Guy Stallard refused to accept that confirmation of Ricardo’s statement.
“Mr. Ricardo has made a mistake, that’s all.”
“Yes, yes,” said Lydia eagerly, and Lucrece Bouchette slipped on to the couch at Lydia’s side. She was dressed as a lawn tennis player, with a bandeau about her head, a short white flannel skirt, and a short-sleeved shirt.
“What’s the matter, dear?” she asked, and she clasped Lydia’s arm affectionately as she spoke.
Lydia Flight, as she said herself, was distracted. She was not accountable for the movement she made, or even for the word she used. But she reacted in the strangest way to the greeting and the touch of Lucrece Bouchette. She uttered a scream — a little sharp, piercing scream which drew the eyes of everyone who was in their neighbourhood, her face grew scarlet, and she shrank away trembling to the end of the couch.
“There are still some people in the garden,” said Stallard quickly to Lydia. “Let us see if Oliver is amongst them.”
Lydia was on her feet in a second.
“Yes,” she said gratefully, and she slipped a hand between his arm and his side. They went off together through one of the window spaces. Lydia in her eagerness was no longer aware of Mr. Ricardo with the tumbler in his hand.
Lucrece Bouchette was also unaware of him. She sat watching Guy Stallard and Lydia Flight as they passed out on to the terrace. The light from the two great projectors on the balcony overhead had been turned off. A step beyond the windows, and the dark night received the two searchers. Guy Stallard in his black dress disappeared from view at once. But Lydia’s, which was outlined against the gloom, flickered as she moved. Ricardo had an illusion that she was quite alone, and that she was following in the dark and through many perils a trail which led to nowhere. He heard her voice raised in a loud cry: “Oliver! Oliver!” He heard Stallard repeat the cry: “Ransom! Ransom!” — and a movement by Lucrece Bouchette upon the couch caught his eyes. She was sitting crouched forward, her face towards the window. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth, her mouth was open in a grin, the grin of an animal. Her face was a livid mask, such a mask as a votary of horrors might design, ugly, wolfish, cruel, and cruelty was the dominating note of it. She stood up suddenly and no doubt Mr. Ricardo moved. For her gaze swept round upon him. For a moment, before their fire was veiled, he saw her eyes; and though he had once or twice seen murder in a face before, he had never seen it so paraded.
Mr. Ricardo was so shocked that he drank the rest of Lydia’s brandy and water in a gulp.
“It’s time for me to go,” he stammered, and from the stairway an acid voice remarked:
“I think so indeed.”
Ricardo would never have imagined that he could greet the intervention of Madame de Viard with pleasure. But he was warm with gratitude now. Her basilisk eyes meant less than nothing to him. There were still a few stragglers to be collected. It was two o’clock in the morning when his launch, the only one which was left, pushed off from the pier and beat upstream for Caudebec.
CHAPTER XII
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
TO JULIUS RICARDO that evening was a bitter disappointment. The gloom of it clouded the next day and it was to be the last day which he would spend at Caudebec. He had hoped to carry away with him into his quite unnecessary villégiature at Aix-les-Bains charming memories of a forgotten townlet on a bay of the Seine. Instead he was actually going to carry away some grim and disturbing pictures; the yellow car shooting out from the gateway of the empty courtyard and purring swiftly along the road to Rouen; Lydia Flight stumbling down the stairs in her gay gala dress, with despair on her face and a cry for Oliver upon her lips; Lucrece Bouchette crouched upon her seat in the lounge, the very likeness and epitome of hate. Ricardo even in the sunshine of noon shivered as he recalled the steady fury of her long and narrow eyes, the cruelty of her face. She had been all Mongol at that moment when Guy Stallard disappeared in the garden by the side of Lydia Flight.
But the night brought to him some consolation. For whilst the moon was still up and the sky clear, the motor launch of the Marie-Popette came tearing down the stream past the hotel, and a girl was riding behind it on an aquaplane board. She wore a bathing-dress and a scarf about her head tied in a flowing knot which blew about her face. The motor launch swept down to the bend and turned on a wide curve, the water breaking from the bows in two rolls of white fire. Mr. Ricardo held his breath as he watched the girl hardly keeping her balance and straining back upon the reins. Then under the opposite bank, where little but the flash of the water was visible, the launch sped homewards to the houseboat. Ricardo’s anxieties were allayed. He, like ten thousand others, had seen a picture of Lydia Flight aquaplaning in the channels of the Bahamas on a moonlit night.
