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The Motor Maid

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Title: The Motor Maid

Author: C. N. Williamson
        A. M. Williamson


        
Release date: December 17, 2005 [eBook #17342]
                Most recently updated: December 13, 2020

Language: English

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THE MOTOR MAID


    *    *    *    *    *


      BOOKS BY C. N. AND A. M. WILLIAMSON

        LORD LOVELAND DISCOVERS AMERICA
        SET IN SILVER
        THE LIGHTNING CONDUCTOR
        THE PRINCESS PASSES
        MY FRIEND THE CHAUFFEUR
        LADY BETTY ACROSS THE WATER
        ROSEMARY IN SEARCH OF A FATHER
        THE PRINCESS VIRGINIA
        THE CAR OF DESTINY
        THE CHAPERON


    *    *    *    *    *


THE MOTOR MAID

by

C. N. AND A. M. WILLIAMSON

Authors of "Lord Loveland Discovers America,"
"My Friend the Chauffeur," "The Princess Virginia," etc.

With Four Illustrations in Color
by F. M. Du Mond and F. Lowenheim







[Illustration: "We raced along a clear road, the Etang shimmering blue
before us"]



A. L. Burt Company
Publishers                New York
All rights reserved, including that of translation
into foreign languages, including the scandinavian
Copyright, 1910, By Doubleday, Page & Company
Published, August, 1910
The Country Life Press, Garden City, N.Y.





                      To The Three Gertrudes





ILLUSTRATIONS

"We raced along a clear road, the Etang shimmering
  blue before us"                                  _Frontispiece_

                                                     facing page
"While I wrestled ... with a bodice as snug as
  the head of a drum, the lord of all it contained
  appeared in the doorway"                                    48

"It took half an hour to dig the car out, and push
  her up from the hollow where the snow lay thickest"        272

"Jack's hand, inside Mr. Stokes's beautiful, tall
  collar, shook Bertie back and forth till his teeth
  chattered like castanets"                                  328





CHAPTER I


One hears of people whose hair turned white in a single night. Last
night I thought mine was turning. I had a creepy feeling in the roots,
which seemed to crawl all the way down inside each separate hair,
wriggling as it went. I suppose you couldn't have nervous prostration of
the hair? I worried dreadfully, it kept on so long; and my hair is so
fair it would be almost a temptation for it, in an emergency, to take
the one short step from gold to silver. I didn't dare switch on the
light in the _wagon-lit_ and peep at my pocket-book mirror (which
reflects one's features in sections of a square inch, giving the survey
of one's whole face quite a panorama effect) for fear I might wake up
the Bull Dog.

I've spelt him with capitals, after mature deliberation, because it
would be nothing less than _lèse majesté_ to fob him off with little
letters about the size of his two lower eye-tusks, or chin-molars, or
whatever one ought to call them.

He was on the floor, you see, keeping guard over his mistress's shoes;
and he might have been misguided enough to think I had designs on
them--though what I could have used them for, unless I'd been going to
Venice and wanting a private team of gondolas, I can't imagine.

I being in the upper berth, you might (if you hadn't seen him) have
fancied me safe; but already he had once padded half-way up the
step-ladder, and sniffed at me speculatively, as if I were a piece of
meat on the top shelf of a larder; and if half-way up, why not all the
way up? _Il était capable du tout._

I tried to distract my mind and focus it hard on other things, as
Christian Scientists tell you to do when you have a pin sticking into
your body for which _les convenances_ forbid you to make an exhaustive
search.

I lay on my back with my eyes shut, trying not to hear any of the sounds
in the _wagon-lit_ (and they were not confined to the snoring of His
Majesty), thinking desperately. "I will concentrate all my mentality,"
said I to myself, "on thoughts beginning with P, for instance. My Past.
Paris. Pamela."

Just for a few minutes it was comparatively easy. "Dear Past!" I sighed,
with a great sigh which for divers reasons I was sure couldn't be heard
beyond my own berth. (And though I try always even to _think_ in
English, I find sometimes that the words group themselves in my head in
the old patterns--according to French idioms.) "Dear Past, how thou wert
kind and sweet! How it is brutalizing to turn my back upon thee and thy
charms forever!"

"Oh, my goodness, I shall certainly die!" squeaked a voice in the berth
underneath; and then there was a sound of wallowing.

She (my stable-companion, shall I call her?) had been giving vent to all
sorts of strange noises at intervals, for a long time, so that it would
have been hopeless to try and drown my sorrows in sleep.

Away went the Gentle Past with a bump, as if it had knocked against a
snag in the current of my thoughts.

Paris or Pamela instead, then! or both together, since they seem
inseparable, even when Pamela is at her most American, and tells me to
"talk United States."

It was all natural to think of Pamela, because it was she who gave me
the ticket for the _train de luxe_, and my berth in the _wagon-lit_. If
it hadn't been for Pamela I should at this moment have been crawling
slowly, cheaply, down Riviera-ward in a second-class train, sitting bolt
upright in a second-class carriage with smudges on my nose, while
perhaps some second-class child shed jammy crumbs on my frock, and its
second-class baby sister howled.

"Oh, why did I leave my peaceful home?" wailed the lady in the lower
berth.

Heaven alone (unless it were the dog) knew why she had, and knew how
heartily I wished she hadn't. A good thing Cerberus was on guard, or I
might have dropped a pillow accidentally on her head!

Just then I wasn't thanking Pamela for her generosity. The second-class
baby's mamma would have given it a bottle to keep it still; but there
was nothing I could give the fat old lady; and she had already resorted
to the bottle (something in the way of patent medicine) without any good
result. Yet, _was_ there nothing I could give her?

"Oh, I'm dying, I _know_ I'm dying, and nobody cares! I shall choke to
death!" she gurgled.

It was too much. I could stand it and the terrible atmosphere no longer.
I suppose, if I had been an early Christian martyr, waiting for my turn
to be devoured might have so got on my nerves eventually that I would
have thrown myself into the arena out of sheer spite at the lions, and
then tried my best to disagree with them.

Anyway, Bull Dog or no Bull Dog, having made a light, I slid down from
my berth--no thanks to the step-ladder--dangled a few wild seconds in
the air, and then offering--yes, offering my stockinged feet to the
Minotaur, I poked my head into the lower berth.

"What are you going to do?" gasped its occupant, _la grosse femme_ whose
fault it would be if my hair did change from the gold of a louis to the
silver of a mere franc.

"You say you're stifling," I reminded her, politely but firmly, and my
tone was like the lull before a storm.

"Yes, but----" We were staring into each other's eyes, and--could I
believe my sense of touch, or was it mercifully blunted? It seemed that
the monster on the floor was gently licking my toes with a tongue like a
huge slice of pink ham, instead of chewing them to the bone. But there
are creatures which do that to their victims, I've heard, by way of
making it easier to swallow them, later.

"You also said no one cared," I went on, courageously. "_I_ care--for
myself as well as for you. As for what I'm going to do--I'm going to do
several things. First, open the window, and then--_then I'm going to
undress you_."

"You must be mad!" gasped the lady, who was English. Oh, but more
English than any one else I ever saw in my life.

"Not yet," said I, as I darted at the thick blind she had drawn down
over the window, and let it fly up with a snap. I then opened the window
itself, a few inches, and in floated a perfumed breath of the soft April
air for which our bereaved lungs had been longing. The breeze fluttered
round my head like a benediction until I felt that the ebbing tide of
gold had turned, and was flowing into my back hair again.

"No wonder you're dying, madam," I exclaimed, switching the heat-lever
to "Froid." "So was I, but being merely an Upper Berth, with no rights,
I was suffering in silence. I watched you turn the heat full on, and
shut the window tight. I saw you go to bed in _all_ your clothes, which
looked terribly thick, and cover yourself up with both your blankets;
but I said nothing, because you were a Lower Berth, and older than I am.
I thought maybe you _wanted_ a Turkish Bath. But since you don't--I'll
try and save you from apoplexy, if it isn't too late."

I fumbled with brooches and buttons, with hooks and eyes. It was even
worse than I'd supposed. The creature's conception of a travelling
costume _en route_ for the South of France consisted of a heavy tweed
dress, two gray knitted stay-bodices, one pink Jaeger chemise, and a
couple of red flannel petticoats. My investigations went no further;
but, encouraged in my rescue work by spasmodic gestures on the part of
the patient, and forbearance on the part of the dog, I removed several
superfluous layers of wool. One blanket went to the floor, where it was
accepted in the light of a gift by His Majesty, and the other was
returned to its owner.

"Now are you better, madam?" I asked, panting with long and well-earned
breaths. She reposed on an elbow, gazing up at me as at a surgeon who
has performed a painful but successful operation; and she was an object
_pour faire rire_, the poor lady!

She wore an old-fashioned false front of hair, "sunning over with curls"
(brown ones, of a brown never seen on land or sea), and a pair of
spectacles, pushed up in an absent-minded moment, were entangled in its
waves. Her face, which was large, with a knot of tiny features in the
middle, shone red with heat and excitement. She would have had the look
of an elderly child, if it hadn't been for her bright, shrewd little
eyes, which twinkled observantly--and might sparkle with temper. Nobody
who was not rich and important would dare to dress as badly as she did.
Altogether she was a figure of fun. Indeed, I couldn't help feeling what
quaint mantelpiece ornaments she and her dog would make. Yet, for some
reason, I didn't feel inclined to laugh, and I eyed her as solemnly as
she eyed me. As for His Majesty, I began to see that I had misunderstood
him. After all, he had never, from the first, regarded me as an eatable.

"Yes, I _am_ better," replied His Majesty's mistress. "People have
always told me it came on treacherously cold at night in France, so I
prepared accordingly. I suppose I ought to thank you. In fact, I do
thank you."

"I acted for myself as much as for you," I confessed. "It was so hot,
and you were suffering out loud."

"I have never travelled at night before," the lady defended herself.
"Indeed, I've made a point of travelling as little as possible, except
by carriage. I don't consider trains a means of conveyance for
gentlefolk. They seem well enough for cattle who may not mind being
herded together."

"Or for dogs," I suggested.

"Nothing is too good for Beau--my _only_ Beau!" (at this I did not
wonder). "But I wouldn't have moved without him. He's as necessary to me
as my conscience. I was afraid the guard was going to make a fuss about
him, which would have been awkward, as I can't speak a word of French,
or any other silly language into which Latin has degenerated. But
luckily English gold doesn't need to be translated."

"It loses in translation," said I, amused. I sat down on my bag as I
spoke, and timorously invited Beau (never was name less appropriate) to
be patted. He arose from the blanket and accepted my overtures with an
expression which may have been intended for a smile, or a threat of the
most appalling character. I have seen such legs as his on old-fashioned
silver teapots; and the crook in his tail would have made it useful as a
door-knocker.

"I don't think I ever saw him take so to a stranger," exclaimed his
mistress, suddenly beaming.

"I wonder you risked him with me in such close quarters then," said I.
"Wouldn't it have been safer if you'd had your maid in the compartment
with you----"

"My maid? My tyrant!" snorted the old lady. "She's the one creature on
earth I am afraid of, and she knows it. When we got to Dover, and she
saw the Channel wobbling about a little, she said it was a great nasty
wet thing, and she wouldn't go on it. When I insisted, she showed
symptoms of seasickness; and in consequence she is waiting for me in
Dover till I finish the business that's taking me to Italy. I had no
more experience than she, but I had _courage_. It's perhaps a question
of class. Servants consider only themselves. You, too, I see, have
courage. I was inclined to think poorly of you when you first came in,
and to wish I'd been extravagant enough to take the two beds for myself,
because I thought you were afraid of Beau. Yet now you're patting him."

"I _was_ rather afraid at first," I admitted. "I never met an English
bull dog socially before."

"They're more angels than dogs. Their one interest in life is love--for
their friends; and they wouldn't hurt a fly."

"Larger game would be more in their way, I should think," said I. "But
I'm glad he likes me. I like to be liked. It makes me feel more at home
in life."

"H'm! That's a funny idea!" remarked the old lady. "'At home in life!'
You've made yourself pretty well at home in this _wagon-lit_, anyhow,
taking off all your clothes and putting on your nightgown. I should
never have thought of that. It seems hardly decent. Suppose we should be
killed."

"Most people do try to die in their nightgowns, when you come to think
of it," said I.

"Well, you have a quaint way of putting things. There's something very
original about you, my dear young woman. I thought you were mysterious
at first, but I believe it's only the effect of originality."

"I don't know which I'd rather be," I said, "original or mysterious, if
I couldn't afford both. But I'm not a young woman."

"Goodness!" exclaimed the old lady, wrinkling up her eyes to stare at
me. "I may be pretty blind, but it can't be make-up."

I laughed. "I mean _je suis jeune fille_. I'm not a young woman. I'm a
young girl."

"Dear me, is there any difference?"

"There is in France."

"I'm not surprised at queer ideas in France, or any other foreign
country, where I've always understood that _anything_ may happen. Why
can't everybody be English? It would be so much more simple. But you're
not French, are you?"

"Half of me is."

"And what's the other half, if I may ask?"

"American. My father was French, my mother American."

"No wonder you don't always feel at home in life, divided up like that!"
she chuckled. "It must be so upsetting."

"Everything is upsetting with me lately," I said.

"With me too, if it comes to that--or would be, if it weren't for Beau.
What a pity you haven't got a Beau, my dear."

I smiled, because (in the Americanized sense of the word) I had one, and
was running away from him as fast as I could. But the thought of
Monsieur Charretier as a "beau" made me want to giggle hysterically.

"You say 'was,' when you speak of your father and mother," went on the
old lady, with childlike curiosity, which I was encouraging by not
going back to bed. "Does that mean that you've lost them?"

"Yes," I said.

"And lately?"

"My father died when I was sixteen, my mother left me two years ago."

"You don't look more than nineteen now."

"I'm nearly twenty-one."

"Well, I don't mean to catechize you, though one certainly must get
friendly--or the other way--I suppose, penned up in a place like this
all night. And you've really been very kind to me. Although you're a
pretty girl, as you must know, I didn't think at first I was going to
like you so much."

"And I didn't you," I retorted, laughing, because I really did begin to
like the queer old lady now, and was glad I hadn't dropped a pillow on
her head.

"That's right. Be frank. I like frankness. Do you know, I believe you
and I would get on very well together if our acquaintance was going to
be continued? If Beau approves of a person, I let myself go."

"You use him as if he were a barometer."

"There you are again, with your funny ideas! I shall remember that one,
and bring it out as if it were my _own_. I consider myself quite lucky
to have got you for a travelling companion. It's such a comfort to hear
English again, and talk it, after having to converse by gesture--except
with Beau. I hope you're going on to Italy?"

"No. I'm getting off at Cannes."

"I'm sorry. But I suppose you're glad?"

"Not particularly," said I.

"I've always heard that Cannes was gay."

"It won't be for me."

"Your relations there don't go out much?"

"I've no relations in Cannes. Aren't you tired now, and wouldn't you
like me to make you a little more comfortable?"

"Does that mean that _you're_ tired of answering questions? I haven't
meant to be rude."

"You haven't been," I assured her. "You're very kind to take an
interest."

"Well, then, I'm _not_ tired, and I _wouldn't_ like to be made more
comfortable. I'm very well as I am. Do you want to go to sleep?"

"I want to, but I know I can't. I'm getting hungry. Are you?"

"Getting? I've _got_. If Simpkins were here I'd have her make us tea, in
my tea-basket."

"I'll make it if you like," I volunteered.

"A French--a half French--girl make tea?"

"It's the American half that knows how."

"You look too ornamental to be useful. But you can try."

I did try, and succeeded. It was rather fun, and never did tea taste so
delicious. There were biscuits to go with it, which Beau shared; and I
do wish that people (other people) were obliged to make faces when they
eat, such as Beau has to make, because if so, one could add a new
interest to life by inviting even the worst bores to dinner.

I was fascinated with his contortions, and I did not attempt to conceal
my sudden change of opinion concerning Beau as a companion. When I had
humbly invited him to drink out of my saucer, which I held from high
tide to low, I saw that my conquest of his mistress was complete.
Already we had exchanged names, as well as some confidences. I knew that
she was Miss Paget, and she knew that I was Lys d'Angely; but after the
tea-drinking episode she became doubly friendly.

She told me that, owing to an unforeseen circumstance (partly, even
largely, connected with Beau) which had caused a great upheaval in her
life, she had now not a human being belonging to her, except her maid
Simpkins, of whom she would like to get rid if only she knew how.

"Talk of the Old Man of the Sea!" she sighed. "_He_ was an afternoon
caller compared with Simpkins. She's been on my back for twenty years. I
suppose she will be for another twenty, unless I slam the door of the
family vault in her face."

"Couldn't Beau help you?" I asked.

"Even Beau is powerless against her. She has hypnotized him with marrow
bones."

"You've escaped from her for the present," I suggested. "She's on the
other side of the Channel. Now is your time to be bold."

"Ah, but I can't stop out of England for ever, and I tell you she's
waiting for me at Dover. A relative (a very eccentric one, and quite
different from the rest of us, or he wouldn't have made his home abroad)
has left me a house in Italy, some sort of old castle, I believe--so
unsuitable! I'm going over to see about selling it for I've no one to
trust but myself, owing to the circumstances of which I spoke. I want to
get back as soon as possible--I hope in a few weeks, though how I shall
manage without any Italian, heaven may know--I don't! Do you speak it?"

"A little."

"Well, I wish I could have you with me. You'd make a splendid companion
for an old woman like me: young, good to look at, energetic (or you
wouldn't be travelling about alone), brave (conquered your fear of
Beau), accomplished (three languages, and goodness knows what besides!),
presence of mind (the way you whisked my clothes off), handy (I never
tasted better tea)--altogether you sum up ideally. What a pity you're
rich, and out of the market!"

"If I look rich my appearance must be more distinguished than I
supposed--and it's also very deceiving," said I.

"You're rich enough to travel for pleasure in _wagon-lits_, and have
silver-fitted bags."

"I'm not travelling for pleasure. You exaggerate my bags and my
_wagon-lits_, for I've only one of each; and both were given me by a
friend who was at the Convent with me."

"The Convent! Good heavens! are you an escaping nun?"

I laughed. "I went to school at a Convent. That was when I thought I
_was_ going to be rich--at least, rich enough to be like other girls.
And if I _am_ 'escaping' from something, it isn't from the arms of
religion."

"If you're not rich, and aren't going to relatives, why not take an
engagement with me? Come, I'm in earnest. I always make up my mind
suddenly, if it's anything important, and hardly ever regret it. I'm
sure we should suit. You've got no nonsense about you."

"Oh yes I have, lots!" I broke in. "That's all I have left--that, and my
sense of humour. But seriously, you're very kind--to take me on faith
like this--especially when you began by thinking me mysterious. I'd
accept thankfully, only--I'm engaged already."

"To be married, I suppose you mean?"

"Thank heaven, no! To a Princess."

"Dear me, one would think you were a man hater!"

"So I am, a _one_-man hater. What Simpkins is to you, that man is to me.
And that's why I'm on my way to Cannes to be the companion of the
Princess Boriskoff, who's said to be rather deaf and very
quick-tempered, as well as elderly and a great invalid. She sheds her
paid companions as a tree sheds its leaves in winter. I hear that Europe
is strewn with them."

"Nice prospect for you!"

"Isn't it? But beggars mustn't be choosers."

"You don't look much like a beggar."

"Because I can make my own dresses and hats--and nightgowns."

"Well, if your Princess sheds you, let me know, and you may live yet to
deliver me from Simpkins. I feel you'd be equal to it! My address
is--but I'll give you a card." And, burrowing under her pillow, she
unearthed a fat handbag from which, after some fumbling, she presented
me with a visiting-card, enamelled in an old-fashioned way. I read:
"Miss Paget, 34a Eaton Square. Broomlands House, Surrey."

"Now you're not to lose that," she impressed upon me. "Write if you're
scattered over Europe by this Russian (I never did believe much in
Princesses, excepting, of course, our _own_ dear Royalties), or if you
ever come to England. Even if it's years from now, I assure you Beau and
I won't have forgotten you. As for your address--"

"I haven't any," I said. "At present I'm depending on the Princess for
one. She's at the Hotel Majestic Palace, Cannes; but from what my friend
Pam--the Comtesse de Nesle--says, I fancy she doesn't stop long in any
town. It was the Comtesse de Nesle who got me the place. She's the only
one who knows where I'm going, because--after a fashion, I'm running
away to be the Princess's companion."

"Running away from the Man?"

"Yes; also from my relatives who're sure it's my duty to be _his_
companion. So you see I can't give you their address. I've ceased to
have any right to it. And now I really think I _had_ better go back to
bed."




CHAPTER II


At half-past ten this morning we parted, the best of friends, and I
dropped a good-bye kiss into the deep black gorge between the
promontories of Beau's velvet forehead and plush nose.

We'd had breakfast together, Miss Paget and I, to say nothing of the
dog, and I felt rather cheerful. Of course I dreaded the Princess; but I
always did like adventures, and it appeared to me distinctly an
adventure to be a companion, even in misery. Besides, it was nice to
have come away from Monsieur Charretier, and to feel that not only did
he not know where I was, but that he wasn't likely to find out. Poor me!
I little guessed what an adventure on a grand scale I was in for.
Already this morning seems a long time ago; a year at the Convent used
to seem shorter.

