‘Yes, sir. The pilot is on board, and the gentleman you expected is just coming alongside.’
‘Oh, he is, is he?’
Mr. Van Torp evidently expected no answer to his favourite form of question when he was thinking over what had just been said; and the captain was silent.
‘Then you can start now,’ said the owner, after a moment’s thought.
‘Where are we bound, sir?’
‘Oh, well, I don’t know. I wanted to say a few words about that, Captain. Do you happen to know anything about a yacht called the Erinna, belonging to a Mr. Logotheti, a Greek gentleman who lives in Paris?’
‘Yes, sir,’ answered Captain Brown, for it was a part of his business to read the yachting news. ‘She was at Cowes when we sailed. She was reported the other day from Gibraltar as having entered the Mediterranean after taking fresh provisions, owner and party on board. There is no further word of her.’
‘Well,’ said Mr. Van Torp, ‘I have an idea she’s gone to Naples, but I want you to find her right away wherever she is, owner and party on board. That’s all, Captain. If you happen to see her anywhere, you just come and tell me if I’m alone, and if I’m not, why send one of your young men to say you want to know something, — anything you happen to think of, and I’ll come to your room and tell you what to do. See? That’s all, and now let’s start, please.’
‘All right, sir.’
So Captain Brown went off with his instructions, and in a few moments his owner heard the distant sound of the chain coming in over the most noiseless of modern patent steam capstans; and the side-lights and masthead and stern lights shone out as the anchor light went down, and the twin screws began to turn over slowly, well below the water; and the Lancashire Lass was under weigh, with the captain, the pilot, and the two junior officers all in a row on the bridge, while the chief mate was seeing the anchor got inboard and stowed. But while the captain was silently looking ahead into the warm dusk and listening to the orders the pilot gave for the wheel in good English, but with a marvellous Venetian accent, he was also considering how he might most quickly find the Erinna, and he reflected that it would be an easier task if he knew a little more definitely where she was. He was not at all disturbed by the orders he had received, however, and was only anxious to get all the speed he could out of his vessel as far as the Straits of Messina, through which the yacht he was to find would almost certainly pass, in preference to the Malta Channel, if she were going to Greece and the East. If she kept to the waters west of Italy, it would not be so very hard to hear of her, as the coast is dotted with excellent marine signal stations, and official information as to the movements of yachts is easily obtained.
When the party assembled in the deck saloon for dinner, Lady Maud was missing. Stemp, who did not intend that his master should dine without his personal attention, no matter how much the chief steward might object to his presence, approached Mr. Van Torp and whispered something. Lady Maud begged that the party would sit down without her, and she would join them in a moment.
So they took their places, and the vacant one was on the owner’s right, between him and the Primadonna.
‘You see,’ said Mr. Van Torp, explaining to Mrs. Rushmore, which was wholly unnecessary, ‘we are Americans, and this ship is America, so the English guest goes first.’
But Mrs. Rushmore knew these things, for she was used to handling lions in numbers; and the little lions and the middle-sized ones are very particular about their places at table, but the great big ones do not care ‘one dingle Sam,’ as Mr. Van Torp would have elegantly expressed their indifference. For he was a great big lion himself.
‘Did you ever meet Lady Maud?’ he inquired, speaking to Kralinsky.
‘Which Lady Maud?’ asked the foreigner in his rather oily voice. ‘There are several.’
‘Countess Leven, who was Lady Maud Foxwell,’ explained Mrs. Rushmore.
Kralinsky turned quietly to her, his single eyeglass fixed and glittering.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘I knew poor Leven well, but I was never introduced to his wife. I have heard that she is very beautiful.’
‘You say you knew the late Count Leven?’ observed Mrs. Rushmore, with an encouraging and interrogatory smile.
‘Intimately,’ answered Kralinsky with perfect self-possession. ‘We were in the same regiment in the Caucasus. I daresay you remember that he began life as a cavalry officer and then entered the diplomacy. Gifted man, very,’ the Russian added in a thoughtful tone, ‘but no balance! It seems to me that I have heard he did not treat his wife very well.’
