The Chink in the Armour/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
On waking the next morning, Sylvia Bailey forgot completely for a moment where she was.
She looked round the large, airy room, which was so absolutely unlike the small bed-room she had occupied in the Hôtel de l'Horloge, with a sense of bewilderment and surprise.
And then suddenly she remembered! Why of course she was at Lacville; and this delightful, luxurious room had been furnished and arranged for the lady-in-waiting and friend of the Empress Eugénie. The fact gave an added touch of romance to the Hôtel du Lac.
A ray of bright sunlight streamed in through the curtains she had pinned together the night before. And her travelling clock told her that it was not yet six. But Sylvia jumped out of bed, and, drawing back the curtains, she looked out, and across the lake.
The now solitary expanse of water seemed to possess a new beauty in the early morning sunlight, and the white Casino, of which the minarets were reflected in its blue depths, might have been a dream palace. Nothing broke the intense stillness but the loud, sweet twittering of the birds in the trees which surrounded the lake.
But soon the spell was broken. When the six strokes of the hour chimed out from the old parish church which forms the centre of the town of Lacville, as if by enchantment there rose sounds of stir both indoors and out.
A woman came out of the lodge of the Villa du Lac, and slowly opened the great steel and gilt gates.
Sylvia heard the rush of bath water, even the queer click-click of a shower bath. M. Polperro evidently insisted on an exceptional standard of cleanliness for his household.
Sylvia felt fresh and well. The languor induced by the heat of Paris had left her. There seemed no reason why she should not get up too, and even go out of doors if so the fancy pleased her.
She had just finished dressing when there came curious sounds from the front of the Villa, and again she went over to her window.
A horse was being walked up and down on the stones of the courtyard in front of the horseshoe stairway which led up to the hall door. It was not yet half-past six. Who could be going to ride at this early hour of the morning?
Soon her unspoken question was answered; for the Comte de Virieu, clad in riding breeches and a black jersey, came out of the house, and close on his heels trotted M. Polperro, already wearing his white chef's cap and apron.
Sylvia could hear his "M'sieur le Comte" this, and "M'sieur le Comte" that, and she smiled a little to herself. The owner of the Hôtel du Lac was very proud of his noble guest.
The Comte de Virieu was also laughing and talking; he was more animated than she had yet seen him. Sylvia told herself that he looked very well in his rather odd riding dress.
Waving a gay adieu to mine host, he vaulted into the saddle, and then rode out of the gates, and so sharply to the left.
Sylvia wondered if he were going for a ride in the Forest of Montmorency, which, in her lying guide-book, was mentioned as the principal attraction of Lacville.
There came a knock at the door, and Sylvia, calling out "Come in!" was surprised, and rather amused, to see that it was M. Polperro himself who opened it.
"I have come to ask if Madame has slept well," he observed, "and also to know if she would like an English breakfast? If yes, it shall be laid in the dining-room, unless Madame would rather have it up here."
"I would much rather come downstairs to breakfast," said Sylvia; "but I do not want anything yet, M. Polperro. It will do quite well if I have breakfast at half-past eight or nine."
She unpacked her trunks, and as she put her things away it suddenly struck her that she meant to stay at Lacville for some time. It was an interesting, a new, even a striking experience, this of hers; and though she felt rather lost without Anna Wolsky's constant presence and companionship, she was beginning to find it pleasant to be once more her own mistress.
She sat down and wrote some letters—the sort of letters that can be written or not as the writer feels inclined. Among them was a duty letter to her trustee, Bill Chester, telling him of her change of address, and of her change of plan.
The people with whom she had been going to Switzerland were friends of Bill Chester too, and so it was doubtful now whether he would go abroad at all.
And all the time Sylvia was writing there was at the back of her mind a curious, unacknowledged feeling that she was waiting for something to happen, that there was something pleasant for her to look forward to. …
And when at last she went down into the dining-room, and Paul de Virieu came in, Sylvia suddenly realised, with a sense of curious embarrassment, what it was she had been waiting for and looking forward to. It was her meeting with the Comte de Virieu.
"I hope my going out so early did not disturb you," he said, in his excellent English. "I saw you at your window."
Sylvia shook her head, smiling.
"I had already been awake for at least half an hour," she answered.
"I suppose you ride? Most of the Englishwomen I knew as a boy rode, and rode well."
"My father was very anxious I should ride, and as a child I was well taught, but I have not had much opportunity of riding since I grew up."
Sylvia reddened faintly, for she fully expected the Count to ask her if she would ride with him, and she had already made up her mind to say "No," though to say "Yes" would be very pleasant!
