The Guests Of Hercules Part 20

"Oh," she laughed, wincing a little. "You couldn't do that to _her_ with all her rings. I was just trying to _draw_ you! Now I've found out all I want to know. You're dreadfully, frightfully in love with Miss Grant."

"Am I?" he asked. "Perhaps. I'm not sure. Only I see that there's something rare about her, and she's too precious to be living as she does, surrounded by a weird gang who all want to get something out of her, or else to give her something she oughtn't to take. Like that Indian chap, the Maharajah of Indorwana--confound the little beast! He's tried to make her take a diamond star and a rope of pearls."

"I suppose she needn't, unless she wants to."

"Oh, I don't know, she's so good-natured, and somehow childlike. She had both the things on at the Casino last night; said he insisted on lending them to her, for luck, and she didn't like refusing them, as he almost cried. And then there's that jeweller man from Paris--has a shop in the Galerie Charles Trois. She strolled into his place to buy the gold bag you saw on the beggars' table and he went wild about her. Cheek of him!

Sent her a bracelet she had to send back. How dare a fellow like that have the impudence to fall in love with a girl like her?"

"Cats may look at kings, and I suppose kings embrace queens, don't they?

You needn't be so mad. You come from a democratic country, and Grandma Carleton's father was a grocer."

"He was a super-grocer. And, anyhow, Americans are different."

"Some of them fly high nowadays, eh, Mr. Air-pirate?"

d.i.c.k laughed. "You haven't told me yet what happened next at the beggars' feast, and how you found out who _she_ was."

"Nothing happened to any one except me. They went on feasting and gave her some more chestnuts. I don't know what she'd given them! But she'd probably rubbed the lucky hump and paid for it. I was dying to go up and speak to my pals, and perhaps be introduced to the girl, but I hadn't got quite cheek enough, and they seemed to be having such a good time, it was a shame to interrupt. The elf was talking, with explosive sort of gestures in between mouthfuls, evidently telling something very interesting. And you know, I always pretend to myself in a kind of fairy story that he's really a person of immense, mysterious influence, a weird power behind the throne, starting or stopping revolutions. Of course it's nonsense--all founded on my seeing him with one of the new revolutionary newspapers in his hand--the ones they allow nowadays to be sold in the princ.i.p.ality, against the Prince, and the Casino, and everything. But if I were to write a sensational story of Monte Carlo, that little red-eyed dwarf at the bridge should be the hero. And just as I was thinking about all that, and tying my second shoe, along came a taxi with poor Captain Hannaford in it. He'd been into Italy to see Madame Berenger, the actress, at her villa, which he would like to buy, and was coming back to lunch; so he made the chauffeur pull up while he asked if he could drive me home? I said yes, because I saw him lift his hat to that girl, and I hoped he could tell me something about her."

"What did he tell you?"

"Not so very much. He didn't seem to want to talk about her, I thought.

That didn't surprise me, because he has an idea that women feel disgust for him and can't bear to look at him if they can help it--all but me, for I've convinced him that I'm really his friend. He only said that her name was Miss Grant, and that she was very lucky at the Casino. And in about three minutes we were at the door of this house."

"Well, I'm mighty glad you're interested in her, and that you're willing to call."

"Willing? I'm charmed. I'll go to-morrow."

"You--you couldn't go to-day, I suppose?"

"Silly boy, it's too late. Here's tea; and here's St. George; and here will be some of the flock presently, who generally appear on the stroke of half-past four."

In another moment Carleton was shaking the hand of a slender, pale man with auburn hair worn rather long, a sensitive mouth, delicate nostrils, and beautiful, bright, hazel eyes which shone with a spiritual, unworldly enthusiasm. He looked like one who would cheerfully have been a martyr to his faith had he lived a few centuries earlier. And d.i.c.k thought his cousin's simile of the high Alps not too far fetched, after all. But there was a warm light in the beautiful eyes as they turned upon Rose; and something in the man's smile hinted that he did not lack a sense of humour, except when too absent-minded to bring it into play.

d.i.c.k felt happy about Rose, and happier about Miss Grant, because Rose would go and see her.

XIV

Life was not running on oiled wheels at the Villa Bella Vista.

