The Guests Of Hercules Part 19

"Oh, you want me to help her? You're _quite_ sure she isn't a Person?"

"I should think not, indeed!" d.i.c.k broke out indignantly. "She's a lady, whatever else she may be."

"It sounds like a Deserving Case. Oh, dear, I do _hope_ she isn't a deserving case? I've had so many thrust under my nose in the last seven weeks, and I'm sorry to say the undeserving ones are usually more interesting. They're all undeserving ones who're coming to tea."

"If you'd call on her, you could see for yourself whether you thought she was deserving or not."

"That's the way I'm to help her--by calling? I thought perhaps I was to get her out of p.a.w.n, or something, by buying her jewellery. But I had to tell you, if _that_ was what you wanted, I couldn't do much, for all my pocket money is exhausted, owing to so many people coming and crying tears as large as eggs all over the living-room--quite strange people I've never seen before. You can't conceive, d.i.c.k, the cataracts of tears that have poured over this rug you admire so much."

"I don't understand," said Carleton, looking blank. "Unless you want to switch me off the subject of----"

"The Poor Dear? No, indeed. But you couldn't be expected to understand, not being a chaplain's wife at Monte Carlo. You see, they hear we're kind, so they call, and then begin to cry and offer me p.a.w.n tickets as security."

"Who are 'they'?"

"Oh, poor creatures--seldom poor dears--who've _lost_, you know. As I suppose your one has?"

"On the contrary," said d.i.c.k, almost sharply. "She's won tremendous sums. She simply can't lose--anything except her head."

"Not her heart? But without joking, if she isn't a 'case,' why do you want me to----"

"Because I think she ought to have some one to look after her, some one who knows the ropes. Honestly, Rose, I'd be awfully obliged if you'd call."

"I will of course," Rose answered. "Have I got to be agreeable to any mothers or aunts she may have lurking in the background?"

"That's the trouble. She hasn't got a soul."

"Oh! And she is quite young?"

"Sometimes she looks a baby. Sometimes I think she's a little older."

"Then she probably is. Where's she staying?"

"At the Hotel de Paris."

"My gracious! _Alone_ at a big Monte Carlo hotel! A young girl! No wonder you glare out of the window while you ask me to call on her, and stick your hands deep in your pockets. People won't allow me for an instant to forget I'm a clergyman's wife. _Et tu Brute!_"

"I told you she was a lady." d.i.c.k turned rather white. "She doesn't know what she's doing. I'm sure she doesn't. She--even Schuyler, who reads most people at sight like A B C, can't make her out. She's a mystery."

"Forgive me," said Rose. "I was half in fun. I wouldn't hurt your _Flying-Fish_ feelings for anything on earth or in air. Is she pretty, and is she American--or what?"

"She's perfectly beautiful, and she's English, I think."

"Hasn't she told you?"

"No. She says nothing about herself--I mean about herself before she came here."

"What's past is past. Dark or fair?--not her past, but her complexion?"

"Fair."

"_Not_ one of those pink and white girls picked out in blue and gold, one sees about so much?"

"As different from them as moonlight from footlights. If ever you went into the Casino, you couldn't have helped having her pointed out to you. She's always there, and she's so awfully pretty and dresses so--so richly, and wins such a lot that everybody stares and talks. She's the sensation of the place."

"But I never do go into the Casino, of course--that is, not into the Rooms. I go to the Thursday Cla.s.sical Concerts, and even that St. George shakes his head over, as it's inside the fatal door. You see he's here to preach against gambling, among other things."

"I don't suppose the gamblers go to hear his sermons?"

"Oh, yes, they do. A good many of them feel that if they attend church and put money in the plate, and don't play on Sunday, the rest's all right. They can keep up a bowing acquaintance with religion that way, anyhow. But I'll go and call on your mystery. What's her name?"

"Miss Grant."

Rose's face changed. "Oh, is it _that_ girl? I _am_ glad! Virtue is its own reward. I shall love to have an excuse to make her acquaintance."

d.i.c.k, who had faced round in the window but was still standing, came and sat down by his cousin.

"What do you know about her?" he asked.

"I'll tell you. It's a sort of story," she answered thoughtfully; "a story about a picture."

