“Prince Victor gave a gesture of pain and reluc-
tance. ‘Must I tell you?’”


RED MASQUERADE
Being the Story of
THE LONE WOLF’S DAUGHTER
BY
LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
FRONTIS PIECE
BY
DO UGLAS DUER
GARDEN CITY, N. Y., AND TORONTO
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1921


COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY IN THE
UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN


TO
J. PARKER READ, J.R., ESQ.
THE CINEMA THAT WAS HIS





APOLOGY -
THIS tale quite brazenly derives from the author's
invention for motion pictures which Mr. J. Parker
Read, Jr., produced in the autumn of 1919 under the
title of “The Lone Wolf's Daughter.”
It is only fair to state, however, that the author
has in this version taken as many high-handed liber-
ties with the version used by the photoplay director
as the latter took with the original.
The chance to get even for once was too tempt—
II19. . . .
Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Company in the first
instance, and then Mr. Arthur T. Vance, editor of
The Pictorial Review, in which the story was published
as a serial, were equally guilty of the encouragement
which results in its appearance in its present guise.
L. J. V.
Westport—31 December, 1920.


Books by Louis Joseph Vance
CYNTHLA-OF-THE-MINUTE
JOAN THURSDAY
NOBODY
NO MAN'S LAND
POOL OF FLAME
PRIVATE WAR
SHEEP'S CLOTHING
THE BANDBOX
THE BLACK BAG
THE BRASS BOWL.
THE BRONZE BELL
THE DARK MIRROR
THE DAY OF DAYS
THE DESTROYING ANGEL
THE FORTUNE HUNTER
THE ROMANCE OF TERENCE O’ROURKE
TREY O HEARTS
Stories About “The Lone Wolf”
THE LONE WOLF
THE FALSE FACES
RED MASQUERADE
ALIAS THE LONE WOLF


CONTENTS
BOOK ONE:
A CHAPTER FROM THE YOUTH OF MONSIEUR
MICHAEL LANYARD
PAGE
I PLEBELAN AND PRINCE . . . . . I
II THE PRINCESS SoFIA . . . . . 6
III MONSIEUR QUIxoTE . . . . . 11
IV THE FOOL AND HIS MONEY . . . 16
W IMPOSTOR . . . . . . . . . . 21
VI THERESE . . . . . . . . . 29
VII FAMILY REUNION . . . . . . 34
VIII GREEK vs. GREEK . . . . . . 49
IX PAID IN FULL . . . . . . . 63
BOOK TWO:
THE LONE WOLF’S DAUGHTER
I THE GIRL SOFIA . . . . . . 75
II MASKs AND FACES . . . . . 81
III THE AGONY COLUMN . . . . . 92


CONTENTS
IV
:
IX
*
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXII
MUTINY .
HOUSE OF THE WOLF .
THE MUMMER .
THE FANTASTICS
CouncIL OF THE GODLESS
MRS. WARING
VICTOR ET AL
HEARTBREAK
SUSPECT
THE TURNIP
CONFERENCE OF THE DAMNED
INTUITION
THE CRYSTAL
THE RAISED CHEQUE
ORDEAL .
UNMASKING
THE DEVIL TO PAY
VENTRE A TERRE .
THE SEVEN BRASS HINGEs
PAGE
103
120
135
144
154
168
181
191
201
210
214
222
229
249
263
272
283
289
301


BOOK I
A CHAPTER FROM THE YOUTH OF MONSTEUR
MICHAEL LANYARD





RED MASQUERADE
I
PLEBEIAN AND PRINCE
HE gentleman was not in the least bored
| who might have been and was seen on that
wintry afternoon in Nineteen hundred, loung-
ing with one shoulder to a wall of the dingy salesroom
and idly thumbing a catalogue of effects about to
be put up at auction; but his insouciance was so
unaffected that the inevitable innocent bystander
might have been pardoned for perceiving in him a
pitiable victim of the utterest ennui.
In point of fact, me was privately relishing life with
enviable gusto. In those days he could and did:
being alive was the most satisfying pastime he could
imagine, or cared to, who was a thundering success in
his own conceit and in fact as well; since all the world
for whose regard he cared a twopenny-bit admired,
respected, and esteemed him in his public status, and
admired, respected, and feared him in his private
capacity, and paid him heavy tribute to boot.
More than that, he was young, still very young
indeed, barely beyond the threshold of his chosen
I


2 RED MASQUERADE
career. To his eagerly exploring eye the future un-
rolled itself in the likeness of an endless scroll illumi-
nated with adventures all piquant, picturesque, and
profitable. With the happy assurance of lucky young
impudence he figured the world to himself as his
oyster; and if his method of helping himself to the
succulent contents of its stubborn shell might have
been thought questionable (as unquestionably it
was) he was no more conscious of a conscience to give
him qualms than he was of pangs of indigestion.
Whereas his digestive powers were superb.
This way of killing an empty afternoon, too, was
much to his taste. The man adored auctions. To
his mind a most delectable flavour of discreet scandal
inhered in such collections of shabby properties from
anonymous homes. Nothing so piqued his imagina-
tion as some well-worn piece of furniture—say an
ancient escritoire with ink stains on its green baize
writing-bed (dried life-blood of love letters long since
dead!) and all its pigeon-holes and little drawers
empty of everything but dust and the seductive smell
of secrets; or a dressing-table whose bewildered mir-
ror, to-day reflecting surroundings cold and strange,
had once been quick and warm to the beauty of eyes
brilliant with delight or blurred with tears; or per-
chance a bed.
And even aside from such stimuli to a lively and
ingenious fancy, there was always the chance that
one might pick up some priceless treasure at an auc-
tion sale, some rare work of art dim with desuetude


PLEBEIAN AND PRINCE 3
and the disrespect of ignorance: jewellery of quaintest
old-time artistry; a misprized bit of bronze; a book, it
might be an overlooked copy of a first edition in-
scribed by some immortal author to a forgotten love;
or even—if one were in rare luck—a picture, its pris-
tine brilliance faded, the signature of the artist illegi-
ble beneath the grime of years, evidence of its origin
perceptible only to the discerning eye—to such an
eye, for instance, as Michael Lanyard boasted. For
paintings were his passion.
Already, indeed, at this early age, he was by way of
being something of a celebrity, in England and on
the Continent, as a collector of the nicest discrimina-
tion.
And then he found unfailing human interest in the
attendance attracted by auction sales; in the dealers,
gentlemen generally of pronounced idiosyncrasies;
in the auctioneers themselves, robust fellows, wielding
a sort of rugged wit singular to their calling, masters
of deep guile, endowed with intuitions which enabled
them at a glance or from the mere intonation of a
voice to discriminate between the serious-minded and
those frivolous souls who bid without meaning to
buy, but as a rule for nothing more than the curious
satisfaction of being able to brag that they had been
outbid.
But it was in the ranks of the general public that
one found most amusement; seldom did a sale pass off
undistinguished by at least one incident uniquely re-
vealing or provocative. And for such moments


4. RED MASQUERADE
Lanyard was always on the qui vive, but quietly, who
knew that nothing so quickly stifles spontaneity as
self-consciousness. So, if he studied his company
closely, he was studious to do it covertly; as now,
when he seemed altogether engrossed in the catalogue,
whereas his gaze was freely roving.
Thus far to-day a mere handful of people other
than dealers had drifted in to wait for the sale to begin
—something for which the weather was largely to
blame, for the day was dismal with a clammy drizzle
settling from a low and leaden sky—and with a soli-
tary exception these few were commonplace folk.
This one Lanyard had marked down midway across
the room, in the foremost row of chairs beneath the
salesman’s pulpit: by his attire a person of fashion
(though his taste might have been thought a trace
florid) who carried himself with an air difficult of
definition but distinctive enough in its way.
Whoever he was and what his quality, he was un-
mistakably somebody of consequence in his own
reckoning, and sufficiently well-to-do to dress the part
he chose to play in life. Certainly he had a con-
scientious tailor and a busy valet, both saturate with
British tradition. Yet the man they served was no
Englishman. -
Aside from his clothing, everything about him had
an exotic tang, though what precisely his racial ante-
cedents might have been was rather a riddle; a habit
so thoroughly European went oddly with the hints of
Asiatic strain which one thought to detect in his


PLEBEIAN AND PRINCE 5
lineaments. Nevertheless, it were difficult otherwise
to account for the faintly indicated slant of those
little black eyes, the blurred modelling of the nose,
the high cheekbones, and the thin thatch of coarse
black hair which was plastered down with abundant
brilliantine above that mask of pallid features.
The grayish pallor of the man, indeed, was startling,
so that Lanyard for some time sought an adjective
to suit it, and was content only when he hit on the
word evil. Indeed, evil seemed the inevitable and
only word; none other could possibly so well fit that
strange personality. -
His interest thus fixed, he awaited confidently
what could hardly fail to come, a moment of self-
betrayal.
That fell more quickly than he had hoped. Of a
sudden the decent quietof King Street, thus far accen-
tuated rather than disturbed by the routine grind of
hansoms and four-wheelers, was enlivened by spirited
hoofs whose clatter stilled abruptly in front of the
auction room.
Turning a speciously languid eye toward the weep-
ing window, Lanyard had a partial view of a hand-
somely appointed private equipage, a pair of spank-
ing bays, a liveried coachman on the box.
The carriage door slammed with a hollow clap; a
footman furled an umbrella and climbed to his place
beside the driver. As the vehicle drew away, one
caught a glimpse of a crest upon the panel.
Two women entered the auction room.


II
THE PRINCESS SOFIA
HESE ladies were young, neither much older
| than Lanyard, both were very much alive,
openly betraying an infatuation with exist-
ence very like his own, and both were lovely enough
to excuse the exquisite insolence of their young
vitality.
As is frequently the case in such associations, since
a pretty woman seldom courts comparison with an-
other of her own colouring, one was dark, the other
fair.
With the first, Lanyard was, like all London, on
terms of visual acquaintance. The reigning beauty
of the hour, her portrait was enjoying a vogue of its
own in the public prints. Furthermore, Lady
Diantha Mainwaring was moderately the talk of the
town, in those prim, remotely ante-bellum days—
thanks to high spirits and a whimsical tendency to
flout the late Victorian proprieties; something which,
however, had yet to lead her into any prank perilous
to her good repute.
The other, a girl whose hair of golden bronze was
well set off by Russian sables, Lanyard did not know
6


THE PRINCESS SOFIA 7
at all; but he knew at sight that she was far too
charming a creature to be neglected if ever opportu-
nity offered to be presented to her. And though the
first article of his creed proscribed women of such
disastrous attractions as deadly dangerousto his kind,
he chose without hesitation to forget all that, and at
once began to cudgel his wits for a way to scrape ac-
quaintance with the companion of Lady Diantha.
Their arrival created an interesting bustle, a buzz
of comment, a craning of necks—flattery accepted
by the young women with ostensible unconcern, a
cliché of their caste. As they had entered in a hu-
mour keyed to the highest pitch of gaiety consistent
with good breeding, so with more half-stifled laughter
they settled into chairs well apart from all others but,
as it happened, in a direct line between Lanyard and
the man whose repellent cast of countenance had first
taken his interest.
Thus it was that Lanyard, after eyeing the young
women unobserved as long as he liked, lifted his
glance to discover upon that face a look that amazed
him.
It wasn’t too much to say (he thought) that the
man was transfigured by malevolence, so that he
blazed with it, so that hatred fairly flowed, an in-
visible yet manifest current of poisoned fire, between
him and the girl with the hair of burnished bronze.
All the evil in him seemed to be concentrated in
that glare. And yet its object remained unconscious
of it or, if at all sensitive, dissembled superbly. The


8 RED MASQUERADE
man was apparently no more present to her percep-
tions than any other person there, except her com-
panion.
Presently, becoming sensible of Lanyard’s in-
trigued regard, the man looked up, caught him in a
stare and, mortally affronted, rewarded him with a
look of virulent enmity.
Not to be outdone, Lanyard gave a fleeting smile,
a bare curving of lips together with an almost im-
perceptible narrowing of amused eyes—goading the
other to the last stage of exasperation—then calmly
ignored the fellow, returning indifferent attention to
the progress of the sale.
Since nothing was being offered at the moment
to draw a bid from him, he maintained a semblance
of interest solely to cover his thoughts, meanwhile
lending a civil ear to the garrulous tongue of a dealer
of his acquaintance who, having edged nearer to in-
dulge a failing for gossip, found a ready auditor.
For when Lanyard began to heed the sense of the
other's words, their subject was the companion of
Lady Diantha Mainwaring.
“. Princess Sofia Vassilyevski, you know,
the Russian beauty.”
Lanyard lifted his eyebrows the fraction of an inch,
meaning to say he didn’t know but at the same time
didn’t object to enlightenment.
“But you must have heard of her! For weeks all
London has been talking about her jewels, her esca-
pades, her unhappy marriage.” |


THE PRINCESS SOFIA 9
“Married?” Lanyard made a sympathetic mouth.
“And so young! Quel dommage!”
“But separated from her husband.”
“Ah!” Lanyard brightened up. “And who, may
one ask, is the husband?”
“Why, he’s here, too—over there in the front row
—chap with the waxed moustache and putty-coloured
face, staring at her now.”
“Oh, that animal! And what right has he got to
look like that?”
The buzz of the scandalmonger grew more confi-
dential: “They say he’s never forgiven her for leav-
ing him—though the Lord knows she had every rea-
son, if half they tell is true. They say he's mad
about her still, gives her no rest, follows her every-
where, is all the time begging her to return to
him 99
“But who the deuce is the beast?” Lanyard inter-
rupted, impatiently. “You know, I don’t like his
face.”
“Prince Victor,” the whisper pursued with relish–
“by-blow, they say, of a Russian grand duke and a
Manchu princess—half Russian, half Chinese, all
devil!”
Without looking, Lanyard felt that Prince Victor’s
stare had again shifted from the women, and that the
mongrel son of the alleged grand duke was aware
he had become a subject of comment. So the emi-
nent collector of works of art elected to dismiss the
subject with a negligent lift of one shoulder.


10 RED MASQUERADE
“Ah, well! Daresay he can’t help his ugly make-
up. All the same, he's spoiling my afternoon. Be a
good fellow, do, and put him out.”
The Briton chuckled a deprecating chuckle; mean-
ing to say, he hoped Lanyard was spoofing; but since
one couldn’t be sure, one’s only wise course was to
play safe.
“Really, Monsieur Lanyard! I'm afraid one
couldn’t quite do that, you know!”


III
MONSIEUR QUIXOTE
HE sale dragged monotonously. The paint-
| ings offered were mostly of mediocre value.
The gathering was apathetic.
Lanyard bid in two or three sketches, more out of
idleness than because he wanted them, and succeeded
admirably in seeming ignorant of the existence of the
Princess Sofia and the husband whose surface of a
blackguard was so harmonious with his reputation.
In time, however, a change was presaged by an
abrupt muting of that murmured conversation be-
tween the beautiful Russian and the almost equally
beautiful Englishwoman. An inquisitive look dis-
covered the princess sitting slightly forward and
intently watching the auctioneer.
The pose of an animated, delightful child, hanging
breathlessly upon the progress of some fascinating
game: one's gaze lingered approvingly upon a
bewitching profile with half-parted lips, saw that
excitement was faintly colouring the cheeks beneath
shadowy and enigmatic eyes, remarked the sweet
spirit that poised that lovely head.
And then one looked farther, and saw the prince,
11


12 RED MASQUERADE
like the princess, absorbed in the business at the auc-
tion block, his slack elegance of the raffish aristocrat
forgotten, all his being tense with purpose, strung
taut—as taut at least as that soft body, only half-
masculine in mould and enervated by loose living,
could ever be. One thought of a rather elderly and
unfit snake, stirred by the sting of some long-buried
passion out of the lassitude of years of slothful self-
indulgence, poising to strike. • -
At the elbow of the auctioneer an attendant was
placing on exhibition a landscape that was either an
excellent example of the work of Corot or an imitation
no less excellent. At that distance Lanyard felt
inclined to dub it genuine, though he knew well that
Europe was sown thick with spurious Corots, and
would never have risked his judgment without closer
inspection.
He was accordingly perplexed when, after a brief
exhortation by the auctioneer, discreetly non-
committal as to the antecedents of the canvas—
“attributed to Corot”—Prince Victor, who had been
straining forward like a hound in leash, half rose in
his eagerness to offer:
“One thousand guineas!”
The entire company stirred as one and sat up
sharply. Even the auctioneer was momentarily
stricken dumb. And for the first time the Princess
Sofia acknowledged the presence of her husband, and
got from him that look of white hatred with a sneer of
triumph thrown in for good measure.


MONSIEUR QUIXOTE 13
Though she affected indifference, Lanyard saw her
slender body transiently shaken by a shudder, it might
have been of dread. But she was quick to pull her-
self together, and the auctioneer had scarcely found
his tongue-“One thousand guineas for this magnifi-
cent canvas attributed to Corot”—when her clear
and youthful voice cut in:
“Two thousand guineas!”
This the prince capped with a monosyllable:
“Three!”
Stupefaction settled upon the audience. The
auctioneer hesitated, blinked astonished eyes, framed
unspoken phrases with halting lips. Prince Victor
again gave his wife the full value of his vindictive
snarl. She would not see, but it was plain that she
was cruelly dismayed, that it cost her an effort to rise
to the topping bid:
“Thirty-five hundred guineas!”
“Four thousand!”
“Four thousand I am offered . . .
The auctioneer faltered, a spasm of honesty shook
him, he proceeded:
“It is only fair, ladies and gentlemen, that I should
state that this canvas is not put up as an authentic
Corot. It very possibly is such, in fact”—the seizure
was passing swiftly—“it bears every evidence of
having come from the brush of the master. But we
cannot guarantee it. There is, however, a gentleman
present who is amply qualified to pass upon the merits
of this work. With his permission”—his eye sought
99


14 RED MASQUERADE
Lanyard’s—“I venture to request the opinion of
Monsieur Michael Lanyard, the noted connoisseur!”
Lanyard detached a deprecating smile from the
pages of his catalogue, but his contemplated response
was cut short by Prince Victor.
“I am not aware,” that one said, icily, “that the
authenticity of this painting is a material question.
Nor have I any need of the opinion of this gentleman,
whatever his qualifications. I have bid four thou-
sand guineas, and insist that the sale proceed. If
there are no further bids, the canvas is mine.”
The auctioneer shrugged, and offered Lanyard an
apologetic bow. “I am sorry ” he began.
“Four thousand guineas!” snapped the prince.
Resigned, the auctioneer resumed:
“Four thousand guineas offered. Are there any
more bids? Going 99
“Forty-five hundred!”
Beyond reasonable doubt the princess had spurred
herself mercilessly to find sufficient courage to make
this latest bid. Lanyard saw her in a rigour of de-
spair, hoping against hope. Only too surely some-
thing in the picture, some association—heaven knew
what!—was more precious to her, almost, than life,
though she had gone already to the limit of her means
and perhaps a bit beyond. If this bid failed, she was
lost. Her anxiety was pitiful.
“Five thousand!”
In the princess something snapped: she recoiled
upon herself, sat crushed, head drooping, white-


MONSIEUR QUIXOTE 15
gloved hands working in her lap. One detected an
appealing quiver on her lips, and noted, or imagined,
a suspicious brightness beneath the long dark lashes
that swiftly screened her eyes. Her young bosom
moved convulsively. She was beaten, near to tears.
“Five thousand guineas . . . going
going .”
The face of the prince was a mocking devil-mask in
gray and black. Lanyard found himself loathing it.
Impossible to stand idle and see the creature get the
better of an unhappy girl
“Five thousand one hundred guineas!” -
With his wits in a blur of amaze, Lanyard knew th
echo of his own voice.


IV
THE FOOL AND HIS MONEY
NE reflected rather bitterly on the many and
obvious oversights of a putatively all-wise
Providence, in especial on its failure so to
fashion the body of man as to enable him on occasion
to discipline his own flesh in the most ignominious
manner imaginable.
Lanyard could have kicked himself; that is to say,
he wanted to, and thought it rather a pity he couldn’t,
and publicly, at that. For the freak he had just in-
dulged was rank quixotism, something which had as
much place in the code of a man of his calling as milk
of human kindness in the management of a pawnshop.
On second thought, he wasn’t so sure. It might
have been that quixotism had inspired his infatuate
gesture, but it might quite as conceivably have been
every-day vanity or plain cussedness: a noble impulse
to serve a pretty lady in distress, a spontaneous device
to engage her interest, or a low desire to plague a
personality as antipathetic to his own as that of a
rattlesnake.
In point of simple fact (he decided), his impelling
motive had been a mixture of all three.
16


THE FOOL, AND HIS MONEY 17
In all three respects, furthermore, it proved
notably successful; in the two last named without
delay.
The Princess Sofia at once took note of Lanyard,
with wonder, some misgivings, and a hint of admira-
tion. For he was not only a personable person in
those days, with a suggestion of devil-may-care in
his air that measurably lifted the curse of his superfi-
cial foppishness, but he was putting a spoke in Prince
Victor’s wheel. And whosoever did that, by chance,
out of sheer voluptuousness, or with malice prepense,
won immediate title to Sofia’s favourable regard.
If she couldn’t thwart Victor herself, she would be
much obliged to anybody who could and did; and she
was nothing loath to betray her bias by looking
kindly upon her self-appointed champion.
A whispered communication from Lady Diantha
did nothing to abate her overt approbation.
As for Victor, his face of leaden gray took on a
tinge of green; he quaked with rage, and the glare
he loosed on Lanyard made that young man wonder
if he were mistaken in believing that the eyes of the
prince shone in that dusky room with something
nearly akin to the phosphorescence to be seen in the
eyes of an animal at night.
The notion was amusing: Lanyard paid it the trib-
ute of a quiet smile, in direct acknowledgment of
which Prince Victor snarled:
“Six thousand guineas!”
“And a hundred,” Lanyard added.


18 RED MASQUERADE
Brief pause prefaced a bid designed to squelch him
completely:
“Ten thousand!”
In a fatigued voice he uttered: “One hundred
more.”
“Fifteen—!”
This time Lanyard contented himself with nodding
to the auctioneer; and the lips of the latter had barely
parted to parrot the bid when Victor sprang to his
feet, his features working, his limbs shaking so that
the legs of the chair beside him, whose back he seized,
chattered on the floor, while the high-pitched voice
broke into a screech:
“Twenty!”
And Lanyard said: “And one.”
“Twenty thousand one hundred guineas!” chanted
the auctioneer. “Are there any more bids? You,
sir—?” He aimed a respectful bow at Prince Vic-
tor, who snubbed him with a sign of fury. “Going
—going-gone! Sold to Monsieur Lanyard for
twenty thousand and one hundred guineas!”
And Lanyard had the satisfaction of seeing Prince
Victor, after a vain effort to master his emotion,
snatch up his topper, clap it on his head, and make
for the door with footsteps whose stuttering haste
was in poor accord with the dignity of his exalted
station.
But it was debatable whether this satisfaction plus
the possession of a questionable Corot was worth its
cost. And Lanyard wasn’t in the humour, now that


THE FOOL, AND HIS MONEY 19
the heat of contest began to abate, to look to Princess
Sofia for promise of further reward. Even if he could
have been guilty of such impertinence, indeed, he
must have forborne for very shame. After all (he
told himself) he hadn’t figured very creditably,
permitting petty prejudice to sway him as it had.
He felt singularly sure he had played the gratuitous
ass in this affair, and he didn’t in the least desire to
see the reflection of a like conviction in the eyes of a
pretty young woman with a flair for the ridiculous.
He dissembled his diminished self-esteem, however,
most successfully, as he proceeded to the desk of the
auctioneer's clerk, filled in a cheque for the amount
of his purchase, and gave instructions for its delivery.
Whether by intention or inadvertence, he was fol-
lowed from the auction room by the Princess Sofia
and Lady Diantha Mainwaring; and just outside the
entrance he found Prince Victor waiting with all the
air of a gentleman impatient for a cab to happen
along and pick him up out of the drizzle.
But in view of the fact that he made no overtures
to a passing hansom, which swerved in to the curb in
response to a signal of Lanyard's cane, this last con-
cluded that the prince was up to his reputedly favour-
ite game of waylaying his rebel wife.
If such were the case, Lanyard had no wish to wit-
ness a public wrangle between the two. So he
stepped briskly up on the carriage-block, and only
hesitated when he saw that the prince, utterly ignor-
ing the presence of the princess and Lady Diantha,


20 RED MASQUERADE
was edging forward and cocking an alert ear to catch
the address which Lanyard was on the point of giving
the cabby.
Hugely diverted, the adventurer looked round
with a quirk of his brows, and amiably commented:
“Monsieur's interest is so flattering! If he really
must know, I’m going home now, to my rooms in
Halfmoon Street. Au revoir, monsieur le prince!”
He beamed benignly upon that convulsed counte-
nance, and saw crestfallen Prince Victor slink away,
to the music of smothered laughter from the ladies
in the doorway—toward which Lanyard was careful
not to look.
Then, in high feather with himself, he chirped to
the driver and hopped into the hansom.


V
IMPOSTOR -
A S LANYARD’S cab swung away, the carriage
wheeled in to take up the Princess Sofia and
Lady Diantha Mainwaring. Observing this,
Lanyard poked his stick through the little trap in the
roof of the hansom and suggested that the driver
pull up, climb down, adjust some imaginary fault
with the harness and, when the carriage had passed,
follow it with discretion.
Enchanted by sight of a half-sovereign in the palm
of his fare, the cabby executed this manoeuvre to
admiration; with the upshot that Lanyard got home
half an hour later than he would have had he pro-
ceeded to his rooms direct, but with information of
value to recompense him.
It wasn’t his habit to lose time in those days of his
youth. And lest his character be misconstrued (which
would be deplorable) it may as well be stated now that
he had not laid down upward of twenty thousand good
golden guineas for a colourable Corot without having
a tolerably clear notion of how he meant to reimburse
himself if it should turn out that he had paid too dear
for his whistle.
21


22 RED MASQUERADE
The hint imparted by his garrulous acquaintance
of the auction room—to the effect that the Princess
Sofia was famous, among other things, for the magnifi-
cence of her personal jewellery—had found a good
home where it wasn’t in danger of suffering for want
of doting interest.
And now one knew where their owner lived, and in
what state
Alighting at his own door, the adventurer surprised
Prince Victor, morosely ambling by, in his vast fa-
tuity no doubt imagining that his passage through
Halfmoon Street would go unremarked in the dusk
of that early winter evening. He wasn’t at all pleased
to find himself mistaken; and though Lanyard did his
best with his blandest smile to make amends for
having discomfited the prince by getting home later
than he had promised to, his good-natured effort was
repaid only by a spiteful scowl.
So he laughed aloud, and went indoors rejoic-
ing.
An hour or so later the painting was delivered by a
porter from the auction room. But Lanyard was in
his bath at the time and postponed examining his
doubtful prize till he had dressed for dinner. For,
though it was his whim to dine in his rooms alone,
and though he had no fixed plans for the evening,
Lanyard was too thoroughly cosmopolitan not to do
in Cockaigne as the Cockneys do.
Besides, in this uncertain life one never knows what
the next hour will bring forth; whereas if one is in


IMPOSTOR 23
evening dress after six o'clock, one is armoured
against every emergency.
At seven he sat down to the morbid sort of a
meal one gets in London lodgings: a calm soup; a
segment of vague fish smothered painlessly in a pale
pink blanket of sauce; a cut from the joint, rare and
lukewarm; potatoes boiled dead; sad sea-kale;
nonconformist pudding; conservative biscuit, and
radical cheese.
With the aid and abetment of a bottle of excellent
Montrachet, however, one contrived to worry
through.
Meanwhile, Lanyard inspected his recent purchase,
which occupied a place of honour, propped up on the
arms of the chair on his right.
It was seldom that Lanyard entertained a guest
of such equivocal character. Wagging a reproving
head—“My friend,” he harangued the canvas,
“you are lucky to have been sold. Sorry I can’t
say as much for myself.”
It was really too bad it wasn’t a bit better. It
wasn’t often that one encountered so genuine a
counterfeit. The hand of an artist had painted it,
but never the hand of Corot. Everything Corot was
accustomed to put into his painting was there, ex-
cept himself. The abode had been prepared in all
respects as the master would have had it, but his
spirit had not entered into it, it remained without life.
Still, Lanyard concluded, surveying his prize
through the illusioning fumes of his cigar, while the


24 RED MASQUERADE
waiter cleared away, it wasn’t so bad after all, it
wouldn’t be in the end a total loss. He could
afford to cart the thing back to Paris with him and
give it room in his private gallery; and some day,
doubtless, some rich American would pay a hand-
some price for it on the strength of its having found
place in the collection of Michael Lanyard, even
though it lacked the cachet of his guarantee.
But what the devil had made it so precious to the
soi-disant Prince Victor and his charming wife?
But for a single circumstance Lanyard would
have been tempted to believe he had been craftily
rooked by an accomplished chevalier d’industrie
and his female confederate; but too much and too real
passion had been betrayed in the auction room to
countenance that suspicion.
No: he hadn’t been rigged; at least, not by
design. Something more than its intrinsic value
had rendered the canvas priceless in the esteem of
those two, something had been at stake more than
mere possession of what they might have believed to
be a real Corot.
But what?
Perplexed, Lanyard took the picture in his hands—
it was not too unwieldy, even in its frame—and
examined it with nose so close to the painted surface
that he seemed to be smelling it. Then he turned it
over and scowled at its reverse. And shook a
baffled head.
But when he tapped the face of the picture smartly


IMPOSTOR 25
with a finger-nail, he gave a slight start, passed a
hand over it with the palm pressed flat, and sud-
denly assumed the humanly intelligent expression
of a hunting-dog that has hit on a warm scent.
Strong fingers and a fruit knife quickly extracted
the painting from its frame and loosened the canvas
from its stretcher, proving that the latter held in
fact two canvases instead of one. Between these
had been secreted several sheets of notepaper of two
kinds, stamped with two crests, all black with
closely penned handwriting.
Lanyard gathered them into a sheaf and scanned
them cursorily, even with distaste. True enough, it
might be argued that he had bought and paid for
the right to pry into the secrets they betrayed; but
it was not a right he enjoyed exercising. A fairly
thoroughgoing state of sophistication, together with
some innate instincts of delicacy, worked to render
him to a degree immune to such gratification as
others might derive from being made privy to an
exotic affair of the heart. Revelation of human
weakness was no special treat to him. And if his
eyebrows mounted as he read, if the corners of his
mouth drew down, if once and again he uttered an
“Oh 1 oh /” of shocked expostulation, he was (like
most of us, incurably an actor in private as well as in
public life) merely running through business which
convention has designated as appropriate to such
circumstances. At bottom he was being stimulated
to thought more than to derision.


26 RED MASQUERADE
Putting the letters aside, he bowed his head
upon a hand and reflected sagely that love was the
very deuce.
He wondered if he could or ever would love or be
loved so madly.
He rather hoped not
Here, if you please, was the scion of a reigning
royal family risking as pretty a scandal as one could
well imagine—and all for love! Given a few more
days of life, and he would have jeopardized his right
of succession and set half-a-dozen European chan-
celleries by the ears—and all for love! But for his
untimely end, that poor, pretty creature would have
joined her life to his, consummating at one stroke
her freedom from the intolerable conditions of ex-
istence with Victor and a diplomatic convulsion
which might only too easily have precipitated all
Europe into a great war—and all for lawless love!
So once more in history Death had served well
the interests of public morality.
After a year these letters alone survived . . .
How they had survived, what hands had collected
and secreted them, and for what purpose, intrigued
the imagination no end. Lanyard inclined to
credit Princess Sofia with the indiscretion of saving
these souvenirs of a grande passion that had almost
made history. There was the sentimental motive
to account for such action, and another: the satis-
faction of knowing she had concrete proof of her
intention to treat Victor as he had treated her.


IMPOSTOR 27
Then somehow the painting must have passed out
of her possession; and in all likelihood she had made
frantic and awkward efforts to regain it which had
aroused the suspicions of Victor; with the sequel of
that afternoon. •
Lanyard’s speculations were interrupted by the
peremptory telephone. Without premonition he
picked up the combination receiver and transmitter.
But his memory was still so haunted by echoes of
that delightful voice which he had heard in the
auction room, he couldn’t entertain any doubt that
he heard it now.
“Are you there?” it said “Will you be good
enough to put me through to Monsieur Lanyard?”
The inspiration to mischief was instantaneous:
Lanyard replied promptly in accents as much unlike
his own as he could manage:
“Sorry, ma’am; Mister Lanyard dined hout to-
night. Would there be any message, ma'am?”
“Oh, how annoying!”
“Sorry, ma'am.”
“Do you know when he will be home?”
“If this is the lidy 'e was expectin’ to call this
evenin’—”
“Yes?” the dulcet voice said, encouragingly.
“—Mister Lanyard sed as 'ow 'e might be quite
lite, but 'e'd 'urry all 'e could, ma'am, and would the
lidy please wite.” -
“Thank you so much.”
“’Nk-you, ma’am.”


28 RED MASQUERADE
Smiling, Lanyard replaced the receiver and rang
for the waiter. -
When that one answered, the adventurer was
hatted and coated and opening his door.
“I’m called out,” he said—“can’t quite say when
I’ll be back. But I’m expecting a lady to call.
Will you tell the doorman to show her into my rooms,
please, and ask her to wait.”


