CHAPTER XVIIThe pit-like dark, th’ impassioned prayers and saintlyFor souls abroad, the life-boat barely inned,The desperate sirens laboring far and faintlyTo pierce the wall of wind.
The pit-like dark, th’ impassioned prayers and saintlyFor souls abroad, the life-boat barely inned,The desperate sirens laboring far and faintlyTo pierce the wall of wind.
The pit-like dark, th’ impassioned prayers and saintlyFor souls abroad, the life-boat barely inned,The desperate sirens laboring far and faintlyTo pierce the wall of wind.
Salvières was at its very best when its owners arrived there with their little nephew—for even midsummer heat is on the Normandy coast entirely bearable—and more so. Like Plenhöel, it stands on a lofty cliff fronting a magnificent sea view. The Castle dates back to the early days of the Duchy, and is built in two, and in some parts in three, stories of singularly massive blocks of granite, with cloisters above and below—that is, on the side facing the open country and the Vallée de Salvières, which alone deserves quite a separate description, so unique and beautiful it is.
Of course it is quite needless to add that the Castle and its dependencies are of the purest and most ancient Gothic architecture. TheSalle des Chevaliersis a marvelous place at the upper end of which an equestrian silver statue of the illustrious Knight Jehan de Salvières, first of the name, gleams in the prismatic lights of a hugevitraille, whose sunset tints of rich orange, vivid scarlet, lucent blue, and emerald green surround it with a glory of blinding color. The walls of theenceintecrown the whole promontory and inclose the immensity of château, chapel, towers, keep,Cour-d’Honneur, armory, andplace-d’armes—not to mention an inner garden of such extentthat its measurements would only court contradiction from those who have not seen it—which, to say the least, is a misfortune not to be atoned for by loudly proclaimed skepticism. At any rate, Salvières would be one of the most remarkable show-places of France and Navarre, more so than even St.-Michel, Josselin, Chenonceax, or Chambord,Le Château de la Reine Jeanne, Couci, or Arthèze de Foix, were it not for the fact that neither Jean nor Tatiana, since their reign there, had cared to have a flock of Cook’s tourists clattering over its beautiful floors, or measuring its art treasures by the length of their umbrellas with guttural yelps of amazement and wonder—when not exclamations of incredulity, and sometimes worse than incredulity, where religious pictures or objects of faith are concerned.
When at Palitzinovna the Salvières certainly kept great state, but when at Salvières they once more entered into the grandeur and splendor that belonged to this ancestral home, and that through the centuries had never yielded one iota to modernism except in what concerned creature comforts. There was an army of servants in attendance, a battalion ofgardes-chassesandgardes-forèstiers, an almoner, a seneschal, a squad of halberdiers in antique costume. The stables contained no less than two hundred horses at all times, and the private harbor, in a small bay at the foot of the huge promontory, floated a steam-yacht, several yawls, and a regular fleet of other craft flying the ducal pennant. The village of Salvières, strange to state, has never once showed signs of accepting as a fact the republican form of government under which France labors. More stubborn than Bretons even—and that is saying the uttermost one can—the canny Normans, who according to the most ancient history can never be tricked into expressing an opinion, nodded their cotton-capped heads when addressed on that subject. “It might well be.” “Perchance it was so.” “Whocould tell?” “Ah! was that it?” So far they would concede; but, as they guilelessly added, they of Salvières knew none but their Duke (Jean might have been Sovereign Duke of Normandy, to hear them), “their own Duke,” whose father and grandfather and great-great-great-great-grandfather had also been their suzerain back to times immemorial; so what did it matter whether in that blackguard Paris (cette gueuse de Paris) there sat in non-majesty a frock-coated man wearing—on state occasions—a broad scarlet cordon across his shirt-front and, mayhap, a pair of white spats on his plebeian feet? “They of Salvières” had naught to do with him, which, as they gave one to understand, was a mercy of the good God. The thriftiness of the Normans is as proverbial as their obstinacy and craft. Had the Republic’s President prevented them from selling their fish, their eggs, their butter or apples to the best advantage, he might have been worth considering, but the Duc de Salvières was their liege-lord, a splendidly generous one at that, and so they were satisfied that all was well now and hereafter, which praiseworthy feelings were entirely pleasing to themselves and to him also.
