The Quest: A Romance

She shook her head slowly.

"I'll try," said she, "but – my golden spell is broken, and I can't mend it alone. I'm sorry."

He turned with a little sigh to leave her, but Miss Benham followed him towards the door of the drawing-room.

"You're a good friend, Richard," she said, when she had come near. "You're a good friend to him."

"He deserves good friends," said the man stoutly. "And besides," said he, "we're brothers in arms nowadays. We've enlisted together to fight for the same cause."

The girl fell back with a little cry. "Do you mean," she said, after a moment, "do you mean that you are working with him – to find Arthur?"

Hartley nodded.

"But," said she stammering, "but, Richard – "

The man checked her. "Oh, I know what I'm doing," said he. "My eyes are open. I know that I'm not – well, in the running. I work for no reward except a desire to help you and Ste. Marie. That's all. It pleases me to be useful."

He went away with that, not waiting for an answer; and the girl stood where he had left her, staring after him.

CHAPTER X

CAPTAIN STEWART ENTERTAINS

Ste. Marie returned, after three days, from Dinard in a depressed and somewhat puzzled frame of mind. He had found no trace whatever of Arthur Benham either at Dinard or at Deauville, and, what was more, he was unable to discover that any one even remotely resembling that youth had been seen at either place. The matter of identification, it seemed to him, should be a rather simple one. In the first place, the boy's appearance was not at all French, nor for that matter English: it was very American. Also he spoke French – so Ste. Marie had been told – very badly, having for the language that scornful contempt peculiar to Anglo-Saxons of a certain type. His speech, it seemed, was, like his appearance, ultra-American, full of strange idioms and oddly pronounced. In short, such a youth would be rather sure to be remembered by any hotel management and staff with which he might have come in contact.

At first Ste. Marie pursued his investigations quietly and, as it were, casually, but, after his initial failure, he went to the managements of the various hotels and lodging-houses and to the cafés and bathing establishments, and told them with all frankness a part of the truth – that he was searching for a young man whose disappearance had caused great distress to his family. He was not long in discovering that no such young man could have been either in Dinard or Deauville.

The thing which puzzled him was that, apart from finding no trace of the missing boy, he also found no trace of Captain Stewart's agent – the man who had been first on the ground. No one seemed able to recollect that such a person had been making inquiries, and Ste. Marie began to suspect that his friend was being imposed upon. He determined to warn Stewart that his agents were earning their fees too easily.

So he returned to Paris more than a little dejected and sore over this waste of time and effort. He arrived by a noon tram, and drove across the city in a fiacre to the Rue d'Assas. But as he was in the midst of unpacking his portmanteau, for he kept no servant (a woman came in once a day to "do" the rooms), the door-bell rang. It was Baron de Vries, and Ste. Marie admitted him with an exclamation of surprise and pleasure.

"You passed me in the street just now," explained the Belgian, "and, as I was a few minutes early for a lunch engagement, I followed you up."

He pointed with his stick at the open bag.

"Ah, you have been on a journey! Detective work?"

Ste. Marie pushed his guest into a chair, gave him cigarettes, and told him about the fruitless expedition to Dinard. He spoke also of his belief that Captain Stewart's agent had never really found a clue at all, and at that Baron de Vries nodded his grey head and said, "Ah!" in a tone of some significance. Afterwards he smoked a little while in silence, but presently he said, as if with some hesitation —

"May I be permitted to offer a word of advice?"

"But surely!" cried Ste. Marie, kicking away the half-empty portmanteau. "Why not?"

"Do whatever you are going to do in this matter according to your own judgment," said the elder man. "Or according to Mr. Hartley's and your combined judgments. Make your investigations without reference to our friend Captain Stewart." He halted there as if that were all he had meant to say, but when he saw Ste. Marie's raised eyebrows, he frowned and went on slowly as if picking his words with some care.

"I should be sorry," he said, "to have Captain Stewart at the head of any investigation of this nature in which I was deeply interested – just now, at any rate. I am afraid – It is difficult to say. I do not wish to say too much – I am afraid he is not quite the man for the position."

Ste. Marie nodded his head with great emphasis.

