The Guests Of Hercules Part 6

V

Mary followed the other people who had left the train. Lord and Lady Dauntrey, with their party, were far ahead, and she could not have spoken to them if she had wished, without running to catch them up; but she did not wish to speak. She had taken no dislike to them; on the contrary, she was interested, but she did not feel inclined to ask advice, or attach herself to any one. She enjoyed the idea of a wonderful new independence.

The sunshine made her feel energetic, and full of courage and enterprise, which had been crushed out of her in London by the chilly manner of her relatives, and the weight of the black fog.

Pa.s.sing through the station, after having part of her ticket torn from its book, she reached the front of the building, where a great many hotel omnibuses and a few private motors were in waiting. A station porter was following her now, with the one dressing-bag which remained of her abandoned luggage. "Quel hotel, Mademoiselle?" he inquired.

Mary hesitated, her eyes roaming over the omnibuses. One was conspicuous, drawn by four splendid horses, driven by a big man with a shining conical hat, and a wide expanse of scarlet waistcoat.

No other omnibus looked quite so important. On it, in gold letters, Mary read "Hotel de Paris." The name sounded vaguely familiar. Where had she lately heard this hotel mentioned! Oh, yes! by Miss Wardropp.

"Hotel de Paris, s'il vous plait," she answered.

In another moment her bag was in the omnibus, and she was climbing in after it in the wake of other persons, enough to fill the roomy vehicle.

As she settled into her corner she saw a man walk slowly by at a distance. He was not looking at her for the moment, and she had no more than a glimpse of a dark, clearly drawn profile; yet she received a curious impression that he had just turned away from looking at her; and she was almost sure it was the man she had noticed at Ma.r.s.eilles. Now her Romeo idea of him struck her as sentimental. She wondered why she had connected such a thought with a man in modern clothes, in a noisy railway station. The morning and its impressions seemed long ago. She felt older and more experienced, almost like a woman of the world, as the big horses trotted up a hill, leaving all the other omnibuses behind. From under the large hat of a large German lady, she peered eagerly, to lose no detail in approaching Monte Carlo.

High at the right rose a terrace like a hanging garden, attached to a huge white hotel. In front of the building, and also very high, ran a long covered gallery where there appeared to be restaurants and shops.

At the left were gardens; and then in a moment more, coming out into an open square, all Monte Carlo seemed made of gardens with extraordinary, ornate white buildings in their midst, sugar-cake buildings made for pleasure and amus.e.m.e.nt, all gla.s.s windows and plaster figures and irrelevant towers, the whole ringed in by a semi-circle of high, gray mountains. It was a fantastic fairyland, this place of palms and bosky lawns, with gra.s.s far too green to seem real, and beds of incredibly brilliant flowers.

One section of the garden ran straight and long, like a gayly patterned carpet, toward a middle background of climbing houses with red roofs; and it began to spread almost from the steps of the cream white building with jewelled and gilded horns, which Mary had seen in Peter's Riviera snapshots: the Casino. As the omnibus swung round a generous half circle, slowly now to avoid loitering groups of people, Mary saw many men and women arriving in motors or on foot, to go up the shallow flight of carpeted marble steps which led into the horned building. She thought again of an immense animal face under these erect, glittering horns; a face with quant.i.ties of intelligent, bright gla.s.s eyes that watched, and a wide-open, smiling mouth into which the figures walked confidently. It looked a kind, friendly animal basking in the gardens, and the big clock above its forehead, round which pigeons wheeled, added to its air of comfortable good nature. Mary was suddenly smitten with a keen curiosity to see exactly what all these people would see who allowed themselves to be swallowed by the mouth which smiled in receiving them. Most of the women were smartly dressed and had gold or embroidered bags in their hands, like those she had seen at Nice station. They went in looking straight ahead, and men ran up the steps quickly. Surely this was more than a mere building. There was something alive and vital and mysteriously attractive about it, though it was not beautiful at all architecturally, only rich looking and extraordinary, with its bronze youths sitting on the cornice and plaster figures starting out of the walls, laughing and beckoning. It had a personality which subtly contrived to dominate and make everything else in the little fairyland of flowers subservient to it, almost as if the emotions and pa.s.sions of thousands and tens of thousands of souls from all over the world had saturated the materials of its construction.

