Chapter 33

Now, when she had walked with Dauntrey to the farthest door on the right-hand side of the room, he stopped. Near by stood two blue-coated, gold-braided Casino footmen, as if keeping guard; and suddenly Mary remembered that these or other footmen were always hovering at that spot. Often, too, she had seen shamed and sad-looking men and women sitting dejectedly on the leather cushioned seat by the side of the door. She had never thought about them particularly, but in this moment of enlightenment she guessed why they haunted this corner, like starved birds waiting in the hope of crumbs. She was thankful to see that the seat was deserted. It would have been terrible to be one of those who had to wait while everybody who knew the secret of the door passed by and saw, and stared curiously or pityingly. She began to understand how it was that Eve's shattered nerves had forbidden her to come and "stand by" Lord Dauntrey.

Leaving the girl a pace or two behind, he squared his shoulders and went up to the footmen. Mary could not hear what he said, but the Casino servant's answer was distinctly audible. It was politely spoken, yet there was, or seemed to be, in the man's manner a slight indifference, and even disdain, which would not have been there in addressing a successful, not a broken, gambler.

"Monsieur is engaged at present, but will be free in a few moments," she heard.

Dauntrey came quickly back to her, as to a refuge. The eyes of both footmen rested upon her for an instant. They were almost, but not quite, expressionless. Under control yet visible was surprise and animal curiosity. The men knew Miss Grant by sight and reputation as "one of the lucky ones," and she felt that they were wondering if she too had lost all, and come whining to the "management" for a _viatique_.

"For heaven's sake let's stand out of the way," Dauntrey whispered, "so every one won't know what we're after." They moved to a little distance, and Lord Dauntrey began trying to make conversation, but could think of nothing to say. Long pauses fell. Both tried not to look at the mirror door, but their eyes were drawn there, as if by an unseen power behind it. They could see themselves and each other in the glass. Mary thought that no one could help noticing how anxious and strained were their faces.

After some moments, which seemed long, the door opened without sound and a woman appeared. She hung her head, and her face was concealed with a veil such as Princess Della Robbia had worn when she came to Rose Winter's flat. A footman with a yellow paper in his hand preceded the drooping figure, steering toward the outer door of the Salle Schmidt, as if going to the atrium. He had a peculiarly stolid air, as if performing a business duty to which he was so used that he could do it very well while other matters engaged his thoughts.

"_She's_ got something, anyhow," mumbled Lord Dauntrey, in a sickly voice. "Come along, please. It's our turn now."

He identified Mary with his own interests, as if they were intimately hers. Politely, or perhaps in cowardice, he stood aside to let her go before him. Immediately and without noise the door was closed behind them.

Mary's hands were cold. A little pulse was beating in her throat, and its throbbing made her feel slightly sick. She looked up, wide-eyed, into the face of a man who had dismissed the veiled woman, and stood waiting to receive them.

He was spare, elderly, black-coated, almost absurdly respectable looking, with his gray beard and mild gaze behind gold-rimmed pince-nez. The small bare room with its plain desk and two or three chairs made a bleak background for the neat figure of the man. The austerity of the closet-like enclosure, in contrast with the magnificence outside, seemed meant as a warning to let petitions be brief, to the point, and above all strictly within the bounds of reason.

"What do you wish me to do for you?" As he asked this question, with cool civility, the benevolent yet cautious eyes peered through their glass screen at Mary; and the thought sprang into her mind that this elderly man of commonplace appearance had perhaps listened to more harrowing stories of human misery and ruin than any other person in the world. Even the most popular father confessor of the church could scarcely have heard as many agonizing appeals. He must be able to discriminate between truth and falsehood, to read faces and judge voices, for no doubt, as Mary guessed, people must often come to him swearing they had lost many thousands of francs, when in reality their losses amounted only to a few hundreds.

Dauntrey, whose hand was unsteady, held out his season card of admission to the Casino. "I suppose you know who I am," he said.

The man in the black coat looked at the name on the card, and inclined his head slightly as if in affirmation.

