Snow lay here and there on the bleak levels flying past the windows. How small the cottages were! Cottages? No—huts—cottage was too cosy a word for these poor cabins. What a poverty-stricken country; the very trees lopped and starved of branch, starved houses, starved peasants ploughing with horse-ploughs, no comfort, no prosperity anywhere; all like a pinched, starved England, till after Boulogne, where sand blowing about from the great dunes was a distinct foreign note. What if the train was over-hot? Cold, cold it was outside, and, if the windows were opened, the wind cut in like a sword. A city of a splendid tower lay in the cold light after a pale pink sunset; the rushing, rocking train came to a stop by a dusky, empty platform, where a solitary, starved-looking boy stood motionless, cold in the cold twilight, his arms rolled in his apron, listless, benumbed. This must be Amiens, or else some dim city of twilit dreamland; mortal railway station it could hardly be, so dim, so chill, so empty, so silent, with no passengers, no officials, only that one ghostly train, whence none descended and whither none climbed, hissing furtively in the greyness, while vague figures in blouses passed silently by, tapping thoughtfully at the wheels now and then, and the thin, hunger-pinched boy looked listlessly about him, his bare arms rolled in his apron. Evidently nobody ever goes to French cathedral cities except to stay there; perhaps even the boy was only a statue, the latest triumph of realistic art.
This grey, starved country, so different from rich, cosy England, would have been depressing but for the swift rush of the rocking train, the warm, downy comfort of the carriage, and the fairy-like strangeness that gave everything an air of unreality. If only Charlie were there, his clear eyes wide with pleasure, sharing the fascination, enjoying the motion, asking impossible questions, and making bewildering comments! Monstrous to send such a baby to a school of rough boys. She was not spoiling him, as his father declared; he was not getting womanish ways; children need tenderness, and a boy may have charming manners and be a delightful companion without being unmanly. At Easter he would come home, steeped in savagery, inarticulate and slangy, full of the surly self-consciousness that dreads to be thought anything but brutal, or to vary by a pin's head from "other fellows." Arthur would be delighted, and say he liked boys to be boys. Arthur, whose one aim in life appeared to be to avoid showing the least sign of emotion or humanity, or anything comforting and pleasant. When it came to saying good-bye, at his sudden departure on the eve of hers, she had choked miserably and said nothing, her eyes brimming over; but he—
"Well, good-bye, dear," she seemed still to hear in a cheerful, indifferent, staccato voice, with a cold, light kiss on the face she lifted, trembling and speechless. "Hope you'll enjoy it. Plenty of hats in Paris."
He was off before the last word, and had banged the door, and sprung into his cab by the time her choke was overcome. If only he had not said "dear," that commonplace symbol of conjugal indifference; "Ermengarde," with the faintest inflection of tenderness, would have made all the difference—she could even have borne the reference to hats had he said something nicer than "dear."
The twilight deepened, and the train became a flying meteor of linked lights; she grew more and more inclined to accept the rift in the lute and make the best of it. Her man had his good points, and all men seemed to be made of hard, unloving stuff; why seek sympathy in the impossible region of rocky male hearts? As for the scene in the study, she may have put a wrong interpretation upon it; she would not admit that she had ever given it the worst; it might mean some passing infatuation, resisted, perhaps overcome, at the utmost—or some harmless mystery, that five words would have made clear. Of course, men should not have secrets from their wives; but equally of course, men did. It was well to be away for a time; new experiences would put all this trouble in the background and show it in true perspective; she would wipe it clean off her memory and begin again, harden her heart, take all cheerfully, without show of feeling, answering chaff with chaff; weakness had made her over-sensitive, returning health would harden her, and, perhaps, who could tell? the man himself might soften, and miss and long for her. She hoped he would be very uncomfortable and mislay everything and have no one to find it, and no one to protect him from the zeal of housemaids, the carelessness of cooks, and the importunity of men of business.
But what was this cry of the man with the napkin? "Diner est servi!" Blissful announcement, if one could only stagger through the rocking corridor without serious mishap. How excellent a thing is dinner—at the proper time. There was the Anarchist, whose grim visage had more than once startled her meditations as he passed her door—"Tramping up and down like a wild beast," she confided to her fellow traveller in the dining-car, while enjoying the really "perfect meal" for which the long fast had prepared her.
How deft the staggering waiters were, dancing with their dancing dishes to the dancing tables, and always contriving to land the portions safely in the plates! How delightful this flying repast through the flying night—providing one faced the engine. Even the Anarchist was judged with lenience; if he did send furtive glances in her direction, her back hair and hat were unconscious of them.Timbale de Parison the menu had an attractive look, the same, sliding about the dish balanced unsteadily over her head, was even more fascinating, lodged triumphantly on her plate after five abortive attempts, it was beyond words delicious, when—was it an earthquake or a collision?—a series of bumps and crashes, and passengers tumbling together and apart like nuts shaken in a bag, and the darkened outside world, starred with the lights of Paris, beginning to run away backwards. Farewell, exquisite icedTimbale! The only safety is in instant flight. The train has turned.
The true inwardness of the phrase "jusqu' à Paris" was now realized, when Ermengarde found herself in great peace, though only half fed, facing the engine in her own compartment, while the lights of Paris twinkled past for some twenty minutes. Then another convulsion of nature seemed to take place, and the world again began to run away backwards from her dizzied sight. "It will turn again at Marseilles," her fellow traveller said cheerily, and at this terrible news there was nothing for it—since the other compartment was now occupied by two men—but to stand, facing the seat, and occasionally fall hither and thither in the rocking of the train, until her companion piled their two bundles of rugs together against the wooden partition and she sat on them, her back stiffened miserably against the straight wooden partition, and her legs jammed between knee and ankle hard against the edge of the seat, and her feet hanging (the space between wall and seat being about fifteen inches, and she a full-sized and shapely lass) in a position to which St. Lawrence's gridiron was luxury, and which soon produced such faintness as had to be treated with brandy.
"And if this," said Ermengarde, when the spirit ran through her veins and restored her speech, "if this is aTrain de Luxe, give me the commonest third-class carriage, with at least a floor to sit and fall upon!"
Was it a dream, or had she really seen the Anarchist's bearded, goggled face bending over her in close proximity to her fellow-traveller's? Who could say? These two were shrouded in mystery, and permeated with intrigue, phantasmic, unreal. The woman professed not to have observed the man, and when asked to notice him as he passed their door in the corridor, had stared blankly in every other direction, looked at the conductor, attendants, other passengers, but always failed to perceive a man with beard and goggles.
Yet, when sitting on the jolting little seat in the corridor, while the attendant made up the beds, at her fellow-traveller's kind suggestion, so that she might lie facing the engine, Ermengarde, now wide awake and sensible, could have taken her oath that she saw these intriguers talking together, in the little lobby at the entrance end of the corridor.
"Talking to whom?" the woman of mystery replied, with that baffling, stony-blank look that she put on like a mask at times. "Yes, I asked the man to make up the beds at once, that you might face the engine. See what nice bedding they give us; sheets, pillow-cases, all complete, and snowy white—so different from London-washed linen. I shall be glad to go to bed myself, after all the shaking and rattling. Which man did you say? I see nobody with a beard. Let us smile at the bed-maker as if we meant tips—five-franc smiles. He's very civil. No; he's clean-shaven. So sorry going backwards upsets you."
