“Yes, she certainly has a party for the vintage,” he said.
“Well then, you see what I want you terribly to do,” said Joyce, turning again towards him and plying him — oh, most unfairly! — with all the glamour of a lovely girl’s confidences and appealing eyes. “If you will, of course. It’s a little prayer, of course. I have no claim. But I know how kind you are—” Did she see the poor man flinch, that she must pile flattery upon prayer and woo him with the most wistful, plaintive voice? “I want you to spend as much time as you can at the Chateau Suvlac. You will be welcome, of course” — she dismissed the ridiculous idea that he could ever be unwelcome with a flicker of her fingers. “You could watch. You can find out what is happening to Diana — whether there is anybody really dangerous to her amongst her associates and then—”
“And then I shall write to you, of course,” Mr. Ricardo said, as cheerfully as these arduous duties so confidently laid upon him enabled him to do. He was surprised, however, to discover that letters to Joyce Whipple upon the subject were not to be included in his duties.
“No,” she answered with a trifle of hesitation. “Of course I should love to hear from you — naturally I should, and not only about Diana — but I can’t quite tell where I shall be towards the end of September. No, what I want you to do is, once you have found out what’s wrong, to jump in and put a stop to it.”
Mr. Ricardo sat back in his chair with a very worried expression on his face. For all his finical ways and methodical habits he was at heart a romantic. To play the god for five minutes so that a few young people stumbling in the shadows might walk with sure feet in a serene light — he knew no higher pleasure than this. But romance must nevertheless be reasonable, even if it took the shape of so engaging a young lady as Joyce Whipple. What she was proposing was work for heroes, not for middle-aged gentlemen who had retired from Mincing Lane. And as he ran over in his mind the names of more suitable champions, a tremendous fact leaped into his mind.
“But surely,” he stammered in his eagerness. “Diana Tasborough is engaged. Yes, I am sure of it. To a fine young fellow too. He was in the Foreign Office and went out of it and into the City, because he didn’t want to be the poor husband of a rich wife.” Mr. Ricardo’s memory was working at forced draught, now that he saw the way of escape opening in front of him, a passage between the Scylla of refusal and the Charybdis of failure. “Bryce Carter! That’s his name! That is his business. You must describe your experiences to him, Miss Whipple, and—”
But Miss Whipple cut him short, very curtly, whilst the blood mounted curiously over her throat and painted her cheeks pink. “Bryce Carter has crashed.”
Mr. Ricardo was shocked and disappointed. “In an aeroplane? I hadn’t heard of it. I am so sorry. Crashed? Dear me!”
“I mean,” said Joyce patiently, “that Diana has broken off the engagement. That’s another reason why I think something ought to be done about it. She was very much in love with him and it all went in a week or two — she gave him no reason. So he’s barred out, isn’t he? I feel that I can’t really stand aside — not, of course, that I have anything to do with it—” Joyce Whipple was rapidly becoming incoherent, whilst the colour now flamed in her cheeks. “So unless you can help—”
But Mr. Ricardo felt that his position was more delicate than ever. He was not at all attracted by his companion’s confusion; and since the hoped — for avenue of escape was closed for him, he cast desperately about for another; and found it.
“I have got it,” he said, shaking a finger at her triumphantly.
“What have you got?” Joyce asked warily. “The only possible solution of the problem.” He was most emphatic about it. There was to be no discussion at all. His arrangement must just go through.
“You are the one person indicated to put the trouble right,” he declared. “You are Diana’s friend. You know all her other friends. You can propose yourself for her party at the Chateau Suvlac. You have influence with her. If there is anyone — dangerous — wasn’t that the word you used? — no one is so likely as you to discover who it is — yes.”
He looked her over. There was a vividness about her, a suggestion of courage and independence which went very well with the straight, slim figure and the delicate tidiness of her appearance. She seemed purposeful. This was the age of young women. By all means let one of them, radiant as Joyce Whipple, blow the trumpet and have the intense satisfaction of seeing the walls of this new Jericho collapse. He himself would look on without one pang of envy from the house of the nobleman with the resonant name, the Vicomte Cassandre de Mirandol.
