The Guests Of Hercules Part 18

And just now most things seemed dull and uninteresting to Mary which were not connected with gambling.

Her winnings were not in themselves out of the common, for every season at Monte Carlo there are at least six or seven players who win great sums, whose gains are talked about and watched at the tables, and who go away with from ten to fifty thousand pounds. But it was the combination of personality with great and persistent good luck which made Mary Grant remarkable, and her behaviour was puzzling and piquantly mysterious to those who had no clue to her past. Everybody talked about her: the croupiers who spun her numbers or put on her stakes, and received her generous tips: the shopkeepers with whom she spent the money she won, buying expensive hats and furs, dresses and jewellery: clerks at the bank where she deposited her winnings: people of all sorts who frequented the Casino, and even those who were there seldom but heard what was going on through acquaintances at the many luncheon parties and "At Homes" which make up the round of life at Monte Carlo. And Mary knew that she was stared at and talked about, and liked it as a child likes to be looked at when walking out with a splendid new doll. She had no idea that any one could say unkind things of her, or that there was anything in her conduct to call for harsh comments. It was so delightful to be winning every day at roulette, and spending the easily gained money in amusing ways, that Mary thought every one who came near her must be almost as much pleased with her luck as she was--all but the one man who had snubbed her, the man whose name she had not heard, but who, she had been told by her devoted waiter, was a Roman prince. He disapproved of or disliked her, she did not know which, or why; and because he kept the table near hers in the restaurant his look, which was sometimes like a vehement reproach, always depressed her, bringing a cold sense of failure where all might have been joy. The thought of this stranger's disapproval was the fly in her amber; and the idea floated through her mind sometimes that they might have known each other in a forgotten state of existence. When their eyes met, it was as if there were a common memory between them, something that had happened long ago, drawing them together.

Days pa.s.sed, and Vanno's project which concerned Mary and the cure was still in abeyance, for the priest was not free yet to leave Roquebrune.

The man whose death was daily expected had not died, and the cure spent as much time with him as could be spared from other duties. But Vanno Della Robbia was not the only one who sought the services of a friend in order to "help" Mary.

One afternoon at the end of the Nice aviation week d.i.c.k Carleton ran up three flights of marble stairs in a huge square house on the left or seaward side of the Boulevard d'Italie at Monte Carlo. It was a building given up to flats, and the corridors were almost depressingly clean and cold looking, with their white floors and stairways of crude, cheap marble, and their white walls glittering with the washable paint called "Ripolin." On each etage were two white doors with openwork panels of iron over gla.s.s, which in most cases showed curtains on the other side.

The door before which Carleton stopped on the third floor had a semi-transparent rose-coloured curtain; and just above the bell push was neatly tacked a visiting card with the name "Reverend George Winter"

engraved upon it.

Carleton had never met the new inc.u.mbent of St. Cyprian's, but the chaplain had lately married an American girl, d.i.c.k's cousin. This was the first time that Carleton had found a chance to call, although he had been staying with Schuyler for over a fortnight. He felt rather guilty and doubtful of his reception, as a neat little Monegasque maid told him that Madame was _chez elle_. But he need not have been anxious. As the maid announced his name with a p.r.o.nunciation all her own, a pretty girl sprang up from a chintz-covered window seat, in a drawing-room which in an instant took Carleton across the sea to his native land.

The girl had been sitting on one foot, and as she jumped up quickly she stumbled a little, laughing.

"Oh, d.i.c.k, you nice thing!" she exclaimed. "I _am_ glad to see you. But my foot's asleep. Goodness, what needles and pins!"

She stamped about on the polished floor, with two small feet in silk stockings and high-heeled, gold-buckled slippers, a novel tucked under her arm, and one hand clasping her cousin's.

"Well," he said, "if any creature could be less like a parson's wife than you, madam, I'd like to see it."

"I know I'm the exact opposite of what one ought to be," she laughed, "and it almost makes me feel not legally married. But don't--don't, please, if you love me, use that awful word 'parson' again. I can't stand it. Don't you think it sounds just like the crackle of cold, overdone toast?"

"Can't say I ever thought about it," said Carleton.

"Well, I have, constantly. It was a long time before I could make up my mind to say 'yes' to St. George, on account of that word."

"Is St. George his name?" d.i.c.k asked.

"It's my name for him. The 'saint' part's my private property. But he is a saint, if ever there was one: and a good thing too, as he's got a dragon on the hearth to tame; but a _little_ inconvenient sometimes for the poor dragon. Oh, d.i.c.k, you've no idea how good and pure-minded and absolutely Alpine and on the heights he is. Often I expect to pick edelweiss in his back hair."

Carlton gave one of his sudden, boyish laughs. "That sounds like you.

How did you come to marry such a chap?"

"I was so horribly afraid some other girl would get him, if I left him lying about. But do let's sit down. My foot's wide awake again now."

