VIEWS AND WHIMS

SUCH, then, was Lucinda’s state of mind with regard to the matter. Her encounter with Nina at Cimiez had opened her eyes; after that, no evasions or lies from Arsenio could avail to blind her. The keys of the fort had been sold behind her back. The one thing that she had preserved and cherished out of the wreck of her fortunes, out of the sordid tragedy of her relations with her husband, had been filched from her; her proud and fastidious independence had been bartered; Arsenio had sold it; Nina Dundrannan had bought it. It was in effect that wearing of Nina’s cast-off frocks which, long ago at Ste. Maxime, she had pictured, with a smile, as an inconceivable emblem of humiliation. Arsenio had brought her to it, tricked her into it by his “presents” out of his “winnings.”

A point of sentiment? Precisely—and entirely; of a sentiment rooted deep in the nature of the two women, and deep in the history of their lives, in the rivalry and clash that there had been between them and between their destinies. The affair of the blue frock (to sum up the offense under that nickname—there had probably been other “presents”) might be regarded as merely the climax of the indignities which Arsenio had brought upon her—the proverbial last straw. To her it was different in kind from all the rest. In her midinette’s frock, in her Venetian shawl, she could make or sell her needlework contentedly; if on that score Nina felt exultation and dealt out scorn, Nina was wrong; nay, Nina was vulgar, and therefore a proper object for the laughter which had amazed and impressed Godfrey Frost. But she had been made Nina’s dependent, the object of her triumphant contemptuous bounty. That was iron entering her soul, a sharp point piercing to the very heart of it. This deadly stroke at her pride was fatal also to the last of her tenderness for Arsenio. The old tie between them—once so strong, so imperious, surviving so much—was finally broken. She was willing to be friendly—if friendliness can co-exist with undisguised resentment, with a sense of outrage bitter as death itself. But, in truth, how could it?

That same afternoon I made my way to the palazzo, rather a gloomy, ruinous-looking old building, on a narrow side canal, facing across it on to the heavy blank bulk of a convent. This, then, was the scene of “Venice,” of the old romance. To this they had come back—not indeed quite in the manner that I had imagined their return in my musings at Paris, but still, I could not doubt, on his part at least with something of the idea and the impulse which my fancy had attributed to him. How was he now finding—and facing—the situation as it stood?

I climbed up the stone staircase—past the piano nÓbile, now let, as I had learnt, past another apartment al secondo—to the third floor. There I knocked. The door was opened by a small wizened man, dressed in seedy black. He looked like a waiter or a valet, run to seed. I asked for Valdez. Yes, Monsieur was in, and would no doubt see Monsieur. He himself was Monsieur Valdez’s servant—might he take my hat and stick? He talked while he did it; he had come with Monsieur from the Riviera—from Nice; he had been—er—in the same business establishment with Monsieur at Nice before—before Monsieur’s great coup. In fact—here he smiled proudly and detained me in the passage, laying one grimy finger on my arm—Monsieur considered him a mascot; it was from him that Monsieur had purchased ticket 212,121. Imagine that! “A pity you didn’t keep it!” said I. He just shrugged his shoulders, a weary smile acquiescing in that bit of bad luck. “However, Monsieur is very good to me,” he ended as he—at last—opened an inner door. Apparently Monsieur’s wonderful luck gave him a sort of divinity in a fellow-gambler’s eyes.

I found myself in a long narrow room, with three windows facing on the canal and the convent. The furniture was sparse, and looked old and rickety, but it had the remains of elegance; only a small rug or two mitigated the severity of the stone floor; one could see by dirty marks where pictures had once hung on the walls, but they hung there no more; altogether a depressing apartment.

Arsenio Valdez was sitting at a big bureau between two of the windows, with his back towards the door. He turned round a dreary-looking face as he heard my entrance. But the moment he saw who I was, he sprang up and greeted me warmly, with evident pleasure. He even held my hand while I accounted for my presence as best I could. I had a holiday, I thought that perhaps the change in his fortunes would bring him back to Venice, and I couldn’t resist the chance of congratulating him. I tried to make a joke of the whole business, and ended by squeezing his hand and felicitating him anew on his magnificent luck. “It took my breath away when I read it in the papers,” I said.

“Oh, but I knew, I knew!” he declared, as he led me to where a couple of armchairs were placed by a small table in the third window, and made me sit down. “It was a question of time, only of time. If I could keep afloat, it was bound to come! That was what nobody would believe. People are so queer! And when Louis, that poor little chap who showed you in, offered me the ticket—he worked at that little den in Nice—when he offered me that ticket—well, it was growing dark, and I had to spell out the figures one by one—two one, two one, two one! You see! There it was. I was as certain as if I had the prize in my pocket. Hard luck on him? No—he’d never have won with it—though the little fool may think he would. That number would never have won except for me. It was my number—and again my number—and once again!”