“Their eyes met.”
Mr. Van Torp had met several very cool characters in his interesting and profitable career, but he thought that if the man before him was Leven himself, as he seemed to be, he beat them all for calm effrontery.
‘Were you ever told that you looked like him?’ asked Mr. Van Torp carelessly.
Even at this question Kralinsky showed no embarrassment.
‘To tell the truth,’ he replied, ‘I remember that one or two in the regiment saw a slight resemblance, and we were of nearly the same height, I should say. But when I last saw Leven he did not wear a beard.’
At this point Lady Maud came in quietly and made directly for the vacant place. The two men rose as soon as she appeared, and she found herself face to face with Kralinsky, with the table between them. Their eyes met, but Lady Maud could not detect the slightest look of recognition in his. Van Torp introduced him, and also watched his face narrowly, but there was not the least change of expression, nor any quick glance of surprise.
Yet Kralinsky possibly did not know that Lady Maud was on the yacht, for he had not been told previously that she was to be of the party, and in the short conversation which had preceded her appearance, no one had actually mentioned the fact. She herself had come to dinner late with the express purpose of presenting herself before him suddenly, but she had to admit that the intended surprise did not take place.
She was not astonished, however, for she had more than once seen her husband placed in very difficult situations, from which he had generally extricated himself by his amazing power of concealing the truth. Being seated nearly opposite to him, it was not easy to study his features without seeming either to stare at him rudely or to be bestowing more attention on him than on any of the others. Her eyes were very good, and her memory for details was fair, and if she did not look often at his face, she watched his hands and listened to the intonations of his voice, and her conviction that he was Leven grew during dinner. Yet there was still a shadow of doubt, though she could not have told exactly where it lay.
She longed to lead him into a trap by asking some question to which, if he were Leven, he would know the answer, though not if he were any one else, a question to which he would not hesitate to reply unsuspectingly if the answer were known to him. But Lady Maud was not ingenious in such conversational tricks, and could not think of anything that would do.
The outward difference of appearance between him and the man she had married was so small that she could assuredly not have sworn in evidence that Kralinsky was not her husband. There was the beard, and she had not seen Leven with a beard since the first months of her marriage four years ago, when he had cut it off for some reason known only to himself. Of course a recollection, already four years old, could not be trusted like one that dated only as far back as three months; for he had left her not long before his supposed death.
There were the hands, and there was the left hand especially. That might be the seat of the doubt. Possibly she had never noticed that Leven had a way of keeping his left little finger almost constantly crooked and turned inward as if it were lame. But she was not sure even of that, for she was not one of those people who study the hands of every one they know, and can recognise them at a glance. She had certainly never watched her husband’s as closely as she was watching Kralinsky’s now.
Margaret was in the best of spirits, and talked more than usu
al, not stopping to think how Van Torp’s mere presence would have chilled and silenced her three or four months earlier. If Lady Maud had time to spare from her own affairs, it probably occurred to her that the Primadonna’s head was slightly turned by the devotion of a financier considerably bigger and more serious than Logotheti; but if she had known of the ‘business agreement’ between the two, she would have smiled at Van Torp’s wisdom in offering a woman who seemed to have everything just the one thing in the world which she desired and had not. Yet for all that, he might be far from his goal. It was possible that Margaret might look upon him as Lady Maud herself did, and wish to make him her best friend. Lady Maud would not be jealous if she succeeded.
On the whole it was a gay dinner, and Mrs. Rushmore and Kralinsky knew that it was a very good one, and told each other so afterwards as they walked slowly up and down the great promenade deck in the starlight. For people who are very fond of good eating can chatter pleasantly about their food for hours, recalling the recent delights of a perfect chaud-froid or a faultless sauce; and it was soon evident that there was nothing connected with such subjects which Kralinsky did not understand and appreciate, from a Chinese bird’s-nest soup to the rules of the great Marie-Antoine Carême and Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste. Kralinsky also knew everybody. Between gastronomy and society, he appeared to Mrs. Rushmore to know everything there was to be known.