"I've lost all I had in the world," Dauntrey went on in a dead voice, "and all my wife had. I've been here since the beginning of December and had the most cursed luck. I--Miss Grant will bear me out. She was staying at our house. You've seen her before no doubt. One of your lucky ones. You--you'll have to do something decent for me. Unfortunately I've got into debt--my rent--and tradesmen. No good having a scandal. You've had a lot out of me--close on ten thousand pounds. You can afford to give me back 10 per cent., can't you?"

The official's face hardened. He looked a man who could be obdurate as well as benevolent. "I regret," he replied in English, "that it is impossible to give any such sum. Nothing like it has ever been granted, not even to those who have lost great fortunes. If the Casino made such presents it would cease to exist. And I cannot help thinking that my lord in excitement exaggerates his losses. I have heard that he has lost not more than four thousand pounds, and that three fourths of that sum belonged to his friends, for whom he kindly played. In my lord's case, two first-class tickets to London----"

"Of no use whatever," Dauntrey broke in sharply. "What would you have me do when my wife and I get to England without a penny?"

"After all, that is your lordship's affair."

Dauntrey's face crimsoned, and the veins stood out in his temples. Then the red faded, leaving him yellow pale.

"It will be your affair if I kill myself here, as I shall be driven to do if you won't help me. My name will cause some little sensation after I'm dead, if it never made any stir while I lived."

"Couldn't the Casino spare Lord Dauntrey five hundred pounds, at least?" Mary begged, stumbling to the rescue. "It would be so dreadful for everybody concerned if--if--anything happened."

"The administration cannot allow itself to be threatened," its mouthpiece answered.

"My threat isn't an empty one," Dauntrey persisted. "You leave only one exit open for me."

"I am sorry, but I have no authority to grant large sums to any one, on any pretext." The tone was firm, but something in the eyes encouraged Mary to persevere. She pleaded as nothing imaginable could have induced her to plead for herself, and at last the man with the pince-nez promised to "recommend the administration" to give his lordship two thousand francs. Dauntrey was provided with a bit of yellow paper, such as Mary had seen in the hand of the veiled woman. This, he was told, must be presented upstairs, and in the morning Dauntrey would receive the gift, or "loan," of two thousand francs.

Mary had expected him to be bitterly disappointed, but when she had secured her hand-bag and they were leaving the Casino together, he seemed comparatively cheerful. "With this money I may win everything back at baccarat in Nice," he said, "if Eve doesn't object. We've got to go somewhere. Why not there? And if I lose, things won't be any worse with us than they are now. What use is two thousand francs except to gamble with? Still, I didn't think they'd give me as much, and they wouldn't, by half, if it hadn't been for you."

"I hope Lady Dauntrey won't be disappointed," Mary ventured.

"I don't know--I don't know," he muttered. "Eve is in a strange state of mind. It makes me anxious for the future. But what's the good of worrying? Perhaps there won't be any future."

Lady Dauntrey was sitting on an iron seat near the top of the gardens. She sprang up when the lamplight showed her the two figures she knew, walking side by side.

"Well?" she asked breathlessly.

"Two thousand francs--thanks to Miss Grant," her husband answered; and Mary was afraid of an angry outburst, but it did not come.

"Two thousand francs!" Eve echoed, dully. "Better than nothing. But what's to become of us? Where shall we go? If we buy tickets even second class for England, there's a lot gone. If only we could get away to some place near by and hide ourselves for a while, till we could have time to look round and make up our minds!" She turned quickly to Mary. "While you were both gone," she said, "I was thinking. It's true, isn't it, that Captain Hannaford left the château he bought to you?"

"Yes," Mary admitted.

"I was wondering if you'd let us live in it for a few days--or a few weeks."

