Читать книгу The Cluny Problem - A. Fielding - Страница 3

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"ANTHONY!" Vivian Young made a laughing surprised clutch at a tall figure stalking ahead of her down the station platform.

The man turned sharply. At the sight of his fiancée he smiled pleasantly, though a sharp observer would have said that there was something in his eyes that suggested a man about to make the best of a position not entirely to his liking.

"My dear girl!" he ejaculated warmly, "what brings you to Macon? Did you get into the wrong train, or out of the right one, or what?"

"I'm on my way to Cluny. Buried, neglected Cluny. The town where the lace is made, and, less interesting to me, I guess, the town where there are some ruins that must be seen in order to be forgotten. I mean the ruins of that wonderful abbey about which the Frenchman raved at dinner last night. You started him off by asking him if he knew the place. But you didn't speak of coming on here yourself."

"Nor you!" Sir Anthony Cross spoke easily, yet the very swiftness of his reply suggested a hidden irritation.

"Ah, but I'm only marking time at Enghien with a sister! You're supposed to be rushing back to London to summon board meetings, and dismiss the president, I mean the prime minister, and generally make very important things hum. Is this the way you usually go back to England?"

"You can reach it via Macon," he said as lightly as she.

Vivian was smiling up into his face. She was a very pretty young woman, in spite of the fact that she looked clever.

"Sure. Just as you could round by Constantinople," she agreed sweetly.

Again Anthony Cross smiled at her. Yet again there was that faint hint in his face of a man not entirely pleased with things.

"As with you," he began easily, "one might think that French professor has fired me up to look at his town. I'm keen on architecture, you know, and I ought to feel quite ashamed of myself that I've never been to the place. But the idea of your going there! Somehow one doesn't connect you with ruins."

"Why not? We all come to them some day," she spoke with the gaiety of under twenty-five. "Besides, as an American, I dote on anything we don't have over at home. If you're off for the same place, why, we shall have the whole long day to ourselves. You look charmed at the notion, Anthony, yet somehow I don't believe you really like it."

She never called him Tony. One could not easily imagine any one calling the man to whom she was speaking, to whom she was engaged, by a nickname. For, though young looking, there was so little of youth's softness in his face, that one suspected him of being much older than he showed. He had, in fact, crossed the forty line. Hard was the mouth, stubborn the jaw, obstinate the nose, and his fine eyes could at times cleave like a flash of lightning. He looked what he was, a man of high position, social and mental. But for an indefinable air of being a man of affairs, one would have guessed him a barrister.

"If so," he said rather slowly, "it's because I shan't be able to see much of you, or of the remains of the great abbey either." He looked at her meditatively before he went on:

"I suppose you're going back to Enghien tomorrow?"

It was at that little resort so near Paris that he and Vivian had just got engaged. There in the hotel where her brother-in-law and his wife had been staying, Anthony Cross and Vivian had renewed an acquaintanceship made earlier on shipboard. She nodded. "You too, I suppose?"

"No. I may be delayed some days. There's history to be read in the stones of Cluny, I fancy—since it was made there once upon a time." He spoke as one turning some other thought over in his mind. Now he looked quickly down at her, as though he had decided on his course of action.

"You know the real reason why I'm back in Europe just now," he said in a low voice.

She nodded. She knew from him that there was a constant leakage from the parcels of diamonds sent to Amsterdam by the Diamond Combine in South Africa, of which Anthony Cross was one of the directors. That great firm's detectives had been trying to locate the leakage for months. They had decided that the master mind was not in Amsterdam, nor in Holland, but probably in France. Possibly in Paris. She knew, too, that Cross had left Capetown to make further, and personal, inquiries in the matter.

"Then, in confidence, I believe that in Cluny I may possibly pick up a certain piece of information which I very much want to get. Or rather, that something that I may learn from a man whom I expect to meet there may settle definitely a point that ought to be settled."

His jaw shut very tightly as he said this last. "And that's the reason, dear, why I may not have been as delighted at the thought of your coming to Cluny just now as I should otherwise be. In reality, but again in strict confidence, mine is entirely and simply a business visit. At which hotel have you engaged rooms?"

She told him.

