I was now behind; and, according to the system, to recoup this loss I must advance on the martingale. I put three hundred francs on the black. Again the black lost and again I played three hundred francs. This time the black won. The winning canceled the losses of the single hundred-franc plays, but the bank remained ahead on the first three-hundred-franc play; and to overcome this I now put five hundred francs on the black. The black came up. I had now overcome the total loss.
The grand duke’s system directed that when the loss was overcome the play was to begin again with a hundred-franc note on the black. So long as the black won, the play was to remain a single hundred-franc note on the black; but when there was a loss the play was to advance on the martingale—3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, and so forth—until the loss was overcome. Then, no matter how far up one had gone on the martingale, when the loss was wiped out he was to begin again with a single hundred-franc note.
As the play went on I began to realize how exceedingly ingenious this system was. The maximum play permitted at roulette is six thousand francs. On a system of simple doubling with an initial play of one hundred francs, after the first loss, this maximum would be reached in five plays; but under this system the player could advance on his martingale twenty-nine times before he reached the maximum. Again, in simple doubling, the loss on the zero might be ruinously great; but, with this system, the chances on the zero were distributed.
I saw, too, how safe this system was. I seemed, all that afternoon, to be merely exchanging the grand duke’s money for that of the bank; but in reality I won steadily. Often I was forced far up on the martingale, but never beyond the thirty-seven; and five times I lost on the zero—but fortunately at low plays. There was no great difference in the return of the black and the red. I had no luck; but, so long as the black returned as often as the red, I won enough on this cunning system to meet the occasional loss on the zero and gain a little on the bank.
The system was slow. It required a large sum of money; and it was as safe as human ingenuity could make it.
I was surprised to learn, however, from the whispers about me, that the Grand Duke Dimitri was mistaken when he believed himself to have invented this system. It was known to the players round the table.
The colors returned in an almost equal rotation during the afternoon. But that night I had a run of luck, and I got up from the table with a hundred and thirty thousand francs.
I was tempted to go on, but the Duchess Dimitri had bade me come away when I had technically carried out the dead man’s directions. I got my coat and hat and went out. On the steps of the Casino I stopped.
The whole world had changed as under the enchantment of a magician. The mistral and the rain had vanished. A sky sown with stars arched over a city of the fairy. Everywhere were the lights, the sounds, the splendors of a pageant. I seemed to have entered, through the door behind me, into a garden party of some princely despot with the wealth of Midas and the imagination of a dreamer. And out of the stagnant air of the Casino I came now into the perfume of sweet, wet groves. I went down the steps and round the Casino on to the great terrace.
Long shadows lay across an enchanted sea, reflecting a million lights; and thin quivering lines of silver slipped in over the burnished water. And out of that mysterious hazy distance, where the water and the heavens joined, any strange craft might have entered this fairy port. All the romance of it entered and possessed me.
I got the midnight express and returned to Nice, and in fancy I put my shoulder to every turn of the carwheel, for I traveled back to the Duchess Dimitri and the paradise of life that now lay before us. The flaming sword was gone out of the gate of it now. The profligate beast was dead; his trust had been carried out and she was free!
The maid was waiting when I knocked gently at the door of the salon. No lights were burning, but the long casement windows were open and the tropical night filled the room with a soft radiance.
The Duchess Dimitri, a vague figure in this fairy light, sprang up with a little startled cry when I entered.
“Oh,” she said, “you have come back! Nothing terrible has happened?”
“Nothing terrible has happened,” I said. “I have brought back one hundred and thirty thousand francs.” And I laid the packet of notes upon the table.
A stifled murmur, as of great anxiety removed, trembled in her mouth.
“Oh,” she said, “I am so glad that dreadful thing is done! I was afraid!”
It was late and the maid was waiting at the door, but I went over and took her two hands and carried them to my lips.
“Sweetheart,” I whispered, “you shall not be afraid any more forever!”
