CHAPTER II
The morning sun flooded the bedroom of the Torrianis. It glinted off the massive antique furniture, revealing its beauty and the need of an immediate dusting. It invaded the region of shadows and comparative coolness underneath the canopy of the immense four-poster bed.
Though a new day was confronting him, the heir of the Torrianis slept on.
In a larger sense, a new and rather cloudy day had six months previously dawned for young Count Rodrigo Torriani, and he had not awakened to that either. It had brought the loss of his family fortune, debts, Signor Minardi, and an uncertainty as to his future. Rodrigo was vaguely aware of this new metaphorical day. He had opened one eye to it sufficiently to dismiss all his servants save Maria, who had sullenly refused to be dismissed. He had started tentative negotiations to rent the palace that had been occupied by his family for three centuries. But, beyond these gestures, he had continued to pursue the same blithe, unproductive course as before.
Rodrigo was in this respect a great deal like his late father, Angelo Torriani, the handsome, impulsive gentleman who was responsible largely for the plight in which the young man now found himself. Angelo Torriani too had been known even in the later years of his life as a waster. To be sure, the elder Torriani had once mingled a bit of politics with his pleasures. It was this unusual mixture of interests that had led to Angelo Torriani's marriage.
For, sent upon a diplomatic mission by his government, the Italian sportsman-politician, after twenty years of falling in and out of love without jeopardizing his bachelorhood in the slightest, had suddenly lost his heart utterly to the quiet, pretty and rather puritanical daughter of a minor English title whom he encountered at a social function in London.
Angelo, like his son after him, had always been selfish in his loves. He was a taker rather than a giver. But when he found that his accustomed sweeping and very Latin style of love-making was not impressing the sensible Edythe Newbold, he became a suppliant. He made solemn promises to abandon his manner of living and he neglected his political duties. And, having at last carried the citadel of her affections by this method, he found that he must also batter down further defences in the form of a father who thoroughly disliked him. Sir Henry Newbold had amassed his fortune and title in the Indian trade. He distrusted foreigners. He particularly distrusted foreigners who did not work. To obtain the hand of Edythe in marriage, Angelo Torriani had to discard the habits and prejudices of three centuries of idling Italian ancestors, enter Sir Henry's business, and go to India.
During the second of the sixteen years which Angelo Torriani spent intermittently in Calcutta as resident manager of Newbold and Company, Rodrigo was born to Edythe. In the fifteenth year, Rodrigo was sent to England to school. In the same year, Sir Henry Newbold died, an elder son of the self-made knight succeeding to the management of the business. For a year Angelo Torriani carried on in an environment and trade which he had always hated. When, at the end of that period, Edythe, never in robust health and of the type which cannot become accustomed to the tropics, succumbed to a fever, Angelo resigned his position and left India forever.
Returning, after those many years, to the palace of his fathers at Naples, Angelo was for many weeks too much overcome with a very sincere grief hardly to show himself outside the iron gates. But then the reaction smote him. He became, after a few months, nearly the adventuresome Angelo of old. He visited Florence, Rome, the Riviera. He re-entered politics, tentatively at first, then more boldly. He began to notice again that women were smiling at him and then lowering lashes. He spent freely both money and energy. Still a handsome, virile figure at forty-five, he discovered that life, after all, was still good. He struck a rapid pace after a while and maintained it until about six months before Rodrigo Torriani met John Dorning at the Café Del Mare. Angelo Torriani then died quite as suddenly as he had fallen in love with Edythe Newbold. The sixteen years in India, busy but abstemious years, had probably prolonged his life. But the blood of the Torrianis, which killed young, had done for him at last.
Rodrigo was a lively, handsome child with large, snapping black eyes, eyes such as friends of mothers jokingly say augur ill for the girls they encounter when the child grows up. In this case, the prophecy worked out. The boy grew up, energetic, quick-tempered, and very attractive.