That was all to be got out of this woman of mystery, who seemed so impersonal and so much above all feminine, not to say human, infirmity. Yet there was a curious attractiveness about her. The eyes, that were at times so blankly impervious to expression from within or impression from without, were beautiful in shape and colour, of the dark blue that varies from grey to purple, and shaded by long sweeping lashes on finely curved lids. Her mouth shut firmly in the true bow shape, with full lips, that, in repose, had a sort of voluptuous sadness. She was slender and rather tall, moved well, and had in her figure and bearing a sort of melancholy distinction. A woman with a past, undoubtedly, and, by all appearances, with a present of precarious tenure and painful interest as well. The kind of woman men can never pass without taking note of, though nothing in her bearing, look, or dress challenges observation, unless it be an accentuated quietness and reserve. Such women, it occurred to Ermengarde, when not absolute saints, are eminently fit for "treasons, stratagems, and spoils." What if she were in league with the Anarchist, whose anarchism might be, after all, of the common-place type that indiscriminately relieves fellow-creatures of the burden of personal property? A distinctly unpleasant idea to entertain of one who shared sleeping-quarters and was so ready to have beds made up and lights covered.
In cases like this, the only comfort is to carry nothing worth stealing. But few travellers are without a watch and at least some little money. Ermengarde's was safely sewn up in some inaccessible portion of her attire, and when her companion plausibly suggested the comfort of undressing before going to bed, and volunteered to help her out of her clothes, she was glad to be able to point out that there was not room enough to undress oneself in, much less anyone else. Then she wondered, did she look rich? and when they found her so little worth robbing, would they murder her in revenge afterwards?—or beforehand to prevent a disturbance—charming reflections to sleep upon. Of course, Arthur had been right—the man had an exasperating way of always being right, especially about unpleasant contingencies—in saying that she ought not to travel alone. How many tales and newspaper records there had been lately of passengers robbed and murdered by unknown hands, especially in Southern France and Italy! It would be a judgment on her for taking things into her own hands, and flaunting in her husband's face a certain small hoard they both knew of—to be used only in great emergency, such as conjugal desertion, or personal violence, or bankruptcy, their jest had been. That had been coarsely done, she owned now with flaming cheeks; he had felt, perhaps resented, the indelicacy of the revolt. Let them rob her, then, but let them spare her life. The thought of a motherless Charlie, screwing his precious fists into his darling eyes, was too moving.
It was his bedtime; perhaps he was just saying his little prayers for "fahver and muvver," or nestling his curly head contentedly into his pillow, and falling into that instant, happy sleep that made him look like a little angel, at the very moment when she laid her own head, uncomfortably full of hairpins—perilous to remove with no chance of replacing them in that jolting, swinging little bunk—upon the train-pillow, expectant of midnight robbery and assassination, but too glad to lay it anywhere to care much about anything.
"Won't you at least let me take off your boots?" the woman of mystery murmured drowsily from the top berth; and Ermengarde would have given all she possessed to do so, had she discerned the remotest possibility of ever being able to put them on again, having now reached that stage of anguish when one seems to have somebody else's feet on, and those several sizes too large.
As she lay face forward on a wide, springy bed, the swaying train soon became a cradle of rest, and the rhythmic rattle and crash of its wheels and engine a soft lullaby, or the gallop of giant steeds, bearing one swiftly away to regions of elysian slumber and soothing dreams. Let the Anarchist rob or murder her, or both, if he would; but let him do it gently, so as not to disturb that exquisite combination of motion and repose, or break the rhythm of that musical gallop of winged steeds, yoked to flying cars, flashing swifter and ever swifter across France, across Europe, across the night, from North to South, from sea to sea, from evening to morning, from darkness to dawn, from earth to fairyland, when—— Bang! crash! jolt! rumble! and everything falling together and coming to a dead stop, at the weird repeated cry of some lost spirit, that pierced the startled night in prolonged reverberations.
No, not a lost spirit, after all; only a sleepy man in a blouse, crying the name of some town—was it Dijon?—through the echoing emptiness of a dimly lighted station, and through the window a glimpse of sky full of stars looking down in peace. They had come tosomewhere else, whither they had flown during the delicious sleep into which she had fallen. There is nothing more delightful than that feeling of having come to somewhere else without effort and without thought, in the stillness of night and sleep.
If only one had on one's own legs and feet, and no hairpins and no close-fitting day clothes, pinching in wrong places, or if only one could find a pocket-handkerchief or a smelling-bottle, or look at one's watch, without fear of waking the woman of mystery, and so hastening the hour of assassination by turning on the light; the presence of which, the latter had averred, was absolutely destructive of her chances of sleep.
But the winged steeds begin to snort and pant, stamping, and clashing their harness, and, with a sudden clatter of trampling hoofs, are off again into the waste places of midnight, through which a star glances intermittently and kindly, and Ermengarde remembers that she has not yet been murdered, but is almost too drowsy to hope she has not been robbed, feeling blindly for the gold sewn into her clothes and not finding it, and not knowing that an excruciating pain under the ribs is what she vainly seeks and is lying upon, or that acute discomfort in other regions means that her hat, a really becoming one, has tumbled off its hook and constituted itself a portion of her couch, which is no longer a bed of roses.
Surely the winged steeds are now tearing away at increasing, headlong speed, and their way is rougher, up hill and down dale, over crag and boulder and chasm; the cradle is rocked less gently, and the rhythm of the rapid gallop is not so smooth, else it would be heavenly to fly thus between the pinions of the fiery coursers through centuries of calm content, unvexed by thought or care; and surely the cadence that seemed, now music, now the burden of some sweet, old ballad of forgotten days, had declined to the double knock of civilization and hourly postal deliveries; to file-firing, to the racket of the housemaid's morning broom and furniture destruction, to summer thunder, to Portsmouth guns? No; silence on a sudden, and stillness, and once more the drowsy cry of some place-name through the echoing emptiness of a dim-lighted building. Again she had arrived somewhere else in sleep—could it be Valence, or Vence, enchanted names? Or rather some city of faery, beleaguered by visions, or dumbed by spells of sweet strong magic; it could be no earthly town; it must be the place of all men's longing, the land of Somewhere Else, of somewhere
"afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow—"
Oddly enough, Arthur was there and Charlie; the woman of mystery had disappeared, and the man with her, and the wild, winged horses were galloping faster and faster through the night, which was no longer black, but pale grey, shot with faint lemon; and there, through the window, glanced and quivered one large, lustrous white star—and—of course, it was fairyland again or some region of old romance, because, where the star had been faintly traced upon the luminous twilight sky, was strange oriental foliage, palm-tops, olive-boughs, fading and passing.
"Shall we switch off the light?" asked a clear cold voice from above; and Ermengarde, springing up with a start, realized that day was breaking and the fear of assassination past.
"Where is Marseilles?" she murmured drowsily, wondering if it were hairpins, or only headache, piercing her skull and brain, and heard that Marseilles was past and the present combination of dock, arsenal and dwelling, was Toulon, and marvelled at the clear pale light and the serene beauty and freshness of the morning.
The train had stopped and turned; the orange glow in the cloudy sky had paled; the sea was visible; pale blue like English sea, but marvellously clear and pure and free of mist, and its breath so sweet. And this was the Mediterranean? And those bushy bluish evergreens in the gardens among aloes, pines and palms, why—they must be olives! Well!——
Still, in spite of splitting headache, sealike qualms, and racked limbs, and the probability of being lamed for life in consequence of sleeping in boots of elegance pointed in the latest mode; in spite of squalid horrors of waiting in a queue of either sex for the chance of even the most hurried sponging of face and hands; in spite of the rift in the home lute, which had seemed to narrow with every mile from home—in spite of all, it was solid invincible joy to glide through this new, strange country in the rich, romantic South, this country of clear and vivid light and colour, of semi-oriental foliage, and foreign buildings, sun-shuttered, square and white.