"I think, on the whole, it would be better if we do not meet. I should in any case, of course, go to another hotel, but I'll let you take this coming train out there alone, and go on later. Sorry, Vivian, it's a rotten way to spend what might have been a most delightful time together, but there's no help for it."

She did not in the least see the reason, or the need, for so much mystery. But men have their own funny ways of doing business, she decided.

"If I run across you in the street, I'll ask you the way to the abbey in French," she promised gaily.

He smiled at that, genuinely this time.

"At any rate, our engagement has nothing to do with what takes me to Cluny. And I want it kept free of it. It's too beautiful a thing to drag into anything sordid."

He looked into her eyes with passion. It was a look that showed him to be possessed of a side not to be guessed even from a careful scrutiny of his very handsome but rather cold face. "And that being so, it means, as I said, that we'd better not meet at all. Cluny's a tiny place. Only some four thousand souls, and I may have to be there for some time."

The explanation explained nothing to Vivian. But if men were odd when it came to business, they were still odder when it came to sentiment. And, therefore, when both were mixed, they were oddest of all.

"Or perhaps I'll put off going there for a couple of days," he said ruminatingly. "Yes, I rather think I will—" He stood a moment in silence.

"You yourself are in no danger?" she asked suddenly. After all, detecting diamond-stealers was dangerous work.

"Not in the least! Here's your train."

He helped her in. The engine pulled out. He looked very grave, very little the lover as he stood there, hat in hand, and yet she felt certain that he was deeply stirred, and trying to conceal the fact.

By what? He was very hard to stir, very hard even to know. And on that came the reflection that he would have had to own a singularly easy character for her to have plumbed it already.

It was only two months since their first meeting. Only a fortnight since their second. True, they had seen a great deal of each other during the passage out from Capetown. Terrific storms had kept the other passengers in their bunks. Officers and the doctor were too busy to have a moment to spare. Anthony had saved her from a rough-and-tumble with a wave when she first came out on deck, tight-reefed in oilskins borrowed from a stewardess. Neither had the faintest idea of who the other was. She had taken him at sight for a much younger man, and had treated him, as Vivian did treat young men, very cavalierly. He had responded in kind. They had quarreled. But they were literally flung together half a dozen times a day. And, in spite of themselves, they grew first to tolerate, then to like, each other. When he told her his name, perhaps half-unconsciously expecting that it would impress her, she treated him as carelessly as ever. And Sir Anthony was considered one of the really great catches of the matrimonial market. It was genuine carelessness too, he saw. Not assumed to lead him on. Whether he were led on, or off, mattered very little to Vivian. When he grasped that fact, he was attracted still more strongly. Her prettiness, of course, had a great deal to do with it, but it was not everything. Then came the night of the all-but wreck in the hurricane. The ship was carrying a full load of steerage passengers. There were many gallant souls on board, but among them all, Anthony Cross stood out by his coolness and his organizing power. He held the frightened steerage quiet, not at the point of his automatic—though he had one in his pocket—but by his own calm personality, and Vivian worked among the women and babies as cheerful, as undismayed, as he. Save for the suffering it caused, she seemed to positively enjoy the danger, and Cross suddenly felt that his life would be incomplete without her. There was something wild and free in the girl that roused the hunter in him. If they lived, he told himself, he would capture her.

He followed her to France, to Enghien-les-bains, and found her in a moment of great depression. An unusual place for Vivian Young to be. She was a journalist by profession and by real preference.

She loved to watch the world with those pretty eyes of hers that were so unexpectedly shrewd, and she loved to shape what she had seen into words. To create an image of her thoughts, see it grow, and watch it stand itself, upright and whole. But she was not making enough to do more than support herself, and at Enghien she learnt from a sister, who prided herself on speaking the truth, that in the past, she had been dependent on her brother-in-law, not, as she had imagined, living on the money left by their parents. Her brother-in-law was an American doctor practicing in Paris, and none too well off. Vivian felt that she must pay him back as soon and as fast as she could.

That evening Anthony Cross proposed. Vivian did not consciously take him as a means of paying what she felt to be a debt of honor. She was much more impressed by him than she let him guess. By him, himself, not by his position, or his name. There was something great in the man as she knew. And she divined also, with that sure instinct of hers, that under his calm, even cold exterior there was flame.

