Jacob's Ladder Part 23

"Gambling doesn't appeal very much to me," Jacob admitted.

The young man who desired to be called Felix sighed.

"Doesn't gamble," he mused, "drinks moderately, and likes his fairies good. Jacob dear, I must introduce you some day to the home circle.

You were certainly made for domesticity. Did you tell Cook's man about yourself when you booked for Monte Carlo?"

"I told him that I'd heard it was a good place for winter golf," Jacob replied, smiling. "If you've finished talking nonsense, perhaps you will bring your mighty intellect to bear upon the question of liqueur brandies."

"Are you feeling at all festive?" Felixstowe enquired.

"Absolutely," Jacob answered.

"Then consult Louis and leave it to him. You know what Pierpont Morgan called Monte Carlo?--'the bleeding place for millionaires.' Louis will see you through it."

The dinner came to a close in a little burst of glory, Louis himself bringing them a dust-encrusted bottle, whilst a satellite placed before them two gla.s.ses which looked like the insides of chandeliers.

"The right stuff," Lord Felixstowe declared approvingly. "Trust Louis."

"Who trusts no one, my lord," the _maitre d'hotel_ jested, with a bow.

"You won't even leave the bottle?" his youthful client implored.

"Not even for the son of my valued patron, Monsieur le Marquis," Louis replied, bearing it off, smiling.

"I go like a giant to my task," the young man declared, as he bade Jacob au revoir. "Prepare for great news."...

Jacob spent a pleasant and a harmless evening wandering about the Sporting Club, winning and losing a few five-louis plaques, and sitting for a while outside the Cafe de Paris. He went to bed early, with a view to a golf match on the morrow, and was wakened by a dead weight upon his shins. He sat up and found Felixstowe sitting on the bed, regarding him sorrowfully.

"Hullo!" Jacob exclaimed. "Where are the spoils?"

The young man opened his lips and spoke illuminating words concerning Monte Carlo, gambling generally, number five table in the Rooms, and the squint-eyed croupier particularly. In conclusion, he referred to himself in terms, if possible, even more lurid. By the time he had finished, Jacob was thoroughly awake.

"Lend me ten louis, old chap, for the journey," his nocturnal visitor begged. "You'll have to wait for your pony."

"Take it off the dressing table," Jacob replied. "What's the hurry?"

"I'm off in three hours' time. Catching the early morning train."

Jacob hesitated for a moment.

"Look here, Felix," he suggested, "if you'd like to have another go at them--"

Felixstowe shook his head.

"I'm not built that way," he interrupted. "I've given them best this time. You see," he went on, "it's a mug's game, after all, and meant for mugs. I shall wait and pick up my little bit where the grey matter talks, what?"

"I see," Jacob replied. "Perhaps you are right. Sorry to lose you, though."

"I'll look you up in town," the young man promised.

CHAPTER XV

Jacob lingered for a month in Monte Carlo. While he found little to attract him in the gambling or the social side of the place, the glorious climate, the perpetual sunshine, the fine air of La Turbie, and a pleasing succession of golf victories helped him to pa.s.s the time pleasantly. He spent a week at Cannes on the way back, making wonderful progress in his tennis, and from there he hired a motor-car and spent a fortnight at Aix. He reached London early in May, to find Dauncey unchanged and his own affairs prosperous. During all this time he had had no word of or from Sybil Bultiwell. He went almost directly to his cottage at Marlingden, where he found Mrs. Harris eagerly awaiting his arrival, and over the supper table, Dauncey and he and a rejuvenated Nora talked over that evening when the two men had arrived home in the motor-car, laden with strange packages and overflowing with their marvellous news.

"Life has been so wonderful ever since," Nora murmured. "d.i.c.k looks ten years younger, and I feel it. The children you can see for yourself. I wonder," she went on a little timidly, as she realised her host's peculiar aversion to expressed grat.i.tude, "I wonder whether you ever realise, Jacob, what it means to have taken two people from a struggle which was becoming misery and to have made them utterly and completely happy."...