Lady Maud caught snatches of the conversation as the two came near her, and then turned back; and she remembered that Leven used to talk on the same subjects with elderly women on whom he wished to make a pleasant impression. The voice was his to the very least intonation, and the walk was his, too, and yet she knew she had a doubt somewhere, a very small doubt, which it was a sort of slow torture to feel was still unsatisfied.
Mr. Van Torp sat between her and Lady Margaret, while the two others walked. The deep-cushioned straw chairs stood round a low fixed table on which there had been coffee, and at Margaret’s request the light had been put out, though it was only a small opalescent one, placed under the awning abaft the wheel-house and bridge.
‘We must be going very fast,’ said Lady Maud, ‘for the sea is flat as a millpond, and yet there’s a gale as soon as one gets out of the lee of things.’
‘She’s doing twenty-two, I believe,’ replied Van Torp, ‘and she can do twenty-three if pressed. She will, by and by, when she gets warmed up.’
‘Where are we going?’ Margaret asked. ‘At this rate we are sure to get somewhere!’
‘I don’t know where we’re going, I’m sure.’ The millionaire smiled in the gloom. ‘But as you say, it doesn’t take more than five minutes to get somewhere in a ship like this.’
‘You must have told the captain what you wanted him to do! You must have given some orders!’
‘Why, certainly. I told him to look around and see if he could find another yacht anything like this, anywhere in the Mediterranean. So he’s just looking around, like that, I suppose. And if he finds another yacht anything like this, we’ll see which of us can go fastest. You see I don’t know anything about ships, or where to go, so I just thought of that way of passing the time, and when you’re tired of rushing about and want to go anywhere in particular, why, I’ll take you there. If the weather cuts up we’ll go in somewhere and wait, and see things on shore. Will that do?’
Margaret laughed at the vagueness of such a roving commission, but Lady Maud looked towards her friend in the starlight and tried to see his expression, for she was sure that he had a settled plan in his mind, which he would probably put into execution.
‘I’ve figured it out,’ he continued presently. ‘This thing will go over five hundred and twenty miles a day for eight days without stopping for coal, and that makes more than four thousand miles, and I call that a pretty nice trip, don’t you? Time to cool off before going to Paris. Of course if I chose to take you to New York you couldn’t get out and walk. You’d have to go.’
‘I’ve no idea of offering any resistance, I assure you!’ said Margaret. ‘I’m too perfectly, completely, and unutterably comfortable on your yacht; and I don’t suppose it will be any rougher than it was last March when we crossed in the Leofric together.’
‘Seems a long time, doesn’t it?’ Van Torp’s tone was thoughtful, but expressed anything rather than regret. ‘I prefer this trip, myself.’
‘Oh, so do I, infinitely! You’re so much nicer than you used to be, or than I thought you were. Isn’t he, Maud?’
‘Far!’ answered Lady Maud. ‘I always told you so. Do you mind very much if I go to bed? I’m rather sleepy after the journey.’ She rose. ‘Oh, I mustn’t forget to tell you,’ she added, speaking to Margaret, ‘I always lock my door at night, so don’t be surprised! If you want to come in and talk when you come down just call, or knock, and I’ll let you in directly.’
‘All right,’ Margaret answered.
Lady Maud disappeared below, leaving the two together, for Mrs. Rushmore and Kralinsky had found a pleasant sheltered place to sit, further aft, and the Count was explaining to the good American lady the delicious Russian mysteries of ‘Borshtsh,’ ‘Shtshi,’ ‘Kasha,’ and ‘Smyetany,’ after extolling the unapproachable flavour of fresh sturgeon’s roe, and explaining that ‘caviare’ is not at all the Russian name for it and is not even a Russian word; and Mrs. Rushmore listened with intense interest and stood up for her country, on a basis of Blue Point oysters, planked shad, canvas-backs, and terrapin done in the Philadelphian manner, which she maintained to be vastly superior to the Baltimorian; and each listened to the other with real interest.