But he did nothing of the sort. Even at this early hour of their acquaintance it struck Sylvia how unlike the Comte de Virieu's manner to her was to that of the other young men she knew. While his manner was deferential, even eager, yet there was not a trace of flirtation in it. Also the Count had already altered all Sylvia Bailey's preconceived notions of Frenchmen.
Sylvia had supposed a Frenchman's manner to a woman to be almost invariably familiar, in fact, offensively familiar. She had had the notion that a pretty young woman—it would, of course, have been absurd for her to have denied, even to herself, that she was very pretty—must be careful in her dealing with foreigners, and she believed it to be a fact that a Frenchman always makes love to an attractive stranger, even on the shortest acquaintance!
This morning, and she was a little piqued that it was so, Sylvia had to admit to herself that the Comte de Virieu treated her much as he might have done some old lady in whom he took a respectful interest. …
And yet twice during the half-hour her breakfast lasted she looked up to see his blue eyes fixed full on her with an earnest, inquiring gaze, and she realised that it was not at all the kind of gaze Paul de Virieu would have turned on an old lady.
They got up from their respective tables at the same moment. He opened the door for her, and then, after a few minutes, followed her out into the garden.
"Have you yet visited the potager?" he asked, deferentially.
Sylvia looked at him, puzzled. "Potager" was quite a new French word to her.
"I think you call it the kitchen-garden." A smile lit up his face. "The people who built the Villa du Lac a matter of fifty years ago were very fond of gardening. I think it might amuse you to see the potager. Allow me to show it you."
They were now walking side by side. It was a delicious day, and the dew still glistened on the grass and leaves. Sylvia thought it would be very pleasant, and also instructive, to see a French kitchen-garden.
"Strange to say when I was a child I was often at the Villa du Lac, for the then owner was a distant cousin of my mother. He and his kind wife allowed me to come here for my convalescence after a rather serious illness when I was ten years old. My dear mother did not like me to be far from Paris, so I was sent to Lacville."
"What a curious place to send a child to!" exclaimed Sylvia.
"Ah, but Lacville was extremely different from what it is now, Madame. True, there was the lake, where Parisians used to come out each Sunday afternoon to fish and boat in a humble way, and there were a few villas built round the lake. But you must remember that in those prehistoric days there was no Casino! It is the Casino which has transformed Lacville into what we now see."
"Then we have reason to bless the Casino!" cried Sylvia, gaily.
They had now left behind them the wide lawn immediately behind the Villa du Lac, and were walking by a long, high wall. The Count pushed open a narrow door set in an arch in the wall, and Sylvia walked through into one of the largest and most delightful kitchen-gardens she had ever seen.
It was brilliant with colour and scent; the more homely summer flowers filled the borders, while, at each place where four paths met, a round, stone-rimmed basin, filled with water to the brim, gave a sense of pleasant coolness.
The farther end of the walled garden was bounded by a stone orangery, a building dating from the eighteenth century, and full of the stately grace of a vanished epoch.
"What a delightful place!" Sylvia exclaimed. "But this garden must cost M. Polperro a great deal of money to keep up"
The Comte de Virieu laughed.
"Far from it! Our clever host hires out his potager to a firm of market gardeners, part of the bargain being that they allow him to have as much fruit and vegetables as he requires throughout the year. Why, the potager of the Villa du Lac supplies the whole of Lacville with fruit and flowers! When I was a child I thought this part of the garden paradise, and I spent here my happiest hours."
"It must be very odd for you to come back and stay in the Villa now that it is an hotel."
"At first it seemed very strange," he answered gravely. "But now I have become quite used to the feeling."
They walked on for awhile along one of the narrow flower-bordered paths.
"Would you care to go into the orangery?" he said. "There is not much to see there now, for all the orange-trees are out of doors. Still, it is a quaint, pretty old building."
The orangery of the Villa du Lac was an example of that at once artificial and graceful eighteenth-century architecture which, perhaps because of its mingled formality and delicacy, made so distinguished and attractive a setting to feminine beauty. It remained, the only survival of the dependencies of a château sacked and burned in the Great Revolution, more than half a century before the Villa du Lac was built.
The high doors were wide open, and Sylvia walked in. Though all the pot-plants and half-hardy shrubs were sunning themselves in the open-air, the orangery did not look bare, for every inch of the inside walls had been utilised for growing grapes and peaches.
There was a fountain set in the centre of the stone floor, and near the fountain was a circular seat.
