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Title: The suspicions of Ermengarde

Author: Maxwell Gray

Release date: February 20, 2024 [eBook #72999]

Language: English

Original publication: London: John Long

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUSPICIONS OF ERMENGARDE ***







  The Suspicions of
  Ermengarde


  By

  Maxwell Gray
  (Mary Gleed Tuttiett)


  Author of "The Silence of Dean Maitland," etc., etc.



  "Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,
  Im dunklen Laub die gold Orangen glühn?
  Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
  Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht;
                            Kennst du es wohl?"



  London
  John Long
  Norris Street, Haymarket
  [_All rights reserved_]




First published in 1908




  _WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

  The Silence of Dean Maitland
  The Reproach of Annesley
  In The Heart of the Storm
  A Costly Freak
      London: Kegan Paul

  The Last Sentence
  Sweethearts and Friends
  The House of Hidden Treasure
  The World's Mercy, and other Tales
  The Forest Chapel, and other Poems
  Four-Leaved Clover
  Richard Rosny
      London: William Heinemann

  The Great Refusal
  An Innocent Impostor
      London: John Long

  Ribstone Pippins
      London and New York: Harper & Bros.

  Lays of the Dragon-Slayer
      London: Sands & Co.




  Contents


  CHAPTER

  I.  THE LITTLE RIFT
  II.  AN INNOCENT VERY MUCH ABROAD
  III.  THE TRAIN DE LUXE
  IV.  THE AZURE SHORE
  V.  ON THE RIDGE
  VI.  MOUNTAIN SUNSET
  VII.  THE CONVENT STEPS
  VIII.  THE CARNIVAL
  IX.  THE CASINO
  X.  THE CASINO GARDENS
  XI.  KATZENJAMMER
  XII.  M. ISIDORE'S HEARTACHE
  XIII.  THE PUBLISHER'S PARCEL
  XIV.  AT TURBIA
  XV.  AN ITALIAN LESSON
  XVI.  THE SAPPHIRE NECKLACE
  XVII.  THE PROMENADE DU MIDI
  XVIII.  THE ONLY HOPE
  XIX.  AN ACT OF JUSTICE
  XX.  THE NECKLACE AGAIN
  XXI.  CONNEXIONS BY MARRIAGE




The Suspicions of Ermengarde



Chapter I

The Little Rift

Fog of the colour known as pea-soup--in reality amber mixed with
lemon-peel and delicately tinted with smut--pervaded the genial
shades of Kensington Gardens and cast a halo of breathless romance
over many a "long, unlovely street" and many a towering pile of
crudely hideous flats in the regions round about.  It sneaked down
chimneys, stalked insolently through front doors, regardless of
locks, curtains and screens; it wandered noiselessly about houses,
penetrating even to my lady's chamber; it permeated cosy
drawing-rooms and snug dining-rooms with gloom like that of an
ancestral ghost, or an unforgettable sorrow, or--the haunting horror
of unpaid bills.

"Yes, _that_ is the true, the inevitable simile, the fitting word,"
Ermengarde said to herself with melancholy triumph, from her downy
nest in the deep warm Chesterfield by the fire, "the haunting horror
of unpaid bills.  'Haunting horror' is good.  And it's not so much
the unpaidness of the bills as the size of them--and the kind of
them.  The butcher's bill, for instance--how _enormous_--and yet
Arthur takes it as coolly as the collection in church, or the
waiter's tip, that just means a finger slipped into a waistcoat
pocket and out again, without even looking.  When one thinks of the
lovely things one might buy with the butcher's quarterly bill and
can't!"

Looking up at the ceiling as if in ecstatic vision of lovely things,
she sighed deeply, and wished that man was not carnivorous, and
wondered why the world went so thwartingly, and what was the matter
with everything, and if civilization was worth that last, worst
penalty of a real London fog--an ideally high and gamey one like
this, that you might smell all the way across Dover Straits--as
least, so Arthur once averred of a fog of less powerful bouquet.

All of a sudden, out of the hidden heart of darkness, whence those
heavy fog-folds rolled, came, on the wings of some evil spirit of the
nether pit, the deadly thought--was Arthur worth--worth what? the
pains and penalties of wedded bliss?  Poor old Arthur!  No, no, that
was unthinkable; the downy depths of the Chesterfield suddenly became
void of the resting form; there was quick pacing to and fro in
fire-gleam and shadow, with knitted brow and troubled glance.

The Demon Influenza was to blame for much, for everything--yes,
everything, even that little rift within the lute of household joy
and peace.  For the little rift was there.  But could the Influenza
Demon be blamed for those five successive and expensive hats, that in
the space of half as many weeks had to be discarded, each after
either, as impossible--with her complexion--or for those two gowns,
creations of a tailor of European renown, that on the second Wearing
made her an absolute frump?  Had the Demon so irrevocably impaired
her looks and altered her figure?  That was conceivable; but not
Arthur's conduct on the occasion.  No demon, nothing, short of
original sin, could be answerable for that.

Memory flashed upon her brain a vivid picture of the Day of Judgment
face with which he had contemplated those five brand-new, chic and
costly hats arraigned in a row before him--the man had actually
disinterred them from various dark recesses in wardrobes--and,
instead of offering the balm of sympathy demanded by this five-fold
affliction, had snapped out the curt, harsh condemnation, "Could any
allowance stand that?" and walked off in wrath and gloom.

It was not as if she had complained of the allowance or ever so
remotely suggested its augmentation by a penny.  She had simply fled
for succour in a crisis of ill-fortune to the one being on earth from
whom she had a right to expect it--in the form of hard cash; she had
asked the bread of sympathy and received the stone of
condemnation--damnation, she muttered bitterly--from the man who--a
sob checked the current of reflection, but was gulped down.--And he
should have remembered that the Flu Demon had left her weak and
depressed, a condition liable to be greatly aggravated by unbecoming
hats.

He had been distinctly nasty about those hats, hatefully sarcastic
over the number, as if some special devilry resided in the sum of
twice two and one over.  By virtue of some ingrained perversity he
had censured her for a run of ill-luck--such runs will occur, as
every woman knows, in clothes, as well as in cards, commerce, horses,
hunting, everything not exclusively feminine--he had censured her for
an inevitable misfortune common to the race; he might as well have
found fault with her for being liable to death, disease and bad
husbands.

Many sorrows had in these last days fallen to Ermengarde's lot.  She
had been losing steadily at bridge; her last At Home had been a
fiasco; hockey had become impossible to her; her cook had been ill;
there were no golf-links within reach, and the motor flight, planned
for her across Europe by an intimate friend, had come to nothing in
consequence of the chauffeur being under arrest for manslaughter.
Meditating on these griefs in the lemon and smut-coloured dusk, her
heart sank, and she had just dried two very large tears on one very
small handkerchief, when the door opened and a visitor was
announced--that is, he would have been, had he not shot himself into
the room with the indecent vigour of aggressive good spirits,
squeezed her hand to a jelly, and filled the room with boisterously
cheerful observations, before there was time for the correct and
aggrieved maid to do anything but maliciously switch on a savage
glare of electric light and vanish.

"Not bucked up yet after that disastrous Flu?  You want sunshine,
colour, fresh life.  Why not try a winter at Cairo?  Nothing like
desert air--like champagne--cheers but not inebriates.  Yes, I'm off
again, bag and baggage, easel and golf-clubs.  Make Allonby take you
to Egypt--you wouldn't know yourself in the sunshine."

"Any more than in the darkness; but, should I know you?"

"Well, you'd see me in a better light.  Not that I say a word against
the poetry and mysticism--misty schism, not bad, eh?--of our native
fogs.  Still, you can have too much of a good thing--when it's fog."

"Or optimism," she sighed, switching off the light, and restoring the
glamour of ever-thickening fog, till the entrance of another
aggravatingly cheerful being obliged her to light one of the two
umbrella lamps that impeded progress in that part of the room not
entirely blocked by screens and potted palms and small and easily
upsettable tables, laden with frail and cherished trifles and
phalanxes of photographs, such as strew the suburban pilgrim's
progress from door to fireplace with stumbling-blocks, pitfalls and
stones of offence.

Just because Ermengarde's head ached and she had fallen into a vein
of pleasing melancholy and wanted to think things out in the
firelight that afternoon, people came trooping in, all breathing
visible breath and complaining of the fog, each alluding to its
density, dirt and inconvenience, as if it were an entirely new and
startling experience, peculiar to each separate individual.

An elderly woman in costly sables had to sit and cough in a corner
for five solid minutes before she was capable of receiving or
imparting instructions in the natural history of fog.  She was going,
she said, when able to speak, to try a winter in Algiers.  The sooner
she began to try the better, Ermengarde thought.  A ruddy John Bull
friend was off to Hyères--or Cannes--he was not sure which--for golf;
a grey retired general, purple from semi-asphyxiation, was bound for
the same place for the same reason.  People were going to San Remo,
to Alassio, to Bordighera, to Nice, to Biarritz, to Davos, chiefly,
to judge from their remarks, to find congenial British society and
avoid foreigners--especially Germans.  Somebody was going to motor to
Rome, thence through Florence, Venice and Dalmatia, going on to
Athens, and taking Buda-Pesth, Innspruck, the Tyrol, the Black
Forest, Belgium and Holland on the return journey; "that is, if we
ever do return," one of the party thoughtfully observed.  Hotels,
routes, the vexatiousness of Customs, the iniquitous slowness of
Continental trains, the wholesale plundering of baggage in the native
land of brigands, and the drawbacks of foreign cookery and
sanitation, were discussed and illustrated by personal experience,
until Ermengarde felt that she had been everywhere and there was
nowhere in particular to go to, though she was longing to go there
again.

"I should like a little sun," she said plaintively at dinner;
whereupon Arthur observed, with the jocular and banal brutality of
his kind, that he should prefer a little daughter, and that their
Charlie was quite handful enough, and Ermengarde returned haughtily
that people should be above chestnuts, especially when they were Joe
Millers.

Then, prompted by some malicious demon, Arthur asked if she would
like some more hats, and Ermengarde rejoined that of all ill
propensities incidental to fallen humanity she especially disliked
nagging.

Arthur looked frowningly on a table-centre, nicely embroidered in
gold by one of His Majesty's Oriental subjects, and silence reigned
till dessert.

When a silence of this kind occurs in a society entirely composed of
two people, it is difficult to put an end to it gracefully, or even
naturally; the longer it lasts the more difficult it becomes.  First
there is a question of which ought to begin; and, as each always
decides that the other should, matters are not advanced.  Next is the
question of what to say; and that is almost as insoluble unless some
lucky accident, such as fire, burglars, or an explosion of gas on the
premises, should furnish unexpected impersonal matter of interest.
Ermengarde almost wished that the kitchen boiler would burst, or the
cook be discovered drunk and disorderly on the kitchen stairs--the
frost had not been hard enough to burst the water-pipes, and the man
never calls for the rates at that hour--for then Arthur would have to
say something, though it would probably be unsuitable for
publication; while the miserable Arthur could think of no topic
unconnected with hats--"What became of those beastly hats of yours?
Why not sell the lot?"--cudgel his brains and tear his moustache as
he might.

Small minds may consider hats as too petty and insignificant to be of
any moment in human affairs, but large minds think on a corresponding
scale, and even hats bulk grandly in commanding intellects.  The Pope
has three, for what is a tiara but a hat in full dress?  And what
intrigues and schemes, what ambitions, heart-burnings and
disappointments, what strifes and despairs may encircle the hat of
one single Cardinal!  Then there is the hat of Gessler upon the
historic pole--not the human--how it brightens the dull page of
history to the youthful mind, and what exciting things resulted from
its transference from its natural elevation to the wooden eminence so
familiar on the pictured page of childish memory!  The triple hat of
a lost industry, that of the extinct Old Clo' man, how rich it was in
symbolism!  The Quaker tile, immovable as a rock in the presence of
man or woman however august, and retained at considerable personal
inconvenience in hot rooms and public buildings, how full of meaning
and mystery is, or rather was, the Quaker tile!  And that hat of the
gorgeous East, the turban, with its next-of-kin, the fez or the
tarbush; and the metal-pot of the warrior of so many ages and
countries, the brazen helmet of the Greek warrior and the modern
fireman, and the darker helm of the British soldier and the
policeman--are they nothing?  Then the busby of the Guardsman, and
the feather bonnet of the Highlander, should they be held lightly?
And what of the plumed and aitchless hat of the cockney maiden, the
cause of Homeric battles, tears, alarms, and excursions to pawnshops;
surely that is a serious matter.  Moreover, is not the lovely and
lustrous headgear, known as the chimney-pot, the sign and symbol of
our present civilization?  Has not the dusky and otherwise garbless
savage been known to stalk among his peers in proud consciousness of
full civilized costume, clad solely in the chimney-pot hat?  And who,
that has ever been privileged to enjoy histrionic art in the vicinity
of dames of high degree, can deny the possibilities of terror, wrath,
and doom lurking in that Hat of the Mighty, that lofty and
awe-inspiring structure, the _Matinée Hat_?

Let no man think lightly of hats.

So Arthur reflected, gloomily sipping his modest glass, and wondering
if it was a _Matinée Hat_ that Jezebel assumed on the unfortunate
occasion when she painted her face and tired her head before looking
out of the window.  To ask Ermengarde's solution of this question
would be impolitic; to remind her of national and individual
tragedies connected with the ownership of those jewelled and golden
hats, styled crowns, diadems, and coronets, equally so.  But his head
was too full of hats to allow the entrance of any other subject,
which was wrong--hats should be on heads, not in them.  Stealthily
and with apparent absence of mind he drew a dish of biscuits out of
his wife's reach.  She liked to nibble a biscuit after dinner; so he
hoped that consuming desire of some might constrain her to say,
"Please pass the biscuits."  She, on the other hand, was hoping that
common civility might prompt him to the question, "Won't you have a
biscuit?"

So, while he waited for her to say, "Please pass the biscuits," and
she waited for him to say "Won't you have a biscuit?" nothing passed
but time, who waits for no man, though often on insufficient warrant
expected to wait for women.

Time on this occasion passed at a snail's gallop, and yet he arrived
at the moment when Ermengarde was wont to rise from table before
Arthur had decided whether to withhold the usual ceremony of opening
the door for her or, in apparent mental preoccupation, to perform it
in stately and withering silence.

The consequence was that, just as he had decided on the latter
course, the indignant rustle and whisk of vanishing skirts accused
him to his conscience of being a beast and a cad, and made him
address several words of doubtful propriety to his pipe, which, not
having been lighted, obstinately refused to draw.

How easily the rift widens in the conjugal lute!  Ermengarde sank in
the Chesterfield by the fire, and wondered why she had been allowed
to marry in her teens.  She had had no youth, she told herself; all
her brightest years had been sacrificed--to an elderly man, devoid of
sympathy.  Her health was gone; she was prematurely aged; she thought
she had detected a grey hair while brushing her locks that morning;
she was almost sure that crow's feet were gathering round her eyes;
her face was thin, pale, and haggard, her beauty lost; the elderly
man she had thoughtlessly married already neglected her.  Charlie
would soon be a man--he was eight already--he would storm out into
the world and be independent of her; he had long hated to be kissed,
and generally ducked his head when she tried.

And Arthur could jest on the subject of having no daughter.  What a
world!

Being so thoroughly used to this man she seemed always to have been
married to him, and could only dimly recall a time when she was not
Mrs. Allonby, and thought of marriage as a vague and distant
possibility, like death.  But those dim maiden days had surely been
sweeter than the married years that followed.  Though he was nine
years older than she, the idea that Arthur was elderly had only just
occurred to her; for in those maiden days the homage of a man old
enough to have lived and beaten out a path for himself in the world,
had seemed a great thing.  First a soldier, then for a brief while a
rancher in the Far West, lastly a knight of the pen, this strong,
spare, bronzed man seemed to the inexperienced girl to know
everything, and to have been everywhere.  To see such a man stammer
and turn white and tremble at a word or a look of hers went dizzily
to her head.

"I suppose I must have married him out of pity," she mused, "or was
it the pride of power?  The important thing is that I did marry
him--to be denied hats and refused sympathy; to be expected to dress
on twopence ha'penny a year; to be derided for misfortune--and can't
unmarry him, not even in the United States, merely because he nags
when I am out of luck, and sulks whenever my head aches."

Yet the remembrance of the wooing was not without charm.  How the man
had trembled, that sunny afternoon in the garden by the rose-beds,
and how she had pretended not to know that he was trembling, while
she gathered the roses and chattered about nothing, until even her
powers of chattering about nothing came to an end, and she was
silent, knowing that he must speak or die of it in another moment.
It was then that an intrusive, short-sighted parent had come upon the
scene and spoilt the climax.

Arthur was to have left early next morning, and there was to be no
further opportunity of being alone with him.  How exciting and
tragical it had been, as the day wore on and the man grew more and
more distraught, and at last, as the hour of separating approached,
in desperation slipped into her hand, where she sat at the piano to
accompany somebody's song, a scrap of paper inscribed:

  "I'd crowns resign
  To call thee mine."

And with what coolness and self-possession she had glanced at the
paper held under the keyboard in one hand, while running over the
keys with the other; and then, as one with a life-long experience of
intrigue and plotting, had idly pencilled her reply on the same
scrap, that she casually let fall, while directing the singer's
attention to the music, for Arthur to pick up!

  "I'd gowns decline
  To call me thine."


"It was so like her," Arthur said afterwards; "so quick and bright,
and so superior to grammar."  But he said that in postnuptial days.

Her retrospections were interrupted by the subject of them, who was
immediately followed by tea.  This harmless domestic beverage was
taken in stony silence, broken at last by a sudden desperate
exclamation in a bass voice of, "What the deuce is the matter with
you, Ermengarde?" that made her literally sit up.

"Nothing," she replied, quickly recovering; and speaking sadly.  "At
least, only what is usual after influenza."

"Headaches?  Try that old port."

"I'd rather try a new port, a foreign port--sunshine, thorough
change--something bright and cheering."

"Well, that's out of the question.  I can't get off just now, as you
know," she heard, and replied that she might advertise for a
fellow-traveller or go alone.  As for expense, what more expensive
than illness?  Besides, the thing was so cheaply done nowadays; there
was no occasion to go far, the Mediterranean was quite far enough for
her, somewhere in the _Côte d'Azur_--Nice, Hyères--a day's journey,
nothing more.

"What more could the lady want?" he quoted in his detestably ironic
way, and suggested visits to country friends or a week at
Bournemouth, before slipping behind his _Times_, and thence into
peaceful slumber.

"Quite seriously, Arthur," she said a day or two later, after perusal
of some travel prospectuses with fascinating illustrations of _Trains
de Luxe_, "I not only wish, but intend, to go to the Riviera this
winter."

"And leave me?" he asked in blank astonishment.

"Why not?  I scarcely ever see you now.  You are at the office two
nights a week regularly, and when you do dine at home, the moment you
leave the table you rush off to the typewriter, or dictate to a
secretary in your study till the middle of the night.  What can you
want with me?"

He muttered something about fireside comfort and repose; then he
laughed and told her not to be ridiculous.  She retorted hotly; he
spoke angrily in return; and another silence ensued, the breach
widening and widening after every such silence until their mutual
mental atmosphere was so charged with electricity that thunder and
lightning might break out at any moment.

"He is tired of me," she thought.  He remembered that nervous
prostration sometimes resulted in estrangement and family
dissensions.  Neither of them put it down to hats.

About this time he became preoccupied, absent, gloomy in manner; he
spoke little, often answering at random when spoken to.  His evenings
at home were fewer and fewer; sometimes, when he paused in the act of
putting on his coat before going out, and looked blankly at her, she
fancied that he was trying to bring himself to make some painful
disclosure beyond his courage.  Her imagination, stimulated by the
sight of letters--the handwriting was a woman's, she was sure--that
increased his preoccupation, and were always hustled out of her
sight, suggested causes she would rather not think of for his evident
weariness of her society.

Yet there were moments when she longed to ask him to tell her all, to
let her know the worst that was weighing on him; but courage always
halted till opportunity fled.

So that one Sunday afternoon, when she was looking through the
illustrations in the last _Traveller's Journal_, thinking him
absorbed in _Spectators_ and _Outlooks_, she was startled to hear him
suddenly begin: "If you are still hankering after this trip to the
South, for which you are manifestly quite unfit--I think you ought to
know this----"

He broke off; she looked up.  "Well?" she asked, impatient of a
prolonged pause.

"That it is at present absolutely impossible----"  He seemed about to
add something, then broke off again.

"Everything that I suggest is absolutely impossible," she thought.
Something in his voice and manner, added to a recent discovery of
graver cause for alienation, of which more hereafter, and joined to
the memory of recent bursts of irritation, told her that the end of
all confidence and affection was come; nothing but mutual toleration
and the bond of common everyday interests remained now; however
deftly the lute might be touched, the music was mute at last.  The
little bickerings of comedy were over, the deep note of tragedy
boomed heavily in the distance.  She could not face it; there was
instant need of flight and absence, of something to block out the
misery of this moment of revelation, which must darken all their life.

"It seems scarcely kind," she said presently, "to set yourself so
fiercely against this small project of mine;" then quietly and
lucidly she pointed out the necessity of doing something to recover
her health and spirits.

He replied that the time was unpropitious; that he had already
suggested, with good reason, the need for diminishing expenses.

"We began, it is true, with a clean slate after that plunge in hats,"
he said.

"Oh, expense!" she interrupted, with the crimson the mention of those
unlucky head-dresses always brought to her face.  "Surely we have
heard enough of expense.  Besides," with bitterness, "it won't affect
you.  I shall manage the finance myself.  No need to come upon the
parish yet."

He started as if stung, and got up and went to the window, his face
turned so that the pain in it was invisible to her.

"As you will," he said presently, in a hard voice.  "No doubt you
will regret it.  But perhaps it is best.  And remember this,
Ermengarde, the worst possible economy is cheap travel."

With that he went out of the room, leaving her, far from being elated
at having gained her point, with the best mind in the world to cry.




Chapter II

An Innocent Very Much Abroad

Having once conceded the point, Arthur did all he could to forward
the foreign trip.  Ermengarde must go by Calais; on those splendid
turbine vessels people couldn't be ill if they tried during the whole
fifty minutes across, and she hardly thought she should try.
Besides, in fifty minutes there was hardly time to settle oneself
comfortably; while as for being tired or faint in that short
crossing, the idea was absurd; a deck-chair and the gentle lulling of
the turbine's swift and smooth motion was superior to any bed, while
the _Train de Luxe_ was simply an invitation to repose.  Some one
suggested rocking as an accompaniment to ultra-rapid motion, but that
idea was scouted; great speed means smooth motion; does a humming-top
wobble before it slackens speed?  Besides, how could it be a _Train
de Luxe_ if it caused train-sickness or any discomfort?  And it
undoubtedly was a _Train de Luxe_, her brother-in-law maintained--in
cost.

If the price was too luxurious, why not go second-class?  Ermengarde
had already learnt from the paternal omniscience of Cook that foreign
express trains carried second as well as first class fares.  Then the
startling intelligence, that not only _Trains de Luxe_, but _Rapides_
and other special quick trains to the Riviera, were only for the
lordly first-class traveller, broke upon her, and fresh sums in
compound addition had to be cast up before an idea of the total cost
could be gained.  "And every time I do it the sum total is bigger,"
she sighed, "though, to be sure, one great saving in going by this
first-class train is that you have no hotel expenses; you pass the
night in the train, instead of driving in an expensive cab to a
hotel, and giving Heaven knows how much for being in Heaven knows how
uncomfortable rooms."

"But you've left out the feeding," her brother-in-law objected.

"Not at all; the train has its own restaurant-car," she returned with
the triumph of recent knowledge.

"You blessed innocent, you don't suppose you are going to be fed free
gratis for twenty-four hours," he shouted, with a vulgar and jarring
mirth that was indecently echoed by Arthur; "a train isn't a prison
or a workhouse."

"It certainly is not," she returned with dignity; "it's a train.  As
you see, 'the waiters will bring things to the compartments if
necessary.'  Besides, how can it be a _Train de Luxe_ if it gives you
nothing to eat all that time?  Just listen to the description.  'On
waking the traveller rings his bell to----'  Oh yes--I see, you do
pay.  'The tariff of prices is in full view in the carriages.  Tea,
tenpence,' etc.  Now I shall have to do another sum.  But I need only
dine, and have a cup of tea in the afternoon.  Lunch I shall carry
with me.  And, as you see, there's the picture of people breakfasting
next morning in the Riviera Palace Hotel at Monte Carlo."

"Benighted infant, it's _déjeuner_ they're having at midday.  You
really must have a companion."

"Not at all.  I've never done any travelling pays before, and it's
high time I learnt how to.  Why do the stupid people say breakfast
when they mean lunch?  Another tenpenneth of tea and the biscuits I
carry will do for my breakfast.  So only dinner need count.  Really
the cost of going all that distance is absurdly small when one thinks
of it.  And then the saving of night travel, besides the comfort of
having a proper bed without the trouble of going to it."

"Still, you pay pretty high for the comfort."

"Only the usual first-class fare.  There it is, written down plainly;
just read the advertisement, Herbert: 'Monte Carlo and Sunshine--as
easy as going to Brighton.  The train, with special new bogie
corridor carriages'--I shan't like the bogie part, though--'leaves
Victoria at 11 a.m.'  H'm, h'm--'you land at Calais in less than an
hour'--just fancy!--h'm--'no scrambling for meals or seats, your
places have been reserved, and you walk in as you would to your stall
at a theatre.'"

"Matinée Hats and all?" interjected Arthur with brutal levity,
haughtily ignored but not unnoted.

"'Separate staterooms'--now I shall know what a stateroom is
like--'artistically furnished and decorated, warmed, lighted by
electricity, and each provided with a dressing-room with hot and cold
water.'  Now, Herbert, isn't it wonderful?  And besides all that,
just listen: 'Perfect meals are served, and the sleeping
accommodation is _magnificent_.'  Now, I should be quite content with
the artistic stateroom and the separate dressing-room, shouldn't you?
H'm--h'm--h'm.  'And you arrive, not fatigued, but _refreshed_, at
Nice at 10.32 a.m., so that'--h'm--h'm--h'm--'you may be taking your
_déjeuner_'--h'm--h'm--'_bathed in sunlight_,' etc., 'in about
twenty-four hours after leaving the fogs of London.'  Bathed in
sunlight," she sighed with luxurious rapture.

"Why have we never done this thing before?" asked Herbert.  "Far from
being expensive, the journey appears positively to enrich you.
Still, I advise you to take some soap and a towel, and a few odd
louis and a handful of francs.  But, my poor child, observe this
little item, 'Supplemental charges' for the sleeping-cars."

"What?  Five pounds practically!  Then I'll just not have a
sleeping-car at all, but tuck myself up in the artistically
furnished, warmed, and lighted stateroom for the night."

"Alas!  I regret to say that the staterooms and sleeping-rooms are
one and indivisible."

"Then," said Ermengarde, with deep and indignant conviction, "it's a
shame and a swindle.  And I'll go by a _Rapide_, and make myself up
in a corner with cushions.  Providing I face the engine and have a
corner seat, I can always sleep in a train."

A cumulative family veto promptly negatived this mad resolve, and
Ermengarde's sum total for the single journey leapt up accordingly,
till, what with booking fees, registrations, insurances, tips, and
those supplemental charges that bristle all over Continental
time-tables, it doubled her original estimate, and she began to think
that, if hotel expenses bounded up in the same proportion, it might
be the more prudent course to stay at home.

But the very word home came with a shock that showed the
impossibility of that course.  She must forget certain things, and
grow accustomed to certain daily deepening pangs, and steep her
thoughts in other atmospheres, and so take breath and strength for
the newer, darker aspects of life confronting her.  Especially she
must forget the experience of a certain dark and dreadful night.  On
that occasion she had dined at her father's house, and growing weary
of the musical evening that followed, and eschewing the delights of
bridge in a dim and distant room clandestinely devoted to that
pastime, had cabbed quietly home at eleven and let herself in with a
latchkey.

The house was silent; the servants evidently had gone to bed; a
candle and matches under a still burning gas-bracket awaited her; but
the light under the study door showed that the master of the house
had come home, presumably to the heavy evening's work that had been
his excuse for not dining at Onslow Gardens.  Thinking to just let
him know she was in, without interrupting his work, she stepped
softly to the study, and as softly opened the door and looked in.

The room was partly in shadow, lighted by fire-gleams.  Over the
writing-table was a shaded lamp, in the interrupted light of which
she saw the slender, bowed figure of a woman sitting, with her face
hidden by her hands.  Beside her, and bending slightly over her,
stood Arthur, his face in shadow, his hand on her shoulder, which
quivered with restrained sobs; he was speaking in a low, earnest
voice words inaudible at the door at the other end of the room.

For a moment Ermengarde stood at gaze, transfixed, a curious
strangling sensation in her throat, and a feeling like hot wires
burning her eyes.  Then, very softly, almost unconsciously, she
closed the door, and, after a moment's pause, turned, carefully
gathering up her skirts from their silken rustle on the floor, and
went to the table, whence she took the unlighted candle, and walked
upstairs with a slow, tired step and a strange proud quiver of lips.

Presently she heard the street door opened, the shrilling of a
cab-whistle and answering trot of a horse, some murmured voices,
followed by hoof-beats dying away, and the sound of shutting the
door, bolts driven, and chain put up.  Half an hour later the study
door, opening, let out the scent of a cigar, and Arthur came up.

"You came home early?" he asked indifferently, and she said "Yes,"
trying to force herself to make some matter-of-fact allusion to the
friend in the study, but not succeeding till next day, when her easy
observation, "Were you alone when I came in last night?" produced the
unembarrassed reply, "No; a secretary was with me.  I had rather a
heavy night."

"So had I," she thought with growing bitterness.

But afterwards she stooped to a thing that lowered her in her own
sight, while something stronger than herself drove her to do it.

"By the way, I thought I heard voices in the study when I came home
last night," she said carelessly to the parlourmaid.  "Did anyone
call while I was out?"

"No, ma'am," with some hesitation.  "At least--only the--the young
lady."

"The _young lady_, Rushton?  What young lady?" sharply.

"Please, m'm, the young lady that comes for master.  I never can
remember her name.  She came last time you went to Onslow Gardens,
and when you were ill--and----"

"Of course, Rushton, of course--" she interrupted, the blood
throbbing in her temples and a mist coming before her eyes.  "How
stupid I am!  I had quite forgotten.  Yes--yes.  Be sure you remember
about the table-centre to-night.  And sweet geranium leaves in the
finger-bowls.  Yes--yes."

That was the tragic note jarring all the music of life; it was that
she wished to forget.  There was no doubt of the meaning of that
scene; it could be nothing else, and whatever its meaning might have
been, she could not stoop to ask any solution.  And being what she
thought, there was no appeal, no help; nothing for it but stoic
endurance and averted eyes.  Often she had listened to the bitter,
godless creed that no man is without reproach, none proof against one
form of temptation; that women can only wait and look away till that
trouble is over-past; and insensibly the dogma had sunk into her
mind, neither welcomed nor repelled, only put out of sight in the
brightness and gaiety of a safe and sunny life.

But would she so readily have grasped the situation except for those
hats? and would he have sneered at those unlucky pieces of costume
had his heart been where it should be?

Not that Ermengarde admitted this to herself.  "O for the wings of a
dove!" she cried in her heart, and explained to herself that the
Influenza demon had weakened and depressed her, that the beginning of
Charlie's first term at school had made the house a desert solitude,
and that she had come to realize the melancholy fact that her married
life had reached the inevitable stage of monotonous indifference and
mutual irritation, of which no poet sings, but ordinary mortals
discourse in very plain, unvarnished prose.  Once she had accustomed
herself to it, no doubt she would be able to put up with it, as other
women did.  So far had she travelled from the petulant security of
the days before the arraignment of the five rejected hats.

It must have been Herbert who made the unlucky suggestion that the
train-booking should be done through Cook, and the services of his
interpreters secured.  To this Ermengarde readily agreed, though her
French was above the British average.  "I'll write to-night," she
said.

Then it was that Arthur observed that it might be well before buying
tickets to decide where she was going.  That horrid sarcastic style
of his was so immeasurably irritating.

"Since you wish to know," she replied haughtily, "my destination is
Nice."

And when asked why, unready with an answer, having settled on the
spur of the moment upon the first name that came up, she said lamely,
"It's--it's the centre of everything."

"But why choose the coldest and dustiest place on the Riviera?" her
mother asked over the afternoon teacups.

"And the resort of the rowdiest lot of visitors and haunt of native
and foreign sharpers," added a woman, who had just appeared, full of
the grievance of being packed and ready and at the last moment denied
a ticket till after the next ten days, every place till then being
booked ahead.  "Besides, if you want quiet and scenery, you hardly go
to a big town."

Somebody else suggested that what had been good enough for Queen
Victoria was good enough for her, and painted the beauties of Cimiez
in glowing colours.  "And think of the Opera and the Theatre at Nice.
And the Battle of Flowers and the Carnival.  To see those properly
you must go to Nice."

Then Ermengarde decided on Hyères, for scenery, good air, and
romantic associations; and, having penned her letter to Cook, heard
from one whose pilgrimage had been to that shrine, that there was
absolutely nothing to do at Hyères and no society whatever, and that
the climate and also that of Costebelle was positively murderous.
Why not try San Remo or Alassio? or Pegli, with the advantage of
being practically at Genoa?  Each of these being in turn decided on,
some dreadful defect in each was in turn discovered.  Everybody
Ermengarde knew had been everywhere and knew everything about it, and
as each had entirely different views of every place, it was a little
bewildering to an unbiased mind.

Bordighera was at last chosen, as being a place of palms, and
associated with Ruffini's charming story, Dr. Antonio.  Then it
turned out that Bordighera was the windiest spot in Europe, and
absolutely without shelter, and that the palms, being tied up like
lettuces for the market, were an abomination of desolation; besides,
crossing the frontier involved another custom-house worry, and the
loss of an hour at Ventimiglia.

So at last Mentone, chosen more than once from rapturous reports of
friends and the charm of Bennett's description in his Mediterranean
book, and more than once abandoned on account of dismal tales of bad
sanitation, heat, damp, and relaxing air, was finally decided upon--a
stern and unanimous family veto having been pronounced against both
Monte Carlo and Monaco--and a seat booked ten days in advance.

"A seat," Ermengarde observed with a deep sigh of content; "rather an
exquisite boudoir"--"'Artistically furnished and decorated,'" her
husband muttered--"with a most luxurious sofa, little tables, and
every comfort, and 'through the window a moving panorama of lovely,
sunlit scenery.'  How restful!  With books, papers, letters to write,
when the outlook palls.  All the comfort of a private room in a
first-class hotel, with no stairs and constant change of scene.  I
could travel for weeks in such circumstances.  The only trouble is
the fellow-traveller.  How nice it would be to be able to take two
places!"

Female friends urged the necessity of summer frocks and shady hats;
Arthur was strong upon furs and wraps.  Monte Carlo would involve
great splendour of evening toilette, and summer hues and textures by
day.  Tailor-mades by artists of renown would be _chic_, but only of
superfine faced-cloth, so Herbert said, quoting with the pride of
recent knowledge from the _Queen_, while as to hats--

"Don't speak of them.  My wife is like Mr. Toots, who, you remember,
was fond of waistcoats," interposed Arthur; "she has a weakness for
hats."

"Out of compassion to you, to give you something to sneer at," she
flashed out, bit her lips, and turned the subject, while Arthur,
dumbfounded, and cudgelling his brains to discover the rock of his
offence, remembered the five discarded hats, and fumed with annoyance.

Victoria at eleven in the morning, when some ruddy gold sunbeams were
struggling through clinging folds of mist, presented a lively
spectacle, something between an Ascot day and a cheap excursion.
Shepherded by men in and out of livery and lady's-maids engaging in
fierce combat with porters and guards, fur-clad dames of high and low
degree, decked with flowers, and with fur-coated squires to match
them, sailed majestically in the path of advancing towers of luggage,
and impeded progress in every direction by standing in picturesque
groups at the doors of carriages, or exactly in front of moving
crowds, to exchange inane smiles, minute bows and meaningless small
talk, impervious to the hoarse shouts of hot and panting porters,
stonily unconscious of civil requests from fellow-travellers looking
for hat-boxes, friends, trunks, mistresses, hand-baggage, servants,
and such oddments, in the hurrying melée among toppling towers of
trunks.

"Half London and the whole of the suburbs seem to be going by the
twelve-fifty boat," Ermengarde said, unmoved by all this hurry and
confusion in the happy security of a corner seat facing the engine,
and booked by Cook.  She was glad that Arthur was unable to see her
off, he having had an unexpected business call to one of the South
Coast summer resorts, she had forgotten which, the day before, so
that only Herbert, her mother, and some half-dozen intimate friends,
were saying good-bye and preventing her from looking after her
luggage.

"Look here, there's some mistake about this ticket," cried Herbert
presently, emerging from an arduous and prolonged struggle all down
the long train and back again.  "No seat is booked for you in this
train, but at last I've found an empty corner, if you come quick
before it's snapped up."

Ermengarde, speechless with amazement and indignation, and clinging
to Herbert's hand, somehow threaded the mazes of the crowd that
surged among laden trunks, staggering porters, hurrying servants with
hand-baggage, imperious conductors and omnipotent guards, all talking
and giving orders at once, while bells rang and whistles shrilled.
She observed, as she struggled through in her brother-in-law's wake,
that every seat was ticketed, and by this time most were occupied, if
not by travellers, by their hand-baggage, and at last found herself
in a corner facing the engine, but without any hand-baggage, hers
having been variously confided piece-meal to porters and friends.

She began to picture the possibilities of twenty-four hours of
empty-handed travel with some sinking of heart, while Herbert
bestowed silver and injunctions for her comfort on the conductor, and
five heavy trucks bearing trunks like Noah's Arks, each inscribed in
large letters "The Lady Emily Appleton," and accompanied by cockaded
men, wedged their way past her door, and were followed at uncertain
intervals by her mother, panting and anxious, with a lunch package,
and her half-dozen friends, each with the same number of papers,
periodicals, baskets of fruit and bouquets, and, finally, after
prolonged skirmishing, a porter with a hold-all and a dressing-bag.
Herbert had vanished to get a ticket for himself and accompany her to
Dover, much moved by the forlorn and bewildered expression on poor
untravelled Ermengarde's face, when she looked from her window (the
door being hopelessly blocked by fellow-travellers and their
followings of friends); and occasionally darted forward to catch a
paper or a flower from a friend's hand outstretched over the heads of
the crowd blocking the door; or tried to hear some shouted assurance
that her ticket was at least all right for the Calais train, that the
sea was like glass, and the sun coming out.  Her seat not being
reserved, she dared not leave it to say the innumerable last words
that rise to the lips of lady householders at such moments, and could
only make signs to an anxious and much hustled mother in the far
distance, who responded without in the least knowing what it was all
about.

The tumult was subsiding, travellers were being respectfully but
firmly recommended to take places, and Ermengarde was about to make
one last wild effort to say good-bye to her mother, when a distracted
female wedged herself up to the carriage, gold-handled eyeglass in
hand, and anxiously sought for her name and number, which the
conductor found for her above the seat in the corner opposite
Ermengarde's, to the lady's great indignation and despair.  She had
expressly written "to face the engine," she cried.  But this was
abominable; she could not possibly travel backwards; she must have a
forward corner; the man might look at the ticket, and so forth and so
forth, with a much-burdened maid and a porter waiting behind her.
The conductor was sorry, he told Ermengarde, but there had been some
mistake, the other lady was unfortunately entitled to the corner,
whence Ermengarde was obliged to move, finding, luckily for her, a
middle seat, but losing all possibility of any but signalled
farewells, and seeing Herbert no more at all.

The sunlight broadened, the fog thinned, as the long train left dear,
dirty, smoky London behind, and the squalor of endless suburb
diminished, and the smell of country air came through a chink of
opened window.  But Ermengarde's heart sank, and she felt herself a
lone, lorn female, utterly incapable of confronting the unknown
perils and discomforts of travel after this bad beginning.  She was
pulling herself together with delicious dreams of the artistic _Train
de Luxe_, when the lady who had ejected her from her corner, and who
evidently regarded her with wrath and indignation as an interloper
and semi-swindler, suddenly shivered and commanded her maid, sitting
opposite, to shut the little saving chink in the window.

Ermengarde's doom was now sealed; she would be train-sick.

She counted the minutes to be gasped through till Dover, and nerved
herself to ask the least forbidding of the two laced and furred dames
dragoning the windows for a little air before things reached a fatal
crisis.  But even at that dread moment the fascinating vision of the
_Train de Luxe_, with its sofa, and wide window at command, its
flying landscape, little tables, artistic furniture and decorations,
warmth and electric lights, came like balm to her troubled breast.




Chapter III

The Train de Luxe

The fear of train-sickness happily ended, Dover castle was seen
climbing and cresting its bold headland, with the Roman church and
Pharos traced against a pale blue sky in the tender wintry sunshine.
Arthur had taken her there from Folkestone one sunny autumn day soon
after their marriage; they had cycled over the downs, been bumped and
rattled up the Castle steeps and across drawbridges, in a rickety
pony carriage commanded by a very small and reckless boy, holding on
at imminent risk of their lives all the way there and back.  She
remembered the scent of the thyme, the interest of the place, the
pleasure of the day, and wanted to cry, she had no notion what for.
But life cannot be all honeymoon; remembering happier things
sometimes affects the eyes like that, and the Dover trip had really
been a success in its way.  Coming back, they had bought prawns, and
prawns make a good _hors d'œuvre_ after open-air exercise.  That
the remembrance of prawns, even in sight and scent of the sea, and
near the hour of lunch, should blur the sight was, of course, absurd;
but then they had been such glorious prawns, so large, so fresh, so
vividly scarlet.  One of them had fallen out of the paper bag into
Arthur's pocket, leaving an occult and pleasant suggestion of ancient
fish there for days before its discovery.

It must have been this defect of vision that made Ermengarde miss
Herbert, who, she supposed, must surely have found a place at
Victoria, if only in the guard's van or the luggage van in the rear.
For, strain her sight as she would, when the endless moving line of
blue-jerseyed sea-porters passing the train had at last been brought
to a stand-still, no vestige of her brother-in-law was to be found on
the platform, and, during the precious moments wasted in vain search,
every one of these amphibious porters seemed to have been snapped up
and laden with those enormous bags, boxes, and rolls of rugs, that
Continental travellers playfully call hand-baggage.

It had become a question whether Ermengarde or her hand-baggage,
which she was quite incapable of shouldering personally, or both,
should be left behind, when, after wild appeals to various haughty
and inaccessible officials, an aged and morose blue jersey was at
last raked out of some recess, and with difficulty prevailed upon to
hang himself with her various properties.  Then, surlily commanding
her to follow him along a quarter of a mile or so of sloppy, narrow
planking, crowded with people hurrying in every direction, to an
invisible and improbable boat, he started off at express speed,
easily making a path for himself through the press by the simple
process of wedging his burdens into the softest parts of people's
ribs and shoulders.

Ermengarde, having no such weapons of offence and defence, not only
failed to make any such path for herself, but suffered sadly from the
assaults of other armed amphibious monsters; and when, after a long
and severe struggle, she arrived, bruised, panting and dishevelled,
at a huge vessel that she hoped was the right one, she found her own
surly amphibian goaded to savagery by waiting to such an extent that
he was only with great difficulty induced to carry his burdens to the
upper deck, where a cloudless sky and a windless sea promised a calm
and exhilarating passage.  But there the blue jersey's remnant of
humanity came to an end.  Find her a seat or a deck-chair he would
not, for love or money or persuasion; but, hurling his burdens to the
floor, he demanded double the silver she placed in his hand, received
it, and bolted.

Serried phalanxes of deck-chairs already crowded the deck and filled
every desirable position; but all were either occupied by happy
voyagers, comfortably tucked up in rugs and motor veils and caps, or
by wraps and luggage, chiefly masculine.  Vainly did the hapless
Ermengarde implore the boys and men constantly emerging from the
bowels of the vessel, laden with chairs and stools, to fetch one for
her.  Stony silence, or at best a negative headshake, was all this
lone, lorn female could extract from these iron-hearted creatures.
She was still very weak; she was also famished; her little strength
was exhausted by the preliminary journey; in dread of sea-sickness,
she dared not turn her back to the vessel's direction, knowing she
could neither walk up and down nor stand, as others did.  She dared
not descend the companion-ladder after the motion once began, and had
she done so, knew herself to be incapable of carrying her rugs and
small necessities.  Shivering and faint, she was about to subside
ignominiously on the planks, when she caught sight of a chair-carrier
returning empty-handed to the companion, and once more entreated a
chair of him.

"Sorry, madam, nothing but camp-stools left," he said, and was
despairingly told to bring anything that could be sat upon, which he
quickly did--for a stipulated price.  All this time an empty
deck-chair had been on one side of her, and another, occupied by an
exceedingly well-tucked-up, fur-collared and fur-rugged youth of
athletic build, on the other.  An elderly man, standing talking to a
grey-haired woman who lounged in another deck-chair, was the lawful
tenant of the empty chair; and when the boy at last appeared with a
rickety camp-stool, on to which Ermengarde was about to sink from
exhaustion in the standing-place she had with difficulty kept all
this time between the two men's chairs, the elderly man suddenly
appeared to become aware of her difficulties, and turned to her with
a gruff, "Better change your stool for my chair--don't suppose I
shall want it--rather walk up and down," and turned sullenly away.

Sinking gratefully upon the long chair, so restful in spite of its
wooden hardness, with the sun shining and the sea sparkling to the
even movement of the great turbine vessel as they caught the faint
breeze of their motion, Ermengarde would now have been happy, but for
the fear of that dread penalty the sea exacts from sensitive
voyagers, and the impossibility in her giddiness and weakness of
opening the straps that held her rugs and shawls.  How
exasperatingly, aggressively, comfortable people looked, chatting and
laughing in their cosy furs; some even shielded themselves from the
mild warmth of the wintry sun with parasols, though Ermengarde would
have welcomed the glare of a furnace, as she shivered in the sharp
sea air.

But others were worse off than she.  So much so that she was even
moved to offer her own hard-won chair to a pretty, slender French
girl, pale and tired-looking, who kept leaning against anything that
came in her way till she seemed to become chilled to the bone, when
she would move a little and come back to the best place she could
find.  Presently she leant against an iron balk close to an inviting
deck-lounge, which was occupied the whole way across by a hard round
hat, a man's fur coat, and some walking-sticks and umbrellas.
Ermengarde longed to send these properties flying--especially the
hat, which inspired her with peculiarly acute hatred--and lay the
pretty, tired French girl upon the comfortable lounge, if only till
the owner of the hard hat came to claim it, which he never did, till
they went ashore.  Had she been certain of her ability to keep her
feet, Ermengarde would certainly have yielded her own chair to the
girl, and annexed to her own use that sequestrated by the owner of
the detestable hat; it would have been such a pleasure to kick and
stamp on that hat and hear it boom like a drum, and pop like a burst
motor-tyre.  But she was by no means certain of her ability to do
anything but shiver.

An eternity of shivers and qualms seemed to pass before the spires of
Calais appeared between gaps made in groups pacing the deck, an
eternity mitigated by the thought that every shiver brought one
nearer to the artistically decorated, electric warmed and lighted,
flying boudoir, with its voluptuous sofa, etc., in the rightly named
_Train de Luxe_--the very sound of which diffused an atmosphere of
comfort and peace.

And now at last all fear of the dread penalty of the inexorable sea
was at an end, and Ermengarde rose to her feet in the proud
consciousness of being able to stand, and even walk, without sudden
subsidences to the deck or into the unwilling embraces of indignant
fellow-voyagers.  Helped by a sailor, who unexpectedly appeared at
her side as if from the clouds, and was easily persuaded to carry her
things, she got down to the level of the landing-place, and enjoyed
the first thrill of foreign parts at the sight of blue-cloaked men in
uniform, short and solid, with bristling moustache and complacent
strut.  How good it is, the first sight of these dear, delightful
creatures, who never seem to have anything to do but enjoy dignified
and ornamental leisure for the benefit of admiring mankind!  And how
good, Ermengarde thought, to see a gangway shot into a crowd of
laughing, gesticulating, blue-bloused porters--to see them hurl
themselves upon the gangway tumultuously, one over the other, in a
solid mass, with shouts, songs, and exclamations, and so board the
vessel, leaping and laughing, and, falling upon passenger after
passenger, tear their precious misnamed hand-baggage from them, strap
it across their own shoulders, and, deaf to all entreaties, fight
their way back to the gangway, leap ashore, and fly from sight.

She would have followed her own especial robber, but that he forbade
her with gay volubility, and bid her accompany the rest of the robbed
and find him again at the Custom-house.

"Numéro Quatre," he cried, tapping the brass plate on his cap, and
dancing off with the grin and gesture of a good-natured gnome.

Observing that all but a few sturdy and muscular men submitted to
this spoliation, and unhesitatingly obeyed the commands of the
gnomes, Ermengarde, feeling very lone and lorn, and suddenly
forgetting for sheer weariness the whole of the French language in a
lump, gave herself up for lost, and was borne passively in the tide
of fellow-sufferers, who formed a soft but shifting support, to the
gangway, where the pleasing spectacle of a nervous man dropping an
open purse of gold into the sea just in front of her in attempting to
produce a ticket, showed that every depth has a lower deep, and
consoled her with the reflection that her own spare pence were safely
bestowed in various inaccessible portions of her attire.

But here she was at last, in the _beau pays de France_, within
measurable distance of the much-desired and artistically decorated
sofa, etc., if stiff and trembling limbs would but support her
through the tourist's purgatory, the Douane.  Never again would she
dread solitary travel; the sea trip in retrospect grew to be
absolutely delicious--if she had only known it at the time--in the
exaltation of having survived the awful ordeal of passing through the
chops of the Channel--not that she had noticed any chops--she felt
capable of penetrating to Central Africa.  Actually penetrating only
to the centre of the Douane, which at first sight she supposed to be
a large stable or coach-house, our poor untravelled traveller sought
the friendly face of Numéro Quatre among the long lines of
brass-plated gnomes, only to find it, with its elfish grin and the
whole of her travelling necessaries, conspicuous by its absence.

