"Leave them for a few days. Leave them to your managers. Stay here and amuse me."
Larssen knew when to give way--or seem to give way--and how to do so gracefully.
"I"ll stay on without asking any conditions," he answered with flattering cordiality. "It"s not often I get a command so pleasant to carry out!"
CHAPTER XI
A LETTER FROM RIVIeRE
Olive made good her promise at once. She packed her father back to England the very next day, to get to work on the Hudson Bay flotation, and Lars Larssen remained on at Monte Carlo.
Though he had led Olive to believe that he had given in merely to please her, yet his true motive was very different. His feelings towards her held no sc.r.a.p of pa.s.sion in them. He knew her as vain, shallow, feverishly pleasure-seeking--a glittering dragon-fly. As a woman she made no appeal to him. But as a tool to serve in the attaining of his ambitions, she might conceivably be highly useful.
His true motive in remaining at Monte Carlo was double-edged--to bring Olive into the orbit of his fascination, and to mark time until the mystery of John Riviere had been set at rest.
John Riviere worried him. Deep down in his being was a keen intuitive feeling that this mysterious half-brother of the dead man was in some way linked up with the attainment of his ambitions--to help or to hinder.
Why had he not come to Monte Carlo as arranged? Why had he sent no line to Olive to excuse himself? Why had he made no further inquiry about Clifford Matheson--or had he indeed made some inquiry which might set him on the track of his brother"s disappearance?
It was vital to know how matters stood with this John Riviere before he could march forward unhesitatingly with the Hudson Bay flotation.
The result of the advertis.e.m.e.nts in the Paris newspapers was annoying.
Where the shipowner had hoped for one answer--or perhaps a couple pointing in the same direction--over a dozen had been received. This meant waste of precious time while Sylvester unravelled them. Over the "phone Larssen and his secretary had discussed the various answers; rejected some of them; wired for confirmatory details in respect of others. Provincial hotel-keepers and railway guards were so keenly "on the make" that they were ready to swear to ident.i.ty on the slenderest basis of fact.
In pursuit of two of the clues, Sylvester travelled as far north as Valognes in the Cotentin, and as far east as Gerardmer in the Hautes-Vosges. Both journeys were fruitless, and worse than fruitless--waste of precious time and energy.
While Larssen waited eagerly for definite news from his secretary with whom he kept constantly in touch by telegram, news came in unexpected fashion through Olive.
"I"ve just heard from Riviere," she announced. "He"s at Arles--down with a touch of fever. That"s the reason he hadn"t written before. Those scientist people are terribly casual in social matters."
"May I see the letter?" asked Lars Larssen. His reason for asking was a desire to study the man"s handwriting and draw conclusions from it. He was a keen student of handwriting.
After he had read through the note he remarked drily: "I guess I can give you another reason."
"For his not writing?"
"Yes.... _Cherchez la femme._"
"Why do you say that?"
"This note was written by a woman."
"It"s a very decided hand for a woman."
"Yes it is. I"d stake big on that. Look at the long crossings to the t"s. Look at the way the date is written. Look at the way words run into one another."
Olive examined the letter carefully, and laughed. "You"re right," said she. "He"s travelling with some woman. Those men who are supposed to be wrapped up in their scientific experiments--you can"t trust them far!"
Then she added with a curious touch of conscious virtue: "But he"d no right to get that woman to send a letter to _me_."
Larssen had noted the printed heading to the letter, "Hotel du Forum, Arles," and he wired at once to Morris Sylvester to proceed to Arles and hunt out further details. It seemed an unnecessary precaution, but the shipowner never neglected the tiniest detail when he had a big scheme to engineer.
His relief at the letter proved short-lived. Late that night came a message from Sylvester:--
"Riviere not at Arles and not down with fever. Am following up further clues. Will wire again in the morning."
Larssen did not show this wire to Olive. He had told her nothing of his search for Riviere--had not even appeared specially interested in him.
But in point of fact his interest in the mysterious half-brother of the dead man was steadily growing with every fresh check to the search. The intuition on which he placed such firm faith told him insistently that John Riviere was a factor vital to the fulfilment of his ambitions.
All the morning he looked for the telegram his secretary was to send him. It came in the early afternoon:--
"Have found Riviere under extraordinary circ.u.mstances. Letter and photograph follow."
