“Sir Julian!” she cried. “Where are you?”
There was still no reply. The silence struck her as having some awesome quality about it. For a moment she lost her nerve. She stepped back on deck. The light hanging from the side of the mast was still burning palely. In the distance she heard the jingling of the harness as the horses shook their heads. She even fancied she could detect the figure of the cochersitting asleep on the box. The sight gave her courage. She turned round and boldly descended into the saloon. It was empty and there were no signs of recent occupancy. Fear had come back to her now. The depression of the evening seemed suddenly magnified a thousandfold. A sense of some impending and terrible disaster made her catch at her breath. She opened the door leading into the galley and cried out wildly.
“Sir Julian! Sir Julian! Is anyone there?”
There was still silence, a sinister, incomprehensible silence. She found the switch of another electric light and turned it on. Again she ventured to look around her. The door of a Frigidaire stood open. Upon a bench by its side was a loaf of bread from which some slices had been cut, a tongue, and a ham, both upon dishes. Upon a plate were several sandwiches already prepared. On the floor a glitter of steel where a knife was lying. . . . With trembling fingers she pushed open the hatch. One of the bunks in the galley had apparently been slept in, and the bedclothes lay in disorder partly upon the floor. She turned on another switch just inside. There was nothing further to be seen. A gleam of coming daylight was visible stealing through the hatch. She looked back at the bench. The tongue was half off the dish, and a carving fork was still sticking in the ham. The whole place had somehow the appearance of having been abandoned in a hurry. All the time, a queer sensation which she had felt from the first moment of her descent below, asserted itself with numbing intensity. She felt that she was being watched! There was complete silence on the boat. Nothing but the lapping of the sea against its sides, the ticking of a clock in the saloon, but she turned her head only in fear and trembling. She even listened for breathing. The time came when she could bear it no longer. Helping herself by clutching at the wall and table as she went, she staggered into the saloon. She crossed it in one brief rush, pulled herself on to the deck, staggered to the gangway. Over her head the single lamp was still burning. Once more she turned round, looked below and listened. No sign of any human being, no sign of any movement. She looked at the gangplank and her knees began to tremble. Nevertheless, she pulled herself together, held tightly to the cord, and stumbled down it on to the quay. Barely twenty yards away was the carriage still waiting. She gave one backward glance at the boat swaying ever so slightly with the incoming tide, then, shivering as she went, she made her way towards the voiture. The horses turned their heads at her coming. There was a slight jingling of the harness, the little dog curled up by his master’s side awoke, stood up on his long spindly legs, shook himself and barked. The cocher opened his eyes, sat quite still for a moment, then staggered to his feet.
“Ah, Madame,” he exclaimed, “vous êtes restée longtemps sur le bateau!”
She was incapable of speech, incapable of responding to the friendly but suggestive grin on the man’s face. She sank back on to the cushions and drew over her knees the frowzy rug.
“The Sporting Club,” she directed.
Still there was delay. The cocher removed the blankets from his horses, gave them each a smack of encouragement, clambered back again and cracked his whip.
“The Sporting Club,” Joan faltered, shivering all the time.
“Parfait, Madame. Tout de suite,” the man replied.
The clip-clop of the horses’ hoofs sounded once more upon the stone pavement of the quay. Through the gleaming dawn Joan gazed fixedly at the silent yacht. There was still no sign of life there—or death.
It was the only hour of silence which Monte Carlo knows, the hour before the dawn. The Casino itself, grim and empty, looked like a forgotten palace of the dead. The tables of the Café de Paris had been gathered in or turned on end. The gardens were deserted and silent. Even the hotel showed scarcely a gleam of light anywhere. The Sporting Club was even more forbidding. The polite commissionaires had taken their leave. The doors were closed and barred. The cocher turned around.
“C’est fini, Madame,” he pointed out with his whip. “Fermé. Closed for the night.”
“Go to the hotel,” she directed.
He turned his horses round, passed the plate glass windows with their closely drawn blinds and funereal aspect and pulled up before the hotel. There was a dim light burning in the lounge but no night porter. Joan handed a hundred francs to the driver.
“C’est assez?” she asked.
“Mais oui, Madame,” the man replied with a little wave of the hat. “Merci bien.”
Joan mounted the steps and entering the drear-looking foyer, followed a shadowy way between the chairs and lounges to the desk. There was no one on duty, but a sleepy-looking night clerk came from the inner office at the sound of her summons. He glanced at her in surprise, produced her key from its hook and laid it down in front of her.
“Isn’t the club closed early to-night?” she asked.
“To-night, Mademoiselle?” he repeated. “It is nearly five o’clock.”
“I forgot,” she murmured. “Tell me—do you know if Sir Julian Townleyes . . .”
“Sir Julian was sleeping on his boat,” the man informed her. “He left word last night.”
“And he has not been up—since?”
The young man looked surprised.
“Sir Julian flew down from Paris last night, Mademoiselle,” he said. “He had dinner in the restaurant and I understood he was going down to his boat. Since then we have seen nothing of him.”
“I wonder,” she asked, “would it be possible to speak to Baron Domiloff?”
This time the clerk was very positive indeed. He shook his head firmly.