Of course, Tatiana, ever since her advent there as a bride, had made herself idolized—not so easy a task in the land of the apple-orchards, for the people there do not wear their hearts as a sleeve-ornament. Her frank, boyish ways interwoven with crystal-pure high breeding, her complete fearlessness at sea and ashore, her prowess on horseback (they are mighty horse-breeders in Normandy) filled them with admiration; and the then mayor of the neighboring little town—who invariably pulled off his tasseledbonnet-de-cotonwhen she met him in the exercise of his functions and apologized for wearing a tri-colored scarf about his vast middle—had once been heard to remark: “That Duchess isn’t a foreigner, nor a stranger—not a bit—no, she is a thoroughbredNormande, bornfarther north than we are, that’s all!” This, for a wonder, perfectly straight and outspoken exposé of feeling, had won general and popular approval. Tatiana was accepted as aNormandefrom farther north,V’là tout!And so it had remained ever since.
Piotr, delighted to be back on the sea edge, was daily clamoring for his “little darling Malou”; and one fine evening Salvières, who had spent a few days at Plenhöel to confer with Régis about that idiotic elopement of Laurence, came home with him and the “Gamin.” Piotr’s explosions of joy at finding her again were so exuberant as to very nearly exhaust even Tatiana’s long-suffering stock of patience with him. In her heart she was thinking: “It is not a child’s enthusiasm; it is a real,bona-fidepassion. What a pity Basil is not and never will be free!”
Marguerite was still wholly unchanged. “A smiling moonglade,” Salvières once paraphrased, gazing at her as she stood with her arm about Piotr’s neck on the wide balcony of theSalle des Chevaliers, watching the stars appear one by one in the ultramarine sky above the rocking waters of the Channel. Slim and extraordinarily girlish in her white frock, she made a lovely silhouette against the blue infinite, and her clear laugh at some remark of the little boy’s held no rift of disappointment or sadness. That she had suffered, and suffered deeply, was no longer a secret to Salvières or Tatiana, and scarcely so even to Régis the optimist, but no allusion from any of them had ever disturbed her quietude and admirable self-control. It goes without saying that she had not been told about Laurence’s escapades. The death of Captain Moray had been discreetly announced as due to an accident, the separation of Basil from his wife as a mere temporary convenience, since Laurence’s dislike of long travels had prevented her from accompanying her husband to Mongolia; but when Piotr arrived with his aunt and uncle at Salvières, her good sense had told her thatthere must be something that was purposely being kept from her. Indeed, the little chap had at once explained to her that “mamma” had left Tverna all of a sudden without “papa,” and that “papa”—but this she at first did not believe—had gone away afterward, “very angry and frowning awfully, without kissing him, Piotr.” But when challenged by that precocious infant to ask the faithful Garrassime if this was not the exact truth, she had forborne to do so, warned by something in the old man’s attitude that he would not speak to her about the matter, and by her own feelings that it was better for her, in any case, to remain in ignorance of the real state of affairs.
All this grew to be extremely unreassuring, but the “Gamin’s” courage was not of a common order. As a matter of fact it might, without the least exaggeration, have been called Spartan, for her smile was never shadowy, her bearing never languid, and soon she was the very soul of the old castle by the sea, as she had always been that of Plenhöel.
So did the days at Salvières slip like bright beads from a many-colored necklace; one by one, diversified by excursions, rides, drives to the old abbeys and shrines with which that province of France is dotted, picnics in the forest or on the caverned shore, sails on the amusingly choppy water, and chases after elusive crawfish by lantern-light up the course of the cool little river that flows across the immense estate. Piotr seemed to have lost his regrettable propensity for sudden fits of fury, and was the happiest little creature on earth. Jean and Tatiana, cheered by Régis’s unfailing good-temper and rose-colored way of looking at things—especially as they felt certain that Basil had so far heard nothing of the latest developments—breathed more easily.
“The calm before the storm,” Garrassime, whom nothing escaped, said to himself. He had no confidence in the future, but he wisely kept his own counsel.
At the beginning of September a succession of squalls ended by a regular gale of the type which churns the Channel into amazing emotions. The North Sea and the Atlantic, hereditary enemies as they are, never miss an occasion to dash at each other’s throats on what they evidently consider a stretch of neutral water; and when this warring at close range begins, both coasts had best draw in their horns, for there is certain to occur what the Bretons and Normans call graphically “de la casse.”
