PAUL VIOTTI TAPPED WITH THE tips of his finger nails the five cards which lay face downwards before him upon the green baize table. His four companions took the hint and prepared to listen. This was no ordinary card room in which the five men had met. It was the Holy of Holies in the most famous gambling club of New York. He would be a brave man who sought entrance there while a séance was being held.
“To-night,” he said, “we are to speak of serious things. Perhaps I am more careful of my health than you others. Anyway, I know when the going is good. One gang against us was dangerous enough. We had all we could take care of when Tim Rooney brought his boys out. Now there are two. I am for fighting when I think that we’ll win. Now I am sure that we shall lose if we go on, I say let us get away.”
His four companions listened in absorbed interest. The game was momentarily forgotten. The cards lay untouched, the chips uncounted. Each seemed to have adopted a different attitude. Marcus Constantine—he was known under a different name in Paris and on the French Riviera—a long, graceful-looking youth, pale of complexion, with dark eyes and a curiously sensitive mouth, slouched across the table, his head supported between his hands, his eyes fixed upon his chief as though afraid of missing a single word. Matthew Drane, a good-looking, elaborately dressed man with smoothly brushed brown hair, pink-complexioned, with a humorous mouth and a right hand which was reputed to be the quickest in the world at drawing a lethal weapon from the obscurity of a hidden pocket, listened with equal interest but more geniality. Tom Meredith, his neighbour, the flamboyant beau of the party, a pudgy-faced, narrow-eyed man of early middle age, dressed in imitation Savile Row cut tweeds, a shirt of violent design and a shameless tie, grunted his impartial approval of the scheme, whilst Edward Staines opposite, a tired-looking man who had the appearance of a successful but hard-working lawyer, listened with the slightly cynical air of one predisposed towards pessimism.
“That’s all very well for you, Paul,” the latter remarked. “You’ve got a country to go to where you can buy a mountain or two and an old castle and live like a lord for a few dollars a year. What the hell are we going to do, fussing about Europe? I’ll admit we’re up against a tough proposition here with this gang of Tim Rooney’s hanging about after our territory, but what about lying low for a few months?”
“No damn’ good that,” Tom Meredith objected. “While we are lying low, Tim would be organising and we should never get our feet in again. Seems to me we’re about through with this racket. We’ve got to either split up or find some place where the Star Spangled Banner doesn’t flutter. We’ve had the cream. Let’s leave the slops for Tim.”
Paul Viotti, a swarthy, black-haired Corsican, expensively dressed, clean-shaven and perfumed, shook a fat forefinger at them all, a forefinger upon which flashed a wickedly assertive diamond.
“I’ve got a hunch for you,” he announced. “There’s only one place for us in the world. Money there for the picking up and a clear field.”
Marcus Constantine looked swiftly across the table.
“Where’s that?” he demanded.
“The South of France,” was the prompt and triumphant reply. “Listen, I got a brother there and I know something. Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo—why at the baccarat there there’s millions, millions you can handle, mind, in good mille notes, changes hands every night. Suckers there by the thousands and not a nursemaid to look after them. Hauling liquor round here has been a good-enough job while it lasted, but the shooting’s getting a bit too free and easy for me.”
The long young man, Marcus Constantine, tapped a cigarette upon the table and lit it. There was a gleam of excitement in his eyes.
“I’ll say that Paul is dead right,” he declared. “As you fellows know, I’m over there every year. I’ve got crowds of friends and I know the runs. Matthew isn’t exactly a stranger there, either.”
Paul Viotti smiled upon them all beneficently with outstretched hands.
“You hear Marcus?” he exclaimed. “He knows what he talks about. My brother over there, too. He knows. He’s not in the game, but he knows. What I say is that we wander over there separately, take our time about it, mind; look at Paris and London first. Wait until people have forgotten what they may have heard about us out here. Time enough if we begin in, say, twelve months. My brother, he can get ready what we need. It won’t be much. Just a place where we can meet and no one guesses—like here.
“There is one thing,” Matthew Drane remarked. “I guess we’ll have to take care of Luke Cheyne. Last we heard of him, he was out that way.”
There was a moment’s silence. Paul Viotti was stroking his black moustache.
