The Place of Honeymoons
of the transmitter, but his patience was presently rewarded. The singer
had not yet been found, but the chauffeur of the mysterious car had turned
up ... in a hospital, and perhaps by night they would know everything. The
chauffeur had had a bad accident; the car itself was a total wreck, in a
ditch, not far from Versailles.
"There!" cried Abbott, slamming the receiver on the hook. "What do you say
to that?"
"The chauffeur may have left her somewhere, got drunk afterward, and
plunged into the ditch. Things have happened like that. Abby, don't make a
camel's-hair shirt out of your paint-brushes. What a pother about a
singer! If it had been a great inventor, a poet, an artist, there would
have been nothing more than a two-line paragraph. But an opera-singer, one
who entertains us during our idle evenings--ha! that's a different matter.
Set instantly that great municipal machinery called the police in action;
sell extra editions on the streets. What ado!"
"What the devil makes _you_ so bitter?"
"Was I bitter? I thought I was philosophizing." Courtlandt consulted his
watch. Half after four. "Come over to the Maurice and dine with me
to-morrow night, that is, if you do not find your prima donna. I've an
engagement at five-thirty, and must be off."
"I was about to ask you to dine with me to-night," disappointedly.
"Can't; awfully sorry, Abby. It was only luck that I met you in the
Luxembourg. Be over about seven. I was very glad to see you again."
Abbott kicked a broken easel into a corner. "All right. If anything turns
up I'll let you know. You're at the Grand?"
"Yes. By-by."
"I know what's the matter with him," mused the artist, alone. "Some woman
has chucked him. Silly little fool, probably."
Courtlandt went down-stairs and out into the boulevard. Frankly, he was
beginning to feel concerned. He still held to his original opinion that
the diva had disappeared of her own free will; but if the machinery of the
police had been started, he realized that his own safety would eventually
become involved. By this time, he reasoned, there would not be a hotel in
Paris free of surveillance. Naturally, blond strangers would be in demand.
The complications that would follow his own arrest were not to be ignored.
He agreed with his conscience that he had not acted with dignity in
forcing his way into her apartment. But that night he had been at odds
with convention; his spirit had been that of the marauding old Dutchman of
the seventeenth century. He perfectly well knew that she was in the right
as far as the pistol-shot was concerned. Further, he knew that he could
quash any charge she might make in that direction by the simplest of
declarations; and to avoid this simplest of declarations she would prefer
silence above all things. They knew each other tolerably well.
It was extremely fortunate that he had not been to the hotel since
Saturday. He went directly to the war-office. The great and powerful man
there was the only hope left. They had met some years before in Algiers,
where Courtlandt had rendered him a very real service.
"I did not expect you to the minute," the great man said pleasantly. "You
will not mind waiting for a few minutes."
"Not in the least. Only, I'm in a deuce of a mess," frankly and directly.
"Innocently enough, I've stuck my head into the police net."
"Is it possible that now I can pay my debt to you?"
"Such as it is. Have you read the article in the newspapers regarding the
disappearance of Signorina da Toscana, the singer?"
"Yes."
"I am the unknown blond. To-morrow morning I want you to go with me to the
prefecture and state that I was with you all of Saturday and Sunday; that
on Monday you and your wife dined with me, that yesterday we went to the
aviation meet, and later to the Odeon."
"In brief, an alibi?" smiling now.
"Exactly. I shall need one."
"And a perfectly good alibi. But I have your word that you are in nowise
concerned? Pardon the question, but between us it is really necessary if I
am to be of service to you."
"On my word as a gentleman."
"That is sufficient."
"In fact, I do not believe that she has been abducted at all. Will you let
me use your pad and pen for a minute?"
The other pushed over the required articles. Courtlandt scrawled a few
words and passed back the pad.
"For me to read?"
"Yes," moodily.
The Frenchman read. Courtlandt watched him anxiously. There was not even a
flicker of surprise in the official eye. Calmly he ripped off the sheet
and tore it into bits, distributing the pieces into the various
waste-baskets yawning about his long flat desk. Next, still avoiding the
younger man's eye, he arranged his papers neatly and locked them up in a
huge safe which only the artillery of the German army could have forced.
He then called for his hat and stick. He beckoned to Courtlandt to follow.
Not a word was said until the car was humming on the road to Vincennes.
"Well?" said Courtlandt, finally. It was not possible for him to hold back
the question any longer.
"My dear friend, I am taking you out to the villa for the night."
"But I have nothing...."
"And I have everything, even foresight. If you were arrested to-night it
would cause you some inconvenience. I am fifty-six, some twenty years your
senior. Under this hat of mine I carry a thousand secrets, and every one
of these thousand must go to the grave with me, yours along with them. I
have met you a dozen times since those Algerian days, and never have you
failed to afford me some amusement or excitement. You are the most
interesting and entertaining young man I know. Try one of these cigars."