A spirit of discontent, a feeling that they had been lured to the house under false pretences, grew among Lady Dauntrey's visitors and was expressed stealthily, a word here, a word there, and sullen looks behind the backs of host and hostess. Even on the first day disappointment began to wriggle from guest to guest, like a little cold, sharp-nosed snake, leaving its clammy trail wherever it pa.s.sed.

In the first place the villa, which had been described glowingly by Lady Dauntrey to the Collises and Dodo Wardropp, was not what she had painted it. Indeed, as Dodo remarked to Miss Collis, it was not what any one had painted it, at least within the memory of man. Once it had been a rich gold colour, but many seasons of neglect had tarnished the gold to a freckled brown, which even the flowering creepers that should have cloaked it seemed to dislike. In depression they had shed most of their leaves; and bare serpent-branches, which might be purple with wistaria in the late spring long after everybody had gone to the north, coiled dismally over the fanlike roof of dirty gla.s.s that sheltered a blistered front door. Inside, a faint odour of mouldiness hung in the air of the rooms, which had been shut up unoccupied for a long time. The ugly drab curtains in the drawing-room smelled of the moth-powder in which they had been wrapped through the summer heat. The imitation lace drapery underneath them had been torn and not mended. Bits of thick brown paper pasted over the windows during the hot months still stuck to the gla.s.s. The furniture was heavy, not old but middle-aged, lacking the charm of antiquity, and in the worst French taste. The pictures were ba.n.a.l; and there was no garden. More painful than all, the house was in the Condamine; and Dodo, when she had spent a few days at "Monte" on her way to England from Australia, had been told that "n.o.body who was anybody lived down in the Condamine: only the 'cheap people' went there." And Dodo did not consider herself a cheap person. She was paying high to be the guest of a "lady of t.i.tle": she wanted her money's worth, and soon began to fear that there was doubt of getting it.

Servants had been engaged in advance for Lady Dauntrey by the agent who had let the house. There were too few; and it needed but the first night's dinner to prove that the cook was third rate, though Lady Dauntrey carefully referred to him as the _chef_. In addition to this person, occasionally seen flitting about in a dingy white cap, there was a man to wait at table and open the door--a man, Dodo said, with the face of a sulky codfish; and a hawk-nosed, hollow-cheeked woman to "do the rooms" and act as maid to the ladies, none of the three having brought a maid of her own. Their hostess had said she could not put up her guests' servants, but they might "count upon a first-rate maid in the house." They reminded each other of this promise, the day after their arrival, and grumbled. Secundina had as much as she could do to keep the rooms in order; and the only other service she was able to give the visitors was to recount gruesome stories of the villa while she made their beds or took a top layer of dust off their dressing-tables.

According to her, the Bella Vista was the cheapest furnished house to let in the princ.i.p.ality, because years ago a murder had been committed in it. A woman had been killed for the sake of her jewels by the tenants, a husband and wife. They had kept her body in a trunk for days, and had attempted to get out of France with it, but had been arrested on their way to Italy. n.o.body who was superst.i.tious would live in the house, and so it was not often let. Secundina did not know where the murder had taken place, but believed it was in the dining-room, and that the trunk had been kept in the cellar.

It was Dodo to whom the tale was told, and she repeated it to Mrs.

Collis and her daughter, the three having forgotten their slight differences in making common, secret cause against the Dauntreys, or, rather, against Lady Dauntrey; for they were inclined to like and be sorry for her husband, pitying him because misfortune or weakness had brought him to the pa.s.s of marrying such a woman. "You could make a whole macadamized road out of her heart," remarked Mrs. Collis.

"It would serve her right if we all marched out of this loathsome den in a body," said Dodo, emphatically, when they had met to talk things over in the Collises' room. "She's a selfish cat and thinks of n.o.body but herself. She won't even let the men come near us girls if she can help it, though you and I both know perfectly well, Miss Collis, that she hinted about the most wonderful chances of great marriages, nothing lower than an earl at meanest. Not that you and I need look for husbands. But that isn't the point; for anyhow, she has no business to snap them out of our mouths. Now, she's jealous if Dom Ferdinand or the Marquis de Casablanca so much as looks at one of us. And she's given us the worst rooms, so she can take in other poor deluded creatures and get more money out of them. And there isn't enough to eat. And all the eggs and fish have had a past. And Secundina says there are black beetles as large as chestnuts in the kitchen. Still----"

"Still," echoed Miss Collis, "Monseigneur's awfully interesting, and it's fun being in the same house with him; though I'm afraid he's selfish too, or he wouldn't calmly keep on his front room, when he can't help knowing we're stuffed into back ones without any view. Of course he _is_ a royalty, so perhaps he has his dignity to think of. But I know an American man wouldn't do such a thing, not even if he were a President."

