The False Faces Part 37

"Attaboy! If I'm not back in half an hour you'll see her safely home, of course?"

"Trust me."

"And you'll excuse me, Miss Brooke? I hope you don't think--"

"What I do think, Mr. Crane, is that you have been most kind to a lonely stranger. Of course I'll excuse you, not willingly, but understanding you must go."

"That makes me a heap easier in my mind. But I' got to run. So it's good-night, unless maybe I see you later. So long, Ember!"

With a flirt of a raw-boned hand, Crane swung about, threw himself spiritedly into the revolving door, was gone.

"Amazing creature," Lanyard commented, laughing.

"I think him delightful," the girl replied, surrendering her wraps to a maid. "If all Americans are like that--"

"Shall we go up?"

She nodded--"Please!"--and turned with him.

The committee on membership himself bowed them into the elevator. Several others crowded in after them. For thirty seconds, while the car moved slowly upward, Lanyard was free to think without interruption.

But what to think now? That Crane, actuated by some motive occult to Lanyard, had engineered this apparently advent.i.tious _rencontre_ for the purpose of throwing him and the Brooke girl together? Or, again, that Crane was innocent of guile in this matter--that other persons unknown, causing Lanyard to be traced to his lodgings, had framed that note to entice him to this place to-night? In the latter event, who was conceivably responsible but Velasco, Dressier, O'Reilly--any one of these, or all three working in concert? The last-named had looked Lanyard squarely in the face without sign of recognition, back there in the lobby of the Knickerbocker, precisely as he should, if implicated in the conspiracies of the Boche; though it might easily have been Velasco or Dressier who had recognized the adventurer without his knowledge....

The car stopped, a narrow-chested door slid open, a gush of hectic light coloured morbidly the faces of alighting pa.s.sengers, a blare of syncopated noise singularly unmusical saluted the astonished ears of Lanyard and Cecelia Brooke. She met his gaze with a smiling _moue_ and slightly lifted eyebrows.

"More than we bargained for?" he laughed. "But there is always something new in this America, I promise you. Au Printemps itself is new, at all events did not exist when I was last in New York."

Following her out, he paused beside the girl in a constricted s.p.a.ce hedged about with tables, waiting for the maitre d'hotel to seat those who had been first to leave the elevator.

The room, of irregular conformation, held upward of two hundred guests and habitues seated at tables large and small and so closely set together that waiters with difficulty navigated narrow and tortuous channels of communication. In the middle, upon a small dancing floor, rudely octagonal in shape, made smaller by tables crowded round its edge to accommodate the crush, a mob of couples danced arduously, close-locked in one another's arms, swaying in rhythm with the over-emphasized time beaten out by a perspiring little band of musicians on a dais in a far corner, their activities directed by an antic conductor whose lantern-jawed, sallow face peered grotesquely out through a mop of hair as black and coa.r.s.e and lush as a horse's mane.

Execrable ventilation or absence thereof manufactured an atmosphere that reeked with heat animal and artificial and with ill-blended effluvia from a hundred sources. Perhaps the odour of alcohol predominated; Lanyard thought of a steam-heated wine-cellar. He observed nothing but champagne in any gla.s.s, and if food were being served it was done surrept.i.tiously. Sweat dripped from the faces of the dancers, deep flushes discoloured all not so heavily enamelled as to preserve an inalterable complexion, the eyes of many stared with the fixity of hypnosis. Yet when the music ended with an unexpected crash of discord these dancers applauded insatiably till the jaded orchestra struck up once more, when they renewed their curious gyrations with quenchless abandon.

The Brooke girl caught Lanyard's eye, her lips moved. Thanks to the din, he had to bend his head near to hear.

She murmured with infinite expression: "Au Printemps!"

The maitre d'hotel was plucking at his sleeve.

"Monsieur had made reservations, no?" Startled recognition washed the man's tired and pasty countenance. "Pardon, monsieur: this way!" He turned and began to thread deviously between the jostling tables.

Dubiously Lanyard followed. He likewise had known the maitre d'hotel at sight: a beastly little decadent whose cabaret on the rue d'Antin, just off the avenue de l'Opera, had been a famous rendezvous of international spies till war had rendered it advisable for him to efface himself from the ken of Paris with the same expedition and discretion which had marked the departure from London of his confrere who now guarded the lower gateway to these ethereal regions of Au Printemps.

The coincidence of finding those two so closely a.s.sociated worked with the riddle of that note further to trouble Lanyard's mind.

