Her companion was Céline’s constant friend who had much experience in soothing irritable prima donnas. His voice was gentle and persuasive.
“The young man is surrounded,” he pointed out. “His is a curious position. I fear it is a fact that there are men dining in this room who have followed him here from his country with the sole intention of taking him back dead or alive. He is just seeking forgetfulness for a few hours. The Baron is terribly absorbed, almost distracted. I was with him in his room to-night. I have never before seen him show a single sign of discomposure, yet to-night, underneath, he is disturbed. I, Adolf Zabruski, who am here for many months in the year, I saw the signs.”
“If this young man needs forgetfulness,” Céline exclaimed, “who could bring it to him more than I? Why does he not come to me? Why does he offer me this huge sum to sing to him and then apparently forget? I sing and he has no more fears.”
“That time will come,” her companion reminded her. “I told the Baron that before eleven I could promise nothing. After that, if all was favorable and the room quiet, you would keep your word.”
“The young man interests me,” she declared. “I shall not fail him. I will sing. See that you keep your promise, Adolf. I must have the lights lowered—I must have silence. This place is too like a Beer Garden.”
“When you have sung your first few notes,” he assured her, “the silence will descend.”
“Why do you not bring him to me if the Baron forgets his word?” she asked. “You present him. I talk to him. I tell him what I will sing. Oh, he knows plenty of music. He has it in him, that young man. I shall tell him in my own way what is coming for him. After that, he will not waste his time talking to those dull people. He will wait until I sing again and then he will come and thank me. But I want to speak to him first.”
“Alas,” her companion regretted, “I have not his acquaintance. You must wait, Céline.”
“I wish I had not promised to sing,” she declared petulantly. “I think I will not. I will go to my room.”
She sat back in her chair and snapped open her vanity case. Her companion leaned towards her. After all, he was her man of affairs, and ten per cent. on fifty thousand francs . . . it was worth all these efforts with a fractious woman.
“Remember, Madame,” he begged, “fifty thousand francs will buy a pearl as large as the tears in your eyes. Sing with them in your throat, if you will. Afterwards, he will listen to no other woman’s voice to-night.”
Céline was mollified. She condescended even to smile.
“Fifty thousand francs,” she repeated in a tone of good-humoured scorn. “It is always money with you, Adolf.”
She waved her hand to Lord Henry, who was dancing with Joan. He responded with fervour.
“Un homme très galant,” she murmured. “A great lord in his country. He has much spirit, but, alas, no music.”
“Too much tennis to-day?” Lord Henry was asking his companion.
She shook her head.
“We played three rather hard sets this morning,” she said. “Since then I have done very little.”
“Absorbed in the Sagastrada crisis?” he enquired a little bitterly.
Joan laughed but without any real gaiety.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she replied. “Still, you do live some in Monte Carlo, don’t you? A wonderful banquet like this, wonderful music, Céline about to sing and that young man, Rudolph Sagastrada, on the borderland between exile and assassination.”
“They say that he was in league with the Russians and one of the most dangerous communists in Europe,” her partner confided.
“I don’t believe it,” she answered. “And anyhow it isn’t our business. Everyone has a right to their opinions.”
“I don’t like the fellow,” he declared impetuously.
Joan danced on in silence. After all, Lord Henry was the first person who had been kind to her in Monte Carlo.
“Seems to have upset the whole place,” he went on. “If he is really a communist he deserves to be shot, if he’s not let him go back and face his trial.”
“They don’t wait to try them, just now,” she replied. “They shoot them first. Germany and Italy are both afraid of Russia, France is afraid of Germany, England is afraid of everybody. It seems to me that mine is the only country with common sense, after all. Come and visit America, Lord Henry, we cannot show you anything like this but we can live without having our nerves racked all the time.”
“My nerves are not being racked,” he assured her. “I am enjoying myself more than I have ever done in my life, or rather I should be if you would be a little kinder to me.”
“Well, you don’t look like it!”
“That is only because I am sick of all this fuss about Sagastrada,” he said. “I hope he takes the Baron’s advice and clears out to-morrow.”
“I don’t think he would be very comfortable on that steamer,” she observed.
“Who cares?”
“Well, I do, for one. I think he is a very charming young man. He knows more about music and poetry than anyone I have ever met and he appreciates beautiful things. He may have evil qualities that one does not know of, but he has some very excellent ones.”
“He seems to have had a queer effect upon you,” Lord Henry declared.
“What, in these few days?” she laughed.
“I saw you go into the Baron’s rooms early this evening—the suite he has lent Sagastrada. Domiloff came out almost immediately because I met him on my way into the club. I must have been there for an hour and a half. When I came back you were just leaving.”
“And so?” she asked coldly.
“Oh, don’t be offended,” he begged. “I’m jealous—that’s all there is about it. If I asked you to come and have cocktails in my rooms you would look at me out of those beautiful brown eyes of yours quite reproachfully and suggest that we have them in the bar.”