I drove up to the hotel in the omnibus which was at the station, and
asked at the office for the Princess Boriskoff. I said that I was
Mademoiselle d'Angely, and would they please send word to the Princess,
because she was expecting me.

It was a young assistant manager who received me, and he gave me a very
queer, startled sort of look when I said this, as if I were a suspicious
person, and he didn't quite know whether it would be better to answer me
or call for help.

"I haven't made a mistake, have I?" I asked, beginning to be anxious.
"This _is_ the hotel where the Princess is staying, isn't it?"

"She was staying here," the youth admitted. "But--"

"Has she _gone_?"

"Not exactly."

"She must be either here or gone."

Again he regarded me with suspicion, as if he did not agree with my
statement.

"Are you a relative of the Princess?" he inquired.

"No, I'm engaged to be her companion."

"Oh! If that is all! But perhaps, in any case, it will be better to wait
for the manager. He will be here presently. I do not like to take the
responsibility."

"The responsibility of what?" I persisted, my heart beginning to feel
like a patter of rain on a tin roof.

"Of telling you what has happened."

"If something has happened, I can't wait to hear it. I must know at
once," I said, with visions of all sorts of horrid things: that the
Princess had decided not to have a companion, and was going to disown
me; that my cousin Madame Milvaine had somehow found out everything;
that Monsieur Charretier had got on my track, and was here in advance
waiting to pounce upon me.

"It is a thing which we do not want to have talked about in the hotel,"
the young man hesitated.

"I assure you I won't talk to any one. I don't know any one to talk to."

"It is very distressing, but the Princess Boriskoff died about four
o'clock this morning, of heart failure."

"Oh!" ... I could not get out another word.

"These things are not liked in hotels, even when not contagious."

The assistant manager looked gloomily at me, as if I might be held
responsible for the inconvenient event; but still I could not speak.

"Especially in the high season. It is being kept secret. That is the
custom. In some days, or less, it will leak out, but not till the
Princess has--been removed. You will kindly not mention it,
mademoiselle. This is very bad for us."

No, I would kindly not mention it, but it was worse for me than for
them. The Hotel Majestic Palace looked rich; very, very rich. It had
heaps of splendid mirrors and curtains, and imitation Louis XVI. sofas,
and everything that a hotel needs to make it happy and successful, while
I had nothing in the world except what I stood up in, one fitted bag,
one small box, and thirty-two francs. I didn't quite see, at first
sight, what I was to do; but neither did the assistant manager see what
that had to do with him.

Once I knew a girl who was an actress, and on tour in the country she
nearly drowned herself one day. When the star heard of it, he said: "How
_should_ we have played to-night if you'd been dead--without an
understudy, too?"

At this moment I knew just how the girl must have felt when the star
said that.

"I--I think I must stay here a day or two, until I can--arrange things,"
I managed to stammer. "Have you a small single room disengaged?"

"We have one or two small north rooms which are usually occupied by
valets and maids," the young man informed me. "They are twelve francs a
day."

"I'll take one," I replied. And then I added anxiously: "Have any
relatives of the Princess come?"

"None have come; and certainly none will come, as it would now be too
late. Her death was very sudden. The Princess's maid knows what to do.
She is an elderly woman, experienced. The suite occupied by Her Highness
will be free to-morrow."

"Oh! And had she no friends here?"

"I do not think the Princess was a lady who made friends. She was very
proud and considered herself above other people. Would you like to see
your room, mademoiselle? I will send some one to take you up to it. It
will be on the top floor."

I was in a mood not to care if it had been on the roof, or in the
cellar. I hardly knew where I was going, as a few minutes later a still
younger youth piloted me across a large square hall toward a lift; but I
was vaguely conscious that a good many smart-looking people were sitting
or standing about, and that they glanced at me as I went by. I hoped
dimly that I didn't appear conspicuously pale and stricken.

Just in front of the lift door a tall woman was talking to a little man.
There was an instant of delay while my guide and I waited for them to
move, and before they realized that we were waiting.

"They say the poor thing is no worse than yesterday, however, my maid
tells me--" The lady had begun in a low, mysterious tone, but broke off
suddenly when it dawned upon her that she was obstructing the way.

I knew instinctively _who_ was the subject of the whispered
conversation, and I couldn't help fixing my eyes almost appealingly on
the tall woman; for though she was middle-aged and not pretty, her voice
was so nice and she looked so kind that I felt a longing to have her for
a friend. She had probably been acquainted with Princess Boriskoff, I
said to myself, or she would not be talking of her now, with bated
breath, as a "poor thing."

Evidently the lady had been waiting for the lift to come down, for when
my guide rang and it descended she took a step forward, giving a
friendly little nod to her companion, and saying, "Well, I must go. I
feel sure it's _true_ about her."

Then, instead of sailing ahead of me into the lift, as she had a perfect
right to do, being much older and far more important than I, and the
first comer as well, she hesitated with a pleasant half smile, as much
as to say, "You're a stranger. I give up my right to you."

"Oh, please!" I said, stepping aside to let her pass, which she did,
making room for me to sit down beside her on the narrow plush-covered
seat. But I didn't care to sit. I was so crushed, it seemed that, if
once I sat down I shouldn't have courage to rise up again and wrestle
with the difficulties of life.

The lady got out on the second floor, throwing back a kindly glance, as
if she took a little interest in me, and wanted me to know it. I suppose
it must have been because I was tired and nervous after a whole night
without sleep that the shock I'd just received was too much for me.
Anyway, that kind glance made a lump rise in my throat, and the lump
forced tears into my eyes. I looked down instantly, so that she
shouldn't see them and think me an idiot, but I was afraid she did.

The young man who was taking me up to the top floor, and treating me
rather nonchalantly because I was a North Roomer and a Twelve Francer,
waved the lift boy aside to open the door himself for the lady; so that
I knew she must be considered a person worth conciliating.

Shut up in my ten-by-six-foot room, I tried to compose myself and make
plans; but to make plans on thirty-two francs, when you've no home, and
would be far from it even if you had one; when you've nobody to help
you, and wouldn't want to ask them if you had--is about as hard as to
play the piano brilliantly without ever having taken a lesson. With
Princess Boriskoff dead, with Pamela de Nesle sailing for New York
to-morrow morning, and no other intimate friends rich enough to do
anything for me, even if they were willing to help me fly in the face of
Providence and Madame Milvaine, it did seem (as Pamela herself would
say) as though I were rather "up against it."

The thought of Miss Paget suddenly jumped into my head, and the wish
that, somehow, I had kept her up my sleeve as a last resort, in case she
really were in earnest about her offer. But she hadn't told me where she
was going in Italy, and it would be of no use writing to one of her
English addresses, as I couldn't stop on where I was, waiting for an
answer.

Altogether things were very bad with me.

After I had sat down and thought for a while, I rang, and asked for the
housekeeper. A hint or two revealed that she was aware of what had
happened, and, explaining that I was to have been Princess Boriskoff's
companion, I said that I must see the Princess's maid. She must come to
my room. I must have a talk with her.

Presently, after an interval which may have been meant to emphasize her
dignity, appeared a pale, small Russian woman whose withered face was as
tragic and remote from the warmth of daily life as that of the eldest
Fate.

She could speak French, and we talked together. Yes, her mistress had
died very suddenly, but she and the doctors had always known that it
might happen so, at any moment. It was hard for me, but--what would you?
Life was hard. It might have been that I would have found life hard with
Her Highness. What was to be, would be. I must write to my friends. It
was not in her power to do anything for me. Her Highness had left no
instructions. These things happened. Well! one made the best of them.
There was nothing more to say.

So we said nothing more, and the woman moved away silently, as if to
funeral music, to prepare for her journey to Russia. I--went down to
luncheon.

One always does go down to luncheon while one is still inclined to keep
up appearances before oneself; but the restaurant was large and terribly
magnificent, with a violent rose-coloured carpet, and curtains which
made me, in my frightened pallor, with my pale yellow hair and my gray
travelling dress, feel like a poor little underground celery-stalk flung
into a sunlit strawberry-bed, amid a great humming of bees.

The vast rosy sea was thickly dotted with many small table-islands that
glittered appetizingly with silver and glass; but I could not have
afforded to acknowledge an appetite even if I'd had one.

My conversation with the Russian woman had made me rather late. Most of
the islands were inhabited, and as I was piloted past them by a haughty
head waiter I heard people talking about golf, tennis, croquet, bridge,
reminding me that I was in a place devoted to the pursuit of pleasure.

The most desirable islands were next the windows, therefore the one at
which I dropped anchor (for I'd changed from a celery-stalk into a
little boat now) was exactly in the middle of the room, with no view
save of faces and backs of heads.

One of the faces was that of the lady who had gone up with me in the
lift; and now and then, from across the distance that separated us, I
saw her glance at me. She sat alone at a table that had beautiful roses
on it, and she read a book as she ate.

One ordered here _à la carte_: there was no _déjeuner à prix fixe_; and
it took courage to tell a waiter who looked like a weary young duke that
I would have _consommé_ and bread, with nothing, no, _nothing_ to
follow.

Oh! the look he gave me, as if I had annexed the table under false
pretences!

Suddenly the chorus of an American song ran with mocking echoes through
my brain. I had heard Pamela sing it at the Convent:

    The waiter roared it through the hall:
    "We don't give bread with _one_ fish-ball!
    We-don't-_give_-bread with one fish-_ba-a-ll_!"

I half expected some such crushing protest, and it was only when the
weary duke had turned his back, presumably to execute my order, that I
sank into my chair with a sigh of relief after strain.

Just at that moment I met the eye of the lady of the lift, and when the
waiter reappeared with a small cup, on a charger large enough to have
upheld the head of John the Baptist, she looked again. In five minutes I
had finished the _consommé_, and it became painful to linger. Rising, I
made for the door, which seemed a mile away, and I did not lift my head
in passing the table where the lady sat behind her roses. I heard a
rustling as I went by, however, a crisp rustling like flower-leaves
whispering in a breeze, or a woman's silk ruffles stroking each other,
which followed me out into the hall.

Then the pleasant voice I had heard near the lift spoke behind me:

"Won't you have your coffee with me in the garden?"

I could hardly believe at first that it was for me the invitation was
intended, but turning with a little start, I saw it repeated in a pair
of gentle gray eyes set rather wide apart in a delicate, colourless
face.

"Oh! thank you!" I hesitated. "I--"

"Do forgive me," went on the lady, "but your face interested me this
morning, and as we're all rather curious about strangers--we idle ones
here--I took the liberty of asking the manager who you were. He told
me--"

"About the Princess?" I asked, when she paused as if slightly
embarrassed.

"He told me that you said you had come to Cannes to be her companion. He
didn't tell me she was dead, poor woman, but--there are some things one
knows by instinct, by intuition, aren't there? And then--I couldn't help
seeing, or perhaps only imagining, that you looked sad and worried. You
are very young, and are here all alone, and so--I thought perhaps you
wouldn't mind my speaking to you?"

"I'm very grateful," I said, "for your interest. And it's so good of you
to ask me to have coffee with you." (I was almost sure, too, that she
had hurried away in the midst of her luncheon to do this deed of
kindness.)

"Perhaps, after all, you'll come with me to my own sitting-room," she
suggested. "We can talk more quietly there; and though the garden's
quite lovely, it's rather too glaring at this time of day."

We went up in the lift together, and the moment she opened the door of
her sitting-room I saw that she had contrived to make it look like
herself. She talked only about her books and photographs and flowers
until the coffee had come, and we seemed better acquainted. Then she
told me that she was Lady Kilmarny--"Irish in every drop in her veins";
and presently set herself to draw me out.

I began by making up my mind not to pour forth all my troubles, lest she
should think that I wanted to take advantage of her kindness and sponge
upon her for help; but she was irresistible, as only a true Irishwoman
can be, and the first thing I knew, I had emptied my heart of its
worries.




CHAPTER III


"You will have to go back to the cousins you've been living with in
Paris," pronounced Lady Kilmarny. "You're much too young and pretty to
be _anywhere_ alone."

"I can't go on living with them unless I promise to marry Monsieur
Charretier," I explained. "I'd rather scrub floors than marry Monsieur
Charretier."

"You'd never finish one floor. The second would finish you. I thought
French girls--well, then, _half_ French girls--usually let their people
arrange their marriages."

"Perhaps I'm not usual. I _hope_ Monsieur Charretier isn't."

"Is he such a monster?"

"He is fat, especially in all the places he oughtn't to be fat. And old.
But worse than his _embonpoint_ and his nose, he made his money in--you
could never guess."

"I see by your face, my poor child: it was Liver Pills."

"Something far more dreadful."

"Are there lower depths?"

"There are--Corn Plasters."

"Oh, my dear, you are _quite_ right! You couldn't marry him."

"Thank you so much! Then, I can't go back to my cousins. They--they
take Monsieur Charretier seriously. I think they even take his
plasters--gratuitously."

"Is he so very rich?"

"But disgustingly rich. He has an awful, bulbous new château in the
country, with dozens of incredibly high-powered motor-cars; and in the
most expensive part of Paris a huge apartment wriggling from floor to
ceiling with _Nouveau Art_. The girl who marries him will have to be
smeared with diamonds, and know the most appalling people. In fact,
she'll have to be a kind of walking, pictorial advertisement for the
success of Charretier's Corn Plasters."

"He must know some nice people, since he knows relations of yours."

"Thank you for the compliment, which I hope you pay me on circumstantial
evidence. But it's deceiving. My mother, I believe, was the only nice
person in her family. These cousins, husband and wife, brought mamma to
Europe to live with them when she was a young girl, quite rich and an
orphan. They were furious when she fell in love with papa, who was only
a lieutenant with nothing but a very old name, the ruins of a castle
that tourists paid francs to see, and a ramshackle house in Paris almost
too dilapidated to let. It was a mere detail to them that he happened to
be one of the best-looking and most agreeable young men in the world.
They did nothing but say, 'I told you so!' for years, whenever anything
disastrous happened--as it constantly did, for poor papa and mamma loved
each other so much, and had so much fun, that they couldn't have time
to be business-like. My cousins thought everything mamma did was a
madness--such as sending me to the most fashionable convent school in
France. As if I hadn't to be educated! And then, when the castle fell so
to bits that tourists wouldn't bother with it any more, and nobody but
rats would live in the Paris house unless it was repaired--and poor papa
was killed in a horrid little Saturday-to-Monday war of no importance
(except to people whose hearts it broke)--oh! I believe the cousins were
glad! They thought it was a judgment. That happened years ago, when I
was only fifteen, and though they've plenty of money (more than most
people in the American colony) they didn't offer to help; and mamma
would have died sooner than ask. I had to be snatched out of school, to
find that all the beautiful dreams of being a happy _débutante_ must go
by contraries. We lived in the tumble-down house ourselves, mamma and I,
and her friends rallied round her--she was so popular and pretty. They
got her chances to give singing lessons, and me to do translating, and
painting _menus_. We were happy again, after a while, in spite of all,
and people were so good to us! Mamma used to hold a kind of _salon_,
with all the brightest and best crowding to it, though they got nothing
but sweet biscuits, _vin ordinaire_, and conversation--and besides, the
house might have taken a fancy to fall down on their heads any minute.
It was sporting of them to come at all!"

"And the cousins. Did they come?"

"Not they! They're of the society of the little Brothers and Sisters of
the Rich. Their set was quite different from ours. But when mamma died
nearly two years ago, and I was alone, they did call, and Cousin Emily
offered me a home. I was to give up all my work, of course, which she
considered degrading, and was simply to make myself useful to her as a
daughter of the house might do. That was what she _said_."

"You accepted?"

"Yes. I didn't know her and her husband as well as I do now; and before
she died mamma begged me to go to them, if they asked me. That was when
Monsieur Charretier came on the scene--at least, he came a few months
later, and I've had no peace since. Lately, things were growing more and
more impossible, when my best friend, Comtesse de Nesle, came to my
rescue and found (or thought she'd found) me this engagement with the
Princess. As I told you, I simply ran away--_sneaked_ away--and came
here without any one but Pamela knowing. And now she--the Comtesse--is
just sailing for New York with her husband."

"The Comtesse de Nesle--that pretty little American! I've met her in
Paris--and at the Dublin Horse Show," exclaimed Lady Kilmarny. "Well, I
wish I could take up the rescue work where she has laid it down. I think
you are a most romantic little figure, and I'd love to engage you as my
companion, only my husband and I are as poor as church mice. Like your
father, we've nothing but our name and a few ruins. When I come South
for my health I can't afford such luxuries as a husband and a maid. I
have to choose between them and a private sitting-room. So you see, I
can't possibly indulge in a companion."

People seemed to be always wanting me as one, and then reluctantly
abandoning me!

"Your kindness and sympathy have helped me a lot," said I.

"They won't pay your way."

"I have no way. So far as I can see, I shall have to stop in Cannes,
anonymously so to speak, for the rest of my life."

"Where would you like to go, if you could choose--since you can't go to
your relations?"

Again my thoughts travelled after Miss Paget, as if she had been a fat,
red will-o'-the-wisp.

"To England, perhaps," I answered. "In a few weeks from now I might be
able to find a position there." And I went on to tell, in as few words
as possible, my adventure in the railway train.

"H'm!" said Lady Kilmarny. "We'll look her up in _Who's Who_, and see if
she exists. If she's anybody, she'll be there. And _Who's Who_ I always
have with me, abroad. One meets so many pretenders, it's quite
dangerous."

"How can you tell I'm not one?" I asked. "Yet you spoke to me."

"Why, you're down in a kind of invisible book, called 'You're You.' It's
sufficient reference for me. Besides, if your two eyes couldn't be
trusted, it would be easy to shed you."

Lady Kilmarny said this smilingly, as she found the red book, and passed
her finger down the columns of P's.

"Yes, here's the name, and the two addresses on the visiting-card. She's
the Honourable Maria Paget, only daughter of the late Baron Northfield.
Yes, an engagement with her would be safe, if not agreeable. But how to
get you to England?"

"Perhaps I could go as somebody's maid," I reflected aloud.

She looked at me sharply. _"Would_ you do that?"

"It would be better than being an advertisement for Corn Plasters," I
smiled.

"Then," said Lady Kilmarny, "perhaps, after all, I can help you. But
no--I should never dare to suggest it! The thought of a girl like
you--it would be too dreadful."




CHAPTER IV


When my father had been extravagant, he used to say gaily in
self-defence that "one owed something to one's ancestors." Certainly, if
it had not been for several of his ancestors, he would not have owed so
much to his contemporaries. But in spite of their agreeable vices, or
because of them, I was brought up in the cult of ancestor worship, as
religiously as if I had been Chinese.

To be a d'Angely was a privilege, in our eyes, which not only supplied
gilding for the gingerbread, but for the most economical substitutes.

   "Ne roi je suis,
    Ne prince aussi,
    Je suis le Sire d'Angely,"

calmly remarked the gentleman of Louis XI.'s time, who became famous for
hanging as many retainers as he liked, and defending his action by
originating the family motto.

Mother also had ancestors who began to take themselves seriously
somewhere about the time of the _Mayflower_, though for all we know they
may have secured their passage in the steerage.

"A Courtenay can do anything," was their rather ambiguous motto, which
suggested that it might have been started in self-defence, if not as a
boast; and it (the name, not the motto) had been thoughtfully
sandwiched in between my Lys and my d'Angely by my sponsors in baptism,
that if necessary I might ever have an excuse at hand for any dark deed
or infra dig-ness.

I used often to murmur the consoling mottoes to myself when pattering
through muddy streets, too poor to take an omnibus, on the way to
sell--or try to sell--my translations or my _menus_. But now, after all
that's happened, if it is to strike conviction to my soul, I shall be
obliged to yell it at the top of my mental lungs.

(That expression may sound ridiculous, but it isn't. We could not talk
to ourselves as we do, in all kinds of voices, high or low, if we hadn't
mental lungs, or at the least, sub-conscious-self lungs.)

_Je suis_ the daughter of the last Sire d'Angely; and a Courtenay can do
anything; so of course it's all right; and it's no good my ancestors
turning in their graves, for they'll only make themselves uncomfortable
without changing my mind.

I, Lys d'Angely, am going to be a lady's-maid; or rather, I am going to
be the maid of an extremely rich person who calls herself a lidy.

It's perfectly awful, or awfully comic, according to the point of view,
and I swing from one to the other, pushed by my fastidiousness to my
sense of humour, and back again, in a way to make me giddy. But it's
settled. I'm going to do it. I had almost to drag the suggestion out of
Lady Kilmarny, who turned red and stammered as if I were the great lady,
she the poor young girl in want of a situation.

There was, said she, a quaint creature in the hotel (one met these
things abroad, and was obliged to be more or less civil to them) who
resembled Monsieur Charretier in that she was disgustingly rich. It was
not Corn Plasters. It was Liver Pills, the very same liver pills which
had dropped into the mind of Lady Kilmarny when I hesitated to put into
words the foundation of my _pretendant's_ future. It was the Liver Pills
which had eventually introduced into her brain the idea she falteringly
embodied for me.

The husband of the quaint creature had invented the pills, even as
Monsieur Charretier had invented his abomination. Because of the pills
he had been made a Knight; at least, Lady Kilmarny didn't know any other
reason. He was Sir Samuel Turnour (evolved from Turner), just married
for the second time to a widow in whose head it was like the continual
frothing of new wine to be "her ladyship."