"I'm going there myself to-night," Mary said impulsively. Then a curious sensation gripped her, as if she were caught by a wave and swept onward, in spite of herself, toward something which she feared and even hated. She wished intensely that Lady Dauntrey had not mentioned the Château Lontana, and that it had been possible to be silent about her own plans. She had spoken without stopping to think; but even now that she did think, she could not see how silence would have been easy. It seemed that unless she were willing to be hard and ungenerous to this unhappy man and woman she could not avoid offering them shelter for a few days. Quickly she told herself that she must give them money in addition to the _viatique_ which Lord Dauntrey would receive in cash to-morrow. If he still refused to accept anything more from her, Lady Dauntrey would need no persuasion. Mary was instinctively sure of this. And she thought that when the husband and wife were in possession of a few hundred pounds they would be only too glad to leave the gloomy Château Lontana and go to England or somewhere else, to recover themselves.

While she hesitated, feeling compelled to invite the Dauntreys, yet facing the necessity with almost exaggerated reluctance, Eve saved her the responsibility of deciding. "Won't you take us with you?" she asked humbly. "It seems--providential--for us that you're going. So strange, too, that it should be to-night; and so queer the idea coming into my head. Just as if it was meant to be!"

Now the matter had passed beyond control, Mary had the impulse to rebel. The wave had got her and was bearing her along. She tried to catch at safety.

"But--Lord Dauntrey must stay in Monte Carlo--till to-morrow. And I have to go to-night," she stammered. "I don't quite see----"

"You're going alone?" Eve asked.

"Yes."

"How queer of the Princess Della Robbia to let you do that!"

"She doesn't know." The girl defended Marie.

"Doesn't know where you're going?"

"No." Mary felt obliged to explain. "I was--vexed at something that happened to-day. So I--finished my visit sooner than I expected."

"Oh! And does your friend Mrs. Winter approve?"

"She doesn't know, either. She's at Nice for the day, with her husband."

"Surely somebody must know what you're doing. Your own Prince Vanno?"

Mary shrank a little from the familiar name on lips that had no right to it; yet she answered gently: "Even he doesn't know. He's in Rome; but perhaps you've heard. It was in the paper, Marie--Princess Della Robbia told me. I shall write to him, of course."

"Of course. Meanwhile, you seem to be--sneaking off the stage when nobody's looking." Lady Dauntrey laughed a staccato laugh at her own rather lumbering joke.

"Nobody but you and Lord Dauntrey, as it happens."

"Well," Eve began to speak slowly, as if on reflection, "I'm sure you must have some wise reason for what you're doing, dear; but whatever it is, I can't help thinking it will be a very good thing for you to have us with you. You're too young and pretty to be running about by yourself, and going to stay in lonesome villas. There are servants at the Château Lontana who expect you, anyhow, I suppose?"

"Only a caretaker Captain Hannaford put in. I haven't had time to let her know."

"Dear me, you are casual! The place is near Ventimiglia, isn't it? I've never seen it."

"I've only passed, motoring to Bordighera. It's not very far beyond the frontier."

"Good! That simplifies matters. Dauntrey can easily run back to Monte to-morrow and get his money. When are you starting, dear?"

"I must find out about trains. And before I leave, I have to go to the Galerie Charles Trois and get a jeweller there to take back one or two pieces of jewellery, for I must have some money. When I--decided to start this evening, the bank was already shut."

Lady Dauntrey darted a sudden glance of interest at the bag in Mary's hand, which she had been too preoccupied to notice until now. Her guest had kept most of the much talked of jewels at the bank, while staying at the Villa Bella Vista, but it was not difficult to guess that at present they were in their owner's hand.

"You won't get nearly what the things are worth," she said. "A pity to sell just because you were too late to cash a cheque! I've got a hundred francs. Why not let us all three go to Italy with that, and Dauntrey can finance you with the Casino money till you get some from your bank? He can take over a cheque of yours. That would save time, you know--for it's late already."

"Very well," Mary agreed. A heavy sense of depression had fallen upon her. The eager anxiety she had felt to reach the end of her journey and write to Vanno died down like a fire quenched by water.

"You didn't tell me that you had a hundred francs," Dauntrey reproached his wife.

"No," she replied. "And I wouldn't have told you now, if you weren't obliged to keep out of the Casino."

He turned his head aside, and was silent.

"Aren't you taking luggage?" Lady Dauntrey inquired of Mary.

"Yes. I have a small trunk and a hand-bag with me."

"Where are they?"