“You are too stupid,” she scoffed. “I am not going to be cross with you.”
“You’d better not be,” he went on. “You had better tell me instead why you came out of that room with a look upon your face I have never seen there before. You have been dazed ever since. I can’t understand what it’s all about.”
“Don’t try,” she advised him. “It is really not your concern.”
He brought the dance to an abrupt conclusion. When she reached the table, she left her place which had been by his side, and sat in a vacant chair next to the Baroness.
“There are times,” she declared almost savagely as she struck a match and lit a cigarette, “when I hate Englishmen.”
“They lack finesse,” Lydia murmured.
“They lack more than that,” Joan went on. “Fancy Lord Henry demanding, as though he had a right to, why I spent an hour and a half in the suite which your husband has lent to Rudolph! If I had spent the whole day or the whole night there it would have been no concern of his.”
The Baroness was faintly amused.
“You must remember, my dear,” she said, “that he is another of your victims. The man is jealous.”
“I don’t mind his being jealous, but I hate his way of showing it. The one quality I expect to find in a man is restraint.”
Lydia Domiloff laughed openly. Perhaps there was a shade of bitterness in her mirth.
“You should have married my husband,” she remarked. “He is the only man I ever met who enjoys complete self-control.”
“Then I respect him even more than I did.”
The Baroness shrugged her ivory-white shoulders.
“It is a great gift,” she acknowledged, “but it is also a destructive force. The man who conquers self completely kills other things.”
Joan glanced across the table at the Baron’s worn face, the deeply graven lines of his forehead and his tired expression. He was at that moment in the act of rising to his feet. A blond young man with a thin mouth and sloping forehead, the redeeming feature of whose appearance was his corre
ct military carriage, had crossed the room to address him.
“This might be interesting,” the Baroness whispered. “You know who that is?”
“No idea,” Joan replied.
“That is Prince Anselm of Herm, who claims to be the overlord and ruler of Herm, and he certainly has some semi-Royal powers. He asked for an interview with Paul this afternoon but Paul escaped. We were talking of self-control. How should you think that my husband was feeling just at this moment? Look at him.”
“He appears to me perfectly indifferent,” Joan confessed.
“On the other hand he is desperately angry,” the Baroness confided, dropping her voice a little. “The young man will not realize it. No one else would guess it. I hope nothing stupid will happen.”
CHAPTER XVIII
Table of Contents
THE young man talked for a few minutes with Domiloff, who listened to what he had to say and then, with the slightest of bows, turned away, walked the length of the table, after pausing to speak to one or two of the guests, and held out his hands to Lucille. She rose at once and in a moment they had passed into the swaying throng of dancers. The intruder whom Domiloff had so abruptly deserted stood for a moment rigid and motionless, then he swung round on his heel and disappeared in the crowd. Townleyes, who had taken a chair next to Joan, looked after him with a faint smile upon his lips.
“The Baron has courage,” he remarked. “What a diplomat he would have made in the old world.”
“He seems pretty sure of himself,” Joan replied anxiously, “but it really does seem to me that he is asking for trouble in this new one.”
“You mean because in a sense he has appointed himself protector of our young host?” Townleyes asked.
“That is just what I do mean,” she admitted.
“The puzzling part of it all is,” Townleyes went on, “that no one seems to know much about the legal side of the question. The Palace is shut up. There is no one there of whom anyone could make enquiries. The Assembly of the three communes has closed its doors pending the return of their chairman from Paris, where he has gone to confer with the French Government. If any foreign country wished to legalize an action here, directed against one of their own nationality, I really do not see, myself, to what authority he could appeal. I heard rumours in London before I left. What it all amounts to I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. Because we saved that young man from being assassinated or abducted at Beaulieu we may find ourselves at any moment accused of having incited a new European war!”
“Shall I save you from it?” Joan asked.
He looked at her curiously.
“How?”
She rose abruptly to her feet.
“Let’s leave international problems alone and go and dance,” she suggested. “The orchestra have to quit before midnight to make way for the great Céline. Fancy a refugee being able to afford to pay a prima donna to leave her opera and come and sing for him!”
“The whole thing is rather like a chapter from the Arabian Nights, isn’t it?” he observed, as they moved on to the floor.
“It is like the Arabian Nights, and to me it seems just as unreal,” she confided. “You know that I have only been here about a fortnight and that I came here for the first time in my life?”
“Yes.”
“From the moment I arrived,” she went on dreamily, “everyone seems to have spoilt me. I have never met such nice people. I have never met with such kindness, and yet more and more it seems to grow unreal. It is like a fantastic but beautiful marionette show with everyone sweeping about the stage saying their little pieces then going away. At first, I was absolutely dazed. To-night I believe that I am just getting hold of the reality of it. People who seemed to me like puppets are becoming men and women.”
