The Hand of Peril/Part 4/Chapter 8
VIII
It was exactly twelve minutes later that Kestner's knock sounded on the door of Suite Seventeen in that rookery of migratory birds known as the Alambo.
He knew the type well enough, for in Paris and Budapest and Monte Carlo and Trouville his work had only too often taken him into such quarters. He was familiar enough with each sordid detail, the entrance of gilt and marble and plush, the belittered breakfast-trays at bedroom doors, the kimonoed figures that visited from floor to floor and calmly arranged hydrogenated hair in elevator-mirrors, the overflow of cocktail glasses and beer bottles ungarnered by slatternly chamber-maids, the mingled odours of musty carpets and house-pets and Turkish cigarettes.
It puzzled Kestner not a little, as he repeated his knock and stood prepared for any emergency, to find adequate excuse for Maura Lambert's presence in such a place. She was not of the breed common to such a rookery. He reminded himself that there must be some exceptional reason for her retreat to an environment so exceptional. Then all thought on the matter ended, for he heard a light step cross the room, and a moment later found himself staring into the somewhat startled eyes of Maura Lambert herself.
It was plain that she was not expecting him. He could see that he had taken her unawares, for over one arm she carried a low-necked gown of white chiffon cloth embellished with dotted net and lace and ribbon-flowers. This she must have been about to pack away in a travelling-bag, for one stood open in a shabby Morris-chair on the far side of the room. He noticed, too, that she was dressed for the street, and it did not surprise him to catch sight of her hat and gloves standing close beside the travelling-bag. Then he looked once more back at her face.
On the brow beneath the heavily massed chestnut hair was a small frown of wonder. The dark-lashed violet-blue eyes were wide with a vague incredulity. There was, too, a touch of timorousness in her pose, but she made no move to withdraw.
"You wanted to see me," was Kestner's casual reminder, as he advanced a trifle, that the door might not be swung between him and the one woman he desired to see. Even as she looked at him her self-possession seemed to return to her.
"I asked if I might come to see you," she amended, with her wide-irised eyes still fixed on his face.
"But you said it was urgent," argued her visitor.
"It is urgent," she admitted.
Kestner could not help noticing the deepened shadows about the heavily-lashed eyes, the sense of nervous strain about the softly-curving lips. The oval face, with its accentuated note of tragedy, reminded him of some pictorial figure which at first he could not place. It was several minutes before his mind reached the goal towards which it had been groping. He knew, then, that her shadowy face was in some way suggestive of Sargent's painting of the prophet "Hosea."
"Then shall I come in?" he quietly inquired.
"Yes," she said with an abstraction which implied her mind was occupied by other and more troubling things.
Kestner, as he stepped into the room, swept the place with one of his quick and comprehensive glances. Through a door opening into a small bedroom he caught sight of a partly packed trunk. On the bed beside it was a disordered tumble of clothing, the litter of wrapping paper about it implying that much of that apparel was newly bought. These quickly comprehended details gave to the place a spirit of transiency. They made it plain to the newcomer that he had interrupted Maura Lambert in some sudden movement towards flight. And again, as he stared into her face, his earlier suspicions as to the possibility of a trap returned to him.
Yet he was very much at his ease, face to face with this old-time enemy of his, and in no way afraid of her. The one thought that troubled him was the contingency that she might not be alone, that behind one of those menacing doors might be a confederate, that close at hand was some coarser-fibred colleague who was using her for his own ends. But the persistent voice of some feeling which he could not quite decipher kept telling him that this was not the case. He wanted to believe in her.
"Won't you sit down?" she said, quietly motioning him towards a chair.
"Thank you," he answered, as formally as though his call had been a social one. Yet he wondered just why she should have this power of restraining and intimidating him. In work such as his there was little room for the finer issues of life, and he had long since learned not to be overcourteous to an enemy.
The sudden consciousness that he was treating her with a consideration which she as his quarry had done nothing to merit made him more watchful of eye and more wary of movement. He resented the higher plane to which she still had the power of coercing him, even while he prayed that she would not confound his inward belief in her.
Before seating himself, however, he moved his chair back until it stood against the wall of the room. This was an announcement, he knew, of his latent distrust in her and her motives. Yet the movement seemed lost on her, though Kestner reminded himself that in the past she had proved herself a capable enough actress. He even wondered, as he gazed about those small and dingy chambers, how often the antique games of blackmail had been played between their faded walls. He also pondered the fact that she would be an especially valuable woman at such work, with her incongruous air of purity and other-worldliness, her undeniable beauty, her almost boy-like unconcern of sex.