VI
THERESE
OSED in a blaze of lights, the Princess Sofia
P contemplated captiously the charming image
reflected in her cheval-glass. One little
wrinkle, not precisely of dissatisfaction, rather of
enquiry, nestled between her delicately arched brows.
A look of misgiving clouded her wide eyes of a
wondering child. The bow of an exquisitely modelled
mouth, whose single fault lay in its being perhaps a
trace too wide, described a shadowy pout.
She was beautiful: yes. Nobody could question
that. La beauté du diable, no doubt, to Anglo-
Saxon eyes, with that skin of incomparable texture
and whiteness rel eved by a heavily coiled crown
of living bronze, the crimson insolence of that
matchless mouth, those luminous and changeable
eyes so like the sea, whose green melted into blue
with the swiftness of thought, whose blue at times as
swiftly shaded into stormy purple-black: but how-
ever bizarre and barbaric, beauty none the less,
and under the most meticulous examination indis-
putable.
But was she as radiant as she had been? .
On this her birthday she was twenty-five. Ap-
29


30 RED MASQUERADE
palling age! Five years hence she would be thirty,
in ten more-forty! And woman’s beauty fades
so swiftly: everybody said so. Was the shadow of
to-morrow already dimming her loveliness? How
could it be otherwise? She had lived so long and
so fully, she had begun to live so young. Six years
of marriage to Victor—that alone should have been
enough, one would think, to metamorphose the
fairest face into a blasted battlefield of passions.
She had a little shiver of voluptuous horror,
remembering what she had endured and escaped.
The sweet, true lines of her flawlessly made body
were transiently undulant within a sheath of shim-
mering sequins: a daring gown, by British standards
of that day, but permissible because she was Russian;
foreigners, you know, are so frightfully weird even
when they’re quite all right.
And yet she was growing old, she was twenty-five!
Though she didn’t feel in the least like one on the
threshold of middle age. Indeed, she had never felt
younger, more thrillingly instinct with the power
and the will to live extravagantly in one endless riot
of youth unquenchable.
Reaction, of course: the swing of the pendulum
to its farthest extreme. It was now two years since
she had been forced to separate from Victor, finding
herself unable longer to countenance and suffer his
many-sided beastliness; and a year since the hand of
Death had penned an inexorable finis to the too-
brief chapter of her one great romance.


THERESE 31
For there had never been love in her life with
Victor. She had been too young at first to ap-
preciate what love and marriage meant, she had
been led to the altar and sacrificed upon it as an
animal is led in sacrificial rites—without premoni-
tion or understanding, only wondering (perhaps) to
find itself so groomed and garlanded, so flattered
and adored. She had hardly known Victor before she
was given to him in marriage by Imperial ukase
to get rid of her, probably, for some in-
scrutable reason related to the mysterious circum-
stances of her parentage.
And now after six years of hell with her husband
and one of mourning in solitude for her love that was
lost, she was coming back to life again . . . at last!
She lifted up arms that might have been a dream of
Phidias chiselled in Parian marble, and stretched
them luxuriously. She was superbly alive, indeed—
and henceforth she meant to live. Only she must
be careful to retain her looks . . . If Youth
must surely go, Beauty must linger and reign long in
its stead.
A maid, a comely creature, trim and smart in black
and white, with that vividly coloured prettiness
which is too often the omen of premature decline
into the fat and florid thirties, fetched a wrap and
settled it upon Sofia’s shoulders.
Long and dark, it disguised her figure as com-
pletely as it covered her toilette. She nodded her
satisfaction, and accepted the veil which she had


32 RED MASQUERADE
desired to complete her disguise, a thing of Spanish
lace, black and ample, like a mantilla. But before
donning it she delayed one minute more before the
mirror.
“Thérèse! Am I still beautiful?’
“Madame la princesse is always beautiful.”
“As beautiful as I used to be?”
“But madame la princesse grows more lovely
every day.”
“Beautiful enough to-night, to keep out of jail, do
you think?”
To the mirth in the voice of her mistress the maid
responded with a smile demure and discreet.
“Oh, madame!” was all she said; but the manner
of her saying it was rarely eloquent.
Sofia laughed lightly, and affectionately pinched
the cheek of the maid.
“And you, my little one,” she said in liquid
French—“you yourself are too ravishingly pretty
to keep out of trouble. Do you know that?” -
Her little one looked more than ever demure
as she enquired after the hidden meaning of madame
la princesse.
“Because you will marry too soon, Thérèse—too
soon some worthless man will persuade you to dedi-
cate all those charms to him alone.”
“Oh, madame!”
“Is it not so?” -
“Who knows, madame?” said Thérèse, as who
should say: “What must be, must.”


THERESE 33
“Then there is a man! I suspected as much.”
“But, madame la princesse, is there not always a
man?”
“Then beware!”
“Madame la princesse need not fear for me,”
Thérèse replied. “Me, my head is not so easily
turned. There is always some man, naturally—
there are so many men!—but when I marry, rest
assured, it will be for something more.”
With the compresced lips of self-approbation she
deftly assisted her mistress to swathe her head in the
mantilla-like veil. -
“Something more than a man?” Sofia enquired
through its folds. “What then?”
“Independence, madame la princesse.”
“What an idea! Marriage and independence:
how do you reconcile that paradox?”
“Madame la princesse means love, I think, when
she speaks of marriage. But love—that is all.
over and done with when one marries. One is
then ready to settle down; one has put by one's dot,
and marries a worthy, industrious man with a little
fortune of his own. With such a husband one
collaborates in the maintenance of the ménage and
the management of a small business, something
substantial if small. And so one ends one's days in
comfortable companionship. That, madame la prin-
cesse, is the marriage for Thérèse! It may not sound
romantic, madame, but it has this rare virtue—it
lasts!”


VII
FAMILY REUNION
HE London night was normal: that is to say,
wet. Darkness had transformed the streets
into vast sheets of black satin shot with
golden strands and studded with lamp-posts like
sturdy stems for ethereal blooms of golden haze.
Within their areas of glow the air teemed with
atoms of liquid gold. The ring of hoofs on wet
pavements was at once disturbing and inspiriting.
Alone in her hired hansom the Princess Sofia sat
with the window raised, drinking deep of the soft
damp air, finding it as heady as strange wine.
Under cover of the veil her eyes were brilliant with
awareness of her audacity, her lips were parted with
the promise of a smile. -
She loved it all, she adored this mood of London:
its nights of rain were sheer enchantment, arabesque,
nights of secrecy and stealth, mystery, and romance
under the rose. On nights such as this lovers pros-
pered, adventures were to the venturesome, brave
rewards to the bold.
For herself she was unafraid, she foretasted entire
success. How should it be otherwise? Consider
34


FAMILY REUNION 35
how famously chance had prospered her designs,
playing into her hands the information that this
Monsieur Lanyard was not at home, might not
return till very late, and was expecting a call from
somebody whom he desired to await his return in his
rooms!
With such an open occasion, how could one fail?
Sofia asked only three minutes alone with the
painting. • •
And if by any mishap she were caught, still she
would not be dismayed. The letters were hers, were
they not? They had been stolen from her, he had
no right title to them who had purchased only the
picture which had served as their hiding-place.
By all means, let him keep that stupid canvas; he
could hardly refuse to let her have her letters, not if
she pleaded her prettiest. And even if he should
prove obtuse, ungenerous •
Her smile was definite and confident. She was
beautiful—and Monsieur Lanyard was aware of that.
Had she not, that afternoon, in the auction room,
without his knowledge detected admiration in his
eyes, a look warm with something more than ad-
miration only?
He was impressionable, then. And it would be no
distasteful task to play upon his susceptibilities.
He was not only personally attractive (“magnetic”
was the catch-word of the period), but if half that
Lady Diantha had hinted concerning him were true,
to make a conquest of Michael Lanyard would be a


36 RED MASQUERADE
feather in the cap of any woman, to attempt it a
temptation all but irresistible to one—like Sofia–
in whose veins ran the ichor of progenitors to whom
the scent of danger had been as breath of life itself.
It was hardly conceivable; even now Sofia must
smile at her friend’s amiable endeavours to identify
this mysterious monsieur with a celebrated and
preposterous criminal.
It might be true that, as Lady Diantha had de-
clared, wherever Michael Lanyard showed himself in
open pursuit of his avowed avocation as a collector
of rare works of art—in London, Paris, Berlin,
Vienna, or where-not—there in due sequence the
Lone Wolf would consummate one of his fantastic
coups.
And it was indisputable that Lanyard was at
present living in London, where for some time past
the Lone Wolf had been perniciously busy; or else
his bad name had been taken in vain by a baffled
and exasperated Scotland Yard.
Again: Diantha had insisted that the Lone Wolf
was by every evidence completely woman-proof;
and there might be something in her contention
that such an elusive yet spectacularly successful
thief could hardly have won the high place he held
in the annals of criminology and in the esteem of
the sensation-loving public, if he were one who
maintained normal relations with his kind.
Sooner or later (so ran Diantha's borrowed reason-
ing) the criminal who has close friends, a wife, a


FAMILY REUNION 37
mistress, children, family ties of any sort, or even
body-servants, must willy-nilly repose confidence in
one of these, and then inevitably will be betrayed.
Depend upon envy, jealousy, spite, or plain venal
disloyalty, if accident or inadvertence fail, to lay
the law-breaker by the heels.
Therefore (Diantha argued) the Lone Wolf must
be a confirmed solitary and misogynist—very much
like this Monsieur Lanyard, according to reports
which declared the latter to be a man who kept to
himself, had many acquaintances and not one inti-
mate, and was positively insulated against wiles of
WOIman.
But—granting all this—it was none the less true
that the utmost diligence, spurred by the pique,
ill-will, and ambition of the police of all Europe,
had failed as yet to forge any link between the
supercriminal of the age and the distinguished
connoisseur of art. Other than Lady Diantha
and the gossips whose arguments she was retailing,
never a soul (so far as Sofia knew) had ventured to
breathe a breath of suspicion upon the good repute of
Monsieur Lanyard.
In short, Diantha's conjectures had been entirely
second-hand, and not even meant to be taken seri-
ously.
And yet the suggestion had fastened firm hold upon
the imagination of the Princess Sofia.
If it were true . . . what an adventure!
There was unaccustomed light of daring in the


38 RED MASQUERADE
eyes of the princess, unwonted colour tinted her
cheeks.
The hansom stopped, discharged the fairest fare
it had ever carried, and rattled off, leaving Sofia
just a trifle daunted and dubious, the animation of
her anticipations something dashed by the uncom-
promising respectability, the self-conscious worthi-
ness of Halfmoon Street.
Enfolded in the very heart of Mayfair, its brief
length bounded on the north by Curzon Street
(its name alone sufficient voucher for its character),
on the south by Piccadilly (hereabouts somewhat
oppressive with its hedge of stately clubs, member-
ship in any one of which is equivalent to two years’
unchallenged credit) Halfmoon Street is largely
given over to furnished lodgings. But it doesn’t
advertise the fact, its landlords are apt to be retired
butlers to the nobility and gentry, its lodgers English
gentlemen who have brought home livers from India,
or assorted disabilities from all known quarters of
the globe, and who desire nothing better than to
lead steady-paced lives within walking distance of
their favourite clubs. So Halfmoon Street remains
quietly estimable, a desirable address, and knows
it, and doggedly means to hold fast to that re-
pute.
A strange environment (Sofia thought) for an
adventurer like the Lone Wolf.
But then—of course!—Diantha's innuendoes had
been based on flimsiest hearsay. The chances were


FAMILY REUNION 39
that Michael Lanyard was an utterly uninteresting
person of blameless life.
So thinking, the Princess Sofia was sensible of a
pang of regret, and tried to be prepared against
bitter disappointment as she rang the bell. Either
she would fail to obtain admittance (perhaps the
lady whom he was really expecting had forestalled
her) or else Lanyard would fail to come home in
time to catch her! Quite probably it would turn
out to be a dull and depressing evening, after
all.
The servant who admitted her in manner and ap-
pearance lent colour to these forebodings. A
creature hopelessly commonplace, resigned, and
unemotional, to her enquiry for Monsieur Lanyard
he returned the discounted response: Mister Lan-
yard was hout, 'e might not be 'ome till quite lite,
but 'ad left word that if a lidy called she was to be
awsked to wite. The princess indicating her desire
to wite, the man turned to the nearest door (Lan-
yard’s rooms were on the street level), opened it
with a pass-key, stepped inside to make a light, and
when Sofia entered silently bowed himself out.
Now when the latch clicked behind him, the
Princess Sofia forgot that the simplicity of her
success thus far was almost discouraging. Her
heart began to beat more quickly, and a little
tremor shook the hands that lifted and threw back
her veil. After all, she was committing an act of
lawless trespass, she was on the errand of a thief;


40 RED MASQUERADE
if caught the penalty might prove most painful and
humiliating. -
Of a sudden she lost appetite entirely for a piquant
encounter with the prepossessing tenant of these
rooms. Now she desired nothing so dearly as to
consummate her business and escape with all
possible expedition.
A swift and searching survey of the living-room
descried nothing that seemed apt to hinder or detain
her. A large room, unusually wide and deep, it had
two windows overlooking the street, with a curtained
doorway at the back that led (one surmised) to a
bedchamber. It was furnished in such excellent
taste that one suspected Monsieur Lanyard must
have brought in his own belongings on taking
possession. The handsome rug, the well-chosen
draperies, the several excellent pictures and bronzes,
were little in character with the furnished lodgings
of the London average, even with those of the better
SOrt.
She had no time, however, to squander on appre-
ciation of artistic atmosphere, however pleasing, and
needed to waste none searching for the object of
her desires. It faced her, distant not six paces
from the door—that shameless little “Corot”!—
resting on the arms of a straight-backed chair.
A low laugh of delight on her lips, she went swiftly
to the chair and laid hold of the picture by its frame.
In that act she checked, startled, transfixed, the
laugh freezing into a gasp of alarm.


FAMILY REUNION 41
Brass rings slithered on a pole supporting the
portières at the back of the room. These parted.
Through them a man emerged.
Her grasp on the picture relaxed. It struck a
corner against the chair and clattered on the floor—
the canvas on its stretcher simultaneously flying
out of the frame.
“Victor!”
“Sweet of you to remember me!”
He advanced slowly with that noiseless, cat-like
tread of his which she had always hated, perceiving
in it a true index to his character: the prowl of a
beast of prey, furtive, cowardly, cruel. It was so:
Victor was as feline and as vicious as a jungle-cat.
Watching him with this thought in mind, one could
almost credit old tales of beasts bewitched and
walking in human guise.
Near by he paused, alertly poised, prepared to
spring. The slotted black eyes glimmered malig-
nantly. His lips drew back in mockery from his
teeth. His hands were hidden in the pockets of his
dinner-coat; but she could guess how they were held,
like claws, in that concealment, claws itching for her
throat. She dared not stir lest she feel them there,
digging deep into her soft white flesh.
Witless, in the extremity of her terror, she stam-
mered: “What do you want?”
A nod indicated the picture that lay between
them, at their feet.
“My errand,” the man said in a silken tone that


42 RED MASQUERADE
gloved grimmest menace, “is much the same as
yours—quite naturally—but more fortunate; for I
shall get not only what I came for, but something
more.”
“What ?”
“The opportunity to plead with you, face to face.
I think you will hardly refuse to listen to me now.”
“How—how did you get in?”
“Oh, secretly! By the window, if you must know;
but quite unseen. You see, I had no invitation.”
“I never thought you had 5 *
“Nor did I think you had—till now.”
Puzzled, she faltered: “I don’t understand—”
“Surely you don’t wish me to believe my pretty
Sofia has turned thief?”
That stung her pride. She drew upon an un-
suspected store of spirit, confronting him bravely.
“What is it to me, what you choose to think?”
“I refuse to think that of you. My reason will
not let me believe it.”
She saw that he was shaking with rage; so she
shrugged and drawled: “Oh, your reason !”
“It tells me you for one did not come here to-night
uninvited.” He was rapidly losing grip on his tem-
per. “Oh, it’s plain enough! I was a fool not to
understand, there in the auction room, when my
face was slapped with proof of your liaison with this
Lanyard!”
She said in mild expostulation: “But you are
quite mad.”


FAMILY REUNION 43
“Perhaps—but not so as to be blind to the truth.
You had him there this afternoon to bid that picture
in for you if your own means failed. Why else
should the man, who knows pictures as I know you,
pay twenty thousand guineas for a footling copy of a
Corot that wouldn’t deceive a—a Royal Academi-
cian! Yes: he bid it in for you—the sorry fool!—
bought with his own money the evidence of your
infatuation for his predecessor in your affections—
and expects you here to-night to receive it from him
and-pay him his price! Ah, don’t try to deny it!”
He growled like a very animal, beside himself.
“Why else should you be admitted to these rooms
without question in his absence?”
Without visible resentment, the Princess Sofia
nodded thoughtfully into those distorted features.
“Yes,” she commented: “quite, quite mad.”
As if she had offered without warning to strike
him, Victor recoiled and for an instant stood gibber-
ing. And she took advantage of this moment in
one lithe bound to put the table between them.
The manoeuvre sobered him. He did not move,
but in two breaths forced himself to cease to tremble,
and subdued every symptom of his passion. Only
his face remained sinister.
“Graceful creature!” he observed, sardonic.
“Such agility! But what good will that do you, do
you think? Eh? Tell me that!”
It was her turn to shiver, and inwardly she did,
who was never quite able to combat the fear which


FAMILY REUNION 45
to his. He moved a pace or two nearer, his voice
dropped to a lower key, the light she had learned to
loathe flickered in the depths of his eyes.
“Come back to me, Sofia! I can’t live without
you 35
Her lips moved to deny him, but made no sound.
Now it was revealed to her, the way.
“Come back to me, Sofia!”
His hand crept along the edge of the table and
lifted, quivering, to capture hers. She steeled her-
self to endure its touch, against sickening repulsion
she fought to achieve a smile that would carry a
suggestion of at least forgetfulness.
“And if I do—?” she murmured.
He gave a violent start, blood suffused his face
darkly, his arms leapt out to enfold her. She
stepped back, evading him with a movement of
coquetry that served, as it was intended, to inflame
him the more.
“Wait!” she insisted. “Answer me first: If I
return to you—then what?”
“Everything shall be as you wish—everything
forgotten-I will think of nothing but how to make
you happy—”
“And I may have my letters?”
He nodded, swallowing hard, as if the concession
wellnigh choked him.
Under his gloating gaze her flesh crawled. Only
by supreme effort did she succeed in resisting a mad
impulse to risk a rush for door or windows, and


46 RED MASQUERADE
whipped her will into maintaining what seemed to be
frank response.
“Wery well,” she said; “I agree.”
Again he offered to touch her, again she moved
slightly, eluding him.
“No,” she stipulated with an arch glance—“not
yet! First prove you mean to make good your word.”
“How?”
“Let me go—with my letters—and call on me
to-morrow.”
His look clouded. “Can I trust you?” He was
putting the question to himself more than to her.
“Dare I?” He added in a tone colourless and flat:
“I’ve half a mind to take you at your word. Only—
forgive my doubts—appearances are against you-
you seem almost too keen for the bargain. How can
I know ?”
“What proof do you want?”
“Something definite. . . . You pledge your-
self to me?” A movement of her head assented.
“You will give yourself back to me?” He came
nearer, but she contrived to repeat the sign of
assent. “Wholly, without reserve?”
An invincible disgust shook her as the full sense
of his insistence struck home. Still she whipped
herself to play out the scene—and win!
“As you say, Victor, as you will.
He moved still nearer. She became conscious of
his nearness as if a palpable aura of vileness ema-
nated from his person.
99
•


FAMILY REUNION 47
“Then give me proof—here and now.”
66 How? 33
He laughed a throaty, evil laugh. “Need you ask?
Not much, my Sofia . . . only a little
53
•
something on account
Suddenly she could no more: memories unspeak-
able rose like disturbed dregs to the surface of her
consciousness. Involuntarily, not knowing what she
did, she flung out an arm and struck down his hands.
“You—leper!”
The epithet was like a knout cutting through the
decayed fibre of the man and raising a livid welt
on his diseased soul. Galled beyond endurance, his
countenance convulsed with fury, he struck wick-
edly; and the vicious bow of his open palm across her
mouth brought flecks of blood to the lips as her
teeth cut into the tender flesh.
It did far more, it shattered at one stroke the
brittle casing of self-command with which centuries
of civilization had sought to veneer the Slav. In a
trice a woman whose existence neither of them had
suspected was revealed, a fury incarnate flew at the
dismayed prince, clawing, tearing, raining blows
upon his face and bosom. Overcome by surprise,
blinded, dazed, staggered, he gave ground, stumbled,
caught at a chair to steady himself.
As abruptly as it had begun, the assault ceased.
Panting and frantic, the girl fell back, paused, re-
newed her grasp upon herself, gazed momentarily
in contempt on that dashed and quaking figure, then


48 RED MASQUERADE
swiftly swooped down to retrieve the picture, and
madly pelted toward the door.
In an instant, Victor was after her. His clutch-
ing fingers barely missed her shoulder but caught
a flying end of the veil that swathed her throat
and head. With finger-tips touching the doorknob
Sofia was checked and twitched back so violently
that she was all but thrown off her feet.
She tried desperately to regain her balance, but
the pressure round her throat, tightening, bade fair
to suffocate her; and reeling, while her hands tore
ineffectually at the folds of the veil, she was drawn
back and back, and tripped, falling half on, half off
the table.
Already her vision was darkening, her lungs were
labouring painfully, her head throbbed with the
revolt of strangulated arteries as if sledge hammers
were seeking to smash through her skull.
Through closing shadows she saw that savage
mask which hovered over her, moping and mowing,
as Victor twisted and drew ever more tight the
murderous bindings round her throat.
A groping hand encountered something on the
table, a lump of metal, cold and heavy. She seized
and dashed it brutally into that hateful face, saw his
head jerk back and heard him grunt with pain, and
struck again, blindly, with all her might.
Instantly the pressure upon her throat was eased.
She heard a groan, a fall


VIII
GREEK VS. GREEK
HE found herself standing, partly resting upon
S the table. Great, tearing sobs racked her slight
young body-but at least she was breathing,
there was no more constriction of her windpipe.
Her head still ached, however, her neck felt stiff and
sore, and she remained somewhat giddy and con-
fused.
She eyed rather wildly her hands. One held torn
and ragged folds of the veil ripped from her throat,
the other the weapon with which she had cheated
death: a bronze paperweight, probably a miniature
copy of a Barye, an elephant trumpeting. The up-
flung trunk was darkly stained and sticky . . .
With a shudder she dropped the bronze, and looked
down. Victor lay at her feet, supine, grotesquely
asprawl. His face was bruised and livid; the cheek
laid open by the bronze was smeared with scarlet,
accentuating the leaden colour of his skin. His
mouth was ajar; his eyes, half closed, hideously
revealed slender slits of white. More blood dis-
coloured his right temple, welling from under the
matted, coarse black hair.
49


50 RED MASQUERADE
He was terribly motionless. If he breathed,
Sofia could detect no sign of it.
In panic she knelt beside the body, threw back
Victor's dinner-coat, and laid an ear above his
heart.
At first, in her mad anxiety, she could hear
nothing. But presently a beating registered, slow
and harsh but steady-paced.
With a sob of relief she sat back on her heels, and
after a little while got unsteadily to her feet.
The house door closed with a dull bang, and from
the entrance hallway came a sound of voices. She
stood petrified in dread till the voices fell and she
heard stairs creak under an ascending tread.
Thus reminded that Lanyard’s return might occur
at any moment, she made all haste to patch up the
disarray of veil and coiffure. Fortunately her cos-
tume, protected by the cloak of heavy and sturdy
stuff, was quite undamaged.
Not till on the point of leaving did she remember
the painting. It lay unharmed where it had fallen
when Victor seized her veil. She was calm enough
now to consider herself fortunate in finding it so
poorly secured in its frame; without the latter it
would be far easier to smuggle the canvas away
under her cloak.
In the final glance she bent upon Victor’s beaten
and insensible body there was no pity, no regret, no
trace of compunction. What he had suffered he had
ten times—no, a hundred, a thousand—earned.


GREEK VS. GREEK 51
Long before she left him Sofia had lost count of the
blows she had taken at his hands, the insults worse
than blows, the lesser indignities innumerable.
But in those abolished days she had never once
struck back, she had been faint of heart, cowed and
terrified, and had lacked what two years of separa-
tion had given her, that spiritual independence which
never before had been able to realize itself, lift up its
head, and grow strong in the assurance of its own
integrity.
Two years ago she would not have dared to lift
a hand to Victor, no matter how sore the provoca-
tion. To-night—if she had one regret it was that
she had struck so feebly: not that she desired his
death, but that she knew it was now her life or his.
She knew the man too well to flatter herself that he
would rest before he had compassed such revenge as
the baseness of his degenerate soul would deem ade-
quate. Half the world were not too much to put
between them if she were now to sleep of nights in
comfortable consciousness of security from his
quenchless hatred.
Callously enough she switched off the lights and
left him lying there, in darkness but for the ash-
dimmed glimmer of a dying fire.
In the entrance hallway she hesitated, coldly
composed and alert. But seemingly the noise of
their struggle had not carried beyond the door.
There was no one about.
With neither haste nor faltering, without the least


52 RED MASQUERADE
misadventure, she let herself quietly out into the
empty, silent, rain-swept street, and scurried toward
the lights of Piccadilly.
Before long a cruising four-wheeler overhauled her.
In its obscure and stuffy refuge she sat hugging her
precious canvas and pondering her plight.
It was borne in upon her that she would do well to
leave London, yes, and England, too, before Victor
recovered sufficiently to scheme and put a watch
upon her movements.
She had need henceforth to be swift and wary and
shrewd
A singular elation began to colour her temper, a
quickening sense of emancipation. Necessity at a
stroke had set her free. Because she must fly and
hide to save her life, society had no more hold upon
her, she need no longer fight to keep up appearances
in spite of her status as a woman living apart from her
husband, little better than a divorcée—an estate
anathema to the English of those days.
She experienced, through the play of her imagina-
tion upon this new and startling conception of life, an
intoxicating prelibation of freedom such as she had
never dreamed to savour.
That waywardness which was a legitimate
inheritance from generations of wilful forebears,
impatient of all those restraints which a fixed en-
vironment imposes upon the individual, an im-
patience which had always been hers though it
slumbered in unsuspected latency, asserted itself of a


GREEK VS. GREEK 53
sudden, possessed her wholly, and warmed her being
like forbidden wine.
In this humour she was set down at her door.
None saw her enter. In a moment of vaguely
prophetic foresight she had bidden Thérèse not to
wait up for her and to tell the other servants there
was no necessity for their doing so. She might be
detained, Heaven alone knew how late she might
be; but she had her latch-key and was quite com-
petent to undress and put herself to bed.
And Thérèse had taken her at her word.
She was glad of that. In event that anything
should leak out and be printed by the newspapers
concerning the theft of Monsieur Lanyard’s famous
“Corot” by a strange, closely veiled woman, it was
just as well that none of the servants was about to
see her come in with the canvas clumsily hidden
under her cloak.
So she exercised much circumspection in shutting
and bolting the door, mounted the stairs without
making any unnecessary stir, and at the door of her
boudoir waited, listening, for several moments,
in the course of which she heard, or fancied she
heard, a slight noise on the far side of the door
which made her suspect Thérèse might after all still
be up and about.
The sound was not repeated, but to make sure
Sofia slipped out of her cloak and wrapped it round
the canvas before she went in; which last she did
sharply, with head up and eyes flashing ominously


54 RED MASQUERADE
beneath scowling brows—prepared to give Thérèse
a rare taste of temper if she found she had been dis-
obeyed.
But though the maid had left the lights on, she
was nowhere to be seen. Nor did she answer from
the bedchamber when the princess called her.
With a sigh of relief that ran into the chuckle of a
child absorbed in mischief, Sofia threw the cloak
across a chaise-longue, and bore her prize in triumph
to the escritoire.
It was her intention to rip the canvas off with a
knife, to get at the letters; and a long, thin-bladed
Spanish dagger that now did service as a paper-
knife was actually in her hand when she noticed how
slightly the painting was tacked to its stretcher,
and for the first time was visited by premonition.
Dropping the knife, she caught a loose edge of the
canvas and with one swift tug stripped it clear of the
unpainted fabric beneath.
The cry that disappointment wrung from her was
bitter with protest and chagrin.
Fortune had failed her, then, the jade had tricked
her heartlessly. With success within her grasp, it
had trickled like quicksilver through her fingers.
Victor had been beforehand with her, had pur-
loined the letters and restored the canvas to its
frame. She might have suspected as much if she
had only had the wit to draw a natural inference from
the way the painting had parted company with its
frame when she dropped it.


GREEK VS. GREEK 55
So the letters for which she had risked and suffered
so much must be back there, in Lanyard’s lodgings,
in Victor's possession-lost irretrievably, since she
would never find the courage to go back for them,
even if she dared assume that Victor had not yet re-
covered and escaped or that Lanyard had not yet
come home.
If only she had thought to rifle Victor's
pockets
“Too late,” she uttered in despair.
“Ah, madame, never say that!”
She swung round but, shocked as she was to the
verge of stupefaction, made no outcry.
The intruder stood within arm’s-length, collected,
amiable, debonair, nothing threatening in his atti-
tude, merely an easy and at the same time quite
respectful suggestion of interest.
“Monsieur Lanyard!”
His bow was humorous without mockery: “Ma-
dame la princesse does me much honour.”
She was silent another instant, in a wide stare
comprehending the incredible, the utterly im-
possible fact of his presence there. The one con-
ceivable explanation voiced itself without her voli-
tion:
“The Lone Wolf!”
“Oh, come now!” he remonstrated, indulgently—
“that’s downright flattery.”
She moved aside, lifting a hand toward the bell-
cord.


56 RED MASQUERADE
“Wait!”
Involuntarily she deferred, her arm dropped.
Then, appreciating that she had yielded where he
had no right to command, she mutinied.
“Why?” she demanded, resentfully.
“Why ring?” he countered, smiling.
“To call my servants—to have them call in the
police.”
“But surely madame la princesse must appreciate
the police might be at a loss to know which house-
breaker to arrest.”
He cocked an eye of mocking significance toward
the purloined “Corot,” and in sharp revulsion of
feeling Sofia had need to bite her lip to keep from
laughing. She hesitated. He was right and reason-
able enough, this impudent and imperturbable
young elegant. Yet she could not afford to concede
so much to him. She was quick to accept his gage.
“Who knows,” she enquired, obliquely, “why
Monsieur the Lone Wolf brought with him this
counterfeit Corot when he broke in to steal > *
“The counterfeit jewels of a titled adventuress!”
An interruption brusque enough to silence her;
or else it was its innuendo that struck the princess
dumb with indignation. Lanyard’s laugh offered
amends for the rudeness, as if he said: “Sorry—but you
asked for it, you know.” He stepped aside, caught
up a handful of her jewels that had been left, a
tempting heap, openly exposed on her dressing-table
(as much her own carelessness as anybody's, Sofia


GREEK VS. GREEK 57
admitted) and tossed them lightly upon the face
of the fraudulent canvas.
“Birds of a feather,” was his comment, whimsical;
“coals to Newcastle!”
“My jewels!”
The princess gathered them up tenderly and faced
him, blazing with resentment. He returned a
twisted smile, an apologetic shrug.
“Madame la princesse didn’t know? I’m so
sorry.”
“How dare you say they’re paste?”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated; “but somebody seems
to have taken advantage of madame's confidence.
Excellent imitations, I grant you, but articles de
Paris none the less.”
“It isn’t true!” she stormed, near to tears.
“But really, you must believe me. A knowledge
of jewels is one of my hobbies: I know !”
She looked down in consternation at the exquisite
trinkets he had condemned so bluntly. Then in a
fit of temper she flung them from her with all her
might, threw herself upon the chaise-longue, and
wept passionately into its cushions.
Then the young man proved himself tolerably
instructed in the ways of womankind. He said
nothing more, made no offer to comfort her by
those futile and empty pats on the shoulder which
are instinctive with man on such occasions, but
simply sat him down and waited.
In time the tempest passed, Sofia sat up and


58 RED MASQUERADE
dabbled her eyes with a web of lace and linen. Then
she looked round with a tentative smile that was
wholly captivating. She was one of those rare
women who can afford to cry.
“It’s so humiliating!” she protested with racial
ingenuousness—one of her most compelling charms.
“But it's ridiculous, too. I was so sure no one would
ever know.”
“No one but an expert ever would, madame.”
“You see”-apparently she had forgotten that
Lanyard was anything but a lifelong friend—“I
needed money so badly, I had them reproduced and
sold the originals.”
“Madame la princesse—if she will permit—
commands my profound sympathy.”
“But,” she remembered, drying her eyes, “you
called me an adventuress, too!”
“But,” he contended, gravely, “you had already
called me the Lone Wolf.”
“But what do you expect, monsieur, when I find
you in my rooms ?”
“But what does madame la princesse expect
when I find she had been to mine—and brought
something valuable away with her, too!”
“I had a reason 5 *
“SO had I.”
“What Was it?”
“Perhaps it was to see madame la princesse alone
—secretly—without exciting the jealousy, which I
understand is supernormal, of monsieur le prince.”


GREEK VS. GREEK 59
“But why should you wish to see me alone?” she
demanded, with widening eyes.
“Perhaps to beg madame's permission to offer
her what may possibly prove some slight consola-
tion.”
She weighed his words in dark distrust. What
was this consolation? What his game? His atti-
tude remained consistently too deferential and
punctilious for one to suspect that by consolation he
meant love-making.
“But how did you get in?”
“By the front door, madame. I find it ajar—
one assumes, through oversight on the part of one
of the servants—it opens to a touch, I walk in—et
Voila!”
His levity was infectious. In spite of herself, she
smiled in sympathy.
“And what, pray, is this wonderful consolation you
would offer me?”
He produced from a pocket a packet of papers.
“I think madame la princesse is interested in
these,” he said. “If she will be so amiable as to
accept them from me, with my compliments and one
little word of advice. .”
“Ah, monsieur!” Look and tone thanked him
more than words could ever. “You are too kind!
And your advice—?”
“They tell too much, madame, those letters.
And I see you have a fire in the grate .”
“Monsieur has reason. .”


