"And yet," declared young Harcourt, "if there still survives, anywhere
in the world, a vestige of Romance, this should be her refuge; her last
stand against the encroachments of the commonplace."
He spoke animatedly, with the double eagerness of a boy and an artist,
sweeping one hand outward in an argumentative gesture. It was a gesture
which seemed to submit in evidence all the palpitating colors of Capri
sunning herself among her rocks: all the sparkle and glitter of the Bay
of Naples spreading away to the nebulous line where Ischia bulked
herself in mist against the horizon: all the majesty of the cone where
the fires of Vesuvius lay sleeping.
Across the table Sir Manuel Blanco shrugged his broad shoulders.
Benton lighted a cigarette, and a smile, scarcely indicative of frank
amusement, flickered in his eyes.
"Do you hold that Romance is on the run?" he queried.
"Where do you find it nowadays?" demanded the boy in flannels. "There!"
With the violence of disgust he slammed a Baedeker of Southern Italy
down upon the table. "That is the way we see the world in these days! We
go back with souvenir postcards instead of experiences, and when we get
home we have just been to a lot of tramped-over places. I'll wager that
a handful of this copper junk they call money over here, would buy in a
bull market all the real adventure any of us will ever know."
The three had been lunching out-doors in a Capri hotel with flagstones
for a floor and overhanging vine-trellises for a roof. Chance had thrown
this young stranger across their path, and luncheon had cemented an
acquaintanceship.
"Who can say?" suggested Benton. "Why hunt Trouble under the alias of
Romance? Vesuvius, across there, is as vague and noiseless to-day as a
wraith, but to-morrow his demon may run amuck over all this end of
Italy! And then--" His laugh finished the speculation.
"And yet," went on the boy, after a moment's pause, "I was just thinking
of a chap I met in Algiers a while back and later on the boat to Malta.
I ran across him in one of those vile little twisting alleys in the
Kasbah quarter where dirty natives sit cross-legged on shabby rugs and
eye the 'Infidel dogs' just as spiders watch flies from loathsome
webs--ugh, you know the sort of place!" He paused with a slight shudder
of reminiscent disgust. "I fancy he has had adventures. We had a glass
of wine later down at one of the sidewalk cafés in the Boulevard de la
Republique. He showed me lots of things that a regular guide would have
omitted. The fellow was on his uppers, yet he had been something else,
and still knew genteel people. Up on the driveway by the villas, where
fashion parades, he excused himself to speak with a magnificently
dressed woman in a brougham, and she chatted with him in a manner almost
confidential. He told me later she might some day occupy a throne; I
think her name was the Countess Astaride."