“A pity about Luke,” he sighed. “He should not have left us. Luke will have to go. Only a few days ago I had a pleasant little chat with Inspector Haygon down at Police Headquarters. I am afraid there is no doubt it was Luke who tipped Conyers off. He didn’t clear out for nothing.”
“What about the stock?” Edward Staines demanded.
“Never been so low,” Viotti confided. “And listen, boys, I’ve an offer for the lot. Four hundred and fifty thousand cash. The stuff’s worth more, but it would clean things up nicely.”
“I’m for making the move,” Tom Meredith declared. “I’d sooner find myself alive at the Ritz Bar this time next month, taking one with Charlie, than feeding the worms up at Woodlawn.”
“Disgusting fellow,” Marcus Constantine drawled. “I take it we’re all agreed upon the move. We’ve drunk many a highball to our luck in this little room before we’ve gone out into the hard world. We’ll drink one now to ‘La Belle France’!”
They all crowded around the sideboard and helped themselves, for no waiter ever crossed the threshold of their sanctum whilst their session was in progress. Paul Viotti alone remained at the table. He had made a million dollars by bootlegging, but it was his boast that he had never yet touched a drop of hard liquor in his life.
“Come along, you boys,” he called out presently. “Let’s start the game. I ante five hundred. Very cheap to see me. Come along, all of you.”
They took their places. The heavily curtained windows reduced the roar of the avenue beyond the square to something stifled and monotonous, but the rattle of the overhead railway and the sirens from the steamships and ferries on the river came as reminders that they were in the heart of the great city.
“I guess,” Tom Meredith remarked thoughtfully, “it will seem quiet at first in Monte Carlo.”
“Maybe we’d soon all be quieter,” Paul Viotti grinned, “if we stayed on here.”
That was the afternoon when it was decided that the most dangerous gang of liquor dealers in the United States should disband and enter upon a fresh sphere of operations in Europe.
Certainly Roger Sloane’s environment was all right. He was seated in a wisteria-wreathed arbour with his back to the snow-capped Alpes-Maritimes and before him the most enchanting landscape in the world. Little wafts of perfume floated up to him from a grove of orange trees just below, and beyond, the mellowing meadows and flower farms faded downwards to the blue streak of the Mediterranean. The Estérels made a silvery background on his right. The ancient hill town of La Bastide hemmed him in on the nearer left—a village so ancient that it was almost impossible to tell the inhabited dwellings from the crawling masses of grey stone. The sunshine was a live thing that morning, dancing and gleaming through the trees and amongst the flowers which stocked his garden. Without a doubt his environment was beyond reproach, yet before him on the rude Provençal table was a neat pile of manuscript paper clipped into a leather case, it’s pages virgin of even one disfiguring scrawl. For three successive mornings he had lounged in this miniature paradise, had soaked himself in the sunshine, been sung to by countless sweet-throated birds, had feasted his eyes upon this mass of colouring and absorbed the perfume of an everchanging nosegay of delicious scents. Not a line written. And he called himself an author!
Along the stony footpath which fringed his domain came an unusual sight, a pedestrian tourist. His attire was strange and his gait peculiar. He walked with a loping slouch, a staff in his right hand, and although more than fully grown, he wore what seemed in the distance to be the undress uniform of a Boy Scout. As he drew nearer, he paused in the middle of the path to stare at Sloane—a little rudely, the latter thought. The occupant of the arbour rose to his feet and sauntered to the wall. The newcomer was, at any rate, a curiosity worth looking at. Besides, there was something familiar about his slouch.
The two men scrutinised one another in perfunctory fashion, perhaps at first a little insolently. Then came almost simultaneous recognition.
“Holy Jupiter!” the pedestrian exclaimed. “It’s the poet!”
“Erskine!” the other young man gasped. “Pips Erskine!”
They babbled a few senseless commonplaces. They had been at a preparatory school and Oxford together, but during the four years since they had slipped into the larger world they had not met.
“How are things with you, Pips?” Roger Sloane asked.
“So-so. And you?”
“I keep free from debts and melancholia. What,” he continued, “for the love of Mike, is the meaning of that musical-comedy costume of yours? Have we gone back to the days of Drury Lane? Are you Dick Whittington searching for the Lord Mayor of these parts? You won’t like him when you find him. He’s a small fruit farmer and seldom sober. He comes of a Corsican family, his name’s Viotti, he hasn’t got a gilliflowers and carnations and even the wild roses, which had taken root in its moss-encrusted interstices. His climb had been long and strenuous. He had always possessed the gift of concentration and his eyes were fixed thirstily upon the villa. His friend struck a gong.
