They sat in the luncheon room at Mont d’Agel, three very hungry but well-satisfied beings, Lord Yeovil, Susan, and Grant. They sipped their aperitifs and waited for their luncheon, “contented but eager,” to use Susan’s own expression.
“The match was a good one,” Grant conceded, “but no Prime Minister has a right to hole out like your father. Lady Susan. Affairs of state and all that sort of thing ought to interfere and make him raise his head.”
“That putt at the sixteenth was sheer robbery,” she agreed.
“An excellent match,” Lord Yeovil declared. “Placing you at scratch, Grant, and Susan at twelve, men’s handicap, the fact that I was able to halve the match against you would seem to indicate my having played somewhere about six. Six is above my form.”
“I think, with the exception of the drive which you sliced from the eighth tee, Dad, and which landed in Italy,” Susan observed, “you were playing better than six.”
“The game has restored my faith in my powers of concentration,” her father announced. “I said to myself, every nation in the world may be at one another’s throats to-morrow, my resignation may be demanded before I return to England, I may march out of Downing Street, bag and baggage, the day of my return, but I will not take my eye off the ball this morning, and I didn’t.”
“Plumb in the centre, every time,” Grant agreed. “Hurray! Here come the hors d’oeuvres!’
“It is not my custom to drink wine in the middle of the day,” Lord Yeovil said, “but I think we must supplement the vin ordinaire a little—Montrachet, perhaps, or Chateau Yquem?”
“This is a terrible start to a strenuous day,” Grant remarked, “To-night I dine with Delilah.”
Susan looked across the table at him a little curiously.
“I am glad that you admit the attraction.”
“I never found any one who knew her and was willing to deny it,” Grant rejoined.
“Quite right,” his host assented. “Thank heavens that I am no longer a young man. I fancy that I should find the Princess irresistible.”
“When I knew her first,” Grant continued reminiscently, “she was a simple American girl, living upon a farm, riding three hours every day, playing a little tennis, doing a little housekeeping. Then she had a season in Washington. After that she became somehow the vogue. A town aunt took her up. It was about that time that Von Diss fell so desperately in love with her.”
“She was a fool to marry him,” Lord Yeovil declared. “Even now, after all these years, a German or an Austrian woman finds it difficult to hold her own. In Berlin the aristocracy, especially, at any rate until about ten years ago, have had a hideous time.”
“There’s a reaction going on now,” Grant reminded him.
“As we well know,” the older man assented. “Chiefly owing, I honestly believe, to that fascinating youth. Prince Frederick. A most charming lad. I only hope that Lutrecht and our dear friend’s husband. Von Diss, and the others of that regime don’t get hold of him and spoil him. By the bye, I am breaking my rule by speaking of such affairs in a public place, and Arthur isn’t here to correct me. I wonder why you are not English, Grant. You would have made a wonderful secretary for me.”
“I’d rather have been an Englishman than belong to any other race, if I hadn’t been an American, sir,” Grant answered. “As it is, I am naturally content.”
“Au revoir to conversation,” his host remarked, watching the approach of their first course. “I now become a glutton. Appetite is, after all, a most entrancing thing.”
“During this regrettable silence of my father’s,” Susan observed, as she helped herself from one of the dishes, “you and I had better exchange a few ideas, Grant. You don’t seem to have had much time for me lately.”
“Dear Lady Susan,” he bemoaned, “the amenities of life have seemed to lie outside the orbit of my jurisdiction the last few days.”
“You always pose as being so busy,” she scoffed. “What do you do with yourself?”
“Solve bridge problems, inspect my crew on the Grey Lady, lose my mille or two, eat, drink, and sleep. It is a most enthralling existence.”
“You seem to have left out a few little things,” she remarked. “There’s the Princess, for instance. I thought that it was rather the object of your life just now to entertain her.”
“Others have shared that task with me,” he replied. “To-night I dine with her. We shall probably be very sentimental. I shall ask her whether she is entirely happy with the man she preferred to me. She will sigh and tears will stand in my eyes as I look through the wall. Then we shall part with a little gulp. I may kiss her fingers and she will go and powder her nose, put on a becoming peignoir and listen for the train. I foresee a sentimental evening.”
