The Mardi Gras Mystery - Henry Bedford-Jones (beginner reading books for adults TXT) 📗

might make; and sure enough, Bob did propose to buy what land is left to me on Bayou Terrebonne, saying he'd persuade his oil company that there was oil on it, and that they'd buy or lease it. I told him no. The Franciscan, afterward, proved to be Henry Gramont; I wondered if you had mentioned——"

"Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Mr. Fell, piously. "I never even met Gramont until last night! Do you like him?"

"Very much." The girl's eyes met his frankly. "Do you?"

"Very much," said Jachin Fell.

Lucie's gray eyes narrowed, searched his face. "I'm almost able to tell when you're lying," she observed, calmly. "You said that a trifle too hastily, Uncle Jachin. Why don't you like him?"

Fell laughed, amused. "Perhaps I have a prejudice against foreign nobles, Lucie. Our own aristocracy is bad enough, but——"

"He's discarded all that. He was never French except in name."

"You speak as though you'd known him for some time. Have you had secrets from me?"

"I have!" laughter dimpled in the girl's face. "For years and years! When I was in New York with father, before the war, we met him; he was visiting in Newport with college friends. Then, you know that father and I were in France when the war broke out—father was ill and almost helpless at the time, you remember. Gramont came to Paris to serve with his regiment, and met us there. He helped us get away, procured real money for us, got us passage to New York. He knows lots of our friends, and I've always been deeply grateful to him for his assistance then.

"We've corresponded quite frequently during the war," she pursued. "I mentioned him several times after we got home from France, but you probably failed to notice the name. It's only since he came to New Orleans that I really kept any secrets from you; this time, I wanted to find out if you liked him."

Jachin Fell nodded slowly. His face was quite innocent of expression.

"Yes, yes," he said. "Yes—of course. He's a geologist or engineer, I think?"

"Both, and a good one. He's a stockholder in Bob Maillard's oil company, and I think he's come here to stay. Well, about last night—he probably guessed at some of my private affairs; I've written or spoken rather frankly, perhaps. Also, Bob may have blabbed to him. Bob still drinks—prohibition has not hit him very hard!"

"No," agreed Fell, gravely. "Unfortunately, no. Lucie, I've discovered a most important fact. Joseph Maillard did not own any stock in the Bayou Oil Company at the time your land was sold them by him, and he had no interest at all in the real estate concern that bought your St. Landry swamplands and made a fortune off them. We have really blamed him most unjustly."

For a moment there was silence between them.

"We need not mince matters," pursued Fell, slowly. "Maillard has no scruples and no compassion; all the same, I am forced to the belief that he has maintained your interest uprightly, and that his mistakes were only errors. I do not believe that he has profited in the least from you. Two small fortunes were swept out of your grip when he sold those lands; yet they had been worthless, and he had good offers for them. His investments in the companies concerned were made afterward, and I am certain he sold the lands innocently."

Lucie drew a deep breath.

"I am glad you have said this," she returned, simply. "It's been hard for me to think that Uncle Joseph had taken advantage of me; I simply couldn't make myself believe it. I think that he honestly likes me, as far as he permits himself to like any one."

"He'd not loan you money on it," said Fell. "Friendship isn't a tangible security with him. And a girl is never secure, as Eliza said when she crossed the ice."

"Well, who really did profit by my loss? Any one?"

Fell's pale gray eyes twinkled, then cleared in their usually wide innocence.

"My dear Lucie, is there one person in this world to whose faults Joseph Maillard is deliberately blind—one person to whose influence he is ever open—one person to whom he would refuse nothing, in whom he would pardon everything, of whom he would never believe any evil report?"

"You mean——" Lucie drew a quick breath, "Bob?"

"Yes, I mean Bob. That he has profited by your loss I am not yet in a position to say; but I suspect it. He has his father's cupidity without his father's sense of honour to restrain him. When I have finished with the Masquer, I shall take up his trail."

Jachin Fell rose. "Now I must be off, my dear. By the way, if I have need of you in running down the Masquer, may I call upon your services?"

"Certainly! I'd love to help, Uncle Jachin! We'd be real detectives?"

"Almost." Jachin Fell smiled slightly. "Will you dine with us to-morrow evening, Lucie? My mother commanded me to bring you as soon as possible——"

"Oh, your mother!" exclaimed the girl, contritely. "I was so absorbed in the Masquer that I forgot to ask after her. How is she?"

"Quite as usual, thank you. I presume that you'll attend Comus with the Maillards?"

"Yes. I'll come to-morrow night gladly, Uncle Jachin."

"And we'll take a look at the Proteus ball afterward, if you like. I'll send Ben Chacherre for you with the car, if you're not afraid of him."

Lucie looked gravely into the smiling eyes of Fell.

