"They sank?"
"Yes, sir."
"Anything else?"
"Nothing else worth reporting, I think.... Do you recognize this coat and stick as belonging to Mr Matheson, sir?"
Lars Larssen nodded non-committally, and ordered the young fellow to get a trunk telephone call through to Sir Francis Letchmere at Monte Carlo. Dean had already found out that he was staying at the Hotel des Hespérides.
But when the telephone connexion had been made, it was Olive who answered from the other end of the wire:—
"This is Mrs Matheson. Who is speaking?"
"Mr Larssen. I want Sir Francis Letchmere."
"He's out just now. Shall I take your message?"
"Have you heard yet from your husband?"
"No. Why?"
"He's off to Canada. I thought he would have wired you."
"That's just like Clifford!" There was an angry sharpness in the voice over the wire.
"I reckon he was in too much of a hurry. It's in connexion with the Hudson Bay scheme—you know about that?"
"Yes. Has anything gone wrong with it?" Now there was anxiety in the voice.
"A new situation has arisen. Your husband suggested to me that he had better hurry across the pond and straighten up matters." Larssen lowered his voice. "Somebody in the Canadian Government wants oiling. Of course he will have to work the affair very quietly."
"It's too annoying! Clifford had promised me faithfully to come on to Monte by to-night's train. I wanted him here."
"That's rough on you!"
"What message did you wish to give to my father?"
"About the Hudson Bay deal. I want to meet Sir Francis and talk business."
"You're not going to drag him back to Paris!"
Again there was annoyance in her voice, and Lars Larssen made a quick resolution. He answered: "Certainly not, if you don't wish it. Rather than that, I'll come myself to Monte."
"That's charming of you!"
"The least I can do. I'll wire later when to expect me."
"Many thanks."
When the conversation had concluded, the shipowner called the young secretary and asked him to bring in the new "Thor" travelling typewriter he had purchased that afternoon. Larssen had proved right in his guess of the make of machine with which his scrap of typing had been done.
"Take a letter. Envelope first," said Larssen.
"You want me to take it direct on the machine, sir?"
"Yes." The shipowner began to dictate. "Monsieur G. R. Coulter, Rue Laffitte, 8, Paris.... Now for the letter.... Cherbourg, March 15th."
"Any address above Cherbourg?"
"Not at present. 'Cherbourg, March 15th. Dear Coulter, I am called away to Canada on business. The matter is very private, and I want my trip kept very quiet. I leave affairs in your hands until my return. Get my luggage from my hotel and keep it in the office. If anything urgent arises, my name and address will be Arthur Dean, Hotel Ritz-Carlton, Montreal.'"
The young secretary went white, and his fingers dropped from the keys of the typewriter.
"Sir!"
It was a moment of crisis.
"Well?" asked Lars Larssen sharply.
"A letter like that, sir...!"
"You don't care to go to Canada?"
"It's not that, but——" He stammered, and stopped short.
Lars Larssen allowed a moment of silence to give weight to his coming words. He drew out a cheque-book from his breast-pocket and very deliberately said: "Make yourself out a cheque for a usual month's wages, and bring it to me to sign. That will be in lieu of notice."
Arthur Dean took the cheque-book with shaking fingers and went to the adjoining room.
When at length he came back, he found the shipowner making out a telegram. He stood in silence until the telegram was given into his hand, open, with an order to send it off to London. His glance fell involuntarily on the writing, and he could see that the wire was to call over somebody to replace him.
"I don't think this will be necessary, sir," said Dean, with a tremor in his voice which told of the mental struggle he had been through in the adjoining room, when his career lay staked on the issue of a single decision.
It was not without definite purpose that Lars Larssen had put the cheque-book into his hands. He knew well the power of suggestion, and used it with a master-hand. He could almost see the young secretary torn between the thoughts of a miserable £8 on the one hand, and the illimitable wealth suggested by a blank cheque-book on the other.
"Understand this," answered Larssen. "Whichever way you decide matters nothing to me from the business point of view. I can get a dozen, twenty men to replace you at a moment's notice. If you don't care to go to Canada, you're perfectly free to say so. Then we part, because you're useless to me. Aside from the purely businesspoint of view, I should be sorry. I like you; I see possibilities in you; I could help you up the business ladder."
"That's very good of you, sir."
"Wait. I want you to see this matter in the proper light. You have an idea that what that letter represents could get you into trouble with the law. That's it, isn't it?"
Dean coloured.
"Now see here. I stand behind that letter. My reputation is worth about ten thousand times yours in hard cash. Would I be mad enough to risk my reputation unless I had looked at every move on the board?"
"I didn't think of that at the time."
"Exactly. Now you see the other side of the picture. If you want half an hour to make up your mind once and for all, take it. Consider carefully what you'd like to be in the future: clerk or business man. Two pound a week; or six, ten, twenty, fifty a week. That represents the difference between the clerk and the business man in cold cash."
"I've made up my mind, sir," answered Dean firmly.
"Good!" said Lars Larssen, and held out his hand to his young employee. "There's the right stuff in you!"
To have his hand shaken in friendship by the millionaire shipowner was as strong wine to Arthur Dean. He flushed with pleasure as he stammered out his thanks.
A couple of hours packed with feverish activityfollowed. Lars Larssen knew that Clifford Matheson had the habit of carrying a small typewriter with him on his journeys, in order to get through correspondence while on trains and steamers. Many busy men carry them. This habit of Matheson's was exceedingly useful for his present purpose. The letter that Arthur Dean was to post off at Cherbourg—one to the Paris office of Clifford Matheson and one of similar purport to the London office—would only need the signature in holograph. Larssen had several of Matheson's signatures on various letters that had passed between them, and these he cut off and gave to his employee to copy.
He criticised the spacing and the general lay-out of the letter already typed, showed Dean how to imitate Matheson's little habits of typing, and arranged that the letters dictated should be retyped on hotel paper at Cherbourg and posted there. Dean was to catch a night train to Cherbourg, take steamer ticket there for Quebec, and proceed to Montreal. There were a host of directions as to his conduct while in Canada, and as Larssen poured out a stream of detailed orders, searching into every cranny and crevice of the situation, the young clerk felt once more the glamour of the master-mind.
Here was an employer worth working for!
