In the early hours of the sleepy afternoon, when the June sun blazes,
and the air outside is heavy with heat, the coolest place in Monte Carlo
is the Casino.
At one of the few roulette tables where play was going on Nielsen sat,
leaning back in his chair, his eyes half closed, and one of his hands
resting upon the table.
It was only three o’clock, but he had finished work for the day. He sat
on, apparently watching the game, in reality occupied in putting
together the pieces of his puzzle. The polished floors, and even the
garish colouring of the walls and ceilings, looked soft in the mellow
light that filtered through the wire blinds set in the windows. The
glass panes had disappeared for the summer, and the cooled air was sweet
with the smell of flowers and shrubs. The murmuring of the few players,
the monotonous scrape of the croupiers’ rakes, the sing-song of their
voices, and the subdued rattle of coins on the green cloth, made a
sleepy sum of sound.
Nielsen found nothing to disturb his reflections. The long rows of
expressionless profiles, clear-cut or indefinite to this side and that,
the shifting play of light and shade on the faces opposite, all meant
nothing to him--no more than the scraping of his clerks’ pens and the
rows of their bent shoulders mean to the merchant, or the eternal coming
and going of pasty-faced assistants to the master shopman.
With him, the indifferent cry of the croupier’s voice, which announced
the gain of his fixed, daily wage, was the ending of all concern in the
tables. Sometimes he waited the whole day for it, watching the game as a
cat watches a mouse, sometimes it came in half-an-hour, but it generally
came. He knew the faces of nearly all the players; the faces of the
born-gamblers who were ruining themselves--lined faces that were for the
most part placid with a schooled placidity, and with restless eyes that
seemed to look at everything and saw nothing but the eternal shifting of
fortune; the faces of the “little” players, dilettante or careless,
reckless or timid--faces which expressed all the emotions in turn, and
which in the days when he had thought about these things had inspired
him with a deep and disheartening belief in the smallness of human
nature; the faces, too, such as you may see in any thoroughfare of life,
of those who sit and sit and keep your place for a louis--patient,
blighted faces, brightening only, and that for a second, at the sight of
a client or a coin; again, the faces of such men as himself, and those
so rare that he could count them on the fingers of one hand--of men who
came there day after day, day after day, just as a man goes to his
office or to his chambers, as habituated and as utterly indifferent to
the inner life of their surroundings as any other professional man, and
who, on leaving the doors of the Casino, shake the dust of it from their
feet and from their minds.
Of the many things to which Nielsen had at one time or another turned
his hand, journalism had had the most attraction for him. There had been
a charm in having a finger, benevolent or corrective, in the pies of
other people, which his own pies had never afforded him. He was by
nature curiously indifferent to the turn of his own affairs, curiously
alive to the weal or woe of the rest of the world. He experienced a
mental glow when dealing with the problems of other people.
At this moment he was engaged upon such an one, and he was conscious of
bringing a fettered intellect to the task. He was prejudiced against the
man upon whose actions he was seeking judgment; prejudiced by the most
hopeless of all prejudices, that of sex--jealous of him, in fact. He
endeavoured to be impartial and logical, but the thing intruded itself
upon him, hampered his reason, coloured his conclusions. He felt that
his conviction was mainly a matter of instinct with him, but he was none
the less convinced. He did not conceal from himself that he knew very
little, had failed to put the puzzle together; but the impression made
upon his mind by Legard’s conduct was vivid and painful. He felt certain
that he had been directly, or indirectly, the cause of his wife’s death.
The motive lay nakedly and glaringly exposed; the man was violently in
love with Jocelyn, he had known that by a jealous instinct for many
weeks. He did not know that Jocelyn returned that love. To his mind it
was a monstrous and a painful idea that she ever should, and as he sat
there, motionless, with the monotonous hum droning in his ears, his
red-brown eyes glowed angrily, and the fingers of his hand began to drum
the table.
His anger was personal, but he was also, and strongly, prompted by the
impersonal feeling that it was a duty to interpose, as when one sees
somebody running, blindfold, a great and unnecessary danger.
He would see Jocelyn, in some way or another he would warn her! He had
said no word of his suspicions to any one, for in spite of his own
conviction, he saw clearly that he had nothing in the nature of legal
evidence; and he was too much a man of the world to put forward what he
could not substantiate.
The funeral had taken place that morning; he had attended it with the
doctor who had been called in.
Irma had been buried in the English cemetery at Mentone. No one had been
invited, and the only other people present had been her own doctor, two
Polish friends, and Legard himself. The latter had looked worn and ill,
had spoken to nobody, and had gone away alone after the funeral. He
seemed to Nielsen, throughout the ceremony, like a man witnessing some
scene upon the stage; he had shown no emotion. There had been amongst
those present a tacit understanding that the tragic and ill-fated manner
of the death should be kept a secret. The doctors referred to it as
failure of the heart. He understood that it was desired to avert the
possible breath of scandal from her memory.
A faint stir at the table attracted his attention; a lady was sitting
down opposite to him. He was conscious of a slight shock in the
recognition of Mrs. Travis. She was bending her head forward, so that
all he caught was a view of a black and white bonnet over an abundant
fringe, and of plump, white-gloved hands arranging nervously her
gambling paraphernalia. It had seemed to himself the most natural thing
in the world to change his clothes and walk straight into the Casino
from the funeral, but he was not somehow prepared for the appearance of
a lady whom he knew to be a connection of Legard’s. After all, the
thing was business to him, pleasure to her--a very different affair, as
he reflected.
Mrs. Travis raised her head. In return for his bow he acquired the
knowledge that her sight varied with her desires. She evidently held to
the conviction that not to see was not to be seen, and held to it
firmly, with a slight deepening of the red in her cheeks, and a puffing
of her lips.
He smiled to himself, and rose gently from his seat. “_Cette chère
dame!_” he thought. He would return her lead. He knew that her departure
was fixed for the following day; he determined, therefore, to go into
Mentone and call upon her. In that way he would certainly see Jocelyn
alone. Upon reflection, he condoned Mrs. Travis’s appearance at the
tables.
He took train and went into Mentone. As he walked up from the station to
the hotel, picking his way carefully over the dusty road, a very correct
figure in grey clothes with a flower in his buttonhole, his heart began
to beat, and his breath to come a little fast. The subtle attraction
which Jocelyn had for him stirred his pulses, and shook his nerve, with
every step he took towards her. He had to stop at the entrance of the
hotel to steady himself before he went in.