The Lone Wolf Returns

by Louis Joseph Vance

On his own part, he could not—had he wished—have forgotten the sinister tension of distrust and cross-purpose running through it all; and if he seemed to let himself go and enter without reserve into the frivolous spirit of the gathering, he remained in his heart an outsider to the end, captious and skeptical, and to the end a prey to dour forebodings. And his attention, ranging in turn from one to another, with a quality of vision inhumanly dispassionate stripped each and every one, even himself, of their trappings of pretension and self deception, and saw the rot that ate at every heart.

He saw in Pagan the perfect pattern of a parasite, fawning on all and sundry for empty laughter, that he might esteem himself a wit and so repair the abrasion of his self-love by the knowledge that he was, at bottom, no better than a pickthank and a pander.

He saw Liane Delorme estranged from these her boon accomplices of yesterday because of Morphew's inexplicable new animus, bitterly stung by the discovery that she who had ever been wont to queen it unchallenged was tonight being barely tolerated for what she might be worth toward the consummation of another's corrupt and ungenerous ends; haunted by the incidental knowledge that her charms were day by day more swiftly fading, that their potency once so magical was now nearly spent, and that the increase of her years had brought and would bring no compensating repose, neither the peace that crowns a life well lived nor any surcease from repining.

He saw Folly McFee, a trifling moth, vain, empty-headed, pretty-to-death, avid for admiration to dull the irk of discontent with life for all it had denied her of her heart's desire, for the shabby indemnity it offered her in the shape of Morphew as her promised husband.

He saw Morphew, gross in person, gross in appetites, seeking in vain to slake his lust for power, that men might look up to him, by fostering those puerile and unprofitable criminal intrigues of his incubation, and at the same time laid so low by love of a doll's face and a pretty body he could not dissemble his fatuous doting or the jealousy that made him sick to his core every time the amorous little baggage of his fancy chose to make eyes at another man.

Finally, Lanyard saw himself, to whom pride had once been as breath of life, broken and degraded to a shameful sort of peonage, constrained to take his orders from a Morphew and faithfully perform the tasks set for him, lest enemy and patron in one withdraw his favour and leave him without defense against the wrath of a society which his mere existence affronted beyond pardon.

Satyr and sycophant, coquette, courtesan and criminal: a shady crew . . .

And against that ring of worn and raddled faces present in actual being to his sight, hall-marked every one by self-seeking, he had ever before him a face infinitely more real and true, his vision of his lost love, beyond all telling fair and kind, never more near to him than now, nor ever more inaccessibly remote.

And these with whom he sat and dined and drank, with whom he laughed and leered and bandied ribald personalities, were they whose egoism had cost him Eve . . .

Dull rage smouldered in his bosom, he knew he was ripe for murder—and went on feeding and guzzling with them, winking and nudging and giggling with the best of them, put in his proper place by life at last, relegated to his rowdy sphere, to escape from which he had been insane ever to aspire . . .