"That I should very much like to study astronomy if in all the world there could be discovered anybody amiable enough to teach me."
"How pathetic! If I only had time----"
"Have you no time at all?"
"It wouldn't do, _mon ami_."
"Why?"
"Because I should be seen going to a rendezvous with you."
"Isn't there any way into the cabaret garden except through the cabaret?" he asked.
She shook her head, laughing at him out of her brown eyes.
He waited a moment to control his voice, but there was a tremor in it when he said:
"Is there no way through the cellar?"
She noticed the tremor and liked it. In the lightest and airiest of flirtations the ardent and unsteady note in a man's voice appeals to any woman to continue and finish his subjugation.
"As for the cellar," she said, "it is true that one can get into the cabaret garden that way. But, Monsieur, do you imagine that a dark, damp, ghostly and pitch-black cellar appeals to any woman?"
"Is the cellar so frightful a place, Mademoiselle?"
"Figure it to yourself!--Some twenty stone steps from the pantry yonder"--She nodded her head toward the battered swinging door of leather.--"And then more steps, down, down, down!--Into darkness and dampness where there are only wine casks and kegs and bottles and mushrooms and rats and ghosts----"
"What of it--if, as you say, the stars are shining on the river----"
"Merci! A girl must certainly be in love to venture through that cellar! And a man, too!"
"Try me. I'll go!"
The girl laughed:
"You! Are you, then, in love already?"
"I should like to prove it. Where is that terrible cellar?"
"Behind the door, there." She waved her hand airily. "Try it. Show me how much you are in love! Perhaps then I'll believe you."
"Will the waiters interfere if I go into the cellar?"
"See how you try to avoid the test!"
"Try me!"
"Very well. The washroom is there. If you choose to wash your hands, you are at liberty to do so. And then if you can't slip down into the cellar while the waiters are looking the other way, all I can say is that you are not in love!"
He looked at her smilingly, scarcely trusting himself to speak for a moment, for the face of Philippa rose unbidden before his eyes and a shaft of fear pierced him.
"You are wrong," he said steadily enough. "I am in love.... Very honestly, very innocently.... It just occurred to me. I didn't know how deeply I felt.... I really am in love--as one loves what is fearless, faithful, and devoted."
"A dog is all that, Monsieur."
"Occasionally a human being is, also. Sometimes even a woman."
Her smile became a little troubled.
"Monsieur, are you, then, in love with some woman who possesses these commendable virtues?"
"No. I am in love with her virtues, Mademoiselle."
"Oh! Then she might even be your sister!"
"Exactly. That is the quality of my affection for her."
The pretty _caissiere_ laughed:
"You were beginning to make me sad," she said. "I--I am really willing to teach you astronomy, if you truly desire a knowledge of the stars."
"I do, ardently."
"But I am sincerely afraid of the cellar," she murmured. "It is ten o'clock before I am released from duty, and the knowledge that it is ten o'clock at night makes that cellar doubly dark and terrible. I--I don't want to give you a rendezvous down there; and I certainly don't propose to traverse the cellar alone. Monsieur, what on earth am I to do?"
"To study the stars on the river, and to reach a rendezvous without being noticed, makes it necessary for you to slip out through the cellar, does it not?"
"Alas!"
"Haven't you the courage?"
"I don't--know."
"Yes, you have."
"Have I?" She laughed.
"Certainly. I'll go to the washroom now, and get into the cellar somehow, and make myself acquainted with it.... I suppose I ought to have a candle----"
She said:
"When I walk home alone at night I have a little electric torch with me. Shall I lend it to you?"
She opened the desk drawer, drew it out concealed under her handkerchief, and he managed to transfer it to his pocket. It clinked against the loaded automatic pistol; nobody noticed the sound.
But for a moment he thought the two men, Meier and Hoffman, had noticed it, because they both got up and came over directly toward him.
However, they merely wished to pay their reckoning with a hundred-franc note, and Warner moved aside while they crowded before the pretty cashier's desk, offering hasty pleasantries and ponderous gallantries, while she dimpled at them and made change.