At Eton, and, later, at Oxford, whence he had been sent from India at the insistence of his mother, Rodrigo was not Edythe Newbold's son, but Angelo Torriani's. He was naturally more popular with his fellows than with his instructors. The latter did not like it because he apparently never studied. This was particularly irritating to the plodding dons in view of the fact that Rodrigo always passed his examinations with ease. He specialized in subjects which he liked, and he did not like subjects for which he did not possess a natural aptitude that made studying almost superfluous. Moreover, he was quick-witted and he had had excellent English tutor in India.
Rodrigo spent most of his vacation periods in the London town house of his mother's brother, Sir William Newbold, and the merchant-knight's rather stuffy family. The family consisted of Rodrigo's prim aunt, who did not at all possess her late sister's good looks or tolerance, and two weedy blond daughters. Though the latter were both about his own age and his own experience among the fair sex was at the time limited by his scholastic activities, he yet treated Evelyn and Sylvia Newbold with a blasé condescension which they did not fancy in the least. Neither did his Aunt Helen, who had esteemed Angelo Torriani as quite unworthy of marrying into the Newbolds and was continually urging Sir William to keep a tight leash upon Angelo's son. Rodrigo, thus, during his leisure time from Oxford found constant barriers in the way of his wandering very far in London on pleasure bent.
It was the irony of fate that a social affair given under the circumspect auspices of his uncle should have led to his acquaintance with Sophie Binner.
Most of the Newbolds' acquaintances were people like themselves—rich, self-satisfied, very respectable, and quite boring. The entertainments given by this set for their very carefully selected guests were for the most part the soul of convention. Bridge for the usual useless prizes, musicales by visiting celebrities, box parties at the opera. On the evening that Sir William came home from the office and suggested that the Newbolds give a Treasure Hunt, his wife was at first mystified and then scandalized.
The Treasure Hunt was the fad of a rather fast set of London society. It was in the nature of a hare and hounds chase, without the hares. The participants started out from a central spot toward a distant goal, aided at frequent intervals by clews posted upon trees, fences and other places. The first to arrive at the goal was the winner. The hunts were usually accompanied by considerable wining, dining and hilarity of a rather rowdy type.
In answer to his wife's disapproval, Sir William announced that a mutual and very respectable friend of theirs had been describing to him a Treasure Hunt in which the friend had participated and which had quite converted him to the sport.
"We have to give a party next month," Sir William urged in his fussy voice. "I think our set needs a little stirring up. Why shouldn't we have a Treasure Hunt! Many conservative people are going in for them. George Trevor said he was quite charmed. And it is important in a business way that I do something in his honor while he is in London. What do you say?"
After several days of deliberation, Helen Newbold yielded. The date was set and preparations were started. Rodrigo, who had just come down from Oxford for three weeks, was interested at once. For the first time since he had been familiar with his uncle's family, they they were about to do something that seemed to promise him some pleasure. He even asked permission to invite some of his Oxford friends who were in town to share in the fun, and received the permission after some questioning by his aunt as to the respectability of these added guests. He invited William Terhune, a Rhodes scholar from South Dakota, a raw-boned, husky chap, crew man and born pleasure-seeker, and Leslie Bond, a classmate from London whom Rodrigo admired for his witty tongue and suavity.
The Treasure Hunters were to travel in automobiles and Rodrigo secured the use of his uncle's light sedan, neatly side-stepping the suggestion that his two cousins travel along with Terhune, Bond and himself.
A large crowd of colorless people gathered one June afternoon in the drive of the Newbolds' town house and received a light collation and their instructions for the hunt. The first directions were to take them out to a London suburb, and the cavalcade started sedately enough, most of the sojourners undecided whether or not the Newbolds were attempting something revolutionary and not quite respectable in this new type of entertainment.
Rodrigo and his two friends were in a chaffing, carefree mood. Rodrigo was never a conservative driver and soon had the borrowed car moving at a pace that started the bobbies at the street intersections frowning and waving admonitory hands at him. Having attained the open country and the little tea house, to which their instructions had led them, in advance of the others, the young men did not stop to partake of the refreshments arranged for them by their host, but set off rapidly for the next rendezvous. This they never attained.