Yet the next movement, as he looked back at the intent face with its inapposite flower-like appeal, he resented the very thought of her as a pawn in anything so sordid as the panel-game. It was unbelievable. He had seen too many of those ladies of draggled plumes and their meretricious assumptions of grandeur. About them all had been the betraying taint, the inconsequential word or move that marked them as demimondaine, the over-acted gentility that proved as obvious, in the end, as the paper roses of stagedom.
"You should not have come here," she said, after several moments of thought.
"Why not?" demanded Kestner.
"Because it is dangerous," was her answer.
"For whom?"
There was a touch of cynicism in his smile, but she chose to disregard it. Her brow did not lose its look of troubled thought.
"For you," she answered.
"But not for you?" he inquired.
"For both of us," she amended. He won a thin and wintry pleasure from the thought that they were bracketed together, if only by peril.
"Then why did you send for me?" was his next question.
There was a shadow of reproof in her eyes at the obliquity of that inquiry.
"I did not send for you," she reminded him. "I asked to come to you."
"For what reason?"
Her eyes were again studying his face. He was struck by both their fearlessness and their lack of guile. That strange life of hers, he felt, must have beaten down those flimsier reticences and privacies of sex behind which youth, as a rule, sat with its illusions.
"I wanted to see if we could possibly come to terms," she finally announced.
It took an effort for Kestner to retain his pose of impersonality.
"What terms?" he quietly inquired.
"That is what we must decide on," she said in the same tone of solemn candour.
"Why?" demanded her visitor, still fencing for time.
"Because I can't go on like this," she replied, with a listlessly tragic movement of the hands; "nothing can go on like this!"
"I know it," was Kestner's quiet retort.
She did not resent any note of triumph that may have been in his voice. Her brow still wore its look of troubled thought.
"It isn't you that I'm afraid of," she announced, the abstraction of her tone taking all sting from the statement.
"Then what is it?" he asked, lamenting the fact that he could not see her face.
"It's myself," she answered after a moment's hesitation. "I can't go on with this. I've got to get away from it all!" The violet-blue eyes were once more courageously meeting Kestner's unparticipating stare. "You remember what you told me in Palermo? How father and I could never keep on at this sort of work, how it must go from bad to worse, and always lead to one end, and only one end? Well, that is the way it is leading. I always tried to tell myself that money would be a protection. To do what we were doing seemed terrible only when it implied poverty and terror and flight from one corner to another. We always had money enough to keep up appearances. And when we worked together we always felt safe. But we were safe only because we kept together."
"And you're not keeping together?" Kestner inquired.
"We can't," was her almost tragic answer,
"Are you willing to tell me why?"
"I'm compelled to tell you why."
"What is it?" he asked.
When she spoke, after a pause, she unconsciously lowered her voice. "It's Morello!"
Kestner could see that she had not easily made that confession.
"But why should you be afraid of one of your own circle?"
"I think you know why I am afraid of him," she answered. Kestner could also see that it was now costing her an effort to speak calmly. "He was always an animal. But now he is half mad, and worse than an animal!"
"Has he anything to do with your being here?" Kestner demanded.
"He has everything to do with my being here. I came here to escape him. I chose this place because I knew he would come to a place like this last. He knows how I hate such things!"
Kestner was watching her narrowly. He decided that she was one of two things: either the most accomplished of actresses, or a woman who was indeed nearing, in some way, the end of her rope. But the years had indurated his sympathies, and he warned himself to go slowly.
"What does your father say about it?" he demanded.
There was a momentary look of revolt in the brooding violet-blue eyes.
"That is the hopeless part of it all," she acknowledged. "He is willing that I should go with Morello. Something has made him change. He doesn't seem willing to help me any more!"
"But without you he is helpless?"
"Without me, as things are, he cannot go on with the work he has been doing," she admitted.
"Why?" asked Kestner.
She did not answer him at once. Instead, she rose to her feet, crossed the room to her open travelling-bag, and from its depths took out a parcel wrapped in a strip of green baize. This parcel was small, and oblong in shape, but as she walked back to the chair with it, it impressed Kestner as being of considerable weight.
"Because here," she said, as she sat down and held the baize-covered bundle on her knees, "I have all the plates with which his new counterfeits were to be printed!"