Early next morning Dean was at grimy Cherbourg, and after posting off his letters he sent the following telegram to Mrs Matheson at Monte Carlo:—
"Sailing this morning for Canada on 'La Bretagne.' Urgent and very private business. Larssen, Grand Hotel, Paris, will explain. Sailing as Arthur Dean to avoid Canadian reporters. Good-bye. Much love."
As the liner lay by the quayside with smoke pouring from her funnels and the bustle of near departure on her decks, a telegram in reply was brought to Arthur Dean. He opened and read:—
"Most annoying. Cannot understand why business could not have been given to somebody else. However, expect nothing from you nowadays. Where is Rivière? Not arrived, and no line from him."
Rivière? Who was this man? Lars Larssen had made no mention of this name. It was the one facet of the situation of which the shipowner knew nothing—the one unknown link in the chain of circumstance.
Arthur Dean could only send a frantic wire to Lars Larssen, and the liner had cast off from her moorings before an answer came. This is what the shipowner found awaiting him at his hotel:—
"Mrs M. wants to know where is Rivière. Reply urgent. Who is Rivière?"
On the morning of March 15th, Clifford Matheson lit a blazing fire in the laboratory of a tumbledown villa in Neuilly in order to destroy the clothes and other identity marks of the financier.
For some months past he had been leading a double life—as Clifford Matheson the financier, and as John Rivière the recluse scientist. He had chosen to take up the name of his dead half-brother because he had been taking up the latter's life-work.
The motives that had urged him to this strange double life were such as a Lars Larssen could scarcely comprehend. Every man has his mental as well as his physical limitations. The keenest brain, if trained on some specialized line, will fail to understand what to the dabbler in many lines seems perfectly natural and reasonable. Larssen, a master-mind, had his peculiar limitations as well as smaller men. His brain had been trained to see the world as an ant-heap into which some Power External had stamped an iron heel. The ants fought blindly with one another to reach the surface—to live. That was the law of life as he saw it—to fight one's way to the open.
The world he looked upon breathed in moneythrough eager nostrils. Money was the oxygen of civilization. Without money a man slowly asphyxiated. It must be every man's ambition to own big money—to breathe it in himself with full-lunged, lustful, intoxicating gulps, and to dole it out as master to dependents pleading for their ration of life. That was the meaning of power: to give or withhold the essentials of life at one's pleasure.
Consequently he had failed to read the riddle of Matheson's motive at that crucial interview in the financier's office on the Rue Laffitte. He had failed to realize that a man might be as eager to give as to grasp. He had failed to reckon on altruism as a possible dominating factor in the decisions of a successful man of business.
Further than that, it lay entirely outside Lars Larssen's plane of thought that a man who had fought his way up to worldly success from a clerk's stool in a Montreal broker's office, who had made himself a power in the world of London and Paris finance, could voluntarily give up money and power and bury himself in obscurity.
Larssen judged that Matheson had been murdered and robbed by theapaches. It was possible, though extremely improbable, that he might have committed suicide. Which it was, mattered nothing to the shipowner. But he did not dream for one instant that Matheson might have thrown up place and power to disappear into voluntary exile.
Clifford Matheson had set himself from the ageof eighteen to achieve a money success. At thirty-seven, he had achieved it. He had slashed out for himself a path to power in the financial world. He was rich enough to satisfy the desires of most men.
Five years ago he had married into a well-known English family, and the doors of society had been opened wide to him. But his marriage had been a ghastly mistake. Olive, after marriage, had showed herself entirely out of sympathy with the idealism that formed so large a part of the complex character of her husband. She wanted money and power, and she drove spurs into her husband that he might obtain for her more and more money, more and more power. Any other ambition in Clifford she tried to sneer down with the ruthlessness of an utterly mercenary woman.
He had come to loathe the sensuous artificiality of his life. He had come to loathe the ruthless selfishness of finance. He was sick with the callousness of that stratum of the world in which he moved.
In the last couple of years he had found himself drawn powerfully towards the calm, passionless atmosphere of science in which his elder brother, John Rivière, had found his life-work. Rivière had made no worldly success for himself. The scientific researches he had undertaken made no stir when they found light in the pages of obscure quarterlies circulating amongst a few dozen other men engaged in similar research. Rivière had not the temperament to push himself or the children of his brain. He had settled into a solitary bachelorlife in a small Canadian college—an unknown, unrecognized man—and yet the calm, steady purpose and the calm, passionless happiness of the life had made a deep impression on Clifford Matheson.
Rivière had come to an accidental death on a holiday with his brother in the wilds of northern Canada. Few knew of it beyond Matheson.
The financier had been drawn towards one special problem of science, and on this he had studied deeply the last few years. From his studies, an idea had developed which could only be worked out by experiments. Many years of patient research would be needed, for this thought-child of Matheson's was a master-idea, an idea which meant the exploring of a practically uncharted sea of knowledge.
In brief, it was an attack of root-problem of human disease. Doctors and pathologists had hitherto been viewing disease from the aspect of its myriad effects on the highly complex human being. It was as though one were to attempt to understand the subtleties of some full-grown language without first learning its elementary grammar—the foundations on which its super-structure is reared.
Now Matheson, coming to the problem with a strong, fresh mind unhampered by the swaddling clothes of a college training, saw it from a view-point entirely different to that of the doctors. He wanted to know the elementary grammar of human disease. He found that no book dealt with it—nor attempted to deal with it. No recognized department of a medical course took asits province the root-causes of disease. Pathology was a study of effects. Bacteriology—that again was merely a study of effects.
He had read widely amongst a variety of scientific research-matter, and had found that here and there an isolated attack was being made on the problem of causes. But nothing strong-planned—as any one of his financial schemes would be planned—nothing co-ordinated. The researches of the day were starting at points too complex, before the basic conditions of the problem were known.
He wanted to learn, and to give to the world, the basic facts.
Disease, as he viewed it, was primarily the result of abnormal conditions of living. His idea was to study it in its simplest possible form. To study the effects of abnormal conditions of life on the lowest living organisms—the microscopic blobs of life whose structure is elemental. From his wide reading of the last couple of years, he knew what little was already known and the vast field that was unexplored territory. He need not waste time over what others had already dealt with—the new territory offered sufficient field for a life-work.
Once he could get at the basic facts of disease as it related to the very simplest organisms, he could progress upwards to the higher organisms, and so eventually to man. What could be learnt from the pathological condition of an amœba might lay the foundations for the conquering of cancer in man, and a hundred other diseases as well.Matheson's idea was a revolutionary one—a master-idea like a master-patent. It held limitless possibilities for the alleviation of human pain and suffering.
