Читать книгу Jeremiah and the Princess - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 3

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From the moment of his arrival at the Hansard place on Long Island, even before he had turned in at the pillared gates, disfigured by their leering gryphons, Jere Strole had been haunted by a quaint but persistent idea that this was to be unlike any other country house visit he had ever before paid. Perhaps the sequel to his presentiment was conveyed in that question he overheard whilst lounging on the terrace a few minutes after his arrival. The soft, drawling voice which came to him from the room a few feet behind was intriguing, not only because of its slightly drawn-out quality but also because of its distinctly foreign accent.

“You seem to have collected a wonderful party of young men here, Alice. Are they all as incredibly rich as they appear to be?”

His hostess’ high-pitched voice with its faintly apologetic note sounded to Jere for the first time in his life a little strident.

“This is not Europe, you must remember, Marya. Here one has to be rich in order to do anything at all.”

“And who of all of them has the most money?”

“Jere Strole, I should say.”

“What strange name was that?”

“Jere Strole, my dear. Jeremiah Vavasour Strole he was christened, but you won’t hear him called anything but ‘Jere’ round here.”

“I do not remember him.”

“You have not met him yet. He has only just arrived. I expect he is somewhere about on the terrace.”

Jere, being a young man with a fine sense of punctilio, rose promptly to his feet and disclosed himself upon the threshold of the long suite of rooms which led out on to the terrace. Alice Hansard, his hostess, a fluffy-haired, elegant little matron still in the early twenties, was talking to a girl who was a stranger to him. There had been ready words of greeting upon his lips, which somehow or other never found form. For a few moments he was absorbed, his momentary irritation evaporated. The question had seemed to him sordid, but there was nothing sordid about the appearance of the girl who had asked it. His first impressions of her were too vivid to be anything but slightly confused. He only realised that she was inclined to be small, that her figure was still immature, that she had the flawless ivory complexion and silky lashes of Eastern Europe and soft brown eyes of unusual size. As to her expression, at that particular moment he was not sure that it pleased him. She had an air of almost too great reserve, and the mouth was a trifle over-supercilious.

“Say, you’re talking some, aren’t you, Alice?” he protested in his full, pleasant voice. “If you only knew the truth, I had to borrow the petrol to bring me down here! Where’s the rest of the crowd?”

“My dear Jere,” was the remorseful reply, “I am so terribly sorry. I forgot that everyone had gone sailing to-day. Too hot for tennis, they said. However, there are compensations for you. Behold the man arriving with cool drinks for the exhausted traveller, and I want to present you to a school friend of mine. Mr. Jeremiah Strole—the Princess Marya of Pletz.”

The girl held out her hand. She was entirely unembarrassed.

“Is it possible that you heard my very stupid question?”

“Sure. I heard Alice’s reply too. You can always depend upon her for false information. She is far too sweet and frivolous ever to know what she’s talking about.”

An elderly lady, inclined to be stout, with aristocratic features but with masses of ill-arranged and unfortunately yellow hair, emerged from one of the further rooms and, walking with the help of a black ebony stick, approached them. She, too, spoke with a distinctly foreign accent, although it differed a great deal from the Princess’ inasmuch as it was guttural rather than Latin.

“I hear voices,” she declared. “I hear also the chink of that delightful ice. I awake from my sleep and I come to join you. Another young man, I see. Dear me, it reminds me, this, of my younger days in Vienna!”

“Jere, let me present you to the Baroness,” his hostess said. “Mr. Jeremiah Strole—the Baroness de Sturgiwil.”

Jere acknowledged the introduction suitably.

“I have met your husband, I believe, Baroness,” he said. “He dined with my father in New York one night. They were talking pictures half the evening.”

“Ach!” she exclaimed with interest. “It is your father then who has that very marvellous private collection. Yes, I have heard my husband speak of that visit. Your father promised to call when he came to Washington, but I do not remember that he has done so.”

“My father seldom leaves New York now,” Jere confided. “We have a small place near here where we used to spend the summers, but it gets more difficult every year to induce him to leave the city, even for a night.”

“Come along, everybody,” Alice Hansard called out. “You must be thirsty after your drive down, Jere.”

They sauntered out on to the most wonderful terrace ever built, with a great circular front overlooking the flower gardens and the sea.

“Say what you want, you people,” their hostess begged. “Jere will take a highball, I know, and I am sure you will have orange juice, Marya. What about you, Baroness?”

“Orange juice, that I will not,” the latter declared, sinking into an easy-chair and producing a fan from her very capacious bag. “I shall take the special cocktail that your good maître d’hôtel prepares for me. Where are all your guests, my dear Mrs. Hansard?”

“Some of them are playing golf, but the others are all sailing somewhere. They decided that it was too hot for tennis. We shall get our evening breeze in a minute or two, though. It comes always from the water about this time.”

