The Guests Of Hercules Part 35

The darkness was bleached with a sheen of stars, and the pulsing beams that shot across the sky from the lighthouses of Cap Ferrat and Antibes.

Here and there, too, an electric lamp dangled from a wire over the mule path, and revealed a flash of white teeth in a dark face or struck a glint from a pair of deep Italian eyes. But they were the eyes and the teeth of young men, or of girls climbing with baskets of was.h.i.+ng on their heads. The old men looked down, watching their own footsteps; and their stooping figures were vague and shadowy as s.h.i.+ps that pa.s.s in the night, not to be recognized if seen again by daylight. Now and then a little old woman stumbled up the path, driving a donkey which tripped daintily along in silent primness, under a load of fresh-cut olive branches. The sound of the tiny feet on the stones and the swish of olive leaves against the wall added to the poetry of the night for Vanno, though he reflected that it was all commonplace enough to the donkeys and the women, who were as important as he in the scheme of things. After all, it was but a question of thinking!

Boys coming up from some late errand, played at being soldiers, and sprang out at each other from behind jutting corners of rock, imitating the firing of guns, or uttering explosive cries.

Vanno felt a great kindness for all the world, and especially for these people who--almost all of them--had the blood of Italy in their veins.

He remembered the cure's saying with a smile that even now, if all Italians were banished from the French coast between Cannes and Mentone, the Riviera would be emptied of more than half its inhabitants; and it gave him a warm feeling in his heart to be surrounded by people of his own blood, at this moment of his great happiness. He would have liked to give these men something to make them happy also, for he knew that they were poor, and that those who were most fortunate were those who worked hardest. Each shadowy figure, as it pa.s.sed on its way up the mountain, gave out a faint odour, not disagreeable or dirty, but slightly pungent, and like the smell of iron filings: what Tolstoi called "the good smell of peasants."

The fire which had enveloped all Monte Carlo at sunset had burnt out long ago, but in the west a faint red-brown glow smouldered, as if a smoky torch had been trailed along the horizon. Monte Carlo and the Rock of Monaco rose out of the steel-bright sea like one immense jewel-box, or a huge purple velvet pincus.h.i.+on, stuck full of diamond and topaz headed pins, with here and there a ruby or an emerald. These lights, reflected in the water, trailed down into mysterious depths, like illuminated roots of magic flowers; and the bright s.h.i.+mmer spreading out over the moving ripples lay on the surface like glittering chain-armour.

Although they had the blaze of these amazing jewels always before their eyes, somehow in talking Mary and Vanno contrived to lose the way, descending to the high road nearer Cap Martin than Monte Carlo. It was six o'clock, and a long tramp home along the level, in the dust thrown up by motors and the trotting hoofs of horses, but in the distance a tram car coming from Mentone sent out a shower of electric sparks, like fireflies crushed to death between iron wheels and iron track. As the car advanced, Vanno stepped out into the road and hailed it. No _arret_ was near, but the driver stopped, with an obliging, French-Italian smile, and the two young people almost hurled themselves into empty seats at the first-cla.s.s end of the tram.

Faces which had been inclined to frown at the illegal delay, even of six seconds, smoothed into good nature at sight of the handsome couple.

Every one at once took it for granted that they were lovers. Mary's hair, ruffled by the hasty putting on of her hat, without a mirror, told the story of a stolen kiss to German eyes swimming with sentiment and romance--eyes which to an unappreciative world appeared incapable of either. Most of the eyes in this first-cla.s.s compartment were German eyes, and some of the faces out of which they looked were round and uninteresting; but not all. German was the language being loudly talked across the car, from one seat to another; and a German mandate had caused all the windows and ventilators to be shut, in fear of that fatal thing, "a draught." English people sitting stiffly in corners, boiling with the desire to protest yet too reserved and proud to "risk a row,"

raged internally with the belief that their German neighbours were coa.r.s.e, food-loving, pus.h.i.+ng, selfish creatures who cared nothing for the beauty of the Riviera, and came only because of the cheap round trip, and the hope of winning a few five-franc pieces. The real truth was very different. The "pus.h.i.+ng creatures" were selfish only because they were not self-conscious. They were as perfectly happy as children.

They raved loudly in ecstasy over the beauty of everything, and were blissfully ignorant that it was possible for any one to despise or hate them. Frankly they admired Vanno and Mary, staring in the unblinking, unashamed, beaming way that children have of regarding what interests them; and their kind, unsn.o.bbish hearts went out to the young couple as no English hearts in the car went out.

Two persons sitting together at the other end, but on the same side as the newcomers, could not see what the pair were like, without bending forward and stretching out their necks. One of these, fired by the intense interest displayed on German faces, could not resist the temptation to be curious. She peered round the corner of a large, well-filled overcoat from Berlin, and saw Mary and Vanno smiling at each other, as oblivious of all observers as though they had the tram to themselves.