Several wrecks had been reported, and the life-saving station at Salvières, lavishly endowed and equipped by Jean—for there are long stretches of bare shore on either side of the Castle where no governmentbâteau de sauvetageis housed—was, so to speak, day and night on the alert. On the fourth day of the gale (and according to the weather-wise there, if a gale lasts thrice over twenty-four hours, it is a bad business) the entire household was awakened about four in the morning by the appalling noise of a storm such as even in that region is something of a rarity. Mountainous waves escaladed the cliff, slavering with rage at their incapacity to scale them entirely; the wind raised so hoarse a voice that one could not hear oneself talk, even in a closed room with walls all of nine feet thick; and the air outside was so dense with spume and flying spindrift that the night had grown old without the faintest hint of dawn.
Assembled in theSalle des Chevaliers, the family and a number of servants awaited God only knew what! There was an impression of disaster in the all-embracing clangor which none could overlook or disregard, used as they all were to similar manifestations, and as the bell for matins faintly pierced the uproar, all filed laboriously along the cloisters into the chapel where the Abbé de Kerdren, the Duke’s cousin and chaplain, was kneeling on the altar steps.
He rose as they entered and faced round toward them, his hands still clasped and his finely modeled features looking white and drawn in the yellow light of the blessed candles—a tall and martial figure, whose vestments took upon him the look of knightly coat-armor, for he had begun life as a naval officer, and had only entered holy orders after the death of his bride of two months, killed in a hunting accident.
“Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae,” he began, raising his voice, for here too the roar of sea and wind was deafening.
Jean and Marguerite, kneeling side by side on the purple cushions of the last step—Tatiana and Régis with Piotr between them were close to the draped rail—could scarcely hear the prayer, and as she whispered it on her moonstone beads she suddenly thought of one line in a ballad that she loved and often sang:
Father, save those at sea to-night.Miserere Domine!
Father, save those at sea to-night.Miserere Domine!
Was it profane to have thought of that just now? Strenuously she tried to force herself out of that train of thought, but the words of matins, of the morning prayer, oddly eluded her, and instead she found herself repeating mechanically the “recommendation” for a departing soul:
“Kyrie eleisonChriste eleisonSancta-Maria, Ora pro eo....”
“Kyrie eleisonChriste eleisonSancta-Maria, Ora pro eo....”
What ailed her, she wondered, and hastily she implored:
“Pax huic dominiEt omnibus habitantibus in ea—”
“Pax huic dominiEt omnibus habitantibus in ea—”
giving the response in the same breath as the “supplication” in her sudden and unaccountable distress.
Sheets of rain were sluicing against the painted windowsof the little church—rain that, caught up by the frantic wind, slanted before it and struck almost horizontally at the glass. Again without very explainable reasons Marguerite shivered and went on praying fervently until the blast paused, as if to take breath. And then there happened during that sinister lull one of those phenomena that landsmen so seldom see, for a storm-light—snatched from the sun rising somewhere out of view beyond the cloud-roof that still closed down the darkness upon the world—smote the great rose-window behind the high altar with a dull orange jet of flame that for an instant seemed to set it on fire. It sank, flared up once more for the beat of a heart, fell, and was replaced by a flashing zigzag of intensely brilliant green, seen and lost in the same breath while it bisected the gold-and-whitefleur-de-lysèdglass of the upper window.
Marguerite felt she must be dreaming, but at her side she saw Salvières rise quickly to his feet, and she imitated him. The abbé was just pronouncing the lastAmen, and with his face turned toward the altar he had also seen, for after a rapid genuflection he joined the others.
“A wreck somewhere!” he brusquely stated, as he almost ran down the side-steps, his hand at the fastening of his surplice, his sea-blue eyes wide with the passion of his first profession—a sailor from head to foot—in a cassock!
It did not take them long to wrap themselves in oilskins and don sou’westers: Salvières, Régis, and the abbé. The great alarm-bell of the Castle, already sounding tocsin-wise, succeeded in overtoning the tempest by dismal fits and starts. Marguerite ran along the cloisters, snatched up a hooded coat, and, followed breathlessly by Garrassime (who had left Piotr in the Duchess’s care), made at full speed for thechemin de rondeoutside the chancel. The men of the house were no longer in sight, and as soon as she turned the corner to the cliff-path shecaught the full force of the wind and tried to battle against it; but at first she could not succeed, and was forced to fall back under the lee of a buttress. By then Garrassime had caught up with her. “Don’t go, Illustrious; don’t!” he tried to shout, but a gust swooped down his throat and he stood gasping beside her, wiping the rain from his eyes.