"In the room of the concierge at Mrs. Winter's."

"Let me think a minute," said Eve. "Why should we wait for a train? There's sure not to be one when we want it. We have no luggage, and you say your trunk is small. We might hire a carriage and drive. It would be much pleasanter. Perhaps you can lend me a few things for to-night?"

"Of course," Mary answered, trying to be cordial.

"How good you are to us!" Eve exclaimed. "We can never be grateful enough. Dauntrey, will you go on to the railway station and order a commissionnaire to fetch Mary's things from the Winters' house? He can bring them back to the station in his cart."

"Why shouldn't we pick the things up on our way, if we're to have a carriage?" her husband argued.

"Because my plan's the best," she insisted. "We must eat before we start. There won't be much food in the villa, as Mary's paying a surprise visit. We'll go to a little hotel by the station. I'm frozen, and food will do us all good. By the time we're ready to start the man will have brought the luggage."

"It sounds unnecessarily complicated," Dauntrey muttered; but Eve gave him a gimlet look from under level brows, and he slouched away obediently, leaving his wife to follow slowly with the girl.

XXXV

The last familiar face Mary saw as she left Monte Carlo was that of the hunchbacked dwarf at St. Roman. He was hobbling away from his pitch to go home, and from the window of the closed landau Mary waved a hand to him as the horses trotted by.

"Who was that?" Eve asked, leaning forward, then throwing herself back as if she wished not to be seen.

"Only the dwarf beggar at the bridge," Mary answered.

"Oh, only a beggar!" Lady Dauntrey settled herself comfortably again.

The voice of the waves came up with the wind in a ceaseless moan, and for the first time Mary hated the sound of the sea. It was like the wailing of a great company of mourning women. Far above the road, Roquebrune clock struck seven. It was scarcely night, but darkness loomed ahead like a black wall, toward which the horses hurried yet could never pass. In this wall glittered square peepholes of light, which were windows of houses at Cap Martin--Angelo's house among others. When with a turn of the road the bright spots vanished, Mary was overwhelmed with homesickness, such pangs as children suffer. She did not wish to be in the Villa Mirasole, but leaving it behind in the darkness and travelling toward the unknown made her feel that she was shut out in the night alone, far from Vanno, far from all that could remind her of him.

"Remember eternal!" She thought with a superstitious pang of the tablet and of the parted lovers.

Marie had "seen pigeons," and said that they meant sorrow and separation. The girl had written of this to Vanno, only a few hours ago, in a spirit of laughter, but she had been young and happy then. Now she felt deserted and old. She was not glad to have the Dauntreys with her. She would rather have been going alone to the Château Lontana. Eve's figure sitting beside her, Lord Dauntrey's opposite, with his back to the horses, looked black against blackness. They spoke seldom and they were like dreams of the night, which had taken life. Mary remembered how she had dreamed of Eve, and how glad she had been to wake. But now she was awake and Eve was by her side. It was like a garden game the big girls had made her play when she was the youngest child in the convent-school. They had wound long, thick strings round her waist and ankles; then they had made her run, and when she had gone a certain distance they drew her back, slowly and firmly, or with violence, according to their mood. This had been a torture to the imaginative little girl, and Sister Marie-des-Anges, seeing it one day, ordered the older children to stop, and the game had been forbidden. This benevolent edict had given Mary a warm sense of being protected; but there was no one to protect her now.

If the girl had been happy, she could have laughed at these memories, coming up in connection with the two silent, dark figures of the man and woman she was to shelter in her house; but in her perplexity their presence made the desolation of the night more desolate.

Mentone streets were empty and the shops shut: only hotel and villa windows were bright. The carriage passed through the town, and beyond the last houses of Garavan the night was blacker than before.