"I'm not exactly afraid of him," she responded, soberly, "but there is something about him that I can't like. I'm sorry that you're trying to regenerate him, in a way."

Fell shrugged lightly. "All life is an effort, little one! Well, good-bye."

Jachin Fell left the house at three-forty. Twenty minutes later the bell rang again. Lucie sent one of the servants to admit Henry Gramont; she kept him waiting a full fifteen minutes before she appeared, and then she made no apologies whatever for the delay.

Not that Gramont minded waiting; he deemed it a privilege to linger in this house! He loved to study the place, so reflective of its owner. He loved the white Colonial mantel that surrounded the fireplace, perpetually alight, with its gleaming sheen of old brasses, and the glittering fire-set to one side. The very air of the place, the atmosphere that it breathed, was sweet to him.

The Napoleon bed that filled the bow window, with its pillows and soft coverings; the inlaid walnut cabinet made by Sheraton, with its quaintly curved glasses that reflected the old-time curios within; the tilt tables, the rosewood chairs, the rugs, bought before the oriental rug market was flooded with machine-made Senna knots—about everything here had an air of comfort, of long use, of restfulness. It was not the sort of place built up, raw item by raw item, by the colour-frenzied hands of decorators. It was the sort of place that decorators strive desperately to imitate, and cannot.

When Lucie made her appearance, Gramont bent over her hand and addressed her in French.

"You are charming as ever, Shining One! And in years to come you will be still more charming. That is the beauty of having a name taken direct from the classics and bestowed as a good fairy's gift——"

"Thank you, monsieur—but you have translated my name at least twenty times, and I am weary of hearing it," responded Lucie, laughingly.

"Poor taste, mademoiselle, to grow weary of such beauty!"

"Not of the name, but of your exegesis upon it. Why should I not be displeased? Last night you were positively rude, and now you decry my taste! Did you leave all your manners in France, M. le prince?"

"Some of them, yes—and all that prince stuff with them." Smiling as he dropped into English, Gramont glanced about the room, and his eyes softened.

"This is a lovey and loveable home of yours, Lucie!" he exclaimed, gravely. "So few homes are worthy the name; so few have in them the intimate air of use and friendliness—why are so many furnished from bargain sales? This place is touched with repose and sweetness; to come and sit here is a privilege. It is like being in another world, after all the money striving and the dollar madness of the city."

"Oh!" The girl's gaze searched him curiously. "I hope you're not going to take the fine artistic pose that it is a crime to make money?"

Gramont laughed.

"Not much! I want to make money myself; that's one reason I'm in New Orleans. Still, you cannot deny that there is a craze about the eternal clutching after dollars. I can't make the dollar sign the big thing in life, Lucie. You couldn't, either."

She frowned a little.

"You seem to have the European notion that all Americans are dollar chasers!"

He shrugged his shoulders slightly. His harshly lined face was very strong; one sensed that its harshness had come from the outside—from hunger, from hardship and privations, from suffering strongly borne. He had not gone through the war unscathed, this young man who had tossed away a princely "de" in order to become plain Henry Gramont, American citizen.

"In a sense, yes; why not?" he answered. "I am an American. I am a dollar chaser, and not ashamed of it. I am going into business here. Once it is a success, I shall go on; I shall see America, I shall come to know this whole country of mine, all of it! I have been a month in New Orleans—do you know, a strange thing happened to me only a few days after I arrived here!"

With her eyes she urged him on, and he continued gravely:

"In France I met a man, an American sergeant named Hammond. It was just at the close of things. We had adjoining cots at Nice——"

"Ah!" she exclaimed, quickly. "I remember, you wrote about him—the man who had been wounded in both legs! Did he get well? You never said."

"I never knew until I came here," answered Gramont. "One night, not long after I had got established in my pension on Burgundy Street, a man tried to rob me. It was this same man, Hammond; we recognized each other almost at once.

"I took him home with me and learned his story. He had come back to America only to find his wife dead from influenza, his home broken up, his future destroyed. He drifted to New Orleans, careless of what happened to him. He flung himself desperately into a career of burglary and pillage. Well, I gave Hammond a job; he is my chauffeur. You would never recognize him as the same man now! I am very proud of his friendship."

"That was well said." Lucie nodded her head quickly. "I shan't call you M. Le prince any more—unless you offend again."

He smiled, reading her thought. "I try not to be a snob, eh? Well, what I'm driving at is this: I want to know this country of mine, to see it with clear, unprejudiced eyes. We hide our real shames and exalt our false ones. Why should we be ashamed of chasing the dollar? So long as that is a means to the end of happiness, it's all right. But there are some men who see it as an end alone, who can set no finis to their work except the dollar dropping into their pouch. Such a man is your relative, Joseph Maillard—I say it without