"The Marquis is nice, too," said Mrs. Collis. "Lord Dauntrey tells me his family's one of the oldest in the 'Almanach de Gotha,' whatever _that_ is. And Monseigneur and he are both great friends of the Dauntreys."

"Only of Lord Dauntrey," Dodo corrected her.

"Well, anyhow, they're likely to stay a while in this house, for whatever there is of the best, they get. And they're playing Lord Dauntrey's system with him at the Casino."

"And losing!"

"Yes. But Dom Ferdinand seems to have plenty of money."

"Secundina says the _chef_ told her it was well known that Monseigneur hasn't a sou of his own, but borrows of people who believe in his Cause.

Then he comes here and gambles with what he gets. According to the cook, he's a well-known figure at Monte Carlo, and sometimes calls out when he's playing in the Rooms, 'There's my cousin's head on that gold piece.

It ought to be mine.'"

"His is a mighty good-looking head, anyhow," remarked Miss Collis thoughtfully. She herself was not rich, but her stepfather, a Chicago merchant, was enormously wealthy, and she was wondering whether, to give her a chance of possible queenhood, David Collis might not open his heart and his purse.

Dodo was at the same time asking herself what would be the smallest sum Dom Ferdinand would consider worth looking at with a wife. Also she contemplated the idea of impressing him with the belief that she was a great heiress, until too late for him to change his mind in honour. But first he must fix his mind upon her. She would have been glad to create distrust of him in the hearts of Lottie Collis and her mother; and while they remained at the Bella Vista in Dom Ferdinand's society Dodo decided not to be frightened away by a few inconveniences. Nor did she wish the story of that long-ago murder to reach his ears. Dom Ferdinand had publicly announced that he was horribly superst.i.tious, and perhaps he would not stay if he knew what had happened in the dining-room. He would think it brought bad luck to live in such a house, even if he could bear the idea of a ghost; for he talked of little else than what one ought to do in order to attract luck.

After a few days at Monte Carlo Lord Dauntrey began to find acquaintances, people he had known long ago in England before he was swallowed up in darkest Africa, or those he had met at hotels since his marriage--hotels chosen by Lady Dauntrey for the purpose of making useful friends. He had a certain wistful, weary charm of manner that was somehow likable and aroused sympathy, especially in women, though it was evident that he made no conscious effort to please.

There was a vague, floating rumour of some old, more than half-forgotten scandal about him: an accident, giving the wrong drug when he was studying medicine as a very young man; a death; a sad story hushed up; a prudent disappearance from Europe, urged by annoyed aristocratic relatives who had little money to speed his departure, but gave what they could; professional failure in South Africa; some gambling-trouble in Johannesburg, and a vanis.h.i.+ng again into the unknown. Nevertheless his t.i.tle was an old one. Men of his race had loomed great in dim historic days, and though during the last two centuries no Dauntrey had done anything notable except lose money, sell land, go bankrupt, figure in divorce cases or card scandals, and marry actresses, they had never in their degeneration lost that charm which, in Charles II's day, had won from a pretty d.u.c.h.ess the nickname of the "darling Dauntreys."

The present viscount was the last and perhaps the least of his race; yet, because of his name and the lingering charm--like the sad perfume of _pot-pourri_ clinging to a broken jar--he would have been given the prodigal's welcome at Monte Carlo (that agreeable pound for lost reputations) but for one drawback. The stumbling block was the woman he had made Lady Dauntrey.

In the permanent English colony on the Riviera, with its jewelled sprinkling of American millionaires and its glittering fringe of foreign notables, there are a few charming women upon whom depends the fate of newcomers. These great ladies turned down their thumbs when with experienced eyes they looked upon Lord Dauntrey's wife, when their trained ears heard her voice, with its curiously foreign, slightly rough accent.

n.o.body wanted or intended to turn an uncompromising back upon her. Lord Dauntrey and she could be invited to big entertainments--the mid-season "squashes" which wiped off boring obligations, paid compliments quickly and easily, and pleased the outer circles of acquaintances.h.i.+p. But for intimate things, little luncheons and little dinners to the elect, she would not "do"; which was a pity--because as a bachelor Lord Dauntrey might have been furbished up and made to do quite well. As things stood, the best that could happen to the pair, if they were found to play bridge well, was to be asked to the bridge parties of the great; while for other entertainments they would have to depend on outsiders to whom a t.i.tle was a t.i.tle, no matter how tarnished or how tattered.

