITATION

Dinner was served in a vast and sombre hall whose darkly panelled walls and high-beamed ceiling bred a mult.i.tude of shadows that danced about the table a weird, spasmodic saraband, without meaning or end, restlessly advancing and retreating as the candles flickered, failed and flared in the gusty draughts.

There was (d.u.c.h.emin learned) no other means of illumination but by candle-light in the entire chateau. The time-old structure had been thoroughly renovated and modernised in most respects, it was furnished with taste and reverence (one could guess whose the taste and purse) but Madame de Sevenie remained its undisputed chatelaine, a belated spirit of the ancien regime, stubbornly set against the conveniences of this degenerate age. Electric lighting she would never countenance. The telephone she esteemed a convenience for tradespeople and vulgarians in general, beneath the dignity of leisured quality. The motor car she disapproved yet tolerated because, for all her years, she was of a brisk and active turn and liked to get about, whereas since the War good horseflesh was difficult to find in France and men to care for it more scarce still.

So much, and more besides, she communicated to d.u.c.h.emin at intervals during the meal, comporting herself toward him with graciousness not altogether innocent of a certain faded coquetry. Having spoken of herself as one born too late for her time, she paused and eyed him keenly, a gleam of light malice in her bright old eyes.

"And you, too, monsieur," she added suddenly. "But you, I think, belong to an even earlier day..."

"I, madame? And why do you say that?"

"I should have been guillotined under the Terror; but you, monsieur, you should have been hanged long before that--hanged for a buccaneer on the Spanish Main."

"Madame may be right," said d.u.c.h.emin, amused. "And quite possibly I was, you know."

Then he wondered a little, and began to cultivate some respect for the shrewdness of her intuitions.

He sat on her left, the place of honour going by custom immemorial to monsieur le cure of Nant. For all that, d.u.c.h.emin declined to feel slighted. Was he not on the right of Eve de Montalais?

The girl Louise was placed between the cure and her sister-in-law.

d.u.c.h.emia could not have been guilty of the offence of ignoring her; but the truth is that, save when courtesy demanded that he pay her some attention, he hardly saw her. She was pretty enough, but very quiet and self-absorbed, a slender, nervous creature with that pathetically eager look peculiar to her age and caste in France, starving for the life she might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare exotic flower set before a screen of l.u.s.treless black velvet. And like a flower to the sun she responded to the homage of his admiration --which he was none the less studious to preserve from the sin of obviousness. For he was well aware that her response was impersonal; it was not his but any admiration that she craved as a parched land wants rain.

Less than three months a wife, more than five years a widow, still young and ardent, nearing the noontide of her womanhood, and immolated in this house of perennial mourning, making vain oblation of her youth, her beauty, the rich wine of life that coursed so l.u.s.tily through her being, upon the altar of a memory whose high priestess was only an old, old woman....

He perceived that it would be quite possible for him, did he yield to the bent of his sympathies, to dislike Madame de Sevenie most intensely.

Not that he was apt to have much opportunity to encourage such a gratuitous aversion: to-morrow would see him on the road again, his back forever turned to the Chateau de Montalais....

Or, if not to-morrow, then as soon as the storm abated.

It was raging now as if it would never weaken and had the will to raze the chateau though it were the task of a thousand years. From time to time the shock of some great blast of air would seem to rock upon its foundations even that ancient pile, those heavy walls of hewn stone builded in times of honest workmans.h.i.+p by forgotten Sieurs de Montalais who had meant their home to outlast the ages.

Rain in sheets sluiced the windows without rest. Round turrets and gables the wind raved and moaned like a famished wild thing denied its kill. Occasionally a venturesome gust with the spirit of a minor demon would find its way down the chimney to the drawing-room fire and send sparks in volleys against the screen, with thin puffs of wood smoke that lingered in the air like acrid ghosts.

At such times the cure, sitting at piquet with Madame de Sevenie, after dinner, would cough distressingly and, reminded that he had a bed to reach somehow through all this welter, anathematise the elements, help himself to a pinch of snuff, and proceed with his play.

d.u.c.h.emin sat at a little distance, talking with Madame de Montalais over their cigarettes. To smoking, curiously enough, Madame de Sevenie offered no objection. Women had not smoked in her day, and she for her part would never. But Eve might: it was "done"; even in those circles of hidebound conservatism, the society of the Faubourg St. Germain, ladies of this day smoked unrebuked.

Louise had excused herself--to sit, d.u.c.h.emin had no doubt, by the bedside of d'Aubrac, under the duenna-like eye of an old nurse of the family.

Being duly encouraged, d.u.c.h.emin talked about himself, of his wanderings and adventures, all with discretion, with the neatest expurgations, and with an object, leading cunningly round to the subject of New York.

At mention of it he saw a new light kindle in Eve's eyes. Her breath came more quickly, gentle emotion agitated her bosom.

Monsieur knew New York?

But well: he had been there as a boy, again as a young man; and then later, in the year when America entered the Great War; not since ...

"It is my home," said Eve de Montalais softly, looking away.

(One noted that she said "is"--not "was.")

So d.u.c.h.emin had understood. Madame had not visited her home recently?

Not in many years; not in fact since nineteen-thirteen. She a.s.sumed the city must have changed greatly.

d.u.c.h.emin thought it was never the same, but forever changing itself overnight, so to speak; and yet always itself, always like no other city in the world, fascinating....

"Fascinating? But irresistible! How I long for it!" She was distrait for an instant. "My New York! Monsieur--would you believe?--I dream of it!"

He had found a key to one chamber in the mansion of her confidence. As much to herself as to him, unconsciously dropping into English, she began to talk of her life "at home"....

Her father had been a partner in a great jewellery house, Cottier's, of Paris, London, and New York. (So that explained it! She was wearing the blue diamond again tonight, with other jewels worth, in the judgment of a keen connoisseur, a king's ransom.) Schooled at an exclusive establishment for the daughters of people of fas.h.i.+on, Eve at an early age had made her debut; but within the year her father died, and her mother, whose heart had always been in the city of her nativity, closed the house on East Fifty-seventh street and removed with her daughter to Paris. There Eve had met her future husband. Shortly after, her mother died. Eve returned to New York to attend to some business in connection with her estate, remaining only a few weeks, leaving almost reluctantly; but the new love was very sweet, she had looked forward joyfully to the final transplanting of her affections.

And then the War, the short month of long, long days in the apartment on the avenue des Champs-Elysees, waiting, waiting, while the earth trembled to the tramp of armed men and the tireless rumbling of caissons and camions, and the air was vibrant with the savage dialogue of cannon, ever louder, daily more near....

She fell silent, sitting with bowed head and gaze remote.

From the splendid jewels that adorned the fingers twisting together in her lap, the firelight struck coruscant gleams.

"Now I hate Paris, I wish never to see it again."

d.u.c.h.emin uttered a sympathetic murmur.

"But New York--?"

"Ah, but sometimes I think I would give anything to be there once more!"

The animation with which this confession was delivered proved transient.

"Then I remind myself I have no one there--a few friends, yes, acquaintances; but no family ties, no one dear to me."

"But--pardon--you stay here?"

"It is beautiful here, monsieur."