“Gin and tonic, whisky and Perrier or country wine?” the latter enquired.
“Gin and tonic,” was the prompt response. “A double, if you don’t mind. I have walked from Nice.”
Sloane gave the order to the white-coated butler who had hastened out from the house. Then he established his friend in a comfortable wicker chair, pushed the cigarettes across to him and filled his own pipe.
“So you really are a lord,” he exclaimed, with a touch of the young American’s curiosity toward an inherited title lurking in his tone.
“I certainly am,” Erskine assured him. “Only a baron, I regret to say. But, after all, I’ve always had a lurking weakness for barons. Ancient history is full of the records of their deeds. Runnymede, for instance—”
The drinks were brought and served. Sloane gave orders for luncheon.
“What, then, is your full designation nowadays?” he enquired of his guest.
“Reginald Phillip Erskine, as before, but I am commonly known now as Lord Erskine. The baronry—”
“That will do,” Roger Sloane interrupted. “I shall continue to call you Pips.”
“How flows the inspiration?” Erskine enquired. “Seems to me a pretty tidy spot for ink-slinging.”
Sloane pointed ruefully to the untouched sheets of manuscript paper. Leisure, environment, opportunity—all favorable. Not a line written.
“I seem to lack mental energy out here,” he complained, stretching his muscular limbs. “I wake up in the morning brimful of ideas and by the time I settle down I can do nothing but listen to the bees, smell the flowers and warm myself in the sunshine.”
“The highest forms of literary effort,” Erskine began. “I mean, the best sort of stuff in your line, was never turned out by any one leading a life of contemplation. The very atmosphere here is soporific.... How did your investments withstand this Wall Street débâcle?”
“Gallantly,” Roger Sloane admitted. “Besides, my uncle’s popped off since our college days and I’ve touched again.”
“There you are,” Erskine pointed out. “You lack the incentive for mental exertion. The stories may form in your brain, but in this atmosphere they will never materialise.... Just a drain more, thanks.”
“What do you suggest, then?” Sloane enquired, having ministered for the second time to his friend’s thirst.
“A breaking away from this life of æsthetic indolence, a life of travel and action,” the visitor urged.
“You are not suggesting,” Sloane shivered, “that I should come out to Ceylon and watch tea plants growing and hang little cups on rubber trees?”
“Certainly I am not suggesting anything of the sort,” Erskine assured him. “I doubt whether you have the moral stamina for a life of real hard work and privations.”
“What about those week-ends at Kandy or Colombo?”
“You have been fed up with false information,” Erskine declared coldly. “Besides, I myself have finished with Ceylon. In course of time I must settle down in England and look after my property and interests. I was referring to the free life I am leading nowadays, wandering about where I like, sleeping where I like, making friends or not as I please. Join me, Roger. Let us explore this part of the world.”
“Not if you’re going on wearing those clothes,” Roger insisted.
“You probably have a car,” his friend observed. “In which case these garments, eminently suitable for pedestrian exercise, will not be necessary. I will humour your whims. I can still assure you, though,” he added, glancing down dispassionately at his stained wide khaki shorts and hairy legs, “that this is the everyday costume of the Singhalese planter.”
“Very healthy and manly and all that,” Roger admitted doubtfully, “but in these parts—well, you have to wear a tie to get into the Casino.”
“I am a broad-minded person,” Erskine declared. “I have other costumes for other pursuits. To-day I am mountaineering.”
ON THE WAY DOWN THE winding road after lunch Roger Sloane drove his Packard at almost a walking pace. The flower gatherers were at work and the drowsy air was sweet with a tangle of perfumes. After the second corner the road became little more than a gully with orange trees on either side. Women and girls and a sprinkling of older people were everywhere busy on ladders, over the tops of which they disappeared into a green-and-white obscurity. Petals were falling everywhere like snow. Roger was surprised to find that even his companion, leaning back in the car, was entranced into silence. His lips were parted, his eyes half-closed. He had the air of one travelling in Paradise. Roger contemplated him in benign approval. Notwithstanding his uncouth attire and mundane luncheon conversation, it was obvious that the joint enthusiasms of their Oxford days might easily be reawakened. He found himself speculating as to the thoughts which might be framing themselves in his friend’s brain.
