Chapter XVI

In the early hours of the sleepy afternoon, when the June sun blazes, and the air outside is heavy with heat, the coolest place in Monte Carlo is the Casino.

At one of the few roulette tables where play was going on Nielsen sat, leaning back in his chair, his eyes half closed, and one of his hands resting upon the table.

It was only three o’clock, but he had finished work for the day. He sat on, apparently watching the game, in reality occupied in putting together the pieces of his puzzle. The polished floors, and even the garish colouring of the walls and ceilings, looked soft in the mellow light that filtered through the wire blinds set in the windows. The glass panes had disappeared for the summer, and the cooled air was sweet with the smell of flowers and shrubs. The murmuring of the few players, the monotonous scrape of the croupiers’ rakes, the sing-song of their voices, and the subdued rattle of coins on the green cloth, made a sleepy sum of sound.

Nielsen found nothing to disturb his reflections. The long rows of expressionless profiles, clear-cut or indefinite to this side and that, the shifting play of light and shade on the faces opposite, all meant nothing to him--no more than the scraping of his clerks’ pens and the rows of their bent shoulders mean to the merchant, or the eternal coming and going of pasty-faced assistants to the master shopman.

With him, the indifferent cry of the croupier’s voice, which announced the gain of his fixed, daily wage, was the ending of all concern in the tables. Sometimes he waited the whole day for it, watching the game as a cat watches a mouse, sometimes it came in half-an-hour, but it generally came. He knew the faces of nearly all the players; the faces of the born-gamblers who were ruining themselves--lined faces that were for the most part placid with a schooled placidity, and with restless eyes that seemed to look at everything and saw nothing but the eternal shifting of fortune; the faces of the “little” players, dilettante or careless, reckless or timid--faces which expressed all the emotions in turn, and which in the days when he had thought about these things had inspired him with a deep and disheartening belief in the smallness of human nature; the faces, too, such as you may see in any thoroughfare of life, of those who sit and sit and keep your place for a louis--patient, blighted faces, brightening only, and that for a second, at the sight of a client or a coin; again, the faces of such men as himself, and those so rare that he could count them on the fingers of one hand--of men who came there day after day, day after day, just as a man goes to his office or to his chambers, as habituated and as utterly indifferent to the inner life of their surroundings as any other professional man, and who, on leaving the doors of the Casino, shake the dust of it from their feet and from their minds.

Of the many things to which Nielsen had at one time or another turned his hand, journalism had had the most attraction for him. There had been a charm in having a finger, benevolent or corrective, in the pies of other people, which his own pies had never afforded him. He was by nature curiously indifferent to the turn of his own affairs, curiously alive to the weal or woe of the rest of the world. He experienced a mental glow when dealing with the problems of other people.

At this moment he was engaged upon such an one, and he was conscious of bringing a fettered intellect to the task. He was prejudiced against the man upon whose actions he was seeking judgment; prejudiced by the most hopeless of all prejudices, that of sex--jealous of him, in fact. He endeavoured to be impartial and logical, but the thing intruded itself upon him, hampered his reason, coloured his conclusions. He felt that his conviction was mainly a matter of instinct with him, but he was none the less convinced. He did not conceal from himself that he knew very little, had failed to put the puzzle together; but the impression made upon his mind by Legard’s conduct was vivid and painful. He felt certain that he had been directly, or indirectly, the cause of his wife’s death. The motive lay nakedly and glaringly exposed; the man was violently in love with Jocelyn, he had known that by a jealous instinct for many weeks. He did not know that Jocelyn returned that love. To his mind it was a monstrous and a painful idea that she ever should, and as he sat there, motionless, with the monotonous hum droning in his ears, his red-brown eyes glowed angrily, and the fingers of his hand began to drum the table.

His anger was personal, but he was also, and strongly, prompted by the impersonal feeling that it was a duty to interpose, as when one sees somebody running, blindfold, a great and unnecessary danger.

He would see Jocelyn, in some way or another he would warn her! He had said no word of his suspicions to any one, for in spite of his own conviction, he saw clearly that he had nothing in the nature of legal evidence; and he was too much a man of the world to put forward what he could not substantiate.

The funeral had taken place that morning; he had attended it with the doctor who had been called in.

Irma had been buried in the English cemetery at Mentone. No one had been invited, and the only other people present had been her own doctor, two Polish friends, and Legard himself. The latter had looked worn and ill, had spoken to nobody, and had gone away alone after the funeral. He seemed to Nielsen, throughout the ceremony, like a man witnessing some scene upon the stage; he had shown no emotion. There had been amongst those present a tacit understanding that the tragic and ill-fated manner of the death should be kept a secret. The doctors referred to it as failure of the heart. He understood that it was desired to avert the possible breath of scandal from her memory.

A faint stir at the table attracted his attention; a lady was sitting down opposite to him. He was conscious of a slight shock in the recognition of Mrs. Travis. She was bending her head forward, so that all he caught was a view of a black and white bonnet over an abundant fringe, and of plump, white-gloved hands arranging nervously her gambling paraphernalia. It had seemed to himself the most natural thing in the world to change his clothes and walk straight into the Casino from the funeral, but he was not somehow prepared for the appearance of a lady whom he knew to be a connection of Legard’s. After all, the thing was business to him, pleasure to her--a very different affair, as he reflected.

Mrs. Travis raised her head. In return for his bow he acquired the knowledge that her sight varied with her desires. She evidently held to the conviction that not to see was not to be seen, and held to it firmly, with a slight deepening of the red in her cheeks, and a puffing of her lips.

He smiled to himself, and rose gently from his seat. “_Cette chère dame!_” he thought. He would return her lead. He knew that her departure was fixed for the following day; he determined, therefore, to go into Mentone and call upon her. In that way he would certainly see Jocelyn alone. Upon reflection, he condoned Mrs. Travis’s appearance at the tables.

He took train and went into Mentone. As he walked up from the station to the hotel, picking his way carefully over the dusty road, a very correct figure in grey clothes with a flower in his buttonhole, his heart began to beat, and his breath to come a little fast. The subtle attraction which Jocelyn had for him stirred his pulses, and shook his nerve, with every step he took towards her. He had to stop at the entrance of the hotel to steady himself before he went in.