Part 31

Everywhere the engagement was talked of, for it was considered extraordinary and hardly allowable that an eccentric, sensational sort of girl about whose early career nobody knew anything should have "gobbled up" a young man whose name was known throughout Europe. There were only a few who went about saying that she was worthy of her Prince; Dick Carleton, who was loyal, though heartbroken; Jim Schuyler, who wondered always why Mary Grant's face was closely associated in his mind with his cousin Molly Maxwell's; Major Norwood, who rejoiced that Mary was appropriated, because the Maharajah of Indorwana would now see the uselessness of lingering at Monte Carlo; and Captain Hannaford, who said rather loudly wherever he went that the Roman chap was a d----d lucky fellow.

The Dauntreys said nothing at all on the subject. If they had opinions they had ceased to count, for more people every day were dropping even Lord Dauntrey. There had been a scene at a hotel, where Lady Dauntrey had struck Miss Collis in the face with her muff, for refusing to bow to her. A pink paper in London had printed a verse describing the scene, which everybody saw and talked about and laughed at. The paying guests all, or almost all, left the Villa Bella Vista after this, and--it was said--tradesmen were refusing supplies. The servants were gone or going; Lady Dauntrey had to do her own work or leave it undone; but still Lord Dauntrey was continually in the Casino, his wife hovering restlessly in the background. Even the Holbeins gave them up, and Lady Dauntrey was sometimes seen with the Frenchman who boasted of receiving Miss Grant's cheques. He was supposed to be introducing amateurs to Lord Dauntrey, as fresh "victims" for the system.

As for Mary, she was out of the exotic atmosphere of gossip and scandal and system-mongering. It would have surprised her extremely if she had been told that whole luncheon parties at villas, and tea-parties at second-rate hotels, thrived and battened on talk concerning her affairs, past, present, and to come. She was so happy that she felt often as if she loved everybody in the world, and longed to make everybody else as happy, or almost as happy, as she.

For two days after meeting the Princess Della Robbia she was thoughtful, and a little absent-minded even with Vanno; but when his brother and sister-in-law came together to call upon her, Marie appeared so light-hearted, so entirely at ease, that Mary began to regain her spirits again. It was foolish to feel sad and anxious, almost conscience-stricken, about Marie, if Marie had none of these feelings about herself.

Then Mrs. Winter gave a large "At Home" in Miss Grant's honour, which was a great success. Marie did not come, because she was unfortunately suffering with headache; but Prince Della Robbia appeared, and stood most of the time near Mary and Vanno.

It was wonderful how many people knew and liked the Winters. All the most interesting "personages" on the Riviera passed through Rose's pretty rooms that afternoon, if but to say "How do you do?" and "Goodbye," and make the acquaintance of Prince Vanno, with the Princess-to-be. Everybody came, from a dowdy and perfectly charming German royalty down to poor old General Caradine, who had played roulette for twenty-five years, with the same live Mexican toad for a fetish; whose two great boasts were that he had learned the language of birds, and that he had fought a duel with a man for defaming Queen Mary of Scots. There were an English Foreign Secretary and a leader of the Opposition hobnobbing together. There was an author who wrote under two names, and had come to study Monte Carlo in order to write two epoch-making novels, one in favour of the Casino, one against, and was taking notes of everybody he met, for both books. There was an Austrian princess who had more beautiful jewels than any woman at Monte Carlo, except a celebrated dancer who was taking a rest cure at the Hôtel de Paris; and there was the princess' half-sister who had married a poor artist and lived in his house in the mountains, doing her own cooking. Also there were all Rose's queer black sheep who yielded meekly to her ribbon-wreathed crook, though they "butted" against George's methods. Some of these were seriously shorn sheep, yet Rose would not for worlds have hurt their feelings by forgetting to invite them.

It was a marvellously incongruous assemblage, as most large and far-reaching entertainments at Monte Carlo must be; and odd things happened in corners behind tea-tables, such as young gamblers producing large wads of notes freshly won in the Rooms and flourishing them under the eyes of ladies who tabooed the name of the Casino. But there was no gossip, no scandal: for somehow in "St. George" Winter's house one felt warmly disposed even to one's enemies; and no unkind words were spoken by any one except General Caradine. He, who had a habit of mumbling his secret thoughts aloud unconsciously, was heard to mutter: "Same old crew: same dull lot, year after year, world without end. Damned tired of 'em!"

This party cleared the air for Mary. Engaged to Prince Vanno Della Robbia, approved by his elder brother, and the guest of the popular Winters, those who counted in the great world were quite ready to forget that she had been "rather talked about," or else to like her all the better for that reason. It was only the people who were on the fringe of things, like Mrs. Cayley-Binns, or beyond the pale, like Mrs. Holbein or Lady Dauntrey, who bitterly remembered her eccentricities.

