industry of adventurer, preferring to exploit the assured rather than to explore the unknown. Lulu’s intercourse with him had been restricted of recent years to the negative processes of being out of town when he called on her, and short of money when he wrote to her. Now, however, she bethought herself of his eminent suitability for the direction of a treasure-seeking experiment; if anyone could extract gold from an unpromising situation it would certainly be Vasco—of course, under the necessary safeguards in the way of supervision. Where money was in question Vasco’s conscience was liable to fits of obstinate silence.
Somewhere on the west coast of Ireland the Dulverton property included a few acres of shingle, rock, and heather, too barren to support even an agrarian outrage, but embracing a small and fairly deep bay where the lobster yield was good in most seasons. There was a bleak little house on the property, and for those who liked lobsters and solitude, and were able to accept an Irish cook’s ideas as to what might be perpetrated in the name of mayonnaise, Innisgluther was a tolerable exile during the summer months. Lulu seldom went there herself, but she lent the house lavishly to friends and relations. She put it now at Vasco’s disposal.
“It will be the very place to practise and experiment with the salvage apparatus,” she said; “the bay is quite deep in places, and you will be able to test everything thoroughly before starting on the treasure hunt.”
In less than three weeks Vasco turned up in town to report progress.
“The apparatus works beautifully,” he informed his aunt; “the deeper one got the clearer everything grew. We found something in the way of a sunken wreck to operate on, too!”
“A wreck in Innisgluther Bay!” exclaimed Lulu.
“A submerged motorboat, the Sub-Rosa,” said Vasco.
“No! really?” said Lulu; “poor Billy Yuttley’s boat. I remember it went down somewhere off that coast some three years ago. His body was washed ashore at the Point. People said at the time that the boat was capsized intentionally—a case of suicide, you know. People always say that sort of thing when anything tragic happens.”
“In this case they were right,” said Vasco.
“What do you mean?” asked the duchess hurriedly. “What makes you think so?”
“I know,” said Vasco simply.
“Know? How can you know? How can anyone know? The thing happened three years ago.”
“In a locker of the Sub-Rosa I found a watertight strongbox. It contained papers.” Vasco paused with dramatic effect and searched for a moment in the inner breast-pocket of his coat. He drew out a folded slip of paper. The duchess snatched at it in almost indecent haste and moved appreciably nearer the fireplace.
“Was this in the Sub-Rosa’s strongbox?” she asked.
“Oh no,” said Vasco carelessly, “that is a list of the well-known people who would be involved in a very disagreeable scandal if the Sub-Rosa’s papers were made public. I’ve put you at the head of it, otherwise it follows alphabetical order.”
The duchess gazed helplessly at the string of names, which seemed for the moment to include nearly everyone she knew. As a matter of fact, her own name at the head of the list exercised an almost paralysing effect on her thinking faculties.
“Of course you have destroyed the papers?” she asked, when she had somewhat recovered herself. She was conscious that she made the remark with an entire lack of conviction.
Vasco shook his head.
“But you should have,” said Lulu angrily; “if, as you say, they are highly compromising—”
“Oh, they are, I assure you of that,” interposed the young man.
“Then you should put them out of harm’s way at once. Supposing anything should leak out, think of all these poor, unfortunate people who would be involved in the disclosures,” and Lulu tapped the list with an agitated gesture.
“Unfortunate, perhaps, but not poor,” corrected Vasco; “if you read the list carefully you’ll notice that I haven’t troubled to include anyone whose financial standing isn’t above question.”
Lulu glared at her nephew for some moments in silence. Then she asked hoarsely: “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing—for the remainder of my life,” he answered meaningly. “A little hunting, perhaps,” he continued, “and I shall have a villa at Florence. The Villa Sub-Rosa would sound rather quaint and picturesque, don’t you think, and quite a lot of people would be able to attach a meaning to the name. And I suppose I must have a hobby; I shall probably collect Raeburns.”
Lulu’s relative, who lived at the Court of Monaco, got quite a snappish answer when she wrote recommending some further invention in the realm of marine research.
The Pond
Mona had always regarded herself as cast for the tragic role; her name, her large dark eyes, and the style of hairdressing that best suited her, all contributed to support that outlook on life. She wore habitually the air of one who has seen trouble, or, at any rate, expects to do so very shortly; and she was accustomed to speak of the Angel of Death almost as other people would speak of their chauffeur waiting round the corner to fetch them at the appointed moment. Fortune-tellers, noting this tendency in her disposition, invariably hinted at something in her fate which they did not care to speak about too explicitly. “You will marry the man of your choice, but afterwards you will pass through strange fires,” a Bond Street two-guinea palm-oilist had told her. “Thank you,” said Mona, “for your plain-speaking. But I have known it always.”
In marrying John Waddacombe, Mona had mated herself with a man who shared none of her intimacy with the shadowy tragedies of what she called the half-seen world. He had the substantial tragedies of his own world to bother about, without straining his mental eyesight for the elusive and dubious distractions belonging to a sphere that lay entirely beyond his range of vision; or, for the matter of that, his range of interests. Potato blight, swine fever, the Government’s
