The Man with the Double Heart Part 43

"Do come and see us off--and we'll take you a little way to try it.

Further on there are low boughs, not designed to suit ladies' hats."

The pretty woman smiled back, looking at him with her wide, dark eyes.

"I'm so sorry--but I can't--it's my evening with Marco for the Casino."

She flung the challenge across the table. The Count wearily shrugged his shoulders while the Poet, with saturnine face, seemed to enjoy the situation.

The Principessa, stirring herself, broke the pregnant silence that followed.

"Cara Emilia," she said, "have you heard of Bellanti's misfortune?"

"No----" the Countess turned quickly--"what has happened?" Don Cesare watched her, a mischievous light in his black eyes, as she went on languidly. "His sister is my dearest friend and she hasn't written to me for weeks! I was really beginning to wonder if she were ill. What is the matter?"

"He's ruined." The Princess turned up her hands with an eloquent gesture of finality. "He was always gambling, as you know, and then he took to borrowing money--enormous sums, I am told--on the strength of his Aunt's fortune--Donna Teresa Bellanti."

"Did you ever meet her?" She paused in her story to open her fan and, lazily, wafted it backward and forward before her pale middle-aged face.

"I don't think so." The Countess smiled, feeling across the narrow table her husband's persistent glance and the silence of the rest of the party.

"She did not care for society--she was always very religious, you know--and has never married--so everyone thought she would leave her money to her nephew."

"Well!" The Countess was impatient. McTaggart felt a shade of pity.

He guessed the Princess was amusing herself by prolonging the other's anxiety.

"She's taken the veil," said the older woman. "You know she's stayed for the last two years at her favourite convent--Our Lady of Loretto--and it seems she was finishing her novitiate. And all her wealth is to go to the Church."

She folded her fan carefully. "It's a fearful blow for Bellanti--I hear he's quite at his wits' end."

The pretty Countess bit her lip; under the table her hands were clenched.

"I can't pity him," said the Poet. He spoke with an air of authority.

"'A fool and his money' ... you know the proverb?" His eyes sparkled vindictively.

"Oh--Gabriele!" The Princess was shocked. "And you so 'simpatico,'

too!"

"He has no brains," the Poet declared--"and he lives a base, material life."

"I'm _awfully_ sorry," McTaggart frowned. "He's the best rider to hounds I know. I'll never forget a run I had with him last winter in the Campagna. And a jolly nice fellow too."

He glanced across at Don Cesare, who was eyeing the Poet with disgust.

"We shall miss Bellanti," said the Countess. Her voice was calm. "I must write to his sister. Poor Bice! She was always so fond of him.

I don't say he was intellectual"--she looked at the Poet thoughtfully--at his ugly, weak little face--"but so good looking--a thorough _man_."

The Principessa followed her gaze.

Don Cesare laughed aloud. "Well--give me good looks any day--and a good seat. I'm for Bellanti."

The Countess gave him a grateful nod.

"And so's Emilia----" he kissed the tips of his fingers to her across the table--"and so's Marco." Wickedly he turned his head toward the Count.

"Exactly--" that worthy watched his wife, moved by a subtle idea. "I was thinking, my dear," he addressed the latter--"We might ask the poor fellow here?"

"Pourquoi pas?" A shade of impertinence lay in the quick French response, and between the pair of dark eyes a silent, menacing challenge pa.s.sed.

For the Count knew that his wife knew that he ... knew!

It was a bribe to settle the strained situation vis-a-vis with "La Carlotta."

And watching this matrimonial by-play McTaggart felt a growing scorn for the shallowness of the social life in which he found himself involved.

This Princess with her puny poet, who ruled her with a rod of iron, and Cesare, a mere school boy, eager for the latest scandal. The pretty woman by his side, playing her lover against her husband, and the Count, deliberately sacrificing his wife's morals to his own intrigues.

England might be dull, he thought, but at least the men and women there held a sterner code of honour. A glow stole through him at the contrast. People might talk of the laxity of conduct in the upper cla.s.ses, but the latter had the decency to veil their occasional lapses from virtue.

And, as a whole, the national standard took a lot of beating, he decided. Love was still reverenced and marriage more than a legal tie to cover innumerable intrigues!

He watched his n.o.ble guests depart without regret, then sat down to write a hurried line to Jill, full of heart-felt sympathy. He wondered--not without a smile--if Countess Marco Viviani would go to prison for Bellanti--like Mrs. Uniacke for the Cause!

He signed the page "Peter McTaggart," with an amused breath of relief.

He liked it better than "Maramonte" for all its air of high romance.

And, as he drew a steady line under the purely British name, unconsciously he made his choice and ran up the Union Jack!

CHAPTER XX

But as he neared the mist-wreathed cliffs of Dover McTaggart's patriotism was put to the test by the captious weather and the hopeless, sea-sick crowd around him. Rain and hail and distant thunder were his portion, a choppy sea and a boat packed with a draggled party from the Polytechnic, returning home.

He said to himself he had never seen his countrymen to worse advantage.

Beside them, Mario, chilled to the bone but still cheerful, inured to the motion by many a past yachting trip, looked a perfect aristocrat from his well-poised head to his slender feet.

A woman, their neighbour on the boat, lost her hat, then her rug, wailing aloud, and Mario, at his master's nod, retrieved them imperturbably from the skittish antics of the wind.

The sufferer never even thanked him, but clutched her belongings with a glance full of mistrust, recognizing a foreigner--or, in other words--a doubtful character!

At last they b.u.mped against the pier; ropes whirled out, gangways creaked; a mad herd of humans crushed after porters, charging with hoisted bags.

The train looked absurdly small. McTaggart thought the station shrunk and his first English cup of tea was cold and strong, in a leaking pot.

Even the fields, as they left the Downs, seemed to have dwindled to half their size. The rain lashed against the gla.s.s. Between the streams trickling down he began to catch green vistas of hops with their quaint, peaked oast-houses like the caps worn by hob-goblins from the pages of a fairy book.

Rochester!--under leaden skies, smoky, blurred. The train rocked on, the shorter gauge oddly aggressive in the low-built, narrow carriage.