He poured this out in a torrent of excited triumph, every bit of him from top to toe full of movement and animation. It was a great vindication of himself, of his faith, that he was putting before the skeptic’s eyes. He stood justified by it in all that he had done and suffered, in all that he had asked others to do and to endure. He was more than justified. It was a glorification of him, Arsenio Valdez, who had never doubted or faltered, who had pursued Fortune for years, unwearied, undaunted. He had caught her by the mantle at last. VoilÀ! He ended with a last tumultuous waving of both his hands.

“Well, you’re entitled to your crow, old chap,” I said, “even if it doesn’t alter the fact that you were a damned fool.”

“Ah, you never had any poetry, romance, imagination in you!” he retorted, now with his old mocking smile. “You haven’t got it, you Rillingtons—neither you, nor yet Waldo. That was why I——” He stopped, looking monkeyish.

“Why Twenty-one became your lucky number? Exactly; I remember the day very well myself. By the way, I ought to tell you that I’ve already seen Lucinda.”

He listened to a brief account of our meeting and excursion in silence, seeming to watch my face keenly. “You and she have always been very good friends,” he remarked thoughtfully at the end. He seemed to be considering—perhaps whether to take me into his confidence, to consult me. I did not, of course, feel entitled—or inclined!—to tell him of the confidences that Lucinda had reposed in me.

“Meanwhile,” I observed, “beyond acquiring a manservant——”

“Louis? Oh, well, I should have been a fool not to keep him about me, shouldn’t I?”

“Yes! Didn’t Roman Generals at their triumphs carry a slave along, whose business it was to remind them that they were mortal? If you look at the unfortunate Louis from that point of view——”

“That fellow will bring me luck again,” he asserted positively and seriously.

“Rot! What I was going to say was that you don’t seem to have launched out much on the strength of your three millions.” I cast a glance round the faded room.

He jerked his head towards the big bureau at which I had found him seated. “The money’s all in there. I haven’t touched a penny of it. I shan’t—just yet.” Again he was watching me; he was, I think, wondering how much Lucinda had said to me. “I’ve got a tenant for the first floor, and get along on the rent of that. And Lucinda——” He gave what may be called an experimental smile, a silent “feeler”——“Well, she persists in her whim, as you’ve seen. Whatever may be said of it down at Nice, it’s purely a whim now, isn’t it?”

“Whims are powerful things with women,” I remarked. And platitudes are often useful conversational refuges.

He sat frowning for a minute, with the weary baffled air that his face had worn before he caught sight of me. “Perhaps you don’t care for such a short let, but, if it suits you, I’ll take the second floor for a month certain,” I continued.

In an instant his face lit up. “You, Julius! Why, that’s splendid! You’ll have to rough it a bit; but Louis will look after you. He’s really very good. Will you actually do it?”

“Of course I will—and glad to get it.”

“Well now, that is good!”

I knew that he was friendly towards me, but this seemed an excess of pleasure. Besides, his face, lately so weary and dreary, had assumed now the monkey smile which I knew so well—the smile it wore when he was “doing” somebody, getting the better of somebody by one of his tricks. But whom could he be doing now? Me? Lucinda? We two seemed the only possible victims. That we were victims—that we fitted into his plan—appeared clear, later on. But it was a mistake to suppose that we only were concerned. His next words enlightened me as to that.

“I should be most delighted to have you for a neighbor, under my roof, in any case. I’m sure you know that. Oh, yes, I’m grateful to you. You might have cut me! I know it. But you’ve taken a broad view. You’ve allowed for the heart—though not for the imagination, for the certainties that lie beyond probability. Besides all that—which I feel deeply—by taking that floor you relieve me of a little difficulty.”

“I’m glad to hear it. How’s that?”

“Since I came here, I have naturally paid some visits among my old friends. You smile! Oh, yes, I’m human enough to like congratulations. Some of them are people of rank, as you know—you used to chaff me about my grandees! Their names appear in the papers—those society paragraphs—the Paris editions of American papers—Oh, my Lord! My name appeared—an item—‘Don Arsenio Valdez has returned to Palazzo Valdez!” He rose, went to the big bureau, and came back with a telegram. “Received to-day,” he added, as he put it into my hands.

I read it, looked across at him, and laughed. It was what I had expected; the only surprise was that Godfrey had taken rather long to track them. Scruples still obstinate, perhaps!

“So he wants to take an apartment in your palazzo, does he?”

“I’ve been under some obligations to him; it would be difficult to refuse. We’re good friends, but—I didn’t want him here. It wouldn’t be—convenient.” Now he was looking furtive and rather embarrassed, as if he were uncertain how much truth and how much lie he had better administer to me.

“I saw him in Paris,” I remarked, “the other day, and from what he said it seemed that he’d made very good friends both with you and with your wife.”