“Damn’ good smell,” the latter murmured drowsily.
Roger opened his lips but his sharp word of rebuke was never spoken. He was suddenly conscious of a brisk tap on the top of his skull and a slowly fluttering waterfall of exquisite blossoms upon his cheeks and head and around his feet. He stopped the car and glanced upwards. Lying upon her stomach on the overhanging branch of a veteran orange tree was a wisp of a girl, long-legged, long-armed, with a mass of chestnut brown hair blowing about her shoulders, eyes so light a hazel that they seemed almost yellow as they laughed into his, and a face like the face of an elf born of a fairy grinning down upon him.
“Mademoiselle!” he protested. “I am blinded.”
He gained nothing by his expostulation. Seeming literally to be hanging through space, she leaned across and reached a neighbouring bough, plucked another branch laden with blossom and, leaning once more perilously downwards to ensure a correct aim, she dropped a shower of petals upon him so that he was again enveloped. Then she laughed and he fancied that a bird must be singing in the tree.
“You little devil!” Roger exclaimed. “Wait till I can get at you.”
He had no idea of any definite purpose. He obeyed apparently some sort of a hunter’s instinct, some subtle response that stirred within him to the challenge of those brown eyes. He jammed the hand brake a little tighter and swung himself out of the car. He had taken one step towards the trunk of the tree—it was probably in his mind to climb or pretend to do so—when one of the most thrilling sounds he had ever heard in his life clamped the soles of his feet to the ground and sent an icy chill, even on that day of hot sunshine, through his veins to the very pulses of his heart. It was the cry of a child in terror—but the soul of the child had found its way to her lips....
There was a flutter of commotion everywhere. The small crowd of flower gatherers, mostly girls and mostly of the same peasant type, deep-bosomed, black-eyed and bareheaded, came creeping out of unexpected corners. From the higher part of the orchard descended the disturbing object and as soon as Sloane had seen him he scented trouble. Here was a man in a passion, a black-browed, heavily built man, cutting the air with a switch as he moved, an ugly protruding jaw reminiscent somehow of the dragon in a child’s story. Sloane could almost imagine the red fire gleaming from the newcomer’s eyes as he loped along through the daffodil-starred long grass. Then his somewhat indifferent curiosity changed to a more poignant emotion. He felt his pulses quicken and a sense of crisis precipitated itself. The strange child above was swaying on the bough and moaning to herself. He looked up. There were no tears in her eyes, but she went on moaning and her fingers were digging deep into the bark.
“Do not be afraid, little one,” he called out encouragingly. “He can’t reach you.”
“There is a ladder,” she sobbed.
Roger saw that she was right and the object of the child’s dread seemed indeed about to use it. He planted it against the tree but, as he placed his foot upon the first rung, Roger realised what was about to happen. The child above him had crawled in her terror an inch or two farther along the bough and that inch or two was just a trifle too far. The limb of the tree sagged and cracked. She swung for a moment in mid-air, a strange medley of struggling arms and legs, a shape of grace and phantasy. Then the bark fell away, the white wood split. Already in the road beneath her Roger stiffened his back, preparing for the inevitable happening. With the final crashing of the branch, she came warm and fluttering into his arms.
A moment before the incident had seemed trivial—an ugly interlude in a pleasing but unexciting hillside pastoral. Now, to Roger Sloane, the seconds seemed stabbed with some magic fire. He was caught up in a blaze of incredible and incomprehensible sensation. This half-dressed, probably unwashed brat was clinging to him with all the abandon of her long supple limbs and pulsating body, her strange-coloured eyes aflame, her breath sweet as the flowers themselves falling hot upon his cheeks. She was nearly mad with terror. Her sobs told him that and the frantic rise and fall of her small bosoms.... The man’s voice—he was only a yard or two away now—broke the silence, ugly with curses, terrifying with threats. The girls and women, even the few older men, gave way before him like scared rabbits. He jumped into the road and paused for a moment to recover his breath. A sudden silence seemed to have fallen upon every one, one of those silences which precede a storm. The man eyed Roger evilly. He had dropped his switch and began to swing his fists. There was mischief in his bloodshot eyes, murder in the leer of his grinning mouth. The girl who, in obedience to his gesture, had unwound herself from Roger’s arms, crept towards the car which was standing by the side of the road. Erskine opened the door and pulled her in, but all the time her eyes were fixed in agony upon her protector. A brave old woman, toothless and decrepit, with a shawl around her head, called out from the other side of the ditch.