I got up early—for joy does not lie abed—got a cup of coffee and went down to smoke on the terrace and wait for the window behind the hallowed balcony to open. But another was before me—the tall, gray figure of the Prefect of Police sat at a table, trifling with a cup and a very black cigar.
“My friend,” he said when I was seated and the pleasantries were over, “the consignment of money sent from Paris to the banks in Algeria was not stolen on the sea. It was taken en route to Marseilles. But we shall presently have the thieves, for the notes are marked. Every house in Europe has been advised and they cannot be presented at any bank.”
Out of my observations of yesterday, but without a thought of any relation to this matter, I replied:
“But they could be played at the tables at Monte Carlo.”
The body of Monsieur Jonquelle did not move, but his fingers snapped the cigar into a dozen pieces.
“Mon dieu!” he said very softly. “I have the head of a pig! This robbery will be the work of that big old Slav, Dolgourky, and his devil daughter. I wish he had kept to his trade of actor in the theaters of Petrograd instead of setting the police of three nations by the ears. He is a genius at impersonation, and he speaks all languages as they are spoken in their capitals.… There was money enough in it.… And that woman, in tragedy, would carry Paris off its feet at the Odéon.”
He mused a moment, crumbling the bits of cigar to dust in his fingers.
“Ah, oui! They will remember where I have forgotten. But they will require a catspaw—for old Dolgourky is known at the tables.”
I no longer listened. I got up slowly and went into the bureau to ask a question of Monsieur Boularde.
There is an Eastern tale of a magician who hypnotized a corpse so that it walked and uttered voices. I went in like that.
The proprietor met me, with his genial smile.
No—Madame Nekludoff was no longer a guest. She had gone aboard a yacht at Ville-franche at five o’clock in the morning!
IV.—The Ruined Eye
Monsieur Jonquelle waited on the great terrace for the Viscount. Below were the endless wheat-fields, crimson dotted with poppies, the white road stretching away toward Paris and the ancient village nestling into the hill. The château was almost sheer above. One could toss a stone from its terrace into the narrow street.
The brilliant morning sun lay on the world, a vagrant wind wandering inland from the sea rippled the wheat-fields into waves, and on the horizon now and then a puff of gray dust would spring up, and a big French limousine would crawl out like a black beetle on the white ribbon of road.
“Vraiment! It is wonderful—this picture!” he said. “But what is God about, to hang it before the door of the meanest man in Europe?”
He was dressed for the road—a light English tweed, a gray cap and motor goggles, of which the big green lenses gave him the huge eyes of some poisonous insect. He removed the goggles, folded them together into a leather case and put them into his pocket; then he leaned over the balustrade and looked down a hundred feet to the door of the inn, where a boy in a blue blouse wiped the dust from his gray two-seated motor. “Ah, ma beauté!” he said. “It is a joy to travel with a lass like you!”
The words were a mere caress, however, as the eye passed on, for the Prefect was searching the villa
ge carefully, door by door, until finally he came to a little shop, before which a gilded watch swung on an iron rod. He marked that the door under the sign stood open; then a big voice thundered behind him on the terrace.
“Who the devil are you?”
The Prefect turned about to see a tall old Englishman standing in the door tearing his card into bits with little nervous jerks of his fingers. The man had a thin, crooked nose, a sort of pale reptilian eye, and the livid color of irascible old men.
“My card would have told you, Monsieur,” replied the Prefect.
“Curse your card!” cried the old man, tearing the pieces into still finer bits. “You can tell me yourself.”
“With pleasure,” returned the Prefect. “I am Monsieur Jonquelle.”
The old man flung away the remaining fragments of the card with a derisive gesture.
“Monsieur Jonquelle, eh?” he snapped. “Well, Monsieur Jonquelle, who sent for you?”