Lady Turnour had lately quarrelled with a maid and dismissed her, Lady
Kilmarny told me. Now, she was in immediate need of another, French
(because French maids are fashionable) able to speak English, because
the Turnour family had as yet mastered no other language. Lady Kilmarny
believed that this was the honeymoon of the newly married pair, and
that, after having paused on the wing at Cannes, for a little billing
and cooing, they intended to pursue their travels in France for some
weeks, before returning to settle down in England. "Her Ladyship" was
asking everybody with whom she had contrived to scrape acquaintance
(especially if they had titles) to recommend her a maid. Lady Kilmarny,
as a member of the League against Cruelty to Animals, had determined
that nothing would induce her to throw any poor mouse to this cat, even
if she heard of a mouse plying for hire; but here was I in a dreadful
scrape, professing myself ready to snap at anything except Corn
Plasters; and she felt bound to mention that the mousetrap was open, the
cheese waiting to be nibbled.

"Do you think she'd have me?" I asked--"the quaint creature, her
ladyship?"

"Only too likely that she would," said Lady Kilmarny. "But remember, the
worst is, she doesn't _know_ she's a quaint creature. She is quite happy
about herself, offensively happy, and would consider you the 'creature.'
A truly awful person, my dear. A man in this hotel--the little thing you
saw me talking to this morning, knows all about them both. I think they
began in Peckham or somewhere. They _would_, you know, and call it
'S.W.' She was a chemist's daughter, and he was the humble assistant,
long before the Pill materialized, so she refused him, and married a
dashing doctor. But unfortunately he dashed into the bankruptcy court,
and afterward she probably nagged him to death. Anyway he died--but not
till long after Sam Turner had taken pity on some irrelevant widow, as
his early love was denied him. The widow had a boy, to whom the
stepfather was good--(really a very decent person according to his
lights!) and kept on making pills and millions, until last year he lost
his first wife and got a knighthood. The old love was a widow by this
time, taking in lodgers in some neighbourhood where you _do_ take
lodgers, and Sir Samuel found and gathered her like a late rose.
Naturally she puts on all the airs in the world, and diamonds in the
morning. She'll treat you like the dirt under her feet, because that's
her conception of her part--and yours. But I'll introduce you to her if
you like."

After a little reflection, I did like; but as it seemed to me that
there'd better not be two airs in the family, I said that I'd put on
none at all, and make no pretensions.

"She's the kind that doesn't know a lady or gentleman without a label,"
my kind friend warned me. "You must be prepared for that."

"I'll be prepared for anything," I assured her. But when it came to the
test, I wasn't quite.

Lady Kilmarny wrote a line to Lady Turnour, and asked if she might bring
a maid to be interviewed--a young woman whom she could recommend. The
note was sent down to the bride (who of course had the best suite in the
hotel, on the first floor) and presently an answer came--saying that Her
Ladyship would be pleased to receive Lady Kilmarny and the person in
question.

Suddenly I felt that I must go alone. "Please leave me to my fate," I
said. "I should be too self-conscious if you were with me. Probably I
should laugh in her face, or do something dreadful."

"Very well," Lady Kilmarny agreed. "Perhaps you're right. Say that I
sent you, and that, though you've never been with me, friends of mine
know all about you. You might tell her that you were to have travelled
with the Princess Boriskoff. That will impress her. She would kiss the
boot of a Princess. Afterward, come up and tell me how you got on with
'Her Ladyship.'"

I was stupid to be nervous, and told myself so; but as I knocked at the
door of the suite reserved for Millionaires and other Royalties, my
heart was giving little ineffective jumps in my breast, like--as my old
nurse used to say--"a frog with three legs."

"Come in!" called a voice with sharp, jagged edges.

I opened the door. In a private drawing-room as different as the
personality of one woman from another, sat Lady Turnour. She faced me as
I entered, so I had a good look at her, before casting down my eyes and
composing my countenance to the self-abnegating meekness which I
conceived fitting to a _femme de chambre comme il faut_.

She was enthroned on a sofa. One could hardly say less, there was so
much of her, and it was all arranged as perfectly as if she were about
to be photographed. No normal woman, merely sitting down, with no other
object than to be comfortable, would curve the tail of her gown round in
front of her like a sickle; or have just the point of one shoe daintily
poised on a footstool; or the sofa-cushions at exactly the right angle
behind her head to make a background; or the finger with all her best
rings on it, keeping the place in an English illustrated journal.

I dared not believe that she had posed for me. It must have been for
Lady Kilmarny; and that I alone should see the picture was a bad
beginning.

She is of the age when a woman can still tell people that she is forty,
hoping they will exclaim politely, "Impossible!"

It is not enough for her to be a Ladyship and a millionairess. She will
be a beauty as well, or at all costs she will be looked at. To that end
are her eyebrows and lashes black as jet, her undulated hair crimson,
her lips a brighter shade of the same colour, and her skin of magnolia
pallor, like the heroines of the novels which are sure to be her
favourites. Once, she must have been handsome, a hollyhock queen of a
kitchen-garden kingdom; but she would be far more attractive now if only
she had "abdicated," as nice middle-aged women say in France.

Her dress was the very latest dream of a neurotic Parisian modiste, and
would have been seductive on a slender girl. On her--well, at least she
would have her wish in it--she would not pass unnoticed!

She looked surprised at sight of me, and I saw she didn't realize that I
was the expected candidate.

"Lady Kilmarny couldn't come," I began to explain, "and--"

"Oh!" she cut me short. "So you are the young person she is recommending
as a maid."

I corrected Miss Paget when she called me a "young woman," but times
have changed since then, and in future I must humbly consent to be a
young person, or even a creature.

For a minute I forgot, and almost sat down. It would have been the end
of me if I had! Luckily I remembered What I was, and stood before my
mistress, trying to look like Patience on a monument with butter in her
mouth which mustn't be allowed to melt.

"What is your name?" began the catechism (and the word was "nime,"
according to Lady Turnour).

"N or M," nearly slipped out of my mouth, but I put Satan with all his
mischief behind me, and answered that I was Lys d'Angely.

"Oh, the surname doesn't matter. As you're a French girl, I shall call
you by your first name. It's always done."

(The first time in history, I'd swear, that a d'Angely was ever told his
name didn't matter!)

"You seem to speak English very well for a French woman?" (This almost
with suspicion.)

"My mother was American."

"How extraordinary!"

(This was apparently a _tache_. Evidently lady's-maids are expected
_not_ to have American mothers!)

"Let me hear your French accent."

I let her hear it.

"H'm! It seems well enough. Paris?"

"Paris, madame."

"Don't call me 'madame.' Any common person is madame. You should say
'your ladyship'."

I said it.

"And I want you should speak to me in the third person, like the French
servants are supposed to do in good houses."

"If mad--if your ladyship wishes."

(Thank heaven for a sense of humour! My one wild desire was to laugh.
Without that blessing, I should have yearned to slap her.)

"What references have you got from your last situation?"

"I have never been in service before--my lady."

"My word! That's bad. However, you're on the spot, and Lady Kilmarny
recommends you. The poor Princess was going to try you, it seems. I
should think she wouldn't have given much for a maid without any
experience."

"I was to have had two thousand francs a year as the Princess's com--if
the Princess was satisfied."

"Preposterous! I don't believe a word of it. Why, what can you _do_? Can
you dress hair? Can you make a blouse?"

"I did my mother's hair, and sometimes my cousin's."

"_Your_ mother! _Your_ cousin! I'm talking of a lidy."

My sense of humour _did_ almost fail me just then. But I caught hold of
it by the tail just as it was darting out of the window, spitting and
scratching like a cross cat.

It was remembering Monsieur Charretier that brought me to my bearings.
"I think your ladyship would be satisfied," I said. "And I make all my
own dresses."

"That one you've got on?--which is _most_ unsuitable for a maid, I may
tell you, and I should never permit it."

"This one I have on, also."

"I thought maybe it had been a present. Well, it's _something_ that you
speak both English and French passably well. I'll try you on Lady
Kilmarny's recommendation, if you want to come to me for fifty francs a
month. I won't give more to an _amateur_."

I thought hard for a minute. Lady Kilmarny had said it would not be many
weeks before the Turnours went to England. There, if Miss Paget (who
seemed extremely nice by contrast and in retrospect) were still of the
same mind, I might find a good home. If not, she was as kind as she was
queer, and would help me look further. So I replied that I would accept
the fifty francs, and would do my best to please her ladyship.

She did not express herself as gratified. "You can begin work this
evening," she said. "I was obliged to send away my last maid yesterday,
and I'm _lost_ without one." (This was delightful from a "lidy" who had
kept lodgers for years, with the aid perhaps of one smudgy-nosed
"general"!) "But have you no more suitable clothes? I can't let a maid
of mine go flaunting about, like a Mary-Jane-on-Sunday."

I mentioned a couple of plain black dresses in my wardrobe, which might
be made to answer if I were allowed a few hours' time to work upon them,
and didn't add that they remained from my mourning for one dearly loved.

"You can have till six o'clock free," said Lady Turnour. "Then you must
come back to lay out my things for dinner, and dress me. What about your
room? Had the Princess taken something for you in the hotel?"

I evaded a direct answer by saying that I had a room; and was inwardly
thankful that, evidently, the Turnours had not noticed me in the
restaurant at luncheon, otherwise things might have been awkward.

"Very well, you can keep the same one, then," went on her ladyship, "and
let the hotel people know it's Sir Samuel who pays for it. To-morrow
morning we leave, in our sixty-horse-power motor car. We are making a
tour before going back to England. Sir Samuel's stepson joins us in
Paris or perhaps before and travels on with us. He is staying now with
some French people of very high title, who live in a château. You will
sit on the front seat with the chauffeur."

This was a blow! I hadn't thought of the chauffeur. "But," thought I,
"chauffeur or no chauffeur, it's too late now for retreat."

Talk of Prometheus with his vulture, the Spartan boy with his decently
concealed wolf! What of Lys d'Angely with an English chauffeur in her
pocket?




CHAPTER V


When I was dismissed from the Presence, I ran to Lady Kilmarny with my
story, and she agreed with me that the thing to dread most in the whole
situation was the chauffeur.

"Of course he'll naturally consider himself on an equality with you,"
she said, "and you'll have to eat with him at hotels, and all that.
Once, when my husband and I were touring in France, and used to break
down near little inns, we were obliged to have a chauffeur at the same
table with us, because there was only one long one (table, I mean, not
chauffeur) and we couldn't spare time to let him wait till we'd
finished. My dear, it was ghastly! You would never believe if you hadn't
seen it, how the creature swallowed his knife when he ate, and did
conjuring tricks with his fork and spoon. I simply _dared_ not look at
him gnawing his bread, but used to shut my eyes. I hate to distress you,
poor child, but I tell you these things as a warning. _Are_ you able to
bear it?"

I said that I, too, could shut my eyes.

"You can't make a habit of doing so. And he may want to put his arm
round your waist, or chuck you under the chin. I used to have complaints
from my maid, who was comparatively plain, while you--but I don't want
to frighten you. He _may_ be different from our man. Some, they say,
are most respectable. I love common people when they're nice, and give
up quite pleasantly to being common; and of course Irish ones are too
delightful. But you can't hope for an Irish chauffeur. I hear they don't
exist. They're all French or German or English. Let us hope this one may
be the father of a family."

It was well enough to be told to hope; and Lady Kilmarny meant to be
kind, but what she said made me "creep" whenever I thought of the
chauffeur.

She advised me not to take my meals with the maids and valets at the
Majestic Palace, because a change, so sudden and Cinderella-like, after
lunching in the restaurant, would cause disagreeable talk in the hotel.
As my living in future would be at the charge of the Turnours, I might
afford myself a few indulgences to begin with, she argued; and deciding
that she was right, I made up my mind to have my remaining meals served
in my own room.

I hastily stripped a black frock of its trimming, dressed my hair more
simply even than usual, parted down the middle, and altogether strove to
achieve the air of a _femme de chambre_ born, not made. But I'm bound to
chronicle the fact for my own future reference (when some day I shall
laugh at this adventure) that the effect, though restful to the eye,
suggested the stage _femme de chambre_ rather than the sober reality one
sees in every-day life. However, I was conscious of having done my best,
a state of mind which always produces a cool, strawberries-and-cream
feeling in the soul; and thus supported I tripped (yes, I _did_ trip!)
downstairs to adorn Lady Turnour for dinner.

The door was open between her bedroom and the sitting-room. Waiting in
the former I could hear voices in the latter. Lady Turnour and her
husband were talking about the arrival of the stepson whose name, I soon
gleaned from their conversation, is Herbert. Naturally, it _would_ be.
People like that are always named Herbert, and are familiarly known to
those whom they may concern as "Bertie."

Presently, her ladyship came into the bedroom, and said, as a queen
might say to her tirewoman, "Put me into my dressing-gown." If there
were a feminine word for "sirrah," I think she would have liked to call
me it.

My eye, roving distractedly, pounced upon a gold-embroidered, purple
silk kimono, perhaps more appropriate to Pooh-Bah than to a stout
English lady of the lower middle class. I released it from its hook on
the door, and would that her ladyship had been as easy to release from
her bodice!

She had not one hook, but many; and they were all so incredibly tight
that, to put her into the dressing-gown as ordered, I feared it would be
necessary to melt and pour her out of the gown she had on.

While I wrestled, silent and red faced, with a bodice as snug as the
head of a drum, the lord of all it contained appeared in the doorway,
and stopped, looking at me in surprise.

He is common, too, this Sir Samuel, millionaire maker of pills; but he
is common in a good, almost pathetic way, quite different from his
wife's way--or Monsieur Charretier's. He has stick-up gray hair curling
all over his round head, blue eyes, twinkling with a mild, yet shrewd
expression (which might be merry if encouraged by her ladyship), and a
large, slouching body with stooped shoulders.

"What young lady have we here?" he inquired.

"Not a young lady at all," explained his wife sharply. "My new French
maid."

"I beg your pardon, I'm sure," said Sir Samuel, though it wasn't quite
clear whether it was my forgiveness or that of his spouse he craved, for
his mistake in supposing me to be a "young lady."

"What's her name?" he wanted to know, evidently approving of me, if not
as a maid, at least as a human being.

"Something ridiculous in French that sounds like 'Liz,'" sniffed her
ladyship. "But I shall call her Elise. Also I shall expect her to stop
dyeing her hair."

"But, madame, I do not dye it!" I exclaimed.

"Don't tell me. I know dyed hair when I see it."

(She ought to, having experience enough with her own!)

"Nature is the dyer, then," I ventured to persist, piqued to
self-defence by the certainty that her object was to strip me of my
wicked mask before her husband.

"I'm not used to being contradicted by my servants," her ladyship
reminded me.

"My dear, do let the poor girl know whether she dyes her hair or not."
Sir Samuel pleaded for me with more kindness than discretion. "I'm sure
she speaks beautiful English."

[Illustration: "While I wrestled ... with a bodice as snug as the head
of a drum, the lord of all it contained appeared in the doorway"]

"As if that had anything to do with it! She may as well understand, to
begin with, that I won't put up with impudence and answering back.
Hair that colour doesn't go with dark eyes. And eyelashes like that
aren't suitable to lady's-maids."

"If your ladyship pleases, what am I to do with mine?" I asked in the
sweetest little voice; and I would have given anything for someone to
whom I might have telegraphed a laugh.

"Wash the dark stuff off of them and let them be light," were the simple
instructions promptly returned to me.

There was no more to be said, so I cast down the offending features (are
one's lashes one's features?) and swallowed my feelings just as Lady
Turnour will have to swallow my hair and eyelashes if I'm to stop in her
service. If they stick in her throat, I suppose she will discharge me.
For a leopard cannot change his spots, and a girl will not the colour of
her locks and lashes--when she happens to be fairly well satisfied with
Nature's work.




CHAPTER VI


Pamela's mother-in-law, _la Comtesse douairière_, wears a lovely, fluffy
white thing over her own diminishing front hair, which I once heard her
describe, when struggling to speak English, as her "combination." Pam
and I laughed nearly to extinction, but I didn't laugh this morning when
I was obliged to help Lady Turnour put on hers.

They say an emperor is no hero to his valet, and neither can an empress
be a heroine to her maid when she bursts for the first time upon that
humble creature's sight, without her transformation.

It _did_ make an unbelievable difference with her ladyship; and it must
have been a blow to poor Sir Samuel, after all his years of hopeless
love for a fond gazelle, when at last he made that gazelle his own, and
saw it running about its bedroom with all its copper-coloured
"ondulations" naively lying on its dressing-table.

Poor Miss Paget's false front was one of those frank, self-respecting
old things one might have allowed one's grandmother to wear, just as she
would wear a cap; but a transformation--well, one has perhaps believed
in it, if one has not the eye of a lynx, and the disillusion is awful.

Of course, a lady's-maid is not a human being, and what it is thinking
matters no more than what thinks a chair when sat upon; so I don't
suppose "her ladyship" cared ten centimes for the impression I was
receiving and trying to digest in the first ten minutes after my morning
entrance.

As my hair waves naturally, I've scarcely more than a bowing
acquaintance with a curling-iron; but luckily for me I always did Cousin
Catherine's when she wanted to look as beautiful as she felt; and though
my hands trembled with nervousness, I not only "ondulated" Lady
Turnour's transformation without burning it up, but I added it to her
own locks in a manner so deft as to make me want to applaud myself.

Even she could find no fault. The effect was twice as _chic_ and
becoming as that of yesterday. She looked younger, and nearer to being
the _grande dame_ that she burns to be. I saw various emotions working
in her mind, and attributed her silence on the subject of my personal
defects (unchanged despite her orders) to the success I was making with
her toilet. In her eyes, I began to take on lustre as a Treasure not to
be lightly thrown away on the turn of a dye.

When she was dressed and painted to represent a "lady motorist," it was
my business to pack not only for her but for Sir Samuel, who is the sort
of man to be miserable under the domination of a valet. There were a
round dozen of trunks, which had to be sent on by rail, and there was
also luggage for the automobile; such ingenious and pretty luggage (bran
new, like everything of her ladyship's, not excepting her complexion)
that it was really a pleasure to pack it. As for the poor motor maid, it
was broken to her that she must, figuratively speaking, live in a bag
during the tour, and that bag must have a place under her feet as she
sat beside the driver. It might make her as uncomfortable as it liked,
but whatever it did, it must on no account interfere with the chauffeur.

We were supposed to start at ten, but a woman of Lady Turnour's type
doesn't think she's making herself of enough importance unless she keeps
people waiting. She changed her mind three times about her veil, and had
her dressing-bag (a gorgeous affair, beside which mine is a mere
nutshell) reopened at the last minute to get out different hatpins.

It was half-past ten when the luggage for the automobile was ready to be
taken away, and having helped my mistress into her motoring coat, I left
her saying farewell to some hotel acquaintances she had scraped up, and
went out to put her ladyship's rugs into the car.

I had not seen it yet, nor the dreaded chauffeur, my galley-companion;
but as the front door opened, _voilà_ both; the car drawn up at the
hotel entrance, the chauffeur dangling from its roof.

Never did I see anything in the way of an automobile so large, so azure,
so magnificent, so shiny as to varnish, so dazzling as to brass and
crystal.

Perhaps the windows aren't really crystal, but they were all bevelly and
glittering in the sunshine, and seemed to run round the car from back to
front, giving the effect of a Cinderella Coach fitted on to a motor.
Never was paint so blue, never was crest on carriage panel so large and
so like a vague, over-ripe tomato. Never was a chauffeur so long, so
slim, so smart, so leathery.

He was dangling not because he fancied himself as a tassel, but because
he was teaching some last piece of luggage to know its place on the roof
it was shaped to fit.

"Thank goodness, at least he's not fat, and won't take up much room," I
thought, as I stood looking at the back of his black head.

Then he jumped down, and turned round. We gave each other a glance, and
he could not help knowing that I must be her ladyship's maid, by the way
I was loaded with rugs, like a beast of burden. Of my face he could see
little, as I had on a thick motor-veil with a small triangular talc
window, which Lady Kilmarny had given me as a present when I bade her
good-bye. I had the advantage of him, therefore, in the staring contest,
because his goggles were pushed up on the top of his cap with an
elastic, somewhat as Miss Paget's spectacles had been caught in her
false front.

His glance said: "Female thing, I've got to be bothered by having you
squashed into the seat beside me. You'd better not be chatty with the
man at the wheel, for if you are, I shall have to teach you motor
manners."

My glance, I sincerely hoped, said nothing, for I hurriedly shut it off
lest it should say too much, the astonished thought in my mind being:
"Why, Leather Person, you look exactly like a gentleman! You have the
air of being the master, and Sir Samuel your servant."

He really was a surprise, especially after Lady Kilmarny's warning.
Still, I at once began to tell myself that chauffeurs _must_ have
intelligent faces. As for this one's clear features, good gray eyes,
brown skin, and well-made figure, they were nothing miraculous, since it
is admitted that even a lower grade of beings, grooms and footmen, are
generally chosen as ornaments to the establishments they adorn. Why
shouldn't a chauffeur be picked out from among his fellows to do credit
to a fine, sixty-horse-power blue motor-car? Besides, a young man who
can't look rather handsome in a chauffeur's cap and neat leather coat
and leggings might as well go and hang himself.

The Leather Person opened the door of the car for me, that I might put
in the rugs. I murmured "thank you" and he bowed. No sooner had I
arranged my affairs, and slipped the scent-bottle and bottle of salts,
newly filled, into a dainty little case under the window, when Lady
Turnour and Sir Samuel appeared.