GREEK VS. GREEK 61
“What are you doing?”
“Taking my unobtrusive departure, madame la
princesse, by the way I came.”
“But—wait—come back!”
He shrugged agreeably, released the door-knob,
and stood before her, or rather over her—for he was
the taller by a good five inches—looking down,
quietly at her service.
“I haven’t thanked you.”
“For what, madame? For treating myself to an
amusing adventure?”
“It has cost you dear!”
“The fortunes of war
Her hands rose unconsciously, with an uncertain
movement. Her face was soft with an elusive bloom
of unwonted feeling. Her eyes held a puzzled look,
as if she did not quite understand what was moving
her so deeply.
“You are a strange man, monsieur. . . .
“And what shall one say of madame la princesse?”
She could but laugh; and laughter rings the death-
knell of constraint.
But Lanyard remembered uneasily that some-
body—Solomon or some other who must have led an
interesting life—had remarked that the lips of a
strange woman are smoother than oil.
“None the less, monsieur, I am deeply in your
debt.” -
His smile of impersonal courtesy failed. He was
becoming more sensitive than he liked to her charm
99
95


62 RED MASQUERADE
and the warm sentiment she was giving out to him.
This strange access in her of haunting loveliness, the
gentle shadows that lay beneath her wide-yet
languorous eyes, the almost imperceptible tremor
of her sweetly fashioned lips, all troubled him
profoundly. He exerted himself to break the spell
upon his senses which this woman, wittingly or not,
was weaving. But the effort was at best half-
hearted.
“I am well repaid,” he said a bit stiffly, “by the
knowledge that the honour of madame la princesse is
safe.”
Sofia laughed breathlessly. Somehow her hands
had found the way to his. Her glance wavered and
fell.
“But is it?” she asked in a tone so intimate that
it was barely audible. And she laughed once more.
“I am not so sure . . . as long as monsieur is
here.” -
Lanyard’s mouth twitched, slow colour mounted
in his face, the light in his eyes was lambent. He
found himself looking deep into other eyes that were
like pools of violet shadow troubled by a deep surge
and resurge of feeling for which there was no name.
Aware that they revealed more than he ought to
know, he sought to escape them by bending his lips
to Sofia’s hands.
Sighing softly, she resigned them to his kisses.


IX
PAID IN FULL
T WAS late when Lanyard got home, but not too
| late: when he entered his living-room enough life
lingered in the embers in the grate to betray to
him a feline shape on all-fours creeping toward his
bedchamber door. As he switched up the lights it
bounded to its feet and dived through the portières
with such celerity that he saw little more of it than
coat-tails level on the wind.
Dropping hat and canvas, Lanyard gave chase
and overhauled the marauder as he was clambering
out through the open window, where a firm hand
on his collar checked his preparations to drop half a
dozen feet to the flagged court.
Victor swore fretfully and lashed out a random
fist, which struck Lanyard’s cheek a glancing blow
that carried just enough sting to kindle resentment.
So the virtuous householder was rather more than
unceremonious about yanking the princely house-
breaker inside and lending him a foot to accelerate
his return to the living-room; where Victor brought
up, on all-fours again, in almost precisely the spot
from which he had risen.
63


64 RED MASQUERADE
He bounced up, however, with a surprising amount
of animation and ambition, and flew back to the
offensive with flailing fists. In this his judgment was
grievously in fault. Lanyard sidestepped, nipped a
wrist, twitched it smartly up between the man’s
shoulder-blades (with a wrench that won a grunt of
agony), caught the other arm from behind by the
hollow of its elbow, and held his victim helpless—
though ill-advised enough to continue to hiss and spit
and squirm and kick.
A heel that struck Lanyard's shin earned Victor a
shaking so thoroughgoing that he felt the teeth
rattle in his jaws. When it was suspended, he was
breathless but thoughtful, and offered no objection
to being searched. Lanyard relieved him of a
revolver and a dirk, then with a push sent Victor
reeling to the table, where he stood panting,
quivering, and glaring murder, while his captor put
the dagger away and examined the firearm.
“Wicked thing,” he commented—“loaded, too.
Really, monsieur le prince should be more careful.
One of these fine days, if you don’t stop playing
with such weapons, one of these will go off right
in your hand—and the next high-light in your
history will be when the judge says: “And may the
Lord have mercy on your soul!’”
Victor confided his sentiments to a handkerchief
with which he was mopping his face. Lanyard sat
down and wagged a reproving head.
“Didn’t catch,” he said; “perhaps it’s just as well,


PAID IN FULL 65
though; sounded like bad words. Hope I’m mis-
taken, of course: princes ought to set impression-
able plebeians a better pattern.”
He cocked a critical eye. “You’re a sight, if you
don’t mind my saying so-look as if the sky had
caved in on you. May one ask what happened?
Did it stub its toe and fall?”
Victor suspended operations with the handkerchief
to bend upon his tormentor a louring, distrustful
stare. His head was still heavy, hot, and painful, his
mental processes thick with lees of coma; but now
he began to appreciate, what naturally seemed ap-
parent, that Lanyard must be unacquainted with the
cause of his injuries.
A searching look round the room confirmed him
in this error. The canvas lay where Lanyard had
dropped it on entering, not in the spot where Victor
remembered seeing it last, but where conceivably an
unheeded kick might have sent it in the course of his
struggle with Sofia. She must have forgotten it,
then, when she fled from what she probably thought
was murder, and what might well have been.
He was much too sore and shaken to be subtile; and
the general trend of his conjectures was perfectly leg-
ible to Lanyard, who without delay set himself to con-
jure away any lingering suspicion of his guilelessness.
“Not squiffy, are you, by any chance?” he en-
quired with the kindliest interest. “You look as if
you’d wound up a spree by picking a fight with a
bobby. Your cheek’s cut and all (shall we say, in


66 RED MASQUERADE
deference to the well-known prejudices of the dear
B. P.?) ensanguined. Sit down and pull yourself
together before you try to explain to what I owe this
honour—and so forth.”
He got up, clapped a hand on Prince Victor's
shoulder, and steered him into an easy chair.
“Anything more I can do to put you at your
ease? Would a brandy and soda help, do you think?”
The suggestion was acceptable: Victor signified as
much with an ungracious mumble. Lanyard fetched
glasses, a decanter, a siphon-bottle, and supplied his
guest with a liberal hand before helping himself.
Victor took the drink without a word of thanks
and gulped it down noisily. Lanyard drank spar.
ingly, then crossed the room to a bell-push. Seeing
his finger on it Prince Victor started from his chair,
but Lanyard hospitably waved him back.
“Don’t go yet,” he pleaded. “You’ve only just
dropped in, we haven’t had half a chance to chat.
Besides, you mustn't forget I’ve got your pistol and
your dirk and the upper hand and a sustaining sense
of moral superiority and no end of other advantages
over you.”
“Why,” the prince demanded, nervously—“why
did you ring?”
“To call a cab for you, of course. I don’t im-
agine you want to walk home-do you?—in your pres-
ent state of shocking disrepair. Of course, if you’d
rather . . . But do sit down: compose yourself.”
“Let me be,” the other snapped as Lanyard


PAID IN FULL 67
offered good-naturedly to thrust him back into the
chair. “I am—quite composed.”
“That’s good! Excellent! Hand steady enough
to write me a cheque, do you think?”
“What the devil!”
“Oh, come now! Don’t go off your bat so easily.
I’m only going to do you a service—”
“Damn your impudence! I want no services of
you!”
“Oh, yes you do!” Lanyard insisted, unabashed—
“or you will when you learn what a kind heart I’ve
got. Now do be nice and stop protesting! You
see, you’ve touched my heart. I’d no idea you were
so passionate about that painting. If I had for
one instant imagined you cared enough about
it to burglarize my rooms . . . But now that
I do understand, my dear fellow, I wouldn’t deny
you for worlds; I make you a free present of it, at
the price I paid-twenty thousand and one hundred
guineas—exacting no bonus or commission whatever.
You'll find blank cheques in the upper right-hand
drawer of my desk there; fill in one to my order, and
the Corot's yours.”
For a moment longer the prince stared, hate and
perplexity in equal measure tincturing his regard.
Then slowly the look of doubt gave way to the ghost
of a crafty smile.
What a blazing fool the fellow was (he thought)
to accept a cheque on which payment could be
stopped before banking hours in the morning—!


68 RED MASQUERADE
Such fatuity seemed incredible. Yet there it was,
egregious, indisputable. Why not profit by it, turn
it to his own advantage? To secure what he had
sought, the letters concealed between the canvases,
and turn them against Sofia, and to play this Lan-
yard for a fool, all at one stroke—the opportunity
was too rich to be slighted.
He dissembled his exultation—or plumed himself
on doing so.
“Very well,” he mumbled, sulkily. “I’ll draw
the cheque.”
“That’s the right spirit!” Lanyard declared, and
escorted him to the desk.
A knock sounded. Lanyard called: “Come in!”
A sleepy manservant, half-dressed and warm from his
bed, entered.
“You rang, sir?”
“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 inter-


PAID IN FULL, 69
position 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
portières, 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
a FIN1.
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 inter-
rupted 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 signa-
ture to the cheque, “is Prince Victor Vassilyevski.
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


70 RED MASQUERADE
repeated the warning gesture. “He is a nobleman
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 com-
promised. 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, assaulted me, blackmailed that
cheque out of me! Nobody 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





BOOK II
THE LONE WOLF’S DAUGHTER





I
THE GIRL SOFIA
HE 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 com-
municated 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 Thérèse.
But for these articles of furniture, the buffet, the
desk, and the door to the kitchen quarters, unin-
terrupted rows of tables, square, with composition-
marble tops, lined three walls of the room. The
fourth was mainly plate-glass 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
75


76 RED MASQUERADE
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
glass:
CAFE DESEXILES
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:
2äIIXH23CIHAO
She gazed in the direction of the windows as a
matter of habit, because Mama Thérèse 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 passersby
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 hap-
pened to be accompanied by a lady, in which un-
happy 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


THE GIRL, SOFIA 77
woman without vanity; which paradox this thor-
oughly 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 Thérèse
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 ad-
ministering the snub sufficient than even Mama
Thérèse; 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 assimilate
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


78 RED MASQUERADE
of him, and she despised him without measure.
And this contempt was founded on something more
than his weakness for taking numerous and surrepti-
tious nips (surreptitious, 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 Thérèse 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 Thérèse did her best to encourage by never
referring to Dupont save as “mon mari”—had they
been less imprudent in recriminations which had
passed 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 Thérèse. 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 brow-
beating the waiters and frustrating their attempts to


THE GIRL SOFIA 79
cheat the house out of its fair dues, and supervising
the marketing and the cuisine: believe it or not,
Mama Thérèse 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 relationship in which
she stood to Mama Thérèse 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 Thérèse,
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, gratitude, unquestioning
affection, and uncomplaining acceptance of a life of
incessant toil at tasks uncongenial when not down-
right unsavoury, without spending money or hours
of untrammelled liberty in which to spend it).
Surely such nobility ought to be requited with
nothing less than love!
Nevertheless, the plain, and to Sofia disquieting,
truth was: it wasn’t.
She was fond of Mama Thérèse after a fashion.
No one was ever more ready to acknowledge the
woman’s good qualities. But her faults, which
included avarice, bad temper, gluttony, native
cruelty of inclination, and simple inability to give


80 RED MASQUERADE
a damn for anybody but herself, forbade satisfaction
of Sofia's yearnings to give her affections freely
through bestowing them upon the abundant and
florid person of Mama Thérèse.
Still, she made no murmur. There was more than
a trace of fatalism in the composition of her spirit.
As she conceived it, in this life either things were or
they were not; and as a rule they uncompromisingly
were not: one couldn’t have everything.
She was not happy, it would be stretching the
truth to say she was content, but she was resigned,
she was patient, she waited not altogether without
confidence.
All the same, sometimes, as she sat, day in day
out, on her high stool, looking down on familiar
aspects of life's fermentation as it manifests in public
restaurants, or peering out of the windows to catch
tantalizing glimpses of its freer, ampler, and—alas!—
more recondite phases—sometimes Sofia wondered
whether there were not grimly cynic innuendo in
those three words which the mystery of choice had
affixed to the window-panes and graven so deep into
her soul.
CAFE DESEXILES
For surely she was in exile there, an exile from all
the fun and frolic and fury of life, marooned in weary
isolation, on a high stool, in a frowsty table d'hôte,
in the living heart of London.


II
MASKS AND FACES
UITE naturally she became acquainted with
Q Faces. •
She grew adept at a game which consisted
mostly in keeping close watch upon those who for
this reason or that engaged her attention, without
giving them the slightest reason to suspect she was
doing anything of the sort.
One could not always be staring in abstraction at
nothing in particular as it passed to and fro on the
sidewalk in front of the Café des Exiles; one could not
often or for long at a time succeed in reading a book
held open in one's lap, below the level of the cashier's
desk, Mama Thérèse was too brisk for that; one had
to do something with one’s mind; and it was some-
times diverting to watch and speculate about people
who looked interesting.
There were so many Faces, they came and went so
constantly, like bubbles in a tideway, that to Sofia
most of them seemed indistinguishable one from
another, mere blurs of flesh colour studded with
staring eyes and slitted by apertures which auto-
matically and alternately gaped to receive gobbets of
81


82 RED MASQUERADE
food and goblets of drink and closed to gulp them
down. A man needed to be remarkable for some-
thing in his looks, not necessarily pulchritude, or for
uncommon individuality, for Sofia to favour him
with more than one of her seemingly casual glances or
to remember him if he visited the café a second time.
But those there were who stood out from the rank
and file, for whom she watched, whom she missed
if they failed to put in appearance at their ac-
customed hours, about whom her idle but able
imagination wove wonderful fantasies, enduing them
with histories and environments as far removed from
fact as the drab dreams of the realists are from the
picturesque commonplaces of everyday.
And there were others who came once and never
again, but whom she never forgot. But for some
of these last, indeed, she would never have remem-
bered some of the former. The brown-eyed young-
ster with the sentimental expression and the funny
little moustache, for example, lurked in the ruck a
long time before the one and only visit of a bird of
passage dignified him in the sight of the girl on the
high stool.
On the occasion of his first appearance (but that
was long ago, Sofia couldn’t remember how long)
the slender young man with the soulful eyes and the
insignificant moustache had commended himself to
her somewhat derisive attentic by seeming un-
commonly exquisite for that atmosphere.
The Café des Exiles was little haunted by the


MASKS AND FACES 83
world of fashion; its diner à prix fixe (2/6), although
excellent, surprisingly well donesfor the money,
did not much seduce the clientèle of the Carlton and
the Ritz. Now and again its remoteness, promising
freedom from embarrassing encounters save through
unlikely mischance, would bring it the custom of a
clandestine couple from the West End, who would
for a time make it an almost daily rendezvous,
meeting nervously, sitting if possible in the most
shadowy corner, the farthest from the door, and
holding hands when they mistakenly assumed that
nobody was looking—until the affair languished or
some contretemps frightened them away.
Aside from such visitations, however, the great
world coldly passed the café by; although it couldn’t
complain for lack of patronage, and in fact prospered
exceedingly if without ostentation on the half-crowns
of loyal Soho and more fickle suburbia.
The Sohobohemian on its native heath and the
City clerk on the loose, however, were not prone to
such vestments as young Mr. Karslake affected.
It wasn’t that he overdressed; even the ribald
would have hesitated to libel him with the name of a
“nut”—which is Cockney for what the United
States knows as a “fancy (or swell) dresser”; it was
simply that he was always irreproachably turned
out, whatever the form of dress he thought appro-
priate to the time of bay; and that his wardrobe was so
complete and varied that he seldom appeared twice
in the same suit of clothes—except, of course, after


84 RED MASQUERADE
nightfall; though his visits to the Café des Exiles
for dinner or afterward were so infrequent that
each attained (after Sofia began to notice him at all)
the importance of an occasion. Luncheon was his
time, and those empty hours at the end of the
afternoon which London fills in with tea and Soho
with drinks.
He seemed to have a very wide and catholic
acquaintance among people of all ranks and stations
in life; one could hardly call them friendships, for
he lunched or sipped an aperti not often with the
same person twice in a blue moon. And whether
his companion were a curate or some ragged wastrel
of the quarter; painted young person from the chorus
of the newest revue or proper matron from Bays-
water; keen adventurer from Fleet Street or solid
merchant from the City, his attitude was much
the same: easy, impersonal, unaffected, courteous,
detached. He was as apt as not (going on his facial
expression) to be mooning about Sofia when his
guest was gesticulating wildly and uttering three
hundred words a minute. When he spoke it was
modestly, in a voice of agreeable cadences but
pitched so low that Sofia never but twice heard
anything he said; and his manner was not char-
acterized by brisk decision. All the same, one
noticed that he had, as a rule, the last word, that
what he said left his hearer either satisfied or pensive.
He was unmistakably silly about Sofia; though
that didn’t impress her, too many of the regulars


MASKS AND FACES 85
were just as hard hit, one more or less didn’t count.
But he never stared to the point of rudeness, and it
always seemed to make him hugely uncomfortable
if she appeared in the least aware of his adoration;
and Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont never even
noticed him, so circumspect was he. Still, Sofia
saw, and sometimes wondered, just as she wondered
now and then about most of the possible men who
seemed disposed to be sentimental about her.
For there were times when she felt she could do
with a little more first-hand experience and a little
less second-hand knowledge.
Love (she supposed) must be a very agreeable
frame of mind to be in, it was so generally
Vogue. . . .
What first led her to think that Mr. Karslake
might be an interesting person to know, entirely
aside from his admiration, happened on an after-
noon in June, a warm day for England, when a
temperature of some 81 degrees was responsible
for “heat-wave” broadsides issued by the evening
papers.
At about tea time, Mr. Karslake, faultlessly
arrayed, ambled in, selected a table diagonally
across the room from the caisse, exchanged pleasan-
tries with the waiter who served him a picon, and
used a copy of The Evening Standard & St. James's
Gazette as a cover for his wistful admiration of Sofia.
Presently he was joined by a gentleman twice
his age, if not older, whose conservative smartness


86 RED MASQUERADE
was such that one wondered if he hadn’t strayed
out of bounds through inadvertence. One would
have thought his place was in the clubs of Picca-
dilly if not (at that particular hour) at a tea table
on the river terrace of the Houses of Parliament.
On the other hand, there wasn’t a trace of self-
importance in his habit, it achieved distinction
solely through the unpretending dignity of a decent
self-esteem.
Sofia tried to fix what it was that made her think
him the handsomest man she had ever seen. She
failed. He wasn’t at all handsome in the smug fash-
ion associated with the popular interpretation of that
term; his features were engagingly irregular of
conformation, but the impression they conveyed
was of a singular strength together with as rare a
fineness of spirit. A mobile and expressive face,
stamped with a history of strange ordeals; but
this must not be interpreted as meaning that it was
haggard or prematurely aged; on the contrary, it had
youthful colour and was but lightly scored with
wrinkles, its sole confession of advancing years was
in the gray at either temple. The eyes, perhaps,
told more than anything else of trials endured and
memories that would never rest.
Once they had looked into hers (but that came
later) Sofia was sure she would never forget those
eyes. And as she saw them then, she never did
forget them. But the next time she saw them she
did not know them at all.


MASKS AND FACES 87
The newcomer hailed Mr. Karslake by his name
(which was the first time Sofia had heard it), sat down
on the wall-seat beside him and, when the waiter
came, desired an absinthe.
He had used two languages already, English to
Karslake, French to the waiter; Sofia understood
both and spoke them to perfection. So it was rather
exasperating when, his absinthe having been served
and the customary platitudes passed on the weather
and their respective states of health, the conversa-
tion was continued in a tongue with which Sofia was
not only unacquainted but which sounded like none
she had ever heard spoken. This seemed the more
annoying because there were few people in the res-
taurant to drown with chatter the sound of those
two voices and because, in spite of their guarded
tones, their table was one so situated that some
freak of acoustics carried every syllable uttered at it,
even though whispered, to the quick ears at the
cashier’s desk. A circumstance which had treated
Sofia to many a moment of covert entertainment and
not a few that threatened to shatter what slender
illusions had survived eighteen years of Mama
Thérèse. But nobody else (with the possible excep-
tion of the last) was acquainted with this secret of the
restaurant, and Sofia was careful never to mention it.
Now it so happened that Mr. Karslake had never
before sat at that particular table.
The language spoken at it to-day intrigued Sofia
extravagantly. It was rich in labials, gutturals,


88 RED MASQUERADE
and odd sibilances. She was positive it was not a
European tongue, though she thought it might
possibly be Russian, because it sounded rather like
Russian print looks; it might just as well have been
Arabic or Choctaw, for all Sofia could say to the
contrary. But his fluent ease in it impressed her
with the notion that young Mr. Karslake might not,
after all, be as negligible a person as he looked and
as she indifferently had assumed.
She determined to study him more attentively.
It was rather a long confabulation, too, and one
that both men seemed to take very seriously—though
its upshot was apparently quite acceptable to both-
and terminated abruptly with Mr. Karslake an-
nouncing, in English, with every evidence of satisfac-
tion:
“Good! Then that’s settled.”
To this the older man dissented tolerantly.
“Pardon: nothing is settled; it is proposed,
merely.”
“Well,” said Karslake with a little laugh that to
Sofia sounded empty, “at all events it ought to be
amusing.”
The other lifted one eyebrow and smiled remotely.
“You think so?”
“To be ordering you about, sir? I should say so!”
But his companion wasn’t listening or chose pur-
posely to ignore that accent of respect.
“You are right, my friend,” he said, abstractedly:
“it will be amusing. But what in life is not? I


MASKS AND FACES 89
fancy that is why most of us go on, because we find
the play entertaining in spite of ourselves. And
even when we think of Death . . . there's the
possibility that on the other side of the curtain,
where the unseen audience sits, whose hisses and
applause we never hear . . . over there it may
be more entertaining still!”
Karslake was inquisitively watching his face.
“You would say that,” he commented, deference
and admiration in his voice. “By all accounts
you’ve had a most amusing life.”
“I have found it so.” The other nodded with
glimmering eyes. “Not always at the time, of
course. But when I look back, especially at my
beginnings, at the times that seemed hardest and
most intolerable .”
He was thoughtful for a moment, glancing inter-
estedly round the room.
“It takes one back.”
“What does?”
“This café, my friend.”
“To your beginnings, you mean?”
“Yes. It is very like the café at Troyon’s, at this
hour especially, when there are so few English about.”
“Troyon’s?”
“A restaurant in Paris. Famous in its day.
Several years ago—before the war—it burned down
one night, cremating many memories. While it
stood I hated it, now I miss it; Paris without it is no
more the Paris that I knew.”


90 RED MASQUERADE
“Why did you hate it, sir?”
“Because I suffered there.”
He indicated a weedy young Alsatian across the
room, a depressed and pimply creature in a waiter's
jacket and apron, who was shambling from table to
table and collecting used glasses and saucers.
“You see that omnibus yonder? What he is to-
day, that was I in mine-omnibus, scullion, valet-de-
chambre, butt and scapegoat-in-general to the
establishment, scavenger of food that no one else
would eat. . . . I suffered there, at Troyon’s.”
“You, sir?” Karslake exclaimed in astonishment.
“Whoever would have thought that you
How did you escape?”
“It occurred to me, one day, I was less than half
alive and never would be better while I stayed on in
that servitude. So I walked out—into life.”
“I wish you'd tell me, sir,” Karslake ventured,
eagerly.
“Some day, perhaps, when I get back. But
now.”—he looked at his watch—“I’ve got just time
enough to taxi to my hotel, pack, and catch the
boat train.”
“Don’t wait for me,” Karslake suggested, signal-
ling the waiter.
“Perhaps it would be as well if I didn't.”
They shook hands, and the older man got up,
secured his hat and stick, and started out toward the
door, moving leisurely, still looking about him with
the narrowed eyes and smile of reminiscence.


MASKS AND FACES : 91
Of a sudden that look was abolished utterly. He
had caught sight of Sofia.
Her interest had been so excited by the singular
confidences she had overheard that the girl had quite
forgotten herself and her professional pose of blank
neutrality. She was bending forward a little, fore-
arms resting on the desk, frankly staring.
The man’s stride checked, his smile faded, his
eyes grew wide and cloudy with bewilderment. For
a moment Sofia thought him on the point of bowing,
as one might on unexpectedly encountering an ac-
quaintance after many years: there was that hint
of impulse hindered by uncertainty. And in that
moment the girl was conscious of a singular sensation
of breathlessness, as if something impended whose
issue might change all the courses of her life. A
feeling quite insane and unaccountable, to be sure;
and nothing came of it whatever. With a readiness
so instant that the break in his walk must have been
imperceptible to anybody but Sofia, the man recol-
lected himself, composed his face, and proceeded to
the door.
Confounded with inexplicable disappointment,
Sofia sat unstirring.
In the open doorway the man turned and looked
back, not at her, but at Karslake, as if of half a
mind to return and say something more to the
younger man. But he didn’t.
He never came back.


III
THE AGONY COLUMN
OFIA dated from that afternoon the first
S stirrings of a discontent which grew in her
throughout the summer till everything related
to her lot seemed abominable in her sight.
Even without this subjective inquietude it would
have been an unpleasant summer. All the world
was at sixes and sevens, the social unrest stirred up
by the war showed no signs of subsiding, but indeed,
quite the contrary, there was trouble in the very
air-ominous portents of a storm whose dull, grim
growling down the horizon could be heard only
too clearly by those who did not wilfully close their
ears, grin fatuous complacence, and bleat like brain-
less sheep: “All’s well!”
High-spirited youth and witless wealth a-lust for
strange new pleasures turned from the long strain
of conflict to indulgence in endless orgies of extrava-
gance like nothing ever witnessed by a world long
since surfeited with contemplation of weird excesses:
daily that wild dance of death attained wilder stages
of saturnalia, the bands blaring ever louder to
drown the mutter of savage elemental forces working
underneath the crust.
*2


THE AGONY COLUMN 93.
And ever and anon a lull would fall and the world
would shudder to the iteration of a word that spelled
calamity to all things fair and sweet and lovable in
life, the word Bolshevism. •
In the Café des Exiles there was endless discord and
strife.
For several reasons trade was not what it had been,
even for the slack season of summer it was poor.
The cost of everything had gone up, waiters were
insubordinate and unreasonable in their demands,
Mama Thérèse had been constrained to increase the
fixed price of the dinner, old customers took umbrage
at this and their patronage elsewhere.
Mama Thérèse cultivated a temper that grew
day by day more vile, Papa Dupont displayed
new artfulness in the matter of sneaking his daily
toll of drink and showed it; the two squabbled inces-
santly.
One of the chefs, surmising the irregularity of
their relations and foreseeing an imminent break,
sought to turn it to his own profit by making amorous
overtures to Mama Thérèse, who for reasons of her
own, probably hoping to make Papa Dupont jealous,
encouraged the idiot. And, as if this were not sick-
ening enough, Papa Dupont, far from resenting this
menace to the pseudo-peace of the ménage, ignored
if he did not welcome it, and daily displayed new
tenderness for Sofia. He kept near her as constantly
as he could, he would even interrupt a wrangle with
Mama Thérèse to favour the girl with a languishing


94 RED MASQUERADE
glance or a term of endearment; he was forever
caressing her disgustingly with his eyes.
The swing door between the café and the pantry
had warped on its hinges and would not stay quite
shut. Normally it stuck in a position which per-
mitted whoever was at the zinc an uninterrupted
view of the desk of la dame du comptoir. Instead
of having it fixed, Papa Dupont put off that duty
from day to day and developed a fond attachment
for the place at the zinc. For hours on end Sofia,
on her high stool, would be conscious of his gloating
regard, his glances that lingered on the sweet lines
of her throat, the roundness of her pretty arms.
She dared make no sign to show that she knew and
resented, to do so would be merely to draw upon
herself the spite of Mama Thérèse.
But she simmered with indignation, and contem-
plated futile plans—especially in the long, empty
hours of the afternoon, between luncheon and the
hour of the apertifs—countless vain plans for abolish-
ing these intolerable conditions.
She thought a great deal of the strange man who
had talked with young Mr. Karslake, and wondered
about him. Somehow she seemed unable to forget
him; never before had any one she didn’t know made
such a lasting impression upon her imagination.
Sometimes she wasted time trying to explain to
herself why the man had seemed, for that brief in-
stant, to think he knew her, only to dismiss such
speculations eventually with the assurance that she


THE AGONY COLUMN 95
probably resembled in moderate degree somebody
whom he had once known.
But mostly she was preoccupied with pondering
the strangeness of it, that he who seemed so brilliant
and brave a figure of the great world should, ac-
cording to his own confession, have risen from be-
ginnings as lowly as her own. All that he had suf-
fered in the days of his youth, in that place in Paris
which he called Troyon’s, Sofia had suffered here
and in large part continued to suffer without prospect
of alleviation or hope of escape.
And remembering what he had said, that his own
trials had come to an end only when he awakened
to the fact that he was, as he had put it, “less than half
alive” there at Troyon’s, and had simply “walked
out into life,” she was persuaded that the cure for her
own discomfort and discontent would never be
found in any other way. But she lacked courage to
adventure it.
To say “walk out and make an end of it” was all
very well; but assuming that she ever should muster
up spirit enough to do it—what then? Which way
should she turn, once she had passed out through the
doors? What could she do? She had neither
means nor friends, and she was much too thoroughly
conversant with the common way of the world with
a woman alone to imagine that, by taking her life
in her own hands, she would accomplish much more
than exchange the irk of the frying pan for the fury
of the fire.


96 RED MASQUERADE
All the same, she knew that she must one day do
it and chance the consequences. Things couldn’t
go on as they were.
And even granting that the outcome of any effort
at self-assertion must be unhappy, she grew im-
patient.
Meanwhile, she did nothing, she sat quietly on her
perch, looked with stony composure over the heads of
the multitude, indifferent alike to admiration and the
uncharitable esteem of her own sex, and waited with
a burning heart. -
Mr. Karslake ran true to form. He drifted in and
out casually, always idle and dégagé and elegant, he
continued his irregular conferences with ill-assorted
companions, he worshipped discreetly and evidently
without the faintest hope, he seemed more than ever
a trifling and immaterial creature. Chance did not
again lead him to the table where he had sat with
the man whom Sofia could not forget, and only the
memory of that conversation held any place for
Karslake in the consideration of the girl.
Even at that she didn’t consider him seriously,
she looked for him and missed him when he didn’t
appear solely because of a secret hope that some
day that other one would come back to meet him
in the café.
Why she held fast to that hope Sofia could not have
said.
Toward the middle of summer Mr. Karslake ab-
sented himself for several weeks, and when he showed


THE AGONY COLUMN 97
up again his visits were fewer and more widely
spaced.
On an afternoon late in August, a hot and weary
day, he sauntered in with his habitual air of having
in particular nothing to do and all the time there was
to do it in, and found a man waiting for him.
This was a person whom Sofia had quite over-
looked after one glance had classified and pigeon-
holed him. A single glance had been enough. They
do some things better in England; a man cast for any
particular rôle in life, for example, is apt to conform
himself, mentally, physically, and even as to his outer
habiliments, so nicely to the mould that he is forever
unmistakably what he is even to the most casual
observer. So this man was a butler, he had been
born and bred a butler, he lived by buttling, a butler
he would die; not a pompous, turkeycock butler, such
as the American stage will offer you when it takes
up English fashionable life in a serious way, but a
mild-mannered, decent body, with plain side-whis-
kers, chopped short on a line with the lobes of his ears,
otherwise clean-shaven, his hair pathetically dyed, a
colourless cast of countenance, eyes meek and mild.
He was soberly dressed in black coat and waist-
coat, the latter showing a white triangle of hard-
polished shirt and a black bow tie, with indefinite
gray trousers and square-toed boots by no means
new. His middle was crossed by a thick silver
watch-chain, and curious, old-fashioned buttons of
agate set in square frames of gold fastened his round


98 RED MASQUERADE
stiff cuffs of yesterday. He carried a well-brushed
bowler as unfashionable as unseasonable.
When Mr. Karslake entered, the polished pattern
of a young gentleman of means, slenderly well set-up
in an exquisitely tailored brown lounge suit, wearing
a boater and carrying a slender malacca stick in one
chamois-gloved hand, the butler stood up at his
table, quietly acknowledged his greeting—“Ah,
Nogam! you here already?”—and waited for the
younger man to be seated before resuming his own
chair: a stoop-shouldered symbol of self-respecting
respectability, not too intelligent, subdued by definite
and unresentful acceptance of “his place.”
Their table was the one immediately beyond the
buffet; and the café was very quiet, with only three
other patrons, two of whom were playing chess
while the third was reading an old issue of the
Echo de Paris. So Sofia could, if she had cared to
eavesdrop, have overheard everything that passed
between Mr. Karslake and the man Nogam. But
she didn’t; their first few speeches failed to excite her
curiosity in the least.
She heard Mr. Karslake, who was becomingly
affable to one of inferior station, express the per-
functory hope that he hadn’t kept Nogam waiting
long, and Nogam reply to the simple effect of
“Oh, not at all, sir.” To this he added that he
'oped there had been no 'itch, he was most heager to
be installed in his new situation, and would do his
best to give satisfaction. Karslake replied airily


THE AGONY COLUMN 99
that he was sure Nogam would do famously, and
Nogam said “Thank you, sir.” Then Karslake
announced they must bustle along, because they were
expected by some person unnamed, but just the same
he meant to have a drink before he budged a foot.
And he called a waiter and requested a whiskey and
soda for himself and some beer for Nogam.
And Sofia turned her attention to other things.
The murmur of their talk meant nothing to her
after that, and she forgot them entirely till they
got up to leave, and then wasted only a moment
in wondering why Mr. Karslake, if he were, as he
seemed to be, engaging a butler for some friend or
employer, should have arranged to meet the man
in a café of Soho. But it didn’t matter, and she
dismissed the incident from her mind.
What did matter was that she was to-day more
than ever galled by the deadly circumstances of her
existence. If they were to continue to obtain,
she felt, life would grow simply unendurable, and
she would to do something reckless to get a little
relief from the tedium and the ugliness of it all.
She was fed up with everything, the shrewishness
of Mama Thérèse, the drunkenness of Papa Dupont,
the hideous dullness of the café, the smell of food,
the fumes of tobacco, the reek of wines.
She was fed up with the leers of Papa Dupont,
the scowls of Mama Thérèse, the grimaces of waiters,
the stares of customers, the very sight of herself
in the mirror across the room.