Jacob thought of her words as he lingered for an hour in his little sitting-room that night. His own memory travelled backwards. He realised the joy which he had felt at paying his debts, the even greater joy of saving the Daunceys from despair. He thought again of the small pleasures which his affluence had brought, the sense of complacency, almost of dignity, which it had engendered. There were many men, he knew, who thought him the most fortunate amongst all their acquaintance. And was he, he wondered? He looked across at the light in the Daunceys' bedroom and saw it extinguished. He looked back with a sigh to his empty room. He had read many books since the days of his prosperity, but books had never meant very much to him. He realised, in those moments of introspection, his weakness and his failure. His inclinations were all intensely human. He loved kind words, happy faces, flowers and children. He was one of those for whom the joys and gaieties of the demimonde were a farce, to whom the delights of the opposite s.e.x could only present themselves in the form of one person and in one manner. He was full of sentiments, full of easily offended prejudices. Fate had placed in his hands the power to command a life which might have been as varied as grand opera, and all that he desired was the life which Dauncey had found and was living.

Upstairs were the Harrises, sleeping together in comfort and happiness, the creatures of his bounty, his grateful and faithful servants. And he knew well how both of those two across the way, whom he envied, blessed his name. It was a happiness to think of them, and yet an impersonal happiness. He longed humanly for the other and more direct kind.

Dauncey found cause for some anxiety in Jacob's demeanour during the course of the next few weeks.

"You know, Jacob," he said, "in one way I never saw you look so well in your life. That bronze you got in the south of France is most becoming, and, if you'll forgive my saying so, you seem to have gained poise lately, to have lost that slight self-consciousness with which you looked out upon life just at first. And yet you don't look as I'd like to see you. I haven't even heard you laugh as you used to."

Jacob nodded.

"I'm all right, d.i.c.k," he a.s.sured his friend. "Fact is, I think I am suffering from a surfeit of good things. Everything in the world's lying ready to my hands, and I don't quite know which way to turn."

"Did you hear anything of Miss Bultiwell while you were abroad?"

Dauncey asked a little abruptly.

"Not a word," Jacob replied. "Her last letter to me seemed to end things pretty effectually."

Dauncey spoke words under his breath which were real and blasphemous.

"Can't you put her out of your thoughts, old chap?"

"I think I have, and yet the place where she was is empty. And, d.i.c.k,"

Jacob went on, "I don't know where or how to fill it. You see, I've crowds of acquaintances, but no friends except you and Nora. One or two rich city people ask me to their houses, and the whole of Bohemia, I suppose, is open to me. I never see any women belonging to my city friends who appeal in the least to my imagination, and there's something wrong about the other world, so far as I am concerned. We are not out for the same thing."

"I think I understand," Dauncey said quietly.

"I expect you do," Jacob continued. "You ought to, because you're exactly where I want to be. I want a wife who is just good and sweet and affectionate. She needn't be clever, she needn't be well-born, and she need know no more about Society than I do. I want her just to make a home and give me children. And, d.i.c.k, with all that million of mine I don't know where to look for her."

"She'll come," Dauncey declared encouragingly. "She is sure to come.

You are young and you'll keep young. You live like a man, of course, but it's a sober, self-respecting life. You've heaps of time. And that reminds me. Could you join us in a little celebration to-night?

My wife has a cousin from the country staying with her, and I have promised to take them out to dine and to a show."

"I have nothing to do," Jacob replied. "I shall be delighted."

It was a little too obvious. Nora's cousin from the country, a very nice and estimable person in her way, was not equal to the occasion.

She wore her ill-fitting clothes without grace or confidence. She giggled repeatedly, and her eyes seldom left Jacob's, as though all the time she were bidding for his approval. She was just well enough looking and no more, the sort of woman who would have looked almost pretty on her wedding day, a little dowdy most of the time during the next five years, and either a drudge or a nuisance afterwards, according to her circ.u.mstances. Jacob was very polite and very glad when the evening was over. His host wrung his hand as they parted.

"Not my fault, old chap," he whispered. "Nora would try it. She hadn't seen Margaret for three or four years."