But was it his heart? How often, in the past few days, he had asked himself that question! He didn't want to believe that it was his heart. He was a man who rode alone; his aloneness was the reason for his swiftness. He had been tricked once by a woman. That was when he was a boy; now he was a man nearing forty. She had cheated him so cruelly that, though she had been dead many years, the bitterness still rankled. Behind the beauty of all women his skepticism detected the shallow loveliness of the one false woman who had stolen his idealism, that she might trample on it.
He did not love Santa. He had assured himself a thousand times that he did not love her. She was too dangerous, too incalculable. He had spent long hours of wakeful nights in completing the inventory of her bad points. And yet, while he had been with her, his veins had run fire; while he had been apart from her, all his pleasures had seemed tasteless. Who was she? Whence had she come? Whither was she going? What had been her business on the Ryndam, and what had Prince Rogovich known about her? The Prince had known something—something which had given him power over her. At a glance from him, her caprice had vanished and she had become downcast as a child. He had muttered a few unintelligible words, probably in Polish, and her pride had crumbled.
Hindwood was at a loss to account for these signs of a secret understanding. It had been he who had introduced them. It had been Santa who had confessed to curiosity about the Prince and had begged for the introduction. The moment he had made them acquainted, they had seemed to become delighted with each other's company—so delighted that there had been times when he himself had felt excluded. A half-humorous rivalry for Santa's favors had sprung up between the Prince and himself. This atmosphere of jealousy had been accentuated by the behavior of the wolfhound; Santa's mere approach had been sufficient to rouse him into fury. He had become so dangerous that he had had to be sent below whenever she was present.
And yet, despite her manifest efforts to hold the Prince enchanted, behind his back she had expressed the most vigorous aversion. She had spoken of his reputation for treachery and the whispers that went the rounds of his heartlessness toward women. During the final days of the voyage she had partly atoned for this inconsistency by appealing to Hindwood to protect her against the Prince's far too pressing attention. She had declared herself to be in some kind of danger—though what kind, whether moral or physical, she had left him to conjecture. She had rather flattered him by her appeal; nevertheless, he had been considerably surprised to observe how little interest she had still displayed in protecting herself. During the whole of that last day, while they had been approaching the white line of Cornish coast, she had scarcely devoted to him a glance or a word; every minute she had spent with His Highness, whom she professed to regard with so much terror. She had created the impression of employing every trick at her disposal in a frantic attempt to secure him as her conquest.
If, as many of the passengers had asserted, the presence of Santa Gorlof and the Prince on the same boat had been no accident, then what had been the object of their elaborately planned deception? Were they lovers who had chosen this secret method of traveling in order to avoid a scandal? Or was she one of the many women whom he was reported to have abandoned, who had seized the leisure of an Atlantic voyage as an opportunity for reinstating herself in his affection?
As Hindwood listened in the darkness to the Prince's name being shouted and waited for the tug to cast off, the surmise strengthened into certainty that he had been the dupe of a piece of play-acting, the purpose of which he could not fathom.
III
Philip!”
He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that he had not noticed how she had stolen up behind him. Without removing his arms from the rail, he turned slowly and surveyed her.
An enviable woman! And her age? Perhaps thirty. She was probably a Slav—either Russian or Polish. Her face was smooth as marble, high cheekboned and golden in complexion. Her eyes were almond-shaped, heavy-lidded, and of the palest gray. Her lips were passionate and always a little parted, revealing a line of perfect whiteness like a streak of snow between the curling edges of two rose-petals. But it was her hair that was her glory—abundant as night, blue-black as steel, and polished as metal. She wore it simply, gathered back from her forehead and caught in a loose knot, low against her neck. There was an air of indefinable aristocracy about her; perhaps it was the slightness of her figure and the alert composure of her carriage. And then there was a touch of the exotic, wistfully sad, yet exceedingly mocking. Like so many Slavs, behind the European there lurked a hint of the Asiatic. If her eyes had been darker, she might easily have passed for a Hindoo princess.