They came to the Italian frontier, broken off from the rich slopes of France by the deep Gorge of St. Louis, resonant with singing water. Mary knew how by daylight the mountains of Italy loomed cold in contrast to the warm cultivation of the western hills, bare as a series of stone shelves at an antiquary's, spread with a few rags of faded green to show off some sparsely scattered jewels. But in the night she could see nothing, and could hear only the moan of sea and wind, mingled strangely with the high complaining voice of hidden streams. On the mountainside twinkled the feeble lights of Grimaldi, a poor rock-town once the fortress house of Monaco's princes; and after another plunge into the darkness of folding hills and olive groves they passed La Mortola. Not more than a mile or two beyond the village and the sleeping garden, Mary, with her face always at the window, said:

"Now we are coming to the Château Lontana!"

Eve and her husband both leaned forward, straining their eyes to make out a height rising above the road, and the black shape of a house with towers which seemed cut in the purple curtain of the sky. There were black nunlike forms of cypress trees also, which stood grouped together as if looking down thoughtfully from their tall slopes, and old, wide-branching olives were filmy as a gray cloud in the darkness.

The Monte Carlo coachman evidently knew the place, for he slowed down without being asked, and stopped in front of a large double gate of iron between glimmering columns of pale stone. This was the entrance from the road; but an avenue ran steeply up the rocky slope, twisting in zigzags to reach the house. Jumping down from his box the man tried the gates, expecting to find them locked, but they yielded to a stout push, and a moment later he drove in. The horses, tired from breasting the wind on many hills, went up the incline slowly, the wheels grating over small stones on the ill-kept drive. Mary thought the noise of hoofs and wheels so sharp and unmistakable that she looked to see some eye of light suddenly open in the black face of the house. It was not yet nine o'clock, and the caretaker could hardly have gone to bed. But there was no sign of life; and the dark château among crowding trees might have stood in silence and desolation for a century of sleep, like the lost palace of the enchanted beauty.

A flight of marble steps went up to a colonnaded terrace, and Lord Dauntrey mounted first to ring the bell.

"Perhaps the caretaker has given herself a holiday, and we can't get in after all," he gloomily suggested. His wife did not answer; but Mary, sitting beside the silent woman, heard her breathing fast. This betrayal of anxiety seemed tragic. "Poor Lady Dauntrey!" the girl said to herself in pity. "Here is her one hope of shelter. She's afraid it may fail." And Mary tried to be glad that whatever happened it was in her power to help the unlucky couple.

The carriage lights gilded the marble stairs, showing cracks and a green, mossy growth under each shallow step. There was a heavy fragrance of datura flowers, sickly sweet, that mingled with a scent of moss and mouldy, unkempt growing things, touching the imagination like the perfume of sad memories.

Lord Dauntrey rang again and again the old-fashioned bell whose insistent voice could be heard jangling through the house. At last, when he had rung four times, a wavering light suddenly streaked with yellow the glass crescent above the door. There was a noise of a chair falling, a bolt slipping back, a key turning rustily; and through these sounds of life the shrill yap, yap of a little dog cut like sharp crackings of a whip. The door opened a few inches, and the yellow light haloed a dark head.

"Who is it?" a woman's voice called out in bad Italian, through the shrill bursts of barking.

Lord Dauntrey could neither speak nor understand Italian; but already Mary was halfway up the steps. "It is the Signorina Grant, of whom you have heard," she explained. "You know from the lawyer that Captain Hannaford has given his place to me?"

"Ah, the Signorina at last!" exclaimed the voice, with an accent of joy. "Be thou still, little ten times devil!" The door opened wide, and a gust of wind would have blown out the flame of the lamp in the woman's hand had she not hastily stepped back into the shelter of a vestibule, at the same time squeezing the miniature wolf-hound under her arm, so that its yap was crushed into a stricken rumble.

Lady Dauntrey now began to ascend the steps, and the coachman, anxious to get home, alertly dismounted the two pieces of baggage. He brought the small trunk and big dressing-bag up to the door, plumping them down on the marble floor of the terrace so noisily that the dog again convulsed itself with rage. The price the man asked was paid without haggling; he and Lord Dauntrey between them dragged Mary's possessions into the vestibule, and the door was shut. As the girl heard the sounds of hoofs trotting gayly away, she would have given much to call after the driver, to spring into the carriage and let herself be taken anywhere, if only she need not stay with the Dauntreys and the yapping dog in this desolate house, which was a dead man's gift to her.