The Sea Wolves/Chapter 1

" Spanish," said the American, Kenner; "you can bet your bottom dollar on it—and look at her daughter."

The other man, a clean-shaven, long-faced, dark-haired Englishman, sitting before a well-chosen déjeûner on the terrace of the great hotel at Monaco, did not betray any desire to contradict the assertion.

"I've been looking at her daughter for half-an-hour," said he, "and if she'll be pleased to go on breakfasting, I'll make it an hour."

The American laughed cheerily, with a great boyish laugh at the rejoinder, and took a cigar from a lizard-skin case.

"Wal," he remarked, "I've seen worse on canvas than the little girl with the straw hat and the streamers; but fix your eye on the maternal property, and I guess you'll shout glory! Why, man, she must be a hundred and four, and young at that!"

"They made her out fifty in the smoking-room last night," remarked the other, "so she's got the benefit of the doubt, any way. It's a case of Beauty and the Beast, and both of them of the feminine gender. The proprietor here will spin yarns about the pair until you wink with listening. He kept me up on cheroots and bad whiskey until three this morning, and if I hadn't got a head like a warming-pan, I'd pass the tale on."

"Does he know where the old girl hoists her flag when she's at home?"

"Broadly—that is, just enough to trouble the post-office. He says she's four walls and a precipice which she calls a castle somewhere in the north-west of Spain. Her profession, occupation, calling, or business, as they style it on the parish census, seems to be equally solitary—she's a wrecker, and she lives on the vitals of ships. What do you think of that?"

"I think he's a handsome liar!"

"But he believes it; and he gave me a list as long as your arm of the properties she has acquired by what the policies call peril of the sea. Look at her now: she's eating oysters with her fingers, you'll observe, and swearing at the waiter in two languages. Isn't there a prima facie case for the assumption?"

The American, who, like the other, was a man of some thirty years of age, fell to stroking his wavy yellow moustache thoughtfully. He did not seem able to look away from the table, luxuriously shadowed by many palms, whereat the Spanish woman and her daughter were sitting. Of these the mother demanded the more immediate notice. She was a woman gaunt and hag-like when your eyes fell upon her face, but of prodigious stature when she rose to walk, having the stride of a man and a gait which would have won applause upon a recreation ground. But age had worn furrows in the brown, hide-like skin of her ferocious countenance, until nothing but her features was discernible at the first; and these, which once had given ornament to a remarkable face, now stood out upon it to disfigurement.

As for her daughter—the little Inez, they called her in the hotel—then eating fruit with youthful recklessness, while the woman at her side was breakfasting off oysters and champagne, she was the contrast which gave to the picture its relief of welcome light. Her hair was dark with the rich sheen of Southern strength; her eyes were black and vivacious; and her face was piquant and beautiful, even after Northern traditions. Those who knew anything of her said that she was eighteen; and in this she had cheated the quick maturity of the land of Alcaldes and of garlic, for she did not look a day more, while her manner had all the childish unrest and the vivacity of an English boarding-school Miss. In truth a stranger family never sought the hospitality of Monaco, or brought yacht over the unsurpassably blue waters of the tideless sea; and the interest of the American, Kenner, and of the listless Englishman, Arnold Messenger—commonly known as "The Prince"—was entirely justified, even to the assumption that the crone-like woman had a past, and that her history was not to be told in the market-place.

Some of these thoughts were alive in Kenner's mind as he sat devouring his cigar and continuing to watch the woman and her daughter. The morning was glorious, for the sun danced with sparkling light upon the still Mediterranean, and shone from the white villas and the rocky promontory as it shines in the Riviera at the nod of spring, bearing full beams upon palm and aloe, and the glorious crannies of flowers which blossom with the salt spray upon them. Men in dazzling "blazers" moved in and out upon the terraces; the breeze, of exulting freshness, bore the strains of dreamy music upon its breath; a few yachts rode without motion under the shelter of the height of towers; tropic luxuriousness of nature seemed to have pushed winter from her hold, and to have come with a rich store from the very heart of Africa. It was not a morning to think of gloom; but the immovable touch of depression suddenly held the American, and he could not shake it off.

"I tell you what. Prince," said he, breaking his chain of silence after many minutes, "if I sit here watching that hag eat oysters—she's had three dozen already—I shall go to sleep and dream she's sticking pins into my figger. She makes me think I've been out on Bad-Lands."

The Prince looked up in astonishment.

"You'd better turn witch-finder!" he exclaimed: "the new Mat Hopkins and the crone of Monaco! I can see a deputation to put her through the water-cure."

"You've the laugh of me right along, but that's not it. Did you ever know that I'd worked the second-sight trade and made a hundred dollars a week in a barn-storming tour through the States?"

"You're clever enough," replied the other, "but I didn't know you'd ever done any thing so honest."

"Wal, a man must have his recreation, and I took mine with mediums; you try it when you're down to a dime."

"That's about my point now, though I don't see what it's got to do with the woman and the oysters."

"Every thing, Prince; and look here: I'm cleaned out if ever I had a clearer reading"

"Of what?"

"Of the hag and of ourselves."

The Prince lighted a cigar, the smoke hiding the jeer upon his lips.

"Go on," said he.

Kenner gave his answer with great deliberation, but he wore the air of the most serious man alive.

"That's exactly what I'm going to do," he remarked; "and in five years' time you can remind me of what's been said. In the first place, I've met that woman before; in the second, I've got to meet her again; and at the next meeting she will best me or I shall best her; but there'll be smart work, and lives lost."

The man was woefully earnest, and his eyes, shining with some excitement, were still fixed upon the crone at the table. But Messenger listened, and laughed aloud.

"Kenner," said he, "you'd have made a better comedian than ever you were table-turner. Don't you think you've fooled around enough?"

The answer was never given, for the Spanish woman had paid her bill and was leaving the terrace. In another hour she had quitted Monaco in her steam yacht, and nothing but the memory of a grotesque and singular personality remained behind her.