Was he to believe Au Printemps the legitimate successor in America of that less pretentious establishment on the rue d'Antin, an overseas headquarters for Secret Service agents of the Central Powers?

He began to regret heartily, not so much that he had presented himself in answer to that note, but the responsibility which now devolved upon him of caring for Miss Brooke. Much as he had wished to see her an hour ago, now he would willingly be rid of her company.

Why had he been lured to this place, if its character were truly what he feared? Conceivably because he was believed--since it now appeared he had cheated death--still to possess either that desired doc.u.ment or knowledge of its whereabouts.

Naturally the enemy would not think otherwise. He must not forget that Ekstrom was playing double; as yet none but Lanyard knew he had stolen the doc.u.ment and done a murder to cover the theft from his a.s.sociates and leave him free to sell to England without exciting their suspicion.

Consequently, Lanyard believed, he had been invited to this place to be sounded, to be tempted, bribed, intimidated--if need be, and possible--somehow to be won over to the uses of the Prussian spy system.

Leading them to the farther side of the room, the maitre d'hotel paused bowing and mowing beside a large table already in the possession of a party of three.

Lanyard's eyes narrowed. One of the three was Velasco, another a young man unknown to him, a mannerly little creature who might have been written by the author of "What the Man Will Wear" in the theatre programmes. The third was Sophie Weringrode, the Wilhelmstra.s.se agent whom he had only that afternoon observed entering the house in Seventy-ninth Street.

He stopped short, in a cold rage. Till that moment a mirror-sheathed pillar had hidden from him Velasco and the Weringrode; else Lanyard had refused to come so far; for obviously there were no unreserved tables, indeed few vacant chairs, in that part of the room.

Not that he minded the cynical barefacedness of the dodge; that was indeed amusing; he was sanguine as to his ability to dominate any situation that might arise, and to a degree indifferent if the upshot should prove his confidence misplaced; and he did not in the least object to letting the enemy show his cards. But he did enormously resent what was, after all, something quite outside the calculations of these giddy conspirators, the fact that he must either beat incontinent retreat or introduce Cecelia Brooke to the company of Sophie Weringrode.

His face darkened, a stinging reproof for the maitre d'hotel trembled on his tongue's tip; but that one was busily avoiding his eye on the far side of the table, drawing out a chair for "mademoiselle," while Velasco and the Weringrode were alert to read Lanyard's countenance and forestall any steps he might contemplate in defiance of their designs.

At first glimpse of the Brooke girl Velasco jumped up and hastened to her, with eager Latin courtesy expressing his unantic.i.p.ated delight in the prospect of her consenting to join their party. And she was suffering with quiet graciousness his florid compliments.

At the same time the Weringrode was greeting Lanyard in the most intimate fashion--and d.a.m.ning him in the understanding of Cecelia Brooke with every word.

"My dear friend!" she cried gayly, extending a bedizened hand. "I had begun to despair of you. Is it part of your system with women always to be a little late, always to keep us wondering?"

Schooling his features to a civil smile, Lanyard bowed over the hand.

"In warfare such as ours, my dear Sophie," he said with meaning, "one uses all weapons, even the most primitive, in sheer self-defense."

The woman laughed delightedly. "I think," she said, "if you rose from the dead at the bottom of the sea, _Tony_, it would be with wit upon your lips.... And you have brought a friend with you? How charming!" She shifted in her chair to face Cecelia Brooke. "I wish to know her instantly!"

Velasco was waiting only for that opening. "Dear princess," he said, instantly, "permit me to present Miss Cecelia Brooke ... Princess de Alavia...."

Completely at ease and by every indication enjoying herself hugely, the girl bowed and took the hand the Weringrode thrust upon her. Her eyes, a-brim with excitement and mischief, veered to Lanyard's, ignored their warning, glanced away.

"How do you do?" she said simply. "I didn't understand Mr. Ember expected to meet friends here, but that only makes it the more agreeable. May we sit down?"

XVII

FINESSE

The person in the educated evening clothes was made known as Mr. Revel.

For Lanyard's benefit and his own he vacated the chair beside Sophie Weringrode, seating himself to one side of Cecelia Brooke, who had Velas...o...b..tween her and the soi-disant princess.

Already a waiter had placed and was filling gla.s.ses for Lanyard and the girl.

With the best grace he could muster the adventurer sat down, accepted a cigarette from the Weringrode case, and with openly impertinent eyes inspected the intrigante critically.

She endured that ordeal well, smiling confidently, a handsome creature with a beautiful body bewitchingly gowned.