It was an idea to which a man might well devote his whole intellect and energies.
Some months before, the financier had bought, in the name of John Rivière, a tumbledown villa on the outskirts of Neuilly. In it he had fitted up a research laboratory in which to pursue the experimental end of the problem which had such vital interest for him.
A high wall surrounded a garden overgrown with weeds and a villa falling to decay. At one time, no doubt, the house had formed a nest for thepetite amieof some rich Parisian, but now the owner of the property was only too glad to sell it at any price, and without asking any but the most perfunctory questions of the man who had offered to buy. In the solitude of the ruined villa, Matheson had been pursuing his scientific research at such times as he could snatch from his financial business. He had been leading a "double life"—from a motive far different to the double life of other married men. There was no woman in the case. There was no secret scheme of money-making. There was no solitary pandering to the senses with drink or drugs.
But the financier had been finding that the leading of a double life bristled with practical difficulties. Apart from the calls of his business, there were the insistent demands of his wife. Theposition was becoming an intolerable one. He had to choose between the life of the money-maker or that of the creator of a new field of knowledge.
On the night of 14th March the conversation on the platform of the Gare de Lyon and the fight with Lars Larssen had brought the question of decision to a head. He had grappled with it in his office, pacing to and fro long after the shipowner had left. He had turned his steps towards the heights of Montmartre so that he might carry his problem up to the solitude of a high place, in the peace of the eternal stars.
He was deep in the question of decision when the two apaches had attacked him in the narrow lane leading to the Basilique of the Sacred Heart. Matheson was a man of considerable strength and alertness. He had felled one of the twoapacheswith his heavy gold-mounted stick; the other one had sent through the fur-lined coat a knife-thrust which had grazed his ribs. Matheson had beaten him off, and had then continued his path to the Basilique.
But the attack had brought a vivid inspiration for the solution of his personal problem.
He would slip off the personality of Clifford Matheson and take up completely that of John Rivière. He would leave his overcoat and stick by the riverside at Neuilly, and 'phone information about them to the police or to a newspaper. That knife-slit in his overcoat would be taken as evidence of murder. They would judge him murdered, with robbery as motive. The courts would give leave for Olive to presume death. She would befreed; she would come into her husband's fortune; she could marry again if she chose to.
Surely that was the solution of his personal problem!
For his part he could live his life unshackled, and there was sufficient money already standing in the name of Rivière at a Paris bank to give him a modest income on which to keep himself and pay for the materials of research.
No one would be the worse for his disappearance; his wife would be the gainer; and mankind, he hoped, would be the gainer through the research to which he could henceforth devote his life.
Yes, that was assuredlythesolution.
Rivière had bought fresh clothes and other necessities at the suburban shops of Neuilly. He had shaved off his moustache; arranged his hair differently; put on a new shape of collar. It is curious how the shape of a collar is associated in most minds with the impression of a man's features. To change into another shape is to make a very noticeable difference to one's appearance.
He had also bought travelling necessities. His intention was to wander for a couple of months. It would help him to clear his brain from the tangle of financial matters which still obsessed it against his will. He wanted to sweep out the Hudson Bay scheme, Lars Larssen, Olive, and many other matters from the living-room of his mind. He wanted a couple of months in which to settle himself in the new personality; plan out his future work in detail; set the mental fly-wheel turning, so as to concentrate his energies undividedly on the work to come.
In the afternoon, old Mme Dromet entered the villa to scrub and clean. She had a standing arrangement to come two or three afternoons a week.
"Are you going away from Paris?" shouted old Mme Dromet to her employer, seeing the portmanteau and the other signs of departure. She was stone-deaf, and in the manner of deaf people always shouted what she had to say.
Rivière nodded assent, and produced a paper of written instructions. These he read through with her, so as to make sure that she thoroughly understood. Then he gave her a generous allowance to cover the next few months.
Later in the afternoon, he was seated with his modest travelling equipment in a cab, driving to No. 8, Rue Laffitte. He mounted to the offices of the financier and, in order to test the efficacy of his changed appearance, asked to see Mr Clifford Matheson.
For a moment the clerk stared at the visitor. The resemblance to his employer was certainly very striking. Yet there were differences. Mr Matheson wore a close-cut moustache, while this man was clean-shaven. The commanding look, the hard-set mask of the financier were softened away; there was joy of life, there was freedom of soul in the features and in the attitude of this visitor.
"I am Mr John Rivière, his half-brother. Will you tell him that I am here?"
The clerk felt somehow relieved. That of course explained the striking resemblance. He replied: "Mr Matheson has not been at the office to-day, sir. I fancy he has left for Monte Carlo. I am not sure, but I believe that was his intention."
"Has he left no message for me?"
"I will see, sir. Please take a seat."
Presently the clerk returned. "I am sorry, sir, but there doesn't seem to be any message left for you."
"Tell him I called," said Rivière, and went back to his cab. In it he was driven to the Gare de Lyon. At the booking-office he asked for a ticket for Arles. His intention was to travel amongst the old cities of Provence, and then make his way to the Pyrenees and into Spain. There was no definite plan of journey; he wanted only some atmosphere which would help him to clear his mind for the work to come. In the Midi the early Spring would be breathing new life over the earth.
About midnight the southern express stopped at some big station. The rhythmic sway and clatter of a moving train had given place to a comparative stillness that awoke John Rivière from sleep. He murmured "Dijon," and composed himself to a fresh position for rest. Some hours later there was again a stoppage, and instinctively he murmured "Lyon-Perrache." The phases of the journey along the main P.L.M. route had been burnt into him from the visits with Olive to Monte Carlo.
In the morning the strange land of Provence opened out under mist which presently cleared away beneath the steady drive of the sun. The low hills that border the valley of the Rhone cantered past him—quaint, treeless hills here scarped and sun-scorched, there covered with low balsam shrubs. Now and again they passeda straggling white village roofed with big, curved, sun-mellowed tiles. Around the village there would be a few trees, and on these the early Spring of the Midi had laid her fingers in tender caress.
The air was keen and yet strangely soft; to Rivière it was wine of life. He drew it in thirstily; let the wind of the train blow his hair as it listed; watched greedily the ever-changing landscape. The strange bare beauty of this land of sunshine and romance brought him a keen thrill of happiness.