It was then, after long and vain search and countless wild and
polyglot inquiries of unsympathizing foreigners, and endless courses
up and down and round the crowded, many-voiced Douane, that the
hapless Ermengarde began to ask herself why she had left the safe and
comfortable precincts of her native land, and braved cold and famine
and the terrors of the deep, only to become the prey of grinning
brigands upon savage and inhospitable shores.  Poor little Charlie,
unwilling victim of enforced football, but at least happy in
ignorance of his mother's fate!  London was undoubtedly foggy; but
property there was comparatively safe.  People there were at least
not compelled to part with the whole of their possessions at the
bidding of strange monsters.  Nor were they obliged there to lose
expensive _Train de Luxe_ by waiting for hours in places with nothing
to sit upon for people who never came.

Crowds of smiling gnomes, cheerfully hung with other people's
property, stood in rank, gaily responding to the cries of rapture
with which their respective victims singled them out; there were
dramatic meetings between robbers and robbed, joyous recognition of
property and gnome, ecstatic greetings on the part of despoiled
tourists of Numéro Cinq, Numéro Cent, Numéro everything but Quatre.

Agonized inquiries for Numéro Quatre of other brass-plated caps
elicited cheerful replies that he would be here soon; but he was
small and Ermengarde was not over tall; and as gnome after gnome was
recaptured by long-lost owners, and compelled to unload his spoil
upon the long counter, to be marked with mystic runes to a briefly
muttered shibboleth in polyglot accents, and the congested crowd
thinned and melted, and time and strength and the last remnants of
hope in Ermengarde's breast with it, she felt herself on the point of
tears, and was just beginning to drag herself empty-handed to the
long-desired repose of that artistically decorated stateroom, when,
at the far end of the hall, the square and cheerful countenance of
the missing Numéro Quatre was at last discerned, and the whole of his
sins and her sufferings forgotten in an eye-blink.

As for the gnome, he unblushingly commanded his victim to quicken her
trembling steps on pain of losing the train, went through a quick
pantomime at the counter, and dashed off with his spoil at express
speed, followed at a respectful distance by his exhausted prey, whose
fainting spirits rose when at last she saw the long-hoped-for train,
with its vases of mimosa, rose, and sweet double stock in the
restaurant car windows.  Very haughtily she handed her ticket to a
magnificently gold-braided person at his demand, expecting to be
respectfully conducted to her place "as to a theatre stall"; and
sighed with deep content, feeling that the great all-compensating
moment of the journey had at last arrived.

But the great gold-braided one, muttering a number to the long-lost
Quatre, merely waved a hand towards a sort of steep companion-ladder,
and turned to resume a broken chat with a friend.  The ladder
surmounted, and the gnome having plumped the baggage, sadly reduced
in quantity and possibly in quality, into the first compartment he
came to and vanished with silver in hand, Ermengarde found herself in
a narrow slip of a compartment with a wide and springy seat, a tiny,
hinged slab under the outside window and just room and no more for
the disposal of moderate-sized female limbs without positive
discomfort or involuntary kicks against an oblique wooden partition,
narrowing to the doorway, varnished, and featureless, a large
spittoon filled with water, a fellow traveller with mountains of
hand-baggage, and nothing more.  The private dressing-room, the airy
space, the little hinged seats, "should the passenger wish to change
position," etc., where were these?

Our pilgrimage through this vale of tears is mile-stoned by lost
illusions, Ermengarde reflected, subsiding with a deep sigh in the
best corner of the seat, which her fellow pilgrim had considerately
left for her, and feeling too glad to sit upon anything after the
long skirmish through the Douane to be over-critical, when suddenly a
frightful thought struck her.

"Surely this carriage faces the sea?" she cried in tones of horror.

"Certainly," the other lady returned sweetly.

"And we go backwards?  And I can't," she gasped.

Then followed a deadly battle with the conductor, compared with which
the skirmish in the Douane ranked as a polite difference of opinion.
Gallantly facing this awful gold-braided personage, who at first was
to busy to be spoken to, and, on the advice of her fellow victim,
bombarding him with reproaches in such scattered remnants of French
as an extreme effort of will could summon from the recesses of an
exhausted brain, and vainly looking meanwhile in every direction for
the civil and paternal Cooks' Interpreter of advertisements and
letters, Ermengarde told how she had booked through the perfidious
Cook a seat facing the engine, and could not by any means travel in
any other way and must have another carriage.  A civil flow of
idiomatic provincial French, upon which the words Marseilles and
Paris floated at intervals, in reply, conveyed nothing but
distraction to her mind.  Finally she demanded an exchange of seats
with some traveller who liked going backwards, in three separate
languages, and heard in two that madame had better _monter vite_, as
the train was off.

During this engagement she was much annoyed by the efforts of a man
in a furred coat, of whose observation she had been indignantly
conscious before, to divert the official's attention to himself, in
which he at last succeeded by some mystic sign (probably Masonic)
conveyed by a touch of the hand in which something glittered in the
sunshine.  At this juncture the other lady appeared on the car steps,
and drawing her inside, explained that it would be all right if she
would only wait till the people were settled in the now moving train,
and found her a slip seat in the corridor, with which the hapless
Ermengarde was obliged to content herself, facing forward, and
cherishing deep resentment against the man in the fur collar, whose
mysterious and insistent gaze from behind coloured spectacles had
continually followed her since her arrival at the train.  She felt
that in some vague way her misfortunes were owing to this creature's
malevolence.

"He looks like an Anarchist or a Nihilist," she confided to the lady.
"He's a Russian; these great hairy men always are--unless they are
Jews or both."

"Are all Russians Nihilists and Anarchists?" the lady asked.

"Always, when they get out of Russia, unless they are diplomatists.
He was hiding a box under his coat.  Filled with dynamite, no doubt."

"To blow us all up?  Oh!  I don't think we are worth that.  No
celebrities on board to-day.  Are you going all the way to the
Riviera?  You look so tired.  Recovering from influenza?  So tedious.
Pray let me help you all I can."

In spite of her civility there was something repellant to Ermengarde
in this young woman, a preoccupation, a reticence, that she
mistrusted.  Surely that voice was familiar, and the face too; she
must have met her, though quite at a loss to say where or when.  But
at her question on this point there was a brief negative and a sudden
retreat from the first cold, calculated approach to friendliness.
The face became an utter blank, and vanished behind a periodical.

The train flew; the hairy-faced Nihilist had ended his discussion
with the conductor, and was standing in the corridor by a window,
surveying the flying landscape and plunged in meditations, dark and
evil, no doubt, and probably hatching villainous schemes for the
destruction of society.  People went up and down the corridor,
brushing and stumbling over her skirts, mistaking their compartments,
and alternately losing and finding, after much tumult, friends, bags,
caps, smoking and restaurant cars.  And this was to last all the way
to Paris.

The man of mystery might as well let off his infernal machine at
once, and have done with it; the slip-seat was narrow, the train
rocked as it flew, and Ermengarde, aching wherever it is possible for
humanity to ache, felt as if she was breaking in halves at the waist.
But what was her surprise and pleasure in the misery of this dark
moment to hear a respectful voice at her ear requesting madame to be
kind enough to take possession of a forward compartment to Paris in
the next carriage, and to find herself at last, as if by enchantment,
in the identical state-room of her dreams and the International
Sleeping Car Company's pictured advertisement, with its private
dressing-room, its airy space, its slip-seat under the
window--"should the passenger desire to change position"--and, better
still, the whole compartment to herself, but _jusqu' à Paris_ only.
What bliss to sink upon the deep, springy seat, to cast aside heavy
coat, furs, and hat; and close tired eyes for a moment, and then open
them and see the flying foreign landscape, chill, bleak, powdered
with snow, and bounded by sea, as they drew near Boulogne!

But what gave the country that unlikeness to English chalk and
heath-lands, that charming unlikeness, so dear to new travellers,
that gives the feeling of being _somewhere else_, the true foreign
touch?  To this pleasure she surrendered herself with drowsy content,
forgetful of recent sufferings, forgetful of the superb _ragout_
peculiar to Calais somebody had solemnly charged her to take at lunch
in the long wait between train and boat, forgetful of lunch to be had
on the car, till the spectacle of a waiter carrying tea past the door
reminded her that "perfect meals are served," and that none
approaching that description had fallen to her lot since that far-off
yesterday, when the luxuries of travel had still been a dream.  After
many and vain requests to the "civil attendants" to bring tea, she
staggered to the dining-car, wondering why the waiters all looked so
absurdly drunk, and the tables behaved as if they were at
spirit-rapping _séances_, and wondering still more when the modest
cup of tea "for about tenpence" took a couple of francs to pacify the
staggering, taciturn waiter's demand.  It was evident that
foreigners, civil and talkative when sober, are surly and taciturn
when drunk, just as Britons, surly and taciturn by nature, become
over-civil and garrulous in liquor.

Snow lay here and there on the bleak levels flying past the windows.
How small the cottages were!  Cottages?  No--huts--cottage was too
cosy a word for these poor cabins.  What a poverty-stricken country;
the very trees lopped and starved of branch, starved houses, starved
peasants ploughing with horse-ploughs, no comfort, no prosperity
anywhere; all like a pinched, starved England, till after Boulogne,
where sand blowing about from the great dunes was a distinct foreign
note.  What if the train was over-hot?  Cold, cold it was outside,
and, if the windows were opened, the wind cut in like a sword.  A
city of a splendid tower lay in the cold light after a pale pink
sunset; the rushing, rocking train came to a stop by a dusky, empty
platform, where a solitary, starved-looking boy stood motionless,
cold in the cold twilight, his arms rolled in his apron, listless,
benumbed.  This must be Amiens, or else some dim city of twilit
dreamland; mortal railway station it could hardly be, so dim, so
chill, so empty, so silent, with no passengers, no officials, only
that one ghostly train, whence none descended and whither none
climbed, hissing furtively in the greyness, while vague figures in
blouses passed silently by, tapping thoughtfully at the wheels now
and then, and the thin, hunger-pinched boy looked listlessly about
him, his bare arms rolled in his apron.  Evidently nobody ever goes
to French cathedral cities except to stay there; perhaps even the boy
was only a statue, the latest triumph of realistic art.

This grey, starved country, so different from rich, cosy England,
would have been depressing but for the swift rush of the rocking
train, the warm, downy comfort of the carriage, and the fairy-like
strangeness that gave everything an air of unreality.  If only
Charlie were there, his clear eyes wide with pleasure, sharing the
fascination, enjoying the motion, asking impossible questions, and
making bewildering comments!  Monstrous to send such a baby to a
school of rough boys.  She was not spoiling him, as his father
declared; he was not getting womanish ways; children need tenderness,
and a boy may have charming manners and be a delightful companion
without being unmanly.  At Easter he would come home, steeped in
savagery, inarticulate and slangy, full of the surly
self-consciousness that dreads to be thought anything but brutal, or
to vary by a pin's head from "other fellows."  Arthur would be
delighted, and say he liked boys to be boys.  Arthur, whose one aim
in life appeared to be to avoid showing the least sign of emotion or
humanity, or anything comforting and pleasant.  When it came to
saying good-bye, at his sudden departure on the eve of hers, she had
choked miserably and said nothing, her eyes brimming over; but he--

"Well, good-bye, dear," she seemed still to hear in a cheerful,
indifferent, staccato voice, with a cold, light kiss on the face she
lifted, trembling and speechless.  "Hope you'll enjoy it.  Plenty of
hats in Paris."

He was off before the last word, and had banged the door, and sprung
into his cab by the time her choke was overcome.  If only he had not
said "dear," that commonplace symbol of conjugal indifference;
"Ermengarde," with the faintest inflection of tenderness, would have
made all the difference--she could even have borne the reference to
hats had he said something nicer than "dear."

The twilight deepened, and the train became a flying meteor of linked
lights; she grew more and more inclined to accept the rift in the
lute and make the best of it.  Her man had his good points, and all
men seemed to be made of hard, unloving stuff; why seek sympathy in
the impossible region of rocky male hearts?  As for the scene in the
study, she may have put a wrong interpretation upon it; she would not
admit that she had ever given it the worst; it might mean some
passing infatuation, resisted, perhaps overcome, at the utmost--or
some harmless mystery, that five words would have made clear.  Of
course, men should not have secrets from their wives; but equally of
course, men did.  It was well to be away for a time; new experiences
would put all this trouble in the background and show it in true
perspective; she would wipe it clean off her memory and begin again,
harden her heart, take all cheerfully, without show of feeling,
answering chaff with chaff; weakness had made her over-sensitive,
returning health would harden her, and, perhaps, who could tell? the
man himself might soften, and miss and long for her.  She hoped he
would be very uncomfortable and mislay everything and have no one to
find it, and no one to protect him from the zeal of housemaids, the
carelessness of cooks, and the importunity of men of business.

But what was this cry of the man with the napkin?  "_Diner est
servi!_"  Blissful announcement, if one could only stagger through
the rocking corridor without serious mishap.  How excellent a thing
is dinner--at the proper time.  There was the Anarchist, whose grim
visage had more than once startled her meditations as he passed her
door--"Tramping up and down like a wild beast," she confided to her
fellow traveller in the dining-car, while enjoying the really
"perfect meal" for which the long fast had prepared her.

How deft the staggering waiters were, dancing with their dancing
dishes to the dancing tables, and always contriving to land the
portions safely in the plates!  How delightful this flying repast
through the flying night--providing one faced the engine.  Even the
Anarchist was judged with lenience; if he did send furtive glances in
her direction, her back hair and hat were unconscious of them.
_Timbale de Paris_ on the menu had an attractive look, the same,
sliding about the dish balanced unsteadily over her head, was even
more fascinating, lodged triumphantly on her plate after five
abortive attempts, it was beyond words delicious, when--was it an
earthquake or a collision?--a series of bumps and crashes, and
passengers tumbling together and apart like nuts shaken in a bag, and
the darkened outside world, starred with the lights of Paris,
beginning to run away backwards.  Farewell, exquisite iced _Timbale_!
The only safety is in instant flight.  The train has turned.

The true inwardness of the phrase "_jusqu' à Paris_" was now
realized, when Ermengarde found herself in great peace, though only
half fed, facing the engine in her own compartment, while the lights
of Paris twinkled past for some twenty minutes.  Then another
convulsion of nature seemed to take place, and the world again began
to run away backwards from her dizzied sight.  "It will turn again at
Marseilles," her fellow traveller said cheerily, and at this terrible
news there was nothing for it--since the other compartment was now
occupied by two men--but to stand, facing the seat, and occasionally
fall hither and thither in the rocking of the train, until her
companion piled their two bundles of rugs together against the wooden
partition and she sat on them, her back stiffened miserably against
the straight wooden partition, and her legs jammed between knee and
ankle hard against the edge of the seat, and her feet hanging (the
space between wall and seat being about fifteen inches, and she a
full-sized and shapely lass) in a position to which St. Lawrence's
gridiron was luxury, and which soon produced such faintness as had to
be treated with brandy.

"And if this," said Ermengarde, when the spirit ran through her veins
and restored her speech, "if this is a _Train de Luxe_, give me the
commonest third-class carriage, with at least a floor to sit and fall
upon!"




Chapter IV

The Azure Shore

Was it a dream, or had she really seen the Anarchist's bearded,
goggled face bending over her in close proximity to her
fellow-traveller's?  Who could say?  These two were shrouded in
mystery, and permeated with intrigue, phantasmic, unreal.  The woman
professed not to have observed the man, and when asked to notice him
as he passed their door in the corridor, had stared blankly in every
other direction, looked at the conductor, attendants, other
passengers, but always failed to perceive a man with beard and
goggles.

Yet, when sitting on the jolting little seat in the corridor, while
the attendant made up the beds, at her fellow-traveller's kind
suggestion, so that she might lie facing the engine, Ermengarde, now
wide awake and sensible, could have taken her oath that she saw these
intriguers talking together, in the little lobby at the entrance end
of the corridor.

"Talking to whom?" the woman of mystery replied, with that baffling,
stony-blank look that she put on like a mask at times.  "Yes, I asked
the man to make up the beds at once, that you might face the engine.
See what nice bedding they give us; sheets, pillow-cases, all
complete, and snowy white--so different from London-washed linen.  I
shall be glad to go to bed myself, after all the shaking and
rattling.  Which man did you say?  I see nobody with a beard.  Let us
smile at the bed-maker as if we meant tips--five-franc smiles.  He's
very civil.  No; he's clean-shaven.  So sorry going backwards upsets
you."

That was all to be got out of this woman of mystery, who seemed so
impersonal and so much above all feminine, not to say human,
infirmity.  Yet there was a curious attractiveness about her.  The
eyes, that were at times so blankly impervious to expression from
within or impression from without, were beautiful in shape and
colour, of the dark blue that varies from grey to purple, and shaded
by long sweeping lashes on finely curved lids.  Her mouth shut firmly
in the true bow shape, with full lips, that, in repose, had a sort of
voluptuous sadness.  She was slender and rather tall, moved well, and
had in her figure and bearing a sort of melancholy distinction.  A
woman with a past, undoubtedly, and, by all appearances, with a
present of precarious tenure and painful interest as well.  The kind
of woman men can never pass without taking note of, though nothing in
her bearing, look, or dress challenges observation, unless it be an
accentuated quietness and reserve.  Such women, it occurred to
Ermengarde, when not absolute saints, are eminently fit for
"treasons, stratagems, and spoils."  What if she were in league with
the Anarchist, whose anarchism might be, after all, of the
common-place type that indiscriminately relieves fellow-creatures of
the burden of personal property?  A distinctly unpleasant idea to
entertain of one who shared sleeping-quarters and was so ready to
have beds made up and lights covered.

In cases like this, the only comfort is to carry nothing worth
stealing.  But few travellers are without a watch and at least some
little money.  Ermengarde's was safely sewn up in some inaccessible
portion of her attire, and when her companion plausibly suggested the
comfort of undressing before going to bed, and volunteered to help
her out of her clothes, she was glad to be able to point out that
there was not room enough to undress oneself in, much less anyone
else.  Then she wondered, did she look rich?  and when they found her
so little worth robbing, would they murder her in revenge
afterwards?--or beforehand to prevent a disturbance--charming
reflections to sleep upon.  Of course, Arthur had been right--the man
had an exasperating way of always being right, especially about
unpleasant contingencies--in saying that she ought not to travel
alone.  How many tales and newspaper records there had been lately of
passengers robbed and murdered by unknown hands, especially in
Southern France and Italy!  It would be a judgment on her for taking
things into her own hands, and flaunting in her husband's face a
certain small hoard they both knew of--to be used only in great
emergency, such as conjugal desertion, or personal violence, or
bankruptcy, their jest had been.  That had been coarsely done, she
owned now with flaming cheeks; he had felt, perhaps resented, the
indelicacy of the revolt.  Let them rob her, then, but let them spare
her life.  The thought of a motherless Charlie, screwing his precious
fists into his darling eyes, was too moving.

It was his bedtime; perhaps he was just saying his little prayers for
"fahver and muvver," or nestling his curly head contentedly into his
pillow, and falling into that instant, happy sleep that made him look
like a little angel, at the very moment when she laid her own head,
uncomfortably full of hairpins--perilous to remove with no chance of
replacing them in that jolting, swinging little bunk--upon the
train-pillow, expectant of midnight robbery and assassination, but
too glad to lay it anywhere to care much about anything.

"Won't you at least let me take off your boots?" the woman of mystery
murmured drowsily from the top berth; and Ermengarde would have given
all she possessed to do so, had she discerned the remotest
possibility of ever being able to put them on again, having now
reached that stage of anguish when one seems to have somebody else's
feet on, and those several sizes too large.

As she lay face forward on a wide, springy bed, the swaying train
soon became a cradle of rest, and the rhythmic rattle and crash of
its wheels and engine a soft lullaby, or the gallop of giant steeds,
bearing one swiftly away to regions of elysian slumber and soothing
dreams.  Let the Anarchist rob or murder her, or both, if he would;
but let him do it gently, so as not to disturb that exquisite
combination of motion and repose, or break the rhythm of that musical
gallop of winged steeds, yoked to flying cars, flashing swifter and
ever swifter across France, across Europe, across the night, from
North to South, from sea to sea, from evening to morning, from
darkness to dawn, from earth to fairyland, when----  Bang! crash!
jolt! rumble! and everything falling together and coming to a dead
stop, at the weird repeated cry of some lost spirit, that pierced the
startled night in prolonged reverberations.

No, not a lost spirit, after all; only a sleepy man in a blouse,
crying the name of some town--was it Dijon?--through the echoing
emptiness of a dimly lighted station, and through the window a
glimpse of sky full of stars looking down in peace.  They had come to
_somewhere else_, whither they had flown during the delicious sleep
into which she had fallen.  There is nothing more delightful than
that feeling of having come to somewhere else without effort and
without thought, in the stillness of night and sleep.

If only one had on one's own legs and feet, and no hairpins and no
close-fitting day clothes, pinching in wrong places, or if only one
could find a pocket-handkerchief or a smelling-bottle, or look at
one's watch, without fear of waking the woman of mystery, and so
hastening the hour of assassination by turning on the light; the
presence of which, the latter had averred, was absolutely destructive
of her chances of sleep.

But the winged steeds begin to snort and pant, stamping, and clashing
their harness, and, with a sudden clatter of trampling hoofs, are off
again into the waste places of midnight, through which a star glances
intermittently and kindly, and Ermengarde remembers that she has not
yet been murdered, but is almost too drowsy to hope she has not been
robbed, feeling blindly for the gold sewn into her clothes and not
finding it, and not knowing that an excruciating pain under the ribs
is what she vainly seeks and is lying upon, or that acute discomfort
in other regions means that her hat, a really becoming one, has
tumbled off its hook and constituted itself a portion of her couch,
which is no longer a bed of roses.

Surely the winged steeds are now tearing away at increasing, headlong
speed, and their way is rougher, up hill and down dale, over crag and
boulder and chasm; the cradle is rocked less gently, and the rhythm
of the rapid gallop is not so smooth, else it would be heavenly to
fly thus between the pinions of the fiery coursers through centuries
of calm content, unvexed by thought or care; and surely the cadence
that seemed, now music, now the burden of some sweet, old ballad of
forgotten days, had declined to the double knock of civilization and
hourly postal deliveries; to file-firing, to the racket of the
housemaid's morning broom and furniture destruction, to summer
thunder, to Portsmouth guns?  No; silence on a sudden, and stillness,
and once more the drowsy cry of some place-name through the echoing
emptiness of a dim-lighted building.  Again she had arrived somewhere
else in sleep--could it be Valence, or Vence, enchanted names?  Or
rather some city of faery, beleaguered by visions, or dumbed by
spells of sweet strong magic; it could be no earthly town; it must be
the place of all men's longing, the land of Somewhere Else, of
somewhere

          "afar
  From the sphere of our sorrow--"

Oddly enough, Arthur was there and Charlie; the woman of mystery had
disappeared, and the man with her, and the wild, winged horses were
galloping faster and faster through the night, which was no longer
black, but pale grey, shot with faint lemon; and there, through the
window, glanced and quivered one large, lustrous white star--and--of
course, it was fairyland again or some region of old romance,
because, where the star had been faintly traced upon the luminous
twilight sky, was strange oriental foliage, palm-tops, olive-boughs,
fading and passing.

"Shall we switch off the light?" asked a clear cold voice from above;
and Ermengarde, springing up with a start, realized that day was
breaking and the fear of assassination past.

"Where is Marseilles?" she murmured drowsily, wondering if it were
hairpins, or only headache, piercing her skull and brain, and heard
that Marseilles was past and the present combination of dock, arsenal
and dwelling, was Toulon, and marvelled at the clear pale light and
the serene beauty and freshness of the morning.

The train had stopped and turned; the orange glow in the cloudy sky
had paled; the sea was visible; pale blue like English sea, but
marvellously clear and pure and free of mist, and its breath so
sweet.  And this was the Mediterranean?  And those bushy bluish
evergreens in the gardens among aloes, pines and palms, why--they
must be olives!  Well!----

Still, in spite of splitting headache, sealike qualms, and racked
limbs, and the probability of being lamed for life in consequence of
sleeping in boots of elegance pointed in the latest mode; in spite of
squalid horrors of waiting in a queue of either sex for the chance of
even the most hurried sponging of face and hands; in spite of the
rift in the home lute, which had seemed to narrow with every mile
from home--in spite of all, it was solid invincible joy to glide
through this new, strange country in the rich, romantic South, this
country of clear and vivid light and colour, of semi-oriental
foliage, and foreign buildings, sun-shuttered, square and white.

There is nothing to equal the charm of these first wakings at dawn in
foreign lands, full of the mysterious enchantment of the unknown.
And this unknown was so very lovely, and this traveller so utterly
untravelled, so happily open to impressions.  So even the woman of
mystery seemed to think, as she leant against a window in the
couloir, with wide eyes and parted lips, absorbed in the pageant of
sunlit sea and snow-sprinkled land and deep-hued foliage flashing
by--all her schemes and machinations apparently in abeyance for a
time.  And yet in the dizzy and futile excursion Ermengarde had made
to the breakfast car, where the sight of the simple but expensive
déjeuner of coffee and roll and the fresh morning faces enjoying it,
did but increase her physical misery and make it impossible to eat or
drink, she had observed that this mysterious woman, breakfasting like
others with amazing calm and even content, had exchanged significant
glances with the Nihilist, whose shifty, sinister gaze had been, as
usual, quite unable to meet the straightforward innocence of
Ermengarde's--though she rarely looked in his direction, she
perpetually felt his sinister gaze upon her, piercing even the
dishevelled masses of back hair of which she was acutely and
shamefastly conscious.  And once when she had staggered and nearly
fallen, in making a hasty exit from the coffee-scented car, this
woman had sprung to her rescue with a cry of "Mrs. Allonby," and so
supported her back to their corner-cupboard--misnamed
state-room--without, it must be owned, inflicting any serious or even
perceptible injury upon her.

"But how," Ermengarde asked in annihilating accents on recovery; "how
did you know my name?"

It is not easy to disconcert that kind of person, she thought,
observing the quickness with which the woman recovered her equanimity
and the admirable calm with which she replied, while affecting to
suppress a smile, "My dear lady, naturally by the label on your bag.
Besides," she added, with the serpentine guile that affects
simplicity, "you asked me last night if I had read any of your
husband's books?"

"If I did, it must have been in my sleep," Ermengarde reflected with
unspoken sarcasm.  "And had you?" she asked grimly.

"Surely you remember that I am among Mr. Allonby's most assiduous
readers, and predict a future for him."

"Poor old Arthur!  She made a wrong shot that time," thought
Ermengarde, who was inclined to consider her husband's essays in
literature as so much waste of hours more legitimately and profitably
given to journalism.  Had she not been overcome by train nausea, she
would have asked what was the woman of mystery's favourite among her
husband's works, which she believed she had never read.  Few people
had.

As it was, she could only cling miserably on to the little hinged
seat in the couloir, whither the ladies had been compelled to take
refuge while their two sleeping-bunks were being transformed into one
sofa.  There she clung, jostled by fellow-passengers staggering past
in various stages of disarray and dishevelment--where, by the way,
were all the smart owners of huge trunks, tall flunkeys, and
reluctantly prim maids of Victoria platform?--jolted by the swaying
of the rushing train, and dimly conscious that this young woman never
ceased to keep an eye upon her lightest motion, under pretence of
sympathy with her discomfort, even when apparently absorbed in
thought--sad thought, to judge by her drooping mouth and wistful
gaze, clouded more than once by tears, furtively dashed away.  Had
Ermengarde dreamed of suppressed sobs above her once or twice during
the night?  Was the Anarchist her husband, and did he beat her?  But
there was no wedding-ring on the slender hand, that had more than
once ministered to ungrateful Ermengarde's needs.  For this absence
there might be reason good.

Suddenly as they flew along the woman's face was transfigured by a
flash of irradiating rapture; she caught her breath, put out her
hand, and gasped in a quick, eager whisper: "Mrs. Allonby; look!"

Ermengarde had already seen, and, as the sorrow and perplexity had
vanished from her companion's face at the sight, the weariness and
physical discomfort went out of hers, while both gazed and gazed in a
silent passion of joyous admiration, with moistened eyes and
trembling lips, absorbed, rapt, caught up and away into the very
shrine and inmost heart of beauty.

They saw, in the transparent stillness of that sunny morning, a long
headland, perhaps island, running out to sea, rising boldly from the
waves, and outlined in dark blue on a deep blue sky, above a sheet of
dark blue sea, the jewel-like surface of which was unruffled by the
faintest breeze; and they knew that they were at last beyond all
doubt seeing the Mediterranean, and that it was blue, deeply, darkly,
divinely blue, blue beyond imagination or description.  The hue of a
peacock's neck in depth and velvety texture, yet with the liquid
blueness of a jewel; blue in various rich shades, all harmonious and
each deeper than the other; a blue as warm as crimson, but still, not
shifting, and never iridescent.  It seemed to be the colour of
happiness; it filled them with a pure and exquisite gladness.  It was
like a glorious dream of what colour might be, and never is, though
it was, then and there in their sight--for one moment of
irrecoverable splendour before the long train had rushed past.
Warmth, sweetness, freshness and life were all in the glorious,
unspeakable colour of velvety blue mountain and sea and sky.

So these two untravelled travellers saw it, and so they would see it
never again, because first things come only once.  But a deep strong
certainty that after all some things are real and abidingly good even
in this stained world of shifting shadows, took hold of these women
at sight of this deep, sweet purity of colour.

"I judge that's Hyères," they heard, as not hearing, from a nasal
voice passing along the corridor.

"Rotten place, Ea," came in another, more familiar accent, from
between teeth gripping a cigarette.  "Nothing to do."

Presently, with abrupt transition as in a dream, Ermengarde found
herself cosily tucked up in her sofa corner, all eye, lost and
absorbed in the novel loveliness through which the train flew in the
clear fresh morning, aches, nausea, weariness, all clean forgotten.
Forgotten also the undesirable and suspicious characters who were to
have robbed and assassinated and otherwise afflicted her during the
night.  As for the unconscious object of so many dire imaginings, her
fellow-traveller, she kept her place by the window in the corridor,
statue-still, and intent on the landscape rushing by, as if she had
veritably "forgotten herself to marble" with much looking.

Never had either seen such brilliant transparence of atmosphere, such
glowing depth of colour.  The sunny air had still a keen frost
sparkle; here and there snow crystals glittered among rich greens and
warm greys of foliage; every little pool was glazed with ice.
Russet-clad peasant women in broad straw hats, men jolting along in
picturesque country carts drawn by horses in quaint, brass-studded
harness with high-peaked collars; a shepherd in a long brown cloak,
his flock before him; beautiful wells and fountains of strange and
primitive design; tiny white, blue and pink-washed houses with green
latticed shutters; brown and leafless vines on trellises or planted
in rows of low, crutch-tipped stems; stone pines, olives,
stiff-spiked aloes, cactus, orange and lemon trees, and everywhere
the golden bloom of mimosa, suggested Italy rather than France.  The
dragon coursers had actually borne them in the night through realms
of romance and poetry; they were even now in Provence, that land of
roses and minstrelsy; was not yonder rich expanse of blue the
Ligurian Sea, or very near it? and Nice, that ancient historic and
much-conquered city, the birthplace of Garibaldi, was not that
essentially Italian by geography and descent, as well as all the
lovely mountain shore from Monaco to the frontier of authentic modern
Italy?

What an oriental touch in those glorious, dark-leaved palms of sturdy
stem and spreading crown!  What rich colour in the thick-bossed
trunks no storm could bend, and the fruit, springing in golden plumes
from stiff, wing-like leaves!

Ermengarde had always thought of palms as slender, waving things; the
massy strength, the architectural splendour, the suggestion of carved
pillar and arched roof of majestic span in the date-palm on this
Saracen-raided shore was a revelation.  Only to repeat to himself the
words, Palm Sunday, filled the inspired Opium-Eater with solemn awe;
but not its great associations alone make the simple word, palm,
impressive to those who have seen this variety.

The winged steeds were no longer yoked to the cars; they must have
vanished long since with the darkness; the train moved more and more
slowly.  That it should gradually slacken speed to a crawl through
all this magical beauty was natural; but that it should actually
stop, like common trains in regions of prose, for people to get out,
claim luggage and pay porters, was amazing, especially as that first
superb colonnade of date-palms was seen to rise behind one of these
stations--perhaps Cannes?  True, they were not stations in the
ordinary sense, but rather pleasant places of pause, where leisurely
persons of distinguished bearing and immaculate attire, gold-braided,
button-booted, and black-kid-gloved, enjoyed the amenities of a life
devoid of care, incidentally remembering from time to time to bestow
a kindly and condescending courtesy upon wanderers descending
casually from the train of luxury, that was now enjoying a beautiful
calm in singular contrast to its wild stir at starting and headlong
rush through the night.

Sometimes, after a long and apparently purposeless pause at one of
these clean and sunny spots, an idea seemed to occur to an
immaculately dressed lounger and interrupt the gentle current of his
chat, if his roving glance happened to be caught by the cars.  "There
is a train," he seemed to say to himself; "perhaps something might as
well be done with it."

Then, after a little silent meditation and some smiling interchange
of thoughts with an acquaintance, he would move leisurely towards the
cars, and indicate by a slight, but graceful, gesture that the pause
was at an end.  Then the journey would be gently resumed, through a
land of rich-hued blossom and glowing green, with solemn mountain
steeps rising on the one hand, and the vast blue radiance of a dark
blue sea breaking in soft and soundless foam on many a purple,
enchanted headland, and in many a sunny bay, on the other.

All the glamour of Shelley's ethereal poetry seemed to breathe and
sing from that glorious sea, which Homer compared to wine in its
depth of colour.  All Shelley's seas are Mediterranean, and most of
Byron's, while Keats and Tennyson, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, for
the most part love the paler grey-blue and more frequent foam of
Northern shores.

Vainly did the woman of mystery remind Ermengarde that she had not
breakfasted; she was feasting with gods; she needed no meaner
sustenance; even the shadow of the man of mystery passing her door,
and glaring insolently through his detestable goggles upon her rapt
face, scarcely annoyed her, except as a momentary eclipse of some
lofty headland running out into the happy morning sea.  She had even
forgotten that she had slept, not only in, but upon, her hat, a
really successful creation from Bond Street.

Strange that at these charmingly named places of retired leisure,
where the train paused, as if for meditation, radiant specimens of
Parisian fashion should appear, in lemon-coloured hair and
artistically applied complexions; what business had they in
fairyland?  And those children of Israel, of rubicund visage,
expansive waistcoat, and patent-leather boots?  And that gay and
fresh-coloured youth, of simple but select toilet and lordly British
bearing--not aggressively lordly, like that of so many Britons
wandering in the land of the barbarous and ineffectual foreigner, not
contemptuously, but unconsciously and cheerily so, like one to whom
life offered all its best treasures as of royal right.

Bright-eyed and lazily smiling, the youth strode slowly along the
quiet platform, carelessly glancing at the windows, when a sudden
thrill of sympathy made Ermengarde turn to see the woman of mystery,
who was standing leaning against their door and looking across her at
the people passing, start with a crimson face and eyes of flame, and
crush herself suddenly far back in the corner of her seat, holding a
paper of far-off yesterday before her eyes, with a quick, deep sigh.

The youth passed on and came back again, stopping to speak to a
Parisian costume in lemon hair and bistred eyes; left her, joyously
laughing with his head thrown back, and cannoned against a brother
Briton in an agony of misunderstanding with a porter, who was
replying to impossible English-French in equally impossible
French-English.

"Riviera Palace, vite!" cried the English youth, cutting the Gordian
knot and calming the troubled waters by those simple words in three
different tongues; then, gripping the bewildered Briton by the arm,
he steered him placidly out of sight.

"So he didn't come for her," Ermengarde reflected.

The mountains soared higher, and drew back from the land with ever
greater majesty, and the headlands became more magically lovely as
they stretched into the shining sea, the villas, the gardens, and
groves ever richer; and, after having seemed to spend a brief but
happy lifetime in traversing a beautiful dream, glorious with palm
and olive and mimosa, the train again paused, and the woman of
mystery suggested to Ermengarde that she had better get out.

"You have arrived," she explained, finding her unwilling to stir.
They had done nothing but arrive at intervals during the last
twenty-four hours, and how should this mysterious creature know that
this was her final destination?

Still, the woman had been exceedingly kind, and Ermengarde thanked
her graciously as she bowed her farewell, suddenly remembering that
the dread ordeal of the Douane had once more to be faced, and her
property, unseen since somebody had taken it to be registered at
Victoria, had to be rescued from the barbarians--probably at high
ransom.




Chapter V

On the Ridge

The moving palace of luxury that had conveyed her in so few hours
through so many dreams of magic and visions of faery, rumbled slowly
out of the spacious hall of idleness commonly known as Mentone
Station, but more nearly resembling a Home of Rest for railway
officials.  There it left Ermengarde, dizzy, bewildered, and
solitary, planted by the luggage, that in some magical and mysterious
way had suddenly been restored to her, and looking vacantly across
the rails at a group of sturdy palms and a purple rim of sea.

Then it was that the melancholy spirit named home-sickness suddenly
fell upon, seized, and rent her.

She would see the woman of mystery no more--so forlorn were her
feelings that it was grief to part even with this probably suspicious
character and possible assassinator of her nocturnal imaginings--she
was going all alone to an unknown foreign house full of strangers,
with not a soul to meet her or speak to her; perhaps to one of those
hostelries so often met with on lonely moors in historic romance,
that exist only as traps to rob and murder wayfarers.

"Quel est l'hôtel de Madame?" had several times been addressed to
unheeding ears before she recovered enough from these dismal
forebodings to reply; whereupon she soon found herself under the
broad bright sky outside, stepping into one of the twenty or thirty
omnibuses drawn up in line before the station, each with the name of
its house in shining gold upon it.  It was reassuring to see Les
Oliviers legibly inscribed upon a veritable, unromantic bus; it was
broad day; there was clearly no question of sinister-looking hovels
with one-eyed landlords intent on murder and robbery--in these days
they do the work more slowly; in the kitchens and on the bills--but
she did wish she had been able to do her hair and tidy herself.

"I shall have to strap-hang, and there's no strap, and I couldn't if
there was," was her mournful reflection, on finding the interior of
this vehicle overflowing with hand-baggage and a lady of ample
proportions on one side, and with a fair-sized gentleman, evidently a
portion of the ample lady's baggage, and a thin gentleman and more
hand-baggage, on the other.  All were English, and all looked at her
with the deadly animosity our countrymen accord to strangers.  The
whole world being the exclusive heritage of the travelling Briton, he
naturally looks upon all other travellers as intruders.  The
appearance of a moustached face, with laughing dark eyes and a gay
smile, at the window, followed by a request in a velvety voice,
half-pleading, half-humorous, of "Place pour Madame, Messieurs et
Madame, _s'il vous plait_," and accompanied by a forcible
transposition of some of these mountains of parcels, resulted in a
clearance of about six inches of cushion, upon which Ermengarde
accommodated as much of a wearied frame as circumstances permitted;
and then, with much furious but innocuous whip-cracking and many
strange anathemas, the omnibus jolted and rumbled off, Ermengarde
feeling more of a pariah with every jolt, hurled now into the
indignant arms of the fair-sized gentleman and now upon the towering
parcels of the lady of ample proportions, and profusely and
irrationally apologizing in German, of which her fellow-voyagers
understood nothing but that it was German, and therefore detestable.
Why she spoke German at that precise moment of her existence she had
no idea, except that it was the only foreign language that happened
to turn up, and that she was obsessed by a vague notion that English
was unsuitable to the surroundings.  So, try as she would, she
continued to speak German all the way to the hotel, to the great
inconvenience and mystification of everybody, including herself.  Her
German was not quite perfect.

The lady of ample proportions meanwhile expressed herself strongly in
very plain English upon the unpleasantness of having to "herd" with
Germans, and said with bitter reproach to the fair-sized man that she
had understood Les Oliviers to be an English house; while the thin
man, who was helplessly pinned in the inmost corner by packages,
vainly tried in a gentle, ineffectual voice, totally ignored by the
stout lady, to pacify her apprehensions; and the fair-sized man
entreated Ermengarde almost with tears to "parlez Français," of which
she was just then totally incapable from sheer fatigue.

But not too tired to perceive that they were jolting along a level
road, shaded by grey and leafless planes unreal and dreamlike in the
marvellously clear sunlight, along a torrent bed, that was threaded
by a stream, in which women were washing linen, kneeling in tubs or
on the bare, shingly bed, just as she remembered them in Swiss
torrents when a girl; or to catch a glimpse on the other side of
marvellous villa gardens ablaze with scarlet salvias and giant
geraniums, and glowing with orange-trees in fruit.  It was "roses,
roses all the way," while, high above in the dazzling sky, soared
bare mountain peaks, warm grey, veined with amethyst and streaked
with snow, jewel-like, wonderful.  They had left the town far behind,
and seemed to have jogged an immense distance inland by the torrent
bed, before they reached a little blue house at the foot of a steep
mountain ridge, cultivated or wooded to the very top, turned in at a
gate, and stopped.  Then Ermengarde's heart, lightened by the foreign
charm and beauty of the road, sank once more.  Could this small and
homely cultivator's house be Les Oliviers?  Not at all; the hotel was
high up out of sight, they were informed, while being gently
requested to alight.

"Mais pourquoi descendre, Messieurs et Mesdames?  But quite simply,
because here the road ceases to exist.  It is now necessary to
mount," was the alarming pronouncement of the driver.

To mount--and to mount a wooded precipice with an invisible summit,
after all the jolting and shaking of the long journey.  Ermengarde at
once decided that the only possible course was to lie down and die
then and there.  The woman of substance, on the other hand, with
sound practical common sense demanded to be told what she was to
mount, and was politely informed that she might take her choice, with
a wave of the hand towards a string of mules and donkeys amiably
blinking in the sunshine beneath a jutting rock, that was almost
hidden in hanging drapery of sarsaparilla, honeysuckle, and bramble,
and topped by pines and great bushes of white heath in flower.

"Mount _them_!" shrieked the poor lady, surveying the unconscious
animals through her lorgnette.  "Merciful Heavens!"

"But, one at a time, not all at once," the driver explained with
gestures of deprecation.

"This is infamous!" thundered the fair-sized man, recovering from
partial suffocation and upon the verge of apoplexy.  "My wife's
minimum weight is fourteen stone!  Infamous!  Besides, she can't
ride.  Atrocious!"

"Unless Madame prefers to mount on foot."

"Unfortunately," the thin man meekly put in, "there is no other
alternative, the hotel being on the top of the ridge and accessible
only by a mule-path."

"What?" cried another British matron of majestic girth, who was
alighting with her daughter from a fly laden with luggage large and
small.  "No road to this place?  It is a positive swindle.  The
people should be exposed at once.  Besides, even if those wretched
donkeys manage to carry us up, how on earth are we to get down again?
And what is to be done with the luggage?"

"Mais," replied the driver, with a large circular sweep of both arms,
obviously intended as a conclusive and satisfactory settlement of all
difficulties.

"_Abscheulich!_" shrilled in Berlin accents from a plump and
comfortable Frau, who had arrived upon the scene in another fiacre,
containing a husband, a daughter, and a few other properties.
"_Undenkbar!_"

At this the owner of the dark eyes, moustache and engaging smile
looked with an expressive twinkle and shrug at Ermengarde (who was
sufficiently refreshed and gladdened by the sight of the stout lady's
difficulties to renounce her intention of lying down and dying for
the present), and came forward with the explanation that the little
climb was nothing; the animals were strong and accustomed to heavy
burdens; the luggage would be carried by pack-mules, and the heavier
passengers by the strongest of the saddle-mules; that no horsemanship
was necessary; both donkeys and mules were to be regarded simply as
ambulant easy-chairs, on which it was possible to doze and dream, to
compose poetry, and evolve philosophic systems and scientific
theories, "as Monsieur does," he added, gracefully indicating the
thin man, who was lame, and having been hoisted on to the largest and
most handsome of the engaging, soft-eyed donkeys, was reclining
wearily with one arm on the velvet back of the saddle.

"Na, Hedwig," growled the tranquil German in the fly, "disturb
thyself not!  There are many hotels in Menton, _Zuruck_!
_Geschwindt!_"

And back they went straightway, impervious to the pleading of the
dark-eyed man, who too late discovered that the senior partner in
that domestic firm was not of the persuadable female sex.  Then,
recognizing Mrs. Allonby to be of more ductile material than the
other two, he devoted his persuasive powers to the woman of substance
and the British matron, whose stern brows soon relaxed beneath his
sunny smile and pleading glances; the woman of substance finding
herself in a trice, she hardly knew how, accommodated with an
improvised _chaise à porteurs_, consisting of a perilously aged
basket-chair and two hoe-handles borne on the shoulders of two
handsome Italian workmen, whose teeth glistened with fun and the
prospect of five-franc pieces to come, while the fair-sized man and
the other matron were mounted each on a strong mule, and before they
could utter a syllable of remonstrance, the mystic word "jay" came
from the mule-driver, and they found themselves bumped out of sight
up the narrow path, which, consisting of steep steps made of huge
cobbles, or, rather, small crags, compelled them to devote their
whole energies to avoid being shot over the mules' tails, as the
animals reared on end with a jerk at each stony stair.

The remaining travellers, having been distributed among the other
mules and donkeys, were soon mounting, nolens-volens and with
inconvenient rapidity, the cobbled stairs, that at first threaded a
sort of chimney in the ridge, and, later, reached a narrow, winding
ledge with a perpendicular drop on one or either side, on the extreme
edges of which the animals took a fiendish pleasure in balancing
themselves, while their miserable riders shut their eyes and clung on
for dear life, vainly imploring the mule-drivers to stop them.  But
the merciless drivers, deaf to entreaty, did nothing but urge the
laggard beasts on with strange sounds, in which the word "jay" alone
was intelligible (suggesting to the thoughtful mind a probable Aryan
root signifying to proceed, from which this vocable and the Hindoo
_fao_ and the British gee are alike derived).  Because whenever a
driver said "jay," every donkey and mule went, and whenever any rider
said anything to the drivers (and some of them said a good deal in
different tongues), these at once cried "jay," bringing out the vowel
sound sharply and leaving off before they had quite finished it.

It was during this ascent that the fold of Ermengarde's brain in
which the French language was located suddenly became accessible, and
she implored them in choicest Parisian to stop, to take her off, to
allow her to fall in some soft place, anywhere, with the sole result
of bringing a fresh shower of twig-blows and _jays_ from these
harmless people, who only understood the Italian patois of the
district, and supposed from her agonized voice and gestures that she
was anxious to ascend more quickly, whereas her one consuming desire
was to get off her ambulant armchair at any price.  It was some years
since the unfortunate Ermengarde had ridden at all, and then it had
been upon an average Christian horse, and only those who have been
borne unwillingly by a series of bone-dislocating rears and jerks up
endless staircases enclosed in rock-walls, and along knife-edged
ledges overhanging abysmal nothingness, upon animals that understand
no civilized language, and answer to no bit or bridle, and whose sole
form of obedience is to run away from whoever pronounces the word
"jay" in their rear, can imagine the complicated anguish of such
riding.  Nothing but the delight inherent to fallen nature at the
spectacle of the misfortunes of others enabled Ermengarde to endure
this singular form of torture; but when she witnessed the spluttering
indignation of the British matron of majestic girth at being
constantly, either crushed between the thin man and the adjacent
rock-wall, or edged perilously over the precipice by his donkey, and
his agonized attempts to avoid this unseemly proximity, with his wild
and ineffectual endeavours to explain his own innocence and the
friendly relations existing between their respective beasts, who
could by no human means be induced to travel apart, she became
uplifted in spirit and capable of enduring anything.  Especially when
the thin man weakly tried to apologize in French, of which he was
hopelessly incapable, thus exasperating the woman of majestic girth
to madness at the idea of being taken for a foreigner.

It was not until the handsome and stalwart donkey that bore the
tortured form of Ermengarde took advantage of some mischance to the
driver's apparel to dart up a side staircase, bordered by succulent
grasses, with a suddenness that extracted an involuntary shriek from
his hapless burden, that her woes came to pause, and, like Balaam's,
her donkey found the path between the vineyards barred by the sudden
apparition, not, indeed, of an angel with a sword, but of a
comfortably real figure, with a walking-stick and two laughing dark
eyes.  He had dropped from heaven knew whence, and understood
Parisian French even on English lips.

"If I don't stop I shall certainly die," gasped Ermengarde, suddenly
relapsing into German, which presented no difficulty to the owner of
the laughing eyes.  "Never in my life have I had to climb a broken
staircase on a wild ass before.  It's like a nightmare."

"Yet Madame sits beautifully, is a good rider?"

"Oh, I can ride--horses--not nightmares, not wild donkeys up endless
chimneys."

Then it was that this man of infinite resource came to the rescue.
He took the donkey's short bridle--too short to be used by the
rider--in one hand, and passing his other arm behind the saddle
brought the lawless animal into subjection, and diverted the rider's
attention from her misadventures to the splendour of the prospect,
which was unfolding beneath them with every step they mounted, but
which she had been totally unable to see because it was all behind.
Then, after a short rest and rearrangement of the Bond Street hat,
which, besides having been slept upon, was obviously not intended to
ride donkeys up precipices in, he personally conducted donkey and
rider for the remainder of the ascent, making Ermengarde's hair stand
on end by disputing edges of precipices with the animal, and
preserving her in violent and unexpected jerks by the support of his
arm.

"But how will you ever face the miserable people you have fastened
upon wild animals against their will, when we get to the top--that
is, if there is any top, and we ever get there?" she asked.

"Ah, Madame," he replied with twinkling eyes and a small shrug, "I am
discreet.  I do not face them, especially the fat lady, till they
have been fed.  But--she is a _drôlesse_, that stout one.  Imagine to
yourself, her porters have already dropped her twice _à force de
rire_ simply.  They fall soft, those padded ones.  And she is now
happily safe on high."

"But can they be expected to stay in your house after being captured
and carried up by force?"

This youth pleased Ermengarde; she told herself, while looking kindly
into his sunny, smiling eyes, that he was a dear boy.  Foreign
subordinates, especially French, she had always understood, are very
different from our clumsy, self-conscious countrymen; no need to keep
them at such a distance; they can be amusing and companionable
without being impertinent or vulgar.  And this one had the bearing of
a prince in disguise.

"But they are obliged to stay, Madame; for, look you, once there,
they cannot get down again.  Besides, it is so charming on high that
no one ever wishes to.  Moreover, it is not, as Madame supposes, my
house."

