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Title: The Lone Wolf

A Melodrama

 

Author: Louis Joseph Vance

 

Release Date: November, 2005 [EBook #9378]

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[This file was first posted on September 26, 2003]

 

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Language: English

 

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONE WOLF ***

 

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THE LONE WOLF

By

LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

1914

CONTENTS

I. TROYON’S

 

II. RETURN

 

III. A POINT OF INTERROGATION

 

IV. A STRATAGEM

 

V. ANTICLIMAX

 

VI. THE PACK GIVES TONGUE

 

VII. L’ABBAYE

 

VIII. THE HIGH HAND

 

IX. DISASTER

 

X. TURN ABOUT

 

XI. FLIGHT

 

XII. AWAKENING

 

XIII. CONFESSIONAL

 

XIV. RIVE DROIT

 

XV. SHEER IMPUDENCE

 

XVI. RESTITUTION

 

XVII. THE FORLORN HOPE

 

XVIII. ENIGMA

 

XIX. UNMASKED

 

XX. WAR

 

XXI. APOSTATE

 

XXII. TRAPPED

 

XXIII. MADAME OMBER

 

XXIV. RENDEZVOUS

 

XXV. WINGS OF THE MORNING

 

XXVI. THE FLYING DEATH

 

XXVII. DAYBREAK

THE LONE WOLF I

TROYON’S

 

It must have been Bourke who first said that even if you knew your way

about Paris you had to lose it in order to find it to Troyon’s. But

then Bourke was proud to be Irish.

 

Troyon’s occupied a corner in a jungle of side-streets, well withdrawn

from the bustle of the adjacent boulevards of St. Germain and St.

Michel, and in its day was a restaurant famous with a fame jealously

guarded by a select circle of patrons. Its cooking was the best in

Paris, its cellar second to none, its rates ridiculously reasonable;

yet Baedeker knew it not. And in the wisdom of the cognoscenti this

was well: it had been a pity to loose upon so excellent an

establishment the swarms of tourists that profaned every temple of

gastronomy on the Rive Droit.

 

The building was of three storeys, painted a dingy drab and trimmed

with dull green shutters. The restaurant occupied almost all of the

street front of the ground floor, a blank, non-committal double doorway

at one extreme of its plate-glass windows was seldom open and even more

seldom noticed.

 

This doorway was squat and broad and closed the mouth of a wide,

stone-walled passageway. In one of its two substantial wings of oak a

smaller door had been cut for the convenience of Troyon’s guests, who

by this route gained the courtyard, a semi-roofed and shadowy place,

cool on the hottest day. From the court a staircase, with an air of

leading nowhere in particular, climbed lazily to the second storey and

thereby justified its modest pretensions; for the two upper floors of

Troyon’s might have been plotted by a nightmare-ridden architect after

witnessing one of the first of the Palais Royal farces.

 

Above stairs, a mediaeval maze of corridors long and short, complicated

by many unexpected steps and staircases and turns and enigmatic doors,

ran every-which-way and as a rule landed one in the wrong room, linking

together, in all, some two-score bedchambers. There were no salons or

reception-rooms, there was never a bath-room, there wasn’t even running

water aside from two hallway taps, one to each storey. The honoured

guest and the exacting went to bed by lamplight: others put up with

candlesticks: gas burned only in the corridors and the restaurant—

asthmatic jets that, spluttering blue within globes obese, semi-opaque,

and yellowish, went well with furnishings and decorations of the Second

Empire to which years had lent a mellow and somehow rakish dinginess;

since nothing was ever refurbished.

 

With such accommodations the guests of Troyon’s were well content. They

were not many, to begin with, and they were almost all middle-aged

bourgeois, a caste that resents innovations. They took Troyon’s as they

found it: the rooms suited them admirably, and the tariff was modest.

Why do anything to disturb the perennial peace of so discreet and

confidential an establishment? One did much as one pleased there,

providing one’s bill was paid with tolerable regularity and the hand

kept supple that operated the cordon in the small hours of the night.

Papa Troyon came from a tribe of inn-keepers and was liberal-minded;

while as for Madame his wife, she cared for nothing but pieces of

gold….

 

To Troyon’s on a wet winter night in the year 1893 came the child who

as a man was to call himself Michael Lanyard.

 

He must have been four or five years old at that time: an age at which

consciousness is just beginning to recognize its individuality and

memory registers with capricious irregularity. He arrived at the hotel

in a state of excitement involving an almost abnormal sensitiveness to

impressions; but that was soon drowned deep in dreamless slumbers of

healthy exhaustion; and when he came to look back through a haze of

days, of which each had made its separate and imperative demand upon

his budding emotions, he found his store of memories strangely dulled

and disarticulate.