“Quite impossible, Mademoiselle,” he said. “The Baron has one or two very strict rules. He disconnects the telephone between three o’clock in the morning and nine o’clock and if anyone ventured to disturb him there would be trouble. If the hotel was on fire, perhaps, but nothing else. Is there anything I can do for Mademoiselle?”
She looked helplessly at the sleepy young man who was doing his best to be polite. It seemed hopeless to try and impress him with any of her own apprehensions. She turned reluctantly away and stumbled down the unlit corridor to her room.
There were people who had called Joan Haskell phlegmatic. No one would have said so if they could have caught a glimpse of her when she drove down to the harbour that morning at half-past nine with Domiloff by her side. When they turned the corner and she heard the same clip-clop of the horses’ hoofs on the hard road, every speck of colour seemed to be drawn from her cheeks. She gripped her companion’s arm.
“My God!” she exclaimed.
“What is it?” he demanded.
She pointed to the vacant space between two of the adjacent yachts.
“The Silver Shadow!”
“Well?”
The finger which pointed to the vacant space was trembling.
“It’s gone!” she cried. “Can’t you see? It’s gone!”
CHAPTER XXIX
Table of Contents
“IF ever the communists should win in this great cataclysmic struggle which you brood about so often, my friend,” Lucille said, “you have another profession in which I should think you are as accomplished as in juggling with the moneys of the world.”
“Too complicated,” Rudolph complained.
“I mean that you could at least always make a living as a golf professional.”
“It would be very tedious,” he admitted, watching his ball soar over an intervening bunker some two hundred yards away and draw inwards over a stretch of flattened country, ending upon the green. “The worst of it is that I have not really the love of games in my blood. The futility of them all becomes so apparent after a time.”
“It may seem nothing to you,” Joan, who was walking a few yards away, remarked, “but to us it is a miracle. Here you are playing on the most beautiful but the most difficult course in the world, you have driven on to the last green, and have three for a sixty-nine the first time round!”
“I have something better than that,” he declared happily, as he sauntered along with his club under his arm. “I have a thirst which is going to astonish that melancholy-looking barman in a few minutes and I have an appetite which should gratify the maître d’hôtel.”
“Considering the life you lead and make us lead,” Lord Henry grumbled, “you must have a marvellous constitution.”
He played his second still short of the green. So far, he was in the position of having lost every hole to his younger opponent.
“I suffer from very little except nerves,” Rudolph confessed. “I am afraid of too many things in life. I was afraid, or very nearly afraid, when we came curling up this road at forty miles an hour and, glorious though it is, I cannot really enjoy looking down these precipices.”
Lord Henry chipped on to the middle of the green still at some distance from the hole. Rudolph approached dead and holed out with the back of his putter.
“Perfectly marvellous,” his opponent declared, as they returned towards the Club House. “I call myself a pretty good four at Sunningdale, but you must owe something wherever you go, Sagastrada.”
“It is not always,” the young man replied, “that you can play in an atmosphere like this. The whole environment is marvellously stimulating. It is, I should think, as near paradise as an ordinary mortal can get.”
They paused and looked for a moment down a clustering array of pines to where Monaco stretched out like a box of child’s toys arranged on the brink of the sea. There were floating wisps of white mist in places but where they were standing the air was dry and clear and the snow mountains, which seemed almost on a level with them, rolled away in a long unbroken line to where they disappeared in a sea of cloud. Between them and the melting distance were gaunt valleys and rocky hillsides, but higher still and in the near woods the undergrowth was sprinkled everywhere with wild flowers. Sagastrada, notwithstanding his thirst, found it difficult to move.
“Some of the Swiss courses are beautiful,” he remarked, “but I should not have thought anyone would have had the courage to build up here.”
“It is as though one were playing on the floor of heaven,” the Princess murmured.
“Come on, you people,” Lord Henry, who was at least a dozen yards ahead, cried. “This tingling air is giving me a wicked appetite.”
“No soul, you know, that man,” Lucille observed. “Never mind, he has common sense. Order luncheon, Henry, will you?” she called out. “And send cocktails outside. We can sit and watch the sun on the snows.”
“Life in these parts,” Joan declared, “is certainly full of contrasts. I had no idea there was such a beautiful place in the world.”
“I feel like the man in the Bible,” Rudolph remarked, “who was always crying aloud ‘It is good to be here,’ and always building tabernacles.”
“Some enterprising fellow did build a bungalow here,” Lord Henry said, “but it pretty well got blown away. Sometimes the place is cut off from La Turbie for a week.”
They drank their cocktails in the glowing sunshine but with a tingling of the snow-chilled breeze upon their cheeks. Afterwards they entered the restaurant and divided their attention between the changeless panorama and the very excellent luncheon.
“The simple life for me,” Lucille declared. “Rudolph, you must go away from Monte Carlo, please. It is you who are setting the example of this night life here and all this terrible gambling. You are corrupting us.”