"You must take a peep, St. George," she said in her husband's ear, that she might be heard over the noise of the tram, without roaring. "It's that beautiful Miss Grant I told you about; and she's with the Roman Prince who invented the parachute Rongier used in the Nice 'flying week.' They are certainly in love with each other! They couldn't look as they do if they weren't. Perhaps they're engaged. Poor d.i.c.k! All his trouble for nothing."

"Why poor d.i.c.k?" inquired the Reverend George Winter.

"Oh, my dear Saint, don't put on your long-distance manner, and forget everything that hasn't a direct connection with heaven. But these two quite look as if they'd just been up there by special aeroplane. Don't you remember my telling you, d.i.c.k's awfully in love with this girl, and took me to see her again yesterday, though she never returned my first call? But I was glad I went, because she was really sweet and charming, and I hated to think of her living in that deadly villa."

"Yes, I remember distinctly," said Winter, with a twinkle of humour in the eyes which seemed always to see things that no one else could see.

"You told me when I was in the midst of writing a sermon, and had got to a particularly knotty point; so I tangled d.i.c.k and his love affairs into the knot, while trying to put them out of my mind. I'm afraid they didn't do my sermon much good. And beautiful as Miss Grant may be, I won't dislocate my neck to look at her in a tram. I advise you not to do so, either. Set our German friends a good example."

"Why is it the best of people always advise you not to do all the things you want to do, and vice versa?" observed Rose, pleased with her success in catching Mary's eye. They bowed to each other, smiling warmly. Vanno took off his hat, and Rose thought him exactly what a prince ought to be and generally is not.

"That's the wife of the English chaplain at Monte Carlo," Mary informed Vanno, in a stage whisper, "She's an American. She called on me yesterday; and only think, though she'd never seen me before, she said she would like me to visit her."

"Did you accept?" Vanno asked.

Mary shook her head. "No. It would have hurt Lady Dauntrey's feelings, perhaps. And besides, yesterday I--I thought of going away soon, to Italy--to Florence. I was travelling to Florence when suddenly it occurred to me to get off at Monte Carlo instead. Oh, how thankful I am now! Think, if we had never met?"

"We should have met. I was following you from Ma.r.s.eilles, you know, and watching to see where you got off. What can your people have been made of, letting you run about alone--a girl like you?"

"Oh, but I have no people--who count. Only such a disagreeable aunt and her daughter! I haven't written to them since I came here. I telegraphed, and gave no address. I shall not write--until--until----"

"I know what you mean, though you won't say it. 'Until we are married.'

You need not, unless you like, for they must have been brutes of women to have been disagreeable to you. But I wish you would stay with this lady--the chaplain's wife. Or else with my sister-in-law. I shall go to see her and Angelo to-morrow morning, and tell them about you. I'll ask them to call at once, and then--I feel almost sure--Marie will invite you to visit her. Would you accept? For that would be best of all. And in any case we must be married from their house."

"Marie!" Mary echoed the name, her voice dwelling upon it caressingly.

"Marie! That was the name of my--not my best, but my second best friend at school. We were three Maries. It will be good of your Marie to call on me; but she is a bride, and it's still her honeymoon. Do you think, if we--that is----"

Vanno laughed. "If you put it in that way, I don't. No, if _we_ were on our honeymoon I couldn't tolerate a third, if it were an angel. But it seems as if every one must want you."

"Hus.h.!.+ People will hear you."

Just then a party of three Englishwomen rose, and descended from the tram to go to a villa in the Avenue de la Vigie. This exodus left a vacancy opposite the Winters.

"Shall we move over there, before the tram gets going too fast?" Mary suggested. "I feel Mrs. Winter would like to talk to us."

Vanno agreed. He was anxious for the invitation to be renewed. And in a few moments after they had begun talking to the Winters across the narrow aisle, his wish was granted. Rose told her husband that she had asked Mary to stay with them, and ordered him to urge the suggestion.

"You see," Rose confided to her opposite neighbours, leaning far forward, her elbows on her knees, "I always try to have some perfectly charming person in our one little spare room, while the 'high season' is on, or else the most terrible bores beg us to take them in. People like that seem to think you have a house or an apartment on the Riviera for the sole purpose of putting them up for a fortnight or so. It's positively weakening! We've just got rid of an appalling young man, whom my husband asked out of sheer pity: a schoolmaster, who'd come here for his health and inadvertently turned gambler. At first he won. He used to haunt my tea-parties, which, as we're idiotically good-natured, are often half made up of criminals and frumps. Extraordinarily congenial they are, too! The criminals are flattered to meet the frumps, and the frumps find the criminals thrilling. This was one of our male frumps: like an owl, with neglige eyebrows, and quite mad, round eyes behind convex gla.s.ses. He used to shed gold plaques out of his clothes on to my floor, because whenever he won he was in the habit of tucking the piece down his collar lest he should be tempted to risk it on the tables again. But at last there were no more gold pieces to shed, and his eyes got madder and rounder. And then St. George invited him to stay with us, in order that I might reform him. I did try, for I _was_ sorry for the creature: he seemed so like one of one's own pet weaknesses, come alive.