There is nothing to equal the charm of these first wakings at dawn in foreign lands, full of the mysterious enchantment of the unknown. And this unknown was so very lovely, and this traveller so utterly untravelled, so happily open to impressions. So even the woman of mystery seemed to think, as she leant against a window in the couloir, with wide eyes and parted lips, absorbed in the pageant of sunlit sea and snow-sprinkled land and deep-hued foliage flashing by—all her schemes and machinations apparently in abeyance for a time. And yet in the dizzy and futile excursion Ermengarde had made to the breakfast car, where the sight of the simple but expensive déjeuner of coffee and roll and the fresh morning faces enjoying it, did but increase her physical misery and make it impossible to eat or drink, she had observed that this mysterious woman, breakfasting like others with amazing calm and even content, had exchanged significant glances with the Nihilist, whose shifty, sinister gaze had been, as usual, quite unable to meet the straightforward innocence of Ermengarde's—though she rarely looked in his direction, she perpetually felt his sinister gaze upon her, piercing even the dishevelled masses of back hair of which she was acutely and shamefastly conscious. And once when she had staggered and nearly fallen, in making a hasty exit from the coffee-scented car, this woman had sprung to her rescue with a cry of "Mrs. Allonby," and so supported her back to their corner-cupboard—misnamed state-room—without, it must be owned, inflicting any serious or even perceptible injury upon her.
"But how," Ermengarde asked in annihilating accents on recovery; "how did you know my name?"
It is not easy to disconcert that kind of person, she thought, observing the quickness with which the woman recovered her equanimity and the admirable calm with which she replied, while affecting to suppress a smile, "My dear lady, naturally by the label on your bag. Besides," she added, with the serpentine guile that affects simplicity, "you asked me last night if I had read any of your husband's books?"
"If I did, it must have been in my sleep," Ermengarde reflected with unspoken sarcasm. "And had you?" she asked grimly.
"Surely you remember that I am among Mr. Allonby's most assiduous readers, and predict a future for him."
"Poor old Arthur! She made a wrong shot that time," thought Ermengarde, who was inclined to consider her husband's essays in literature as so much waste of hours more legitimately and profitably given to journalism. Had she not been overcome by train nausea, she would have asked what was the woman of mystery's favourite among her husband's works, which she believed she had never read. Few people had.
As it was, she could only cling miserably on to the little hinged seat in the couloir, whither the ladies had been compelled to take refuge while their two sleeping-bunks were being transformed into one sofa. There she clung, jostled by fellow-passengers staggering past in various stages of disarray and dishevelment—where, by the way, were all the smart owners of huge trunks, tall flunkeys, and reluctantly prim maids of Victoria platform?—jolted by the swaying of the rushing train, and dimly conscious that this young woman never ceased to keep an eye upon her lightest motion, under pretence of sympathy with her discomfort, even when apparently absorbed in thought—sad thought, to judge by her drooping mouth and wistful gaze, clouded more than once by tears, furtively dashed away. Had Ermengarde dreamed of suppressed sobs above her once or twice during the night? Was the Anarchist her husband, and did he beat her? But there was no wedding-ring on the slender hand, that had more than once ministered to ungrateful Ermengarde's needs. For this absence there might be reason good.
Suddenly as they flew along the woman's face was transfigured by a flash of irradiating rapture; she caught her breath, put out her hand, and gasped in a quick, eager whisper: "Mrs. Allonby; look!"
Ermengarde had already seen, and, as the sorrow and perplexity had vanished from her companion's face at the sight, the weariness and physical discomfort went out of hers, while both gazed and gazed in a silent passion of joyous admiration, with moistened eyes and trembling lips, absorbed, rapt, caught up and away into the very shrine and inmost heart of beauty.
They saw, in the transparent stillness of that sunny morning, a long headland, perhaps island, running out to sea, rising boldly from the waves, and outlined in dark blue on a deep blue sky, above a sheet of dark blue sea, the jewel-like surface of which was unruffled by the faintest breeze; and they knew that they were at last beyond all doubt seeing the Mediterranean, and that it was blue, deeply, darkly, divinely blue, blue beyond imagination or description. The hue of a peacock's neck in depth and velvety texture, yet with the liquid blueness of a jewel; blue in various rich shades, all harmonious and each deeper than the other; a blue as warm as crimson, but still, not shifting, and never iridescent. It seemed to be the colour of happiness; it filled them with a pure and exquisite gladness. It was like a glorious dream of what colour might be, and never is, though it was, then and there in their sight—for one moment of irrecoverable splendour before the long train had rushed past. Warmth, sweetness, freshness and life were all in the glorious, unspeakable colour of velvety blue mountain and sea and sky.
So these two untravelled travellers saw it, and so they would see it never again, because first things come only once. But a deep strong certainty that after all some things are real and abidingly good even in this stained world of shifting shadows, took hold of these women at sight of this deep, sweet purity of colour.
"I judge that's Hyères," they heard, as not hearing, from a nasal voice passing along the corridor.
"Rotten place, Ea," came in another, more familiar accent, from between teeth gripping a cigarette. "Nothing to do."
Presently, with abrupt transition as in a dream, Ermengarde found herself cosily tucked up in her sofa corner, all eye, lost and absorbed in the novel loveliness through which the train flew in the clear fresh morning, aches, nausea, weariness, all clean forgotten. Forgotten also the undesirable and suspicious characters who were to have robbed and assassinated and otherwise afflicted her during the night. As for the unconscious object of so many dire imaginings, her fellow-traveller, she kept her place by the window in the corridor, statue-still, and intent on the landscape rushing by, as if she had veritably "forgotten herself to marble" with much looking.
Never had either seen such brilliant transparence of atmosphere, such glowing depth of colour. The sunny air had still a keen frost sparkle; here and there snow crystals glittered among rich greens and warm greys of foliage; every little pool was glazed with ice. Russet-clad peasant women in broad straw hats, men jolting along in picturesque country carts drawn by horses in quaint, brass-studded harness with high-peaked collars; a shepherd in a long brown cloak, his flock before him; beautiful wells and fountains of strange and primitive design; tiny white, blue and pink-washed houses with green latticed shutters; brown and leafless vines on trellises or planted in rows of low, crutch-tipped stems; stone pines, olives, stiff-spiked aloes, cactus, orange and lemon trees, and everywhere the golden bloom of mimosa, suggested Italy rather than France. The dragon coursers had actually borne them in the night through realms of romance and poetry; they were even now in Provence, that land of roses and minstrelsy; was not yonder rich expanse of blue the Ligurian Sea, or very near it? and Nice, that ancient historic and much-conquered city, the birthplace of Garibaldi, was not that essentially Italian by geography and descent, as well as all the lovely mountain shore from Monaco to the frontier of authentic modern Italy?
What an oriental touch in those glorious, dark-leaved palms of sturdy stem and spreading crown! What rich colour in the thick-bossed trunks no storm could bend, and the fruit, springing in golden plumes from stiff, wing-like leaves!
Ermengarde had always thought of palms as slender, waving things; the massy strength, the architectural splendour, the suggestion of carved pillar and arched roof of majestic span in the date-palm on this Saracen-raided shore was a revelation. Only to repeat to himself the words, Palm Sunday, filled the inspired Opium-Eater with solemn awe; but not its great associations alone make the simple word, palm, impressive to those who have seen this variety.
The winged steeds were no longer yoked to the cars; they must have vanished long since with the darkness; the train moved more and more slowly. That it should gradually slacken speed to a crawl through all this magical beauty was natural; but that it should actually stop, like common trains in regions of prose, for people to get out, claim luggage and pay porters, was amazing, especially as that first superb colonnade of date-palms was seen to rise behind one of these stations—perhaps Cannes? True, they were not stations in the ordinary sense, but rather pleasant places of pause, where leisurely persons of distinguished bearing and immaculate attire, gold-braided, button-booted, and black-kid-gloved, enjoyed the amenities of a life devoid of care, incidentally remembering from time to time to bestow a kindly and condescending courtesy upon wanderers descending casually from the train of luxury, that was now enjoying a beautiful calm in singular contrast to its wild stir at starting and headlong rush through the night.