The day after Rose's "At Home" for Miss Grant was Mary's last as the Winters' guest. Princess Della Robbia wanted her at the Villa Mirasole, and Vanno wished her to go. He had written to tell the Duke of his engagement; and as his father begged him to come home and talk it over, he thought of leaving soon, for three or four days. He felt that, if he must part from Mary, he would like her to be at his brother's house.

While Rose's maid obligingly packed her things, Mary went out on that last afternoon for a walk with Vanno. He had a special object in view, it seemed, but intended it to be a surprise.

First, he took her to the rock of the tablet, "Remember eternal at my heart." It was early, and fashionable folk were still lingering over their luncheons at the restaurants, therefore the two had the long road, in curve after curve of dusty whiteness, all to themselves, as if hour and place were both their own.

"It was here we first spoke to each other," Vanno said, "here where another man of Italy who loved a girl of your country had the great moment of his life to remember. Something made me speak to you at this spot. Perhaps where love has been--everlasting love--it leaves an influence always, something stronger and more eternal and far more subtle than words carved in a tablet of marble or stone. Who can tell about such things in life, things that are in life yet beyond and behind it, where we can catch only whispers of a message and a mystery? Perhaps it was the influence of that other love which made me speak in spite of myself--for I hadn't meant to speak. I wanted to tell you here, dearest one, _cara_, _carissima_, how I love you--how my love for you is 'eternal at my heart' and my soul--all there is of me."

He took both her hands, and when his eyes had said again to her eyes what his lips had just spoken, they both looked up at the words on the marble tablet.

"If those two who loved each other return in spirit sometimes together," Vanno said, "I think they must have been here the day when we first met at this spot, and that they are here again now. If they see us they know why we have come, and they are glad and pleased with us, like two lovers who 'make a match' between dear friends."

"It is a beautiful thought of yours," Mary answered; "and it seems so real that I can almost see those lovers. But remember the story--how they were parted forever on this earth. Do you know, I feel almost--just a tiny bit--superstitious. I mean about our coming here especially to make a vow of eternal love to each other. What if we, too, should be parted?"

"Darling, nothing can part us," Vanno assured her, "because love has made our hearts one, now and forever. You and I have belonged to each other since time began, through hundreds of earth-lives perhaps, and thousands of vicissitudes: always finding one another again. A little while ago, a cloud came between us, and it seemed as if we might be swept away from one another; but it passed, and we found each other and ourselves, in the light, far above cloudline. That's why I say, nothing can part us now, not even death. And as for this tablet of two parted lovers, it wasn't put up to commemorate their sorrows, but their happiness; and so it can bring us only happiness."

"Look!" Mary exclaimed, standing back a little from the mule path which descended there, and pressing closer under the rock of the tablet. Winding down the path came a little procession, a few peasants bareheaded, dressed in black, clean and piteous in their neatness. The women were silently crying, tears wet on their brown cheeks, their eyes red. The men, two who were old and two who were young, carried a very small, roughly made bier, on which was a tiny coffin almost covered with flowers, and wild, scented herbs of the mountains. Their thick boots clattered on the cobblestones, but they made no other sound, and none raised their eyes as they went by. It was as if the lovers were invisible to them, as though they were of a different order of being which the sad eyes were not fitted to see.

As the procession defiled upon the main road, at the foot of the mule path it paused a moment. Though the mourners did not see him, Vanno took off his hat and stood with it held rather high above his head, in his right hand, as is the custom with all Latin men for the passing of a funeral. The driver of a landau that climbed the hill, and a chauffeur driving an automobile down toward the lower Corniche, paid the same reverence to the little coffin, giving right of way to the procession before moving on. The funeral turned in the direction of Roquebrune, and Mary and Vanno guessed that it was going to the church there, and the curé. But in the landau which had waited was a pretty young bride and a tall-hatted bridegroom, with bridesmaid and "best man." They were evidently beginning the honeymoon, which would consist of a long drive in wedding finery and flowers, then a dinner, and perhaps the grand _finale_ of a dance. At sight of the funeral coming out from the mule path and passing directly in front of their horses, the bride let fall her huge bouquet, and regardless of tulle veil and fluffy laces, cast herself into her husband's arms, hiding her face on his shoulder.

"_Quel mauvais signe!_" muttered the driver, as he put on his much paraffined silk hat, settled his wedding _boutonnière_ in its place, and drove on at a trot.

