He smiled at that, genuinely this time.
"At any rate, our engagement has nothing to do with what takes me to Cluny. And I want it kept free of it. It's too beautiful a thing to drag into anything sordid."
He looked into her eyes with passion. It was a look that showed him to be possessed of a side not to be guessed even from a careful scrutiny of his very handsome but rather cold face. "And that being so, it means, as I said, that we'd better not meet at all. Cluny's a tiny place. Only some four thousand souls, and I may have to be there for some time."
The explanation explained nothing to Vivian. But if men were odd when it came to business, they were still odder when it came to sentiment. And, therefore, when both were mixed, they were oddest of all.
"Or perhaps I'll put off going there for a couple of days," he said ruminatingly. "Yes, I rather think I will—" He stood a moment in silence.
"You yourself are in no danger?" she asked suddenly. After all, detecting diamond-stealers was dangerous work.
"Not in the least! Here's your train."
He helped her in. The engine pulled out. He looked very grave, very little the lover as he stood there, hat in hand, and yet she felt certain that he was deeply stirred, and trying to conceal the fact.
By what? He was very hard to stir, very hard even to know. And on that came the reflection that he would have had to own a singularly easy character for her to have plumbed it already.
It was only two months since their first meeting. Only a fortnight since their second. True, they had seen a great deal of each other during the passage out from Capetown. Terrific storms had kept the other passengers in their bunks. Officers and the doctor were too busy to have a moment to spare. Anthony had saved her from a rough-and-tumble with a wave when she first came out on deck, tight-reefed in oilskins borrowed from a stewardess. Neither had the faintest idea of who the other was. She had taken him at sight for a much younger man, and had treated him, as Vivian did treat young men, very cavalierly. He had responded in kind. They had quarreled. But they were literally flung together half a dozen times a day. And, in spite of themselves, they grew first to tolerate, then to like, each other. When he told her his name, perhaps half-unconsciously expecting that it would impress her, she treated him as carelessly as ever. And Sir Anthony was considered one of the really great catches of the matrimonial market. It was genuine carelessness too, he saw. Not assumed to lead him on. Whether he were led on, or off, mattered very little to Vivian. When he grasped that fact, he was attracted still more strongly. Her prettiness, of course, had a great deal to do with it, but it was not everything. Then came the night of the all-but wreck in the hurricane. The ship was carrying a full load of steerage passengers. There were many gallant souls on board, but among them all, Anthony Cross stood out by his coolness and his organizing power. He held the frightened steerage quiet, not at the point of his automatic—though he had one in his pocket—but by his own calm personality, and Vivian worked among the women and babies as cheerful, as undismayed, as he. Save for the suffering it caused, she seemed to positively enjoy the danger, and Cross suddenly felt that his life would be incomplete without her. There was something wild and free in the girl that roused the hunter in him. If they lived, he told himself, he would capture her.
He followed her to France, to Enghien-les-bains, and found her in a moment of great depression. An unusual place for Vivian Young to be. She was a journalist by profession and by real preference.
She loved to watch the world with those pretty eyes of hers that were so unexpectedly shrewd, and she loved to shape what she had seen into words. To create an image of her thoughts, see it grow, and watch it stand itself, upright and whole. But she was not making enough to do more than support herself, and at Enghien she learnt from a sister, who prided herself on speaking the truth, that in the past, she had been dependent on her brother-in-law, not, as she had imagined, living on the money left by their parents. Her brother-in-law was an American doctor practicing in Paris, and none too well off. Vivian felt that she must pay him back as soon and as fast as she could.
That evening Anthony Cross proposed. Vivian did not consciously take him as a means of paying what she felt to be a debt of honor. She was much more impressed by him than she let him guess. By him, himself, not by his position, or his name. There was something great in the man as she knew. And she divined also, with that sure instinct of hers, that under his calm, even cold exterior there was flame.
There was flame in her too. That night he all but won her. She believed that he had. But ever since then, she had felt more and more certain that he had not, which meant that he never would. For one thing, he was too old for her. For another—but what was the use. She had promised to marry him. Still, an engagement is but a trial run of the car, as it were. It's very purpose is to find out how one likes it.
At the first station beyond Macon, a young woman, also an American by the look of her, hurried towards the train where she sat. The newcomer was making for another compartment, but Vivian, at sight of her, flung the door open.
"Edith! Edith! Come in here!" she called.
The newcomer swung herself in and the two kissed affectionately.
"My dearest Vi! Why, what brings you to this part of Europe...and just when we're off for Switzerland...I do call that real mean of things. We only started this morning. Adolphe left some papers behind him at Clermain that he must have. Adolphe's my husband, you know."
She threw in the explanation as though referring to the cat.
"We have a villa there all among the vineyards. But how just too frightfully maddening that you should be so close to us now. The house is shut up, or I should insist on carrying you off. Where are you making for?"
"Cluny." It was the first word that Vivian had been able to slip in. That had always been the way with Edith Metcalf as she had been in the convent at Paris, where they both had been sent to learn French. Edith de Montdore as she was now. Vivian remembered hearing that she had married a French wine-grower and that the couple lived near Dijon.
"Cluny? Don't tell me, Vivian Young, that you know the vamp?"
"Calm yourself, my dear girl, I've never heard of her. I'm on the way to Cluny for the purpose of self-education. Early Christian churches—wonderful abbey—marvelous abbot's palace and so on...But this sounds much more in my line. Who is the woman? Does she vamp at Cluny? Or where you live?"
"At Cluny. I bet I should move if she came to Clermain," laughed Edith. "She's staying with her husband at a house there owned by a man we know. A Frenchman. But an awfully nice fellow."
"Staying with her husband? Where's the vamping then?"
"Oh, she's a subconscious one, child. She looks as meek as Moses, and as quiet as Lazarus before he was raised from the dead. But all the men rave about her. Oh, Adolphe too! One of the reasons I decided on going away for a bit. I loathe Switzerland in a motor. So many roads you can't go over. But anything's better than the vamp. She's lips like a darkey's, and hair like one too, though it's red, and she's no complexion whatever. Yet Adolphe says she's a Rossetti, and a wonderful type. Don't let your Anthony have a look at her. The best of wishes to you both on your engagement, by the way. I did write them, but allow me to embrace you, as they say here."
Edith Montdore did so, without a pause in her chatter.
"Say, you have done well for yourself! And what a splendiferous ring!"
Vivian was carrying her left-hand glove, a fancy of the moment. On her third finger was a great clouded sapphire, a Cross heirloom. Though not otherwise particularly superstitious, Vivian had a dislike to that fault in that particular gem. She said as much.
"Well, I guess I agree with you. Though the setting's perfectly lovely. I told Mrs. Brownlow—that's the vamp's name, by the way—about clouded sapphires meaning a death in one's circle—or rather, only I told her that it meant a loss, for she has some wonderful stones, but two are a bit dark. And within the month after I told her, she lost sapphires and all. I believe the thief got about five thousand dollars worth of jewels off her altogether. I still reckon in dollars, you see, the exchange