"Oh, I think that story was an exaggeration," said her husband. "Genevra says that he was very ill—nervous something or other."

"Probably true, too. He's a wreck. She will be the prettiest widow in Europe before Christmas," said the young count. "Unless, of course, any one of the excellent husbands surrounding me should die," he added gallantly.

"Well, my heart bleeds for her," said Deppingham.

"She's going into it with her eyes open," said the Prince. "It isn't as if she hadn't been told. She could see for herself. She knows there's the other woman in Paris and—Oh, well, why should we make a funeral of it? Let's do our best to be revellers, not mourners. She'll live to fall in love with some other man. They always do. Every woman has to love at least once in her life—if she lives long enough. Come, come! Is my entertainment to develop into a premature wake? Let us forget the future of the Princess Genevra and drink to her present!"

"And to her past, if you don't mind, Prince!" amended Lord Deppingham, looking into his wife's sombre eyes.



CHAPTER XXXVI

THE TITLE CLEAR

Two men and a woman stood in the evening glow, looking out over the tranquil sea that crept up and licked the foot of the cliff. At their back rose the thick, tropical forest; at its edge and on the nape of the cliff stood a bungalow, fresh from the hands of a hundred willing toilsmen. Below, on their right, lay the gaudy village, lolling in the heat of the summer's day. Far off to the north, across the lowlands and beyond the sweep of undulating and ever-lengthening hills, could be seen a great, reddish structure, its gables and towers fusing with the sombre shades of the mountain against which they seemed to lean.

It was September. Five months had passed since the King's Own steamed away from the harbour of Aratat. The new dispensation was in full effect. During the long, sickening weeks that preceded the coming of the Syndicate, Hollingsworth Chase toiled faithfully, resolutely for the restoration of order and system among the demoralised people of Japat.

The first few weeks of rehabilitation were hard ones: the islanders were ready to accede to everything he proposed, but their submissiveness was due in no small measure to the respect they entertained for his almost supernatural powers. In course of time this feeling was more or less dissipated and a condition of true confidence took its place. The lawless element—including the misguided husbands whose jealousy had been so skilfully worked upon by Rasula and Jacob von Blitz—this element, greatly in the minority, subsided into a lackadaisical, law-abiding activity, with little prospect of again attempting to exercise themselves in another direction. Murder had gone out of their hearts.

Eager hands set to work to construct a suitable home for the tall arbiter. He chose a position on the point that ran out into the sea beyond the town. It was this point which the yacht was rounding on that memorable day when he and one other had watched it from the gallery, stirred by emotions they were never to forget. Besides, the cliff on which the new bungalow stood represented the extreme western extremity of the island and therefore was nearest of all Japat to civilisation and—Genevra.

Conditions in Aratat were not much changed from what they had been prior to the event of the legatory invaders. The mines were in full operation; the bank was being conducted as of yore; the people were happy and confident; the town was fattening on its own flesh; the sun was as merciless and the moon as gentle as in the days of old.

The American bar changed hands with the arrival of the new forces from the Occident; the Jews and the English clerks, the surveyors and the engineers, the solicitors and the agents, were now domiciled in "headquarters." Chase turned over the "bar" when he retired from active service under Sir John Brodney. With the transfer of the company's business his work was finished. Two young men from Sir John's were now settled in Aratat as legal advisers to the islanders, Chase having declined to serve longer in that capacity.

He was now waiting for the steamer which was to take him to Cape Town on his way to England—and home.

The chateau was closed and in the hands of a small army of caretakers. The three widows of Jacob von Blitz were now married to separate and distinct husbands, all of whom retained their places as heads of departments at the chateau, proving that courtship had not been confined to the white people during the closing days of the siege.

The head of the bank was Oscar Arnheimer, Mr. Bowles having been deposed because his methods were even more obsolete than his coat of armour. Selim disposed of his lawful interest in the corporation to Ben Ali, the new Cadi, and was waiting to accompany his master to America. It may be well to add that the deal did not include the transfer of Neenah. She was not for sale, said Selim to Ben Ali.

It was of Mr. Bowles that the three persons were talking as they stood in the evening glow.

"Yes, Selim," said the tall man in flannels, "he's a sort of old dog Tray—ever faithful but not the right kind. You don't happen to know anything of old dog Tray, do you? No? I thought not. Nor you, Neenah? Well, he was——"

"Was he the one who was poisoned at the chateau, excellency?" asked Neenah timidly.

"No, my dear," he replied soberly. "If I remember my history, he died in the seventeenth century or thereabouts. It's really of no consequence, however. Any good, faithful dog will serve my purpose. What I want to impress upon you is this: it is most difficult for a faithful old dog to survive a change of masters. It isn't human nature—or dog nature, either. I'm glad that you are convinced, Neenah—but please don't tell Sahib Bowles that he is a dog."