For a half mile or so beyond the tea house, they overtook an open runabout containing two very attractive young ladies. The blonde who was driving was particularly pretty in a bold, artificially arranged way. The girl at the wheel glanced back at the rapidly approaching car, flashed a friendly but taunting smile at it, and then stepped upon the accelerator and attempted to pull away from it. Rodrigo and his companions were interested and aroused at once. Rodrigo sped up and the race was on.
The sedan's glittering radiator-cap was almost even with the left rear wheel of the other car. Down a hill the cars swooped. Fifty yards farther on, the car of Rodrigo was exactly abreast of the runabout. Then came a sharp turn to the left, which the cars took together and plunged up the grade leading to the little rustic bridge neck and neck.
And here came catastrophe.
For the turn and the bridge were surprises to both drivers. It was a small wooden bridge spanning a ravine and a narrow stream running swiftly far below. A stout railing stretched along either side of the road, across the bridge. There was room for two carefully driven cars to pass each other. But not room enough for two speed maniacs.
The thunder of the flying cars across the loose planks was broken by a splintering crash. When the dust cleared away, the hood and front wheels of the runabout were disclosed suspended in mid-air over the ravine, the glass of the front lights and wind-shield were no more. Yet the motor of the runabout was still throbbing, and the two girls, though dust-covered and with faces bleeding slightly from tiny bits of glass that had pricked their skin, were unhurt. They discovered this after moving cautiously around a little.
When Rodrigo and his companions drove slowly back to them, offering succor, both girls were smiling, though a little uneasily to be sure, and the girl at the wheel was showing disturbing signs of putting the motor into reverse and seeking to back off the heavy piece of bridge-railing that, jammed in between their rear mud-guard and the side of the car, was the only thing preventing the machine from plunging off into eternity.
"I say, leave the motor alone!" Rodrigo shouted at once and scrambled hurriedly out from behind the wheel of the sedan, his companions following.
"And whose motor is it, may I ask?" the pretty blonde in the driver's seat came back promptly, at the same time jabbing furiously at levers.
Rodrigo was by this time at her side and, horrified, was clutching for her wrist. "Lady, lady," he cried half in fear and half in mockery. "Shut off the motor and get out quick. You're on the brink of eternity."
"Yes, Sophie, do," the other girl, slightly older and a brunette, agreed.
At first inclined to be stubborn, Sophie at length permitted herself to be helped down from her precarious perch and her companion followed, Terhune and Bond re-inforcing Rodrigo.
Thus the Oxonians made the acquaintance of Sophie Binner and Adele Du Bois, ladies of the chorus in "The Golden Slipper," the current revue at the Gayety. On the promise of stopping at the nearest garage and having the wrecked machine sent for, the girls consented to enter the sedan and be driven back to London. By the time the outskirts of the city were reached, the party was a very gay one and Sir William Newbold's Treasure Hunt was quite forgotten.
Rodrigo was especially interested in Sophie. He had at that time met very few ladies of the stage informally. The frankness, sharp tongue and cream-and-gold beauty of Sophie intrigued him. Rodrigo was rather adroit with all types of women, even at twenty. He flattered Sophie half seriously, half banteringly, exchanged bon mots, made an engagement in a low voice to see her again. Bill Terhune told her on the quiet that Rodrigo was the son of a real Count, thus increasing many fold the force of the impression the good-looking Latin had made upon her.
The Oxonians had dinner with Sophie and Adele, saw the show at the Gayety, and took the girls later to a supper club. It was the first of several parties in which Rodrigo's and Sophie's friends took part.
Having, following this adventure, made his apologies to his uncle and aunt for having left the Treasure Hunt flat, the excuse being the necessity of rescuing an automobile party in distress, Rodrigo proceeded to cultivate the further acquaintance of Miss Binner assiduously and without the knowledge of the Newbolds.