As this fancy came to Mary's mind, the sun in its last look over the gray Tete de Chien struck her full in the eyes as with a flung golden gauntlet, then dropped behind the mountain, setting the sky on fire. An unreal light illumined the buildings in the fairy gardens, and Mary became conscious of an invisible tide of burning life all around her which caught her in its rushing flood. She was impelled to float on a swift and shining stream which she knew was carrying many others besides herself in the same direction toward an unseen but definite end. She was like a leaf s.n.a.t.c.hed from a quiet corner by the wind and forced to join the whirl of its fellow-dancers. It was a feeling that warmed her veins with excitement, and made her reckless.

The omnibus pa.s.sed the Casino, and a little farther on stopped in front of the Hotel de Paris. It too was fantastically ornate, surely the most extraordinary hotel on earth, with a high roof of a gray severity which ironically frowned down upon gilded balconies and nude plaster women who supported them, robustly voluptuous creatures who faded into foliage below the waist, like plump nymphs escaping the rude pursuit of G.o.ds.

Their bareness and boldness startled the convent-bred girl, even horrified her. She was the last to leave the omnibus, and then, instead of pushing in with her fellow-pa.s.sengers to secure a room before others could snap up everything, she lingered a moment on the steps.

Still that magical light illumined the _Place_, under the sky's rosy fire. The long gla.s.s facade of the restaurant sent out diamond flashes.

The pigeons strutting in the open s.p.a.ce in front of the Casino were jewels moving on sticks of coral. As they walked, tiny purple shadows followed them, as if their little red legs were tangled in pansies.

Across the _Place_, on the other side of the garden and opposite the hotel, was an absurd yet gay collection of bubbly Moorish domes, and open or gla.s.sed-in galleries, evidently a cafe. Music was playing there, and in front of the balconies were many chairs and little tables where people drank tea and fed the strutting pigeons. Beyond the bubbly domes shimmered a panorama of beauty which by force of its magnificence redeemed the frivolous fairyland from vulgarity, rather than rebuked it.

Under the rain of rose and gold, as if seen through opaline gauze, shone sea and hills and distant mountains. On a green height a ruined castle and its va.s.sal rock-village seemed to have fallen from the top and been arrested by some miracle halfway down. Beneath, a peninsula of pines silvered with olives floated on a sea of burnished gold; and above soared mountains that went billowing away to the east and to Italy, deep purple-red in the wine of sunset.

Mary forgot that people do not come to hotels for the sole purpose of standing on the steps to admire a view. It was a liveried servant who politely reminded her of her duty by holding the gla.s.s door open and murmuring a suggestion that Mademoiselle should give herself the pain of entering. Then, slightly dazed by new impressions and the magnitude of her independence, Mary walked humbly into an immense hall, marble paved and marble columned. She had never seen anything half so gorgeous, and though she did not know yet whether she liked or disliked the bewildering decorations of mermaids and sea animals and flowers, she was struck by their magnificent audacity into a sense of her own insignificance. Before she could dare to walk here as by right, or seat herself in one of those great gilded and brocaded chairs, she must buy clothes which suited Monte Carlo as all this florid splendour of ornamentation suited it. She did not put this in words, but like all women possessed of "temperament," had in her something of the chameleon, and instinctively wished to match her tints with her environment.

Suddenly she recalled a solemn warning from Mrs. Home-Davis that some hotels refused to receive women travelling alone, and her heart was inclined to fail as she asked for a room. But fortunately this was not one of those cruel hotels Aunt Sara had heard about. Mary was received civilly and without surprise. A view of the sea? Certainly Mademoiselle could have a room with a view of the sea. It would be at the price of from thirty to fifty francs a day. Mary said that she would like to see a room for thirty francs, and felt economical and virtuous as she did so. She had been brought up to consider economy a good thing in the abstract, but she knew practically nothing of the value of money, as she had never bought anything for herself until she went to London. It seemed to her now that, with fifty thousand pounds, she was so rich that she could have anything she wanted in the world, but she had nebulous ideas as to what to want.