There was flame in her too. That night he all but won her. She believed that he had. But ever since then, she had felt more and more certain that he had not, which meant that he never would. For one thing, he was too old for her. For another—but what was the use. She had promised to marry him. Still, an engagement is but a trial run of the car, as it were. It's very purpose is to find out how one likes it.

At the first station beyond Macon, a young woman, also an American by the look of her, hurried towards the train where she sat. The newcomer was making for another compartment, but Vivian, at sight of her, flung the door open.

"Edith! Edith! Come in here!" she called.

The newcomer swung herself in and the two kissed affectionately.

"My dearest Vi! Why, what brings you to this part of Europe...and just when we're off for Switzerland...I do call that real mean of things. We only started this morning. Adolphe left some papers behind him at Clermain that he must have. Adolphe's my husband, you know."

She threw in the explanation as though referring to the cat.

"We have a villa there all among the vineyards. But how just too frightfully maddening that you should be so close to us now. The house is shut up, or I should insist on carrying you off. Where are you making for?"

"Cluny." It was the first word that Vivian had been able to slip in. That had always been the way with Edith Metcalf as she had been in the convent at Paris, where they both had been sent to learn French. Edith de Montdore as she was now. Vivian remembered hearing that she had married a French wine-grower and that the couple lived near Dijon.

"Cluny? Don't tell me, Vivian Young, that you know the vamp?"

"Calm yourself, my dear girl, I've never heard of her. I'm on the way to Cluny for the purpose of self-education. Early Christian churches—wonderful abbey—marvelous abbot's palace and so on...But this sounds much more in my line. Who is the woman? Does she vamp at Cluny? Or where you live?"

"At Cluny. I bet I should move if she came to Clermain," laughed Edith. "She's staying with her husband at a house there owned by a man we know. A Frenchman. But an awfully nice fellow."

"Staying with her husband? Where's the vamping then?"

"Oh, she's a subconscious one, child. She looks as meek as Moses, and as quiet as Lazarus before he was raised from the dead. But all the men rave about her. Oh, Adolphe too! One of the reasons I decided on going away for a bit. I loathe Switzerland in a motor. So many roads you can't go over. But anything's better than the vamp. She's lips like a darkey's, and hair like one too, though it's red, and she's no complexion whatever. Yet Adolphe says she's a Rossetti, and a wonderful type. Don't let your Anthony have a look at her. The best of wishes to you both on your engagement, by the way. I did write them, but allow me to embrace you, as they say here."

Edith Montdore did so, without a pause in her chatter.

"Say, you have done well for yourself! And what a splendiferous ring!"

Vivian was carrying her left-hand glove, a fancy of the moment. On her third finger was a great clouded sapphire, a Cross heirloom. Though not otherwise particularly superstitious, Vivian had a dislike to that fault in that particular gem. She said as much.

"Well, I guess I agree with you. Though the setting's perfectly lovely. I told Mrs. Brownlow—that's the vamp's name, by the way—about clouded sapphires meaning a death in one's circle—or rather, only I told her that it meant a loss, for she has some wonderful stones, but two are a bit dark. And within the month after I told her, she lost sapphires and all. I believe the thief got about five thousand dollars worth of jewels off her altogether. I still reckon in dollars, you see, the exchange bobs about too much. My, she was mad! She was taking them to Paris to have them re-set. That sort of makes it doubly annoying. They were only insured for about half their value, it seems. That was her husband's doing."

"What's he like?" Vivian asked. She was quite willing to be chattered to.

"I always thought him a brainless, boneless, sort of creature, until I met a woman the other day who knew them years ago out in China—he's something to do with silk. And this woman told me a story that makes me wonder if he's such a weasel as he looks. It seems that out there all the men fell for Mrs. Brownlow, same as they do here. And one young fellow in particular went wild over her. So wild that Mr. Brownlow turned him out of the house one evening. And next morning the boy was found drowned in the river!"

"But what has that to do with the husband—I mean, I don't see—" Vivian wrinkled her smooth forehead.

