THE WINNING TICKET

THEN came the astonishing turn of fortune’s wheel—that is almost fact, scarcely metaphor—which seemed to transform the whole situation. It came to my knowledge on the very day on which those protracted labors of ours reached a conclusion at last.

We had had a long and tedious final session—for this time there was not only business to wind up, but compliments to be exchanged too—and I came out of it at half-past six in the evening so exhausted that I turned into the nearest cafÉ at which I was known, and procured a whisky-and-soda. With it the waiter brought me a copy of Le Soir, and, as I sipped my “refresher” and smoked a cigar, I glanced through it, hoping (to be candid) to find some complimentary notice of the achievements of my Conference. I did not find that—perhaps it was too soon to expect it—but I did find something which interested me a great deal more. Among the miscellaneous items of “intelligence” I read the following:

“The first prize in yesterday’s draw of the Reparation Lottery Loan has been won by M. Arsenio Valdez of Nice. The amount of the prize is three million francs. The number of the winning ticket was two hundred and twelve thousand, one hundred and twenty-one. We understand that the fortunate winner purchased it for a trifling sum from a chance acquaintance at Monte Carlo.”

I re-read the winning number; indeed, I took my pencil out of my pocket and wrote it down—in figures—on the margin of the newspaper. I believe that I said softly, “Well, I’m damned!” The astonishing creature had brought it off at last, and brought it off to some tune. Three million francs! Pretty good—for anybody except the Frosts of this world, of course!

Aye, Arsenio would buy that ticket from a chance acquaintance (probably one of the same kidney as himself) if he had the coin, or could beg, borrow, or steal it! Number 212, 121! There it was three times over—21—21—21. He would have seemed to himself absolutely mad if he had let that ticket escape him, when chance threw it in his way. It was, indeed, as though Fortune said, “I have teased you long enough, O faithful votary, but I give myself to you at last!” And she had—she actually had. Arsenio’s long quest was accomplished.

What would he do with it, I pondered, as I puffed and sipped. I saw him resplendent again as he had been on that never forgotten Twenty-first, and smiling in monkeyish triumph over all of us who had mocked him for a fool. I even saw him paying back Nina and Godfrey Frost, though possibly this was a detail which might be omitted, as being a distasteful reminder of his days of poverty. I saw him dazzling Lucinda with something picturesquely extravagant, a pearl necklace or a carpet of banknotes—what you will in that line. I heard him saying to her, “Number twenty-one! Always twenty-one. Your number, Lucinda!” And I saw her flushing like a girl just out of the schoolroom, as Godfrey had seen her flush at Nice.

Ah, Godfrey Frost! This event was—to put the thing vulgarly—one in the eye for him, wasn’t it? He had lost his pull; his lever failed him. He could no longer pose, either to himself or to anybody else, as the chivalrous reliever of distress, the indignant friend to starving beauty. And Nina’s gracious, though sadly unappreciated, bounty to a fallen rival—that went by the board too.

These things were to the good; but at the back of my mind there lurked a discontent, even a revolt. Godfrey had proposed to buy Valdez; to buy Lucinda from Valdez, he had meant. Now Arsenio himself would buy her with his winning ticket, coating the transaction with such veneer of romance as might still lie in magic Twenty-one, thrice repeated. One could trust him to make the most of that, skillfully to eke it out to cover the surface as completely as possible. Would it be enough? His hope lay in what that flush represented, the memories it meant, that feeling in her which she herself, long ago, had declared to be hers because she was a primitive woman.

I did not, I fear, pay much attention to the speeches—though I made one of them—at the farewell dinner of our Conference that night; and next day, my first free day, was still filled with the thought of Arsenio and his three million francs; my mind, vacant now of pressing preoccupations, fell a prey to recollections, fancies, images. A restlessness took possession of me; I could not stay in Paris. I was entitled to a holiday; where should I pass it? I did not want to go to Cragsfoot; I had had enough of the Riviera. (There was possibly a common element, ungallant towards a certain lady and therefore not explicitly confessed to myself, in my reluctance to turn my steps in either of those directions.) Where should I go? Something within me answered—Venice!

Why not? Always a pleasant place for a holiday in times of peace; and one read that “peace conditions” were returning; the pictures, and so on, were returning too, or being dug up, or taken out of their sandbags. And the place was reported to be quite gay. Decidedly my holiday should be passed at Venice.

Quite so! And a sporting gamble on my knowledge of Arsenio, of his picturesque instinct, his eye for a situation! As a minor attraction, there were the needy aristocrats, his father’s old set, whom he had been wont to “touch” in days of adversity; it would be fine to flaunt his money in their eyes; they would not sniff, Frost-like, at three million francs. Here I felt even confident that he would speak gracefully of repayment, though with care not to wound Castilian pride by pressing the suggestion unduly. But the great thing would be the association, the memory, the two floors at the top of the palazzo. Surely she would go there with him if she would go anywhere? Surely there, if anywhere, she would come back to him? That, beyond all others, was the place to offer the pearl necklace, to spread the carpet of bank notes. If the two were to be found anywhere in the world together, it would be at Venice, at the palazzo.