But after he threatened to take poison at the luncheon table, my husband thought it too hard on my nerves. I began to get so thin that my veils didn't fit; and George sent the man home to his mother, at our expense.

At the present moment a soldier boy on leave--a Casino pet, whom all the ladies love and lend money to, and give good advice to, and even the croupiers are quite silly about, though he roars at them when he loses--is hinting to visit us, so that I may undertake the saving of his soul, and incidentally what money he has left. But he carries a nice new revolver, and shows it to the prettiest ladies when they are sympathizing the most earnestly. And he has _no_ mother to whom we can send him, if he attempts to add his pistol to our luncheon menu. Do, do save us from the Casino pet, dear Miss Grant. I've been holding an awful aunt of George's over the young man's head, saying she may arrive at any minute. But you know how things you fib about do have a way of happening, as a punishment, and I feel she may drop down on us if the room isn't occupied."

They all laughed, even the chaplain, whom Mrs. Winter evidently delighted in trying to shock. "I should like Miss Grant to be with you,"

Vanno said; and this--if she had not guessed already--would have been enough, Rose thought, "to give the show away." "I should like her to go to you at once, since you are so kind."

"Kind to ourselves!" Rose smiled. "Will you come, Miss Grant?"

Mary hesitated. "I should love it, but--I hate to be rude to poor Lady Dauntrey."

"If I hadn't dedicated my life to a member of the clergy, I know what I should want to say about Lady Dauntrey," Rose remarked, looking wicked.

"Can't you, Prince--well, not _say_ it, but do something to rescue Miss Grant, without damage to any one's feelings?"

"I mean to," Vanno answered. "I wanted her to visit my brother and sister-in-law, but--they're on their honeymoon, and----"

"I see," Rose interpolated. She did not volunteer the information that her own honeymoon was but just ended. Evidently it was to be taken quietly for granted that these two were engaged. She guessed that Prince Vanno had hinted at the truth in order that she should not misconstrue Mary's actions. He was almost forcing their relations.h.i.+p upon her notice, and her husband's notice, as if to justify his being with the girl unchaperoned.

"Not that we should have minded," Rose said to herself. "There's no room in St. George's 'thought-bag' for any bad thoughts, it's so cram full of good ones. And he's taught me how horrid it is, always rehearsing the judgment day for one's friends."

She threw a warm-hearted glance at her husband, valuing his kindly qualities the more because they two had just come from a tea-party, at a villa where the alternative to bridge had been telling the whole truth about people behind their backs, and digging up Pasts by the roots, as children unearth plants to see if they have grown. Luckily St. George had remained in blissful ignorance of the latter popular game. People showed only their best side to him, and made good resolutions about the other, while his influence was upon them.

"As for us," Rose went on, "we're quite a staid married couple, and I feel I'm intended by nature for the ideal chaperon--for a blonde like Miss Grant. We shall look charming together, and though we mayn't make her comfortable, I guarantee to amuse her; for as a household we are unique. We live in an ugly, square apartment house--a kind of quadrupedifice--and our cook is in love, consequently her omelettes are like antimaca.s.sars; but I have a chafing-dish, and the most wonderful maid, and our tea-parties are famous--honey-combed with countesses and curates, to say nothing of curiosities. And my husband, though a clergyman, lets me go to all the lovely concerts where the dear conductor grabs up music by the handful and throws it in the faces of his orchestra. The only thing beginning with a C, which Miss Grant will have to miss with us, is--the Casino."

"I shan't miss that!" Mary exclaimed; then flushed brightly.

"Does that mean you will come?"

"Yes. It does mean that she will come," Vanno spoke for her.

"I think," remarked Rose, "that your future husband is a masterful person who intends you to 'toe the line.' But if it's his heart line, it will be all right."

"Perhaps," said Vanno, "for we are both very old-fas.h.i.+oned." He looked at Mary, and she at him. It was adorable to have little secrets that n.o.body else could understand.

Rose, dearly as she loved her husband, almost envied them for an instant: lovers only just engaged, with no cooks and housemaids and accounts to think of: nothing but each other, and poetry and romance.

Yet, she was not quite sure, on second thoughts, that she did envy them.

Vaguely she seemed to see something fatal in the two handsome, happy faces; something that set them apart from the comfortable, commonplace experiences of the rest of the world.

"I think--after all I'd rather be myself than that girl," she decided.