A pretty little pink and gray room was shown her, so pretty that it seemed cheap until she heard that food and everything else was "extra"; but the view decided her to take it. The large window looked southwest, with the harbour and rock of Monaco to the right, and to the left an exquisite group of palms on the Casino terrace, which gave an almost mysterious value to a background of violet sky melting into deeper violet sea. As she stood looking out, silver voices of bells chimed melodiously across the water, from the great Byzantine cathedral on the Rock. It was all beautiful and poetic. Mary would have taken the room if it had been a hundred instead of a paltry thirty francs a day. But she could not afford to stop and look at the violet sea, still haunted by the red wreckage of sunset. She had her shopping to do, for she must somehow find exactly the right hat and dress, ready to put on, or she would have to dine in her room, and that would be imprisonment on the first night at Monte Carlo.

She ran quickly downstairs again, not in the least tired after her journey, and changed a thousand-franc note, which perhaps inspired official confidence in the young English lady with only a hand-bag for luggage. Also, she inquired where she could buy the prettiest things to wear, and was directed to the Galerie Charles Trois, which turned out to be that covered gallery with shops and restaurants that she had noticed when driving up the hill.

By this time, though it was not yet dark, lights gleamed everywhere like great diamonds scintillating among the palms, or stars shining on the hills. The gra.s.s and trees and flowers in the _Place_ of the Casino looked twice as unreal as before, all theatrically vivid in colour, and extraordinarily flat, as if cut out of painted cardboard against a background of gauze.

The ruined castle and old rock-town tumbling down the far-off hillside still smouldered in after-sunset fire, windows glittering like the rubies in some lost crown, dropped by a forgotten king in battle. But the red of the sky was paling to hyacinth, a strange and lovely tint that was neither rose nor blue. As Mary went to buy herself pretty things, walking through a scene of beauty beyond her convent dreams, she murmured a small prayer of thanksgiving that she had been guided to this heavenly place.

She must write to Reverend Mother and Peter, she thought, explaining why she was here, and how glad she was that she had happened to come. Then it struck her suddenly, though more humorously than disagreeably, that it would be rather difficult to explain, especially in a way to satisfy Peter. Perhaps dear Reverend Mother would be anxious for her safety, if Peter said any of those rather silly things of Monte Carlo which at the last she had said to her--Mary. After all, maybe it would be better to keep to the first plan and not write until she could date a letter Florence. Then she put the little worry out of her mind and gave her soul to the shop-windows in the Galerie Charles Trois.

It was a fascinating gallery, where lovely ladies walked, wonderfully dressed, pointing out dazzling jewellery in plate gla.s.s windows, to slightly bored men who were with them. Nearly everybody who pa.s.sed sent out wafts of peculiarly luscious perfume. Mary walked the length of the gallery, so as to see all the shops there were to see, before deciding upon anything. She pa.s.sed brilliantly lighted restaurants where people were having tea, some of them at little tables out of doors, protected by gla.s.s screens; and as she walked, people stared at her a good deal, especially the men who were with the lovely ladies; and the bored look went out of their eyes. Mary noticed that she was stared at, and was uncomfortable, because she imagined that her gray tweed and travelling hat drew unfavourable attention.

But she intended to change all this. She would soon be as well dressed as anybody, and no one would stare any more. In one window there were displayed, not only gowns, but hats and cloaks, and exquisite furs, all shown on wax models with fashionably dressed hair and coquettish faces.

One pink and white creature with a startlingly perfect figure wore a filmy robe of that intense indigo just taken on by the sea. Underneath a shadowlike tunic of dark blue chiffon there was a glint of pale gold, a sort of gold and silver sheath which encased the form of the waxen lady.

"My hair is that colour," Mary thought, and imagined herself in the dress. The next thing was to walk in and ask a very agreeable Frenchwoman if the gown were likely to fit her without alteration. "I must have something at once," Mary explained. "My luggage has gone to Italy."