“Let him alone, Pierre Viotti. You have drunk too much red wine. The young American has done no harm. That little devil, Jeannine, she pelted him with the orange blossoms. Au temps de ‘la fleur’ ils sont tous en folie!“
Pierre Viotti took no notice. He went blundering on to his doom. He struck savagely at the usually good-natured, but now stern face of the young man, only to find that he was beating the air. A moment later he was lying in the dust of the road, partial oblivion clouding his murky senses. Roger bent over him for a moment, listened to his stertorous, but regular breathing, then stepped back into the car.... The attitude of the crowd was somewhat uncertain. Some of the young women were dancing for joy. The older people were whispering together. One lad was slouching off towards the village. After all, the man lying in the road was a rentier and their mayor and the man who had struck him was a foreigner. They hung together like leeches, these French village folk.
“If you take my advice,” Erskine observed, with a glance around, “you will get out of this, Roger. Pity you could not have let the fellow know what you did at Harvard and Oxford in boxing.”
“No time to tell him anything,” Roger replied, thrusting the gear shift into reverse. “I couldn’t even warn him. He came at me like a mad bull.”
They backed noiselessly to the corner, swung around and crawled up to the entrance of the pink-and-white villa on the hillside. The girl seemed to have got over her terror and was making queer little noises in her throat. Roger glanced at her questioningly. Suddenly he realised that she was laughing. Her eyes were dancing with happiness, her brown face had puckered up into creases of mirth, her soft, delicately shaped mouth was quivering, no longer with fear. She was clasping and unclasping the long fingers of her scratched but shapely brown hands and swaying from side to side in rhythmical content.
“What the mischief are you going to do with her?” his friend demanded.
“Heaven knows,” Roger answered.
Madame Vinay, cuisinière and housekeeper, summoned from the kitchen, was inclined to take a gloomy view of the situation.
“He is a bad man, Pierre Viotti,” she declared, “but he is the mayor and he owns all the land, the épicerie and the café. He does what he pleases with the girls and all the people about the place. If Monsieur has touched him, he will probably go to prison.”
“Oh, la, la,” the girl laughed gaily. “Has Monsieur seen Henri our gendarme? He is no bigger than I am. Monsieur Viotti—he is the strongest man in the village and voilà, Monsieur l’a battu.”
“Where are your father and mother?” Roger asked.
The girl shook her head. Madame Vinay explained.
“The child’s father and mother never lived in the village, Monsieur. Her mother taught in the school and her father was a foreman at Molinard’s, the perfume factory in Grasse. They died within a few weeks of one another and her grandmother brought her here. Now the old grandmother is herself dead since last week. What is to become of the child no one knows. The Curé has concerned himself in the matter, but Monsieur le Maire wishes her for his house. Just now there is work for all in the fields, but afterwards—well, Pierre Viotti is the mayor and what can one do?”
The child calmly stretched out her long arm, helped herself to an apple from a dish on the sideboard and began to eat it. “I will never work for Monsieur Viotti,” she declared firmly. “He is a bad man. All the children in the village are afraid of him and so am I. I will pick the blossom for Monsieur here,” she added, her eyes laughing into Roger’s.
“The Curé is in the kitchen,” Madame Vinay observed. “He might have advice to give. After what has happened, the child would be better away from the neighbourhood altogether.”
“By all means let us consult him,” Roger agreed. “Fetch him at once, Madame.”
Madame Vinay rustled out and the Curé presently made his appearance in her company. He was an elderly man, rotund in shape and with few of the graces of life, but his expression was pleasant and he was at once helpful.
“Monsieur,” he said earnestly to Roger, “what you have done may indeed turn out to be a fortunate action. We are all bound to respect Monsieur le Maire, who is a hard-working man and has amassed much money. Nevertheless he is not a fitting guardian for the child.”