Mary looked up at Vanno without speaking, but her eyes, saddened by the sorrow of others, asked a question.

"'In the midst of life!'" Vanno quoted. "But it is not a bad sign for us or for any one. And even if we were superstitious, we saw the wedding _last_."

XXX

Vanno's "surprise" for Mary was a beautiful piece of land which he wanted to buy for her, in order to have a home where they might come sometimes, and spend a few weeks alone together in the country where they had first met and loved each other.

The ground that he had set his heart upon was close to the curé's garden, and it belonged to Achille Gonzales. Already, at Vanno's request, the curé had interviewed both Achille and the older Gonzales. An appointment had been made for three o'clock, and the curé was to have introduced the two rich peasants, father and son, to the Prince; but owing to the procession which Vanno and Mary had seen, he was not able to keep his engagement. And rather strangely, Mary's host had been prevented by much the same reason, from accepting Vanno's invitation to meet him "on the land" a little later. He too had a funeral service that day, but a very different funeral, and one which oppressed "St. George" Winter with a peculiar sadness. Death, as a rule, did not seem sad to him; but he had a horror of the habit of gambling, which appeared to his eyes like an incubus on a man's life, a dead albatross hung round the neck to rot. And this man who had died and was to be buried in the cemetery at Monaco had been a gambler for thirty years. He and his faded wife had existed rather than lived in a third-class hotel, where they kept on the same rooms year after year, never going away in the summer unless, if exceptionally prosperous, to spend a few of the hottest weeks in the mountains. Their tiny rooms were given them at a cheap rate because the man brought clients to the hotel, "amateurs" who wished to learn his great system, the system to whose perfecting he had devoted thirty years. He had advertised himself, and almost believed in himself, as "_le roi de la roulette_," who for payment of two louis would impart to any one the secret of unlimited wealth. Ignoring failure, pursuing success, his own tiny fortune, his wife's youth, had gone. And as his body went to the grave the whole record of his life--thousands of roulette cards in neat packets, innumerable notebooks containing the great secret--lay waiting for the dustman. The man's wife in preparing to leave Monte Carlo forever had turned all his treasures out of the trunks where through years they had accumulated, and had them flung into a huge dust bin kept for the waste things of the hotel kitchen. This George Winter knew, for the woman had boasted bitterly of the last revenge she meant to take. "'Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.' Let all be swept away and forgotten," she had said; and the words haunted the chaplain, mourning through his brain like the voice of the tideless sea that moaned ceaselessly under his study window.

He longed to go back to Rose and be cheered by her into hopefulness, to have her assure him in her warm, loving way that he was doing some good in this strange place of brilliant gayety and black tragedy; that his work was not all in vain, though so often he likened it to the task of Sisyphus. But he found Dick Carleton with Rose, and their faces told him that there was no hope of comfort.

"Oh, St. George, poor Captain Hannaford is dead!" were Rose's first words as her husband came into the drawing-room. Then she was sorry that she had flung the news at him so abruptly, for just too late she read in his eyes the wistful need of consolation.

"Dead!" he echoed, almost stupidly. He had liked Hannaford, and had often invited him to play chess in the evenings, hoping with unconquerable optimism to "wean him from the Casino." The quiet man, with his black patches, his calm manner and slow smile as unreadable as the eyes of the Sphinx, had seemed to George Winter a curiously tragic yet mysteriously attractive figure. "Hannaford dead!" he repeated slowly.

"I only just heard," Dick explained. "I was down at my hangar tinkering with the _Flying Fish_, for, you know, I'm taking her to Cannes to-morrow. Poor Hannaford's hotel isn't far away, and he used to stroll over and talk to me sometimes. The manager knew that, and sent a boy to ask me to come in at once. He didn't say what the matter was, except that something had happened to Hannaford. It seems that lately he's been in the habit of sleeping through the whole morning, giving orders that he wasn't to be disturbed till he rang. So when there were no signs of him to-day at lunch time nobody worried. It was only when two o'clock came and he hadn't stirred that the _valet de chambre_ began to think it queer. They have glass transoms over the doors, and they could see his room was dark. I expect they listened at the keyhole; anyhow, the landlord was consulted at last, and when they'd knocked and called without getting any answer, at last they opened the door. Luckily nobody was about at that time of day--every one out of doors or in the Casino, so there was no scene. Hannaford was lying as if asleep in bed, but stone cold; and the doctor they sent for said he must have been dead for hours. In his hand was a volume of Omar Khayyam, with a faded white rose for a book marker. There was a bottle half full of veronal tabloids on the table by the bedside; and he was known to be in the habit of taking veronal, as he was a bad sleeper. One hopes it was simply--an overdose, taken accidentally."

