CHAPTER III
SOME EMOTIONS – WITHOUT A MORAL

Not until he was dressing, and the contents of his pockets were spread on a table, did Medenham remember Dale’s commission. It was quite true, as he told Mrs. Devar, that he had backed Vendetta for a small stake on his own account. But that was an afterthought, and the bet was made with another bookmaker at reduced odds. Altogether, including the few sovereigns in his possession at the beginning of the day, he counted nearly fifty pounds in gold, an exceptionally large amount to be carried in England, where considerations of weight alone render banknotes preferable.

He slipped Dale’s money into an envelope, and took thirty pounds to be exchanged for notes by the hotel’s cashier. At the same time he wrote a telegram to his father, destroying two drafts before he evolved something that left his story untold while quieting any scruples as to lack of candor. It was not that the Earl would resent his unexpected disappearance after nearly four years’ absence from home, because father and son had met in South Africa during the war, and were together in Cannes and Paris subsequently. His difficulty was to explain this freak journey satisfactorily. The Earl of Fairholme held feudal views anent the place occupied in the world by the British aristocracy. His own hot youth was crowded with episodes that Medenham might regard with disdain, yet he would be shocked out of his well-fed cynicism by the notion that his son was gallivanting round the country as the chauffeur of an unconventional American girl and a middle-aged harpy like Mrs. Devar.

So Medenham’s message was non-committal.

Aunt Susan was unable to come Epsom to-day. Have taken car to Brighton, and Bournemouth. Home Saturday, perhaps earlier. George.

Of course, he meant to fill in details verbally. It was possible in conversation to impart a jesting turn to an adventure which would be unconvincing and ambiguous in the bald phrases of a telegram.

Then he dined, filled a cigarette case from the box of Salonikas which Tomkinson had not omitted to pack with his clothes, and strolled out, bare-headed, to enrich Dale. He could trust his man absolutely, and was quite sure that the Mercury would then be in the drying stage after a thorough cleaning. Thus far he was justified, but he had not counted on the pride of the born mechanic. Though the car was housed for the night, when he entered the garage the hood was off, and Dale was annoying two brothers of the craft by explaining the superiority of his engine to every other type of engine.

All three were bent over the cylinders, and Dale was saying:

“Just take a squint at them valves, will you? – ever seen anything like ’em before? Of course you haven’t. Don’t look like valves, eh? Can you break ’em, can you warp ’em, can you pit ’em? D’ye twig how the mixture reaches the cylinder? None of your shoulders or kinks to choke it up – is there? – and the same with the exhaust. Would you ever have a mushroom valve again after you’ve once cast your peepers over this arrangement? Now, if I took up areonotting – if I wanted to fly the Channel – ”

He stopped abruptly, having seen his master standing in the open doorway.

“By gad, Dale,” cried Medenham, “I have never heard your tongue wagging in that fashion before.”

Dale was flustered.

“Beg pardon, my lord, but I was only – ” he began.

“Only using the cut-out, I fancy. Come here, I want you a minute.”

The other chauffeurs suddenly discovered that they had urgent business elsewhere. They vanished. Dale thought it necessary to explain.

“One of them chaps has a new French car, my lord, and he was blowing so loudly about it that I had to take him down a peg or two.”

Medenham grew interested. Like every keen motorist, he could “talk shop” at all times.

“What sort of car?”

“A 59 Du Vallon, my lord. It is the first of its class in England, and I rather think his guv’nor is running it on show.”

“Indeed. Who is he?”

“A count Somebody-or-other, my lord. I did hear his name – ”

“Not Count Edouard Marigny?” said Medenham, with a sharp emphasis that startled Dale.

“That’s him, my lord. I hope I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Medenham, early in life, had formed the habit of not expressing his feelings when really vexed, and it stood him in good stead now. Dale’s blunder was almost irreparable, yet he could not find it in his heart to blame the man for being an enthusiast.

“You have put me in a deuce of a fix,” he said at last. “This Frenchman is acquainted with Miss Vanrenen. He knows she is here, and will probably see her off in the morning. If his chauffeur recognizes the car he will be sure to speak of it. That gives the whole show away.”

“I’m very sorry, my lord – ”

“Dash it all, there you go again. But it is largely my own fault. I ought to have warned you, though I little expected this sort of a mix-up. In future, Dale, while this trip lasts, you must forget my title. Look here, I have brought you your winnings over Eyot – can’t you rig up some sort of a yarn that I am a sporting friend of yours, and that you were just trying to be funny when you addressed me as ‘my lord’? If you have an opportunity, tell Count Marigny’s man that your job is taken temporarily by a driver named Fitzroy. By the way, is the chauffeur a Frenchman, too?”

