Grant walked into the Carlton at a quarter past twelve that evening, the exact hour mentioned by Cleo in the note which the commissionaire at the Sporting Club had given to him. He left his coat and hat in the coat room, made his way inside the restaurant, which was as yet sparsely occupied, and, ignoring the efforts of the maitre d’h?tel to provide him with a table, strolled across to where Cleo was seated alone. She welcomed him with a bare uplifting of the eyebrows, the sparsest possible smile.
“You permit me?” he asked, with his hand on the back of her chair.
“Certainly,” she assented. “Sit down if you wish, but I have changed my mind. I have nothing to say to you.”
He summoned a waiter and ordered some wine.
“That seems unfortunate,” he remarked. “May I have the pleasure of providing you with your accustomed beverage?”
“You can order some tea for me,” she said shortly, “and as many cigarettes as you like. But, alas, you will be wasting your kindness. I have nothing to say to you.”
“Perhaps,” he suggested, “I should not be considered unreasonable if I were to ask why this change? I am here at your invitation.”
“It is permitted always to a woman to change her mind,” she reminded him. “I believe you’re one of those with whom frankness is best. I have changed mine because Itash—”
“Sometimes called Sammy,” he murmured.
“—has changed his attitude towards me.”
“All up with the little lady from the Café de Paris?” Grant queried.
“He has finished with her,” she confided. “It was nothing but a passing fancy, ministered to by her lies. I wish, instead of talking nonsense to you, I had killed her.”
“But, my dear lady, consider how different everything would have been,” Grant pointed out. “Things having happened, as they have, behold ourselves seated—friends, I trust—in this very pleasing place of entertainment, alive and well, and with perfectly robust futures. If you had killed that rather impossible young lady, where would you be now? In that uncomfortable-looking edifice which these wise people of Monte Carlo keep absolutely out of sight, awaiting your trial and not in the least sure what was going to happen to you.”
“I am satisfied, if you are,” she said shortly.
“Of course, as a patriotic American,” he went on, “there are drawbacks to the situation. You were going to explain to me, if I remember rightly, exactly how to save my country from her impending doom, and you were also going to reveal to me various nefarious schemes directed against her.”
“Imagination!” she declared. “Nothing that I said was true. It was just spite.”
“Well, I don’t know that it much matters,” he observed, sipping his wine. “I didn’t believe it, anyhow.”
“Why didn’t you believe it?” she demanded.
“Because,” he told her, “I have had some conversation with Count Itash. I have come to the conclusion that that young man is not a fool. Under those circumstances I do not see how he could possibly have confided important political secrets to you. Nor can I conceive any sane reason for his having put them upon paper in such a fashion that you could have stolen them. Therefore, the existence of any means by which you could have read the riddles of Itash’s brain does not seem to me possible.”
“So, to put it in plain words,” she suggested
“I think that you were romancing.”
She looked at him half mockingly, half in admiration.
“Really,” she confessed, “I find you, for quite an ordinary person, unusually quick of perception.”
“And to be equally honest,” he rejoined, “I find you only attractive inasmuch as you are entirely removed from the commonplace. You are not good-looking enough to be a danseuse here. I am not sure that you dance well enough. You just have qualities that go to the ordinary man’s head. And therefore shall we have one dance before I make my disappointed way back to the hotel?”
Again there was the beginning of that smile, which she seemed never to finish. They moved away to the music. When the dance was finished they found their way to two easy-chairs in a far corner of the Bar. She looked at him sombrely. The smile was no nearer breaking into fruition upon her lips.
“If I were not in love with Sammy,” she acknowledged, “I think that I should rather like you.”
“A pity about that subjunctive,” he sighed. “I am not at all sure that he deserves you.”
“If a man really deserved a woman,” she said, “it is perfectly certain that the woman would not care for him. That always happens.”
“It sounds platitudinal for you,” he commented.
“Pooh!” she scoffed. “We all have to be reminded of the things we know best. I am, as you have suggested, plain, dull, altogether ordinary. Yet I have gifts. Sammy, at one time, loved me desperately. If he ceases to love me and puts another in my place, I shall destroy him. At present his passion has returned. He has been very sweet to me for many hours, and so, Monsieur l’Armericain, let us say good-bye. He does not like you and it would do me no good to have him’ come here and find us together.”
Grant rose to his feet and bent low over her fingers.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “I do not think that this is the end. You would doubtless prefer, under the circumstances, that I quit the restaurant.”
“It would be to my advantage, in case Sammy should come,” she admitted. “If you were with a party of your friends it would be another matter.”