Then, after tipping the waiter, they went out into the late afternoon sunshine.
Warner, looking after them, could see that they were crossing the square toward the Boule d'Argent; and he knew that Halkett must have seen them and that he would manage to keep them in view.
Now was his time to investigate the cellar, and he said so to the brown-eyed girl behind the cage, who had been inspecting him rather pensively.
"I ought not to do this," said the pretty _caissiere_.
"Of course not. Otherwise we should not find each other agreeable."
She smiled, looking at him a little more seriously and more attentively.
"It is odd, is it not," she said under her breath, "how two people from the opposite ends of the earth chance to meet and--and find each other--agreeable?"
"It is delightful," he admitted smilingly.
"I don't even know your name," she remarked, playing with her pencil.
"James."
"Tchames?"--with a pretty attempt to imitate his English.
"Jim is easier."
"Djeem?"
"Perfect!"
"Djeem," she repeated, looking musingly at the tall, well-built American. "C'est drole, ce nom la! Djeem? It is pleasant, too.... My name is Jeanne." She shrugged her youthful shoulders. "Nothing extraordinary, you see.... Still, I shall try to please you, Monsieur Djeem."
"I dare not hope to please you----"
She laughed:
"You _do_ please me. Do you suppose, otherwise, I should dare enter that frightful cellar?"
Under cover of her desk, she deftly detached a key from the bunch at her belt, covered it with her hand, palm down, and let it rest on the counter before him.
"Do you promise to keep away from the wine bins?" she asked lightly.
"I promise solemnly," he said, and took the key.
"Very well. Then you may go and look at this dreadful cellar at once. And when you behold it, ask yourself how great a goose a girl must be who ventures into it at ten o'clock at night merely because a young man desires to take a lesson in astronomy on the river Recollette."
*CHAPTER XVII*
He had little difficulty in gaining the cellar from the washroom. Both doors opened out of the pantry passage; he had only to watch the moving figures silhouetted through the pantry doorway, and when they were out of sight for the moment, he stepped out, unlocked the cellar door, closed it gently behind him, flashed his electric torch, and started down the broad stone steps.
It was one of the big, old-time cellars not unusual in provincial towns, but built, probably, a century before the cafe and cabaret had been erected on its solid stone foundations.
Two rows of squatty stone pillars supported the low arches of the roof; casks, kegs, bins, empty bottles, broken bottles, and row after row of unsealed wine bottles lined the alleyways leading in every direction through the darkness.
On either side of the main central corridor stood wine casks of every shape and size, some very ancient, to judge from the carving and quality of the wood, some more or less modern, some of today. Almost all were hoisted on skids with bung and bung starter in place and old-time jugs and measures of pewter or glass at hand; a few lay empty amid the cellar debris, where the salts born of darkness and dampness dimly glimmered on wall and pavement, and a rustling in unseen straw betrayed the lurking place of rats.
Warner, playing his flashlight, walked swiftly forward, traversing the three principal alleys in succession. The third round included the little dark runways twisting in and out among the bins, turning sudden angles into obscurity, or curving back in a blind circle to the point of entrance.
And as he stood resting for a moment, trying to get his bearings and shifting his electric torch over the labyrinth within which he had become involved, a slight but distinct sound broke the silence around him.
It came from the cellar steps: somebody had opened the door above.
Instantly he extinguished his torch; the blackness walled him in, closing on him so swiftly that he seemed to feel a palpable pressure upon his body.
Listening, every nerve on edge, he heard footsteps falling cautiously upon the stone stairway; a white radiance spread and grew brighter at the far end of the vaulted place; and in a moment more the blinding star of an electric torch dazzled his eyes, where he stood looking out between the cracks of the piled-up boxes which made of the alley in which he had halted a rampart and an impasse.
Two men were advancing, shining the way before them, turning their heads from side to side with curiosity, but without apparently any suspicion.
They seemed to know the place and to be entirely familiar with every alley, for, just before they passed the runway where he crouched behind the boxes, they turned aside, played their light over the dusty banks of bottles, chose one, coolly knocked off its neck, and leisurely drained it between them.