The agreeable Frenchwoman was sympathetic. But yes, the dress would fit to perfection, not a doubt of it, for Mademoiselle had the ideal figure for model robes. And if, unfortunately, the trunks had all gone, Mademoiselle would want not only one dress but several? And hats? Yes, naturally. Other things also, of the same importance. The house made a speciality of trousseaux. Had Mademoiselle but the time to look? She need not buy anything, or fear giving trouble. Then Madame added a few compliments against which Mary, unaccustomed to such food, was not proof.

She bought the blue chiffon over pale gold, which was hastily tried on behind a gilded screen; and the wax lady was robbed of gold embroidered stockings and golden shoes to match. There was a hat of dark blue with a crown of silver-threaded golden gauze, which was indispensable with the dress. To wear over this a long cloak of white satin with a wide collar of swansdown, was the _dernier cri_ of Paris, Madame a.s.sured her customer. There were other dresses and hats too, for morning and afternoon, and even more extravagant _dessous_ than those Jennings had tabooed in London.

After the first, Mary forgot to ask prices. She was lost in a delirium of buying, and ordered whatever she liked, until her brain was tired.

She then thanked Madame charmingly for her politeness and asked to have the things sent home at once.

But yes, they should go on the moment. And would Mademoiselle pay now, or at her hotel?

Mary laughed at herself, because she had forgotten about paying. It might as well be now, as she wished to go farther and get some gloves.

Deftly Madame made out the account. It came to three thousand eight hundred and ninety francs.

When Mary had mentally turned francs into pounds she was a little startled; but luckily, against her aunt's advice, she had come away with a good deal of ready money, English, French, and Italian. It took nearly all she had to settle the bill, but, as Madame remarked gayly, Mademoiselle had left herself enough for an evening game at the Casino.

This was, of course, true, as more could somehow be obtained to-morrow.

For the moment Mary had forgotten her curiosity about the pleasant, basking animal in the garden, but she decided that, after dinner--which she must have soon, as she was already beginning to be hungry--she would walk into the monster's smiling mouth.

VI

Prince Giovanni Della Robbia, known to his friends in Rome as Vanno, went down early to dinner at the Paris. This, not because he was hungry, but having come to the hotel because he knew that his Juliet of Ma.r.s.eilles was there, he had no intention of missing a chance to look at her. If she did not appear early, he would go on dining until it was late, no matter how late.

Such a resolution, and just such an adventure as this into which he had flung himself with characteristic impulsiveness and pa.s.sion, were strange for Prince Vanno, because since a first unhappy love, when he was a mere boy, he had avoided women. Adventure and romance were in his blood, the Italian blood of his father, the Irish-American blood of his beautiful mother. But his adventures had not been love adventures, since that first agony had driven him for comfort to the silence of the desert. Since then he had gone back to the desert for desire of great empty s.p.a.ces, and the fire of eastern stars, needing comfort no longer for a lost love. That had pa.s.sed out of his heart years ago, leaving no scar of which he was conscious.

He had just come back from the desert now, and an Arab astrologer who was a friend of his had told him that December of this year would be for him a month of good luck and great happenings, the star of his birth being in the ascendant. Almost it began to look as if there might be something in the prophecy; and Prince Vanno, laughing at himself (with the dry sense of humour that came from the Irish-American side of his parentage), was half inclined to be superst.i.tious. Astronomy was his love at present, not astrology, and last year he had discovered a small blue planet which had been named after him and whose sapphire beauty had been much admired. Still, because he had always had a pa.s.sion for the stars, and went to the east to see them at their brightest, he was tolerant of those who believed in their influence upon earth-dwellers; therefore he was ready to yield with confident ardour to sudden impulses in this the month of his star. Mary Grant's eyes had looked to him like stars, and he had followed them. Already he had had one stroke of luck in the adventure, for he had been bound to Monte Carlo from Ma.r.s.eilles, before he saw her, not to try his fortune at the tables, but to meet his elder brother and sister-in-law who were to finish their honeymoon close by, at Cap Martin, and to stay for an aviation week at Nice, when an invention of his would be tried for the first time. But if Mary had gone on beyond Monte Carlo, he too would have gone on. Having plunged into the adventure, for a pair of eyes, he was prepared to pursue it to the end wherever the end might be, even if he missed the flying week and broke an engagement with the bride and bridegroom. But it was luck that she should be getting out at the place where he had meant to stop for his own reasons.