Twice, during that few hundred yards down to the front, Grant stopped, fancying that he was followed. Each time, if there had been a shadow behind, it faded away. He entered the Casino, which he seldom visited, without exactly knowing why, avoided the Cercle Prive and hung about the tables near the entrance where the stranger visitants to Monte Carlo congregate. He drew near a table and threw a louis on his favourite number. It lost the first time. He repeated his stake and won. He turned abruptly around, with his winnings, and was not in the least surprised to find Itash standing behind him.
“You are fortunate,” the young man murmured equably.
“They are a small part of life, these games of chance,” Grant replied.
Itash’s dark eyes glowed behind their spectacles.
“Listen,” he expounded. “If you treat life like a science to be lived by the direction of the brain, day by day, year by year, decade by decade, then life is a thing that grows dry as dust in the living. It counts only for the hucksters. But if one only realises—if one treats it as a gamble—a hundred-to-one chance, if you will—then life is entrancing.”
“Philosophy on the floor of the Casino,” Grant observed, smiling. “You haven’t lost all your Orientalism, then, in Berlin and London?”
“I have only learnt to value it the more,” was the calm reply. “Without it no man can do more than climb to the middle places. In this world one needs the gambler’s instinct.”
“You’d be a dangerous fellow,” Grant remarked, “to be trusted with the whole of your patrimony within these walls.”
Itash glanced at his watch and smiled.
“My whole patrimony, my name, and my honour,” he said, “are already at stake, but it is not the spinning of a wheel which decides my fate. Will you take a little supper with me at the Carlton, Mr. Slattery? I have a friend who awaits me there—an acquaintance, also, I believe, of yours.”
“With the utmost pleasure,” Grant assented. “I only came in here because I was bored.”
So they climbed the hill and went back to the Carlton. Cleo was still seated alone at her table. She watched the two men enter together, without change of countenance. Itash was very ceremonious.
“You have, I believe, already met my friend, Mr. Grant Slattery,” he ventured.
“I have taken advantage of Mademoiselle’s official position here,” Grant hastened to intervene. “I have given myself the pleasure of dancing with her.”
“In that case, Mademoiselle will permit us to join her,” Itash suggested. “But you have wine already upon your table, Cleo! How is that?”
She glanced at the bottle which Grant had left three quarters filled.
“They come here, these men, after a dance,” she explained. “They order wine. The management prefers that I accept.”
Itash waved it away impatiently and gave a fresh order. Nevertheless his eyes were sombrely lit.
“Amongst Orientals,” he confided, “there is always one trait which survives—the trait of curiosity. Now that I have you here together, tell me, I beg, on what subject did you two converse so earnestly in the corner of the Bar there, last night—or was it two nights ago?”
“I was endeavouring to persuade Mademoiselle,” Grant replied, “that the Tango, as a dance, is an incomplete affair. The most perfect dances in the world have been those in which the steps are absolutely registered—the minuet, for instance.”
“I was venturing,” Cleo murmured, “to disagree with Monsieur.”
“It appeared,” Itash reflected, “that you took the affair seriously.”
“Dancing,” Grant remarked, “is the profession of Mademoiselle. It happens to be my chief amusement.”
Itash turned upon his guest. His question was asked with rapier-like suddenness.
“Your chief amusement, but not your only one, Monsieur?”
“I play golf, I sail my yacht a little, I am an indifferent hand at tennis,” Grant acknowledged.
“You have no more serious occupation in life?” Itash demanded incredulously.
His guest leaned over the table.
“My friends,” he told his two companions, “I started life trying to be serious, I was moderately well off. I needed a profession. I embraced diplomacy and then—see what happened to me. I was left seventeen million dollars, the whole of the Van Roorden estate. Well, I confess it, I fell where many a better man has fallen before. I yielded to the call of wealth. I am an idle man now for the rest of my days.”
Itash himself took the bottle from the ice pail, filled his own glass and Grant’s to the brim. He appeared to have recovered his composure. The shadow of some fear seemed to have passed from him.
“It is what I have been told,” he admitted. “Such wealth might dazzle any one. The spending of it might indeed enchain the imagination of the most ambitious on earth. So I drink to your health, Mr. Grant Slattery. I have had a nightmare. It has passed.”
They drained their glasses. Itash was himself again. He leaned towards Cleo.
“You will dance with me?” he murmured.
She rose at once. Just then there was the bustle, in the entrance hall, of new arrivals. Gertrude and Arthur Lymane were being ushered in.