"Oh, but the young man had a brother who wrote to the British Consul that Mr. Brownlow must have shoved him in, Mr. Brownlow was all but prosecuted—so this woman said. Only there wasn't enough evidence. She herself firmly believed that he had done it. So did most of the people out there. That's why the Brownlows left finally. Thrilling, isn't it! I tell you that story made all the difference as to how I look at Mr. Brownlow now!" Apparently it had greatly increased her respect for the man. And Vivian burst out laughing.

"But surely they're not staying at Cluny year out, year in?" she asked.

"Pretty nearly," Edith Montdore said gloomily. "That's why we're off now. We weren't going for another month. But that woman gets on my nerves. Clermain is only some six miles from Cluny, and we're always meeting, and she makes me look, and feel, like a picture on a cigarette box. Frankly I'm in flight. You see, this Monsieur Pichegru—that's the name of the man they're staying with—runs his house, Villa Porte Bonheur, as a sort of paying-guest house. I believe he lost his money for a time—something went wrong with his vineyards—so he started this, and keeps it up because he likes it. He belongs to an awfully good family and knows every one for miles around. He's a duck, but the only thing is, he won't take maids or valets with people. He says that he hasn't the rooms to spare for them, and that they upset his own servants."

"I should be lost without a maid!" Vivian said in mock distress.

"You'll have to have one as Lady Cross!"

Vivian nodded. The prospect did not allure her in the least. There was a short pause, then Edith Montdore babbled on:

"Monsieur Pichegru is unmarried, and at his age that means he isn't going to marry. By the way, he's giving a costume dance, masked too, this Saturday. Every one is going. I was, of course, only my frock turned out to be a ghastly failure. Lovely in itself but, my! I looked so homely in it when it came home, that I promptly developed a heat rash. Suppressed. It seems you can have a suppressed rash. So I have it. The doctor has told my husband that it would only get better with change of air. It has—already." She chuckled gleefully. "Still, when Adolphe left those papers behind him, I insisted on being the one to fetch them. Oh, I'm only joking, but really that woman is the sort you read of." She meant "that you see on the films." Edith Montdore never opened a book—not even a novel. "You know, the kind that set all the men raving with one look."

The ticket collector came in. Mrs. Montdore had no ticket. She was sure that she had dropped it in the corridor. There was not room for more than two of them to hunt. Vivian sat on in the compartment. She was thinking. Vaguely at first, now with certitude came the idea that she had heard the name of Brownlow before. And recently. Quite recently. At the dinner last night when she had first heard of the existence of Cluny. Quickly, with that speed of thought which can flash a whole series of sights and sounds on the screen of memory at once, she seemed to be hearing Anthony Cross ask the French professor of archeology, who was one of the guests at her sister's table, "Is Cluny worth a visit, do you think?"

That had led to an account of the little town, and of what can still be seen there. A glowing account. Vivian, in swift retrospect, remembered now wondering a little that Cross, though quite an antiquarian himself, had not asked one question except about the state of the roads, the lie of the houses. And afterwards she had heard him step up to the other again, and say, even more quietly than usual, "You know Cluny well?"

"Very well. My brother is the directeur of its school of arts and crafts. I have just come away from the town."

"Indeed? Did you by any chance meet an Englishman there of the name of Brownlow?"

Yes, Vivian was certain that that had been the name murmured so softly by Anthony last night.

The Frenchman had not, and the talk was at once changed. Funny the way one rarely hears a new name without hearing it a second time very soon afterwards! Vivian thought. But the entrance of her friend and the ticket, properly found and clipped, brought her back to the present.

"Say, Vi, I wish you could have a look at the vamp," Edith said, reseating herself and taking up the conversation where she had left off, as though it were a piece of knitting. "You're such a wonderful judge of character from one look at a face. Or you used to be. I sure would like to know where that woman belongs—with us hens, or out among the hawks. I know what! Go to Villa Porte Bonheur for a few days. Monsieur Pichegru won't take ordinary passing tourists, but he'll take any friend of ours."

"His house may be full," Vivian objected.

"It never is. He only has enough people nowadays to keep him from feeling lonely."

"But I'm intending to stay in Cluny for merely the one night," Vivian pointed out.