“Alas!” replied the Prefect with composure, “like death, I am hardly ever sent for.” He looked about for a chair, carried it to the balustrade and sat down; then he lighted a cigarette. “Pardon, Monsieur,” he added; “there must be quite three hundred steps in your path from the village.”
The old man exploded with anger.
“Eh? What?” he spluttered. “Confound your insolence! I’ll have you kicked down every one of those three hundred steps.”
The Prefect blew little rings of white smoke upward into the soft air.
“Would it be wise,” he said, “in view of the exigencies of chance? Somewhere, on the descent I might take an injury to my eye and claim damages in the sum of five hundred thousand francs.”
“The devil!” cried the old man, a sudden calm descending on him. “What do you know about that?”
“Why, this, Monsieur,” replied the Prefect, leaning over the balustrade and pointing downward with his smoking cigarette: “Yonder, I believe, is the curve in the road where Mademoiselle Valzomova’s car came suddenly upon Monsieur’s horse; and yonder is the oak tree into which Monsieur’s horse shied; and extending south at right angles to the road is the limb that struck Monsieur on the temple, resulting in a concussion, which Monsieur advises Mademoiselle Valzomova has caused the total loss of sight in his left eye, ‘whereby and by reason whereof’”—the Prefect consulted a letter from his pocket as though to refresh his memory—“Monsieur le Vicomte will sue Mademoiselle in the courts for five hundred thousand francs.”
“And I’ll do it!” interrupted the old man. “The devil take me if I don’t!”
“Unless——” continued the Prefect.
“Unless!” snarled the old man. “There is no unless. I’ll sue out the writ to-morrow in Paris.”
“Unless this thing that the Vicomte himself has written,” the Prefect went on—“unless Mademoiselle chooses to settle with the Vicomte immediately for the damage. Well, that is what Mademoiselle chooses to do.”
The Viscount was taken by surprise.
“Eh? What?” he cried. “And so the hussy is going to settle, is she?”
“Monsieur,” replied the Prefect—and there came a hard note into his voice—“is it not enough to take Mademoiselle Valzomova’s money? Would you insult her also?”
“Damn!” returned the Viscount. “Do I have to hunt about for one of your pretty phrases when I name an opera singer? What’s the creature anyway?”
Monsieur Jonquelle looked up with a calm, inscrutable face.
“I will tell you what she is,” he said: “She is one of the best women in Europe. But for her, a hundred little children would die every year in the heat of Paris. It is Mademoiselle Valzomova who sends them to the sea. And, therefore, it is Mademoiselle Valzomova who gives them life and Mademoiselle Valzomova who is the angel of a hundred mothers. Ah, Monsieur, I who know the wickedness of many know also the goodness of a few!
“And, moreover”—he paused and looked out across the incomparable valley below him—“it is Mademoiselle who offers to the weary and the wretched a blessed brimming cup of forgetfulness. Men listen to her and the bitterness of life ebbs away from them—she sings in the Place de l’Opéra and we hear the beating of wings above the iron din of the elements, and understand again honor and duty and undying love; we feel the truths of our mysterious religions and the loom of some immortal destiny.
“Ah, Monsieur, believe me, the prophets are dead; but there is sometimes born after them a greater than the prophets. Eh bien! Has the good God, then, only mad priests in His service?”
“Humph!” snorted the Viscount. “If the singer is such a wonder she will have plenty of money to pay for my eye!”
The Prefect looked up suddenly into the man’s face.
“Monsieur,” he said, “is it really your intention to insist upon a money payment from a woman for this accident?”
The Viscount exploded.
“My word!” he cried. “Has a man anything more valuable than his eye?”
“Some men,” replied the Prefect, “believe themselves to possess a thing more valuable.”
“Well,” snapped the Viscount, “I am not one of them.”
“No,” replied the Prefect; and he looked over the old man slowly from crown to toe, as though he were some new and peculiar creature. “You are not one of them!”
He put out his middle finger and struck the ashes from his cigarette.