They sat on the cushioned window seat and smiled into each other's eyes.

"How brown you are!" she exclaimed.

"How pretty you are!" he retorted.

And it was true. She was very pretty, a girlish creature, thin and eager looking, with large tobacco-brown eyes full of a humorous, observant interest in everything. Her skin was dark and smooth as satin. Even her long throat and nervous hands, and the slim, lace-covered arms, were of the same satin-textured duskiness as the heart-shaped face, with its laughing red mouth. Her cheekbones were rather high and touched with colour, as if a geranium petal had been rubbed across them, just under the brown shadows beneath the eyes. Her chin was small and pointed, her forehead low and broad, and this, with the slight prominence of the cheekbones and the narrowing of the chin, gave that heartlike shape to her face which added piquancy and made it singularly endearing.

She was very tall and graceful, with pretty ways of using her hands, and looking from under her lashes with her head on one side, which showed that she had been a spoiled and petted child.

"Yes, I'm quite pretty," she agreed gayly, "and I have on a pretty dress, which is part of my trousseau, and I hope it will last a long time. But the thing I am princ.i.p.ally interested in just now is our flat.

Call this a 'living-room' at once, or I shall feel homesick and burst into tears. The question is, do you think _it_ is pretty?"

"Awfully pretty; looks like you somehow," answered d.i.c.k, gazing around appreciatively. "Jolly chintz with roses on it, and your rugs are ripping. Everything goes so well with everything else."

"It ought to. I have taken enough trouble over it all, introducing wedding presents to each other and trying to make them congenial. I have no boudoir, so I can't boude. But St. George has a study with books up to the ceiling, and lots still on the floor, because we are not settled yet, though we arrived--strangers in a strange land--in November. I expect you'll recognize some of the things here, because old colonial furniture doesn't grow on blackberry bushes in this climate, and I brought over everything Grandma Carleton left me: that desk, and cabinet and mirror, and those three near-Chippendale chairs. Wouldn't the poor darling make discords on her golden harp, or moult important feathers out of her wings, if she could see her parlour furniture in a room at Monte Carlo?"

"Nice way for a par--I mean a chaplain's wife to talk," said d.i.c.k.

"I've been _so_ prim for three whole months," Rose Winter excused herself, "except, of course, when I'm alone with St. George."

"Ever since you were married. Poor kid! But don't you have to be prim with him?"

"Good gracious, no! That would be death. I arranged with him the day I definitely said yes, and again on our wedding eve, so as to have _no_ misunderstanding, that I might keep all my pet slang, and even use _language_ if I felt it really necessary; otherwise he would certainly have been the 'Winter of my discontent.'"

"What do you call language?" d.i.c.k wanted to know.

"Oh, well, I have invented some and submitted it for St. George's--if not approval--tolerance. 'Carnation' for instance, and 'split my infinitives,' are the most useful, and entirely inoffensive, when one's excited. Also I may have a cigarette with him after dinner, if I like, when we're alone. Only I haven't wanted it yet, for we have so much to say, it won't stay lighted. But now tell me about yourself. Of course we knew you'd come. It was in a paper here, that tells us all the news about everybody, in English: who's who (but who isn't who nowadays who can play bridge?), also what entertainments Who gives to Whom."

"Sounds complicated," said d.i.c.k.

"So it is, complicated with luncheon parties and tea parties, and knowing whether to invite So and So with Thing-um-bob, or whether they've quarrelled over bridge or something, and don't speak. It's most intricate. But I've kept track of you--as much as one _can_ keep track of an airman. We knew how busy you'd be, so we didn't expect you to call. And St. George didn't like to go and worry you at Stellamare, as he isn't acquainted with Mr. Schuyler."

"I believe Schuyler sends subscriptions to the church at Monte Carlo and at Mentone, and to the Catholic priest at Roquebrune as well, and thinks he's quit of religious duties," said Carleton. "Yet he's an awfully good fellow--gives a lot away in charities, all around here. He is great chums with some of the peasants. It's quite an experience to take a walk with him: He says how-de-do to the quaintest creatures. But he can't be bothered with society. Vows most of the people who come back here every winter to the villas and hotels are like a lot of goldfish going round and round in a gla.s.s globe."

"I hope _we_ shan't get like that," said Rose. "At present, I am quite amusing myself. And it seems to me there are many different kinds of life here. You have only to take your choice, just as you do in other places, only here it's curiously concentrated and concrete."

"Now, I ask you, is it the right spirit, to talk of 'amusing yourself'

in taking up your new parochial duties?" Carleton teased her.