"Ah!" he cried, "that's just what I have felt, you know, all along. And it's what Hartley felt too, I'm sure. No, Stewart is not the sort for a detective. He's too cock-sure. He won't admit that he might possibly be wrong now and then. He's too – "

"He is too much occupied with other matters," said Baron de Vries. Ste. Marie sat down on the edge of a chair.

"Other matters?" he demanded. "That sounds mysterious. What other matters?"

"Oh, there is nothing very mysterious about it," said the elder man. He frowned down at his cigarette and brushed some fallen ash neatly from his knees.

"Captain Stewart," said he, "is badly worried, and has been for the past year or so – badly worried over money matters and other things. He has lost enormous sums at play, as I happen to know; and he has lost still more enormous sums at Auteuil and at Longchamps. Also the ladies are not without their demands."

Ste. Marie gave a shout of laughter.

"Comment donc!" he cried. "Ce vieillard?"

"Ah well," deprecated the other man, "Vieillardis putting it rather high. He can't be more than fifty, I should think. To be sure he looks older, but then, in his day, he lived a great deal in a short time. Do you happen to remember Olga Nilssen?"

"I do," said Ste. Marie. "I remember her very well indeed; I was a sort of go-between in settling up that affair with Morrison. Morrison's people asked me to do what I could. Yes, I remember her well, and with some pleasure. I felt sorry for her, you know. People didn't quite know the truth of that affair. Morrison behaved very badly to her."

"Yes," said Baron de Vries, "and Captain Stewart has behaved very badly to her also. She is furious with rage or jealousy or both. She goes about, I am told, threatening to kill him, and it would be rather like her to do it one day. Well, I have dragged in all this scandal by way of showing you that Stewart has his hands full of his own affairs just now, and so cannot give the attention he ought to give to hunting out his nephew. As you suggest, his agents may be deceiving him. I don't know, I suppose they could do it easily enough. If I were you I would set to work quite independently of him."

"Yes," said Ste. Marie in an absent tone. "Oh yes, I shall do that, you may be sure." He gave a sudden smile.

"He's a queer type, this Captain Stewart," said Ste. Marie. "He begins to interest me very much. I had never suspected this side of him (though I remember now that I once saw him coming out of a milliner's shop). He looks rather an ascetic, rather donnish, don't you think? I remember that he talked to me one day quite pathetically about feeling his age and about liking young people round him. He's an odd character. Fancy him mixed up in an affair with Olga Nilssen! or, rather, fancy her involved in an affair with him! What can she have seen in him? She's not mercenary, you know. At least she used not to be."

"Ah! there," said Baron de Vries, "you enter upon a terra incognita. No one can say what a woman sees in this man or in that. It's beyond our ken." He rose to take his leave, and Ste. Marie went with him to the door.

"I've been asked to a sort of party at Stewart's rooms this week," Ste. Marie said. "I don't know whether I shall go or not. Probably not. I suppose I shouldn't find Olga Nilssen there?"

"Well, no," said the Belgian, laughing. "No, I hardly think so. Good-bye! Think over what I've told you. Good-bye!" He went away down the stair, and Ste. Marie returned to his unpacking.

Nothing more of consequence occurred in the next few days. Hartley had unearthed a somewhat shabby adventurer, who swore to having seen the Irishman, O'Hara, in Paris within a month, but it was by no means certain that this being did not merely affirm what he believed to be desired of him, and in any case the information was of no especial value, since it was O'Hara's present whereabouts that was the point at issue. So it came to Thursday evening. Ste. Marie received a note from Captain Stewart during the day, reminding him that he was to come to the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré that evening, and asking him to come early, at ten or thereabouts, so that the two could have a comfortable chat before any one else turned up. Ste. Marie had about decided not to go at all, but the courtesy of this special invitation from Miss Benham's uncle made it rather impossible for him to stay away. He tried to persuade Hartley to follow him later on in the evening, but that gentleman flatly refused, and went away to dine with some English friends at Armenonville.