Sometimes, after a long and apparently purposeless pause at one of these clean and sunny spots, an idea seemed to occur to an immaculately dressed lounger and interrupt the gentle current of his chat, if his roving glance happened to be caught by the cars. "There is a train," he seemed to say to himself; "perhaps something might as well be done with it."
Then, after a little silent meditation and some smiling interchange of thoughts with an acquaintance, he would move leisurely towards the cars, and indicate by a slight, but graceful, gesture that the pause was at an end. Then the journey would be gently resumed, through a land of rich-hued blossom and glowing green, with solemn mountain steeps rising on the one hand, and the vast blue radiance of a dark blue sea breaking in soft and soundless foam on many a purple, enchanted headland, and in many a sunny bay, on the other.
All the glamour of Shelley's ethereal poetry seemed to breathe and sing from that glorious sea, which Homer compared to wine in its depth of colour. All Shelley's seas are Mediterranean, and most of Byron's, while Keats and Tennyson, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, for the most part love the paler grey-blue and more frequent foam of Northern shores.
Vainly did the woman of mystery remind Ermengarde that she had not breakfasted; she was feasting with gods; she needed no meaner sustenance; even the shadow of the man of mystery passing her door, and glaring insolently through his detestable goggles upon her rapt face, scarcely annoyed her, except as a momentary eclipse of some lofty headland running out into the happy morning sea. She had even forgotten that she had slept, not only in, but upon, her hat, a really successful creation from Bond Street.
Strange that at these charmingly named places of retired leisure, where the train paused, as if for meditation, radiant specimens of Parisian fashion should appear, in lemon-coloured hair and artistically applied complexions; what business had they in fairyland? And those children of Israel, of rubicund visage, expansive waistcoat, and patent-leather boots? And that gay and fresh-coloured youth, of simple but select toilet and lordly British bearing—not aggressively lordly, like that of so many Britons wandering in the land of the barbarous and ineffectual foreigner, not contemptuously, but unconsciously and cheerily so, like one to whom life offered all its best treasures as of royal right.
Bright-eyed and lazily smiling, the youth strode slowly along the quiet platform, carelessly glancing at the windows, when a sudden thrill of sympathy made Ermengarde turn to see the woman of mystery, who was standing leaning against their door and looking across her at the people passing, start with a crimson face and eyes of flame, and crush herself suddenly far back in the corner of her seat, holding a paper of far-off yesterday before her eyes, with a quick, deep sigh.
The youth passed on and came back again, stopping to speak to a Parisian costume in lemon hair and bistred eyes; left her, joyously laughing with his head thrown back, and cannoned against a brother Briton in an agony of misunderstanding with a porter, who was replying to impossible English-French in equally impossible French-English.
"Riviera Palace, vite!" cried the English youth, cutting the Gordian knot and calming the troubled waters by those simple words in three different tongues; then, gripping the bewildered Briton by the arm, he steered him placidly out of sight.
"So he didn't come for her," Ermengarde reflected.
The mountains soared higher, and drew back from the land with ever greater majesty, and the headlands became more magically lovely as they stretched into the shining sea, the villas, the gardens, and groves ever richer; and, after having seemed to spend a brief but happy lifetime in traversing a beautiful dream, glorious with palm and olive and mimosa, the train again paused, and the woman of mystery suggested to Ermengarde that she had better get out.
"You have arrived," she explained, finding her unwilling to stir. They had done nothing but arrive at intervals during the last twenty-four hours, and how should this mysterious creature know that this was her final destination?
Still, the woman had been exceedingly kind, and Ermengarde thanked her graciously as she bowed her farewell, suddenly remembering that the dread ordeal of the Douane had once more to be faced, and her property, unseen since somebody had taken it to be registered at Victoria, had to be rescued from the barbarians—probably at high ransom.
The moving palace of luxury that had conveyed her in so few hours through so many dreams of magic and visions of faery, rumbled slowly out of the spacious hall of idleness commonly known as Mentone Station, but more nearly resembling a Home of Rest for railway officials. There it left Ermengarde, dizzy, bewildered, and solitary, planted by the luggage, that in some magical and mysterious way had suddenly been restored to her, and looking vacantly across the rails at a group of sturdy palms and a purple rim of sea.
Then it was that the melancholy spirit named home-sickness suddenly fell upon, seized, and rent her.
She would see the woman of mystery no more—so forlorn were her feelings that it was grief to part even with this probably suspicious character and possible assassinator of her nocturnal imaginings—she was going all alone to an unknown foreign house full of strangers, with not a soul to meet her or speak to her; perhaps to one of those hostelries so often met with on lonely moors in historic romance, that exist only as traps to rob and murder wayfarers.
"Quel est l'hôtel de Madame?" had several times been addressed to unheeding ears before she recovered enough from these dismal forebodings to reply; whereupon she soon found herself under the broad bright sky outside, stepping into one of the twenty or thirty omnibuses drawn up in line before the station, each with the name of its house in shining gold upon it. It was reassuring to see Les Oliviers legibly inscribed upon a veritable, unromantic bus; it was broad day; there was clearly no question of sinister-looking hovels with one-eyed landlords intent on murder and robbery—in these days they do the work more slowly; in the kitchens and on the bills—but she did wish she had been able to do her hair and tidy herself.
"I shall have to strap-hang, and there's no strap, and I couldn't if there was," was her mournful reflection, on finding the interior of this vehicle overflowing with hand-baggage and a lady of ample proportions on one side, and with a fair-sized gentleman, evidently a portion of the ample lady's baggage, and a thin gentleman and more hand-baggage, on the other. All were English, and all looked at her with the deadly animosity our countrymen accord to strangers. The whole world being the exclusive heritage of the travelling Briton, he naturally looks upon all other travellers as intruders. The appearance of a moustached face, with laughing dark eyes and a gay smile, at the window, followed by a request in a velvety voice, half-pleading, half-humorous, of "Place pour Madame, Messieurs et Madame,s'il vous plait," and accompanied by a forcible transposition of some of these mountains of parcels, resulted in a clearance of about six inches of cushion, upon which Ermengarde accommodated as much of a wearied frame as circumstances permitted; and then, with much furious but innocuous whip-cracking and many strange anathemas, the omnibus jolted and rumbled off, Ermengarde feeling more of a pariah with every jolt, hurled now into the indignant arms of the fair-sized gentleman and now upon the towering parcels of the lady of ample proportions, and profusely and irrationally apologizing in German, of which her fellow-voyagers understood nothing but that it was German, and therefore detestable. Why she spoke German at that precise moment of her existence she had no idea, except that it was the only foreign language that happened to turn up, and that she was obsessed by a vague notion that English was unsuitable to the surroundings. So, try as she would, she continued to speak German all the way to the hotel, to the great inconvenience and mystification of everybody, including herself. Her German was not quite perfect.
The lady of ample proportions meanwhile expressed herself strongly in very plain English upon the unpleasantness of having to "herd" with Germans, and said with bitter reproach to the fair-sized man that she had understood Les Oliviers to be an English house; while the thin man, who was helplessly pinned in the inmost corner by packages, vainly tried in a gentle, ineffectual voice, totally ignored by the stout lady, to pacify her apprehensions; and the fair-sized man entreated Ermengarde almost with tears to "parlez Français," of which she was just then totally incapable from sheer fatigue.