“No, my l – .” Dale caught Medenham’s eye, a very cold eye at that instant. “No, sir. He’s just a fitter from the London agency.”

“Well, we must trust to luck. He may not remember me in my chauffeur’s kit, which is beastly uncomfortable, by the way. I must get you a summer rig. Here is your money – five to one I took. Don’t lose sight of those two fellows, and spend this half sovereign on them. If you can fill that chap with beer to-night he may have a head in the morning that will keep him in bed too late to cause any mischief. When we meet in Bournemouth and Bristol, say nothing to anybody about either the car or me.”

Dale was a model of sobriety, but the excitement of “fives” when he looked for “threes” was too much for him.

“I’ll tank him all right, my l – , I mean, sir,” he vowed cheerfully.

Medenham lit a new cigarette and strolled out of the yard.

From the corner of his eye he saw Marigny’s helper looking at him. Without undue exaggeration, he craned his neck, rounded his shoulders, and carried himself with the listless air of a Piccadilly idler. He reflected, too, that a bare-headed man in evening dress would not readily be identified with a leather-coated chauffeur, and Dale, he hoped, was sufficiently endowed with mother wit to frame a story plausible enough to account for his unforeseen appearance. On the whole, the position was not so bad as it seemed in that first moment when the owner of the 59 Du Vallon was revealed in the handsome Count. In any event, what did it matter if his harmless subterfuge were revealed? The girl would surely laugh, while Mrs. Devar would squirm. So now for a turn along the front, and then to bed.

It was a perfect June evening, the fitting sequel to a day of unbroken sunshine. A marvelous amber light hovered beyond the level line of the sea to the west; an exquisite blue suffused the horizon from south to east, deepening from sapphire to ultramarine as it blended with the soft shadows of a summer’s night. He found himself comparing the sky’s southeasterly tint with the azure depths of Cynthia Vanrenen’s eyes, but he shook off that fantasy quickly, crossed the roadway and promenade, and, propping himself against the railings, turned a resolute back on romance. He did not gain a great deal by this maneuver, since his next active thought was centered in a species of quest for the particular window among all those storeyed rows through which Cynthia Vanrenen might even then be gazing at the shining ocean.

He looked at his watch. Half-past nine.

“I am behaving like a blithering idiot,” he told himself. “Miss Vanrenen and her friends are either on the pier listening to the band, or sitting over their coffee in the glass cage behind there. I’ll wire Simmonds in the morning to hurry up.”

A man descended the steps of the hotel and walked straight across King’s Road. A light gray overcoat, thrown wide on his shoulders, gave a lavish display of frilled shirt, and a gray Homburg hat was set rakishly on one side of his head. In the half light Medenham at once discerned the regular, waxen-skinned features of Count Marigny, and during the next few seconds it really seemed as if the Frenchman were making directly for him. But another man, short, rotund, very erect of figure, and strutting in gait, came from the interior of a “shelter” that stood a little to the right of Medenham’s position on the rails.

“Hello, Marigny,” said he jauntily.

The Count looked back towards the hotel. His tubby acquaintance chuckled. The effort squeezed an eyeglass out of his right eye.

“Aie pas peur, mon vieux!” cried he in very colloquial French. “My mother sent a note to say that the fair Cynthia has retired to her room to write letters. I have been waiting here ten minutes.”

Now, it chanced that Medenham’s widespread touring in France had rubbed up his knowledge of the language. It is ever the ear that needs training more than the tongue, and in all likelihood he would not have caught the exact meaning of the words were it not for the hap of recent familiarity with the accents of all sorts and conditions of French-speaking folk.

“Jimmy Devar!” he breathed, and his amazement lost him Marigny’s muttered answer.

But he heard Devar’s confident outburst as the two walked off together in the direction of the West Pier.

“You are growing positively nervous, my dear Edouard. And why? The affair arranges itself admirably. I shall be always on hand, ready to turn up exactly at the right moment. What the deuce, this is the luck of a lifetime…”

The squeaky, high-pitched voice – a masculine variant of Mrs. Devar’s ultra-fashionable intonation – died away midst the chatter and laughter of other promenaders. Medenham’s first impulse was to follow and listen, since Devar had yielded to the common delusion of imagining that none except his companion on the sea-front that night understood a foreign language. But he swept the notion aside ere it had well presented itself as a means of solving an astounding puzzle.

“No, dash it all, I’m not a private detective,” he muttered angrily. “Why should I interfere? Confound Simmonds, and d – n that railway van! I have a good mind to hand the car over to Dale in the morning and return to town by the first train.”