“I shall probably never go aquaplaning myself,” his argument ran. “My youth was spent in the age of bathing-machines on wheels. But I need not aquaplane myself to be sure that it is a sport for young people on the top of their spirits. I don’t see despair upon an aquaplane board. So if my little friend Lydia is swaggering down the Seine on hers to-night, I may infer that her troubles are now unloaded.”
Whether it was sound or not, the argument satisfied Ricardo; and the next morning, his bill paid, his luggage all packed upon his car and many cordial farewells taken, at the reasonable and gentlemanly hour of a quarter to twelve he set off for Havre-de-Grace. His plans, of course, were all mapped to the last detail. He would take his luncheon at a famous restaurant on the Quai which had a specialité de la maison. Mr. Ricardo’s palate was in fact no more delicate than yours or mine, but he liked to think that it was. “On mange bien chez Victor,” he would say. “Recommend yourself to him by mentioning my name, and ask for les croustilles du batelier. You will not be disappointed.” After his luncheon he would saunter round the quays and criticise the yachts. He might with luck meet his friend Hanaud, Inspecteur Principal of the Sûreté Generale, who had been engaged at Havre upon a question of incendiarism on one of the great Atlantic liners. He would look into the Museum, he would dine at the Hotel Frascati, and towards eleven o’clock he would occupy his cabin-de-luxe on the Havre-Southampton steamer. He would reach London on the Saturday morning, pick up his valet and more luggage at his fine house in Grosvenor Square, and leave again for Aix-les-Bains on Sunday morning. Meanwhile his chauffeur would drive his forty-nine-fifty Rolls-Royce car, the latest model, from Havre to Aix, and he would find it waiting at the station to carry him up the hill to the Hotel Majestic. Thus he planned, and certainly he did lunch chez Victor at Havre-de-Grace.
It was a few minutes past one. At his elbow a high window commanded a corner of the sunlit quay and a basin where grimy smacks from the Normandy bay threatened the white daintiness of half a dozen pleasure yachts. In front of him was the comfortable square room with its cushioned benches against the wall; and by the side of his table stood Victor himself.
“The croustilles du batelier, Victor, a minute steak with a few soufflé potatoes and a flan,” said Ricardo.
“And to drink, monsieur?”
“I think — yes — a bottle of the Haut Brion, Victor.”
He named the year of the vintage, pretending to a Frenchified taste in wines. Three in the cask and seven years in the bottle. No more. A foolish humorist had once sought to jest with Ricardo on this important matter.
“I’ve always thought it should be seven years and a quarter in the bottle,” he had said.
“I cannot allow it,” Mr. Ricardo had replied, and there was an end of the conversation. He now turned to Victor.
“It is two years, my dear Victor, since I ate in Havre, and I confess I came to you with trepidation. The Café Anglais, Voisin, Paillard — where are they? We need a new Villon to write a ballad of dead restaurants. The transatlantic ladies ordering water and their hometown cereal, and that is the beginning of the end. Beware of them, Victor!”
The croustilles were placed in front of him crisply brown. The Haut Brion glowed dark
ly in a thin wineglass. Mr. Ricardo would not admit for a moment that his sense of contentment was due to the picture of a girl whom he had thought to be sunk in distress, racing joyously down the Seine on an aquaplane board. No! It was due to the cooking at this famous Restaurant du Sceptre. Ricardo saw himself as a modern and more respectable Elagabalus and wondered with a tinge of awe that Mincing Lane should thus compete with the Imperial purple. And whilst he thus wondered, to his insufferable disgust a dirty grey feather from some bedraggled fowl floated down from the air and settled on the white table-cloth beside his plate.
“Really?” said Mr. Ricardo, as with the tips of his fingers he dropped the offensive thing upon the floor. Behind him a full ripe voice chuckled and said:
“Birds with a feather flock together.”
“Of—” Ricardo corrected automatically and realised that he had only one friend who so maltreated the English language.
“Hanaud!” he cried warmly, and he sprang to his feet. He shook hands with a large and burly man who had the mobile face and the blue chin of a comedian.
“You shall lunch with me. Victor, another chair, another plate, another bottle of wine. I shall mark this day with a white stone after the fashion of the Romans.” He placed Hanaud in a chair at his elbow. “You cannot do better, my friend, than eat exactly as I am eating.”
Hanaud, Inspecteur Principal of the Sûreté Generale, waved his hands with enthusiasm.
“Have I not always said that Mr. Ricardo was amongst the princes of gastronomy!”