Precisely at the time Courtlandt stepped into the automobile outside the
war-office, a scene, peculiar in character, but inconspicuous in that it
did not attract attention, was enacted in the Gare de l'Est. Two
sober-visaged men stood respectfully aside to permit a tall young man in a
Bavarian hat to enter a compartment of the second-class. What could be
seen of the young man's face was full of smothered wrath and
disappointment. How he hated himself, for his weakness, for his cowardice!
He was not all bad. Knowing that he was being watched and followed, he
could not go to Versailles and compromise her, uselessly. And devil take
the sleek demon of a woman who had prompted him to commit so base an act!
"You will at least," he said, "deliver that message which I have intrusted
to your care."
"It shall reach Versailles to-night, your Highness."
The young man reread the telegram which one of the two men had given him a
moment since. It was a command which even he, wilful and disobedient as he
was, dared not ignore. He ripped it into shreds and flung them out of the
window. He did not apologize to the man into whose face the pieces flew.
That gentleman reddened perceptibly, but he held his tongue. The blare of
a horn announced the time of departure. The train moved. The two men on
the platform saluted, but the young man ignored the salutation. Not until
the rear car disappeared in the hazy distance did the watchers stir. Then
they left the station and got into the tonneau of a touring-car, which
shot away and did not stop until it drew up before that imposing embassy
upon which the French will always look with more or less suspicion.
CHAPTER VI
THE BIRD BEHIND BARS
The most beautiful blue Irish eyes in the world gazed out at the dawn
which turned night-blue into day-blue and paled the stars. Rosal lay the
undulating horizon, presently to burst into living flame, transmuting the
dull steel bars of the window into fairy gold, that trick of alchemy so
futilely sought by man. There was a window at the north and another at the
south, likewise barred; but the Irish eyes never sought these two. It was
from the east window only that they could see the long white road that led
to Paris.
The nightingale was truly caged. But the wild heart of the eagle beat in
this nightingale's breast, and the eyes burned as fiercely toward the east
as the east burned toward the west. Sunday and Monday, Tuesday and
Wednesday and Thursday, to-day; and that the five dawns were singular in
beauty and that she had never in her life before witnessed the creation of
five days, one after another, made no impression upon her sense of the
beautiful, so delicate and receptive in ordinary times. She was conscious
that within her the cup of wrath was overflowing. Of other things, such as
eating and sleeping and moving about in her cage (more like an eagle
indeed than a nightingale), recurrence had blunted her perception.
Her clothes were soiled and crumpled, sundrily torn; her hair was in
disorder, and tendrils hung about her temples and forehead--thick black
hair, full of purple tones in the sunlight--for she had not surrendered
peacefully to this incarceration. Dignity, that phase of philosophy which
accepts quietly the inevitable, she had thrown to the winds. She had
fought desperately, primordially, when she had learned that her errand of
mercy was nothing more than a cruel hoax.
"Oh, but he shall pay, he shall pay!" she murmured, striving to loosen the
bars with her small, white, helpless hands. The cry seemed to be an
arietta, for through all these four maddening days she had voiced it,--now
low and deadly with hate, now full-toned in burning anger, now broken by
sobs of despair. "Will you never come, so that I may tell you how base and
vile you are?" she further addressed the east.
She had waited for his appearance on Sunday. Late in the day one of the
jailers had informed her that it was impossible for the gentleman to come
before Monday. So she marshaled her army of phrases, of accusations, of
denunciations, ready to smother him with them the moment he came. But he
came not Monday, nor Tuesday, nor Wednesday. The suspense was to her mind
diabolical. She began to understand: he intended to keep her there till he
was sure that her spirit was broken, then he would come. Break her spirit?
She laughed wildly. He could break her spirit no more easily than she
could break these bars. To bring her to Versailles upon an errand of
mercy! Well, he was capable of anything.
The room was large and fairly comfortable, but contained nothing
breakable, having been tenanted at one time by a strenuous lunatic, who
had considerately died after his immediate family and relations had worn
themselves into their several graves, taking care of him. But Eleonora
Harrigan knew nothing of the history of the room while she occupied it.
So, no ghost disturbed her restless slumberless nights, consumed in
watching and listening.
She was not particularly distressed because she knew that it would not be
possible for her to sing again until the following winter in New York. She
had sobbed too much, with her face buried in the pillow. Had these sobs
been born of weakness, all might have been well; but rage had mothered
them, and thus her voice was in a very bad way. This morning she was
noticeably hoarse, and there was a break in the arietta. No, she did not
fret over this side of the calamity. The sting of it all lay in the fact
that she had been outraged in the matter of personal liberty, with no act
of reprisal to ease her immediate longing to be avenged.
Nora, as she stood in the full morning sunlight, was like to gladden the
eyes of all mankind. She was beautiful, and all adjectives applicable
would but serve to confuse rather than to embellish her physical
excellence. She was as beautiful as a garden rose is, needing no defense,
no ramparts of cloying phrases. The day of poets is gone, otherwise she
would have been sung in cantos. She was tall, shapely, deep-bosomed,
fine-skinned. Critics, in praising her charms, delved into mythology and