“Ach, I feel it already,” the Baroness declared contentedly. “Soon I shall need my fan no longer. This is the one country house in America, my dear Mrs. Hansard, which I love. You have defeated the mosquitoes, you have pleasant guests and you understand what the Baron calls the art of moderation. I am of the old school, but I am also modern. I have lived in too many different capitals not to understand that there is no universal code or view of life. At the same time I am thankful to say that I can still be sometimes shocked. Here I am not.”

“It is that dear old Tom of mine,” Alice Hansard murmured. “He puts the brake on whenever he thinks things are getting too rapid. All the same, young people are rather a problem to their poor mothers these days.”

“Gwen is not giving you any trouble, I hope?” Jere inquired anxiously.

“Even in this country,” Alice laughed, “at the age of one year and one month our children trouble their nurses more than their chaperones.”

The Princess leaned a little forward.

“I do not get enough of your delicious breeze,” she complained.

“Take her on to the wharf, Jere,” his hostess suggested. “You will get all of it you want there, and you can watch the others come in.”

Jere rose promptly to his feet.

“Would you care to come, Princess?” he invited. “It is only a hundred yards or so.”

She hesitated for a moment and Jere felt that he would have given a great deal to have known the real reason for that hesitation. Nevertheless, in the end she rose.

“I should like very much to visit the wharf,” she decided, “if Mr. Strole would be so kind....”

The Baroness looked after the two young people through her very powerful lorgnettes.

“A young man of good manners,” she declared. “Good looking, too. He carries himself like our officers did in the old days. Most American young men are good looking enough, but they are too large. I like them of finer mould. Your Mr. Strole pleases me. Tell me about him.”

“There’s not much to tell, I am afraid,” Alice Hansard replied, as she lit a cigarette. “The Stroles are one of our oldest families, and his father is still nominally head of the famous bank—Vavasour Strole, Incorporated. He has spent most of his youth and middle age in Italy, though, and I do not think he ever goes near Wall Street now. Jere did the usual things at College—nothing brilliant that I ever heard of. He is going in for diplomacy, I believe.”

“Not the banking?” the Baroness queried.

Alice shook her head.

“There is too much money already,” she yawned. “Jere startled everyone in his younger days by a remarkable capacity for languages. I remember when we were children together at Biarritz he used to chatter away just like a native.”

“Is he attached anywhere at present?”

“Not for the moment. He has had two of those trying-out jobs down in South America, and he’s waiting now for something in Europe.”

“I like his type,” the Baroness declared. “He pleases me. I like his soft voice. I should like him next me at dinner.”

“Can’t be managed to-night,” her hostess regretted. “De Brett, the Belgian Ambassador, you know, an old friend of your husband’s, I believe, is dining—coming over from Joe Dimsdale’s place with some others. I’ve worn myself out with the name cards. I can manage the domestic article, but it is so difficult with you distinguished foreigners. To-morrow night you can have him with pleasure.”

“My dear, that will do excellently,” the Baroness agreed. “It will give me pleasure to improve my acquaintance with the young man. Christian, too, will be interested to hear of him. He spoke of his father as a very remarkable old gentleman, and Christian, as you know, is sometimes a trifle difficult on this side of the Atlantic.”

“Everyone who has artistic tastes like the Baron loves Vavasour Strole,” Alice Hansard remarked. “I’m rather afraid of him myself. I know he looks upon me as a little ignoramus, but it can’t be helped. I love life just as we have it out here. Something doing all the time—golf, picnics, sailing, tennis, dancing. I love it when one hasn’t a moment to spare. I have no time for abstractions.”

The Baroness smiled. The breeze was delicious and she was feeling very content.

“The least troublesome part of the world is like you, my dear,” she murmured.

“So you are in diplomacy?” Marya asked her companion, as she picked her delicate and tentative way in impossible shoes along the gravel path.

“A beginner,” he confessed, with a deprecatory gesture.

“And it is your father who is the famous banker?”

“Sure. Dad’s the head of Vavasour Strole,” he assented. “I fancy he knows more about pictures than money making, though.”

“But he is very rich?”

“Well, you see,” Jere explained, “it was my grandfather who made the money—he and his father before him.”

“That is more the way things happen in England, is it not?”

“I suppose so,” he admitted.

“In this country it interests me more to meet the men who have themselves achieved something,” she confided.

“I’m afraid that puts me off the map,” he sighed.

She paused for a moment at a turn in the path, and looked at him speculatively. Jere had as much aplomb as most young men of his years, but he felt slightly uncomfortable at her steady, appraising scrutiny.

“You are quite young,” she observed.

“I am twenty-four. That’s getting on for being middle-aged in New York.”

She smiled—flaming red lips which parted slowly, a splash of soft, but vivid colour untouched by the hideous weapons of the beauty parlour, a fascinating contrast to the lustrous pallor of her cheeks.

