Read Ebook: Captain Dieppe by Hope Anthony

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Ebook has 903 lines and 35134 words, and 19 pages

d. The Count lived in solitude. Half his house--and that the other half--was brilliantly lighted, and he left his bedroom because of a cat. Here were circumstances that might set the least inquisitive of men thinking. It crossed Dieppe's mind that his host was eccentric, but the Count's manner gave little warrant for the supposition; and Dieppe could not believe that so courteous a gentleman would amuse himself by making fun of a guest. He listened eagerly when the Count, after a long silence, went on to say:

"The reason I put forward must, no doubt, sound ludicrous, but the fact is that the animal, in itself a harmless beast, became the occasion, or was made the means, of forcing on me encounters with a person whom I particularly wish to avoid. You, however, will not be annoyed in that way."

There he stopped, and turned the conversation to general topics. Never had Dieppe's politeness been subjected to such a strain.

No relief was granted to him. The Count talked freely and well on a variety of questions till eleven o'clock, and then proposed to show his guest to his bedroom. Dieppe accepted the offer in despair, but he would have sat up all night had there seemed any chance of the Count's becoming more explicit.

The Cardinal's Room was a large apartment situated on the upper floor , about the middle of the house; its windows looked across the river, which rippled pleasantly in the quiet of the night when Dieppe flung up the sash and put his head out. He turned first to the left. Save his own room, all was dark: the Count, no doubt, slept at the back. Then, craning his neck, he tried to survey the right wing. The illumination was quenched; light showed in one window only, a window on the same level with his and distant from it perhaps forty feet. With a deep sigh the Captain drew his head back and shut out the chilly air.

Ah, there was an inner door on the right hand side of the room; that the Captain had not noticed before. Walking up to it, he perceived that it was bolted at top and bottom; but the key was in the lock. He stood and looked at this door; it seemed that it must lead, either directly or by way of another apartment between, to the room whose lights he had just seen. He pulled his moustache thoughtfully; and he remembered that there was a person whom the Count particularly wished to avoid and, owing to a cat, could not rely on being able to avoid if he slept in the Cardinal's Room.

"Well, then--" began Dieppe with a thoughtful frown. "Oh, I can't stand it much longer!" he ended, with a smile and a shrug.

And then there came--the Captain was really not surprised, he had been almost expecting it--a mew, a peevish, plaintive mew. "I won't open that door," said the Captain. The complaint was repeated. "Poor beast!" murmured the Captain. "Shut up in that--in that--deuce take it, in that what?" His hand shot up to the top bolt and pressed it softly back. "No, no," said he. Another mew defeated his struggling conscience. Pushing back the lower bolt in its turn, he softly unlocked the door and opened it cautiously. There in the passage--for a narrow passage some twelve or fifteen feet long was revealed--near his door, visible in the light from his room, was a large, sleek, yellow cat from whose mouth was proceeding energetic lamentation. But on sight of Dieppe the creature ceased its cries, and in apparent alarm ran half-way along the passage and sat down beside a small hole in the wall. From this position it regarded the intruder with solemn, apprehensive eyes. Dieppe, holding his door wide open, returned the animal's stare. This must be the cat which had ejected the Count. But why--?

In a moment the half-formed question found its answer, though the answer seemed rather to ask a new riddle than to answer the old one. A door at the other end of the passage opened a little way, and a melodious voice called softly, "Papa, papa!" The cat ran towards the speaker, the door was opened wide, and for an instant Dieppe had the vision of a beautiful young woman, clad in a white dressing-gown and with hair about her shoulders. As he saw her she saw him, and gave a startled shriek. The cat, apparently bewildered, raced back to the aperture in the wall and disappeared with an agitated whisk of its tail. The lady's door and the Captain's closed with a double simultaneous reverberating bang, and the Captain drove his bolts home with guilty haste.

His first act was to smoke a cigarette. That done, he began to undress slowly and almost unconsciously. During the process he repeated to himself more than once the Count's measured but emphatic words: "A person whom I particularly wish to avoid." The words died away as Dieppe climbed into the big four-poster with a wrinkle of annoyance on his brow.

For the lady at the other end of the passage did not, to the Captain's mind, look the sort of person whom a handsome and lonely young man would particularly wish to avoid. In spite of the shortness of his vision, in spite of her obvious alarm and confusion, she had, in fact, seemed, to him very much indeed the opposite.

THE MAN BY THE STREAM

Apart from personal hopes or designs, the presence, or even the proximity, of a beautiful woman is a cheerful thing: it gives a man the sense of happiness, like sunshine or sparkling water; these are not his either, but he can look at and enjoy them; he smiles back at the world in thanks for its bountiful favours. Never had life seemed better to Dieppe than when he awoke the next morning; yet there was guilt on his conscience--he ought not to have opened that door. But the guilt became parent to a new pleasure and gave him the one thing needful to perfection of existence--a pretty little secret of his own, and this time one that he was minded to keep.

"To think," he exclaimed, pointing a scornful finger at the village across the river, "that but for my luck I might be at the inn! Heaven above us, I might even have been leaving this enchanting spot!" He looked down at the stream. A man was fishing there, a tall, well-made fellow in knickerbockers and a soft felt hat of the sort sometimes called Tyrolean. "Good luck to you, my boy!" nodded the happy and therefore charitable Captain.

Going down to the Count's pleasant room at the corner of the left wing, he found his host taking his coffee. Compliments passed, and soon Dieppe was promising to spend a week at least with his new friend.

"I am a student," observed the Count, "and you must amuse yourself. There are fine walks, a little rough shooting perhaps--"

"Fishing?" asked Dieppe, thinking of the man in the soft hat.

"The fishing is worth nothing at all," answered the Count, decisively. He paused for a moment and then went on: "There is, however, one request that I am obliged to make to you."