It would have needed the long memory of Macaulay to recall amongst the sayings of Hanaud anyone half so flattering to Mr. Ricardo; and even Ricardo himself was puzzled. But there was growing up within him a desire to confide to his friend the disturbing little riddle of the House of the Pebble and to ask if he could solve it. After all, once or twice they had put their heads together in other days; and continuing his thought he spoke it aloud:
“Together, my dear Hanaud,” he said rather fiercely, “we were to be reckoned with.”
“Together,” replied Hanaud without a twitch of his lips, “we were formidable.”
“Formidable is the word,” cried Ricardo, and he ordered the largest cigars and the fine de la maison. “I shall tell you something. I leave Havre to-night by the Southampton steamer. But I am a little troubled. Oh, no doubt I am making anxieties for myself out of nothing at all. But I should like you to hear — yes it is curious — the house-boat, the net—” Mr. Ricardo broke off suddenly. Not until this moment had he thought of linking up his visit to the Marie-Popette with the events at the House of the Pebble. That visit, however, became very vivid to him now: the girl working away obediently at the meshes, Lucrece Bouchette, the petite fonctionnaire in petticoats and — oh, yes, certainly not to be forgotten, the vulgar little creature about whom some Highness or another was crazy. Here was another troublesome picture taking shape by the side of the other. “Yes, it just shows,” Ricardo continued aloud. “To tell one’s story is the first step towards understanding it.”
“It certainly will be for me,” Hanaud interposed drily. “For up till now I do not understand one word of what you are saying.”
“Very well,” said Ricardo, “I shall begin again. This morning I left Caudebec.”
“Caudebec?” exclaimed Hanaud and he jumped in his chair.
“It is a town between Havre and Rouen,” said Ricardo. “Caudebec-en-Caux. I have been staying there for the best part of a month.”
“You?”
“I!”
“At Caudebec?”
“At Caudebec.”
“But what are you saying to me, my friend?”
“Very little up till now,” Mr. Ricardo rejoined, “and I shall say still less if you interrupt me at every word.” Hanaud grovelled. Later on he would try to make his dear friend understand that his interruptions were not without reason.
“I beg you to proceed,” said he. “You keep me on the pothooks.”
“I do not,” Ricardo rejoined firmly. “Only backward children are kept upon pothooks, and I am not a schoolmistress, though to be sure two nights ago,” and he giggled lamentably, “I was a cordon bleu.”
Hanaud clamped his jaws together. He would not utter even a cry of despair. He would try to find a way through this maze of words. He fixed his eyes upon the opposite wall and he listened.
Ricardo told him of his first meeting with Lydia Flight and her escort, with Lucrece Bouchette, Scott Carruthers and Byron without his limp, in the cool shadows of the cathedral; of his visit to the Marie-Popette; and of his discomforts and perplexities during the ball at the Castle of the Pebble. He tried a little word-painting, and listened to his own narrative with considerable pleasure. When he came to the upsetting of the bottle of champagne, he described it with the mock heroics which really seemed to have a faint kinship with the Rape of the Lock. But as he reached the flight of the yellow car, Lydia stumbling down the stairs and the murderous glances of Lucrece, the story deepened of itself. And on the top of his uneasiness, a certain alarm chilled him. Hanaud was so very still, so very alert. Ricardo was driven to force himself to a lightness of tone.
“Of course what had happened was a lovers’ quarrel between Lydia Flight and Oliver Ransom. Everything’s so terribly serious to young lovers. A quarrel and what is left but the interminable years of loneliness waiting for old age and the tomb. Oliver had dashed off in a rage and Lydia stumbled down the stairs,” and his voice trailed away miserably, for he did not believe a word of his explanation, and he added defiantly:
“Anyhow, I sleep to-night in my cabin-de-luxe on the Southampton steamer.”
If Hanaud heard that statement, he paid no attention to it whatever. He said:
“But that pretty explanation leaves two things unexplained. The young lady’s shrinking from Lucrece Bouchette upon the couch, and the violence of Lucrece Bouchette’s reaction.”
“Oh, that!” returned Ricardo. He was more than ever determined to sleep in his cabin-de-luxe. Old adventures gave a pleasant tang to a choice luncheon in a restaurant of the first order, but it would be deplorable to repeat them. “It is possible,” he said airily, “that Lucrece Bouchette had set her cap at the limpless Byron.”
Suddenly Hanaud turned towards his companion.
