“There is a physician near by,” hazarded a sympathetic woman who had crowded into the room. The music had stopped with a crash.
“Summon him at once!” energetically ordered Hawke. “Some brandy—quick!” he cried, listening to her agonized words, “Valerie! My God! It is Valerie herself! My poor sister!” In a few moments an elderly man parted the assembling loiterers. His bustling air of command soon dispelled the loiterers. A woman attendant was bending over the still senseless woman as the spectacled medico seized Alan Hawke’s arm. “Has your wife ever had a previous heart attack?” he gravely asked, as he opened his lancet case. Major Hawke shook his head, and gazed pityingly upon the beautiful pallid face before him.
“Can I be of any use to Monsieur?” demanded the chef d’orchestre in evening grand tenue, his baton still in his hand.
There was a glance of wondering astonishment as the Englishman faced the speaker. “Wieniawski—Casimir, you here?” The other dropped his voice as the physician ripped up the sleeve of the patient’s gown.
“Major Hawke, I thought you were still in Delhi? Your wife—” faltered the artist, as he listened to a low moan when the lancet blade entered the ivory arm of the sufferer. Then, with a backward step, he pressed his hands to his brows. “My God! It is Alixe Delavigne!” he brokenly said. But Hawke sprang to his side and quickly drew him from the room.
“Not a word! Not a single word to any one! Where are you stopping? I will come to you tonight!” the excited man sternly said, his firm hand still clutching the musician’s arm.
“Here, at the Casino! Come in after ten! I will await you! But where did you meet her?” the Polish violinist cried, speaking as if in a dream.
“You shall know all later! I must get her to the hotel!” He returned to the physician’s side, who authoritatively cried, “Now an easy carriage and to the Faucon, you said?” In half an hour, Berthe Louison was sleeping, a nurse at her side, while Alan Hawke counted the moments crawling on till ten o’clock.
CHAPTER III. AND AT DELHI WHAT AM I TO DO?
Major Alan Hawke was the “observed of all observers,” in the cosy salon of the Grand Hotel Faucon, when the sympathetic hotel manager interrupted a colloquy between the handsome Briton and the Doctor. “A mere syncope, my dear sir. Perhaps—even only the result of tight lacing, or inaction. Perhaps some sudden nerve crisis. These are the results of the easy luxury of an enervating high-life. All these social habits are weakening elements. Now, fortunately, your wife has a singularly strong vital nature. You may safely dismiss all your fears. Madame will be entirely herself in the morning.”
“Can I be of any service?” demanded the genial host, secretly urged on by a coterie of curious, womanly sympathizers in silk and muslin.
“I am the trustee of Madame Louison, in some important business matters, and not her husband,” gravely remarked the Major. “I only came up here to confer with her upon some matters of moment.” Both the listeners bowed in silence.
“Then, my dear sir, you can be perfectly reassured,” the physician briskly concluded, tendering his card. “My professional conscience will not allow me to make even a single future visit, as doctor, to the charming Madame Louison. Should Madame awake in other than her normal health and spirits, I should be professionally at fault.”
Major Hawke then led the doctor aside and pressed a five-pound note upon him. “Madame is of a wonderfully strong constitution. An heiress of nature’s choicest favors,” the happy Galen floridly said, as he took his leave.
“So she is,” grimly assented Hawke.
The gossipy boniface was already spreading such meager details of the sudden seizure as he had been able to pick up, and, the words “Polish noblewoman,” “Italian marchesa,” “French countess,” were tossed about freely in the light froth of the conversation in the ladies’ drawing-room.
Meanwhile, Alan Hawke was smoking a meditative cigar alone, while pacing the old Cantonal high road before the Faucon. “I think I will remain on picket here,” he mused. “This fiddler fellow, Wieniawski, must not meet her. She must be led on to leave here at once. Constitution, nerve, aplomb; she has them all. She should have been born a man. What a soldier! One of nature’s mistakes—man’s mental organization, woman’s soft, flooding emotions, and beauty’s fiery passions.”
“I must pump Casimir. He will be safely nailed to the platform by his duties, from eight to ten. I will not leave her a moment, however, till he has the baton in his hand. I will then watch him until ten—meet him down there, and, if he meets her after we separate for the night, he is a smarter Pole than I take him for. And now I must go and frighten her away from here.”
Major Hawke was quick to note all the outer indications of man’s varying fortunes. He had so long buffeted the waves of adversity himself that he was a past master of the art of measuring the depth of a hidden purse. He recalled the brilliant Casimir Wieniawski of eight years past—the curled darling of the hot-hearted ladies of Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Singapore. In a glance of cursory inspection Alan Hawke had noted the doubtful gloss of the dress suit; it was the polish of long wear, not the velvety glow of newness. There was a growing bald spot, scarcely hidden by the Hyperion Polish curls; there were crows’-feet around the bold, insolent eyes, and the man’s smile was lean and wolfish when the glittering white teeth flashed through the professional smirk of the traveling artist. The old, easy assurance was still there, but cognac had dulled the fires of genius; the tones of the violin trembled, even under the weakening but still magic fingers, and the splendid sapphire and diamond cluster ring of old was replaced by a too evident Palais Royal work of inferior art.
“Poor devil! It is the downward fluttering of the wearied eagle!” mused Alan Hawke. “Women, roulette, champagne, and high life—all these past riches fade away into the gloomy pleasures of restaurant cognac, dead-shot absinthe, and the vicarious smiles of a broken soubrette or so! And all the more you can be now dangerous to me, Monsieur Casimir Wieniawski, for the old maneater forgets none of his tricks, even when toothless.”
Casimir, the handsome Pole, glib of tongue, the heir to a thousand minor graces, reckless in outpouring the wine of Life, had truly gone the downward way with all the abandon of his showy, insincere race. Hawke well knew the final level of misery awaiting the wandering, broken-down artist here in a land where really fine music was a mere drug; where the orchestra was only a cheap lure to enhance the cafe addition. The “Professor” was but a minor staff officer of the grim Teutonic Oberkellner of the Brasserie Concert.
“But how shall I muzzle this Robert Macaire of the bow?” cogitated Hawke, as he anxiously eyed the two windows of Madame Louison’s rooms, and then sternly gazed at the open front doors of the Hotel Faucon.
A light broke in upon his brain. “There is the golden lure of the Misses Phenie and Genie Forbes, of Chicago, U. S. A. Those madcap girls will be easily gulled. They arrive to-morrow at nine. A few stage asides, as to the stock romance of every Polish upstart, will do the trick!”
“Russian brutality, fugitive Prince, Siberian wanderings, romantic escape, killed the Russian general who burned his chateau; all that sort of thing will enchant these. This may occupy Casimir and leave me free. When the devil is idle he catches flies, and under the cover