"But, why?" her friend asked. "Cluny really is charming. Why not stay for the dance on Saturday? This is Thursday."

"And go in my dressing-gown as 'A lady surprised by a fire?'" Vivian asked. "I'm a traveler, my child, not a bride with all her trousseau to choose from."

"Wear my new dress!" Edith pleaded. "I'll send it on to you. And we're very much the same figure. Besides it's the sort of frock that would fit any one. And though it doesn't suit me, it's a dream of cream and gold. Just your colors. 'Lady into Fox' is what it's supposed to represent. Adolphe designed it himself from some funny book or other. You would look a duck in it!"

"You mean a fox, surely!"

"Now, don't keep on joking!" Edith Montdore was really in earnest. "I want you to promise me to have a good look at the vamp, and give me your opinion. It'll be unbiased, you see. And mine can't be. And yet I really do want to hear what you think of her. Oh, Vi, why not? Monsieur Pichegru charges no more than the hotels do. You told me that Sir Anthony is going back to England, and that, until you joined him in September, you were just going to keep on staying at Enghien. That's a fortnight off. Why not put in two or three days down here instead? I'll get the frock when I go for the papers—it's still in its box—and send it off to you, to wait at the railway station until you have it fetched. And I'll telephone Monsieur Pichegru as soon as I get home—we're one station short of Cluny—you will, won't you?"

Once more Vivian laughed. How like Edith all this rush was! But she promised to think over the idea. It would depend on whether she liked the look of Cluny or not. When she saw, lying among the green Cevennes hills, a little gray town with spires and towers rising against the trees in a charming picture, she fell in love with the quiet nook. There were vineyards, and meadows, and a splashing stream rushing down the valley.

Clear of the station, she asked her way to the Villa Porte Bonheur. The name had stuck. Was it not tempting fate to give a house a name like that?

The villa, painted ivory, was one of the prettiest in the place. And the garden was a vision of pink roses and blue delphiniums. It was the garden that did it. At first. But the real reason that made her press the front door bell was a face, of which she caught a glimpse as she walked the winding drive towards the house. It was a woman's face, bending over an embroidery-stand under a tree. For a second Vivian stared, then she turned off down a little side path. That face! She knew quite well where she had seen a photograph of it. It was a very unusual face. Adolphe Montdore was right. It was the true Rossetti type. Inert to everything except the call of the senses, though for that very reason beauty-loving. And the photograph of it that she had seen, had been in the fingers of Anthony Cross only some three days ago. She had come on him suddenly standing staring at it. Lost to the world. At her touch he would have pocketed it, but she had caught his hand.

"Not on your life, young man! It's a picture of your mother, isn't it?" He had laughed, yet in the half-unwilling fashion of one who is annoyed by a sense of humor obtruding on what is not really funny in the least.

"No. She's a problem—a problem that belongs to the past." He now spoke very gravely. "Please don't ask me to tell you about her."

"Because I won't," his eye had said.

Vivian had changed the subject, biting back a retort that the problem out of the past had a most modern frock on. And now here was the original of that portrait—and of that dress. This must be the vamp of Edith Montdore's outpourings. There could not be two women with faces like that in Cluny—in Villa Porte Bonheur. Something stirred in Vivian. It was anger. Anthony Cross had told her frankly the evening when he asked her to marry him, or apparently frankly, that there had been one woman in his life, in his heart, who had owned it completely for many years. Even though she had been married, and had sent him away from her, his passion had gone so deep that it had been beyond his power to uproot for many a year. But that now it was a thing of the past. Had been of the past for some time.

But this woman, sitting looking down at her embroidery with a slow, faint, oddly waiting look, a look that somehow stirred the imagination, was not of the past. She was of the present. And suddenly Vivian made up her mind to stay at Porte Bonheur if there were room for her. To stay and see whether Anthony Cross's visit were in any way connected with that face instead of missing diamonds. True, he had only asked the Frenchman about the husband—for Vivian was certain that here, close to her, sat Mrs. Brownlow—and Anthony had spoken to herself just now, as though only duty were taking him to the little town. But, Vivian remembered suddenly a lightly flung quip of his on board ship. "Oh, yes, it is always necessary to tell the truth. But it isn't always necessary to tell the truth."

