"Now, where on earth have I seen that girl before?" Joan Carthew asked
herself.
It was at Biarritz, where she was enjoying, as she put it to herself, a
well-earned holiday; and she was known at her hotel, and among the few
acquaintances she had made, as the Comtesse de Merival, a young widow
with plenty of money. She was a Comtesse because it is easy to say that
one has married a sprig of foreign nobility, without being found out;
she was a widow because it is possible for a widow to be alone,
unchaperoned, and to amuse herself without ceasing to be _comme il
faut_.
Joan had amused herself a great deal during the six weeks since she had
left England, and the cream of the amusement had consisted in inventing
a romantic story about herself and getting it believed. It was as good
as acting in a successful play which one has written for oneself.
At the present moment she was walking on the _plage_, pleasantly
conscious that she was one of the prettiest and best-dressed women among
many who were pretty and well-dressed. Then a blonde girl passed her, a
blonde girl who was new to Biarritz, but who, somehow, did not seem new
to Joan's retina. Her photograph was somewhere in the book of memory,
and, oddly enough, it seemed to have a background of sea and blue sky,
as it had to-day.
The girl was pretty, as a beautifully dressed, golden-haired doll in a
shop window is pretty. She was also exceedingly "good form," and she was
vouched for as a young person of importance by a remarkably
distinguished-looking old man who strolled beside her.
They turned, and in passing the "Comtesse" for the second time, the girl
looked full in Joan's face, with a lingering gaze such as a spoiled
beauty often directs upon a possible rival.
Then, all in an instant, Joan knew.
"Why," she reminded herself, "it's the girl I saw at Brighton--the girl
I envied. I know it is she. That's eight years ago, but I can't be
mistaken."
Somehow this seemed an important discovery. If Joan, a miserable,
overworked slavey of twelve, nursing her tyrant's baby, had not been
bitten with consuming jealousy of a child no older but a thousand times
more fortunate than herself, she might have gone on indefinitely as a
slavey, and might never have had a career.
The little girl at Brighton had looked scornfully from under her softly
drooping Leghorn hat at the shabby child-nurse, and a rage of resentment
had boiled in Joan's passionate young heart. Now, the tall girl at
Biarritz looked with half-reluctant admiration from under an equally
becoming hat at the Comtesse de Merival, who was more beautiful and
apparently quite as fortunate as she. Nevertheless the old scar
suddenly throbbed again, so that Joan remembered there had once been a
wound; and she knew that she had no gratitude for the girl to whom,
indirectly, she owed her rise in the world.
Joan was usually generous to women, even when she had no cause to love
them, for, with all her faults, there was nothing of the "cat" in her
nature; yet, to her surprise, she felt that she would like to hurt this
girl in some way. "What a brute I must be!" she said to herself. "I
didn't know I was so bad. Really I mustn't let this sort of thing grow
on me, otherwise I shall degenerate from a highwayman (rather a gallant
one, I think) into a cad, and I should lose interest in foraging for
myself if I were a cad."
As she thought this, the girl and her companion were joined by a man.
Joan glanced, then gazed, and decided that he was the most interesting
man to look at whom she had ever seen in her life. Not that he was the
handsomest, as mere beauty of feature goes, but he was of exactly the
type which Joan and most women admire at heart above all others.
One did not need to be told, to know that he was a soldier. As he stood
talking to his friends, with his hat off, and the sun chiselling the
ripples of his close-cropped hair in bronze, his head towered above
those of the other men who came and went. His face was bronze, too, of
a lighter shade, blending into ivory half way up the forehead, and his
features were strong and clear-cut as a bronze man's should always be.
He wore no moustache or beard, and his mouth and chin were self-reliant,
firm, and generous, but Joan liked his eyes best of all. As she passed
slowly, they met hers for a second, and their clear depths were brown
and bright as a Devonshire brook when the noonday sun shines into it.
It was only for a second that the man's soul looked at her from its
windows, but it was long enough to make her sharply realise two facts.
One, that she was far, far beneath him; the other, that he was the only
man in the world for her.
