Red Masquerade | Page 7

laughed aloud, and went indoors rejoicing.
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 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, except 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 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 handsome 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 with a finger-nail,
he gave a slight start, passed a hand over it with the palm pressed flat,
and suddenly 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! oh!_" of shocked expostulation, he

was (like most of us, incurably an actor in private as well as in public
life) merely running