It would indeed be an odd conjunction if it were mere chance that his inquiries into the stolen diamonds and the woman of his past—"the problem"—problem, very likely, because she had preferred her husband to him. Vivian thought cynically and irately—both met here in tiny Cluny. Vivian was not fond of coincidences in a novel and she did not believe in them in real life. And, then, that insistence that he should be left entirely to himself, like any other unattached man...

It was with a very determined step that Vivian swung round, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. She sent in a card of Edith Montdore's, on which that young woman had scribbled an introduction.

Monsieur Pichegru came down at once into the cold gray drawing-room—one of those typically French drawing-rooms that look chilly even on the hottest day. He was a pleasant-faced, elderly man with the alert, vigorous look of so many of his race. Edith had duly telephoned, and he pressed Vivian to stay at the villa for at least one night, and as many more as she could manage. The terms were very moderate for the comfort provided. He explained, as he showed her around, that he had injured his shoulder a little while ago while shooting rabbits, thanks to a young gun-bearer's brilliant idea of resting the gun that he was reloading on the wet clay ground, with the result that the barrel was blocked and the gun exploded. Monsieur Pichegru rightly thought himself very lucky to have got off with only a bruised shoulder and neck tendons. He usually, at this time of the year, had his house full of people who wanted a day at the birds, but now, with one exception, the villa only held some quiet people who, like herself, were interested in the ruins to be found in Cluny.

Vivian finally chose a charming bedroom looking over the old abbey gardens. At dinner she met the rest of the guests. They appeared to be very usual.

Mrs. Brownlow showed on closer acquaintance to be a very soft-spoken graceful Frenchwoman of approximately thirty-five. Unlike Edith Montdore, Vivian thought her very beautiful, and very finished. Though it was a type that repelled as well as attracted her. But Mrs. Brownlow seemed very gentle and kind. As for the husband, he appeared to be a silent, quiet, obliging little man. Remembering the tale passed on her, she smiled. It would have to be a very Eastern imagination indeed, she thought, that could picture him drowning his wife's admirer. Vivian thought that he was distinctly proud of her. And they seemed devoted to each other. So much for gossip, she reflected.

There were three young men in the house. Two friends called respectively, Smith and Lascelles. They seemed to Vivian rather superior beings, at least in their own estimation. Smith was in a crack cavalry regiment and was rather fussy over the fact that just now his host could not accompany him shooting, and that two friends of Monsieur Pichegru's, big bankers from Lyons, to whom he had been promised introductions, had not yet come to their country houses near by. Lascelles, Vivian learned, was a master in a smart preparatory school. He had the Cambridge manner to excess, and his account of the geological finds that dot what he called the Burgundian Passage, which once linked the Channel and the Mediterranean, was quite beyond her.

The two young men seemed only mildly interested in Mrs. Brownlow. Unlike the third young fellow, the possessor of ears like jug handles and great red hands and the name of Tibbitts, who was clearly her abject slave.

After dinner, Vivian sent down to the station for the box left for her by train. It was there. And with its arrival, she felt that she had definitely committed herself to at least a stay of over the week-end.

As to what Anthony would think of it—she did not greatly care. She would, of course, strictly keep to her promise if they met. But would they meet? That was the interesting point. If he really were coming because of those thefts...

She felt a growing uncertainty as to what Anthony would do, and even as to what she herself might do, in the next few days. It struck her that possibly Edith Montdore might not obtain as unbiased an opinion of Mrs. Brownlow as she expected.

Had Vivian loved the man, the position would have been intolerable. But as it was, she confessed with some malice that not for a long time had she looked forward to anything more than she did to his arrival in Cluny.

Altogether, her stay in Villa Porte Bonheur promised to be most interesting. But she decided that it would be as well to start an article or two for her old paper. Very probably the next week would see her once more with nothing in front of her but her own earnings. And a very pleasant prospect too, she thought it. Even the "desolate freedom of the wild ass," has its points. At least it is freedom, and if you are a wild ass, that alone, not the warmed stable, nor the fenced field, calls to you.