The wind was whooping louder, whirling in waves of swiftness and sound now close to the ground, now high up aloft—a regular typhoon of a storm—and it was dark as pitch, too, for even the ghastly storm-light had disappeared, swallowed by the tempest. Twice Marguerite attempted to peer around the angle of the buttress, her hand shielding her eyes, and twice she was flung back; but something impelled her forward again, some premonition she could not understand; and all at once in the chaos beyond, as, clutching the rough granite, she was bending half across its sharp edge, she saw a tear in the blackness, a stripe of pulsating red—to the east of north—a flash of blinding green, and then a tossing ball of whiteness that might be a masthead light.
A wreck? Yes, a wreck, and what could live in such a sea? If there was a sinking boat out there in the darkness, with men clinging desperately to the rigging, they had best not pray for human help—that she knew—and she sent a glance heavenward where no heaven was to be seen. A dreadful fear for her paladin of a father, for Jean de Salvières, for the sailor-abbé whom she revered and loved with all her heart, shot through her to add to her wretchedness. She was aware that, peril or no peril, they would not hesitate a second to do much more than their duty: and at last, detaching herself from the protection of the huge wall, she battled on, half creeping, leaning against the gusts, fighting every inch of the way to the cliff edge. Down the sheer face of the rock to the narrow beach of pebbles below, where in half anhour the breakers would be thundering, ran an iron cable—a short cut on ordinary occasions for sailors and coastguards; but just now a mere vibrating thread stretched downward to the Pit. She had stumbled many times and fallen twice, for the path was slippery as ice, and as her hand came in contact with the stanchion she paused to listen; Garrassime at her shoulder, braced and rigid like a tree, holding her with both arms for fear she would be carried over the ghastly brink.
Another rocket, then another, and another. A little sob choked Marguerite, straining her eyes in the slowly, slowly dragging dawn that now was beginning to make the gloom more visible. She was at home in storms—a child of the tempest, Régis often said—and for herself she was not caring; but when gradually she began to discern away down there on the foam-flecked shingle two darker masses, evidently the life-boats and a throng of men fighting forward to the launching, all possible difficulty was wiped out of her mind, and, tearing herself free from Garrassime, she started forward.
“Mother of God!” roared the Russian, his gray hair fairly bristling on his head. “You are not going to try that!” But Marguerite, holding to the cable-head, was peering downward for the first of the unequal footholds cut in the rock, and his voice was lost in those of wind and sea. Under her long coat she wore a woolen gown made in a single piece, a handy garment she had hastily put on when she had been roused by the storm, so, merely kicking off her little sodden slippers, and before he could more effectually interpose himself, she was over and already descending, her face to the cliff, her back to the unseen void. Garrassime was a strong man, but no sailor; besides, he was so tall and heavy that to follow her would mean sure destruction for both of them; but he suddenly remembered a fissure that slanted down the cliff-side some two hundred yards further on, and, praying withall his might that she might be spared, he ran for it—bent nearly double beneath the terrible weight of the wind, his heart beating with anguish against his ribs—anguish for her whom he had learned to worship, the dear, sweet, daring, foolhardy little lady of Plenhöel.
Through wildly tossing clouds the eastern sky was now showing faintly gray, and the “Gamin” began to see the notches that she touched one after another with her silk-shod feet. She must be half-way now, and, sparing her breath, clinging hard, flattening her little body to the dripping crag, she doggedly continued to crawl down, hearing dully the clang of the tocsin far, far above her head.
“Ah,” she suddenly cried, aloud, “I am in the water! The tide must be coming fast!”
She let go the cable from her torn and bleeding palms, turned around, leaning against the base of the rock, and searched the maddened sea—white as atourmenteof snow. No! there was no sign of a ship on the tossing froth, save two black spots appearing and disappearing convulsively in the spouting water—the life-boats she knew—but whether they were coming shoreward or going out toward some invisible point she could not tell. Determined to see better, she climbed half a dozen of the wet steps again and gazed fixedly seaward. At last something flecked with white and red, she thought, caught her eye; it was rolling in and out among the breakers, and behind it there were other objects lugubriously bobbing up and down. She jumped, and ran plungingly toward the thing nearest to the beach, finally wading thigh-deep in the broken back-wash of the flooding tide; snatched desperately at the queer bundle, and dragged it ashore, pulling it up after her with all her strength. Gasping for breath, she stopped at the shingle-top, and before investigating what she held she set her teeth. A white serge skirt, two narrow stockinged feet, a torrent of drenched hair! She turned it over, trembling violently, and, falling on herknees, saw the beautiful features—unspoiled, unscarred even, and strangely sculptural—of Laurence Palitzin. On her breast, embroidered across the white jersey, the wordsWild Rose—the name of her yacht—made Marguerite cry out with a new horror. For a moment she crouched there, seeking mechanically for the heart, the wrist, of this first victim recovered; but she could find no sign of life; and, tears running down her face mingling with the rain and brine, she asked herself how she could at least save the body before the galloping flood claimed it again. Of herself she had no time to think, and at that minute, clambering out of the fissure, Garrassime stumbled toward her with reckless haste. Before she had either heard or seen him he was at her side, had caught up the body of his lost mistress—which a life-belt still encircled in futile mockery—and, drawing Marguerite by the hand, was hastening to the higher beach near the life-station’s weed-grown stairs.
