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Hunterleys dined alone at a small round table, set in a remote corner of the great restaurant attached to the Hotel de Paris. The scene around him was full of colour and interest. A scarlet-coated band made wonderful music. The toilettes of the women who kept passing backwards and forwards, on their way to the various tables, were marvellous; in their way unique. The lights and flowers of the room, its appointments and adornments, all represented the last word in luxury. Everywhere was colour, everywhere an almost strained attempt to impress upon the passerby the fact that this was no ordinary holiday resort but the giant pleasure-ground of all in the world who had money to throw away and the capacity for enjoyment. Only once a more somber note seemed struck when Mrs. Draconmeyer, leaning on her husband's arm and accompanied by a nurse and Lady Hunterleys, passed to their table. Hunterleys' eyes followed the little party until they had reached their destination and taken their places. His wife was wearing black and she had discarded the pearls which had hung around her neck during the afternoon. She wore only a collar of diamonds, his gift. Her hair was far less elaborately coiffured and her toilette less magnificent than the toilettes of the women by whom she was surrounded. Yet as he looked from his corner across the room at her, Hunterleys realised as he had realised instantly twelve years ago when he had first met her, that she was incomparable. There was no other woman in the whole of that great restaurant with her air of quiet elegance; no other woman so faultless in the smaller details of her toilette and person. Hunterleys watched with expressionless face but with anger growing in his heart, as he saw Draconmeyer bending towards her, accepting her suggestions about the dinner, laughing when she laughed, watching almost humbly for her pleasure or displeasure. It was a cursed mischance which had brought him to Monte Carlo!
Hunterleys hurried over his dinner, and without even going to his room for a hat or coat, walked across the square in the soft twilight of an unusually warm February evening and took a table outside the Café de Paris, where he ordered coffee. Around him was a far more cosmopolitan crowd, increasing every moment in volume. Every language was being spoken, mostly German. As a rule, such a gathering of people was, in its way, interesting to Hunterleys. To-night his thoughts were truant. He forgot his strenuous life of the last three months, the dangers and discomforts through which he had passed, the curious sequence of events which had brought him, full of anticipation, nerved for a crisis, to Monte Carlo of all places in the world. He forgot that he was in the midst of great events, himself likely to take a hand in them. His thoughts took, rarely enough for him, a purely personal and sentimental turn. He thought of the earliest days of his marriage, when he and his wife had wandered about the gardens of his old home in Wiltshire on spring evenings such as these, and had talked sometimes lightly, sometimes seriously, of the future. Almost as he sat there in the midst of that noisy crowd, he could catch the faint perfume of hyacinths from the borders along which they had passed and the trimly-cut flower-beds which fringed the deep green lawn. Almost he could hear the chiming of the old stable clock, the clear note of a thrush singing. A puff of wind brought them a waft of fainter odour from the wild violets which carpeted the woods. Then the darkness crept around them, a star came out. Hand in hand they turned towards the house and into the library, where a wood fire was burning on the grate. His thoughts travelled on. A wave of tenderness had assailed him. Then he was awakened by the waiter's voice at his elbow.
"Le café, monsieur."
He sat up in his chair. His dreaming moments were few and this one had passed. He set his heel upon that tide of weakening memories, sipped his coffee and looked out upon the crowd. Three or four times he glanced at his watch impatiently. Precisely at nine o'clock, a man moved from somewhere in the throng behind and took the vacant chair by his side.
"If one could trouble monsieur for a match!"
Hunterleys turned towards the newcomer as he handed his matchbox. He was a young man of medium height, with sandy complexion, a little freckled, and with a straggling fair moustache. He had keen grey eyes and the faintest trace of a Scotch accent. He edged his chair a little nearer to Hunterleys.
"Much obliged," he said. "Wonderful evening, isn't it?"
Hunterleys nodded.
"Have you anything to tell me, David?" he asked.
"We are right in the thick of it," the other replied, his tone a little lowered. "There is more to tell than I like."
"Shall we stroll along the Terrace?" Hunterleys suggested.
"Don't move from your seat," the young man enjoined. "You are watched here, and so am I, in a way, although it's more my news they want to censor than anything personal. This crowd of Germans around us, without a single vacant chair, is the best barrier we can have. Listen. Selingman is here."
"I saw him this afternoon at the Sporting Club," Hunterleys murmured.
"Douaille will be here the day after to-morrow, if he has not already arrived," the newcomer continued. "It was given out in Paris that he was going down to Marseilles and from there to Toulon, to spend three days with the fleet. They sent a paragraph into our office there. As a matter of fact, he's coming straight on here. I can't learn how, exactly, but I fancy by motor-car."
"You're sure that Douaille is coming himself?" Hunterleys asked anxiously.
"Absolutely! His wife and family have been bustled down to Mentone, so as to afford a pretext for his presence here if the papers get hold of it. I have found out for certain that they came at a moment's notice and were not expecting to leave home at all. Douaille will have full powers, and the conference will take place at the Villa Mimosa. That will be the headquarters of the whole thing. … Look out, Sir Henry. They've got their eyes on us. The little fellow in brown, close behind, is hand in glove with the police. They tried to get me into a row last night. It's only my journalism they suspect, but they'd shove me over the frontier at the least excuse. They're certain to try something of the sort with you, if they get any idea that we are on the scent. Sit tight, sir, and watch. I'm off. You know where to find me."
The young man raised his hat and left Hunterleys with the polite farewell of a stranger. His seat was almost immediately seized by a small man dressed in brown, a man with a black imperial and moustache curled upwards. As Hunterleys glanced towards him, he raised his Hamburg hat politely and smiled.
"Monsieur's friend has departed?" he enquired. "This seat is disengaged?"
"As you see," Hunterleys replied.
The little man smiled his thanks, seated himself with a sigh of content and ordered coffee from a passing waiter.
"Monsieur is doubtless a stranger to Monte Carlo?"
"It is my second visit only," Hunterleys admitted.
"For myself I am an habitué," the little man continued, "I might almost say a resident. Therefore, all faces soon become familiar to me. Directly I saw monsieur, I knew that he was not a frequenter."
Hunterleys turned a little in his chair and surveyed his neighbour curiously. The man was neatly dressed and he spoke English with scarcely any accent. His shoulders and upturned moustache gave him a military appearance.
"There is nothing I envy any one so much in life," he proceeded, "as coming to Monte Carlo for the first or second time. There is so much to know, to see, to understand."
Hunterleys made no effort to discourage his companion's obvious attempts to be friendly. The latter talked with spirit for some time.
"If it would not be regarded as a liberty,"
