Part 21

"Hurrah!" said Dick, his eyes always on the table and Mary's play. "I'm glad some one's in luck, anyhow." He had heard from Rose Winter, and from Hannaford himself, of the negotiations for Madame Rachel Berenger's place just across the Italian frontier. Every one knew of her wild play at the Casino and of her losses, which were now so great that she wished to sell the old château which she had bought after her retirement from the stage; and Hannaford's friends were aware that for some months he had been quietly bargaining for it. His ambition was to buy the place out of his winnings, but until to-night they had not reached the price asked by the old actress. Twenty years ago she had paid two hundred thousand francs for the huge house, almost in ruin. Later she had spent nearly as much again in restoring it, and creating a garden which for a while had been the marvel of the coast. Long ago, however, it had gone back to wilderness. The splendid furniture imported by Madame Berenger from the palace of an impoverished Bourbon princess had lost its gilding and its rich brocade of silk and velvet. Two discouraged servants remained with her, out of a staff of twelve. Once there had been ten gardeners; now there was none; and the one hope left for this lost palace of sleep was in a new ownership. The whole place smelt of decay and desolation, yet to Hannaford it was more attractive than such a beautiful and prosperous domain as Schuyler's Stellamare. The sad loveliness of the old house and the old garden made a special appeal to him. He wanted to save the Château Lontana from ruin, and felt superstitiously that the interest he would find in such a task might redeem him from the desolation which, like a high wall, rose between him and life.

Something of this feeling Mrs. Winter had gathered from Hannaford, though he had never put it in words, and Dick knew she would be glad of to-night's news. It was no secret that Madame Berenger had refused to accept less than three hundred thousand francs; therefore Dick sprang to the conclusion that this must be the sum of Hannaford's winnings.

"I congratulate you heartily," he said. "My cousin will be delighted. She likes you, and has been interested about the Château Lontana."

"She's been very kind and sympathetic. No wonder everybody loves her! I know what she'll want to say now, even if she doesn't say it. 'Pay for your château, and play no more.' Well, if you see her sooner than I do, please tell Mrs. Winter I'm going to take her advice before I get it--to a certain extent. Not a louis do I risk till the place is mine. Then--perhaps I'll follow my luck, and try to make the Casino help me restore the house and garden. Not that I want to do much, only enough to make the place habitable, and give the flowers a chance to breathe."

"Then you mean to live there?"

"For a while at all events. Perhaps not long. Who knows what one may do? But I shall have the pleasure of knowing it's mine."

Dick, though interested, had fallen into absent-mindedness. Two or three persons having slipped away, he was able to get nearer the table, and to see more clearly what Mary was doing. It almost seemed that if he and Hannaford concentrated their whole minds upon willing her to stop play for the night, she must feel the influence. Her luck was out, certainly. She had lost a great deal, but she had a goodly store of winnings to fall back upon.

"Let's will her hard, to leave off," he suggested, half ashamed of the proposal, yet secretly in earnest.

Hannaford smiled indulgence. "All right," he said. "Here goes!"

Vanno Della Robbia less deliberately yet with more ardour had thrown himself into the same experiment. He thought that Mary's anger against him might have one good result: in making her wish to leave the table where he had come to sit. She could scarcely fall upon worse luck elsewhere, and perhaps she might give up play for the evening if she went away from this unlucky corner. If a wish of his could be granted by fate, she would never play again. Yet, desiring this with all the force that was in him, he began nevertheless to gamble, for the first time since coming to Monte Carlo. No conscientious scruple had held him back hitherto; but the game had not appealed to him. He disliked the crowding, the sordidness and vulgarity which, to his mind, attended it; and it seemed to him that public gambling was an unintelligent, greedy vice.

His idea in putting on money now was merely to "pay for his place," whence he did not mean to move as long as Mary stayed. Many other men would be ready to snatch the chair the instant he abandoned it, therefore he had no right to usurp the Casino's property without payment. He had no small money with him, and to avoid the trouble of changing notes with a croupier, he staked a hundred francs on red, the colour of the number which Lord Dauntrey had just advised Mary to choose.