"Oh, no, excellency!" she cried earnestly.

"She is very close-mouthed, sahib," added Selim, with conviction.

"We'll take Bowles to England with us next week," went on Chase dreamily. "We'll leave Japat to take care of itself. I don't know which it is in most danger of, seismic or Semitic disturbances."

He lighted a fresh cigarette, tenderly fingering it before applying the match.

"I'll smoke one of hers to-night, Selim. See! I keep them apart from the others, in this little gold case. I smoke them only when I am thinking. Now, run in and tell Mr. Bowles that I said he was a Tray. I want to be alone."

They left him and he threw himself upon the green sod, his back to a tree, his face toward the distant chateau. Hours afterward the faithful Selim came out to tell him that it was bedtime. He found his master still sitting there, looking across the moonlit flat in the direction of a place in the hills where once he had dwelt in marble halls.

"Selim," he said, arising and laying his hand upon his servant's shoulder, his voice unsteady with finality, "I have decided, after all, to go to Paris! We will live there, Selim. Do you understand?" with strange fierceness, a great exultation mastering him. "We are to live in Paris!"

To himself, all that night, he was saying: "I must see her again—I shall see her!"

A thousand times he had read and re-read the letter that Lady Deppingham had written to him just before the ceremony in the cathedral at Thorberg. He knew every word that it contained; he could read it in the dark. She had said that Genevra was going into a hell that no hereafter could surpass in horrors! And that was ages ago, it seemed to him. Genevra had been a wife for nearly three months—the wife of a man she loathed; she was calling in her heart for him to come to her; she was suffering in that unspeakable hell. All this he had come to feel and shudder over in his unspeakable loneliness. He would go to her! There could be no wrong in loving her, in being near her, in standing by her in those hours of desperation.

A copy of a London newspaper, stuffed away in the recesses of his trunk, dated June 29th, had come to him by post. It contained the telegraphic details of the brilliant wedding in Thorberg. He had read the names of the guests over and over again with a bitterness that knew no bounds. Those very names proved to him that her world was not his, nor ever could be. Every royal family in Europe was represented; the list of noble names seemed endless to him—the flower of the world's aristocracy. How he hated them!

The next morning Selim aroused him from his fitful sleep, bringing the news that a strange vessel had arrived off Aratat. Chase sprang out of bed, possessed of the wild hope that the opportunity to leave the island had come sooner than he had expected. He rushed out upon his veranda, overlooking the little harbour.

A long, white, graceful craft was lying in the harbour. It was in so close to the pier that he had no choice but to recognise it as a vessel of light draft. He stared long and intently at the trim craft.

"Can I be dreaming?" he muttered, passing his hand over his eyes. "Don't lie to me, Selim! Is it really there?" Then he uttered a loud cry of joy and started off down the slope with the speed of a race horse, shouting in the frenzy of an uncontrollable glee.

It was the Marquess of B——'s white and blue yacht!

* * * * *

Three weeks later, Hollingsworth Chase stepped from the deck of the yacht to the pier in Marseilles; the next day he was in Paris, attended by the bewildered and almost useless Selim. An old and valued friend, a campaigner of the war-time days, met him at the Gare de Lyon in response to a telegram.

"I'll tell you the whole story of Japat, Arch, but not until to-morrow," Chase said to him as they drove toward the Ritz. "I arrived yesterday on the Marquess of B——'s yacht—the Cricket. Do you know him? Of course you do. Everybody does. The Cricket was cruising down my way and picked me up—Bowles and me. The captain came a bit out of his way to call at Aratat, but he had orders of some sort from the Marquess, by cable, I fancy, to stop off for me."

He did not regard it as necessary to tell his correspondent friend that the Cricket had sailed from Marseilles with but one port in view—Aratat. He did not tell him that the Cricket had come with a message to him and that he was answering it in person, as it was intended that he should—a message written six weeks before his arrival in France. There were many things that Chase did not explain to Archibald James.

"You're looking fine, Chase, old man. Did you a lot of good out there. You're as brown as that Arab in the taximetre back there. By Jove, old man, that Persian girl is ripping. You say she's his wife? She's—" Chase broke in upon this far from original estimate of the picturesque Neenah.

"I say, Arch, there's something I want to know before I go to the Marquess's this evening. I'm due there with my thanks. He lives in the Boulevard St. Germain—I've got the number all right. Is one likely to find the house full of swells? I'm a bit of a savage just now and I'm correspondingly timid."

His friend stared at him for a moment.

"I can save you the trouble of going to the Marquess," he said. "He and the Marchioness are in London at present. Left Paris a month ago."

"What? The house is closed?" in deep anxiety.

"I think not. Servants are all there, I daresay. Their place adjoins the Brabetz palace. The Princess is his niece, you know."