IV
MUTINY
OFIA had never heard the name of Michael
S Lanyard. Neither did the firm style of
Messrs. Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, mean
anything to her. Notwithstanding, she wasted
more time than she knew trying to picture to herself
a man who looked like Michael Lanyard sounded,
and wishing (no matter what his looks might be)
that she were his long-lost daughter Sofia, and that
he would see the advertisement, and communicate
privately as requested, and hear news of her, and
come speeding in a Rolls-Royce to the Café des
Exiles, and walk in and humble Papa Dupont with a
look of hauteur and confound Mama Thérèse with a
peremptory word, and take Sofia by the hand and
lead her out and induct her into such an environment
as suited her rightful station: said environment
necessarily comprising a town house if not on Park
Lane at least nearly adjacent to it, and a country
house sitting, in the mellowed beauty of its Seven-
teenth Century architecture, amid lordly acres of
velvet lawn and private park.
She hoped the country house would be within
103


104 RED MASQUERADE
sight of the sea, and that the family garage would
run to a comfortable little town-car for her personal
use when she went shopping in Bond Street, or to
pay calls or leave cards, or to concerts and mati-
IneeS. •
At about this stage her châteaux en Espagne
began to rock upon their foundations; a seismic
phenomenon due to the appearance of Mama
Thérèse and Papa Dupont, coming from zinc and
kitchen for their dinner, which meal they habitually
consumed in the café when the evening rush was over,
the tables undressed, and the establishment had settled
down to drowse away the dull hours till closing time.
Thus reminded that it was nine o’clock or there-
abouts of a stuffy evening in a stodgy world where
nothing ever happened that hadn’t wearily hap-
pened the day before and the day before that and
so back to the beginning of Time, and wasn’t sched-
uled tediously to continue happening to-morrow
and the day after and so on to the end of Eternity,
Sofia sighed and shook herself and put away the
vanity of dreams.
But her beauty, as she sat brooding, was as sultry
as the night.
In the rear of the room Mama Thérèse and Papa
Dupont wrangled sourly over their food; not with
impassioned rancour but in the natural order of
things—as others might discuss the book of the
moment or the play of the year or scandal or Charlie
Chaplin or the thundering fiasco of Versailles—


MUTINY 105
these two discussed each other's failings with utmost
candour and freedom of expression: handling their
subjects without gloves; never hesitating to touch
upon topics not commonly mentioned in civil inter-
course or to use the apt, unprintable word; never
dreaming of politely terming a damned old hoe a
spade; tossing the ball of recrimination to and fro
with masterly ease.
Their preoccupation with this pastime was so
thoroughgoing that Mama Thérèse even failed to
notice the passage of the postman on his last round
of the day. Ordinarily, for reasons best known to
herself and which Sofia had never thought to ques-
tion, Mama Thérèse preferred personally to receive
all letters and contrived to be on hand at the post-
man’s customary hours of call. Butto-night she only
realized that he had come and gone when, happening
to glance toward the caisse, she saw Sofia shuffling the
half-dozen envelopes which had been left with her.
Immediately Mama Thérèse pushed back the
table and got up, wiping chin and moustache with
her napkin as she rolled toward the desk.
But she was too late. Already Sofia had sorted
out and was staring in blank wonder at an envelope
addressed to Mama Thérèse and bearing in its upper
left-hand corner the imprint of its origin:
Secretan & Sypher
Solicitors
Lincoln's Inn Fields
London, W. C. 3.


106 RED MASQUERADE
As yet she was simply startled by the coincidence,
her brain had not had time to absorb its full sig-
nificance—that Mama Thérèse should receive a
communication from these distinctively named
solicitors on the evening of the very day on which
they advertised concerning a young woman named
Sofia!—when the letter was snatched out of her
hand, a torrent of objurgation was loosed upon her
devoted head, and she looked into the black scowl
of the Frenchwoman.
“Sneak! Spying little cat! How dare you pry
into my letters?”
“But, Mama Thérèse—!”
“Be still, you! Has one asked you to speak?
Give me those others”—Mama Thérèse with a vast
show of violence appropriated them from Sofia’s
unresisting grasp—“and after this keep your nose of
a mouchard out of what doesn’t concern you!”
“But, Mama Thérèse! 25
“Hold your tongue. I wish to hear nothing from
you, I hear too much—yes, and see too much, too!
Oh, don’t flatter yourself I am like that fat dolt of a
Dupont, to be taken in by a pair of round eyes and
innocent ways. I know your sort, I know you,
mam'selle, too well! Me, I am nobody’s fool,
least of all yours, young woman. What goes on
under my nose, I see; and if you imagine otherwise
you are a bigger simpleton that you take me for.”
She snapped her fingers viciously in Sofia’s
crimsoned face, uttered a contemptuous “Zut !” and


MUTINY 107
waddled off, shaking her head and growling to her-
self.
Sofia felt stunned. The offensive had been
launched so swiftly, she was conscious of having done
so little to invite it, she had been taken unprepared,
thrown into confusion, her feeble objections silenced
and overwhelmed by that deluge of abuse, publicly
disgraced. •
Her face was burning, and tears started in her
eyes; but she winked them back, she would not let
them fall. Conscious of the grins of the handful
of patrons, and the leers of the waiters, she steeled
herself to suppress every betrayal of the mortification
in which her soul was writhing, she made no sign
but stared on stonily at the blackness of the night
that peered in at the open doors.
Then indignation came to her rescue, the flaming
colour ebbed from her face and left it unnaturally
white, the mists before her eyes dissipated and their
look grew fixed and hard, even her lips took on a
grim, unyielding set. Beneath the desk her hands
clenched into small fists. But she did not move.
The sensation stirred up by the outbreak of Mama
Thérèse subsided, the domino players resumed their
game, the old gentleman reading Le Rire turned a
page and read on with a knowing smile, lovers re-
turned to their low-voiced lovemaking, waiters
yawned behind their hands, all was as it had been
save that, at their table (Sofia could see by the
mirror, without looking directly) Mama Thérèse


108 RED MASQUERADE
and Papa Dupont seemed to have declared an
armistice and were gobbling down the rest of their
meal in silence and indecorous haste.
Presently they got up and sought their living
quarters. To do this they had to pass the caisse and
through the green baize door. Mama Thérèse
marched ahead with forbidding frown and quiver-
ing chins, with the militant carriage of misprized
and affronted rectitude. To her, it was obvious,
Sofia for the time being did not exist. At her heels
Papa Dupont shambled uneasily, hanging the head
of deep thoughtfulness, avoiding Sofia’s gaze. It
was his part to pretend that all was well and always
would be; only he lacked the effrontery, just then,
for his usual smirk.
When they had disappeared Sofia began to
think. -
There was something more in this affair than mere
coincidence, there was mystery, a sinister ques-
tion.
Her countenance grew as dark as the complexion
of her reverie. Athwart the field of her abstracted
vision drifted the figure of young Mr. Karslake.
She was barely conscious of it.
He seated himself with plain premeditation
directly opposite the caisse, staring openly. But
Sofia did not heed him at all. An odd smile shad-
owed his lips, an expression half eager, half ap-
prehensive; there was a hint of puzzlement in his
scrutiny. It was rather as if he had unexpectedly


MUTINY 109
found some new reason for thinking the girl an
exceptionally interesting personality. But she con-
tinued all unaware.
Shortly after being served with a drink which he
ordered but made no offer to taste, he moved as if
minded to rise and cross to Sofia, sat up and edged
forward on the wall-seat with a singular air of timid-
ity and embarrassment. But whatever his in-
tention, he reconsidered and sat back, glancing
round the room to see if anybody were watching him.
He could not see that anybody was. Not even
Sofia. Relieved, he settled back, found a handsome
gold case in the waistcoat of his dinner jacket, ex-
tracted a cigarette, nipped it between his lips—
and forgot to light it.
Of a sudden Sofia had arrived at a decision; and
with every expression of it in her manner she slipped
down from the high stool and left the caisse to take
care of itself. Turning to the swing door she barged
through with a high head and fire of determination
illuminating her face.
She had had enough of riddles.
Behind the zinc an elderly and trusted waiter was
nodding. The kitchen was cold and dark for the
night. Papa Dupont, then, would be upstairs,
closeted with the genius of the establishment.
From the pantry a narrow staircase led up to the
apartment above the restaurant. Sofia mounted
rapidly, with a firm tread that was nevertheless
practically noiseless, thanks to the paper-thin soles


110 RED MASQUERADE
of well-worn slippers. She could hear voices bicker-
ing above.
At the top there was a short, dark corridor, with
three doors. Two of these were closed on sleeping-
rooms; the third door, to a sort of combination
office and living-room, stood open, letting out a
stream of light.
Sofia approached on tiptoe, though the altercation
going on within had reached a stage so acute that it
was doubtful whether either of the disputants would
have heard had she stumped like a navvy.
The point of dissension was not at first apparent,
because Mama Thérèse was speaking, and what she
said had exclusively to do with her estimate of
Dupont's character, the mettle of his spirit, the
stuff of his mentality, the authenticity of his pedi-
gree (with especial reference to the virtue of his
maternal ancestry) and the circumstances of his
upbringing; which estimate in sum was low but by
no means so low as the terms in which Mama
Thérèse was inspired to couch it.
Papa Dupont did not seem to be greatly interested.
He had heard all this before, many a time, with
insignificant phraseological variations. Sofia, paus-
ing unseen and unsuspected in the darkness just
outside the doorway, could see him slouching deep
in his chair, to one side of the table, his soft fat
hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, his chin
sunken on his chest, something dogged in the lour-
ing frown which he was bending upon nothing, some-


MUTINY 111
thing of genuine indifference in his passive attitude
toward the blowsy virago who was leaning across
the table the better to spit vituperation at him.
And he waited with singular patience until she
had to stop for want of breath. Then he shrugged
and said heavily:
“Still, I don’t see what else you propose to do, my
old one.”
Apparently his old one was aspoorinexpedient ashe.
“It is for nothing,” she said, acidly, “that one
looks to you!”
“I have said my say. If you have anything
better to suggest. .” He made a rhetori-
cal pause for reply, but Mama Thérèse was well
blown and sulky for the moment. “I am not old,
not so old as you, and I have reason to believe the
girl is not indifferent to my person.”
“Drooling old pig,” Mama Thérèse observed
with reason: “if you dream she would trouble to
look twice at you !”
“That remains to be seen. And I, for one, fail
to see how else we are to hold her. All this money
that has been coming in, paid on the dot every
quarter—that means there is more, much more to
come to her. Are you ready to give it up?”
“Never!” Mama Thérèse thumped the table
vehemently. “It is mine by rights, I have earned it.
Look at the way I have slaved for her, the tender care
I have lavished upon her, ever since she was a little
one in my arms.”


MUTINY 113
solution. Meantime, let me have another look at
that accursed letter.”
Mama Thérèse did not respond, she offered no
objection when Dupont took up the sheet of paper
that lay between them, but ground the heels of her
hands into her fat cheeks and sat glowering vin-
dictively while he read aloud, slowly, with the labour
of one to whom reading is unaccustomed dissipation:
DEAR MADAM:
Herewith we beg to enclose our cheque to your order in
the sum of two hundred and fifty pounds, being the quarterly
payment in advance due you from the estate of our deceased
client, the Princess Sofia Vassilyevski, for your care of her
daughter. We further beg to advise that, pursuant to the
provisions of her will, we begin to-day, on the eighteenth birth-
day of the young Princess Sofia, a search for her father with the
object of apprising him of his daughter's existence. Therefore we
would request you to make arrangements to have the young
Princess Sofia brought to England forthwith from the convent
in France where we understand she is finishing her education.
We take leave, however, to advise that, pending the outcome
of our enquiries, the question of her father's existence be not
discussed with the young princess. In event of his death being
established or of failure to find him within six months, the
Princess Sofia is to enter without more delay or formality into
possession of her mother's estate.
Papa Dupont put down the letter. “It is plain
enough,” he expounded: “if this father is found,
we can whistle for our money; whereas if I were
married to Sofia, as her husband I would control 5 *
He broke off sharply, and added in consternation:
“One million thunders!”


114 RED MASQUERADE
Sofia stood between them.
And yet she wasn’t the Sofia they knew, but an-
other person altogether, a transfigured and exalted
Sofia, aflame with righteous wrath and contempt-
uous with the pride of birth which had leaped into
full being a moment since.
A princess, born the daughter of a princess, now
she knew and looked it.
All thought of fear or deference was gone, she had
nothing left but scorn for these two despicable
creatures, the fat harpy and her crapulent consort
who had battened so long upon her misery, who had
held her in bondage to the most menial tasks of their
wretched restaurant while they filched and hoarded
the money paid them for giving her the care and the
advantages that were her due.
And something of this new-found dignity, to which
her title was so unquestionable, which set her upon a
level from which she could not but look down on
these two paltry frauds, so abashed the French-
woman that the phrases of invective and vilification
which gushed instinctively from the foul springs of
her temper stuck in her throat, she couldn’t utter
them, and she well-nigh choked with impotent fury
and fear as the girl spoke.
“You swindlers!” Sofia said, deliberately. “You
poor cheats! To pocket a thousand pounds a year
of my mother’s money—and make me slave for you
in your wretched café! And for eighteen years!
For eighteen years you have been robbing me of


116 RED MASQUERADE
invested that room, the tomb of her defrauded
childhood, the prison of her maltreated youth, to
make her linger there, but only hateful ones to speed
her going.
She turned and fled.
Stumbling on the stairs, she heard Thérèse still
screaming imprecations and commands at Dupont,
then the clumping of the man’s feet as, yielding
at length, he started in pursuit.
Through the green baize door she burst into the
café like a young tornado. Every head turned her
way with gaping mouths and protruding eyes of
astonishment as she stopped at the caisse and
brazenly, in the face of them all, plundered the till.
This was a matter of necessity. Sofia had not
one shilling of her own. But those two had robbed
her, what she took was not so much as a thousandth
part of the money of which they had despoiled her.
Moreover, she dared not go out penniless to face
London.
Snatching a handful of loose coin, she made for
the door. But the delay had been fatal. Dupont
was now at her heels, and displaying extraordinary
agility in a man of his years of dissipation and
sedentary habits. And Thérèse was not far behind.
Seeing coins trickling through the fingers of the
fugitive and falling to ring and spin upon the floor,
the Frenchwoman raised an anguished shriek of
“Thief / Stop thief l’—and such part of the audience
as had remained in its seats rose up as one man.


MUTINY 117
In the same instant Dupont's fingers clamped down
on Sofia’s shoulder. She screamed, and he chuckled
and dragged her back. Then his arm was struck up
by a deft hand, the girl slipped from his hold and
darted out through the doors.
Roaring with rage (now that his blood was up, his
heart in the chase) Dupont turned upon the med-
dler. This was young Mr. Karslake. Dupont did
not know him except by sight, but that slender,
boyish figure and the semi-apologetic smile on
Karslake's lips did not inspire respect. Blindly and
with all his might Dupont swung his right to the
other's head, only to find it wasn’t there.
The weight of the unexpended blow carried Du-
pont off his feet. He fell in a heap, and Mama
Thérèse, charging wildly after Sofia, tripped on
his body and deposited fourteen stone of solid
flesh squarely in the small of Dupont's back with a
force that drove the breath out of him in one ago-
nized blast.
Karslake laughed aloud: it was all as good as a
cinema. Then he followed Sofia.
It was a dark and silent street by night, little used,
a mere link between two main thoroughfares.
Sofia, running for dear life, was still far from the
nearest corner. Karslake doubled nimbly across
the street to the only vehicle in sight, an impressive
“Rolls-Royce town-car. Jumping on the running-
board he pointed out the fleeing shadow to the
chauffeur.


118 RED MASQUERADE
“Lay alongside that young woman before she
makes the corner, Albert!”
Without delay the car began to move.
Meanwhile, the Café des Exiles was erupting antic
shapes, waiters, customers, Dupont, Thérèse. The
quiet hour was made hideous by their yells.
“Stop thief!” “A la voleuse!” “L'arrêtez!” “A
la voleuse!” “Stop thief!”
An entirely superfluous bobby weathered the
corner, discovered Sofia in flight across the street,
came about, and shaped a diagonal course to cut
across her bows. She saw him coming and stopped
short with a gasp of dismay. Simultaneously the
Rolls-Royce slid smoothly in between them and
Karslake hopped down. Sofia uttered a small cry,
more of surprise than fright, and hung back, trying
to free the arm by which he was trying to guide her
to the open door.
“It’s our only chance,” he warned her, coolly.
“We’re between two fires. Better not delay!”
She yielded and tumbled in. Karslake followed
and slammed the door. The car shot away and
rounded into the cross street before the bobby
could collect himself enough to look at its license
plate. He made after it, but when he had reached
the corner it had turned another and was lost.
At the second turning Karslake looked round from
the window with a reassuring laugh, and settled back
beside Sofia.
“So that ends that!”


MUTINY 119
She stared wide-eyed through the shadows. She
knew him now, she was not in the least afraid, but
she was confused beyond measure.
“Why—why—” she faltered—“what—who are you
and where are you taking me?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon!’” said the young man,
contritely. “I forgot. One ought to introduce
one’s self before rescuing ladies in distress—but there
really wasn’t time, you know. If you’ll overlook the
informality, my name's Karslake, Roger Karslake,
Princess Sofia, and I’m taking you to your father.”


W
HOUSE OF THE WOLF
HIS startling announcement Sofia received
without comment and with a composure quite
as surprising. The life which had made her
what she was, a young woman singularly unillu-
sioned, well-poised, and well-informed, had brought
out in her nature a strong vein of scepticism. She
was not easily to be impressed. The more remark-
able the circumstance in question, the less inclined
was she to exclaim about it, the stronger was her
propensity to look shrewdly into the matter and
find out for herself just what it was that made it
seem so odd.
She didn’t repose much faith in those striking
synchronizations which apparently unrelated in-
fluences sometimes effect with related events, and
which we are accustomed to term coincidences. She
distrusted their specious seeming of spontaneity,
she suspected a deep design behind them all.
For example: Up to the moment of her flight from
the Café des Exiles there had been, as Sofia saw it,
nothing extraordinary or inexplicable in the chapter
of happenings which had made her acquainted, as
120


HOUSE OF THE WOLF 121
abruptly as tardily, with certain facts concerning
her parentage.
You might, if you felt like it, call it a strange coin-
cidence that she should have read the advertisement
of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher just before their letter
was delivered and Mama Thérèse by her intemperate
conduct warmed Sofia’s simmering suspicions to the
boiling point. But then Sofia read the Agony
Column every time it came into her hands: she
would have been more surprised had she missed
noticing her given name in print, and downright
ashamed of herself if she had failed to associate the
letter with the advertisement.
If you asked her, she called it Fate, the fore-
ordained workings of occult forces charged with
dominion over human affairs. Sooner or later
she must somehow have learned the truth about her
right place in the world; and to her way of thinking
it was no more astonishing that she should have
learned it through accident supplemented by the
acute inferences of a sharply stimulated imagination,
rather than through being waited upon by a dele-
gation of legal gentlemen commissioned with the
duty of enlightening her.
And the colossal set-piece of the evening having
been duly exploded, no sequel whatever could expect
anything better than relegation to the cheerless limbo
of anticlimax.
Thus when young Mr. Karslake explained his
uninvited if timely intervention by stating that he


122 RED MASQUERADE
was conducting her to the parent of whose existence
she had so recently been informed, he succeeded—
not to put too fine a point upon it—only in making it
all seem a bit thick.
So for the time being Sofia contented herself with
silent study of his face as fitfully revealed by the
passing lights of Shaftesbury Avenue.
A nice face (she thought) open and naive, perhaps
a trace too much so; but, viewed at close quarters,
by no means so child-like as she had thought it, and
by no means wanting in evidences of quiet strength
if one forgave the funny little moustache which
(now one came to observe it seriously)was precisely
what lent that possibly deceptive look of innocence
and inconsequence, positively weakening the char-
acter of what might otherwise have been a counte-
nance to foster confidence.
As for Mr. Karslake, he endured this candid scru-
tiny with a faintly apprehensive smile, but volun-
teered nothing more; so that, when the silence in time
acquired an accent of constraint, it was Sofia who
had to break it, not Mr. Karslake.
“I’m wondering about you,” she explained quite
gravely.
“One fancied as much, Princess Sofia.”
She liked his way of saying that; the title seemed
to fall naturally from his lips, without a trace of
irony. None the less, it wouldn’t do to be too readily
influenced in his favour.
“Do you really know my father?”


HOUSE OF THE WOLF 123
“Rather!” said Mr. Karslake. “You see, I’m
his secretary.”
“How long 35
“Upward of eighteen months now.”
“And how long have you known I was his daugh-
ter?”
Mr. Karslake, consulting a wrist-watch, permitted
himself a quiet smile.
“Thirty-eight minutes,” he announced—“say,
thirty-nine.”
“But how did you find out—?”
“Your father called me up—can’t say from where
—said he’d just learned you were acting as cashier at
the Café des Exiles, and would I be good enough to
take you firmly by the hand and lead you home.”
“And how did he learn ?”
“That he didn’t say. Fraid you’ll have to ask
him, Princess Sofia.”
Genuinely diverted by the cross-examination, he
awaited with unruffled good humour the next ques-
tion to be put by this amazingly collected and direct
young person. But Sofia hesitated. She didn’t want
to be rude, and Karslake seemed to be telling a toler-
ably straight story; still, she couldn’t altogether be-
lieve in him as yet. She couldn’t help it if his visit
to the restaurant had been a shade too opportune,
his account of himself too confoundedly pat.
No: she wasn’t in the least afraid. Even if she
were being kidnapped, she wasn’t afraid. She was
so young, so absurdly confident in her ability to take


124 RED MASQUERADE
care of herself. On the other hand, intuition kept
admonishing her that in real life things simply didn’t
happen like this, so smoothly, so fortunately; some-
how, somewhere, in this curious affair, something
must be wrong.
“Please: what is my father's name?”
“Prince Victor Vassilyevski.”
“You’re sure it isn’t Michael Lanyard?”
Now Mr. Karslake was genuinely startled and
showed it. Sofia remarked that he eyed her un-
easily.
“My sainted aunt! Where did you get hold of
that name?”
“Isn’t it my father's?”
“Ye-es,” the young man admitted, reluctantly; at
least with something strongly resembling reluctance.
“But he doesn’t use it any more.”
“Why not?”
Mr. Karslake was silent, thoughtful. Sofia felt
that she had scored and with determination pressed
her point.
“Do you mind telling me why he doesn’t use that
name, if it’s his?”
“See here, Princess Sofia”—Karslake slewed
round to face her squarely with his most earnest and
persuasive manner—“I am merely Prince Victor's
secretary, I’m not supposed to know all his secrets,
and those I do know I’m supposed not to talk
about. I’d much rather you put that question to
Prince Victor yourself.”


HOUSE OF THE WOLF 125
“I shall,” Sofia announced with decision. “When
am I to see him? To-night?”
“Of course. That is, I presume you will. I
mean to say, Prince Victor wasn’t at home when I
left, but if I know him he's sure to be when we ar-
rive. And I’m taking you there as directly as a
motor can travel in this blessed town.”
Sofia looked out of the window. The car, having
turned down Regent Street from Piccadilly Circus,
was now traversing sedate Pall Mall; and in another
moment it swung into the passage between St.
James's Palace and Marlborough House Chapel;
and then they were in The Mall, with the Victoria
Memorial ahead, glowing against the dingy backing
of Buckingham Palace.
Now, since all Sofia’s reading had inculcated the
belief that the enterprising kidnapper always made
off with his victim by way of dark bystreets and
unsavoury neighbourhoods, she felt somewhat re-
assured.
“Have we very far to go?”
“We’re almost there now—Queen Anne's Gate.”
A good enough address. Though that proved
nothing. There was still plenty of time, anything
might happen. . . .
Sofia shrugged, and settled back to await de-
velopments.
But there was nothing to warrant misgivings in
the aspect of the dwelling before which the car
presently drew up. If it wasn’t the palace Sofia


HOUSE OF THE WOLF 127
congruous figure, unpretending but alien to that
atmosphere; here, in the plain evening-dress livery of
his station, he blended perfectly into the picture.
Karslake gave his hat and stick to the man, then
opened one wing of a great double doorway, and with
a bow invited Sofia to precede him. She faltered,
hazily conceiving that threshold in the guise of an
inglorious Rubicon. But she had already gone too
far into this adventure to draw back now with-
out forfeiting her self-respect. With a deceptively
firm step she entered a room to wonder at.
Sombre shadows masked much of its magnificent
proportions, but what Sofia could see suggested less
the study of a man of everyday interests than the
private museum of an Orientalist whose wealth knew
no limits.
The air was warm and close, aromatic with the
ghosts of ten thousand perished perfumes. The
quiet, when Karslake had closed the door, was op-
pressive, as if some dark enchantment here had
power to tame and silence the growl of London that
was never elsewhere in all the city for an instant still.
On a great table of black teakwood inlaid with
mother of pearl burned a solitary lamp, a curious
affair in filigree of brass, furnishing what illumina-
tion there was. Its closely shaded rays made vaguely
visible walls dark with books, tier upon tier climbing
to the ceiling; chairs of odd shape, screens of glowing
lacquer; tables and stands supporting caskets of
burning cinnabar, of ivory, of gold, of kaleidoscopic


128 RED MASQUERADE
cloisonné; trays heaped high with unset jewels;
cabinets crowded with rare objects of Eastern art;
squat shapes of neglected gods brandishing weird
weapons; grotesque devil masks ferociously a-grin;
chests of strange woods strangely fashioned, strangely
carved, and decorated with inlays of precious metals,
banded with huge straps of black iron, from which
gushed in rainbow profusion silks and brocades stiff
with barbaric embroideries in gold- and silver-
thread and precious stones.
Confused by the impact upon her perceptions of
so much that was unexpected and bizarre, the girl
looked round with an uncertain smile, and found
Karslake watching her with a manner of peculiar
gravity and concern.
“Prince Victor is an extraordinary man,” Kars-
lake replied to her unspoken comment; “probably
the most learned Orientalist alive. Sometimes I
think the East has never had a secret he doesn’t
know.”
He paused and drew nearer, with added earnest-
ness in his regard.
“Princess Sofia,” said he, diffidently, “if I may
say something without meaning to seem disrespect-
ful—”
Perplexed, she encouraged him with one word:
“Please.”
“I’m afraid,” Karslake ventured, “you will have
many strange experiences in this new life. Some of
them, I fancy, you won’t immediately understand,


HOUSE OF THE WOLF 129
some things may seem wrong to you, you may find
yourself confronted with conditions hard to ac-
cept .”
He rested as if in doubt, and she fancied that he
was listening intently, almost apprehensively, for
some signal of warning. But on her part Sofia
heard no sound. -
Impressed and puzzled, she uttered a prompting
“Yes?”
“I only want to say”—he employed a tone so low
that she could barely hear him—“if you don’t mind
—whatever happens—I’d be awfly glad if you’d
think of me as one who sincerely wants to be your
friend.”
“Why,” she said in wonder—“thank you. I shall
be glad 35
She checked in astonishment: a man was approach-
ing from the general direction of the door by which
they had entered.
The effect was uncanny, as if the figure had ma-
terialized before her very eyes, out of clear air, as if
one of those many shadows had taken on shape and
substance while she looked.
The man himself was nothing unusual in general
aspect, of no remarkable stature, neither tall nor
small, neither robust nor slender. His evening
clothes were without fault, but as much might be
said of ten thousand men who might be seen any
night in the public rendezvous of leisured London.
His carriage had special distinction only in that he


130 RED MASQUERADE
moved with a sort of feline grace. Still, something
elusive made him unlike any other man Sofia had
ever met, something arresting and not altogether
prepossessing.
As he drew nearer and his features became more
clearly defined by the light, she was sensible of gazing
into a face of unique cast. Of an odd grayish pallor
accentuated by hair so black that it might have been
painted on his skull with india-ink, the skin seemed
to be as soft and smooth as a child's, beardless and
wholly without lustre. The mouth was sensuous
yet firm, with hard, full lips. Leaden pouches
hung beneath heavy-lidded eyes set at a noticeable
angle. The eyes themselves were as black as night
and as lightless; the rays of the lamp struck no gleam
from them; in spite of this they were compelling,
masterful, and disconcerting.
Karslake at once fell back, with a bow so low it
was little less than an obeisance.
“Prince Victor!”
The man nodded acknowledgment of this greeting
without detaching attention from the girl. His
voice, slightly tremulous with emotion, uttered her
name: “Sofia?”
She collected herself with an effort. “I am Sofia,”
she replied almost mechanically.
“And I, your father . . .”
Prince Victor lifted hands of singular delicacy,
slender and tapering, whose long fingers were dressed
with many curious rings.


HOUSE OF THE WOLF 131
A reluctance she could not understand hindered
Sofia from going gladly into those arms. She had to
make herself yield. They tightened hungrily about
her. She closed her eyes and experienced a slight,
invincible shudder.
“My child!”
The lips that touched her forehead astonished her
with their warmth. Instinctively she had expected
them to be cool, as frigid as the effect of that strange
mask of which they formed a part.
Then, held at arm’s-length, she submitted to an
inspection whose sum was enunciated with a
strange smile of gratification:
“You are beautiful.”
In embarrassment she murmured: “I am glad you
think so—father.”
“As beautiful as your mother—in her time the
most beautiful creature in the world—her image, a
flawless reproduction, even to her colouring, the
shade of the hair, the eyes—so like the sea!”
“I am glad,” the girl repeated, nervously.
“And until to-night I did not know you lived!”
She mustered up courage enough to ask:
“How—?”
The heavy lids drooped lower over the illegible
eyes. “My attention was called to a newspaper
advertisement signed by a firm of solicitors. I got
in touch with them—a matter of some difficulty,
since it was after business hours—and found out
where to look for you. Then, prevented from acting


132 RED MASQUERADE
as quickly as I wished, myself, I sent Karslake here
to bring you to me.”
“But, according to their letter, the solicitors
thought I was in France, in a convent!”
“When they advertised for me—yes. But by the
time I enquired they were better informed.”
“But the advertisement was addressed to Michael
Lanyard!”
The thin lips formed a faint smile. “That was
once my name. I no longer use it.”
Against a feeling that she was adopting an at-
titude both undutiful and unbecoming, Sofia per-
sisted.
66 Why?”
Prince Victor Vassilyevski gave a gesture of pain
and reluctance.
“Must I tell you? Why not? You must know
some day, as well now as later, perhaps. Twenty
years ago the name of Michael Lanyard was famous
throughout Europe—or shall I say infamous?—
the name of the greatest thief of modern times, other-
wise known as “The Lone Wolf’.”
Involuntarily, Sofia stepped back, as if some shape
of horror had been suddenly thrust before her face.
“The Lone Wolf!” she echoed in a voice of dismay.
“A thief! You!”
The man who called himself her father replied with
a series of slow, affirmative nods.
“That startles you?” he said in an indulgent voice.
“Naturally. But you will soon grow accustomed


HOUSE OF THE WOLF 133
to the thought, you will condone that chapter in my
history, remembering I am no longer that man, no
longer a thief, that for many years now my record
has been without reproach. You will remember
that there is more joy in Heaven over the one sinner
who repents . . . You will forgive the father,
if only for your mother's sake.”
“For my mother’s sake—?”
“What the Lone Wolf was in his day, your mother
was in hers—the most brilliant adventuress Europe
ever knew.”
“Oh!” cried the girl in semi-hysterical protest.
“Oh, no, no! Impossible!” -
“I assure you, it is quite true. Some day I may
tell you her history—and mine. For the present,
you will do well to think no more about what I have
confessed. Repining can never mend the past. It is
to-day and to-morrow you must think of: that you
are restored to me, and that I have not only the
means but a great hunger to make you happy, to
gratify your slightest whim.”
“I want nothing!” Sofia insisted, wildly.
“You want sleep,” Prince Victor corrected, fondly—
“you want it badly. You are nervous, overstrung,
in no condition to understand the great good fortune
that has befallen you. But to-morrow you will see
things in a rosier light.”
Apparently he had manipulated some signal un-
remarked by Sofia. The door opened, framing the
figure of the man Nogam. Without looking round,


134 RED MASQUERADE
but with an inscrutable smile, Prince Victor took the
girl in his arms again and held her close.
“You rang, sir?”
“Oh, are you there, Nogam? Is the apartment
ready for the Princess Sofia?”
“Quite ready, sir.”
“Be good enough to conduct her to it.” Again
Prince Victor kissed Sofia’s forehead, then let her go.
“Good-night, my child.”
Moving slowly toward the door, drooping, Sofia
made inarticulate response. She felt suddenly stupe-
fied with fatigue. To think meant an effort that
mocked her flagging powers. A vast lassitude was
weighing upon her, body and spirit were faint in the
enervation of an inexorable disconsolation.