So to Venice I went—on an errand never defined to myself, urged by an impulse, a curiosity, a longing, to which many things in the past united to give force, which the present position sharpened. “I must know; I must see for myself.” That feeling, which had made me unable to rest at Villa San Carlo, now drove me to Venice. Putting money in my pocket and giving my Paris bankers the name of my hotel, I set out, on a road the end of which I could not see, but which I was determined to tread, if I could, and to explore.

In spite of my “facilities”—I had them again, and certainly this time Lady Dundrannan, if she knew my errand, would not have offered to secure them—my journey was slow, and interrupted at one point by a railway strike. When I arrived at my hotel on the Grand Canal—Arsenio’s palazzo was just round the corner by water, to be reached by land through a short but tortuous network of alleys with a little high stone bridge to finish up the approach to its back door—a telegram had been waiting forty-eight hours for me, forwarded from Cragsfoot by way of Paris. In it Waldo told me of Aunt Bertha’s death; influenza had swooped down on the weakened old body, and after three days’ illness made an end. It was hopeless to think of getting back in time for the funeral; I could have done it from Paris; I could not from Venice. I despatched the proper reply, and went out to the Piazza. My mind was for the moment switched off from what I had come about; but I thought more about Sir Paget than about poor old Aunt Bertha herself. He would be very lonely. Would Briarmount allay his loneliness?

It was about eleven o’clock on a bright sunny morning. They were clearing away the protective structures that had been erected round the buildings—St. Mark’s, the Ducal Palace, the new Campanile. I sat in a chair outside Florian’s and watched. There on that fine morning the war seemed somehow just a bad dream—or, rather, a play that had been played and was finished; a tragedy on which the curtain had fallen. See, they were clearing away the properties, and turning to real ordinary life again. So, for a space, it seemed to a man seduced by beauty into forgetfulness.

They came and went, men, women and children, all on their business and their recreations; there were soldiers too in abundance, some draggled, dirty, almost in rags, some tidy, trim and new, but all with a subtle air of something finished, a job done, comparative liberty at least secured; even the prisoners—several gangs of them were marched by—had that same air of release about them. Hawkers plied their wares—women mostly, a few old men and young boys; baskets were thrust under my nose; I motioned them away impatiently. I had traveled all night, and uncomfortably, with little sleep. Here was peace; I wanted peace; I was drowsy.

Thus, half as though in a dream, half as if it were an answer to what my mood demanded,—beauty back into the world, that was it—she came across the Piazza towards the place where I sat. Others sat there too—a row of them on my left hand; I had taken a chair rather apart, at the end of the row. She wore the little black frock—the one she had worn at Ste. Maxime, the one Godfrey had seen her in at Cimiez, or the fellow of it. On her left arm hung an open basket; it was full of fine needlework. I saw her take out the pieces, unfold them, wave them in the air. She found customers; distant echoes of chaff and chaffering reached my ears. From chair to chair she passed, coming nearer to me always.

I had upon me at this moment no surprise at seeing her, no wonder why she, wife of the now opulent Don Arsenio Valdez, was hawking fine needlework on the Piazza. The speculation as to the state of affairs, with which my mind had been so insatiably busy, did not now occupy it. I was just boyishly wrapped up in the anticipation of the joke that was going to happen—that must happen unless—horrible thought!—she sold out all her stock before she got to me. But no! She smiled and joked, but she stood out for her price. The basket would hold out—surely it would!—As she came near, I turned my head away—absorbed in the contemplation of St. Mark’s—just of St. Mark’s!

I felt her by me before she spoke. Then I heard, “Julius!” and a little gurgle of laughter. I turned my head with an answering laugh; her eyes were looking down at my face with their old misty wonder.

“You here! I can’t sit down by you here. I’ll walk across the Piazzetta, along to the quay. Follow me in a minute. Don’t lose sight of me!”

“I don’t propose to do that,” I whispered back, as she swung away from me. I paid my account, and followed her some fifty yards behind. I did not overtake her till we were at the Danieli Hotel. “Where shall we go to talk?” I asked.

“Once or twice I’ve done good business on the Lido. There’s a boat just going to start. Shall we go on board, Julius?”

I agreed eagerly and followed her on to the little boat. She set me down in the bows, went off with her basket, and presently came back without it. “I’ve left it with the captain,” she explained; “he knows me already, and will take care of it for me. No more work to-day, since you’ve come! And you must give me lunch, as you used to at Ste. Maxime. Somewhere very humble, because I’m in my working clothes.” She indicated the black frock, and the black shawl which she wore over her fair hair, after the fashion of the Venetian girls; I was myself in an uncommonly shabby suit of pre-war tweeds; we matched well enough so far as gentility was concerned. I studied her face. It had grown older, rather sharper in outline, though not lined or worn. And it still preserved its serenity; she still seemed to look out on this troublesome world, with all its experiences and vicissitudes, from somewhere else, from an inner sanctum in which she dwelt and from which no one could wholly draw her forth.