But not too tired to perceive that they were jolting along a level road, shaded by grey and leafless planes unreal and dreamlike in the marvellously clear sunlight, along a torrent bed, that was threaded by a stream, in which women were washing linen, kneeling in tubs or on the bare, shingly bed, just as she remembered them in Swiss torrents when a girl; or to catch a glimpse on the other side of marvellous villa gardens ablaze with scarlet salvias and giant geraniums, and glowing with orange-trees in fruit. It was "roses, roses all the way," while, high above in the dazzling sky, soared bare mountain peaks, warm grey, veined with amethyst and streaked with snow, jewel-like, wonderful. They had left the town far behind, and seemed to have jogged an immense distance inland by the torrent bed, before they reached a little blue house at the foot of a steep mountain ridge, cultivated or wooded to the very top, turned in at a gate, and stopped. Then Ermengarde's heart, lightened by the foreign charm and beauty of the road, sank once more. Could this small and homely cultivator's house be Les Oliviers? Not at all; the hotel was high up out of sight, they were informed, while being gently requested to alight.
"Mais pourquoi descendre, Messieurs et Mesdames? But quite simply, because here the road ceases to exist. It is now necessary to mount," was the alarming pronouncement of the driver.
To mount—and to mount a wooded precipice with an invisible summit, after all the jolting and shaking of the long journey. Ermengarde at once decided that the only possible course was to lie down and die then and there. The woman of substance, on the other hand, with sound practical common sense demanded to be told what she was to mount, and was politely informed that she might take her choice, with a wave of the hand towards a string of mules and donkeys amiably blinking in the sunshine beneath a jutting rock, that was almost hidden in hanging drapery of sarsaparilla, honeysuckle, and bramble, and topped by pines and great bushes of white heath in flower.
"Mountthem!" shrieked the poor lady, surveying the unconscious animals through her lorgnette. "Merciful Heavens!"
"But, one at a time, not all at once," the driver explained with gestures of deprecation.
"This is infamous!" thundered the fair-sized man, recovering from partial suffocation and upon the verge of apoplexy. "My wife's minimum weight is fourteen stone! Infamous! Besides, she can't ride. Atrocious!"
"Unless Madame prefers to mount on foot."
"Unfortunately," the thin man meekly put in, "there is no other alternative, the hotel being on the top of the ridge and accessible only by a mule-path."
"What?" cried another British matron of majestic girth, who was alighting with her daughter from a fly laden with luggage large and small. "No road to this place? It is a positive swindle. The people should be exposed at once. Besides, even if those wretched donkeys manage to carry us up, how on earth are we to get down again? And what is to be done with the luggage?"
"Mais," replied the driver, with a large circular sweep of both arms, obviously intended as a conclusive and satisfactory settlement of all difficulties.
"Abscheulich!" shrilled in Berlin accents from a plump and comfortable Frau, who had arrived upon the scene in another fiacre, containing a husband, a daughter, and a few other properties. "Undenkbar!"
At this the owner of the dark eyes, moustache and engaging smile looked with an expressive twinkle and shrug at Ermengarde (who was sufficiently refreshed and gladdened by the sight of the stout lady's difficulties to renounce her intention of lying down and dying for the present), and came forward with the explanation that the little climb was nothing; the animals were strong and accustomed to heavy burdens; the luggage would be carried by pack-mules, and the heavier passengers by the strongest of the saddle-mules; that no horsemanship was necessary; both donkeys and mules were to be regarded simply as ambulant easy-chairs, on which it was possible to doze and dream, to compose poetry, and evolve philosophic systems and scientific theories, "as Monsieur does," he added, gracefully indicating the thin man, who was lame, and having been hoisted on to the largest and most handsome of the engaging, soft-eyed donkeys, was reclining wearily with one arm on the velvet back of the saddle.
"Na, Hedwig," growled the tranquil German in the fly, "disturb thyself not! There are many hotels in Menton,Zuruck!Geschwindt!"
And back they went straightway, impervious to the pleading of the dark-eyed man, who too late discovered that the senior partner in that domestic firm was not of the persuadable female sex. Then, recognizing Mrs. Allonby to be of more ductile material than the other two, he devoted his persuasive powers to the woman of substance and the British matron, whose stern brows soon relaxed beneath his sunny smile and pleading glances; the woman of substance finding herself in a trice, she hardly knew how, accommodated with an improvisedchaise à porteurs, consisting of a perilously aged basket-chair and two hoe-handles borne on the shoulders of two handsome Italian workmen, whose teeth glistened with fun and the prospect of five-franc pieces to come, while the fair-sized man and the other matron were mounted each on a strong mule, and before they could utter a syllable of remonstrance, the mystic word "jay" came from the mule-driver, and they found themselves bumped out of sight up the narrow path, which, consisting of steep steps made of huge cobbles, or, rather, small crags, compelled them to devote their whole energies to avoid being shot over the mules' tails, as the animals reared on end with a jerk at each stony stair.
The remaining travellers, having been distributed among the other mules and donkeys, were soon mounting, nolens-volens and with inconvenient rapidity, the cobbled stairs, that at first threaded a sort of chimney in the ridge, and, later, reached a narrow, winding ledge with a perpendicular drop on one or either side, on the extreme edges of which the animals took a fiendish pleasure in balancing themselves, while their miserable riders shut their eyes and clung on for dear life, vainly imploring the mule-drivers to stop them. But the merciless drivers, deaf to entreaty, did nothing but urge the laggard beasts on with strange sounds, in which the word "jay" alone was intelligible (suggesting to the thoughtful mind a probable Aryan root signifying to proceed, from which this vocable and the Hindoofaoand the British gee are alike derived). Because whenever a driver said "jay," every donkey and mule went, and whenever any rider said anything to the drivers (and some of them said a good deal in different tongues), these at once cried "jay," bringing out the vowel sound sharply and leaving off before they had quite finished it.
It was during this ascent that the fold of Ermengarde's brain in which the French language was located suddenly became accessible, and she implored them in choicest Parisian to stop, to take her off, to allow her to fall in some soft place, anywhere, with the sole result of bringing a fresh shower of twig-blows andjaysfrom these harmless people, who only understood the Italian patois of the district, and supposed from her agonized voice and gestures that she was anxious to ascend more quickly, whereas her one consuming desire was to get off her ambulant armchair at any price. It was some years since the unfortunate Ermengarde had ridden at all, and then it had been upon an average Christian horse, and only those who have been borne unwillingly by a series of bone-dislocating rears and jerks up endless staircases enclosed in rock-walls, and along knife-edged ledges overhanging abysmal nothingness, upon animals that understand no civilized language, and answer to no bit or bridle, and whose sole form of obedience is to run away from whoever pronounces the word "jay" in their rear, can imagine the complicated anguish of such riding. Nothing but the delight inherent to fallen nature at the spectacle of the misfortunes of others enabled Ermengarde to endure this singular form of torture; but when she witnessed the spluttering indignation of the British matron of majestic girth at being constantly, either crushed between the thin man and the adjacent rock-wall, or edged perilously over the precipice by his donkey, and his agonized attempts to avoid this unseemly proximity, with his wild and ineffectual endeavours to explain his own innocence and the friendly relations existing between their respective beasts, who could by no human means be induced to travel apart, she became uplifted in spirit and capable of enduring anything. Especially when the thin man weakly tried to apologize in French, of which he was hopelessly incapable, thus exasperating the woman of majestic girth to madness at the idea of being taken for a foreigner.
It was not until the handsome and stalwart donkey that bore the tortured form of Ermengarde took advantage of some mischance to the driver's apparel to dart up a side staircase, bordered by succulent grasses, with a suddenness that extracted an involuntary shriek from his hapless burden, that her woes came to pause, and, like Balaam's, her donkey found the path between the vineyards barred by the sudden apparition, not, indeed, of an angel with a sword, but of a comfortably real figure, with a walking-stick and two laughing dark eyes. He had dropped from heaven knew whence, and understood Parisian French even on English lips.