"No?  You are--who are you, then--not the proprietor?"

"Heaven forbid!  I am quite simply--they call me--Monsieur Isidore,
at your service."

"Son?" she pondered silently, "secretary--or _maitre-d'hotel_?"

They were now winding round a rocky steep, crowned by a plain white
building, half hidden by cypresses, the flickering, flame-like points
of which surprised her by their solemn and symbolic beauty.  Making a
sudden sharp turn they found themselves in a sunny, open garden,
ablaze with flowers of summer sweetness, shaded by orange, olive, and
palm trees, planted sparsely upon a ridge summit, and commanding a
glorious, wide, and open prospect ending in the warm, deep blue of
the sea.

All round and far up behind the house towered a vast amphitheatre of
mountains clothed in every spur and gorge with wood or terraced
orchard, and crested by towered villages almost to their tossing
peaks, uplifted, bare, and beautiful, with amethyst veining and
delicate snow-streaks, into the intense velvety blue sky.  Except
where the ridge ran up behind the house into a little crest topped by
dark green pines glowing vividly on the vivid sky, and then plunged
on into the mountains' heart, the garden stood isolated on the edge
of the sheer ridge that fell from the sun-facing front in steep
terraces of lemon orchard, vineyard, and garden down to the torrent
bed, crawling slowly, slowly, among houses and gardens half hidden in
trees, to the mass of clean, red-brown roofs, that lay with never a
smoke-stain among trees by the sea, like an estuary of masonry.
Thence on the East a hill-spur suddenly rose and ran back into the
mountains, hiding from view the harbour with its shipping and all the
old town, except one church-tower raised above the hill and outlined
upon the sea.  And on every hill-slope and steep, terrace after
terrace of vine, and olive, and lemon with golden fruit, and mimosa
in golden bloom, or pine woods in clefts and on abrupt steeps.  And
everywhere small houses, growing smaller as they rose on the heights,
with ruddy brown roofs and walls of clean pink and blue and white;
and all this bathed and flooded and steeped in such transparence and
clarity of sunlight as the Children of the Mist see never in their
own dim poetic shores.

Ermengarde was speechless, all eye and ear, breathing in the warm,
spiced, exhilarating air, that never a ruffle stirred, as if it were
life for both soul and body, and not knowing how she had parted
company with the gentle, soft-eyed creature that had borne her up
into this paradise.  Something cool touched her cheek; it was a lemon
hanging from a dark-leaved branch.  Her skirts swept a little forest
of scented oak-leaf geranium, so sturdy and compact of growth one
could almost stand on it; then they brushed a border thick-set with
double stocks one mass of solid bloom.  Here were geraniums, trees,
not plants, with hard stems, their velvety leaves crimson, olive, and
orange; here on a wall strong almond perfume gave token of a curtain
of heliotrope in flower; and, as in the road below, "it was roses,
roses all the way," from marble-stepped terrace to terrace, on bush
and trellis and wall and balustrade.

"Will they want to assassinate me for this, Madame?" M. Isidore
asked, regarding her with amused satisfaction.  "When one reaches
paradise, does one quarrel with the paths to it?"

"How can I tell; I was never there; but--I've known people capable of
it."  She thought of the woman of substance and of Arthur's eldest
aunt.  "Where are all the people?" she asked, becoming aware that the
paradise was tenanted solely by a Swiss porter with a bristling
moustache standing at the door of the plain, square villa.  Empty
garden-seats, cane lounges, and a pile of trunks by a side door bore
witness to human occupation, though no soul stirred.

"They are happy, Madame; they breakfast.  I am without fear as
without reproach."

He laid a cluster of tea-roses in her hand, and she turned with a
smile of thanks and a little sigh of content, to perceive that the
view seawards to the west was blocked by a sudden rise of the ridge,
round which they had just travelled, the villa and garden sitting
down upon the hollow back in a sort of saddle.  On the crest of this
rise, as if emerging from the pine-woods clothing the steep flank,
gleamed the white walls and little bell-gable of a convent,
surrounded by cypress and eucalyptus, all in shadow and etched
sharply upon that marvellous sky, that before nightfall would be
gold, like an early Italian background, or lemon, or one chrysolite,
or rose-crimson mingled with orange and green.

This gave the last consecrating touch.  Thence the Angelus would
float down over vineyard and olive-garden, at morning, noon, and
evening, and break in soft music across the ravine and over the hill
to the hidden town, all the towers of which would take it up in rich
confused melody, repeated and heard far out at sea.

"But no," she heard; "the convent is now subject to the closure.  The
fraternity is dispersed.  The house is private property."

The subject appeared distasteful to her guide.  She turned and went
into the cool, fresh house, finding the shadow and coolness of the
broad, stencilled corridors welcome, and forgetting the ice and fog
and shivering of yesterday, and the picture of the thin, starved boy,
blue and shuddering on the bleak station, as if they had never been.

But she did not forget the roses coloured like a sunset, that this
man of resource had laid in her hand.  They reposed in water, while
the weary traveller, refreshed by hot water and soap more than by
food, laid her aching limbs at last in a stationary and silent bed,
and slept with a vigour that excluded dreams and every sensation but
one of bitter hostility to the chambermaid when she came, as straitly
charged, and roused her with equal vigour in time for dinner.  Then
the roses were promoted to a place of honour in the simplest of
demi-toilets, and she made her way to the dining-room, with a
strange, lost feeling at having to sit at meat with total strangers,
every one of whom had something to say to every one but herself, and
all of whom appeared to regard her with a savage animosity and
depreciation, under which she found herself quailing to such an
extent, that to assert herself she was obliged to demand salt of her
next neighbour in aggressively firm tones, and, though she was
unaware of it, in her best German.

The dining-room was not as pleasant now as when, after a slight
temporary acquaintance with soap and water, she had taken her
solitary _déjeuner_ there in the morning.  It was empty then, and her
seat faced a row of windows looking across the ravine, all powdery on
the opposite side with blue bloom of pine and olive, much alike in
the strong sunlight.  Through the window just opposite, the white
village of Castellare gleamed on a hill-crest, above which the bare
peaks of the Berceau glowed jewel-like in a pure, deep sky.  Then the
masses of flowers, fresh from the garden, gathered, not bought, such
flowers, so full and rich and joyous of growth, and the fruit--orange
and lemon, just off the bough, with the dark leaves clinging to
them--how fragrant, poetic, and beautiful the whole had been.  That
first _déjeuner_ was a poem, contrasted with the prosaic
luncheon-tables of the City of Perpetual Fog.

The fruit and flowers were still there, a great bank of spiced double
stocks totally effaced the thin man plaintively sipping his soup
opposite.  People were squeezing fresh lemons into their glasses most
temptingly, but the mountains were blotted out, and the table was
ringed with human faces, alien, unfriendly, grim of glance.  It was
the hapless Ermengarde's first appearance alone at a _table d'hote_
(Arthur always insisted on a private table in public); she was
unaware that a new-comer in a pension is considered as a heathen man
and a publican, an unwarrantable intruder, an encroacher upon vested
rights, a probable pickpocket, a possible escaped lunatic--especially
if a foreigner in British company--most especially if German.

Not knowing this, she drew the inference that something in her
appearance incited public hostility.  The whole of her hair was grown
upon the premises; there she was founded on rock, impregnable.  But,
before retiring to rest after _déjeuner_, she had availed herself of
the convenience of Hinde's curlers.  Could she have left any in?
What is all the beauty of the Riviera--or of all the world--to a
woman who, through inadvertence or the malice of demons, finds
herself dining publicly in Hinde's curlers?  Or had that horrible
fastened-behind blouse come undone again?  Was there a smut on her
nose?  Had she contracted a sudden squint from excessive fatigue?
People had been known to do so.  Perhaps her features resembled those
of some notorious, and probably improper, woman.  Or she had suddenly
broken out into a rash--she felt her cheeks burning--and people
thought her infectious, and that was why the woman of substance,
instead of passing the salt, only glared at her and drew her
impeccable skirts away from contact with hers.

Having reduced the waiter, who happened to be an Italian, to the
verge of imbecility by demanding salt of him in this same German
tongue, and aggravated his confusion by a further request for bread,
in reply to which he brought mustard, pepper, and lemons in
succession, she was at last rescued by the thin man, who, divining
her wants by the light of reason and supplying them, plaintively
explained the waiter's nationality and ignorance of German from
behind the stocks, which he pushed aside, suspecting that they
concealed a better view.

Amply rewarded by a smile and a "_Danke sehr_," the thin man ventured
upon a hope that the donkey-ride had turned out better than it looked.

"How it looked I don't know," she said, "but it couldn't possibly
have looked worse than it felt," and was met by the cheerful
assurance that the anguish of riding donkeys up stone stairs was
nothing to the torture of riding them down.  Then, cheered by the
persuasion that the thin man could appreciate beauty, even with a
smut on its nose or curlers in its hair, she drew from him that he
had already spent a couple of weeks at Les Oliviers, and asked what
kind of weather had prevailed, and how far they were from shops, in
her native tongue, until a bowl of salad travelling in the rear of a
dish of chicken came to a dead stop near the woman of substance,
whereupon terror of the latter's disapproving eye threw her back to
the brain-fold in which her German was located, and she meekly asked
for the salad in that tongue.

"I suppose you mean salad," was the severe reply that accompanied the
plumping of the bowl on the table by her side.  "You seem to speak
English fairly well.  Where did you pick up that accent?"

"I--I really don't know," she faltered.  "I didn't know I had an
accent.  But I came quite honestly by it," she added hastily.

Just then a sound from some one dining at a little table immediately
behind her, something between a splutter, a cough, and a chuckle,
made her turn sharply, with a gasp that began by being a suppressed
cry, and look straight into the bearded, goggled face of that
miserable Anarchist, whose sinister gaze fell before the fearless
interrogation of hers.  As she wrote afterwards to her husband, it
was a very damaging feature in his character that this truculent
creature could never look her straight in the face.

"Then the woman of mystery can't be far off," she reflected, after
recovering from the first shock of being pursued by this
objectionable person to her remote mountain fastness.  "But I leave
the place to-morrow, if I have to ride down those rocks on a
rhinoceros.  He gives me the creeps, glowering at me behind those
horrid goggles."




Chapter VI

Mountain Sunset

Nobody seemed to know what was the exact position M. Isidore occupied
in the hotel, nor, indeed, did anybody care, as long as he was civil
and made himself generally useful.  Yet there was a vague feeling of
mystery associated with the light-hearted youth, who in some
inexplicable way commanded a certain amount of deference that
excluded familiarity.  His name floated continually on the surface of
general conversation.  It was "Ask M. Isidore this--M. Isidore will
see to that," or, "Where _is_ M. Isidore?" and the vivid face and
dancing eyes were there.

He had a habit of suddenly appearing without audible summons in
crises of discomfort and perplexity, when, as if by magic, things
came straight, and, with a jest and a shrug, he vanished--Heaven only
knew whither, for he seemed to possess neither local habitation nor
surname.  You never knew where to look for him, yet he was always to
be found.

If donkeys from Mentone were wanted, he tapped and clicked in a
little corner cupboard, and after one or two soft "Ola's!" listened
as if in communion with subject spirits to whom he whispered words of
power, whereupon, in no time to speak of, gaily-caparisoned but
self-willed animals, in charge of women in flat straw hats, stood
waiting on a little sort of bastion on the ridge, outside the gate at
the back of the house.

If people wanted to know what the weather was going to be--and only
newcomers asked what everybody else knew by experience to be
unchangeably superb--or the menu, or the temper of riding mules, or
the hire of carriages, the weight of postal packets, and the best
places to buy oranges to send home, or when every train left, and
arrived at, Mentone, or the probable cost of sailing to Africa, the
price and programme of every entertainment at Nice, Mentone, and
Monte Carlo, the most trustworthy hair-dressers and restaurants in
the town, the hours of Divine worship, and the most infallible system
of winning at roulette, they unhesitatingly asked M. Isidore in any
language they happened to know best, and he as unhesitatingly replied
in the same--namely, his own.  Hence it happened that his replies
often exercised and impressed the imagination as strongly as those of
the Delphian oracle, and like those were subject to diverse
interpretations by diverse hearers.  And, if the oracles were
unfulfilled, this in no wise detracted from the confidence reposed in
his omniscience.  For, given three different interpretations, it was
obviously impossible for all to be fulfilled, and if one was
fulfilled it was equally obvious that that must have been the right
one.  If people lost their way or fell off donkeys in the mountains,
they were usually met or picked up by M. Isidore.  If they wanted
change, postage-stamps, picture-cards, these were invariably in his
pocket.  And if, as occasionally occurs in cosmopolitan
boarding-houses, things became a little dull after dinner, M. Isidore
would cheerfully swallow carving-knives, and make small articles of
personal property change owners unseen, boil eggs in hats and turn
wine into ink, and make people's flesh creep delightfully by reading
their thoughts, telling their fortunes, and divining their
characters.  He would also play billiards in the French manner.

If Madame Bontemps, the proprietress, a tall and handsome woman, were
ruffled in spirit by domestic contrarieties, inefficient service,
exacting inmates, and the general tendency of things to be broken,
lost, spoilt, and worn out, he could always soothe her exasperated
feelings, and soften the asperities of her speech.  He stood between
her wrath and guilty servants; he defended her from the attacks of
infuriated guests.  He even teased that majestic woman, and openly
made fun of her smaller vices, thereby drawing a soft suggestion of
smiles about her iron mouth.  Madame Bontemps never laughed, probably
because she never had time.  But she had a husband, who sadly needed
discipline.  When she had a few moments' leisure, which was seldom,
she sat in a small office, and received complaints and orders, gave
advice, made up accounts, drew cheques and knit stockings.  Indeed,
she never ceased to knit stockings, unless her busy brown fingers
were otherwise employed.  It was supposed that she knit stockings in
bed, if she ever went to bed, which was generally doubted.  She had
been heard at dawn in the garden giving orders in a tongue that none
but the labourers could understand, except perhaps her husband, for
it was that in which she usually quarrelled with him.  She was
sometimes found patrolling the corridors and stairs at night, after
lights were out and the hotel was ostensibly plunged in repose.

If anything--illness, fire, or burglars--happened during the night,
Madame always appeared fully dressed with unruffled hair.  At any
hour of the day she might be seen in gardens, vineyards, and lemon
orchards, directing labourers, or in the kitchen, making the chef's
hair bristle with terror, or in the topmost corridors discovering the
sins of trembling _femmes de chambre_, or in the poultry yard,
cow-stall, or dairy; and wherever Madame Bontemps found things done
as they should not be done, she was capable, not only of commenting
in vigorous terms upon the subject, but also of practically showing
how they should be done.

People going to her office and finding it empty had only to press an
electric button, and she appeared as if attached to a secret spring.
No one knew what Madame Bontemps did not do.

On the other hand, nobody knew what M. Bontemps did.  But he was
invariably polite and cheerful, and invariably provided with
cigarettes and criticisms of life, for which he entertained a
tolerant contempt, mixed with appreciation.  He always referred to
Madame with profound deference as the one supreme authority on earth.
It was rumoured, but not generally credited, that he had once carried
a pannier of wood up to some one's room.  He had beautiful dark blue
eyes, inherited by his youngest daughter.  His eldest was cast in
sterner mould, more like her mother.  She spoke English well but not
willingly; her frame was tall and powerful, her bearing majestic, her
face dark and strong, with those very dark liquid eyes full of latent
passion, that suggest a Moorish or Saracenic strain in the ancestry.
Mlle. Geneviève, Ermengarde understood, was learning hotel management
under her mother, whose able lieutenant she had already become.  Some
of these facts were gathered from the thin man and some from M.
Isidore himself, in the course of the first, long, idle, dreamy day
of basking on the sunny garden terrace.

It is probable that these things lost nothing in their transmission
through Mrs. Allonby's letters home.  As she lay in a long chair
among spiced stocks in the still clear sunlight, she supposed herself
to be writing letters.  But in reality she was absorbing the beauty
of the pictures spread before her, and realizing how much more
exhausted she had been by her illness than had been suspected, and
how unfit to cope with the trouble that had invaded her guarded,
commonplace life.  Only stillness and this healing warmth of sunlight
seemed any good to her now.  The stocks touching her feet were backed
by a rustic balustrade, twined with roses and jasmine, immediately
above a narrow belt of lemon-trees, the yellow-fruited tops of which
were just visible, on the edge of the ridge which fell so steeply
that, as she lay, there was nothing between her eyes and the distant
band of dark blue sea.  She seemed to be poised in mid air, with the
lemons and roses, between sea and sky.

There was now no need to leave the house, the Anarchist having
apparently taken his departure.  With what anxiety she had listened
to the voices of people breakfasting that first morning in the sunny
air beneath her open window, while she took her coffee and roll
cosily in bed, fearing to detect the harsh tones of the Anarchist
among them.  But she could only distinguish the plaintive notes of
the thin man and the high treble and artificial gurgling laugh of
Miss Boundrish, the daughter of the woman of ample girth, above the
general cheerful ripple of morning chat.  Her window being _au
troisième_, she ventured once, modestly veiled in lace curtains, to
peep out upon this amazing picture of people breakfasting out of
doors at eight o'clock of a mid-winter morning, and, as every face
was turned from the house to the glorious prospect of sunlit space,
and most were too immediately beneath her to look up without
dislocated necks, there was little fear of being seen.  How pleasant
it was, this intermittent sound of voices in open air.  There was the
thin man in a picturesque hat, breakfasting all alone on the edge of
a little jutting plateau, his head outlined upon the blue space of
the ravine, his face seaward.  There is but one pleasanter thing than
this social breakfasting out of doors--to lie in bed and hear other
people do it through open windows.

The voices were chiefly insular with a sprinkling of _Jawohls_ and
_Sos_ and _Mais ouis_.  Little bursts of laughter and detached
sentences sometimes floated up to the window _au troisième_.  Once
she heard, in Miss Boundrish's overpowering head voice, "Mrs.
Allonby, oh!" followed by the artificial gurgle that in the course of
time jarred people's nerves; then Ermengarde knew that she had been
given as it were to the lions, and was being served hot as a relish
to the coffee and rolls, that her character, features, dress,
complexion, figure, her probable past and possible present, her
position, her upbringing and connexions, were being tossed from beast
to beast, and disputed, growled, and chortled over.  And once, in the
voice of Miss Boundrish's mother, she heard the ejaculation, "What?
_the_ Allonby?" and wondered which of Arthur's relations had been
hung, and why he had never told her.

Yet Miss Boundrish's mother had actually conferred upon Mrs. Allonby
the shady white hat that reposed upon her hair as she sat in the
garden terrace this afternoon.

"I tried to wear it to pacify Mr. Boundrish, who's always worrying
about sunstrokes and fevers, my dear," the kind lady said; "but it
was too young for me, and Dorris is _very_ particular about her hats,
as you may have noticed."

She certainly had noticed the rose-wreathed and unsuitable elegance
in which Miss Boundrish had graced the table at luncheon.  How
delightful it had been to see people trooping into the cool, shadowy
dining-room in summer hats and frocks, a little flushed with sun, and
to think of shivering unfortunates with frost-tipped noses lunching
at home by electric light, in a pea-green atmosphere flavoured with
soot and sulphur.  Mrs. Boundrish's hat was not what her daughter
called chic, but it harmonized with Mrs. Allonby's simplest, least
attractive costume; yet Ermengarde wore the thing contentedly.  She
was so tired, and so glad to rest from the innumerable petty
complexities of suburban life, and steep herself in beauty and calm
forgetfulness.  As she lay in the sunny stillness, she wondered how
she had borne with it so long, and was amazed to remember that she
had cared about hats and been wounded by Arthur's contempt for those
five.  He would not believe his eyes if he could see her sitting thus
in contented, humdrum chat with buxom Mrs. Boundrish, a woman of
little more social consideration than her own cook, with a thing on
her head like an inverted dish-cover, made of straw and garnished
with two pocket-handkerchiefs.

"You may," the mother of Dorris--not classic Doris--apologized, "have
thought me a little--ah--stiff last night; but the fact is," she
added, suddenly confidential, "I took you for a foreigner."

"Ah!" returned Ermengarde, as much as to say, "That explains all."

"And, of course, in a place like this, one had to be so very
particular."

"Very."

Ermengarde was wondering if the huge, bee-like insects plunging into
the hearts of the quivering stocks were fireflies in their winter
state--later, the thin man said they were humming-bird moths--and
once more took a pencil and a little writing-block and began relating
the perils of yesterday's donkey-ride to Charlie, while Miss
Boundrish's mother, murmuring various platitudes, resumed her woollen
crochet-work, till authoritatively summoned to some parental duty by
the piercing voice of Dorris.

One line had contrived to get itself written--"My darling boy, your
poor old mother"--then the pencil slipped--it is wonderful how easily
pencils do this out of doors--from her fingers to the gravelled path,
and before she could decide if it were possible to pick it up without
disturbing the comfortable posture in which some Good
Samaritan--either M. Isidore or the thin man--had tucked her up in
rugs, the letter-block fell off on the other side.

Just then the woman of substance sailed up, and hoped with a
deference that astounded the new visitor that she was rested after
her journey, and recounted a whole Odyssey of her private
misadventures during yesterday's ascent--how her _chaise_ positively
broke down under her, and she had to be taken aside into a dreadful
little smelly cottage, or rather the outside of it, under the vines,
lest she should be trampled by the procession of donkeys and mules
coming behind; and how those wretched foreigners did nothing but
laugh and make faces and address impertinent remarks to her in an
unknown tongue, that her husband said was neither French nor Italian,
nor any civilized speech; and how finally her porters were doubled,
and a sort of basket or tub was brought, and she was forced into it,
and slung and jolted on four broomsticks by her four porters, at the
peril of all five lives, to the present eminence, on which she
supposed she must end her days, unless a proper road could be made
before her time came.

Ermengarde listened with a sympathetic face and proper interjections,
wondering if the rounded softness of that passionately dark blue
sea-rim, so much less sharply edged than paler seas--if that came
from the clear and vapourless air, through which one saw so far over
the very slope of the world; and presently, when the Odyssey came to
a pause, she made some reference to the romance and charm of Provence.

"Provence," mused the woman of substance.  "H'm, yes; Provence roses.
Never was there in my life.  But I dare say you have travelled a good
deal."

"But surely you came by the _Train de Luxe_ yesterday?"

"Oh yes.  Mr. Robinson's extravagance--quite unnecessary----"

"Then you were in Provence yesterday," murmured Ermengarde drowsily,
quite sure now that she saw over the earth-slope, and the woman of
substance, coupling this obviously inaccurate statement with the
unaccountable excursions into foreign languages of the previous day,
looked curiously at her, and wondered if it was drink or incipient
insanity.

"So young, too!" she reflected mournfully, turning away to find a
comfortable and yet substantial seat, but turning once again to look
at the figure extended in the sun among the flowers in the dish-cover
hat, the uncompromising dowdiness of which conveyed comforting
assurance of respectability to her motherly soul.  Vice and that hat
could never be companions, she was sure.

Once again Ermengarde made a feeble effort at correspondence.  Arthur
would expect letters, though absent from home and without definite
address.  It was quite easy to write "Dear Arthur," but how to go on
was the difficulty.  Of the misadventures and discomforts of the
journey it was inadvisable to write, lest the joy of "I told you so"
should make him exult; neither was it politic to dilate upon the
probable criminality of the woman of mystery, and on her complicity
and secret understanding with the Anarchist.  Of the latter, as a
source of terror and danger to the community at large, she wrote
much, not without some gentle complacence in her own perspicacity in
detecting, and courage in braving, by dauntless but insupportable
glances, the villainy and scheming of this truculent being.

"The power of the human eye, especially over beasts of prey and
hardened criminals," she wrote, "has not been exaggerated.  One
honest, fearless, straightforward look will unmask the vilest and
most cunning, and cause the blackest heart to quail, as that
creature's invariably did--at least, his eyes did--before mine."  And
this sentence, like all referring to the man, when after many days it
reached him, filled the recipient of the letter with peculiar and
ecstatic joy, producing explosions of mirth unutterable.

But of this same Anarchist she could get but the scantiest
information--even from M. Isidore.  No one appeared to have observed
the presence of any such person at dinner the night before, or to
have seen him come and go at Les Oliviers.  After much meditation, M.
Isidore supposed she must refer to a foreigner, presumably a Pole,
since his name ended in ski, who had dined there, or lunched, or
both, on the preceding day.  As to whether he had slept there, or was
likely to return, M. Isidore was unable to give any information.  No
one apparently had seen him at breakfast, or luncheon, or about the
place, that morning.  Neither had anyone observed his arrival; he had
come and gone like a phantom, or a suspicion.  He was an absolute
mystery.  She began to suspect that she must have dreamt him.

After all, perhaps everything past was a dream.  All this clarity of
atmosphere and bright light, steeping the fairy-like loveliness of
mountain, gorge, and sea, seemed to have blotted out past trouble and
pain, as if those dark, transparent waters were some celestial wine,
or waters of Lethe, drunk in spirit, and giving both healing and
oblivion.

The obstinate letters utterly refused to get themselves written that
afternoon, but the ever-helpful M. Isidore produced picture-cards,
the inscription of which was a sop to still the barkings of
conscience, and had them posted.

The sun sloped away and away from the stocks and lemons, until the
wooded summit topped by the convent was one mass of shadow with
cross-tipped gables, cypress-flame, and eucalyptus-top, all etched in
sharp outline on a sky of lucid gold.  Ermengarde shivered as she
drew her furs about her throat, and heard a sound like the patter of
sudden rain behind her, but turning, saw that it was only the rustle
of wind in the branches of a palm.

"Where are they all going?" she asked as the lotus-eating groups
basking on the terrace melted away before the slanting shadow.

"They follow the sun; it is a veritable fire-worship," M. Isidore
said, picking up her scattered properties.  "Madame will be among the
worshippers?"

Out of the shadow, and up marble steps, with "roses, roses all the
way" again, to a little rock platform west of the villa, giving a
prospect round the convent hill, they came upon a fresh world of
wide, sunlit space, with another ravine half in purple shadow, and
other villages and houses, and, high up, dark against a lucid sky,
giant peaks turning pink and gold where they caught the blaze of the
sun, that was sinking in a green and lilac sky, above a sea of molten
gold touched with scarlet.

Here were seats under a shelter of rye-straw thatch that caught and
retained the whole blaze and warmth of the shifting pageant of the
sunset.  Here, too, it was quiet and peaceful, the lotus-eaters
having gone elsewhere, and here her guide left her to absorb the
solemn hush and splendour.  The little homely convent seemed to have
grown naturally out of the rocks; to which it clung unevenly, as a
pine-tree throws twisted roots from rock to rock to get firm hold,
ending in garden terrace on the sunniest face of the rock, now bright
in the westering rays.  Far off the surf, breaking on the long, low
headland of Cap Martin, was visible in the glow, taking rose and
orange tints in its fall.  The mountain flanks sent up little blue
spirals of smoke from every fold and dimple, where cot and hamlet
nestled; the earth breathed deepest peace.  A spirit of prayer was
everywhere; the smoke was like incense from many altars; sounds of
common life came distinct and clear, yet hushed, through the stilled
and waiting air.  The ever-changing colours on mountain, sky, and sea
hinted at the progress of some glorious spiritual drama of mysterious
import.  It seemed in the waiting hush as if the secret of the
universe might soon be whispered abroad.

But Nature worshipped alone; there was no sweet-toned Angelus
floating over crest and gorge, from convent to church tower, and
trembling far away over darkening waves, to give the antiphon and
complete the evensong of the world.  Republican France is too free to
allow men to worship publicly as they please.

Ermengarde, uplifted, tranquillized, yet full of unrest and a sort of
compunction mingled with longing, was like a wondering child at some
solemn rite, dimly guessed at through the faces of those present.
She lost herself completely in watching the moving drama of flushed
sky and sea.  What pure, pale-green spaces above the sun-glow, what
lakes of rose, purple, violet, and orange! the whole spectrum broken
up and scattered, while the deep peacock blue of the Eastern sea grew
deeper than ever.

The sunlight lying so lovingly on vine and olive-covered steep,
turning blue gloom of pines to glowing velvet, and calling out all
the warmer tints in the mysterious grey-green of olives, slanted more
and more till every wood and cultivated patch and building on gorge
and flank facing the light, had its true colour, flushed, darkened,
and faded.  Night was gathering in vales and clefts, and stealing up
the great shoulder of _Mont Agel_, dark upon the west; the eastern
peaks were crimson jewels paling to palest claret.  Ermengarde was
absorbed in the silent symphony of melting and mingling colour to
that degree she scarcely seemed to breathe, when voices jarred
suddenly into the stillness from beneath her feet, where the
mule-path ran unseen under the rocky steep.

With the voices came the soft patter of asses' feet, and the firm
step of a man, light laughter, and then a single voice, cheerful,
masculine, English.

"Not going to play to-night?  Come now," it remonstrated.

"When I have tell you I am broke to stone," returned a reproachful,
metallic treble.  "And my next last _parure_ of diamonds is what you
call pop for a nozzing.  I will no more gif my fine jewels to ze
Shoos for two sous.  Also I haf lend from a friend hundred louis zat
I lose last night."

They stopped where the path broadened on a rocky jut, their party
having gone in at the hotel gates higher up.  Ermengarde could hear
the donkey improving the occasion by a vigorous cropping of tough
herbage.  She was sure the woman was painted, and fancied that the
odour of musk floated up.

"All the more bound to play, Countess," the genial baritone replied.
"You're bound to rake 'em in somehow, don't you know.  How else get
the things back?  Let me lend you----"

"No, no, _mon cher_.  I rob not the poors.  Not you, my poor child,
who are poor like ze mouse at Mass--you say."

A cheery laugh rang out.  "Not now," the gay voice cried.  "Bless
you, dear Countess, I've got a system now, and I raked 'em in for all
I was worth last night.  I'm simply swimming in gold and notes.
Don't know what to do with 'em.  Thought the banker would have gone
for me."

"Ah, ze banker enraged himself?  Good."  Then, in a changed voice, in
which the note of greed was audible: "How much louis have you win,
_mon bon ami_?  No, I rob not.  Ach! all the world is come behind.
Make but this donkey to march, Monsieur."

"Gee up, then!  The little beast's mouth's made of iron.  Jay, jay.
Come up, you little devil!  Take a poor hundred louis, Countess, just
for luck.  Give me the pleasure.  Just to give me luck."

"Ah, but how will I pay?"

"Give me--give me that heather in your belt.  White heather means
good luck, don't you know."

A deep sigh, one of those melancholy French sighs that are
semi-groans and half-caresses, was heard; and then, as the donkey
suddenly decided upon moving on with a quick patter of little hoofs,
there was a complicated stamping and much joyous laughter from the
Englishman, who, Ermengarde was quite sure, had been leaning his arm
on the back of the lady's saddle, and just missed being tumbled down
the gorge by the animal's unexpected change of mind.  She had just
risen from her seat, gathering that the conversation was private.
Her movement brought the speakers into her line of vision, and she
recognized the young Englishman on the Monte Carlo platform, the
sight of whom had so perturbed the woman of mystery the day before.
She had been right in supplying the lady with powder and paint.  As
they disappeared round the corner, she caught the gleam of
orange-dyed curls, pinned on a Parisian and unsuitable hat, and the
healthy glow of the young man's upturned face.  Then the path was
crowded by half a dozen donkeys and riders, followed by some with
panniers and a few pedestrians, and in two minutes the whole company
had passed noisily out of sight, leaving the mountain stillness
stiller than ever.

To come there, and in face of all that solemn peace and splendour,
flaunt their sordid vices and petty anxieties!  What had they to do
in the heart of that austere mountain beauty?  A vile reek of musk
and cigars floated after them; they had tainted the very air in their
passage over the ridge.

The enchantment vanished.  The mountain-peaks were all grey and cold
now under some silver stars, but the sea still kept some mauve and
gold and chrysolite reflections from the lucid western sky;
thickening shadows stole heavily up the mountain flank; the air had a
sharp edge.  She went slowly back to the garden, and stood by the
border of scented stocks, and was looking down the gorge to the
clean-roofed town by the sea, pensive and a little homesick, when out
of the lemon-tops rose a face, and then a slim figure, and
recognizing the woman of mystery, she hastened to meet her with a
little cry of joy.




Chapter VII

The Convent Steps

The band had long stopped playing; the afternoon sunshine was growing
soft, and the Jardins Publics were empty of all but a few
stragglers--_bourgeois_ babies playing round mothers basking on sunny
benches and among beds of carnations and cyclamen, and people
crossing the paths on their way home.  Agatha turned at the top of
the long series of parterres bordered by orange-trees, palms,
eucalyptus and pepper trees, that lay between street and street, and
was bounded by the band of glowing purple sea, whence on either hand
long hill-spurs ran up into the mountain amphitheatre just behind the
town, and wondered at all the sunny beauty.  Especially at the palms,
which sprang up, straight and sturdy, everywhere closing street
vistas, lending charm to featureless buildings and romance to ugly
ones, and sometimes spreading their broad tops above a knot of
dark-faced Arabs, lounging picturesque in burnous and fez.

"It was lovely once," the man at her side granted.  "The torrent bed
ran down in wild, broken beauty all the way to the sea a few years
since.  There's your house yonder on the ridge.  Do you walk up?
Well, take time.  The way's straight enough.  Report as often as you
can.  Be very careful.  I thought the whole thing was exploded more
than once yesterday--especially----"

"Oh!  There was not the faintest suspicion.  You were quite out in
that.  But I will be careful.  Good-bye."

He went up the road to the station; she passed under the viaduct by
the torrent bed and paused, watching women stepping down under the
oleanders from the other side to beat linen in the stream, and then
turned and went on with a lagging step, that meant dejection more
than fatigue.  Winding along under the grey ghostliness of arching
plane-tops was a string of pack-mules, leisurely plodding under bales
and panniers; fine, strong, patient beasts, in curious contrast to
the long, smoke-snorting dragon of a train that roared and rattled
out of sight over the railway bridge at the avenue's end in about two
hoof-beats.  Were people unhappy up there in those mountain villages,
where life was simple and close to Nature?  There was a restfulness
and an air of cheerful romance about this little procession of
plodding mules and bright-eyed peasants, a feeling of the
picturesque, of leisurely labour in sunshine and sweet air, very
comforting to a torn heart, wasted by anxiety.  If one could but
vanish and fade away into those mountain fastnesses and forget,
working peacefully by some quiet hearth, under one of those sunlit
church towers cresting the pine ridges.

But sorrow is heavy and hard to bear in youth, when fullness of life
throbs in every heart-beat, rebelling at every denial and refusing
every pang; and there are moments when all that should console and
soften suffering contributes to deepen and intensify it.  As the
graceful solitary figure walked wearily along the torrent bed in a
network of shadows woven by the plane-tops, all the sunny beauty of
gorge and peak, of lemon orchard and glowing pine-top and dream-soft
olive haze, and all the purple splendour of sea and sky and blue
bloom of distance wrought upon her with such power that every sense
and faculty, uplifted and expanded, helped to put an edge on the
anguish within her.  The higher the rocky path turning from the level
bed was, the greater the beauty grew, and the pain; every hanging
wreath of geranium and scented myrtle, every blaze of cactus trailing
down the rock walls, through which the steep, stair-like path
climbed, impressed itself sharply upon her.  She turned with a
movement of impatience, and looked back, and every sunlit sail and
turquoise shade on the purple sea and every shadow of the hills made
itself acutely felt.  And when the path led under the solemn shadow
of olives, and the light misty foliage parted here and there to give
glimpses of sea and red-roofed town and far headland, her heart was
like to break; and yet the majesty of far-stretching mountains, the
glory and beauty of land and sea, had never been more vividly sweet
to her.

For this is a strange thing, that the whole weight and power, the
whole magic and mystery of beauty in Nature and Art, can only be felt
in supreme moments of gladness or sorrow, when the mind and heart are
full and every faculty is tense.  The beauty deepens the pain with
the very balm it brings, it magnifies the gladness with the very awe
that chastens it.

Now she knew what olive-trees meant; and they mean so much, in
loveliness so subtle, so manifold in suggestion; they cannot be read
through and taken in at a glance, except in emotional crises, when
veils are lifted and faculties quickened.

Yet there was comfort in those endless steps, that were in reality
vine-terraces made on south-fronting declivities, and in the thought
of the human patience and long labour of centuries, that had carried
up and enriched every strip of soil on these hand-hewn ledges, and
buttressed them solidly with rock till they glowed with the gladness
of purple vintage and glory of emerald leaves.  And here, in the
olive shade, and there, backed by a rock terrace tangled in myrtle
and white-blooming heath and the goblin foliage of prickly pear, were
little red-roofed shrines, with frescoes telling the Seven Sorrows,
blotched and dim, with scanty votive flowers withering in coarse
earthen pots.  The pathos of these humble, deserted shrines touched
her; they seemed friendly in their silent desolation.  Yet Mrs.
Allonby, in her wild ascent the day before, had hardly seen them.

But this tall, clear-eyed young woman was so drawn by the fascination
of the forlorn shrines that she followed the path they lined, and it
led her astray.  She laid a spray of flowering rosemary on the
Seventh--"for remembrance"--and sighed.  For she who bore that
sevenfold sword of sorrow in her heart could never have borne this of
looking on, helpless, and baffled in every wild effort to save, at
the gradual ruin and degradation of any she loved; that barren and
bitter sorrow at least was spared her.

But what if she, whose pain had been so fruitful to man, could hear,
and from her place of peace give balm to crushed and broken hearts?
Human sympathy may not be confined to this brief passage through time
and space, she mused.

The path led with a sudden turn through garden ground, unfenced, then
past a pink house with a pergola, and ended at an abrupt fall of
narrow vine terraces down the ravine.  Thence was seen a fuller,
broader prospect facing south, bounded by a sea of purple and gold
shot with crimson.  There she turned, and climbing a broad flight of
steps leading to the low-walled summit of the ridge, became aware of
a large wooden cross standing against the pure sky on the top, as if
with open arms of welcome.

Above and around it were quivering spires of cypress and plumy tops
of eucalyptus, and, between black cypress boughs, the white gleam of
convent walls.

The weight of silent, secret grief grew to a physical burden on those
weary steps; her heart sank and died when she reached the top, and
stood in rich sunshine at the foot of the great bare cross, its arms
uplifted in witness and welcome for many and many a mile round, and
listlessly spelt out the words cut round the centre:

  Ave, crux, spes unica!

Then something gave way in her aching breast, the four healing words
echoed and found response in her heart.

"Ave, ave!" she faltered, her slender figure bowed in the golden
light, the healing scent of eucalyptus blossom floating down to her,
and the majesty of those soaring mountain peaks and buttressed
hill-flanks spreading far above in the hush and glow of the passing
day.  There, with her face pressed to the sun-warmed wood and her
arms clasping it, a huge weight--"the burden and the mystery of all
this unintelligible world"--fell away from her heart, and the great
prayer that has no words filled it with peace beyond
understanding--the _spes unica_--the only road to solution of all the
tangled mystery of life.

When she rose the world was changed.  On either side of the cross
stood a tall eucalyptus tree; long tresses of pale fragrant blossom
hung among their scimitar-shaped leaves; their cinnamon-coloured
trunks, whence rolls of scented bark peeled, were so forked that the
branched stems made a comfortable seat; there the tired girl rested
in the ruddy glow, silently absorbing the same tranquil pageant of
vesper splendour that light-hearted Ermengarde was watching from the
hotel garden above.  Sea murmurs were faintly audible in the deep
stillness, the incense curling bluely from hill-altars was sweet,
glorious were the grandly-grouped peaks and mountain masses changing
and glowing with life-like motion in the sliding lights, silent,
majestic witnesses to the everlasting beauty that underlies and
transfuses all things.  God was speaking through all that beauty;
doubt and fear vanished; in spite of misery, care, and sin, all must
be well at last.

Lightened at heart, she leant on the low convent wall and looked down
the ravine, that was rapidly filling with shadow, and across it at
the white village poised on a hill, its slender tower uplifted like a
standard under the purple-shadowed mountain peak.

Suddenly a harsh high laugh broke upon the charmed stillness, and was
followed by strident voices and a confused hurry of footsteps, as the
whole rout of pleasure-seekers from the hotel gate clattered round
the corner under the convent walls unseen, while a polyglot cackle,
playing round the words systems, hotels, Monte, tables, winnings,
losings, dinners, poured out in passing crescendo and died gradually
away in the distance.

But before they were quite out of hearing, as they filed out upon a
part of the path visible from the convent wall, the young woman's
gaze was startled and arrested by the same lady and attendant youths
whose talk had already been overheard from the hotel gardens, and her
heart stood still and her colour went at the sight.

These two?  Was it these two really beyond doubt?  Then what she had
heard and what had been feared was true, much too true.  And for such
as they, of what avail to wrestle, to agonize, to beat at the gate of
heavenly mercy with fastings and tears and inward silent
heart-bleeding?  Even now the boy's mother must be praying at home
for him.  And of what avail?  Yet was not yonder vast cathedral
reared to the lucid sky telling in superb and solemn beauty of the
infinite power and love and pity of the divine poet and artificer of
all?  And even if that calm majesty had no power to rebuke fretting
or silence despair, there was the _spes unica_ shining in the
deepening after-glow, a beacon to storm-driven hearts.

A little withered old woman passed along under the rock wall, leading
a self-willed goat, and briskly knitting.  She sent up a shrill and
cheerful "_Buon sera_," laughed, and nodded, and went on her tranquil
way.  Then the lay brother in charge of the deserted garden, passing
the eucalyptus on his way home from work, told her she had taken the
longest way, and put her on the shorter, and she went down the steps
as the first few stars trembled into the sky, and so round through
olives and pines to the hotel.  And there, in the glowing twilight
above the lemon-tops, was the face of her fellow-traveller,
brightening at the sight of her with smiles of welcome.

"My dear woman of mystery, where did you spring from?" she cried.  "I
thought you had gone on to Italy.  And how on earth did you climb up
this terrific hill?  And where is your luggage?  And how very glad I
am to see you again!"

That Italy was just round the corner, that the parting had been but
yesterday, and that it was possible for an able-bodied woman to climb
a mile of mountain-path without utter destruction, filled Ermengarde
with a wonder only less than her wonder at her own unfeigned delight
in unexpectedly meeting this woman, who appeared to be somewhat
overpowered by her effusive reception.

"Dear Mrs. Allonby," she protested faintly, while being carried off
to the house, "indeed, I am not at all hungry, and not so very tired."

"Oh, but you are!" she insisted.  "Dreadfully tired.  And you must
have some tea at once--in my room.  I had mine long ago, out of
doors.  I will make tea for you in my own Etna--the one that upset in
my dress-basket.  Are you expected?  Have you engaged rooms?  Let me
take you in to Madame Bontemps, proprietress and manager.  Most civil
and obliging; will make you very comfortable.  We shall find her in
the office.  Heinrich?  What's become of the porter?  Madame
Bontemps?  What on earth's the matter?"

The inner door, which had been closed at sunset, yielded to pressure,
and let a torrent of strident voices and sounds of discord pour out
upon the startled air, disclosing a spectacle that caused both ladies
to retreat in momentary terror, and despair of all peaceful and safe
passage through the hall.

Madame Bontemps had, as it were, taken the stage--that is, the middle
of the hall--and with blazing eyes and murderous gestures, was
calling down what sounded the most terrific maledictions upon the
devoted head of the stalwart Swiss porter, Heinrich, who, with
bristling moustache and hair and balled fists, thundered back
denunciations even more terrific with gestures of even greater
violence.

"And not a policeman to be had!" Ermengarde lamented.  "What on earth
is to be done?  She will be killed, and so will he.  Heinrich!
Madame!  Monsieur Bontemps!  Feu--au secours!" she cried, heedless of
the new arrival's suggestion to wait till the storm was over.  But of
this there appeared to be little chance.  Madame Bontemps, her
features distorted with fury, shrieked fiercer and fiercer
maledictions at the retreating Heinrich, springing across the hall at
him, when he fled from her onset, soon to return to the charge,
before which she in her turn retreated, with denunciations and
gestures that put Madame Bontemps' life at a pin's fee.

"If there was only a fire-bell," murmured Ermengarde, looking round,
deaf to her companion's reassurance that the contest would be
bloodless, "or a police-whistle, or even a cab-stand!"

But Madame, undismayed and active, her rolled back hair quivering,
her tall form dilating, her hands on her hips, repulsed the charge of
Heinrich with such a torrent of abuse as drove him back once more to
the middle of the hall.  There both stood, still shouting and
misunderstanding each other in three languages for a measurable
space, during which Monsieur Bontemps lounged in an easy attitude,
cigarette in mouth, at the office door, softly stroking his beard,
and contemplating the engagement with indifference, tinged with
approval and admiration of the majesty and fury of Madame.

"It is just this," he explained, with gentle condescension, when the
storm lulled, "the French of Madame is incomplete; she supplements it
with the Italian of the country--a tongue entirely unknown to
Heinrich.  The French of Heinrich, on the contrary, is absolutely
vile.  He supplements it with German, of which both he and Madame are
partly ignorant, and with Swiss-German, a tongue known to none but
those mountaineers.  Hence misunderstandings.  Myself, I ignore all.
Que voulez-vous?"

Yielding to pressure, however, he at length drew the infuriated
lady's attention from the combat to the claims of her guests.  In a
moment her looks of fury were replaced by smiles of courteous
welcome; her blazing eyes shed light of soft inquiry, and she came
forward with a stately bow and a genial, "Bon soir, mesdames," while
Heinrich as quickly forgot his wrongs and his wrath, and, dissolving
into cheerful smiles, took his usual station by the door.  Finally,
the tumult being succeeded by perfect calm, he blandly picked up a
few of the woman of mystery's parcels, which had arrived beforehand,
and carried them to her room, whither they were preceded by the
stately presence of Madame Bontemps herself.

The new arrival never forgot the tea brewed for her that evening.  To
that she attributed every digestive disturbance that afflicted her
all her life after.

Nor did Ermengarde lightly dismiss from memory her own joy and
fatigue in making that tea with her own hands, and for the first
time, over a complicated and expensive new patent spirit-lamp,
expressly devised to boil a minimum of water with a maximum of peril,
inconvenience, and delay.  A serious initial difficulty in lighting
the lamp was presently overcome by the discovery that there was no
spirit in it.  A little of this, after some deliberation and delay,
was borrowed of Miss Boundrish's mother.  "But on no account tell
Dorris," the latter implored; "she don't like lending things."  The
second difficulty of the kettle not boiling was surmounted after
finding that it had no water--a circumstance which nearly resulted in
burning a hole in it--by ringing the bell not more than five times
for water of unimpeachable purity.  The kettle at last having been
filled, boiled over during a long and futile search for the tea,
several parcels of which had been artfully mislaid in improbable
portions of wearing apparel with the guileful purpose of evading
douaniers and defrauding the French Republic of revenue.  At last the
brilliant idea of following up the trail of those packets, that had
burst and peppered priceless raiment with black dust and broken
stalks, resulted in their discovery.  No matter how widely friends at
home had differed in their advice to those about to travel, all had
agreed that as much tea as the regulations by utmost stretching
permitted, besides as much again as that, must be carried in every
separate parcel and trunk, with the result that Ermengarde, finding
little use during her travels for the tea upon which she had
squandered so much substance, and incidentally making all her things
smell like a grocer's shop, furtively shed small packets of it all
across the Continent on her return home, in vague terror of incurring
mysterious pains and penalties by secreting so much contraband.

"Is it refreshing?" she asked, when at last, flushed with triumph and
heat, and smudged with lamp-black, besides having burnt her hand in a
spirit-flare, she handed the precious beverage in an enamelled tin
mug without a saucer.  She would not have had a saucer for the world;
it would have spoilt the whole thing.

"It's--very--hot," gasped the recipient, with watering eyes and a
look of deep anguish.

"It's a very special tea," Ermengarde said impressively, watching the
sufferer's agonies with complacence.

"Very special," sighed the victim; "most special."

"I got it myself, from a woman whose cousin married a tea-planter.
He sends her a chest every now and then to sell to intimate friends
to pay for Church work," Ermengarde continued, with intense
satisfaction.  "That accounts for the remarkable flavour."

"No doubt it does," murmured the sufferer, recovering breath, and
correctly attributing the mingled taste of old boots and
public-houses, that characterized the special tea, to the probability
of the kettle having had no lid on and a strong spirit flare under it.

"Poor dear; you must have been dying for a cup!" her tormentor
murmured, with relentless benignity.

"From a cup," the victim thought; but by degrees she gallantly
swallowed the whole dose, finding it impossible to evade the pleased
and compassionate eyes bent so persistently upon her.

"How odd that we should have been coming to the very same house all
the time!" Ermengarde said, wearily drawing a lamp-blacked hand
across her still aching forehead, and sinking upon the nearest seat,
when the tea-drinking was over.

"Ah, yes," with a little hesitation.

"And chance upon rooms adjoining, too!"

"Very odd."

"How glad I am it's you, and not that dreadful Anarchist,
Miss--ah----"

"My name is Somers--Agatha Somers," she said quickly, with a flush,
not unnoticed.

"Only think, if the wretch were to come back?  Do you think he will?"
suddenly, with a keen look.

"How can I possibly guess?" she replied, with the stone blank
expression noticed in the train.

"Strange that he should have come up here for a single night, instead
of going to one of the hotels in the town."

"Did he?  Perhaps he thought this dull.  It is a little--secluded."

"If ever I saw guilt written on a human face," thought Ermengarde,
her suspicions all awake again, in a moment of sudden repulsion.
"Well," she added, rising to go, "au revoir till dinner.  But I must
give you one piece of advice, Miss Somers," she added, turning back
and sitting on the edge of the bed, her eye chancing to fall on an
open letter that had slipped from a hand-bag on the bed--a strange
letter, written in what was no doubt cipher, all dots and dashes and
lines and bars, with little explosions here and there.  "Don't say
anything not meant to meet the ear of the public on the path outside
the straw shelter.  I'll tell you what I heard this afternoon.  As
you can't possibly know the people, it can't matter; it is not
tale-telling.  And I dare say that poor boy has a mother," she
sighed, at the close of her tale, "who little knows what harpies are
preying upon him.  By the way," she added, "do you remember seeing a
tall, cheery-looking English lad at Monte Carlo Station yesterday?
It was that very boy."