So Ste. Marie, in a vile temper, dined quite alone at Lavenue's, beside the Gare Montparnasse, and towards ten o'clock drove across the river to the Rue du Faubourg. Captain Stewart's flat was up five stories, at the top of the building in which it was located, and so well above the noises of the street. Ste. Marie went up in the automatic lift, and at the door above his host met him in person, saying that the one servant he kept was busy making preparations in the kitchen beyond. They entered a large room, long but comparatively shallow, in shape not unlike the sitting-room in the Rue d'Assas but very much bigger, and Ste. Marie uttered an exclamation of surprise and pleasure, for he had never before seen an interior anything like this. The room was decorated and furnished entirely in Chinese and Japanese articles of great age and remarkable beauty. Ste. Marie knew little of the hieratic art of these two countries, but he fancied that the place must be an endless delight to the expert.

The general tone of the room was gold, dulled and softened by great age until it had ceased to glitter, and relieved by the dusty Chinese blue, and by old red faded to rose, and by warm ivory tints. The great expanse of the walls was covered by a brownish-yellow cloth, coarse, like burlap, and against it round the room hung sixteen large panels representing the sixteen Rakan. They were early copies – fifteenth century, Captain Stewart said – of those famous originals by the Chinese Sungmaster Ririomin, which have been for six hundred years or more the treasures of Japan. They were mounted upon Japanese brocade of blue and dull gold, framed in keyaki wood, and, out of their brown time-stained shadows, the great Rakan scowled or grinned or placidly gazed, grotesquely graceful masterpieces of a perished art.

At the far end of the room, under a gilded canopy of intricate wood-carving, stood upon his pedestal of many-petalled lotus a great statue of Amida Buddha in the yogi attitude of contemplation, and at intervals against the other walls other smaller images stood or sat; Buddha in many incarnations; Kwannon, Goddess of Mercy; Jizo Bosatzu; Hotei, pot-bellied, God of Contentment; Jingo-Kano, God of War. In the centre of the place was a Buddhist temple table; and priests' chairs, lacquered and inlaid, stood about the room. The floor was covered by Chinese rugs, dull yellow with blue flowers; and over a doorway which led into another room was fixed a huge rama of Chinese pierced carving, gilded, in which there were trees and rocks and little grouped figures of the hundred immortals.

It was indeed an extraordinary room. Ste. Marie looked about its mellow glow with a half-comprehending wonder, and he looked at the man beside him curiously, for here was another side to this many-sided character. Captain Stewart smiled.

"You like my museum?" he asked. "Few people care much for it except, of course, those who go in for the Oriental arts. Most of my friends think it bizarre – too grotesque and unusual. I have tried to satisfy them by including those comfortable low divan couches (they refuse altogether to sit in the priests' chairs), but still they are unhappy." He called his servant, who came to take Ste. Marie's hat and coat, and returned with smoking things.

"It seems entirely wonderful to me," said the younger man. "I'm not an expert at all – I don't know who the gentlemen in those sixteen panels are, for example; but it is very beautiful. I have never seen anything like it at all." He gave a little laugh.

"Will it sound very impertinent in me, I wonder, if I express surprise – not surprise at finding this magnificent room, but at discovering that this sort of thing is a taste and, very evidently, a serious study of yours? You – I remember your saying once with some feeling that it was youth and beauty and – well, freshness that you liked best to be surrounded by. This," said Ste. Marie, waving an inclusive hand, "was young so many centuries ago! It fairly breathes antiquity and death."

"Yes," said Captain Stewart thoughtfully. "Yes, that is quite true." The two had seated themselves upon one of the broad low benches which had been built into the place to satisfy the philistine.

"I find it hard to explain," he said, "because both things are passions of mine. Youth – I could not exist without it. Since I have it no longer in my own body, I wish to see it about me. It gives me life. It keeps my heart beating. I must have it near. And then this – antiquity and death, beautiful things made by hands dead centuries ago in an alien country! I love this too. I didn't speak too strongly, it is a sort of passion with me – something quite beyond the collector's mania, quite beyond that. Sometimes, do you know, I stay at home in the evening, and I sit here quite alone with the lights half on and, for hours together, I smoke and watch these things – the quiet, sure, patient smile of that Buddha for example. Think how long he has been smiling like that, and waiting! Waiting for what? There is something mysterious beyond all words in that smile of his, that fixed, crudely carved wooden smile. No, I'll be hanged if it's crude! It is beyond our modern art. The dead men carved better than we do. We couldn't manage that with such simple means. We can only reproduce what is before us. We can't carve questions – mysteries – everlasting riddles."