He was her constant cavalier. She taught him much—for instance, that a baby-faced blonde can possess a wicked tongue, a sudden and devastating temper and a compensating tenderness that made up for both defects. He was thoroughly infatuated at first. Then his ardor cooled as he realized that Sophie was professing to take his wooing seriously. The idea of contracting an alliance with a future nobleman seemed to appeal to her. Rodrigo did not think of her in that regard at all, and he was alarmed. He began looking for a loophole.
The climax came at a party arranged for after the show in Sophie's Mayfair apartment. Rodrigo had recruited Bill Terhune, Bond and three or four other Oxford friends for the fun. They had accumulated Sophie, Adele and a quartet of their sister coryphees at the theatre after the evening performance and whirled them through the London streets in a fleet of taxicabs. At two o'clock in the morning the party was in full swing. The tinpanny piano crashed out American jazz under the nimble fingers of Sophie. Leslie Bond numbered drumming among his numerous avocations and had brought along the clamorous tools of his hobby. His hysterical efforts on drums, cymbals and cowbells augmented the din and broke both drums.
The revelers sang, danced, drank and made love. Bill Terhune, under the impetus of spirits, was especially boisterous.
There was a sharp knocking upon the door. A corpulent, red-faced Englishman in a frayed and gaudy bathrobe announced that he occupied the apartment below, had been awakened by plaster falling upon his bed and his person, and that "this Donnybrook Fair must cease at once." He was set upon joyously by three burly Oxonians and good-naturedly propelled down the stairs.
Sophie, from the piano, however, did not share their enthusiasm. "It may interest you impetuous lads to know that our killjoy friend is a magistrate and will probably have a couple of bobbies here in five minutes," she warned them. They laughed at her and the party went on.
In twenty minutes there was another knock. Two bobbies, each built like Dempsey, confronted Rodrigo when he opened the door. The policemen entered with that soft, authoritative tread that London police have. One of them laid hands upon Bill Terhune. Bill, former intercollegiate boxing champion, was in a flushed and pugnacious mood. He promptly struck the officer in the face and sent him reeling to the floor.
Immediately the party grew serious. Englishmen respect the police. An American may attack a Broadway policeman, but hitting a London bobby is something else again. The other bobby swung into action with his club. There was a concerted rush for the door. Rodrigo could have easily escaped. But he chose instead to stand by Sophie, who, he knew, was due for trouble as the tenant of the apartment. When the tumult and the shouting died, the room contained Sophie, Rodrigo, one angry bobby with pencil raised over his book, and one still bobby recumbent upon the floor.
"The names now—the right ones," commanded the erect bobby.
"First, don't you think we'd better revive your friend on the floor?" Rodrigo suggested.
When they had brought the fallen one back to life, Rodrigo soothingly and skillfully persuaded the officers to let Sophie alone, to allow him to assume sole responsibility for the trouble. He asked only permission to telephone his uncle, Sir William Newbold. The bobbies generously consented to take him, without Sophie, to jail for the rest of the night, but they declined to allow him the use of the telephone.
The jail cell was cold, cramped and dirty. Rodrigo's cellmate was a hairy navvy recovering from a debauch. Rodrigo had to listen to the fellow's alternate snoring and maudlin murmurings until dawn. When, around ten o'clock in the morning, he did succeed in getting in touch with his uncle, the latter's influence was sufficient to secure his release.
Sir William delivered to his nephew a severe lecture. Then he telephoned the newspaper offices with the idea of having any possible news of his nephew's incarceration suppressed. In this endeavor he was unsuccessful. Two papers contained an account of the arrest, and the more sensational sheet of the two declared that Rodrigo, son of Count Angelo Torriani and nephew of "London's leading merchant-knight, Sir William Newbold," was the fiancé of Sophie Binner and that they were to be married shortly. Rodrigo denied this vehemently to his uncle and was indeed just as angry about it as was Sir William. He saw in it evidence that Sophie had prevaricated to the newspapers, had used his ill fortune as a means of securing notoriety and possibly of binding him publicly to an alliance that did not exist.
He resolved to call upon her and break off any possible entanglement with her.