"Let us sit down," said Paul de Virieu suddenly. But when Sylvia Bailey sat down he did not come and sit by her, instead he so placed himself that he looked across at her slender, rounded figure, and happy smiling face.
"Are you thinking of staying long at Lacville, Madame?" he asked abruptly.
"I don't know," she answered hesitatingly. "It will depend on my friend Madame Wolsky's plans. If we both like it, I daresay we shall stay three or four weeks."
There fell what seemed to Sylvia a long silence between them. The Frenchman was gazing at her with a puzzled, thoughtful look.
Suddenly he got up, and after taking a turn up and down the orangery, he came and stood before her.
"Mrs. Bailey!" he exclaimed. "Will you permit me to be rather impertinent?"
Sylvia reddened violently. The question took her utterly by surprise. But the Comte de Virieu's next words at once relieved, and yes, it must be admitted, chagrined her.
"I ask you, Madame, to leave Lacville! I ask permission to tell you frankly and plainly that it is not a place to which you ought to have been brought."
He spoke with great emphasis.
Sylvia looked up at him. She was bewildered, and though not exactly offended, rather hurt.
"But why?" she asked plaintively. "Why should I not stay at Lacville?"
"Oh, well, there can be no harm in your staying on a few days if you are desirous of doing so. But Lacville is not a place where I should care for my own sister to come and stay." He went on, speaking much quicker—"Indeed, I will say more! I will tell you that Lacville may seem a paradise to you, but that it is a paradise full of snakes."
"Snakes?" repeated Sylvia slowly. "You mean, of course, human snakes?"
He bowed gravely.
"Every town where reigns the Goddess of play attracts reptiles, Madame, as the sun attracts lizards! It is not the game that does so, or even the love of play in the Goddess's victims; no, it is the love of gold!"
Sylvia noticed that he had grown curiously pale.
"Lacville as a gambling centre counts only next to Monte Carlo. But whereas many people go to Monte Carlo for health, and for various forms of amusement, people only come here in order to play, and to see others play. The Casino, which doubtless appears to you a bright, pretty place, has been the scene and the cause of many a tragedy. Do you know how Paris regards Lacville?" he asked searchingly.
"No—yes," Sylvia hesitated. "You see I never heard of Lacville till about a week ago." Innate honesty compelled her to add, "But I have heard that the Paris trades-people don't like Lacville."
"Let me tell you one thing," the Count spoke with extraordinary seriousness. "Every tradesman in Paris, without a single exception, has signed a petition imploring the Government to suspend the Gambling Concession!"
"What an extraordinary thing!" exclaimed Sylvia, and she was surprised indeed.
"Pardon me, it is not at all extraordinary. A great deal of the money which would otherwise go into the pockets of these tradesmen goes now to enrich the anonymous shareholders of the Casino of Lacville! Of course, Paris hotel-keepers are not in quite the same position as are the other Parisian trades-people. Lacville does not do them much harm, for the place is so near Paris that foreigners, if they go there at all, generally go out for the day. Only the most confirmed gambler cares actually to live at Lacville."
He looked significantly at Sylvia, and she felt a wave of hot colour break over her face.
"Yes, I know what you must be thinking, and it is, indeed, the shameful truth! I, Madame, have the misfortune to be that most miserable and most God-forsaken of living beings, a confirmed gambler."
The Count spoke in a tone of stifled pain, almost anger, and Sylvia gazed up at his stern, sad face with pity and concern filling her kind heart.
"I will tell you my story in a few words," he went on, and then he sat down by her, and began tracing with his stick imaginary patterns on the stone floor.
"I was destined for what I still regard as the most agreeable career in the world—that of diplomacy. You see how I speak English? Well, Madame, I speak German and Spanish equally well. And then, most unhappily for me, my beloved mother died, and I inherited from her a few thousand pounds. I felt very miserable, and I happened to be at the moment idle. A friend persuaded me to go to Monte Carlo. That fortnight, Madame, changed my life—made me what the English call 'an idle good-for-nothing.' Can you wonder that I warn you against staying at Lacville?"
Sylvia was touched, as well as surprised, by his confidences. His words breathed sincerity, and the look of humiliation and pain on his face had deepened. He looked white and drawn.
"It is very kind of you to tell me this, and I am very much obliged to you for your warning," she said in a low tone.
But the Comte de Virieu went on as if he hardly heard her words.
"The lady with whom you first came to Lacville—I mean the Polish lady—is well known to me by sight. For the last three years I have seen her at Monte Carlo in the winter, and at Spa and Aix-les-Bains in the summer. Of course I was not at all surprised to see her turn up here, but I confess, Madame, that I was very much astonished to see with her a"—he hesitated a moment—"a young English lady. You would, perhaps, be offended if I were to tell you exactly what I felt when I saw you at the Casino!"
