"That's about my point now, though I don't see what it's got to do with the woman and the oysters."
"Every thing, Prince; and look here: I'm cleaned out if ever I had a clearer reading——"
"Of what?"
"Of the hag and of ourselves."
The Prince lighted a cigar, the smoke hiding the jeer upon his lips.
"Go on," said he.
Kenner gave his answer with great deliberation, but he wore the air of the most serious man alive.
"That's exactly what I'm going to do," he remarked; "and in five years' time you can remind me of what's been said. In the first place, I've met that woman before; in the second, I've got to meet her again; and at the next meeting she will best me or I shall best her; but there'll be smart work, and lives lost."
The man was woefully earnest, and his eyes, shining with some excitement, were still fixed upon the crone at the table. But Messenger listened, and laughed aloud.
"Kenner," said he, "you'd have made a better comedian than ever you were table-turner. Don't you think you've fooled around enough?"
The answer was never given, for the Spanish woman had paid her bill and was leaving the terrace. In another hour she had quitted Monaco in her steam yacht, and nothing but the memory of a grotesque and singular personality remained behind her.
II. THE RECORDER INTRUDES
When Arnold Messenger gave me the bundle of papers from which in the more part this narrative of an episode has been put together, he forgot, at the same time, to present me with any facts in his past which would help the biographer of a very singular man to do him complete justice. I knew him in Montevideo as one who had played for a very great stake at no distant date, but had lost nigh all he had in the throw, even to the unquestioning friendship of the young man, by name Hal Fisher, who then accompanied him. Under such circumstances the making of crooked paths straight and the removal of stumbling-blocks was a task which I could accomplish but partially, and with no measure of complete satisfaction. Of the man's youth or boyhood I could learn little, save that he had been sent down from Magdalen College at Cambridge, and had left the university without taking a degree. The after years of his coming to manhood seem to have been spent in indolent luxury; and even in exploits which, but for the financial advocacy of his uncle, a rich rubber factor in Grantham, would have led to his acquaintance with the criminal law. Such a fate passed him by, and that it failed to overwhelm him may be set down both to his remarkable, if misdirected, intelligence, and to this succour of which I have spoken.
During his wanderings in London two years after he left Cambridge he had met the lad who, when I first encountered him, passed as his brother. The boy had befriended him in a street brawl, and, mutual confidences being exchanged, a very strange and inexplicable intimacy had come about. Hal Fisher was the son of a coffee merchant in Liverpool. He had suffered much—his mother dying at his birth—from a brutal interpretation of paternal duty which his father expounded to him; and at the age of fourteen he had quitted the private school in Edgbaston, Birmingham, where the aforesaid apocalypse was developed fruitfully, and had come to the city, as many have come, hoping, fearing, with no friends, no knowledge, no plan, no prospect. On the very evening of his arrival a chance curiosity led him to press into the heart of a crowd which had gathered—as British crowds will —to see one man set upon by five; and, being led instinctively to the defence of the minority, he joined heartily in the fray, and found himself shortly after in the rooms of Arnold Messenger, where he told the grave, thoughtful, sympathetic stranger the whole history of his life.
The result was a friendship which endured unbroken for nearly forty months. Fisher had much learning for his years; he wrote a capital letter, he had read many books. And here you will note a strange freak of fortune, which placed so fine a lad in the company of one of the most plausible and most accomplished chevaliers d'industrie in London. Arnold Messenger at that time—and after, as I fear—got meat and drink only by unfailing trickery. He found it mighty convenient to use the powers of one who never questioned him, who gave him faithful service, who had no plaguing curiosity—above all, one who deemed him in some part a hero, and betrayed for him an ardent boyish affection. The man, who had never evinced a regard unto that time even for a dog, was led to reciprocate the attachment in a generous way. He found himself acting the part of an elder brother. He shielded the boy from any participation in his dangerous ventures; he had pride in the thought that Fisher believed him to be honest; and he spent his money for the lad's good with a generosity which proved that he had two sides to his character.
This, then, is the somewhat reserved and priestly-looking man whom we find a loiterer at Monaco in the company of Kenner. His friend, the American, wore the reputation of riches, and had brought his yacht to the Mediterranean solely in search of pigeons to pluck, and schemes—honest or otherwise—to pursue. But fortune had not smiled either upon him or upon Messenger. They lost heavily at the tables, they were banned by the elect, they could not run down a single fool who would give heed to their multifarious schemes. For the Englishman the immediate future was so dark that he contemplated a thousand and one schemes by which he might delude trusting hotel-keepers, and quit Italy for a new campaign. Yet the spring of his knavish inspiration remained dry; the waters of roguery refused to flow.
This diminuendo of hope had just been struck when the pair encountered the Spanish woman and her daughter Inez. They watched her leave the town in her yacht, her ostensible destination being Genoa; after which they loitered for an hour about the quaint little harbour, and then returned, at Messenger's request, to hunt up the boys. Of these I have spoken sufficiently of Fisher, now a lad of seventeen; but of the other, Sydney Capel, a young fellow of twenty-four, I learned but little. Fisher had met him at Monaco; in his account of himself he said that he was a clerk in the firm of Capel, Martingale & Co., the financiers, of Bishopsgate Street, his uncle being head of the house, and reckoned a man of much substance. He was quite a boy still in habit and achievement, and the lads rowed and sailed together every day to their mutual satisfaction. When Messenger and the American found them on the morning I am writing of, they were in spurs and breeches, hot from a gallop, and already reducing the abundance of fish, flesh, and fowl which served them for déjeûner. And while they talked, which they did unceasingly, they never for a moment relaxed the grip of knife and fork, or gave the waiters a "stand-easy."
"I tell you what, Prince," said Fisher, attacking a dish of wild strawberries and cream with particular relish, "that road to Mentone is about the grandest bit I've yet done in explorations. I never saw any thing like those carouba-trees in my life; and as for cypress and euphorbia, why, you can revel in them! We saw the Corsican snow caps again this morning—grand they were in the sun, just like the mountains in a 'Percy', and as clear as a photograph—eh, Capel?"
Sydney Capel, who admitted with reluctance that beauty could be found four miles from Charing Cross, answered unpoetically, and with full mouth—
"Good old Corsica!"
"That's just where he's such a brute," continued Fisher, quite disregarding the animalism of the observation. "I show him a hill all alive with grey olives and lemon-trees, and he says that it reminds him of Regent's Park! I believe the only thing Capel cares for in the universe is a hansom cab or a theatre ticket."
"He's only chaffing you, Hal," said the Prince, who smoked with a pleasant smile as he listened to the babble; "if you treat him properly, he'll let you give him a whole essay on heliotrope, and a bookful of facts about the prickly pear."
"Will he?" replied Fisher, looking round for yet a further measure of sweet sustenance. "You don't know what an unartistic beggar it is—all facts and figures, like a calculating machine. What do you think, now? He's going back to London to-night to lug Heaven knows how many kegs of gold to St. Petersburg!"
The American had been reading during this talk, but he looked up sharply