“Twenty-four is not very old,” she reflected. “If you had been following the fortunes of your family business you might soon have become famous. A diplomat has to achieve age and dignity before he counts for very much in the world.”

Jere was inclined to be irritated. For some incomprehensible reason he felt that he was being disapproved of.

“You don’t think much of diplomacy as a career, then?”

“It has been the greatest of all careers,” she acknowledged. “It may become so again. At present—no. In this new world which has arrived since the war it is only money that counts.”

“You depress me,” he confided, with a note of sarcasm in his tone.

She glanced at him and he felt himself rebuked. For a few moments he was also ignored. They had reached the wharf and she looked away to where a tall-masted yacht, still some distance out, was heeling over to catch the wind. The boards under their feet were hot, the breeze only fitful. The voices of the passengers on the in-coming boat travelled loud and strident to their ears. The Princess turned round and pointed to a thatched summer-house on the grassy slope which led to the tennis lawns.

“We will go there,” she said to Jere. “These friends of Alice’s are charming but very noisy. We can watch them disembark and reach the house the other way.”

He turned to follow, vaguely flattered by the selective preference which excluded him from the little gathering who had failed to please. He watched the effortless grace of her movements as she climbed, caught her flash of something unexpectedly provocative in the eyes as she glanced over her shoulder, and set his teeth. This thing, the threat of which he had felt in the first few seconds of their meeting, should not happen. He dragged into the foreground of his memory that illuminating query, the first words he had heard from her lips, so callous, so calculating:

“Who of all of them has the most money?”

They pushed their way through the clustering bougainvillea twined around sweet-smelling ramblers, and found two basket chairs which Jere dragged out on to the loggia. The breeze came now with a salt tang from the Atlantic. She closed her parasol and sat for a moment with half-closed eyes.

“Why do you think so much of money?” he asked bluntly.

“I suppose because in my country we have so little of it.”

“I never realised,” he observed, “that Jakovia was a specially poor kingdom.”

“Then it is very apparent that you know nothing about Jakovia,” she told him crushingly.

She watched with lazy interest the drawing nearer of the yacht with its scattered company of white-flannelled passengers. Jere sat frowning and ignored by her side. Again he was conscious of the fact that he had blundered.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about Jakovia,” he confessed, after a pause. “Must I go and dig up an encyclopædia or won’t you tell me something about the place?”

“Why should I?” she asked. “You cannot possibly be interested.”

“At the present moment,” he assured her fervently, “there is nothing in the world which interests me so much as the well-being of Jakovia.”

She unbent slightly, but there was still coldness in her dangerous monosyllable.

“Why?”

“Because Jakovia is your country.”

Her forehead was slightly wrinkled with the slow uplifting of her eyebrows.

“Are you not a trifle obvious?” she inquired tonelessly.

“The truth is generally obvious. I have developed a sincere interest in Jakovia. I should like to know why it is a poor country.”

“It is easily understood,” she told him. “Upon the land and under the land there is great wealth—a vast treasure. Alas, it lies there undisturbed. Jakovia has not the money to sink oil-wells, to buy the machinery for mining, to build sawmills and turn its forests into timber by modern means. Therefore the peasants are almost starving and the cities are only half populated.”

“The King is rather a bad lad, too, isn’t he?” Jere asked.

She flashed a quick glance of disapproval at him.

“You must remember, if you please,” she said stiffly, “that King Phillip is my cousin.”

“I beg your pardon,” Jere apologised. “How was I to know?”

“I forgot that I was in America,” she conceded. “In Europe one knows those things in one’s own circle as a matter of course. I will admit that Phillip is not a good king. He thinks too much of himself and his pleasures and too little of the grievous condition of his people. For that he may some day have to pay.”

“You live in the country?” he asked.

“No one who was born in Jakovia,” she replied, “could ever live anywhere else unless their duties necessitated it. I have a palace there, but I have not been able to occupy it during the last few months.”

“Is it permitted to ask why not?”

“There have been political troubles in my country,” she confided sadly, “the nature of which I cannot explain. You may have read something of them in the journals. It seemed wiser for me to keep aloof for a time. Besides, I wished very much to come to the United States. New York, they tell me, has become the world’s storehouse of gold. I wanted to meet some of these merchant princes whom I have read about.”

Jere was frankly intrigued. He had travelled in Italy and on the French Riviera, and he had spent several seasons in London. Titles had lost their glamour for him, but a princess whose presence or absence from the capital city of her birth was a matter of moment seemed to him in these days a very picturesque anachronism. Marya herself too, notwithstanding her grave demureness, which had its own peculiar charm, seemed little more than a grown-up child.

“How old are you?” he asked.

It was not Jere’s good day. Again he saw the drawing together of those silky eyebrows and detected the note of resentment in her stiff reply.