"Any wish of yours is a command to me, my dear host."

"It is that during your visit you will hold no communication whatever with the right wing of the house." The Count was now lighting a cigar; he completed the operation carefully, and then added:

"The Countess's establishment and mine are entirely separate--entirely."

"The Countess!" exclaimed Dieppe, not unnaturally surprised.

"I regret to trouble you with family matters. My wife and I are not in agreement; we have n't met for three months. She lives in the right wing with two servants; I live in the left with three. We hold no communication, and our servants are forbidden to hold any among themselves; obedience is easier to insure as we have kept only those we can trust, and, since entertaining is out of the question, have dismissed the rest."

"You have--er--had a difference?" the Captain ventured to suggest, for the Count seemed rather embarrassed.

"A final and insuperable difference, a final and permanent separation." The Count's tone was sad but very firm.

"I am truly grieved. But--forgive me--does n't the arrangement you indicate entail some inconvenience?"

"Endless inconvenience," assented the Count.

"To live under the same roof, and yet--"

"My dear sir, during the negotiations which followed on the Countess's refusal to--to well, to meet my wishes, I represented that to her with all the emphasis at my command. I am bound to add that she represented it no less urgently to me."

"On the other hand, of course, the scandal--" Dieppe began.

"We Fieramondi do not much mind scandal. That was n't the difficulty. The fact is that I thought it the Countess's plain duty to relieve me of her presence. She took what I may call the exactly converse view. You follow me?"

"Perfectly," said Dieppe, repressing an inclination to smile.

"And declared that nothing--nothing on earth--should induce her to quit the Castle even for a day; she would regard such an act as a surrender. I said I should regard my own departure in the same light. So we stay here under the extremely inconvenient arrangement I have referred to. To make sure of my noticing her presence, my wife indulges in something approaching to an illumination every night."

The Count rose and began to walk up and down as he went on with a marked access of warmth. "But even the understanding we arrived at," he pursued, "I regret to say that my wife did n't see fit to adhere to in good faith. She treated it with what I must call levity." He faced round on his guest suddenly. "I mentioned a cat to you," he said.

"You did," Dieppe admitted, eyeing him rather apprehensively.

"I don't know," pursued the Count, "whether you noticed a door in your room?" Dieppe nodded. "It was bolted?" Dieppe nodded again. "If you had opened that door--pardon the supposition--you would have seen a passage. At the other end is another door, leading to the Countess's apartments. See, I will show you. This fork is the door from your room, this knife is--"

"I follow your description perfectly," interposed Dieppe, assailed now with a keener sense of guilt.

"The Countess possesses a cat--a thing to which in itself I have no objection. To give this creature, which she likes to have with her constantly, the opportunity of exercise, she has caused an opening to be made from the passage on to the roof. This piece of bread will represent--"

"I understand, I assure you," murmured Dieppe.

"Every evening she lets the cat into the passage, whence it escapes on to the roof. On its return it would naturally betake itself to her room again."

"Naturally," assented the Captain. Are not cats most reasonable animals?

"But," said the Count, beginning to walk about again, "she shuts her door: the animal mews at it; my wife ignores the appeal. What then? The cat, in despair, turns to my door. I take no heed. It mews persistently. At last, wearied of the noise, I open my door. Always--by design, as I believe--at that very moment my wife flings her door open. You see the position?"

"I can imagine it," said Dieppe, discreetly.

"We are face to face! Nothing between us except the passage--and the cat! And then the Countess, with what I am compelled to term a singular offensiveness, not to say insolence, of manner, slams the door in my face, leaving me to deal with the cat as I best can! My friend, it became intolerable. I sent a message begging the Countess to do me the favour of changing her apartment.

"She declined point-blank. I determined then to change mine, and sent word of my intention to the Countess." He flung himself into a chair. "Her reply was to send back to me her marriage contract and her wedding-ring, and to beg to be informed whether my present stay at the Castle was likely to be prolonged."

"And you replied--?"

"I made no reply," answered the Count, crossing his legs.

A combination of feelings prevented Dieppe from disclosing the incident of the previous night. He loved a touch of mystery and a possibility of romance. Again, it is not the right thing for a guest to open bolted doors. A man does not readily confess to such a breach of etiquette, and his inclination to make a clean breast of it is not increased when it turns out that the door in question leads to the apartments of his host's wife.

Finally, the moment for candour had slipped by: you cannot allow a man to explain a locality by means of forks and knives and pieces of bread and then inform him that you were all the while acquainted with its features. Dieppe was silent, and the Count, who was obviously upset by the recital of his grievances, presently withdrew to his study, a room on the upper floor which looked out on the gardens at the back of the house.

"What did they quarrel about?" Dieppe asked himself; the Count had thrown no light on that. "I 'll be hanged if I 'd quarrel with her," smiled the Captain, remembering the face he had seen at the other end of the passage. "But," he declared to himself, virtuously, "the cat may mew till it's hoarse--I won't open that door again." With this resolve strong in his heart, he took his hat and strolled out into the garden.

He had no sooner reached the front of the house than he gave an exclamation of surprise. The expanse of rather rough grass sprinkled with flower-beds, which stretched from the Castle to the point where the ground dipped steeply towards the river, was divided across by a remarkable structure--a tall, new, bare wooden fence, constituting a very substantial barrier. It stood a few paces to the right of the window which the Captain identified as his own, and ran some yards down the hill. Here was plain and strong evidence of the state of war which existed between the two wings. Neither the Count nor the Countess would risk so much as a sight of the other while they took their respective promenades. The Captain approached the obstacle and examined it with a humorous interest; then he glanced up at the wall above, drawing a couple of feet back to get a better view. "Ah," said he, "just half-way between my window and--hers! They are very punctilious, these combatants!"

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