It was as though he had loosed himself from prison chains and had emerged into a new life of freedom.
In full morning they reached Arles, the old Roman city in the delta of the Rhone. It clusters, huddles around the stately Roman arena on the hill in the centre of the town—a place of narrow, tortuousruelleswhere every stone cries out a message from the past. In the lanes, going about the business of the day, were women and girls moulded in the strange dark beauty of the district—the "belles Arlésiennes" famous in prose and verse.
Yet chiefly it was the arena that fascinated him. All through the afternoon he wandered about the great stone tiers, flooded in sunlight, and reconstructed for himself a picture of the days when gladiators down below had striven with one another for success—or death. The arena was the archetype of civilized life.
Now he was a spectator, one of the multitude who look on. It was good to sit in the flooding sunlight and know that he was no longer a gladiatorin the arena. There was higher work for him to do, away from the merciless stabbing sword and the cunning of net and trident.
At intervals during the afternoon a few tourists—mostly Americans—rushed up in high-powered, panting cars to the gateway of the arena; gave a hurried ten minutes to the interior; and then whirled away across the white roads of the Rhone delta in a scurry of dust.
Only one visitor seemed to realize, like himself, the glamour of the past and to steep the mind in it. This was a woman. Her age was perhaps twenty-five, in her bearing was that subtle, scarcely definable, sureness of self which marks off womanhood from girlhood. She climbed from tier to tier of the amphitheatre with firm confident step; stood gazing down on her dream pictures of the scene in the arena; moved on to a fresh vantage-point. She wore a short tailored skirt which ignored the ugly, skin-tight convention of the current fashion. Her cheeks were fresh with a healthy English colour; her eyes were deep blue, toning almost to violet; her hair was burnished chestnut under the soft felt hat curled upwards in front; a faint odour of healthy womanhood formed as it were an aura around her.
All this John Rivière had noticed subconsciously as she passed close by him on the ledge where he sat, walking with her firm, confident step. Though he noted it appreciatively, yet it disturbed him. He did not want to notice any woman. He had big work to do, and on that he wanted to concentrate all his faculties. He had had nothought of a woman in his life when he broke the chains that shackled him to the Clifford Matheson existence. He purposed to have no call of sex to divert him from the realization of his big idea.
Presently she had climbed to the topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, and stood out against the sky-line of the sunset-to-be, deep-chested, straight, clean-limbed, a very perfect figure of a modern Diana.
It is a dangerous place on which to stand, that topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, with no parapet and a sheer drop to the street below. Almost against his will, Rivière mounted there.
But there was no occasion for his help, and they two stood there, some yards apart, silent, watching the red ball of the sun sink down into the limitless flats of the Camargue, and the grey mist rising from the marshes to wrap its ghostly fingers round this city of the ghostly past.
Twice she looked towards him as though she must speak out the thoughts conjured up by this splendid scene. It wanted only some tiny excuse of convention to bridge over the silence between them, but Rivière on his side would not seek it, and the woman hesitated to ask him to take up the thread that lay waiting to his hand.
A cold wind sprang up, and she descended and made her way to her hotel on the Place du Forum.
At dinner in the deserted dining-room of his hotel, Rivière found himself seated at the next table to her. There are only two hotels worthy of the name in Arles, and the coincidence of meeting again was of the very slightest. Yetsomehow he felt subconsciously that the arm of Fate was bringing their two lives together, and he resented it.
The silence between them remained unbroken.
In the evening he wrapped himself in a cloak against the bitter wind rushing down the valley of the Rhone and spreading itself as an invisible fan across the delta, and wandered about the dark alleys of the town, twisting like rabbit-burrows, lighted only here and there with a stray lamp socketed to a stone wall. Now he had left the big-thoughted age of the Romans, and was carried forward to the crafty, treacherous Middle Ages. In such an alley as this, bravos had lurked with daggers ready to thrust between the shoulder-blades of their victims. Now he was in a wider lane through which an army had swept pell-mell to slay and sack, while from the overhanging windows above desperate men and women shot wildly in fruitless resistance. Now he was in another of the lightless rabbit-burrows....
A sudden sharp cry of fear cut out like a whip-lash into the blackness. A woman's cry. There were sounds of angry struggle as Rivière made swiftly to the aid of that woman who cried out in fear.
Stumbling round a corner of the twisting alley, he came to where a gleam from a shuttered window showed a slatted glimpse of a woman struggling in the arms of a lean, wiry peasant of the Camargue. Rivière seized him by the collar and shook him off as one shakes a dog from the midst of a fray. The man loosed his grip of the woman, and snarling like a dog, writhed himself free of Rivière. Then, whipping out a knife from his belt, he struck again and again. Rivière tried to ward with his left arm, but one blow of the knife went past the guard and ripped his cheek from forehead to jawbone.
At that moment a shutter thrown open shot as it were a search-light into the blackness of the alley, full on to the man with the knife, and Rivière, putting his whole strength into the blow, sent a smashing right-hander straight into the face of his adversary. Thrown back against the alley-wall, the man rebounded forward, and fell, a huddled, nerveless mass, on the ground.
From doorways near men came out with lights ... there was a hubbub of noise ... excited questions eddied around Rivière.
But the latter made no answer. He turned to find the woman who had been attacked.
"Mr Rivière!"
It was the woman who had stood by him on the topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, drinking in that glorious fiery sunset over the grey Camargue. She was flushed, but very straight and erect.
"That brute was attacking me. Oh, if only I had had some weapon!" Then she noticed the blood dripping from the gash in his forehead, and cried out: "You're hurt! Take this."
Her handkerchief was pressed into his hand. He answered as he took it: "It's nothing. Fortunately it missed the eye. And you?"
"I'm not hurt, thanks. Oh, you were splendid! It makes one feel proud to be an Englishwoman."
"Come to the hotel," he said, and ignoring theexcited questioning of the knot of men, took her arm and led her rapidly to their hotel on the Place du Forum.
"Let me dress your wound until the doctor can come."
"I don't want a doctor," he replied coldly. A sudden aloofness had come into his voice.
Her eye sought his with a piqued curiosity. For a moment, forgetting that here was a man who had rescued her from insult at considerable bodily risk, she saw him only as a man of curious, almost boorish brusqueness. Why this sudden cold reserve?
Then, with a reddening of cheek at her momentary lapse from gratitude, she began to thank him for his timely help.