I have met few, if any, queens in daily life, but I'm almost sure that
the Queen of England, for instance, wouldn't consider it beneath her
dignity to take some notice of her chauffeur's existence if she were
starting on a motor tour. Lady Turnour was miles above it, however. So
far as she was concerned, one would have thought that the car ran
itself; that at sight of her and Sir Samuel, the arbiters of its
destiny, its heart began to beat, its body to tremble with delight at
the honour in store for it.

"Tell him to shut the windows," said her ladyship, when she was settled
in her place. "Does he think I'm going to travel on a day like this with
all the wind on the Riviera blowing my head off?"

The imperial order was passed on to "him," who was addressed as Bane,
or Dane, or something of that ilk; and I was sorry for poor Sir Samuel,
whose face showed how little he enjoyed the prospect of being cooped up
in a glass box.

"A day like this" meant that there was a wind which no one under fifty
had any business to know came out of the east, for it arrived from a sky
blue as a vast, inverted cup of turquoise. The sea was a cup, too; a cup
of gold glittering where the Esterel mountains rimmed it, and full to
the frothing brim of blue spilt by the sky.

Perhaps there was a hint of keenness in the breeze, and the palms in the
hotel garden were whispering to each other about it, while they rocked
the roses tangled among their fans; yet it seemed to me that the
whispers were not of complaint, but of joy--joy of life, joy of beauty,
and joy of the spring. The air smelled of a thousand flowers, this air
that Lady Turnour shunned as if it were poison, and brought me a sense
of happiness and adventure fresh as the morning. I knew I had no right
to the feeling, because this wasn't my adventure. I was only in it on
sufferance, to oil the wheels of it, so to speak, for my betters; yet
golden joy ran through all my veins as gaily, as generously, as if I
were a princess instead of a lady's-maid.

Why on earth I was happy, I didn't know, for it was perfectly clear that
I was going to have a horrid time; but I pitied everybody who wasn't
young, and starting off on a motor tour, even if on fifty francs a month
"all found."

I pitied Lady Turnour because she was herself; I pitied Sir Samuel
because he was married to her; I pitied the people in the big hotel,
who spent their afternoons and evenings playing bridge with all the
windows hermetically sealed, while there was a world like this out of
doors; and I wasn't sure yet whether I pitied the chauffeur or not.

He didn't look particularly sorry for himself, as he took his seat on my
right. I was well out of his way, and he had the air of having forgotten
all about me, as he steered away from the hotel down the flower-bordered
avenue which led to the street.

"Anyhow," said I to myself, behind my little three-cornered talc window,
"whatever his faults may be, appearances are _very_ deceptive if he ever
tries to chuck me under the chin."

There we sat, side by side, shut away from our pastors and masters by a
barrier of glass, in that state of life and on that seat to which it had
pleased Providence to call us, together.

"We're far enough apart in mind, though," I told myself. Yet I found my
thoughts coming back to the man, every now and then, wondering if his
nice brown profile were a mere lucky accident, or if he were really
intelligent and well educated beyond his station. It was deliciously
restful at first to sit there, seeing beautiful things as we flashed by,
able to enjoy them in peace without having to make conversation, as the
ordinary _jeune fille_ must with the ordinary _jeune monsieur_.

"And is it that you love the automobilism, mademoiselle?"

"But yes, I love the automobilism. And you?"

"I also." (Hang it, what shall I say to her next?)

"And the dust. It does not too much annoy you?"

(Oh, bother, I do wish he'd let me alone!)

"No, monsieur. Because there are compensations. The scenery, is it not?"

"And for me your society." (What a little idiot she is!)

And so on. And so on. Oh yes, there were consolations in being a motor
maid, sitting as far away as possible from a cross-looking if rather
handsome chauffeur, who would want to bite her if she tried to do the
"society act."

But after a while, when we'd spun past the charming villas and
attractive shops of Cannes (which looks so deceitfully sylvan, and is
one of the gayest watering-places in the world) silence began to be a
burden.

It is such a nice motor car, and I did want to ask intelligent questions
about it!

I was almost sure they would be intelligent, because already I know
several things about automobiles. The Milvaines haven't got one, but
most of their friends in Paris have, and though I've never been on a
long tour before, I've done some running about. When one knows things,
especially when one's a girl--a really well-regulated, normal girl--one
does like to let other people know that one knows them. It's all well
enough to cram yourself full to bursting with interesting facts which it
gives you a vast amount of trouble to learn, just out of respect for
your own soul; and there's a great deal in that point of view, in one's
noblest moments; but one's noblest moments are like bubbles, radiant
while they last, then going pop! quite to one's own surprise, leaving
one all flat, and nothing to show for the late bubble except a little
commonplace soap.

Well, I am like that, and when I'm not nobly bubbling I love to say what
I'm thinking to somebody who will understand, instead of feeding on
myself.

It really was a waste of good material to see all that lovely scenery
slipping by like a panorama, and to be having quite heavenly thoughts
about it, which must slip away too, and be lost for ever. I got to the
pass when it would have been a relief to be asked if "this were my first
visit to the Riviera;" because I could hastily have said "Yes," and then
broken out with a volley of impressions.

Seeing beautiful things when you travel by rail consists mostly on
getting half a glimpse, beginning to exclaim, "Oh, look _there_!" then
plunging into the black gulf of a tunnel, and not coming out again until
after the best bit has carefully disappeared behind an uninteresting,
fat-bodied mountain. But travelling by motor-car! Oh, the difference!
One sees, one feels; one is never, never bored, or impatient to arrive
anywhere. One would enjoy being like the famous brook, and "go on
forever."

Other automobiles were ahead of us, other cars were behind us, in the
procession of Nomads leaving the South for the North, but there had been
rain in the night, so that the wind carried little dust. My spirit sang
when we had left the long, cool avenue lined with the great
silver-trunked plane trees (which seemed always, even in sunshine, to be
dappled with moonlight) and dashed toward the barrier of the Esterels
that flung itself across our path. The big blue car bounded up the
steep road, laughing and purring, like some huge creature of the desert
escaped from a cage, regaining its freedom. But every time we neared a
curve it was considerate enough to slow down, just enough to swing round
with measured rhythm, smooth as the rocking of a child's cradle.

Perhaps, thought I, the chauffeur wasn't cross, but only concentrated.
If I had to drive a powerful, untamed car like this, up and down roads
like that, I should certainly get motor-car face, a kind of inscrutable,
frozen mask that not all the cold cream in the world could ever melt.

I wondered if he resorted to cold cream, and before I knew what I was
doing, I found myself staring at the statuesque brown profile through my
talc triangle.

Evidently animal magnetism can leak through talc, for suddenly the
chauffeur glanced sharply round at me, as if I had called him. "Did you
speak?" he asked.

"Dear me, no, I shouldn't have dared," I hurried to assure him. Again he
transferred his attention from the road to me, though only a fraction,
and for only the fraction of a second. I felt that he saw me as an eagle
on the wing might see a fly on a boulder toward which he was steering
between intervening clouds.

"Why shouldn't you dare?" he wanted to know.

"One doesn't usually speak to lion-tamers while they're engaged in
taming," I murmured, quite surprised at my audacity and the sound of my
own voice.

The chauffeur laughed. "Oh!" he said.

"Or to captains of ocean liners on the bridge in thick fogs," I went on
with my illustrations.

"What do you know about lion-tamers and captains on ocean liners?" he
inquired.

"Nothing. But I imagine. I'm always doing a lot of imagining."

"Do you think you will while you're with Lady Turnour?"

"She hasn't engaged my brain, only my hands and feet."

"And your time."

"Oh, thank goodness it doesn't take time to imagine. I can imagine all
the most glorious things in heaven and earth in the time it takes you to
put your car at the next corner."

He looked at me longer, though the corner seemed dangerously near--to an
amateur. "I see you've learned the true secret of living," said he.

"Have I? I didn't know."

"Well, you have. You may take it from me. I'm a good deal older than you
are."

"Oh, of course, all really polite men are older than the women they're
with."

"Even chauffeurs?"

It was my turn to laugh now. "A chauffeur with a lady's-maid."

"You seem an odd sort of lady's-maid."

"I begin to think you're an odd sort of chauffeur."

"Why?"

"Well--" I hesitated, though I knew why, perfectly. "Aren't you rather
abrupt in your questions? Suppose we change the subject. You seem to
have tamed this tiger until it obeys you like a kitten."

"That's what I get my wages for. But why do you think I'm an odd sort
of chauffeur?"

"For that matter, then, why do you think I'm an odd lady's-maid?"

"As to that, probably I'm no judge. I never talked to one except my
mother's, and she--wasn't at all like you."

"Well, that proves my point. The very fact that your mother _had_ a
maid, shows you're an odd sort of chauffeur."

"Oh! You mean because I wasn't always 'what I seem,' and that kind of
_Family Herald_ thing? Do you think it odd that a chauffeur should be by
way of being a gentleman? Why, nowadays the woods and the story-books
are full of us. But things are made pleasanter for us in books than in
real life. Out of books people fight shy of us. A 'shuvvie' with the
disadvantage of having been to a public school, or handicapped by not
dropping his H's, must knock something off his screw."

"Are you really in earnest, or are you joking?" I asked.

"Half and half, perhaps. Anyway, it isn't a particularly agreeable
position--if that's not too big a word for it. I envy you your
imagination, in which you can shut yourself up in a kind of armour
against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

"You wouldn't envy me if you had to do Lady Turnour's hair," I sighed.

The chauffeur laughed out aloud. "Heaven forbid!" he exclaimed.

"I'm sure Sir Samuel would forbid, anyhow," said I.

"Do you know, I don't think this trip's going to be so bad?" said he.

"Neither do I," I murmured in my veil.

We both laughed a good deal then. But luckily the glass was expensively
thick, and the car was singing.

"What are you laughing at?" I asked.

"Something that it takes a little sense of humour to see, when you've
been down on your luck," said he.

"A sense of humour was the only thing my ancestors left me," said I. "I
don't wonder you laugh. It really is quaintly funny."

"Do you think we're laughing at the same thing?"

"I'm almost sure of it."

"Do tell me your part, and let's compare notes."

"Well, it's something that nobody but us in this car--unless it's the
car itself--knows."

"Then it is the same thing. They haven't an idea of it, and wouldn't
believe it if anyone told them. Yes, it is funny."

"About their not being--"

"While you--"

"And you--"

"Thanks. A lady--"

"A gentleman--"

"And the only ones on board--"

"Are the two servants!"

"As long as _they_ don't notice--"

"And we do!"

"Perhaps we may get some fun out of it?"

"Extra--outside our wages. Would it be called a 'perquisite'?"

"If so, I'm sure we deserve it."

I sighed, thinking of her ladyship's transformation, and lacing up her
boots. "Well, there's a lot to make up for."

And he gave me another look--a very nice look, although he could see
nothing of me but eyes and one third of a nose. "If I can ever at all
help to make up, in the smallest way, you must let me try," he said.

I ceased to think that his profile was cross, or even stern.

I was glad that the chauffeur and I were in the same box--I mean, the
same car.




CHAPTER VII


All the same, I wondered a great deal how he came there, and I hoped
that he was wondering the same sort of thing about me. In fact, I laid
myself out to produce such a result. That is to say, I took some pains
to show myself as little like the common or parlour lady's-maid as
possible. I never took so much pains to impress any human being, male or
(far less) female, as I took to impress that mere chauffeur--the very
chauffeur I'd been lying awake at night dreading as the most
objectionable feature in my new life.

All the nice things I'd thought of by the way, before we introduced
ourselves to each other, I trotted out (at least, as many as I had
presence of mind to remember); and though I'm afraid he didn't pay me
the compliment of trying to "brill" in return, I told myself that it was
not because he didn't think me worth brilling for, but because he's
English. It never seems to occur to an Englishman to "show off." I
believe if Sir Samuel Turnour's chauffeur, Mr. What's-his-name, knew
twenty-seven languages, he could be silent in all of them.

He did let me play the car's musical siren, though; a fascinating
bugbear, supposed to warn children, chickens, and other light-minded
animals that something important is coming, and they'd better look
alive. It has two tunes, one grave, one gay. I suppose we would use the
grave one if the creature hadn't looked alive?

Although he didn't say much, the chauffeur (or "shuvvie" as he
scornfully names himself) knew all about Robert Macaire and Gaspard De
Besse--knew more about them than I, also their escapades on this road
over the Esterels, and in the mountain fastnesses, when highwaymen were
as fashionable as motor-cars are now. I'd forgotten that it was this
part of the world where they earned their bread and fame; and was quite
thrilled to hear that the ghost of De Besse is supposed to keep on, as a
permanent residence, his old shelter cave near the summit of strangely
shaped Mont Vinaigre. I'm sure, though, even if we'd passed his pitch at
midnight instead of midday, he wouldn't have dared pop out and cry
"Stand and deliver!" to a sixty-horsepower Aigle.

I almost wished it were night, as we swooped over mountain tops, our
eyes plunging down the deep gorges, and dropping with fearful joy over
precipices, for the effect would have been more solemn, more mysterious.
I could imagine that the fantastically formed rocks which loomed above
us or stood ranged far below would have looked by moonlight like statues
and busts of Titans, carved to show poor little humanity such creatures
as a dead world had known. But it is hard for one's imagination to do
the best of which it feels capable when one is dying for lunch.

Even the old "Murder Inn," which my companion obligingly pointed out,
didn't give me the thrill it ought, because time was getting on when we
flew past it, and I would have been capable of eating vulgar bread and
cheese under its wickedly historic roof if I had been invited.

"Do you suppose they know anything about the road and its history?" I
asked the chauffeur, with a slight gesture of my swathed head toward the
solid wall of glass which was our background.

"They? Certainly not, and don't want to know," he answered with an air
of assurance.

"Why do they go about in motors then," I wondered, "if they don't take
interest in things they pass?"

"You must understand as well as I do why this sort of person goes about
in motors," said he. "They go because other people go--because it's the
thing. The 'other people' whom they slavishly imitate may really like
the exhilaration, the ozone, the sight-seeing, or all three; but to this
type the only part that matters is letting it be seen that they've got a
handsome car, and being able to say 'We've just come from the Riviera in
our sixty-horse-power motor-car.' They'd always mention the power."

"Lady Turnour did, even to me," I remembered. "But is Sir Samuel like
that?"

"No, to do him justice, he isn't, poor man. But his wife is his
Juggernaut. I believe he enjoys lying under her wheels, or thinks he
does--which is the same thing."

"Have you been with them long?" I dared to inquire.

"Only a few days. I brought the car down for them from Paris, though not
this way--a shorter one. We're new brooms, the car and I."

"All their brooms seem to be new," I reflected. "I wonder what the
stepson is like?"

"Luckily it doesn't matter much to me," said the chauffeur
indifferently.

"Nor to me. But his name's Herbert."

"His surname?"

"I don't know. There's a Herbert lurking somewhere. It always suggests
to me oily hair parted in the middle and smeared down on each side of a
low, narrow forehead. Could you know a 'Bertie'?"

"I did once, and never want to again. He was a swine and a snob. Hope
you never came across the combination?"

I forgot to answer, because, having left the mountain world behind, a
formidable line of nobly planned arches began striding along beside us,
through the sun-bright fields, and I was sure it must be the giant Roman
aqueduct of Fréjus.

Instead of discussing such little things as the Turnours and their
Bertie, we began to talk of Phoenicians, Ligurians, and of Romans; of
Pliny, who had a beloved friend at Fréjus; and all the while to breathe
in the perfume of a land over which a vast tidal wave of balsamic pines
had swept.

Fréjus we were not to see now: that was for the dim future, after lunch;
but we turned to the left off the main road, and ran on until we saw,
bathed in pines, deliciously deluged and drowned in pines, the white
glimmer of classic-looking villas. These meant Valescure, said the
chauffeur; and the Grand Hotel--not classic looking, but pretty in its
terraced garden--meant luncheon.

The car drew up before the door, according to order, or rather,
according to hypnotic suggestion; for it seems that it is the chauffeur
who alone knows anything of the way, and who, while appearing to be
non-committal, is virtually planning the tour. "Valescure might be a
good stopping-place for lunch," he had murmured, an eye on the road map
over which his head bent with Sir Samuel's. "Very beautiful--rather
exclusive. You may remember Mr. Chamberlain stopped there."

The exclusiveness and the Chamberlain-ness decided Lady Turnour, behind
Sir Samuel's shoulder (so the chauffeur told me); consequently, here we
were--and not at St. Raphael, which would have seemed the more obvious
place to stop.

I say "we," but Lady Turnour would have been surprised to hear that her
maid dared count herself and a chauffeur in the programme. Creatures
like us must be fed, just as you pour petrol into the tanks of a motor,
or stoke a furnace with coals, because otherwise our mechanism wouldn't
go, and that would be awkward when we were wanted.

The chauffeur opened the door of the car as if he had been born to open
motor-car doors, and Lady Turnour allowed herself to be helped out by
her husband. Her jewel-bag clutched in her hand (she doesn't know me
well enough yet to trust me with it, and hasn't had bagsful of jewels
for long), she passed her two servants without expending a look on them.
Sir Samuel followed, telling his chauffeur to have the automobile ready
at the door again in an hour and a quarter; and we two Worms were left
to our own resources.

"I shan't garage her," said my fellow Worm of the car. "I'll just drive
her out of the way, where I can look over her a bit when I've snatched
something to eat. I'll take the fur rugs inside--you're not to bother,
they're big enough to swamp you entirely. And then you--"

"Yes, then I--" I repeated desolately. "What is to become of me?"

"Why, you're to have your lunch, of course," he replied. "I thought you
said you were hungry."

"So I am, starving. But--"

"Well?"

"Aren't you going to have a proper lunch?"

"A sandwich and a piece of cheese will do for me, because there are one
or two little things to tinker up on the car, and an hour and a quarter
isn't long. I think I shall bring my grub out of doors, and--But is
anything the matter?"

"I can't go in and have lunch alone. I simply can't," I confessed to the
young man whose society I had intended to avoid like a pestilence. "You
see, I--I never--this is the first time."

A look of comprehension flashed over his face.

"Yes, I see," he said. "Of course, the moment I heard your voice I
realized that this wasn't your sort of work, but I didn't know you were
quite so new to it as all that. You've never taken a meal in the
couriers' room of an hotel?"

"No," I confessed. "At the Majestic Palace Lady Kil--that is, I decided
to have everything brought up to my room, there."

"By Jove, we are a strange pair! This is my first job, too, and so far
I've been able to feed where I chose; but that's too good to last on
tour. One must accommodate oneself to circumstances, and a man easily
can. But you--I know how you feel. However, it's the first step that
costs. Do you mind much?"

"It's the stepping in alone that costs the most," I said.

"Well, I'm only too delighted if I can be of the least use. Let the car
rip! I'll see to her afterward. Now I'm going to take care of you. You
need it more than she does."

What would Lady Kilmarny have said if she had heard my deliberate
encouragement of the chauffeur, and his reckless response? What would
she have thought if she could have seen us walking into the couriers'
dining-room, side by side, as if we had been friends for as many years
as we'd really been acquaintances for minutes, leaving the car he was
paid to cherish in his bosom sulking alone!

That sweet lady's face, surprised and reproachful, rose before my eyes,
but I had no regrets. And instead of trembling with apprehension when I
saw that the couriers' room was empty, I rejoiced in the prospect of
lunching alone with the redoubtable chauffeur.

It was too early for the regular feeding hour of the _pensionnaires_,
maids, and valets, and we sat down opposite each other at the end of a
long table. A bored young waiter, with little to hope for in the way of
_pourboires_, ambled off in quest of our food. I began to unfasten my
head covering, and after a search for various fugitive pins I emerged
from obscurity, like the moon from behind a cloud.

With a sigh of relief, I smiled at my companion; and it was only his
expression of surprise which reminded me that he had been seeing me "as
through a glass darkly."

I suppose, unless you are a sort of Sherlock Holmes of physiognomy, you
can't map out a woman's face by a mere glimpse of eyes through a
triangular bit of talc, already somewhat damaged by exposure to sun and
wind.

It mayn't be good manners to look a gift motor-veil in the talc, but I
must admit that, glad as I was of its protection, mine was somewhat the
worse for certain bubbles, cracks, and speckles; so whether or no Mr.
Bane or Dane may combine the science of chauffeuring with that of
physiognomy, it's certain that he had the air of being taken aback.

Of course, I know that I'm not exactly plain, and that the contrast
between my eyes and hair is a little out of the common; so, as soon as I
remembered that he hadn't seen me before, I guessed more or less what
his almost startled look meant. Still, I suppose most girls--anyway,
half-French, half-American girls--would have done exactly what I
proceeded to do.

I looked as innocent as a fluffy chicken when it first sidles out of its
eggshell into the wide, wide world; and said: "Oh, I do hope I haven't a
smudge on the end of my nose?"

"No," replied the chauffeur, instantly becoming expressionless. "Why do
you ask?"

"Only I was afraid, from your face, that there was something wrong."

"So far as I can see, there's nothing wrong," said he, calmly, and
broke a piece of bread. "Very good butter, this, that they give to _nous
autres_," he went on, in the same tone of voice, and my respect for him
increased.

(Men are really rather nice creatures, take them all in all!)