THE MUMMER 137
woman was at her desk with a face like a thunder-
cloud. While I was trying to make up my mind
what would be my best approach, she jumped down,
flew upstairs and, I gathered, kicked up a holy row.
You see, she’d seen that advertisement of Secretan
& Sypher’s, and smelt a rat.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing definite, sir: seemed to understand she
was the daughter of Princess Sofia Vassilyevski,
only she objected to her father being anybody but
Michael Lanyard.”
“Go on.”
“After a bit she stampeded downstairs again, with
the old girl and that swine of a Dupont at her heels.
I blocked him and gave Sofia a chance to get outside.
The whole establishment boiled out into the street
after us, yelling like fun, but I got the girl into the
car . . . and here we are.”
But Prince Victor seemed to have lost interest.
The glow ebbing from his face, his lips tightening,
the thick lids drooping low over his eyes, he sat in
apparent abstraction, aping the impassivity of the
graven idols that graced his study.
“I don’t mind owning, sir,” the younger man
resumed, nervously, “she had me sparring for wind
when she put it to me point-blank her father's name
was Michael Lanyard.”
Without moving Victor enquired in a dull voice:
“What did you tell her?”
“That it was a name you had once used, sir,


THE MUMMER 139
Vindictiveness that could find relief only in action
mastered the man.
“Be good enough to take this dictation.”
Karslake turned to the table and opened a port-
folio of illuminated Spanish leather.
“Ready, sir,” he said, with pencil poised.
“To Michael Lanyard, Intelligence Division, the
War Office, Whitehall. Sir: Your daughter Sofia
is now with me. Permit me to suggest that, in consider-
ation of this situation, you cease to meddle with my
affairs. Your own intelligence must tell you nothing
could be more fatal than an attempt to communicate
with her.
“Sign on the typewriter with the initial V.”
“Yes, sir.” -
“Type it on plain paper, use a plain envelope, be
sure that neither has a watermark, and get it off to-
night without fail. Take a taxi to St. Pancras sta-
tion and post it there. If you make haste you can
get it in a pillar-box before the last collection.”
“I shan’t lose a minute, sir.”
Karslake straightened up, folding the paper, and
made for the door.
“One moment, Karslake. . . . This man,
Nogam: where did you pick him up?”
“He used to buttle for my father, sir, but got into
trouble—some domestic unpleasantness, I believe—
needed money, and raised a cheque. The old boy let
him off easy; but I’ve got the cheque, and Nogam
knows it. The fellow’s perfectly trained and ab-


140 RED MASQUERADE
solutely dependable, knows his place and his duties
and not another blessed thing. I’ll send him in if
you like.”
Prince Victor uttered with dry accent: “Why?”
“Thought you might care to have a talk with him,
sir.”
“I have.”
“Oh!” Mr. Karslake exclaimed—“I didn’t know.”
“Quite so,” commented Prince Victor. “I shan’t
need you again to-night, Karslake.”
“Good-night, sir.”
When the secretary had gone, Victor sat motion-
less, so still that his breathing scarcely stirred his
body, with a face absolutely imperturbable, stead-
fastly gazing into that darkness which shrouded the
workings of his mind.
On the doorstep a shrill whistle sounded: Nogam
calling Karslake's taxi. Victor heard the vehicle
roll in and stand panting at the curb, then the slam
of its door, the diminishing rumble of its departure.
The house door closed, and after a little the study
door opened, and Nogam halted on the threshold.
Unstirring Victor enquired: “What is it, Nogam?”
“I wished to enquire would there be anything more
to-night, sir.”
“Nothing.”
“’Nk you, sir.”
“But Nogam: in this house, regardless of the cus-
tom which may have obtained in other establish-
ments where you have served, you will always knock


THE MUMMER 141
before entering a room, and never enter until you
obtain permission.”
“But if I’m sure the room is empty, sir, and get
InO anSWer ?”
“Then you may enter any room but this. Never
this, unless I am here—or Mr. Karslake is—and you
get leave.”
“’Nk you, sir.”
“Good-night.”
As the door closed Victor extended a thin, effemi-
nate hand to a casket of ivory, searched with sensitive
finger-tips its exquisite tracery until a cunningly hid-
den spring responded and the lid, splitting in two,
sank down into its walls. In the pocket thus re-
vealed were many pills, apparently hand-moulded,
of a grayish-brown substance, putty-soft.
Slowly Victor selected three, placed one after
another upon his tongue, and swallowed them.
He shut the casket and sat waiting.
Slowly the keenness of his countenance became
blurred, as if the hand of an unseen sculptor were
rubbing down its features, doing away the veneer
with which Europe had overlaid the primitive Asiatic,
which now showed on the surface, in every detail of
coarsely modelled nose, oblique eyes of animal cun-
ning, pendulous lips cruel and sensual.
By degrees a faint trace of colour began to flush
Victor’s cheeks, a smile modified the set of his mouth,
the heavy-lidded eyes lost their lustreless opacity and
glimmered with uncanny light.


142 RED MASQUERADE
He breathed deeply, evenly, with an evident relish.
The action of the opium was visibly renewing his
powers. His expression, softening, became terrible
with brute tenderness and longing. Gazing into
shadows in which he saw that which he wished ar-
dently to see, he stretched forth his arms, and his lips
moved, shaping a name:
“Sofia ''”
As those syllables, freighted with that undying
passion which consumed the man, sounded upon the
stillness, Victor turned sharply, with a gesture of
irritation, looking aside, listening.
Instantaneously the Asiatic disappeared, thrust
back into its habitual latency within the prison of
European: Prince Victor was as he had been, as
always to the world, cool, composed, and crafty,
master, never creature, of his emotions.
A faint buzzing was audible, broken by muffled
clicks.
Rising, Victor approached a table in a corner and
with a key from his pocket ring unlocked a heavy
casket of bronze. As he raised its cover a small
electric bulb illuminated the interior, focussing on the
paper-covered face of a mechanical writing device,
upon which a pencil with a broad flat lead operated
by a metal arm was tracing characters resembling
the hieroglyphics of the Chinese.
When the clicking ceased and the pencil was at
rest, Victor caught an end of the paper and pulled
it forward until a blank surface again occupied the


THE MUMMER 143
writing-bed. Upon this with another pencil he in-
scribed a reply, then closed and relocked the casket.
Back at the table with the lamp, the message just
received became crisp black ash on a brazen tray.
From a locked chest Victor produced an inverness
and a soft hat of black felt. Wearing these he
moved quietly out of the lamp's radius of light,
and made himself one with the shadows that crowded
one another round the walls. He did not leave by
the hall door; but of a sudden the room was un-
tenanted.


VII
THE FANTASTICS
OWNSTREAM from The Pool, a little way
D below Shadwell, an uncouth row of dilapi-
dated dwellings in those days stood—or,
better, squatted, like a mute company of draggletail
crones—atop a river-wall whose ancient blocks, all
ropy with the slime of centuries, peered dimly out
through groups of crazy spiles at the restless pageant
of Thames-life.
Viewed by day, say from the deck of a river
steamer, the spectacle they offered was, according to
bias of mood and disposition, unlovely and drear or
colourful and romantic: Whistler might have etched
these houses, Dickens have staged therein a lowly
tragedy, Thomas Burke have made of one a frame
for some vignette unforgettable of Limehouse life.
Builded of stone or brick or both as to their land-
ward faces, without exception they presented to the
river false backs of wooden framework which over-
hung the water. Ordinarily, their windows were
tight-shut, the panes opaque with accumulated grime
—many were broken and boarded. Their look was
dismal, their squalor desperate.
144


THE FANTASTICS 145
Below, by day, heavy wherries swung moored to
the ooze-clad spiles or, when the tide was out,
sprawled upon stinking mud-flats with a gesture of
pathetic helplessness peculiar to stranded water-
craft. Seldom was one observed in use: to all
seeming they existed for purposes of atmosphere
alone.
More seldom still did any dwelling betray evidence
of inhabitation beyond faint wisps of smoke, like
ghosts of famine, drifting from the chimneypots, or—
perhaps—some unabashed exhibit of red flannel hung
out to dry with wrist or ankle-bands nipped between
a window-sash and sill.
By night, however, a stir of furtive life was to be
surmised from cryptic lights that flared and faded
behind the crusted window-glass or fell through
opened floor-traps to the thick black element that
swirled about the spiles, and from guarded calls as
well, inarticulate cries of hate and love and pain,
rumours of close and crude carousal.
And ever and again the belated riverfarer would
encounter one of the wherries, its long oars swung
by brawny arms and backs, stealing secretly across
the inky waters on some errand no less dark.
On land the buildings lined a cobbled street, from
dawn to dark a thoroughfare for thundering lorries
and, twice daily, in murk of early morning and gloom
of early night, scoured by a nondescript rabble em-
ployed in the vast dockyards whose man-made for-
ests of masts and cordage, funnels and cranes, on


146 RED MASQUERADE
either hand lifted angular black silhouettes against
the misty silver of the sky. -
Black and white and yellow and brown, men of
every race and skin, they came and went, their brief
hours loud with babel of strange tongues and a
scuffling of countless feet like the sound of surf; and
their goings left the street strangely hushed, a way
of sinister reticences, its winding length ill-lighted
by infrequent corner-lamps, its mephitic glooms en-
livened by windows of public houses all saffron with
specious promise of purchasable good-fellowship.
One of these, the Red Moon, faced the row of
waterfront houses, standing at the intersection of a
street which struck inland to the pulsing heart of
Limehouse. A retired bully of the prize-ring ruled
with a high hand over its several bars and many
patrons, yellow men and white girls, deck-hands and
dock-workers, pugilistic and criminal celebrities of
the quarter, and their sycophants. Its revels
rendered the nights cacophonous, its portals sucked
in streams of sweethearts and more impersonal
lovers of life and laughter, and spewed out sots close-
locked in embraces of maudlin affection or brutal
combat. Bobbies kept an eye on the Red Moon,
a respectful one: interference with the time-hallowed
customs and prerogatives of its clientèle was some-
thing to be adventured with extreme discretion.
Out of the hinterland of Limehouse, a tall man
came to the Red Moon that night, walking with
long, loose-jointed strides, holding his head high


THE FANTASTICS 147
and looking over the heads of all he passed with a
fixed, far gaze. He had a hatchet-face, sallow, with
lantern jaws, a petulant mouth, hot eyes that showed
too much white above their pupils. A lank black
mane greased his collar. His garments, shoddy but
whole, were stained and bleached in spots, appar-
ently the work of acids, and so wrinkled and shapeless
as to suggest that their owner slept without un-
dressing as a matter of habit. The pockets of his
coat bulged noticeably.
Shouldering heedlessly into the saloon-bar, he
found it deserted except for a chinless potman: the
liveliest evening trade was always plied in the cheaper
bars adjacent.
One glance sufficed to identify him: with a surly
nod the potman ducked behind a partition to call the
proprietor. Drinks were in order when this last
appeared; and a brief conference in undertones
ended when, having made careful reconnaissance,
the publican nodded shortly to the patron, a jerk
of his thumb designating a small door let into the
wall to one side of the bar proper.
Through this the tall man passed to find himself
upon a dark stairway, at the foot of which another
door admitted to an underground chamber where an
apparently exclusive social gathering was in session
of Saturnalia.
In one corner a long-suffering piano was taking
cruel punishment at the hands of a flashily dressed,
sharp-faced man of horsey type. Flanking him,


148 RED MASQUERADE
two young women of the world, with that insouciance
which appertains—in Limehouse—to sweet sixteen,
were chanting shrilly to his accompaniment: both
more than comfortably drunk. In the middle of the
room assorted lawbreakers gathered round a table
were playing fan-tan at the top of their lungs. At
smaller tables men and women sat consuming
poisons of which they were obviously in no crying
need; while in bunks builded against one wall
devotees of the pipe reclined in various stages of
beatitude. The air was hot, and foul with cigarette
smoke, sickening fumes of sizzling opium, effluvia of
beer and spirits, sour reek of sweating flesh.
Incurious glances greeted the newcomer: none
paid him more heed than an indifferent nod. On
his part, brief but comprehensive survey having
deepened the stamp of scorn upon his features, he
ignored them all and, proceeding directly to a bunk
of the lowermost tier, aroused its occupant with a
smart tap on the shoulder.
The ostensible drug-addict looked up dreamily,
then opened his eyes wide, with surprising docility
rolled out and, uttering no word, lurched to the fan-
tan table. The tall man took his place, lay down,
and drew together the unclean curtains of sleazy
stuff provided to afford privacy to shrinking souls.
This done, he turned on his side and knuckled in
peculiar rhythm the back of the bunk, a solid panel
which slipped smoothly to one side, permitting the
man to tumble out into still another room, a cheer-


THE FANTASTICS 149 :
less place, with floor of stone and the smell of a
vault.
When the panel had slipped back into place, clos-
ing out the bunk, the man stood in night absolute.
But after a minute a slender beam of golden light
struck suddenly athwart the darkness and found his
face. This he endured impassively, only lifting a
hand to describe an obscure sign. Immediately the
light was shut off, a door opened in the wall opposite,
dull light from behind disclosed the silhouette of a
man in Chinese robes, his head inclined in a bow of
courteous dignity.
In good English but with musical Eastern inflec-
tion a voice gave greeting:
“Good evening, Thirteen. You are awaited—
and welcome!”
“Good evening, Shaik Tsin,” the European replied
in heavy un-English accents. “Number One is
here, yes?”
“Not yet. But we have just received a telauto-
graphic message saying he is on his way.”
Nodding impatiently, Thirteen passed through the
door, which the Chinaman quickly closed and
barred.
The chamber to which one gained admittance by
ways so devious and fantastic was large—exactly
how large it was difficult to guess, since all its walls
were screened by black silk panels upon which golden
dragons writhed and crawled. A thick carpet of
black covered every inch of visible floor space, a


150 RED MASQUERADE
black silk canopy hid the ceiling, and all the room
was in deep shadow save the space immediately
beneath a great lamp of opalescent glass, likewise
draped in black.
Here stood an octagonal table of black teakwood,
on seven sides of which seven chairs were placed.
When Thirteen had taken his seat all these were
occupied. On the eighth side an eighth chair stood
empty on a low dais, the heavy carving of its high
back, its massive arms and legs, picked out with
gold.
The six who had anticipated Thirteen at this
bizarre rendezvous hailed him as a familiar, according
to their several idiosyncrasies, brusquely, indiffer-
ently, or with some semblance of cordiality. They
made a motley crew.
Two were Englishman in appearance, though the
figure of languid elegance in evening dress that
might have graced the lounge of a West End club
had a voice soft with Celtic brogue. The other
owned a gross body clothed in loud checks and, with
his mean blue eyes, his mottled complexion, and
cunning leer, would not have seemed out of place in
a betting-ring.
Aside from these there were a moon-faced Bengali
babu, a dark Italian with flashing eyes and teeth,
and a stout person of bovine Teutonic cast—the
type that is sage, shrewd, easy-going when unop-
posed, but capable under provocation of exhibiting
the most conscienceless brutality.


THE FANTASTICS 151
From this last Thirteen got his warmest welcome.
“You are late, mine friend.”
“In good time, however,” Thirteen responded with
a nod toward the vacant chair. “More than that,
the summons was handed me only twenty minutes
ago.”
“How was that?” the babu asked. “It was sent
at six o'clock.”
“I was at work in the laboratory and had left
orders I was not to be disturbed. But for one
thing”—the petulance of Thirteen’s habitual ex-
pression was lightened by a flash of self-gratulation,
and his voice shook a little with excitement—“I
might not have received the summons before morn-
ing.”
“And that one thing?”
“Success, comrades! At last—after months of
experimentation—I have been sucessful!”
“’Ow?” dryly demanded the man in the checked
suit.
“I have discovered a great secret—discovered,
perfected, adapted it to common means at our com-
mand. Comrades, I tell you, to-night we hold all
England in the hollow of our hands!”
With an incoherent exclamation and eyes afire
the Russian sat forward. Unconsciously the others
imitated his action. Only the man in evening dress
made a show of remaining unimpressed.
“It’s fine, fat words you’re after using,” he
commented. “All England in the hollow of our


152 RED MASQUERADE
hands!” If they mean anything at all, comrade,
they mean > *
“Everything!” Thirteen cut in with arrogant
assertiveness; “all we’ve been waiting for, hoping
for, praying for—the end of the ruling classes,
extinction of the accursed aristocrats, subjugation
of the thrice-damned bourgeois, the triumph of the
proletariat, all at a single stroke, swift, subtle, and
sure! Freedom for Ireland, freedom for India, free-
dom for England, the speedy spreading of that red
dawn which lights the Russian skies to-day, till all
the wide world basks in its warm radiance and ac-
claims us, comrades, its redeemers!”
“Lieber Gott!” the German breathed. “Colossal!”
“’Ear, 'ear!” the Englishman applauded, per-
functory and skeptical. “Bli’me if you didn’t mike
me forget where I was—'ad me thinking I was in
'Yqe Park, you did, listening to a bloody horator on
a box.”
“You may laugh,” Thirteen replied with a sour
glance; “but when you have heard, you will not
laugh. I am not boasting—I am telling you.”
“Not a great deal,” the Irishman suggested.
“Your mouth is full of sounds and fury, but till you
tell us more you’ll have told us nothing.”
The face of Thirteen grew darker still, and for a
moment he seemed to meditate an angry retort;
but he thought better of it, contenting himself with
an impatient movement and a mutter: “All in good
time; Number One is not here yet.”


THE FANTASTICS 153
“W’y wyste time w’itin’ for 'im?” demanded the
Englishman. “’E’s no good, 'e's done.”
Thirteen’s eyes narrowed. “How so?”
“’E’s done, Number One is—finished, counted
out, napoo! 'E’s 'ad is d’y, and a pretty mess 'e's
mide of it—and it’s ’igh time, I say, for 'im to step
down and let a better man tike 'old.”
Growls in chorus endorsed this declaration of
mutiny; but suddenly were stilled by a voice, sonor-
ous and calm, from outside the circle:
“You think so, Seven? Well—who knows?—per-
haps you are right.”


VIII
COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS
OMEONE exclaimed in an accent of alarm:
S “Number One!”
With a concerted turning of startled heads,
a hasty thrusting back of chairs, the gathering rose
in involuntary deference. That is, five rose as one;
and, after a moment during which his spirit of in-
subordination faltered and failed, the Englishman
got awkwardly to his feet and stood abashed and
sullen.
The one to remain seated was the Irishman so well
turned out by Conduit Street; who made no move
more than slightly to elevate supercilious brows and
slouch a little lower in his chair, glancing from face
to face of the circle, then back to the cold counte-
nance presented by the author of the abrupt inter-
ruption.
This last stood quietly beside the eighth chair, a
hand on its carved arm, one foot on the edge of the
dais. A long robe of black silk enveloped him; on
its bosom a Chinese unicorn was embroidered. His
girdle clasp was of Imperial jade set with rubies. The
girdle itself was yellow. A great ruby button,
154


COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS 155
nearly an inch in diameter, set in a mounting of
worked gold, crowned a hat like an inverted round
bowl. His black silk shoes were heavy with golden
embroidery, and had white soles an inch thick.
Authority lent inches to his stature, so that he
seemed to dominate his company physically as well
as spiritually.
A pace or two in the rear Shaik Tsin, with impas-
sive face and arms folded in voluminous sleeves,
waited as might a bodyguard.
A sardonic glimmer in eyes half visible under
heavy lids alone betrayed relish of the situation, the
homage commanded and the sensation created by
this inopportune and unheralded arrival: deliberately
Number One mounted the dais and posed himself
in the throne-like chair. Then, as his look read face
after face, he smiled with twitching and disdainful
nostrils.
“Gentlemen of the Council,” he said, slowly, “I
bow to you all. Pray be seated.”
In confounded silence the six resumed their seats,
while the seventh—who had not moved-lighted a
cigarette, inhaled deeply, and through a veil of
smoke continued to regard Number One with in-
solent eyes.
“I fear my arrival was ill-timed, gentlemen.
Seven had the floor, and I confess to finding what I
happened to overhear extremely interesting. If he
will be good enough to continue . . .”
The Irishman gave a light, derisive laugh. Shift-


COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS 157
“Aren’t you a bit behindhand in arriving at that
conclusion?” the Irishman suggested with an ill-
dissembled sneer.
“No, Eleven,” Number One replied, mildly,
“since I arrived at it some time since.”
“But took no measures 53
“You are in a position to state that as a fact?”
Eleven shrugged lightly. “Need I be? Does not
our situation speak for itself?”
“Since you cannot be as thoroughly acquainted
as I am with the situation, and since it seems I am
required to account for my leadership or surrender it
to you, Eleven . . . I believe you have selected
yourself to replace me as Number One, have you
not?—that is to say, in the improbable event of my
abdication.”
“Improbable?” repeated the Irishman. “I
wouldn’t call it that.”
“You are right,” Number One assented, gravely:
“unthinkable is the word. But you haven’t an-
swered my question.”
“Oh, as for that, if the Council should see fit to
appoint me Number One, I’d naturally do my best.”
“And most noble of you, I’m sure. But rather
than bring down any such disaster upon this organi-
zation, I will say now that measures have already
been taken, and I am to-night in a position to promise
you that the new spirit in Scotland Yard will no
longer be a factor in our calculations.”
“That wants proving,” Eleven contended.


158 RED MASQUERADE
A spasm of anger shook the figure in the throne-
like chair, but only for an instant; immediately the
iron will of the man imposed rigid self-control; almost
without pause he proceeded in level and civil accents:
“I think I can satisfy you and—this once—I
consent to do so. But first, a question: Have
you yourself formed any theory as to the identity of
this hostile intelligence which has so hindered us of
late?”
“I’d be a raw fool if I hadn’t,” the Irishman re-
torted. “We know the Lone Wolf has been hand-
in-glove with the authorities ever since the British
Secret Service used him during the war.”
“You think, then, it is Lanyard ?”
“It’s a wise saying: “Set a thief to catch a thief.”
I believe there's no man in England but Lanyard
who has the wit and vision and audacity to fight
us on our ground and win.”
“I agree entirely. Therefore, I have this day tied
the hands of the Lone Wolf; he will not again dare to
contend against us.”
Eleven sat up with a startled gesture.
“Are you meaning you’ve got the girl?”
Number One indulged a remote and chilly smile.
“Then you, too, noticed the advertisement?
Accept my compliments, Eleven. Decidedly you
might prove a dangerous rival—were I in a temper to
countenance competition. . . . But it is true:
I have the girl Sofia—the Lone Wolf's daughter.”
“Where?”


COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS 159
The smile faded; the man on the dais looked down
loftily.
“It is enough for you to know I have proved far-
sighted and unfailing in my fidelity to our common
cause.”
“So you say . . .
Though the Irishman winced and fell silent under
the cold glare of the other’s eyes, the voice that
answered him was level and passionless.
“I am not here to have my word challenged—
or my authority. If any one of you imagines
I am even thinking of surrendering the latter,
under any conceivable circumstances, he is mad.
And if any one of you doubts my power to enforce
my will, I promise him ample proof of it before the
night is ended. . . . Let us now proceed to
business, the question held over from our last
meeting. If Comrade Four will consult his min-
utes”—a nod singled out the babu, who, beaming
with importance, produced a note-book—“they
will show we adjourned to consider overtures made
by the Smolny Institute of Petrograd, seeking our
coöperation toward accelerating the social revolution
in England.”
“Thatt,” the Bengali affirmed, “is true bill of
factt.”
“If the temper in which you received those pro-
posals is fair criterion,” Number One resumed,
“there can be little doubt as to our decision. Speak-
ing for myself, I think it would be suicidal to reject
5 *


COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS 161
He paused and lifted his head, looking round the
circle of intent faces.
“If I am wrong or too sanguine, I am ready to be
corrected.”
He heard only a murmur of admiration, never a
note of dissent; and a smile of gratification, yet half
satiric, curved his thin lips.
“I take it, then, the Council endorses my decision
to proceed with the negotiations instituted by Soviet
Russia; to accept its proposals and pledge our co-
operation in every way?”
This time there was no mistaking the accuracy
with which he had gauged the minds of his asso-
ciates.
“One thing remains to be decided: a plan of ac-
tion, something which will demand all that we have
of imagination, ingenuity, common sense, and far
prevision. We can afford to waste not a single
ounce of strength: the blow, when we strike, must
be sudden, sharp, merciless—irresistible. But if
Thirteen is not over-confident of the discovery which
he says he has to-day perfected, the means to deal
just such a blow is ready to our hands.
Thirteen?”
A nod and gracious smile invited that one to speak.
He rose, trembling a little with excitement, bowed
to Number One and, delving into capacious pockets,
produced a number of small tin canisters together
with three sealed bottles of brown glass. Surveying
these, as he arranged them on the teakwood table


COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS 163
but more terrible than the massacre of the Hugue-
nots, more savage than the French Revolution!”
“But I believe,” the inventor commented, “your
Excellency said we required the means to deal a
‘blow sudden, sharp, merciless—irresistible’.”
“Surely now,” the Irishman suggested, mockingly
—where a wiser man would have held his tongue—
“you’ll not be sticking at a small matter like whole-
sale murder if it’s to make us masters of England?”
“Of England?” the German echoed. “Herr Gott!
Of the world!”
“And you, Excellency, our master,” the inventor
added, shrewdly.
A sign at once impatient and imperative demanded
silence, and for a few minutes it obtained unbroken,
while the gathering, keyed to high tension, studied
closely the face of their leader and found it altogether
illegible.
On his part he seemed forgetful of the existence
of anybody but himself, forgetful almost of himself
as well: sitting low in his great chair, his body as
stirless as it were bound by some spell of black
magic, his far gaze probing unfathomable remote-
nesses of thought.
Slowly he recalled himself to his surroundings; with
a suggestion of weariness he sat up and reviewed the
little company that hung so breathlessly upon the
issue of his judgment. The shadow of that satiric
smile returned.
“If the thing be feasible,” he promised, “it shall


164 RED MASQUERADE
be done. It remains for Thirteen to be more
explicit.”
With an extravagant flourish the inventor whipped
from his breastpocket a folded paper, and spread it
out face uppermost on the table.
“A map of London,” he announced, “based on
the latest Ordnance Survey and coloured to show
the districts supplied by the mains of each individual
gas depot. Thus you will observe”—what his long,
bony finger indicated—“the district supplied by the
mains of the Westminster gas works, comprising
Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the
War Office, and the Admiralty, Downing Street, the
homes of hundreds of the aristocracy. All these
we can at will turn into the deadliest of death
traps.”
A tense voice interrupted with the demand:
“How?”
“Quite easily, comrade: with the ramifications of
our power throughout London, all under the control
of his Excellency”—the inventor bowed to Number
One—“it should be an easy matter to place a few
trustworthy men with the Westminster gas works.”
“It can readily be done,” Number One affirmed.
“And then ?”
“While this is being done means must be found
to smuggle other men, in the guise of servants, into
the various buildings selected, or to corrupt those
already so employed therein. At the designated
hour—”


COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS 165
The words dried upon his lips as somewhere
a hidden bell stabbed the quiet with short, sharp
thrills of sound, a code that spelled a message of
terrifying significance. The inventor started vio-
lently, but no more so than every man about the
table. Even Number One, shocked out of his
lounging pose, grasped the arms of his throne with
convulsive hands.
Quietly and without a hint of hurry, the Chinese,
Shaik Tsin, moved back into the shadows and, un-
noticed, disappeared behind a screen.
For a moment, when the bell had ceased, nobody
spoke; but pallid face consulted face and eyes
grown wide with dread sought eyes that winced
in terror.
Then the Bengali leaped from his chair, jabbering
with bloodless lips.
“Police! Raid! We are betrayed!”
He made an uncertain turn, as if thinking to seek
safety in flight but doubting which way to choose;
and the movement struck panic into the minds and
hearts of his fellows. In a twinkling all were on their
feet. But before one could move a step the lamp
in the ceiling winked out, the room was left in dark-
ness unrelieved, and the accents of Number One were
heard, coldly imperative.
“Gentlemen! be good enough to resume your
places—let no one move before there is light again.
We are in no immediate danger: Shaik Tsin will
show you out by a secret way long before the police


166 RED MASQUERADE
can hope to find and break into this chamber. In
the meantime—”
The infuriated voice of the Englishman inter-
rupted:
“And ’oo’re you to give us orders?—you ’oo
talked so big about 'avin’ tied the 'ands of the Lone
Wolf and Scotland Yard! You blarsted blow’ard!
Bli’me if I don’t believe it’s you ’oo-”
“Quietly, Seven! Have you forgotten you have a
bad heart?—that excitement may mean your sudden
death?”
The rage of the Englishman ran out in a gasp and a
whisper.
“In the meantime,” Number One resumed as if
there had been no break, “I promised that, before
the night was out, you should have proof of my
ability to enforce my will.”
A groan of agony answered him, followed by an
oath of witless fear. From a distance the voice,
now thin but still sonorous, added:
“Thirteen will hold himself ready to wait on me
when I send for him to-morrow. Gentlemen of the
Council, I bow to you all.”
Again silence held for a long minute during which
no man stirred or spoke. Then overhead the lamp
burned bright again, discovering six frightened
men upon their feet and one who, still seated, did
not stir, and never would again.
His head fallen forward, chin resting on his chest,
mouth ajar, inert arms dangling over the arms of the


COUNCIL OF THE GODLESS 167
chair, heavy legs lax, the Englishman sat quite
dead, dead without a sign to show how death had
come to him.
Number One had disappeared.
There was a remote rumour of cries and shouts,
the muffled sound of axes crashing into wood-
work.


IX
MRS. WARING
I ATE in the forenoon a pencil of golden light
found a chink in jealously drawn draperies,
and groped the rich dusk of the bedchamber
till it came to rest, as if happy that its search had
found so lovely a reward, upon the face of a young
girl who lay sleeping in a bed whose exquisite adorn-
ment must have flattered even the exalted person of
a princess.
With a swift but silent movement another girl,
who had been sitting patiently on a low stool nearby,
rose and put herself in the way of the sunbeam. But
too late: already long lashes were a-flutter upon the
delicately modelled cheeks of the sleeper.
A gentle sigh brushed parting lips; the sweet body
stirred luxuriously; unclouded by any shadow of mis-
giving, the blue eyes of the Princess Sofia looked
out upon the first day of her new world.
Then they grew wide with wonder, comprehending
the sleek, pretty face of a Chinese girl of about her
own age who, with eyes downcast, demure mouth
and folded hands, submissively awaited recognition.
“Who are you?” Sofia demanded in a breath.
168 -


MRS. WARING 169
A bob of courtesy, wholly charming, prefaced a
reply pattered in English of quaintest accent:
“You’ handmaiden—Chou Nu is my name.”
“My handmaiden!”
“Les, Plincess Sofia.”
“But I don’t understand. How—when—?”
“Las’ night Numbe’ One he send for me, but
when I come you go-sleep.”
“Number One?”
Surprise coloured faintly the explanation: “Plince
Victo’, honol’ble fathe of Plincess Sofia. You like
get up now, take bath, have blekfuss?”
The smile was irresistibly ingratiating: Sofia
could not but return it. Delighted, Chou Nu ran to
the windows, threw wide their draperies, and darted
into the bathroom.
Autumnal sunlight kindled to burning beauty the
golden-bronze tresses coiled upon the pillows where
Sofia lay unstirring, like a princess enchanted—as
indeed she was. Surely nothing less potent than
magic had wrought this metamorphosis in the fabric
of her life! And whether the magic were white or
black—what matter? Its work was good.
No more the Café des Exiles, no more the deadly
tedium of daily service at the desk of the caisse,
no more the shrewish tongue of Mama Thérèse,
the odious oglings of Papa Dupont, the ceaseless
cark of discontent
Incredible!
As one who moves in a dream, Sofia rose presently


170 RED MASQUERADE
and bathed, then, robed in a ravishing negligée of
rare brocade, breakfasted on melon, tea, and toast
from a service of eggshell china.
In a long mirror she saw and watched but did not
know herself. Like Goody Twoshoes of nursery
fame she could have cried: Lawkamercy! this is
never I!
The presence of Chou Nu served merely to stress
the sense of unreality: for, obviously, only the
heroine of a true fairy tale could have broken from a
chrysalis stage of sordid Soho to the brilliant butter-
fly existence of a Russian princess domiciled in the
most aristocratic quarter of London and attended by
a Chinese maid!
And Chou Nu proved a delight. Once satisfied
she need fear neither ill-temper nor arrogance from
her new mistress, she indulged an even and constant
flow of artless high spirits, her amusing, clipped
English affording Sofia considerable entertainment
together with not a little food for thought.
Thus one learned that the main body of the service
staff was Chinese under a major domo named Shaik
Tsin–Chou Nu’s “second-uncle”—who enjoyed
Prince Victor's completest confidence and was,
second to the latter only, the real head of the estab-
lishment, its presiding genius. The front of the
house alone was dressed with a handful of English
servants nominally under the man Nogam, but
actually, like him, answerable in the last instance to
Shaik Tsin.