"Why should any one suspect the contrary?" Winter asked, his kind voice sharpened by distress.

Dick was silent, looking at Rose.

"Come and sit by me, dear," she said, holding out her hand to her husband. He came, sinking down on the sofa with a sense of relief, for he had been conscious of a weakness in the knees, as if on entering the room he had stumbled blindly against a bar of iron.

"Dick and I had just got to that part, when you opened the door," Rose went on. "We are afraid--you said yourself that Captain Hannaford was changed, the last time he came here."

"Only three days ago," George mused aloud. "He didn't look well. But he said he was all right."

"He would! You know how he hated to talk of himself or anything he felt, poor fellow. But I thought even then--I guessed----"

"What?"

"That it was a blow to him, hearing of Mary Grant's engagement." As she said this, Rose carefully did not look at her cousin. She was not at all anxious about Dick. She knew that he would "get over it," and even prophesied to herself that his heart would be "caught in the rebound" by the first very pretty, very nice girl who happened to be thrown with him in circumstances at all romantic. Mary was not his first love by any means, and would certainly not be his last; and meanwhile Rose felt that unconsciously he was enjoying his own jealous pain. Still, she did not wish to "rub it in." "We both imagined that Captain Hannaford was in love with Miss Grant," she explained; for one had to explain these things to George. She often thought it a wonder that he had come down to earth long enough to fall in love, himself; but when she observed this to him, he had answered that it was not coming down to earth.

"We were most of us more or less in that condition," Dick remarked bravely.

"The rest of you have a great deal left to live for, even without her," said Rose. "Captain Hannaford hadn't. But I'm thankful they're not likely, anyhow, to prove that his death was not--an accident."

"They don't go out of their way to prove such things here, ever," Dick mumbled.

"People will say," Rose pursued, "that there was no motive for suicide--nothing to worry about. He'd won heaps of money, and seemed very keen on the villa he'd bought."

"By Jove, I wonder what'll happen to that unlucky villa now!" Carleton exclaimed. "Somehow, Hannaford didn't seem the sort of chap to bother about wills and leaving all his affairs nice and tidy in case anything happened."

"He told me once that he had no people--that he was entirely alone," said George. "Still, he must have had friends, friends far more intimate than those he made here. Even we were no more than acquaintances. He gave us no confidence."

"I can't imagine his confiding in any one," Rose said. "But--I'm not at all sure whether it's a coincidence or not: a letter has just come by the afternoon post, for Mary Grant, in his handwriting. It has an Italian stamp, and is post-marked Ventimiglia. Probably he wrote it yesterday, at the Château Lontana, knowing it wouldn't get to her till this afternoon, as the posts from Italy are so slow."

"How strange!" George exclaimed. "Strange, and very sad."

"The letter hadn't been in the house five minutes, when Dick came in with the news of his death."

George's eyes, which appeared always to see something mysteriously beautiful behind people's heads, fixed themselves on vacancy that did not seem to be vacant for him. "Hannaford was there in his house alone yesterday, writing to Miss Grant," he murmured. "How little he thought that when she read his letter he would be in another world."

"I wonder?" Rose whispered. "It is long after five. Mary will be coming in soon. Then, perhaps, we shall know."

XXXI

Dick Carleton had gone before Vanno brought Mary back to the Winters' flat. Unconsciously he was enjoying his heartbreak. It was satisfactory to prove the depth and acuteness of his own feelings, for sometimes he had feared that he might not be capable of a great love, a love in the "grand manner," such as swept off their feet men in the novels and plays which women adored. Now he believed himself to be in the throes of such a love and was secretly proud of his passion, but the pain of seeing Prince Vanno with Mary was rather too real, too sharp for analytical enjoyment; and when he could, Dick avoided twisting the knife in his wound.

Rose and George Winter had been alone together only for a few minutes, and there had been no time to decide upon any plan of action, when Mary and Vanno came in.

The girl was looking radiant, for in the excitement of bargaining for land she had forgotten, not the little procession to which men lifted their hats, but the heavy sense of impending loss it had laid upon her heart. Rose thought that she had never seen Mary in such beauty. She seemed to exhale happiness; and the fancy flashed through the mind of the older woman that the girl's body was like a transparent vase filled to its crystal brim with the wine of joy and life. To tell the news of Hannaford's death would be to pour into the vase a dark liquid, and cloud the opalescent wine. Still, Mary must be told, and it would be better, safer, for her to know before she opened the letter with the Italian postmark; otherwise something written there might come upon her with a shock. Rose and her husband glanced at one another. Each was hoping that the other would find a way to begin.