Rivière cut her short. "There is nothing to thank me for. I didn't even know it was you. I heard a woman's cry—that was all. You ought not to go about these darkruellesalone at night-time."
They were at the door of their hotel by now.
"Can't I dress the wound for you?" she asked. "I've had practice in first aid, Mr Rivière."
He paused suddenly in the doorway and asked her abruptly: "How do you know my name?"
"I know more than your name. When your cut has been dressed, I'll explain in full."
"Thank you, but I can manage quite well myself. Let us meet again in thesalonin, say, half an hour's time."
They parted in the corridor and went to their respective rooms.
When they met again, he had his head bound up with swathes of linen. His face was white with the loss of blood, and she gave a little cry of alarm.
"You were badly hurt!"
"No; merely a surface cut. But please tell me what you know about me."
There was a quick change in her to a smiling gaiety. The man was human again—he had at all events a very human curiosity.
"The name was from the hotel register, naturally," she answered. "But I know also that you are on your way to Monte Carlo, which certainly can't come from the register."
Rivière's face became coldly impassive as he waited for her to explain further.
"You are a scientist," she continued slowly, watching him to note the effect of her words. "You are to meet a lady for the first time at Monte Carlo. Yet she knows you by your first name, John. You see that I know a good deal about you."
She waited for him to question her further, but he remained silent, deep in thought.
More than a little piqued that he would not question further, she gave him abruptly the solution of the riddle.
"Two nights ago I travelled here from Paris in the same train with an Englishwoman and her father. They took breakfast at the table near to mine in the restaurant car, and I could scarcely help overhearing what they were saying. They chatted about you. Then I found your name in the hotel register."
"But why did you look it up?" he challenged abruptly.
She parried the question. "The name caught my eye by accident. Naturally I was interested by the coincidence."
Rivière turned the conversation to the impersonal subject of Arles and its Roman remains, and soon after they said good-night.
"Shall I see you at breakfast?"
"I hope so," he answered.
As she moved out of the room, a splendidly graceful figure radiating health and energy and life full-tide, Rivière could not help following her with his eyes. His innermost being thrilled despite himself to the magic of her splendid womanhood.
It plucked at the strings of the primitive man within him.
In his room that evening he took up the blood-drenched handkerchief. In the corner was the name "Elaine Verney." The name conveyed nothing to him. He threw the handkerchief away, and shut her from his thoughts. He wanted no woman in this new life of his.
With the morning came a resolution to avoid her altogether. He rose very early and took the first train out of Arles.
It took him to Nîmes.
"Who is Rivière?"
Here was a new factor in the situation. Lars Larssen mentally docketed it as a matter to be dealt with immediately. After sending off a reply telegram to Cherbourg (which reached the quayside too late and was afterwards returned to him), the shipowner got a telephone call through to Olive at the Hotel des Hespérides.
"This is Mr Larssen speaking. Are you Mrs Matheson?"
"Yes. Good morning."
"Good morning. I called you up to say that your husband has sailed for Canada on 'La Bretagne.' I had a line from Cherbourg this morning."
"So had I."
"I suppose he explained matters to you?"
"No, he referred me to you for explanations. Just like Clifford!... What about Rivière—is he coming to Monte?"
Lars Larssen had to tread warily here. So he answered: "I didn't quite catch that name."
"John Rivière, my husband's half-brother. He lives in some suburb of Paris, I forget where, and Clifford was to bring him along to Monte."
The shipowner decided that he must find this man and discover if he knew anything. The words of Jimmy Martin flashed through his brain: "I doubt if the police'll do much unless the relatives kick up a shindy." Meanwhile, there was nothing to do but tell the truth, which was his usual resource when in an unforeseen difficulty.
"Don't know anything about him. If you give me his Paris address I'll dig him out."
"We don't know his address."
"Then I'll find it at the office. As soon as I get a line on him I'll wire you. Rivière? The name sounds French."
"French-Canadian. He's a couple of years older than Clifford, I believe.... When are you coming yourself?"
"To-night's train or to-morrow. I'm not sure if I can get away to-night."
"Do you play roulette?"
"No. Never been at the tables."
"Then I must teach you," said Olive gaily.
"Delighted!"
After the telephone conversation, Larssen went straight to No. 8, Rue Laffitte. He had wired the night before to London to have a secretary sent over—Sylvester, his usual confidential man, if the latter were back at business; if not, another subordinate he named. Catching the nine o'clock train from Charing Cross, the secretary would arrive in Paris about five in the afternoon. Meanwhile, Larssen, had to make his search for Rivière in person.
The business of a financier differs radically froma mercantile business on the point of staff. The main work of negotiation can only be carried out by the head of the firm himself, as a rule, and the routine work for subordinates is small, except when a public company flotation is being made. Matheson had found that his Paris office needed only a manager, Coulter, and a couple of clerks, one English and one French. Coulter was a steady-going, reliable man of forty odd, extremely trustworthy and not too imaginative.
He knew Lars Larssen, of course, and received him deferentially.
"What can I have the pleasure of doing for you, sir?"
"I want the address of Mr John Rivière. Or rather, Mrs Matheson wants it."
"Who is Mr John Rivière?"
This came as a fresh surprise to Lars Larssen, and made him doubly anxious to discover the man. Why all this mystery surrounding him?
"I understand from Mrs Matheson that Mr Rivière is her husband's half-brother. Lives somewhere around Paris."
"Strange! I've never heard of him myself. I'll make enquiries if you'll wait a moment."
Presently Coulter returned with the young English clerk of the office.
"It seems that Mr Rivière called here yesterday afternoon and enquired for Mr Matheson," explained Coulter.
Lars Larssen turned to the young clerk with a questioning look. "It was the first time I had ever seen him, sir," said the clerk. "He came in andasked quite naturally for Mr Matheson. There was an astonishing likeness between them, but that was explained at once when he told me they were half-brothers."
"An astonishing likeness?"
"When I say a likeness, sir, I mean of course in a general way. Mr Rivière is younger and different in many ways."
"Describe him."
The clerk did so to the best of his ability.
"Did he leave an address?"
"No, sir."
"Or a message?"
"No."
"Or say where he was going?"
The clerk could offer no clue to the whereabouts or intentions of John Rivière. Repeated questioning added little to the meagre information already given.
"Mr Matheson has not been at the office to-day or yesterday. Have you seen anything of him?" asked Coulter of the shipowner.
