Red Masquerade Part 10

"Yes, Harris." Lanyard tossed him a sovereign. "Sorry to rout you out so late, but I need a cab. Whistle up a growler, will you?"

"'Nk-you, sir."

The man retired cheerfully, rewarded for many a night of broken slumber.

Prince Victor got up from the desk and proffered Lanyard the cheque.

"I fancy," he said with a leer, "you'll find that all right."

Lanyard scrutinized the cheque minutely, nodded his satisfaction.

"Thanks ever so ... No, not a word!" He forbade inflexibly a wholly imaginary interposition on the part of Prince Victor. "You don't know how to thank me--do you? Then why try? I know I'm too good, but I really can't help it, it's my nature--and there you are! So what's the good of bickering about it?... Now where did you leave your coat and hat? On my bed, as you came in?"

He smiled charmingly and darted through the portieres, returning with the articles in question. "Do let me help you."

The prince struggled into the coat and grunted an acknowledgment of the service. Lanyard pressed the hat into his hand, picked up the canvas, replaced it in its frame, and tucked both under the princely arm.

Another knock: Harris returned.

"The four-wheeler is w'iting, sir."

"Thanks, Harris. Half a moment: I want a word with you. You see this gentleman?" Lanyard caught Victor's look of angry resentment and interrupted himself. "Don't forget yourself, monsieur le prince.

Remember ..."

He patted significantly the pocket which held the revolver, and turned back to Harris.

"This gentleman," he said, consulting the signature to the cheque, "is Prince Victor Va.s.silyevski. Please remember him. You may have to bear witness against him in court."

"What insolence is this?" Victor demanded, hotly.

"Calm yourself, monsieur le prince." Lanyard repeated the warning gesture.

"He is a n.o.bleman of Russia, or says he is, and--strangely enough, Harris!--a burglar. I caught him burglarizing my rooms when I came home just now. You may judge from his appearance what difficulty I had in subduing him."

"'E do seem fair used up, sir," Harris admitted, eyeing Victor indignantly.

"Would you wish me to call a bobby and give 'im in charge?"

"Thanks, no. Prince Victor and I have compromised. He doesn't relish going to jail, and I've no particular desire to send him there. But he does want what he broke in to steal--that painting you see under his arm--and I've agreed to sell it to him. Here's the cheque he has just given me. Providing payment is not stopped on it, Harris, you will hear no more of this incident. But if by any chance the cheque should come back from his bank--I may ask you to testify to what you have seen and heard here to-night."

"It is a lie!" Prince Victor shrilled. "You brought me in with you, a.s.saulted me, blackmailed that cheque out of me! n.o.body saw us--"

"Sorry," Lanyard cut in; "but it so happens, that the gentleman who has the rooms immediately above came in when I did, and can testify that I was alone. That's all, monsieur le prince. Your carriage waits."

Harris opened the door. Choking with rage, the prince shuffled out, Lanyard politely escorting him to the curb. There, with a foot lifted to enter the four-wheeler, Prince Victor turned, shaking an impa.s.sioned hand in Lanyard's face.

"You'll pay me for this!" he spluttered. "I'll square accounts with you, Lanyard, if I have to follow you to the gates of h.e.l.l!"

"Better not," Lanyard warned him fairly, "if you do, I'll push you in ...

Bon soir, monsieur le prince!"

BOOK II

THE LONE WOLF'S DAUGHTER

I

THE GIRL SOFIA

She sat all day long--from noon, that is, till late at night--on a high stool behind the tall, pulpit-like desk of the caisse; flanked on one hand by the swing door of green baize which communicated with the kitchen, on the other by a hideous black walnut buffet on which fruits of the season were displayed, more or less temptingly, to the taste of Mama Therese.

But for these articles of furniture, the buffet, the desk, and the door to the kitchen quarters, uninterrupted rows of tables, square, with composition-marble tops, lined three walls of the room. The fourth was mainly plate-gla.s.s window, one on either side of the main entrance.