The woman of mystery, in the act of raising the lid of a trunk before
which she was kneeling, let it fall with a crash that drew a faint
sudden sound of pain from her.

"It was the lock," she faltered, rising to her feet, and leaning
against the tall French window frame, rather pale and holding her
hand.  "Oh, not really hurt; it only smarts for the moment.  But what
were you saying?  I beg pardon.  You recognized a friend at Monte
Carlo Station yesterday?  How observant you are, dear Mrs. Allonby!
And one English boy is so like another."

"But this one has such a happy laugh, so infectious, so jolly, so
devil-may-care.  And that painted foreign thing was such a cat.
She'd got her claws so deep in him.  Such a Countess as poor Yvette's
mother, I should say--a Countess in her own--wrong.  I suspect there
are tons of that sort at Monte Carlo."

"No doubt," Agatha returned, absently looking out of the window at
the lights lying along the torrent-bed like a thin river of light,
broadening into an estuary where the roofs of the town were crowded
together by the darkened sea.  "I think I will take your advice, dear
Mrs. Allonby, and lie down till dinner.  I'm more tired than I
thought."




Chapter VIII

The Carnival

That Dorris Boundrish was an exceedingly pretty girl her severest
critics could not deny, nor could her greatest admirers refrain from
a suspicion that she was scarcely as irresistible or as brilliant as
she imagined.  Her mouth was like pink coral, small and sweet, but
with hints of peevishness and discontent in the corners; her face had
wild-rose tints; her eyes were clear, speedwell blue, but a little
hard at times; something on her velvety forehead said, "Not much in
here."  Of that deficiency poor Miss Dorris was wholly unaware; on
the contrary, she supposed the premises to be unusually spacious and
well-stocked, and in this persuasion was benignantly given to impart
her superfluous knowledge to an ungrateful world to an extent that
sometimes made people thankful to be spared such information as that
sea-water is too strong of salt to make a pleasant drink, or that two
and two amount together to the round number of four.

All evils have their compensations; and this amiable weakness of Miss
Dorris sometimes became a source of joy to the community of Les
Oliviers, when properly manipulated by M. Isidore, for example.  For
it was the especial delight of this fair young creature to impart
recently acquired knowledge to her neighbours, and recently acquired
knowledge being undigested, and in many cases hastily and
inaccurately received, sometimes emerges from its temporary lodging
in the brain in a changed, even unrecognizable, form.  Moreover, M.
Isidore, having an imagination of unusual fertility and an impish
delight in mischief, was tempted to confide myths having only a
poetic and ideal foundation in fact, to the ear of Dorris, in the
sure anticipation of hearing them issue in some novel form from the
pink coral lips at _table d'hôte_; always providing he listened, as
he frequently did, unseen behind an open door, to the general buzz of
table talk, above which Miss Boundrish's arrogant treble shrilled
high and incessant.  When the intelligence conveyed by the pink coral
lips was very wildly improbable, that every conscript, for example,
during his first month of service, was dieted entirely on frogs to
inspire him with martial courage, the thin man, usually silent,
would, very gently expressing astonishment, venture to ask the source
of Miss Boundrish's information.

"Oh, it's perfectly true, Mr. Welbourne," the overbearing treble
would scream down the table, "I had it from a man who had been in the
French army himself.  The frogs are those little green things in the
tanks, that are beginning to make such a croaking every night.  Of
course, you know that Mont Agel is _terrain militaire_, where nobody
is allowed to go for fear of disturbing these frogs, which are kept
in tanks on purpose.  The diet is so stimulating, you know, it makes
the soldiers long to fight."

"Really?" the thin man would murmur pensively.  "How very
interesting!  What a remarkably ingenious people the French are!
Would such an idea ever occur to the dull British brain, do you
suppose?"

Then a smile would go round the table, and coughs and suppressed
chokings would be heard, and M. Isidore would dance with rapture in
the corridor outside, and, on being severely interrogated by
Ermengarde and the thin man afterwards, would truthfully say that he
only asked Mademoiselle if she had heard of this curious custom of
dieting on frogs for courage, and with regard to Mont Agel had
chanced to mention that the public were excluded from that, as from
all terrain militaire, and that many tanks containing frogs were
there, as everywhere in the hills.

"The imagination of Mademoiselle," he would observe innocently,
"invests things with a magic of its own.  In short, she is a poet."
Then he would laugh gently, and Ermengarde would shudder for his
future, though she was not above suggesting to him themes similar to
the results of a frog diet for Miss Boundrish's imagination to
develop.  So that _table d'hôte_ was sometimes the scene of some
remarkable additions to human knowledge.

To account for her various and invincible charms, speculation as to
where Miss Boundrish had been dragged up was frequent and diverse.
Yet her parents were there in attendance upon her, harmless, worthy
people of the comfortable, Philistine, mid-middle class, the father
rather deaf--he had registered her with two r's, because her mother
insisted on the short o in Doris, and the man was too logical to
leave his child with insufficient letters--the mother placidly
content with the wildest utterances of her only child, and both well
trained in the ways in which modern parents are expected to go.  That
no subject was too abstruse for Dorris's discussion, and that nothing
could be spoken of upon which she was not quite as well informed as
anyone present, or better, caused them no apparent surprise.  But
Miss Boundrish's father was a little deaf, and Miss Boundrish's
mother once confided to the thin man that it was a little tiring to
be the mother of an exceptionally gifted and accomplished child, and
that a few days' visit to Nice, contemplated by Dorris, would afford
her a welcome opportunity of taking a "much-needed" rest.  "I should
like," she sighed, "to have two solid days to do nothing in and to
think nothing in--and," she added, after a pause, "to _fear_ nothing
in."

"So that one hopes the fair Dorris doesn't beat her," the thin man
commented to Ermengarde, who thought her quite capable of it.  But
Agatha suggested that even Miss Boundrish's mother might not be quite
insensible to the fury some of her little ways evoked from the
community; that pretty little way of drawing up a chair or of walking
up and stopping dead for the express purpose of breaking into
intimate or interesting dialogue, that even prettier way of pursuing
people bent on solitude, dual or otherwise, to pleasant points of
view, and pouring out entirely familiar, guide-book information.

As, for instance, when the setting sun brought the craggy peaks that
wall the high hill-village of St. Agnes into unusual beauty, and a
party coming home from an excursion and another drawn out to the
mountain from the hotel, stood silently enjoying it, and Dorris's
high voice suddenly rang over the gorge with the history of the
walled hill-villages, of the abduction of the innocent young Agnes by
Saracens in one of their raids, and of the miracle wrought by her
faith, which resulted in the conversion of many, the restoration of
St. Agnes to her home among the crags, and a yearly commemoration of
the event to this day by a procession of villagers.

"Why," murmured the thin man on that occasion, "why are there no
Saracens to-day?"

"There are plenty, Mr. Welbourne," cried the shrill voice
unexpectedly.  "I saw some Moors in the town yesterday.  They're all
the same, you know."

"But they don't----" the thin man paused, allowing a daring word to
die on his lips.  "That is--the great days of old--the days of daring
and romance--are over.  We live in a degenerate age."

He spoke so mournfully that Miss Boundrish was much moved, and joined
him in lamentation over the past, while every heart present echoed
his unspoken thought, that a Saracen raid upon the Riviera might
involve the abduction of Miss Boundrish, the mere idea of which
filled them with joy.  They were sure that she would have pleased the
Saracenic taste, and doubted if her prayers would work a miracle.

"Where on earth did you pick up that Somers girl, Mrs. Allonby?" the
sweet girl asked one day with pleasing directness and candour.  It
was during a descent upon the town to see the Carnival, arranged
between the thin man, Ermengarde, and Agatha.  Miss Boundrish,
overhearing this arrangement the night before--she always overheard
everything--had offered to make a fourth in the party, so suddenly,
so loudly, and with such a certainty of conferring a favour, and also
so immediately in the hearing of her mother, that neither of the
three was ready with a civil excuse for declining the honour, though
each said sadly to the others afterwards, "Why are there no Saracens
now?"

"That Somers girl," Ermengarde repeated slowly and thoughtfully, as
if wondering to whom she referred.

"_I_ don't think much of her," continued Dorris.  "You know you can't
be too particular who you get to know in places like this.  Very
queer people in these cheap Continental pensions."

"How true!" Ermengarde murmured thoughtfully.  "I've never seen a
Carnival, have you?"

"You ought to see the Nice Carnival; this is a very one-horse thing.
Did you know Miss Somers in England?"

"Did you?"

"Not exactly, but I knew of her.  That is, I knew the man she was
supposed to be engaged to.  I--I knew him rather well, in fact."
Miss Boundrish's smile suggested worlds.

"Were you engaged to him, as well?"

"Well--not exactly engaged.  Poor Ivor!" with the usual gurgle.
"Such an escape for him."--So Ermengarde thought.--"They say his
people knew nothing about it.  So you picked her up abroad?"

"She--if you mean Miss Somers--picked me up once, on the floor of a
corridor carriage.  Not pleasant to tumble down in a faint on the
floor of a train.  One is thankful to be picked up and taken care
of----"

"By anybody, of course," with the gurgle so familiar at Les Oliviers.
"Well, you'd better be on your guard, that's all.  Did you lose any
money, anything of value on the way?"

"Miss Boundrish, what are you talking about?" was the sharp rejoinder.

"Only that, going about in the world, I get to know a lot of things.
There are so many sharpers about on the Continent--gangs of them in
league together.  They follow people to Nice and Monte Carlo, and all
these places, and rook them in all sorts of ways.  They are regular
birds of prey, living by their wits.  Some think the police are in
their pay.  Robbery after robbery takes place in trains and
custom-houses; at least, jewels, money, and letters of credit
disappear from locked and registered luggage, and the thieves are
scarcely ever found out.  I say, where do you think she spent the
afternoon of the day she came to Les Oliviers?--Ah! here they are,"
as Miss Somers and the thin man came in sight of the waiting-place in
the Jardins Publics.  "Poor Mr. Welbourne, he's quite gone on her
already.  She can't leave him alone a minute."

"Four seats on the stand, but not together," said the thin man,
unconscious of personal comment.  "How shall we divide?"

Although Ermengarde had by this time made some progress in the art of
sticking on to a perpendicular donkey acting as an intermittent
see-saw, somebody having given her some lessons on the most
gentle-paced beast to be found, she was not enamoured of that form of
gymnastic, and of two evils had thought a descent by a shorter path
through gardens and woods on foot with Miss Boundrish, the less,
leaving Miss Somers to ride down the longer mule-path with the thin
man, whose slight lameness made him a poor pedestrian.  But her
feeling of relief when the other two came up brought her to the
conclusion that even donkeys were preferable to Dorris.  Yet the
hints from the pink coral lips were not without effect upon her,
chiming as they did with her own inferences, and she was dying to
know where Agatha had spent the afternoon of that first day, which
Dorris had also passed away from the hotel.

The party being now complete, they left the gardens and wound through
the holiday streets in the sunshine, now jostled by a cheerful and
apologizing devil, black from head to heel, with bat-wings of black
crape stretched on cane; now mixed up in a flock of geese with human
legs and monstrous cackling beaks; now avoiding the attentions of
dominos flinging paper serpents and trying to draw them into
impromptu dances whenever a band was heard along the street.

How gay and odd and foolish and delightful it was to unsophisticated
Ermengarde!  The narrow, foreign streets, palms closing their vistas,
great hotels, in gardens glowing with gorgeous exotics and flowers,
breaking their lines here and there; the warm deep purple of the sea
barring every side street on one hand; the picturesque old Italian
town climbing the wooded hill-spur and cresting it with its tower on
the other; and the great mountain amphitheatre stretching far up
beyond that, with bare peaks, violet-veined, crystalline, drawn clear
and sharp on the deep, clear, velvety sky; the motley crowd of mad
masks and dominos, cheaply gaudy, childishly absurd, helplessly gay;
the rippling laughter and confused babble of local dialect and
foreign tongues on the liquid air; the droll family parties,
transparently disguised, even the babies, in coloured calico; the
trim little mountain soldiers, bright-eyed and smiling, keeping the
streets; the hawkers of toys, sacks of confetti, and endless paper
coils; the vendors of strange local pastry and sweets on little
standings; the look of expectant enjoyment on every face, especially
the broad and business-like bourgeois countenance; the atmosphere of
spontaneous gaiety, sunshine, and enjoyment, all went to English
Ermengarde's head.  Old life-long artificial restraints gave way; the
joy of life sprang up; she could almost have taken hands and danced
with the maskers dancing along the street.  The eternal child,
dormant in us all, was awake and happy in her.

It was not the show, that was poor and disappointing, all its cheap
and tawdry vanities blotting the pure beauty of atmosphere and
setting, that gave this new vivid sense of unconstrained gladness.
Perhaps she had never seen people madly, spontaneously, and yet
decorously gay before.  The Carnival folk were all, young and old,
rich and poor, merry and not wise and bent upon being merry and not
wise, and yet they were not in the least ashamed or conscious of any
cause for shame.  Even some Americans, a people never young but aged
and biases from their cradles, snatched a brief hour of long-deferred
childhood, and a few self-conscious Britons, their gloomy national
pride concealed in dominos, condescended to diversions that in their
own personality they scorned as only fit for foreigners and fools.
No wonder that the sparkling sunny sea-air and atmosphere of
infectious enjoyment dissipated light-hearted Ermengarde's insular
self-consciousness, and she suddenly discovered that there is more
enjoyment in life than is commonly supposed.

What was the mad tune band after band kept playing as the huge cars,
grotesquely laden, filed slowly past; it was jingly and poor, but so
crazily full of headlong mirth--La Mattschiche?  Long afterwards it
gave her a pleasant thrill to hear it shouted by street boys, thumped
on pianos and street organs, and blared on brass bands.  It was "full
of the warm South" for her.

Mr. Welbourne, an artist and no Philistine, though a true-born
Englishman, public-school-milled, politely and unobtrusively bored,
was agreeably surprised by his countrywoman's interest in the show;
it was like taking a child--a real old-fashioned child--to a
pantomime.  Even Agatha observed her with grave but pleased surprise.
Dorris, when not explaining things in a loud voice, expressed
unmitigated contempt for everything; yet Ermengarde, though she
longed for Saracenic invasions when the gurgle was too persistent,
scarcely knew that Miss Boundrish was sitting beside her on the stand
erected in front of the Mairie, the thin man and Agatha being in the
row behind them.  Mr. Welbourne, though simple and honest in his
ways, had sufficient guile to contrive that.

The stout elderly _bourgeoise_ with a bad cold and strong scent of
garlic, sitting next Ermengarde, had come, she told her, from Monte
Carlo, under sad anxiety lest the bad cold should keep her at home,
and never stopped showering confetti on everybody that passed, always
missing them, yet wrought to ecstasy when confetti were thrown to
her, and pleased as a child when her paper serpents caught in the
snapping jaws of the crocodile on a car full of these creatures of
all sizes.

Another very dowdy old dame in front was quite as active; she was as
thickly snowed over with confetti and wound about with paper serpents
as Lot's wife in her salt.

"I say, Mrs. Allonby," Dorris suddenly hissed in her ear, "look
behind, quick!"  And Ermengarde, obeying at once, saw nothing but the
woman of mystery, unwinding a paper serpent coiled round her neck by
a man with a huge false nose in a smart carriage full of silk dominos.

"The sting is in the tail," murmured Dorris, and Ermengarde became
aware of a small packet at the end of the coil, that Agatha hastily
glanced at and slid into her hand-bag, her cheek flushing when she
looked up and caught eyes upon her.

Ermengarde sighed madly for Saracens.  "How could you?" she
reproached Dorris, who became mysterious and full of dark hints.

Then a serpent was coiled round Mrs. Allonby's neck, and looking up
at the thrower, she recognized a Spanish cavalier on a mule, who had
already thrown her confetti and bouquets several times in passing the
Mairie.  She had scattered most of the flowers on the crowd, but kept
some especially sweet tea-roses, also a bunch of Parma violets,
thrown from the car that carried a few family parties of crocodiles,
opening and shutting their long jaws, to the great delight of the
populace.

There was something in the Spaniard, a flash of the eyes under the
broad sombrero, that made her heart beat.  Where and when could she
have seen that whiskered face?  He threw both serpents and confetti
freely as he passed, but no flowers, except to her.  Very few flowers
were thrown by anyone.

When the serpent was unwound, there was a little weight at the end of
the coil.  A letter?  A bomb?  Perhaps only chocolate.  This was
thrilling and mysterious, but entirely delightful--a thing that could
not possibly happen at home--at least, not with propriety.  The
weight turned out to be a morocco box wrapped in tissue paper.  The
man had evidently taken her for somebody else--a respectable somebody
else, it was to be hoped; she had dropped into the middle of some
romantic entanglement, or some dreadful Anarchist or Nihilist plot.
Heavens! it might have been meant for her mysterious
fellow-traveller, and contain a signal for the instant assassination
of some distinguished statesman or royal person recognized through
his disguise, or for the blowing up of the whole place.  The spring
tentatively and gingerly touched, the lid flew up, but--though she
shut her eyes for quite two seconds--nothing whatever happened,
nothing went off, nobody was killed; there was neither explosive nor
written instruction inside--nothing but a thin gold chain, its
delicate links separated at every inch by pearls or diamonds,
daintily coiled on the violet velvet lining.  Could it be poisoned,
or charged with accumulated electricity to a deadly extent?  A dainty
toy it looked; she had seen and longed for one just like it at
Spink's, not long ago.  "Well, when the money-ship comes home,"
Arthur had growled; and that, of course, meant never.

"Just look," she cried, holding it up in the sunshine.  "I had no
idea people threw things like this to strangers."

"They don't," Dorris said grimly.  "It was carefully aimed."

"Then it can't be for me," she mused, and turned back to Agatha, who
was reading the folded paper flung in the end of her coil, her hand
shielding her face from the sun, which struck full upon her.  Just
then such volleys of confetti came broadside from a high car
representing a ship that nothing but defence could be thought of, and
the chain was slipped into a purse and forgotten.  And when
Ermengarde turned again to Agatha, she saw her, to her unspeakable
amazement, bending over the side of the stand, speaking to the
Spaniard--now dismounted and stopping on his way through a lane at
the corner of the stand.

This incident had not escaped Miss Boundrish, who smiled acidly at
Ermengarde's look of surprise.  "Now we can guess the true
destination of the chain," she whispered.

But the sudden spectacle of the thin man across the road biding the
pelting of a pitiless storm of confetti from three several silken
dominos at once, with bent head and a face of resigned anguish, was
so joyous that Ermengarde forgot her momentary desire to murder
Dorris; and when Mr. Welbourne had taken refuge in such flight in an
opposite direction as his infirmity permitted, the temporary blinding
and partial choking of Miss Boundrish, who had received a dexterous
handful while enjoying a hearty, but unconcealed, yawn, further
blunted the edge of her murderous desires, and made her offer Eau de
Cologne instead of poison, with whole-hearted enjoyment of the
damsel's spluttering indignation and vehement assertions that she was
poisoned.

"In that case," it was suggested, "best take an emetic at once," a
proposition received with scorn and fury, and further declarations
that she was blinded for life, and wondered why there were no gens
d'armes, and considered that the least Mrs. Allonby could have done
was to give the beast into custody, and she wished she had brought
her father.

"But you can't give a large green frog on the top of a mountain on
wheels into custody, dear Miss Boundrish--Oh! pff!"

It was now Ermengarde's turn to be pelted by a Cyrano de Bergerac,
whose enormous nose was in striking contrast to his slender, elastic
figure.  The Cyrano, who had been one of the party in the carriage
whence the serpent with the letter in its tail was thrown to Agatha,
soon tired of raining paper on to a steadily held sunshade, and went
away, finding better sport in a silken domino, one of a group walking
in the road, who showed fight gallantly, revealing a pair of dark
eyes flashing with spirit and challenge.  After a sharp engagement,
the domino's ammunition having run out, she turned and ran, pursued
and stopped by the Cyrano, who pelted her unmercifully in the face,
even holding a fold of the domino and spirting the confetti under it
to make her uncover, till at last he brought her to bay just under
the side of the stand, off the street.

"Beast!" muttered Ermengarde, her indignation intensified by the
English accent of the unchivalrous Cyrano.  She would actually have
rushed to the assistance of the wronged lady, but that help came from
another quarter in the shape of a crocodile, which suddenly descended
in a series of astonishingly agile leaps from the very top of the
great, shell-shaped car of crocodiles, that was lumbering by, and,
seizing the Cyrano de Bergerac by the scruff of his neck, shook him
like a rat till he was forced to let go the lady, just as she slipped
the domino back, discovering the indignant, tearful face and blazing
eyes of Mlle. Bontemps.  This revelation was evidently more
discomfiting to the Cyrano than the furious assault of the crocodile,
from the slit-open throat of which glared the face of M. Isidore,
white with fury.

"Why, it's the very crocodile who threw you the violets," shouted
Dorris.  "I thought I recognized him, and that plain and frumpish
Bontemps girl!"

If only the Boundrish had been effectually choked!  Why had a weak
and culpable sympathy comforted her with Eau de Cologne?

The Cyrano was not to be shaken to death like a rat without showing
fight; in the tussle that ensued his rich costume suffered
considerably before the crocodile let him go; and what the one said
and the other gasped and growled in reply, though not intelligible
through the din of bands and crowds, was presumably of an
uncomplimentary character.

Finally, flinging the long-nosed masquer from him, M. Isidore, his
crocodile head thrown back like a hood and helplessly wobbling behind
him, drew the insulted domino's hand through his arm with an air of
possession and protection, the rescued damsel clinging to him with
evident confidence and gratitude, and the two men, unconscious in
their passion of their absurd appearance, the crocodile pale and
calm, the long-nose red with confusion and fury and haughtily
apologetic, stood glaring fiercely at each other with question,
accusation, and explanation.

Presently the long-nose, as if at the crocodile's request, produced a
small white square from the recesses of his sumptuous dress; the
crocodile handed him a similar square in return; they bowed and
separated.  M. Isidore led Mlle. Bontemps away on his arm towards a
blue glimpse of sea at the end of a side-street, and the Cyrano,
removing his plumed cap, and with it his great nose, that had become
very shaky in the course of the fray, disclosed to Ermengarde's
astonished gaze the features of the young Englishman of Monte Carlo.

It was but a moment before the nose was hastily replaced, and its
owner turned back into the main street, where he stood talking to a
Pierrot, immediately in front of the stand, behind a soldier keeping
the road.

"Thought you'd have known better than that," the Pierrot grumbled.
"It wasn't playing the game."

"I could have sworn it was the Countess," the Cyrano was heard to say
dejectedly.  "And after yesterday--well, I didn't feel bound to play
the game with her.  Besides, _she_ wouldn't have cared."

"Let us go," said Ermengarde, suddenly sick of the fooling, and
worried by the band's mad tune repeated over and over again; but,
looking round for Agatha, she found her place empty, and Mr.
Welbourne, who had returned to his seat, unable to give any account
of her.

Many thoughts were in Ermengarde's heart, while in response to the
thin man's timely suggestion of tea at Rumpelmayer's, they slipped
out of the press to the comparative quiet of the promenade by the
sea, that glowed like a peacock's velvety throat on the horizon, with
the near shallows of turquoise, and broke with a deep soft boom in
snowy surf on the rocks.

She was glad of the fresh sea-breath and the beauty of the bay's
broad sweep between the purple headland of Bordighera and the craggy
bluffs above Monte Carlo.  And when they turned into the Gardens
under the tall eucalyptus, the appearance of the woman of mystery
coming down an avenue of palms was a great relief.  But a flush on
Agatha's cheek and a vision of the Spaniard rapidly disappearing
under palms in the opposite direction, filled her with misgiving
again.  What could all this atmosphere of intrigue and mystification
portend?  Certainly nothing praiseworthy.

"It was so hot and dusty on the stand," Agatha said, to explain her
sudden disappearance, upon which Dorris alone had commented.

That evening, when they had gone to their rooms for the night,
Ermengarde knocked at Agatha's door and handed her the little box
containing the chain.  "I think this must be yours, Miss Somers," she
said.  "_Your friend the Spaniard_ threw it, and it caught round my
neck by mistake."

"My friend?" she asked, confused.  "Oh, you mean the Spaniard who
stopped by the stand to ask the way to the sea?"

"Yes, the Spaniard, not the Cyrano de Bergerac."

The flush died from the woman of mystery's cheek, and the stone mask
settled upon it.  She returned the chain, saying coldly it could not
be intended for her, and that she knew nothing about it.

"The Cyrano," Ermengarde observed casually, as she turned from the
door, "turned out to be the young Englishman of Monte Carlo, the same
who was overheard offering money to the foreign Countess."

"Did he?" she replied, without interest.  "Good night, dear Mrs.
Allonby.  You look tired."




Chapter IX

The Casino

Monte Carlo, justly reputed one of the loveliest spots on earth, is
most magically beautiful perhaps when seen from the sea, or from the
long, low, wooded headland of Cap Martin.

Thence, on her first visit one golden afternoon, Ermengarde enjoyed a
most poetic vision of it, never forgotten and never surpassed.  She
had left her party, and was basking on a shore thick set with
rich-fruited, wind-stunted myrtle and rosemary bushes, the odours of
which mingled with pine scents and sweet, sharp sea-breath, while she
listened to the soft boom of waves plunging in white, azure-shadowed
foam on the rocks at the point, where the sea is more intensely blue
than anywhere else and the foam whiter, yet always with that faint
azure tinge in shadow.

From this point landwards an enchanting prospect spreads in
long-drawn splendour from the gracefully sweeping outline of
Bordighera, running far out to sea on the right, to that faint and
fairy headland, whence rise the Provençal mountains, so bold in
outline, in substance so dim and shadowy, beyond the abrupt crags of
the Tête du Chien, which hold Monte Carlo as in a cup.  Between these
points the great Alpine amphitheatre sweeps grandly back in lofty,
soaring outline, enclosing a rich and sunny Paradise of gorge and
ridge and mountain spur, running in headland after headland, with
tower-crested town, village, garden, and wood, into the clear dark
sea.  There, beyond the Italian frontier, sits Ventimiglia throned
with many towers high above the waves, and there a white pyramidal
mass of houses, based on the harbour arches on a sea-fronting steep
and topped by a slender church-tower that dominates all for many a
mile, is Mentone, regally beautiful.  Here little Roccabruna
shoulders itself into the sparkling blue, and in mountain recesses
far behind it is many a hill village up to the very peaks.  On that
afternoon the battered Roman tower of Turbia showed clear on its
craggy bluffs against the sky above Monte Carlo, but the ravine
beneath and Monte Carlo itself were veiled in purply shadow, mystic,
dim.

The song of the breakers was lulling; the air, spiced with myrtle and
sea-scent, sweet and stimulating; the fullness of colour a joy
nothing could blight.  Old happy rambles between cliff and sea, as a
child, a bride, a young mother, came to mind, all the beauty of many
lovely sea places gathered up in, and falling short of, this, which
still wanted the cream and salt of all, the loves and companionships
of old, young days--a thought that drew tears, not wholly sad.

Presently a silvery-grey cloud gathered over the Tête du Chien, and
suddenly the whole shadowed hill-cup holding Monte Carlo, with Monaco
sitting on the steep rock beneath it in the sea, flashed out,
clear-cut and distinct in every detail.  The broad hollow of the
gorge, up to the very crags almost, seemed full of white buildings
set in rich dark verdure, and crowding down to the water's edge.
Fleets of tiny fishing-vessels cruised about round Monaco, and
yachts, both white-sailed and steam-funnelled, flitted over the
paling sea and rode at anchor in the harbour, the whole composing a
picture of loveliness beyond imagining.

The thin man was in despair.  He was an impressionist; and having had
his painting things and himself conveyed hither and set down among
the rosemary and lentisk, on purpose to record impressions, was so
stunned and bewildered by the multitudes that rushed crowding in
every variety of loveliness upon him, that he could only sit on his
camp-stool with his easel before him, and hold his head in his hands
and groan.

"Seize Monte Carlo!" Ermengarde shouted to him from her distant
boulder when it flashed out, one glorious pearl, under the silvery
cloud, and he seized and painted it with a trembling hand before it
vanished and the great hill-cup was again a mass of purple shadow.
The impression was faint, but the thin man was eternally grateful to
Ermengarde for that, and for her further command to snap up Mentone,
majestically enthroned above a glowing sapphire sea, and framed by
wind-twisted pines, which threw ruddy stems and blue-black crowns
from the low shore across it.  And though another injunction to
impress the long hill-spur running down to Bordighera, when it
changed from indigo to warm deep violet with heliotrope shadings,
plunged Mr. Welbourne back to despair, his gratitude broke out in a
generous impulse.

"Let us go to Monte Carlo to-morrow," he cried.  "Give me the
pleasure of your company, Mrs. Allonby, since you don't care to go
alone.  It is not as terrible as you suppose."

"Well, why not?  Only don't speak of it, or Miss Boundrish will
manage to nip in again."

The thin man was really very handy on occasion; he made a respectable
and entirely biddable escort, and, knowing so many people of Mrs.
Allonby's acquaintance and being cousin to most of them, seemed more
like an elderly relative than a chance acquaintance.  He knew many
things, and well knew how to talk; his old-fashioned pedantry and
fulness of phrase was forgiven, as being in character with his
neutral-tinted, old-bachelor personality; he impressed Ermengarde as
a sort of social sofa-cushion, restful, harmless, and very useful in
travelling.

"The success of any ramble, picnic, excursion, or small party," he
added pensively, "depends entirely on arithmetic.  No matter of what
elements the party be composed, the addition or subtraction of one
may spoil all," a pronouncement heartily endorsed by Ermengarde, as
expressing her own feelings on the subject, though she had not
guessed at what person's subtraction he was obscurely hinting as
ruinous to his enjoyment.  Nor did she for a moment suspect that, in
arranging the Monte Carlo afternoon for two performers only, she had
sadly diminished poor Mr. Welbourne's pleasure.  Since the Carnival,
the woman of mystery had not been asked to accompany Mrs. Allonby
anywhere, nor had the two ladies once helped each other to dress or
exchanged small talk from their adjoining rooms, which communicated
by a door.  A woman who received jewellery from one mask and letters
from another, and held conversations and clandestine meetings with at
least two suspicious male characters, was not a desirable
acquaintance for a grass widow and a mother of unimpeachable
respectability.  Yet Ermengarde's heart misgave her when she met the
silent question of Agatha's melancholy eyes at any approach to
companionship on her part meeting with repulse.  She hated herself
especially the morning after the Cap Martin excursion when, with the
full intention of spending the afternoon at Monte Carlo, she declined
a mountain walk with Agatha on the ground that it was less tiring to
bask in the sunny garden at home.

"Then I think I will run down to Mentone," Agatha said, in a
confidence untouched by suspicion.  "I have an invalid friend in the
place who likes me to come in to luncheon sometimes."

After all, could there be anything more restful than these quiet
lounges by train from spacious halls of leisure, called Gares in that
country? the thin man and Ermengarde wondered, as they sauntered
about the clean and airy emptiness of Mentone Station, and chanced to
take seats in a train that happened to be strolling in the direction
of France, and was entirely composed of first-class carriages,
well-cushioned, and provided with antimacassars of spotless
crochet-work.  Other people as casually strolled over and rested, as
if by happy chance, in the clean and comfortable carriages, and after
some time, enjoyably spent with a prospect of sea and mountain and
near view of palm and garden and sunny street, it seemed to occur to
the person lounging upon the engine to propel the string of carriages
gently in the direction of France, and they glided through the now
familiar but never-lessening enchantment of rich scenery between
mountain and sea, always plunging into the tunnelled darkness
whenever a fairy headland ran out into blue and foam-fringed bays.

But what talk they heard on this fairy progress!  The tongues were
many, but the subject one alone.  For example--

"You'll hardly be at the tables to-night, Ethel?"

"Why not?  Easy to unpack and settle in before dinner.  And only
staying three weeks, a pity to lose a night."

"True, I shall put in a couple of hours before dinner as well as
after."

Again, in Teutonic accents, "So Hedwig leaves next week?"

"Yes, her husband says they are thoroughly tired of Monte Carlo."

"So?  I thought Hedwig had lost rather heavily of late.  And
Hermann's luck has evidently turned too."

Or it was, "System this, system that," and, "So many francs to the
good at the end of the week," and the wonderful run of So-and-so's
luck, and M. Tel-et-tel winning five hundred francs in half an hour,
and the positive madness of putting anything on a number that had
just turned up, and why _à travers_ meant so much, and how a cool
head and an accurate memory of the winning numbers of the last six or
seven turns were absolutely necessary to work any system.

"But why," Ermengarde tragically demanded, "come to the loveliest
spot on earth to do this devilry?  A disused coal-mine would do
equally well to gamble in."

The thin man conjectured that very likely the devil likes to kill two
birds with one stone.  "Because," he sighed, "the moment a beautiful
and pleasant spot is discovered in any corner of the earth, he
incites people to build flaring hotels and villas upon it, and run
railways to it; and, if there is sea, to block it from sight with
ghastly buildings, and spoil its strand with sea-walls and piers and
promenades; and, if there are trees, to cut them down or blast them
with smoke and chemicals; and, if there are mountains, to scar and
tunnel them with lines of smut and iron; and, if meadows and grassy
slopes commanding lovely prospects, to destroy their beauty and make
rasping noises and knock balls over them all day.  He gets people to
rush in herds to places made for beauty and calm, to chatter and
snigger and look at fashionable clothes-shops emptied on thoughtless
females from every capital in Europe, and gorge themselves upon all
the luxuries and vices of towns.  And the lovelier the spot the
greater satisfaction the devil seems to take in getting men to
practise ugly and squalid sins in it, and to corrupt and degrade
simple and sane folk for miles round it."

By this time they were crammed like sardines with others in a close
box, that; by some invisible and probably diabolic agency, was drawn
up to a higher level, upon which they were contumeliously ejected by
a morose official who had previously mulcted them of small coin.
Then, passing under avenues of wondrous exotic trees, by beds blazing
with cyclamens, carnations, salvias, and petunias, and passing
rivulets dancing and rippling down rocks covered with maidenhair and
broadening in pools half hidden by water lilies, they emerged upon a
terrace fronting a vast blue splendour, firmly rimmed beneath a
nearly white band of sky, and bounded by the purple of Bordighera on
one side, and Monaco, running out on its rock beneath the headland of
Cap d'Ail on the other.  And in the foreground, dainty steam and
sailing yachts, some moored, some flitting over the sunny sea, and
crowds of fishing-boats dotted here and there.

"But what is that?" she asked, pointing to a sort of jetty topped
with sickly green, like a worn and dirty billiard table, and dotted
with rough deal boxes, that projected its squalor into the pure blue
waves below.

The crack of a shot from under their feet startled her, and the
simultaneous opening of a box, out of which fluttered a wounded
pigeon, pursued to the edge of the billiard-table and killed there by
a dog, answered her question, telling her that this sordid
hideousness drawing every eye, in the very centre of the fairy-like
beauty, was the world-famed _Tir aux Pigeons_.

There was no escaping from the sight except by turning from the
lovely circle of bays and mountain spurs, to look upon the flaring
vulgarity of the Casino, with its sprawling nudities affronting the
pure sky, and flocks of tail-clipped birds flitting about the
cornices and pediments, scurrying out at every shot that slaughtered
one of their kindred in full sight below.  Crack!  Crack!  Crack! the
shots jarred on the nerves.  Ermengarde hurried her halting escort
away through the strange Arabian Nights' magnificence of the gardens
that spread everywhere, flowing round hotels and shops and houses,
and glowing in weird luxuriance beneath the grim grey mountain bluff
and its dark wooded gorge.

Here was every variety of palm, with agaves and pepper-trees, caroubs
and myrtles, geraniums in trees many feet high, or trailing over
rocks, ruddy-leaved and grey-stemmed; here great cacti writhed and
swelled in reptilian forms, and certain huge bushes of prickly pears,
their broad fleshy leaves like goblin hands outspread, their grey,
distorted stems like the fossil bones of huge extinct animals, and
their dull-red, prickly fruit like oozing blood, suggested nothing so
much as those trees in the Inferno, that bled at touch and were lost,
living souls.

This strange exotic luxuriance has something infernal in its beauty;
the darkly massed foliage, in hard contrast with the white glare of
flaunting hotels and restaurants and the marble and gilding and
flamboyant style of the Casino, gives the whole a violence, a crude
insistence of wealth and luxury, in harmony with the spirit of the
place, and much at variance with its superb natural setting and
associations.

"And what people!  Oh, what people!" Ermengarde murmured to the thin
man, who was glad to sit down and pretend to listen to the band and
watch the crowd strolling and sitting outside the Café de Paris.
"What tawdriness, what dowdiness, what Parisian elegance run wild!
Look at that woman; she has six purses at her belt.  You can see the
gold through the net.  She's going into the Casino--let us go too!"

"So young, so fair, and so very business-like!  Yes, beneath that
Parisian hat, in that expensive Parisian raiment, is the cool and
calculating brain and steady nerve of a financier.  She has a system
and works it, Mrs. Allonby."

How tawdry and tarnished was the vaunted splendour of the Casino, and
how wearisome the formalities exacted before admittance to the
gaming-hall!

"Such meddlesome impertinence.  The man actually asked my age,"
Ermengarde complained.

"Ah! they don't ask mine," sighed the artist, whose head already
showed the silver touch of time; "they are quite sure that I am of
_âge majeur_."

Most places have their characteristic odour.  That of Mentone is
garlic, with a suspicion of sewage; that of the _Salle de Jeu_ is a
fine blend of garlic, old clothes, musk, and money--especially paper
money.  The garlic is mostly contributed by hollow-eyed croupiers,
who are in some measure responsible for the old clothes, an odour
otherwise due to grave elderly persons, chiefly female, in garments
of indescribable frumpishness and respectability, who form the staple
of the afternoon congregation, and seem to contemplate life and its
agreeable weaknesses from a standpoint of ferocious piety.

Surely they must have dropped into a prayer-meeting by mistake.
Ermengarde looked round for the minister, after some seconds'
contemplation of long green tables covered with coin and diagrams,
and surrounded by treble and quadruple rows of staid and solemn
faces, "all silent and all damned."  This congregation was apparently
listening with hushed reverence to spasmodic, low-muttered words of
wisdom from a priestly person flavoured with garlic, who appeared to
be consulting some oracle, or celebrating some religious rite, by
turning a brass wheel in a basin sunk in the table, and surrounded by
votive offerings in the shape of rolls and rolls of five-franc pieces
and golden louis in glittering, provocative piles.

Besides these muttered spells in which, after long listening, she
could only make out occasionally "ne va
plus"--"rouge"--"treize"--"vingt-sept," the only sound was the
perpetual clink of coins, which after every utterance began to dance
from hand to hand and fly hither and thither, as if trying to evade
the incessant pursuit of small wooden rakes and clutching hands
sparkling with diamonds, grimed with long-established dirt, white and
brown, yellow and black, red, skinny, and fat.  Sometimes two hands
clutched the same pile of coin, when there were hurried mutterings
and looks of suppressed fury; anon a wooden rake smote an encroaching
paw urgently from its golden prey, and there was silence.

On what principle the piles of gold and sheaves of fluttering notes
before each worshipper by the little books of ritual they consulted
so devoutly, were increased and diminished, was a mystery to the
spectator, who saw nothing but a mystic and subtly woven dance of
coins and notes crossing and recrossing over the morrice of the green
table with rhythmic intermittance, dependent upon the dark utterance
of him who turned the wheel.  But little by little she gathered that
coin placed in one way increased or diminished two-fold, in another
five-fold, in another thirty-fold, and found herself handing louis
and notes from those behind to the croupier for change, and gloating
over the golden multitudes that came rolling to the calm worshippers.
The thin man, easily tired and overcome by evil air, had been
compassionately despatched to a café to wait for her; he had modestly
owned to a weakness for staking a couple of louis now and again for
pastime; this lowered him perceptibly in his companion's esteem.

But when he was gone and the glittering heaps had wrought their
mesmerism, he was more leniently judged; and certain five-franc
pieces in Mrs. Allonby's bag seemed to ask aloud to play a part in
the morrice dance on the green; they even worked their way out, after
a little, and insisted on planting themselves in certain squares,
returning--she never knew how or why--with a partner apiece, and
bringing a pleasant glow to their owner's cheek.

"You have never played before?" asked a genial English voice at her
elbow.  "Would you mind putting this across that corner for me for
luck?"

She willingly placed the louis on the corner of the four spaces
indicated, scarcely glancing at the player, who was sitting in the
front row, with notebook and pencil, piles of coin and notes, all in
most business-like array before him; but when he turned and looked up
to bow his thanks, with a sudden sweet smile on his grave and anxious
face, she recognized the Cyrano de Bergerac of the Carnival.  She had
been so intent on the morrice, and he so near below her, only the
close-cropped head, bent over the pencilled calculations, visible,
that she had not recognized him until he turned.

Even as he smiled, the anxious gravity returned to his white, drawn
face, to study which she silently changed her position near a
croupier.  He turned quickly back, and once more riveted his eyes to
the table, with a wolfish eagerness that destroyed the young
debonnair beauty of his face, and drew lines of age and fatigue upon
it.  Then the wheel stopped, the brass ball clicked into a niche in
the basin, and the player's face changed and his eyes glittered, as
the louis came home with a whole troop rolling after them.  On this
he looked up with another smile and bow, that somehow made her sorry
for him and wonder if he had a mother.

Just then a sickening smell of musk, and a pretty substantial push
from a gorgeously clad shoulder, made her turn to find herself edged
vigorously aside by the painted woman who had ridden down the ridge
with him that first afternoon at Les Oliviers.  Shrinking from the
unholy contact, Ermengarde quickly gave place to her, and, passing
behind the croupier to a gap between the heads of two short people,
saw the countess bend down and accost the young man, who looked up,
worried and impatient, but after some interchange of question and
answer, reluctantly yielded his golden spoil to her greedy clutch,
and turned again with knitted brows to his calculations and
annotations, receiving in reward an unacknowledged pat on the
shoulder from the diamond-covered hand, that looked like a glittering
claw.

The five-franc pieces in the bag again became restive; everybody,
including the woman of the bistred eyes, seemed to be winning.  A
vision of a gown--a plain white serge coat and skirt, simply but
exquisitely cut, and only costing eighteen guineas--floated before
Mrs. Allonby's mental gaze.  Since seeing it in a shop in Mentone,
she had sighed to think of the infrequency of guineas in a world like
this, and of the desirability of white tailor-made raiment of
exquisite cut for a woman like her.  White was the most becoming
wear, almost the only wear for this climate; and white serge, when
one came to think of it, was the sole material absolutely fit for
blazing sunshine and sharp air.  The white serge that arrayed her at
the moment would not be white much longer; it had already begun to
leave off being white.  Absurd to come to a place like this without
proper clothes.  Eighteen guineas was not very dear for such a cut as
that; sheer folly to think of getting anything in a foreign winter
resort at London or Paris prices.  Considering the cost of carriage
and customs and the profit of the Mentone shopkeeper, the thing was
dirt cheap.  Moreover, it was absolutely necessary.  And here;
threading the green mazes of the morrice-dance, were gold and silver
coins in moving multitudes, only waiting to be raked in by the
enterprising.  Two of her five-franc pieces soon sat on the corner
intersecting the four spaces so lucky to Cyrano, and with like
result.  Her heart began to play quick marches, and her eyes to
lighten; she was undoubtedly a lucky person; she staked here and
staked there, and the coins came rolling in till she felt a little
dizzy, and scarcely knew that on one occasion a marauding claw
clutched some of her lawful spoil.

Now she staked more and more wildly, confident in her luck, and
always won.  Her cheeks burnt, her pulses leapt; people looked at her
with envy, hatred and malice.  A gold louis rolling towards her
hopped off the table, unobserved by her; a liveried attendant came
behind unseen, with a lighted lantern at the end of a stick, and
pushed it amongst people's feet and under the table, while a man with
a vacuous face, staring aimlessly about the hall, set his foot quite
casually on the coin, not seeming to observe the attendant looking
for it with the lantern, and then, without appearing to make any
movement, lounged carelessly on with the same vacuous look, but
leaving no corn where his foot had been.

Two hundred francs in notes had jumped into Ermengarde's bag, which
was stuffed to bursting with gold and silver besides.  The coat and
skirt was hers many times over.  It would be mean to stop now;
besides, it was impossible to turn from the magic of that flowing
tide of gold and silver; the feeling of possession and power, and the
enchantment of successfully daring that wild blind demon of chance,
was too strong.  People had made fortunes in a night; why not she?
She placed a little pile of gold _à travers_; the wheel stopped, and
the croupier pushed her pile to the bank.  She bit her lip, frowned,
staked again, and lost again.  Cowardly to draw back now; who was
going to give in?  Another golden stake, and her pile came back
doubled.  Of course; fortune always favours the brave.

But at the end of another half-hour the croupier had been changed;
many players had come and gone from the outer ranks of that table,
the inner circle remaining unbroken, except that Cyrano had vanished
unnoticed by Ermengarde, who saw nothing but the whirling wheel, the
dancing ball, and the flying mazes of the great five-franc pieces and
louis d'or over the green table.  Nothing now remained in her bag but
a few odd coins raked from every recess, and together making five
francs, for which an obliging neighbour gave her a broad silver piece.

Her luck at that table was clearly gone; she left it, selected
another, and, after a short calculation and some watching of the
play, set her teeth, and placed her five-franc piece with a shaking
hand on a carefully chosen square.  The little demon of a ball
clicked into place; the ruthless rake pushed her stake to the bank.

The game was up; Mrs. Allonby found herself three minutes later
standing on the Casino steps in the pure air, feverish and faint from
the reaction and the fetid atmosphere of the gambling-room, vainly
trying to remember where Mr. Welbourne had promised to wait for her,
and minus not only the usual contents of her purse, but also minus
the note that was to have paid a week's bill at Madame Bontemps's
little office before starting that afternoon, and a couple of hundred
franc notes, tucked into a pocket of the bag besides.  In view of
attractive apparel and bric-à-brac sure to be found in the sumptuous
shops, those hundred franc notes were, indeed, sadly insufficient;
but without them what was to be done?

Clearly the only thing now was to get a cup of tea at the café
immediately opposite, where people were sitting in the sunshine and a
band was playing delightfully.  Surely Mr. Welbourne had said Café de
Paris, or was it Giro's?  No; he could never have walked so far as to
Giro's.  It was important to find him, else there could be no tea.
She was too tired to look for him, too tired to do anything but sit
down very wearily; however, she set out to find him, knowing he could
not be far away.

But the spare, slim figure with the slight halt and the grizzled hair
was nowhere to be found, either in the moving crowd or among the
groups at the little tables; she had not even the price of a twopenny
chair, much less of a cup of tea, and where was all that fine moral
indignation of the early afternoon?

The band played triumphantly to a climax, and ended on a grand crash
of all instruments; the sun, hidden under a floating cloud, shone
gloriously out again, and there, in the blaze among the promenaders,
showed conspicuously the graceful figure of M. Isidore, gay as ever,
faultlessly dressed, wearing his hat with the little rakish tilt of
gilded French youth, and talking with easy and familiar vivacity to a
youngish woman, arrayed in the last and most refined Parisian style,
and with that unmistakable air of being in the higher social world
that is the exclusive property of no nation.  The handsome couple
stopped, exchanged a few final words, and parted, M. Isidore turning
with lifted hat to shoot a last Parthian arrow of wit that sent the
lady off, after a gesture of reproval, with heaving shoulders and
eyes brimming with laughter.  It was then that M. Isidore perceived
Mrs. Allonby, and came smiling with raised hat towards her, with "Ah,
Madame, you too?  Have you also tried your luck at the tables?" and
would have gone by, but that she cried joyously, "What a happy chance
to meet you, M. Isidore!  I have lost my last centime and mislaid Mr.
Welbourne, and am positively dying for a cup of tea."




Chapter X

The Casino Gardens

The affair of the crocodile had by no means diminished the esteem in
which Mrs. Allonby held M. Isidore; nor, to judge from an incident
she witnessed from her window on the morning after the Carnival, had
it lessened the regard of the Bontemps family--to whom he was vaguely
supposed to be related, having been heard to address Madame as "Ma
tante"--for that gallant and gay little champion of distressed
damsels.

As she often did, Ermengarde had slipped that morning into a
dressing-gown, wound the thick plaits of her hair round her throat,
and gone to her open window to watch the sun rise and drink the fresh
morning air.

It was an hour of magical beauty; the deep quiet of dawn lay on
mountain, sea, and sleeping town; no one was yet stirring in house or
grounds.  The sea was a dark peacock green as deep in tone as the
blue of the bird's neck, paling to the shore, but on the horizon a
firm dark line against a band of glowing orange sky, above which
floated crimson cloudlets over pale green.  Great masses of shadow
were slowly leaving the gorges; the olives gradually brightened and
took clear form on the western slopes.  Not a sound or a breath
stirred the deep peace of the windless dawn; flower-scents rose from
gardens and lemon-trees set with blossom and fruit; the sea scarcely
heaved in its sleep.  Ermengarde leant on the balcony, lost in the
beauty and calm, and wondered at the depth of magnificent velvety
green beneath the orange sky.  Some labourers came into the gardens
and turned the hose over the thirsty flower-beds with a pleasant
showering sound.

Suddenly a figure on the railed platform on the brink of the steep
stood out against the dark blue shadow of the gorge; then another and
another, and voices--quick, emphatic, French-Italian voices--rang out
in the stillness; the gardeners looked up at the group, and made
unintelligible comments.  The tall form of Madame Bontemps, her
iron-grey hair glossy in morning light, appeared, followed by the
slight compact figure of M. Isidore full of eager gesture.  M.
Bontemps lounged after them; the three voices grew in urgency and
rapid interchange to one common shout; the gestures increased to
frenzy.  M. Bontemps seemed about to hurl M. Isidore, who had
suddenly become rigid and stood with folded arms glaring at him, over
the barrier; Madame intervened, with an action that threatened
annihilation to both but injured neither.