“Can’t everyone recognize that?” he exclaimed. “You have something in your face to-night, Miss Joan Haskell,” he added, lowering his voice, “which I have never seen there before.”
“How intriguing! Go on, please. When did you first notice it?”
“When you passed through the foyer on your way to change for dinner this evening. I don’t know what you had been doing since Domiloff came and whisked you away from the bar, but that intelligent tourist-like expression of a young woman come into a strange world and poking about for impressions had all gone. It was as though you had had a vision of the real thing and were still shivering from the shock of it.”
“Am I improved or not?” she enquired.
“The word is not comprehensive enough,” he answered. “You are changed. I suppose a psychologist would say that you were no longer an enquirer, that you had taken your place in the world with other women. You had suffered and learnt to understand.”
“Have you been watching me as closely as all that?” she asked anxiously.
“Why not? You must know that I am interested in you.”
The music changed its rhythm and for a time she seemed absorbed in the dance.
“Please do not talk any more nonsense,” she begged lightly. “I have had rather an exciting day for a poor, lonely girl. I have come to the conclusion that I have found my way into the wrong place for a quiet month’s holiday.”
“It depends what sort of a holiday you are looking for,” he rejoined. “If you want excitement and novelty there may be plenty here before long.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” he assured her hastily. “Don’t think for a moment that I am posing as being behind the scenes. I am not. I am completely mystified myself. The Baron shows no desire to take me or anyone else into his confidence, but one cannot help feeling that there are possibilities about the situation.”
“Such as?”
“Well, Sagastrada is, after all,” he went on, “the representative of a great European family, and in venturing to strike a blow at them his government must have something at the back of their minds which they have not yet disclosed.”
The orchestra ceased to play. The leader waved away all suggestion of an encore. There was the familiar rum-tum-tum of the drums.
“Céline is going to sing!” Joan exclaimed.
In a marvellously short time the floor was empty, the lights were lowered, a new and smaller orchestra filed into their places. The master of ceremonies stepped to the front of the stage.
“Mesdames et Messieurs,” he announced, “Madame Céline, our great prima donna, has consented to sing.”
There was muffled applause from all parts of the room. The lights went a little lower still. The violinist commenced to play, the bow of the ’cellist was suspended over his instrument, the fingers of the pianist hovered over the notes. Then Céline herself swept on to the stage; there came that long, passionate note which served as the prelude of her song and the room was filled with music. The magical hush was followed by a profound silence, against the background of which the music rose and fell. The Princess, who was seated next to Rudolph Sagastrada, heard the quick intake of his breath, saw his fingernails dig into the tablecloth as he leaned a little forward, his eyes dilated, his cheeks unnaturally pale, every fibre of his being drawn taut, thrilled with joyous appreciation. . . . Of Céline’s voice there had been at different times varying notes of criticism; of its magnetic, almost devouring qualities there had never been a whisper of hesitation. Someone once said of her a little cynically that there was more sex appeal in the call of her voice than in the sinuous movements of any of the most wonderful courtesans the world had ever known. Rudolph had remained standing amidst the storm of applause long after her song had finished and Céline had left the stage. Apparently the demand for an encore was to meet with no response. Every now and then the hubbub died away, only to flare up again in another direction. Presently the young man who acted as master of ceremonies came across the stage, jumped lightly down and made his way to where Rudolph was still standing with his eyes fastened upon that corner of the stage where Céline had disappeared. He held a scrap of paper in his hand.
He held out the scrap of paper he had been carrying. Rudolph glanced at it and nodded.
“Yes,” he agreed eagerly. “Yes.”
“It would appear to be the moment for flowers,” Lord Henry remarked a little sarcastically.
Flowers! Rudolph hesitated for a moment. Then he leaned over and clutched at the huge vases of roses and cyclamen which decorated the table. He stripped the vases everywhere within reach and pushed armsful of the blossoms into the embarrassed young man’s hands.
“Take these to Madame, and these,” he went on, moving a little way down the table and removing the whole of the centrepiece. “Tell her that all the flowers which I could strip from my table lie on the ground at her feet. Tell her that we rest here with fast-beating hearts—waiting.”
The young man staggered away. Rudolph muttered something to himself. He slowly retraced his steps to his place. Joan was conscious of a curious sense of depression. She felt the colour ebbing from her cheeks, she knew that her eyes had lost their fire. All the time she watched Sagastrada. The lights which had been turned on again were once more lowered. The master of ceremonies reappeared and whispered a word to the violinist. The leader of the orchestra tapped with his baton. A few stealthy notes crept like a line of smothered fire into the room. Even the least impressionable moved uneasily in their places. Sagastrada, drawn to his full height, stood at the head of the table where everyone else was seated and when Céline suddenly appeared, she came to the corner of the stage as near to him as possible. The sleeves fell back from her bared arms. Slowly they were stretched in his direction. It was years before anyone who heard her sing those few fiery bars of flaming music ever again called them banal or even hinted at melodrama.
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