CHAPTER XII
THE SECOND MEETING
Europe"s beauty-spots of to-day were the beauty-spots of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago. Wherever the traveller around Europe now reaches a place that makes instant appeal; where harsh winds are screened away and blazing sunshine filters through feathery foliage; where all Nature beckons one to halt and rest awhile--there he is practically certain to find Roman remains. The wealthy Romans wintered at Nice and Cannes and St Raphael; took the waters at Baden-Baden and Aix in Savoy; made sporting centres of Treves on the Moselle and Ronda in Andalusia; dallied by the marble baths of Nimes.
Nimes had captured Riviere at sight. His first day in that leisured, peaceful, fragrant town, nestling amongst the hills against the keen _mistral_, had decided him to settle there for some weeks. He had taken a couple of furnished rooms in a villa with a delightful old-world garden. For a lengthy stay he much preferred his own rooms to the transiency and restlessness of a hotel, and at the Villa Clementine he had found exactly what he required. The living-room opened wide to the sun. One stepped out from its French windows into the garden, where a little pebbly path led one wandering amongst oleanders and dwarf oranges and flaming cannas, to a corner where a tiny fountain made a home for lazy goldfish floating in placid contentment under the hot sun.
Here there was an arbour wreathed in gentle wisteria, where Riviere took breakfast and the mid-day meal. At nightfall a chill snapped down with the suddenness of the impetuousness Midi, and his evening meal was accordingly taken indoors.
Besides this little private preserve of his own, there was the beautiful public garden of Nimes--called the Jardin de la Fontaine--draping a hillside that looks down upon the marble baths of the Romans, almost as freshly new to-day as two thousand years ago. A thick battalion of trees at the summit of the hillside makes stubborn insistence to the northern _mistral_, so that even when the wind tears over the plains of Provence like a wild fury, scourging and freezing, the Jardin de la Fontaine is serene and windless. The _mistral_ goes always with a cloudless sky, as though the clouds were fleeing from its icy keenness, and the sun pours full upon the semi-circle of the Jardin de la Fontaine, turning it to a hothouse where the most delicate plants and shrubs can find a home.
Here men and women in toga and flowing draperies have whiled away leisure hours, spun day-dreams, made love, or schemed affairs of state and personal ambition. To-day, it is still the resort of Nimes where everyone meets everyone else, either by design or by the chance intercourse of a small town.
On a morning of _mistral_, Riviere was seated in the pleasant warmth of the Jardin, planning out a special piece of apparatus for his coming research-work. He was concentrating intently--so intently that he did not notice Miss Verney pa.s.sing him with a very professional-looking campstool, easel and sketch-book.
This second encounter was pure accident. Elaine had no intentions whatever of following the man who had left Arles with such boorish brusqueness, without even the conventional good-bye at the breakfast-table. She had come to Nimes because she was a worker, because this town contained special material necessary to her bread-winning.
She had guessed that Riviere"s hurried departure from Arles was made in order to avoid meeting her. It hurt. Woman-like, she set more value on a few pleasant words of farewell over a breakfast-table and a warm handshake than on a defence from a.s.sault at the risk of a man"s life.
The seeming illogicality of woman is of course a mere surface illusion.
It hides a train of reasoning very different to a man"s. It is a mental short-cut like an Irishman"s "bull," which condenses a whole chain of thought into a single link.
In this case Elaine knew that Riviere"s rescue held no personal significance. He did not know at the time that it was _she_ who was being attacked. He would have gone to the defence of any woman under similar circ.u.mstances. While altruism appealed to her strongly in a broad, general way, it did not appeal when it came home in such a specific, individual fashion.
On the other hand, a warm handshake at the breakfast-table would have its personal significance. It would be a homage to herself, and not to women in general. Its value would lie in its personal meaning.
While she knew this thought was ungenerous, yet at the same time she knew that behind it there lay a sound basis of reason.
Her pride--that form of pride which is a very wholesome self-respect--made her flush at the thought that Riviere would see her and imagine, in a man"s way, that she had followed him to Nimes. She hurried on past him with a rapid side-glance. The situation was an awkward one. She had her work to do by the old Roman baths and the Druid"s Tower on the hillside, and she could not leave Nimes without doing it.