In a moment she was back again at the counter.
“Give me a piece of paper, will you? And a pencil.” She wrote. “That is my address. I’ll come in tomorrow before ten in the morning. You’ll keep it till then?”
The little dealer promised. And then the shop was empty. The little dealer, of course, was present, and he himself, too, Adrian Shard. But all the same, the shop was empty.
“What can I have the honour to show you, Sir?”
The question was certainly uttered and as certainly unheard. It was repeated with a greater insistence.
“What can I show you?”
“That,” said Adrian, nodding towards the ornament upon the counter.
“But as the gentleman no doubt heard, it is not until ten o’clock tomorrow open to the purchasing.”
“Nevertheless, I want to see it.”
Adrian advanced. The ornament was a gold collar of a make a little too solid for the modern taste, with a lovely pendant — a big emerald carved into the shape of an old galleon.
“Is it old?” Adrian asked.
“Yes, Sir. It is of Spanish workmanship. Heavy, to be sure. No doubt some old Grandee once wore it in Madrid or Peru. Who knows?”
Adrian laughed at the idea that this girl should covet it. Now, if Cartier had possessed it he would have whipped off that cumbersome chain, substituted a slender thing of platinum and brilliants, set the galleon in diamonds, and really offered her something for her money. But then, she didn’t want to wear it. She wanted to own it. A whim? Or something deeper? A really good reason not understood by herself but felt, and certainly not intelligible to him?
“But the gentleman wants something for himself?” the dealer in antiquities insisted.
“Of course I do,” said Adrian, remembering, now, why he had entered the shop. “I want that walking stick in the window.”
He bought it, and as he paid for it he saw just beneath his eyes the slip of paper on which the girl had written her name. Something Cratton, it would be. But it was not Cratton at all. “Sonia Chalice,” he read. Was she merely a visitor in Grosvenor Street? He looked at the address — he might just as well take note of the address whilst he was about it. It was the hotel at which he himself was staying.
“Good,” said he.
He went out of the shop, crossed the road to the café, and ordered a mixed vermouth. He was greatly disturbed by the absurd rigidity of the Social Code. Here was a girl on the one side, Sonia Chalice, who desperately wanted a golden collar with an emerald pendant — not to wear, but to keep. Clearly, therefore, she ought to have it. But she couldn’t afford it. On the other hand, here was a man, Adrian Shard, who could afford it and wanted desperately to give it to her. But he mustn’t because of the insignificant detail that he hadn’t been introduced. He would be introduced of course, one day, and very soon —
“Oh!” he cried. He jumped up, paid for his drink, and hurried back across the road. He burst into the shop.
“That collar! If the young lady doesn’t buy it in the morning, I will. Is that clear?”
“The most clear, Sir, that ever,” replied the dealer.
“Good.”
Adrian turned, greatly relieved, towards the door. But a question occurred to him.
“Do you know anything of its history?”
“Ah!”
The dealer went to a little bureau at the back of the counter and got out from a drawer a slip of paper.
“I have had the chain a long time. There was an English gentleman with his family in Genoa when the War exploded. He had difficulties with the monies and was anxious to get himself home. The checks, you understand, would not pay themselves. He sold this jewel to me and I wrote down what he told me about it. I put it away with the writing and forgot it. But the other day I was wandering with my fingers through my safe and I found it with the paper.”
He spread the paper out and read: “‘The collar was for centuries in the house of a Scotsman on the the Island of—’ is there such a name, Sir?— ‘Mooll.’”
“Mull,” said Adrian.
“That is it. Mooll. It appears that a galleon of the Armada sank in the bay there and the collar came, somehow, from the wreck. The Scotch gentleman became poor and sold the collar to a jeweller in the Street of the Prince in Edinbourg — see, there is the year, 1902. My English gentleman bought it there a year afterwards. He kept it in a case until 1914. But then his daughter did the revolt. The emerald must be properly set and she must wear it. They brought it with them to Italy, meaning to have it set in Florence.”
“Thank you,” said Adrian, as he left the shop.
The history of the collar so far was not so very interesting to him. Although he had bought a malacca cane in a shop of antiquities, his antiquarian leanings ended there. But the future history of the collar was going to be interesting in a supreme degree. For in some way, on some day — and pretty soon, too — it was going to pass into the ownership of Sonia Chalice.
XXVIII. SONIA CHALLICE
So, friend, when first I looked upon your face
Our thoughts gave answer, each to each, so true,
Opposed mirrors, each reflecting each —
Although I knew not in what time or place
Me thought that I had often met with you
And each had lived in other’s mind and speech.
— Tennyson
At eleven o’clock the next morning Adrian Shard went down in the lift to the first landing and knocked upon the door of Mr Spencer Cratton’s suite of rooms. An English courier opened it.
“Mr Spencer Cratton?” Adrian asked for him with a confidence which he did not feel.
“You are expected, Sir,” answered the courier, and shutting the door, he led the way briskly along a passage.
Adrian followed. He had obviously been mistaken for someone else. He had sent no warning of his visit, and he could not expect that Mr Spencer Cratton had read his name in the Visitors’ Book and anticipated that he would call. But he was taking his luck where he found it. The courier opened a door at the end of the passage.