Through the pale blue wreathing smoke of his cigarette Captain Stewart gazed down the room to where Eternal Buddha stood and smiled eternally. And from there the man's eyes moved with slow enjoyment along the opposite wall over those who sat or stood there, over the panels of the ancient Rakan, over carved lotus and gilt contorted dragon for ever in pursuit of the holy pearl. He drew a short breath which seemed to bespeak extreme contentment, the keenest height of pleasure, and he stirred a little where he sat and settled himself among the cushions. Ste. Marie watched him, and the expression of the man's face began to be oddly revolting. It was the face of a voluptuary in the presence of his desire. He was uncomfortable and wished to say something to break the silence, but, as often occurs at such a time, he could think of nothing to say. So there was a brief silence between them. But presently Captain Stewart roused himself with an obvious effort.

"Here! this won't do," said he, in a tone of whimsical apology. "This won't do, you know. I'm floating off on my hobby (and there's a mixed metaphor that would do credit to your own Milesian blood!) I'm boring you to extinction, and I don't want to do that, for I'm anxious that you should come here again – and often. I should like to have you form the habit.

"What was it I had in mind to ask you about? Ah yes! The journey to Dinard and Deauville. I am afraid it turned out to be fruitless or you would have let me know."

"Entirely fruitless," said Ste. Marie. He went on to tell the elder man of his investigation, and of his certainty that no one resembling Arthur Benham had been at either of the two places.

"It's no affair of mine, to be sure," he said; "but I rather suspect that your agent was deceiving you – pretending to have accomplished something by way of making you think he was busy." Ste. Marie was so sure the other would immediately disclaim this that he waited for the word, and gave a little smothered laugh when Captain Stewart said promptly —

"Oh no! No! That is impossible. I have every confidence in that man. He is one of my best. No, you are mistaken there. I am more disappointed than you could possibly be over the failure of your efforts, but I am quite sure my man thought he had something worth working upon.

"By the way, I have received another rather curious communication – from Ostend this time. I will show you the letter, and you may try your luck there if you would care to." He felt in his pockets and then rose. "I've left the thing in another coat," said he; "if you will allow me, I'll fetch it." But before he had turned away the doorbell rang, and he paused.

"Ah well," he said, "another time. Here are some of my guests. They have come earlier than I had expected."

The new arrivals were three very perfectly dressed ladies, one of them an operatic light who chanced not to be singing that evening, and whom Ste. Marie had met before. The two others were rather difficult of classification, but probably, he thought, ornaments of that mysterious borderland between the two worlds which seems to give shelter to so many people against whose characters nothing definite is known, but whose antecedents and connexions are not made topics of conversation. The three ladies seemed to be on very friendly terms with Captain Stewart, and greeted him with much noisy delight. One of the unclassified two, when her host, with a glance towards Ste. Marie, addressed her formally, seemed inordinately amused, and laughed for a long time.

Within the next hour ten or a dozen other guests had arrived, and they all seemed to know each other very well, and proceeded to make themselves quite at home. Ste. Marie regarded them with a reflective and not over-enthusiastic eye, and he wondered a good deal why he had been asked here to meet them. He was as far from a prig or a snob as any man could very well be, and he often went to very Bohemian parties which were given by his painter or musician friends, but these people seemed to him quite different. The men, with the exception of two eminent opera singers, who quite obviously had been asked because of their voices, were the sort of men who abound at such places as Ostend and Monte Carlo, and Baden Baden in the race week. That is not to say that they were ordinary racing touts or the cheaper kind of adventurers: there was a count among them, and a marquis who had recently been divorced by his American wife; but adventurers of a sort they undoubtedly were. There was not one of them, so far as Ste. Marie was aware, who was received anywhere in good society, and he resented very much being compelled to meet them.