“He is a beast!” the latter declared vehemently, her white, beautifully shaped teeth crunching once more into the apple.
“What I should like to do,” Roger Sloane explained, “is to find the child reputable employment and a safe home until she is old enough to decide for herself what she would like to do. I will be responsible for any money that is necessary and if you will help me in this matter, Monsieur le Curé, I will with pleasure give a donation to your poor.”
“I wish to remain with Monsieur,” the child begged. “I will work for him. I will be obedient. I will do what I am told.”
Madame Vinay, who was standing in the background, coughed.
“In the village,” she said severely, “they say that you obey no one.”
“In the village,” the child scoffed. “But that is different. Here I will obey you, Madame Vinay. I will obey Monsieur.”
“What do you think, Monsieur?” Sloane asked.
The Curé hesitated.
“Jeannine is a strange child but I believe that she has good qualities,” he pronounced. “They say in the village that she fights all the time.”
“I only fight if I am touched,” she cried. “I will not be touched by those others. When they leave me alone, I behave.”
The Curé scratched his chin thoughtfully.
“If Monsieur would try her for a week,” he suggested.
The girl sprang suddenly to her feet and danced around the room, her arms waving, her legs moving to some strange measure. They stared at her in astonishment. Madame Vinay sighed and shook her head. The Curé only smiled.
“They say that her mother once wished to be a danseuse,” he confided. “The child is difficult but I have found her truthful.”
She came to a sudden pause in front of Sloane, dropped almost on one knee, seized his hand and kissed it. Then she stood up again.
“I will obey you,” she promised. “I will pick your blossoms faster than any one has picked them before. I will do everything that Madame Vinay tells me.”
Roger Sloane drew a deep sigh of relief. He found himself wondering why he was so persistently anxious to avoid looking into the depths of those questioning brown eyes with their strange lights.
“That’s all arranged then,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “You and I can get on our way to Nice, Pips.”
In Nice the two young men spent an evening of masculine, but restrained hilarity. Upon their arrival Roger strolled upon the Promenade des Anglais and watched the sunset while his companion went to his hotel and changed his attire. Afterwards they visited the Casino, drank cocktails and amused themselves playing midget golf. They dined at a famous restaurant, gambled for an hour or two at the Palais de la Mediterranée, supped at Maxim’s and even danced. At three o’clock Roger dropped his friend at his hotel and drove homeward through the velvety darkness. For the last ten kilometres the road wound its way through the flower-growing country and already the carts were crawling along the lanes to pick up their cargoes of blossoms. Once or twice Roger paused by the wayside to listen to the nightingales and to feel the queer fascination of the silence before the morning. The first pencil shaft of light was creeping into the sky when he reached the villa. He drove his car into the garage, locked it up and mounted to his room by the back stairs. He walked with light footsteps and a smile upon his lips. After the meretricious and somewhat futile straining after pleasure of a night spent in crowded rooms, of gambling, noisy music and overheated atmospheres, the coolness and perfume of his own home delighted him. He felt like the boy Marius on his way to his bed in the mountain monastery, with the life of the cities far behind and the purity and sweetness of the country already like a sweet tonic in his blood.... Then, during his last few steps, his fingers outstretched towards the handle of his door, he came to a sudden standstill. There was an old-fashioned Provençal bench outside which looked as though it had been made from a discarded refectory table. Seated upon it, wrapped in an old dressing gown of flaming red, probably a loan from Madame, was Jeannine!
Her eyes shone up into his, her quivering lips parted expectantly. He was astonished to find how sternly he could speak.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Je ne fais pas de mal,” she faltered, a little frightened at his tone. “Je vous attendais.“
“But why?”
Her lips became almost pathetic.
“Monsieur Viotti—”
“What about him?” Roger interrupted, speaking with fierce anxiety but keeping his voice low.
“He told me that if I served him in the house and he spent the evening out, that I must wait up till he came home. He told me that any one I served would expect that. I was waiting for you.”
He met her eyes, frankly this time. There was a stern but kindly light in his own and a sense of great relief in has heart. It was not for the child to know that his knees were trembling.
“Forget everything that such a beast has told you,” he enjoined. “Go to your room at once and stay there.”