"If I don't stop I shall certainly die," gasped Ermengarde, suddenly relapsing into German, which presented no difficulty to the owner of the laughing eyes. "Never in my life have I had to climb a broken staircase on a wild ass before. It's like a nightmare."
"Yet Madame sits beautifully, is a good rider?"
"Oh, I can ride—horses—not nightmares, not wild donkeys up endless chimneys."
Then it was that this man of infinite resource came to the rescue. He took the donkey's short bridle—too short to be used by the rider—in one hand, and passing his other arm behind the saddle brought the lawless animal into subjection, and diverted the rider's attention from her misadventures to the splendour of the prospect, which was unfolding beneath them with every step they mounted, but which she had been totally unable to see because it was all behind. Then, after a short rest and rearrangement of the Bond Street hat, which, besides having been slept upon, was obviously not intended to ride donkeys up precipices in, he personally conducted donkey and rider for the remainder of the ascent, making Ermengarde's hair stand on end by disputing edges of precipices with the animal, and preserving her in violent and unexpected jerks by the support of his arm.
"But how will you ever face the miserable people you have fastened upon wild animals against their will, when we get to the top—that is, if there is any top, and we ever get there?" she asked.
"Ah, Madame," he replied with twinkling eyes and a small shrug, "I am discreet. I do not face them, especially the fat lady, till they have been fed. But—she is adrôlesse, that stout one. Imagine to yourself, her porters have already dropped her twiceà force de riresimply. They fall soft, those padded ones. And she is now happily safe on high."
"But can they be expected to stay in your house after being captured and carried up by force?"
This youth pleased Ermengarde; she told herself, while looking kindly into his sunny, smiling eyes, that he was a dear boy. Foreign subordinates, especially French, she had always understood, are very different from our clumsy, self-conscious countrymen; no need to keep them at such a distance; they can be amusing and companionable without being impertinent or vulgar. And this one had the bearing of a prince in disguise.
"But they are obliged to stay, Madame; for, look you, once there, they cannot get down again. Besides, it is so charming on high that no one ever wishes to. Moreover, it is not, as Madame supposes, my house."
"No? You are—who are you, then—not the proprietor?"
"Heaven forbid! I am quite simply—they call me—Monsieur Isidore, at your service."
"Son?" she pondered silently, "secretary—ormaitre-d'hotel?"
They were now winding round a rocky steep, crowned by a plain white building, half hidden by cypresses, the flickering, flame-like points of which surprised her by their solemn and symbolic beauty. Making a sudden sharp turn they found themselves in a sunny, open garden, ablaze with flowers of summer sweetness, shaded by orange, olive, and palm trees, planted sparsely upon a ridge summit, and commanding a glorious, wide, and open prospect ending in the warm, deep blue of the sea.
All round and far up behind the house towered a vast amphitheatre of mountains clothed in every spur and gorge with wood or terraced orchard, and crested by towered villages almost to their tossing peaks, uplifted, bare, and beautiful, with amethyst veining and delicate snow-streaks, into the intense velvety blue sky. Except where the ridge ran up behind the house into a little crest topped by dark green pines glowing vividly on the vivid sky, and then plunged on into the mountains' heart, the garden stood isolated on the edge of the sheer ridge that fell from the sun-facing front in steep terraces of lemon orchard, vineyard, and garden down to the torrent bed, crawling slowly, slowly, among houses and gardens half hidden in trees, to the mass of clean, red-brown roofs, that lay with never a smoke-stain among trees by the sea, like an estuary of masonry. Thence on the East a hill-spur suddenly rose and ran back into the mountains, hiding from view the harbour with its shipping and all the old town, except one church-tower raised above the hill and outlined upon the sea. And on every hill-slope and steep, terrace after terrace of vine, and olive, and lemon with golden fruit, and mimosa in golden bloom, or pine woods in clefts and on abrupt steeps. And everywhere small houses, growing smaller as they rose on the heights, with ruddy brown roofs and walls of clean pink and blue and white; and all this bathed and flooded and steeped in such transparence and clarity of sunlight as the Children of the Mist see never in their own dim poetic shores.
Ermengarde was speechless, all eye and ear, breathing in the warm, spiced, exhilarating air, that never a ruffle stirred, as if it were life for both soul and body, and not knowing how she had parted company with the gentle, soft-eyed creature that had borne her up into this paradise. Something cool touched her cheek; it was a lemon hanging from a dark-leaved branch. Her skirts swept a little forest of scented oak-leaf geranium, so sturdy and compact of growth one could almost stand on it; then they brushed a border thick-set with double stocks one mass of solid bloom. Here were geraniums, trees, not plants, with hard stems, their velvety leaves crimson, olive, and orange; here on a wall strong almond perfume gave token of a curtain of heliotrope in flower; and, as in the road below, "it was roses, roses all the way," from marble-stepped terrace to terrace, on bush and trellis and wall and balustrade.
"Will they want to assassinate me for this, Madame?" M. Isidore asked, regarding her with amused satisfaction. "When one reaches paradise, does one quarrel with the paths to it?"
"How can I tell; I was never there; but—I've known people capable of it." She thought of the woman of substance and of Arthur's eldest aunt. "Where are all the people?" she asked, becoming aware that the paradise was tenanted solely by a Swiss porter with a bristling moustache standing at the door of the plain, square villa. Empty garden-seats, cane lounges, and a pile of trunks by a side door bore witness to human occupation, though no soul stirred.
"They are happy, Madame; they breakfast. I am without fear as without reproach."
He laid a cluster of tea-roses in her hand, and she turned with a smile of thanks and a little sigh of content, to perceive that the view seawards to the west was blocked by a sudden rise of the ridge, round which they had just travelled, the villa and garden sitting down upon the hollow back in a sort of saddle. On the crest of this rise, as if emerging from the pine-woods clothing the steep flank, gleamed the white walls and little bell-gable of a convent, surrounded by cypress and eucalyptus, all in shadow and etched sharply upon that marvellous sky, that before nightfall would be gold, like an early Italian background, or lemon, or one chrysolite, or rose-crimson mingled with orange and green.
This gave the last consecrating touch. Thence the Angelus would float down over vineyard and olive-garden, at morning, noon, and evening, and break in soft music across the ravine and over the hill to the hidden town, all the towers of which would take it up in rich confused melody, repeated and heard far out at sea.
"But no," she heard; "the convent is now subject to the closure. The fraternity is dispersed. The house is private property."
The subject appeared distasteful to her guide. She turned and went into the cool, fresh house, finding the shadow and coolness of the broad, stencilled corridors welcome, and forgetting the ice and fog and shivering of yesterday, and the picture of the thin, starved boy, blue and shuddering on the bleak station, as if they had never been.
But she did not forget the roses coloured like a sunset, that this man of resource had laid in her hand. They reposed in water, while the weary traveller, refreshed by hot water and soap more than by food, laid her aching limbs at last in a stationary and silent bed, and slept with a vigour that excluded dreams and every sensation but one of bitter hostility to the chambermaid when she came, as straitly charged, and roused her with equal vigour in time for dinner. Then the roses were promoted to a place of honour in the simplest of demi-toilets, and she made her way to the dining-room, with a strange, lost feeling at having to sit at meat with total strangers, every one of whom had something to say to every one but herself, and all of whom appeared to regard her with a savage animosity and depreciation, under which she found herself quailing to such an extent, that to assert herself she was obliged to demand salt of her next neighbour in aggressively firm tones, and, though she was unaware of it, in her best German.