"I know. He's away to Canada."
"To Canada!"
"Yes. We discussed the matter the night I was here. Hasn't he written you?"
"We've heard nothing."
"Reckon you will to-day.... Say, couldn't you look in Mr Matheson's desk to find the address of this Mr Rivière?"
Coulter was the financier's confidential man. He had full power to go over his employer's desk except for certain drawers labelled "Private," and he did so now.
When he came back from the search, he had an envelope in his hand addressed "Lars Larssen, Esq."
"All I could find was this envelope for you, sir. There seems to be no record of Mr Rivière's address."
The shipowner slit open the letter and read it with a countenance that gave no clue whatever to what was passing in his mind.
"My dear Larssen," it ran, "I estimate your expenses on the Hudson Bay scheme at roughly £20,000, and I enclose cheque for that amount. If this is right, please let me have a formal receipt and quittance. I want you to understand that my decision on the matter is final. I regret that I am obliged to back out at the last moment, but no doubt you will be able to proceed without my help."
The letter was in handwriting, and had not been press-copied. Larssen noted that point at once with satisfaction. But the letter itself gave him uneasiness. It explained nothing of Matheson's motives. From the 'phone conversation with Olive, it was clear that she had no suspicion that her husband wanted to withdraw from the Hudson Bay deal. In fact, she had asked anxiously if anything had gone wrong with the scheme. Sir Francis Letchmere might of course be closer in Matheson's business confidence, and that was one of the reasons for travelling to Monte Carlo and talking to him face to face.
But with his keen intuitive sense, Lars Larssen felt that the explanation was in some way connected with this mysterious John Rivière. It was imperative to get in touch with the man.
Where was Rivière? Was there nobody who could throw light on his whereabouts? His jaw tightened as he began to chew on the problem. Paris is too big a city in which to hunt for a mere name.
After thanking the manager, Larssen withdrew from the room. Passing through the outer office, he was addressed by the other of the two clerks, a young Frenchman.
"Monsieur," said he in French, "here is a point which perhaps will be of service. I am at the window when Monsieur Rivière arrivesen taxi-auto. On theimpérialeI see a portmanteau. Doubtless Monsieur Rivière journeys away from Paris."
"Did you note the number of the cab?"
The young Frenchman made a gesture of sympathetic negation. There had been no reason to look at the number, even if he could have read it from a window on the second story.
"Thanks," said Larssen, but the information seemed at first sight valueless. A man takes an unknown cab from an unknown house in an unknown suburb to an unknown terminus, when he buys a ticket for an unknown destination. Sheer waste of energy to hunt for a needle in that haystack!
Yet his bulldog mind would not let go of the problem. Presently he had found a new avenue of approach to it. If Rivière had travelled away from Paris on the evening of the 15th, probably he stayed that night or the next day at some hotel. There he would have to fill in his name, etc., in the hotel register according to the strict requirements of the French law.
Advertise in the papers for one John Rivière from Paris, age thirty-seven, staying at a hotel in the provinces on the 15th or 16th. Offer a reward for information. The average Frenchman is very keen on money; without a doubt he would answer the advertisement if he knew anything of John Rivière. Advertise inLe Petit Journal,Le Petit Parisienand a few other dailies which cover France from end to end, as no English or American journals do in their respective countries.
That was the right solution!
Larssen did not pay the cheque for £20,000 into his bank. He was after big game, and a mere £20,000 was a jack-rabbit. It would be safer, he felt, to let it lie amongst his secret papers.
When Sylvester, his private secretary, arrived by the afternoon train from London, Lars Larssen placed him in touch with only so much of the situation as he considered desirable. This was little. Sylvester was to stay in Paris while the shipowner went on to Monte Carlo. If the various advertisements brought a reply, Sylvester was to hunt out John Rivière in whatever part of France he might be, and then communicate with Lars Larssen for further orders.
The secretary was a quiet, self-contained, silent man of thirty or thirty-one. A heavy dark moustache curtained expression from his lips. Not only could he carry out orders to the letter, but he was to be trusted to keep his head in any unforeseen emergency and act on his own responsibility in a sound, common-sense way. But Lars Larssen trusted no man beyond the essentials ofany situation. His was the brain to plan and direct. He preferred obedient tools to brilliant, independent helpers.
At the train-side, Larssen gave a final direction to his subordinate: "Keep me in touch with every move."
Back at his hotel, Sylvester occupied himself with the development of some films he had taken on the Channel passage. In his hours of leisure he was a devoted amateur photographer. At the present time there was nothing to be done but wait the possible answer to the advertisement.
Next day, the wonderful panorama of the Riviera was unfolding itself before the eyes of the shipowner. The red rocks and the dwarf pines of the Esterel coves, against which an azure sea lapped in soft caress.... Cannes with its far-flung draperies of white villas.... The proud solemnity of the Alpes Maritimes thrusting up to the snow-line and glinting white against the sun.... Fairy bungalows nesting in tropic gardens and waving welcome with their palm-fronds to the rushing train.... The Baie des Anges laughing with sky and hills.... The many-tunnelled cliff-route from Villefranche to Cap D'Ail, where moments of darkness tease one to longing for the sight of the azure coves dotted with white-winged yachts and foam-slashed motor-boats.... Europe's silken, jewelled fringe!
But scenery made no appeal to Lars Larssen. Scenery would not help him to the attainment of his great ambitions. Scenery wasno useto him. His delight lay in men and women and the using of them. Business—the turning of other men's energies to his own ends—was the very breath of his being.
He was glad to reach the hectic crowdedness ofthe tiny principality of Monaco—that triple essence of civilization and sensuous luxury. He felt at home with the big idea that drew the whole world to the gaming tables to pay homage to the goddess Fortune. For a moment the suggestion came to him to buy up some beautiful islet and build a pleasure city on it which should be a wonder of the world. He was making a note of it for future consideration, when Olive and her father met him on the platform at Monte Carlo.
"I thought perhaps you would bring John Rivière with you," said Olive after they had exchanged greetings. A strong desire had sprung up to see this mysterious relation of Clifford's, and to be balked of any passing whim was keen annoyance to her.
"Bring a will-o'-the-wisp," answered Larssen.
"Can't you find him?" asked Sir Francis. Larssen shook his head. "Gad, that's curious. Why doesn't he write? Bad form, you know. But when a man's lived all his life in the backwoods of Canada, I suppose one can't expect him to know what's what."