Then M. Bontemps rushed into the house, and quickly emerged again,
leading by the hand Mlle. Geneviève, reluctant, downcast, who
instantly turned her back on all three, and looked down the gorge in
gloomy silence, while the others declaimed, singly and in unison,
with gestures of entreaty, to the massive and glossy coils of her
back hair.  At last she turned sharply and faced them with a fierce
energy, that almost precipitated them backwards down the ridge and
drove them to the balustrade, where the risen sun touched their faces
with ruddy gold.  Mlle. Geneviève then wept bitterly; her father
placed his hand despairingly on his heart and groaned; her mother
stormed; M. Isidore covered his face with his hands, with a movement
of such despair as suggested the advisability of putting an end to
his sufferings by springing down the steep.

Instead of this, with an alarming suddenness that drove Mlle.
Bontemps back to the other side, he threw out his arms and sprang
forwards, directing what sounded like a torrent of abuse upon Mlle.
Geneviève, who shrank and quailed beneath it, and then lifted her
hands appealingly to Heaven with renewed weeping.  A general
engagement--to witness which the gardeners left the hose to its own
discretion, with the unexpected result of very nearly drenching the
whole of the combatants--then took place with such energy and
apparent fury that Ermengarde, terror-stricken and in default of
police, was about to cry "_Au secours!_" when M. Isidore suddenly
hurled himself weeping upon the ample bosom of Madame Bontemps, who
tenderly embraced and kissed him; after which Monsieur fall upon his
neck in such wise that the two men represented an inverted V, when
they kissed on both cheeks and parted.

Then Mlle. Geneviève, with downcast eyes and reluctant step, led by
her mother and encouraged by her father, allowed M. Isidore to take
both her hands and respectfully salute her on both cheeks, and sudden
calm fell upon the quartette, now in full sunshine.

After this, as if nothing had happened, they strolled, casually
chatting, about the little platform, M. Bontemps yawning and resuming
his interrupted cigarette, and Madame leaning over the railing; that
looked across the chasm towards the garden, and composedly issuing
commands to the gardeners before returning to the house.  Thither she
was accompanied by her daughter, now restored to cheerfulness and
executing a graceful _pas seul_ to that mad Carnival tune of the day
before, as she went, while Ermengarde, unconscious of her deficient
toilet, remained petrified at her balcony, staring blankly at the
sunny sea and the hill-crest topped by the convent, every olive, pine
and cypress on which was now clear and distinct in a flood of
brilliant sunshine.

But Mrs. Allonby was not the only witness of this family drama.  The
voices of the actors, penetrating through the open window of Miss
Boundrish, had roused the amiable girl from her slumbers, and caused
her, with much irritation and reluctance, conquered by curiosity, to
spring from her downy nest, classically dressed in the first thing
that came handy, and view the platform scene from her window with
appropriate mental comment.

A vivid imagination, capable of forging missing links in a chain of
evidence at a moment's notice, and then presenting them as veritable
parts of the original, enabled her to produce a version entirely her
own of what actually occurred.  And not content with constructing a
consistent romance out of the pantomime enacted in the morning, she
insisted upon imparting the whole of it in the afternoon to a few
friends in the garden, in a voice that must have been heard all over
the grounds, if not by the whole house.

It was actually heard by Mrs. Allonby, who, under the mistaken
impression that she was writing letters, was basking in the sun among
the flowers, idly looking over the lemon-tops and across gorge and
ridge to the sea, and peacefully thinking of nothing at all.  But,
roused from this pleasant occupation by the dulcet accents of her
favourite Dorris, she turned and engaged in a sharp verbal encounter
with the romancer, and contrived to give her such a severe snubbing
(though to snub Dorris was no child's work) as reduced her victorious
self to a state of pleasant exhaustion, that made sunshine and fair
scenes and _dolce far niente_ more enjoyable than ever.

"Surely," murmured the thin man, who had been a silent and apparently
unconscious auditor of the fray, in mortal terror lest either
antagonist should appeal to him, and who would have fled but for the
fear of attracting attention, "our young friend would be quite as
happy, and infinitely more charming, had she been born without a
tongue?"

"Oh, she'd have gurgled and giggled more than ever to make up.  Such
people ought not to be let loose in civilized hotels."

"Poor girl," said the more merciful Agatha, who had just come up,
"are we not a little hard on her?  An interest in her
fellow-creatures, perhaps more zealous than discreet, and a slight
congenital deficiency in tact----"

"Deficiency?  A born cat!"

"But a good heart, dear Mrs. Allonby?"

"What's the good of a good heart if you don't sheathe your claws?"

The thin man and Miss Somers, meeting each other's eyes, smiled; for,
whatever she may have given, poor Dorris had undoubtedly received a
pretty good but strictly polite clawing before retreating in great
disarray from the fur-strewn field.

"Do you realize that all our characters are at the mercy of those
good-hearted claws, Miss Somers?"

The gentle observation in reply, that characters needing defence were
not of much account, filled Ermengarde with amazement.  "What an
actress!" she reflected, rapidly marshalling the compromising events
of the Carnival in her memory, and looking at the lemons till they
mesmerized her and her eyelids began to close, then suddenly opened
to their widest extent.

For out of the dark lemon-leaves to the left there emerged a head--a
not unusual occurrence, one of the garden entrances from a terraced
path being just there--a handsome young head, followed by well-braced
shoulders and the whole figure of the Cyrano de Bergerac of the
Carnival.  Having risen to the garden level, he stopped and looked
about as if considering the way to the house, while Ermengarde,
conscious through occult sympathy of nervous tension near, looked at
Agatha, who had made a slight quick movement, her hands clasped
tightly together, her face vivid, and then with a deep sigh had drawn
the mask of inexpression, now so familiar, over her features.  It was
at this moment that Cyrano caught sight of her; and, taking a step
forward, paused doubtfully, took another step, smiled with nervous
hesitation, very different from his usual gay assurance, looked
appealingly at the sphinx-like face that was averted from him, gazing
straight before her, and raised his hat.

At this, she turned her head slightly, bowed frigidly, almost
imperceptibly, and turned away again.

A flash of anger and mortification crimsoned Cyrano's face; turning
quickly, he walked up to the house, where he was distantly heard
entering into a prolonged misunderstanding with Heinrich, the
cheerful porter, the purport of which appeared to be that some one
asked for was not in the house, but that there was a restaurant
attached to the hotel where Monsieur would find excellent
refreshment.  This appeared to fill Cyrano with the utmost fury and
indignation.  "Did nobody keep the beastly place?  Was there no
secretary or manager or anything?" he shouted, coming to the end of
his French.

The porter's vague reference to _fiançailles_ and the desirability of
leaving a message with the patron himself, who might possibly be
induced to appear in the office if perseveringly rung for, suggested
that Madame Bontemps and her daughter being both out, and M. Isidore
absent, and M. Bontemps left in temporary and reluctant charge,
anarchy reigned within.

But all this being entirely unintelligible to poor Cyrano, the
well-known national swear-word came rolling vigorously out, and after
some futile stamping on the gravel and further hopeless
misunderstanding with the ever affable Swiss, the visitor went into
the house with quick, angry steps, and was seen no more till soon
after sunset.  At that hour Mrs. Allonby, idling cosily between her
wood-fire and the window, saw him walking and amicably talking with
the hostile crocodile of the Carnival--who, with the Bontemps ladies,
had come back half an hour before--from the private wing of the house
to the gate, where they parted with ceremony, leaving Ermengarde in
doubt as to whether it meant pistols and coffee or friendship and
apology.  The thin man subsequently averred that the young Englishman
had been eating humble pie, and M. Isidore had graciously accepted
his explanation, and duly presented it and the apologist to M.
Bontemps, who had been equally gracious.

In the meantime Ermengarde put two facts together--that the woman of
mystery had received and furtively read a letter from the Cyrano on
one afternoon, and on the next had accorded him a recognition one
remove from a dead cut.

And upon this occasion of meeting M. Isidore in the Casino Gardens
walking with a woman of such distinguished appearance, with whom he
appeared to be on equal and friendly, almost affectionate, terms, she
remembered that the young Englishman's manner to him that afternoon
at Les Oliviers had been quite that of an equal.  Who and what, then,
was this pleasant and mysterious youth, occupying a position so
palpably anomalous?  In any case, it was a great convenience to have
such a delicate, Ariel-like being at hand as an attendant sprite,
especially on this unfortunate occasion, of being so completely
cleaned out at the tables as not even to have the price of a cup of
tea.

"You are always our guardian angel at Les Oliviers," she told him,
after imparting the history of the afternoon's ill-luck.  "Evidently
you possess a sixth sense, by virtue of which you invariably turn up
whenever we come to grief.  It was only yesterday that you saved Mr.
Welbourne from a broken neck."

"Ah! ce pauvre monsieur!  Mais il vaut bien la peine, n'est-ce pas,
Madame?"

The sorrows of the roulette table vanished into the limbo of
forgetfulness; Mrs. Allonby found herself magically installed in a
cosy nook outside the café, with a full view of the craggy head of
the gorge, the Roman tower of Turbia outlined above it on the
sunset-flushed sky, and in the foreground the enchanted Armida
gardens, promenaders streaming in and out of avenues of dark exotic
trees, gorgeous parterres, the gleam of white masonry between palm
and olive boughs, and the tide of smart carriages and snorting motors
rolling along the main road under dark-leaved boughs.  The band
played the Overture to Tannhäuser, and the Pilgrim's Chorus,
overpowered again and again by the scream of warring violins, surged
out solemn and triumphant again and yet again.

Tea of the perfect quality a brief experience leads the traveller to
expect in the better French restaurants, with dainty but appallingly
rich cakes, was before her, though how procured it was impossible to
conjecture, every table, chair, and waiter having been appropriated
or promised two deep a moment before--unless, as appeared probable,
M. Isidore exercised some mysterious influence over the harried
waiters, who fled at his nod and contrived to produce, and perhaps
manufacture on the instant, hitherto non-existent tea-tables and
seats in suddenly improvised corners.  Her bag had been replenished
with small coin by the same enchanter, who gracefully accepted an
invitation to share the tea, and spiced it with much useful local
information and many bright and apposite remarks and condolences upon
the unfortunate experiences in the Casino.

"Fancy having tea in public with a hotel-manager at home," she
reflected complacently, forgetting that it is quite as possible to be
found out abroad as at home, and agreeably conscious of a slight
flavour of impropriety, or at least unconventionality, in the
adventure.  Her spirits rose; she drew a pathetic picture of her
anguish at the loss of the white serge costume that brought tears of
laughter from M. Isidore's eyes.  After two cups of tea and several
cream buns in the sweet air, perfumed by a great bush covered with
clusters of tea-roses overhanging this cosy corner, the Casino
mischance acquired a new aspect--it became a positive joy; it was
part of the game.  After all, it was seeing life.  It behoved the
mother of Charlie to know life--_real_ life.  This was very real.

To leave off with a pile of winnings and buy the frock next day would
have been too obvious and commonplace.  But to win so splendidly and
lose so fatally was to acquire a new thrill.  The inconvenience of
having lost more than a fortnight of the holiday by this financial
mischance could be reserved for future consideration
and--_reparation_.

And this was the woman who had been severe on the poor painted
countess and her cavalier for daring to speak of their "sordid vices"
in that first mountain sunset, and had even looked down upon the thin
man's little innocent five franc flutters!

M. Isidore, on his part, was anything but depressed.  Of course, he
was delighted with the luck of turning up just in time to be of
service to Madame.  It was singular that he had chosen that
particular afternoon to call on friends staying in this place.  The
lady Madame had been so kind as to compliment upon her chic
appearance was, in effect, the cause of his visit; she was his sister.

Ermengarde's eyes widened.  _His_ sister?  An early prejudice
regarding the veracity of foreigners, together with a memory of
Olympian leniency towards falsity on certain topics, led her to
condone this flagrant mis-statement of fact, and pass quickly to
other subjects.  M. Isidore was a man of singular charm; his eyes
were liquid and soft, like a gazelle's.  He could not even explain
that the vulgar atrocity of flaring white masonry, that formed the
centre of every picture of the mountains behind Monte Carlo, was
neither a prison nor a half-finished barrack, but only the Riviera
Palace Hotel, without some delicately allusive pleasantry, some
unavowed tribute to the fascination of her presence.

It was just when Mrs. Allonby had arrived at these favourable
conclusions respecting M. Isidore's eyes and conversation that the
Anarchist happened to pass the crowd of tables outside the café, and
Ermengarde, smiling softly and not untenderly upon the Frenchman,
happened to look up and meet the blazing ferocity of that baleful
person's eyes, with a start of apprehension and astonishment that
caused his truculent gaze to blanch before hers.

"That dreadful man again--he never can look me straight in the face!
That is the man I asked about the first day.  Who is he?" she cried.

"Celui-la, l'homme à la barbe bleue?  Ah! the Pole?  Of him I know
nothing.  He was at Les Oliviers, that is all, Madame.  My friend, I
have done you no wrong that you should look pistol shots at me,
though my position is doubtless one to crack the heart with envy.  He
would like my blood in a cup to drink, Madame, hein?"

"Perhaps he has the evil eye," she suggested, crimsoning with a
sudden ghastly suspicion that the Anarchist, in his dark and dreadful
fashion, might be in love with her; a suspicion chiefly based, it is
to be feared, upon the malevolence with which this mysterious man
glared upon M. Isidore, who appeared to enjoy it amazingly, and
twirled his moustache and flashed his eyes at the Pole with a
taunting insolence no Englishman can command.  And dreadful as the
notion of being the object of the Anarchist's passion was, it still
held substantial compensation in the implied idea of being suspected
of a flirtation with a young and handsome foreigner of dubious social
status and admitted charm.  It gave the proper Bohemian spice to the
whole adventure.  This, she recognized with a thrill, certainly was
real life; the bon-bons M. Isidore offered her with an air of
respectful gallantry tinged with despair had the zest of forbidden
fruit.

Everybody must have some fun sometimes, once in a life-time at least.
The thin man was a most estimable person, with sound moral principles
and interesting views upon art and literature; his paintings were
charming--in the impressionist manner--but his presence was not
entirely necessary to the enjoyment of the moment; he would probably
turn up quite soon enough.

The Anarchist passed on, turning once to inflict a final murderous
glance upon the guileless Frenchman, who twirled his moustache with a
more deadly insolence than ever in return.  Mrs. Allonby went on
enjoying real life, bon-bons and sunshine, quite peacefully, till the
sound of a familiar gurgling chuckle made her turn her laughing eyes
to the passing crowd, in the midst of which sailed the slender figure
of Miss Boundrish, in a frock due to the genius of a renowned Paris
maker, and accompanied by a tall and stiffly-carried youth, whose
accent and bearing alike confessed him a Prussian officer--a fact of
which he was, to do him justice, anything but ashamed.

An air of possession on the lady's part, and of reluctant submission
on the man's, proclaimed the situation clearly and afforded
Ermengarde much quiet enjoyment.  This was succeeded by a thrill,
rather too keen this time, at the expression, or rather succession of
expressions, on Miss Boundrish's face when her roving glance took in
gradually the whole inwardness of the group of two in the
rose-covered corner.  Life was becoming almost too real now; for
Ermengarde knew perfectly well that before slumber fell upon the
household at Les Oliviers that night, every creature in it would
possess some version, with variations and embroideries, of the
present meeting in the gardens.

Dorris gave Ermengarde one of the little patronizing nods she was
fond of bestowing on her betters, ignoring M. Isidore, whose serenity
was nevertheless undisturbed.  Ermengarde's acknowledgment of the
fair girl's salute was a trifle ceremonious, a circumstance that
possibly impelled Dorris to penetrate to the rose-embowered corner,
and promptly present her captive, who drew his heels together and
saluted with unmitigated melancholy.

"Fancy finding _you_ here!" she graciously gurgled.  "Rather noisy
for you?  Of course, you didn't attempt the Casino?  You wouldn't
like it at all.  The evening is the right time for the _Salle du
feu_.  Such dresses--such diamonds--there's nothing like it.  I must
get the mater to take you one evening.  The lieutenant will escort
us----"

"Doch," was the humble rejoinder with clicked heels.

"It will be quite a ploy for you--as Mr. Welbourne says.  You ought
to see a little life.  I'm glad you are resting here instead of at
that dull old mountain place; a nice change for you--odd place to
rest in though," with an arch look, for which Ermengarde could have
murdered her without remorse.

"You had a pleasant day at Nice, Miss Boundrish? and found your aunt
better?" she asked sweetly.

"My aunt?  Nice?  Oh, quite better," she gurgled with temporary
confusion.  "But, I say, Mrs. Allonby, don't you give me away.  The
mater doesn't know everything.  Wouldn't do at all, you know.
Auntie's _quite_ better, thank you.  Ta ta."

M. Isidore, always standing, and raising his hat at the proper time,
listened to this colloquy with a smile of pleased interest, and when
the pair had gone he laughed a droll little laugh.

"Figure to yourself, Madame," he said, in the only tongue he ever
cared to speak, "that it is possible for me to detest one of your
charming sex.  In that case I avenge myself by giving her to a German
husband.  _Hein?_"

"But the poor German?"

"Ah!  One still remembers Alsace-Lorraine.  Yes?"

"Surely there are limits even to a patriotic vengeance.  But I must
catch this train, and please do you try to catch me Mr. Welbourne."

"Perfectly."

Pleasant to wind slowly through the enchanted gardens to the sea in
the last sunglow, pleasanter still to find on the way a quiet nook by
a rippling stream, and sink upon a bench, half hidden in
geranium-trees and quite hidden from the public, and look round at
the gay and fragrant flower-bands, and--see the woman of mystery
seated on another bench in earnest colloquy with Cyrano, the very
same Cyrano whose acquaintance had been as good as repudiated by her
at Les Oliviers a few days since.

Agatha's face was turned from Ermengarde; Cyrano's, full of emotion,
was in the same direction, bent upon the lady's; one arm lay along
the back of the bench behind her; his other almost encircled the
figure turned from him; his hand was upon hers clasped on her lap;
every line and gesture of the two figures indicated a situation of
extreme poignancy; he was speaking in low tones of strong feeling,
interrupted by sharp retorts of pain and indignation from her; there
was clearly no place for a third person.  But the superfluous third
hardly knew how to remove herself without attracting attention; she
had just risen for the purpose when Agatha, turning with quick anger
to Cyrano, saw her.  Ermengarde, wondering why everybody's invalid
aunts should just then be staying clandestinely at Monte Carlo, bowed
instinctively, and would have passed on, but that Agatha, with one of
her sudden transitions to marble, came towards her with some calm and
commonplace phrase, and obliged her to stop and reply.

"Yes.  This is the last train in time for dinner," Agatha said, as if
nothing mattered more than missing a meal; "and it's growing cold.
May I introduce Mr. Paul, my--my--that is, a--a----"

"A connexion by marriage," Cyrano suggested, with what Ermengarde
thought an odd expression.

"Quite so; a connexion by marriage," she echoed, as if greatly
relieved by this definition.  "Mrs. Allonby travelled from Calais
with me, Ivor.  She has been most kind.  We are--luckily for me--in
the same pension."

"Really?  Awfully nice for you."

Ermengarde was stunned.  Here was the woman of mystery introducing
and explaining _her_ to this disreputable young villain, whom she had
scarcely acknowledged before, and appearing to welcome her intrusion
on a too intimate _tête-à-tête_ with her "connexion by marriage," as
an excuse for ending it.

"I hope you found your invalid aunt better, Miss Somers," she
murmured, with civil interest, when she recovered breath after Cyrano
had been summarily dismissed.

"My _aunt_!" she echoed, puzzled.

"Or connexion--by marriage.  You were to lunch with her in Mentone,
you remember."

"Oh, of course!  I had forgotten.  She--she was engaged; she only
sees one person at a time.  So I came on here."

A flush came and quickly passed from the woman of mystery's
statuesque features.  Ermengarde marvelled at the readiness of her
inventive powers, and reflected that a connexion by marriage
sometimes means a good deal.

"Your connexion," she said, "has not had the best luck this
afternoon, did he tell you?  It was he I overheard on that first
evening at Les Oliviers talking to the thing with the black-leaded
eyes.  She was in the Casino with him to-day.  He asked me to play
for him, seeing I was new and lucky."

"Yes?  And you gave him luck?"

"Only for that once.  And the creature with the orange-coloured hair
clawed it."

"Poor boy!  What a pity!  Did you win much, Mrs. Allonby?"

"Not on the whole," she replied diplomatically, turning very red at
the sudden apparition of the thin man, who had laboured up, panting,
from behind them.

"Well," he gasped, "I hope you got a decent cup of tea somewhere.  I
promenaded Giro's from end to end in vain, and imagined the most
terrible disasters befalling you.  So I had to have seven cigars and
an ice.  I pictured you shot in heroic attempts to rescue wounded
pigeons at the Tir, or to snatch pistols from would-be suicides, or
yielding to the fascinations of jewellers' shops, and being run in by
mistake for adroit thefts, or robbed of that dainty little bag, and
here I find you, safe under Miss Somers' angel wing all the time."

"Not all the time.  But I thought you said Café de Paris.  So sorry."

The thin man was in great spirits.  He observed that few things were
more enjoyable than the walk through the Gardens to the train at that
evening time, as he handed the ladies into their carriage, while
Ermengarde silently gave the palm to other incidents of an enjoyable
afternoon.

In the carriage they discovered, one by one, Miss Boundrish,
"returning from Nice," she gurgled confidentially; M. Isidore,
unobtrusively polite as usual; and, glaring fiercely at them from a
remote corner, the Anarchist.  The latter suddenly discovered, just
as the train was beginning to move, that he had taken the wrong one,
and got out again, to Ermengarde's immense relief--for the creature
snorted and puffed intolerably.  Probably, she reflected, he knew his
own weakness, and doubted his ability to refrain from assassinating
M. Isidore, if compelled any longer to witness his proximity to
herself--a reflection not entirely devoid of charm.

"Why," Mr. Welbourne murmured in his most melancholy voice at her
ear, as the train rolled slowly in the direction of Italy--"why
choose the loveliest spot on earth for all this devilry, when it
could be done quite as well in a disused coal-mine?"

"Why," she whispered, with reddening cheeks, in reply; "why hit a man
when he is down?"




Chapter XI

Katzenjammer

In its leisurely progress back to Mentone the train passed through
the same scenes as in leaving it, but they had not the same charm.
The sun was set, the air chill, the world inclined to be grey.

Everybody, except Miss Boundrish, who gurgled till both Ermengarde
and the thin man prayed earnestly to be delivered from the temptation
to choke her, was silent.  Agatha's face had taken on its deepest
expression of sadness; she seemed absorbed in thought too melancholy
for words, and weighed by care too heavy for human sufferance.
Ermengarde felt smaller, cheaper, and of less account than she had
done for years.  She would have to go home at least a fortnight
earlier than she had intended in consequence of that afternoon's
diversion; there would be no margin for pleasant expensive nothings
and no gifts for Charlie.  And for the first time in a new place
Charlie's picture post-cards had been forgotten.  The thought of it
burnt her cheeks and clouded her eyes.  And as for Arthur--well, he
had not expressed any very acute anguish at their separation.  He was
obviously enjoying life as much as possible in that prolonged
business excursion of his, to judge by the brevity and infrequency of
his letters.  Why should men have all the fun?

"You appear to have had a delightful afternoon, Mrs. Allonby," Miss
Boundrish's mother said at dinner.  "What lovely carnations!  Did
_they_ come from Monte Carlo?"

"Will you have one, Mrs. Boundrish?" she returned, with a sweet
smile, wondering if she were really bound in honour not to give
Dorris away.

"And did M. Isidore play _too_?" was another question from some one
across the table, eliciting the frigid reply that Mrs. Allonby knew
nothing of M. Isidore's recreations.

"Now tell me in confidence, dear Mrs. Allonby," urged a third
persecutor, pursuing her to a corner, into which she had tucked
herself cosily, after dinner in the salon.  "How much _did_ you lose,
and was it _very_ exciting?  I hear that M. Isidore makes quite a
little income by his average winnings.  Of course, he has a system."

There was something in Mrs. Boundrish's allusion to her flowers that
fired a train of thought in Mrs. Allonby's mind.  Fresh flowers had
always appeared on her table before dinner; she had taken them in her
inexperience as part of the usual entertainment for man and beast to
be expected at hotels, not observing that none were on Agatha's
table, and that no charge for flowers appeared in the bills.  But
these superb Malmaison carnations were obviously not from the
Oliviers garden.  Moreover, instead of donkey-riding up to the house
with the others that afternoon, she had taken the steep, short cut
through the lemons and olives, finding the kind assistance of M.
Isidore in this ascent most useful in the dusk.  Just as they came up
into the light of the electric lamp in the grounds by a very steep
climb, for which M. Isidore had given her a hand up, that gallant
gentleman dropped a large paper cornet he had personally conducted
with great care from Monte Carlo.  And when Mrs. Allonby stopped its
descent into the lemon-trees with her sunshade, it burst open and
disclosed a sheaf of Malmaisons, exactly like those found afterwards
on her table.

Further, when she went to the office after dinner, she found
Mademoiselle Geneviève in charge, smiling and radiant, with a huge
sheaf of Malmaisons in her belt and one flower nestling becomingly in
her dark hair.  M. Isidore, as often happened at that hours sat near
her on the sofa, and conversation of a joyous and pleasant nature
appeared to be forward.  How could Miss Boundrish call this girl
plain and frumpish?  To-night she was positively handsome in a
brilliant Southern style, her face lit with laughter, her great,
liquid dark eyes sparkling, her white, even teeth gleaming between
full red lips.  Her figure was fine in a statuesque way, strong and
stately.  Mlle. Bontemps was unusually gracious in supplying the
information desired until her full, dark eye lit on the Malmaisons in
Mrs. Allonby's belt; then her face changed; she turned with a flash
of fury and looked at M. Isidore, who looked studiously through the
open doorway at nothing at all, while Ermengarde beat a retreat as
hasty as was consistent with dignity and a proper Parisian accent.
Afterwards, at the first opportunity, she asked the chambermaid
whence the flowers on her table came, and heard with misgiving that
they were so placed daily by command of M. Isidore.

"So it is the duty of M. Isidore to supply all the dressing-tables
with bouquets?" she asked carelessly.

"Mais, Madame," came in deep, contralto remonstrance, "est-ce que
tout le monde dépense comme ça pour les fleurs?"

"No doubt I am extravagant, Louise," she confessed humbly, "but the
flowers usually come from the gardens or the mountains, and are not
charged for in the bills."

Louise smiled approval of this reply; she had studied life in many
aspects.  She liked Mrs. Allonby, whom she had made acquainted with
the whole of her family history, and of whom she had asked and
received counsel and munificent tips--but the latter unasked.

"Stupid boy!" Ermengarde said to herself, with vexation.  She had
dined publicly in his flowers night after night, beginning with the
tea-roses he gave her in the garden on her arrival.  And the
crocodile at the Carnival had thrown her Parma violets.  Yes, and she
had worn them--idiot!--without thinking.  Luckily, nobody would
know--except Miss Boundrish and her mother, and----  But, after all,
what are flowers? and what did this French boy's impertinence or
ignorance matter?

A wet day, accompanied by a furious headache and the state of mind
Germans call _Katzenjammer_, followed the thrilling afternoon of real
life at Monte Carlo.  Odd to think that it was actually raining at
Les Oliviers.  But not common, dreary rain, such as makes London
streets a foretaste of the future habitation of sinners.  No, fairy
rain, clean, bright, transparent, a sort of crystalline veil through
which that beautiful Southern shore could be seen with undazzled
eyes, and yet more distinctly than in the clear sunlight, like a
lovely human form, lovelier through transparent drapery.  The clouds
were not leaden, but of pearly lustre; the feathery, misty grace of
olive-woods was no longer confused with the heavier mass and colour
of pines; the delicate symmetry of those flights of steps that were
vine-terraces, connected by miniature flights that were real stairs,
came into view; every solitary cottage and every towered hamlet stood
out clear on its crest beneath the solemn mountain peaks.  The sea
behind those shining curtains of moving rain was still blue, and
there was leisure now to be glad of a four-square house on a mountain
ridge, with a wide and glorious prospect from every window, and a
different view on every side of the house.

Mr. Welbourne was trying to catch an impression from five sides at
once, and in despair wandered up and down the corridors looking at
each in turn.  An amateur was thumping music-hall melodies on the
ground-floor piano, which was out of tune, while another played
fragments of Wagner in the drawing-room immediately above it, and
Miss Boundrish practised _solfeggi_ in the room over that.

And yet Ermengarde's headache and _Katzenjammer_--or mental
atmosphere sequent on nights enjoyed less wisely than well--steadily
increased as the day wore on.  After luncheon, quite overcome and
flattened out by these afflictions, she retired shivering to bed.  On
this the woman of mystery, at once transformed into Sir Walter
Scott's ministering angel, tucked her up cosily, kindled a wood fire
on her hearth, and sat silent and thoughtful in its light, softly
blowing up the logs with a little carved bellows fetched from her own
room.  To her the tinkle and plash of this sweet, clear rain was
soothing after the long dryness, and the silvery light a relief from
the perpetual purple splendour of sky and sea.  Ermengarde, soothed
by these attentions and the soft sound of the bellows, watched the
fire-light play on Agatha's still, clear-cut features and graceful
form, and meditated on her failings.  Sad that one so fair should be
presumably so false, paying imaginary visits to fictitious aunts, and
conspiring with bearded Anarchists and beardless prodigals in
goodness knew what wickedness; but she enjoyed being petted, and knew
that in their common estimation of Miss Boundrish's varied social
charm Agatha and she were one.  There was something that strongly
attracted her in this mysterious young person.  Might this fine
nature have been perverted by unfortunate surroundings and evil
example in youth?  Who could tell?

The Good, but suspected, Samaritan read her to sleep, and on her
waking made her excellent tea, unobtrusively and silently in her own
room, and brought it in with biscuits, and shared it in a
comfortable, home-like way; whereupon Ermengarde's heart expanded and
her tongue was loosed, and she recounted her ill-fortune at the
tables, and received sympathy untouched by scorn.

In return she heard--in the spirit of a Sadducee--somewhat of the
family history of Miss Somers' "connexion by marriage."  Mr. Paul's
mother, it appeared, had married twice; her second husband and that
youth's step-father being Miss Somers' uncle.  Mr. Paul's mother was
consequently her aunt--a species of relative that Ermengarde was
inclined to regard as shadowy and thin, and much too capable of
multiplication at will.

"How many aunts have you, dear Miss Somers?" she asked gently; "it is
sometimes an advantage to possess several of them."

"So Ivor and I call ourselves cousins," Miss Somers added, not
enumerating her aunts.  "And, as I have always been very fond of my
aunt, I am very much interested in this boy, and exceedingly anxious
that he should keep straight."

"Naturally," Ermengarde assented.  "What inventive power!" she
thought.  "By the way," she added suddenly, "Ivor is not a very
common name, and Miss Boundrish was once engaged to an Ivor, who knew
you.  This might be the same man."

"Miss Boundrish engaged to Ivor!  Oh! how funny!"  Agatha laid down
her toy bellows as if to enjoy the visionary relationship, laughing
quietly to herself.  "Miss Boundrish!  But an Ivor who knew me!  What
on earth has that girl been romancing about me?"

Ermengarde studied the leaves in the bottom of her cup, and smiled
sadly over human infirmity.  The pot is always calling the kettle,
and not only the kettle, but even the silver tea-pot--black.

"What a dangerous girl," continued Agatha.  "In a house like this,
too.  And how very unlucky that she saw you at tea with M. Isidore
yesterday."

"And pray why should I not have tea with the boy?" Ermengarde
demanded with sudden dignity.

"Why not, indeed?  But--please don't think me impertinent or
intrusive, dear Mrs. Allonby"--she spoke with a sort of childlike
appeal and affection--"the most innocent and obvious things are not
always wise, especially in a world in which unmuzzled Boundrishes run
about loose."

She looked so guileless, so sweet, so tenderly pleading; her eyes
uplifted to Ermengarde's had the transparent candour of a child's;
there was a tremulous diffidence about her mouth that went to
Ermengarde's heart.  A woman who could invent aunts and male
connexions by marriage on the spur of the moment, who wrote and
received surreptitious letters in cipher--only that afternoon she had
been perusing one by the fire, when Ermengarde opened her eyes after
a doze, and had quickly pocketed it on discovering that she was
watched.

"Boundrishes," continued the woman of mystery, not blenching under
the searching gaze upon her, "are--not that this one means any harm,
it's only vanity and silliness--they are unconscious
gossip-conductors and accumulators combined; they are always
discharging whatever happens to have come into their heads, and
nothing ever seems to go in quite straight, and all comes out
enlarged and distorted."

"Dear Miss Somers, I congratulate you on your truly serpentine
wisdom.  How did you manage to acquire it?"

"Women who get their own living have to keep their eyes open, else
they go down.  I sometimes wonder if you realize what the actual
position of this young Isidore is, Mrs. Allonby?"

"That surely is obvious, even to eyes not very wide open.  But tell
me about yourself and your work, dear Miss Somers; women who work are
always interesting."

Her work, she replied, was not particularly interesting, rather
drudging and casual.  Family misfortune had obliged her to provide
for herself; she had not been brought up to any profession, but to
leisure and comparative affluence.  She had tried companioning and
secretarial work, even a little hack literary work.  She had no
decided talent for anything.  Her parents were early lost; she had
been partly brought up by an aunt--"What! another aunt?" Ermengarde
murmured to herself--whose affairs had become entangled and her means
diminished, especially during late years.  "So I have to work," the
woman of mystery said, with a sigh that implied intense weariness and
disgust at the necessity, "to take at least one burden from my poor
aunt's shoulders."

"Far too thin," Ermengarde thought, and hazarded the observation that
the woman of mystery must be greatly enjoying her present holiday; to
which she replied that she certainly was, her expenses being supplied
by her employer, to whom her sojourn in those regions was in some
vague way useful.

"You are possibly collecting information on his behalf?"

"In a way--yes," she admitted, with a faint blush.

"A detective way?  Shadowing?  Family mysteries?"

"One can't always explain--in detail----"

"Especially in work of such a delicate nature."

The sphinx mask had suddenly fallen back on the woman of mystery's
features, and she had audibly remembered a letter to take down for
the post.

Having done this, she returned only just in time to dress for dinner
and bring the menu for the invalid to select from.

"And I'll see that you have what you choose," she promised.  "Louise
will bring it up.  Ah! she has brought your flowers already," with a
quick change of expression.

"Yes--with the hot water," Ermengarde faltered, changing colour
quickly.  "She always puts flowers on my table for dinner."

"Would she put them on mine, I wonder?"

"Miss Somers, what can it matter?  Why in the word shouldn't the
stupid boy give me flowers if he likes?  Besides, I only found it out
yesterday."

"I was sure you didn't know.  Miss Boundrish only discovered it quite
recently.  She is of an inquiring disposition.  And what she knows,
or thinks she knows, is not long ignored by her world."

"She may know anything and everything she likes about me," Ermengarde
flashed out furiously; "how many hairpins I use a day, whether I curl
with Hinde's or with tongs, and where I get my gowns--and who pays
for them and how much!"

How dared this young woman hint to her of prudence and propriety?

After dinner Agatha came up again, put on fresh logs, and sat meekly
by the hearth.  She described the desolation Mrs. Allonby's absence
had created at _table d'hôte_, as well as Miss Boundrish's Christian
desire to visit and console her in her affliction.

"Of course she has a headache," the fair Dorris had shouted across
the table, "and no wonder after yesterday."

"Sweet girl!" Ermengarde commented, thankful that the visit scheme
had been frustrated.

"I said this afternoon that I had no fortune," the woman of mystery
observed presently, bringing in a morocco case from her room.  "But I
had forgotten this for the moment.  It is a little fortune in itself;
a thing that has been in our family since--oh, since nobody knows
when."

"Very probably, not even the people they were sneaked from,"
Ermengarde reflected.  The light had been switched off, and they had
been talking and dreaming in the firelight.  The woman of mystery, a
slender figure in dead creamy-white, bent to the hearth, and,
throwing a handful of eucalyptus bark on the embers, made a leaping
blaze in which some jewels in a necklace she drew from the morocco
case flashed and quivered like live things.  Ermengarde gave a long
sigh of wonder and admiration, not untinged by vague longing, at the
sight of this rich and beautiful piece of jewellery.

"I never wear it," Agatha said, pensively regarding the gems flashing
in her hands as she knelt in the hearth-glow.  "How could I, dressing
as I do, and of course ought to?  And I do not suppose I ever shall.
Yet one scarcely cares to part with an heir-loom--except under very
serious pressure."

"Put it on," Ermengarde said, and Agatha clasped the necklace round
her full white throat, still kneeling and looking into the fire, the
jewels quivering with the rise and fall of her breath.

The foundation was a simple collar of lozenge-shaped sapphires, set
thick with brilliants; sapphire drops set with brilliants began at
the back below the collar and increased to a complicated interlacing
of pendants in front, the largest and deepest being star-shaped, the
sapphire centre of it unusually rich.  The plain white woollen dress
was not cut low enough to give the full effect of jewels on white and
satiny skin, except to the throat collar and smaller pendants, but
the sparkle and lustre they communicated to the finely-cut features
and deep eyes was marvellous, while the indifference with which the
necklace was worn and the far-away look often so characteristic of
her face showed the wearer too deep in thought to care for trifles.

"You are made to wear jewels," Ermengarde said.  "How lovely!  And
how costly!"

"They should be worth some thousands, I believe, and I must sell
them--just as they are.  I should like to keep part, if only one
pendant.  They are said to bring luck to our family."

"And have brought you the luck of having to sell them?"

She smiled rather sadly, spreading her hands to the glow and looking
thoughtfully into the red chasms of burning wood, the diamonds
winking and quivering in crimson and purple flashes in the light;
then she drew a deep sigh.

"Jewels change hands often here," she said presently.  "Did you
notice the Monte Carlo shops, Mrs. Allonby, blazing with diamonds and
opals in every shape?  Half the shops seem to be jewellers, the
windows massed and piled with tiaras, collars--thick dog-collars,
solid with emeralds and diamonds--necklaces, rivières, negligés, set
thick with them, and ropes and ropes of pearls.  I never saw such a
profusion of splendid and costly things.  People lose at the tables,
and sell their ornaments for half-price, and the jewellers sell them
again for about three-quarters, glad to turn their money quickly.  M.
de Querouailles was showing some things he had got for a mere song
for his daughter the other night in the salon--lovely things, for a
few hundred francs."

"A place to buy rather than to sell in, then?"

"Oh, of course!  But necessity is a hard master."

She sighed another long sigh, unclasped the necklace, held it a
moment in the best light, looked steadily, almost lovingly, at it,
laid it back in the case, and put it on a little table near the
hearth.  Ermengarde expressed some mild wonder at her hardihood in
carrying her fortune so unguardedly about, and spoke of recent
repeated jewel robberies.

"But I don't look rich," the woman of mystery assured her.  "Nobody
would suspect me of sapphires.  Besides, when I travel, I wear them."

"And now, dear Mrs. Allonby," she added after a pause, "I want to ask
you to do me a great favour.  I have sudden and urgent need for a
considerable sum of money.  It is a family matter of some delicacy,
and there are reasons why I should appear to have no hand in it.  So
I wonder--I wonder if you would be so very kind as to sell my
necklace for me at Poupart's?"

"Good gracious!  Why, I never sold anything in my life; I never even
bought anything of this kind.  I've no notion of the value of
jewellery.  The people would rook me without mercy."

"Oh, that is in the bill.  They would rook anybody.  I should say
that--this--urgent necessity is as yet not quite certain; but if it
should become certain, as I fear it will, in the course of a few
days, then, dearest Mrs. Allonby, will you--_will_ you do me this
very great kindness?"

"You have been kind--most kind to me, Miss Somers, and I should be
exceedingly glad of an opportunity to do anything for you in return.
But, indeed, I am not a good hand at this kind of thing; I should end
in giving your necklace away very likely.  I am no good, I assure
you--for this."

The woman of mystery looked disappointed--the sphinx mask failed her
for once--but she forbore to press her point.  Ermengarde's heart
misgave her; still she was firm.  She felt that she really was not
quite such a fool as she looked, and was quite capable of taking care
of herself--a somewhat unsatisfactory source of pride, after all.

Of course, she saw through the whole thing, beautifully planned and
acted, she confessed--the assumption of guileless interest and
angelic sympathy; the delicate, unobtrusive attentions; the
child-like, personal confidences; the casual, illuminating glimpses
of family history; the carefully prepared, dramatic point of the
necklace, so artlessly introduced in the firelight; and the casual
unconscious carelessness of the carefully studied pose by the hearth.
Yes, it was very well done; and a less acute observer might very well
have been taken in by these wiles.  Her old suspicion had been
correct.  Here were jewels of price, snatched probably from some
unsuspecting fellow-traveller in the _Train de Luxe_, skilfully
concealed upon the body, and covered by an innocent bearing and a
pathetic smile, artfully calculated to disarm suspicion.  And to
dispose of this plunder without danger, she, Ermengarde Allonby, was
to be used--she was to be the cat's-paw, and incur the risk of
selling stolen goods.  "A matter of delicacy," "Reasons for not
appearing to be personally concerned," etc.--excellent reasons, a
matter of the greatest delicacy, in good truth.  What an escape!
Arthur should know of this.

She had confided to Miss Somers her dark misgivings as to the
Anarchist's interest in herself, to the intense and ill-concealed
amusement of that lady, who was doubtless aware that her possessions,
and not herself, were the object of his interest in her.  Here she
was, she reflected, when the lights were out and the house wrapped in
silence, alone in a foreign country, utterly at the mercy of this
unscrupulous and dangerously attractive young woman, who had made a
dead set at her from the first, within an ace of being made her
accomplice, practically in the same room with her; for the door of
communication was unlocked, and the key had mysteriously disappeared.
The police might at any time pounce upon them.  She might be robbed
to any extent--that is, had she happened to have possessed anything
worth stealing--she might be implicated in robberies; stolen property
might be secreted among her things to throw the police off the scent;
she might be entangled in a conspiracy, mixed up with that dreadful
Anarchist--anything--a frightful situation to be in, dangerous beyond
imagination.  Yet, after all, more amusing than the conventionalities
and social amenities of Kensington, more thrilling even than that
first wild experience of real life in the Casino Gardens.

And through all she had a sneaking kindness for this woman of
mystery.  Perhaps her sins were not entirely her fault; no doubt
society had sinned against her and forced her into courses of a
regrettable nature.  Regrettable is a beautiful word.  It was of
absolutely incalculable value to us during the last Boer War, through
which, indeed, we should never have come without it.

And however regrettable were the courses to which society had
mysteriously condemned Agatha Somers, there was no doubt that she was
a most charming and sympathetic companion, and read aloud to
perfection.  A nature of finest grain, however warped by
circumstance; a kind heart beneath the sphinx mask; intelligence of
high order, however misapplied; beauty of an unusual and
distinguished kind, and a right instinct in dress--all these,
Ermengarde reflected on her passage to the land of dreams, were the
property of this fascinating but misguided young woman, whose life
appeared to be exercising such a strong and sinister influence upon
her own.




Chapter XII

M. Isidore's Heartache

It was among the many exasperating features in Arthur's character
that you could never tell if a good, honest knock hit him hard or
only just glided off him, so atrocious was the depth of his
secretiveness and undemonstrativeness.  He could have carried foxes,
wolves, hyenas, even rats, under his cloak, and let them gnaw him
till his last gasp, without giving a sign.

It was only from side-lights flashed from family and friendly letters
that his wife could have enjoyed the just satisfaction of hearing
that he was supremely uncomfortable in her absence; and even that was
denied her, by reason of his perversity in remaining on that
mysterious circular business tour, that never seemed to end, and
respecting which he gave the most meagre information.  There was no
hope of his being uncomfortable on that tour; on the contrary, he was
quite certain to enjoy it immensely.  That is one of the irritating
things in life--the supreme satisfaction with which business fills
the male mind.  Business is a large word; it embraces all the
concerns of men that exclude women, or rather wives--so Mrs. Allonby
sometimes explained to young friends about to marry.

Still, she could not help hoping that he was desperately
uncomfortable and longing for her earlier return, though the wretch
never had the decency to hint at anything of the kind.  Well, she
would not tell him of the unlucky necessity for her early return; she
would simply appear in Kensington as if on a sudden impulse, and say
that the Riviera was too hot, too cold, too rowdy, too
respectable--either adjective fitted--but never confess to the
misfortunes of Monte Carlo.

But the incident of the necklace had so strengthened her worst
suspicions connecting the woman of mystery that, before she slept
that very night, the headache having vanished, she took pen and
paper, and, by the light of a moon looking steadily from a dark-blue
vault, cleared of cloud by rain, related the whole story to her
husband, not omitting the sudden irruption of improvised aunts at
Monte Carlo, or the dark intriguings with the young English prodigal
and the elderly Russian Anarchist.  "If that creature," she wrote,
with reference to the Anarchist, "dogs my footsteps and glares at me
through his detestable goggles much more, I shall have to leave the
place.  I do hope he is not smitten by me, but sometimes I fear it.
No doubt he ought to be in Siberia, where at least there would be
nothing but wolves for him to glare at and scheme against."  These
remarks occasioned her correspondent some diversion of a harmless
character.  For her other _bête noire_--namely, the woman of
mystery--she wrote, she thought it might be possible to obtain some
information concerning her.  Should she apply to the nearest British
Consul, or ask information of the French police?  It was becoming
dangerous to be mixed up with a woman who had actually gone the
length of trying to make her an accomplice in selling priceless
jewels, of which she was obviously not the rightful owner.

It was while inditing this sentence that a beautiful thought flashed
upon Ermengarde's mental vision, and, laying aside pen and paper, and
sweeping her hair back from her shoulders, she leant her chin on her
hands and looked out upon the silver-steeped olive-groves and
pine-woods and the broad, bright path of sea trembling in silvery
sparkles beneath the moon.

She would sell the chain flung to her at the Carnival.

It was certainly hers, and quite as certainly she would never wear
the thing.  She remembered the high price of that she had seen at
Spink's.  This one appeared to be quite as good, the pearls of quite
as excellent colour and lustre, the diamonds the same.  It ought to
fetch something substantial.

With this comfortable thought she folded her letter and went to bed,
and slept till morning blushed (as it did at the proper time in vivid
crimson), while the poor suspected woman in the next room tossed upon
an uneasy pillow, and racked her brains in vain, feverish efforts to
find some way of turning the sapphires into money, until youth and
nature conquered, and she too sank into blissful forgetfulness.

Ermengarde found it useless to take the thin man into her confidence
with regard to the woman of mystery; his mind on that subject seemed
to be of impenetrable brass.  Had Mr. Welbourne observed this or that
singular proceeding on the part of Miss Somers? drew from him a look
of blank stupidity, a brazen want of comprehension, or some remark to
the effect that Miss Somers was a young lady of singular charm; that
she possessed intelligence of a high order, was remarkably
well-informed, a most restful companion, with unusual conversational
powers, enhanced by the still more unusual faculty of knowing when to
be silent; that her beauty was of a very distinguished order, the
marble whiteness of her complexion having the quality of
_morbidezza_, and being due to an exceptionally fine and clear skin,
rather than to ill-health.

"In short, my dear creature," Ermengarde reflected, "you think her
far too good-looking to be criticized, much less suspected."

She remembered that the thin man was a bachelor, and not so very old,
probably not much more than forty, the age of most acute
susceptibility to feminine attraction.  In the sight of men of that
age, beauty can do no wrong.  Yet the thin man honestly detested poor
Miss Boundrish; he had been known to flee as if for life, and hide
behind trees, rocks, trellises, and folding screens, even on one
occasion behind an upright piano, where by mischance he was
imprisoned for two solid hours, in trying to escape the society of
that coral-lipped, dewy-eyed sylph.

But the woman of mystery had known how to tame that wild and shy
bachelor heart to her hand.  Perhaps she would make _him_ sell the
sapphires.

"Supposing," Ermengarde asked Mr. Welbourne, the day after her
refusal to oblige Agatha by that small service, conscience having
given her some uncomfortable qualms on that account--"supposing some
one were to ask you to sell extremely valuable jewels for them, on
the ground that _they_ did not wish to be seen selling diamonds,
would you do it?"

"Why not?  If it were a lady, of course I would," he said promptly,
reflecting that he was in for it, and could make better bargains than
she, and hoping that parting with her jewels would be a lesson to
Mrs. Allonby on the folly of gambling.

"But supposing you were another lady?"

"How suppose anything so utterly impossible?"  What on earth had that
to do with it, he wondered.

"Well, would one woman ask another woman to do such a thing without
very strong reason?"

The man's brain swam; certainly she was not asking him to sell jewels
for her.  What could she be driving at?

"Dear lady, I hope you will forgive my saying that the common consent
of mankind throughout the ages agrees that your sex never acts upon
reason."

"I can't forgive anything so insulting to my sex.  My impression is
that the woman stole the necklace."

"Ah, now we leave the abstract and come to the concrete--a particular
woman and a particular necklace--and forgetting logic, we go
gallantly upon feelings, intuitions.  Still, the impression that
certain costly jewels have been stolen by an individual acquaintance
is somewhat powerful, not to say aggressive.  Modern altruism, still
less old-fashioned Christian charity, would scarcely cherish an
impression of that kind, would it?"  After all, he reflected, this
little woman is not as simple as she appears.

"Well, but if she wants to sell them, why can't she do it herself?"

"People exist who never, as a matter of principle, do anything they
can get anybody else to do for them.  I can't defend the principle,
though I often act upon it; indeed, it appears to have its roots very
deep in human nature, like the propensity to bottle up trumps at
bridge."

"One dislikes to be disobliging; it seems unkind."

"If," replied the thin man, a light suddenly breaking upon his
bewildered brain, "the lady in question should happen to be our dear
young friend of the too frequent laugh, Mrs. Allonby, don't be
afraid.  She has neither the wit nor the self-command to make a big
haul like that.  But she is quite silly enough to get into
difficulties over play or dress"--here Ermengarde's cheeks vied with
the scarlet salvias blooming hard by--"and to sell jewels on the sly,
and it would be the worst service you could do a child like that to
help her."

"Sweet girl!  I quite agree with you.  She's much too small for large
sins.  And I've never seen her with valuable jewels.  Dear Mr.
Welbourne, your advice is as always so excellent.  Ever since we met
here you have been a second father to me."