“You! Of course, you!” he exclaimed admiringly.
Suddenly the positions were reversed. So great a discomfort was visible in Joyce Whipple’s movements and in her face that Mr. Ricardo was astonished. He had chanced upon a quite unexpected flaw in her armoury. It was she who now must walk delicately.
“No doubt,” she admitted with a great deal of embarrassment. “Yes, and I have been asked to Suvlac…and I shall go if — I can. But I don’t think that I can.” She broke out passionately: “I wish with all my heart that I could! But I shall probably be out of reach. In America. That’s why I said that it was of no use to write to me, and why I wanted to unload the whole problem upon you. You see” — she looked at Mr. Ricardo shyly and quickly looked away again— “you see, Cinderellas must be off the premises by midnight,” and with a hurried glance at the clock, “and it’s almost midnight now.”
She rose quickly as she spoke, and with a smile and a pleasant word, she joined a small cluster of young people by the flower-banked grate. These had obviously been waiting for her, for they wished their hostess good night and immediately went away.
Mr. Ricardo certainly had the satisfaction of knowing that he had not committed himself to Joyce Whipple’s purposes. But the satisfaction was not very real. The odd story which she had told him was just the sort of story which appealed to him; for he had a curious passion for the bizarre. And even then he was less intrigued by the narrative than by the narrator. He tried indeed to fix his mind upon the problem of Diana Tasborough. But the problem of Joyce Whipple popped up instead. Almost before he realized his untimely behaviour, he had got her dressed up like some wilful beauty of the Second Empire. There she was, sitting in front of him, as he drove back to his house in Grosvenor Square, her white shoulders rising entrancingly out of one of those round, escalloped gowns which kept up heaven knows how, and spread in voluminous folds about her feet. Yet even so, with her thus attired before his eyes, as it were, he began to doubt, to wonder whether he was not growing a trifle old-fashioned and prejudiced. For after all, could Joyce Whipple, with her straight, slender limbs, her wrists and hands and feet and ankles as fragile seemingly as glass, have looked more lovely in any age than she had looked in the short shimmering frock which she had worn that night? Her voice certainly supported the argument that her proper period was the Second Empire. For instead of the brisk high notes to which he was accustomed, it was soft and low and melodious and had a curiously wistful little drawl which it needed great strength of character to resist. There were, however, other points which affected him less pleasantly. Why had his two suggestions thrown her into so manifest a confusion? What had she to do with Bryce Carter that she must blush so furiously over the rupture of his engagement to Diana Tasborough? And —
“Bless my soul,” he cried, in the solitude of his limousine, “what was all this talk of Cinderella?” The glass-slipper portion of that pretty legend was all very appropriate and suitable. But the rest of it? Miss Joyce Whipple had come over from the United States with a sister a year or two older than herself, and almost as pretty — yes. The sister had married recently and had married well — yes. But before that event, for two years wherever the fun of the fair was to be found, there also were the Whipple girls. Deauville and Dinard had known them and the moors of Scotland, from which Mr. Ricardo was excluded. He himself had seen Joyce Whipple flaming on the
sands of the Lido in satin pyjamas of burnt orange. For Mr. Ricardo was one of those seemly people who from time to time looked in at the Lido in order that they might preach sermons about its vulgarities with a sound and thorough knowledge. Joyce Whipple had certainly looked rather dazzling in her burnt orange pyjamas — but at that moment Mr. Ricardo’s car stopped at his front door and put an end to his reflections. Perhaps it was just as well.
