The Guests Of Hercules Part 41

x.x.x

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 cure's garden, and it belonged to Achille Gonzales. Already, at Vanno's request, the cure had interviewed both Achille and the older Gonzales.

An appointment had been made for three o'clock, and the cure 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-cla.s.s 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 acc.u.mulated, 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 a.s.sure 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 d.i.c.k 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," d.i.c.k 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 n.o.body 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 gla.s.s 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 n.o.body 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.

d.i.c.k 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.

"d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k. 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 circ.u.mstances 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," d.i.c.k 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," d.i.c.k 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 Chateau 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 d.i.c.k 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."

x.x.xI

d.i.c.k 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 pa.s.sion, but the pain of seeing Prince Vanno with Mary was rather too real, too sharp for a.n.a.lytical enjoyment; and when he could, d.i.c.k 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.

Mary had come to feel very happily at home with the Winters in the short time she had spent with them; and often at night when she dreamed of being at the Villa Bella Vista she waked thankfully, with a sense of escape from something unknown yet vaguely terrible. She could talk with Rose and George Winter as with old friends, and Vanno too had the feeling of having known them both for a long time.

They began to tell of their adventures with the Gonzales family at Roquebrune, and Rose caught at the excuse to put off the moment she dreaded.

"It was such fun up there!" Mary exclaimed. "I'd no idea that one bought land by the square yard, or metre; but it's the way here, apparently; and Vanno's going to give that handsome young man who's engaged to your maid twelve francs a metre for his _terrain_, although there's no road to it. But really that's a great advantage according to the father, a large yellow old man with no hair to speak of, and only one tooth, round which his words seem to eddy as water eddies round a stone in a pool.

It was fascinating to watch! We're to have crowds of fireflies, because there'll be no motor dust; and the saying among the peasants is that the _mouches brillantes_ search always with their lanterns, for a lost brother. And birds will '_se coucher dans les roses chez nous_.' Isn't that a darling expression? Think of having birds go to bed in your roses! So you see, the land's quite worth the twelve francs, because there's no road; and I almost hope there'll never be one, for Vanno and I shan't want to come down often from our castle in the air, where the view's so wonderful. There's no water there yet; but the most fun of all to-day was the water-diviner the old Gonzales brought. He squatted on the ground, holding an immense silver watch by a chain--a little gnome of a man with a huge head thatched with gray hair. As he swung his watch, tendons in his throat worked as chicken's claws do scratching for worms; and whenever his watch began to swing violently it meant that he was over a spring. He found three springs within a few yards of each other, so we've only to dig, and get torrents of water."

"I'm sure you were children in the hands of those shrewd peasants," said Rose, "unless your friend the cure was with you."

"No, he wasn't, but he sent a man to translate the _patois_, for the old Gonzales can't speak much French; and it was lucky we had this man to take our part, because of a big caroubier-tree on the place which belongs to a distant cousin of the Gonzales, and has been in his family for generations. Vanno must buy it separately, otherwise the owner will have a right to come and beat it all night if he likes, or tether animals under the branches. Fortunately the cure's friend warned us in time."

"Gonzales is rather a celebrated old chap," George Winter remarked, composing his mind as Mary talked on. "He made a reputation by refusing a fortune in order to keep a tiny _baraque_ of a house which he and his wife had lived in for forty years."

"So he told us," said Vanno. "A wonderful story; it sounded too good to be true."

"Was it about the Russian countess who wanted to buy a large piece of land, and all the other peasant owners were keen to sell, except Gonzales, who had a bit about twenty yards square, exactly in the middle?" asked Rose.

"Yes, and the countess went up and up in her bidding from two thousand francs to four hundred thousand; but Gonzales wouldn't sell, because he liked the view. He told us that he still lives in the _baraque_, though he owns other houses and much land."

"Perfectly true," said Rose. "I walk up and chat with him sometimes.

He's very rich for a peasant, and shrewd, though stupid too, for he has a horror of banks and hides his money heaven knows where. He had thousands of francs in banknotes in a cellar among his potatoes, and they were all eaten by rats; but he only shrugged his shoulders and said 'twas no worse than having them devoured by speculators. Oh, these peasants of the Riviera are wonderful!"

"Vanno and I will make friends with them when we have a house up there,"

said Mary. "Maybe it will be ready next year. Who knows? Vanno says we must come every season, if only for a few weeks, just to show ourselves that we care for other things than the Casino. And then, how delightful to see our friends! You, who have been so good to me, and Captain Hannaford, if he's living in his Italian chateau----"

"Dear, he won't be there," said Rose, laying her hand on Mary's, as the two sat together on the flowery chintz sofa.