"Perhaps one does things better if it amuses one to do them," she argued. "And really I'm a success as shepherd's a.s.sistant, or sheep-dog-in-training. I don't go barking and biting at the poor sheep's heels (_have_ sheep heels?), for the sheep here are pampered and sensitive, and their feelings have to be considered, or they jump over the fence and go frisking away. Besides, I always think it must give dogs such headaches to bark as they do! Instead, I make myself agreeable and do pretty parlour tricks, which would be far beneath St. George's dignity; and, anyhow, _he_ couldn't do tricks to save his life. His place is on the mountain tops, so I sit in the valley below, and give the weakest sheep tea and smile at them or weep with them, whichever they like better."

The cousins laughed, both looking very young and happy, and pleased with themselves and each other. They were almost exactly of the same age, twenty-three, and as children had played together in the pleasant old Kentucky town which had given them both their soft, winning drawl. But d.i.c.k's people had moved North, and hers had stayed in the South, until three years ago, when Rose and her father had started off on a tour of Europe. In England she met George Winter, and did the one thing of all others which she would have vowed never to do: she fell in love with a clergyman. They had been married three months ago in Louisville, had then visited his parents in Devonshire; and because Winter had not fully recovered tone since an attack of influenza, he had accepted a chaplaincy in the south of France. Rose Fitzgerald and d.i.c.k Carleton, children of sisters, had put a marker in the book of their old friendship, and were able to open it at the page where they had left off years ago. She was not in the least hurt because he had let more than a fortnight go by before calling, for she knew that he had come for the aviation, and must have had head and hands full. She was not aware that he found time to see a good deal of another young woman who had no claim of old friendship; but even if she had known, she would have understood and forgiven almost as one man understands and forgives another. For quaintly feminine as she was, Rose often said, and felt, that "before a woman can be a true lady she must be a gentleman." And, being a gentleman, she can learn to be a "good fellow"--an invaluable accomplishment for a woman.

"I saw you fly, you know," she said, when they had finished laughing. "I went to Nice on purpose--that is, nearly on purpose. I combined it with buying a dress, a perfectly sweet Paris dress, which I shall try to wear with a slight English accent, so as not to be too smart for a well-regulated sheep-dog. Every one declared the honours of the aviation week were yours, with that wonderful _Flying Fish_. I wouldn't have believed a machine made by man could do such weird things, if I hadn't heard all about the Glenn Curtiss experiments and successes with the _Triad_ at home. I was proud of you. Except that man who tested the Della Robbia parachute, you were quite the most distinguished thing in the air, although it was really crowded--all sorts of quaint creatures giving you their airwash. I want to have a Skye terrier now, and name him after you. St. George was going to give me a dachshund, but they do look so bored to tears, I think it would depress me having one about.

And, besides, I draw the line at an animal which can't know whether its ancestors were lizards or dogs."

"Look here, Rosie," d.i.c.k began when she paused, with an introspective look which told her that he had not heard a word she said, "there's something I want you to do for me."

"It won't be the first time," she replied pertly. "I 'spect I'll like to do it. But if it's anything important, better begin now, for some of my own specially collected sheep will be drifting in to tea."

"Sheep at tea! A new subject for an artist," mumbled Carleton.

"My special ones are so shorn it would be scarcely decent to paint them, and a few are already quite black. But they all like tea--from my hands.

It knits them together in a nice soft woolly way. And St. George will probably stroll in with the Alpine glow of a sermon-in-the-making still lighting up his eyes. And he will be introduced to you and drop crumbs on my lovely Persian rug, and ask to have the gramophone started. He loves it. Often I think our friends must go away and complain of being gramophoned to death by a wild clergyman. So out with what you have to ask me, my dear man, or the enemy will be upon us."

Carleton got up, with his hands in his pockets, and stared out of the window which looked down from a seemingly great height over the turquoise sea. He could see a train from Italy tearing along a curve of the green and golden coast, like a dark knight charging full tilt toward the foe, a white plume swept back from his helmet. Suddenly the smooth blue surface of the sea was broken by the rush of a motor-boat practising for a forthcoming race, a mere buzzing feather of foam, with a sound like the beating of an excited heart, heard after taking some drug to exaggerate the pulsation. Yet Carleton was hardly conscious of what he saw or heard. He was thinking how best to ask Rose Winter to make Miss Grant's acquaintance. Several ways occurred to him, but at last he blurted out something quite different from what he had planned.

"There's a girl--a lady--I--I want to get your opinion about," he stammered, turning red, because he knew that Rose was looking at him with a dangerously innocent expression in her eyes. "That is, I should like to know how you'd cla.s.sify her," he finished.

Rose answered lightly. "There are just three sorts of women, Boy--counting girls: Perfect Dears, Poor Dears, and Persons. Men of course are still easier to cla.s.sify, because there are only two kinds of them--nice and horrid. But under which of the three heads would you yourself put your friend? I suppose you think she's a Perfect Dear, or you wouldn't have to go and look out of the window while you lead up to asking if I'll make her acquaintance."

"No," said d.i.c.k. "I'm afraid she's rather more like a Poor Dear. That's why I want you to help her."