MRS. WARING 171
Why this should be Chou Nu couldn’t say. Sofia
supposed it was because Prince Victor thought his
Occidental guests would feel more at ease with Eng-
lish servants; or perhaps he himself preferred them,
when it came to the question of personal atten-
dance. -
No success rewarded efforts to extract from Chou
Nu her reason for referring to Victor as “Number
One.” She stated simply that all Chinamans in
London called him that; and being pressed further
added, with as near an approach to impatience
as her gentle nature could muster, that it was obvi-
ously because Plince Victo’ was Numbe’ One: ev’-
body knew that.
A knock at the door interrupted Sofia’s question-
ing. Answering, Chou brought back word that the
honourable father of Princess Sofia submitted his
august felicitations and solicited the immediate
favour of her serene attendance in his study.
Hasty search failed to locate the garments dis-
carded on going to bed and, in the indifference of
depression and fatigue, left in a tumble on the
floor. All had vanished while Sofia slept; Chou Nu
professed blank ignorance of their fate; and ap-
parently nothing had been provided in their stead
but Chinese robes, of sumptuous vestments well
suited to one of high estate. With these, then, and
with Chou Nu’s guidance as to choice and ceremoni-
ous arrangement, Sofia was obliged to make shift;
and anything but unbecoming she found them—or


172 RED MASQUERADE
truly it was a shape of dream that looked out from
her mirror.
Yet it was with reluctant feet that she left her
room, descended the broad staircase to the entrance
hall, and addressed herself to the study door. It
had been so beautiful, that waking dream the sequel
to her night of dreamless sleep, too beautiful to be
foregone without regret.
For Sofia had not forgotten, she could never for-
get, she had merely been successful temporarily in
banishing from mind that bitter disillusionment
which had poisoned what should have been her time
of greatest joy.
To be told, by the father of whose dear existence
one had only learned within the hour, that one was
the child of a notorious thief and an adventuress . . .
It needed more than common fortitude to face
renewed reminder of that shame.
Oddly enough, it seemed to help a bit, somehow
to lend her courage and assurance, to pass the man
Nogam in the hall and acknowledge his bow and
smile. Sofia wondered vaguely what it was that
made his smile seem so kind; it was entirely respect-
ful, there was nothing more in it that she could fix
on; and yet
She was able to offer Victor a composed, almost a
happy countenance, and to return cheerful assurances
to punctilious enquiries after her well-being and her
comfort overnight. To the real affection in which
he held her, the warmth of his embrace, and the linger-


MRS. WARING 173
ing pressure of his lips gave convincing testimony;
and in time, no doubt, as she grew to know him bet-
ter, her response would become more spontaneous
and true. Indeed, she insisted, it must; she would
school herself, if need be, to remember that this
strange man was the author of her being, the natu-
ral object of her affections—deserving all her love
if only because of that nobility which had enabled
him to renounce those evil ways of years long
dead.
But to-day—and this, of course, she couldn’t
understand—a slight but invincible shiver, percepti-
ble to herself alone, attended her submission to
paternal caresses; and the eyes were too dispassion-
ate with which she saw Prince Victor. Still, they
found little to which fair exception might be taken.
If Life had thus far been callously frank with Sofia as
to its broader aspects, the niceties of its technique re-
mained measurably a mystery, she was insufficiently
instructed to perceive that Victor’s morning coat
(for example) had been cut a shade too cleverly, or
that the ensemble of his raiment was a trace ornate;
and where a mind more mondain would have marked
ponderable constraint in his manner, she saw only
dignity and reserve. But for all that she recognized
intuitively a lack of something in the man, the sum
of this second impression of him was formless dis-
appointment, she felt somehow cheated, disheart-
ened, chilled.
That she was able at all to dissemble this sense of


174 RED MASQUERADE
dashed expectations was thanks in the main to a
third party, a stranger whose presence she over-
looked on entering, when Prince Victor met her near
the door, while the other remained aside, half hidden
in the recess of a window.
Directly, however, that Victor half turned away,
saying “I have found a friend for you, my dear,”
Sofia, following his glance, discovered a woman
whose every detail of dress and deportment was
unmistakably of the fashionable world and whose
face carried souvenirs of loveliness as unmistak-
able.
Smiling and offering her hands, she approached,
while Victor's voice of heavy modulations uttered
formally:
“Sybil, permit me to present my daughter. Sofia,
Mrs. Waring has graciously offered to sponsor your
introduction to Society, to guide and instruct you
and be in every way your mentor.”
“My dear!” the woman exclaimed, holding Sofia’s
hands and kissing her cheek. And then, looking
aside to Victor, “But how very like!'” she added with
the air of tender reminiscence.
“Oh!” Sofia cried, “you knew my mother?”
“Indeed—and loved her.” Sofia never dreamed
to question the woman's sincerity; and her charm
of manner was irresistible. “You must try to like
me a little for her sake—”
“As if one could help liking you for your own, Mrs.
Waring!”


MRS. WARING I75
“Prettily said, my dear. You have inherited more
from your mother than your good looks alone. Is
it not so, mon prince?”
“Much more.” Victor's enigmatic smile gave place
to a look of regret and uneasiness. “Let us hope,
however, not too much. Heredity,” he mused in
sombre mood, “is a force of such fatality in our
lives. .”
He gave a gesture of solicitude and continued with
characteristic deliberation, and that preciseness of
diction which he seemed never able to forget, even
though deeply moved.
“More than ever, now that Sofia is restored to
me, I could wish the past other than what it was, that
she might start life with a handicap less cruel of
inherited tendencies. But when I reflect that both
her parents 95
“Please!” Sofia begged, piteous. “Oh, please!”
“I am sorry, my dear.” Victor closed tender
hands over those which the girl had lifted in appeal.
“It is for your own good only I give myself this pain
of warning you against your worst enemy, I mean
yourself, the self that is so strange a compound of
hereditary weaknesses. . . . Please remember
always that, no matter what may happen, however
far you may be led into transgression of the social
codes, I shall never reproach you, on the contrary,
you may count implicitly on my sympathetic under-
standing. Never forget, I, too, have known, have
suffered and fought myself—and in the end won at a


MRS. WARING 177
did, you were in good hands, well cared for, happy-
lest my enemies seek to strike at me through you.
But when I saw that unfortunate advertisement I
dared delay not another hour about bringing you
within the compass of my protection. Even now,
untiring as my care for you shall ever be, I know my
enemies will be as tireless in endeavours to rob me of
you. You will be followed, hounded, importuned,
lied to, threatened—all without rest. If they cannot
take you from me bodily, they will seek to poison
your mind against me. Therefore, rather than keep
you practically a prisoner in your home, I feel
obliged to require a promise of you.”
Deeply stirred by the melancholy gravity that
informed his pose, the girl protested earnestly: “Any-
thing—I will promise anything, rather than be an
anxiety to one who is so kind.”
“Kind? To my own daughter?” Victor smiled
sadly. “But I love you, little Sofia. Nor is it much
that I must ask of you: merely that you never go out
alone, but only in the company of Mrs. Waring or
Mr. Karslake or, preferably, both.”
“Oh, I promise tha 5 *
“But there is more: If by any accident you should
ever find yourself left alone in public, do not let
strangers speak to you, refuse to listen to them.”
“I promise.”
“And finally: If anybody should ever seek to
turn you against me, come to me instantly and tell
me about it.”


178 RED MASQUERADE
“But naturally I would do that, father.”
“Good. I rely upon your discretion and loyalty.
At another time I will explain matters in more detail.
For the present-enough of an unpleasant subject.
You have a busy day before you. At my request
Mrs. Waring has arranged to have various trades-
people wait upon you this morning to take your
orders for the beginnings of a wardrobe. If you can
find something ready-made to wear you will want,
no doubt, to spend the afternoon shopping. A car
will be at your disposal, and I give you carte blanche.
I wish you never to know an unsatisfied need or de-
sire. Still, I am selfish enough to reserve for myself
the happiness of selecting your jewels.”
“Oh!” Sofia cried, breathlessly. Victor was hold-
ing his arms open; and how should she deny him?
“You are too good to me,” she murmured. “How
can I ever show my gratitude?”
Holding her close, Victor smiled a singular smile.
“Some day I may tell you. But to-day—no more.
I am much preoccupied with affairs; but Mrs. War-
ing will take care of you till evening, when I promise
myself the pleasure of dining with you both.”
At the sound of a knock he put Sofia gently from
him, and said in a strong voice:
“Enter.”
The door opened, Nogam announced:
“Mr. Sturm.”
Hard on the echo of his name a man swung into
the room with an air at once nervous and aggressive-


MRS. WARING 179
a tall man shabbily dressed, holding his head high—
and at sight of Sofia and Mrs. Waring, where he
had doubtless thought to find Prince Victor alone,
stopped short, betraying disconcertion in the way he
instinctively assumed the stand of a soldier at atten-
tion, bringing his heels together with an undeniable
click, straightening his shoulders, stiffening both arms
to rigidity at his sides. And for a bare thought
his eyes rolled almost wildly in their deep sockets.
Then he bowed twice, from the hips, with mechanical
precision, profoundly to Victor, with deep respect
to the women.
Victor smothered an exclamation of annoyance.
Unbidden, a word shaped in Sofia's consciousness,
a French monosyllable into which the war had
packed every shade and gradation of hatred and
contempt, the epithet Boche.
Immediately erasing every sign of irritation, Victor
greeted the man with casual suavity. “Oh, there you
are, eh, Sturm?” Then, as Sofia and Mrs. Waring
turned to go, he added quickly: “A moment, please.
Since Mr. Sturm to-day becomes a member of the
household, acting as my assistant in some research
work which I am undertaking, I may as well present
him now. Mrs. Waring, permit me: Mr. Sturm.
And the Princess Sofia Vassilyevski, my daugh-
ter .”
Mumbling their names after Victor, the man
Sturm executed two more bows. At the same time
he seemed to remind himself that his soldierly


180 RED MASQUERADE
carriage was perhaps injudicious, and forthwith
abandoned it for a studied slouch which, in Sofia’s
sight, was little less than insolent. And unmis-
takably there was something nearly resembling
insolence in the eyes that boldly sought hers: a look
equivocal at best and, intentionally or no, wholly
offensive in essence; as if the fellow were asserting
their partnership in some secret understanding;
or as if he knew something by no means to Sofia’s
credit.
Her acknowledgment of his salute was accordingly
cool, and she was glad when a nod from Prince Victor
gave her leave to go.


X
VICTOR ET AL
T: first few weeks of emancipation from
the ennui of existence at the Café des Exiles
were so replete with wonders that Sofia lived
largely in a beatific state of breathless excitement,
devoting the best part of her days to thoughtless
flying from delight to new delight, and going nightly
to her bed so healthily tired that she slept like a top
and never once awakened to memories of disturbing
dreams.
Perhaps her pleasure burned the brighter for its
dark, ambiguous background-those many ques-
tions which Prince Victor persisted in leaving un-
answered. Sofia knew bad times of perplexity and
depression, when the price of translation from drudge
to princess seemed a sore price to pay.
And yet, required to state the cost to her in terms
explicit, she must have hesitated lest she appear
ungrateful in complaining, who hardly needed to ex-
press a wish to have it granted, who indeed knew
many a wish realized in fact before she was fully
aware of its inception in her private thoughts.
All those lovely material things of life which her
181


182 RED MASQUERADE
famished girlhood had ached for so hopelessly now
were hers in abundant measure, and all the less
tangible things, too, so requisite to the happiness of
women in a worldly world—or nearly all. Frocks
she had, with furs and furbelows no end; flowers and
flattery and frivolities; freedom within limitations
as yet not irksome; jewels that would have graced an
imperial diadem—everything but the single essential
without which everything is hollow nothing and life
itself only the dreaming of a dream.
The one lack known to the Sofia of those days was
the lack of Love.
She had gone so long longing to love, questing
blindly and vainly for some human being to whom her
affection would mean something vital and dear—it
seemed cruel that her longing must be still denied.
As it had been with Mama Thérèse, it was now
with the romantic father so newly self-declared. She
wanted desperately and tried her best to love Victor
as his daughter should; and that he cared for her
profoundly she knew and never questioned; yet when
she searched her secret heart Sofia discovered no
feeling for the man other than a singular form of fear.
His look, his tone, his manner, his presence alto-
gether, inspired a nameless sort of shrinking, in-
articulate apprehensions, and mistrust which the
girl found at once utterly unaccountable and dis-
mally disappointing; so that, with every wish and
will to do otherwise, she found herself involuntarily
making excuse of trivial interests to keep out of Vic-


VICTOR ET AL, 183
tor's way and, when there was no escaping, sitting
silent and ill at ease in his society, or seizing on some
slender pretext, it didn’t matter what, to inveigle
into their company a third somebody, it didn’t mat-
ter whom—Mrs. Waring, Karslake, even the un-
speakable Sturm.
Nevertheless, there were times, far too many of
them, too, when of a sudden Victor would forsake his
occult preoccupations and, unceremoniously upset-
ting whatever arrangements Sofia might have made
with Mrs. Waring or Karslake, would find other
pleasures of his own invention for her to share with
him alone: long motor jaunts through the English
countryside, apparently his favourite recreation; a
box all to themselves at a theatre, where Victor
would sit watching the girl with a fascination only
rivalled by her fascination with the traffic of the
boards; curiously constrained little dinners à deux
in fashionable restaurants; morning rides in Rotten
Row, where it oddly appeared that Victor knew
everybody, whereas not one in five hundred seemed
to know him—or to care to know him.
Sofia, indeed, was often puzzled to account for what
to her appeared to be an almost pathetic eagerness
on the part of Victor, in strange accord with his
lofty pretensions, to claim acquaintanceship with
and win the recognition even of persons of the utmost
inconsequence. And she remarked, too, that his
temper was apt to be raw in sequel to their excursions
into the haunts of the well-known. But it was for


184 RED MASQUERADE
other reasons altogether that she came to dread them
most.
For one thing, Victor's conversation was ordinarily
rather dull; at best, the reverse of exhilarating.
And in spite of her unquestioning acceptance of him
as her father, he remained to Sofia actually a new
acquaintance; in effect, a strange man. And from
strangers, more than from relatives with whose
minds one is presumably on terms of close intimacy,
one is warranted in expecting something in the way
of mutual stimulation through the opening of new
perspectives of experience, thought, and feeling.
Whereas—with Sofia, at least—Victor seemed un-
able to talk on more than two subjects, one or the
other of which was constantly uppermost in his
thoughts.
He never wearied of warning Sofia against the
dangers of those moral infirmities which he asserted
were hers by legitimate inheritance; and which,
if Victor were right in his contentions, she could
hardly hope to overcome without a desperate
struggle. She would have to be forever on guard, he
insisted, lest the temptation of some moment, not
to be foreseen, prove too strong for her latent
weakness of character, and commit her, through
some unpremeditated act of defiance to the law—
most probably an act of theft—to the life of a social
Outcast.
To do her justice, the girl was consciously not much
impressed by this alleged peril. She had never been


VICTOR ET AL, 185
aware of any failing such as Victor would have en-
dowed her with; so far as she could remember she
had never been tempted to commit more venial sins
than inhered in lying to Mama Thérèse now and then
in order to escape unmerited disciplining at the heavy
hands of that industrious virago; and as for thieving,
the very thought of anything of that sort was de-
testable to Sofia.
But unconsciously, no doubt, the everlasting
iteration of Victor's admonitions had its purposed
effect upon that sensitive and impressionable spirit.
Then, too, by degrees, but all too soon, it became
manifest that the memory of his passionate attach-
ment for her mother possessed Victor to the point
of monomania. It was only with an effort that
he could force himself to talk to Sofia on other
subjects. He thought of nothing else while with
her; if she read his eyes aright, often glimpses of
weird light flickering in their opaque depths, like
heat lightning of a murky summer's night, fairly
frightened her, and she knew a shuddering percep-
tion of the possibility that Victor was at times in
danger of confusing the daughter with the mother.
“Never was there such resemblance,” he once
uttered, in a stare. “You are more like her than she
herself!”
Sofia was pardonably puzzled, and looked it.
“I mean, you re-create my vision of the woman I
loved and lost—the woman I saw in her, not the
woman she was.”


186 RED MASQUERADE
“Lost?” the girl murmured.
The gray countenance took on an added shade of
sombre passion. “She never understood me, she
treated me badly. Once, in a fit of pique, she ran
away. I did everything—everything, I tell you!—
to win her back, but—”
He choked on bitter recollections—and Sofia was
painfully reminded of the Chinese devil-masks in Vic-
tor's study. But the likeness faded even as she saw
it, under her gaze the twisted features were ironed
back into their accustomed cast of austerity.
“Before I could persuade her, you were born.
. . . Then she died.”
Sensible though she was of the ellipsis, and afraid
it would never be filled in if she interrupted, Sofia
could not help uttering a sound of regret and pity
for the lot of the mother she had never seen, whose
untimely death had ended a life accounted unendur-
able as Victor's wife, for reasons unknown but none
the less, to the daughter, vaguely and lamentably
understandable.
For Sofia by now had passed the stage of pretend-
ing to herself that she was not happier away from
her father.
Victor mistook the nature of the feeling that
swayed the girl—took to himself the sympathy ex-
cited by his revelations.
“But do not grieve on my account. Is not that
which was lost restored again to me? In you my
old love lives once more . . . little Sofia!”


VICTOR ET AL 187
He caught and pressed a hand that rested on the
cloth between them. (They happened that night
to be dining at the Ritz.) And Sofia re-experienced
that inevitable, hateful flinching with which she was
growing too familiar.
She dropped her head that her eyes might not be-
tray her.
“People will see . .
“What if they do? Those who know us will
hardly see any wrong in my squeezing the hand of
my own daughter; and the others—not that they
matter—will only think me the luckiest dog alive—
as I am!”
Chuckle and smirk both were indescribably odious,
reminding Sofia of the creature Sturm; he had a
laugh like that for her, on the rare occasion when
chance propinquity encouraged the Boche to begin
one of his uncouth essays in flirtation.
Sturm’s attitude, in truth, perplexed Sofia to
exasperation; that is to say, as much as it offended
her. For Victor the man seemed to entertain an
exaggerated yet deeply rooted respect, approaching
actual awe, which he tried his best to carry off with a
swagger; for to hold anybody in any degree of defer-
ence was, one judged, somehow deplorable, even
shameful, in the code of Sturm; but in Victor's pres-
ence the fellow’s bravado would quickly wilt into
hopeless servility, he would cringe and crawl like a
dog currying the favour of a harsh master.
Nevertheless, Victor's daughter seemed to be no
35
•


188 RED MASQUERADE
more than fair game, in Sturm’s understanding, and
a source of supercilious amusement but thinly
veiled or not at all. Alone with the girl, Sturm put
on the airs of a Prussianized pasha condescending
to a new odalisque.
Sofia held the animal in a deadly loathing which,
betrayed in word or look or gesture, animated in him
only a spirit of derision. In the absence of Victor,
Sturm’s eyes were ever ironic, his bows and leers
mocking, his speeches flavoured with clumsy sarcasm;
from which it resulted that the girl never quite for-
got the impression which he had managed to convey
in those few moments of their first encounter, that
Sturm knew something she ought to know but
didn’t, and was meanly jeering at her in his sleeve.
What virtues Victor Vassilyevski perceived in the
man passed comprehension. But so did most of
Victor’s whims and ways. What riddle more ob-
scure than that portentous business which permeated
the atmosphere of the establishment with the taint
of stealth and terror?—the famous “research work”
that kept Victor closeted with Sturm in his study
daily for hours at a time, often in confabulation with
others of like ilk, men of furtive and unprepossess-
ing cast who came and went by appointment at all
hours, but as a rule late at night!
Into these conferences, Sofia observed, Karslake
was never summoned. She wondered why. He
was, as she saw him, so unquestionably the better
man, everything that Sturm was not, open of


VICTOR ET AL 189
countenance, fair of temper and tongue, well-bred
and well-mannered, light of heart and high spirited,
and at the same time dependable, with metal of
sincerity and earnestness like tempered steel in his
character—or Sofia misread him woefully.
She had been quick to see the man behind the
misleading little moustache. And already she was
beginning to count that amusement tame which
Karslake did not share.
Mrs. Waring was undeniably a dear. Sofia
could hardly be grateful enough to the happy
chance which had cast that lady for the rôle of her
chaperone; lacking her guidance the girl must have
been innocently guilty of many a gaucherie in ways
new and strange to untried, faltering feet. And it
was to her alone that Sofia owed the slow but con-
stant widening of her social horizon. For Sybil
Waring, it seemed, quite literally “knew every-
body”; and Sofia soon learned to count it an off day
when Sybil failed to present her protégée to the
notice of somebody of position and influence.
Most of these persons were women with sounding
names and the solid backing of much money con-
spicuously in evidence—matrons of the younger and
more giddy generation which was just then so busily
engaged in providing material for the most hectic
chapters of London’s post-war social history. But
Sofia was scarcely qualified to be critical or to guess
that they were climbers equally with herself, and
that if their footing had been of older establishment


XI
HEARTBEEAK
OT yet prepared to admit it even to herself,
N in her heart Sofia knew she prized the com-
panionship of Karslake for something more
than the mere amusement it afforded her: there was
a deeper feeling she would not name. For all
that, her times of solitude knew dreams quick and
warm with the thought of Karslake, his words and
ways, the gracious little attentions he had accus-
tomed her to expect of him and which his manner
subtly invested with a personal flavour inexpressibly
delightful, indispensably sweet.
Nor did she ever quite forget how long he had wor-
shipped with unostentatious devotion at her lowly
shrine of the caisse in the Café des Exiles, and how
shabbily she had rewarded his admiration-never
once, in those many months, with so much as a
smile—and how unresentful had been his acceptance
of her half-feigned, half-real indifference to his exis-
tence.
But whenever her reflections took that back-
turning she would recall the man who had talked to
Karslake in the café, that day so long ago, of his
191


HEARTBREAK 193
“But you do know Chinese, don’t you?”
“Not a syllable.”
Sofia opened her, lips to protest, but delayed
to study Karslake's face intently. He didn’t try to
escape her scrutiny, he even seemed to court it; but
there was a curious, quizzical look in his eyes, those
half-smiling lips had a whimsical droop.
“Mr. Karslake!” Sofia announced, severely,
“you’re fibbing.”
“Nice thing to say to me.”
“You do speak Chinese—confess.”
“My dear Princess Sofia,” Karslake protested:
“if I had known one word of Chinese I could never
have landed my job with your father.”
“Why not?”
“He expressly stipulated that I should be ignorant
of that language.”
“What a silly condition to make!”
“Still, I daresay Prince Victor had his reasons.”
“I can’t imagine what .”
“Possibly preferred a secretary who couldn’t
understand everything he said to the servants. I’ve
never pretended to know all Prince Victor's secrets,
you know.”
After a little pause Sofia asked gently: “Did
you really need the job so badly, Mr. Karslake?”
“To get it meant more to me than I can tell you—
almost as much as to hold on to it does to-day.”
Sofia turned her eyes away at this, and for the
rest of the ride—they were homeward bound from a


194 RED MASQUERADE
matinée, having dropped Sybil Waring at her flat
in Mayfair—kept her thoughts to herself.
Only the most perfunctory civilities passed be-
tween them, in fact, until they had been ushered into
the study by Nogam, who advised them that Prince
Victor had ordered tea to be served there and had
promised to be home in good time for it.
The tea service was already set out on a little
table beside the fireplace in that room of secrets,
whose normal atmosphere of brooding gloom was
now the darker for the deepening dusk. Only the
tea itself remained to be served, a special rite never
performed in that household by hands more profane
than those of the major-domo, Shaik Tsin himself.
And this last could be counted upon not to put in
appearance until Nogam took him word that Victor
was waiting.
So, having laid aside her furs and satisfied herself,
by a seemingly aimless but in fact exacting survey,
that the abominable Sturm was not skulking any-
where in the shadows, Sofia established herself on a
lounge that faced the fireplace, while Karslake stood
before the fire, looking down with an expectant smile
of which she was but half aware.
“Aren’t you going to forgive me?” he asked,
quietly, after a time.
Sofia withdrew a pensive gaze from the ruddy
bed of coals.
“For What?”
“You were kind enough to call it merely fibbing.”


HEARTBREAK 195
“I’m still thinking about that.”
In fact, she had been thinking of nothing else.
There was so much to be considered. Imprimis,
that Karslake had been guilty of practising a de-
ception upon her father. Deceit in itself was one
form of treachery. And how often had Victor
stressed to her the dangers of his position, sur-
rounded by nameless but implacable enemies who
would stick at no infamy to compass his ruin!
But if she told him that Karslake understood
Chinese she would lose her friend forever—no
question about that. Victor would not hesitate an
instant—indeed, Sofia felt sure he was only waiting
for some such pretext to get rid of his secretary.
She was anything but unobserving, this child of
Soho, whose wits had been sharpened in the so-
phisticated atmosphere of a French restaurant;
and more than once she had seen Victor's face
duplicate the expression Papa Dupont's had so often
assumed on his discovering that some patron of the
café was taking too personal an interest in the pretty
young dame du comptoir. A look of insensate
jealousy . . .
To risk forfeiting the comradeship that had grown
to be so dear? Or to be constructively derelict in her
duty as a daughter?
A difficult choice to make; but Sofia made it
honestly. In point of fact, she assured herself,
coldly, there was no choice, there was only one
thing she could do under the circumstances. And


198 RED MASQUERADE .
A ring of sarcastic apology provided the only clue
she got to the import of Victor's words. Sobered a
trifle, her mental processes somewhat less incoherent,
still she knew she would hardly regain her poise until
she was alone. And breathing an excuse, she left the
room with such dignity as she could muster.
In the hall, with the closed door behind her, she
paused to collect herself. Then she missed furs and
gloves and handbag and, remembering that she
had left them in the study, for some obscure reason
imagined she must have them before proceeding to
her room.
Much more mistress of herself by now, it never
occurred to Sofia that there could be any reason
why she should hesitate about returning or feel
embarrassed before Victor. True, he had surprised
them, Sofia was not at all sure he hadn’t actually
seen her in Karslake's arms. But what of that?
Love like hers was nothing to be ashamed of; and
that Victor could reasonably object to her giving her
heart to one of his secretaries was something far from
her thought just then.
She put a hand to the knob, turned it, and swung
the door open—all on impulse—then faltered, trans-
fixed by the tableau before the fireplace.
The door was silent on its hinges, and Karslake's
back was to her. Victor, on the other hand, facing
both Karslake and the door, unquestionably saw
Sofia, but pretended not to, and had his say out with
Karslake in a manner bitterly cynical.


HEARTBREAK 199
sadly in error if you flatter yourself I pay
you a wage to make love to Sofia behind my back.”
“Sorry, sir.” Karslake's tone was level, re-
spectful but firm. “Your instructions were, I be-
lieve, to win her confidence. Well—I have always
found love the one sure key to a woman’s con-
fidence. Of course, if I had understood you cared
one way or the other 5 *
Sofia heard no more: unconsciously she had
closed the door, at one and the same time shutting
from her sight Victor’s exultant sneer and from her
hearing the words with which the man whom she
loved had damned himself irretrievably and dashed
her spirit from radiant pinnacles of ecstasy into the
profoundest black abyss of shame and despair.
Primitive instinct bade the stricken girl seek her
room and hide her suffering there; but the shock
had stunned her to the point of physical weakness.
Already a hand was pressed above her heart, that
ached cruelly; and as she moved to cross to the
foot of the staircase her knees gave under her.
She clutched the newel-post for support, waiting to
find strength for the ascent.
From the shadowed back part of the hall the man
Nogam moved hastily into view, his features twisted
in a grimace of concern as he recognized the bleak
misery of Sofia’s face. His voice sounded strangely
thin and remote.
“Is there anything the matter, miss?—anything I
can do?”
© 6
•


200 RED MASQUERADE
She contrived to shake her head slightly and utter
an inarticulate sound of negation, then began slowly
to mount the stairs.
Below, Nogam stood watching, in a pose of in-
decision, as if tempted to follow and offer the support
of an arm lest she fall, restrained only by fear of a
rebuff. But Sofia’s leaden limbs carried her safely
to the upper landing, then on to the blessed shelter
of her room, where she collapsed upon a chaise-
longue and there lay in a stirless huddle, dry of eye
but deaf to the plaintive entreaties of Chou Nu and
numb to all sensation but the anguish of her hu-
miliated heart.


XII
SUSPECT
OWARD mid-evening the man Victor
| Vassilyevski and his creature Sturm sat where
the lamp of hand-wrought brass made the top
of the teakwood table an oasis of light amid a waste
of shadows, their heads together over a vast glut of
books and papers-maps printed and sketched,
curious diagrams, works of reference, documents all
dark with columns of figures and cabalistic writings
intelligible only to initiated eyes.
They had the study all to themselves. Never-
theless, when they spoke it was in the discreet pitch
of those who deal in fatal secrets. At a distance of
two paces only a lip-reader could have caught the
substance of their communications, and even such
a one must have failed unless equally at home in
German and in English.
Aside from these occasional and circumspect voices,
and the busy rustle of a steel pen in the hand of
Sturm, the quiet of the room had a tolerably constant
background of sound in a subdued whisper punctu-
ated by muffled clicks, emanating from the bronze
casket that housed the telautographic apparatus.
201


202 RED MASQUERADE
From time to time, as this noise temporarily
suspended, Victor would get up, read what the
mechanical stylus had inscribed, tear off the paper,
and return to his chair.
Some of the messages thus received he made
known to Sturm, who invariably acknowledged this
courtesy with effusive gratitude, sometimes adding a
few words of contented comment. Other messages
Victor chose to keep to himself, silently setting fire
to them and adding their brittle ashes to those of
their predecessors on the brazen tray provided for the
purpose. At such times Sturm would bend lower
over his work. But Victor was well able to guess
what resentment glimmered in the eyes so stud-
iously averted; and his cold, sardonic smile more
than once commented, unknown to Sturm, upon
the accuracy with which he read the mean workings
of his “secretary’s” mind.
The buzz of a muted bell presently interrupted the
even tenor of their industry, causing Sturm to
start sharply, drop his pen, and slue round in his
chair, turning to Victor a livid face in which his
dark eyes of a fanatic were live embers of excite-
ment.
Without a sign to show he shared or even was
aware of Sturm’s emotion, Victor deliberately fished
from beneath the table a telephone instrument,
unhooked the receiver, and pronounced a conven-
tional phrase of greeting. To this he added a short
“Yes,” and after listening quietly for some seconds,


SUSPECT 207
“The dictograph?”
“Make your mind easy about that. This room is
searched regularly by Shaik Tsin. So is Nogam’s.
It is certain there is neither a dictograph installed
here nor any means at Nogam’s disposal for con-
necting with a dictograph installation. Indeed, so
closely is Nogam watched, and by more cunning
eyes than mine—sometimes I begin to be afraid he is
simply what he seems.”
“Then you do suspect him!”
“My good Sturm, I suspect everybody.”
Sturm pondered this before pressing his point
again.
“Karslake found the fellow for you,” he suggested
at length.
“True.”
“And Karslake—”
“Has been guilty of nothing more treacherous
than falling in love with Sofia.”
“Your daughter, Excellency!”
“The young woman seems content to call herself
that. . . . Can’t say I blame Karslake.”
“But do you forgive him?”
“Ah, that is another matter. Mine is not a for-
giving nature, Sturm—not even toward excessive
shrewdness.”
Victor took up a docket of papers, and Sturm,
mumbling an apology, gave himself up to jealous
brooding till he forgot the broad hint he had received.
“If I can satisfy you that Nogam is untrust-


208 RED MASQUERADE
worthy ” he began, meaning to continue: Kars-
lake will stand his proved accomplice.
But Victor would not let him finish. “Nothing
could please me more,” he interrupted. “Do so,
by all means—if you can—and earn my everlasting
gratitude.”
Sturm questioned him with puzzled eyes.
“I ask no greater service of any man,” Victor
elucidated with a smile that made Sturm shiver,
“than proof that Nogam is what I suspect him of
being.” A hand extended upon the table unclosed
and closed slowly, with fingers tensed, like a murder-
ous claw. “I want no greater favour of Heaven or
Hell !”
He broke off abruptly. Having entered noiselessly
in his padded shoes, Shaik Tsin now stood before
Victor, offering a low obeisance.
“You took your time,” Victor grumbled. And
Shaik Tsin smiled serenely. “I want you to tend
the door to-night,” Victor pursued. “Eleven is
expected at any moment. You need not announce
him, simply show him in.”
“Hearing is obedience.”
“Wait”—as the Chinaman began to bow himself
out—“Karslake is still in his room, I suppose?”
“Yes, master.”
“And Nogam?”
“Has just gone to his.”
“When did you last search their quarters?”
“During dinner.”


SUSPECT 209
“And of course found nothing?” Shaik Tsin
bowed. “Make sure neither leaves his room to-
night. Set a watch outside each door.”
“I have done so.”
Victor gave a sign of dismissal.