“Ah, well,” he said, “if you insist upon it what can Mademoiselle do but pay? She cannot deny the accident—the resulting injury as claimed by Monsieur she might, of course, deny; but how would she sustain that contention in any court? The brain centers of vision are deep-seated and mysterious; they cannot be examined by any known appliance. And if these remote areas have been injured by a concussion the fact that all visible organs are in order does not prove that Monsieur’s sight in that eye remains to him.” He paused. “It is then merely a question of the amount that Mademoiselle must pay. I hope,” and he looked anxiously at the Viscount, “that Monsieur does not mean to ask five hundred thousand francs?”
“Not a sou less!”
The Prefect looked down at the red tiles under his feet.
“It is impossible!” he said. “Consider, Monsieur, how great a sum is five hundred thousand francs—half a million—a fortune in France! Why, Monsieur, I can find you a thousand men in Paris who will pluck out an eye for a tenth of the money. Five hundred thousand francs! Mon Dieu! the half of Europe would sell their souls at that figure! It is impossible!”
Then it was that avarice dispossessed the Viscount’s irascible mood.
“Bah!” he said. “I’ll warrant the singer considers five hundred thousand francs no very great sum.”
The Prefect reflected.
“Well,” he said, “you know how careless of money actresses are. To them it has no value. It is the need of it only that they measure. If they are down they will haggle for a franc. If they are in funds you may fill your pockets. It is so with all temperaments that create. Did not Dumas keep a bowl of gold coins on the mantelpiece from which any one could help himself? If Monsieur were in Paris to-day he might find Mademoiselle willing to consider a sum that a week later she would think out of the question.”
The Prefect flung away the fragment of his cigarette and rose.
“Bonjour, Monsieur!” he said. “I came out from Paris to see if the Vicomte Macdougal could not be induced to withdraw this demand upon Mademoiselle Valzomova; but it is clear, I think, that my mission is quite hopeless. Monsieur will adhere to his own ideas.”
Then he stopped suddenly and turned about.
“Pardon, Monsieur,” he said. “Can you tell me which turn of the highway yonder I must take in order to enter Paris on the road from Rouen? There is a sharp curve on that road about which the Department of Highways has been several times advised. It promised yesterday to put up a proper warning and I wish to see how that promise has been kept.”
The old man had followed him for a step or
two on the terrace.
“It is the second turn to the right,” he answered. “But a moment, sir. Why do you tell me that if I were in Paris to-day I might find this woman more—er—reasonable than later?”
“Because, Monsieur,” replied the Prefect, “it is to-day that Mademoiselle receives the advance payment on her engagement at the opera. And so to-day she will have a very large sum of money in bulk, but she will not keep it. No one of them ever does.… Ah, merci, Monsieur. It is the second turn to the right then.”
But the Viscount called after him:
“A word, if you please: Do you think I ought to go to Paris to-day?”
“The Vicomte will do about that as he likes,” replied the Prefect.
“Wait!” And the old man followed after him. There was the lust of money in his hard, irascible face. “Would you take me up in your automobile?”
Monsieur Jonquelle suppressed a gesture of annoyance.
“I suppose I could come back,” added the old man hurriedly, “on the evening train.”
The Prefect shrugged his shoulders—he was not entirely able to conceal how little the suggestion pleased him; but he replied with a show of courtesy:
“If Monsieur does not object to half an hour’s delay by reason of the Rouen Road I shall be very glad to take him.”
The old man snapped at the invitation. It was a chance to reach Paris at no cost and he shuffled into the château for his coat. The Prefect looked after him, making a gesture of contempt.
“Pardieu!” he said. “When these creatures become intolerable in their own countries they buy an estate in France! Under what curse of God are we?”
The Viscount presently returned in an old weather-beaten coat and the two men went down the steep path to the village. The great roadster was standing as the Prefect had left it, before the door of the inn; the boy in the blue blouse had wiped it clean as a jewel.
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