Back of the tables were wall-seats upholstered in red plush, dusty and threadbare; and, above, a frieze of mirrors. The floor of the restaurant was a patternless mosaic of small hexagonal tiles, bare in warm weather, in the winter covered by a thick but well-worn Brussels carpet of peculiarly repulsive design. The windows wore half-curtains of net which, after nightfall, were reinforced by ruffled draperies of rep silk. Through the net curtains, by day, the name of the restaurant was shadowed in reverse by plain white-enamel letters glued to the gla.s.s:

CAFe DES EXILES

The girl stared so constantly at these letters, during the off hours of the day, that she sometimes wondered if they were not indelibly stamped upon her brain, like this:

[Reverse: CAFe DES EXILES]

She gazed in the direction of the windows as a matter of habit, because Mama Therese objected to her reading at the desk (all the same, sometimes she did it on the sly) because the glimpses she caught, above the half-curtains, of heads of pa.s.sersby gave her idle imagination something to play with, but mostly because it was difficult otherwise to seem unconscious of the stares that converged toward her from every table occupied by a masculine patron, whether regular or casual--unless the patron happened to be accompanied by a lady, in which unhappy event he had to content himself with furtive, sidelong glances, not always furtive enough by half.

The feminine patrons stared, too, but from quite another angle of view.

Sofia knew why. If she hadn't, the mirror across the room would have enlightened even a woman without vanity; which paradox this thoroughly human young person was not.

She was, indeed, healthily vain; and when she wasn't focussing dream-dark eyes upon the windows, or verifying additions and making change, she was as likely as not to be stealing consultations with the mirror opposite, making sure she hadn't, in the last few minutes, gone off in her looks. Not that her comeliness bade fair ever to prove the cause of any real excitement.

Mama Therese made a first-rate dragon: she was very much on the job of discouraging enterprising young men, and this without respect for union hours or overtime. And when she wasn't functioning as the ubiquitous wet-blanket, Papa Dupont understudied for her, and did it most efficiently, too. If anything he was more vigilant and enthusiastic when it came to administering the snub sufficient than even Mama Therese; in Sofia's sight, indeed, he betrayed some personal feeling in the business; he seemed to consider alien admiration of his charge an encroachment upon his private prerogatives, to be resented accordingly.

Sofia understood. At eighteen--thanks to the comprehensive visual education in the business of life which she could hardly have failed to a.s.similate from a coign of vantage overlooking every table of a Soho restaurant--there were precious few things she didn't understand. But her insight into Papa Dupont's mind in respect of herself was wholly devoid of sympathy. She was just a little bit afraid of him, and she despised him without measure. And this contempt was founded on something more than his weakness for taking numerous and surrept.i.tious nips (surrept.i.tious, at least, until they became numerous) while presiding over the zinc in the pantry between the restaurant proper and the kitchen; and on something more than his reluctance to let Mama Therese make an honest man of him, although these two had squabbled openly for so many years that most of the house staff believed them to be married hard and fast enough.

For the matter of that, Sofia herself might have been the dupe of this popular delusion--which Mama Therese did her best to encourage by never referring to Dupont save as "mon mari"--had they been less imprudent in recriminations which had pa.s.sed between them in private when Sofia was of an age so tender that she was presumed to be safely immature of mind.

Whereas she had always been precocious, if rather a self-contained child.

Almost from infancy she had been conversant with many things which she knew it wouldn't do to talk about.

Such sympathy as Sofia wasted on the couple was all for Mama Therese. What with keeping an eye on Papa Dupont that prevented his drinking himself to death seven times per calendar week, and an eye on Sofia that was fondly credited with being largely responsible for her failure to run away with each and every presentable man who ogled her, and browbeating the waiters and frustrating their attempts to cheat the house out of its fair dues, and supervising the marketing and the cuisine: believe it or not, Mama Therese led a tolerably busy life and deserved whatever gratification she got out of it, to say nothing of highest commendation for industry, fidelity, and frugality. But that did nothing to prevent Sofia from not liking her.

Her inability to play up to the relations.h.i.+p in which she stood to Mama Therese in the manner prescribed by sentimentalists worried Sofia more than a little. She was as hungry to give affection as to receive it; and surely she ought to be fond of Mama Therese, who (Sofia was forever being reminded) had in the goodness of her great heart adopted her as the orphaned offspring of a cousin far-removed, and had brought her up at her own expense, expecting no return (excepting humility, grat.i.tude, unquestioning affection, and uncomplaining acceptance of a life of incessant toil at tasks uncongenial when not downright unsavoury, without spending money or hours of untrammelled liberty in which to spend it).

Surely such n.o.bility ought to be requited with nothing less than love!

Nevertheless, the plain, and to Sofia disquieting, truth was: it wasn't.