As if she fully realized that her luck had failed her to-night, for several spins she had been guided entirely by Lord Dauntrey. He was directing her play according to his system, to which his faith still desperately clung, though he now admitted to his friends that his own capital was not big enough to test it fairly. His game was upon numbers, columns, and dozens, all at the same time, increasing the stakes, as he said, "with the bank's money," or, in other words, after a win. It was therefore a loss following directly upon a win which was the worst enemy of the system, and occasionally there came a long run of exactly this alternation: win, loss, win, loss, win, loss. It happened so to-night, greatly to his annoyance, as he hoped to interest Miss Grant in his method. Dom Ferdinand was sulkily waiting for more remittances, and amusing himself meanwhile by throwing about a few louis here and there, undirected by his friend Lord Dauntrey. The Marquis de Casablanca had stopped play entirely, perhaps in the hope of setting his patron a wise example. The Collises had never been useful. Dodo Wardropp liked to gamble "on her own," and Mrs. Ernstein, though rich, was a coward when it came to risking her money at the tables. Others in the house made themselves as irritating to Lord Dauntrey in their selfish obstinacy as Dodo; and all his hopes centred upon Mary. She was a lamb whom his wife had cleverly caught in the bushes, a lamb with golden fleece. He would have liked above all things to help her win this first night; but curiously enough she lost monotonously, no matter what game she tried, unless Prince Giovanni Della Robbia pushed money on to some chance where her stake happened to lie. Then and then only she won; so that if she inclined to superstition (as did most women at the tables) she would believe that not Lord Dauntrey but the Roman "brought her luck." Nevertheless she seemed vexed rather than pleased when the Prince (whom Dauntrey knew by sight and name) fixed upon a chance where she had staked. Presently, though she won four times running when this occurred, she kept back her money until the last, staking only just before the croupier's "Rien ne va plus," to prevent Della Robbia from following her lead. At last, she got up impatiently. "I am tired!" she said, in a voice that trembled slightly. "I hardly know what I'm doing."

Mary did not pick up the money--comparatively little--which was the remnant of her losses, and Dauntrey asked sympathetically if she would like him to play for her, according to the plan they had begun to follow out.

"Yes, if you please," she replied, seeming to attach no importance to her answer or to the small pile of gold and notes, all that remained of a hundred thousand francs with which she had begun the evening.

Without another glance at the table, or a flicker of the lashes at Vanno, she turned away; and after a whispered word or two in Lord Dauntrey's ear, Eve went with her, in the direction of the Salle Schmidt.

Vanno had an immediate impulse to rise, but common sense forbade. Mary had so unmistakably shown her dislike of his presence, and the association of his play with hers, that it was impossible for him to follow her. Though he detested Lady Dauntrey, in his heart he preferred her to a man as a companion for Mary, even a man like Dick Carleton; and for the moment the jealousy he could not control was at rest. Seeing that Lord Dauntrey's weary eyes were fixed upon him, he continued to play, as if he had not noticed Mary's going. By and by the game began to absorb him in a way he would not have believed possible. He became excited, with an odd, tense excitement which had an almost fierce joy in it. Never before had he felt an emotion exactly like this, except once, when in India he and a friend had lain in wait for a man-eating tiger, in the night, at the tiger's drinking place. Dimly it amused him to compare this sensation with the other; and it surprised him, too, that he should feel as he felt now; for gambling had always seemed to him not only greedy and sordid and vulgar, but a stupid way of passing the time, unworthy a man or woman of sense and breeding.

To his own amazement, the pleasure of the game was balm for the heartache Mary had made him suffer. He did not forget her, or his repentance, or the determination to right himself in her eyes; yet the hot throb of his anxiety was soothed, as by an opiate. What he felt for Mary was but a part of this keen emotion that flowed through him like a tide.

He remembered the prophecy of his friend the astrologer, in the Libyan desert, that his star in the ascendant would bring him good fortune this month of December. Certainly he had not found luck in love. Perhaps it was to come to him through gambling. He wondered if there could be any possible connection between the stars and the actions of a man, or the chances of a game like roulette. Though his studies of the stars had been confined to astronomy, the romance in him, and the dreamer's love of mystery, refused to shut the door on belief in another branch of the same science. It was enormously interesting to think that perhaps the stars, the planets, controlled this tiny sphere of ivory in its mad dash round the revolving wheel. Since the whole universe was made up of marvels almost beyond credence, who with certainty could say "no?"

Vanno was not rich. He had no more than thirty thousand francs a year, left him by his mother, and had refused an extra allowance from the Duke. It had been his pride to live within his income, all through his travels, and despite his love of collecting rare books. His father had given him his observatory at Monte Della Robbia, but nothing else of importance. His invention was beginning to bring him in a little, but it would never make a fortune; and he was not one who could afford a "flutter" at Monte Carlo without counting the cost. To-night, however, after winning some thousands of francs, it did not occur to him--as it might if some other man in his circumstances had been concerned--that it would be wise to stop. The spin of the wheel began to exert a fascination over his mind, appealing to all that was adventurous in him. Not once was he conscious of putting on a stake for the sake of the money it might gain; not once did he hesitate from fear of loss. It was the call of the unknown that lured him, the thrilling doubt as to where the ball would stop.