Naturally enough he felt much less concern on the score of the ladies. It is an undoubted and wellnigh universal truth that men who would refuse outright to meet certain classes of their own sex show no reluctance whatever over meeting the women of a corresponding circle – that is, if the women are attractive. It is a depressing fact, and inclines one to sighs and head-shakes and some moral indignation, until the reverse truth is brought to light: namely, that women have identically the same point of view; that while they cast looks of loathing and horror upon certain of their sisters, they will meet with pleasure any presentable man whatever his crimes or vices.

Ste. Marie was very much puzzled over all this. It seemed to him so unnecessary that a man who really had some footing in the newer society of Paris should choose to surround himself with people of this type; but, as he looked on and wondered, he became aware of a curious and, in the light of a past conversation, significant fact. All of the people in the room were young, all of them in their varying fashions and degrees very attractive to look upon, all full to overflowing of life and spirits and the determination to have a good time. He saw Captain Stewart moving among them, playing very gracefully his role of host, and the man seemed to have dropped twenty years from his shoulders. A miracle of rejuvenation seemed to have come upon him; his eyes were bright and eager, the colour was high in his cheeks, and the dry pedantic tone had gone from his voice. Ste. Marie watched him, and at last he thought he understood. It was half revolting, half pathetic, he thought, but it certainly was interesting to see.

Duval, the great basso of the Opéra, accompanied at the piano by one of the unclassified ladies, was just finishing Mefistofele's drinking song out of Faust when the door-bell rang.

CHAPTER XI

A GOLDEN LADY ENTERS: THE EYES AGAIN

The music of voice and piano was very loud just then, so that the little soft whirring sound of the electric bell reached only one or two pairs of ears in the big room. It did not reach the host certainly, and neither he nor most of the others observed the servant make his way among the groups of seated or standing people and go to the outer door, which opened upon a tiny hallway. The song came to an end, and everybody was cheering and applauding and crying bravo or bis, or one of the other things that people shout at such times, when, as if in unexpected answer to the outburst, a lady appeared between the yellow portières, and came forward a little way into the room. She was a tall lady of an extraordinary and immediately noticeable grace of movement, a lady with rather fair hair, but her eyebrows and lashes had been stained darker than it was their nature to be. She had the classic Greek type of face – and figure too – all but the eyes, which were long and narrow, narrow perhaps from a habit of going half closed; and when they were a little more than half closed, they made a straight black line that turned up very slightly at the outer end with an Oriental effect, which went oddly in that classic face. There is a very popular piece of sculpture now in the Luxembourg Gallery for which this lady "sat" as model to a great artist. Sculptors from all over the world go there to dream over its perfect line and contour, and little schoolgirls pretend not to see it, and middle-aged maiden tourists with red Baedeckersin their hands regard it furtively, and pass on, and after awhile come back to look again.

The lady was dressed in some close clinging material, which was not cloth-of-gold but something very like it, only much duller – something which gleamed when she stirred but did not glitter; and over her splendid shoulders was hung an Oriental scarf heavily worked with metallic gold. She made an amazing and dramatic picture in that golden room. It was as if she had known just what her surroundings would be and had dressed expressly for them.

The applause ceased as suddenly as if it had been trained to break off at a signal, and the lady came forward a little way, smiling a quiet assured smile. At each step her knee threw out the golden stuff of her gown an inch or two, and it flashed suddenly a dull subdued flash in the overhead light, and died and flashed again. A few of the people in the room knew who the lady was, and they looked at one another with raised eyebrows and startled faces; but the others stared at her with an eager admiration, thinking that they had seldom seen anything so beautiful or so effective. Ste. Marie sat forward on the edge of his chair. His eyes sparkled, and he gave a little quick sigh of pleasurable excitement. This was drama and very good drama too, and he suspected that it might at any moment turn into a tragedy.

He saw Captain Stewart, who had been among a group of people halfway across the room, turn his head to look, when the cries and the applause ceased so suddenly, and he saw the man's face stiffen by swift degrees, all the joyous buoyant life gone out of it, until it was yellow and rigid like a dead man's face; and Ste. Marie, out of his knowledge of the relations between these two people, nodded, en connaisseur, for he knew that the man was very badly frightened.