"To think that _that_ girl should know him, and I not!" she said to
herself rebelliously. "He is miles too good for me, but he's more miles
too good for her, because she hasn't any soul, and I have, even though
it's a bad one. Again, after all these years, that girl passes through
my life, taking with her as she goes what I would give all I own, all I
might ever gain, to have. It's Kismet--nothing less."
"_Ah, Comtesse, bon jour_!" murmured a voice that Joan knew, and then it
went on in very good English, with only a slight foreign accent: "You
are charming to-day, but you do not see your friends. They must remind
you of their existence before they can win a bow."
"I have just seen some one who was like a ghost out of the past,"
returned Joan, with a careless smile for the handsome, dark young man
who had stopped to greet her.
"What!" his face lighted up. "You know that young lady you were looking
at? That is indeed interesting, and I will tell you why, presently, if
you will let me. If you would but introduce me--at all events, to the
father. The rest I can do for myself."
"I don't know her," said Joan, "although an important issue of my life
was associated with the girl. I can't even give you her name."
"I can do as much as that for you," said the Marchese Villa Fora. "She
is a Miss Violet Ffrench, and the old man is her father, General
Ffrench. Not only is she one of the greatest beauties, but one of the
greatest heiresses in England."
"Ah!" said Joan, "no wonder you are interested."
"No wonder. But what good does that do to me, since I have not the
honour of her acquaintance, and since she is to marry that great, bronze
statue of a fellow?"
A pang shot through Joan's heart, and she was ashamed because it was a
jealous pang. "She is to marry him! How do you know that, since you
are not acquainted with her?"
"It is an open secret. I saw the father and daughter in Paris three
weeks ago, and fell in love at first sight--ah! you may laugh. You
Englishwomen cannot understand us Latins. It is true that I proposed to
you, but you would not take me, and my heart was soon after caught in
the rebound. It is very simple."
"You thought that you fell in love with me at first sight, too; at
least, you said so, and without any introduction except picking up my
purse when I dropped it in the Champs Elysees."
"I got an introduction afterwards."
"Yes, a lady who was staying at my hotel."
"At all events, she vouched for me. She has known my family for years,
in Madrid."
"She warned me against you, Marchese. She said that you were a
fortune-hunter, and that you fancied I was rich. When you had proposed,
and I had told you frankly that my fortune was but silver-gilt,
warranted to keep its colour for a few years only, you were very much
obliged to me for refusing you, as it saved you the trouble of jilting
me afterwards. You are still more obliged to me now that you have met a
genuine heiress who has all other desirable qualifications as well."
"You are cruel," exclaimed Villa Fora, to whose style of good looks
reproaches were becoming. "Cannot a man love twice? What does it matter
to the heart whether there has been an interval of weeks or of years? I
am madly in love with Miss Ffrench, and as you promised to be my friend
if I would 'talk no more nonsense,' I have no hesitation in confessing
it to you. I followed her here from Paris, and arrived only this
afternoon. She is at the Hotel Victoria; therefore, so am I."
"So am I, but not 'therefore,'" cut in Joan. "And the--the man you say
she is to marry?"
"Colonel Sir Justin Wentworth? He is at the Grand. But he has come for
her. I know the whole story--I have it from a gossiping old lady who is
_au courant_ with every one's affairs if they are worth bothering with;
and she does not make mistakes. She has told me that General Ffrench was
the guardian of this Sir Justin, that the father--a baronet--was his
dearest friend. The match has been an understood thing ever since
Wentworth was eighteen and the girl five; for there is quite thirteen
years' difference in their ages."
"Then he is about thirty-four or five," said Joan thoughtfully.
"Yes, but in that I am not interested. The awful part for me is that the
girl is now of age, and the obstacle of her youth no longer prevents the
marriage. Any day the worst may happen. If I could only meet her, I
might have a chance to undermine the cold, bronze statue, even though he
has a great reputation as a soldier, and is a V.C. But how to manage an
introduction? The father has the air of a mediaeval dragon."
Joan's heart said: "The man is not a cold statue," but aloud she
remarked: "I see now why you hoped that I knew Miss Ffrench. You wanted
_me_ to manage it. Well, perhaps I can, even as it is. I have
undertaken more difficult things and succeeded."
