Jeanne of the Marshes

  CHAPTER V

  The Princess was only obeying a faint sign from Forrest. She leanedforward and addressed her host.

  "It isn't a bad idea," she declared. "Where are we going to playbridge, Cecil? In some smaller room, I hope. This one is reallybeginning to get on my nerves a little. There is an ancestor exactlyopposite who has fixed me with a luminous and a disapproving eye. Andthe blank spaces on the wall! Ugh! I feel like a Goth. We are toomodern for this place, Cecil."

  Their host laughed as he rose and turned towards Jeanne.

  "Your mother," he said, "is beginning to be conscious of herenvironment. I know exactly how she is feeling, for I myself am aconstant sufferer. Are you, too, sighing for the gilded salons ofcivilization?"

  "Not in the least," Jeanne answered frankly. "I am tired of mirrors andelectric lights and babble. I prefer our present surroundings, and Ishould not mind at all if some of those disapproving ancestors of yoursstepped out of their frames and took their places with us here."

  Cecil laughed.

  "If they have been listening to our conversation," he said, "I thinkthat they will stay where they are. Like royalty," he continued, "wecan boast an octagonal chamber. I fear that its glories are of thepast, but it is at least small, and the wallpaper is modern. I haveordered coffee and the card-tables there. Shall we go?"

  He led the way out of the gloomy room, chilly and bare, yet in a waymagnificent still with its reminiscences of past splendour, across thehall, modernized with rugs and recent furnishing, into a smallerapartment, where cheerfulness reigned. A wood fire burnt in an opengrate. Lamps and a fine candelabrum gave a sufficiency of light. Thefurniture, though old, was graceful, and of French design. It had beenthe sitting chamber of the ladies of the De la Borne family forgenerations, and it bore traces of its gentler occupation. One thingalone remained of primevalism to remind them of their closer contactwith the great forces of nature. The chamber was built in the tower,which stood exposed to the sea, and the roar of the wind was ceaseless.

  "Here at least we shall be comfortable, I think," Cecil remarked, asthey all entered. "My frescoes are faded, but they represent flowers,not faces. There are no eyes to stare at you from out of the wallshere, Princess."

  The Princess laughed gaily as she seated herself before a Louis Quinzecard-table, and threw a pack of cards across the faded green baizecloth.

  "It is charming, this," she declared. "Shall we challenge these twoboys, Nigel? You are the only man who understands my leads, and whodoes not scold me for my declarations."

  "I am perfectly willing," Forrest answered smoothly. "Shall we cut fordeal?"

  Cecil de la Borne leaned over and turned up a card.

  "I am quite content," he remarked. "What do you say, Engleton?"

  Engleton hesitated for a moment. The Princess turned and looked at him.He was standing upon the hearthrug smoking, his face as expressionlessas ever.

  "Let us cut for partners," he drawled. "I am afraid of the Princess andForrest. The last time I found them a quite invincible couple."

  There was a moment's silence. The Princess glanced toward Forrest, whoonly shrugged his shoulders.

  "Just as you will," he answered.

  He turned up an ace and the Princess a three.

  "After all," he remarked, with a smile, "it seems as though fate weregoing to link us together."

  "I am not so sure," Cecil de la Borne said, also throwing down an ace."It depends now upon Engleton."

  Engleton came to the table, and drew a card at random from the pack.Forrest's eyes seemed to narrow a little as he looked down at it.Engleton had drawn another ace.

  "Forrest and I," he remarked. "Jolly low cutting, too. I have playedagainst you often, Forrest, but I think this is our first rubbertogether. Here's good luck to us!"

  He tossed off his liqueur and sat down. They cut again for deal, andthe game proceeded.

  Jeanne had moved across towards the window, and laid her fingers uponthe heavy curtains. Cecil de la Borne, who was dummy, got up and stoodby her side.

  "Do you know," she said, "although your frescoes are flowers, I feelthat there are eyes in this room, too, only that they are looking infrom the night. Can one see the sea from here, Mr. De la Borne?"

  "It is scarcely a hundred yards away," he answered. "This window looksstraight across the German Ocean, and if you look long enough you willsee the white of the breakers. Listen! You will hear, too, what myforefathers, and those who begat them, have heard, from the birth ofthe generations."

  The girl, with strained face, stood looking out into the darkness.Outside, the wind and sea imposed their thunder upon the land. Within,there was no sound but the softer patter of the cards, the languidvoices of the four who played bridge. A curious little company, on thewhole. The Princess of Strurm, whose birth was as sure as her socialstanding was doubtful, the heroine of countless scandals, ignored bythe great heads of her family, impoverished, living no one knew how,yet remaining the legal guardian of a stepdaughter, who was reputed tobe one of the greatest heiresses in Europe. The courts had moved tohave her set aside, and failed. A Cardinal of her late husband's faith,empowered to treat with her on behalf of his relations, offered afortune for her cession of Jeanne, and was laughed at for his pains.Whatever her life had been, she remained custodian of the child of thegreat banker whom she had married late in life. She endured calmly thethreats, the entreaties, the bribes, of Jeanne's own relations. Jeanne,she was determined, should enter life under her wing, and hers only. Inthe end she had her way. Jeanne was entering life now, not through therespectable but somewhat bourgeois avenue by which her great moniedrelatives would have led her, but under the auspices of her stepmother,whose position as chaperon to a great heiress had already thrown open agreat many doors which would have been permanently closed to her in anyother guise. The Princess herself was always consistent. She assumed toherself an arrogant right to do as she pleased and live as she pleased.She was of the House of Strurm, which had been noble for centuries, andhad connections with royalty. That was enough. A few forgot her pastand admitted her claim. Those who did not she ignored....

  Then there was Lord Ronald Engleton, an orphan brought up in Paris, awould-be decadent, a dabbler in all modern iniquities, redeemed fromfolly only by a certain not altogether wholesome cleverness, yet with adisposition which sometimes gained for him friends in most unlikelyquarters. He had excellent qualities, which he did his best to conceal;impulses which he was continually stifling.

  By his side sat Forrest, the Sphynx, more than middle-aged, a man whohad wandered all over the world, who had tried many things without everachieving prosperity, and who was searching always, with tired eyes,for some new method of clothing and feeding himself upon an income ofless than nothing a year. He had met the Princess at Marienbad yearsago, and silently took his place in her suite. Why, no one seemed toknow, not even at first the Princess herself, who thought him chic, andadored what she could not understand. Curious flotsam and jetsam, thesefour, of society which had something of a Continental flavour;personages, every one of them, with claim to recognition, but withoutany noticeable hall-mark....

  There remained the girl, Jeanne herself, half behind the curtain now,her head thrust forward, her beautiful eyes contracted with the effortto penetrate that veil of darkness. One gift at least she seemed tohave borrowed from the woman who gambled with life as easily andreadily as with the cards which fell from her jewelled fingers. In herface, although it was still the face of a child, there was the sameinscrutable expression, the same calm languor of one who takes andreceives what life offers with the indifference of the cynic, or theimperturbability of the philosopher. There was little of the joy or theanticipation of youth there, and yet, behind the eyes, as they lookedout into the darkness, there was something--some such effort, perhaps,as one seeking to penetrate the darkness of life must needs show. Andas she looked, the white, living breakers gradually resolvedthem-selves out of the dark, thin filmy phosphorescence, and the roar
of the lashed sea broke like thunder upon the pebbled beach. She leaneda little more forward, carried away with her fancy--that the shrillgrinding of the pebbles was indeed the scream of human voices in pain!