Septimus Part 2

She had broken no man's heart, and her own was whole. The tribes of Crim Tartary had exhibited no signs of worry and had left her unmolested. She had furthermore taken rapturous delight in cathedrals, expensive restaurants, and the set pieces of fas.h.i.+onable scenery. Rattenden had not a prophetic leg to stand on.

Yet she longed for the unattainable--for the elusive something of which these felicities were but symbols. Now the wanderer with a haunting sense of the Beyond, but without the true vagabond's divine gift of piercing the veil, can only follow the obvious; and there are seasons when the obvious fails to satisfy. When such a mood overcame her mistress, Turner railed at the upsetting quality of foreign food, and presented bicarbonate of soda.

She arrived by a different path at the unsatisfactory nature of the obvious. Sometimes, too, the pleasant acquaintances of travel were lacking, and loneliness upset the nice balance of Zora's nerves. Then, more than ever, did she pine for the Beyond.

Yet youth, receptivity, imagination kept her buoyant. Hope lured her on with renewed promises from city to city. At last, on her homeward journey, he whispered the magic name of Monte Carlo, and her heart was aflutter in antic.i.p.ation of wonderland.

She stood bewildered, lonely, and dismayed in the first row behind the chairs, fingering an empty purse. She had been in the rooms ten minutes, and she had lost twenty louis. Her last coup had been successful, but a bland old lady, with the white hair and waxen face of sainted motherhood, had swept up her winnings so unconcernedly that Zora's brain began to swim.

As she felt too strange and shy to expostulate she stood fingering her empty purse.

The scene was utterly different from what she had expected. She had imagined a gay, crowded room, wild gamblers shouting in their excitement, a band playing delirious waltz music, champagne corks popping merrily, painted women laughing, jesting loudly, all kinds of revelry and devilry and Bacchic things undreamed of. This was silly of her, no doubt, but the silliness of inexperienced young women is a matter for the pity, not the reprobation, of the judicious. If they take the world for their oyster and think, when they open it, they are going to find pearl necklaces ready-made, we must not blame them. Rather let h.o.a.ry-headed sinners envy them their imaginings.

The corners of Zora Middlemist's ripe lips drooped with a child's pathos of disillusionment. Her nose delicately marked disgust at the heavy air and the discord of scents around her. Having lost her money she could afford to survey with scorn the decorous yet sordid greed of the crowded table. There was not a gleam of gaiety about it. The people behaved with the correct impa.s.siveness of an Anglican congregation. She had heard of more jocular funerals.

She forgot the intoxication of her first gold and turquoise day at Monte Carlo. A sense of loneliness--such as a solitary dove might feel in a wilderness of evil bats--oppressed her. Had she not been aware that she was a remarkably attractive woman and the object of innumerable glances, she would have cried. And twenty louis pitched into unprofitable s.p.a.ce! Yet she stood half fascinated by the rattle of the marble on the revolving disc, the glitter of the gold, the soft pat of the coins on the green cloth as they were thrown by the croupier. She began to make imaginary stakes.

For five coups in succession she would have won. It was exasperating. There she stood, having pierced the innermost mystery of chance, without even a five-franc piece in her purse.

A man's black sleeve pushed past her shoulder, and she saw a hand in front of her holding a louis. Instinctively she took it.

"Thanks," said a tired voice. "I can't reach the table. She threw it, _en plein_, on Number Seventeen; and then with a start, realizing what she had done, she turned with burning cheeks.

"I _am_ so sorry."

Her glance met a pair of unspeculative blue eyes, belonging to the owner of the tired voice. She noted that he had a sallow face, a little brown mustache, and a shock of brown hair, curiously upstanding, like Struwel Peter's.

"I am _so_ sorry," she repeated. "Please ask for it back. What did you want me to play?"

"I don't know. It doesn't matter, so long as you've put it somewhere."

"But I've put it _en plein_ on Seventeen," she urged. "I ought to have thought what I was doing."

"Why think?" he murmured.

Mrs. Middlemist turned square to the table and fixed her eyes on the staked louis. In spite of the blue-eyed man's implied acquiescence she felt qualms of responsibility. Why had she not played on an even chance, or one of the dozens, or even a _transversale_? To add to her discomfort no one else played the full seventeen. The whole table seemed silently jeering at her inexperience.