CHAPTER 3
THE MAN WITH THE BEARD
A MONTH LATER chance, or destiny, if so large a word can be used in connection with Mr. Ricardo, conspired with Joyce Whipple. Mr. Ricardo was drinking his morning coffee at the reasonable hour of ten in his fine sitting- room on the first floor of the Hotel Majestic, with his unopened letters in a neat pile at his elbow, when the writing upon the envelope of the top one caught and held his eye. It was known to him, but he did not recognize it. He was in a vacuous mood. The sun was pouring in through the open windows. It was more pleasant to sit and idly speculate who was his correspondent than to tear open the envelope and find out. But years ago he had received a lesson in this very room at Aix-les-Bains on the subject of unopened letters, and, remembering it, he opened the letter and turned at once to the signature. He was a little more than interested to read the name of Diana Tasborough. He read the whole letter eagerly now. The Vicomte Cassandre de Mirandol did not, after all, propose to bring his servants out of Bordeaux and open up his chateau for the vintage. He would be amongst his vineyards himself for ten days or so, with no more attendance than his valet and the housekeeper at the chateau. Under these circumstances it would be more comfortable for Mr. Ricardo if he put up at the Chateau Suvlac.
There will only be a small party, and you will complete it, Diana wrote very politely. You will meet Monsieur de Mirandol at dinner here, and I shall look forward to your arrival on the list of September.
Mr. Ricardo had perused every word of this letter before he realized that it had provoked in him no uncanny sensations whatever; and when he did realize that disconcerting fact, he was not a little mortified. But there it was. Not one dead drowned incomplete malignant face heaved on a tide between the ink and the paper. No, not one! It is true that the ink was purple instead of black; and for a moment or two Mr. Ricardo sought an unworthy consolation in that difference. But his natural honesty made him reject it. The colour of the ink could be only the most superficial circumstance.
“Not one dead drowned face, not a suggestion of evil, not a pang of alarm,” Mr. Ricardo announced to himself as he nicked the letter away with considerable indignation. “And yet I am no less sensitive than other people.”
It might be, of course, that if he suspended his mind more thoroughly he in his turn might receive the thrill of a message from the world beyond. It was certainly worth an experiment.
“My best plan,” he argued, “will be to shut my eyes tight and think of nothing whatever for five minutes. Then I will read the letter again.”
He shut his eyes accordingly with the greatest determination. He was modest. He did not ask for very much. If he saw something pink and round like a jelly-fish when he opened his eyes, he would be content and his pride quite restored. But he must give himself time. He allowed what he took to be a space of five minutes. Then he opened his eyes, pounced upon the letter — and received one of the most terrible shocks of his life. On the table, by the letter, rested a hand, and beyond the hand an arm. Mr. Ricardo with startled eyes followed the line of the arm upwards, and then uttering a sharp cry like the bark of a dog he slid his chair backwards. He blinked, as well he might do. For sitting over against him, on the other side of the table, sprung silently; heaven knew whence, sat a brigand — no less — a burly brigand of the most repulsive and menacing appearance. A black cloak was wrapped about his shoulders in the Spanish style, a big, unkempt, bristling beard grew like a thicket upon his face, and crushed upon his brows he wore a high-crowned, broad- brimmed soft felt hat. He sat amazingly still and gazed at Mr. Ricardo with lowering eyes as though he were watching some obnoxious black beetle.
Mr. Ricardo was frightened out of his wits. He sprang up with his heart racing in his breast. He found somewhere a shrill piercing voice with which to speak.
“How dare you? What are you doing in my room, sir? Go out before I have you flung into prison! Who are you?”
Upon that the brigand, with a movement swift as the shutter of a camera, lifted up his beard, which hung by two bent wires upon his ears, until it projected from his forehead, leaving the lower part of his face exposed.
“I am Hanaudski. The King of the Tchekas,” said the alarming person, and with another swift movement he nicked the beard back into its proper position.
Mr. Ricardo sank down into his chair, exhausted by this second shock which trod so quickly upon the heels of the first.
“Really!” was all that he had the breath or the wit to say. “Really!”