The thin man sighed.  It is a sweet and seemly thing to be the father
of a charming and lovely young woman, but only when one is too old
for other relationships.  It occurred to him that it might be wise to
shave; a beard sometimes gives a false appearance of age.  The
patriarchs wore beards, while Greek gods, with the exception of Zeus,
are mostly represented as beardless.  No one ever heard of a bearded
angel.  Only yesterday Miss Boundrish had wondered publicly and at
the top of her voice why Mr. Welbourne "had never married," and he
had replied very meekly that it was not his custom to do anything in
a hurry; upon which Miss Boundrish's mother had encouragingly cited
the case of a cousin's uncle on the other side, who had married at
eighty-five.

It was while Mr. Welbourne was sighing and meditating on his own
beard and the probable extent of her pecuniary difficulties that
Ermengarde, who, with his helping hand had just climbed up among the
twisted roots of some pines to the height on which the monastery was
built, caught sight of the figure of a stranger.  He was pacing the
broad and level walk beneath the cypresses, outside the building,
where the ridge was highest, and whence the outlook over mountain
gorges on one hand and capes and headlands running out to sea on the
other was widest and of most varied beauty.  It was a tall, thin,
black figure in a hooded cloak, with a clean-shaven, ascetic face
bent over the book he carried and was perusing with devout interest.

"Surely," she said, stopping to rest on the low, crumbling wall by
the steps leading on to this plateau--"surely that must be one of the
expelled monks, or his ghost, come back to the old home.  Reading his
breviary."

Mr. Welbourne found a seat on the wall beside her, carefully avoiding
a geranium-bush, that had grown up to the top among the broken
stones, and gave out a delicate scent where Ermengarde's skirt swept
it.

"No," he said, looking at the studious figure, "it is not a monk.  I
doubt if the book he is studying with such devout interest is a book
of hours--or a psalter."

"An interesting type--pale, worn, emaciated, deep-set eyes, a keen,
subtle face--the true ascetic type.  What stories that face could
tell," she mused aloud--"that is, the mouth."

"Well, yes; it has told a few thumpers to my certain knowledge.  No,
it is not a monk, Mrs. Allonby.  It is only Mr. Mosson."

"You know him?  How interesting!"

"Oh, everybody knows Mr. Mosson--everybody who has come to grief,
that is."

"A philanthropist?  The modern form of religious enthusiasm--deeds,
not words; feeding the hungry instead of saying prayers.  A holy
materialism."

How soon, Mr. Welbourne reflected, misfortune breeds cynicism.  It
was hardly forty-eight hours since calamity at the tables had
befallen this young woman, and she could talk like this.  "Should you
be in want of money," he continued, "you have merely to name the sum
to our ascetic friend, and it is forthcoming.  People often want
money in these regions, because everybody here is rich.  It is only
the rich who want money."

"Really?  Then what on earth do the poor want?"

"Oh, lots of things--food, fire, friends, advice, sympathy, clothes,
work, but money never."

"Really?  Then how very, very rich I must be."

"Undoubtedly you are.  But here comes our friend."

They had to stand in the narrow path to let the reverend man pass on
his pious way, and, the _déjeuner_ bell having just left off
sounding, followed him into the house very shortly after, but at too
small a distance to permit further discussion of his virtues--a point
much on Mr. Welbourne's conscience at the time, but unfortunately
soon driven from his memory by after-events.

The benefactor of his species in the meantime, unconscious of the
veneration he inspired, took his place at a small solitary table in
the background, silent and, after the first few moments of curiosity
his presence excited, unnoticed, and presumably absorbed in schemes
for the amelioration of mankind.  With the _déjeuner_ he vanished,
but was again discovered at his secluded table at dinner, just as if
he had never moved, and so for several days.

Rumour spoke of a motor-car waiting daily at the foot of the ridge,
and bearing him away in a cloud of dust and unpleasant smell.  M.
Bontemps hinted that he came up to Les Oliviers for a few days' rest,
much to Mrs. Allonby's surprise.  She had had no idea that the
practice of beneficence was so fatiguing.

People often came up to the little house on the ridge for rest and
quiet, out of the closer air of the town, out of the racket and
turmoil of the huge and hideous barrack hotels, that desolated the
face of the country for many a mile round, even drawing great
splotches of aggressive ugliness across the lovely wooded slopes of
the mountains, so that no eye could possibly escape the sight of
them.  And after a brief sojourn, refreshed and soothed to the point
of boredom, they returned with renewed zest to the horrors of
civilization and excessive wealth in the barracks.

Les Oliviers itself was certainly not beautiful, and it was visible
from far, but its humble position behind and beneath the monastery,
its moderate size and similarity to the little green-shuttered houses
dotted among vineyards and olive-gardens, with its absence of all
pretence and meretricious ornament, redeemed it from vulgarity, and
put its want of comeliness out of mind.  So at least Mrs. Allonby
told M. Isidore, who acknowledged the compliment with a bow, and
observed with a sigh of deepest melancholy that it was the home of
his heart's desire.

A cloud had for some days past hung over the habitual gaiety of the
cheery little man, a cloud neither black with thunder nor leaden with
low-hanging rain, but rather one of those pearly transparencies that
flutter about sunset skies, catching and transmuting every glorious
glow of crimson and gold and purple.  He was obliging, courteous,
full of wit and gaiety, as ever; but interspersed his sallies with
deep-drawn sighs, emotional exclamations, and those little,
half-humorous groans, that are the peculiar characteristic of the
lively Gaul.

He had even discussed--with Mrs. Allonby--the frequency and
inevitableness of self-destruction as a result of feminine scorn and
variableness, and of blighted hopes, together with the best way of
effecting it.  For this, he had been gently, very gently, rebuked,
and wisely and kindly counselled, and recommended to give back scorn
for scorn.

"What care I how fair she be?" etc.

In rejoinder he had referred to the tragic circumstance that he
possessed a heart, placing his hand over the region where hearts are
supposed to be, with a gesture expressive of severe internal pain.

In short, there was no manner of doubt that M. Isidore was the victim
of unrequited passion of the most powerful description, or that the
sympathy implied or expressed by Mrs. Allonby's reception of his
hinted confidences was balm to his wounded breast.

She told him quite plainly that he was a fool--a fact that he
admitted with gusto--that he was young, and would soon get over it,
which he denied with fury.  Some such confidences had been imparted
during chance meetings and aimless rovings along paths through
pine-woods aromatic with undergrowth of myrtle and juniper; through
solemn olive-groves, hushed and dim, their drooping foliage tangled
with azure lights; between vineyards; by lonely cottages,
pergola-shaded; through shadowy dells and along sunny ridge-tops.  In
the bee-haunted silence of these secluded ways suddenly, round a
corner, up a ravine, down a steep, emerging from an aisle of
pine-trunks, anything or anybody might appear as if by magic.
Sometimes a mule, pattering softly and steadily under panniers of
household goods and garden stuff, and followed by a peasant with
ready smile and chat in broken French; now an old woman leading a
goat; sometimes men or women laden with faggots and grass more
heavily than their own patient, soft-eyed beasts; sometimes a
gaily-caparisoned donkey bearing a tourist, sometimes a whole noisy
troop of them; now a solitary pedestrian, now a numerous party,
breaking the charmed quiet by confused babble of nasal American,
guttural German, slurred English, or burred French; sometimes the
sudden, abhorred gurgle of Miss Boundrish.

The suddenness and unexpectedness of these apparitions, the feeling
that anything--a wood-nymph, a fairy, a mountain gnome, a Greek faun,
the face of an old friend, or the bearer of some new fresh
happiness--might appear was a great charm.  One afternoon Ermengarde
had been sitting under a pine-tree on a sandy bank by the path,
looking across the ravine at the great sweep of crag-peaked mountains
running down to a broad blue space of sea, when the figure of M.
Isidore issued from hidden depths, and was suddenly outlined on the
sky in front of her.

Quite naturally, and without hesitation, he let himself down on the
myrtle-covered bank near the lady, but a little lower down, so that
in speaking he had to look up.  The easy, friendly ways of this
attendant Ariel sometimes aroused a momentary wonder, soon stilled by
the reflection that it was "only M. Isidore," a convenient and
agreeable foreigner, outside conventions, socially non-existent, like
the peasants who chatted and smiled so pleasantly in passing.

Though the daily unacknowledged offering of flowers continued, none
had been worn since the episode of the Malmaisons.  Not that any
importance was to be attributed either to the French youth's graceful
courtesy in giving flowers, or to the woman of mystery's unwarranted
hints of gossip about it.  Mrs. Allonby seldom wore flowers at table
now, unless they were obviously wild; that was all.

Nor had the Italian lessons M. Isidore had been giving her
stopped--he gave conversational lessons in that language to Miss
Boundrish, to Mr. Welbourne, and other male visitors as well.  There
was nothing tedious or fatiguing in the Italian lessons given to Mrs.
Allonby.  They always began with _Ollendorffian_ questions and
answers in slow and indifferent Italian, as thus: "Do you like
cheese?  I do not like cheese, but the sister-in-law of the Italian
organ-grinder likes cheese," and ended in light and gay discussions
in quick, fluent French upon subjects of various interest, art,
literature, the only drastic and effectual remedy for blighted hopes,
the best place to pop and redeem jewels in, the last big haul at
Monte Carlo, and the eminent personalities to be seen playing
there--topics upon which this light-hearted youth was very well
informed.

"Ah, Madame!" he sighed on this sunny afternoon, his beautiful dark
eyes uplifted to her sympathetic face, and his hand fervidly pressing
the upper part of his waistcoat; "if I might but reveal to you the
anguish that is consuming me!"

Bees were drowsily humming in masses of grey-blue rosemary bloom, so
drowsily that they accentuated the deep mountain silence, upon which
the minor tones of the lovelorn youth's voice fell plaintive and
clear.  Ermengarde, regarding him with the unconsciously sweet
expression that had won her many a heart, was replying, "Well, why
not?  Perhaps the trouble is not so great as it seems," when she
became sympathetically aware, without looking up, through a sudden
nervous tremor in her young friend's frame, of another presence on
the path, and turned simultaneously with him to see the statuesque
figure and cold, rigid face of Mlle. Bontemps.

She had apparently sprung up unobserved from the depths of the earth,
as everybody did on that ridge, and stood waiting, her massively
coiled hair shining uncovered in the fading sun, for an opportunity
to speak.

The luckless Isidore was on his feet with a bound, while Ermengarde
started with a smothered exclamation, and recovered with a little
embarrassed laugh.

"How you startled me, Mademoiselle!" she said.  "One hears nothing on
this soft sand."

Mademoiselle seemed neither to see nor to hear Mrs. Allonby.  Looking
coldly at the embarrassed and apologetic Isidore, she said with a
kind of weary calm, "Maman is still waiting," turned and walked away
with her usual haughty bearing, and sank out of sight down the steep
path, pursued, after a moment of despairing gesture, in which his
hair suffered, and a wild exclamation of, "Mon Dieu! je l'avais
oubliée, cette vieille!" by M. Isidore, to the mingled amusement and
regret of Ermengarde, who justly divined that the charm of her
society had beguiled the unfortunate youth into forgetfulness of the
hour of some domestic duty, and that his reception at the hotel might
be stormy.

"He really is a very dear boy," she reflected, leaning back against
the gnarled pine-trunk, and watching the shadows fill hollow and
ravine with vague blueness and the upward slanting sunlight steep the
mountain peaks in crimson and rose, while the hushed sea grew bluer
than its own incredible blue, and the clear, deep sky took a violet
tinge.  "How on earth did this boy come to be born in this small
hotel-keeper class?  He has the bearing of a prince, the instincts of
a knight of romance, and the charm of a gallant child.  And then to
be sulked at and called over the coals by a girl like Geneviève, and
at the beck and call of a woman like this Madame Bontemps!"

The situation was odious, impossible.  She wished the poor boy were
her son.  When youngish women--women under thirty--find themselves
wishing to be the mothers of full-grown and fascinating youths, they
should at once begin to think as hard as possible of something else.
Instead of this, Mrs. Allonby went on thinking how this young Isidore
might be her son.  He could not be more than twenty-one, certainly;
it was hardly possible to be a mother at seven--but at seventeen?
Had she been born just ten years earlier, the thing would have been
not only possible, but probable.  She might have been forcibly
married to some unpleasant elderly person at sixteen--some foreign
vicomte, who, after a few years, would have conveniently and politely
died, leaving her in the bloom of youth, free and rich, as they do in
French novels.

Then she might have met Arthur and married him, at eight or nine and
twenty--a much more appropriate age for Arthur's wife--that is, in
the event of Arthur having had the sense to be born on the date of
his actual birth, though, of course, a man so exasperating was
capable of anything.  It would have been so interesting to marry a
French noble and have those few years' glimpse of foreign life.  And,
in that case, the poor dear boy would certainly not have found
himself in this sordid hotel-keeping element; he might have been in
the diplomatic service; he was made for it.  Why had her life not
been arranged on these lines?  An elder brother would have been so
good for Charlie; she would have been less tempted to spoil the
child; and being nearer his age, and having already trained one
husband, she would have been more capable of understanding Arthur's
freaks and fancies; and some recent regrettable incidents might never
have occurred.  But it is a crooked world.

Turning with a sigh, she found herself face to face with a figure
that had come down unseen in the shadows, and proved to be that of a
fellow-visitor.  "Where is M. Isidore?" this lady asked abruptly in
the German manner.

Hardly had Ermengarde expressed polite ignorance on the subject, when
her musings were again interrupted by the appearance of Miss
Boundrish's parents, on their evening stroll, with the same query,
followed by expressions of disappointment at her inability to satisfy
their curiosity.

"But where can he be?" exclaimed Mrs. Boundrish with irritation, upon
which she was tartly advised to go back to the hotel and telephone
for the required information.

"But you must know which way he went?" Mrs. Boundrish persisted
obstinately.

"Indeed, I am neither as observant nor as curious as you suppose,"
she replied sweetly, vexed at having shown temper to a casual
travelling acquaintance--a mere "passing ship"--whereupon Mr. and
Mrs. Boundrish exchanged glances; while Ermengarde, incidentally
remarking upon the well-known chill of the sunset hour, rose and
walked in the opposite direction to her
inquisitors--homewards--remembering as she went that it was not the
first time that questions concerning the youth who might have been
her son, if she had been ten years older, had annoyed her.  The
pettiness and impertinence of these underbred _tourists_--tourists
are never of the first person; people have owned to criminality, but
not to being tourists--the worst of these small hotels--people are so
mixed up and thrown together.

"Well, and if the poor boy is hard hit," she meditated, "a grand
passion is a necessary phase in a young man's development, and the
more hopeless the better.  But the _bourgeois_ mind cannot grasp the
beauty of an ideal devotion, of the unselfish homage a gallant youth
gladly pays to one in every way hopelessly above him.  A Boundrish
can vulgarize even that poetic passion.  How very lucky that the
object of the poor lad's devotion happens to be a staid and sensible
matron old enough to give motherly advice and young enough to be
sympathetic," she reflected complacently, while she went slowly back
to the house and dressed for _table d'hôte_.

She was still pursuing this current of reflection while she went
downstairs in her simple semi-toilet, adorned no longer by tributary
flowers, and sank upon the least hard-hearted of the drawing-room
easy-chairs.

"Oh, I say, Mrs. Allonby!" cried Miss Boundrish, bursting into the
half-lighted, empty room with her usual grace and charm, and
punctuating her remarks with gurgles, "I'm jolly glad you're safe, so
far.  That Bontemps girl is going for you the minute she sees you.
There has been the most awful row downstairs about you.  Best
double-lock your door to-night, and be careful to eat nothing that
has not been tasted by somebody else."

"My _dear_ Miss Boundrish," she replied gently, observing that no one
else was in the room; "you are young, and your imagination is vivid;
_do_ you think it quite wise to mix yourself up with the people of
the house?"

But Dorris was not to be crushed; she only gurgled scornfully, and
would have made some pert retort, had not the thin man, who, after
all, had been lounging unseen in a shadowed corner, suddenly glided
to the piano, struck some full bass chords and begun to improvise in
a pleasant fashion he had at times: when the room was empty and he
felt moved to confide his thoughts and dreams to the spirit in the
instrument.

Then Ermengarde, ruffled and inwardly raging, but grateful for Mr.
Welbourne's paternal care, took a seat touching the piano, and was
silent; the man with the ascetic face came in and stood like a statue
behind the player; the room slowly filled; but Mr. Welbourne,
contrary to custom, played on, as if something within him must find
expression in music, even when a buzz of talk hummed through the room
and lights were turned up, until dinner.




Chapter XIII

The Publisher's Parcel

Though conjectures as to the manner in which poor Agatha Somers had
become possessed of the necklace disturbed Ermengarde's sleep, and
the glow of the sapphires coloured all her thoughts of her, she was
obliged to take the creature to her heart; there was in her something
so lovable and so pathetic, especially that appeal in her eyes--so
she confided to Mr. Welbourne, who smiled and seemed gratified by
this view of their mutual friend, though he said little.

She seems fond of me, Ermengarde reflected; I wonder why?  How great,
she mused, is the attraction that virtue has for the depraved and
rectitude for the outcast!  Who could tell what redeeming influence a
good woman's kindness might exercise upon this erring young soul?
She would certainly befriend the wanderer in every possible way,
except that of helping her to dispose of ill-gotten jewellery.
Perhaps there might be some grain of truth, some small foundation in
fact, for the circumstantial family history this ingenious young
person had related to her by the wood fire that evening.  She was
undoubtedly well-bred, possibly well-born; it was highly probable
that she had been nurtured in comfort, if not luxury--still, how did
she come by that necklace?  It was a small fortune in itself.  Nobody
reduced to bread-labour would keep so much money locked up.  Again,
what possible work of a secretarial character could she be doing in
this land of lotus-eating?  Or how could a penniless young woman
afford such an expensive holiday as this?  Was she, could she be, a
female detective?

In that case, who could she be shadowing, up here in the mountains,
among this little company of highly respectable, not to say frumpish,
folk?  Surely not the thin man--yet human character abounds in the
unexpected and even the incredible--had Mr. Welbourne, after all, a
wife desirous of shunting him?  Was he a wolf in sheep's clothing, a
hypocrite steeped in iniquity?  Lame and deformed people often have a
twist in their character--not that poor Mr. Welbourne was
deformed--indeed, had his fleshly covering been a little more
abundant, he would have been rather good-looking, his features
well-cut, his eyes bright and animated.  There was nobody else to
shadow at Les Oliviers--no English body else, that is--the visitors
mostly consisted of family parties.

No; she must be some kind of spy or conspirator, in league as she was
with the Anarchist.  Yet Ivor Paul was hardly a spy or a conspirator;
both the thin man and the fair Dorris agreed in placing him as the
scion of a family of rank; they knew that he was only five lives off
a peerage, but those lives were young and vigorous.  Lady Seaton, who
knew the ins and outs and most intricate ramifications of every
family of consequence, and never forgot who married who, and how they
were connected with everybody else, a widow old enough to mention her
age without prevarication, and herself allied in some distant and
complicated manner to every coronet-bearing English name, had known
his father in his youth; she remembered that his mother had married a
second time; she had forgotten the man's name; it would come back to
her presently.  Sir George, her late husband, had been in public
life; the present baronet represented a North-country constituency,
and had been a Minister.  So far, the truth of Agatha's story was
confirmed; though what the woman of mystery's relations with this
young man might be, it was wiser not to dwell upon.  And if she
improvised ailing aunts at need, so did Miss Boundrish, about whom,
with all her delightful deviations from the normal English girl,
there was no manner of mystery, her father giving himself out for
what he undoubtedly was--a plain, substantial British merchant.

"Our young friend," Mr. Welbourne observed one day after some act of
kindness on the part of Agatha to Ermengarde, whose weakness had not
yet entirely left her, "appears to be much attached to you, Mrs.
Allonby."

"But I can't think why," she replied; "though I can't help liking the
girl myself."

"Why should you help it?  A kindly nature," he added, with a sigh so
deep and so despairing that she was sorry for him.  Had the thin man
met with so few kindly natures on his earthly pilgrimage; or was it,
could it, at his age be, hopeless passion?

Lady Seaton had but recently come up to the peace of the house on the
ridge from one of the great hotels below, where there was too much
crowding and racket for her.  She was fairly well read and interested
in many things, and had shown much friendliness, mixed with something
that was almost deference, to Ermengarde.  In the course of half an
hour's desultory chat in the garden she had become acquainted with
all the leading facts in Mrs. Allonby's life; Charlie's name, age,
school, disposition, and beauty; the busy journalist husband; the
attack of influenza; the subsequent depression, and present holiday
trip; while Ermengarde had had a vague notion that they had been
discussing the climate and topography of the Riviera, and Lady
Seaton's own health, all the time.

"You must be very proud of your husband, Mrs. Allonby," she said,
when they were parting on that occasion, and Ermengarde made some
vague and wondering assent to the assumption.

A husband is a not unusual piece of personal property; why on earth
be proud of it?  Still, she was not going to let people think she was
ashamed of poor old Arthur, who, with all his faults, was probably no
worse than other men--besides, even if he were ever so bad, he was
_her_ man, and she must stand up for him.  "A poor thing, sirs, but
mine own."

Since Lady Seaton's arrival Ermengarde had been dimly conscious of a
difference in people's manner to her, as if that of the kind-hearted
old lady had been infectious, or her avowed interest had conferred
some distinction upon her.

Once, when she had tucked herself up cosily in a nook behind a
rose-trellis and fallen asleep in the sunshine, she had been waked by
a murmur of voices from people on the other side of her trellis, and
heard in the adored treble shout of the Boundrish, "Well!  I simply
call it scandalous.  I wonder the Bontemps put up with it.  Such
goings on are a reflection upon us all."

"You need have no fear, Miss Boundrish," replied Lady Seaton's low,
distinct voice, in which Ermengarde detected a subtle hint of
sarcasm, "you are quite beyond any such reflection."

"Well, I don't know about that," she replied with complacent gurgles.
"One doesn't care to associate with people who get themselves talked
about.  An inherited instinct, I suppose," with more gurgles.
"Besides, how do you know who she is, or whether she has a husband at
all?  Grass-widows who run about the Continent alone, and play at
Monty to that extent that they have to pop their jewels----"

Ermengarde smiled at this.  "After all, I'm not the only one who pops
jewels here," she thought; "but who on earth can the Boundrish be
going for now?"

"--Why, I saw her go in myself, and she thought I didn't know her
under her black gossamer, and I saw the things in the window
afterwards----"

"You were there, too?" the thin man interjected, with a greenish
glitter in his eye.

"Oh yes; nothing escapes _me_----"

"So it appears, and nobody," he murmured to himself.

"--A grass-widow who does that kind of thing needn't go about with
her nose in the air, snubbing people she couldn't possibly get in
with at home, not to speak of the disgraceful way in which she
persecutes that poor silly young Isidore, who will probably get the
sack owing to her, besides losing his fiancée----"

Ermengarde smiled to herself.  Was the poor boy engaged, then? and
how could his engagement affect the only grass-widow besides herself
in the house?  It certainly was well known that the latter gave the
young man a good deal of unnecessary trouble, but what had that to do
with this supposed engagement of his?

"Though it's true," the artless girl continued, "that she has given
up wearing his flowers at dinner, just to put people off the scent,
and persuades herself that nobody notices all the little walks and
talks on the quiet--

Ermengarde, who had listened guilelessly, supposing these remarks to
be addressed to the general public, suddenly changed colour, while
another voice, that of Agatha, as suddenly struck in, "Miss
Boundrish, you are positively slanderous.  Such things ought not to
be said, even if true, which they are not."

"Say, Miss Somers, don't you get mad," the American lady began.  "I
judge this young Isidore can look after himself some, whoever makes
eyes at him, Miss Boundrish.  There are folks must flirt, if it's
only with a broomstick; they just can't help making eyes when there's
any men around.  I guess they don't know they're doing it all the
time."

"When people are attractive," came in Lady Seaton's exact intonation,
"they are often accused of trying to attract."

"Oh, attract," gurgled Miss Boundrish.  "How anyone can be attracted
by a nose like that--why, you might hang your hat upon it.  And as
for her waist----"

"Want of style," her mother suggested, "while her dress----"

"Oh, she don't calculate to dress any.  She just slumps along anyhow
up in these mountains, I judge.  I never was much on the
apple-cheeked, yalla-haired sort--British gells are too beefy for my
taste--else she's pretty enough, and, my! don't her eyes snap;
nights, when she kind of fancies herself!"

"And thinks she can play bridge, and tries to strum on the piano,"
added Dorris viciously.

"Were our fair friend the subject of masculine comment," observed Mr.
Welbourne impressively, "the verdict would, I venture to predict, be
one of whole-hearted admiration on every count."

"Thank you," sighed Ermengarde in her corner, whence she dared not
try to escape.

"Oh, a man's woman is pretty much the same as a lady's man," Dorris
gurgled, "so they say."

"You may stake your pile on that, Miss Boundrish," the American
corroborated.

"And you don't suppose that hair of hers is all grown on the
premises," continued Dorris acidly.

"Whatever you suppose, I've seen it brushed out," Agatha
retorted--"lovely hair, like floss-silk."

"At any rate, no hair could be that colour naturally, and it gets
brighter every day--thanks to the climate, I suppose.  The Monte
Carlo yellows are famous, you know----"

"Cat!" murmured Ermengarde.  "How I should enjoy the twisting of
yours!"

"But what I simply can't _stand_," pursued the injured maiden
plaintively, "is her making herself out to be somebody--pretending to
be that man's wife----"

"Ah, well! this can't be me.  _I_ don't pretend to be anybody's
wife," thought Ermengarde.

"She _is_ his wife," Agatha said.

"Or one of his wives.  He may have dozens for all we know----"

"Dorris, my _dear_," faltered her poor mother, blushing wildly.

"Well, mater, so he may; that kind of man often does.  And, as I said
before, nobody knows anything about her, or whether she has any
husband at all--she may have five--or six----"

"Seven is considered a round, complete, and therefore sacred, number,
though the wife of Bath only had five," observed Mr. Welbourne
thoughtfully.

"Bath!  What Bath?  D'you mean Lord Bath's wife?" Dorris asked.  "And
did he get her divorced?"

"For the Land's sake, Miss Boundrish," shouted Mrs. Dinwiddie, the
American lady, "if you don't just tickle me to death!  Lord Bath----"
while the thin man chuckled grimly to himself.

"I never _can_ remember about titled people," Dorris complained
bitterly, as if this defect of memory was owing to the malice of
present company.  "And I should have thought that Americans never
knew anything to forget," she added vindictively.

"That is so--'cept when we marry dukes.  But don't you fret, Miss
Boundrish, there's a sight of things better worth knowing than that,
you put your bottom dollar on it."

Agatha and Lady Seaton had in the meantime drawn Mrs. Boundrish into
other talk, and the thin man had reminded them of an early promise to
come to a private view of his sketches, in which project Miss
Boundrish, who was within earshot, promptly included herself.

The American went off in another direction, and Ermengarde, unable to
stir an inch without attracting attention, kept her eyes fiercely
shut, so as to look asleep, till the footsteps died away.  Then she
rose and went round to the front of the terrace, where Agatha still
sat among the flowers, with a fountain pen and a paper partially
covered with cipher in her hand, but looking over the sunny amplitude
of space to the sea.

She started at seeing Ermengarde, and seemed relieved when the latter
told her she had been dozing behind the trellis, and had waked to
hear the conversation.  "For your part of which, thank you," she
said, smiling.  "No doubt I ought to have got away, but I hadn't wit
or pluck enough," she added, sitting by Agatha, and laying her hand
caressingly on her arm.  "What that horrid cat said about popping
jewellery was partly true.  I sold the chain I got at the Carnival,
and--a ring--and--h'm--I redeemed the ring only yesterday--there it
is--and I hope nobody else will ever know what a fool I've been.  The
solid truth is, I should have had to go home to England at once if I
hadn't got back those few louis I lost that afternoon--and I badly
wanted to stay on."

"Did Mr. Mosson give you a wrinkle, or was it pure luck?" Agatha
asked, warmed to the heart by this unwonted cordiality.

"Oh, pure luck."

"It's so beguiling--that first luck," Agatha sighed.  "And then, when
the luck goes, there's the necessity and hope of getting the losses
back.  The demon of chance sits there, I suppose, like a great
spider, weaving, weaving his poison-webs, till the poor fly, caught
and tangled hopelessly all round, can struggle no more.  And people
live on this--on these blighted lives, broken homes, shattered
hearts, and widespread misery and despair!  Have you seen the
cathedral, Mrs. Allonby--that snow-white, brand-new, dazzling
immensity of marble at Monaco, flaunting among the palms and pines
and flowers, all built out of these cruel gains, these despairs and
miseries and degradations?  And that palace?  Nearly all the palace
is new, built out of Casino winnings, as you remember."

"Perhaps that's why it's so vulgar.  You want to wipe it out of the
picture--cathedral and palace, too, built of money."

"Not of money," she said, her eyes shining with a hard brilliance.
"No, built of broken hearts--women's hearts, mothers' hearts, wives'
hearts.  Oh, to see the whole accursed monstrosity levelled to the
ground!  I cannot speak of it."

What did this sudden passion mean, Ermengarde wondered; then she
remembered the "connexion by marriage," and was sorry for her.

"According to Mr. Welbourne, it is not the gamblers who make the
income," she said.  "It is the people who stop a few days at Monte
Carlo, and throw away a couple of louis at the tables to pass the
time.  After all, most amusements have to be paid for, and what
enjoyment is not liable to abuse?"

"Enjoyment," cried Agatha, "enjoyment!"

"The gambling instinct, the delight in the excitement of chance,
seems pretty deeply rooted in human nature."

"What vile passion is not deeply rooted in human nature?  Mrs.
Allonby, I could tell you tragedies.  But no----"

Could anything be more moral, correct, and praise-worthy than this
impetuous outburst?

And yet, on the very next day, who should Ermengarde meet in the
Casino, coming out of the _Salle de Jeu_, but the woman of mystery
herself?  Not alone, certainly, but in earnest conversation with the
ubiquitous and elusive Anarchist, whom she began to suspect of being
no creature of flesh and blood, but some sinister spirit haunting her
path with evil intent.  So absorbed in their talk were those two that
they passed her without recognition, as she turned aside to go into
the concert-hall with the American lady and the thin man, who chanced
to be with her that day.

A Thursday Classic Concert was being given by the world-famous
orchestra; the hall was crowded.  Ermengarde thought she recognized
everybody she knew on the Riviera in different parts of the house.
An aunt, a genuine relative of her own, from Cap Martin, nodded
across the fauteuils to her, and missed her in coming out, not wholly
to Mrs. Allonby's regret.  Elderly relatives are for the fireside,
with purring cats, singing tea-kettles and buttered muffins, but they
scarcely seem in keeping with places of public amusement.  Family
matters should never be discussed at full-dress functions.

It was very pleasant outside in the sunlit Gardens by the café, where
chairs in a commanding position had been easily found.  Fine
orchestral music agreeably excites the imagination while it soothes
the nerves.  Never had the Pathetic Symphony of Tchaikowsky been more
beautifully played; it lingered and echoed with harmonious
heart-break in the imagination, heightening the beauty of the
scenery, making the fresh air fresher and the tea even more enjoyable.

Lady Seaton came up, bringing a nephew, and was easily induced to
join the tea-party.  The nephew turned out well.  Ermengarde observed
that his nose was in the Greek style, and his eyes twinkled like the
little star of infantile verse.  She was in the happy and peaceful
mood induced by the subconsciousness of absolutely becoming and
perfectly fitting costume.  A glance snatched at a little mirror in
her bag had assured her that not a hair was out of place, and neither
flush nor pallor marred a complexion unsullied by powder or paint.
In short, they were all in a mood of great content and enjoyment,
when a sudden, a too familiar, sound struck upon Ermengarde's ear,
and drew cold chills down her back.  It was the voice of Miss
Boundrish.

Vainly did the whole party, struck with sudden silence, try to look
the other way, and avoid meeting the fair girl's speedwell blue eye,
which beamed with friendly recognition and good fellowship.  Making
her way steadily through the crowd, with the captive Teuton in her
wake, she bore resolutely down upon them, her coral lips wreathed in
smiles, and graciously announced her intention to join their party.

The captive, innocent of offence, obediently placed chairs in their
circle, and gloomily discoursed upon the performance of the orchestra
and the shots at the _Tir aux Pigeons_ in correct English and an
accent of resigned despair, Dorris, whenever the conversation
threatened to become at all interesting, breaking in upon it with
some trivial personality.

Mrs. Dinwiddie, fortified by three cups of scented China tea, and
refreshed by several deep plunges into a box of superfine bonbons
handed her by the thin man, had been drawn from raptures over the
kettle-drums into some enlightening hints at the mysteries of
American political machinery in different States, of which she had
experimental knowledge.

Everybody, especially the Prussian officer, was listening with
interest; no one spoke, except to draw out further information; even
Ermengarde's familiar demon, the Anarchist, who, to her disgust, was
sitting at a table near, drinking something through a long straw, was
hanging upon Mrs. Dinwiddie's words, when Dorris, after several
baffled attempts by various irrelevant remarks and inept questions,
promptly snubbed by the genial Yankee, to plunge headlong into the
talk, suddenly shouted, "Mrs. Allonby, I do want to know something
very badly," with such energy and emphasis that it was impossible not
to give some faint response.

"Yes?" said Ermengarde, politely patient, though she had not
forgotten the fair girl's depreciation of her nose, which certainly
had a tiny tilt at the tip.

"I want badly to know," Dorris called across Mrs. Dinwiddie, "whether
you really are the wife of _the_ Allonby?"

"That is so," echoed the American, her interest suddenly diverted.
"Do tell, Mrs. Allonby, are you?"

"How can I tell?" she objected.  "I know very well which is my
Allonby, but how do I know which is yours?"

"Land's sake!" cried Mrs. Dinwiddie, "Why, the famous Allonby, to be
sure--the author of 'Storm and Stress.'  Are you a relative of that
prominent writer?"

What was the woman driving at?  'Storm and Stress'?  Was it--could it
be the title of Arthur's latest effusion?

"Well," she replied slowly and thoughtfully, "I never like to be too
certain about anything--it is not good manners, so I was brought up
to think--but I--ah--I think--yes, I rather fancy that I
am--connected with him--the writing-man you are speaking of.  As far
as I _know_, he is some sort of a connexion of mine--by
marriage--only a connexion by marriage."

A curious snorting sound drew momentary and disgusted attention to
the Anarchist, who appeared to be choking badly through the long
straws--foreigners are so hopelessly ignorant of the niceties of
table manners.  Mrs. Dinwiddie looked disappointed, even defrauded,
until she caught Ermengarde's eye, when her high-featured visage
expanded into a genial smile.  But Dorris was all gurgles,
triumphant, exasperating.  "I knew it all the time," she exclaimed
scornfully.  "I was sure you were not his wife, but Lady Seaton and
Mr. Welbourne would have it you were."

"Mr. Allonby's is a very remarkable work," Lady Seaton said.  "I
don't know when I have been so thoroughly roused and invigorated by
any book.  All thinking people must be grateful to the author of
'Storm and Stress.'"

"All thinking people are," the nephew added; with firm conviction.

"Very kind of you to say so," Ermengarde faintly murmured.

"They're just mad about it on our side," Mrs. Dinwiddie told her.
"We judge that Arthur Allonby has arrived with 'Storm and Stress' on
our side."

"A not unusual way of crossing the Atlantic," Ermengarde hazarded, at
her wits' end, and imagining some wild mistake or confusion of names,
though not without some vague memory of the title mentioned, in
connexion with a postal packet from Arthur's publishers, the contents
of which she was always going, from a sense of duty, to investigate,
and always from innumerable causes omitting to.  It would not run
away; it could be opened and read at any time, which is no time.

"Well, I reckon it didn't make him sick anyhow," Mrs. Dinwiddie
replied, with a grim smile, and Dorris stridently supposed that
successful writers usually went to America to read their works in
public, and always found that American cookery upset their internal
economy more seriously than crossing the Atlantic, an observation
that appeared to afford joy to everybody but the captive, whom it
plunged into reverie of a melancholy nature.

_The_ Allonby!  Not her own native charm, then, but the prestige of
that tiresome old Arthur's name was the cause of this new deference
that had come to Ermengarde of late.  And he had never told her--a
lump rose in her throat--had left her to hear his good fortune
casually from strangers.  To be sure, he could hardly have been
expected to write to her: "I have just become a celebrity," "My new
novel is a marvel of genius," "I am one of the most remarkable men of
this age."  Still, she was injured.  A wife should not be the last
person to hear of a husband's promotion.

Going home in the train that afternoon, she found her neighbour
absorbed in a Tauchnitz volume, and sudden curiosity overpowering
good manners, she made out "Storm and Stress" on the top of the page.
Dining with friends in one of the big barrack hotels that evening,
she saw the book lying on little tables in the lounge, in the
drawing-room, in her host's sitting-room; and, her glance being
detected upon it, heard that it was being read all over Mentone, the
Riviera, at Rome, at Florence, in the Engadine, in Paris, wherever
wandering Britons congregated; that it was being discussed at
suburban dinners and teas, and was found in the reading-rooms of West
End clubs; that it had been consigned to the fire by Bishops, and
preached about by Archdeacons; that it was talked of by people of
culture, and had even penetrated to our most ancient Universities,
where undergraduates, face downwards on the turf of sunny college
gardens, had been known to pass shining hours in its perusal.  And he
had never said a word, and had grudged her five hats.

"How proud and happy you must be, dear Mrs. Allonby," said her
hostess.  "And how does he take it?  Is he surprised, or does he take
it all for granted?  He must at least have known that he was going to
make a hit."

"Do you know the sex of the sphinx?" she returned faintly, some hot
inexplicable tears misting her eyes.  "I have always been sure the
sphinx must have been a man.  Men are so subtle--especially mine."

"Somebody was saying that the Allonbys don't quite hit it off," her
friend told her husband afterwards.  "And it's my opinion that she
doesn't know where he is.  I wonder if _he_ knows where _she_ is?"

When the wife of _the_ Allonby reached her shelter on the ridge that
night, she avoided meeting anybody, especially Agatha, who was
equally anxious to avoid meeting her, and for the same reason--that
she had been having a good cry.  But Agatha knew perfectly well why
she had had recourse to those waters of comfort, while Ermengarde had
not the remotest idea.

Having felt the usual relief from the world-old remedy, brushed out
her hair, wrapped herself in a dressing-gown, and smelt M. Isidore's
latest floral offering, Mrs. Allonby lighted a tall candle and set to
work to master the contents of the publisher's parcel.

So that, when an orange and crimson sunrise came up gloriously out of
a peacock green sea, it showed a woman asleep in an easy-chair by a
guttering candle, her head on one arm on a table, and half-hidden in
a cloud of fair hair, with a volume labelled "Storm and Stress" on
the floor at her side.




Chapter XIV

At Turbia

  "What Roman strength Turbia showed
  In ruin by the mountain road.
  How like a gem, beneath, the city
  Of little Monaco, basking, glowed."


"Little Monaco, basking," and glowing, too, as the poet says, sits on
its rock that runs out into the sea, in a world of its own, cut off,
distinct, aloof from the every-day world, like some enchanted
princess, walled away from reality in a faery land by rose and fire.
The tiny city, that is also a principality, with a tiny harbour and
arsenal at the rock foot, and a castled palace where it joins the
mainland, is little more than a stone's throw--less than a long-range
rifle-shot--from Monte Carlo, but in atmosphere worlds away.  It has
nothing in common with it, except the deep gorge stretching behind
both and backed by the craggy bastion of the Tête du Chien and the
dark rich sea, that breaks impartially upon the rocky base of each.

You may step into a tram-car at the Casino out of a crowd of painted
women, sporting men, Jews, semi-invalids, respectable tourists, and
disreputable sharpers from every capital in Europe, and from some in
Africa and America, and in five minutes find yourself in an
impossible fairy region of tranquil beauty--a town that is partly
Italian and partly dream-magic, scantily peopled by priests, nuns,
lay-sisters in various garb and wide-winged cap, orphanage children,
Monagask soldiers, a few peasant folk leaning from roof-gardens and
loggias in narrow, silent streets, and a sprinkling of humble
bourgeois in the recesses of small dark shops, selling humble
necessaries that nobody seems to want.  Sometimes a procession of
richly vestured priests, and acolytes with candles and swinging
censers, slowly traverses the empty ways.  The silence is so deep you
can almost hear it.  Every vista is closed by pines, through the
deep-green boughs and ruddy stems of which glows that glorious
deep-blue sea under a sky of paler blue.

And what a road it is that leads to the still city, winding round and
up the steep rock, upon which she sits superb above the waters, a
rock hung with rich-hued tapestry of geranium, cactus, rose, and even
our old friend the homely blackberry, transformed by the wizardry of
the winter sun into splendour of crimson and golden arras.  Very few
steps past the dazzling new cathedral, that rises snow white above
the quiet streets, lead you by a short turn into those strange
gardens, that are really enchanted woods of olive, palm, and pine,
with glorious flowers for undergrowth, cresting the sheer,
sea-fronting steep of rock, down the face of which flowers, gorgeous
creepers and hanging plants overflow to the white-combed breakers
beneath.  Thence the Armida gardens and glaringly vulgar Monte Carlo
Casino gleam idealized in frames of olive foliage and pine-boughs,
and all the beauty of the vast sweep of coast in its amphitheatre of
circling mountains.  Nightingale song throbs quick and rich above the
deep murmur of surging wave and sighing pine-top, always providing
you go at the right time; bees hum and the ring of a sail running
down a mast with the wash of steam vessels and motors is faintly
heard through the clear and sunny air.  You may go back from this
fairy land to the racket and worldliness of Monte Carlo through the
strange vegetable diablerie and Arabian Nights' charm of the Casino
gardens and their surrounding and intermingling shops and
restaurants, and enjoy a still more striking contrast in the simple
act of taking a seat in what Germans call a go-chair--Fahr-stuhl.

This prosaic modern convenience is found in a small dark enclosure
that recalls a prison exercise yard, sunless, squalid.  Take a seat
in it, and wait patiently until it occurs to the mountain gnome or
brownie in charge to work some spell of Nature magic, when the thing
rises like the Arabian carpet, and in two minutes all the blazing
diamonds, Parisian costumes, and blatant vulgarities centred round
the glaring Casino sink and fade into a few blurred scars on the
terraced hill-face below.  Meanwhile the occupant of the cushioned
go-chair winds and soars between cultivated vine and lemon terraces,
scattered at intervals, with here and there a homestead and here and
there a pergola and flower-garden, but mainly through woods of
black-coned, light-foliaged Mediterranean pine and huge gnarled
olives, black-fruited, of inconceivable antiquity, their grey
columnar trunks writhen by secular, perhaps millennial, storms,
rising from rich red soil between pale grey boulders--soars and winds
up the vast sides of the mighty gorge, so thick and dark with olive
and pine that the sparsely scattered brightness of vine and lemon and
mimosa is lost among dense foliage; winds and soars till the woods
thin and orange, olive, and myrtles are left far below, the gardens
and vineyards grow poorer, the air keener, and the long, craggy bluff
ending in the Tête du Chien is scaled, and the go-chair stops finally
under the shadow of the stately Roman tower of Turbia, massive and
scarcely worn by time, but half ruined by the wanton violence of
eighteenth-century spoilers.

And ever as the crude luxury and meretricious ornament of the
pleasure-town sinks, the splendour of the sea-bounded prospect
spreads and grows, from the purple majesty of Bordighera headland,
running down from its Alpine background, to the promontory of Cap
d'Ail beyond the craggy bluff that shelters Monte Carlo; with many a
sheltered town and towered villa and headland stepping into
foam-fringed bays, enclosed in the grand sweep of mountain coast.
Just within the curve of the deep gorge under Turbia the
Irish-looking column of Les Moulins stands up clear and gaunt far
below, on the level-topped rock fringed with wood; Monaco shows
bright and distinct on the broad plain of vivid blue sea, and, the
centre of all, softened and lessened by distance, the white marble
domes of the Casino are traced upon the liquid sapphire, vulgar no
more, but lovely as if seen through

  "Magic casements, opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn."

Only nothing is forlorn in this land of light and colour; all is gay,
friendly, full of laughter and life.

Yet on a certain radiant forenoon the Fahr-stuhl, or rope-railway,
lifted through all this wild poetic beauty a healthy, full-blooded
young Englishman, bright-eyed and well-groomed, blind to all.

He had wandered, aimless and unseeing, through the contrasted charm
and picturesque strength of Monaco, strolled by the tiny harbour, up
the hill, through the weird suggestion of writhen bone-like
cactus-trees and richness of palm and aloe, caroub and rose and
glowing flower-bed, past Casino and hotel, still unseeing, his
features, made for facile laughter and easy geniality, lined by care
and drawn into heavy frowns.  From the gardens of Monaco he had
looked long and wistfully into the sea breaking so softly at the rock
foot, and once again by the harbour, with a sort of irresolute
longing that came to nothing.  In the funicular he had read and
re-read letters, and made calculations with pencilled figures, and
then with weary impatience torn them up and scattered them where the
line ran steep and sheer above the gorge.

And when he stepped out upon the craggy mountain rim at Turbia, his
listless feet took him to the plaster hotel tracing its mean outlines
upon the sky, beside the majesty of the fine tower that marks Cæsar's
subjection of conquered Liguria--subject to so many masters since--to
Rome.

Perhaps he only went that way because the other occupants of the
go-chair, the lady with blackened eyes and red curls pinned outside
her hat-brim, the gentleman with the hooked nose, shiny hair, and
vast white waistcoat, the grave family party scattering exclamations
of _Wunderschön_, _Prachtvoll_, _Echt malerisch_, on the sunny air,
the mature maidens, absorbed in Baedekers, and lordly, tweed-clad
Britons, conversing in grunts, went straight from the rich flesh-pots
of Monte Carlo to the oil and wine of a mean restaurant perched on
the stately crag-wall, making the centre view point for scores of
miles round.

For when he found himself in the grounds looking down upon the vast
splendour of mountain and sea, he seemed to recollect himself, turned
and went through the village that lies modestly behind the Roman
tower, over cobbled paths, under Roman archways, through narrow
streets, picturesque with loggia and outside stair and dark-arched
entrance, through wide, pleasant spaces planted with trees and
scattered with long blocks of limestone, used as seats, and polished
to marble by the friction of generations; here meeting a slow-paced
pack-mule, peasant-led; here a woman, wearing a huge and heavy basket
on her head, like a crown; and here a group of soldiers, in baggy
trousers of stained red and worn tunic of soiled blue, with a general
air of having slept, unwashed, for weeks in uniform.  And west of the
ancient village the craggy crest of the Tête du Chien, the fortress
of to-day, and east and south sea and mountain, and everywhere garden
growth, foliage, and scented blossom, and the beauty of children at
play and young women and handsome youths at work.

For all this the traveller, looking round and searching in the rich
vocabulary of British youth for a term at once fit and comprehensive,
found the choice phrase, "Rotten hole, this."

He stopped at a corner house abutting on a tree-shadowed square, with
a loggia ending in a sort of roof-garden; and, stumbling through a
dark archway, and falling over several garden and household tools on
to a steep stairway, drew further upon his vocabulary for the
epithet, "Beastly rotten hole."  By this time the rumble tumble of
his wild scramble up the stairs had brought out a stalwart form, a
few rays of light and words of welcome, from the door of a room
opening on the loggia.

"Here at last, young un?  How many more of you?  Row enough for ten."

It was a shaggy-bearded, brown-faced man, with deep-set eyes of
piercing lustre and a forehead like a cliff-wall, roughly dressed,
but clean-looking as an Englishman, though his name ended in ski; he
had risen from a table covered with papers of various script,
newspaper cuttings and journals in many tongues, and furnished with a
type-writing machine.  A bed, a chest of drawers topped by a milk-jug
in a slop-basin, a small, square looking-glass, a clothes-press, two
chairs, an easel, a bag of golf-clubs, some walking-sticks and
mineral-water bottles, several pairs of boots, a wood basket and
books of all sizes, falling out of packing-cases and strewn over bed,
chairs, floor and every available ledge, completed the furniture of a
fair-sized sunny room with an open hearth, on which some wood ashes
gave token of a former fire.

"Snug," the host said, indicating the surroundings with a sweep of
the hand, and tipping a pile of books off a chair.

"Topping," replied the guest, stepping gingerly through the
archipelago of books, and surveying the scene with ill-dissembled
disgust.

"You seem jolly chippy this morning.  What's the row?" continued the
host, handing a cigarette-box.

"Nothing much.  Only stone-broke."

"What, again?  I say, young un, you'll do this once too often."

"I jolly well have."

"Oh, come along and have some lunch.  Can you do with native fare?  I
feed at the _osteria_ over there, and hear all the gossip of the
place.  Olives, cheese, omelettes, sardines, salad, coffee, _vin du
pays_."

"Thanks.  I bar the vinegar."

The enjoyment of this simple menu appeared to lighten the young man's
cheer considerably.  His appetite, for a person who had been
contemplating a violent exit from a world of care at intervals all
the forenoon, was not bad--a circumstance not unobserved by his host.
The table talk was impersonal and even lighter than the fare.  An
anecdote spiced with dry humour drew from the stony-broke a
light-hearted, boyish laugh, the gay ring of which attracted the
attention and sympathetic smiles of some workmen and peasants.

"He has a light heart, that one," they told each other in their
patois, as if the possession of a light heart were guarantee of all
that is admirable in man.

"Didn't you try ranching once?" the light-hearted one suddenly asked
the man of piercing gaze.

"I did.  Once."

"Any money in ranching?"

"Best part of mine left in it."

"What _has_ money in it?  That's what I want to know?"

"What is that to you?  You don't want money."

"Oh, don't I just!  When I tell you I'm stone-broke."

"With you it's chronic.  No, you don't want money.  What you want is
sense."

"Anything else?"

"Just a trifle of self-control, a smattering of principle,
manliness--h'm--_honour_!"

"Thanks, awfully.  Have one of these?"  His face crimsoned, darkened,
and set in a sullen ferocity.  The elder man smiled behind his beard,
glad to have touched some harder stuff under the facile sweetness.

"Yes, young one, that's the right word," he repeated.

The boy got up, very pale, thanked him for the luncheon, and said
that he had to go.  The man rose, too, put some silver on the table,
and followed him into the sunny street.  There they walked silently
side by side till they reached the outskirts of the village, behind
the Roman tower, where the turf was broken by grey boulders and
dotted with thorn and bramble-bushes, and the air was sharp even in
the brilliant sun.