The croupiers had completed the payments of the last coup. The marble fell with its sharp click and whizzed and rattled around the disc. Zora held her breath. The marble found its compartment at last, and the croupier announced:

_"Dix-sept, noir, impair et manque."_

She had won. A sigh of relief shook her bosom. Not only had she not lost a stranger's money, but she had won for him thirty-five times his stake. She watched the louis greedily lest it should be swept away by a careless croupier--perhaps the only impossible thing that could not happen at Monte Carlo--and stretched out her arm past the bland old lady in tense determination to frustrate further felonious proceedings. The croupier pitched seven large gold coins across the table. She clutched them feverishly and turned to deliver them to their owner. He was nowhere to be seen. She broke through the ring, and with her hands full of gold scanned the room in dismayed perplexity.

At last she espied him standing dejectedly by another table. She rushed across the intervening s.p.a.ce and held out the money.

"See, you have won!"

"Oh, Lord!" murmured the man, removing his hands from his dinner-jacket pockets, but not offering to take his winnings. "What a lot of trouble I have given you."

"Of course you have," she said tartly. "Why didn't you stay?"

"I don't know," he replied. "How can one tell why one doesn't do things?"

"Well, please take the money now and let me get rid of it. There are seven pieces of five louis each."

She counted the coins into his hand, and then suddenly flushed scarlet. She had forgotten to claim the original louis which she had staked. Where was it? What had become of it? As well try, she thought, to fish up a coin thrown into the sea. She felt like a thief.

"There ought to be another louis," she stammered.

"It doesn't matter," said the man.

"But it does matter. You might think that I--I kept it."

"That's too absurd," he answered. "Are you interested in guns?"

"Guns?"

She stared at him. He appeared quite sane.

"I remember now I was thinking of guns when I went away," he explained.

"They're interesting things to think about."

"But don't you understand that I owe you a louis? I forgot all about it. If my purse weren't empty I would repay you. Will you stay here till I can get some money from my hotel--the Hotel de Paris?"

She spoke with some vehemence. How could the creature expect her to remain in his debt? But the creature only pa.s.sed his fingers through his upstanding hair and smiled wanly.

"Please don't say anything more about it. It distresses me. The croupiers don't return the stake, as a general rule, unless you ask for it. They a.s.sume you want to back your luck. Perhaps it has won again. For goodness'

sake don't bother about it--and thank you very, very much."

He bowed politely and moved a step or two away. But Zora, struck by a solution of the mystery which had not occurred to her, as one cannot grasp all the ways and customs of gaming establishments in ten minutes, rushed back to the other table. She arrived just in time to hear the croupier asking whom the louis on seventeen belonged to. The number had turned up again.

This time she brought the thirty-six louis to the stranger.

"Dear me," said he, taking the money. "It is very astonis.h.i.+ng. But why did you trouble?"

"Because I'm a woman of common sense, I suppose."

He looked at the coins in his hand as if they were sh.e.l.ls which a child at the seaside might have brought him, and then raised his eyes slowly to hers.

"You are a very gracious lady." His glance and tone checked an impulse of exasperation. She smiled.

"At any rate, I've won fifty-six pounds for you, and you ought to be grateful."

He made a little gesture of acknowledgement. Had he been a more das.h.i.+ng gentleman he might have expressed his grat.i.tude for the mere privilege of conversing with a gracious lady so beautiful. They had drifted from the outskirts of the crowded table and found themselves in the thinner crowd of saunterers. It was the height of the Monte Carlo season and the feathers and diamonds and rouge and greedy eyes and rusty bonnets of all nations confused the sight and paralyzed thought. Yet among all the women of both worlds Zora Middlemist stood out remarkable. As Septimus Dix afterwards explained, the rooms that evening contained a vague kind of conglomerate woman and Zora Middlemist. And the herd of men envied the creature on whom she smiled so graciously.

She was dressed in black, as became a young widow, but it was a black which bore no sign of mourning. The black, sweeping ostrich plume of a picture hat gave her an air of triumph. Black gloves reaching more than halfway up shapely arms and a gleam of snowy neck above a black chiffon bodice disquieted the imagination. She towered over her present companion, who was five foot seven and slimly built.

"You've brought me all this stuff, but what am I to do with it?" he asked helplessly.

"Perhaps I had better take care of it for you."

It was a relief from the oppressive loneliness to talk to a human being; so she lingered wistfully in conversation. A pathetic eagerness came into the man's face.