As he had sacrificed his duty to the car for me, I sacrificed my duty to
my digestion for him, and bolted my luncheon. Then, when released from
guard duty, he returned to his true allegiance, and I ventured to walk
on the terrace to admire the view.

Far away it stretched, over garden, and pineland, and flowery
meadow-spaces, to the blue, silver-sewn sea, which to my fancy looked
Homeric. Nothing modern caught the eye to break the romance of the
illusion. All was as it might have been twenty or thirty centuries ago,
when on the Mediterranean sailed "Phoenicians, mariners renowned, greedy
merchantmen with countless gauds in a black ship."

I had just begun to play that I was a young woman of Tyre, taken on an
adventurous excursion by an indulgent father, when presto! Lady
Turnour's voice brought me back to the present with a jump. There's
nothing Homeric about her!

She and Sir Samuel had finished their luncheon, and so had several other
people. There was an exodus of well-dressed, nice-looking women from
dining-room to terrace, and conscious that I ought to have been herding
among their maids, I fled with haste and humility. What right had I, in
this sweet place divinely fit to be a rest-cure for goddesses tired of
the social diversions of Olympus?

I scuttled off to the car, and stood ready to serve my mistress when it
should please her to be tucked under her rugs.

Despite delays, the chauffeur had finished whatever had to be done, and
soon we were spinning away from Valescure, far away, into a world of
flowers.

Black cypresses soared skyward, so clean cut, so definite, that I seemed
to hear them, crystal-shrill, like the sharp notes in music, as they
leaped darkly out from a silver monotone of olives and a delicate ripple
of pearly plum or pear blossom. Mimosas poured floods of gold over the
spring landscape, blazing violently against the cloudless blue. Bloom of
peach and apple tree garlanded our road on either side; the way was
jewelled with roses; and acres of hyacinths stretched into the distance,
their perfume softening the keenness of the breeze.

"Are they going to let you pass Fréjus without pausing for a single
look?" I asked mournfully. But at that instant there came a peal of the
electric bell which is one of the luxurious fittings of the car. It
meant "stop!" and we stopped.

"Aren't there some ruins here--something middle-aged?" asked Sir Samuel,
meaning mediæval.

"Roman ruins, sir," replied his chauffeur, without changing countenance.

"Are they the sort of things you ought to say you've seen?"

"I think most people do stop and see them, sir."

"What is your wish, my dear?" Sir Samuel gallantly deferred to his
bride. "I know you don't like out-of-door sightseeing when it's windy,
and blows your hair about, but--"

"We might try, and if I don't like it, we can go on," replied Lady
Turnour, patronizing the remains of Roman greatness, since it appeared
to be the "thing" for the nobility and gentry to do.

The chauffeur obediently turned the big blue Aigle, and let her sail
into the very centre of the vast arena where Cæsar saw gladiators fight
and die.

It was very noble, very inspiring, and from some shady corner promptly
emerged a quaintly picturesque old guardian, ready to pour forth floods
of historic information. He introduced himself as a soldier who had seen
fighting in Mexico under Maximilian, therefore the better able to
appreciate and fulfil his present task. But her ladyship listened for
awhile with lack-lustre eyes, and finally, when dates were flying about
her ears like hail, calmly interrupted to say that she was "glad she
hadn't lived in the days when you had to go to the theatre out of
doors."

"I can't understand more than one word in twelve that the old thing
says, anyhow," she went on. "Elise must give me French lessons every day
while she does my hair. I hope she has the right accent."

"He's saying that this amphitheatre was once almost as large as the one
at Nîmes, but that it would only hold about ten thousand spectators,"
explained the chauffeur, who was engaged partly for his French and
knowledge of France.

"It's nonsense bothering to know that now, when the place is tumbling to
pieces," sneered her ladyship.

"I beg your pardon, my lady; I only thought that, as a rule, the best
people do feel bound to know these things. But of course--" He paused
deferentially, without a twinkle in his eye, though I was pressing my
lips tightly together, and trying not to shake spasmodically.

"Oh, well, go on. What else does the old boy say, then?" groaned Lady
Turnour, _martyrisée_.

Mr. Bane or Dane didn't dare to glance at me. With perfect gravity he
translated the guide's best bits, enlarging upon them here and there in
a way which showed that he had independent knowledge of his own. And it
was a feather in his cap that his eloquence eventually interested Lady
Turnour. She made him tell her again how Fréjus was Claustra Gallæ to
Cæsar, and how it was the "Caput" for this part of the wonderful Via
Aurelia, which started at Rome, never ending until it came to Arles.

"Why, we've been to Rome, and we're going to Arles," she exclaimed. "We
can tell people we've been over the whole of the Via Aurelia, can't we?
We needn't mention that the automobile didn't arrive till after we got
to Cannes. And anyway, you say there were once theatres there, and at
Antibes, like the one at Fréjus, so we've been making a kind of Roman
pilgrimage all along, if we'd only known it."

"It is considered quite the thing to do, in Roman amphitheatres, to make
a tour of the prisoners' cells and gladiators' dressing-rooms, the guide
says," insinuated the chauffeur. And then, when the bride and
bridegroom, reluctant but conscientious, were swimming round the vast
bowl of masonry, like tea-leaves floating in a great cup, he turned to
me.

"Why don't you thank me?" he inquired. "I was doing it for you. I knew
you hated to miss all this, and I saw she meant to go on, so I
intervened, in the only way I could think of, to touch her."

"If you're always as clever as that, I don't see why this shouldn't be
_our_ trip," I said. "That will be a consolation."

"I'm afraid you'll often need more consolation than that," he answered.
"Lady Turnour is--as the Americans say--a pretty 'stiff proposition.'"

"Still, if you can hypnotize her into going to all the places, and
stopping to look at all the nicest things, this will at least be a cheap
automobile tour for us both."

I laughed, but he didn't; and I was sorry, for I thought I deserved a
smile. And he has a nice one, with even white teeth in it, and a wistful
sort of look in his eyes at the same time: a really interesting smile.

I wondered what he was thinking about that made him look so grave; but I
conceitedly felt that it was something concerning me--or the situation
of us both.




CHAPTER VIII


The tidal wave of pines followed us as, having had one glance at the
Porte Dorée, we left Fréjus, old and new, behind. It followed us out of
gay little St. Raphael, lying in its alluvial plain of flowers, and on
along the coast past which the ships of Augustus Cæsar used to sail.

Not in my most starry dreams could I have fancied a road as beautiful as
that which opened to us soon, winding above the dancing water.

Graceful dryad pines knelt by the wayside, stretching out their arms to
the sea, where charming little bays shone behind enlacing branches, blue
as the eyes of a wood-nymph gleaming shyly through the brown tangle of
her hair. Pine balsam mingled with the bitter-sweet perfume of almond
blossom, and caught a pungent tang of salt from the wind.

What romance--what beauty! It made me in love with life, just to pass
this way, and know that so much hidden loveliness existed. I glanced
furtively over my shoulder at the couple whose honeymoon it is--our
master and mistress. Lady Turnour sat nodding in the conservatory
atmosphere of her glass cage, and Sir Samuel was earnestly choosing a
cigar.

Suddenly it struck me that Providence must have a vast sense of humour,
and that the little inhabitants of this earth, high and low, must
afford It a great deal of benevolent amusement.

All too soon we swept out of the forest, straight into a little town,
St. Maxime, with a picturesque port of its own, where red-sailed fishing
boats lolled as idly as the dark-eyed young men in cafés near the shore.
A few tourists walking out from the hotel on the hill gazed rather
curiously at us in our fine blue car; and we gazed away from them,
across a sapphire gulf, to the distant houses of St. Tropez, banked high
against a promontory of emerald.

I should have liked to run on to St. Tropez, for I knew his pretty
legend; how he was one of the guards of St. Paul in prison, and was
converted by the eloquence of his captive; but the chauffeur said that,
after La Foux (famed home of miniature horses) the coast road would lose
its surface of velvet. It would be laced in and out with crossings of a
local railway line, and there would be so many bumps that Lady Turnour
was certain to wake up very cross.

"For your sake I don't want to make her cross," said he, and turned
inland; but the way was no less beautiful. The pines were tired of
running after us, but great cork trees marched beside the road, like an
army of crusaders in disarray, half in, half out, of armour. Above, rose
the Mountains of the Moors, whose very name seemed to ring with the
distant echo of a Saracen war song; and here and there, on a bare, wild
hillside, towered all that was left of some ancient castle, fallen into
ruin. Cogolin was fine, and Grimaud was even finer.

Up a steep ascent, through shadowy forests we had passed, now and then
coming suddenly upon a little red-roofed village nestling among the
trees as a strawberry among its leaves, when abruptly we flashed out
where spaces of sky and silver sea opened. Between hills that seemed to
sweep a curtsey to us, we flew down an apple-paring road toward Hyères.

The Turnours had lunched, if not wisely, probably too well, at Valescure
about one o'clock, and it wasn't yet four; but the air at the beautiful
Costebelle hotels is said to be perpetually glittering with Royalties
and other bright beings of the great world, so her ladyship wouldn't
have been persuaded to miss the place.

Not that anyone tried to persuade her, for the two powers behind the
throne (and in front of the car) wanted to go--not to see the Royalties,
but the beauties of Costebelle itself.

We slipped gently through the town of Hyères, whose avenues of giant
palms looked like great sea anemones turned into trees, and then spurted
up a hill into a vast and fragrant grove that smelled of a thousand
flowers. In the grove stood three hotels, with wide views over
jade-green lagoons to an indigo sea; and at the most charming of the
trio we stopped.

Nothing was said about tea for the two servants, but while the "quality"
had theirs on an exquisite terrace, the chauffeur brought a steaming cup
to me, as I sat in the car.

"This was given me for my _beaux yeux_," he said, "but I don't want any
tea, so please take it, and don't let it be wasted."

I was convinced that he had paid for that cup of tea with coin harder
if not brighter than the _beaux yeux_ in question; but it would have
hurt his feelings if I had refused, therefore I drank the tea and
thanked the giver.

"You are being very kind to me," I said, "Mr. Bane or Dane; so do you
mind telling me which it is?"

"Dane," he replied shortly. "Not that it matters. A chauffeur by any
other name would smell as much of oil and petrol. It's actually my real
name, too. Are you surprised? I was either too proud or too stubborn to
change it--I'm not sure which--when I took up 'shuvving' for a
livelihood."

"No, I'm not surprised," I said. "You don't look like the sort of man
who would change his name as if it were a coat. I've kept mine, too, to
'maid' with. You 'shuv,' I 'maid.' It sounds like an exercise in a
strange language."

"That's precisely what it is," he answered. "A difficult language to
learn at first, but I'm getting the 'hang' of it. I hope you won't need
to pursue the study very thoroughly."

"And you think you will?"

"I think so," he said, his face hardening a little, and looking dogged.
"I don't see any way out of it for the present."

I was silent for almost a whole minute--which can seem a long time to a
woman--half hoping that he meant to tell me something about himself; how
it was that he'd decided to be a professional chauffeur, and so on. I
was sure there must be a story, an interesting story--perhaps a romantic
one--and if he confided in me, I would in him. Why not, when--on my
part, at least--there's nothing to conceal, and we're bound to be
companions of the Road for weal or woe? But if he felt any temptation to
be expansive he resisted it, like a true Englishman; and to break a
silence which grew almost embarrassing I was driven to ask him, quite
brazenly, if he had no curiosity to know my name.

"Not exactly curiosity," said he, smiling his pleasant smile again. "I'm
never curious about people I--like, or feel that I'm going to like. It
isn't my nature."

"It's just the opposite with me."

"We're of opposite sexes."

"You believe that explains it? I don't know. Man may be a fellow
creature, I suppose--though they didn't teach me that at the Convent.
But tell me this: even if you have no curiosity, because you hope you
can manage to endure me, _do_ you think I look like an 'Elise'?"

"Somehow, you don't. Names have different colours for me. Elise is
bright pink. You ought to be silver, or pale blue."

"Elise is my professional name; Lady Turnour is my sponsor. My real
name's Lys--Lys d'Angely."

"Good! Lys _is_ silver."

"I wish I could coin it. Let me see if I can guess what you ought to be?
You look like--like--well, Jack would suit you. But that's too good to
be true. I shall never meet a 'Jack' except in books and ballads."

"My name is John Claud. But when I was a boy, I always fought any chap
who called me 'Claud,' and tried to give him a black eye or a bloody
nose. You may call me Jack, if you like."

"Certainly not. I shall call you Mr. Dane."

"Shuvvers are never mistered."

"Not even by the females of their kind? I always supposed that manners
were very toploftical in the servants' hall."

"We may both soon know."

"Elise, take that cup at once where you got it from, and come back to
your place. We are ready to start."

This from Lady Turnour. (Really, if she takes to interfering every time
we others have got to the middle of an interesting conversation, I don't
know what I shall do to her! Perhaps I'll put her transformation on
side-wise. Or would that be blackmail?)

Silently the chauffeur took the cup from my frightened fingers, and
marched off with it into the hotel, without a "by your leave" or "with
your leave."

"My word, your chauffeur might have better manners!" grumbled Lady
Turnour to Sir Samuel, as she climbed into the car; but there was no
scolding when the rude young man came briskly back, looking supremely
unconscious of having given offence.

"Now we must make good time to Marseilles, if we're to get there for
dinner," he said, when he had started the car, and taken his place. "We
shall stop there to-night, or rather, just outside the town, in one of
the nicest hotels on earth, as you will see."

"Whose choice?" I asked.

"Mine," he laughed, "but I don't think Sir Samuel knows that!"

Down to Hyères we floated again, on the wings of the Aigle, I looking
longingly across the valley where the old town climbed a citadeled
hill, and lay down at the foot of a sturdy though crumbling castle. If
this were _really_ my own tour, as I am trying to play it is, I would
have commanded a long stop at Costebelle, to make explorations of the
region round about. I can imagine no greater joy than to be able to stay
at beautiful places as long as one wished, and to keep on doing
beautiful things till one tired of doing them.

But life is a good deal like a big busybody of a policeman, continually
telling us to get up and move on!

Our world was a flower world again, ringed in like a secret fairyland,
with distant mountains of extraordinarily graceful shapes--charming
lady-mountains; and as far as we could see the road was cut through a
carpet of pink, white, and golden blossoms destined by and by for the
markets of Paris, London, Berlin, and Vienna.

Before I thought it could be so near, we dashed into Toulon, a very
different Toulon from the Toulon of the railway station, where I
remembered stopping a few mornings (which seemed like a few years) ago.
Now, it looked a noble and impressive place, as well as a tremendously
busy town; but my eye climbed to the towery heights above, wondering on
which one Napoleon--a smart young officer of artillery--placed the
batteries that shelled the British out of the harbour, and gained for
him the first small laurel leaf of his imperial crown.

I thought, too, of all the French novels I'd read, whose sailor heroes
were stationed at Toulon, and there met romantic or sensational
adventures. They were always handsome and dashing, those heroes, and as
we threaded intricate fortifications, I found myself looking out for at
least one or two of them.

Yes, they were there, plenty of heroes, almost all handsome, with
splendid dark eyes that searched flatteringly to penetrate the mystery
of my talc triangle. They didn't know, poor dears, that there was
nothing better than a lady's-maid behind it. What a waste of gorgeous
glances!

I laughed to myself at the fancy, and the chauffeur sitting beside me
wanted to know why; but I wouldn't tell him. One really can't say
everything to a man one has known only for a day. And yet, the curious
part is, I feel as if we had been the best of friends for a long time. I
never felt like that toward any man before, but I suppose it is because
of the queer resemblance in our fates.

Beyond Toulon we had to slow down for a long procession of gypsy
caravans on their way to town; quaint, moving houses, with strings of
huge pearls that were gleaming onions, festooned across their blue or
green doors and windows; and out from those doors and windows wonderful
eyes gazed at us--eyes full of secrets of the East, strange eyes, more
fascinating in their passing glance than those of the gay young heroes
at Toulon.

So we flew on to the village of Ollioules, and into the dim mountain
gorge of the same musical name. The car plunged boldly through the veil
of deep blue shadow which hung, ghostlike, over the serpentine curves of
the white road; and out of its twilight-mystery rose always the faint
singing of a little river that ran beside us, under the steep gray wall
of towering rock.

At the top of the gorge a surprise of beauty waited for us as our way
led along a sinuous road cut into the swelling mountain-side. Far off
lay the sea, with an army of tremendous purple rocks hurling themselves
headlong into the molten gold of the water, like a drove of mammoths.
All the world was gold and royal purple. Hills and mountains stood up,
darkly violet, out of a golden plain, against a sky of gold; and it was
such a picture as only Heaven or Turner could have painted.

Nor was there any break in the varied splendor of the scene and of the
sun's setting until we came to the dull-looking town of Aubagne. After
that, the Southern darkness swooped in haste, and while we wound
tediously through the immense, never-ending traffic of Marseilles, it
"made night." All the length and breadth of the Cannebière burst into
brilliance of electric light, as if in our honor. The great street
looked as gay as a Paris boulevard; and as we turned into it, we turned
into an adventure.

To begin with, nothing seemed less likely than an adventure. We drew up
calmly before the door of a hotel whence a telephonic demand for rooms
must be sent to La Reserve, under the same management. It was the
chauffeur who had to go in and telephone, for the bridegroom is even
more helpless in French than the bride; and before Mr. Dane could stop
the car, Sir Samuel called out: "Keep the motor going, to save time. You
needn't be a minute in there. Her ladyship is hungry, and wants to get
on."

The chauffeur raised his eyebrows, but obeyed in silence, leaving the
motor hard at work, the automobile panting as impatiently to be off as
if "she" suffered with Lady Turnour.

No sooner was the tall, leather-clad figure out of sight than a crowd of
small boys and youths pressed boldly round the handsome car. Her
splendour was her undoing, for a plain, every-day sort of automobile
might have failed to attract.

Laughing, jabbering _patois_, a dozen young imps forced their audacious
attentions on the unprotected azure beauty. What was I, that I could
defend her, left there as helpless as she, while her great heart
throbbed under me?

It was easy to say "_Allez-vous en--va!_" and I said it, not once, but
again and again, each time more emphatically than before. Nobody paid
the slightest attention, however, except, perhaps to find an extra spice
of pleasure in tormenting me. If I had been a yapping miniature lap-dog,
with teeth only _pour faire rire_, I could not have been treated with
greater disdain by the crowd. I glanced hastily round to see if Sir
Samuel had not taken alarm; but, sitting beside his wife in the big
crystal cage, he seemed blissfully unconscious of danger to his splendid
Aigle. Instead, the couple looked rather pleased than otherwise to be a
centre of attraction.

"Perhaps," I thought, "they're right, and these young wretches can work
no real harm to the car. They ought to know better than I--"

But they didn't; for before the thought could spin itself out in my
mind, a gypsy-eyed little fiend of twelve or thirteen made a spring at
the driver's seat. With a yelp of mischievous glee he proved his daring
to his comrades by snatching at the starting-lever. He was quick as a
flash of summer lightning, but if I hadn't been quicker, the big car
might have leaped into life, and run amuck through the most crowded
street in busy Marseilles. I felt myself go cold and hot, horribly
uncertain whether my interference might work harm or good, but before I
quite knew what I did, I had sent the boy flying with a sounding box on
the ear.

He squealed as he sprawled backward, and I stood up, ready for battle,
my fingers tingling, my heart pounding. The imp was up again, in half a
breath, pushed forward by his friends to take revenge, and I could hear
Sir Samuel or her ladyship wrestling vainly with the window behind me.
What would have happened next I can't tell, except that I was in a mood
to fight for our car till the death, even if knives flashed out; and I
think I was gasping "Police! Police!" but at that instant Mr. Jack Dane
hurled himself like a catapult from the hotel. He dashed the weedy
youths out of his way like ninepins, jumped to his seat, and the car and
the car's occupants were safe.

"You are a trump, Miss d'Angely," said he, as we boomed away from the
hotel, scattering the crowd before us as an eddy of wind scatters autumn
leaves. "You did just the right thing at just the right time. It was all
my fault. I oughtn't to have left the motor going."

"It was Sir Samuel's fault," I contradicted him.

"No. Whatever goes wrong with the car is always the chauffeur's fault.
Sir Samuel wanted me to do a foolish thing, and I oughtn't to have done
it. I had your life to think of--"

"And theirs."

"Theirs, of course. But I would have thought of yours first."

It made my heart feel as warm as a bird in a nest to be complimented by
the man at the helm for presence of mind, and then to hear that already
I'd gained a friend to whom my life was of some value. Since my mother
died, there has been no one for whom I've come first.

I wanted badly to do something to show my gratitude, but could think of
nothing except that, by and by, when we knew each other better, I might
offer to sew on his buttons or mend his socks.




CHAPTER IX


"I suppose we'll meet by-and-by at dinner?" I said (I'm afraid rather
wistfully) to the chauffeur as he drove the car up a steep hill to the
door of La Reserve, on The Corniche.

"Well, no," he answered, "because you needn't fear anything disagreeable
here, and I'm going to stop at a less expensive place. You see, I pay my
own way, and as I really have to live on my screw, it doesn't run to
grand hotels. This one _is_ rather grand; but you will be all right,
because, although it's a famous place for food, at this season few
people stop overnight, and I've found out through the telephone that the
Turnours are the only ones who have taken bedrooms. That means you'll
have your dinner and breakfast by yourself."