Just then, riding a tremendous wave, the first life-boat—the one that bore Tatiana’s name—toppled half-over as it took the shore, and Marguerite vaguely saw her father and her uncle Jean leap into the whirling water, and receive from the abbé’s arms another limp and apparently lifeless body that somehow seemed all dislocated; but by this time the girl was past all emotion and listlessly looked on as they plunged forward with their burden.
It was as full daylight by now as it would be that morning, and the dimness that fell from the sky and rose from the sea showed with astonishing precision the helpless form in soaked white flannels, the head thrown back and rolling horribly from side to side. Who it was she did not care. She watched the grim procession ofsauveteurscarrying more bodies, saw the other life-boat rush up almost atop of its companion, and the abbé turn again to the swirling tide to see if yet more derelicts were floating up with it. Then she found herself, somehow orother, in the round room of the “Station,” staring at something upon an already dripping truckle-bed, and Régis and Jean bending over a placid white face with closed, dark-fringed lids, and a relaxed mouth into which some one was attempting to pour brandy.
It was all so much like a nightmare that once or twice Marguerite shook herself as if to waken her palsied faculties. Surely she had seen that face before. Where? When? Ah! at Lady Seton’s in the Meurice apartment a night some few centuries ago....
Malgré les brisants—et l’orageIl atteint la côte....
Malgré les brisants—et l’orageIl atteint la côte....
Had she not sung that herself?
Pauvre P’tit Gas!Pauvre P’tit Gas!
Pauvre P’tit Gas!Pauvre P’tit Gas!
She roused with a shiver. “Preston Wynne!” she muttered, her teeth chattering. “What is he doing here?”
The Salvières doctor, who had been there all the time, it appeared, had taken possession of Preston Wynne, and Garrassime was pulling her gently away. He was not dead then? “Pauvre P’tit Gas!”
The others, for whom there was no hope, were being piled like cord-wood in the other room of the “Station,” where the life-savers on duty watched all night; but she passed this new horror with scarce a glance—quite passive now, leaning a little against Garrassime as he led her away; while Régis and Jean, the doctor and the abbé, tirelessly pursued their energetic ministrations.
At last a faint tinge of color began to underly the lividity of Preston’s face, his eyelids moved ever so slightly; in a short while he feebly tried to resist the ordeal of resuscitation he was passing through—the agonies of rebirth—under those skilled fingers. Then the young doctor, sweat dripping from his forehead, paused in hisexhausting work just long enough to murmur, hoarsely: “He will live, I think, but I fear he is badly hurt.”
They did not question him—standing ready to help when the medical man should take up his task again. Salvières was watching intently the spasmodic changes of expression upon Preston’s drawn white features.
“A little more brandy, please,” the doctor said; and the abbé held out the flask and raised the patient’s head with deft precaution. This time he swallowed a few drops voluntarily, it seemed, and the doctor, bending his ear to the blue lips until it almost touched them, heard the words, “Is it you?”
“Who do you want?” he asked, slowly and very distinctly; but Preston’s mouth closed tight with a queer, distressed droop.
All at once his eyes opened and he fell to staring at the heavy oaken beams crisscrossing the ceiling. Presently they closed again, and he fell to whispering softly in that brainless self-absorption that characterizes the sayings of unconsciousness:
“I’ll catch you—jump! A fool— Yes! God—I’ve not lived according to the Pure Food Law lately. Laurence, where are you? Get busy ... there’s no time!”
The four men around the bed glanced at one another. To two of them, Régis and Salvières, who had known Preston in other days, this persistent and purely mechanical survival of originality in speech verged on the sinister, and they turned about with a simultaneous motion. They felt like running away.
The abbé had knelt down by the bed and was whispering something that the others could not hear, so they drew back farther yet.
“You say he will live?” Salvières asked of the young doctor.
“Yes—that is, I think so, Monsieur le Duc,” was the guarded answer. “But I am almost certain that thereis some grave injury to the spine; the lower part of the body seems—inert.”
