About half-way through dinner that night, Cecil de la Borne drew a long
sigh of relief. At last his misgivings were set at rest. His party was
going to be, was already, in fact, pronounced, a success. A glance at
his fair neighbour, however, who was lighting her third or fourth
Russian cigarette since the caviare, sent a shiver of thankfulness
through his whole being. What a sensible fellow Andrew had been to
clear out. This sort of thing would not have appealed to him at all.
"My dear Cecil," the Princess declared, "I call this perfectly
delightful. Jeanne and I have wanted so much to see you in your own
home. Jeanne, isn't this nicer, ever so much nicer, than anything you
had imagined?"
Jeanne, who was sitting opposite, lifted her remarkable eyes and
glanced around with interest.
"Yes," she admitted, "I think that it is! But then, any place that
looks in the least like a home is a delightful change after all that
rushing about in London."
"I agree with you entirely," Major Forrest declared. "If our friend has
disappointed us at all, it is in the absence of that primitiveness
which he led us to expect. One perceives that one is drinking Veuve
Clicquot of a vintage year, and one suspects the nationality of our
host's cook."
"You can have all the primitivism you want if you look out of the
windows," Cecil remarked drily. "You will see nothing but a line of
stunted trees, and behind, miles of marshes and the greyest sea which
ever played upon the land. Listen! You don't hear a sound like that in
the cities."
Even as he spoke they heard the dull roar of the north wind booming
across the wild empty places which lay between the Red Hall and the
sea. A storm of raindrops was flung against the window. The Princess
shivered.
"It is an idyll, the last word in the refining of sensations," Major
Forrest declared. "You give us sybaritic luxury, and in order that we
shall realize it, you provide the background of savagery. In the
Carlton one might dine like this and accept it as a matter of course.
Appreciation is forced upon us by these suggestions of the wilderness
without."
"Not all without, either," Cecil de la Borne remarked, raising his
eyeglass and pointing to the walls. "See where my ancestors frown down
upon us--you can only just distinguish their bare shapes. No De la
Borne has had money enough to have them renovated or even preserved.
They have eaten their way into the canvases, and the canvases into the
very walls. You see the empty spaces, too. A Reynolds and a Gainsboro'
have been cut out from there and sold. I can show you long empty
galleries, pictureless, and without a scrap of furniture. We have
ghosts like rats, rooms where the curtains and tapestries are falling
to pieces from sheer decay. Oh! I can assure you that our primitivism
is not wholly external."
He turned from the Princess, who was not greatly interested, to find
that for once he had succeeded in riveting the attention of the girl,
whose general attitude towards him and the whole world seemed to be one
of barely tolerant indifference.
"I should like to see over your house, Mr. De la Borne," she said. "It
all sounds very interesting."
"I am afraid," he answered, "that your interest would not survive very
long. We have no treasures left, nor anything worth looking at. For
generations the De la Bornes have stripped their house and sold their
lands to hold their own in the world. I am the last of my race, and
there is nothing left for me to sell," he declared, with a momentary
bitterness.
"Hadn't you--a half brother?" the Princess asked.
Cecil hesitated for a moment. He had drifted so easily into the
position of head of the house. It was so natural. He felt that he
filled the place so perfectly.
"I have," he admitted, "but he counts, I am sorry to say, for very
little. You are never likely to come across him--nor any other
civilized person."
There was a subtle indication in his tone of a desire not to pursue the
subject. His guests naturally respected it. There was a moment's
silence. Then Cecil once more leaned forward. He hesitated for a
moment, even after his lips had parted, as though for some reason he
were inclined, after all, to remain silent, but the consciousness that
every one was looking at him and expecting him to speak induced him to
continue with what, after all, he had suddenly, and for no explicit
reason, hesitated to say.
"You spoke, Miss Le Mesurier," he began, "of looking over the house,
and, as I told you, there is very little in it worth seeing. And yet I
can show you something, not in the house itself, but connected with it,
which you might find interesting."
The Princess leaned forward in her chair.