"Oh, that will be nice!" I said, trying to speak as if I delighted in
the thought of solitude and reflection. "I wish I were paying my own
way, too; but I couldn't do it on fifty francs a month, could I?"

"Fifty francs a month!" he echoed, astonished. "Is that your
compensation for being a slave to such a woman? By Jove, it makes me hot
all over, to think that a girl like you should--"

"Well, this trip is thrown in as additional compensation," I reminded
him. "And thanks to you and your kindness, I believe I'm going to find
my place more than tolerable."

The car stopped, and duty began. I couldn't even turn and say good night
to the chauffeur, as I walked primly into the hotel, laden with my
mistress's things.

She and Sir Samuel had the best rooms in the house, a suite big enough
and grand enough for a king and queen, with a delightful _loggia_
overlooking the high garden and the sea. But of course Lady Turnour
would die rather than seem impressed by anything, and would probably
pick faults if she were invited to sleep at Buckingham Palace or Windsor
Castle--a contingency which I think unlikely. She was snappish with
hunger, and did not trouble to restrain her temper before me. Poor Sir
Samuel! It is he who has snatched her from her lodging-house, to lead
her into luxury, because of his faithful love of many years; and this is
the way she rewards him! If I'd been in his place, and had a javelin
handy, I think I might suddenly have become a widower.

She was better after dinner, however, so I knew she must have been well
fed: and in the morning, after a gorgeous _déjeuner_ on the loggia, she
was in an amiable mood to plan for the day's journey.

At ten o'clock the chauffeur arrived, and was shown up to the Turnours'
vast Louis XVI. salon. He looked as much like an icily regular,
splendidly null, bronze statue as a flesh-and-blood young man could
possibly look, for that, no doubt, is his conception of the part of a
well-trained "shuvver"; and he did not seem aware of my existence as he
stood, cap in hand, ready for orders.

As for me, I flatter myself that I was equally admirable in my own
_métier_. I was assorting a motley collection of guide-books, novels,
maps, smelling-salts, and kodaks when he came in, and was dying to look
up, but I remained as sweetly expressionless as a doll.

The bronze statue respectfully inquired how its master would like to
make a little _détour_, instead of going by way of Aix-en-Provence to
Avignon, as arranged. Within an easy run was a spot loved by artists,
and beginning to be talked about--Martigues on the Etang de Berre, a
salt lake not far from Marseilles--said to be picturesque. The Prince of
Monaco was fond of motoring down that way.

At the sound of a princely name her ladyship's mind made itself up with
a snap. So the change of programme was decided upon, and curious as to
the chauffeur's motive, I questioned him when again we sat shoulder to
shoulder, the salt wind flying past our faces.

"Why the Etang de Berre?" I asked.

"Oh, I rather thought it would interest you. It's a queer spot."

"Thank you. You think I like queer spots--and things?"

"Yes, and people. I'm sure you do. You'll like the Etang and the country
round, but _they_ won't."

"That's a detail," said I, "since this tour runs itself in the interests
of the _femme de chambre_ and the chauffeur."

"We're the only ones who have any interests that matter. It's all the
same to them, really, where they go, if I take the car over good roads
and land them at expensive hotels at night. But I'm not going to do that
always. They've got to see the Gorge of the Tarn. They don't know that
yet, but they have."

"And won't they like seeing it?"

"Lady Turnour will hate it."

"Then we may as well give it up. Her will is mightier than the sword."

"Once she's in, there'll be no turning back. She'll have to push on to
the end."

"She mayn't consent to go in."

"Queen Margherita of Italy is said to have the idea of visiting the Tarn
next summer. Think what it would mean to Lady Turnour to get the start
of a queen!"

"You are Machiavelian! When did you have this inspiration?"

"Well, I got thinking last night that, as they have plenty of
time--almost as much time as money--it seemed a pity that I should whirl
them along the road to Paris at the rate planned originally. You see,
though there are plenty of interesting places on the way mapped
out--you've been to Tours, you say--"

"What of that?"

"Oh, the trip might as well be new for everybody except myself; and as
you like adventures--"

"You think it's the Turnours' duty to have them."

"Just so. If only to punish her ladyship for grinding you down to fifty
francs a month. What a reptile!"

"If she's a reptile, I'm a cat to plot against her."

"Do cats plot? Only against mice, I think. And anyhow, _I'm_ doing all
the plotting. I've felt a different man since yesterday. I've got
something to live for."

"Oh, _what?_" The question asked itself.

"For a comrade in misfortune. And to see her to her journey's end. I
suppose that end will be in Paris?"

"No-o," I said. "I rather think I shall go on all the way to England
with Lady Turnour--if I can stand it. There's a person in England who
will be kind to me."

"Oh!" remarked Mr. Dane, suddenly dry and taciturn again. I didn't know
what had displeased him--unless he was sorry to have my company as far
as England; yet somehow I couldn't quite believe it was that.

All this talk we had while dodging furious trams and enormous waggons
piled with merchandise, in that maelstrom of traffic near the Marseilles
docks, which must be passed before we could escape into the country. At
last, coasting down a dangerously winding hill with a too suggestively
named village at the bottom--L'Assassin--the Aigle turned westward. The
chauffeur let her spread her wings at last, and we raced along a clear
road, the Etang already shimmering blue before us, like an eye that
watched and laughed.

Then we had to swing smoothly round a great circle, to see in all its
length and breadth that strange, hidden, and fishy fairy-land of which
Martigues is the door. Once the Phoenicians found their way here,
looking for salt, which is exploited to this day; Marius camped near
enough to take his morning dip in the Etang, perhaps; and Jeanne, queen
of Naples, held Martigues for herself. But now only fish, and fishermen,
and a few artists occupy themselves in that quaint little world which
one passes all regardlessly in the flying "_Côte d'Azur_."

As we sailed round the road which rings the sleepy-looking salt lake,
Lady Turnour had a window opened on purpose to ask what on earth the
Prince of Monaco found to admire in this flat country, where there were
no fine buildings? And her rebellion made me take alarm for the success
of our future plots. But the chauffeur (anxious for the same reason,
maybe, that she should be content) explained things nicely.

Why, said he, for one thing the best fish eaten at the best restaurants
of Monte Carlo came out of the Etang de Berre. The _bouillabaise_ which
her ladyship had doubtless tasted at La Reserve last night, originally
owed much to the same source; and talking of _bouillabaise_, Martigues
was almost as famous for it as La Reserve itself. One had but to lunch
at the little hotel Paul Chabas to prove that. And then, for less
material reasons, His Serene Highness might be influenced by the fact
that Corot had loved this ring of land which clasped the Etang de
Berre--Ziem, too, and other artists whose opinion could not be despised.

These arguments silenced if they didn't convince Lady Turnour, though
she had probably never heard of Ziem, or even Corot, and we two in front
were able to admire the charming scene in peace. Crossing bridges here
and there we saw, rising above sapphire lake and silver belt of olives
jewelled with rosy almond blossom, more than one miniature Carcassonne,
or ruined castle small as if peeped at through a diminishing glass.
There was Port le Bouc, the Mediterranean harbour of the Etang, or
watergate to fairyland, as Martigues was the door; Istre on its proud
little height; Miramas and Berre, important in their own eyes, and
pretty in all others when reflected in the glassy surface of blue water.
There were dark groups of cypresses, like mourning figures talking
together after a funeral--ancient trees who could almost remember the
Romans; and better than all else, there was Pont Flavian, which these
Romans had built.

Even Lady Turnour condescended to get out of the car to do honour to the
bridge with its two Corinthian arches of perfect grace and beauty; but
she had nothing to say to the poor little, tired-looking lions sitting
on top, which I longed to climb up and pat.

She wanted to push on, and her one thought of Aix-en-Provence was for
lunch. Was Dane sure we should find anything decent to eat there? Very
well, then the sooner we got it the better.

What a good thing there was someone on board the car to appreciate
Provence, someone to keep saying--"We're in Provence--_Provence!_"
repeating the word just for the joy and music of it, and all it means of
romance and history!

If there had not been someone to say and feel that, every turn of the
tyres would have been an insult to Provence, who had put on her
loveliest dress to bid us welcome. Among the olives and almonds, young
trees of vivid yellow spouted pyramids of thin, gold flame against a sky
of violet, and the indefinable fragrance of spring was in the air. We
met handsome, up-standing peasants in red or blue _beréts_, singing
melodiously in _patois_--Provençal, perhaps--as they walked beside their
string of stout cart-horses. And the songs, and the dark eyes of the
singers, and the wonderful horned harness which the noble beasts wore
with dignity, all seemed to answer us: "Yes, you are in Provence."

We talked of old Provence, my Fellow Worm and I, while our master and
mistress wearied for their luncheon; of the men and women who had passed
along this road which we travelled. What would Madame de Sévigné, or
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, or George Sand have said if a blue car like
ours had suddenly flashed into their vision? We agreed that, in any
case, not one of them--or any other person of true imagination--would
call abominable a wonderful piece of mechanism with the power of
flattening mountains into plains, triumphing over space, annihilating
distance; a machine combining fiercest energy with the mildest docility.
No, only old fogies would close their hearts to a machine fit for the
gods, and pride themselves on being motophobes forever. We felt
ourselves, car and all, to be worthy of this magic way, lined with
blossoms that played like rosy children among the strange rocks
characteristic of Provence--rocks which seemed to have boiled up all hot
out of the earth, and then to have vied with each other in hardening
into most fantastic shapes. Even we felt ourselves worthy to meet a few
troubadours, as we drew near to Aix, where once they held their Courts
of Love; and we had talked ourselves into an almost dangerously romantic
mood by the time we arrived at the hotel in the Cours Mirabeau.

There, in the wide central _Place_, sprayed a delicious fountain
splashed with gold by the sunlight that filtered through an arbour of
great trees; and there, too, was a statue of good King René. Perhaps, if
I hadn't known that Aix-en-Provence was the home of the troubadours, and
that its springs had been loved by the Romans before the days of
Christianity, I might not have thought it more charming than many
another ancient sleepy town of France; but it is impossible to
disentangle one's imagination and sentiment from one's eyesight;
therefore, Aix seemed an exquisite place to me.

Now that I knew how knight-errantry in some of its branches was likely
to affect Mr. Dane's pocket, I resolved that nothing should tempt me to
encourage him in the pursuit. No matter how many flirtatious smiles were
shed upon me by enterprising waiters, no matter how many conversations
were begun by couriers who took me for rather a superior sample of
"young person," I would bear all, all, without a complaint which might
seem like a hint for protection.

When Lady Turnour had forgotten me, in the dazzling light that beat
about the thought of luncheon, I almost bustled into the hotel, and
asked for the servants' dining-room. I knew that there was little hope
of eating alone, for several important-looking motor-cars were drawn up
before the hotel; but I was hardly prepared for the gay company I found
assembled.

Three chauffeurs, a valet, and two maids were lunching, and judging from
appearances the meal was far enough advanced to have cemented lifelong
friendships. Wine being as free as the air you breathe, in this country
of the grape, naturally the big glass _caraffes_ behind the plates were
more than half empty, and the elder of the two elderly maids had a
shining pink knob on her nose.

I hadn't yet taken off my diving-bell (as I've named my head covering),
and every eye was upon me during the intricate process of removal.
Conversation, which was in French, slackened in the interests of
curiosity; and when the new face was exposed to public gaze the three
gallant chauffeurs jumped up, as one man, each with the kind intention
of placing me in a chair next himself. "_Voilà une petite tête trop
jolie pour être cachée comme ça!_" exclaimed the best looking and
boldest of the trio.

The ladies of the party sniffed audibly, and raised their somewhat
moth-eaten eyebrows at each other in virtuous disapproval of a young
female who provoked such remarks from strangers. The valet, who had the
air of being engaged to the maid with the nose, confined himself to a
non-committal grin, but the second and third chauffeurs loyally
supported their leader. "_Vous avez raison_," they responded, laughing
and showing quantities of white teeth. Then they followed up their
compliment by begging that mademoiselle would sit down, and allow her
health to be drunk--with that of the other ladies.

"Yes, sit down by me," said Number One, indicating a chair. "This is the
Queen's throne."

"By me," said Number Two. "I'll cut up your meat for you."

"By me," said Number Three. "I'll give you my share of pudding."

By this time I was red to the ears, not knowing whether it were wiser
for a lady's-maid to run away, or to take the rough chaff
good-humouredly, and make the best of it. I fluttered, undecided, never
thinking of the old adage concerning the woman who hesitates.

In an instant, it was forcibly recalled to my mind, for Number One
chauffeur, smelling strongly of the good red wine of Provence, came
forward and offered me his arm.

This was too much.

"Please don't!" I stammered, in my confusion speaking English.

"_Ah, Mademoiselle est Anglaise!_" the two others exclaimed, "_Vive
l'entente cordiale!_ We are Frenchmen. You are Italian. She belongs to
our side."

"Let her choose," said the handsome Italian, pointing his moustache and
doing such execution upon me with his splendid eyes, that if they'd been
Maxim guns I should have fallen riddled with bullets.

"I'll sit by nobody," I managed to answer, this time in French. "Please
take your seats. I will have a chair at the other end of the table."

"You see, mademoiselle is too polite to choose between us. She's afraid
of a duel," laughed good-looking Number One. "I tell you what we must
do. We'll draw lots for her. Three pellets of bread. The biggest wins."

"Beg your pardon, monsieur," remarked Mr. Dane, whom I hadn't seen as he
opened the door, "mademoiselle is of my party. She is waiting for me."

His voice was perfectly calm, even polite, but as I whirled round and
looked at him, fearing a scene, I saw that his eyes were rather
dangerous. He looked like a dog who says, as plainly as a dog can speak,
"I'm a good fellow, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. But put
that bone down, or I bite."

The Italian dropped the bone (I don't mind the simile) not because he
was afraid, I think, but because Mr. John Dane's chin was much squarer
and firmer than his; and because such sense of justice as he had told
him that the newcomer was within his rights.

"And I beg mademoiselle's pardon," he replied with a bow and a flourish.

"I'm so glad you've come--but I oughtn't to be, and I didn't expect
you," I said, when my chauffeur had pulled out a chair for me at the end
of the table farthest from the other maids and chauffeurs.

"Why not?" he wanted to know, sitting down by my side.

"Because I suppose it's the best hotel in town, and--"

"Oh, you're thinking of my pocket! I wish I hadn't said what I did last
night. Looking back, it sounds caddish. But I generally do blurt out
things stupidly. If I didn't, I shouldn't be 'shuvving' now--only that's
another story. To tell the whole truth, it wasn't the state of my
pocketbook alone that influenced me last night. I had two other reasons.
One was a selfish one, and the other, I hope, unselfish."

"I hope the selfish one wasn't fear of being bored?"

"If that's a question, it doesn't deserve an answer. But because you've
asked it, I'll tell you both reasons. I'd stopped at La Reserve before,
in--in rather different circumstances, and I thought--not only might it
make talk about me, but--"

"I understand," I said. "Of course, Lady Turnour isn't as careful a
chaperon as she ought to be."

Then we both laughed, and the danger-signals were turned off in his
eyes. When he isn't smiling, Mr. Dane sometimes looks almost sullen,
quite as if he could be disagreeable if he liked; but that makes the
change more striking when he does smile.

"You needn't worry about that pocket of mine," he went on, as we ate our
luncheon. "It's as cheap here as anywhere; and when I saw all those
motors before the door, I made up my mind that you'd probably need a
brother, so I came as soon as I could leave the car."

"So you are my brother, are you?" I echoed.

"Don't you think you might adopt me, once for all, in that relationship?
Then, you see, the chaperoning won't matter so much. Of course, it's
early days to take me on as a brother, but I think we'd better begin at
once."

"Before I know whether you have any faults?" I asked. And just for the
minute, the French half of me was a little piqued at his offer. That
part of me pouted, and said that it would be much more amusing to travel
in such odd circumstances beside a person one could flirt with, than to
make a pact of "brother and sister." He might have given me the chance
to say first that I'd be a sister to him! But the American half slapped
the French half, and said: "What silly nonsense! Don't be an idiot, if
you can help it. The man's behaving beautifully. And it will just do you
good to have your vanity stepped on, you conceited little minx!"

"Oh, I've plenty of faults, I'll tell you to start with--plenty you may
have noticed already, and plenty more you haven't had time to notice
yet," said my new relative. "I'm a sulky brute, for one thing, and I've
got to be a pessimist lately, for another--a horrid fault, that!--and I
have a vile temper--"

"All those faults might be serviceable in a _brother_," I said. "Though
in any one else--"

"In a friend or a lover, they'd be unbearable, of course; I know that,"
he broke in. "But who'd want me for a friend? And as for a lover, why,
I'm struck off the list of eligibles, forever--if I was ever on it."

After that, we ate our luncheon as fast as we could (a very bad habit,
which I don't mean to keep up for man or brother), and even though the
others had begun long before we did, we finished while they were still
cracking nuts and peeling apples, their spirits somewhat subdued by the
Englishman's presence.

"The great folk won't have got their money's worth for nearly an hour
yet," said Mr. Dane. "Don't you want to go and have a look at the
Cathedral? There are some grand things to see there--the triptych called
'Le Buisson Argent,' and some splendid old tapestry in the choir; a
whole wall and some marble columns from a Roman temple of Apollo--oh,
and you mustn't forget to look for the painting of St. Mitre the Martyr
trotting about with his head in his hands. On the way to the Cathedral
notice the doorways you'll pass. Aix is celebrated for its doorways."

(Evidently my brother passed through Aix, as well as along the Corniche,
under "different circumstances!")

"You mean--I'm to go alone?"

"Yes, I can't leave the car to take you. I'm sorry."

The French half of me was vexed again, but didn't dare let the sensible
American half, which knew he was right, see it, for fear of another
scolding.

I thanked him in a way as businesslike as his own, and said that I would
take his advice; which I did. Although I hate sightseeing by myself, I
wouldn't let him think I meant to be always trespassing on his good
nature; and afterward I was glad I hadn't yielded to my inclination to
be helpless, for the Cathedral and the doorways were all he had
promised, and more. It was a scramble to see anything in the few minutes
I had, though, and awful to feel that Lady Turnour was hanging over my
head like a sword. The thought of how she would look and what she would
say if I kept the car waiting was a string tied to my nerves, pulling
them all at once, like a jumping-jack's arms and legs, so that I
positively ran back to the hotel, more breathless than Cinderella when
the hour of midnight began to strike. But there was the magic glass
coach, not yet become a pumpkin; there was the chauffeur, not turned
into whatever animal a chauffeur does turn into in fairy stories; and
there were not Sir Samuel and her ladyship, nor any sign of them.

"Thank goodness, I'm not late!" I panted. "I was afraid I was. That dear
verger wouldn't realize that there could be anything of more importance
in the world than the statue of Ste. Martha and the Tarasque."

"Nothing is, really," said Mr. Dane, glancing up from some
dentist-looking work he was doing in the Aigle's mouth under her lifted
bonnet. "But you _are_ a little late--"

"Oh!" I gasped, pink with horror. "You don't mean to say the Turnours
have been out, and waiting?"

"I do, but don't be so despairing. I told them I thought I'd better
look the car over, and wasn't quite ready. That's always true, you know.
A motor's like a pretty woman; never objects to being looked at. So they
said 'damn,' and strolled off to buy chocolates."

"It's getting beyond count how many times you've saved me, and this is
only our second day out," I exclaimed. "Here they come now, as they
always do, when we exchange a word."

I trembled guiltily, but there was no more than a vague general
disapproval in Lady Turnour's eyes, the kind of expression which she
thinks useful for keeping servants in their place.

I got into mine, on the front seat; the car's bonnet got into its, the
chauffeur into his, and at just three o'clock we turned our backs upon
good King René.

The morning had drunk up all the sunshine of the day, leaving none for
afternoon, which was troubled with a hint of coming mistral. The
landscape began to look like a hastily sketched water-colour, with its
hills and terraces of vine; and above was a pale sky, blurred like
greasy silver. The wind roamed moaning among the tops of the tall
cypresses, set close together to protect the meadows from one of "the
three plagues of Provence." And even as the mistral tweaked our noses
with a chilly thumb and finger, our eyes caught sight of the second and
more dreaded plague: the deceitfully gentle-seeming Durance, which in
its rage can come tearing down from the Alps with the roar of a famished
lion.

Far above the wide river, the Aigle glided across a high-hung suspension
bridge, the song of the water floating up to our ears mingling with the
purr of the motor--two giant forces, one set loose by nature, the other
by man, duetting harmoniously together, while the wind wailed over our
heads. But for the third and last plague of Provence we would have had
to search in vain, for the land is no longer tormented by Parliament.

Always the road had stretched before us, up hill after hill, as straight
drawn between its scantily grass-covered banks as the parting in an old
man's hair; and always, far ahead, wave following wave of hill and
mountain had seemed to roll toward us like the sea as we advanced to
meet them. After the vineyards had come wild rocks, set with crumbling
forts, and towers, and châteaux; then the mild interest of fruit blossom
spraying pink and white among primly pollarded olives; then grape
country again, with squat, low-growing vines like gnomes kicking up
gnarled legs as they turned somersaults; then a break into wonderful
mountain country, with Orgon's ruins towering skyward, dark as despair,
a wild romance in stone. But before we reached the great suspension
bridge, the Pont de Bonpas, the landscape appeared exhausted after its
sublime efforts, and inclined to quiet down for a rest. It was only near
Avignon that it sprung up refreshed, ready for more strange surprises;
and the grim grandeur of the scenery as we approached the ancient town
seemed to prophesy the mediæval towers and ramparts of the historic
city.