He supposed, of course, that she was travelling with relatives or friends. Although he had seen her mounting the steps of a _wagon lit_ apparently alone, this did not argue that some one who belonged to her was not inside. And when, from the window of the train whence he leaned at every station, he saw her again at Monte Carlo, she was surrounded by a crowd. One of the ladies shoulder to shoulder with her might be a mother or aunt, one of the men a father or uncle; and it had been the same when he followed, just in time to see her get into the Hotel de Paris omnibus. Already the vehicle was full. She was the last in. His idea was that, being the youngest of her party, she had waited for them to be placed before taking a seat herself.

He knew of her now, having examined the visitors' book at the Paris, that she was "Miss M. Grant"; that the name was written in a very pretty, rather old-fashioned hand; that after it came "London" in the same writing. He was sure the name must be hers, because it was last on the page before he wrote his own; and she had gone in last, after everybody else, leaving the people she was with to do their name-signing before her. Also, the other women on the page were all "Madame" or "Frau" or "Mrs." He was rather surprised, somehow, to learn that she was English. In spite of her unusually fair hair he had fancied that she would turn out to be French, her type was so _spirituelle_, yet so suggestive of "temperament."

If he had not been following a pair of eyes, Prince Vanno would have gone to a quiet hotel in the Condamine, to be near the aviation ground, for, being utterly unsn.o.bbish, like all Italians of great families, he rather disliked "smart" crowds, rich food, and gorgeous decorations. But the only way not to lose the stars he followed was to keep near them. He would not for a great deal have questioned the hotel people about "Miss M. Grant," otherwise he might have learned for how long a time her room was engaged, and, incidentally, that she was alone. But as it was, he had to find out things for himself, and to do this must be in the same hotel.

It was only seven o'clock when he came down from his little room at the top of the house, not nearly as expensive as Mary's, and stopped at the foot of the marble stairs, which he liked better than the lift, to look round the big hall. There was no great crowd, for most people who had come in from the Casino were dressing for dinner, and Prince Vanno saw at a glance that Miss M. Grant was not there. He went on slowly through the Louis Seize tea-room, to the gorgeous restaurant with its domed and gilded ceiling, its immense wall paintings, and gla.s.s front.

At one of these window tables--a very small one--sat a lovely creature, alone. A good many heads were turning to look at her, so probably she had not long ago arrived. For an instant Vanno's eyes were fixed upon the glittering figure, and the bowed face shadowed by an eccentric hat, without recognizing it. But it was only for an instant. Then, with a shock of surprise which was almost horror, he realized that this lovely, low-necked bird of Paradise creature was the same gentle girl he had followed.

"Dio!" he said to himself, and bit his lip. He felt the blood rush up to his face, as if some one had given him an insulting blow, which he could not avenge because his hands were tied.

There were two or three other young and beautiful women alone, dressed with equal extravagance, their gowns as low, their hats as big; only she, his Juliet, was more beautiful than any. That was the difference between them. But was it the only difference? The young man, whose eyes still reflected the golden light of vast desert s.p.a.ces, asked himself the question with a sick sinking of the heart. He had followed an angel, and found her--what? Because about those two or three others there was no question at all. And why was she here alone, dressed like them, if--but he would not finish the sentence in his mind. He resolved to study the girl, and give her the full benefit of the doubt, so long as there was a ray of hope.

Vanno had not gone so far as to fall in love at first sight; yet coming back from the desert with his heart open to beauty and romance, he had been willing to let himself go to the brink, or over it, if it were worth while, else he would not have followed Juliet's eyes. But he wished to have nothing to do with the white angel if she were a fallen angel. Such a one would be easy to know, to walk with and talk with, whereas he might have found it difficult to make the acquaintance of a conventionally brought up girl. Some men might have been glad to find the heroine of a romantic adventure dining alone at a fashionable hotel at Monte Carlo, in a sheath-like, low-cut dress and a hat of to-morrow's fashion. But Prince Vanno Della Robbia was sick at heart, and dazed as by a blow.