Van Torp and Margaret had not been alone together for five minutes since they had left Bayreuth on the previous day, but instead of talking, after Lady Maud was gone, the Primadonna began to sing very softly and beautifully, and not quite for herself only, for she well knew what pleasure her voice gave her companion, and she was the more ready to sing because he had never asked her to do so. Moreover, it cost her nothing, in the warm evening air under the awning, and like all great singers she loved the sound of her own voice. To be able to do almost anything supremely well, one must do it with real delight, and without the smallest effort which it is not a real pleasure to make.
So Margaret leaned back comfortably in her cushioned chair, with her head inclined a little forward, and the magic notes floated from her lips through the soft moving night; for as the yacht ran on through the calm sea at her great speed, it was as if she lay still and the night itself were flying over her with muffled wings.
Margaret sang nothing grand nor very difficult; not the waltz-song that had made her famous, nor the ‘Good Friday’ music which she could never sing to the world, but sweet old melodious songs she had learned when a girl; Schubert’s ‘Serenade’ and ‘Ave Maria,’ and Tosti’s ‘Malia,’ and then Beethoven’s ‘Adelaide’; and Van Torp was silent and perfectly happy, as well he might be. Moreover, Margaret was happy too, which was really more surprising, considering how very angry she had been with Logotheti for a whole week, and that she was quite aware of the manner in which he was passing his time in spite of her urgent message. But before the magnificent possibilities which the ‘business agreement’ had suddenly opened to her, the probability of her again sending him any word, within a reasonable time, had diminished greatly, and the prospect of flying into a rage and telling him her mind when she saw him was not attractive. She had always felt his influence over her more strongly when they had been together; and it had always lost its power when he was away, till she asked herself why she should even think of marrying him. She would not be the first woman who had thought better of an engagement and had broken it for the greater good of herself and her betrothed. In all probability she had never been really and truly in love, though she had been very sincerely fond of Edmund Lushington the English writer, who had discovered rather late that the magnificent and successful Margarita da Cordova was not at all the same person as the ‘nice English girl,’ Margaret Donne,
whom he had worshipped before she had gone upon the stage. So far as he was concerned, she had received his change of mind as a slight; as for Logotheti, she would never forgive him for not having remained faithful even during the few weeks since they had called themselves engaged; but Van Torp’s position as a suitor was different. At all events, she said to herself, he was a man; and he did not offer her romantic affection, but power, and a future which should soon give her the first position in the musical world, if she knew how to use it. She was accustomed to the idea of great wealth and of the ordinary things it could give; mere money impressed her no more than it does most very successful artists, unless they are miserly and fond of it for its own sake, which is comparatively unusual. She wasted most of what she earned, in a sort of half-secret luxury and extravagance which made little show but cost a great deal and gave her infinite satisfaction. Even Lady Maud did not dream of the waste that was a pleasure to the Primadonna, and the meek Potts was as reticent as the fierce Justine was garrulous. It was a secret joy to Potts, besides being a large source of revenue, to live with a mistress who flatly refused ever to wear a pair of silk stockings more than once, much less a pair of gloves. Mrs. Rushmore would have held up her elderly hands at such reckless doings. Margaret herself, trusting to her private fortune for her old age in case she never married, did as she pleased with her money, and never thought of investing it; but now and then, in moments of depression, it had occurred to her that when she left the stage, as she must some day, she would not be able to live as she did now, and the thought vaguely disturbed her for a few minutes, but that was all, and she had always within reach the easy remedy of marrying a millionaire, to whom such a sum as five hundred pounds a year for silk stockings would be an insignificant trifle; and while her voice lasted she could make more than that by giving one concert in Chicago, for instance, or by singing two nights in opera.
This is not a digression. The Diva cared nothing for money in itself, but she could use a vast amount of it with great satisfaction and quite without show or noise. Mr. Van Torp’s income was probably twenty or thirty times as large as the most she could possibly use, and that was a considerable asset in his favour.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1253