Skirting the huge city wall, the blue car was the one note of modernity;
but hardly had we turned in at a great gate worthy to open in welcome
for Queen Jeanne of Naples, or Bertrand du Guesclin, than we were in the
hum of twentieth-century life. I resented the change, for one expects
nothing, wants nothing, modern in Avignon; but in a moment or two we had
left the bright cafés and shops behind, to plunge back into the middle
ages. Anything, it seemed, might happen in the queer, shadowed streets
of tall old houses with mysterious doorways, through which the Aigle
cautiously threaded, like a glittering crochet needle practicing a new
stitch. Then, in the quiet _place_, asleep and dreaming of stirring
deeds it once had seen, we stopped before a dignified building more like
some old ducal family mansion than a hotel.

But it was a hotel, and we were to stop the night in it, leaving all
sightseeing for the next morning. Lady Turnour was tired. She had done
too much already for one day--with a reproachful glance at the chauffeur
whom she thus made responsible for her prostration. Nothing would induce
her to go out again that evening, and she thought that she would dine in
her own sitting-room. She didn't like old places, or old hotels, but she
supposed she would have to make the best of this one. She was a woman
who _never_ complained, unless it really was her duty, and then she
didn't hesitate.

This was her mood when getting out of the car, but inside the quaint and
charming house a look at the visitors' register changed it in a flash.
There was one prince and one duke; there were several counts; and as to
barons, they were peppered about in rich profusion. Each noble being was
accompanied by his chauffeur, so evidently it was the "thing" to stop in
the Hotel de l'Europe, and the _haut monde_ considered Avignon worth
wasting time upon. Instantly her ladyship resolved to recover
gracefully from her fatigue, and descend to the public dining-room for
dinner.

So fascinated was she by the list of great names, that she lingered over
the reading of them, as one lingers over the last strawberries of the
season; and I had to stand at attention close behind her, with her rugs
over my arm, lest any one should miss seeing that she had a maid.

"Dane says the best thing is to make Avignon a centre, and stop here two
or three nights, 'doing' the country round, before going on to Nîmes or
Arles," she said to Sir Samuel, who was clamouring for the best rooms in
the house. "I didn't feel I should like that plan, but thinking it over,
I'm not sure he isn't right."

I knew very well what her "thinking it over" meant!

They stood discussing the pros and cons, and as I didn't yet know the
numbers of our rooms, I was obliged to wait till I was told. I was not
bored, however, but was looking about with interest, when I heard the
teuf-teuf of a motor-car outside. "There goes Mr. Jack Dane with the
Aigle," I thought; and yet there was a difference in the sound. I'm too
amateurish in such matters to understand the exact reason for such
differences, though chauffeurs say they could tell one make of motor
from another by ear if they were blindfolded. Perhaps it wasn't our car
leaving, but another one coming to the hotel!

I had nothing better to do than to watch for new arrivals. My eyes were
lazily fixed on the door, and presently it opened. A figure, all fur and
a yard wide, came in.

It was the figure of Monsieur Charretier.




CHAPTER X


For a minute everything swam before me, as it used to at the Convent
after some older girl had twisted up the ropes of the big swing, with me
in it, and let me spin round. Also, I felt as if a jugful of hot water
had been dashed over my head. I seemed to feel it trickling through my
hair and into my ears.

If I could have moved, I believe I should have bolted like a frightened
rabbit, perfectly regardless of what Lady Turnour might think, caring
only to dart away without being caught by the man I'd done such wild
deeds to escape. But I was as helpless as a person in a nightmare; and,
indeed, it was as unreal and dreadful to me as a nightmare to see that
fat, fur-coated figure walking toward me, with the bearded face of
Monsieur Charretier showing between turned-up collar and motor-cap
surmounted by lifted goggles.

They say you have time to think of everything while you are drowning. I
believe that, now, because I had time to think of everything while that
furry gentleman took a dozen steps. I thought of all the things he and
my cousins had ever done to disgust me with him during his "courtship."
I asked myself whether his arrival here was a coincidence, or whether
he'd been tracking me all along, step by step, while I'd been chuckling
to myself over my lucky escape. I thought of what he would do when he
recognized me, and what Lady Turnour would say, and Sir Samuel. And
although I couldn't see exactly what good he could do in such a
situation, I wished vaguely that my brother the chauffeur were on the
spot. Then suddenly, with a wild rush of joy, I remembered that I was
facing the danger through my little talc window.

Any properly trained heroine of melodrama would have ejaculated "Saved!"
but I haven't a tragedy nose, and I gave only a stifled squeak, more
like the swan-song of a dying frog than anything more romantic.

Nobody heard it, luckily; and Monsieur Charretier, who had just come
into the twilight of the hall from the brighter light out of doors,
bustled past the retiring figure of the lady's-maid without a glance. I
had even to take a step out of his way, not to be brushed by his fur
shoulder, so wide he was in his expensive motoring coat; and trembling
from the shock, I awkwardly collided with Lady Turnour. She, in her
turn, avoiding my onslaught as if I'd been a beggar in rags, stepped on
Monsieur Charretier's toe.

He exclaimed in French, she apologized in English.

He bowed a great deal, assuring madame that she had not inconvenienced
him. She accused her maid, whose stupidity was in fault; and because
each one looked to the other rich and prosperous they were extremely
polite to one another. Even then, though her ladyship snapped at me,
"What _has_ come over you, Elise? You're as clumsy as a cow!" he had no
notice to waste upon the _femme de chambre_. Yet I dared not so much as
murmur, "Pardon!" lest he should recognize my voice.

Fortunately my mistress and her husband were now ready to go up to
their rooms, and we left Monsieur Charretier engaging quarters for
himself and his chauffeur. Evidently he was going to stop all night; but
from his indifference to me I judged joyfully that he had not come to
the hotel armed with information concerning my movements. He might be
searching for his lost love, but he didn't know that she was at hand.

All my pleasure in the thought of sightseeing at Avignon was gone, like
a broken bubble. I shouldn't dare to see any sights, lest I should be
seen. But stopping indoors wouldn't mean safety. Lady's-maids can't keep
their rooms without questions being asked; and if I pretended to be ill,
very likely Lady Turnour would discharge me on the spot, and leave me
behind as if I were a cast-off glove. Yet if I flitted about the
corridors between my mistress's room and mine, I might run up against
the enemy at any minute.

I tried to mend the ravelled edges of my courage by reminding myself
that Monsieur Charretier couldn't pick me up in his motor-car, and run
off with me against my will; but the argument wasn't much of a
stimulant. To be sure, he couldn't use violence, nor would he try; but
if he found me here he would "have it out" with me, and he would tell
things to Lady Turnour which would induce her to send me about my
business with short shrift.

He could say that I'd run away from my relatives, who were also my
guardians, and altogether he could make out a case against me which
would look a dark brown, if not black. Then, when Lady Turnour and Sir
Samuel had washed their hands of me, and I was left in a strange hotel,
practically without a sou--unless the Turnours chose to be
inconveniently generous, and packed me off with a ticket to Paris--I
should find it very difficult to escape from my Corn Plaster admirer.
This time there would be no kind Lady Kilmarny to whom I could appeal.

Between two evils, one chooses that which makes less fuss. It wasn't as
intricate to risk facing Monsieur Charretier as it was to eat soap and
be seized with convulsions; so I went about my business, waiting upon
her ladyship as if I had not been in the throes of a mental earthquake.
She was not particularly cross, because the gentleman whose acquaintance
I had thrust upon her might turn out to be Somebody, in which case my
clumsiness would be a blessing in disguise; but if she had boxed my ears
I should hardly have felt it.

Bent upon dazzling the eyes of potentates in the dining-room, and
outshining possible princesses, the lady was very particular about her
dress. Although the big luggage had gone on by train to some town of
more importance (in her eyes) than Avignon, she had made me keep out a
couple of gowns rather better suited for a first night of opera in Paris
than for dinner at the best of provincial hotels. She chose the smarter
of these toilettes, a black _chiffon_ velvet embroidered with golden
tiger-lilies, and filled in with black net from shoulder to throat. Then
the blue jewel-bag was opened, and a nodding diamond tiger-lily to match
the golden ones was carefully selected from a blinding array of
brilliants, to glitter in her masses of copper hair. Round her neck went
a rope of pearls that fell to the waist whose slenderness I had just,
with a mighty muscular effort, secured; but not until she had dotted a
few butterflies, bats, beetles and other scintillating insects about her
person was she satisfied with the effect. At least, she was certain to
create a sensation, as Sir Samuel proudly remarked when he walked in to
get his necktie tied by me--a habit he has adopted.

"I wonder if I ought to trust Elise with my bag?" Lady Turnour asked
him, anxiously, at last. "So far, since we've been on tour, I've carried
it over my arm everywhere, but it doesn't go very well with a costume
like this. What do you think?"

"Why, I think that Elise is a very good girl, and that your jewels will
be perfectly safe with her if you tell her to take care of the bag, and
not let it out of her sight," replied Sir Samuel, evidently embarrassed
by such a question within earshot of the said Elise.

"Perhaps I'd better have dinner in my own room, so as to guard it more
carefully?" I suggested, brightening with the inspiration.

"That's not necessary," answered her ladyship. "You can perfectly well
eat downstairs, with the bag over your arm, as I have done for the last
two days. I don't intend to pay extra for you to have your meals served
in your room on any excuse whatever."

I couldn't very well offer to pay for myself. That would have raised the
suspicion that I had hidden reasons of my own for dining in private, and
I regretted that I hadn't held my tongue. Lady Turnour ostentatiously
locked the receptacle of her jewels with its little gilded key, which
she placed in a gold chain-bag studded with rubies as large as currants;
and then, reminding me that I was responsible for valuables worth she
didn't know how many thousands, she swept away, leaving a trail of white
heliotrope behind.

In any case I would wait, I thought, until I could be tolerably certain
that all the guests of the hotel had gone down to dinner. If I knew
Monsieur Charretier, he would be among the first to feed, but I couldn't
afford to run needless risks. I lingered over the task of putting my
mistress's belongings in order, almost with pleasure, and then, once in
my own room, I took as long as I could with my own toilet. I was ready
at last, and could think of no further excuse for pottering, when
suddenly it occurred to me that I might do my hair in a demurer, less
becoming way, so that, if I should have the ill luck to encounter a
sortie of the enemy, I might still contrive to pass without being
recognized.

I pinned a clean towel round my neck, barber fashion, and pulling the
pins out of my hair, shook it down over my shoulders. But before I could
twist it up again, there came a light tap, tap, at the door.

"There!" I thought. "Some one has been sent to tell me the servants'
dinner will be over if I don't hurry. Perhaps it's too late already, and
I'm _so_ hungry!"

I bounced to the door, and threw it wide open, to find Mr. John Dane
standing in the passage, holding a small tray crowded with dishes.

"Here you are," he said, in the most matter-of-fact way, as if bringing
meals to my door had been a fixed habit with him, man and boy, for
years. "Hope I haven't spilt anything! There's such a crush in our
feeding place that I thought you'd be safer up here. So I made friends
with a dear old waiter chap, and said I wanted something nice for my
sister."

"You didn't!" I exclaimed.

"I did. Do you mind much? I understood it was agreed that was our
relationship."

"No, I don't mind much," I returned. "Thank you for everything." I shook
back a cloud of hair, and glanced up at the chauffeur. Our eyes met, and
as I took the tray my fingers touched his. His dark face grew faintly
red, and then a slight frown drew his eyebrows together.

"Why do you suddenly look like that?" I asked. "Have I done anything to
make you cross?"

"Only with myself," he said.

"But why? Are you sorry you've been kind to me? Oh, if you only knew, I
need it to-night. Go on being kind."

"You're not the sort of girl a man can be kind to," he said, almost
gruffly, it seemed to me.

"Am I ungrateful, then?"

"I don't know what you are," he answered. "I only know that if I looked
at you long as you are now I should make an ass of myself--and make you
detest or despise me. So good night--and good appetite."

He turned to go, but I called him back. "Please!" I begged. "I'll only
keep you one minute. I'm sure you're joking, big brother, about being an
ass, or poking fun at me. But I don't care. I need some advice so badly!
I've no one but you to give it to me. I know you won't desert me,
because if you were like that you wouldn't have come to stop at this
hotel to watch over your new sister--which I'm sure you did, though
that may sound ever so conceited."

"Of course I won't desert you," he said. "I couldn't--now, even if I
would. But I'll go away till you've had your dinner, and--and made
yourself look less like a siren and more like an ordinary human
being--if possible. Then I'll run up and knock, and you can come out in
the passage to be advised."

"A siren--with a towel round her neck!" I laughed. "If I should sing to
you, perhaps you might say--"

"Don't, for heaven's sake, or there would be an end of--your brother,"
he broke in, laughing a little. "It wouldn't need much more." And with
that he was off.

He is very abrupt in his manner at times, certainly, this strange
chauffeur, and yet one's feelings aren't exactly hurt. And one feels,
somehow, as I think the motor seems to feel, as if one could trust to
his guidance in the most dangerous places. I'm sure he would give his
life to save the car, and I believe he would take a good deal of trouble
to save me; indeed, he has already taken a good deal of trouble, in
several ways.

When he had gone I set down the tray, shut the door, and went to see how
I really did look with my hair hanging round my shoulders. My ideas on
the subject of sirenhood are vague; but I must confess, if the creatures
are like me with my hair down, they must be quite nice, harmless little
persons. I admire my hair, there's so much of it; and at the ends, a
good long way below my waist, there's such a thoroughly agreeable curl,
like a yellow sea-wave just about to break. Of course, that sounds very
vain; but why shouldn't one admire one's own things, if one has things
worth admiring? It seems rather ungrateful to Providence to cry them
down; and ingratitude was never a favourite vice with me.

One would have said that the chauffeur knew by instinct what I liked
best to eat, and he must have had a very persuasive way with the waiter.
There was crême d'orge, in a big cup; there were sweetbreads, and there
was lemon meringue. Nothing ever tasted better since my "birthday
feasts" as a child, when I was allowed to order my own dinner.

My room being on the first floor, though separated by a labyrinth of
quaint passages from Lady Turnour's, there was danger in a corridor
conversation with Mr. Dane at an hour when people might be coming
upstairs after dinner; but he was in such a hurry to escape from me that
I had no time to explain; and I really had not the heart to make myself
hideous, by way of disguise, as I'd planned before his knock at the
door. As an alternative I put on a hat, pinning quite a thick veil over
my face, and when the expected tap came again, I was prepared for it.

"Are you going out?" my brother asked, looking surprised, when I flitted
into the dim corridor, with Lady Turnour's blue bag dutifully slipped on
my arm.

"No," I answered. "I'm _hiding_. I know that sounds mysterious, or
melodramatic, or something silly, but it's only disagreeable. And it's
what I want to ask your advice about." Then, shamefacedly when it came
to the point, I unfolded the tale of Monsieur Charretier.

"By Jove, and he's in this house!" exclaimed the chauffeur, genuinely
interested, and not a bit sulky. "You haven't an idea whether he's been
actually tracking you?"

"If he has, he must have employed detectives, and clever ones, too," I
said, defending my own strategy.

"Is he the sort of man who would do such a thing--put detectives on a
girl who's run away from home to get rid of his attentions?"

"I don't know. I only know he has no idea of being a gentleman. What can
you expect of Corn Plasters?"

"Don't throw his corn plasters in his face. He might be a good fellow in
spite of them."

"Well, he isn't--or with them, either. He may be acting with my cousin's
husband, who values him immensely, and wants him in the family."

"Is he very rich?"

"Disgustingly," said I, as I had said to Lady Kilmarny.

"Yet you bolted from a good home, where you had every comfort, rather
than be pestered to marry him?"

"Oh, what do you call a 'good home,' and 'every comfort'? I had enough
to eat and drink, a sunny room, decent clothes, and wasn't allowed to
work except for Cousin Catherine. But that isn't my idea of goodness and
comfort."

"Nor mine either."

"Yet you seem surprised at me."

"I was thinking that, little and fragile as you look--like a delicate
piece of Dresden china--you're a brave girl."

"Oh, thank you!" I cried. "I do love to be called 'brave' better than
anything, because I'm really such a coward. You don't think I've done
wrong?"

"No-o. So far as you've told me."

"What, don't you believe I've told you the truth?" I flashed out.

"Of course. But do women ever tell the whole truth to men--even to their
brothers? What about that kind friend of yours in England?"

"What kind friend?" I asked, confused for an instant. Then I remembered,
and--almost--chuckled. The conversation I had had with him came back to
me, and I recalled a queer look on his face which had puzzled me till I
forgot it. Now I was on the point of blurting out: "Oh, the kind friend
is a Miss Paget, who said she'd like to help me if I needed help," when
a spirit of mischief seized me. I determined to keep up the little
mystery I'd inadvertently made. "I know," I said gravely. "_Quite_ a
different kind of friend."

"Some one you like better than Monsieur Charretier?"

"_Much_ better."

"Rich, too?"

"Very rich, I believe, and of a noble family."

"Indeed! No doubt, then, you are wise, even from a worldly point of
view, in refusing the man your people want you to marry, and
taking--such extreme measures not to let yourself be over persuaded,"
said Mr. Dane, stiffly, in a changed tone, not at all friendly or nice,
as before. "I meant to advise you not to go on to England with Lady
Turnour, as the whole situation is so unsuitable; but now, of course, I
shall say no more."

"It was about something else I wanted advice," I reminded him. "But I
suppose I must have bored you. You suddenly seem so cross."

"I am not in the least cross," he returned, ferociously. "Why should I
be?--even if I had a right, which I haven't."

"Not the right of a brother?"

"Hang the rights of a brother!" exclaimed Mr. Dane.

"Then don't you want to be my brother any more?"

He walked away from me a few steps, down the corridor, then turned
abruptly and came back. "It isn't a question of what I want," said he,
"but of what I can have. Sometimes I think that after all you're nothing
but an outrageous little flirt."

"Sometimes? Why, you've only known me two days. As if you could judge!"

"Far be it from me to judge. But it seems as though the two days were
two years."

"Thank you. Well, I may be a flirt--the French side of me, when the
other side isn't looking. But I'm not flirting with _you_."

"Why should you waste your time flirting with a wretched chauffeur?"

"Yes, why? Especially as I've other things to think of. But I don't
_want_ your advice about those things now. I wouldn't have it even if
you begged me to. You've been too unkind."

"I beg your pardon, with all my heart," he said, his voice like itself
again. "I'm a brute, I know! It's that beastly temper of mine, that is
always getting me into trouble--with myself and others. Do forgive me,
and let me help you. I want to very much."

"I just said I wouldn't if you begged."

"I don't beg. I insist. I'll inflict my advice on you, whether you like
it or not. It's this: get the man out of Avignon the first thing
to-morrow morning."

"That's easy to say!"

"And easy to do--I hope. What would be his first act, do you think, if
he got a wire from you, dated Genoa, and worded something like this:
'Hear you are following me. I send this to Avignon on chance, to tell
you persecution must cease or I will find means to protect myself. Lys
d'Angely.'"

"I think he'd hurry off to Genoa as fast as he could go--by train,
leaving his car, or sending it on by rail. But how could I date a
telegram from Genoa?"

"I know a man there who--"

"Elise, I'm astonished at you!" exclaimed the shocked voice of Lady
Turnour. "Talking in corridors with strange young men! and you've been
out, too, without my permission, and _with_ my jewel-bag! How dare you?"

"I haven't been out," I ventured to contradict.

"Then you were going out--"

"And I had no intention of going out--"

"Don't answer me back like that! I won't stand it. What are you doing in
your hat, done up in a thick veil, too, at this time of night, as if you
were afraid of being recognized?"

I had to admit to myself that appearances were dreadfully against me. I
didn't see how I could give any satisfactory explanation, and while I
was fishing wildly in my brain without any bait, hoping to catch an
inspiration, the chauffeur spoke for me.

"If your ladyship will permit me to explain," he began, more
respectfully than I'd heard him speak to anyone yet, "it is my fault
ma'mselle is dressed as she is."

"What on earth is he going to say?" I wondered wildly, as he paused an
instant for Lady Turnour's consent, which perhaps an amazed silence
gave. I believed that he didn't know himself what to say.

"I wanted your ladyship's maid, when she had nothing else to do, to put
on her out-of-door things and let me make a sketch of her for an
illustrated newspaper I sometimes draw for. Naturally she didn't care
for her face to go into the paper, so she insisted upon a veil. My
sketch is to be called, 'The Motor Maid,' and I shall get half a guinea
for it, I hope, of which it's my intention to hand ma'mselle five
shillings for obliging me. I hope your ladyship doesn't object to my
earning something extra now and then, so long as it doesn't interfere
with work?"

"Well," remarked Lady Turnour, taken aback by this extraordinary plea,
as well she might have been, "I don't like to tell a person out and out
that I don't believe a word he says, but I do go as far as this: I'll
believe you when I see you making the sketch. And as for earning extra
money, I should have thought Sir Samuel paid good enough wages for you
to be willing to smoke a pipe and rest when your day's work was done,
instead of gadding about corridors gossiping with lady's-maids who've no
business to be outside their own room. But if you're so greedy after
money--and if you want me to take Elise's word--"

"I'll just begin the sketch in your ladyship's presence, if I may be
excused," said Mr. Dane, briskly. And to my real surprise, as well as
relief, he whipped a small canvas-covered sketch-book out of his pocket.
It was almost like sleight of hand, and if he'd continued the exhibition
with a few live rabbits and an anaconda or two I couldn't have been much
more amazed.