He confronted her in her apartment in the middle of the next afternoon. She looked especially lovely, her spun-gold tresses in informal disarray and her beauty encased in a silken lounging gown. But Rodrigo was firm. He accused her of exploiting last night's episode in the papers, of giving out news of an engagement that was false. Though she denied this, at first poutingly, then coyly and finally with considerable vehemence not unmixed with vulgarity, Rodrigo insisted. He worked her into a tempest and, at the climax, dramatically walked out of the room and, as he thought, of her life.
During the two years following his graduation from Oxford, Rodrigo had vague ambitions to become a painter and spent considerable time browsing about the galleries of England, Spain, France and his native Italy. He had a workroom fitted up in the palace of the Torrianis and did some original work in oil that was not without merit. But he worked spasmodically. His heart was not in it. He knew good painting too well to believe that his was an outstanding talent, and he lacked ambition therefore to concentrate upon developing it.
In the pursuit of pleasure and the spending of money he was more whole-hearted. He skied and tobogganed at St. Moritz, gambled at Monte Carlo, laughed at Montmartre's attempts to shock him, and flirted in all three places. Upon the invitation of the bobby-assaulting American Rhodes scholar, Terhune by name, now squandering his South Dakotan father's money in New York under the pretence of making a career in architecture, Rodrigo visited America. America, to Rodrigo, was represented by the Broadway theatre and nightclub belt between dusk and dawn. Having in a few weeks exhausted his funds and finding his cabled requests for more greeted with a strange reticence, Rodrigo started for home. Three days out from New York he received the cable announcing to him Count Angelo Torriani's sudden death.
Rodrigo had adored and respected his quiet, high-minded English mother, from whom he had inherited the thin vein of pure gold concealed deep down below the veneer of selfishness and recklessness that coated his character. He loved his father, from whom he drew the superficial and less desirable traits of his personality. Loved him and, without respecting him particularly, treated him as he would an older brother of kindred tastes and faults.
His father's death shook Rodrigo down considerably for a while. It sobered him, made him suddenly aware of his appalling aloneness in a world of many acquaintances but not an understanding relative nor close friend. The secondary calamity of having been, out of a clear sky, left penniless and in debt did not at first impress itself upon him. When the late Count Torriani's will was read, revealing the surprisingly devastated condition of the Torriani finances, and debtors began to present their claims, Rodrigo, now Count Rodrigo faced the realization that his whole mode of life must be changed.
He dismissed the servants, keeping Maria because she refused to go, even after being informed that she would probably have to serve without pay if she stayed. He finally brought himself to talking with an agent at Naples about renting the palace and selling some of the works of art which it contained. The agent was very brisk and business-like. He jumped up and down from his chair and rubbed his hands continually, like an American. Rodrigo was irritated by the vulgarian. He abruptly left the matter and the realtor up in the air and jumped into his car outside. As he swung along the shore of the bay he was in very low spirits, lonesome and as nearly depressed with life as he had ever been. In his preoccupation he paid only subconscious attention to the road ahead and the swift speed at which his car was traveling. He heard suddenly a shriek and flashed his eyes in its direction just in time to avoid killing a girl.
In the flash he saw that the girl was dark, and beautiful in a wildflower-like manner. She was also very dusty from walking. In the torrent of oaths which she poured after him, she furthermore revealed herself as charmingly coarse and unrestrained. Rodrigo cheered up. After the weeks of grief and loneliness, and particularly after the Naples realtor, he found himself wanting ardently to talk to a woman, any woman. He stopped the car and slowly backed up even with the approaching girl. She continued to swear at him. He smiled. When she had gradually quieted, he apologized and offered her a seat beside him. Her angry face relaxed, she pouted, and ended by accepting.
In a few days he had drifted into a fast ripening friendship with Rosa Minardi, who was childlike, was no tax upon his conversational charms or ingenuity, and who liked him very much. Her mother was dead, her father was away in Rome on some mysterious errand. Rodrigo badly needed any sort of companionship, and Rosa filled the need.