XIII
THE TURNIP
ously papered and furnished with cheerless,
massive relics of the early Victorian era, the
man Nogam pursued methodical preparations for
bed.
Spying eyes, had there been any—and for all
Nogam knew, there were—would have seen him
follow step by step a programme from whose order
he had departed by scarcely as much as a single
gesture on any night since his first installation in the
house near Queen Anne's Gate.
Loosening the waistcoat of his evening livery, he
freed the heavy silver watchchain from its button-
hole, drew from its pocket an old-fashioned silver
watch of that obese style which first earned the
portable timepiece its nickname of “turnip,” and
opening its back inserted a key attached to the
other end of the chain. Its winding was a laborious
process, prodigiously noisy. Once finished, Nogam
shut the back with a loud click, and reverently
deposited the watch on the marble slab of the
black walnut bureau.
I' A spacious chamber beneath the eaves, hide-
210


212 RED MASQUERADE
knelt for several minutes in a devout attitude by the
side of his bed, then rising opened the window, took
the turnip from the bureau, and snuggled it beneath
his pillow, inserted his bare shanks between the
sheets, and opened at a marked place a Bible bound
in black cloth.
On the table by his shoulder a battered electric
standard with a frayed cord and a dingy shade
remained alight long enough to permit Nogam to
spell out a short chapter. Then he put the Bible
aside, yawned wearily, and switched out the lamp.
Profound darkness now possessed the room, im-
materially modified by the light-struck sky beyond
the windows. And in this grateful obscurity Nogam
permitted himself the luxury of ceasing to be Nogam.
A light suddenly flashed upon his face would have
discovered a keen and alert intelligence trans-
figuring the apathetic mask of every day. Also, it
would have rendered Nogam’s probable duration of
life an interesting speculation.
Under cover of the darkness, furthermore, he did a
number of things which Nogam, qua Nogam, would
never have dreamed of doing.
His first act was to withdraw from under his pillow
the turnip, his next to re-open the back of its sil-
ver case and then the inner lid—something which a
deft thumbnail accomplished without a sound.
From the roomy interior of the case—whose bulky
ancient works had been replaced by a wafer-thin
modern movement, leaving much useful space back


THE TURNIP 213
of the dial-sensitive fingers extracted a metal disk
about the size and thickness of a silver dollar. One
face of this disk was generously perforated, the
other, solid, boasted a short blunt post round which
several feet of extremely fine wire had been coiled.
Unwinding the wire and bending the free end into
the form of a rude hook, the man attached this last
to the cord of his bedside lamp at a point, located
by sense of touch, where a minute section of electric
light wire had been left naked by defective insulation.
Direct connection now being established with a
microphone secreted in the base of the brass lamp
on the study table, three floors below, and the per-
forated side of the microphone detector serving as an
earpiece, one could hear every word uttered by the
conspirators.
The man in bed contributed a broad smile to the
kind darkness—sheer luxury to facial muscles
cramped and constrained to the cast of Nogam for
eighteen hours a day. He was now at last to reap
the reward of three months of preparation and three
weeks of ingenious, but necessarily spasmodic, and
at all times desperately dangerous, tampering with
the house wiring system.
He lay very still for a long time, listening


XIV
CONFERENCE OF THE DAMNED
N IRISH voice was making the hush of the
A. study musical with mellow cadences.
“This week-end sure, your Excellency—
within the next three nights—the little Welshman
will be after summoning the Cabinet to sit in secret
in Downing Street, with His Most Gracious Majesty
attending in person; the emergency extraordinary
being thoughtfully provided by this shindig me
amiable but spirited fellow-countrymen are kicking
up across the Channel—God bless the work!”
The speaker laughed lightly, flashing white teeth at
Prince Victor across the width of the paper-strewn
table.
“In more Parliamentary language, by the Irish
Question. But we’ll hear no more of that, I’m
thinking, once we’ve proclaimed the Soviet Govern-
ment of England.”
Victor bowed in grave assent.
“You have my word as to that,” he said; and after
a moment of thoughtful consideration: “You speak,
no doubt, from the facts?”
“I do that. It’s straight I’ve come from the
214


216 RED MASQUERADE
habit whose integrity a conservative and reactionary
government has ever since the war been struggling
desperately to preserve. The blow we shall strike
within three days will shatter that crust in a hundred
places.”
“And let Hell loose!” the Irishman added with a
nervous laugh.
In a dry voice Victor commented: “Precisely.”
“Omelettes,” Sturm interjected, assertively, “are
not made without breaking eggs.”
“And all rivers, no doubt, flow to the sea? What
a lot you know, Herr Sturm! Is it the Portfolio of
the Minister of Education you’ve picked out for your
very own, after the explosion comes off—if it’s a fair
question?”
“You Irish are all mad,” the German complained,
sourly—“mad about laughing. Even me you will
laugh at, while you trust your very life to me, while
you trust to my genius to make Soviet England
possible and Ireland free.”
“Faith! you’re away off there, me friend. If it
was you and your genius I had to trust, it’s meself
would turn violent reactionary and advise Ireland
to be a good dog and come to England’s heel and lick
England’s hand and live off England’s leavings.
I’ll trust nobody in this black business but himself—
Number One.”
“You have changed your tune since that night at
the Red Moon,” Sturm reminded him, angrily.
“I had me lesson then and there,” Eleven agreed,


CONFERENCE OF THE DAMNED 217
cheerfully. “And I don’t mind telling you, the next
time I’m taken with a fancy to call me soul me own,
I’ll be after asking himself first for a license.”
Victor put a period to the passage with a dis-
passionate “By your leave, gentlemen—that will
do.” To the Irishman he added: “You understand
the danger, I believe, of remaining within the con-
demned area—that is to say, except in the open air?”
“Can’t say I do, altogether.”
“It is simple: no person in any house supplied by
the mains of the Westminster gas works will be safe
for hours after the formula of Thirteen has begun its
work. My advice to you is to keep out of the district
entirely.”
“Faith, and I’ll do that! But how about yourself
in this house?”
“I shall spend the week-end outside of London,”
Victor replied, “not too far away, of course, and”—
the shadow of his satiric smile was briefly visible—
“prepared at any moment to answer the call of my
stricken country. . . . The few who remain
here will be provided with the essentials for their
protection. Furthermore, a general warning will be
sent out to all who can be trusted.”
“And the others—?”
“With them it must be as Fate wills.”
“Women and children, potential sympathizers and
supporters of all classes?” the Irishman persisted in
incredulous horror—“all?”
“All,” Victor affirmed, coldly. “We who deal in the


CONFERENCE OF THE DAMNED 219
“Be reassured. I promised you three weeks ago
his interference would not continue beyond that
night. It has not. Lanyard knows I have his
daughter, that any blow aimed at me must first strike
her.”
“Doubtless yourself knows best.
With the Irishman gone, Prince Victor turned to
Sturm.
“You will want a good night's sleep,” he sug-
gested with pointed solicitude. “Who knows but
that to-morrow will bring your night of nights, my
friend?”
He lapsed immediately into remote abstraction,
sitting with chin bent to the tips of his joined
fingers, his eyes downcast, motionless.
Disgruntled, but afraid to show it, the German
cleared away the litter of papers, assorting them into
huge portfolios, and took himself off. Shaik Tsin
replaced him, moving noiselessly about the room,
restoring the reference books to the shelves and
stowing the portfolios away in a massive safe hidden
behind a lacquered screen. This done, he stationed
himself before his master, awaiting his attention, a
shape of affable placidity, intelligent, at ease; his atti-
tude not entirely lacking a suggestion of familiarity.
Without changing his pose by so much as the
lifting of an eyelash, Victor spoke in Chinese:
“To-morrow afternoon, late, I shall motor down
into the country with the girl Sofia. I shall be gone
three days—perhaps. I will leave a telephone num-
55


220 RED MASQUERADE
ber with you, to be used only in emergency. As soon
as I have left, you will dismiss all the English
servants, with a quarter's wage in advance in lieu
of notice. Karslake will provide the money.”
“He does not accompany you?”
“No.”
“And the man Nogam?”
Victor appeared to hesitate. “What do you
think?” he enquired at length.
“What I have always thought.”
“That he is a spy?”
“Yes.”
“But with no tangible support for your suspi-
cions?”
“None.”
“You have not failed to watch him closely?”
“As a cat watches a mouse.”
“But—nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Yet I agree with you entirely, Shaik Tsin. I
smell treachery.”
“And I.”
“Nogam shall go with me as my bodyservant.
Thus I shall be able to keep an eye on him. Let
Chou Nu be prepared to accompany us as maid to the
girl Sofia. In my absence you will be guided by such
further instructions as I may leave with you. These
failing, consider the man Sturm, my personal repre-
sentative. In the contingency you know of, Sturm
will warn you in time to clear the house.”


CONFERENCE OF THE DAMNED 221
“Of everybody?”
“Of all servants except those whom you may need
to guard the man Karslake. These and yourself
will be provided with means of self-protection by
Sturm.”
“And Karslake?”
“I have not yet made up my mind.”
“Hearing is obedience.”
Victor relapsed into another reverie which lasted
so long that even the patience of Shaik Tsin bade
fair to fail. In the end the silence was broken by two
words:
“The crystal.”
From a cabinet at the end of the room Shaik Tsin
brought a crystal ball supported on the backs of three
golden dragons standing tail to tail, superbly wrought
examples of Chinese goldsmithing. This he placed
carefully on the black teakwood surface at Victor's
elbow.
“And now, inform the girl Sofia I wish to see her.”
“And if she again sends her excuses?”
“Say, in that event, I shall be obliged to come to
her room.”


XV
INTUITION
HE had not thought, of course, of going down
to dinner; she had, instead, sent Victor word
simply that she begged to be excused from
joining him for that meal. Then, unable longer to
endure Chou Nu's efforts to comfort or distract her,
Sofia had stepped out of her street frock and into a
négligée and, dismissing the maid, returned to the
chaise-longue upon which, in vain hope of being
able to cry out the wretchedness of her heart, she had
thrown herself on first gaining the sanctuary of her
TOOIn.
For hours, she did not guess how many, she
scarcely stirred. Neither was the blessed boon of
tears granted unto her. Alone with her immense and
immitigable misery, she lay in darkness tempered
only by the dim skyshine that filtered through the
window draperies; hating life, that had no mercy;
hating the duplicity that had led Karslake into mak-
ing untrue love to her, but inexplicably not hating
Karslake himself, or the enshrined image that wore his
name; hating herself for her facile readiness to give
love where all but the guise of love was lacking,
222


INTUITION Q27
wrist might have slipped the envelope under the
door and sent it skimming across the floor to the foot
of the chaise-longue.
But nobody would have dared do that without a
powerful motive for wishing to communicate secretly
with Sofia.
She tore the flap and withdrew a single sheet of
notepaper penned in a hand she knew too well. Her
heart leapt. . .
I implore you, of your charity, do not condemn me without a
hearing because of anything you may have overheard me say.
After you left us in the study I saw his eyes watching the
door while we talked, and knew from his look that something
to please him had happened behind my back. And in the temper
he was in only one thing could possibly have pleased him.
I said what I said to him, dear, because I had to—or lose
the right, dearer to me than life, to be near you, to serve and
protect you. I lied to him because I loved you. But I have
never lied to you about my love-and only once, through
necessity, about anything else. Perhaps you can guess what
that lie was, somehow I rather think you do; at least, I am
sure, you are beginning to wonder if I told the truth—or knew
it, then.
If this sound cryptic, I can only beg you to be patient
and charitable until I find opportunity to clear away this one
lie which stands between us—and which is, by comparison, al-
most immaterial, since all that matters is the one great truth in
my life, that I love you beyond all telling.
R. K.
If questions trouble your mind, I beg you do not let him
know it. Your only safety now lies in his continuing to be-
lieve that you are unsuspicious. Above all, do your best to
seem to fall in with his wishes, however strange or unreasonable
they may seem. It will be only a few days more before I can
claim you for my own, and laugh at his pretensions.


228 RED MASQUERADE
A curious love-letter; yet it was Sofia’s first. If it
made her thoughtful, it made her illogically happy as
well. If it put the issue to her squarely, of loyalty
to Prince Victor or loyalty to Karslake, she was un-
aware that she had any choice of courses. When
Shaik Tsin thumped the panels of her door, she
crushed the note into the bosom of her négligée be-
fore answering.
When one is of an age to love, it is never the parent
who gets the benefit of a doubt.


XVI
THE CRYSTAL
I IKE some shy, sad shade summoned up by the
malign genius of a haunted chamber, a
slender shape of pallor in softly flowing
draperies slipped through the silent door and, advanc-
ing a few reluctant steps into the soundless gloom,
paused and in apprehensive diffidence awaited the
welcome that was for a time withheld.
For minutes Victor gave no sign or stir; and in all
the room nothing moved but ghostly whorls of smoke
writhing slowly upward from a pungent censer of
beaten gold.
The great lamp of brass was dark, and there was
no other light than a solitary bulb, whose hooded
rays were concentrated upon the crystal ball, so
that the latter shone with a dead-white glare, some-
how baleful, like an elfin moon deeply lost in a sea of
sombre enchantment.
Bending forward in his chair, an elbow planted
on the table, his forehead resting upon the tips of
long, white fingers, Victor's gaze was steadfast to the
crystal. Refracted light sculptured with curious
shadows that saturnine face intent to immobility.
229


230 RED MASQUERADE
Too young, too inexperienced and sensitive to be
insusceptible to the spell of the theatrical, the girl
was conscious of a steady ebb of her new-found store
of fortitude, skepticism, and defiance, together with
an equally steady inflow of timidity and uneasiness.
That sinister figure at the table, absorbed in study of
the inscrutable sphere—what did he see there, to
hold his faculties in such deep eclipse? Adept in
black arts of the Orient as he was said to be, what
wizardry was he brewing with the aid of that tradi-
tional tool of the necromancer? What spectacle of
divination was in those pellucid depths unfolding to
his rapt vision? And what had this consultation
of the occult to do with the man’s mind concerning
herself?
Sofia was shaken by a tremor of dread.
And as if her emotion were somehow communi-
cated, arousing him to knowledge of her presence,
Victor started, sat back, and with a sigh passed a
hand across his eyes. When the hand fell, his face
wore its habitual look for Sofia, modified by a slightly
apologetic and weary smile.
“My child!” he exclaimed in accents of contrite
surprise, “have I kept you waiting long?”
“Only a few minutes. It doesn’t matter.”
But her voice seemed sadly small and thin in
comparison with Victor’s rotund and measured into-
nations.
“Forgive me.” Victor rose, nodding to in-
dicate the shining crystal. “I have been consulting


THE CRYSTAL, 231
my familiar,” he said with a light laugh. “You
have heard of crystal-gazing? A fascinating art
that languishes in undeserved neglect. The ancients
were more wise, they knew there was more in
Heaven and Earth . . . You are incredulous?
But I assure you, I myself, though far from pro-
ficient, have caught strange glimpses of unborn
events in the heart of that transparent enigma.”
He took her hands and cuddled them in his own.
She quivered irrepressibly to his touch.
“But you are trembling!” he protested, solicitous,
looking down into her face—“you are wan and sad,
my dear. Tell me you are not ill.”
“It is nothing,” Sofia replied—again in that faint,
stifled voice. She added in determined effort to
subdue her trembling and turn their talk to es-
sentials: “You sent for me—I am here.”
“I am so sorry. If I had guessed . . .” En-
lightenment seemed to dawn all at once. “But
surely it isn’t because of that stupid business with
Karslake? Surely you didn’t take him seriously?”
“How should I ?”
“It is too absurd. The poor fool misconstrued my
instructions to make himself agreeable—I am so
taken up with the gravest matters at present, I
didn’t want you to feel lonely or neglected—and, it
appears, felt it incumbent upon him to flirt with
you as a matter of duty. I am out of temper with
him, but not unreasonable; I shan’t dispense with his
services altogether, without more provocation, but


236 RED MASQUERADE
us—me from the nameless forebears whom I never
knew, you directly from parents both of whom
boasted criminal records.”
“I don’t believe it!” Sofia declared, passionately—
“I can’t believe it, I won’t! Even if you are—”
She was going on to say “if you are my father,” but
caught herself in time. Had not Karslake warned
her in his note: “Your only safety now lies in his con-
tinuing to believe that you are unsuspicious.” She
continued in a tempest of expostulation whose fury
covered her break:
“Even if you were once a thief and my mother—
my mother!—everything vile, as you persist in trying
to make me believe—God knows why!—it is possible
I may still have failed to inherit your criminal ten-
dencies; and not only possible, but true, if I know'
myself at all. For I have never felt the temptation
to steal that you insist I must have inherited from
you-nor any other inclination toward things as
mean, contemptible, and dishonourable as they are
dishonest!”
With only his slow, forbearing smile by way of
comment, Victor heard her out, but when she paused
to reassort her thoughts, lifted a temporizing
hand.
“Not yet, perhaps,” he said, gently. “There is
always the first time with every rebel against man-
made laws. But, where the predisposition so in-
dubitably exists, it is inevitable, soon or late it must
come to you, my dear—the time when the will is too


THE CRYSTAL 237
weak, temptation too strong. Against it we must
be forever on our guard.”
“I am not afraid,” Sofia contended.
“Naturally; you will not be before the hour of
ordeal which shall prove your strength or your weak-
ness, your confidence in yourself, or my loving fears
for you.”
Sofia gave a gesture of weariness and confusion.
What did it matter? If he would have it so, let him:
it couldn’t affect the issue in any way, what he be-
lieved, or for his own purposes pretended to believe.
Had not Karslake promised . . .
She tried to recall precisely what it was that
Karslake had promised, but found her memory of a
sudden singularly sluggish. In fact, her mind seemed
to have lost its marvellous clarity of those first mo-
ments after tasting the wine of China. Small won-
der, when one remembered the emotional strain she
had experienced since early evening!
“Still,” she argued, stubbornly, “I don’t see what
all this has to do with Lady Randolph West’s invita-
tion.”
“Only that to accept means to expose you to the
greatest temptation one can well imagine.”
Sofia stared blankly. Her wits were working
even more slowly and heavily than before. And
the glare in her eyes from the luminous sphere of
crystal was irritating. Almost without thinking,
she lifted her glass again; when she put it down it
was empty.


238 RED MASQUERADE
“The jewels of Lady Randolph West,” Victor
went on to explain without her prompting, “are
considered the most wonderful in England; always
excepting, of course, the Crown jewels.”
“What is that to me?”
Resentment sounded in her tone. She was think-
ing more readily once more, thanks to that second
magical draught, but was nevertheless conscious of a
general failing of powers drained by her great fatigue.
She wished devoutly that Victor would have done
and let her go. . . .
“Elaine is very careless, leaves her jewels scattered
about, hardly troubles to put them away securely at
night. If you should be tempted to appropriate
anything, she might not discover her loss for days;
and then, again, she might. And if you were caught
—consider what shame and disgrace!”
“I think I see,” the girl said, slowly, after some
difficult thinking. “You don’t want me to go.”
“To the contrary, I do—but I want more than
anything else in the world that my daughter should
be sure of herself and fall into no irreparable error.”
“But I am sure of myself—I have told you
that.”
“Then let us fret no more about it, but accept, and
go prepared to enjoy ourselves. I will send the
letter.”
Victor rang, and Shaik Tsin presented himself so
quickly that Sofia wondered dully where he could
have been waiting. In the room with them, perhaps?


240 RED MASQUERADE
“Oh,” said Sofia with a good show of indifference—
she was so tired—“that!”
“Believe me, little Sofia”—Victor put out a
hand to hers, and held her eyes with a compelling
gaze—“boy-and-girl romance is all very well, but
there is a greater destiny reserved for you than mar-
riage to a hired secretary, however amiable, person-
able, and well-meaning. You must prepare your-
self to move in a world beyond and above the common
hearthstone of bourgeois domesticity.”
The girl shook a bewildered head.
“It is a riddle?” she asked, wearily.
“A riddle?” Victor echoed. “Why, one may
safely term it that. Is not the Future always a
riddle? Nature knows the Future as the Past, but
Nature holds it secret, lest man go mad with too much
knowledge. Only to the few, the favoured, does
she grant rare glimpses through media which she
has provided for the use of the initiate—such as this
crystal here, in which I was studying your future,
when you came in, the high future I plan for you.”
“And—you won’t tell me?”
“I may not. It is forbidden. Nature deals un-
kindly with those who violate her confidence. But—
who knows?”
He checked himself as if struck by a new turn of
thought, and studied the girl’s face intently.
“Who knows?” he repeated, as if to himself.
“What ?”
“It is quite within the bounds of possibility,”


THE CRYSTAL 241
Victor mused, “that you should have inherited some
of the psychic power which was born in me. Per-
haps—who knows?—to you as well Nature will be
supple and disclose her secrets. . . . If you
care to seek her favour?”
“But—how?”
“By consulting the crystal.”
Sofia’s eyes sought that coldly burning stone. Her
head was so heavy, she hesitated, oppressed by mis-
givings without shape that she could name, phases
of formless timidity having rise in some source which
she was too tired to search out.
But she lingered and continued to stare at the
crystal.
“Why not?” Victor’s accents were gently per-
suasive. “At worst, you can only fail. And if you do
not fail, it will make me happy to think that you have
been given a little insight into my dreams for you.”
“Yes,” Sofia assented in a whisper— “why not?”
Victor drew her forward by the hand.
“Look,” he said “look deep! Divest your
mind as nearly as you can of all thought—let the
crystal give up its message to a mind devoid of
prejudice, its receptiveness unimpaired. Think of
nothing, if you can manage it—simply look and see.”
Automatically to a degree the girl obeyed, already
in a phase of crepuscular hypnosis, her surface senses
dulled by the potent “wine of China.” And watch-
ing her closely, Victor permitted himself a smile of
satisfaction as he noted the rapidity with which she


244 RED MASQUERADE
the opening of the eyes, which sought and remained
steadfast to Victor’s, yet without intelligence or
animation. -
“Do you hear me, Sofia?”
A voice like a sigh rustled on the parted lips, whose
stir was imperceptible:
“I hear you. . . .
“Then heed what I say. My will is your law.
You know that?”
Faintly the voice breathed: “Yes.”
“Tell me what it is you know.”
“Your will is my law.” -
“You will not resist my will, you cannot. Tell
me that.”
“I will not resist your will, I cannot.”
“Good. I, Prince Victor Vassilyevski, am your
father. You believe that. Do you understand?
Tell me what you believe.”
“I believe that you, Prince Victor Vassilyevski,
are my father.”
“You will not forget these things?”
“I shall not forget.”
“In all things.”
“I will obey you in all things.”
“Without question or faltering.”
“Without question or faltering.”
“You recall what arrangements we made this after-
noon for to-morrow?”
“I remember.”
“Listen carefully. Memorize my wishes with
5 *


THE CRYSTAL, 245
respect to our visit to Frampton Court, remembering
that I communicate my will, which you must obey.”
The girl remained silent, waiting. Victor took a
moment to marshall his thoughts, then proceeded:
“After arriving at Frampton Court, you will make
occasion quietly to find out how your room is situated
in relation to the boudoir of Lady Randolph West.
You will do this without knowing why you do it. You
understand?”
“Yes.”
“At night, on going to bed, you will go promptly
to sleep. After an hour you will wake up, put on a
dressing gown and slippers, and proceed to Lady
Randolph West’s boudoir, taking care not to be ob-
served. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Once in the boudoir, you will proceed to the safe
where Lady Randolph West keeps her jewels. It will
not be locked, she is careless in such matters. Hav-
ing found the safe, you will open it, take whatever
jewels you find therein, and return to your room. All
this you will perform with utmost circumspection,
taking all pains not to make any noise. In your
room you will hide the jewels in your dressing-case.
Then you will go back to bed and to sleep. Have
you committed all this to memory?”
The sleeping girl answered in the affirmative.
Then, to the injunction, “Tell me what you are to
do to-morrow night?” she repeated in a toneless voice
every item of the programme outlined for her, while


246 RED MASQUERADE
Victor nodded in undisguised delight, and Shaik
Tsin grinned blandly over her head.
“On waking up to-morrow morning, you will
remember nothing of my instructions, but you will
carry them precisely as memorized in your subcon-
ciousness, and you will carry them out without thought
of opposition to my will, understanding that you are
without will of your own in this matter. Finally, on
waking up on the morning following your abstraction
of the jewels, you will remember nothing of the affair
until reminded of it by me, and then only this much:
That in obedience to irresistible impulse, you stole
the jewels. Is that clear? Repeat .”
Without a mistake the woman in hypnosis iterated
the commands imposed upon her.
The impish grin of the latent savage broke through
the habitual austerity of Victor's countenance.
“There is no more,” he said, “but this: Sleep
now, and do not waken before noon to-morrow-
sleep!”
With a quavering sigh, the girl reclosed her eyes
and instantly relapsed into the sleep of trance which
was insensibly in the course of the night to merge
into natural slumber.
Victor ironed out his grimace, and signed to Shaik
Tsin.
“Bear her back to her room. Instruct Chou Nu
to put her to bed and not to wake her up before
noon.”
“Hearing is obedience.”


THE CRYSTAL Q47
The Chinaman bent over, gathered the inert body
into his arms, and without perceptible effort stood
erect. But in the act of turning away he paused
and, continuing to hold the girl as easily as if she
weighed no more than a child, interrogated the man
he served.
“You believe she will do all you have ordered?”
“I know she will.”
“Without error?”
“Barring accidents, without flaw from beginning
to end.”
“And in event of accidents—discovery
“So much the better.”
“That would please you, to have her caught?”
“Excellently.”
Shaik Tsin nodded in grave yet humorous compre-
hension. “Now I begin to understand. If she is
caught, that gives you a power over her?”
“Precisely.”
“And if she is not, when the robbery becomes
known, your power over her will be still more strong?”
“And over yet another stronger still.”
“The Lone Wolf?”
Victor inclined his head. “To what lengths will
he not go to cover up his daughter’s shame, if it
threatens to become public that she is a thief? I do
nothing without purpose, Shaik Tsin.”
“That is to say, you have to-night taken out in-
surance against punishment if this other business
fails.” -
?”


248 RED MASQUERADE
“If it fail, others may suffer, but if necessary the
Lone Wolf himself will arrange my escape from
England.”
“To serve so wise a man is an honour my unworthi-
ness can never hope to merit.”
“As to that, Shaik Tsin,” Victor said without a
smile, “our minds are one. Go now. Good-night.”


XVII
THE RAISED CHEQUE
HILE the Princess Sofia, Sybil Waring, and
W W Prince Victor motored down from London
in the lilac dusk of that dim September day,
and the maid Chou Nu accompanied them, riding in
front beside a newly engaged Chinese chauffeur, the
man Nogam made the journey to Frampton Court
by train, and alone.
Alone, at least, in the finer shading of that adject-
ive; aside from the usual assortment of self-contained
fellow-travellers in the third-class carriage, he had
no company other than his thoughts; a gray and
meagre crew, if that pathetic face of middle-age
furnished trustworthy reflection of his mind. •
So absolute was the submergence of that ardent
adventurer who, overnight, had lain awake for
hours, a dictograph receiver glued to his ear, eaves-
dropping upon the traffic of those malevolent in-
telligences assembled in Prince Victor's study, and al-
ternately chuckling and cursing beneath his breath,
aflame with indignation and chilled by inklings of
atrocities unspeakable abrew!
If he surmised that he travelled alone in appear-
249


252 RED MASQUERADE
branch of an old and honoured house; and its present
lord and lady, having failed to win the social welcome
they had counted on too confidently, were doing
their silly, shabby best to squander a princely fortune
and dedicate a great name to lasting disrepute by
fraternizing with a motley riffraff of profiteering
nouveaux riches. Other than bad manners and worse
morals, the one genuine thing in the whole establish-
ment was, it seemed, the historic collection of family
jewels.
This information explained away much of Nogam’s
perplexity on one score.
After dinner, when the house party began to settle
into its stride, he made occasion, aping the other
servants, to peep in at a door of the great ballroom,
where an impromptu dance had been organized; and
was rewarded by sight of the Princess Sofia circling
the floor in the arms of a boldly good-looking young
man whose taste was as poor in flirtation as in self-
adornment.
To Nogam the young girl looked wan and wistful—
as if she were missing somebody. And he won-
dered if Mr. Karslake knew what a lucky young devil
he was.
He wondered still more about the present where-
abouts and welfare of Mr. Karslake. Prince Victor
must have contrived some devious errand to get
the young man out and away early that day; for by
the time Nogam had looked for him in the morning,
Karslake was nowhere to be found; neither had he


254 RED MASQUERADE
Promptly Victor became deaf, blind, and numb to
the fascinations so generously paraded by Lady
Randolph West; and presently excusing himself,
left her and sought his rooms.
As he went up the stairs, he saw the door to his
bedchamber cautiously opened far enough to permit
one eye to spy out and discover his approach. Im-
mediately then the door swung wide, and Nogam
ambled into view with an envelope on a salver and an
air of childlike innocence, an assumption of ease so
transparent, indeed, that only the vision of a child
could have been cheated by it.
“Just coming to look for you, sir,” he announced,
glibly. “Telegram, sir—just harrived.”
“Thanks,” said Victor, shortly, taking the envelope
and marching on into his rooms.
His manner toward his servants was always abrupt.
No need to be alarmed by this manifestation of it.
Blinking mildly, Nogam trotted at his heels.
Seating himself at an escritoire, Victor opened the
envelope with a display of languid interest. Curios-
ity about the contents of a telegram is ordinarily
acute. Victor, on the contrary, sat for a long mo-
ment staring thoughtfully at nothing and absently
turning the envelope over and over in his hands;
while Nogam with specious nonchalance found some-
thing unimportant to do in another quarter of the
TOOnn.
The envelope was damp and warm to the touch.
True: nightfall had brought with it a thick drizzle,


256 RED MASQUERADE
though undoubtedly guilty of the sin of prying, had
been able to read the meaning below the surface of
this communication.
Nevertheless, undue inquisitiveness on the part of
a servant in the pay of Victor Vassilyevski could have
but one reward.
“Nogam!”
“Sir?”
“Fetch me an A-B-C.”
“Very good, sir.”
With Nogam out of the way, Victor enclosed the
telegram in a new envelope and addressed it simply
to “Mr. Sturm—by hand.” Then he took a sheet of
the stamped notepaper of Frampton Court, tore
it roughly, at the fold, and on the unstamped half
inscribed several characters in Chinese, using a
pencil with a fat, soft lead for this purpose. This
message sealed into a second envelope without
superscription, he lighted a cigarette and sat smiling
with anticipative relish through its smoke, a smile
swiftly abolished as the door re-opened; though
Nogam found him in what seemed to be a mood of
rare sweet temper.
Taking the railway guide, Victor ruffled its pages,
and after brief study of the proper table remarked:
“Afraid I must ask you to run up to town for me
to-night, Nogam. If you don’t mind .”
“Only too glad to oblige, sir.”
“I find I have left important papers behind. Give
this to Shaik Tsin”—he handed over the blank


THE RAISED CHEQUE 257
envelope— “and he will find them for you. You
can catch the ten-fifteen up, and return by the
twelve-three from Charing Cross.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Oh—and see that Mr. Sturm gets this, too, will
you? If he isn’t in, give it to Shaik Tsin to hand to
him. Say it’s urgent.”
“Quite so, sir.”
“That is all. But don’t fail to catch the twelve-
three back. I must have the papers to-night.”
“Ishan’t fail you, sir—D. V.”
“Deo volente? You are a religious man, Nogam?”
“I’umbly 'ope so, sir, and do my best to be, ac-
cordin’ to my lights.”
“Glad to hear it. Now cut along, or you’ll miss
the up train.”
Long after Nogam had left the memory of their
talk continued to afford Victor an infinite amount
of private entertainment.
“A religious man!” he would jeer to himself.
“Then—may your God help you, Nogam!”
Some thought of the same sort may well have
troubled Nogam’s mind as he sat in an otherwise
untenanted third-class compartment blinking owl-
ishly over the example of Victor's command of the
intricacies of Chinese writing.
He was happily free of surveillance for the first
time in his waking hours of many days. The Chinese
chauffeur had driven him to the station, and had
furthermore lingered to see that Nogam did not


258 RED MASQUERADE
fail to board it. And Nogam felt reasonably safe
in assuming that he would not approach the house
near Queen Anne's Gate without seeing (for the
mere trouble of looking) a second and an entirely
gratuitous shadow attach itself to him with the in-
tention of sticking as tenaciously as that which God
had given him. But the next hour was all his
OWn.
His study of the Chinese phonograms at length
resulted in the transformation of his careworn face
by a slowly dawning smile, the gleeful smile of a
mischief-loving child. And when he had worked for a
while on the message, touching up the skillfully
drawn characters with a pencil the mate to that which
Victor had used, he sat back and laughed aloud over
the result of his labours, with some appreciation of
the glow that warms the cockles of the artist’s heart
when his deft pen has raised a cheque from tens to
thousands, and he reviews a good job well done.
The torn envelope which had held the message to
Shaik Tsin lay at his feet. Nogam had not bothered
to worry it open so carefully that it might be resealed
without inviting comment; though that need not
have been a difficult matter, thanks to the dampness
of the night air.
Of the envelope addressed to Sturm, however, he
was more considerate; to violate its integrity and seal
it up again was an undertaking that required the
nicest handling. Nor was it accomplished much
before the train drew into Charing Cross.


THE RAISED CHEQUE 259
Outside the station taxis were few and drivers
arrogant; and all the 'buses were packed to the
guards with law-abiding Londoners homeward bound
from theatres and halls. So Nogam dived into the
Underground, to come to the surface again at St.
James's Park station, whence he trotted all the
way to Queen Anne's Gate, arriving at his destina-
tion in a phase of semi-prostration which a person of
advancing years and doddering habits might have
anticipated.
Such fidelity in characterization deserved good
reward, and had in it a rare stroke of fortune; for as
he drew up to it, the door opened, and Sturm came
out, saw Nogam, and stopped short.
“Thank’Eaven, sir, I got 'ere in time,” the butler
panted. “If I’d missed you, Prince Victor wouldn’t
’ave been in 'arf a wax. ''E told me I must find you
to-night if I’ad to turn all Lunnon inside out.”
Pressing the message into Sturm’s hand, he rested
wearily against the casing of the door, his body
shaken by laboured breathing, and—while Sturm,
with an exclamation of excitement, ripped open the
envelope—surveyed the dark and rain-wet street out
of the corners of his eyes.
Across the way a slinking shadow left the sidewalk
and blended indistinguishably with the crowded
shadows of an areaway.
In a voice more than commonly rich with accent,
Sturm demanded sharply:
“What is this? I do not understand!”


THE RAISED CHEQUE 261
to receive the onslaught. A fist, that carried twelve
stone of bone and sinew jubilant with realization of
the hour for action so long deferred, found shrewdly
the heel of a jawbone, just beneath the ear. Its
victim dropped without a cry, but the impact of the
blow was loud in the nocturnal stillness of that by-
street, and was echoed in magnified volume by the
crack of a skull in collision with a convenient lamp-
post.
Followed a swift patter of fugitive feet.
Tempered by veils of mist, the lamplight fell upon
a face upturned from a murmurous gutter, a yellow
face, wide and flat, with lips grinning back from
locked teeth and eyes frozen in a staring question to
which no living man has ever known the answer.
The pattering footsteps grew faint in distance and
died away, the street was still once more, as still as
Death.
In the study of Prince Victor Vassilyevski the man
Sturm put an impatient question:
“Well? What you make of it—hein?”
Shaik Tsin looked up from a paper which he had
been silently examining by the light of the brazen
lamp.
“Number One says,” he reported, smiling sweetly,
while his yellow forefinger moved from symbol to
symbol of the picturesque writing: “‘The blow falls
to-night. Proceed at once to the gas works and do that
which you know is to be done.’”
“At last!”