Olive studied the shipowner keenly as they drove to their hotel. His massive strength of body and masterful purpose of mind, showing in every line of his face, attracted her strongly. Olive worshipped power, money, and all that breathed of them. Here was the living embodiment of money and power.
After dinner that evening all three went to the Casino. The order had been given to Sir Francis Letchmere's valet that he was to bring over to theSalle de Jeux any telegram or 'phone message that might arrive.
Larssen was keenly interested in the throng of smart men and women clustered around the tables. Here was the raw material of his craft—human nature. Moths around a candle—well, he himself had lit many candles. The process of singeing their wings intrigued him vastly.
Olive explained the game to him with a flush of excitement on her cheeks. He noted that flush and made a mental note to use it for his own ends. She took a seat at a roulette table and asked him to advise her where to stake her money. Sir Francis preferredtrente-et-quarante, and went off to another table.
"I can see you've been born lucky," she whispered to Larssen.
"I'll try to share it with you," he answered, and suggested some numbers with firm, decisive confidence. Though he had keen pride in his intellect and his will, he had also firm reliance on his intuitive sense. With Lars Larssen, all three worked hand in hand.
Olive began to win. Her eyes sparkled, and she exchanged little gay pleasantries and compliments with the shipowner.
"We've made all the loose hay out ofthissunshine," said Larssen after an hour or so, when a spell of losing set in. "Now we'll move to another table."
Olive obeyed him with alacrity. She liked his masterful orders. Here was a man to whom one could give confidence.
"Five louis oncarré16-20," he advised suddenly when they had found place at another table.
Without hesitation she placed a gold hundred-franc piece on the intersecting point of the four squares 16, 17, 19, 20. The croupier flicked the white marble between thumb and second finger, and it whizzed round the roulette board like an echo round the whispering gallery of St Paul's. At length it slowed down, hit against a metal deflector, and dropped sharply into one of the thirty-seven compartments of the roulette board. A croupier silently touched the square of 16 with his rake to indicate that this number had won, and the other croupier proceeded to gather in the stakes.
Forty louis in notes were pushed over to Olive.
At this moment Sir Francis' valet came up to Larssen with a telegram in his hand. The latter opened and scanned it quickly.
"What is it?" asked Olive.
"A tip to gamble the limit on number 14," replied Larssen smilingly.
Olive placed nine louis, the limit stake, on number 14, and two minutes later a pile of bank-notes aggregating 6300 francs came to her from the croupier's metal box.
"You're Midas!" she whispered exultantly.
"Midas has a hurry call to the 'phone," he answered.
For the telegram was from Sylvester, and it read:—
"Fourteen replies to hand. Fourteen J. Rivière's scattered about France."
"Clifford is a very shrewd man of business," remarked Larssen, drinking his third cognac at Ciro's at the end of a dinner which was a masterpiece even for Monte Carlo, where dining is takenau grand sérieux. He did not sip cognac, but took it neat in liqueur glassfuls at a time. There was a clean-cut forcefulness even in his drinking, typical of the human dynamo of will-power within.
Sir Francis puffed out a cloud of cigar-smoke with an air of reflected glory. He had helped to capture Matheson as a son-in-law, and a compliment of this kind was therefore an indirect compliment to himself.
The capture of Matheson was, in fact, the most notable achievement of his career. Beyond that, he had done little but ornament the Boards of companies with his name; manage his estate (through an agent) with a mixture of cross conservatism and despotic benevolence; and shoot, hunt and fish with impeccable "good form." He was typical of that very large class of leisured landowner in whose creed good form is next above godliness.
"Yes, Clifford has his head screwed on right," he said.
"Before he left for Canada," continued Larssen, "he managed to gouge me for a tidy extra in shares for you and for Mrs Matheson."
Olive had been markedly listless, heavy-eyed and abstracted during the course of the dinner, a point which Larssen had noted with some puzzlement. His mind had worked over the reasons for it without arriving at any definite conclusion. But now, at this unexpected announcement, her eyes lighted up greedily.
"For me!" she exclaimed. "That's more than I expected from Clifford."
The shipowner reached to take out some papers from his breast-pocket, then stopped. "I was forgetting. I oughtn't to be talking shop over the dinner-table."
Sir Francis made an inarticulate noise which was a kind of tribute to the fetish of good form. He wanted to hear more, but did not want to ask to hear more.
"Please go on," said Olive. "Talk business now just as much as you like. Unless, of course, you'd rather not discuss details while I'm here."
"I'd sooner talk business with you present, Mrs Matheson. I think a wife has every right to be her husband's business partner. I think it's good for both sides. When my dear wife was with me, we were share-and-share partners." He paused for a moment, then continued: "Here's the draft scheme for the flotation."
He held out a paper between Sir Francis and Olive, and Sir Francis took it and read it over withan air of concentrated, conscious wisdom—the air he carefully donned at Board meetings, together with a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez.
"Clifford will be Chairman," explained Larssen. "You and Lord St Aubyn and Carleton-Wingate are the men I want for the other Directors. I, as vendor, join the Board after allotment."
"Where's the point about shares for me?" asked Sir Francis, reading on.
"That doesn't appear in the prospectus, of course. A private arrangement between Clifford and myself. Here's the memorandum."
This he handed to Olive, who nodded her head with pleasure as she read it through, her father looking over her shoulder.
"Keep it," said Larssen as she made to hand it back. "Keep it till your husband returns from Canada."
"When did he say he will be back?"
"It's very uncertain. He doesn't know himself. It's a delicate matter to handle—very delicate. That's why he went himself to Montreal."
"He wired me that he's travelling under an assumed name."
"Very prudent," commented Larssen.
"I don't quite like it," murmured Sir Francis. "Not the right thing, you know."
Larssen did not answer, but Olive rejoined sharply: "What does it matter if it helps to get the flotation off and make money?"
"Well, perhaps so. Still——"
"Can you fix up St Aubyn and Carleton-Wingate?" asked Larssen. "Quickly?"
"Yes, I expect so. But has Clifford approved this scheme?"
"Of course."
"Have you it with you?"
"Have I what?"
"I mean the agreement Clifford signed."
Sir Francis, without knowing it, had stumbled upon the crucial weakness of Larssen's daring scheme. But it would have taken a far shrewder man than he to realize the vital import of the point from Larssen's easy, almost causal answer:
"There's no signed agreement. We agreed the scheme in principle at the interview in Clifford's office, and he left details to you and me. His last words were: 'Tell my father-in-law to go ahead as quickly as he can manage.'"