"Oh, if you would! But why should I hope it, since you have nothing to
gain?"
Joan dropped her eyes and did not answer.
"Yet you will try?" pleaded Villa Fora.
"Yet I will try, on one condition. You must be a connection of the late
Comte de Merival."
"Your husband!"
Joan smiled as she nodded.
"I am Spanish; he was, I understand, French. But then that presents no
difficulty. There are such things as international marriages."
"Yes. Your mother's sister married an uncle of my husband's, didn't
she?"
"Quite so. It is settled," agreed the Marchese gravely.
"Well, then, that is the sharp end of the wedge. I will do my best and
cleverest to insert it," said Joan. "As you have just arrived, it will
be the easier. We are cousins. It can appear to all those whom it does
not concern (meaning the gossips of the hotel) that you have run on to
see your cousin. For the rest, you must trust me for a day or two, or
perhaps more."
Joan had tea--with her cousin--at Miremont's; and they saw the Ffrenches
and Sir Justin Wentworth, also having tea. Violet Ffrench looked at
Joan with the same side-glance of half-grudging admiration as before,
and Joan looked, now and then, at Violet Ffrench with a charming, frank
gaze, which seemed to say: "You are so sweetly pretty that I can't keep
my eyes off you, and I like you for being pretty." In reality it said
something quite different, but it was effects, not realities, which
mattered at the moment.
Thus the campaign had begun, though the enemy was blissfully ignorant of
the activity upon the other side.
Joan went back to the hotel rather earlier than she had intended, and
going straight to the large, empty dining-room, rang for the head
waiter. When he appeared, she asked if it were yet arranged where a new
arrival, General Ffrench, was to sit with his daughter. The waiter
pointed out a small table or two, near the centre of the room; but
before his hand withdrew from the gesture, it was turned palm upward in
answer to a slight, silent hint from Joan. Finally, it retired with a
louis in its clasp. "I want you to put my table close to theirs," said
she. "It shall be done, madame," replied the man; and it was done.
Therefore Joan and Violet could scarcely help exchanging more glances
from between their red-shaded candles that night at dinner, which Joan
ate alone, unaccompanied by the wistful Villa Fora.
The Ffrenches appeared to know nobody in the hotel, and of this she was
glad. There was the more chance for her.
After dinner there was conjuring, and Joan contrived to sit next to Miss
Ffrench. Villa Fora was on the opposite side of the big drawing-room,
where he had reluctantly gone in obedience to his "cousin's"
instructions. The conjuring made conversation, and Joan was not
surprised to find the heiress open to flattery. When the performance
was over, she kept her seat; and by this time, having introduced herself
to Miss Ffrench, the introduction was passed on to the father. He, good
man, was too well-born to be actually a snob, but he had no objection to
titles, even foreign ones, and the Comtesse de Merival was so pretty, so
modest, altogether such good form, that he had no objection to her as,
at least, an hotel acquaintance for his daughter.
It seemed that General Ffrench had been ordered to Biarritz for his
health, and that he hoped to do some golfing; but Miss Ffrench hated
golf, and as she had no friends in the place, she expected to be very
dull.
At this, Joan reminded her gaily of the friend with whom she and her
father had been walking in the afternoon.
"Oh, but he is such an old friend, he doesn't count," exclaimed Violet,
blushing a little.
"She isn't a bit in love with him," thought Joan. "What a shame!
But--_tant mieux_. She is vain and romantic; often the two qualities go
together in a woman. The ground is all prepared for me."
By and by, Sir Justin Wentworth strolled in from his hotel. Though she
was dying to stay and meet him, and perhaps have a few words, Joan rose
and walked away. This course was approved by General Ffrench. He would
have known what to think if the beautiful Comtesse had made herself
fascinating, at such short notice, to his son-in-law elect.
Joan talked with her "cousin," who had been in the smoking-room, and
Violet Ffrench had time to be intensely curious as to the connection
between her charming new acquaintance, the Comtesse de Merival, and the
handsome, dark young man who had been in her hotel at Paris. He had
looked at her then; he looked at her now. What was he to the Comtesse?
what was the Comtesse to him?