“I shall tell you a question which troubles me,” and the look upon his face was a shock to Ricardo. There was a fierceness in it, and an absorption. Furlong, the little ostlerish man, would have said he was not “‘uman,” and indeed he was not. He was a hound which had picked up the scent.
“Yes?” asked Ricardo.
“What was Elsie Marsh doing that afternoon on the Marie-Popette?”
Ricardo was staggered. Certainly the question had passed through his mind, but he had dismissed it as an odd but insignificant problem.
“Elsie Marsh? You know her?”
“Of course. Elsie Marsh of the Casino de Paris. Who doesn’t know her?”
“Of the Casino de—” Mr. Ricardo sat with his mouth open. So that was who she was! “I’ll tell you something she wasn’t doing. She wasn’t doing any work on that fishing net. She was talking of a Highness.”
“The young Rajah of Chitipur, whose mistress she used to be,” Hanaud explained, “and whose quite irreplaceable rope of pearls was stolen on the night of the fancy dress ball at Mr. Stallard’s Château du Caillou.”
“What!”
“Yes. And your friend, Miss Lydia Flight, was wearing it, and her friend Oliver Ransom was guarding it.” Mr. Ricardo opened his mouth once or twice like a fish gasping for air. Then he touched Hanaud on the arm.
“That is undoubtedly of the utmost interest,” he said, “and nothing would have delighted me more than to hear what you have to say about it had I been free. But I have a cabin-de-luxe on the Southampton steamer—”
“I could not wish you to travel in any less commodious manner,” Hanaud interposed. “But I point out that the steamer does not leave until midnight.”
“That is so, of course.”
“And during the summer months, a boat with cabin-de-luxe leaves every night except Sunday at the same hour.”
Mr. Ricardo lifted a finger to summon his dear Victor. This effort to delay him must be stopped at once. He must have his bill and take flight and lock himself in a room at the Hotel Frascati. He must see the light on the Nab Tower wane in the dawn and the banks of Southampton Water slide past him in the fullness of the morning. He must breakfast on the boat-train to London.
“I have my curriculum,” he said.
“A minute ago it was a cabin-de-luxe,” said Hanaud, who was puzzled. “See! There is a clock on the wall. It says a few minutes after half-past one. For a few minutes more I shall tell you my difficulties. Then for another few minutes we put us the heads together in the old way. Again the world will say: ‘Oh, la, la, la, that formidable couple!’”
Mr. Ricardo could not but smile with pleasure. He was torn and rent. The young man dashing off in the car — Octavian stumbling down the stairs. Of course if they were thieves, private inclinations must be suppressed and justice done. They wouldn’t have much chance — poor people — if Hanaud and himself were launched in pursuit. On the other hand if they were innocent what a fine stroke of fortune they would experience! What all these arguments really meant, of course, was that Mr. Ricardo was as curious as a giraffe. He was twitching with excitement.
“I shall hear you,” he said magnificently, and Hanaud drew so profound a breath of relief and one so cloudy with all the incense of flattery that the light upon the Nab Tower was extinguished and the banks of Southampton Water were hidden out of sight. Hanaud wanted help.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FORMIDABLE COUPLE
“YESTERDAY,” SAID HANAUD, “the young Rajah Nahendra Nao received a telegram telling him that his famous rope of pearls had been stolen. The telegram was sent by his secretary, Major Scott Carruthers, from Trouville, on information which Miss Lydia Flight had given to him that morning at Trouville. The telegram was brought up to the Goodwood Private Enclosure from the house at which Nahendra Nao was staying, and Nahendra Nao received it at one o’clock. There was a little delay at the house and a little more on the race-course before the Rajah was found. He acted thereupon with a good deal of common sense. Your Ambassador to France was present and Nahendra Nao told him the story of this chaplet. And at once telephones got busy and your Ambassador missed a race or two. I need hardly tell a citizen of the world like Mr. Ricardo that such an affair found us sympathetic to the extremest degree. We have our own Princes of the East and we know the difficulties when, young and inexperienced and headstrong and rich, they find themselves in our glittering cities with the smooth mob of rascals and thieves at their elbows. We are tender with them. Perhaps we strain the laws a little so that they may go home without a scandal. So in this case. The chaplet spoilt by Elsie Marsh and cured by Lydia Flight must be recovered. Not so easy, hein? But more, it must be recovered quietly. Otherwise Nahendra Nao’s papa may shut Nahendra Nao up in a box for the rest of his life. And, mark me, Nahendra Nao is a gentleman. I have seen him. I bear the testimony of Hanaud. A great gentleman. That is agreed.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 129