The little dancing white thing, magical as a silver bullet, seemed a miniature incarnation of destiny, spinning his fate. Always Vanno was pricked by the desire to try again, and see if he could once more foretell the result. There lay the poignant, the indescribable charm: in not knowing.

He saw now that he had misjudged gamblers in believing them all to be mercenary, at least at the moment of gambling. Some might be so, many perhaps; but he began to realize that the chief appeal was to the imaginative temperament, such as he knew his own, and guessed Mary's, to be.

When his stake was larger than usual--larger a good deal than he could afford in prudence--he revelled in the uncertainty of the event which he intensely desired. And it dawned in his mind that this was the true intoxication of the gambler, the delicious anguish of playing with the unknown. It was a more dangerous intoxication than he had supposed it to be, because more subtle, as the effect of cocaine or morphia is more insidious than that of alcohol.

Like a hunter, he pursued the game until, to his great surprise, a croupier announced, "Les trois derniers." It was almost impossible to believe that he had sat at the table for hours.

By this time Vanno had abandoned all attempt to check his winnings and losses. It was not until he had gathered up his money and counted it on leaving the table that he knew he had lost not only his winnings, but three thousand francs besides. The discovery filled him with a peculiar, bitter annoyance, as if an alkaloid fluid ran through his veins: and this not because of the loss, which was comparatively insignificant, but because he had failed, because he had been ignominiously beaten by the bank. He had had his luck, and had stupidly thrown it away, after the manner of all those fools for whom he had felt a superior, pitying contempt. Still, he was not sorry that he had played. His short experience of roulette and the curious exhilaration the spin of the wheel had given brought him nearer to understanding Mary than he had ever come before, or could have come otherwise. Also, his combativeness was roused. His nerves seemed to quiver, to bristle with an angry determination to justify himself in his own eyes, and to have his revenge upon the brutal power of the bank.

"I'll get it all back from them to-morrow," he thought, "and more besides. I won't be beaten. And when I've done something worth doing, I'll stop. That's the way to gamble."

XX

Mary was not comfortable at the Dauntreys', and the house depressed her; but it was a refuge from the Hôtel de Paris, where Prince Giovanni Della Robbia was; and Lady Dauntrey was so kind, so affectionate, that Mary felt it her duty to be grateful. Almost strangers as they were, her hostess poured into her ears a great many intimate confidences, and asked her guest's advice as well as sympathy. Mary was touched by this, for Lady Dauntrey seemed a strong woman; and, besides, the slight put upon her by Vanno had left a raw wound which appreciation from others helped superficially to heal. She had been so openly admired and flattered at Monte Carlo that vanity had blossomed in her nature like a quick-growing flower, though she had no idea that she had become vain. Men looked at her with the look which is a tribute from the whole sex. She could hardly bear it that the One Man should disapprove.

Those impecunious painters who haunt the open-air restaurants at Monte Carlo, on the chance of selling a five-minute portrait, had buzzed round her like bees round a honey-pot, but they were not the only ones. Two artists of some renown had got themselves introduced through acquaintances the Casino had given her, and begged her to sit to them. Also it was true, as gossip said, that the artist she had met in the train had arrived, and hastened to renew the acquaintance. He had painted her portrait. She had paid for it and--burnt it. She, the quiet schoolgirl, the earnest postulant, the novice who had never thought of her own face, who for a year had not seen it in a mirror or missed the sight of it, knew herself now for a beauty, a charming figure of importance in this strange, concrete little world where Hercules entertained his guests. And then, to be despised by the one person who occupied her thoughts, despised and thrust away at the very moment when he confessed to loving her! It was a blow to the woman's pride which had not consciously stooped to unworthiness, and a still sharper hurt to her new vanity.

She wanted to show Vanno, if he still thought of her, that others burned incense to her beauty, though he had not placed her on an altar. The discomforts of the Villa Bella Vista mattered little to the girl who had gone through a hard novitiate in a Scotch convent. She made her own bed and dusted her room. She did not care what she ate; and she tried to throw her whole heart into the life of the household, that amazing household which was unlike anything she could have imagined out of a disordered dream.