“But where am I to go to?” the young man demanded. “I am an exile, a fugitive, anything of that sort you like to call me. I was born in the same country as my father and my grandfather, yet I have no country. One of these puppet emperors has crawled up from the bowels of the earth and we people who have worked for generations and triumphed over many difficulties are counted as nothing in the land of our birth. Am I getting serious?” he went on, changing his tone. “That was foolish. I complain at nothing. I have no word against a fate that has brought me into such company, set me down in such a paradise and offered me wine as mellow and food as good as this.”
“The philosophical spirit is what one needs in these days,” Lucille reflected.
“All very well for you women,” Lord Henry complained. “You haven’t got to hold your own against these Goliaths who spring up from the underworld.”
“We might find them easier to deal with than you seem to,” Lucille smiled. “Unfortunately the modern type of Napoleon does not seem to hanker after our sex.”
“As a matter of fact, I think that our sex is passing through a period of neglect,” Joan declared. “Take the case of our dear friend here, Rudolph Sagastrada. He plays marvellous golf, he has his music, his painting and his moneybags. He has no time for us.”
“I have plenty of time on my hands,” Lord Henry confided, filling his glass from a cobwebbed bottle of Burgundy, “and I am in love with both of you.”
“Do you want us to hate one another?” Lucille sighed.
“You have not enough to think about, you people,” Sagastrada told them suddenly. “It is the only fault one can find with this life. You pursue pleasure with too much zest.”
“We are like the chap that Italian wrote about,” Lord Henry put in. “The plague spreads all over the world and we take refuge in a walled garden.”
Sagastrada, who had been gazing at the snows, suddenly smiled.
“But the time will come,” he prophesied, “when we shall go out and fight that plague and the sun will shine once more upon the world. We become hysterical here. We are too happy and too depressed. These are joyous holiday hours that we spend in this atmosphere but we all know that we are going back. My own time may be very soon indeed. That marvellous fellow, Domiloff, has some scheme in his mind. I do not want to lurk about in foreign countries. I want to go back to work.”
“I shouldn’t, old chap,” Lord Henry advised him. “You should read the words of that prophet of woe who writes the articles about your country in the Times the last few mornings.”
Rudolph, whose eyes had once more been fixed dreamily upon the snow mountains, turned round in his place. Something firmer seemed to have crept into his voice. He had almost the expression of a prophet.
“I should like to go back,” he said, “and speak to every one of those sixty million of my country people direct, so that they heard every word I said as from the top of a mountain. I would like to tell them the truth. It could be done so easily. It could be shorter than even the shortest chapter in the Bible. If every man and woman in the world carried the truth in their hearts and went forward without swerving, the nations would find it so easy. Life could become beautiful once more so naturally. It is choked now with weeds. There are words that could be said which would wither them.”
There was a moment’s silence. Lord Henry was puzzled. The two women were both in their way impressed. Rudolph rose suddenly to his feet. He called the maître d’hôtel and asked for the bill.
“I am excused for five minutes?” he begged. “I make it a rule always to go and pay my respects to the professional. I have enjoyed playing on his course. I must talk about it. You excuse—yes?”
“Of course,” they assented.
Lord Henry watched him depart with a curious light in his eyes.
“When a fellow gets talking like that,” he remarked, “I’m up a tree.”
“He is an unusual type, perhaps,” Joan said, “but he is sincere.”
“I admire him very much,” Lucille declared. “I wish that all men would take life as seriously.”
“I have nothing to say against him,” Lord Henry went on meditatively. “A chap who can play a round of golf like that—my hat! He has the most beautiful swin
g I have ever seen in my life. You can’t help but hand it to him. He’s a sportsman all right but when he mounts up into the clouds I can’t keep pace.”
“You are a low fellow, Henry,” Lucille told him with a compensating gleam of affection in her eyes. “Let’s go down before the afternoon mists arrive.”
They trooped out and found Rudolph Sagastrada the centre of an admiring little group. The professional with beaming face followed him out to the car, his arms full of newly purchased golf clubs and two or three boxes of balls.
“We will have a game before I go back,” Rudolph promised him.
“I will be little use to you from what I have heard of your play, sir,” the man replied respectfully, “but it will be a great pleasure.”
They started off, Lord Henry driving Lucille in his two-seater Lancia and Rudolph and Joan in a hired car. The Lancia shot past them at the first bend and disappeared in a cloud of dust. Rudolph half-rose from his place as they swung by but resumed it again with a little shrug of the shoulders. He let down the window and leaned out, gazing at the twisted way below them. The Lancia soon became almost a speck in the distance.
“Anything wrong?” Joan asked.
He shook his head.
“Nothing at all,” he answered. “The only thing was—”
He hesitated.
“Go on,” she begged.
“May have been stupid of me,” he continued, “but did you see two men lunching alone in the restaurant and a third man with his back to us just round the corner? They left almost as soon as we entered.”
“I didn’t notice them,” she admitted. “The luncheon and that marvellous view were too engrossing. I could not have told you whether there was a soul in the place or not.”
“I do not blame you.”
“But those men?”
“Well, perhaps you will think that I am losing my nerve,” he said smiling, “but the one alone, his shoulders somehow reminded me of Prince Anselm, and those two others were certainly not our idea of golfers. They looked as much like a gangster’s bodyguard as anything I have ever seen.”
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