“Struck on a rock or on a bit of wreckage, you think?”
“Very likely. But one can’t tell yet without a more thorough examination. Where did you find him, Monsieur le Marquis?” the young medico asked of Régis.
“Caught him on the rebound, as it were,” the latter replied, “from the heart of a wave. I saw an arm dark against the foam by the light of our lanterns, and grabbed at it. It was not so difficult, though the force of the pull nearly wrenched my own arm out of its socket.”
The doctor nodded. “I dare not move him until I can find out what is really the matter. He must be kept here for the present.”
He was interrupted by the opening of the door. On the sill stood the captain of the life-savers, one rough hand to the dripping brim of his sou’wester.
“Pardon, Monsieur le Duc,” he said, “another live un with a broken arm brought ashore. He is here outside. He says he’s the first mate of theWild Rose.”
“Ah,” muttered Salvières, “perhaps now we can hear how all this came to pass.” And with a quick caution to Régis he hurried into the passage.
The man standing outside the door, one arm hanging limply at his side, was white under his tan and glistening with wet. He was a handsome chap above the middle height, with a trim blond beard cut to a point in naval style, clear gray eyes, and—even in this crisis—a rather proud way of carrying his head.
Salvières looked sharply at him. The horrors of that terrible summer night, the long swim ashore, and the pain of his hurt had left their mark quite unmistakably on the second-in-command of the big steam-yacht that had just foundered; but this did not affect the impassiveness so well in keeping with the square jaw and firm lips of the man.
“When the doctor has set your arm I wish to have atalk with you,” Salvières said. “Sit down. I’ll fetch you some brandy”; and he pointed to the stone bench running along the wall.
“Sit down”; he repeated, but there was no answer. Through the thick panes of one of the round windows, the mate was staring across the lashed waters at the foot of the promontory whereon the “Station” stood, his square chin thrust forward, his resolute lips compressed.
“Keeping the Penvan light east-southeast, and having the South Bay Rock west by north, we should have found the gullet even in such weather,” he said, slowly, without looking again at Salvières.
“Yes,” the latter assented. “Who was master?” He had sent a message to the doctor to come as soon as he could, and now stood motionless beside the sailor.
“Captain Braines—an Englishman, who had never made a mistake in seamanship—stainless record.” The tone was monotonous but convincing.
“Yes,” Salvières said again, “but don’t speak now; wait till you feel better.” And he handed him the tumbler the captain of the life-station had just brought.
“I can answer your questions now, sir.”
“Better not till a bit later. Ah, here’s the doctor”; and, pulling off his coat, Salvières prepared to assist him.
An hour after, as Salvières and his cousin were stepping upon the Castle esplanade, a footman—fighting the wind, his powdered head bent to the blast and much the worse for wear—met them at a run, clutching a telegram tightly in his fist.
“What now!” grumbled Salvières, taking refuge in a mullioned doorway and tearing the envelope open with his damp fingers.
Am coming to you at once. Received infamous news in Shanghai from my agent. Send wireless as soon as feasible P.O.S.S.Mondoria, giving latest facts and destination ofWild Rosein cipher. Make all possible inquiries meanwhile.Basil.
Am coming to you at once. Received infamous news in Shanghai from my agent. Send wireless as soon as feasible P.O.S.S.Mondoria, giving latest facts and destination ofWild Rosein cipher. Make all possible inquiries meanwhile.
Basil.
Salvières stared for a full minute at the paper trembling in his hand, and then passed it silently to Régis.
His sou’wester pushed back, his blond mustache falling on both sides of his mouthà la Vercingetorix, the Marquis de Plenhöel said nothing at all, very emphatically.
“Right you are!” assented Salvières, just as if he had spoken. “Come, we have work to do.” As, indeed, they had, and, following the line of least resistance, they finally found themselves engulfed by a side entrance.
In the central hall they were met by Tatiana and Marguerite. Both were very pale and very collected, and their voices were perfectly calm. Piotr, they explained, was asleep, with Garrassime on watch. “The—Laurence”—here Tatiana faltered a little—“has been placed in achapelle-ardente. She—she is very beautiful; the sea has been merciful.” And now her heroes—she dwelt tenderly upon that word—must change into dry clothes and eat something warm and comforting. She glanced anxiously at her husband, then at Régis, and felt, with her marvelous instinct, that there was some new and startling development; but this wise woman asked no questions, and was satisfied to busy herself with what she specified as “first aid to the deserving.” They needed it by this time, of that there could be no doubt, and it was only when completely revived and limbered up by hot bath and cold shower, and steaming coffee with a gracious accompaniment of more substantial viands, followed by a refreshing smoke, that they felt quite equal to assembling the necessarily narrowconseil-de-famillethat should decide upon immediate steps. Naturally Marguerite was excluded, for the questions under discussion were not of the sort one can bring to maidenly ears, but the Abbé de Kerdren was called in, and those four—Tatiana, Jean, Régis, and the sailor-priest—sat down before a glorious driftwood-fire in the library to attain some conclusion.