Always after coming to the Dauntreys' she continued to lose at the Casino, often large sums, occasionally picking up a little, as if luck hovered near, awaiting its cue to return, only to be frightened away again. But after a few days' time, in which more than two hundred thousand francs slipped through her fingers, Lady Dauntrey suggested that Miss Grant should "rest" for a while, meantime letting Dauntrey play his system for her benefit and with her capital. This idea did not amuse Mary.

The "gambler's blood," of which she had been warned by her father, warmed to the excitement of the game. She craved this excitement, and felt lost without it, now that the interest of Prince Vanno's distant presence in her life was gone. Still, she could not bring herself to refuse an offer which seemed meant in kindness. She gave Lord Dauntrey one thousand louis, the smallest capital, he explained, necessary to exploit his system with five-franc pieces at roulette. He assured her that with pleasure he would add this money to the same sum of his own, and play for her as well as himself, the syndicate he had originally formed being now dissolved. Dodo hinted that operations had been stopped because the whole capital was lost, but Lord Dauntrey had already mentioned to Mary that a few slight reverses had frightened the "shareholders." This cowardice, he said, had so disgusted him that he had given back the capital to each one intact, and politely refused to play any longer for the syndicate. A position of such responsibility was only possible if he were upheld by the confidence of all concerned. Otherwise, he preferred to gamble only for himself, or for a personal friend or two who trusted him.

Each night, after Mary placed her thousand louis in his hands, Lord Dauntrey gave her five hundred francs. This was as high a percentage, he made clear to her, as could be got out of the capital except at a risk of heavy losses, and he "did not care to run big risks for a woman." On a thousand louis, Lord Dauntrey explained, five hundred francs profit nightly represented 900 per cent. a year, which was of course enormous; and regarded thus, her risk was an investment, not a speculation.

When some of Lady Dauntrey's bright particular stars left her firmament (as they did leave occasionally with the quick flight of comets) she hastened to fill the vacancies with any small luminaries available. The Villa Bella Vista remained full, even when Mrs. Ernstein went suddenly to Cannes, where "villa life" might be considered even more aristocratic than at "Monte"; and Dom Ferdinand took himself and his ally out of danger's way when Dodo refused to understand that only flirtation, not marriage, was possible with a "commoner." The price of Dauntrey hospitality had, however, fallen. Those who could be attracted by the bait of their barren title had now to be looked for low in the social scale: and it was difficult to get eligible _partis_ with whom to dazzle heiresses. The slender Austrian count, whom Dodo scornfully pronounced a "don't count," vanished mysteriously soon after Mary's arrival. He did not even say goodbye; and Dodo, who vowed that she had often heard him groaning behind the thin partition which divided her room from his, went whispering about the house that he had committed suicide in the Casino gardens.

"Why not?" she argued almost convulsively, when Mary protested that surely such a dreadful thing could not have been kept secret. "Would the Dauntreys tell, if they knew? No, of course they'd hush it up, and get rid of anything he'd left--in one way or another. Not that there was much to get rid of, for the Mont de Pieté was a kind of home from home for the Count. He used to run back and forth between there and the Casino, like a distracted rabbit: pawn his watch; play with the money; win; race back and get his watch; lose again; and so on a dozen times a day, till he was stripped of jewellery down to his studs and collar buttons. It all came from his obstinacy in believing that the croupiers at trente et quarante were signalling to him whether it was going to be _inverse_ or _couleur_, when they were really only licking their thumbs to deal the cards better! _I_ say, if you must have a fetish, have a reasonable one, like playing for neighbours of zero at roulette. But that silly boy thought himself too smart for roulette, and he wouldn't take any advice, so this is what comes of it. I feel in my bones that _his_ are in the suicide's cemetery this minute. Has nobody told you that there are no inquests of coroners here in this principality? And a jolly good thing, too! Why make the rest of us gloomy by putting nasty details in the papers, when we've come here to enjoy ourselves? _They_ don't ask people to gamble, they merely make it nice for 'em if they're determined to, and anyhow it's honest gambling. They don't want you to play if you can't afford it and are going to be an idiot, because they hate rows and scandal. It's all for _our_ benefit! If a man's cad enough to blow his brains out at the tables, all over a lady's dress, he is whisked away so quick nobody has time to realize what's up before a glass door in the wall has opened with a spring and shut again as if nothing had happened. Not a croupier stops spinning. I call it magnificent. But it does make you feel a bit creepy when anybody you've known disappears into space!"