The dining-room was not as pleasant now as when, after a slight temporary acquaintance with soap and water, she had taken her solitarydéjeunerthere in the morning. It was empty then, and her seat faced a row of windows looking across the ravine, all powdery on the opposite side with blue bloom of pine and olive, much alike in the strong sunlight. Through the window just opposite, the white village of Castellare gleamed on a hill-crest, above which the bare peaks of the Berceau glowed jewel-like in a pure, deep sky. Then the masses of flowers, fresh from the garden, gathered, not bought, such flowers, so full and rich and joyous of growth, and the fruit—orange and lemon, just off the bough, with the dark leaves clinging to them—how fragrant, poetic, and beautiful the whole had been. That firstdéjeunerwas a poem, contrasted with the prosaic luncheon-tables of the City of Perpetual Fog.
The fruit and flowers were still there, a great bank of spiced double stocks totally effaced the thin man plaintively sipping his soup opposite. People were squeezing fresh lemons into their glasses most temptingly, but the mountains were blotted out, and the table was ringed with human faces, alien, unfriendly, grim of glance. It was the hapless Ermengarde's first appearance alone at atable d'hote(Arthur always insisted on a private table in public); she was unaware that a new-comer in a pension is considered as a heathen man and a publican, an unwarrantable intruder, an encroacher upon vested rights, a probable pickpocket, a possible escaped lunatic—especially if a foreigner in British company—most especially if German.
Not knowing this, she drew the inference that something in her appearance incited public hostility. The whole of her hair was grown upon the premises; there she was founded on rock, impregnable. But, before retiring to rest afterdéjeuner, she had availed herself of the convenience of Hinde's curlers. Could she have left any in? What is all the beauty of the Riviera—or of all the world—to a woman who, through inadvertence or the malice of demons, finds herself dining publicly in Hinde's curlers? Or had that horrible fastened-behind blouse come undone again? Was there a smut on her nose? Had she contracted a sudden squint from excessive fatigue? People had been known to do so. Perhaps her features resembled those of some notorious, and probably improper, woman. Or she had suddenly broken out into a rash—she felt her cheeks burning—and people thought her infectious, and that was why the woman of substance, instead of passing the salt, only glared at her and drew her impeccable skirts away from contact with hers.
Having reduced the waiter, who happened to be an Italian, to the verge of imbecility by demanding salt of him in this same German tongue, and aggravated his confusion by a further request for bread, in reply to which he brought mustard, pepper, and lemons in succession, she was at last rescued by the thin man, who, divining her wants by the light of reason and supplying them, plaintively explained the waiter's nationality and ignorance of German from behind the stocks, which he pushed aside, suspecting that they concealed a better view.
Amply rewarded by a smile and a "Danke sehr," the thin man ventured upon a hope that the donkey-ride had turned out better than it looked.
"How it looked I don't know," she said, "but it couldn't possibly have looked worse than it felt," and was met by the cheerful assurance that the anguish of riding donkeys up stone stairs was nothing to the torture of riding them down. Then, cheered by the persuasion that the thin man could appreciate beauty, even with a smut on its nose or curlers in its hair, she drew from him that he had already spent a couple of weeks at Les Oliviers, and asked what kind of weather had prevailed, and how far they were from shops, in her native tongue, until a bowl of salad travelling in the rear of a dish of chicken came to a dead stop near the woman of substance, whereupon terror of the latter's disapproving eye threw her back to the brain-fold in which her German was located, and she meekly asked for the salad in that tongue.
"I suppose you mean salad," was the severe reply that accompanied the plumping of the bowl on the table by her side. "You seem to speak English fairly well. Where did you pick up that accent?"
"I—I really don't know," she faltered. "I didn't know I had an accent. But I came quite honestly by it," she added hastily.
Just then a sound from some one dining at a little table immediately behind her, something between a splutter, a cough, and a chuckle, made her turn sharply, with a gasp that began by being a suppressed cry, and look straight into the bearded, goggled face of that miserable Anarchist, whose sinister gaze fell before the fearless interrogation of hers. As she wrote afterwards to her husband, it was a very damaging feature in his character that this truculent creature could never look her straight in the face.
"Then the woman of mystery can't be far off," she reflected, after recovering from the first shock of being pursued by this objectionable person to her remote mountain fastness. "But I leave the place to-morrow, if I have to ride down those rocks on a rhinoceros. He gives me the creeps, glowering at me behind those horrid goggles."
Nobody seemed to know what was the exact position M. Isidore occupied in the hotel, nor, indeed, did anybody care, as long as he was civil and made himself generally useful. Yet there was a vague feeling of mystery associated with the light-hearted youth, who in some inexplicable way commanded a certain amount of deference that excluded familiarity. His name floated continually on the surface of general conversation. It was "Ask M. Isidore this—M. Isidore will see to that," or, "WhereisM. Isidore?" and the vivid face and dancing eyes were there.
He had a habit of suddenly appearing without audible summons in crises of discomfort and perplexity, when, as if by magic, things came straight, and, with a jest and a shrug, he vanished—Heaven only knew whither, for he seemed to possess neither local habitation nor surname. You never knew where to look for him, yet he was always to be found.
If donkeys from Mentone were wanted, he tapped and clicked in a little corner cupboard, and after one or two soft "Ola's!" listened as if in communion with subject spirits to whom he whispered words of power, whereupon, in no time to speak of, gaily-caparisoned but self-willed animals, in charge of women in flat straw hats, stood waiting on a little sort of bastion on the ridge, outside the gate at the back of the house.
If people wanted to know what the weather was going to be—and only newcomers asked what everybody else knew by experience to be unchangeably superb—or the menu, or the temper of riding mules, or the hire of carriages, the weight of postal packets, and the best places to buy oranges to send home, or when every train left, and arrived at, Mentone, or the probable cost of sailing to Africa, the price and programme of every entertainment at Nice, Mentone, and Monte Carlo, the most trustworthy hair-dressers and restaurants in the town, the hours of Divine worship, and the most infallible system of winning at roulette, they unhesitatingly asked M. Isidore in any language they happened to know best, and he as unhesitatingly replied in the same—namely, his own. Hence it happened that his replies often exercised and impressed the imagination as strongly as those of the Delphian oracle, and like those were subject to diverse interpretations by diverse hearers. And, if the oracles were unfulfilled, this in no wise detracted from the confidence reposed in his omniscience. For, given three different interpretations, it was obviously impossible for all to be fulfilled, and if one was fulfilled it was equally obvious that that must have been the right one. If people lost their way or fell off donkeys in the mountains, they were usually met or picked up by M. Isidore. If they wanted change, postage-stamps, picture-cards, these were invariably in his pocket. And if, as occasionally occurs in cosmopolitan boarding-houses, things became a little dull after dinner, M. Isidore would cheerfully swallow carving-knives, and make small articles of personal property change owners unseen, boil eggs in hats and turn wine into ink, and make people's flesh creep delightfully by reading their thoughts, telling their fortunes, and divining their characters. He would also play billiards in the French manner.
If Madame Bontemps, the proprietress, a tall and handsome woman, were ruffled in spirit by domestic contrarieties, inefficient service, exacting inmates, and the general tendency of things to be broken, lost, spoilt, and worn out, he could always soothe her exasperated feelings, and soften the asperities of her speech. He stood between her wrath and guilty servants; he defended her from the attacks of infuriated guests. He even teased that majestic woman, and openly made fun of her smaller vices, thereby drawing a soft suggestion of smiles about her iron mouth. Madame Bontemps never laughed, probably because she never had time. But she had a husband, who sadly needed discipline. When she had a few moments' leisure, which was seldom, she sat in a small office, and received complaints and orders, gave advice, made up accounts, drew cheques and knit stockings. Indeed, she never ceased to knit stockings, unless her busy brown fingers were otherwise employed. It was supposed that she knit stockings in bed, if she ever went to bed, which was generally doubted. She had been heard at dawn in the garden giving orders in a tongue that none but the labourers could understand, except perhaps her husband, for it was that in which she usually quarrelled with him. She was sometimes found patrolling the corridors and stairs at night, after lights were out and the hotel was ostensibly plunged in repose.