"But when I put this before St Aubyn and Carleton-Wingate, they'll be expecting me to—I mean to say, isn't it deuced irregular, you know?"
Larssen did not answer this for a moment. He had a keen appreciation of the value of silence in business negotiations. He poured himself out another glass of cognac and drank it off. His attitude conveyed a contempt for Letchmere's cautiousness which he would be too polite to put into words.
"If you'd sooner write to Clifford and have his agreement to the scheme in black and white ..." was his studiously, chilly reply.
Olive put in a word: "I dislike all those niggling formalities."
"Business is business," quoted her father sententiously.
"Besides, Clifford will be back before the prospectus goes to the public."
"Probably," agreed Larssen. "But in case he is not back in time, we're to go ahead just as if he were here. That's what he told me before he left Paris. Didn't he write you to that effect, Sir Francis?"
"I heard nothing from him."
"But I showed you my telegram," answered Olive. "Clifford said to refer to Mr Larssen for all details."
"I must think matters over," said the baronet obstinately.
Lars Larssen had been studying his man through half-closed eyelids, and he now summed him up with penetrating accuracy. It was not suspicion that made Sir Francis hesitate, but petty dignity. He had become huffed. He felt that his dignity had not been sufficiently studied in the transaction. Matters had been arranged over his head without formally consulting him. It was "not the thing"—"not good form."
To attempt to force matters would merely drive him into deeper obstinacy.
And yet it wasvitalto Larssen's plan that Sir Francis should go ahead with the work of the flotation quickly—should go ahead with it in the full belief that Clifford Matheson had agreed to the scheme and to the use of his name. It was vital that Sir Francis should take the whole responsibility of the flotation on to his own shoulders. He was to make use of his son-in-law's name with the other prospective Directors and on the printedprospectus just as though Matheson were personally sanctioning it.
Larssen himself planned to remain in the background and pull the wires unseen. When the revelation of Matheson's death came to light—as it inevitably must in the course of time—Letchmere would be so far involved that he would be forced to shoulder responsibility for the use of Matheson's name.
To try to rush matters with Sir Francis would perhaps wreck the whole delicate machinery of the scheme. Larssen quickly resolved to get at him in indirect fashion through Olive, and accordingly he answered evenly:
"Think it over by all means. There's plenty to consider. Take the draft scheme and look it through at your leisure.... Now what's the plan of amusement for to-night?"
Before going to the Casino, Olive made an excuse to return to her rooms at the Hespérides. Alone in her bedroom, she took out from a locked drawer a hypodermic syringe in silver and glass, and a phial of colourless liquid. She held the phial in her hands with a curious look of furtive tenderness, fondling it softly. For many months past this had been her cherished secret—the drug that unlocked for her new realms of fancy and exquisite sensation.
To herself she called it by a pet name, as though it were a lover.
In the course of the evening's play at the tables, Larssen was struck with her increasing animation and gaiety. The heavy, listless look had left hereyes, and they now glittered with life and fire. When they left the tables to stroll by the milk-white terraces of the Casino, there was a flush in her cheeks and iridescence in her speech very different from a couple of hours before.
A spirit of caustic, impish brilliance was in her. She turned it upon the people they had rubbed shoulders with at the tables; upon the people walking past them on the terraces; even upon her husband:
"Clifford is a 90 per cent. success. There are men who can never achieve full success in any field whatever. They climb up to 70, 80, 90 per cent., and then the grade is too steep for them."
"They stick."
"Or run backwards downhill. I'm a passenger in a car of that kind. Near to the top, but not reaching it. So I get out to walk on myself."
"There are mighty few men who have the 100 per cent. in them."
"Tell me this, Mr Larssen. Did you know you were a 100 per cent. man when you started your business life, or did you come to realize it gradually?"
"I knew it from the first," replied the shipowner steadily. "Knew it when I was a mere kiddy. Set myself apart from the other boys. Told myself I was to be their master. Made myself master. Fought for it. Fought every boy who wouldn't acknowledge it.... When I went to sea as cabin-boy on the "Mary R." of Gloucester, the men on the trawler tried to "lick me into shape," as they called it. They didn't know what they were upagainst. I used those men as whet-stones—used them to kick fear out of myself. You notice that I limp a little? That's a legacy from the days of the 'Mary R.'"
Olive looked at him with open admiration. "That's epic!" she exclaimed. "How far are you going to climb?"
Larssen had never revealed to any man or woman—save only to his wife—the great ultimate purpose of his life. He did not tell it to Olive. She was to be used as a pawn in the great game, just as he was using Sir Francis and the dead Clifford Matheson. It came upon him that she was now a widow. He would fan her open admiration so as to make use of it when she awoke to the fact of her widowhood.
So he answered: "How far I climb depends on the help of my best friends. I don't hide that. When my dear wife was with me, she was an inspiration to me. No man can drive his car to the summit without a woman to spur him on."
"Did marriage change you much?"
"Strengthened me. Bolted me to my foundations.... But here I'm monopolizing the conversation with talk about myself. Let's switch. What areyourambitions?"
Olive laughed—a laugh with a bitter taste in it. "I wanted to help a man to drive his car to the summit, and the car has stuck. I could inspire, but my inspiring goes to waste. I'm an engine racing without a shaft to take up its energy. Clifford is developing scruples. I don't know where hecaught them. I can't stand sick people. That's my temperament—I must have energy and action around me."
"I understand that. Felt it myself at times," he answered sympathetically.
Without apparent reason her thoughts skipped to a woman who had sat near them at the roulette table. "Wasn't she the image of a disappointed vulture? I mean the woman in green. Swooping down from a distance to gorge herself with a tasty feast, and then finding a man with a rake to chase her off. I chuckled to myself as I watched her. Do men and women look to you like animals? They do to me. Monte Carlo's a Zoo, only the animals aren't caged."
"That's right! You're an extraordinarily keen observer, Mrs Matheson."
Sir Francis Letchmere approached them beamingly from the direction of the Casino. He had won money attrente-et-quarante, and was feeling very pleased with his own judgment and powers of intellect generally.
"Leave him to me," whispered Olive to Larssen. "I'll see that my father gets busy on the Hudson Bay Scheme. But on one condition."