“Something has happened to you,” Susan declared. “You used not to be so sentimental, or so cynical.”
“A great deal has happened to me,” he agreed. “In three days’ time, Lady Susan, if you will trust me so far, I will tell you a most entrancing story.”
“And, in the meantime,” she reminded him, a little coldly, “the tears will stand in your eyes, and you will look through the wall, whilst thinking of the woman you have loved.”
“Those things have to be,” he apologised.
“For what purpose?” she demanded. “Where is the necessity? Have you anything to gain, for instance, by flirting with the Princess? Or do you do it to indulge in a sort of sentimental debauch—to go through it and then analyse your feelings? Because—”
She was suddenly silent. She felt that, in a sense, she had betrayed herself. Her father glanced at her across the table. Grant saved the situation.
“You read me like a book. Lady Susan,” he acknowledged. “You always do. As a matter of fact, a passion for diluted psychology of an analytical type stopped my taking honours at Harvard, and will, without a doubt, interfere with my complete success in life. I am hideously curious about little things. Still, I offer no apologies. The Princess has stirred colder hearts than mine.”
“If I were your age,” Lord Yeovil declared, helping himself to omelette unselfishly, and yet with discretion, “there is nothing in this world which would prevent my being in love with the Princess.”
“I am glad that you recognise my difficulties,” Grant said gratefully.
“Experience has such a charm for the very young,” Susan observed, a little sarcastically.
“After all, it’s rather a relief,” Grant observed, looking round the room, “to be free for an hour or two from this little host of intriguers. Here we are with a crowd of strangers, amongst whom I only recognise our very excellent friend Baron Funderstrom, the Scandinavian. None of the others are here. I fancy that this atmosphere is a little too bracing for them. We are in a different world. Intrigue up here is unknown—except the intrigue of cutting in.”
“Dashed annoying intrigue, too, when it comes off,” Lord Yeovil grumbled. “Are you two young people going to play again? Because, I tell you frankly that I am not. I’ll send the car back for you with pleasure. A nap in my study for the next hour or two is the thing which appeals to me most.”
“Just as Lady Susan wishes,” Grant said, looking towards her.
“I should like another round, unless it bores you,” she decided.
Their final round was played in the brilliant declining sunlight of a perfect Riviera afternoon. The wind had dropped and brought no longer icy reminiscences from the snow-clad Alps. The air, though keen, was sweet and laden with the fragrance of the trees in blossom, which fringed the slopes of the hills. More than once they paused to look downwards. Susan was, for her, a little listless.
“I don’t think you’re really enjoying the Riviera this year,” he remarked.
“I’m not sure that I am,” she admitted. “Somehow or other, from the moment we arrived, we seem to have lived in an unfamiliar atmosphere. I can’t explain it. Baron Naga’s death seemed to be part of it. Dad bluffs most beautifully but he is all the time nervous and on edge. You—although I don’t know what you have to do with it all—seem to be living half in this world and half in some other you won’t talk about. Arthur has the air of a man about to commit suicide. The Lancasters are the only normal people, and perhaps that is because they are brainless. What’s it all about, Grant? Have you really lost your head about this old sweetheart of yours? And is there really any cause for Dad to worry? All these politicians who come to call are so delightfully amiable and polite that one can’t realise that they may not be absolutely sincere.”
“I’m not going to try and bluff to you, Lady Susan,” Grant said seriously. “I’m afraid there may be trouble afoot. We can’t quite get to grips with it, but it’s there. We have indications of it, and warnings from all sorts of unsuspected quarters. Personally, I think your father is in a very awkward position. You see the great difficulty is that, however hard he tries, he can’t find out exactly how things really do stand. When the Pact was inaugurated, all the nations started trusting one another. They dropped secret treaties and secret understandings and swept the whole of their Secret Service departments into the four corners of the world,—that is to say, the honest ones did. Consequently, now there’s trouble about, we don’t know where to turn.”
“But you?” she protested. “You’re out of it all. You’re not even English. Why are you so disturbed?”
He smiled as he watched his ball go travelling over a bunker.