Basil was coming back as fast as steam could bring him,his brain afire with wrath and humiliation, determined beyond a doubt to punish the guilty betrayed to him by his faithful and indiscreet agent. The guilty? Tatiana thought of the still, white form in the chapel—that sculptured beauty on the silver brocades of her last couch, between the tall candlesticks burning their pale-yellow flames amid sheaves of snowy flowers. The abbé, Régis, and Jean remembered the quietly delirious man in his strange sick-room at the foot of the cliffs, awaiting unknowingly the verdict of the great physicians telegraphed for to Paris—and there was a silence pregnant with pain and wretchedness. Ah, surely the punishment had already been dealt by stronger hands than Basil’s!
Up-stairs little Piotr, ignorant of what new complications Fate was weaving around his baby existence, was playing now with Garrassime—Garrassime moving as in a dream, his honest heart well-nigh broken by so many repeated blows.
Salvières explained that during the second interview he had just had with theWild Rose’sfirst mate in the Castle infirmary, he had discovered that after a cruise in the Mediterranean, among the Ionian Islands, and back to Gibraltar, Princess Laurence had crossed the straits to Tangier, where she had hired a Moorish house inclosed by an impenetrable rampart of cactus, and set upon the flank of a fortress-like hillock beyond the Sôk, and outside the city gates, beyond the spot where the East and the West rub shoulders. TheWild Roselay at anchor on the still bosom of the bay, at the least conspicuous moorings that could be found—this by the special command of the Princess. Every evening Captain Braines or the first mate went up to the house for orders, more often than once walking out of town by the Mazàn and the dusky lanes shadowed by sweeping cedars and hedged by prickly-pear. The mate had a natural picturesqueness ofexpression which Salvières faithfully reproduced as he retold the tale. To hear him it was difficult to realize that Laurence’s hiding-place was but a few short miles away from Europe as the swallow flies across that sunlit strait. The house, it seemed, had been luxurious. The Princess, served by her own confidential servants brought with her on the yacht, had never left its seclusion, but spent her time in the queer, fragrant old garden, with its ever-splashing fountains and irregular bosquets of palms and flowering trees, where roses and camellias made a blaze of color in the day, and the big Oriental moon cast its triumphant glamour at night. There she had lain in a hammock, apparently wasting her beauty upon the almost awesome solitude of the place, until one evening when the captain, walking up the path of crushed shells between the high thickets, had seen a man rise hastily and disappear behind a clump of ilexes. The bluff Englishman had told the mate of this incident on coming aboard, in shocked and very strong language, but, contrary to expectation, the days had passed without further developments. Two weeks later, however, the Princess had bidden the captain be ready to take to sea again, and twenty-four hours afterward theWild Rosehad steamed out of Tangier, bound for the Azores, carrying, besides its former contingent, a very good-looking young man, who was, so it was said, her Serene-Highness’s newly engaged secretary, an Englishman; by name Preston Harrington.
Throughout the trip the Princess, who had evidently taken a sudden turn toward literature, had been closeted in her own suite with “Mr. Harrington” for many hours a day, dictating, doubtless, the novel to which she freely referred when talking to the captain, whom she daily honored with a visit on the bridge. It was to be—she claimed—the work of her life, a great-lady way of avoidingennuiin this weary, weary existence of plenitude.
It had leaked out, however, as such things are over-aptto do, that the Azores were but a pretext, a port of call on the way to the States; that “Mr. Harrington” was in reality an American, and that his post of secretary had not been adopted for the sake of obtaining a remunerative position, since his pockets were royally filled, as was testified by the munificence of his tips to every man-jack of the crew and engine-room. He had made himself well liked, too, and had gained the brevet title of a “real gentleman” among them. Also he was a splendid sailor, visibly used to a pleasing existence on a yacht of extreme luxuriousness.