Next morning, both General Ffrench and Sir Justin Wentworth walked off
to the golf-links, leaving Violet to write letters in the glass room
that looked out on the sea. Presently Joan came in, with a writing-case
in her hand, and Violet stopped in the midst of the first sentence of
her first letter. Joan did not even begin to write, nor had she ever
cherished the faintest intention of doing so.
Violet rather hoped that she would mention the dark young man, but she
did not; and then, of course, Violet hoped it a great deal more. The
two girls drifted from one subject to another, and finally, by way of a
favourite author and a popular novel of the moment, they touched the key
of romance.
"I used to think that romance was dead in this century, but lately I
have been finding out that it isn't," said Joan. "Oh, not personally.
Romance is over for me. I loved my husband, you see, and he died the day
of our wedding; I married him on his death-bed. That is not romance; it
is tragedy. But I am speaking of what I should not speak of, to you, so
let us talk of something else."
"Why?" asked Violet.
"Oh, because--because I have an idea that you are engaged."
"How can that matter?"
"It does matter. I oughtn't to explain, so you mustn't urge me."
"You rouse my curiosity," said Violet; but this was not news to Joan.
"Engaged girls shouldn't have curiosity about anything outside their own
romances," replied the Comtesse de Merival mysteriously.
"I've never had a real romance," sighed Violet. "I've always been more
or less engaged to Sir Justin Wentworth ever since I can remember. He
is a splendid fellow, as you can see."
"I hardly noticed," said Joan; then added, in a whisper, but not too low
a whisper to be heard: "I was so busy pitying someone else."
Violet's colour rose, and she was really a very pretty girl, though
vanity made her eyes cold.
"Sir Justin's father and mine were old chums," went on Violet. "Our
place and his lie close together in Devonshire. We have even some of
the same money-interests--mines in Australia. He has heaps of money,
too, so there's no question of his needing to think of mine."
"As if any man could think of your money when he had you to think of!"
exclaimed Joan. "No doubt you will be very happy. Such a long
friendship ought to be a good foundation for the rest, and yet--and
yet--it's a pity that you should have to marry and become a placid
British matron without first knowing some of the wild joys of _real_
love, real romance."
"I thought you doubted there being any left in the world?"
"No; I said I had found at least one case which had built up my faith
again; a case of passionate love, born at first sight, and strong enough
to carry the man across the world, if necessary, to follow the woman he
loves."
"Such love isn't likely to come my way."
"It has come your way. It is here--close to you. Oh, I have done
wrong! I should not have spoken. But I am so sorry for him--my poor,
handsome cousin."
"Your cousin!" This was a revelation, and Violet's eyes were not cold
now, but warm with interest.
"Yes, the Marchese Villa Fora, the best-looking and one of the best-born
young men in Spain. But indeed we must not talk of him. What a lovely
day it is! I must have my motor-car out this afternoon. How I should
love to take you with me!"
Violet would ask no more questions; but all that had been dark was now
clear, and she could think of nothing and no one except the Comtesse's
cousin, the Marchese Villa Fora.
Joan had been in the hotel at Biarritz for ten days, and by the trick of
"being nice" (she knew how to be very nice) to the unattached old ladies
and middle-aged dowagers, she had been accepted on her own valuation.
She did not flirt, she had a title, she appeared to be rich, she owned a
motor-car, therefore none of her statements regarding herself was
doubted. General Ffrench made an inquiry or two concerning her, was
satisfied with the replies, and therefore consented to let his daughter
join an automobile party arranged by the Comtesse for the afternoon.
Somehow, in the motor-car, Violet sat next to the Marchese Villa Fora,
who gazed at her sadly with magnificent eyes and said very little. It
was extremely interesting, she discovered, to sit shoulder to shoulder
with a man who was dying of hopeless love for you, and had followed you
across France, though he had never spoken a word to you until to-day.
It was he who helped her out when they came back to the hotel, and the
thrill in her fingers after his had pressed them almost convulsively for
an instant remained for a long time.