Thus did Monsieur Hanaud, the big inspector of the Surete Generale, with the blue chin of a comedian, renew after a year’s interval his incongruous friendship with Mr. Ricardo. It had begun a lustrum ago in Aix-les-Bains, and since Hanaud took his holidays at a modest hotel of this pleasant spa, each August reaffirmed it. Mr. Ricardo was always aware that he must pay for this friendship. For now he was irritated to the limits of endurance by Hanaud’s reticence when anything serious was on foot; and now he was urged in all solemnity to expound his views, which were then rent to pieces, and ridiculed and jumped upon; and again he found himself as now the victim of a sort of schoolboy impishness which Hanaud seemed to mistake for humour, and was in any event totally out of place in a serious person. In return, Mr. Ricardo was allowed to know the inner terrible truth of a good many strange cases which remained uncomfortable mysteries to the general public. But there were limits to the price he was prepared to pay, and this morning Monsieur Hanaud had stepped beyond them.
“This is too much,” said Mr. Ricardo, as soon as he had recovered his speech. “You come into my room upon tiptoe and unannounced at a time when I am giving myself up to thought-concentration. You catch me — I admit it — in a ridiculous position, which is not half so ridiculous as your own. You are, after all, Monsieur Hanaud, a man of middle age—” And he broke off helplessly.
There was no use in making reproaches. Hanaud was not listening. He was utterly pleased with himself. He was absorbed in that pleasure. He kept lifting up his beard with that incredibly swift movement of his hand, saying to himself with startling violence, “Hanaudski, the Tcheka King,” and then nicking down the great valance of matted hair into its original position.
“Hanaudski, the King of the Tchekas! Hanaudski from Moscow! Hanaudski, the Terror of the Steppes!”
“And how long do you propose to go on with this grotesque behaviour?” Mr. Ricardo asked. “I should really be ashamed, even if I were able to excuse myself on the ground of Gallic levity.”
That phrase restored to Mr. Ricardo a good deal of his self-esteem. Even Hanaud recognized the shrewdness of the blow.
“Aha! You catch me one, my friend. A stinger. My Gallic levity. Yes, it is a phrase which punishes. But see my defence! How often have you said to me, and, oh, how much more often have you said to yourself: ‘That poor man Hanaud! He will never be a good detective, because he doesn’t wear false beards. He doesn’t know the rules and he won’t learn them.’ So all through the winter I grow sad. Then with the summer I shake myself together. I say: ‘I must have my dear friend proud of me. I will do something. I will show him the detective of his dreams.’”
“And instead, you showed me a cut-throat,” Mr. Ricardo replied coldly.
Hanaud disconsolately removed his trappings and folded them neatly in a pile. Then he cocked his head at his companion. “You are angry with me?”
Mr. Ricardo did not demean himself to reply to so needless a question. He returned to his letter; and for a little while the temperature of the room even on that morning of sunlight was low. Hanaud, however, was unaba
shed. He smoked black cigarette after black cigarette, taking them from a bright blue paper packet, with now and then a whimsical smile at his ruffled friend. And in the end Mr. Ricardo’s curiosity got the better of his indignation.
“Here is a letter,” he said, and he took it across the room to Hanaud. “You shall tell me if you find anything odd about it.”
Hanaud read the address of an hotel in Biarritz, the signature and the letter itself. He turned it over and looked up at Mr. Ricardo.
“You draw my leg, eh?” he said; and proud, as he always was, of his mastery of English idioms, he repeated the phrase. “Yes, you draw my leg.”
“I don’t draw your leg,” Mr. Ricardo answered with a touch of his recent testiness. “A most unusual expression.”
Hanaud took the sheet of paper to the window and held it up to the light. He felt it between his fingers, and he saw his companion’s eyes brighten eagerly. There could be no doubt that Mr. Ricardo was very much in earnest about this simple invitation.
“No,” he said at length. “I read nothing but that you are bidden to the Chateau Suvlac for the vintage by a lady. I congratulate you, for the Bordeaux of the Chateau Suvlac is amongst the most delicate of the second growths.”
“That, of course, I knew,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“To be sure,” Hanaud agreed hastily and with all possible deference. “But I find nothing odd in this letter.”
“You were feeling it delicately with the tips of your fingers, as though some curious sensation passed from it into you.”
Hanaud shook his head.
“A mere question in my mind whether there was anything strange in the texture of the paper. But no! It is what a thousand hotels supply to their clients. What troubles you, my friend?”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 88