"This sounds so interesting," she murmured. "What is it, Cecil? A
haunted chamber?"
Their host shook his head.
"Something far more tangible," he answered, "although in its way quite
as remarkable. Hundreds of years ago, smuggling on this coast was not
only a means of livelihood for the poor, but the diversion of the rich.
I had an ancestor who became very notorious. His name seems to have
been a by-word, although he was never caught, or if he was caught,
never punished. He built a subterranean way underneath the grounds,
leading from the house right to the mouth of one of the creeks. The
passage still exists, with great cellars for storing smuggled goods,
and a room where the smugglers used to meet."
Jeanne looked at him with parted lips.
"You can show me this?" she asked, "the passage and the cellars?"
Cecil nodded.
"I can," he answered. "Quite a weird place it is, too. The walls are
damp, and the cellars themselves are like the vaults of a cathedral.
All the time at high tide you can hear the sea thundering over your
head. To-morrow, if you like, we will get torches and explore them."
"I should love to," Jeanne declared. "Can you get out now at the other
end?"
Cecil nodded.
"The passage," he said, "starts from a room which was once the library,
and ends half-way up the only little piece of cliff there is. It is
about thirty feet from the ground, but they had a sort of apparatus for
pulling up the barrels, and a rope ladder for the men. The preventive
officers would see the boat come up the creek, and would march down
from the village, only to find it empty. Of course, they suspected all
the time where the things went, but they could not prove it, and as my
ancestor was a magistrate and an important man they did not dare to
search the house."
The Princess sighed gently.
"Those were the days," she murmured, "in which it must have been worth
while to live. Things happened then. To-day your ancestor would simply
have been called a thief."
"As a matter of fact," Cecil remarked, "I do not think that he himself
benefited a penny by any of his exploits. It was simply the love of
adventure which led him into it."
"Even if he did," Major Forrest remarked, "that same predatory instinct
is alive to-day in another guise. The whole world is preying upon one
another. We are thieves, all of us, to the tips of our finger-nails,
only our roguery is conducted with due regard to the law."
The Princess smiled faintly as she glanced across the table at the
speaker.
"I am afraid," she said, with a little sigh, "that you are right. I do
not think that we have really improved with the centuries. My own
ancestors sacked towns and held the inhabitants to ransom. To-day I sit
down to bridge opposite a man with a well-filled purse, and my one idea
is to lighten it. Nothing, I am convinced, but the fear of being found
out, keeps us reasonably moral."
"If we go on talking like this," Lord Ronald remarked, "we shall make
Miss Le Mesurier nervous. She will feel that we, and the whole of the
rest of the world, have our eyes upon her moneybags."
"I am absolutely safe," Jeanne answered smiling. "I do not play bridge,
and even my signature would be of no use to any one yet."
"But you might imagine us," Lord Ronald continued, "waiting around
breathlessly until the happy time arrived when you were of age, and we
could pursue our diabolical schemes."
Jeanne shook her head.
"You cannot frighten me, Lord Ronald," she said. "I feel safe from
every one. I am only longing for to-morrow, for a chance to explore
this wonderful subterranean passage."
"I am afraid," their host remarked, "that you will be disappointed.
With the passing of smuggling, the romance of the thing seems to have
died. There is nothing now to look at but mouldy walls, a bare room,
and any amount of the most hideous fungi. I can promise you that when
you have been there for a few minutes your only desire will be to
escape."
"I am not so sure," the girl answered. "I think that associations
always have an effect on me. I can imagine how one might wait there,
near the entrance, hear the soft swish of the oars, look down and see
the smugglers, hear perhaps the muffled tramp of men marching from the
village. Fancy how breathless it must have been, the excitement, the
fear of being caught."
Cecil curled his slight moustache dubiously.
"If you can feel all that in my little bit of underground world," he
said, "I shall think that you are even a more wonderful person--"
He dropped his voice and leaned toward her, but Jeanne laughed in his
face and interrupted him.
"People who own things," she remarked, "never look upon them with
proper reverence. Don't you see that my mother is dying for some
bridge?"