"I do not suppose I should be offended," said Sylvia softly.
"I felt, Madame, as if I saw a lily growing in a field of high, rank, evil-smelling—nay, perhaps I should say, poisonous—weeds."
"But I cannot go away now!" cried Sylvia. She was really impressed—very uncomfortably impressed—by his earnest words. "It would be most unkind to my friend, Madame Wolsky. Surely, it is possible to stay at Lacville, and even to play a little, without anything very terrible happening?" She looked at him coaxingly, anxiously, as a child might have done.
But Sylvia was not a child; she was a very lovely young woman. Comte Paul de Virieu's heart began to beat.
But, bah! This was absurd! His day of love and love-making lay far, far behind him. He rose and walked towards the door.
In speaking to her as he had forced himself to speak, the Frenchman had done an unselfish and kindly action. Sylvia's gentle and unsophisticated charm had touched him deeply, and so he had given her what he knew to be the best possible advice.
"I am not so foolish as to pretend that the people who come and play in the Casino of Lacville are all confirmed gamblers," he said, slowly. "We French take our pleasures lightly, Madame, and no doubt there is many an excellent Parisian bourgeois who comes here and makes or loses his few francs, and gets no harm from it. But, still, I swore to myself that I would warn you of the danger"
They went out into the bright sunshine again, and Sylvia somehow felt as if she had made a friend—a real friend—in the Comte de Virieu. It was a curious sensation, and one that gave her more pleasure than she would have cared to own even to herself.
Most of the men she had met since she became a widow treated her as an irresponsible being. Many of them tried to flirt with her for the mere pleasure of flirting with so pretty a woman; others, so she was resentfully aware, had only become really interested in her when they became aware that she had been left by her husband with an income of two thousand pounds a year. She had had several offers of marriage since her widowhood, but not one of the men who had come and said he loved her had confessed as much about himself as this stranger had done.
She was the more touched and interested because the Frenchman's manner was extremely reserved. Even in the short time she had been at the Villa du Lac, Sylvia had realised that though the Count was on speaking terms with most of his fellow-guests, he seemed intimate with none of the people whose happy chatter had filled the dining-room the night before.
Just before going back into the Villa, Sylvia stopped short; she fixed her large ingenuous eyes on the Count's face.
"I want to thank you again," she said diffidently, "for your kindness in giving me this warning. You know we in England have a proverb, 'Forewarned is forearmed.' Well, believe me, I will not forget what you have said, and—and I am grateful for your confidence. Of course, I regard it as quite private."
The Count looked at her for a moment in silence, and then he said very deliberately,
"I am afraid the truth about me is known to all those good enough to concern themselves with my affairs. I am sure, for instance, that your Polish friend is well aware of it! You see before you a man who has lost every penny he owned in the world, who does not know how to work, and who is living on the charity of relations."
Sylvia had never heard such bitter accents issue from human lips before.
"The horse you saw me ride this morning," he went on in a low tone, "is not my horse; it belongs to my brother-in-law. It is sent for me every day because my sister loves me, and she thinks my health will suffer if I do not take exercise. My brother-in-law did not give me the horse, though he is the most generous of human beings, for he feared that if he did I should sell it in order that I might have more money for play."
There was a long, painful pause, then in a lighter tone the Count added, "And now, au revoir, Madame, and forgive me for having thrust my private affairs on your notice! It is not a thing I have been tempted ever to do before with one whom I have the honour of knowing as slightly as I know yourself."
Sylvia went upstairs to her room. She was touched, moved, excited. It was quite a new experience with her to come so really near to any man's heart and conscience.
Life is a secret and a tangled skein, full of loose, almost invisible threads. This curiously intimate, and yet impersonal conversation with one who was not only a stranger, but also a foreigner, made her realise how little we men and women really know of one another. How small was her knowledge, for instance, of Bill Chester—though, to be sure, of him there was perhaps nothing to know. How really little also she knew of Anna Wolsky! They had become friends, and yet Anna had never confided to her any intimate or secret thing about herself. Why, she did not even know Anna's home address!
Sylvia felt that there was now a link which hardly anything could break between herself and this Frenchman, whom she had never seen till a week ago. Even if they never met again after to-day, she would never forget that he had allowed her to see into the core of his sad, embittered heart. He had lifted a corner of the veil which covered his conscience, and he had done this in order that he might save her, a stranger, from what he knew by personal experience to be a terrible fate!