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This strange development of that night of Destiny began to assume in P. Sybarite's esteem a complexion of baleful promise.
Through the engine-room ventilators a long jingle of the telegraph was heard; and directly the Sybarite's pulses began to beat in quicker tempo, while darker volutes of smoke rolled in dense volume from her funnel and streamed away astern, resting low and preserving their individuality as long as visible, like a streak of oxidization on a field of frosted silver.
Repeated if covert glances at his companion supplied no clue; P. Sybarite's face remained as uncommunicative as well-to-do relations by marriage; his shadowy, pale and wistful smile denoted, if anything, only an almost childlike pleasure in anticipation of the evening's promised amusement.
The telegram with its sprawling endorsement in ink, "Mr. Bayard Shaynon, Monastery Apartments," was for several moments within two feet of P. Sybarite's nose. Impossible to conjecture what intimate connection it might not have with the disappearance of Marian Blessington, what a flood of light it might not loose upon that dark intrigue!
But his taste, rendered critical by much observation both at home and abroad, at once told him that he was mistaken. "The expression is well enough," he thought, "but she has not a single perfect feature not one that an artist would copy, except perhaps the eyes, and even they are not soft and Madonna-like." He had a sybarite's eye for beauty, and an intense admiration for it.
November rose to meet him, reversing his pistol and aiming at P. Sybarite's head a murderous blow. This, however, the little man was alert to dodge. November came bodily into his arms. Grappling, the two reeled and went down, P. Sybarite's fingers closing on the throat of the assassin just as the latter's head struck the pavement with brutal force. The man shivered, grunted, and lay still.
Wrapping her negligee round her, she swept magnificently out of the "den," and a moment later again crossed P. Sybarite's range of vision as she ascended the stairs. Then she disappeared, and there was silence in the house: a breathing spell which the little man strove to employ to the best advantage by endeavouring to assort and rearrange his sadly disordered impressions.
From this time nothing had been heard of the Romans; their occupation had lasted forty years, and in another forty the only physical traces of it remaining were a camp at Jerbourg, the nearly obliterated tessellated pavement and fragments of wall belonging to the sybarite's villa, which occupied the site in the King's Mills Valley where the Moulin de Haut now stands, the pond in the Grand Mare in which the voluptuary had reared the carp over which, dressed with sauces the secret of which died with him, he dwelt lovingly when stretched on his triclinium, and the basins at Port Grat in which he stored his treasured mullet and succulent oysters.
The furniture was also of oak, and cushioned in red Morocco leather. Altogether the library gave evidence of a refined taste, and was a cross between a monkish cell and a sybarite's bower. "Well, Miss Denham," said Morley, his merry face more than a trifle serious, "what have you to say?" "There is nothing I can say," replied Anne, with composure, "the letter has nothing to do with me."
Hardened though they were to scenes of violence, the clients of the dive had stilled in apprehension the moment November lifted his voice in anger; while P. Sybarite's first overtly offensive move had struck them all dumb in terror.
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