She rose obediently to her feet, but she was shivering as though his words had hurt her. He laid his hands upon her shoulders and kissed her lightly upon either cheek. He could almost feel the warmth of her inviting lips as he passed them by.
“Now run,” he ordered.
He entered his room, closed the door and listened to her departing footsteps. As soon as there was silence, he turned the key very softly and threw wide open both his windows. Already the streak of light had grown broader and the moon paler. There was only one nightingale left in the valley, still singing faintly. Here and there, along the lanes, the carts with their swaying lanterns were moving—ghostly, obscure objects. And all the time the perfume of the orange blossoms. He thought of the old woman’s speech—
“Au temps de ‘la fleur’ ils sont tous en folie!“
The two friends lunched together a few days later under a striped umbrella upon the terrace of Juan-les-Pins Casino. Already the early heat had drawn the crowds to the sands below. There was a fair sprinkling of bathers, a great many more lying about enjoying a sun bath. The suggestion of a mistral had given a faint tang to the sea breeze. The Estérels had thrown off their silver mantle, their sharp outline was firm and vivid against the crystalline background.
“What about the little protégée?” Erskine asked.
“I’ve scarcely seen her during the last few days,” Roger replied. “Madame Vinay’s latest report was that she was restless and didn’t wish to work outdoors. She thought of trying to get a job for her in a flower shop in Nice or Monte Carlo.”
Erskine watched the serving of a mostelle with an air of reverent admiration.
“Do you know, Roger,” he confided, “I shouldn’t be surprised if that girl didn’t turn out damn’ good-looking some day.”
“She’s quite attractive enough now,” Roger said calmly.
“No, but I mean a real tip-topper,” Erskine persisted. “She’s got something about her, I don’t know what it is, that these Frenchmen describe so well in the memoirs of all their famous courtesans. Write a novel about her, old chap. If you’ve got the right touch, you might achieve immortality.”
“I’m off work,” was the rather terse reply. “Look here, Pips, I’ve been thinking—one’s got to clear out of here presently. I’ve been here six months on end and that’s pretty well long enough. I’ll make a bargain with you, if you like. I’ll do as you suggested and go back to England with you, look up a few old pals and get some golf while you settle up your affairs and—what is it you have to do?—stick a coronet on your head and strut across the Palace yard and get turned into a bona fide Lord. I’ll see you through this if you’ll come across to the States with me for a month or so and get back here in say, November or December. How does that appeal to you?”
“It’s a bargain,” Erskine declared emphatically. “Nothing I should like better, old chap. We’ll get back, as you say, about October or November and I’ll have a real season here. I always thought I should like to, if I could get hold of a little of the ready. When do you think you could make a move? The only trouble is, I really ought to get over to London at once, you know. I got off at Marseilles and I was doing a tramp around here to sort of get my bearings, but the lawyers are getting a bit sniffy now. They can’t understand a chap who’s come in for a title and a decent spot of the ready not being anxious to get his hands on it.”
“I’ll start to-morrow, if you like,” Roger promised.
“Capital,” Erskine exclaimed. “We’ll make it the day after, if you don’t mind. Or let’s say the first day we can get seats on the Blue Train; or there may be a steamer calling at Monaco.”
“Agreed.”
They lunched lazily but with excellent appetites. The food was good, the wine and service perfection. Erskine was thoroughly content. Now and then he looked at his friend curiously.
“I should think you’re right in what you say, old chap,” he remarked. “Six months might be enough for any one without a move, and you look a trifle fagged. We’ll have some golf up in Scotland, but by Jove, the one thing I’m going to look forward to is our next season out here.”
They raised their glasses and drank to it. A few thousand miles westward five men, including Paul Viotti, the illustrious brother of the Mayor of La Bastide, were doing very much the same thing.
Down the mountainside, a week later, in snakelike fashion, through the vine-growing country and the stripped flower farms crawled the dilapidated grey motor omnibus which plied between the out-of-the-way hill villages of the Alpes-Maritimes and Nice.
Jeannine, with Madame Vinay on one side and the Curé opposite, felt herself so well guarded that she indulged in a derisive grimace at Monsieur Viotti, the Mayor, who was leaning against his grey stone wall looking steadily seawards. Madame Vinay reproached her charge severely.
