I’d like to know,” he whispered, “is just this. How do I stand with the boys? You could tell me, Prince. Don’t mind giving me a bit of a scare, if it’s coming to me. I just want to know.”
Savonarilda tapped a cigarette upon the table and lit it. To all appearance he was sublimely indifferent to the gossip of the little group from whose circle they had slightly withdrawn their chairs. All the time, however, from under his veiled eyelids he was watching—and listening.
“I think you’re all right, Luke,” he replied. “They didn’t like your quitting, of course. But we’ve quit ourselves now, so you were only anticipating. The game was getting too dangerous and you were never a fighting man, were you?”
“I never pretended to be,” Luke Cheyne reminded his companion. “That wasn’t my part of the show. Tell me, then—it seems odd to be calling you Prince—you think I’m all right to stick on here? They’re not sore with me?”
“You’re all right to stick on here till doomsday,” Savonarilda drawled, “even if some of the others are having a look at Europe. That doesn’t mean that they’re here on serious business. You should sleep at night, Luke. No one has anything against you.”
Luke Cheyne called for another drink. His spirits had risen visibly. He responded with alacrity when Lord Bradley beckoned him to draw his chair a little closer.
“We’re all wondering,” the latter observed, “how long it would take a disciplined band of criminals, such as you have on the other side, Mr. Cheyne, to break down the police of this country as they seem to have done in the States. Those little pets in the gay uniforms outside, for instance, I wonder how some cold shooting in the streets would strike them.”
“You may get it,” Cheyne rejoined grimly, “and then you’ll find out. The profession is becoming overcrowded in New York and Chicago and I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear any day that a band of American crooks had made this place their headquarters. Did you read about that Englishman who disappeared last week in Marseilles?”
“Nothing in that,” Terence Brown intervened, breaking off his conversation with Lady Julia. “He was a poor man and he wouldn’t have been worth robbing.”
“That just shows you don’t read your own newspapers,” Luke Cheyne replied. “In this morning’s Eclaireur they announced that he had been paid over seven hundred thousand francs for a big land deal the day he disappeared and there is not a trace of the money in either of his banks.”
“Personally,” Lady Julia remarked, “I can’t think why Monte Carlo is such a law-abiding place. With all the money there is about, I shouldn’t be surprised any day to hear of one of you rich people being murdered in his bed.”
“We don’t carry our wealth about with us,” Bradley pointed out. “You women always have your jewellery in evidence. I would sooner insure a millionaire’s life than that of a woman who wears such diamonds as yours.”
She made a little grimace.
“How horrid of you,” she exclaimed. “You’ve probably spoilt my night’s sleep. Anyway, I’m not one of those careless women who leave their things all over the dressing table. I keep—”
She paused. Terence Brown had struck the table in front of him lightly but firmly so that the glasses jingled. He leaned toward her.
“Lady Julia,” he begged, “do please forgive a hint from an elderly person of experience. Don’t talk about what you do with your jewellery.”
“I suppose you are right,” she admitted. “Still, we are all friends here.”
“That doesn’t amount to much,” Luke Cheyne observed. “It’s generally our friends that rob us.”
“The point of the matter is this,” Savonarilda explained. “We happen to be all friends at this particular table, but there are others in the room and unless I’m very much mistaken one or two of them, at any rate, are listening to what we are talking about. This is a club in name only, you must remember. Even murderers belong to clubs and all they have to do here is to plank down their hundred francs.”
“And yet the trouble I had,” Lady Julia sighed, “to get my dear little protégée from Prétat’s a carte. First she was too young, then they objected to her because she has done a stroke or two of work now and then in the Principality and then, at last,—”
Lady Julia never finished her sentence. There was a little chorus of welcoming exclamations from the table. Every one was waving their hands and calling to a tall, sunburnt young man who had just entered the room.
“Why, it’s Roger!” Lady Julia exclaimed.
“Roger Sloane, by all that’s amazing!” Terence Brown called out.
The young man came up to them, smiling pleasantly. He was overwhelmed with greetings. A valet brought him a chair, another a glass. Lady Julia, who was his aunt, presented her cheeks. Every one else insisted upon being shaken hands with. Maggie Saunders passed her arm through his and clasped it.
“The only man I ever cared for,” she cried, “and he went away like that—” she snapped her fingers. “Vanished! Over a year ago. Not a line. Not a word. People last season got tired of asking one another—what’s become of Roger?”
“Quite right,” Terence Brown agreed. “Give an account of yourself, young man.”
“There have been several most alarming rumours,” Lady Julia sighed.
“One,”’ Savonarilda observed, “was that you had murdered a peasant near your villa and been obliged to go into hiding.”
“After having abducted his daughter,” some one else murmured.
“Your character would have been torn to shreds,” Lady Julia declared, “if I had not been here to protect you. Still—what did happen?”
Roger drank his wine and smiled upon them. He was looking a trifle older but the slight lines in his face were not unbecoming. He had lost all signs of easy living.
“I got rather fed up with the life here,” he explained. “One day Erskine, Pips Erskine—some of you know him, I expect; he was at Oxford with me—came along, also at a loose end. We had a night in Nice together and I suddenly felt that this atmosphere was too enervating for me to stick it any longer. Pips and I left for England a few days later by a steamer that was going direct from Monaco to London. We were going to the States after that, but Pips had to go back to Ceylon to settle things up there and I went back with him. He’d been tea planting there, poor devil. Pretty sick he must have been of it. Afterwards we went on to India and wound up in Abyssinia.”
“Good sport?” Bradley asked.
“Wonderful, and every sort of it,” Roger replied. “Snipe shooting between Colombo and Kandy, and a couple of tigers and several cheetah up North. In India I had some of the most marvellous duck shooting and three days of driven peacock. Beats all your pheasants. Then I had some good days after tiger at Hyderabad. Abyssinia was difficult and the climate pretty beastly, but I didn’t do so badly there.”
“Well, it’s good to see you back again, anyway,” Lady Julia declared.
“Where are you staying?” Terence Brown asked.
“Pips and I are both staying here for a day or two,” Roger answered. “We picked up the Franconia at Port Said and she brought us to the door. The villa will want restaffing, so I shan’t be able to go there for a few days.”
“Any work?” Bradley asked. “I could do with a good strong serial for one of my North Country papers.”
“My stuff wouldn’t suit you,” Roger assured him. “Altogether too high class! Besides, I’m beginning to lose faith in serialisation. Seems to take the gilt off the gingerbread, somehow or other.”
“You’ll refuse my good money?” Bradley grumbled.