Once or twice the mate himself had heard voices raised to the pitch of anger in the saloon, when keeping his midnight watch on deck, and had greatly wondered, but reported nothing of what he had discovered. Once, as a matter of fact, he had unwillingly caught a sentence of the Princess: “I will not go with you to America! We must find some other place!” And the answer in “Harrington’s” lower tones: “I don’t care where we go.Youmust decide. You know very well that now I am utterly in your hands.”
A short sojourn at the Azores, spent mostly on the yacht, and then orders to steam back again to Europe. Célèste, her Highness’s French maid, had chatted about Norway to one of the quartermasters who was a Norwegian, and had let fall that her mistress, already sickened of sub-tropical landscapes, would spend the end of the summer in the Fjords. There was no longer peace on board, however. Laurence scowled savagely during meal-times, as was asserted by the head steward and his under-strappers. “Mr. Harrington” looked grim and worried by turns, and the admirably trained, carefully selected crew gossiped between themselves, just as if they had been the most ordinary passenger-steamer lot; only their faces remained aristocratically wooden, and their tongues reduced to pianissimo expressions.
On nearing Europe theWild Rosehad encountered dirty weather of the midsummer kind, the most trying for seafarers to bear, and the Princess had signified to her captain that her next point of destination would be Trondhjem. Then suddenly he had been summoned to her “study” and had received orders not to go by way of the English Channel.
Greatly surprised, Captain Braines had respectfully pointed out to her that any other route would be a roundabout one, if Norway was really her Highness’s destination; but evidently apprehensive of meeting other yachts in those much-traveled waters, she had objected with her usual stubbornness, and only by protesting the lateness of the season had the captain finally succeeded in gaining his point. Beaten by contrary winds, theWild Rosehad entered the Channel, and had attempted to seek shelter from the final tempest in some French port. Fog-banks of impenetrable thickness and terrible cross-seas had been her portion, and then—the end! The first mate confessed that the unreasonableness of the Princess, her incomprehensible behavior in the teeth of imminent peril, had unmanned the crew and shaken even the captain himself, though “Mr. Harrington’s” cool courage and resourcefulness in a desperate situation might have still saved her had she but listened to him. The rest of the recital was mere maritime detail—a welter of raging waters, the gnashing teeth of breakers—and of no present interest, so Salvières leaned back in his chair and took the cigarette his wife silently handed to him.
And what could they all do now? That was the grievous point. What would be the dictum of the “Princes of Science” summoned to Salvières? How conceal the true identity of Preston Wynne, granted that the Ducal doctor was correct in his fears of permanent disablement? There was Basil, too, to reckon with. Perhaps he would hear or read of the disaster to theWildRosebefore reaching France, whither he was journeying, knowing that the de Salvières were in Normandy. They looked sadly at one another, these people who a few short months before had all been so happy.
The afternoon was far advanced, and the weather had sensibly moderated, when the carriage departed to fetch the medical men from the nearest railway station. They were coming on a special train, for no time was to be lost in mercy to Preston, who, still wandering in his mind, was in charge of two nursing sisters on the narrow truckle-bed that the life-savers used, turn and turn about, to snatch a wink or so of sleep during their nights on duty.
Marguerite had devoted herself to the amusement of Piotr; a difficult Piotr to-day, rendered peevish by his disturbed night’s rest, impossible to please, restive as the unbroken colt he was. At last she came down, very pale in her white dinner-dress, and a trifle ghostly as she glided along the inner gallery to the glassed-in terrace where all were waiting. “Moonglade?” yes, but a very faint presentment of her usual “crystal and silver” self, to quote Tatiana. Her father, who had been pacing restlessly up and down between the two arched, creeper-garlanded entrances of this sublimized conservatory, went forward and threw his arm about her shoulders. He said nothing, but suddenly bent his tall form and kissed her above the eyebrow, his eyes full of pity as he noticed the small hands, gloved to the elbow, so as to hide the thin bandages beneath. She had been cruelly torn by that rusty cable in sliding down the cliff, and he was far from reassured.
Everybody spoke to her that night, and for days to follow, in a tender, careful manner, as though afraid to touch upon too sensitive a point, of hurting her in some way; and it was in an almost hesitating tone that Tatiana asked her just then whether she felt able to take her place for an hour or so, later on, while she herself went downwith the doctors, Jean, the abbé, and Régis, to be present at their examination of the wounded man.
“Why, of course, ‘Aunt’ Tatiana!” she replied, smiling nearly as usual. “I’ll be only too glad to be of use.”
Tatiana glanced curiously at her. “Of use? What was the ‘Gamin’ ever else but useful to all those she loved, and to many others besides?”