 

The earliest definite picture was that of himself, a small but vastly

important figure, nursing a heavy heart in a dark corner of a fiacre.

Beside him sat a man who swore fretfully into his moustache whenever

the whimpering of the boy threatened to develop into honest bawls: a

strange creature, with pockets full of candy and a way with little boys

in public surly and domineering, in private timid and propitiatory. It

was raining monotonously, with that melancholy persistence which is the

genius of Parisian winters; and the paving of the interminable strange

streets was as black glass shot with coloured lights. Some of the

streets roared like famished beasts, others again were silent, if with

a silence no less sinister. The rain made incessant crepitation on the

roof of the fiacre, and the windows wept without respite. Within the

cab a smell of mustiness contended feebly with the sickening reek of a

cigar which the man was forever relighting and which as often turned

cold between his teeth. Outside, unwearying hoofs were beating their

deadly rhythm, cloppetty-clop….

 

Back of all this lurked something formlessly alluring, something sad

and sweet and momentous, which belonged very personally to the child

but which he could never realize. Memory crept blindly toward it over

a sword-wide bridge that had no end. There had been (or the boy had

dreamed it) a long, weariful journey by railroad, the sequel to one by

boat more brief but wholly loathsome. Beyond this point memory failed

though sick with yearning. And the child gave over his instinctive but

rather inconsecutive efforts to retrace his history: his daily life at

Troyon’s furnished compelling and obliterating interests.

 

Madame saw to that.

 

It was Madame who took charge of him when the strange man dragged him

crying from the cab, through a cold, damp place gloomy with shadows,

and up stairs to a warm bright bedroom: a formidable body, this Madame,

with cold eyes and many hairy moles, who made odd noises in her throat

while she undressed the little boy with the man standing by, noises

meant to sound compassionate and maternal but, to the child at least,

hopelessly otherwise.

 

Then drowsiness stealing upon one over a pillow wet with tears …

oblivion….

 

And Madame it was who ruled with iron hand the strange

new world to which the boy awakened.

 

The man was gone by morning, and the child never saw him again; but

inasmuch as those about him understood no English and he no French,

it was some time before he could grasp the false assurances of Madame

that his father had gone on a journey but would presently return. The

child knew positively that the man was not his father, but when he was

able to make this correction the matter had faded into insignificance:

life had become too painful to leave time or inclination for the

adjustment of such minor and incidental questions as one’s parentage.

 

The little boy soon learned to know himself as Marcel, which wasn’t his

name, and before long was unaware he had ever had another. As he grew

older he passed as Marcel Troyon; but by then he had forgotten how to

speak English.

 

A few days after his arrival the warm, bright bedchamber was exchanged

for a cold dark closet opening off Madame’s boudoir, a cupboard

furnished with a rickety cot and a broken chair, lacking any provision

for heat or light, and ventilated solely by a transom over the door;

and inasmuch as Madame shared the French horror of draughts and so kept

her boudoir hermetically sealed nine months of the year, the transom

didn’t mend matters much. But that closet formed the boy’s sole refuge,

if a precarious one, through several years; there alone was he ever

safe from kicks and cuffs and scoldings for faults beyond his

comprehension; but he was never permitted a candle, and the darkness

and loneliness made the place one of haunted terror to the sensitive

and imaginative nature of a growing child.

 

He was, however, never insufficiently fed; and the luxury of forgetting

misery in sleep could not well be denied him.

 

By day, until of age to go to school, he played apprehensively in the

hallways with makeshift toys, a miserable, dejected little body with

his heart in his mouth at every sudden footfall, very much in the way

of femmes-de-chambre who had nothing in common with the warm-hearted,

impulsive, pitiful serving women of fiction. They complained of him to

Madame, and Madame came promptly to cuff him. He soon learned an almost

uncanny cunning in the art of effacing himself, when she was imminent,

to be as still as death and to move with the silence of a wraith. Not

infrequently his huddled immobility in a shadowy corner escaped her

notice as she passed. But it always exasperated her beyond measure to

look up, when she fancied herself alone, and become aware of the

wide-eyed, terrified stare of the transfixed boy….

 

That he was privileged to attend school at all was wholly due to a

great fear that obsessed Madame of doing anything to invite the

interest of the authorities. She was an honest woman, according to her

lights, an honest wife, and kept an honest house; but she feared the

gendarmerie more than the Wrath of God. And by ukase