He smiled; having no such shame as ordinary mortals have, he accepted exposure easily. He relapsed into the truth quite gracefully. “I don’t know how the devil Lucinda feels about him,” he confessed. “I wish he wouldn’t come at all, but I can’t help that. At all events he needn’t be in the house with us now!”

“Have you any reason to suppose she doesn’t like him?” I asked.

His restlessness returned, and with it his dreary look. He got up and began to wander about the long room, fingering furniture and ornaments, then drifting back to me at the window, and the next moment away again. Suddenly, from the other end of the room, he came out with, “What have they told between them? Godfrey at Paris, and Lucinda here to-day?”

“Well, pretty nearly everything, I fancy. If you mean the money and Nina Dundrannan, and so forth. He described that meeting at Cimiez, for example.”

“Yes, they’ve told you everything—everything that matters. Well, what do you think?”

“If we’re to be friends, I’d sooner not offer an opinion.”

He flashed out at me. “There’s your code—your damned code! Didn’t I learn it in England? Didn’t I have it literally drubbed into me—thrashed into me—at school? And you keep it even when you love a woman!”

“H’m! Not always in that case, I’m afraid, Arsenio.”

“If you ever do love a woman,” he went on contemptuously. “For my part, I don’t believe any of you know how!” He came to a stand before me. “Why didn’t Waldo come after me and shoot me through the head?”

“There was the greatest difficulty in stopping him, I honestly assure you. But the war came, you know, and it was his duty——”

“His duty! Oh, my Lord, his duty!” He positively groaned at the point of view. “I give you my word, if he had come after me, I would have never returned his fire. I would have bared my breast—so!” A rapid motion of his hands made as though to tear the clothes from his chest; it was a very dramatic gesture. “But when he didn’t come—pooh!”

“He was fighting for his country,” I suggested mildly.

“And even you might have taken up the quarrel with great propriety,” he said gravely.

“I apologize for not having shot you. Try not to be such an ass, Arsenio.”

“You and he can sit down under such an affront as I put on you and your family, and shelter yourselves under duty. Duty! But up go your noses and down go your lips when I, adoring the adorable, milk a couple of vulgar millionaires of a few pounds to make her happy, splendid, rich as she ought to be. Yes, yes, about that you—offer no opinion! And these people—my dupes, eh?”

“The word’s rather theatrical—as you’re being, Arsenio. But let it pass.”

“Oh, yes, theatrical! I know! If a man doesn’t love just like, and no more than, a bull, in England, he’s theatrical. Well, what about my dupes? The woman with her moneybags, meanly revengeful—Ah, you give her up to me! You haven’t a word to say, friend Julius! And the young man? Let us forgive the good God for creating the young man! He would buy my wife! Ah, would he? And buy her cheap! All I’ve had of him would perhaps buy her a fur coat! For the rest, he relied on his fascinations. Cheaper than cash! I would have cashed a million pounds and flung them at her feet!”

“But that’s just as vulgar,” I protested, rather weakly. I was a little carried away by Arsenio’s eloquence; it was at least a point of view which I had not sufficiently considered.

“Not from him! It would be giving what he loves best!” He laughed in a bitter triumph, then suddenly flung himself down into his chair again. “I had ten louis left—five of hers, five of his. With hers I bought the ticket; on his I starved till the draw came. Am I not revenged on the woman who would humiliate my wife, on the man who would buy the honor of Donna Lucinda Valdez?”

“It’s about the oddest kind of revenge I ever heard of,” was all I found to say. “You’ll complete it, I suppose, by dazzling Godfrey, when he arrives, with the spectacle of Luanda’s virtuous splendor? Or is he to find her still selling needlework on the Piazza?”

He leant across the little table and laid his hand on my arm. I imagined that it must be the table at which Lucinda had once sat, mending her gloves—most skillfully no doubt, for had she not proved herself a fine needlewoman?

“You too are against me?” he asked in a low voice. “Bitterly against me, Julius?”

“Once you took her—yes, here. Then you forsook her. Then you took her again. And you’ve dragged her in the dirt.”

“But now I can——!”

“That to her would be dirt too,” I said. “I suppose she won’t touch that money? That’s why she’s still peddling her wares on the Piazza?”

He made a despairing gesture of assent with his hands—despairing, uncomprehending. Then he raised his head and said proudly, “But if she doesn’t yet understand, I shall make her!” Then, with a sudden change of manner, he added, “And you’ll move into the floor below to-morrow? That’s capital! You might ask us both to dinner—give a housewarming! Louis will look after your marketing and cooking.”

“With the greatest of pleasure,” I agreed, but with some surprise. It would have seemed more natural in him to invite me on the first night.

He saw my surprise; what didn’t he see when he exercised his wits?

“It must be that way; because she never comes into my apartment,” he said, but now quietly, cheerfully, as if he were mentioning another of those whims which are so powerful with women.