As Rose Winter had said to Carleton, "Who _isn't_ Who, if they can play bridge?" But it had been important for Lady Dauntrey's plans not to be received on sufferance. She had meant and expected to be some one in particular. In the South African past of which people here knew nothing, but began to gossip much, it had been her dream to marry a man who could lead her at once to the drawing-room floor of society, and she saw no reason in herself why she should not be a s.h.i.+ning light there. She knew that she was handsome, and fascinating to men, and while using her gifts as best she could, always she had burned with an almost fierce desire to make more of them, to be a beauty and a social star, like those women of whom she read in the "society columns" of month-old London papers, women not half as attractive as she. She had felt in herself the qualities necessary for success in a different world from any she had known; and because, during a period when she was a touring actress she had played the parts of great ladies, she had told herself confidently that she would know without any other teaching how great ladies should talk, behave, and dress.

"Who _was_ she?" people asked each other, of course, when she and her husband appeared at Monte Carlo in the beginning of the season, and Lord Dauntrey began quietly, un.o.btrusively, to remind old acquaintances of his own or of his dead uncle's (the last viscount's) existence. n.o.body could answer that question; but "_What_ was she?" seemed simpler of solution as a puzzle, at least in a negative way; for certainly she was not a lady. And one or two Americans who had lived in the South of their own country insisted that she had a "touch of the tar brush." She confessed to having pa.s.sed some years in South Africa, "in the country a good deal of the time." And something was said by gossips who did not know much, about a first husband who had been "a doctor in some G.o.d-forsaken hole." Perhaps that was true, people told each other; and if so, it explained how she and Dauntrey had met; because it was generally understood that he had been, or tried to be, a doctor in South Africa. Thus the story went round that he had been her late husband's a.s.sistant, and had married her when she was free.

Even the first ten days in Monte Carlo showed Lady Dauntrey that her brilliant scheme for the season was doomed to failure: and that heart of hers, out of which Mrs. Collis said a whole macadamized road might be made, grew sick with disappointment and anxiety.

She had married Dauntrey--almost forced him to marry her, in fact, by fanning the dying embers of his chivalry--because she expected through him to realize her ambitions. Under this motive lay another--an almost savage love, not unlike the love for an Apache of the female of his kind. Only, Dauntrey was not an Apache at heart, and Eve Ruthven was.

Eve, of course, was not her real name. She had been Emma Cotton until she went on the stage twenty years ago, at sixteen; but she was the type of woman who admires and takes the name of Eve. And Mrs. Ruthven she had been as wife and widow after the theatrical career had been abandoned in disaster. Something in her nature would have yearned toward Dauntrey if he had had nothing to recommend him to her ambition; but she would have resisted her own inclination for a penniless man without a t.i.tle.

What money there was between them had been saved in one way or other by her; but, as Dodo Wardropp surmised, there was far less than Mrs.

Ruthven had persuaded Lord Dauntrey to believe. At first she had worked upon the overmastering pa.s.sion of his nature, where most other loves and desires were burnt out or broken down: the pa.s.sion for gambling. He had told her about the roulette system which he had invented, a wonderful system, in practising which with a roulette watch or a toy wheel, he had managed to get through dreadful years of banishment, without dying of boredom. She had encouraged him to hope that with her money they would have enough capital to play the system successfully at Monte Carlo, and win fortune in a way which for long had been the dream of his life, as hers had been to become a personage in "real society."

With five thousand pounds, Lord Dauntrey was confident that he could win through the worst possible slide the system was likely to experience, playing with louis stakes. Mrs. Ruthven mentioned that she had eight thousand pounds. After he had asked her to marry him, and she had said yes, and told everybody she knew, about the engagement--including newspaper men in Johannesburg--Dauntrey discovered that the figure she had mentioned was in hundreds, not thousands. But she sobbed out a pa.s.sionate confession, saying she had lied because she loved him: and they could still go to Monte Carlo, with a plan she had, and try the system with five-franc pieces instead of louis.