Larssen did not show this wire to Olive. He had told her nothing of his search for Rivière—had not even appeared specially interested in him. But in point of fact his interest in the mysterious half-brother of the dead man was steadily growing with every fresh check to the search. The intuition on which he placed such firm faith told him insistently that John Rivière was a factor vital to the fulfilment of his ambitions.
All the morning he looked for the telegram his secretary was to send him. It came in the early afternoon:—
"Have found Rivière under extraordinary circumstances. Letter and photograph follow."
CHAPTER XII
THE SECOND MEETING
Europe's beauty-spots of to-day were the beauty-spots of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago. Wherever the traveller around Europe now reaches a place that makes instant appeal; where harsh winds are screened away and blazing sunshine filters through feathery foliage; where all Nature beckons one to halt and rest awhile—there he is practically certain to find Roman remains. The wealthy Romans wintered at Nice and Cannes and St Raphael; took the waters at Baden-Baden and Aix in Savoy; made sporting centres of Treves on the Moselle and Ronda in Andalusia; dallied by the marble baths of Nîmes.
Nîmes had captured Rivière at sight. His first day in that leisured, peaceful, fragrant town, nestling amongst the hills against the keen mistral, had decided him to settle there for some weeks. He had taken a couple of furnished rooms in a villa with a delightful old-world garden. For a lengthy stay he much preferred his own rooms to the transiency and restlessness of a hotel, and at the Villa Clémentine he had found exactly what he required. The living-room opened wide to the sun. One stepped out from its French windows into the garden, where a little pebbly path led one wandering amongst oleanders and dwarf oranges and flaming cannas, to a corner where a tiny fountain made a home for lazy goldfish floating in placid contentment under the hot sun. Here there was an arbour wreathed in gentle wisteria, where Rivière took breakfast and the mid-day meal. At nightfall a chill snapped down with the suddenness of the impetuousness Midi, and his evening meal was accordingly taken indoors.
Besides this little private preserve of his own, there was the beautiful public garden of Nîmes—called the Jardin de la Fontaine—draping a hillside that looks down upon the marble baths of the Romans, almost as freshly new to-day as two thousand years ago. A thick battalion of trees at the summit of the hillside makes stubborn insistence to the northern mistral, so that even when the wind tears over the plains of Provence like a wild fury, scourging and freezing, the Jardin de la Fontaine is serene and windless. The mistral goes always with a cloudless sky, as though the clouds were fleeing from its icy keenness, and the sun pours full upon the semi-circle of the Jardin de la Fontaine, turning it to a hothouse where the most delicate plants and shrubs can find a home.
Here men and women in toga and flowing draperies have whiled away leisure hours, spun day-dreams, made love, or schemed affairs of state and personal ambition. To-day, it is still the resort of Nîmes where everyone meets everyone else, either by design or by the chance intercourse of a small town.
On a morning of mistral, Rivière was seated in the pleasant warmth of the Jardin, planning out a special piece of apparatus for his coming research-work. He was concentrating intently—so intently that he did not notice Miss Verney passing him with a very professional-looking campstool, easel and sketch-book.