If he really meant what he said he ought to have gone back to his hotel, played billiards for an hour, and sought his bedroom with an easy conscience. He was debating the point when the conceit intruded itself that Cynthia’s pretty head was at that moment bent over a writing-table in a certain well-lighted corner apartment of the second floor, so he compromised with his half-formed intent, whisked round to face the sea again, and lighted another cigarette from the glowing end of its predecessor. Some part of his unaccountable irritation took wings with the cloud of smoke.

“Blessed if I can tell why I should worry,” he communed. “Never saw the girl before to-day … shall never see her again if I put Dale in charge… Her father must be a special sort of fool, though, to trust her to the care of the Devar woman… What was it that rotter said? – ‘The affair arranges itself admirably.’ And he would be ‘always on hand.’ What is arranging itself?.. And why should Jimmy Devar be ready, if need be, ‘to turn up exactly at the right moment?’ I suppose the answer to the first bit of the acrostic is simple enough. Cynthia Vanrenen is to become the Countess Marigny, and the Devar gang stands in on the cash proceeds. Oh, a nice scheme! This Frenchman is posted as to the tour. By the most curious of coincidences he will reappear at Bournemouth, or Bristol, or in the Wye Valley. What more natural than a day’s run in company?.. Ah, I’ve got it! Jimmy is to come along when Marigny thinks that Cynthia will take a seat in the 59 Du Vallon for a change – just to try the new French car… By gad, I shall have a word to say there… Steady, now, George Augustus! Woa, my boy; keep a tight hand on the reins. Why in thunder should you concern yourself with the wretched business, anyhow?”

It was a marvelously still night. Beneath him, on an asphalted path nearly level with the stone-strewed beach, passed a young couple. The man’s voice came up to him.

“Jones expects to be taken into partnership after this season, and I am pretty certain to be given the management of the woolen department. If that comes off, no more long hours in the shop for you, Lucy, but a nice little house up there on the hill, just as quick as we can find it.”

“Oh, Charlie dear, I shall never be tired then…”

A black arm was suddenly silhouetted across the shoulders of a white blouse, whose wearer received a reassuring hug.

“Let’s reckon up,” said the owner of the arm – “July, August, September – three months, sweetheart…”

Medenham had never given a thought to marrying until his father hinted at the notion during dinner the previous evening, and he had laughed at it, being absolutely heart-whole. There was something irresistibly comical then about the Earl’s bland theory that Fairholme House needed a sprightly viscountess, yet now, twenty-four hours later, he could extract no shred of humor from the idyl of a draper’s assistant. It seemed to be a perfectly natural thing that these lovers should talk of mating. Of what else should they whisper on this midsummer’s night, when the gloaming already bore the promise of dawn, and the glory of the sea and sky spread quiet harmonies through the silent air?

Perhaps he sighed as he turned away, but his own evidence on that point would be inconclusive, since the first object his wondering eyes dwelt on was the graceful figure of Cynthia Vanrenen. There was no possibility of error. An arc lamp blazed overhead, and, to make assurance doubly sure, his recognition of Cynthia was obviously duplicated by Cynthia’s recognition of her deputy chauffeur.

In the girl’s case some degree of surprise was justified. It is a truism of social life that far more distinctiveness is attached to the seemingly democratic severity of evening dress than to any other class of masculine garniture. Medenham now looked exactly what he was – a man born and bred in the purple. No one could possibly mistake this well-groomed soldier for Dale or Simmonds. His clever, resourceful face, his erect carriage, the very suggestion of mess uniform conveyed by his clothing, told of lineage and a career. He might, in sober earnest, have been compelled to earn a living by driving a motor-car, but no freak of fortune could rob him of his birthright as an aristocrat.

Of course, Cynthia was easily first in the effort to recover disturbed wits.

“Like myself, you have been tempted out by this beautiful night, Mr. Fitzroy,” she said.

Then “Mr.” was a concession to his attire; somehow she imagined it would savor of presumption if she addressed him as an inferior. She could not define her mental attitude in words, but her quick intelligence responded to its subtle influence as a mirrored lake records the passing of a breeze. Very dainty and self-possessed she looked as she stood there smiling at him. Her motor dust-coat was utilized as a wrap. Beneath it she wore a white muslin dress of a studied simplicity that, to another woman’s assessing gaze, would reveal its expensiveness. She had tied a veil of delicate lace around her hair and under her chin, and Medenham noted, with a species of awe, that her eyes, so vividly blue in daylight, were now dark as the sky at night.