“Manners such as that are not for the town,” she declared. “In Nice one must forget such peasant ways.”
Jeannine made no reply. There was something in her eyes, however, and the quiet smile upon her lips which made her guardian just a trifle uncomfortable. More and more every day she was getting to realise that this charge which she had undertaken at Roger’s earnest request was likely to be no sinecure. When they turned the corner, from which was a fine view of the sea below, Jeannine leaned out and her eyes travelled westward. That way his ship had gone—the man whom some day she hoped to make suffer....
Behind them, and some distance above them now, Monsieur Pierre Viotti was also gazing at the sea, a cunning smile of self-satisfaction upon his lips. Halfway across the Atlantic, bound straight for Cherbourg, came the great three-funnelled steamer bearing his famous brother and his friends. He gloated over the thought of their arrival, made plans, indulged in mischievous fancies. What strange instructions these were which he had received. Never mind, they should all be carried out. In time, perhaps, he might become as rich as Paul....
That little devil of a Jeannine! So they were going to try and cheat him out of her. Not a chance. What did Monte Carlo matter? He would be there himself in a few weeks. The leer of the village satyr parted his thick red lips.
THE SEASON TO THE SUCCESS of which Roger and Erskine had drunk on the terrace at Juan-les-Pins, the season which Pierre Viotti had awaited so impatiently, had arrived at last, and on a certain evening early in December the round table in the centre of the Sporting Club bar at Monte Carlo was crowded with a gay little company of habitués. There were the Terence Browns—Franco-Americans and globe-trotters known in every resort in Europe, but finding in Monte Carlo, as Terence Brown frequently confided, their spiritual home. There was Lady Julia Harborough, elderly and autocratic, but exceedingly popular and still one of the leaders of the social life. There was Luke Cheyne, an American banker, a very pleasant fellow and also popular, but with the appearance of a man who was suffering from nerves or dyspepsia. He was talking to Prince Savonarilda, a tall, elegant young Sicilian, who was reported to have enormous, but unprofitable estates in Sicily and who made periodic but mysterious visits to New York. Maggie Saunders, the most sought-after young woman in the Principality, was retailing one of her marvellous stories to Lord Bradley, an English newspaper peer, who was clutching six plaques of a hundred thousand francs each which he had just won at trente et quarante. Under cover of the general buzz of conversation, Luke Cheyne was talking very confidentially indeed to Prince Savonarilda.
“What I’d like to know,” he whispered, “is just this. How do I stand with the boys? You could tell me, Prince. Don’t mind giving me a bit of a scare, if it’s coming to me. I just want to know.”
Savonarilda tapped a cigarette upon the table and lit it. To all appearance he was sublimely indifferent to the gossip of the little group from whose circle they had slightly withdrawn their chairs. All the time, however, from under his veiled eyelids he was watching—and listening.
“I think you’re all right, Luke,” he replied. “They didn’t like your quitting, of course. But we’ve quit ourselves now, so you were only anticipating. The game was getting too dangerous and you were never a fighting man, were you?”
“I never pretended to be,” Luke Cheyne reminded his companion. “That wasn’t my part of the show. Tell me, then—it seems odd to be calling you Prince—you think I’m all right to stick on here? They’re not sore with me?”
“You’re all right to stick on here till doomsday,” Savonarilda drawled, “even if some of the others are having a look at Europe. That doesn’t mean that they’re here on serious business. You should sleep at night, Luke. No one has anything against you.”
Luke Cheyne called for another drink. His spirits had risen visibly. He responded with alacrity when Lord Bradley beckoned him to draw his chair a little closer.
“We’re all wondering,” the latter observed, “how long it would take a disciplined band of criminals, such as you have on the other side, Mr. Cheyne, to break down the police of this country as they seem to have done in the States. Those little pets in the gay uniforms outside, for instance, I wonder how some cold shooting in the streets would strike them.”
“You may get it,” Cheyne rejoined grimly, “and then you’ll find out. The profession is becoming overcrowded in New York and Chicago and I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear any day that a band of American crooks had made this place their headquarters. Did you read about that Englishman who disappeared last week in Marseilles?”
“Nothing in that,” Terence Brown intervened, breaking off his conversation with Lady Julia. “He was a poor man and he wouldn’t have been worth robbing.”