“How long have you been here?” I asked her, as the little steamboat sped on its short passage across to the Lido.

“Oh, about a fortnight or three weeks. I like it, and I got work at once. I’d rather sew than sell, but they sew so well here! And they tell me I sell so well. So selling it mainly is!”

“Then you came before the—the result of the lottery?”

“Oh, you’ve heard about the lottery, have you? From Arsenio, or——?”

“No. I just saw it in the papers.”

The mention of the lottery seemed to afford her fresh amusement, but she said nothing more about it at the moment. “You see, I wanted to come away from the Riviera—never mind why!”

“I believe I know why!”

“How can you? If you’ve not heard from Arsenio!”

“I’ve been in Paris—and there I saw Godfrey Frost.”

“Oh!” The exclamation was long drawn out; it seemed to recognize that my having seen Godfrey Frost might explain a good deal of knowledge on my part. But she went on with her explanation. “Since the air raids have stopped, Arsenio has managed to let one floor of the palazzo—the piano nÓbile; and I suggested to him that I might come and live on the top floor. I’d saved enough money for the journey, and I pay Arsenio rent. I’m entirely independent.”

“As you were at Ste. Maxime—and at Nice—or Cimiez?”

“I believe you do know all about it!”

“Shall I mention a certain blue frock?”

She flushed—for her, quite brightly—and slowly nodded her head. Then she sat silent till we reached the Lido, and had disembarked. Now she seemed unwilling to talk more of her affairs; she preferred to question me on mine. I told her of Aunt Bertha’s death.

“Ah, she liked me once. Poor Sir Paget!” was her only comment. “I think he likes you still,” I suggested. She shook her head doubtfully, and insisted on hearing about what I had been doing in Paris.

It was not till after we had lunched and were sitting drinking our coffee—just as in old days at Ste. Maxime—that I brought her back to her own affairs—to the present position.

“And you’re alone here—on the top floor of the palazzo?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered, smiling. “Alone—alone on the top floor. I came here alone; we had had a quarrel over—over what we’ll call the blue frock. Arsenio promised not to follow me here unless I gave him leave—which I told him I never should do. ‘Oh, yes, you will some day,’ he said; but he gave me the promise. Oh, well, a promise from him! What is it? Of course he’s broken it. He arrived here the day before yesterday. He’s now at the palazzo—on the floor below mine. It’s just like Arsenio, isn’t it?”

She spoke of him with a sharper bitterness than she had ever shown at Ste. Maxime, though the old amusement at him was not entirely obscured by it. Her tone made me—in spite of everything—feel rather sorry for him. The dream of his life—was it to come only half true? Was the half that had come true to have no power to bring the other half with it? However little one might wish him success, or he deserve it, one pang of pity for him was inevitable.

“Well, perhaps he had some excuse,” I suggested. “He was naturally—well, elated. That wonderful piece of luck, you know!”

“Oh, that!” she murmured contemptuously—really as if winning three million francs, on a million to one chance or something like it, was nothing at all to make a fuss about! And that to a man who had spent years of his life, and certainly sacrificed any decency and self-respect that he possessed, in an apparently insane effort to do it.

Her profile was turned to me now; she was looking over the sands towards the Adriatic. I watched her face as I went. “And he won on his favorite number! On twenty-one, three times repeated! That must have seemed to him——” There was no sign of emotion on her face. “Well, he called it your number, didn’t he?”

She knew what I meant, and she turned to me. But now she did not flush like a girl just out of the schoolroom. There was no change of color, no softening of her face such as the flush must have brought with it.

“You’re speaking of a dead thing,” she told me in a low calm voice. “Of a thing that is at last quite dead.”

“It died hard, Lucinda.”

“Yes, it lived through a great deal; it lived long enough—obstinately enough—to do sore wrong to—to other people,—better people than either Arsenio or me; long enough to make me do bad things—and suffer them. But now it’s dead. He’s killed it at last.”

At the moment I found nothing to say. Of course I was glad—no use in denying that. Yet it was grievous in its way. The thing was dead—the thing that so long, through so much, had bound her to Arsenio Valdez. The thing which had begun with the kiss in the garden at Cragsfoot, years ago, was finished.

“He put me to utter shame; he made me eat dirt,” she whispered with a sudden note of passion in her voice. She laid her arm on mine, and rose from her chair. “It spoils my meeting with you to think of it. Come back; I can do some work before it’s dark, and you can go and see him—he’ll be at the palazzo. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be friends with him still.”

“I don’t quite know about that,” I observed cautiously.

“I’m willing enough to be friendly with him, for that matter. But that’s—that’s not enough. Come along, we shall just about catch a boat, I think.”

We began to walk along to the quay where we were to embark.

“So he says he’s going to kill himself!” Lucinda added with a scornful laugh.