"I'd like to have a look at that thing," observed Lady Turnour,
suspiciously, as in a business-like manner he proceeded to release a
neatly sharpened pencil from an elastic strap.

Without a word or a guilty twitch of an eyelid he handed her the book,
and we both stood watching while the fat, heavily ringed and rosily
manicured fingers turned over the pages.

He could sketch, I soon saw, better than I can, though I've (more or
less) made my living at it. There were types of French peasants done in
a few strokes, here and there a suggestion of a striking bit of mountain
scenery, a quaint cottage, or a ruined castle. Last of all there was a
very good representation of the Aigle, loaded up with the Turnours'
smart luggage, and ready to start. My lips twitched a little, despite
the strain of the situation, as I noted the exaggerated size of the
crest on the door panel. It turned the whole thing into a caricature;
but luckily her ladyship missed the point. She even allowed her face to
relax into a faint smile of pleasure.

"This isn't bad," she condescended to remark.

"I thought of asking your ladyship and Sir Samuel if there would be any
objection to my sending that to a Society motoring paper, and labelling
it 'Sir Samuel and Lady Turnour's new sixty-horse-power Aigle on tour
in Provence.' Or, if you would prefer my not using your name, I--"

"I see no reason why you should _not_ use it," her ladyship cut in
hastily, "and I'm sure Sir Samuel won't mind. Make a little extra money
in that way if you like, while we're on the road, as you have this
talent."

She gave him back the book, quite graciously, and the chauffeur began
sketching me. In three minutes there I was--the "abominable little
flirt!" in hat and veil, with Lady Turnour's bag in my hand, quite a
neat figure of a motor maid.

"You may put, if you like, 'Lady Turnour's maid,'" said that young
person's mistress, "if you think it would give some personal interest to
your sketch for the paper."

"Oh, this is for quite a different sort of thing," he explained. "Not
devoted to society news at all: more for caricatures and _funny_ bits."

"Oh, then I should certainly not wish my name to appear in _that_,"
returned her ladyship, her tone adding that, on the other hand, such a
publication was as suitable as it was welcome to a portrait of _me_.

"Now, Elise, I wish you to take those things off at _once_, and come to
my room," she finished. "Mind, I don't want you should keep me waiting!
And you can hand over that bag."

No hope of another word between us! Mr. Jack Dane saw this, and that it
would be unwise to try for it. Pocketing the sketch-book, he saluted
Lady Turnour with a finger to the height of his eyebrows, which gesture
visibly added to her sense of importance. Then, without glancing at me,
he turned and walked off.

It was not until he had disappeared round the bend of the corridor that
her ladyship thought it right to leave me.

I knew that she had made this little expedition in search of her maid
with the sole object of seeing what the mouse did while the cat was
away--a trick worthy of her lodging-house past! And I knew equally well
that before I tapped at her door a little later she had examined the
contents of the blue bag to make sure that I had extracted nothing. How
I pity the long procession of "slaveys" who must have followed each
other drearily in that lodging-house under the landlady's jurisdiction.
They, poor dears, could have had no chauffeur friends to save them from
daily perils, and it isn't likely that their mistress allowed such
luxuries as postmen or policemen.




CHAPTER XI


I decided to have my breakfast very early next morning, and would have
thought it a coincidence that Mr. Dane should walk into the couriers'
room at the same time if he hadn't coolly told me that he had been lying
in wait for me to appear.

"I thought, for several reasons, you would be early," he said. "So, for
all the same reasons and several more, I thought I'd be early too. I had
to know what the situation was to be."

"The situation?" I repeated blankly.

"Between us. Am I to understand that we've quarrelled?"

"We had," I said. "But even on good grounds, it's difficult to keep on
quarrelling with a person who has not only brought up your dinner and
sauced it with good advice, but saved you from--from the _dickens_ of a
scrape."

"I hope she didn't row you any more afterward?"

"No. She was too much interested, all the time I was undressing her, in
speculating about Monsieur Charretier to Sir Samuel. It seems that they
struck up an acquaintance over their coffee on the strength of a little
episode in the hall.

"Inadvertently I introduced them--threw them at each others' heads.
Monsieur Charretier--Alphonse, as he once asked me to call him!--told
her he was on his way to Cannes, where he heard that a friend of his,
whom it was very necessary for him to see, was visiting a Russian
Princess. He had stopped in Avignon, he said, because he was expecting
the latest news of the friend, a change of address, perhaps; and--I
don't know who proposed it, but anyway he arranged to go with Sir Samuel
and Lady Turnour to the Palace of the Popes at ten o'clock. Her ladyship
was quite taken with him, and remarked to Sir Samuel that there was
nothing so fascinating as a French gentleman of the _haut monde_. Also
she pronounced his broken English '_sweet_.' She wondered if he was
married, and whether the friend in Cannes was a woman or a man. Little
did she know that her maid could have enlightened her! Their joining
forces here is, as my American friend Pamela would say, 'the _limit_.'"

"Don't worry. The Palace of the Popes won't see him to-day," said the
chauffeur. "He's gone. Got a telegram. Didn't even wait for letters, but
told the manager to forward anything that came for him, Poste Restante,
Genoa."

"Oh, then you--"

"Acted for you on my own responsibility. There was nothing else to do,
if _anything_ were to be done; and you'd seemed to fall in with my
suggestion. It would have been a pity, I thought, if your visit to
Avignon were to be spoiled by a thing like that."

"Meaning Monsieur Charretier? I hardly slept last night for dwelling on
the pity of it."

"It's all right, then? I haven't put my foot into it?"

"Your foot! You've put your _brains_ into it. You said the other night
that I had presence of mind. It was nothing to yours."

"All's forgotten and forgiven, then?"

"It's forgotten that there was anything to forgive."

"And the 'motor maid' business? You didn't think it too clumsy?"

"I thought it most ingenious."

"It wasn't a lie, you know. I haven't a happy talent for lying. I do, or
rather did when I had nothing else on hand, send occasional sketches to
a paper. But the more I look at my 'motor maid,' the more I feel I
should like to keep her--in my sketch-book--if you're willing I should
have her?"

"Then I don't get my promised five shillings?" I laughed.

"I'll try and make up the loss to you in some other way."

"I have you to thank that I didn't lose my situation. So the debt is on
my side."

"You owe me the scolding you got. I oughtn't to have lured you into the
corridor."

"It was on my business. And there was no other way."

"It was my business to have thought of some other way."

"Are you your sister's keeper?"

"I wish I--Look here, mademoiselle _ma soeur_, I'm all out of repartees.
Perhaps I shall be better after breakfast. I shall be able to eat, now
that I know you've forgiven me."

"I don't believe you would care if I hadn't," I exclaimed. "You are so
stolid, so phlegmatic, you Englishmen!"

"Do you think so? Well, it would have been a little awkward for me to
have taken you about on a sightseeing expedition this morning if we were
at daggers drawn--no matter how appropriate the situation might have
been to Avignon manners of the Middle Ages, when everybody was either
torturing everybody else or fighting to the death."

"_Are_ you going to take me about?"

"That's for you to say."

"Isn't it for Lady Turnour to say?"

"Sir Samuel told me last night that I shouldn't be wanted till two
o'clock, as he was going to see the town with her ladyship. He wanted to
know if we could sandwich in something else this afternoon, as he
considered a whole day too much for one place. I suggested Vaucluse for
the afternoon, as it's but a short spin from Avignon, and I just
happened to mention that her ladyship might find use for you there, to
follow her to the fountain with extra wraps in case of mistral. I
thought, of all places you'd hate to miss Vaucluse. And we're to come
back here for the night."

I feared that Monsieur Charretier's sudden disappearance might upset the
Turnours' plans, but Mr. Dane didn't think so. He had impressed it upon
Sir Samuel that no motorist who had not thoroughly "done" Avignon and
Vaucluse would be tolerated in automobiling circles.

He was right in his surmise, and though her ladyship was vexed at losing
a new acquaintance whom it would have been "nice to know in Paris," she
resigned herself for the morning to the society of husband and
Baedeker. It was kind old Sir Samuel's proposal that I should be left
free to do some sight-seeing on my own account while they were gone (I
had meant to break my own shackles); and though my lady laughed to scorn
the idea that a girl of my class should care for historical
associations, she granted me liberty provided I utilized it in buying
her certain stay-laces, shoe-strings, and other small horrors for which
no woman enjoys shopping.

When she and Sir Samuel were out of the way, as safely disposed of as
Monsieur Charretier himself, I felt so extravagantly happy in reaction,
after all my worries, that I danced a jig in her ladyship's sacred
bedchamber.

Then I prepared to start for my own personally conducted expedition; and
this time I took no great pains to do my hair unbecomingly. Naturally, I
didn't want to be a jarring note in harmonious Avignon, so I made myself
look rather attractive for my jaunt with the chauffeur.

He was sauntering casually about the _Place_ before the hotel, where
long ago Marshal Brune was assassinated, and we walked away together as
calmly as if we had been followed by a whole drove of well-trained
chaperons. When one has joined the ranks of the lower classes, one might
as well reap some advantages from the change!

"What we'll do," said Mr. Dane, "is to look first at all the things the
Turnours are sure to look at last. By that plan we shall avoid them, and
as I know my way about Avignon pretty well, you may set your mind at
rest."

I can think of nothing more delightful than a day in Avignon, with an
agreeable brother and--a mind at rest. I had both, and made the most of
them.

When her ladyship's shoe-strings and stay-laces were off my mind and in
my coat pocket, we wandered leisurely about the modern part of the
wonderful town, which has been busier through the centuries in making
history than almost any other in France. Seen by daylight, I no longer
resented the existence of a new--comparatively new--Avignon. The pretty
little theatre, with its dignified statues of Corneill and Molière,
seemed to invite me kindly to go in and listen to a play by the
splendidly bewigged gentlemen sitting in stone chairs on either side of
the door. The clock tower with its "Jacquemart" who stiffly struck the
quarter hours with an automatic arm, while his wife criticized the
gesture, commanded me to stop and watch his next stroke; and the
curiosity shops offered me the most alluring bargains. People we met
seemed to have plenty of time on their hands, and to be very
good-natured, as if rich Provençal cooking agreed with their digestions.

Sure that the Turnours would be at the Palace of the Popes or in the
Cathedral, we went to the Museum, and searched in vain among a riot of
Roman remains for the tomb of Petrarch's Laura, which guide-books
promised. In the end we had to be satisfied with a memorial cross made
in the lovely lady's honour by order of some romantic Englishmen.

"Yet you say we're stolid and phlegmatic!" muttered Mr. Dane, as he read
the inscription. (Evidently that remark had rankled.)

We had not a moment to waste, but the Turnours had to be avoided; so my
brother proposed that we combine profit with prudence, and take a cab
along the road leading out to Port St. André. Where the ancient tower of
Philippe le Bel crowns a lower slope I should have my first sight of
that grim mountain of architecture, the Palace of the Popes. It was the
best place from which to see it, if its real grandeur were to be
appreciated, he said--or else to go to Villeneuve, across the Rhône,
which we dared not steal time to do; but the Turnours were certain not
to think of anything so esoteric in the way of sight-seeing.

The vastness of the stupendous mass of brick and stone took my breath
away for an instant, as I raised my eyes to look up, on a signal of
"Now!" from Mr. Dane. It seemed as if all the history, not alone of Old
Provence, but of France, might be packed away behind those tremendous
buttresses.

Of what romances, what tragedies, what triumphs, and what despairs could
those huge walls and towers tell, if the echoes whispering through them
could crystallize into words!

There Queen Jeanne of Naples--that fateful Marie Stuart of
Provence--stood in her youth and beauty before her accusers, knowing she
must buy her pardon, if for pardon she could hope. There the wretched
Bishop of Cahors suffered tortures incredible for plots his enemies
vowed he had conceived against the Pope. There came messages from
Western Kings and Eastern Emperors; there Bertrand du Guesclin, my
favourite hero, was excommunicated: and there great Rienzi lay in
prison.

"Now I think we might risk going to the Palace," said Mr. Dane, when we
had stood gazing in silence for more minutes than we could well afford.
So we made haste back, and walked up to the Rochers des Doms, where we
lurked cautiously in the handsome modern gardens, glorying in the view
over the old and new bridges, and to far off Villeneuve, where the Man
in the Iron Mask was first imprisoned. When we had admired the statue of
Althen the Persian, with his hand full of the beneficent madder that did
so much for Provence, we were rewarded for our patience by seeing Sir
Samuel and Lady Turnour rush out from the Papal Palace, looking furious.

"They look like that, because they've been inside," said the chauffeur.
"Their souls aren't artistic enough to resent consciously the ruin and
degradation of the place, but even they can be depressed by the hideous
whitewashed barracks which were once splendid rooms, worthy of kings.
You will look as they do if you go in."

"I hope my cheeks wouldn't be dark purple and my nose a pale lilac!" I
exclaimed.

"You're twenty, at most, and Lady Turnour's forty-five, at least," said
my brother. "You can stand the pinch of Mistral; but the inside of that
noble old pile is enough to turn the hair gray. It would be much more
original to let your imagination draw the picture."

"Then I will!" I cried, knowing that nothing pleases a man more in a
girl than taking his advice. By the lateness of the hour we judged that
the Turnours must have visited the Cathedral before they "did" the
Palace, so we went boldly on to Notre Dame des Doms, beloved of
Charlemagne.

No wonder, I said, that he had thought it worth restoring from the
ruins Saracens had left! Nothing could be more glorious than the
situation of the historic church, once first in importance, perhaps, in
all Christendom; and nothing could be more purely classic than the west
porch. We strained the muscles of our necks staring up at ancient,
fading frescoes, and rested them again in gazing at famous tombs; then
it was time to go, if we were not to start for Vaucluse too hungry to
feed satisfactorily on thoughts of Laura and Petrarch.

"Now to our own trough with the other beasts," I sighed. "What an
anti-climax! From the cathedral to the couriers' dining-room."

"I thought that we might have our own private trough, just this once, if
you don't object," said the chauffeur, almost wistfully. "It would be a
shame to spoil the memory of a perfect morning, wouldn't it, so don't
you think you might accept my humble invitation?"

I hesitated.

"Is it conventionality or economy that gives you pause?" he asked. "If
it's the latter, or rather a regard for my pocket, your conscience can
be easy. My pocket feels heavy and my heart light to-day. I remember a
little restaurant not far off where they do you in great style for a
franc or two. Will you come with me?"

He looked quite eager, and I felt myself unable to resist temptation.
"Yes," said I, "and thank you."

A biting wind, more like March than flowery April, nearly blew us down
into the town, and I was glad to find shelter in the warm, clean little
restaurant.

"_Is_ my nose lilac after all?" I inquired, when a dear old smiling
waiter had trotted off with our order, murmuring benevolently, "Doude de
zuide, M'sieur," like a true compatriot of Tartarin.

"A faint pink from the cheeks is undeniably reflected upon it," admitted
the chauffeur. "We're going to be let in for a cold snap as we get up
north," he went on. "I read in the papers this morning that there's been
a 'phenomenal fall of snow for the season' on the Cevennes and the
mountains of Auvergne. Do you weaken on the Gorges of the Tarn now I've
told you that?"

"Mine not to reason why. Mine but to do or die," I transposed, smiling
with conspicuous bravery.

"Not at all. It's yours to choose. I haven't even broken the Gorges,
yet, to the slaves of my hypnotic powers. I warn you that, if all the
papers say about snow is true, we may have adventures on the way. Would
you rather--"

"I'd rather have the adventures," I broke in, and had as nearly as
possible added "with you," but I stopped myself in time.

We lunched more gaily than double-dyed millionaires, and afterward,
while my host was paying away his hard-earned francs for our food, I
slipped out of the restaurant and into a little shop I had noticed close
by. The window was full of odds and ends, souvenirs of Avignon; and
there were picture-postcards, photographs, and coins with heads of
saints on them. In passing, on the way to lunch, I'd noticed a silver
St. Christopher, about the size of a two-franc piece; and as the Aigle
carries the saint like a figure-head, a glittering, golden statuette six
or seven inches high, I had guessed that St. Christopher must have been
chosen to fill the honourable position of patron saint for motors and
motorists.

"What's the price of that?" I asked, pointing to the coin.

It was ten francs, a good deal more than I could afford, more than half
my whole remaining fortune. "Could not madame make it a little cheaper?"
I pleaded with the fat lady whose extremely aquiline nose proclaimed
that she had no personal interest in saints. But no, madame could not
make it cheaper; the coin was of real silver, the figure well chased; a
recherché little pocket-piece, and a great luck-bringer for anybody
connected with the automobile. No accident would presume to happen to
one who carried _that_ on his person. Madame had, however, other coins
of St. Christopher, smaller coins in white metal which could scarcely be
told from silver. If mademoiselle wished to see them--

But mademoiselle did not wish to see them. It would be worse than
nothing to give a base imitation. Instead of feeling flattered, St.
Christopher would have a right to be annoyed, and perhaps to punish.
Recklessly I passed across the counter ten francs, and made the coveted
saint mine. Then I darted out, just in time to meet Mr. Dane at the door
of the restaurant.

"This is for you," I said. "It's to give you luck."

I pressed the coin into his hand, and he looked at it on his open palm.
For an instant I was afraid he was going to make fun of it, and my
superstition concerning it, which I couldn't quite deny if
cross-questioned. But his smile didn't mean that.

"You've just bought this--to give to me?" he asked.

"Yes," I nodded.

"Why? Not because you want to 'pay me back' for asking you to lunch--or
any such villainous thing, I hope, because--"

I shook my head. "I didn't think of that. I got it because I wanted to
bring you luck."

Then he slipped the coin into an inside pocket of his coat. "Thank you,"
he said. "But didn't I tell you that you'd brought me something better
than luck already?"

"What _is_ better than luck?"

"An interest in life. And the privilege of being a brother."




CHAPTER XII


It would be a singularly hard-headed, cold-hearted person who could set
out for Vaucluse without the smallest thrill; and hard heads and cold
hearts don't "run in our family." As we spun away from the Hotel de
l'Europe soon after two o'clock that afternoon I felt that I was largely
composed of thrill. Cold as the wind had grown, the thrill kept me warm,
mingling in my veins with ozone.

Inside the car the middle-aged honeymooners had an air of desperate
resignation which the consciousness of doing their duty according to
Baedeker gives to tourists. The tap was turned on in the newly invented
heating-apparatus in the car floor, through which hot water from the
radiator can be made to circulate; and I wondered, if this extreme
measure were resorted to already, what would be left to do when we
reached those high, white altitudes of which the chauffeur had been
speaking. I prayed that Lady Turnour might not read in the papers about
the "phenomenal fall of snow" in those regions, for if she did I was
afraid that even Mr. Dane's magnetic powers of persuasion might fail to
get her there. He might dangle Queen Margherita of Italy over her head
in vain, if worst came to worst: for what are queens to the most
inveterate tuft-hunters if the feet be cold? Yet now that "adventures"
were vaguely prophesied, I felt I could not give up the promised gorges
and mountains.

Out of Avignon we slid, past the old, old ramparts and the newer but
impressive walls, and turned at the right into the Marseilles road.
"Vaucluse!" said a kilometre-stone, and then another and another
repeated that enchanted and enchanting word, as we flew onward between
the Rhône and the Durance.

This was our own old way again, as far as the Pont de Bonpas; then our
road wound to the northeast, away from the world we knew--I said to
myself--and into a world of romance, a world created by the love of
Petrarch for Laura, and sacred to those two for ever more.

The ruined castle, with machicolated towers and haughty buttresses, on
the great rampart of a hill, was for me the porter's lodge at the
entrance gate of an enchanted garden, where poetic flowers of love
bloomed through seasons and centuries; laurels, roses, and lilies, and
pansies for remembrance. We didn't see those flowers with our bodies'
eyes, but what of that? What did it matter that to the Turnours in their
splendid glass cage this was just a road, with queer little gnome
dwellings scooped out of solid rock to redeem it from common-placeness,
with a fringe of deserted cottages farther on, and some ugly brickworks?
My spirit's eyes saw the flowers, and they clustered thicker and
brighter about Pieverde, where I insisted to Mr. Dane that Laura had
been born.

He was inclined to dispute this at first, and bring up the horrid theory
that the pure white star of Petrarch's life had been a mere Madame de
Sade, with a drove of uninteresting children. But eagerly I quoted
Petrarch himself, using all the arguments on which Pamela and I prided
ourselves at the Convent; and by the time we had got as far as that
sweet "little Venice full of water wheels," L'Isle, I'd persuaded him to
agree with me. In the midst of all that lovely, liquid music of running,
trickling, fluting water, who could go on callously insisting that Laura
resisted Petrarch merely because she was a fat married woman with a
large family?

All was green and pastoral here, and we seemed to have come into eternal
spring after the bleak, windy plains encircling Avignon. It was
beautiful to remember Petrarch's description of his golden-haired,
dark-eyed love, fair and tall as a lily, sitting in the grass among the
violets, where her bare feet gleamed whiter than the daisies when she
took off her sandals. Even Nicolete, flower of Provençal song, had no
whiter feet than Laura, I am sure!

We were slipping 

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