“It is not customary to ask such direct questions in Europe. If one is curious there are books which gratify one’s curiosity.... I see that our fellow guests are landing.”

The yacht had reached its moorings, and its occupants, some ten or twelve in number, had arrived at the wharf in a very beautiful motor boat and were now disembarking. The Princess and Jere watched them, at first indifferently enough.

“The same old bunch,” Jere murmured. “The Van Heyden twins, Stella Seabright, John and Charlie Boyd, Tom and——”

“The good God!”

Jere broke off suddenly, startled, almost terrified, by the cry which had escaped his companion’s lips. It was an exclamation not only of surprise but of fear, not only of fear but of terror. He turned towards her in amazement. Her lips were parted, her wide-opened eyes fixed upon the wharf were luminous with a curious mixture of emotions. She had the air of one who looks on unpropitious things.

“What is it, Princess?” he asked breathlessly.

She pointed downwards. Her voice sounded like a dead force.

“Who are those people in the dinghy just landing?” she asked. “They came from the yacht too.”

Jere, who had been intent upon recognising his friends, noticed the others for the first time.

“Why, that’s De Brett,” he exclaimed. “Count de Brett, the Belgian Ambassador, who is dining here to-night.”

“They are not staying in the house.”

“I’ll tell you what must have happened,” he explained. “Our crowd put in at the Dimsdales’ place for a drink and brought over the men who are dining. There is another small motor boat behind, you see, with two servants and suit cases.”

She continued, speaking half to herself.

“That man who is stepping on to the wharf now! It is—Michael!”

“He’s a stranger to me,” Jere confessed, shading his eyes with his hand. “No, he isn’t, though; he was with Joe at the Racquets Club yesterday afternoon. A fellow named Grovner or Grogner; I didn’t get the name very clearly. Played quite a decent game of squash. A foreigner of some sort.”

Marya seemed scarcely to be listening. Her eyes were fixed upon that one particular person below. He had joined the rest of the party now and was talking to one of the Van Heyden twins, a slim, distinguished figure in his well-cut yachting clothes—very pale compared to the sunburnt crowd by whom he was surrounded—with an immovable monocle in his eye and an unmistakable military carriage about his movements.

“How dared he?” Marya muttered, and this time it was anger which predominated in her tone.

“Someone you know?” Jere ventured.

She rose to her feet.

“The way to the house—by the tennis courts?” she asked. “Is it quicker than the other?”

“Half the distance,” Jere assured her.

“Let us go then, please,” she begged. “I should like to reach the house before the others. I must talk to my aunt.”

Jere fell into step by her side. The precise state of his feelings at that moment should have been illuminating to him if he had been given to self-analysis. The slight tremble of her lips as she had risen had done the mischief. He was filled with an insane desire to throw this intruding foreigner into the Sound!

“Princess,” he appealed to her earnestly, “you will forgive me, but is there anything I can do?”

She shook her head.

“Nothing. I am unduly distressed perhaps at the coming of this man. He is an enemy.”

“I would not care what he was,” Jere persisted. “I will get up a row with him if you like after dinner—fix it so that we both have to leave.”

“But you must not think of doing that,” she cried in alarm. “That is just what would please him. He is a wonderful swordsman and a deadly shot. He killed his greatest friend in a duel. He would have had to leave the army when he was a young man if he had been anyone else’s son.”

Despite himself Jere grinned. The idea of a duel at the Hansard place on Long Island on one of the lawns or down on the shore appealed irresistibly to his sense of humour.

“He couldn’t get away with that stuff here. We might show him a new form of fighting, though,” Jere added hopefully. “We don’t understand duelling any more than we do cock-fighting, but we can take care of ourselves if there is anyone about who means mischief.”

She almost smiled as she looked up at him. His complete and utter confidence seemed somehow reassuring.

“Do not think of quarrelling with him on my account, please,” she begged. “He is a very dangerous man.”

“I’m not going to have you bothered,” Jere declared doggedly.

This time the smile really broke from her lips. They were near the house, behind the shelter of its southern wing, and she slackened her speed.

“You need have no fear,” she assured him. “He will not presume to approach me unless I give him permission. The evil which he does is always in the background. I feel that there is something poisonous in the atmosphere when he is near at hand. And behind all that,” she went on, the smile fading from her face, “he is one of the figures in a great tragedy which might bring destruction upon my country at any moment. You will forgive me that I hurry away,” she concluded, as they reached one of the long French windows leading into the house.

“Sure,” he answered. “Can’t you promise, though, that you will tell me more about Jakovia some time this evening?”

There was a shadow of evasion in her gesture.

“Perhaps,” she murmured. “Perhaps not. There is a great deal which might interest you. The trouble is, though, that there are parts of her underground history which keep us all shivering and yet they can never be told to anyone.”