"Very English," the elder man said, pointing to the turf; but the
young one was silent still, and his friend saw that he was fighting
to keep back tears.

"Just look at those soldiers," he added, when their road crossed
another, quite open, but labelled _défense militaire_, where some men
in shabby uniforms and dented _képis_ were strolling.  "Did they come
out of a second-hand clothes shop?"

"They don't walk; they shamble," the young man replied, roused to
look at them with a critical eye, and thinking of the smart,
well-set-up fellows under his own command with a home-sick pang.

"What should you give yours for that, eh?"

"It isn't so much your English, as your slang, that I wonder at, de
Konski.  Where on earth did you get it?" the young man asked.

"In England probably.  Yes, I have spent some time in England.  Do
you know, Paul, I used to see a good deal of your mother at one time,
and I have never lost touch with her."

"Ah, _she_ didn't teach you slang," he reflected, wondering if the
man had been an old flame of his mother's.  That he was for some good
reason passing under an assumed name he knew; that he was on intimate
terms with people of his acquaintance, and conversant with all his
family affairs, he was well aware, else he knew only that the man had
befriended and helped him as a friend of his cousin's.

"And I know more about her now than you do, perhaps, for I know what
is breaking her heart," the elder man added.

"Oh, hearts don't break so easily.  But I know what will cut her up
awfully when she hears it," the youth said, jamming his hat sullenly
over his eyes.  "But--well, my sisters will look after her.  They'll
make her happy.  As for me--well, it must be the ranks, or the
Colonies--or the first opportunity of being washed overboard--taken
with cramp, swimming.  No other way.  I did think of the sea--or a
shot--this morning.  But--she mustn't think it's on purpose.  She----"

"Come, come," remonstrated the elder man, laying a hand on his
shoulder.  "Let's hear all about it.  It's a rare thing that is past
mending."

"No mending for me.  Played out, and done for at last.  What you--you
said--though you were a beast to say it--is true.  Good for
nothing--best out of the way."

On this road, that was sheltered from the sharp breeze by the cliff,
it was hot.  A glimpse of snow-peak up a gorge far inland was
refreshing, and yonder, on the left across a wooded ravine, came the
blue glow of the sea from the other side by unseen Villafranca behind
the hill, whence warships were steaming slowly.

The elder man sat down on a rock by the road, and observed all this
beauty of sunny sea and green mountain slope and far-vistaed gorge.
The other saw nothing.  He stood with his face turned from his
companion, who observed a slight quiver in the square shoulder
towards him; then the young man suddenly flung himself face downwards
on the grassy bank by his side, while the bearded man lit a pipe and
smoked thoughtfully for some seconds, till the faint convulsive
motion of the shoulders had stopped.

"What is the net amount this time?" he asked then of the recumbent
figure, which turned slowly on its back and sat up, staring vacantly
out into the purple sea-spaces.

"It's the Spider," he said at last, "and, you see, it's been piled up
gradually--heaven knows how--I hadn't a notion.  He's been
accommodating me from time to time with a few louis, and now he has
stuck on his beastly interest--made it run into four figures, and
flung it at me, yesterday.  And the beast won't wait for my infernal
luck to change, as of course it must before long.  Threatens to ask
the chief to stop it out of my pay."

"And what have you to meet this with?" asked the bearded man, taking
and reading the figures on the paper handed to him.

The young man drew a few francs from his pocket.  "These, and a
longish score at the hotel, where they are beginning to dun me.
Watch gone, everything, but a pair of gold sleeve-links.  Two horses
at home, and a few sticks in barracks, and several bills to pay.  So
the game's played out."

"It looks dark," the Pole acknowledged, "but there may be a gleam
somewhere."

"I've been so unlucky," the young man sighed--"everything against me."

"You've had exactly the luck you deserve in this matter, and much
better than you deserve in others."

"Oh, hit a man when he is down!  But I shouldn't have gone to the
dogs if _she'd_ have stuck to me."

"What girl with any self-respect could stick to you in the company
you kept?"

"If you mean that poor woman--a good-hearted creature and more sinned
against than sinning--what harm was there in helping her out of a
tight place?"

"A good many tight places, from the time you've been at it, I should
say.  While your mother was pinching and denying herself, and your
sisters were deprived of all society and every pleasure natural to
their age and station.  While your cousin was out in the world,
working for daily bread----"

"Whose fault but her own?  My mother's house always was and is open
to her.  My mother has begged and implored her to stay; it is the
greatest grief to her to lose her."

"Your cousin is not the kind of woman to add to the burdens of those
dear to her.  Do you know that she supplies your sisters with
typewriting work?"

"My sisters?  Typewriting?  What on earth for?"

"To help keep the house over your mother's head.  People don't go on
selling stock without lessening their income."

"Selling stock?"

"How do you suppose widows raise money without selling stock, or
land, or whatever they happen to possess?"

"But I thought--I thought--her money was safely tied up."

"There are such things as releases--when the beneficiaries are of
age----"

"Then that is what Agatha meant.  She was bound not to let it out;
she only hinted.  I wish I had blown my brains out this morning."

"You'd never have felt the loss."

"I'm not the first man driven to the dogs by a woman's falseness, and
I shan't be the last.  They're all alike--cold, and hard, and
unforgiving, making no allowance for a man's temptations, which they
can't understand.  Heaven defend us all from good women, de Konski."

"The good woman to whom I suppose you allude, your cousin, has been a
great blessing to me."

"Oh, has she?  And how?"

"In many ways.  Partly by the stimulus of a brave and beautiful
nature, purified by suffering, and unselfish to the core.  In a more
material sense, as a most capable and useful and discreet secretary."

"Secretary?  Private secretary?  To you--to a man?"

"Certainly.  The calling is recognized and honourable.  There are
many more arduous and less pleasant ways of earning a competence--for
women.  Still, I shall be glad for her sake when the day comes, as it
surely will, for me to lose my valuable secretary by a suitable
marriage, though I can't help being a little grateful to you for
making it necessary for her to work."

"I?  When I've been ready to marry her, and would have asked her any
time this two years, but for her everlasting snubbing and coldness?"

"Oh, I thought you said she was false."

"When I implored her not to leave my mother----"

"Whose bread you were taking to help disreputable females out of
tight places."

"By Heaven, de Konski, you hit hard!  Of course I knew that my cousin
was in some way working for pay, but somehow I didn't realize----
Oh, Lord, a private secretary!  Mixed up in political intrigues!  A
paid secretary!"

"Who is to defend good women from dissipated boys?  Yes, that sweet
and noble lady's fate is hard indeed.  And the boy's mother!  If good
women are hard, some of them have a pretty hard time of it."

"Well, they'll soon be shut of me, and the sooner the better.  As for
that other poor woman, she knows how to stand by a fellow when he's
knocked out of time.  She--she--well, never mind about her----"

"Is she going to help you out of a tight place?"

"She would.  She'd raise half for six months and the whole for three,
at five per cent."

"Does she think you would accept?"

"Do you?" he returned fiercely, giving de Konski's searching look
steadily back.  "Am I a cur?"

The bearded face softened in a smile that was almost tender.  "Poor
chap!" he said, laying a hand on his shoulder, and looking with
unseeing eyes across the gorge and away over the sea to the faint
mountain chain rising dim and dreamlike on the horizon.

"_I_ was in a tight place once," said the Anarchist presently.  "I
had been playing the fool rather more than most young asses do.  So I
went straight to my chief and made a clean breast of it----"

"You were a soldier?  I always thought so."

"And he put me on honour never to touch a card again--and helped
and--saved me."

"Mine breaks a chap," the boy said wearily.  "Chauffeurs get good
pay, they say.  I might be that, mightn't I?"

"What you have to do now is to raise this money, cut the whole thing,
before it comes to your chief's ears, and go straight.  He won't
stand this kind of thing.  I've heard him say it's incurable.  But
nothing is--except cruelty, perhaps.  Yes; this money must be raised
at once."

"But how?" the boy asked, looking up with wondering eyes and a gleam
of incredulous hope.

De Konski was silent, smoking steadily with long, even puffs, and
staring with close-drawn brows at the sea, over which the black hulls
of battle-ships were now ranged in lines and squadrons half-hidden by
the smoke of their guns, beginning to boom in the opening thunders of
sham fight.

"But how?" the lad repeated, impatiently scanning the thoughtful
face, that seemed to seek solution of the problem from those
smoke-hidden monsters upon the velvety blue.

The firing was too fierce and incessant for any speech to be audible
for some seconds; then it suddenly stopped, and de Konski turned and
was about to reply, when his attention was arrested by the sound of a
high treble voice coming round the bend of the rock-strewn bank on
which they were sitting, screened from the sight of those approaching
from Turbia.  Many had come thence and passed in the last half-hour
on their way to see the review off Villafranca.

"It's notorious," the high voice proclaimed.  "She tried to pass as
the wife of _the_ Allonby, the 'Storm and Stress' man, and took
everybody in till I asked her straight out one day, and caught her on
the hop.  She was so taken aback that she let out she was not his
wife at all--only a connexion by marriage.  And I don't believe she's
even that, or Mrs. Allonby at all, or Mrs. Anybody.  Miss
Nobody-in-particular, _I_ should say.  They ought to be more careful
who they take in at these small hotels.  Fast?  _Rather_.  A regular
Monty harpy; lives on the tables, they say.  That poor young Isidore
is infatuated--absolutely.  It's the talk of the hotel.  She scarcely
lets him out of her sight.  One is always stumbling upon the
pair--looking unutterable things at each other.  Quite unpleasant for
us.  Pretty?  That sort always are.  But as for manners, and good
breeding--well, anything goes down with foreigners and silly old owls
like Welbourne.  You know she has broken off Isidore's engagement."

The fair being who originated these remarks, having her face slightly
turned to her companion, had not observed the presence of the two men
screened by the bend of the bank on which they sat.  Nor would the
younger man have given a thought to these two ladies, but for the
effect they produced upon his companion, who started and listened
with blazing eyes and tense interest to every word that rang out on
the still air.  Not content with hearing what was said in passing, he
rose, as if drawn by the voice, and followed the quick English steps,
quickly outpacing them.  Then, planting himself in front of the two
ladies and raising his broad felt hat, he brought them to a
standstill.

"I have heard," he said, addressing the speaker in slow, distinct
French, "every word in the clear and accurate voice of Madame, and
venture to suggest that it is a perilous thing to speak English in
this country, unless you wish to be heard, English being now so
generally understood, even when not spoken."

"Much obliged," returned Dorris sharply, meaning to pass on; "but
it's nothing to me whether people hear what I say or not."

"Pardon me," he replied, barring her progress.  "It may be much to
you; it is a serious matter in this country to speak slander in
public; it may have very grave consequences for you."

"Nonsense; I don't understand French--je ne comprends pas," she
muttered hastily and brokenly, looking round as if for protection.
Then, perceiving the younger man, "Mr. Paul," she cried piteously,
"Mr. Paul."

"That is my name," he admitted, rising and raising his hat, but not
approaching.

"Mr. Paul fully agrees with me upon the danger of speaking slanderous
things in public," said the Pole coolly, in English.

"It's no slander," she protested; "let me go.  We were going to see
the review."

"Let us pass on; you have no right to stop people you don't know,"
shouted the other lady in a shaky voice.

"I happen to know the lady with whose name you were taking such
unwarrantable liberties," continued the Pole, keeping his blazing
eyes fixed on poor Dorris's terrified face.  "She is incapable of any
such conduct as you attribute to her.  Once more let me warn you that
you are in a country in which strange things happen; in which walls
have eyes and trees ears; in which people sometimes take the law into
their own hands with impunity."

"Mr. Paul," cried Dorris once more, with supplicating hands, "oh, Mr.
Paul!"

"Awfully sorry," he replied, "but it's true.  You have to jolly well
mind what you say about people in this country."

"Good gracious!  In what country?" cried the distressed damsel.  "I
thought we were----  Oh, where on earth are we, Emily?"

"Oh, I don't know, dear; let us go home.  Never mind the
review--never mind anything--only let us go home."

"You are practically, though not politically, in Italy, the land of
hired avengers.  But I will detain you no longer, ladies.  I have
sufficiently warned you of the peril in which slander places people,"
said the Pole, politely stepping aside with the ceremonious bow
seldom seen this side the Channel.  Then he resumed his seat on the
rock, while Dorris and her friend, frightened out of their wits, fled
without any ceremony at all at the top of their speed along the white
road till a bend hid them from sight.

"I say, de Konski, you did give that girl beans.  So you know Mrs.
Allonby?" asked the young man when they were gone.  "Then you must
know the Johnnie they are making such a row about--the 'Storm and
Stress' chap--eh?"

"Yes," the Pole replied absently, his fury not yet appeased.  "I know
them both--at least, I used to--especially him--rather well."

"Well!  You did land that poor girl a nasty one.  And, I say, you
_can_ speak English.  You must have English blood in you somehow."

"Ah, yes!  My--mother was English."

"Well, you never seemed like a foreigner to me.  That's why I took to
you.  Why, you must have served under our colours!"

"Why not?  But about this fix of yours?"

"Well, what I thought when I came this morning was, that a man like
you, on secret service of some kind, knowing the ropes of most
things, and speaking every known lingo, might be able to get at this
beast, Mosson, and square him.  Fake up some rot, as you did to those
poor women.  Bluff."

"My dear boy, there's only one way of squaring the Spider, and that
is by paying him in full.  Yes, I was hard on that poor fool of a
girl.  But a tongue like that!  And think of the other, the slandered
woman.  By George!  I could hardly keep my hands off the little liar.
But the Spider.  He's quite another matter.  What the Spider doesn't
know of the seamy side of life is not knowable.  The only argument
with him is hard cash down on the nail."

"But how to get it?" sighed the boy once more.  And even as he sighed
the fury of the Pole and the terror of the two women suddenly came
before his mind in such an absurd light that he burst into a roar of
light-hearted laughter.  "My word! but you made that poor girl sit
up," he shouted.  "You couldn't have gone for her worse if the other
woman had been your sister or mother."




Chapter XV

An Italian Lesson

With all her childishness and perversity, Ermengarde was not
destitute of judgment and critical taste.  Long before she reached
the end of "Storm and Stress" she perceived that it was a really fine
work, giving evidence of power and imagination and a knowledge of
human nature, hitherto dormant and unsuspected in her husband.  There
was humour in it, unexpected flashes, that occasionally made little
bursts of laughter startle the quiet of her room, and pathos poignant
enough to bring hot, sudden tears to her eyes.  She read on and on
through the night, too much engrossed in the drama to think of the
writer till overcome by sleep; and, when she woke, shivering in the
cool dawn, read on to the end instead of going to bed.

Then she remembered that all this moving drama of intense thought and
feeling, of insight into character, and vital, insoluble problems,
came from the mind and heart of the man at whose side she had lived
so long and so blindly, who had misunderstood her, and whom she had
misunderstood, with whose real inward life and thought she had never
once been in touch.

The man had lived a double life; he possessed two distinct selves,
one of which was entirely strange to her.  The Arthur she knew, the
humdrum, irritating, fireside being of everyday life, could never
have written "Storm and Stress"; he was absolutely devoid of the
fire, the passion, and the imagination, the tenderness and poetry,
the refined humour and delicate fancy, contained in that fine novel.
He had never remotely hinted to her of the existence of these
intricate social and political questions, so forcibly presented in
this picture of actual life.  And what could he know of the inner
workings of a mother's heart--he who had misunderstood and wounded
those of his own child's mother?  Arthur, that cold, sarcastic being,
that ambulant wet blanket upon all enthusiasms?  No; she had married
two men, and one was a stranger; she had unthinkingly mated with a
genius, and never found it out; she was the wife of a man carrying a
dark lantern that was always turned away from her.

It was humiliating; it was exasperating, the more so from the vague
and haunting sense of remorse it kindled within her.  Yet she was
pleased, and in a way proud, to discover this rich mine of powerful
imagination and intellectual vigour in the man so near her.  But the
thought that she was shut out and allowed no part in it chilled and
cut her to the heart, even while conscience asked rather grimly why
the publisher's parcel had remained so long unopened, receiving no
adequate reply.

She came down late to her open-air breakfast, and found a table in a
solitary corner, where she could take her coffee and roll unobserved
of the few late lingerers on the sunny terrace, whose voices came
clear upon the still and flower-scented air to her unheeding ears.

The beauty of that wide prospect of sea and mountain never staled;
every change of hour and weather gave variety; morning after
cloudless morning came always with a fresh surprise and novel charm.

Her corner was by the balustrade on the edge of the steep ravine,
whence a wall of rock fell steep and far beneath.  She sat with the
morning sunlight behind her and the lemon terraces sinking away on
one side to the platane-shadowed torrent by the road, where the
people looked small as ants, and carts and waggons were toys, leading
to the clean, bright-walled town embowered in dark foliage, with
illimitable spaces of dark purple sea beyond it, all glowing in the
clear brilliance of southern sun.  Sounds of cheerful labour rose
pleasantly from a saw-mill niched in the bottom of a narrow gorge,
from carpenters' hammers, mingling with washerwomen's voices, the
roll and clatter of wheels, the tramp of soldiers and confused noises
of the town, and floated up, softened and mellowed, above the faint
and far sea-murmurs.  And before her, in the full morning light, so
soft though so strong, the white-walled monastery towered high on its
dark, wooded ridge, with gabled roof, quivering cypress flames and
feathery eucalyptus tops traced clear on the dark blue sky.  What a
glow in the blue-black pine foliage, what mystery in the purply bloom
of those olive-woods, climbing the steep summit far above the vines!
How lovingly the golden light lay upon all, steeping it in splendour,
caressing it with warm radiance, and bringing out every detail of
shape and colour and shadowy distance.  Contrasted with all this
joyous colour and radiance, how solemnly beautiful was the
convent-crested steep, and how grand and awe-inspiring the deep sweet
blue of the broad, unbounded sea sweeping far away into unseen space!

Her troubled spirit and unquiet heart were soothed and calmed by this
familiar but never-staling beauty; the sweet, sharp air, so light and
pleasant to breathe, kindled fresh life with every inspiration; she
seemed to drink it with her coffee and eat it with her crisp roll and
butter.

And yet--and yet, with what different eyes she once saw it.  Where
was the mental elevation, the pure and healing emotion, of her first
sight of this large, fresh, foreign beauty of purple-shadowed
mountain and glowing sea?  Talk about the gaming-tables, about petty
vices and sordid troubles, had filled her with incredulous disgust
then.  But now?  She had lost more than money on those green tables,
and bartered something more precious than jewels in the glittering
Monte Carlo shops; and here, in the pure and rose-scented air, some
subtle soul-perfume had floated away and vanished, she knew not how.

A little breeze, shaking the palm-foliage close by, had the sadness
of pattering rain, but it brought a wave of spiced carnation and
heliotrope and sweet geranium mixed with rose.  Ermengarde sighed
with the breeze.  Her unquiet breast told her that something was
wrong within; she could not, perhaps would not, say what; she had
fallen a little way from some height, but how she could not tell.
Only she was quite sure she ought to have opened the publisher's
parcel earlier; she was equally sure that she should have been given
some knowledge of the importance of its contents beforehand.  In any
case, she had been the last to know of an event that altered the
whole tenor of her own and her husband's lives.  Arthur must have
known at least that he had produced something of a higher quality,
and greater aim and scope, than he had ever done before; yet he had
lived under the same roof with her and never said a word; he had been
like a man in a dream, absorbed, preoccupied, moving in a world
apart, of which she had never been given the faintest glimpse.
Perhaps her darkest suspicions were justified.  And now, in the full
blaze of a sudden fame, he had made no sign and given her no shadow
of participation in his changed fortune.  No one could make a first
great success like that with indifference.  He must have been deeply
moved, if only by the prospect of a fresh vista of mental activity
opening before him, or, less worthily, by the comparative wealth it
assured.  Yes; those huge sales of which she heard must mean a solid
accretion of hard cash for the writer of the book, were publishers
never so rapacious.

And his short, scrappy letters gave no hint of what must be an epoch,
a turning-point, in his life.  They were without address, because of
that mysteriously prolonged business tour; they were evidently
written some time before they reached her, while her answers,
addressed to the home he appeared never to have seen since they
parted, had presumably made long tours before he received them.

Where was Arthur?

An inquiry addressed to Herbert on the subject had met with an
unsatisfactory reply.  Her father and mother only mentioned her
husband in answer to her questions; they had not seen him; he had not
yet returned; he was a notoriously bad letter-writer, conducting his
correspondence mainly by telegraph or telegrammatic post-cards, she
heard.  Things undoubtedly were more serious, the breach between them
more deadly, than she had suspected.  A very bad feature of the case
was his refusal to finance the tour of which she had stood in such
real need on the plea of poverty.  Poverty!  When he must have known
that he was on the brink of a gold-mine.

Men know men.  No doubt Herbert and her father knew more than they
cared to say of the strained relations between husband and wife, and
of the causes that had produced this bitter state of affairs.  Well,
at least Charlie was left.  Poor little Charlie, whose short, stiff,
pot-hook letters, written with such laborious effort, expressed
nothing but that the child was executing a wearisome task, and whose
solitary sentence, "Farther cent a good big Kake; The fellers ett
it," was his sole allusion to him.  Poor little Charlie!

Through tears evoked by the vision of a little, lonely, curly-headed
boy bending with inky fingers and knitted brows over toilsome
letters, all the bright and sunny beauty and the great peace of the
vast sea-plains darkening and glowing on that solid blue horizon rim
seemed full of rebuke and chiding.  Snowy sails, flitting bird-like
on the deep-blue splendour, and black hulls, trailing their smoke
pennons above it, reproached her, and the quivering cypress-spires on
the monastery height condemned her.  For what?  Then the shining
lemon-foliage took up the tale, and rustled disapproval among the
gleaming yellow fruit, and the voices and low laughter of people
sitting in the sun vaguely excluded her, making her a thing apart
from general sympathy.  But why?

There was nobody to consult or confide in; even the woman of mystery,
who, for all her presumable sins, was at least sincerely attached to
her, was absent, probably on some errand of dubious integrity.  Not
that such sorrow as this could be confided to anybody except by vague
hints, though it might in some measure be divined by sympathy.  Best
to go home.  She had been growing more and more home-sick of late,
especially since that last and worst afternoon at the tables.

Presently the thin man emerged from the lemon-foliage, and, seeing
her, raised his hat and passed on with friendly smile and halting
step.  He had been a father to her, but for this emergency was
probably supplied with no paternal counsels.  Pacing the walk on the
monastery ridge under the cypresses, the spare figure of Mr. Mosson,
the philanthropist, was visible.  That benefactor to his species
appeared to be absorbed as usual in his morning devotions, intently
perusing the red book that Mr. Welbourne had pronounced to be no Book
of Hours or Breviary, as she had rashly conjectured.  Should she
throw herself upon his charity, and seek balm of him for at least one
of her troubles?  That something must be done before long to this
effect was absolutely certain.  The eighteen-guinea serge gown could
not well be pawned, besides having lost some of its pristine
freshness in excursions on the Azure Shore, and the jewel-box was
perilously near emptiness.

The American lady was kind and cordial; but a marked indisposition to
plank down indiscriminate dollars had always formed a feature in an
estimate of trans-Atlantic character as conceived from early
childhood; moreover, divorce laws being so varied by locality, and so
light-heartedly sought and obtained, in the United States, citizens
of that Republic could not logically be credited with sound views
upon matrimonial duties and relationships.

The only person whom it was possible to consult upon questions of
that delicate complexion, besides being absent and unattainable,
happened to be the very person whose conduct was arraigned for
judgment, and the most rabid democrat has not yet gone so far as to
allow the criminal to be his own judge and jury.

Suddenly a light step on the gravel and a blithe "Bon jour, Madame,"
broke this current of melancholy thought, and evoked responsive
brightness on her clouded face, as the laughing eyes and gay
personality of M. Isidore appeared above the sun-steeped flowers.
Madame was perhaps too tired for the usual Italian lesson, he
conjectured.

"Do I look tired?" she asked, smiling cheerfully, and heard that
there was a shadow on her face as of one who had not slept well.

What depth of sympathetic insight in this charming young fellow, the
general utility person of the hotel!

"I have not slept at all," she replied gaily.  "I sat up reading all
night.  That is why I am haggard and fishy-eyed this morning."

The appropriateness of these adjectives was promptly and warmly
denied, with remarks to the effect that some faces only acquire fresh
and spiritualized charm under the shadow of fatigue.  There was
further, she heard in elegant idiomatic French, a special quality of
beauty peculiar to sadness and another to gaiety.  Madame, it was
thoughtfully averred, usually gave the impression of possessing
gaiety and _joie de vivre_.

"We all have our dark moods at times," she sighed, in Italian so
outrageous that M. Isidore was obliged to repeat the sentence in an
amended form, which he did with a sigh and an accent that made it the
expression of his own intimate feelings.

Upon this the pupil commented that we live in a vale of tears.
Having corrected this proposition, the teacher contradicted it as
flatly as was consistent with politeness and good Italian.

"We live, on the contrary," he added, opening _Le mie Prigioni_ at a
turned-down page with a view to reading it aloud--"we others at Les
Oliviers--we live in an earthly Paradise.  Yes?" he asked, smiling
and indicating all the sunny beauty with a sweep of the hand.  "But,"
he added, with a deep sigh, and in wild Italian, "Paradise had its
serpent and the Garden of the Hesperides its dragon.  So also our
Paradise here."

"Very true," the pupil corroborated, wondering what the serpent of
the Oliviers Paradise was.

The thin man, she remembered, once said it was frogs.  Miss Boundrish
thought it was the absence of fashion shops.  Her father considered
it to be the badness of foreign tobacco and the late arrival of Money
Market intelligence.  Her mother held the inferiority of butcher's
meat, together with the presence of foreigners, a fair equivalent for
the Enemy of Mankind.  A German Baron had been heard to mutter that
it was the impossibility of escaping from "diese verrückten
Engländer," and a Frenchman, the ubiquity of "_ces Miss Anglaises
maigres et à dents enormes_."

After a thoughtful pause, M. Isidore hinted darkly in correct and
melancholy French at griefs too poignant for expression, and entirely
peculiar to Les Oliviers.  The place, he added, lay under the spell
of a powerful enchantment.  Personally, he was unable to resist it.
In some respects, he confessed, he was weak, powerless as an infant
even.  But he was fully aware that, as Madame had been gracious
enough to observe, this was no place for him.  His relations
continually counselled, even commanded him, to leave it, but in vain.
He was rooted to the spot; he was bound to the ridge with unbreakable
chains; he had, under the terrible spell cast upon him, long ceased
to be master of himself.  Of course, he was fully aware that he ought
not to make revelations of a character so intimate.  He was abusing
the angelic goodness of Madame; he was trespassing upon the gracious
consideration, the sympathetic interest, she had been so obliging as
to manifest for him; but, in short, he could not help it.

How well emotion became this handsome young foreigner; how natural
and unaffected, how perfectly free from self-consciousness and false
shame he was!  The French certainly are a most fascinating people--at
least, when young and good-looking, and of another sex--Madame
reflected.  "But I do wish the poor boy wasn't quite so hard hit.  It
might be awkward too."

"Pray don't apologize, dear M. Isidore," she replied, in the best
English and the kindest possible manner.  "You honour me by your
confidence; it interests me exceedingly.  It touches me.  Don't
hesitate," she added, in dulcet accents, suddenly remembering his
lack of English, and speaking French, "to tell me anything that is on
your mind, if--if it affords you the slightest relief.--For if," she
reflected, "he really is so madly in love with me, he had better out
with it at once, and I can laugh it off as a boy's fancy, and at the
same time let him see how much higher and holier English views of
such feelings and relationships are.  It may be the turning-point,
the beginning of a new era, a higher life to this young and ardent
nature.--Tell me," she said with a gentle smile, "as you would tell
your own mother."

"I have told my own mother.  I went to Monte Carlo yesterday on
purpose," he returned, with perfect simplicity.  "And she entirely
disapproves of my sentiments--of the whole affair, in short."

"Oh!" murmured Ermengarde, rather taken aback.

"But what would you?" he added.  "Mothers are like that.  It is
perfectly natural.  She counsels me to take refuge in flight.  But
there are sentiments, and those of the most sacred, the most
exalted--there are crises of the soul--for which flight is of no
avail."

"It depends----"

"There are enchantments that are only deepened and intensified by
absence."

She had to confess that this was indubitable, and added vaguely that
it was sad.

"My mother declares my passion to be an infatuation, a madness----"

"Perhaps it is, or a folly, or only a boy's fancy," she said, smiling
softly, and then shrinking back in sudden terror.

For all at once he sprang to his feet, stamping and gesticulating,
his face darkened and distorted with fury, clutching his head with
both hands, with blazing eyes and gestures of indescribable scorn and
anger.  "Boy," he shouted, "boy!  What immature, what puerile, breast
could endure the strain of a passion so virile, so invincible, so
beyond all conception, so far transcending anything that can possibly
be imagined by any female mind, as this?  Such a passion as mine is
not to be trifled with, Madame; it is too mighty, too terrible in its
virile power.  Ah! if women did but know what depths they have power
to stir in male hearts, what inextinguishable fires they have power
to kindle!--  Pardon me, Madame," he added, gasping, and all at once
perceiving the deadly pallor and terrified gaze of Ermengarde's
shrinking face, and the gestures with which she seemed to be vainly
seeking some way of bodily escape from the explosion.  "My transports
render me ferocious, forgetful of the consideration due to your sex
and weakness.  There is more of the tiger than the boy in my ardent
nature; my passionate adoration frightens you, as it devours,
consumes, destroys me.  Reassure yourself, dear Madame, I implore
you.  See, I am calm, penitent, desolated to have occasioned a
momentary emotion of terror in a breast so gentle, in a heart so
adorable, to which all homage, and consideration the most tender, is
due."

So speaking, he sank gracefully before her, his voice now sweet and
low, his gestures supplicatory, even caressing.  "Pardon me," he
murmured, with clasped hands and a face all sunshine, while poor
Ermengarde was white and trembling and as scared as some small and
mischievous boy meddling with prohibited gunpowder and hearing it
bang and go off in all directions--"pardon me.  The overwhelming
force of my passion is my one, my ample, excuse."

She murmured faintly that there was nothing to pardon; only she hoped
he would not do it again, and would he be so obliging as to rise from
his penitential posture upon one knee?  This he did with infinite
grace, bowing low over her hand, which he appeared to kiss, wholly
oblivious of the fact that the spot upon which this scene was enacted
was raked by the fire of two blazing dark eyes from the office window.

Poor, frightened Ermengarde gasped a little, for it is one thing to
be the object of a boy's distant, poetic homage and quite another to
be raved at by a demented and exacting person, who describes himself
as a tiger and his feelings as ferocious.  She looked aimlessly over
the lemons and olives to the deep dark blueness that glowed to a firm
and rounded intensity against a pale sky, quite unable to put two
words together, while M. Isidore, his eyes full of soft, inward
light, and his features calm and composed as a sleeping babe's,
looked as if nothing could disturb the sunny peace of his soul, and
composedly suggested that they should continue to follow the
melancholy experiences of "this poor M. Pellico," with which
intention he took a seat at her side, and, placing the open book on
the table between and before them, began to read aloud to ears
confused with terror and remorse.

At this juncture the approach of Heinrich, the porter, not yet in his
smart gold and green livery, but green-baize-aproned and
shirt-sleeved, as his morning duties required, and with a curious
smile in his great, soft, dark eyes, put a final stop to the Italian
lesson by conveying a summons to the teacher to transact some homely
business in those obscure back premises whither no visitor ever
penetrated.

"Peste!" cried the impassioned lover, with darkening brows.  "Zese
dampt duties," he added in English, with a little shrug and a sunny
smile, to the still pale and terrified Mrs. Allonby.  "Our poor
lesson!  Madame excuses?  Yes?  _A rivederla!_" and with a bow and
smile he was gone, and Ermengarde began to breathe more freely.

She looked at the monastery sitting on the wooded hill, at the
velvety blue above it, the peacock blue below, at the violet-veined
mountain peaks around; she watched great bees and hawk-moths plunging
into the petals of stocks, and butterflies fluttering above the heads
of people reading and basking in the blue and golden morning, drawing
long breaths and wondering why everything seemed vaguely to accuse
her.  She turned to the towered village throned and shadowy beneath
the eastern peak, and that, too, seemed to despise her.  She felt
unworthy of the very flower scents.  Yet she had done nothing, and
had meant so well.  Could any reasonable being have foreseen this?
Who, stroking the soft fur of some gamesome fireside pet, could
expect the growl and clawing of a full-sized tiger?

Oh, for a good, full-flavoured, suffocating mouthful of London fog,
for firelight dancing on china and polished surface in the murky
noonday at home, instead of this perpetual, unnatural, homeless glare!

She went into the house, and, remembering something she wanted at the
office, turned aside to the ever-open door, and found Mlle. Geneviève
on duty at the desk.

But what had come to the young woman that she should receive her
gentle address with scowling brow and eyes of smouldering flame, and,
instead of replying, should turn her back upon her, and, calling
something down a speaking-tube, walk slowly through the opposite door
into private regions?

Ermengarde waited, uncertain for a moment whether to give up the
trifling matter on which she had come, or to ring sharply for
attendance.  She was about to turn away, too full of inward disquiet
to mind a small discourtesy, when the opposite door opened,
disclosing the majestic presence of Madame Bontemps, to whom she
listlessly made her request.

Silently then a drawer was opened, stamps and postcards silently
handed out, money received and change returned, in dread and ominous
stillness.  Then was fulminated this bolt from the blue; she was
informed in a dry and level voice, and with much regret, that her
room would be required for another guest at the expiration of the
week.

"But what do you mean?" cried Ermengarde.  "People can't be allowed
to take my room.  Besides, I don't intend to give it up."

"Pardon me.  Madame is mistaken.  The room is already reserved for
the date indicated, and there is no other in the house suitable to
the requirements of Madame."

"Why, you are positively turning me out," she cried, incredulous with
amazement.

The Padrone crossed her arms upon her ample breast and smiled a
cast-iron smile.  "It is not for me to contradict the assertion of
Madame," she replied, with a fierce shrug and a stony eye.

Ermengarde turned white, and looked steadily in the hard and hostile
face for a second.

"I see that I have been mistaken in the character of this house," she
said coldly.  "Be good enough to accept my notice to leave at my
earliest convenience."  Then, without waiting for a reply, she went
out into the sunshine and paced slowly through the garden, her skirts
brushing scent from oak-leaf geraniums and her cheek tapped by the
rounded coolness of lemons on the garden boughs, and came out upon
the path that led over the open mountain ridge, drawing a long breath.

"The insolence!" she burst out to an old woman, harmlessly knitting
and leading her goat, who nodded and smiled in return, under the
impression that kind remarks were being addressed to her--"the
incredible insolence!  All the people seem to have gone out of their
senses this morning, or else I've gone out of mine."




Chapter XVI

The Sapphire Necklace

The path immediately behind Les Oliviers, worn by the steps of many
generations of mules and men, was steep and rugged, here and there
sinking deeply and filled in with broken fragments and buttressed
with rock slabs.  A little further on the ridge ran up in an abrupt
narrow steep; a clump of pines on its summit stood out clear and
glowing upon the sky, with a straw-roofed hut under the dark boughs.
Ermengarde loved that little clump of pine-trees soaring up above the
house and grounds, whether, as now, in the full glow of forenoon, or
in still, golden afternoons, or flushed with sunset upon a crimson
and amber sky, or, later still, traced on the pale clear green of
after-glow, or black against a blue-black vault pierced with shining
stars.  She had often and vainly tried to draw it; but even the thin
man had failed to catch its charm; much paper had been spoiled and
colour wasted in the attempt.  When you gained that abrupt eminence
you seemed to have reached the top of the world, which unrolled
itself beneath, and spread blue and far to the unseen African shore;
but when you turned from the sea, and saw the path winding higher
along the wooded brink to mountain summits endlessly unfolding, you
knew that you were still very far from the top.

The warm bright air was spiced with aromatic scents.  Myrtle and
lavender, cistus and juniper, rosemary, thyme, and pine, clothed and
climbed every cliff and steep down to the torrent beds that ran on
each side the ridge, and sprang from every crack and crevice in rock
and cliff.  Higher still, the ridge broadened into a pine-wood, and
narrowed abruptly upon its steep wooded sides, then widened again
into a grassy plateau, where the columnar trunks of hoary olives
showed dim and solemn through shadows of drooping foliage shot with
subdued, changing colour.

Where the pine-wood ended and the olive-grove began the ridge-side
fell more gently, laying a slope of myrtle and rosemary open to the
full south sun.  Here Ermengarde sat, the mysterious murmur of
pine-woods on one hand, the solemn stillness and blue-grey haze of
olives on the other.  The sunny bank was grey with massed rosemary
blossom, into which countless bees plunged and buzzed drowsily in the
warmth.  Far below, forest and olive-terrace sank into purple bloom
of shadow; the distance was closed by bare mountain peaks rolling up
in great billows of stone above wooded slopes, and towered villages
white in sunlight.

All this solemn beauty rebuked her and made her ashamed.  She knew
that she had forgotten the message and missed the healing of the
mountains.  She had played the fool and made herself a mark for
fool's gossip.  Oh, how small and cheap she felt, and how very sick
of herself and her petty follies!

Such feelings are not at all comfortable; it was a relief to forget
them in indignation at the indignity of being turned out of a hotel.
How had the woman dared?  Was she, Ermengarde Allonby, to submit to
the creature's impertinence, to be driven away by the insolence of an
unmannerly Frenchwoman?  Never, though at first she had intended to
go straight home.

Turned out of a hotel?  Well, after all, _à qui la perte_?  Les
Oliviers was not the only house of entertainment on the Riviera.  It
would be something to escape from the eternal cackle of the
Boundrish; there could not possibly be two Boundrishes along the
Azure Shore.  It was an opportunity to drop the undesirable
friendship with the woman of mystery.  Somehow, the prospect of
dropping this friendship was not wholly agreeable.  There was a
dreadful fascination about that young woman, whose good points were
undeniable.  Besides, Ermengarde was so sorry for her, and so ready
to do her any service short of selling doubtfully acquired jewellery
for her.  Then there was the moral regeneration of this frail sister
to be considered.  That certainly had not as yet made great progress;
indeed, some faint hesitation as to her own power of effecting it was
beginning to creep into Ermengarde's mind.  She realized that she was
herself hardly a saint.  After all, there is not so much superfluous
virtue floating loose in the world that people can afford to share
any with erring brothers and sisters.  Perhaps her own lamp wanted a
little trimming and replenishing.

It would be lonely work to go into a strange hotel, and probably more
expensive than staying here.  No; she must go home--home to fogs and
mud and east winds; home to a husband who, besides not being there,
never had, and never would, care for her; who had been capable of
becoming suddenly famous by writing the most powerful and remarkable
novel of the last twenty years, and never telling her a word about it.

She had no home to go to; she had been turned out of a third-rate
hotel.  So many sorrows were out of proportion to her demerits; she
was very, very sorry for herself.  Warm sunshine drew out the
fragrance of rosemary and myrtle; the still air was drowsy with the
buzzing of innumerable bees; mountain peaks nodded, shadowy dells and
wooded slopes heaved gently like summer waves; the humming deepened
to a sea-surge, to organ-booming, and now Ermengarde sank back
against a springy cushion of grey-white heather, her head pillowed on
rosemary-bloom, fast asleep.

The bees went on humming in the rosemary, droning all sorts of
suggestions into her ear.  Now it was the hum of a schoolroom about a
little curly-headed boy, with his fingers in his ears, his elbows on
a desk, and his brows knitted over a dog's-eared book not unstained
by tears.  "_Musa_--a song, _Musæ_--of a song," he was drearily
droning over and over again.  Then it was an interminable clergyman
in a lofty pulpit upon the crags, discoursing wearily of the sins of
the woman of mystery and the follies of Ermengarde, for which there
seemed to be no remedy.  The clergyman was curiously like the thin
man, and was beginning to be very wearisome on the indiscretions of
the young Isidore, when he suddenly changed to Arthur, standing on
the drawing-room hearthrug at home, and holding forth on the same
topics with the name and identity of Ivor Paul confused with those of
M. Isidore.

Arthur's voice was unmistakable; it was rather deep, and liable to
become monotonous, especially when he discoursed upon excesses in
hats and gowns, of the desirability of keeping accurate accounts, of
never exceeding one's allowance or letting bills run on, of the
excellent household management of his mother, and inferior
capabilities of ladies of the present generation.  The voice became
clearer and more resonant, the dreamer grew conscious of
rosemary-scent and sunshine, the grey columns of the olive-grove swam
out of a haze of sunshot foliage, and became distinct above patches
of golden light on flowery grass.  Arthur's voice rumbled away in
confused murmurs; there was a faint sound of skirts brushing herbage
and a woman's lighter voice; finally, the well-known figures of the
woman of mystery and the Anarchist were seen upon the path under the
olives, leading away from the rosemary bank, and Ermengarde knew that
she had been dozing, and was now wide awake again.

Her heart was beating hard; the dream of Arthur had been so vivid.
She could not realize that it had only been a dream; it was as if he
had actually been standing here on the thin grass under the pendent
olive-branches in the tender shadowy light.  The familiar voice was
still in her ears, stirring all sorts of buried memories and
slumbering feelings.  Oh, why was he not with her?  How was it that,
with all the leisure and independence this great success must mean,
he could not leave that miserable, so-called business of his, and
come and take care of her, and rescue her from the insults of
hotel-keepers and the persecutions of Anarchists?  It was not as if
he were obliged to stay in London.  She was so lonely, so unfriended,
so desperately home-sick.  Yes, home-sick; that was the name of this
lonely, gnawing heart-pang that grew worse from day to day.

The woman of mystery and her cavalier struck into a sloping path
immediately in front of her, leading to the first terrace beneath the
mule-path, where they were screened from the sight of people passing
on the ridge, but not from the eyes of Ermengarde, whose
reclining-place was behind a myrtle, through the stems of which she
saw without being seen.  The olives on this first terrace were
gnarled and hoary, like those bordering the mule-path; the sunshot,
lavender mist of their drooping boughs gave the same air of mystery
and magic.  The two figures actually standing on the grass, vivid
with anemone and dark with violet, seemed less real than those of her
dream.

She was too little interested to reflect that they were unaware of
her presence, and might not wish to be seen.  They kept close to the
turfed wall behind them, and were screened by the massive olive-trunk
in front, but only the thin myrtle-boughs came between her drowsy
eyes and a full side-view of them.  But they were too far off for
anything more than confused murmurs of their conversation to reach
her.  It suddenly struck her that Agatha might be the Anarchist's
wife, or even daughter, though she was undoubtedly English.  An
English wife might be very useful in all these "treasons, stratagems,
and spoils" of his, though what but sudden and probably temporary
insanity could have induced any Christian female to marry that hairy,
unwashed Orson of a man was unimaginable to any sane observer.

Two red admirals fluttered past, one over the other, in pure joy of
life; a lizard darted across the path at her feet.  She saw the rosy
bloom of a peach-tree far down on the last olive-terrace, and then
became aware that the woman of mystery was agitated and the Anarchist
silent and interested.  There followed a brief bass murmur, and then
something suddenly flashed in the sunlight, making Ermengarde's heart
jump into her mouth.

But it was not a dagger, or any other murderous implement, she
observed, after winking away the first dazzle; only the quivering
brilliance of diamonds and sapphires glancing and dancing in Agatha's
hands.  It was, in fact, the necklace shown to her in the firelight
on that wet afternoon, the improvised history of which had fallen on
such sceptical ears--the necklace of doubtful origin but undoubted
value that this mysterious and secretive young woman had asked her to
sell for her.  Why had she not asked the Anarchist in the first
place, she wondered, or could he be the unlawful acquirer of that
shining treasure?  Had he suggested or commanded the making a
cat's-paw of her?  But, from the way in which he took and looked at
the jewels, it seemed that they were new to him.  He held them in
this light and that, pushing the spectacles up to his forehead to
examine them more closely, weighing them thoughtfully in his hand,
and exchanging remarks upon them with Agatha, who presently took the
necklace back, and held it this way and that, as if discussing its
value.  Finally, she clasped it round her neck over her white blouse,
as she had done by the fire that day, with the same air of using
herself to show off the jewels, and looked absently across the blue
bloom of the ravine to the high mountains, while the Anarchist,
thoughtfully stroking his beard, and with his goggles pushed up under
his hat-brim, contemplated the necklace gem by gem, but not the
wearer, evidently appraising the beauty and value of each sparkling
drop and pendant as it flashed and quivered in the sun.

Then he turned and paced the grassy terrace, while Agatha took off
the necklace and laid all the shining splendour carefully in its
velvet bed, and again looked absently and sadly away across the blue
bloom of distance to the mountain peaks.  Then the Anarchist came
back, said a few words, took the morocco case, and put it away in an
inner breast-pocket, at the same time handing her a paper, which she
read with interest and anxiety, and returned to him with a sigh and a
look of relief.  He held her hand a moment, then, saying something
that made her turn her head away to hide tears, that Ermengarde saw
sparkling in the sunshine, he sprang up the turf-banked terrace where
it was a little broken, walked across the grass under the olives, and
disappeared on the other side, where a steep path led by the
olive-dresser's cottage and wound down the precipitous ridge-side to
the high-road by the torrent-bed.

He could not have gone far down the steep, when he was seen emerging
upon the olive-shadowed plateau once more, and hastily stepping back
across it and down the bank to the woman of mystery, who was
evidently more surprised than pleased at this return.  Saying
something quickly, he took out the morocco case, and, after some
reluctance and apparent objection on her part, placed it in her
hands, pointed, to Ermengarde's horror, towards her hiding-place,
again climbed the terrace bank, hurried across the path, and vanished
down the steep; while Agatha, after a short pause, as of indecision,
suddenly seemed to become resolute, put the case in her pocket,
turned and dashed quickly, almost at a run, straight along the
terrace towards Ermengarde, who gave herself up for lost.

But before she could collect her senses sufficiently to decide
whether to lie back and pretend to be asleep or get up and seem to be
just emerging from the wood behind her, Agatha had flashed by like a
whirlwind, her skirts brushing Ermengarde's feet, looking straight
ahead and in too great a hurry to see what lay on the rosemary-bank
behind the myrtle.

Then Ermengarde, petrified with amazement, got up and went back to
the path over the ridge, remembering that the way taken by the woman
of mystery through the wood was shorter than the mule-track along the
ridge, so that there was no fear, unless she went at a much greater
rate than Agatha, of overtaking her and leading her to suppose that
she had been in the olive-garden during the interview.

She therefore walked slowly back along the mule-path, meditating upon
the mysterious and nefarious proceedings of her young friend, and
alternately blaming herself for watching the interview, and wondering
what it meant, and congratulating herself on having accidentally been
the witness of what justified her suspicions about that necklace, and
reached the gate of the hotel just in time to see that same Agatha
and Mr. Mosson coming out from a path on the wooded convent steep in
earnest colloquy.

There was no reason why two of the hotel visitors should or should
not be walking in the monastery grounds at the same time; but, as the
descent by the hotel gate was very abrupt and much tangled by
interlacing roots of pine-trees, there was every reason why Mr.
Mosson, even if, instead of being a benefactor to his species, he had
been a misanthrope (and from the grim set of his jaw and hard eyes,
and thin, tight-drawn mouth, Ermengarde was inclined to think him
that), should hand Miss Somers carefully over the snaky roots and
crumbling ledges, as he did with the greatest politeness and
deference, standing aside with raised hat to let her pass into the
grounds before him, and on perceiving Ermengarde's approach from the
opposite direction, extending the same courtesy to her.  And yet the
juxtaposition of these two seemed to confirm her suspicions
concerning Agatha and stamp her with double intrigue.  Was Mr. Mosson
a suppositious uncle of Agatha's?--an aunt he clearly could not
be--so she debated, walking by necessity at this suspicious young
woman's side through the garden paths.

"Have you been up the ridge?" asked Agatha, with cheeks flushed and
eyes over bright.

"I came back through the olives, so pleasant and peaceful," replied
Ermengarde, observing a tremor in her companion's voice, and
wondering what had been the last experience of the necklace.  "And
you?"

"I have been up by the monastery," she said.  "Bordighera is very
beautiful to-day: an indescribable peacock blue bloom upon it."

"Velvety, and yet with the clear brilliance of a jewel," Ermengarde
commented pensively.  "By the way, Miss Somers," as if struck by a
sudden thought, "_did_ you ever succeed in selling that lovely
necklace of yours?"

"Oh yes.  I disposed of it quite satisfactorily," she returned in the
half-bored way in which people refer to things long over and done
with.  "It cost me a pang."

"I wonder what it cost _him_?" Ermengarde mused, as they were merged
in a stream of sun-burnt, sun-hatted people flocking in to luncheon
in the cool shadow of the house.

For all his reputed benevolence and ascetic cast of face there was a
curious feline quality in Mr. Mosson, Ermengarde observed.  He sat at
his solitary table in a corner, quietly intent on what was put before
him, yet all the time stealthily watching people from under drooped
eyelids, with an occasional hungry flash in his eyes when suddenly
bent upon some individual, as, for instance, to-day upon Agatha, and
slightly crouching in his chair like some great creature of the cat
tribe, gathering itself together to spring on its prey.

So he might look at and spring upon her, she reflected with a shiver,
if she put herself within reach of that quick, aggressive paw (now
peeling oranges with slow and stealthy ferocity, as if they were
alive and felt being skinned so closely), and so he might devour her,
crunching her audibly, bones and all, as he crunched the crisp
_zwieback_ that he slowly munched from time to time to fill in the
pauses between courses.  Was Agatha being slowly crunched and ground
to powder by those cruel jaws? or was she on the tiger-man's side, a
tool or decoy to bring his prey within range?

It was embarrassing to the last degree, and yet it was a sort of
comfort, to find that Agatha was not only going down into
Mentone--"down below," as it was pleasantly termed on the ridge--but
was bent on accompanying her in her quest for fresh quarters.

Two people, the woman of mystery truly said, were better than one;
they presented a more imposing front to the enemy--that is, the
hotel-keeper--and in case of any bluffing or attempt at imposition,
offered a double supply of the courage necessary to unmask and combat
his stratagems of war.