"You say the Brabetz palace is next door?" demanded Chase, steadying his voice with an effort.

"Yes—the old Flaurebert mansion. The Princess was to have been the social sensation of Paris this year. She's a wonderful beauty, you know."

"Was to have been?"

"She married that rotten Brabetz last June—but, of course, you never heard of it out there in what's-the-name-of-the-place. You may have heard of his murder, however. His mistress shot him in Brussels——"

"Great God, man!" gasped Chase, clutching his arm in a grip of iron.

"The devil, Chase!" cried the other, amazed. "What's the matter?"

"He's dead? Murdered? How—when? Tell me about it," cried Chase, his agitation so great that James looked at him in wonder.

"'Gad, you seem to be interested!"

"I am! Where is she—I mean the Princess? And the other woman?"

"Cool off, old man. People are staring at you. It's not a long story. Brabetz was shot three weeks ago at a hotel in Brussels. He'd been living there for two months, more or less, with the woman. In fact, he left Paris almost immediately after he was married to the Princess Genevra. The gossip is that she wouldn't live with him. She'd found out what sort of a dog he was. They didn't have a honeymoon and they didn't attempt a bridal tour. Somehow, they kept the scandal out of the papers. Well, he hiked out of Paris at the end of a week, just before the 14th. The police had asked the woman to leave town. He followed. Dope fiend, they say. The bride went into seclusion at once. She's never to be seen anywhere. The woman shot him through the head and then took a fine dose of poison. They tried to save her life, but couldn't. It was a ripping news story. The prominence of the——"

"This was a month ago?" demanded Chase, trying to fix something in his mind. "Then it was after the yacht left Marseilles with orders to pick me up at Aratat."

"What are you talking about? Sure it was, if the yacht left Marseilles six weeks ago. What's that got to do with it?"

"Nothing. Don't mind me, Arch. I'm a bit upset."

"There was talk of a divorce almost before the wedding bells ceased ringing. The Grand Duke got his eyes opened when it was too late. He repented of the marriage. The Princess was obliged to live in Paris for a certain length of time before applying to the courts for freedom. 'Gad, I'll stake my head she's happy these days!"

Chase was silent for a long time. He was quite cool and composed when at last he turned to his friend.

"Arch, do me a great favour. Look out for Selim and Neenah. Take 'em to the hotel and see that they get settled. I'll join you this evening. Don't ask questions, but put me down here. I'll take another cab. There's a good fellow. I'll explain soon. I'm—I'm going somewhere and I'm in a hurry."

* * * * *

The voiture drew up before the historic old palace in the Boulevard St. Germain. Chase's heart was beating furiously as he stepped to the curb. The cocher leaned forward for instructions. His fare hesitated for a moment, swayed by a momentary indecision.

"Attendre" he said finally. The driver adjusted his register and settled back to wait. Then Chase mounted the steps and lifted the knocker with trembling fingers. He was dizzy with eagerness, cold with uncertainty.

She had asked him to come to her—but conditions were not the same as when she sent the compelling message. There had come into her life a vital break, a change that altered everything. What was it to mean to him?

He stood a moment later in the salon of the old Flaurebert palace, vaguely conscious that the room was darkened by the drawn blinds, and that it was cool and sweet to his senses. He knew that she was coming down the broad hallway—he could hear the rustle of her gown. Inconsequently he was wondering whether she would be dressed in black. Then, to his humiliation, he remembered that he was wearing uncouth, travel-soiled garments.

She was dressed in white—a house gown, simple and alluring. There was no suggestion of the coronet, no shadow of grief in her manner as she came swiftly toward him, her hands extended, a glad light in her eyes.

The tall man, voiceless with emotion, clasped her hands in his and looked down into the smiling, rapturous face.

"You came!" she said, almost in a whisper.

"Yes. I could not have stayed away. I have just heard that you—you are free. You must not expect me to offer condolences. It would be sheer hypocrisy. I am glad—God, I am glad! You sent for me—you sent the yacht, Genevra, before—before you were free. I came, knowing that you belonged to another. I find you the same as when I knew you first—when I held you in my arms and heard you say that you loved me. You do not grieve—you do not mourn. You are the same—my Genevra—the same that I have dreamed of and suffered for all these months. Something tells me that you have descended to my plane. I will not kiss you, Genevra, until you have promised to become my wife."

She had not taken her eyes from his white, intense face during this long summing-up.

"Hollingsworth, I cannot, I will not blame you for thinking ill of me," she said. "Have I fallen in your eyes? I wanted you to be near me. I wanted you to know that when the courts freed me from that man that I would be ready and happy to come to you as your wife. I am not in mourning to-day, you see. I knew you were coming. As God is my witness, I have no husband to mourn for. He was nothing to me. I want you for my husband, dearest. It was what I meant when I sent out there for you—that, and nothing else."

THE END