XIII

"You know the two beggars who stand by the bridge, just over the Monegasque frontier as you go toward Cabbe-Roquebrune and Mentone?" Rose said, her eyes no longer on Carleton, but fixed upon something she alone could see. "Of course you know they keep off Monaco territory by half an inch or so, because begging is forbidden in the princ.i.p.ality. There's an old white-haired man with rather a sinister face. I'm not sure if he's deformed in any way, or if he just produces on the mind an odd effect of some obscure deformity. He's one of the beggars; and the other's a little humpbacked elf of a creature, hardly human to look at, with his big head and ragged red eyelids; but he's always smiling and gay, bowing and beckoning. It's his _metier_ to be merry, just as it's the other's pose to be overwhelmed with gloom."

"I know them both," said d.i.c.k. "I can't resist throwing the little humpback a fifty-centime piece now and then, from Jim's automobile, though Jim scolds me for it in a superior way--the way people have who take a firm moral stand against beggars. Jim's on the firm moral stand about a lot of things. He's a strong man, body and soul and mind, but I have a whole brood of pet weaknesses running about that I hate to destroy. The other day when I was going over to Nice to try my luck with the _Flying Fish_ for the first time, I'm ashamed to say I chucked that little red-eyed, grinning imp five francs for luck--my luck, not his?"

"It's a wonder you didn't get out and rub his hump, as a lot of gamblers do. They say he's quite a rich man, owing to that sort of silly superst.i.tion, but I can't resist him, either. And I feel it quite a feather in my cap of fascination that I've made the other one--the gloomy beggar--smile, though I've never given him a sou. He has quite a sense of humour, when you get to know him--and when he's realized that he can't fool you. I often walk to the bridge and back, just for a chat with the two beggars, instead of everlastingly promenading up and down the Terrace, bowing to every one I know, when I want exercise. I thought I was the only person original enough or brave enough or depraved enough to visit the beggars socially; but the other morning I was on my way to pay them a call, when I saw that somebody else was ahead of me. It was quite a picture. You remember the blazing hot day we had last week?"

"Wednesday. The best we had at Nice. Not a breath of wind. The day Rongier tried the Della Robbia parachute the second time and made his sensational descent."

"Well, then it was Wednesday. It was like June. The beggars were having a lovely time. They'd taken off their comfortable winter overcoats with those wing-like, three-leaved capes which they've been wearing ever since the beginning of December, and had gone back to summer things: nice, shady, flapping felt hats and cool clothes; and they were having one of their pleasant little feasts which I used quite to envy them when we first came, while the weather was still very warm. A rough table in the road, close to the stone wall, with thick chunks of black bread, and cheese and salad, and chestnuts instead of the figs they had in autumn, all spread out on a paper tablecloth. They had wine of the country, too, with slices of lemon in it; and when I came along a girl was there, peeling a big chestnut for herself which the beggars had given her.

She'd taken off her gloves and laid them on the table, with a perfectly gorgeous gold chain bag blazing with jewels, and a gold vanity box to keep the gloves down. Just imagine! On the beggars table! And they didn't seem to grudge her such splendid possessions one tiny bit. They were grinning at her in the most friendly way, as if they loved her to have pretty things and be rich and beautifully dressed. You could see by their air that they considered themselves chivalrous knights of the road being gallant to a lovely lady. That gloomy old wretch was grinning at least an inch wider for her than he ever did for me; and she was smiling, with heaven knows how many dimples flashing as brilliantly as her rings, while she peeled the chestnut."

"Yes, that must have been Miss Grant!" exclaimed d.i.c.k, delightedly. "I never saw such dimples as she's got."

"Or else you've forgotten the others. Well, I walked slowly so as not to break up the picture. She had on a thin veil, so I thought maybe she wouldn't be as pretty or young without it, but it was like a pearly mist with the sun shining on it, and it gave her that kind of mysterious, magic beauty of things half seen which stirs up all the romance in you."

"Don't I know?" d.i.c.k muttered. "But she's always got that, with or without a veil. It's a peculiar quality of her features or her expression--I don't know which--that can't be described exactly, any more than the lights on the clouds can, that I see sometimes when I've got up a few hundred feet high in the sunrise. I wouldn't have said all this about her if you hadn't begun. But anybody must feel it."

"I believe the beggars did, without knowing it. I did--even I, a woman.

I felt I must see if she'd be as pretty when she lifted her veil to eat the chestnut, so I stopped not far off, on the Monaco end of the bridge, and pretended to tie up my shoe-string. I thought I'd never seen a face like hers--not at all modern, somehow. Who is it says romance is the quality of _strangeness_ in beauty? Hers has that. It seemed to me when she got her veil up that she was more wonderful, not belonging to any century in particular, but to all time, as if thousands of lovely ancestresses had given her something of themselves as a talisman."

"Rose, what a darling you are!" d.i.c.k said, seizing her hands and squeezing them hard.