“The gentleman to see you, Sir,” he said.
There was no lack of confidence in the courier. He had shut the door behind Adrian almost before the words were out of his mouth. Adrian stood, his hat in one hand, his fine malacca cane in the other, in a light and cheerful room. A couple of windows facing him overlooked the great harbour. A second door was upon his left hand. A man with grey hair and a lackadaisical manner was seated at a large table with his back to the windows. A heap of opened letters and their envelopes was lying at his elbow. But he was not attending to them. He was engaged in translating, with the help of a small Italian dictionary, passages from a Genoese newspaper of that morning. He was doing it languidly as though he were very, very bored, and smoking at the same time a large and fat cigar.
“Parecchi means several. Now, why?” he said, like one despairing of the contrariety of things and words. He made a note and spoke in a different tone as his pencil travelled over a sheet of paper. “I thought it would be prudent if we had a talk here, privately — we’re out of the way in Genoa — and then perhaps not meet so often until the affair’s over.”
He looked up at this point and saw a slim and embarrassed youth standing by the door. An Italian journalist? No. On the other hand he might be an enterprising correspondent of an English paper. If that were so, it would be a bore. Mr Spencer Cratton leaned back in his chair and folded his hands.
“Now, who the devil are you?” he asked quietly.
Adrian Shard pronounced his name. He added: “Dr Elve, the Master of my College, wrote to you, Sir.”
“Elve! Elve! Yes, I remember. You want to go in for politic:?”
“Yes.”
“The management of public affairs is a fine aim for a young man.
There was no condescension in his voice, nor a trace of vanity. He was apparently detached from ambition himself. Great affairs had found him rather than he
them, and he had put up with them.
“Yes, and you wanted to become the private secretary of a Cabinet Minister asa preliminary to contesting a seat.”
Yes, Sir, said Adrian.
A light, keener than Adrian expected, shone suddenly in the great man’s eyes, but he changed neither his attitude nor his indolent tone.
“And you are fresh from Oxford?”
“I took my degree last summer. I went to Jamaica in the autumn to complete the sale of my house there. I returned this spring.”
“A novice, then,” said Mr Spencer Cratton pleasantly.
Adrian was a trifle nettled.
“A novice,” he agreed. “But, on the other hand, I am clean, sober, willing and industrious, and a past President of the Oxford Union.”
The Cabinet Minister smiled faintly.
“These are all excellent qualifications, and—” again the lazy brown eyes gleamed sharply— “and I am not sure that an unfamiliarity with the tricks of the trade is altogether a disadvantage. Those old hands! Terrible!”
He was raising his arms to accentuate his words when Adrian added: “I am pretty good, too, at ciphers.”
Spencer Cratton lowered his arms quickly.
“Ciphers!” he exclaimed. “What do you mean by that?”
“I am interested in them. They have been a hobby of mine.” He smiled as he explained. “I think that I must have had an ancestor who did a good deal of secret work. I’m quick at them, unravelling them — inventing them.”
“Oh, are you?” said Spencer Cratton, looking at the boy with a new interest. “Well, the sort of ciphers we deal in are worked out by the permanent officials—”
His ears detected a sound outside the door. He got up from his chair, unfolding himself into a tall figure of a man with loose legs, but his indolence had gone.
“I’ll see you this afternoon at five. I have no time now.”
“Thank you, Sir,” said Adrian, and he turned towards the door.
But a couple of voices were now plainly heard, one protesting, the other insisting.
“Wait!” said Cratton quickly. “I have another sitting room here.” He gathered up his letters in a hurry. “You might take hold of these and let me see what answers you would write. You can leave them when you have finished and I’ll look them over before you come back.”
He pushed the letters into Adrian’s hand and stepped quickly to the second door.
“In here!”
But he was not in time. For the first door was pushed open not too gently and a third man stood upon the threshold. He was a man of middle height, with a big wave of hair like a musician’s and a strongly marked arrogant face. Adrian had no difficulty in recognizing the man who had laid down the law in the house in Grosvenor Street. And now that he saw him at close quarters, he had no doubt who he was.
“Your servant tried to keep me out,” the visitor said, with a touch of some foreign accent; and then he saw Adrian and came to a stop. “I thought that we were to be alone,” he added with displeasure.
“Quite so,” Mr Spencer Cratton replied. He was easy enough, now. What had happened had happened, and why bother about it? “Mr Shard called upon me unexpectedly. He means to stand for Parliament.”
The newcomer acknowledged the one-sided introduction with a curt bow.
“The management of men,” he said. “The best of all careers.
Mr Spencer Cratton explained that Adrian wished to become his private secretary in order that he might learn the ropes; and the newcomer’s eyebrows were lifted in surprise.
“I thought that all you great men were provided with secretaries by a grateful country,” he said.
“An illusion, my dear fellow,” said Cratton, and he showed Adrian into the second room and shut the door.
