Basil was coming back as fast as steam could bring him, his brain afire with wrath and humiliation, determined beyond a doubt to punish the guilty betrayed to him by his faithful and indiscreet agent. The guilty? Tatiana thought of the still, white form in the chapel—that sculptured beauty on the silver brocades of her last couch, between the tall candlesticks burning their pale-yellow flames amid sheaves of snowy flowers. The abbé, Régis, and Jean remembered the quietly delirious man in his strange sick-room at the foot of the cliffs, awaiting unknowingly the verdict of the great physicians telegraphed for to Paris—and there was a silence pregnant with pain and wretchedness. Ah, surely the punishment had already been dealt by stronger hands than Basil’s!
Up-stairs little Piotr, ignorant of what new complications Fate was weaving around his baby existence, was playing now with Garrassime—Garrassime moving as in a dream, his honest heart well-nigh broken by so many repeated blows.
Salvières explained that during the second interview he had just had with the Wild Rose’s first mate in the Castle infirmary, he had discovered that after a cruise in the Mediterranean, among the Ionian Islands, and back to Gibraltar, Princess Laurence had crossed the straits to Tangier, where she had hired a Moorish house inclosed by an impenetrable rampart of cactus, and set upon the flank of a fortress-like hillock beyond the Sôk, and outside the city gates, beyond the spot where the East and the West rub shoulders. The Wild Rose lay at anchor on the still bosom of the bay, at the least conspicuous moorings that could be found—this by the special command of the Princess. Every evening Captain Braines or the first mate went up to the house for orders, more often than once walking out of town by the Mazàn and the dusky lanes shadowed by sweeping cedars and hedged by prickly-pear. The mate had a natural picturesqueness of expression which Salvières faithfully reproduced as he retold the tale. To hear him it was difficult to realize that Laurence’s hiding-place was but a few short miles away from Europe as the swallow flies across that sunlit strait. The house, it seemed, had been luxurious. The Princess, served by her own confidential servants brought with her on the yacht, had never left its seclusion, but spent her time in the queer, fragrant old garden, with its ever-splashing fountains and irregular bosquets of palms and flowering trees, where roses and camellias made a blaze of color in the day, and the big Oriental moon cast its triumphant glamour at night. There she had lain in a hammock, apparently wasting her beauty upon the almost awesome solitude of the place, until one evening when the captain, walking up the path of crushed shells between the high thickets, had seen a man rise hastily and disappear behind a clump of ilexes. The bluff Englishman had told the mate of this incident on coming aboard, in shocked and very strong language, but, contrary to expectation, the days had passed without further developments. Two weeks later, however, the Princess had bidden the captain be ready to take to sea again, and twenty-four hours afterward the Wild Rose had steamed out of Tangier, bound for the Azores, carrying, besides its former contingent, a very good-looking young man, who was, so it was said, her Serene-Highness’s newly engaged secretary, an Englishman; by name Preston Harrington.
Throughout the trip the Princess, who had evidently taken a sudden turn toward literature, had been closeted in her own suite with “Mr. Harrington” for many hours a day, dictating, doubtless, the novel to which she freely referred when talking to the captain, whom she daily honored with a visit on the bridge. It was to be—she claimed—the work of her life, a great-lady way of avoiding ennui in this weary, weary existence of plenitude.
It had leaked out, however, as such things are over-apt to do, that the Azores were but a pretext, a port of call on the way to the States; that “Mr. Harrington” was in reality an American, and that his post of secretary had not been adopted for the sake of obtaining a remunerative position, since his pockets were royally filled, as was testified by the munificence of his tips to every man-jack of the crew and engine-room. He had made himself well liked, too, and had gained the brevet title of a “real gentleman” among them. Also he was a splendid sailor, visibly used to a pleasing existence on a yacht of extreme luxuriousness.
Once or twice the mate himself had heard voices raised to the pitch of anger in the saloon, when keeping his midnight watch on deck, and had greatly wondered, but reported nothing of what he had discovered. Once, as a matter of fact, he had unwillingly caught a sentence of the Princess: “I will not go with you to America! We must find some other place!” And the answer in “Harrington’s” lower tones: “I don’t care where we go. You must decide. You know very well that now I am utterly in your hands.”
A short sojourn at the Azores, spent mostly on the yacht, and then orders to steam back again to Europe. Célèste, her Highness’s French maid, had chatted about Norway to one of the quartermasters who was a Norwegian, and had let fall that her mistress, already sickened of sub-tropical landscapes, would spend the end of the summer in the Fjords. There was no longer peace on board, however. Laurence scowled savagely during meal-times, as was asserted by the head steward and his under-strappers. “Mr. Harrington” looked grim and worried by turns, and the admirably trained, carefully selected crew gossiped between themselves, just as if they had been the most ordinary passenger-steamer lot; only their faces remained aristocratically wooden, and their tongues reduced to pianissimo expressions.
On nearing Europe the Wild Rose had encountered dirty weather of the midsummer kind, the most trying for seafarers to bear, and the Princess had signified to her captain that her next point of destination would be Trondhjem. Then suddenly he had been summoned to her “study” and had received orders not to go by way of the English Channel.
Greatly surprised, Captain Braines had respectfully pointed out to her that any other route would be a roundabout one, if Norway was really her Highness’s destination; but evidently apprehensive of meeting other yachts in those much-traveled waters, she had objected with her usual stubbornness, and only by protesting the lateness of the season had the captain finally succeeded in gaining his point. Beaten by contrary winds, the Wild Rose had entered the Channel, and had attempted to seek shelter from the final tempest in some French port. Fog-banks of impenetrable thickness and terrible cross-seas had been her portion, and then—the end! The first mate confessed that the unreasonableness of the Princess, her incomprehensible behavior in the teeth of imminent peril, had unmanned the crew and shaken even the captain himself, though “Mr. Harrington’s” cool courage and resourcefulness in a desperate situation might have still saved her had she but listened to him. The rest of the recital was mere maritime detail—a welter of raging waters, the gnashing teeth of breakers—and of no present interest, so Salvières leaned back in his chair and took the cigarette his wife silently handed to him.
And what could they all do now? That was the grievous point. What would be the dictum of the “Princes of Science” summoned to Salvières? How conceal the true identity of Preston Wynne, granted that the Ducal doctor was correct in his fears of permanent disablement? There was Basil, too, to reckon with. Perhaps he would hear or read of the disaster to the Wild Rose before reaching France, whither he was journeying, knowing that the de Salvières were in Normandy. They looked sadly at one another, these people who a few short months before had all been so happy.