262 RED MASQUERADE
The voice of the Prussian was full and vibrant
with exultancy. He threw back his head with a
loud laugh, and his arm described a wild, dramatic
gesture.
“At last—der Tag! To-night the Fatherland shall
be avenged!”
Shaik Tsin beamed with friendliest sympathy.
Sturm turned to go, took three hurried steps toward
the door, and felt himself jerked back by a silken
cord which, descending from nowhere, looped his
lean neck between chin and Adam’s apple. His cry
of protest was the last articulate sound he uttered.
And the last sounds he heard, as he lay with face
hideously congested and empurpled, eyeballs starting
from their deep sockets, and swollen tongue pro-
truding, were words spoken by Shaik Tsin as that one
knelt over him, one hand holding fast the ends of the
bowstring that had cut off forever the blessed breath
of life, the other flourishing a half-sheet of note-
paper.
“Fool! Look, fool, and read what vengeance
visits a fool who is fool enough to play the spy!”
He brandished the papers before those glazing
eyeballs.
In an eldritch cackle he translated:
“‘He who bears this message is a Prussian dog, police
trained, a spy. Let his death be a dog's, cruel and swift.
—Number One.’”


XVIII
ORDEAL
EVIEWING the day, as she undressed and
R prepared for bed, Sofia told herself she had
never yet lived through one so wearing, and
thought the history of its irksome hours all too
legible in the lack-lustre face that looked back from
the mirror when Chou Nu uncoifed her hair and
brushed its burnished tresses.
Though she had slept late, in fact till noon and
something after, her sleep had been queerly haunted
and unhappy, she could not remember how or why,
and she had awakened already ennuyé, with a mind
incoherently oppressed, without relish for the promise
of the day—in a mood altogether as drear as the
daylight that waited upon her unclosing eyes.
Main strength of will had not availed to dispel
these vapours, neither did their melancholy yield
to the distraction provided by first acquaintance
with ways of a world unique alike in Sofia’s esteem
and her experience.
She who had theretofore known only in day-dreams
the life of light frivolity and fashion which found
feverish and trumpery reflection at Frampton
263


264 RED MASQUERADE
Court, was neither equipped nor disposed to be
hypercritical in the first hours of her début there;
and at any other time, in any other temper, she
knew, she must have been swept off her feet by its
exciting appeal to her innate love of luxury and sen-
sation. But the sad truth was, it all seemed to
her unillusioned vision an elaborate sham built up
of tinsel, paste, and paint; and the warmth of her
welcome at the hands, indeed in the very arms, of
Lady Randolph West, and the success her youth and
beauty scored for her—commanding in all envy,
admiration, cupidity, or jealousy, according to age,
sex, and temporal state of servitude—did nothing to
mitigate the harshness of those first impressions.
If anything her depression grew more perversely
morbid the more she was catered to, courted, flat-
tered, and cajoled. Something had happened, she
could never guess what, perhaps some mysterious
reaction effected through the chemistry of last
night's slumber, to turn her vivid zest in life to
ashes in her mouth, so that nothing seemed to matter
any more.
Thoughts of Karslake as her lover, recollection of
her first deep joy in his avowal and her subsequent
passion of shame and regret, re-perusal of his note,
that last night had seemed so sweet a thing, precious
beyond compare—found her indifferent to-day, and
left her so. Try as she would, she failed to recapture
any sense of the reality of those first raptures. And
yet, somehow, she didn’t doubt he loved her or that,


ORDEAL 265
buried deep beneath this inexplicable apathy, love for
Karslake burned on in her heart; but she knew no
sort of comfort in such confidence, their love seemed
as remote and immaterial an issue as the menu for
day after to-morrow’s dinner. Nothing mattered!
She was able even to meet Prince Victor without
her customary shiver of aversion; and when she re-
called the persistence and enthusiasm with which
she had reasoned herself into believing, last night,
that he might be another than her father, she came
as near to mirth as she was to come that day; but it
was mirth bitter with self-derision. Of course he
was her father, she had been a ninny ever to dream
contrariwise, or that it mattered.
Nor had she met with more success in efforts to
find a cause for this drab humour; unless, indeed,
it were simply the farthest swing of the pendulum
from yesterday’s emotional crises, a long swing out
of sunlit spaces swept by the brave winds of young
romance into a gloomy zone of brooding torpor,
whose calm was false, surcharged with unseizable
disquiet, its atmosphere electrical with formless
apprehensions, its sad twilight shot with lurid gleams
no sooner glimped than gone.
In this state Sofia’s sensibilities were less benumbed
than bound in a palsy of suspense not wholly desti-
tute of dread; beneath the lethargic shallows of con-
sciousness lay soundless deeps troubled by sinister
premonitions. . . .
Now, retracing stage by stage the record of the


266 RED MASQUERADE
day, Sofia became aware that its most poignant
moment for her was actually the present, with its
Keen wonder that she had contrived to survive such
exquisite tedium.
She perceived that she had moved throughout
like an automaton swayed by a will outside its own;
functioning rather than living; performing appointed
business, executing prescribed gestures, uttering fore-
ordained observations, and making dictated re-
sponses, all without suggestion of spontaneity, and
all without meaning other than as means to bridge an
empty space of waiting.
Waiting for what?
Sofia could not guess. . . .
She went to bed presently, hoping only to find
surcease of boredom; and her head no sooner touched
the pillow than oblivion closed down upon her facul-
ties like a dense, dark cloud.
Discreet and well-instructed, Chou Nu turned
the night-light down to a glimmer, placed on and
under a chair adjacent to the bed a robe of cashmere
that wouldn’t rustle, and slippers of fine felt with
soles of soft leather, in which footfalls must be in-
audible—and glided gently from the room.
For sixty minutes its deep hush was unbroken;
the even respiration of the girl made no sound, she
rested without tossing, without moving a finger.
Then, sleep having held her for precisely one hour
by the clock, Sofia opened her eyes, drew in a deep
breath, and at once sat up on the side of the bed.


ORDEAL 267
The memory of that hour was not to leave the girl
while life was in her; nor was the question it raised
ever to be answered in a fashion satisfactory to her
intelligence. When later she heard it stated with
authority, by men reputed to be versed in psychic
knowledge, that a subject in hypnosis cannot be
willed to act contrary to the instincts of his or her
better nature, she held her peace, but wondered.
Was Victor right, then, and the crime he had willed
her to commit in final analysis not repugnant to her
instincts? Or was it some secret faculty of the soul,
telepathy or of its kin, that roused and sent her to
keep her rendezvous with destiny?
A riddle never to be read: Sofia only knew that,
finding herself awake, she got up, donned négligée
and slippers, and set her feet upon the way ap-
pointed without its occurring to her that the way was
strange, without stopping to question why or
whether.
If independent volition, sensible or subliminal,
were absent, it could hardly have been apparent.
Sofia herself was not aware of its suspense or super-
session. She knew quite well what she was doing,
her every action was direct and decided, the goal
alone remained obscure. She only knew that
somewhere, somehow, something was going wrong
without her, and her presence was required to set it
right.
Letting herself out into the corridor, she drew the
door to behind her, but left it unlatched; with what


268 RED MASQUERADE
object, she did not know. But the lateness of the
hour, the stillness of the sleeping household, made it
seem quite in order that she should pause to look
cautiously this way and that and make sure that
nobody else was astir to spy upon her or challenge
the purpose of this as yet aimless nocturnal flitting.
There was nobody that she could see.
Down the corridor, then, never asking why that
way, like a ghost in haste she sped, but as she drew
near to a certain door found her pace faltering.
Sofia knew that door; through it Lady Randolph
West herself had introduced the girl to her boudoir,
not two hours since, when chance, or Fate, or the
smooth working out of malicious mortal machina-
tions had moved the two women simultaneously to
seek their quarters for the night. And in the bou-
doir Sofia had spent the quarter of an hour before
going on to her own room and bed, civilly attending
to vapid chatter and admiring as in duty bound the
admirable jewels of the family.
Now she saw the door a few inches ajar with, be-
yond it, a dim glow. The circumstance seemed
singular, because—now that she remembered—when
Sofia had expressed perfunctory curiosity concerning
what precautions were taken to safeguard the jewels,
Lady Randolph West had airily informed her that
she considered insurance to their appraised value plus
a stout lock on the boudoir door better than any
strong-box as yet devised by the ingenuity of man.
“There's the safe they’re kept in, of course,” the


270 RED MASQUERADE
were shaking violently, that her every limb, her
whole body indeed, was agitated by desperate
trembling. And dully asked herself why this
should be . . . But didn’t hesitate.
Her actions now more than ever resembled those
of an unthinking puppet, although she knew quite
well what she was doing; and her gestures might
have been the fruit of long lessoning at the hands of
some master of stage melodrama, so true were they
to theatrical convention.
With furtive, frightened glances toward both doors,
Sofia dropped to her knees before the safe. . . .
When she stood up again her hands were filled with
jewellery, her two hands held a treasure of incalcul-
able price in precious stones.
She paused for a little, staring at them with dilate
eyes dark in a pale, rapt face. Her lips were parted,
but only her quickened breathing whispered past
them. She was trembling more painfully than ever.
But she seemed unable to think of anything but
the jewels, her gaze was held in fascination by their
coruscant loveliness as revealed by the light of the
little lamp.
Hers for the taking!
Then, without warning, a tremendous convulsion
laid hold on her body and soul, and she was racked
and shaken by it, and at its crisis her outstretched
hands opened and showered the top of the desk with
jewels, then flew to her head and clutched her
throbbing temples.


ORDEAL 271
She cried out in a low voice of suffering: “No l”
And of a sudden she was reeling back from the
desk, toward the corridor door, repeating over and
over on an ascending scale: “No! no! no! no! no!”
Her quaking legs blundered against a chair, her
knees gave, she tottered to fall; strong arms caught
her, held her safe, a voice she knew yet didn’t know
in its guarded key muttered in her ear: “Thank
God!”
She made no struggle, but her eyes of pain and
terror sought the speaker’s face, and saw that he
was the man Nogam. In extremity of amazement
she spoke his name. He shook his head.
“No longer Nogam,” he said in the same low ac-
cents, and smiled—“but your father, Michael Lan-
yard!”


UNMASKING 273
Victor—or for the matter of that, if you were as
poor of spirit as you would seem on your own
valuation, if you were not at heart your mother's
daughter, and mine, my child by a woman whom I
loved well, and who long ago loved me!”
He paused deliberately to let her grasp the full
sense of his words, then pursued:
“It may help you get your bearings to know that I
am truly the Michael Lanyard to whom Messieurs
Secretan & Sypher addressed their advertisement—
you remember—as this should prove.”
He offered a slip of paper, and after another mo-
ment of dumb staring, the girl took it and read
aloud the message which Victor had dictated fol-
lowing Sofia's flight to him from the Café des
Exiles.
“To Michael Lanyard, Intelligence Division, the
War Office, Whitehall—’”
“That is to say,” Lanyard interpreted, “of the
British Secret Service.”
“You!”
He bowed in light irony. “One regrets one is at
present unable to offer better social standing. To-
morrow, it may be . . . But who knows?”
Sofia shook her head impatiently, and in a murmur
of deepening amazement resumed her reading of
the note:
“‘Your daughter Sofia is now with me . . Your
own intelligence must tell you nothing could be more
fatal than an attempt to communicate with her.’”


274 RED MASQUERADE
To the interrogation eloquent in her eyes Lanyard
replied:
“Dictated by Victor to Karslake, who passed it
on to me, the night he brought you to the house
from the Café des Exiles.”
“You knew—you, who claim to be my father—yet
permitted him ?”
“You were in the house before I knew I had a
daughter; Karslake had no chance to consult me be-
fore fetching you. Furthermore, if he had hesi-
tated to carry out Victor’s orders just then, not only
would he have nullified all our preparations to secure
evidence enough to convict the man, or at least run
him out of England 99
“Prince Victor? What was he doing, that you
should ?” -
“Dabbling in all manner of infamy, from financing
a thieves’ fence to organizing an association of com-
mon criminals to bring it business; from maintaining
a corps of agitators to foment social discontent to
fostering this last, most imbecile scheme of all,
which comes to naught to-night, an attempt to over-
throw the British Empire and set up in its stead a
Soviet England, with Victor Vassilyevski in the dual
rôle of Trotsky and Lenine!”
The girl made a sign of bewilderment and incre-
dulity.
“What are you telling me? Are you mad?”
“No—but Victor is, mad with lust for power,
insane with illusions of personal aggrandizement.


276 RED MASQUERADE
to die in your protection, if it had ever come to
that?”
Lanyard had drawn so near that only a few inches
separated them, and had his voice in such control
that at three paces’ distance a vague and inarticu-
late murmur at most might have been heard; but in
Sofia's hearing his accents rang with passionate
sincerity, persuading her against the reason which
would have rejected his indictment of Victor as too
fantastic, too imaginative, and too hopelessly over-
drawn to be given credence. She believed him,
knowing in her heart that he believed his statements
to the last word; and knowing more, that he was
surely what he represented himself to be, her father.
Inscrutable the processes of human hearts: even
as from the very first Sofia had instinctively yet
unconsciously recognized the intrinsic falsity of
Victor's pretensions, so now she perceived the inte-
gral honesty that informed Lanyard’s every word and
nuance of expression, and accepted him without
further inquisition.
To his insistent “Have I made you understand?”
she returned a wan wraith of a smile, pitiful with
entreaty, while one of her hands found the way to his.
“I think so,” she replied in halting apology—
“at least, I believe you. But be a little patient
with me. It is all so new and strange, what you
tell me, it's hard at first to grasp, there's so much
I must accept on faith alone, so much I don’t under-
stand .”


UNMASKING 277
“I know.” Lanyard pressed her hand gently.
“But try to have faith; I promise you it shall be fairly
rewarded. Only a little longer now, an hour or two
at most, and Karslake will be here to prove the truth
of all I have asserted. You will believe him, at
least.”
“Of course,” the girl said, simply. “I love him.
You knew that?”
“I guessed, and I am glad, glad for both of you.”
“But he is safe?” Sofia demanded in sudden access
of alarm so strong that her voice rose above the pitch
of discretion.
“Quietly. Yes, he is safe enough.”
“You know that for a fact? How do you
know ?”
“I’ve seen him to-night, talked with him—not two
hours since.” -
“You have been in London?” she questioned—
“to-night?”
“Rather! Victor sent me.” Lanyard laughed
lightly. “You didn’t know, of course, but—well,
I gave him reason to suspect me, so he sent me up
to be assassinated by Shaik Tsin. As it turned out,
however, Herr Sturm most obligingly understudied
for me. . . . Before coming back, I looked
Karslake up. He'd been busy, playing a lone hand,
ever since Victor trumped up an errand to keep him
out of your way all day. No need to go into tedious
details; I found Karslake had matters well in hand:
the gas works surrounded by a cordon of troops, the


278 RED MASQUERADE
house under close watch, and—best of all—a sworn
confession from an Irish Member of Parliament
whom Victor had managed to buy with a promise
to free Ireland once Soviet England was an accom-
plished fact. So I left Karslake to wind up loose
ends in London, and posted back with my heart
in my mouth for fear I’d be too late.”
“Too late?” Sofia queried with arching brows.
“Need I remind you where we are?”
A sweep of Lanyard’s hand indicated the boudoir;
and Sofia started sharply in perplexity and alarm.
“Where we are!” she echoed in a frightened
whisper.
Of a sudden memory returned of what had passed
in that room before Lanyard had revealed himself
to her, and knowledge of her peril so narrowly es-
caped drove home like a knife to her heart.
“What am I doing here?” she breathed in horror.
“What have I done?”
“Nothing more dreadful than prove yourself as
true as you are fine, by revolting in the end against
the most powerful force known to man, the force
of suggestion implanted in hypnotism. You couldn’t
know that it was hypnotic not natural sleep you
passed into last night, when Victor tricked you with
that damned crystal, or that, while you slept, he
willed you to do here to-night what, when it came
to the final test, your nature would not let you do.”
“But he so often told me I had the instincts of a
thief—!”


UNMASKING 281
and gave the sum of what he saw in a gesture of
finality, then leaving the door ajar turned swiftly
back to the girl. -
“Too late,” he said: “they’re swarming out into
the hall like bees. In another minute . . .”
Of a sudden he closed with Sofia, roughly clasping
her body to him.
“Struggle with me!” he pleaded—“get me by the
throat, throw me back across the desk 5 *
“What do you mean? Let me go!”
In answer to her efforts to wrench away, Lanyard
only tightened his hold and swung her toward the
desk.
“Do as I bid you! It's the only way out. Let
them think you heard a noise, got up to investigate,
found me here, rifling the safe—”
“No,” she insisted—“no! Why should I save
myself at your expense?—betray you—my
father !”
“Then give me the obedience of a daughter
. . . or let Victor succeed in branding you a
thief, the daughter of a thief!”
He stilled the protest she would have uttered by
placing fingers over her lips.
“Listen!”
In the corridor an angry rumour of voices, alarmed
calls and cries, with thumps and scuffles of hasty
feet, in the bedchamber the shrieks persisting without
the least hint of failing: as a damned soul might bawl
upon its bed of coals


282 RED MASQUERADE
“Sofia, I implore you!”
Still she hesitated.
“But you ?”
“Never fear for me, remember that I am of the
Secret Service: two minutes after I see the inside of
the nearest police station, I shall be free—and happy
in the assurance that yourname is without stain. Then
Karslake will come for you, bring you to me
Now !”
Lanyard caught the girl’s two wrists together and,
throwing himself bodily backward across the desk,
carried her hands to his throat.
With a simultaneous crash the door was flung back
to the wall. Led by Victor Vassilyevski a dozen
men, guests and servants, in various stages of dis-
habille, streamed into the room.


284 RED MASQUERADE
Had Nogam, as he had meekly insisted on being
questioned subsequent to his subjugation, truly
delivered the two messages as directed and, mi-
raculously escaping his fate decreed, returned to
Frampton Court by the twelve-three, likewise in
strict conformance with instructions?
This statement Nogam had neglected to amplify,
and Victor had been chary of too close questioning,
lest it elicit too much in the hearing of others. Once
overpowered, Nogam had been philosophic about
his bad luck; but the eyes in his face of a stoic had
held a gleam that Victor didn’t altogether like, a
light that seemed suspiciously malicious, a sugges-
tion of spirited humour deplorable to say the least
in a self-confessed sneak-thief caught in the very
act, deplorable and disturbing; in Victor's sight a look
constructively indicative of more knowledge than
Nogam had any right to possess. Take it any way
you pleased, something to think about •
Still more disquieting Victor thought the circum-
stance that nobody else had seemed to notice that
anomalous light in Nogam’s eyes; which of course
might mean merely that Victor had worked himself
into such a state of nerves that he was seeing things,
but equally well that the look was one reserved for
Victor alone, intentionally or not holding for him a
message, if he had but had the wit to read it, of
peculiarly personal import.
It might have implied, for example, that Victor's
half-hearted and paltering distrust of Nogam had


THE DEVIL TO PAY 285
all along been only too well warranted. In which
case, the fat was already in the fire with a vengeance,
and Victor’s probable duration of life was dependent
wholly upon the speed with which he could quit
Frampton Court and hurl his motor-car through
the night to the lower reaches of the Thames.
Envisagement of the worst at its blackest being
part of the holy duty of self-preservation, Victor
sat fully dressed, with every other provision made
for flight at the first flash of warning, only waiting to
make sure, and with what impatience was apparent
in the working of paste-coloured features, the
wincing and shifting of slotted eyes, the incessant
shutting and unclosing of tensed fingers.
All rested with the telephone that stood mockingly
mute at the man’s elbow, callous alike to his anxiety
and the rancorous regard in which he held it.
His call for the house near Queen Anne's Gate had
now been in for more than forty minutes; in that
interval he had no less than three times pleaded
its urgency to the trunk-line operator. And still the
muffled bell beneath the desk was dumb.
And the worst of it was, fatal though the delay
might prove, he dared not stir a hand to save him-
self until he knew. -
In the taut torment of those long-drawn minutes a
sound of circumspect scratching was enough to
bring Victor to his feet in one startled bound.
He stood for a moment, a-twitch, but intent upon
the corridor door, then composed himself with in-


THE DEVIL TO PAY 287
punctuating the buzz and whine of the empty wire
with her call of a talking doll—“Are you theah?
Are you theah? . . . Are you theah?”
At length, however, the connection was estab-
lished; and Victor, hearing the falsetto of Chou
Nu's second-uncle cheerily respond to the operator’s
query, unceremoniously broke in: -
“Shaik Tsin? It is I, Number One. And the
devil’s own time I’ve had getting through. Why
didn’t you answer more promptly? What’s the
matter? Has anything gone wrong?”
“All is well, Excellency, as well as you could wish,
knowing what you know.”
Profound relief found voice in a sigh from Victor’s
heart.
“You got my messages, then? Nogam delivered
them?”
“So I understand. I myself did not see him,
Excellency. The man Sturm * >
On that name the voice died away in what Victor
fancied was a gasp that might have been of either
fright or pain.
“Hello!” he prompted. “Are you there, Shaik
Tsin? I say! Are you there? Why don’t you
answer?” -
He paused: no sound for seconds that dragged
like so many minutes, then of a sudden a deadened
noise like the slam of a door heard afar—or a pistol
shot at some distance from the telephone in the study.
Further and frantic importuning of the cold and


290 RED MASQUERADE
hateful associations. Where Victor was, she could
not rest.
If she had feared the man before, now she hated
him; but hatred had added to her fear instead of
replacing it, she remained afraid, desperately afraid,
so that even the thought of continuing under the same
roof with him was enough to make her prefer to tramp
unknown roads alone in the mirk of that storm-swept
night.
Though she went in trembling, she felt sure nobody
spied upon her going; and in this confidence crept
to the great staircase, down to the entrance hall,
and on to the front doors; and a good omen it seemed
to find these not locked, but simply on the latch.
And if the night into which she peered was dark
and loud with wind and rain, its countenance seemed
kindlier, more friendly far than that of the world she
was putting behind her. Without misgivings Sofia
stepped out.
It was like stepping over the edge of the universe
into the eternal night that bides beyond the stars.
Neither did waiting seem to habituate her vision to
the lack of light.
Still, the feel of gravel underfoot ought to guide
her down the drive to the great gateway; and once
outside the park, clear of its overshadowing trees,
one would surely find mitigation of darkness sufficient
to show the public road.
She took one tentative step out of the recessed
doorway and into Victor's arms. -


JVENTRE A TERRE Q91
That they were Victor's she knew instantly, as
much by the crawling of her flesh as by the choking
terror that stifled the scream in her throat and froze
body and limbs with its paralyzing touch.
And then his ironic accents:
“So good of you to spare me the trouble of coming
for you!”
Before she could reply or even think, other hands
than his were busy with her. A folded cloth was
whipped over the lower half of her face, sealing her
lips, and knotted at the nape of her neck. Stout
arms clipped her knees and swung her off her feet,
leaving her body helpless in Victor's tight embrace.
And despite her tardy recovery and efforts to
struggle, she was carried swiftly away, a dozen paces
or so, then tumbled bodily in upon the floor of a
motor-car.
The door closed as she tried to pick herself up,
the smooth purring of the motor became a leonine
roar while she was still on her knees, gears clashed,
and the car leaped with a jerk that drove her head-
long against the cushions of the seat. Then the
dome light was switched on, and she saw Victor with
a bleak face sitting over her, an automatic pistol
naked in his hand.
“Get up!” he said, grimly, “and if there's any
thought of fight left in you, think better of it,
remember your mother paid with her life the price
of defying me, and yours means even less to me. Up
with you and sit quietly beside me—do you hear?”


292 RED MASQUERADE
He lent her a hand that wrenched her arm brutally
and wrung a cry which Victor mocked as Sofia fell
upon the seat and cringed back into the corner.
For perhaps thirty seconds, while the car raced
away down the drive, he continued to hold her in
the venom of her sneer; then his gaze veered sharply,
and leaning over he switched off the light.
With the body of the car again the dwelling-place
of darkness, objects beyond its rain-gemmed glass—
the heads of the Chinese maid and chauffeur, the
twin piers of the nearing gateway—attained dense
relief against the blue-white glare of two broad head-
light beams, that of the limousine boring through
the gateway to intersect at right angles that of an-
other car approaching on the highroad but as yet
hidden by the wall of the park.
In one breath and the same the lights of the second
car swerved in toward the gateway, and consterna-
tion seized hold of Sofia’s intelligence and wiped it
clear of all coherence.
Already the strange lamps were staring blankly
in between the piers—and the momentum of Victor’s
car was too great to be arrested within the distance.
The girl cried out, but didn’t know it, and crouched
low; the horn added a squawk of frenzy to a wild
clamour of yells; all prefatory to a scrunching,
rending crash as, in the very mouth of the gateway, a
front fender of the incoming car ripped through the
rear fender above which Sofia was sitting. Thrown
heavily against Victor, then instantly back to her


294 RED MASQUERADE
hindhand, eh? When you come to know me better,
my dear, you’ll find they invariably are—with me.”
Aftermath of fright made her tongue inarticulate;
and Victor's sneer took on a colour of mean amuse-
ment.
“Something on your mind?”
She twisted her hands together till the laced
fingers hurt.
“Wha-what are you go-going to do with me?”
“Make good use of you, dear child,” he laughed:
“be sure of that!”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Really not? But there I think you do injustice
to your admirable intelligence.”
The jeering laugh sounded as he put out the light
again, in darkness the derisive voice pursued:
“If you must know in so many words—well, I
mean to keep you by me till the final curtain falls.
As long as it lasts, yours will be an interesting life—
I give my word.”
“And you call yourself my father!”
“Oh, no! No, indeed: that's all over and done
with, the farce is played out; and while I’m aware
my rôle in it wasn’t heroic, Ishan’t play the purblind
fool in the afterpiece—pure drama—upon which the
curtain is now rising. Neither need you. Oh, I’ll
be frank with you, if you wish, lay all my cards on
the table.”


-
VENTRE A TERRE 295
A deliberate pause ended in a chuckle.
“I have at present precisely two uses for my
precious little Sofia: She will serve excellently as
insurance against further persecution on the part
of her accomplished and energetic father—with whom
I shall deal in my good leisure—and . . . But
need one be crudely explicit?”
Sofia answered nothing to that, for a long time
she said nothing, but sat pondering. . . .
And Victor was speedily provided with another
interest which engrossed him to the exclusion of
further efforts to bait a victim defenseless against
his insolence.
When for the third time after that narrow scrape
at the gates the man roused up to peer back through
the rear window of the limousine, Sofia heard a
harshly sibilant intake of breath between shut teeth,
and surmised the discovery that the car which had
so narrowly missed blocking their escape had picked
up the trail, and was now in hot chase.
Even youth, however, could distill but slender
hope from this. The pace was too terrific at which
Victor's car was thundering through the night-bound
countryside, it seemed idle to dream that another
could overhaul it, even though driven with as much
skill and maniacal recklessness. And Sofia returned
to thoughts to which Victor’s innuendo had given
definite shape and colour, if with an effect far from
that of his intention. Threatened, the spirit of the
girl responded much as sane young flesh will to a cold


298 RED MASQUERADE
Victor now knelt constantly on the back seat, his
face in the fitful play of light and shadow uncannily
resembling that of a hunted jungle cat. On the
polished steel of his pistol sinister gleams winked
and faded. From his snarling lips foul oaths fell, a
steady stream, black blasphemies spewed up from
the darkest dives of the Orient—most of them
happily couched in the tongues of their origin and so
unintelligible to his one auditor. As it was, she
heard and understood enough, too much.
Nevertheless, the man was not too completely
absorbed in watching the shifting fortunes of the
race to be unmindful of the girl. And when once
she sat up to ease cramped limbs, he misread her
intention and, catching her viciously by an arm, threw
her back into her corner and advised her not to play
the giddy little fool.
After that Sofia was at pains to stir as seldom as
possible, and bided her time quietly enough, but never
for an instant relaxed her watchfulness or lost heart.
The shouldering houses that hedged their course
discovered a profile, ragged, black against a sky
whose purple dimness held the first dull presage
of dawn.
In the wild rush of a marauding tomcat the car
crossed a broad public square and sped up the
graded approach to a bridge. The smell of the
Thames was unmistakable, the far-flung lamps of the
Embankment were pearls aglow upon violet velvet.
Leaving the bridge, the limousine took a turn on


XXII
THE SEVEN BRASS HINGES
to wall and seven deep from the front door to the
foot of a cramped flight of crazy wooden stairs,
some ten people were crowded, Sofia and the maid
Chou Nu in a knot of excited men.
In the saffron glow of an ill-trimmed paraffin
lamp smoking in a wall bracket, desperate faces,
yellow and brown and white, consulted one another
with rolling eyeballs and strange tongues clamorous.
Sofia heard the broken rustling of heavy respirations;
she saw uncouth gesticulations carve the shadows;
her nostrils were revolted by effluvia of unclean
bodies, garments saturate with opium smoke and
curious cookery, breaths sour with alcohol.
Two were busy at the door, under the direction of
Prince Victor, setting stout bars into iron sockets.
When they had finished, Victor elbowed them out of
his way and thrust back the slide of a narrow hori-
zontal peephole, through which he reconnoitred.
The tall, thin body stiffened as he looked, and
without turning he flung an open hand behind him
and snapped a demand in Chinese. Somebody
I' a space perhaps four feet in width from wall
301


THE SEVEN BRASS HINGES 303
boarded up from sills to lintels, the air was close
and dank with the stale flavour of foul tidal waters.
Here Victor took charge of Sofia, the chauffeur
holding the lamp to light the other Chinaman at his
labours with a trap-door in the floor, a slab of
woodwork so massive that, when its iron bolts had
been drawn, it needed every whit of the man’s
strength to lift and throw it back upon its hinges;
and its crashing fall made all the timbers quake and
groan.
Through the souare opening thus discovered Sofia
saw a ladder of several slimy steps washed by black,
oily waters that sucked and swirled sluggishly round
spiles green with weed and ooze.
Down these steps the Chinaman crept gingerly, but
halfway paused with a cry, then cringed back to the
head of the ladder, yellow face blanched, slant eyes
piteous with fear, as he exhibited an end of stout
mooring line whose other end was made fast to a
ring bolt in one of the joists. -
With a smothered oath Victor snatched the rope’
end from the trembling hand and examined it closely.
Even Sofia could see that it had been cleanly severed
by a knife.
Victor's countenance was ablaze as he dropped the
rope. Before the tempest of his wrath the China-
man bent like a reed, with faint, protesting bleats
and feebly weaving hands.
But in full tide the tirade faltered, Victor seemed
to forget his anger or else to remind himself it was


304 RED MASQUERADE
puerile in contrast with the mortal issues that now
confronted him.
He turned to Sofia eyes of cold fire in a wintry
countenance.
“So,” he pronounced, slowly, “it appears you are
to have your way, after all, and more speedily than
either of us reckoned. You are to die, and so am I,
this day—you in my arms. Well, it is time, I dare-
say, when I permit myself to be duped and over-
reached by police spies like your persevering father
and lover. Yes; I am ready to pay the price of my
fatuity—but not until they had paid me for their
victory—and dearly. Come!”
He motioned to the Chinese to reclose and fasten
the trap-door, and grasping Sofia's wrist with cruel
fingers hurried her back through the hallway.
Repeated breaks of pistol-fire guided them to the
front room, a racket echoed in diminished volume
from the street.
In an atmosphere already thick with acrid fumes of
smokeless powder two men held the windows, firing
through loopholes in iron-bound blinds of oak.
At their feet a third squatted, reloading for them as
occasion required. As Sofia and Victor entered one
man dropped his weapon and, grunting, fell back
from his window to nurse a shattered hand. Re-
leasing the girl without another word, Victor caught
up the pistol and took the vacant post.
Instantly, on peering out, he fired once, then
again. Evidently missing both shots, he settled to


THE SEVEN BRASS HINGES 307
two dormer windows, boarded; in one corner a
cot-bed with tumbled blankets, near this a low
wooden stand, with a pipe, spirit lamp, and other
paraphernalia of an opium smoker—no chairs, not
another stick of furniture of any kind.
Removing the lamp, the girl set it on the floor, and
pushed the table over against the door. By not so
long as half a minute would its reinforcement delay
Victor when he made up his mind to get in. But in
such emergencies the human kind is not impatient
of the most futile expedients.
There was nothing more she could do. She stood
still, listening. The rattle of pistol fire three floors
below continued in fits and starts, but the sound
of it was oddly unreal, resembling more stammering
explosions of a string of firecrackers than snaps of
the whiplash of Death.
She tried one of the windows without encourage-
ment, but at the other found a board with a loose
end, which she pried aside, till through begrimed
glass she could see a ghastly, weeping sky of day-
break and, by craning her neck, peer down into the
dark gully of the street.
At first she thought it empty; but presently her
straining vision made out two huddled shapes upon
the farther sidewalk, close under the walls of a
public house whose sign she could just barely de-
cipher: the Red Moon.
Then, about to draw back from the window, she
saw five men, oddly foreshortened figures from that


308 RED MASQUERADE
lofty coign of view, leave the Red Moon by one
of its bar entrances, bearing between them a heavy
beam of wood, and with this improvised battering-
ram aimed at the door to the besieged house, charge
awkwardly across the cobbles.
The house spat fire from door and windows, a
withering blast. In the middle of the street the
beam was abandoned, three of its fool-hardy bearers
took to their heels, each shaping an individual course,
while one lay still upon the wet black stones, and an-
other, apparently wounded in the legs, sought piti-
fully to drag himself by his arms, inch by inch,
out of the zone of fire. But presently his efforts
grew feeble, then he, too, lay stirless, prone in the
sluicing rain.
The girl shrank back from the window, hiding her
eyes as if to blot out that picture.
The light, that is to say the absence of it in true
sense, the angle of view, and the distance, all had
conspired to prevent her from making sure that
neither her father nor Karslake were of those four
whose broken bodies cluttered the street. But the
fear and uncertainty were maddening. •
She wheeled suddenly toward the door: the ancient
stairs were creaking beneath a measured tread. She
made an offer to add her weight to that of the table,
but checked and fell back immediately, seeing the
folly of sacrificing her strength, the wisdom of sav-
ing it to serve her when finally •
The creaking ceased, the wards of the lock grated,


THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.