THE BECKONING HAND                                                   1
  LUCRETIA                                                            33
  THE THIRD TIME                                                      53
  THE GOLD WULFRIC                                                    74
  MY UNCLE'S WILL                                                    112
  THE TWO CARNEGIES                                                  128
  OLGA DAVIDOFF'S HUSBAND                                            164
  JOHN CANN'S TREASURE                                               188
  ISALINE AND I                                                      225
  PROFESSOR MILLITER'S DILEMMA                                       245
  IN STRICT CONFIDENCE                                               278
  THE SEARCH PARTY'S FIND                                            299
  HARRY'S INHERITANCE                                                318




_THE BECKONING HAND._


I.

I first met Césarine Vivian in the stalls at the Ambiguities Theatre. I had promised to take Mrs. Latham and Irene to see the French plays
which were then being acted by Marie Leroux's celebrated Palais Royal
company. I wasn't at the time exactly engaged to poor Irene: it has
always been a comfort to me that I wasn't engaged to her, though I knew
Irene herself considered it practically equivalent to an understood
engagement. We had known one another intimately from childhood upward,
for the Lathams were a sort of second cousins of ours, three times
removed: and we had always called one another by our Christian names,
and been very fond of one another in a simple girlish and boyish fashion
as long as we could either of us remember. Still, I maintain, there was
no definite understanding between us; and if Mrs. Latham thought I had
been paying Irene attentions, she must have known that a young man of
two and twenty, with a decent fortune and a nice estate down in
Devonshire, was likely to look about him for a while before he thought
of settling down and marrying quietly. I had brought the yacht up to London Bridge, and was living on board in
picnic style, and running about town casually, when I took Irene and
her mother to see "Faustine," at the Ambiguities. As soon as we had got
in and taken our places, Irene whispered to me, touching my hand lightly
with her fan, "Just look at the very dark girl on the other side of you,
Harry! Did you ever in your life see anybody so perfectly beautiful?" It has always been a great comfort to me, too, that Irene herself was
the first person to call my attention to Césarine Vivian's extraordinary
beauty. I turned round, as if by accident, and gave a passing glance, where
Irene waved her fan, at the girl beside me. She was beautiful,
certainly, in a terrible, grand, statuesque style of beauty; and I saw
at a glimpse that she had Southern blood in her veins, perhaps Negro,
perhaps Moorish, perhaps only Spanish, or Italian, or Provençal. Her
features were proud and somewhat Jewish-looking; her eyes large, dark,
and haughty; her black hair waved slightly in sinuous undulations as it
passed across her high, broad forehead; her complexion, though a dusky
olive in tone, was clear and rich, and daintily transparent; and her
lips were thin and very slightly curled at the delicate corners, with a
peculiarly imperious and almost scornful expression of fixed disdain. I
had never before beheld anywhere such a magnificently repellent specimen
of womanhood. For a second or so, as I looked, her eyes met mine with a
defiant inquiry, and I was conscious that moment of some strange and
weird fascination in her glance that seemed to draw me irresistibly
towards her, at the same time that I hardly dared to fix my gaze
steadily upon the piercing eyes that looked through and through me with
their keen penetration. "She's very beautiful, no doubt," I whispered back to Irene in a low
undertone, "though I must confess I don't exactly like the look of her. She's a trifle too much of a tragedy queen for my taste: a Lady Macbeth,
or a Beatrice Cenci, or a Clytemnestra. I prefer our simple little
English prettiness to this southern splendour. It's more to our English
liking than these tall and stately Italian enchantresses. Besides, I
fancy the girl looks as if she had a drop or two of black blood
somewhere about her." "Oh, no," Irene cried warmly. "Impossible, Harry. She's exquisite:
exquisite. Italian, you know, or something of that sort. Italian girls
have always got that peculiar gipsy-like type of beauty." Low as we spoke, the girl seemed to know by instinct we were talking
about her; for she drew away the ends of her light wrap coldly, in a
significant fashion, and turned with her opera-glass in the opposite
direction, as if on purpose to avoid looking towards us. A minute later the curtain rose, and the first act of Halévy's
"Faustine" distracted my attention for the moment from the beautiful
stranger. Marie Leroux took the part of the great empress. She was grand, stately,
imposing, no doubt, but somehow it seemed to me she didn't come up quite
so well as usual that evening to one's ideal picture of the terrible,
audacious, superb Roman woman. I leant over and murmured so to Irene. "Don't you know why?" Irene whispered back to me with a faint movement
of the play-bill toward the beautiful stranger. "No," I answered; "I haven't really the slightest conception." "Why," she whispered, smiling; "just look beside you. Could anybody bear
comparison for a moment as a Faustine with that splendid creature in the
stall next to you?" I stole a glance sideways as she spoke. It was quite true. The girl by
my side was the real Faustine, the exact embodiment of the dramatist's
creation; and Marie Leroux, with her stagey effects and her actress's
pretences, could not in any way stand the contrast with the genuine
empress who sat there eagerly watching her. The girl saw me glance quickly from her towards the actress and from
the actress back to her, and shrank aside, not with coquettish timidity,
but half angrily and half as if flattered and pleased at the implied
compliment. "Papa," she said to the very English-looking gentleman who
sat beyond her, "ce monsieur-ci...." I couldn't catch the end of the
sentence. She was French, then, not Italian or Spanish; yet a more perfect
Englishman than the man she called "papa" it would be difficult to
discover on a long summer's day in all London. "My dear," her father whispered back in English, "if I were you...." and
the rest of that sentence also was quite inaudible to me. My interest was now fully roused in the beautiful stranger, who sat
evidently with her father and sister, and drank in every word of the
play as it proceeded with the intensest interest. As for me, I hardly
cared to look at the actors, so absorbed was I in my queenly neighbour.