“Let it alone, Lady Susan,” he begged. “You’re the one person outside it all. Stop outside for a time. If the trouble comes you will know of it fast enough.”
She was not altogether satisfied.
“Is it my fancy,” she asked, “or am I being treated like some one just emerged from the nursery?”
“My dear Lady Susan,” he pointed out, “it wouldn’t do you a bit of good to be let into your father’s worries or mine. And they very likely don’t amount to anything, after all.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Do you talk like this to the Princess?” she queried.
He smiled.
“I should certainly not tell the Princess the things you are asking me,” he assured her.
“I suppose I am a cat,” Susan reflected, “but I don’t like the Princess.”
“You’ll like her when you know her better,” he ventured.
“I don’t want to know her any better,” she declared. “She seems to me the sort of woman who makes use of people. That’s what I can’t help thinking about you, and her, and Arthur.”
“What use can she make of us?” he asked.
“She wants to get to know things, for the sake of that husband of hers, I suppose. It’s all very well for you, but I do think Arthur ought to be more careful. Father never says much but I fancy he’s thinking a good deal.”
They finished the round almost in silence, and their conversation over tea was negligible. On the way down. Grant was conscious of a sudden fear. Susan, after all, was a creature of impulse. These purgatorial days through which he and the others were passing, meant nothing to her. She might fail to make allowance for them. She was always surrounded by young men, and, for the moment at any rate, she was seriously annoyed with him.
“Lady Susan,” he began.
“Mr. Slattery.”
“I thought it was generally ‘Grant’,” he remonstrated.
“I have heard myself called ‘Susan’,” she reminded him.
“Look here, then, Susan,” he recommenced. “We seem to have got wrong somehow. I don’t like it. I want to be friends.”
“My dear man,” she protested, “have I shown any signs of quarrelling with you?”
“You’re annoyed, and I don’t want you to be.”
“Does it really make any difference?” she asked a little bitterly.
“Of course it does.”
“Do something to please me then, will you?”
“Anything,” he declared, with foolish optimism.
“Don’t dine with that Von Diss woman to-night.”
He was distressed.
“My dear Susan!” he expostulated. “I can’t get out of it.”
“Had you asked her to dine with you or did she invent that on the yacht?”
“She invented it on the yacht,” he admitted. “At the same time I accepted it, and, to tell you the truth, Susan, for certain reasons, I really am anxious to dine with her.”
“The certain reasons being, I suppose, that she may go on making love to you in the flagrant way she did on the yacht.”
“Do you mind whether she does or not?”
“Not in the least,” she declared untruthfully.
“Then it wouldn’t be any use my asking you—”
She turned suddenly towards him with a touch of her old manner.
“You can ask me anything you like, Grant, if only you’ll promise not to dine with her to-night.”
He was half embarrassed, half irritated. She was, after all, such a child.
“Susan,” he begged, “be reasonable.”
“What a horrible suggestion!” she scoffed. “I’ll be reasonable when I’m middle-aged,—when nothing matters. I’m a very foolish person, of course, but it does happen to matter a good deal to me that you insist upon dining with that woman to-night. To prove how unreasonable I am—voila!”
The car had been crawling round the corner of the Square, and Susan jumped lightly onto the footpath. She waved her hand to Grant.
“Thanks so much for the game,” she said. “I’m going to talk to Bobby and Rose.”
She waved her hand once more and started off to join her friends. Grant stopped his car by the pavement.
“Look here, you can’t leave me like that,” he protested. “Your father left you in my care.”
“Can’t help it,” she replied. “You were beginning to bore me, so I had to escape.”
“But how are you getting out to the Villa?” he asked.
“Bobby will take me. Won’t you, Bobby?”
“Rather!” that young man promised. “Push off Grant! You’ve had a pretty good innings, old chap. We haven’t seen anything of Susan all day. Come along! We’ll have mixed vermouths over at the Café de Paris, gamble for half an hour, then we’ll get rid of Rose, and I’ll take you home in a petite voiture.”
“It’s a desperate enterprise, but I accept,” she declared. “Good-by. Grant! Hope you enjoy your dinner.”
“I shall do my best,” he answered, with a little unnecessary emphasis.