Adrian was a little troubled. He could quite understand that a man in the delicate position of a Cabinet Minister should be circumspect when he arranged interviews with an international financier as notorious as Mr George Andros. But he assumed a phenomenal innocence in Adrian if he believed him to be ignorant of his visitor’s identity. Mr Andros’ picture appeared and reappeared in the daily press. Besides, phrases had been uttered which were not too pleasant. The management of affairs — that was what a political career meant to the Cabinet Minister. The management of men — that’s what it meant to the great financier. But of service — not a word from either of them. Probably they were both of them using the catchwords which avoided discussion. He set himself to his letters. He thanked inventors, he did his best to answer questions, he avoided appointments. The time slipped by, and he had been fully an hour upon these conventional replies when the door, not from Mr Cratton’s chief sitting room but from the passage, was briskly opened and a startled voice cried: “Oh!”
A voice he knew. He looked up and saw gazing at him in perplexity the lovely lady of the emerald galleon.
“Oh!” she said again.
He rose to his feet. There were the most important things to be said to this girl, only he couldn’t say them. He was tongue-tied. He just stood, throwing his weight first upon one foot and then upon the other. The girl herself was no less embarrassed. She certainly did not rock, but her colour came and went in her cheeks as though it were a metronome set to time his rocking.
She was quicker than he, however, to break through the embarrassment.
“I thought my stepfather might be here,” she said.
“Your stepfather!”
Adrian looked about as if he half expected to find him in the coal scuttle.
“Yes.”
Adrian stared.
“Not Mr Spencer Cratton?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, I see.” It had seemed, indeed, almost incredible that this lovely miracle in front of him was the daughter of the languid Minister in the next room. But his stepdaughter! That was another matter. And indeed, the relationship, like Adrian’s inexperience, was not without its advantages. He pulled forward a chair.
“Mr Spencer Cratton is engaged for the moment with a visitor,” he said. “The interview is serious. The meeting private. I expect that it will take a little time.” He hurried on in a panic, lest the girl should take him at his word and go away. “Oh, not so very long! Won’t you sit down? Please!”
But the girl did not sit down. A line deepened between her brows.
“A visitor?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“Yes. Mr George Andros.”
The girl expected the answer. But she was not pleased with it. She stood, her eyes smouldering, her face mutinous. She glanced at the letters on the table.
“But I shall be disturbing you,” she objected.
“Not in the sense that you’ll be interrupting my work,” Adrian returned, “for it’s finished.”
“Your work?” the girl asked, taking the seat.
Adrian nodded his head.
“I am, solely upon approbation, Mr Spencer Cratton’s private secretary.”
That approbation must now, at all costs, be secured. Hours of work? The longer the better, if from time to time this girl was going to blow into the room. Salary? Of no consequence at all.
“In that case,” said the girl, “we ought, perhaps, to introduce ourselves.”
“That’s a marvellous idea,” Adrian agreed. The girl had not only beauty, she had brains. “My name is Adrian Shard.”
She was leaning forward a little, and earnestly, to hear it. But whatever expectation she had was, seemingly, disappointed. She repeated the name slowly and shook her head, as though it should have been familiar to her but was not.
“And mine—” she began.
“Is Sonia Chalice,” he said, and if he lingered upon it for a second and his voice caressed it ever so lightly, who shall blame him?
Sonia’s face lit up.
“There!” she cried. “I knew I was right. We have met already.”
“Yesterday,” Adrian answ
ered in surprise. “In a shop where an old man sold antiquities.”
He was surprised because he had felt quite certain that, though her eyes had rested upon him, she had not been aware of him at all She must have taken, subconsciously, an impression of him upon her mind. But Sonia would not listen to such a theory.
“Yesterday won’t do,” she said distinctly. “Before yesterday. I knew it when I saw you here in this room. We were friends somewhere. Yes, somewhere long ago.”
She was serious and simple, neither lingering upon the words nor disfiguring them with coquetries. Adrian shifted his chair along the table towards her.
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “That’s the second lobe of the brain not keeping its appointments. I’ll explain it to you—”
“But I don’t want it explained,” she interrupted wistfully. “I am sure that my idea is just as likely as your explanation and much more pleasant.” She ended with a frank and joyous laugh which made him want to cry out, “Oh, please do that again!”
But once more perplexity showed in her expression.
“My stepfather spoke about you. I remember. Somebody wrote. Yes, you are going to stand for Parliament.”
“If I find a constituency which will have me.”
Sonia swept that preliminary aside with a cry of derision. But she was still puzzled. With his rather sensitive face and his lean, supple frame, he had the look of some adventurer of past times, half poet, half soldier — a youth of the line of Philip Sidney. She could not reconcile him with the chicanery of elections and the obsessions of party men.
“Won’t you find that sort of life dull?” she asked.
Adrian shook his head vigorously.
“To do today the same dull thing which you did twice yesterday, as if your country lived by it — that’s the secret of good service.”
He spoke in a mock heroic tone, like one making light of a real conviction lest it should sound smug.
“A quotation?” she asked.
Adrian searched his memories.
“I suppose so,” he said at length. “And from my father, I think. I got all the little wisdom I have from him, and that is wisdom.”
“He wanted you to go into Parliament?”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 632