If anything—illness, fire, or burglars—happened during the night, Madame always appeared fully dressed with unruffled hair. At any hour of the day she might be seen in gardens, vineyards, and lemon orchards, directing labourers, or in the kitchen, making the chef's hair bristle with terror, or in the topmost corridors discovering the sins of tremblingfemmes de chambre, or in the poultry yard, cow-stall, or dairy; and wherever Madame Bontemps found things done as they should not be done, she was capable, not only of commenting in vigorous terms upon the subject, but also of practically showing how they should be done.
People going to her office and finding it empty had only to press an electric button, and she appeared as if attached to a secret spring. No one knew what Madame Bontemps did not do.
On the other hand, nobody knew what M. Bontemps did. But he was invariably polite and cheerful, and invariably provided with cigarettes and criticisms of life, for which he entertained a tolerant contempt, mixed with appreciation. He always referred to Madame with profound deference as the one supreme authority on earth. It was rumoured, but not generally credited, that he had once carried a pannier of wood up to some one's room. He had beautiful dark blue eyes, inherited by his youngest daughter. His eldest was cast in sterner mould, more like her mother. She spoke English well but not willingly; her frame was tall and powerful, her bearing majestic, her face dark and strong, with those very dark liquid eyes full of latent passion, that suggest a Moorish or Saracenic strain in the ancestry. Mlle. Geneviève, Ermengarde understood, was learning hotel management under her mother, whose able lieutenant she had already become. Some of these facts were gathered from the thin man and some from M. Isidore himself, in the course of the first, long, idle, dreamy day of basking on the sunny garden terrace.
It is probable that these things lost nothing in their transmission through Mrs. Allonby's letters home. As she lay in a long chair among spiced stocks in the still clear sunlight, she supposed herself to be writing letters. But in reality she was absorbing the beauty of the pictures spread before her, and realizing how much more exhausted she had been by her illness than had been suspected, and how unfit to cope with the trouble that had invaded her guarded, commonplace life. Only stillness and this healing warmth of sunlight seemed any good to her now. The stocks touching her feet were backed by a rustic balustrade, twined with roses and jasmine, immediately above a narrow belt of lemon-trees, the yellow-fruited tops of which were just visible, on the edge of the ridge which fell so steeply that, as she lay, there was nothing between her eyes and the distant band of dark blue sea. She seemed to be poised in mid air, with the lemons and roses, between sea and sky.
There was now no need to leave the house, the Anarchist having apparently taken his departure. With what anxiety she had listened to the voices of people breakfasting that first morning in the sunny air beneath her open window, while she took her coffee and roll cosily in bed, fearing to detect the harsh tones of the Anarchist among them. But she could only distinguish the plaintive notes of the thin man and the high treble and artificial gurgling laugh of Miss Boundrish, the daughter of the woman of ample girth, above the general cheerful ripple of morning chat. Her window beingau troisième, she ventured once, modestly veiled in lace curtains, to peep out upon this amazing picture of people breakfasting out of doors at eight o'clock of a mid-winter morning, and, as every face was turned from the house to the glorious prospect of sunlit space, and most were too immediately beneath her to look up without dislocated necks, there was little fear of being seen. How pleasant it was, this intermittent sound of voices in open air. There was the thin man in a picturesque hat, breakfasting all alone on the edge of a little jutting plateau, his head outlined upon the blue space of the ravine, his face seaward. There is but one pleasanter thing than this social breakfasting out of doors—to lie in bed and hear other people do it through open windows.
The voices were chiefly insular with a sprinkling ofJawohlsandSosandMais ouis. Little bursts of laughter and detached sentences sometimes floated up to the windowau troisième. Once she heard, in Miss Boundrish's overpowering head voice, "Mrs. Allonby, oh!" followed by the artificial gurgle that in the course of time jarred people's nerves; then Ermengarde knew that she had been given as it were to the lions, and was being served hot as a relish to the coffee and rolls, that her character, features, dress, complexion, figure, her probable past and possible present, her position, her upbringing and connexions, were being tossed from beast to beast, and disputed, growled, and chortled over. And once, in the voice of Miss Boundrish's mother, she heard the ejaculation, "What?theAllonby?" and wondered which of Arthur's relations had been hung, and why he had never told her.
Yet Miss Boundrish's mother had actually conferred upon Mrs. Allonby the shady white hat that reposed upon her hair as she sat in the garden terrace this afternoon.
"I tried to wear it to pacify Mr. Boundrish, who's always worrying about sunstrokes and fevers, my dear," the kind lady said; "but it was too young for me, and Dorris isveryparticular about her hats, as you may have noticed."
She certainly had noticed the rose-wreathed and unsuitable elegance in which Miss Boundrish had graced the table at luncheon. How delightful it had been to see people trooping into the cool, shadowy dining-room in summer hats and frocks, a little flushed with sun, and to think of shivering unfortunates with frost-tipped noses lunching at home by electric light, in a pea-green atmosphere flavoured with soot and sulphur. Mrs. Boundrish's hat was not what her daughter called chic, but it harmonized with Mrs. Allonby's simplest, least attractive costume; yet Ermengarde wore the thing contentedly. She was so tired, and so glad to rest from the innumerable petty complexities of suburban life, and steep herself in beauty and calm forgetfulness. As she lay in the sunny stillness, she wondered how she had borne with it so long, and was amazed to remember that she had cared about hats and been wounded by Arthur's contempt for those five. He would not believe his eyes if he could see her sitting thus in contented, humdrum chat with buxom Mrs. Boundrish, a woman of little more social consideration than her own cook, with a thing on her head like an inverted dish-cover, made of straw and garnished with two pocket-handkerchiefs.
"You may," the mother of Dorris—not classic Doris—apologized, "have thought me a little—ah—stiff last night; but the fact is," she added, suddenly confidential, "I took you for a foreigner."
"Ah!" returned Ermengarde, as much as to say, "That explains all."
"And, of course, in a place like this, one had to be so very particular."
"Very."
Ermengarde was wondering if the huge, bee-like insects plunging into the hearts of the quivering stocks were fireflies in their winter state—later, the thin man said they were humming-bird moths—and once more took a pencil and a little writing-block and began relating the perils of yesterday's donkey-ride to Charlie, while Miss Boundrish's mother, murmuring various platitudes, resumed her woollen crochet-work, till authoritatively summoned to some parental duty by the piercing voice of Dorris.
One line had contrived to get itself written—"My darling boy, your poor old mother"—then the pencil slipped—it is wonderful how easily pencils do this out of doors—from her fingers to the gravelled path, and before she could decide if it were possible to pick it up without disturbing the comfortable posture in which some Good Samaritan—either M. Isidore or the thin man—had tucked her up in rugs, the letter-block fell off on the other side.
Just then the woman of substance sailed up, and hoped with a deference that astounded the new visitor that she was rested after her journey, and recounted a whole Odyssey of her private misadventures during yesterday's ascent—how herchaisepositively broke down under her, and she had to be taken aside into a dreadful little smelly cottage, or rather the outside of it, under the vines, lest she should be trampled by the procession of donkeys and mules coming behind; and how those wretched foreigners did nothing but laugh and make faces and address impertinent remarks to her in an unknown tongue, that her husband said was neither French nor Italian, nor any civilized speech; and how finally her porters were doubled, and a sort of basket or tub was brought, and she was forced into it, and slung and jolted on four broomsticks by her four porters, at the peril of all five lives, to the present eminence, on which she supposed she must end her days, unless a proper road could be made before her time came.