"But why leave Les Oliviers?" she questioned, as they stepped down
the ravine side together.  "Surely there could be nothing more
charming, or half as healthy, down below?"

To this Mrs. Allonby began with haughty reticence, to the effect that
one had excellent reasons not always possible or desirable to
explain, and ended, before they reached the town, by confiding to her
that she had been turned out of Les Oliviers, the manner of which
turning out she related not without humour, the absurd side of the
catastrophe having suddenly presented itself to her imagination.  The
whole episode now showed itself in the light of an excellent joke and
capital opportunity of getting a change.  Les Oliviers was
undoubtedly dull, euphemistically, restful.  It had been remarked by
foreign visitors that none but English could put up with the dulness
of that high-placed, solitary house.

The woman of mystery observed that the onslaught of Madame Bontemps
was sudden and apparently unprovoked, and Ermengarde returned that it
was absolutely unprovoked; she had not so much as seen either mother
or daughter for a couple of days at least, so that an opportunity of
provocation had not been forthcoming even.

"I was out nearly all day yesterday," she said, "and went straight to
my room when I came in at night, and I was down late this morning,
and breakfasted alone in the corner looking down the gorge, and never
moved till I went in.  I couldn't move, in fact, because my Italian
lesson came immediately afterwards."

"Oh, your Italian lesson," said Agatha, with a look of enlightenment.
"Ah! and you found Mlle. Bontemps in the office?  I see."

Having found the key to the mystery, she suddenly became so
absent-minded as not to hear the question, "What do you see?"  Then
she began to warn Mrs. Allonby equally against the larger hotels and
any in the Caravan Bay, and Ermengarde took the opportunity of
finally refusing to drag her into the fag of hotel-hunting, and got
into a tram going towards Caravan by herself.

But when, a couple of hours later, she found herself leaning on the
balustrade by the sea on the Promenade du Midi, very tired and hot,
and unable to find any room in the crowded hotels just visited, she
was partly annoyed and partly pleased to see the tall, slight figure
of this woman of mystery coming towards her.

"I never saw it more darkly and deeply blue," Agatha said, stopping
and leaning at her side, "or the turquoise of the shoal water more
clear and lovely."

The soft boom of surf on the rocks was very lulling and sweet, and
the scent of the pure, azure-shadowed spray that dashed from waves
breaking in fine curves of every shade of blue, with never a tint of
green, fresh and vivifying.  Even the subdued menace of the
ground-swell was mellow, not harsh with the scream of dragged
shingle, as in paler, greyer seas.  It was restful to look and look,
to plunge and steep the sight in the intense glowing blue, and wonder
if it could be true, a real sea rolling through this mid-earth, and
not some incredible splendour of "faery lands forlorn."  Even the
wickedness and cruelty of Arthur took a softer complexion in the
light of that warm and clear dark sea.  Far out towards the horizon
the velvety depth of blue made the sky white by comparison; but
nearer it had a liquid quality, a sparkling sweetness that promised
to assuage thirst and renew failing pulses as with some divine
elixir.  One might drink deep of that clear wave and lose all memory
of pain and grief, or, like the waters of Eunoe, it might bring to
mind all that is beautiful--lost joys, forgotten aspirations, divine
desires, old sweet loves.

But in a world of prose and fatigue tea was a more desirable, or at
least a more attainable, elixir; for was not Rumpelmayer's hard
by--Rumpelmayer's of the pure and perfumed China leaf and select
company?  Thither Ermengarde turned, and secured a table outside,
with that broad purple splendour still in sight, and its salt
freshness stealing through the palm-colonnade and rustling the
feathery tops of the giant eucalyptus in the public gardens opposite;
and thither, after some hesitation and consultation of her watch, the
woman of mystery was persuaded to accompany her.

The last strains of the band were dying away in the dark greenery of
the gardens; people were streaming off in every direction in the
golden afternoon; Rumpelmayer's was rapidly filling to overflow
inside and out--carriage after carriage rolling up and setting down
charming costumes of muslin and pale summer tints of various texture,
oddly finished with furs and sunshades of dainty hue.  There was a
cheery murmur of voices and laughter all around, with the solemn
undertone of sea-surges booming through all.  Ermengarde had left
Agatha to fill the cups with that exquisite China fragrance, while
she went in to choose cakes, and was just coming out with a heaped
plate when she met the smiling gaze of Ivor Paul, who seemed to have
been strolling aimlessly with the crowd, when he stopped to speak to
Agatha, whose manner conveyed an impression of unrest and anxiety,
rather than embarrassment, at this meeting.

"You may have forgotten Mr. Paul, who was at Les Oliviers some time
since," she said; and Ermengarde, replying graciously, reflected that
her opportunities of forgetting this young man had been singularly
scanty.  He positively haunted them; he was as persistent as a family
ghost, or the Anarchist himself.

He proved more entertaining than either of those, however,
discoursing most gaily and pleasantly about nothing, laughing at
less, and listening with due sympathy to the sorrows and fatigues of
Ermengarde in her expulsion from one hotel and ineffectual hunt for
another, and observing that it was a beastly shame, and that
hotel-keepers were a rotten lot, which confirmed her in a growing
conviction that this turning-out was of the nature of an excellent
joke and delightful adventure.  Had Mrs. Allonby tried Pension
Gilardoni?  An aunt, or some such elderly and respectable relation,
of his had wintered there, and found it most satisfactory and quite
reasonable--altogether a ripping place.  It was just along there on
the west of the gardens by the sea.  It would give him pleasure to
conduct her to the house there and then.

But Ermengarde had had enough of hotel-hunting for that day, and
after a little pressure accepted the woman of mystery's offer to go
and explore the house for her, personally conducted by Mr. Paul; or
rather, as she reflected when left to sip her second cup alone, the
two young people had simply gone off at once upon this benevolent
quest, without waiting for any consent or comment, vanishing among
the palms before there was time to take breath, and leaving Agatha's
steaming second cup to waste its perfume on the unthinking crowd.




Chapter XVII

The Promenade du Midi

"Do you know that you are half an hour before time?" Agatha said as
soon as they were out of hearing in the gardens.

"Yes; but I didn't expect to find you yet.  But when I spotted you at
the tea-shop I had to come.  I thought you were alone.  The game's up
at last, and no mistake.  This is good-bye, sweetheart--good-bye for
ever now!"

There was a sudden break in his voice.  He wanted to tell her that he
had hungered for a sight of her, and longed for a word to restore him
to hope, courage, self-respect; that he had lost his bearings, and
was drifting headlong upon hidden rocks and quicksands; but would not
founder without throwing up some danger signal, and catching at any
spar floating by or any rope flung to him.  But he could find no
words.  The hoarse murmur of the broken surf and subdued roar of the
ground-swell mingled with the heavy surging of blood in his ears, and
dazed and stupefied him, as they walked in the nearly deserted
gardens, their eyes on the ground.

Presently Agatha looked up and saw that the surface laughter had died
from his face, which was white and drawn, and almost stern in its
gravity.

"Now you look like your mother, Ivor," she said gently; and he
retorted with sudden fierceness:

"Heaven forbid she should look like me!  She is a good woman, Agatha;
it was a bad day for her when she brought me into the world.  I've
always been in the wrong box, somehow.  To go straight I ought to
have been born rich; I'm made like that.  But it's all done and over
now.  And I want you to tell her--tell her--I'm sorry for her
sake--I've gone under.  That's all."

"No, Ivor, not all.  Let me tell her--for her sake, that you have
risen again--as you can and must--for her sake."

"You talk like a woman," he said impatiently.  "And what do women
know?"

How could he tell her--not that he wished to--what had driven him
there to be near her, if not actually with her, an hour before the
time fixed, for succour and refuge from shipwreck more complete and
terrible than that of which she knew--in part, at least--already?
How could she enter ever so slightly into the passion and misery that
were tearing him, into the struggle of all that was best in him
enlisted on the side of all that was worst, of a weak and wavering
will, drawn hither and thither by the fierce contention of honour and
chivalry, gratitude and compunction--against despair and passion and
a certain dire, half-conscious need of that tenderness, even
protection, that weak woman often gives to strong man?

The dumb and piteous appeal in his eyes--great, soft eyes, like a
loving repulsed dog's--went to her heart, but what did it mean?  Was
he only sorry for himself, this great man-child, helpless before his
own passions, or was the spring of real penitence touched at last?
Did he want comforting exculpation and the assurance that his mother
would never know half or grieve for a quarter, and that all would
come right by some mysterious magic?  Silently, with a gentle
pressure, she slipped her hand into his arm; he pressed it hard
against his throbbing side, with a deep, gasping breath, and drew her
to a bench, set back in shining foliage outside the gardens fronting
the sea, where they sat looking absently at sunlit sails dipping and
gliding over the broad blueness, and listening absently to the
continuous plunge and break of tumbling waves.

He had been in quite other company that day, and was still tingling
and throbbing with the sound of another voice and the excitement of a
scene of sudden, unimagined passion, the thought of which made him
press the hand in his own more convulsively to his side, as if it had
power to save him, like a frightened child clinging to a mother.

It had come so suddenly.  He had been loitering drearily in the
Casino gardens in the forenoon to kill time till the appointed
meeting at Mentone, loitering by a hedge of prickly pear, its bare,
bone-like stems and fleshly leaves spread like distorted hands, its
dull-red, warty fruit, grotesquely suggestive of weird spells and
horrible enchantments, when round the corner all at once he had come
eye to eye with the Countess, solitary, sad and with a new, subdued
gentleness in her manner.

He must come in to her apartment, to the balcony looking on the
gardens, he heard; she was alone; they must breakfast together; she
was sure he had not breakfasted; they would have a bottle of that
Clos Vougeot he had liked.

The breakfast had been very cheerful and reviving--dainty cookery, a
lively and warm-hearted hostess bent on pleasing, and afterwards an
excellent and favourite cigar and a cup of coffee of unimaginable
perfection.  Such things soften the bitterness of affliction and
bring people to contemplate misfortune in gentler mood and through
rosier light.  And in this cool, sumptuously fitted apartment by the
balcony that looked on the gardens, it was pleasant to linger and
laugh, forgetful of the thorns of life.  And there and then the offer
to square the Spider had been pressingly renewed and courteously
declined.  No man preyed upon women.

But the woman this time was in luck; she could spare whatever was
necessary to appease the cormorant; there was no question of preying
on her.--  But men must stand or fall by themselves.  No; he was
cruel; he scorned her help; there were tears.

These, of course, had to be dried.  There followed assurances of
gratitude, friendship, respect; then the counter-assurance of her
suddenly inherited wealth.  Still her desire to recognize and return
old kindnesses was not held to justify preying upon women.  He was
sincerely grateful, but she must not be hurt by an absolute refusal
of her generous offer.

Then came the bolt from the blue, in the shape of an outburst of
frenzied passion, fiercely tender, throbbing with life, deep as death.

She loved him.  It was the one deep and lasting and genuine passion
in a life of many loves, light, fugitive, and easily forgotten; no
pale, self-regarding girl's love, but the fervid and passionate
self-devotion, the worship, of a matured and full-blooded nature, of
one who had drunk deeply of the cup of life, who knew the world and
had sounded all the mysteries of passion.  She asked nothing in
return--nothing but leave to adore, to cherish.  They would go to
some sunny summerland, where he was not known, wherever he pleased;
they might cruise about in their own yacht; they might live on her
estate sometimes--anywhere, only together.  If he were, as he said,
cast broken and friendless upon the world, without a crust, with
neither friends, nor hope, nor prospects, why not take refuge in her
love?  Her wealth was ample.  All she had was his without reserve.
He might exchange into a regiment on foreign service; he might serve
in a foreign army.  He might not think it, but she could be a tame,
fireside woman for his sake: she would make him a true and devoted
wife, married or not.  When a woman loved truly she was capable of
anything.

Her appeal had the irresistible force of real passion; she was
handsome--he had had no idea how handsome till now.  Emotion brought
back the sweet freshness of youth to her face, called out wonderful
tones in her voice and strange brilliance in her eyes.  Now she was
tender, gentle, sisterly; now she was tragic, fierce, despairing;
then suppliant and reproachful, but always with that electric flame
of passion kindling and overcharging an atmosphere of mysterious
enchantment akin to the magic of the weirdly beautiful gardens and
the diablerie of the glittering Casino.

The details of that wild scene he could in no wise recall; nor could
he remember exactly how it had come to an end, and he had found
himself once more in the free air, thrilled, intoxicated, revolted,
bewildered, fascinated, but not bound.

After all, there were worse women than the poor countess.  She was a
good comrade, and infinitely to be pitied.  Was it her fault that she
had been torn from her convent in the white innocence of ignorant
girlhood and flung without power of protest into the arms of an
elderly and unlovable husband, with no pause for reflection, and
neither knowledge nor a moment's experience of life?  What was there
to guide and protect a lovely, lonely, fascinating girl, childless
and unloved, and unconscious alike of her power and her weakness,
through the rocks and quicksands of a hard and cruel world?  Poor
child--poor, dear, good-hearted countess!  And if her reputation were
a trifle damaged, how many, far less tempted and yet of spotless fame
in the eyes of a hoodwinked world, were frailer than she!  And, after
all, who was spotless among women--except Agatha?

To be near Agatha would be calm and safety from that wild and
wandering fire.  And yet, as he sat listening to the multitudinous
murmur of broken seas, with her hand pressed hard to his side, he was
powerless to shake off the spell of that passionate hour; the
physical attraction, the glowing eyes, the transfigured beauty, the
thrilling voice, the pathos, the pity, the deep emotion, were always
in his eyes and ears and heart.  What could Agatha know of that, or
of the intensified power of it all in an hour of desperate need and
misery?

"Is it true," he asked, after a long silence, "that my mother is
pressed for money, and that you give typewriting to the girls?"

"Ask her yourself.  I may say nothing."

"And are you _that man's_ paid secretary?  Don't say that's true--not
that."

"What man?"

"Oh, that foreign chap, that Pole--de Konski, as he calls himself.
He's on some secret service; half English he says he is.  He's all
right for me; but for you to be his secretary!"

"Certainly I am--his confidential secretary."

"Good Lord!  Confidential!  Mixed up in all that underhand
business--intrigues--who knows what devilry!  In his pay!  And why?
When you have a good home, when mother is wanting you, and would give
anything to have you back with her."

"Surely you know why, Ivor--not that your poor mother does.  We try
to keep the worst from her.  The girls help a little--she thinks it
is her own money.  She can't realize how that has dwindled--and then
my--pay is very good."

"O Lord!  As bad as that!  And if only--yes, I might have gone
straight, I might--if only--if only you had given me a chance, a
hope, had kept true to me!"

"True?  I have always been the same to you.  We have always been
friends, Ivor, ever since we were such little things, playfellows,
then companions.  Always fond of each other--in that way--till now,
when you reproach me and make other claims upon me."

"I should never have got into this mess if only you would have cared
for me."

He knew this was untrue; but the Circean spell, working so strongly
in his blood, darkened his brain and made him savage to her who had
power to set him free.

"What nonsense, Ivor!  Why should I care for you in that way?
Anything of that kind was hateful to your mother; you know that she
was always against it.  Even if you had spoken out, she had other
views for you.  She trusted me, and told me, and you know it, Ivor.
How could I, under her roof, eating her bread--how could I take her
son from her and spoil her happiness?"

"Spoiling _my_ happiness is nothing, of course.  Yet she chose her
husband.  A man has a right to choose his wife."

"But you had not chosen me.  She was not sure.  She was only afraid
of what might be if we were much together.  You were so young, even
if you had really cared----"

"Really cared?  If?  When you knew----"

"I knew nothing but her fears and objections.  You said nothing----"

"It was understood----"

"Only by you.  And so you took it for granted, till just now since
you found me here?  You had no right to do so.  You never spoke,
Ivor."

"And if I had spoken?  Agatha!"

"I could only have asked you to forget.  I knew her dislike of it.  I
was no match for you.  I had less than nothing.  My dear aunt was
quite right.  She knows you.  Are you the sort of man to be happy on
a crust?  Yet she is no lover of mercenary matches."

He let go the hand, till now squeezed so fiercely to his side; the
touch of it sent a mortal chill through him.  She could sit there,
calm and cold and unmoved, and discourse of the unwisdom of penniless
marriages, while he was thirsting for a word or sign responsive to
the love that thrilled him, and the need of love that devoured him,
and the longing for sympathy that filled him with a desolate despair.
And yet it was not such love as hers that he wanted in his secret
heart, but a wilder, fiercer flame, though he did not know it.  Yet
he knew and feared the baser enchantment working in his blood, and in
his better self revolted against it.

Her voice was even and sweet; all that she said was reasonable, cold,
and calculated.  She was so self-contained, so perfectly composed;
kind and gentle, but with no hint of hidden fervour or suppressed
feeling.  Could nothing carry her off her feet; could she never
forget herself in any sudden warmth, any gust of unconscious emotion?

And all the time the glow and stir of that other woman's tempestuous,
self-forgetting passion moved him; the love-thrilled voice, the
impassioned gestures, the splendidly moulded figure, the
transfiguring tenderness on the beautiful, though faded, face,
dazzled and inebriated him, in spite of moments of repulsion and
disgust.

"Money," he muttered, "money! when all that one hungers for is a
little love.  Oh, you good women, cold and calculating and
condescending to us poor, hot-headed, hot-blooded sinners, who only
want a hand to help us out of the mud--a hand you won't reach out
ever so little for fear of tumbling in yourselves."

"How unjust you are, Ivor," she cried, with tears in her voice and
eyes, "you who clung to the mud you speak of, and refused to be
helped out of it!"

"Help me now," he murmured.  "Reach out a hand now--now that I'm
sinking--deeper and deeper.  I'm a beast, and a selfish beast at
that.  But marry me; it's my only chance.  I haven't a penny in the
world, and I've no prospects.  I'm done for--broken, good for
nothing--but--marry me--pick me out of the gutter."

"Ivor!  Are you mad?"

"Yes, and drunk too--raving mad and blind drunk," he shouted
savagely.  "I was always in love with you," he faltered, "even when
you were a little mite of a thing in short frocks and long hair, when
you used to bowl for me and bat for me and field for me, and I used
to swing you in the swing in the big horse-chestnut----"  He dropped
his face in his hands with a heavy sigh, his arms propped on his
knees, and his eyes bent frowningly on the gravel.

She was trembling now, but controlled her voice too well.

"And yet," she said, "I have no power with you--you will do nothing
for me--you want me to go on batting and bowling and fielding for you
in the perpetual, desultory cricket you make of life."

"And you," he retorted--"you want me to go on swinging you
everlastingly under the humdrum, goody-goody chestnut you make of
life."

"And this," said Agatha bitterly, "is love--a man's love!"

"Oh, I'll swing you," he returned savagely, "if you'll only have
me--swing you for all I'm worth, if you'll only love me--love me,
love me, Agatha--backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, as
long as you like, till my arms crack and drop off.  That's love--a
man's love."

She could not speak for the hot rush of sobs rising in her throat.
She shut her hands tight, choked back the sobs, and looked straight
before her at the broad blue sea glowing deeply in the sun.  The
dolphin-like hill-spur of Bordighera, all dreamy blue, with violet
tints, paled while she looked and slipped suddenly under a veil of
grey mist, while a huge black cloud, rising rapidly behind it, threw
its shadow over the sea, changing peacock-blue and turquoise into
deepest indigo.  The chill of it struck into her.  She drew in her
breath and swallowed down her tears, and spoke in a low, even voice.

"Ivor," she said, "will you do this for me--only this one thing--the
thing I have asked you so often before?"

"I'll do anything, everything; but I can't turn Methody, if you mean
that--even for you----"

"Will you, once for all--I ask it for the last time--for my sake,
give up gambling in every form--cards, betting----"

"How can I?  Oh, you can make terms and conditions.  You can stop and
haggle over whether I'm worth raking out of the gutter or not.  Well,
I'm not.  You may stake all you're worth on that.  But if you cared
twopence for me, you'd never stop to think whether I was or not;
you'd just reach out a hand before you knew where you were, and haul
me out.  I know what love is, what even a woman's love can be.  You
don't----"

"Ah!  Don't I?----"

"I'm not worth raking out.  I know that fast enough.  And I've only
one chance to make it worth while from _your_ point of view, and that
is to square Mosson somehow.  De Konski thinks it just possible; he
may get him to wait awhile on a heavy percentage and say nothing.  My
leave is up in two days, and in those two days I must somehow rake in
the dollars--supposing the beast will wait, that is--and of course my
infernal luck is bound to turn now.  And when I get home I know a
horse or two I stand to make a pot of money on.  So you see I can't
do the thing you ask anyhow.  Ask me something easier, Agatha;
there's nothing I won't do for you but that, which I absolutely
can't."

"But this is all I want," she said, shivering In the growing chill.
"Promise this one thing, Ivor."

"It's mocking at me to ask that.  It can't be done.  If Mosson sticks
to his pound of flesh, as he jolly well will--there's only just the
off-chance that he won't--it means I'm broken, have to send in my
papers--you know what the chief is--sell up the last stick, raise
something on expectations, and begin again with no chances and a
heavy debt.  The best would be to work out a passage to Canada or
South Africa and try my luck there.  Else--there is only the sea," he
said, looking at the waves darkening under the great cloud sailing up
from Bordighera with a cold blast before it, that drove sand and
small pebbles into their faces and swept the promenade clear of
people, donkeys, and mules in a minute, crashing eucalyptus-boughs
together, twisting and twining tulip-tree and catalpa, and making the
palm-tops writhe and rattle drily with a sound of pattering rain.

They were forced to get up and shelter from blinding sand and pebbles
behind the trees and shrubs in the gardens, whither the storm pursued
them, piercing through every chink.  Ivor's hat went, and he had to
plunge some yards after it, while Agatha, half blinded by a branch
dashed in her face, stood waiting, cowering from the wind behind
shrubs, through the stems of which she could see the broad band of
sea, the western half still glowing deeply like a peacock's throat in
vivid sunlight, and the eastern half meeting it in accurate sharp
division, as darkly and deeply indigo, the shallow waters shading to
duck's-egg.  Calm and storm, brightness and darkness, were in close
contention, like the spirits in Ivor's soul--the dark and the bright,
the pure love and the impure.  Yet the sunlight lay deep and warm on
the western waves, and the western sky was clear and cloudless above
the shadowed bluffs.

"Only the sea," he repeated sullenly, striding back to her, holding
on his hat, and bracing himself against the fierce blast; "and you'll
all be jolly well rid of me."

"Why will you talk like an idiot?" she cried through the loud wind.
"Be a man, Ivor, for once.  Your own folly brought you to this, you
know perfectly well.  Try to use a little sense, a little manliness.
Pick yourself out of the mud and make a better thing of life than you
have ever done yet.  Give up this miserable gambling, for your own
sake, if not for mine.  Square the man yourself.  He can get nothing
by breaking you.  Who can get blood from a stone?  What if you have
to leave the Service?  Use those muscles of yours to some purpose.
Use your brains.  You are not the idiot or the child you make
yourself out.  Think of those who depend upon you, and don't talk of
being dependent on women.  Don't for a moment suppose that I, or any
woman of spirit, would dream of marrying a man who can't stand on his
own foundation."

They were walking against the wind, fighting their way through the
deserted gardens to shelter behind the bandstand.  The storm was so
wild that things displayed outside shops parallel to the gardens were
swept away before there was time to take them in; china hung on the
walls rattled, clashed, and even cracked; newspapers, cards,
handkerchiefs and scarves, flew hither and thither across street and
gardens; the sunshine left the mountains, and the sky darkened.

"I was an ass to think you would," he replied grimly, maddened by her
scorn, and in spite of the beating wind on it his face was quite
white; for he knew that of the spirits casting dice for his soul the
black one had won.  "But," he added, stopping to catch the scarf that
flew from Agatha's hand as she tried to wind it round her
neck--"but----  Hullo, here's de Konski!"

The Anarchist was sheltering from the storm inside a café, and came
out on their approach in the first great drops of a pelting
rainstorm.  "Yes, here I am," he repeated, saying something to Agatha
in a language that had no meaning for Ivor, to which she replied
quickly in the same, stepping aside in the shelter while the
Anarchist hailed and stopped a fiacre flying past to stables.  Then
she wished Ivor good-bye, offering her hand, which he either did not
or would not see.

"Good-bye," he said, when de Konski was handing her into the
carriage.  As she got in, she looked out and saw him replace his hat
in the buffeting wind.  Then she drove to Rumpelmayer's, where
Ermengarde was still waiting.  She could not catch the expression of
his face as she drove off, but fancied a softening in its sullen
hardness, while Ivor, unable in the rain and wind to catch a full
glance of her face, turned back into the café with a dreadful
sickness of heart, feeling that he had parted once for all with the
better influences and purer hopes of his life, and was thrown
definitely back to such consolation as a dishonourable union offered.
Nothing mattered now; a sort of reckless joy took hold of him at the
thought, and he shook off the heart-sickness with a wild laugh.

"Let's have a bock," he cried gaily.  "If we must go to the devil,
let's go with a light heart."

"But why go to the devil at all?" de Konski asked, when the waiter
brought the drink.

"Nowhere else to go to, old chap.  Nobody else to so much as look at
the likes of me.  I ain't worth the snap of a finger.  Lord bless
you, de Konski, that young saint you just popped into the trap out of
my contaminating company never cared a hang for me--no, not a
twopenny damn, so she says, and now I'm down on my luck she won't----
O Lord!  Well! who cares?  Better fish in the sea than ever came out
of it, eh?"

"That depends on your fishing.  Sometimes you net one with gold in
its mouth.  Pity to let that kind go."

"I shall never net this one," he sighed, setting down the glass he
had drained, and staring blankly at the table before him.  "She never
did and never could care for me," he repeated silently to himself.
And all the malign enchantment of the morning rushed back in full
force, now that, scorned and rejected of one, he felt free to
surrender himself to the other.  "But I'll do the square thing," he
told himself.  "I'll marry her, I'm blest if I won't.  She shall have
her chance at last, poor woman!"

The Anarchist, sitting opposite at the wine-stained table,
contemplated him with interest.  "How," he asked presently, "do you
propose to make the journey?"

"Going to marry for money, to begin with."

"No occasion, then, to trouble about the Spider any more?"

"O Lord, that beast!  I'd forgotten all about him.  I'm an ungrateful
brute, de Konski.  I'm awfully obliged to you, though, all the same.
Shylock sticks out for his pound of flesh, of course?"

"Well, hardly that.  After all, even he's human, Paul."

"Oh, I say, though, you don't mean to say--you can't mean to
say--you've squared the beast!" he cried, springing up and making the
glasses dance on the table.

"Well, yes, I've squared him--in a way."

"What way?  Half my pay as interest?  Seventy per cent. at the final
square up six months hence?"

"No; but on conditions----"

"Conditions?  Mosson making conditions?"

"Here is a paper signed by him.  It is in duplicate, signed and
witnessed.  He remits you----"

"Mosson remitting?  The sun'll tumble out of the sky."

"He remits you the whole, gives you a receipt in full--there it is in
black and white--on condition that you bind yourself to play no more,
to give up every kind of gaming and betting, and sign to that
effect--witnessed by me.  So now, Paul, you are a free man.  No
question of the descent to Avernus, the mercenary marriage, or
anything of the sort--always providing you take this pledge."

"Oh, I say!" he muttered thickly, the drops starting on his forehead.
"It can't be true--it can't.  And the chief?----"

"Will know nothing."

"But Mosson?" he gasped.  "Mosson to make me a present of all that?
It's unheard of!  Besides, it isn't the square thing; he must be
paid--you can't rook him, if he's ever such a beast.  And it's
nothing to him whether I go under or not."

"Mosson is paid to the last centime--that is, he will be if you make
this promise."

"Paid by whom?" he asked hoarsely.

"Naturally not by an enemy.  By some one who makes it a stipulation
that you never know, by some one who has your welfare so much at
heart as to be willing to pay a price for it, who wishes you to be
absolutely free and unfettered by any obligation--except that of
giving up this stupid, ruinous vice."

"The countess!" he whispered, turning cold and sick, as he sank back
in the chair he had left, covering his face with his hands.

"Pff!  Is it likely?  I may not give you the smallest hint; I'm bound
in honour, so don't ask.  But, if you mean the woman you are always
helping out of tight places, is it likely?  Look here, Paul, there is
the paper and its duplicate.  Here is a pen--a fountain.  Read and
sign it.  But think before you sign."

There was silence for some time--silence except for the fitful return
of the quieting storm outside, the crackle of hail on roof and
pavement, and the last faint pattering of rain before it stopped.
Ivor did not move from his posture, his head fallen forward on the
table between the glasses, his face in his hands, his shoulders
slightly convulsed once, then rigid.  The Anarchist looked at him
with a sort of weary patience, but said nothing.

At last Ivor got up and went to the window, drawing the back of his
hand across his eyes, and looked out on the drenched gardens, where
orange-trees and palms were still quivering in the half-spent blast
and the hail lay in great stones like lumps of sugar on the sunlit
grass.  Then he turned back, read the papers carefully, and silently
asked for the pen and signed, his signature being duly attested by de
Konski, who gave him one paper and kept the other.

"Now you are free," the Anarchist said, shutting up the pen and
pocketing one paper.

"Yes, free," repeated Ivor, like a man in a dream.




Chapter XVIII

The Only Hope

The storm had become so furious that the driver, after taking
Ermengarde up from Rumpelmayer's, insisted on putting in for shelter
under the crowded _porte cochère_ of the nearest hotel.

"We might as well have stayed at Rumpelmayer's, after all," she
murmured, the wretchedness evoked by reading the publisher's parcel
rushing back upon her at the first dull moment.  Rumpelmayer's
bon-bons were pleasant, and several interesting glimpses of human
nature had been given her there at the little tables which were
unusually thronged for the time of day on account of the storm.--"It
was at least warm at Rumpelmayer's.  And what of Villa Gilardoni,
Miss Somers?"

"Oh, Villa Gilardoni!  What _will_ you think of me, dear Mrs.
Allonby?  My cousin began talking of--family matters; they were
absorbing; time somehow slipped away, and the storm rushed up so
suddenly--it was impossible to stand against it----"

"And so 'the hobby-horse, the hobby-horse, was forgot'?  But it was
too kind of you even to propose this fag on my behalf, much less to
try to carry it out.  And yet--you are looking very tired, dear Miss
Somers."

"I am not tired," she replied hastily; "I am exhausted.  I--oh! these
storms upset one's nerves."

"Which storms?" Ermengarde wondered, and came to the conclusion that
nothing merely meteorological had caused this upset.  Could it be
remorse? or was it the connexion by marriage?  How much easier,
simpler, and sweeter life would be were there no men in the world,
she reflected, though, like other Utopias and earthly paradises, she
thought it might be just a trifle dull.  And who knew that, not only
man, but even the devil himself might have his uses in the economy of
things?  The latter supposition she prudently confided to the secrecy
of her own breast, while murmuring sympathetic common-places to
Agatha, until such time as it pleased the driver to brave the abating
fury of the storm, and take them through the drenched town to the
sheltered road under the plane-trees, and so to the foot of the ridge
where there was nothing for it but to walk or ride up on donkeys and
mules.

They chose the former alternative, the heavy rain having given place
to a hailstorm by this time, and, before they had climbed in the
shelter of vineyard-walls and steep rock-ledges to the first ridge,
the hail gave over and the storm-beaten, indigo sea spread darkly,
dashed with white foam-ridges, to their sight, when they stopped to
take breath and shake out their skirts, whitened by hail.

Some fresh mimosa boughs in a jar of rough country pottery adorned
one of the faded shrines of the Seven Sorrows.  Who had placed it
there, and in memory of what anguish?  Agatha wondered, and
Ermengarde told her of the phantom nuns Heinrich the porter had seen
haunting the shrines at night.

"He must have believed that he saw them," she argued, "because nuns
are improbable.  If he had invented them, they would have had to be
monks, since this was a male community--and still is--for the
brothers come back occasionally now.  How the people must miss them!
They used to serve that church across the ravine.  And look--this is
how they got to their church."

She pointed to a long straight flight of narrow steps, hewn by
hand-labour out of one steep and solid rock, making a long and giddy
descent of slippery and uncertain footing where the narrow steep
stairs were mossed and uneven; so steep and so long the flight was
that the greater part of it was hidden from sight below.

Agatha looked with unseeing eyes, her heart too full of her grief to
be interested in anything unconnected with it.  She remembered well
her first acquaintance with those pathetic shrines, deserted but
still finding some humble hearts to honour them in their evil hour.
She remembered her anguish and prayer--prayer she knew now
ungranted--on the convent steps, in the very face of the consolation
offered upon the cross planted there as if in welcome.  All the earth
had seemed full of silent prayer in the hush and glory of sunset, on
that first evening; every hill and ridge had been an altar smoking
with sacrificial incense, and the amphitheatre of mountains standing
round the broad sweep of the bay a vast temple of adoration, in the
centre of which the cross on the top of the steps spread out its
welcoming, protecting arms.

She remembered, too, the sight that had afterwards met her gaze from
the convent wall; and even now, as she walked wearily past the
shrines, fancied the rank odours of musk and cigars tainting the
purity of the sweet, still air.  Even while she had been wrestling in
prayer for him on that evening, Ivor had passed, laughing and fooling
with that evil woman who had been his destruction.

Such agony overcame her at this thought that companionship of any
kind was insupportable.  She made some excuse for prolonging her walk
in another direction, while Ermengarde took the most direct way home,
under the steep on which the monastery garden spread its fertile
terraces to the south, showering vine-trails, fig-branches and
prickly pears down the walls to the very edge of the mule-path.  But
Agatha turned aside and climbed the slope where the cultivator's
pink-walled house stood, or rather reclined, among fruit-trees and
pergolas, and passed on and up to the convent steps, weariness of
mind and body reacting upon each other to such a degree that she
would fain have flung herself down on the wet herbage and risen no
more.  She had definitely asked the man who demanded and implored her
love to renounce for her sake the vice that had brought him to ruin,
and he had definitely refused to do so.  He loved her; he besought,
almost commanded her love, but would give up nothing for her.  Even
while proclaiming his own worthlessness he had claimed her entire
devotion and self-sacrifice.  What was such love worth?  And what was
such a man worth?  Could he even be called a man and not rather a
petulant, dissolute boy, heedless of all but his own comfort and
enjoyment, unable to deny himself the gratification of any passion
for any sake?  And yet--he had shown some compunction in regard to
his mother, had been really grieved to cause her pain and such
privation as had been hitherto unknown to her.  That is to say, he
was not entirely without feeling for the woman who had loved and
blessed him from his earliest breath, was not absolutely unnatural
and unfilial.  And yet Agatha loved him, in wild wonder that such as
he should kindle love in any heart; and yet she felt that he had no
real love for her, though he required and desired her whole heart's
devotion.

Had she been hard to him, too hard?--for some hardness is the only
kindness to such natures as his.  Was it some true instinct, after
all, that impelled him to fly to her to pick him out of the mire and
save him?  Her last words to him had indeed been hot and harsh; she
had seen him wince and quiver under them--poor Ivor!  She would have
softened their effect with some kinder and sweeter words but for the
storm and the baleful interruption of the Anarchist, who should have
known better than to intrude at such a moment.  Now she would see him
no more; nothing could heal the wounds she had made; they would
always rankle in his memory; the acid would bite deeper and deeper,
as time went on and he plunged deeper and deeper into the mire of
which he had spoken, whence gentler words and the love he craved
might have drawn him.  And yet her words had been terribly true.
Yes, but she might have put them more gently and sweetly; she had
blundered with a bludgeon, where a silken lash or the prick of a
knife-point might have been enough.  If only the storm and the
Anarchist had kept away a few minutes, just a few precious, golden,
irretrievable minutes, longer!  But he would never have made the
renunciation she asked.  No; but if she had been kinder; if she had
let him see that she was to be won; nay, if she had even given way,
held out the hand he asked for and let him grasp it firmly, who knows
but she might gradually and with much pain and anguish have rescued
him?  Who could tell?  She might at least have given him hope.  And
even if all had been in vain, could it have been much worse than this?

She pictured him in his despair and anger, hardening day by day,
descending deeper and deeper, reckless, loveless, degraded.  She
began to hate this mad, proud reticence of women, that will only give
love for assured, declared love; what was it in comparison with a
man's salvation?  Why not have told the poor boy she loved him?  Too
late now.  It was all over; her sacrifice had been in vain.  Oh! she
should have given more.  She should have thrown herself into the
breach, her whole self and all her shrinkings and loathings, her
pride and reticence.  No; that too would have been vain; to stain
herself would never make him clean; nor could her descent ever lift
him up.

His mother, that sweet, long-suffering mother and high-souled woman,
what pain for her!  Now she would have to bear this bitter sorrow
always.  Had a true instinct and no common sense prudence warned her
that Agatha could do nothing for her prodigal, when she besought her
so earnestly to give no response to his advances?  These thoughts
warring in her heart brought her to distraction and took the last
remnants of strength from her tired body; she could hardly drag
herself ever so slowly and falteringly up the steps, with gasping
breath and throbbing pulse.

The storm had completely passed now; the divine stillness of the
mountain solitudes had returned; sound there was none, save the
distant roar of the vexed and chafing sea, whence the indigo stain
had fled, leaving it darkly and deeply blue as before, with tumbling
ridges of white foam, touched with gold.  For now the setting sun
flashed out from broken cloud, throwing rose-gold radiance across the
western bay, striking up wooded hill-spurs, bringing towers and
village walls into sudden glow, and flushing the wet, bare mountain
peaks one after another with crimson fire.

Even Agatha's sad heart was quickened as she lifted her eyes to that
glorious spectacle and saw the rose flame kindle peak after peak in
the vast sweep of engirdling mountains with vivid changing splendour.
It was as if the fire of Heaven had visibly descended upon that
temple of many altars, in token of some hidden, accepted sacrifice,
some offered incense found worthy and well-pleasing.  The splendour
glowed and deepened till every barren, craggy peak, veined with
shadow and streaked with fresh snow, was a crimson flame on a violet
sky; the deep silence was a mystic, triumphant psalm of praise to
which the solemn roar of the troubled sea was a humbler antiphon, a
more earthly response.  "The Lord sitteth above the water-flood--The
Lord is King be the people never so impatient," the far-off surges
sang, and the impatience died from her troubled heart; the poignancy
of her despair abated.  The celestial fire, changing and quivering as
with life-breath, kindled upon ridge after ridge; every village
tower, every cottage and hut glowed in the jewel-flame; the white
convent walls gleamed in pale claret and lambent gold from between
dark cypress and eucalyptus boughs; and at the top of the steps, its
welcoming arms flung wide to the world, the great wooden cross, one
blaze of rose-gold fire, proclaimed the one hope in all the wide
waste tumult of human life, the one eternal sacrifice, the Calvary
that is the only road to any Paradise.

  Ave Crux Spes Unica,

she read once more on the glowing centre of the cross.

Only a few hours since, she had prayed and implored, even knelt to,
the Jewish usurer near that very cross for Ivor--and all to no
purpose.  It had been very bitter, to humble herself to that man, to
lay bare to his contemptuous and cruel gaze that secret
heart-sanctuary a woman veils jealously even from herself.  He had
said things that brought the crimson to her face and cut her to the
very quivering heart; he had laughed and prophesied the futility of
what she implored, even though he had melted and given way with
respect, almost tenderness, at last.  What if her own sacrifice, poor
and petty, though so much to her, were vain, could that symbolized in
the plain wood steeped in glorious rose-lustre above her ever fail?

No; that could never fail, never be in vain, not wholly, not
eternally, in vain, something whispered to her stricken heart, and
she fell on her knees among the melting hailstones, and prayed with
greater passion than ever before, consumed with anguish, uplifted by
faith, quivering with love and adoration, thrilled through all her
sorrow with a deep divine sweetness; and notwithstanding the fervour
of her supplication, full of quiet acquiescence in whatsoever the
divine will should accord, even though it seemed despair.

The rosy fire died from the cross and the lower hill-crests, and
faded lingeringly from the topmost peaks, leaving wooded steep and
gorge in deep shadow, while Agatha poured out her heart on the rock
steps with tears and prayers unutterable.

And when she rose, soothed and tranquillized, and sat a moment in the
fork of the eucalyptus, looking down across the torrent and the town
to the café by the sea, where she had left Ivor an hour before, she
could not know that he had just signed the papers put before him by
the Anarchist.  Yet she turned from the darkening, murmuring sea and
faded sunset sky, and walked lightly home through the monastery
grounds in the violet afterglow, her heart full of peace.

Not that she was destined to reach home without further adventure;
for she had but crossed the level under the cypresses when a slender
figure that had been leaning on the western wall, watching the dying
glory change on mountain and sea, stood up, darkly outlined against
the lucid sky, and came forward to meet her with quick but halting
step.

"I thought I could not be mistaken," the thin man said; "I have a
keen ear for footsteps, and at once recognized yours.  But----"  He
paused, struck by the mingled fatigue and exaltation on her face,
seen clear in the after-glow.  "You are tired; you have been
worried--more than worried.  Pardon me, Miss Somers; but you are
young, you are alone and unprotected--a friend may be of service to
you, however intrusive and undesired.  Is there anything I could do
for you?  Could I knock somebody down?  I observed something this
morning--here--on this very spot--you had been annoyed--upset--a
person--I trust you had been subjected to no undesirable attention
from that unworthy quarter."

A gentle smile flitted over Agatha's face; the idea of the thin man
knocking anybody down--or even entertaining such a project--was
extremely funny.  Indeed, there was this evening something entirely
foreign to his usual self in Mr. Welbourne's voice and manner.  His
self-control was imperfect; he stammered; there was fire in his eye.

"I wonder," he added, "that the people of the house should admit that
man to a small and respectable hotel like this.  It is an outrage----"

"Mr. Mosson?  Oh, poor Mr. Mosson is not as bad as all that, Mr.
Welbourne.  Indeed, he is not without heart, after all.  And I must
confess that, far from his annoying me with his company, it was I who
trespassed upon the poor man's leisure.  I--I wanted to speak to
him--on--on a matter of business, and he was most obliging--most
accommodating----"

"Accommodating? obliging?  Good heavens!  Miss Somers, do you know
that to be accommodated by this rascally Jew spells ruin?  Once in
his toils, his victims rarely escape.  Don't you know that Mosson is
a most notorious usurer, is the too well-known Spider?  I do most
earnestly trust that he has not accommodated you to a large
amount--and as a man of the world--which naturally no lady is
expected to be--I warn you--I entreat you to allow me to be your
banker--it happens that I have a good deal of capital lying idle for
the moment--let me enable you to pay this man off at once, before the
interest has accumulated.  Give me this pleasure, I beseech you.
I--I--require a small interest--one and a half per cent.----"

"But indeed, dear Mr. Welbourne, you are quite mistaken.  I have
borrowed no money of anybody, really.  I can't say how deeply I
appreciate your kindness in offering this.  No; the poor Spider only
did me a--kindness--in the way of business; he lent me nothing at
all, I assure you.  Nor do I need money, thank you.  I thank you many
times."

"Oh!" said the thin man, amazed beyond words and disappointed as well.

"But I do," she added, seeing his bewilderment and distress, "I do
need, we all need, at all events sometimes, kindness.  And for yours
I thank you most cordially."

She offered her hand; he took it and bowed over it with such reverent
courtesy as belongs to an earlier day than this decadent time of
ours, but remained silent still, as if struggling with some deep
feeling.  And, when he again raised his head and relinquished her
hand, she saw that he was flushed and agitated, and came to the
conclusion that the poor gentleman in some far-off, foolish days of
youth had probably been ensnared by some old-time Spider, who had
drained his blood and left him to drag out a withered and blighted
life.  Hence possibly his celibate condition.

"It--it is a great relief," he said, "a very great relief," and yet
the relief he expressed was scarcely evident in his face, upon which
the utmost dejection was traced, "to hear that you owe that hard, bad
man nothing.  May such a misfortune never befall you.  And may you
never need to borrow of anyone.  Should you, however, be so
unfortunate, I trust that I may be allowed the great privilege of
accommodating you with whatever may be necessary.  I know--of
course," he added, "that I have no right--no claim--no--that is to
say--I am but a casual acquaintance, after all.  And yet--pardon my
presumption in venturing to say so--I believe that you have no truer,
no more devoted friend in the world than I am."

"You have always been kind," she replied with the unconscious cruelty
of a mind too much preoccupied to be very observant.  "Mrs. Allonby
and I have often said that you have been a father to us both from the
moment we entered the house."

Mr. Welbourne started; he turned and looked at the moaning sea,
whence the last rose-tints were dying, and then he turned and looked
at the mountain peaks, above which a trembling star hung lustrous.
"Oh!" he sighed very sadly at last; and Agatha wondered why he looked
so sad, not knowing that the last relationship the thin man desired
with her was that of a parent.

"But that is no reason why either of us should plunder you," she
added very kindly and tenderly, as they passed into the shadow of the
pines on the other side of the monastery.

"I suppose," he rejoined meekly, "that I seem quite--old in your
young eyes."

"Oh no!" she assured him earnestly, observing, as she took the hand
with which he was helping her over the same twisted roots that had
afforded Mr. Mosson an opportunity of civility in the morning, that
it trembled, and fearing she had hurt his feelings, "I don't think
you old at all, dear Mr. Welbourne.  In these days people don't even
begin to be old till seventy."

"I am not yet seventy," murmured the thin man, handing her down the
last steep little ledge in the dusk, with a mixture of resignation
and despair.

"I should think not, indeed," she returned reassuringly, "but I
hope," she added in a burst of generous feeling, "that you soon will
be."

"Good Heavens!" ejaculated the poor man, "soon be seventy!"

"I mean," she hastily corrected, "I hope you will live to a good old
age--full of honours--with troops of friends----"  Oh, Heaven! the
kindly patronage in her voice, the gracious condescension of youth to
age, the total absence of any feeling but that of cold respect and
half pitiful gratitude!--"And that I may have a place among those
many friends," she added, regretting to have expressed herself
clumsily; she was tired; had had a day of worries, was stupid.

"I ought not to bore you with my prosy affairs and blundering
surmises," he confessed.  And yet, owing either to the malice of some
demon, or that madness which comes to those the gods menace with
ruin, before they reached the lighted hall full of people, he had
made her acquainted with his true age--at which she expressed
untimely and unthinking surprise--and the whole state of his worldly
affairs, not forgetting the temporary nature and cause of his
lameness, and his position in life, besides asking her to honour him
by the acceptance of a bunch of carnations, which she did with
matter-of-fact calm, hardly remembering a hasty "Thank you" when she
left him on the stairs.

So the thoughts he confided to the piano in the dusk before dinner
that evening were in plaintive minor keys and chords of dissonant
intervals slowly resolved.

Ermengarde, who had stolen noiselessly in to listen unseen, was much
soothed by this music; she was sure that the thin man was telling the
piano of the lost dreams and broken hopes of his youth in those
subdued minor melodies and daring, harmonic progressions, till the
fair Dorris, flouncing in, loudly pronounced them "Shopping
reminiscences," and so broke the charm.

The tale of woe Mrs. Allonby confided to the thin man's paternal ear
after dinner evoked tepid sympathy; indeed, it struck her that her
filial confidences were but half understood, and that the interest
displayed in her affairs was spasmodic and forced.  There was clearly
something wrong with Mr. Welbourne; had he been losing at the tables,
or was it impending gout?  Her father was just like that before a fit
of gout.

The poor man disappeared early into the solitude of his room, and
after pacing the parquet dejectedly for some time, turned on a full
light, stood before a mirror, and studied the lines in his face and
the grey streaks in his hair.  Then he called himself a fool seven
times, at uncertain intervals, and finished a drawing he was making
of a woman's face.




Chapter XIX

An Act of Justice

No trace of storm remained next morning; it was, on the contrary, a
day of brilliant and cloudless calm, a lotus-eating day, made for
basking in sunshine and rejoicing only to be alive.

But Miss Boundrish was not content with merely being alive, she
wished to be very comfortable as well; and to that end selected the
pleasantest spot in the grounds, outside that same shelter of
rye-straw whence Ermengarde had overheard scraps of conversation
between two strangers on her first day there.  Miss Dorris was quite
aware of the acoustic properties of the place, whence she had on many
occasions derived entertainment and information that she was not
unwilling to impart.  This little plateau, which was reached by a
flight of marble steps, was not always well supplied with seats; on
the present occasion, besides some iron chairs only fit to do penance
in, there were only two very cosy cushioned wicker arm-chairs with
deep low seats to be had.  These the young lady arranged along the
edge of the little platform immediately over the mule-path, and,
sitting in one, put up her feet cosily on the other in such a way
that she appropriated nearly the whole front, commanding the fair and
extensive prospect seaward and across the mountain gorges.  Thus
extended at full length, holding up a huge white sunshade, she made
an interesting foreground etched upon the purple bloom of distance,
and considerately blotted out most of the sunshine and nearly all the
view from the shelter.  Provided with a novel, a packet of letters, a
box of chocolates and the prospect of revelations of human character
from people passing on the mule-path, she felt herself securely
fortified against attacks of dulness, and surrendered herself with a
gentle sigh to the voluptuous charm of a long morning of _dolce far
niente_.

She had not long enjoyed the amenities of this position, when her
solitude was invaded by the sound of a slow and dragging step
accompanied by faint gasps, and turning with a slight frown on her
velvet brow, she perceived the figure of an elderly invalid emerging
slowly from under the olive-boughs shading the steps.  Encumbered
with shawls, cushions, and writing and working materials, this poor
lady made slow and panting progress, and was obliged to rest a minute
on the wooden seat surrounding the olive-trunk; and upon perceiving a
youthful form stretched on chairs along the foreground, of the aerial
prospect before her, she was not without hope that the graceful
figure in full bloom of health would get up and help her.  In this
she was disappointed, since the face of the fair damsel in question,
after the first frowning glance, continued to be bent in studious
absorption upon her book, as if undisturbed by or unaware of her
presence.  Observing this, the new-comer, in the habit of occupying
one of the chairs now supporting the fairy figure, for whole mornings
together, her infirmities not permitting her to walk or be carried in
the ambulant arm-chairs known to common minds as donkeys, and
supposing her approach to have been both unseen and unheard, rose,
and gathering up her burdens, dragged herself across the platform to
Dorris, with some friendly words.

At this the fair student raised her eyes languidly to the frail and
bent figure standing at her side, and, having favoured her with a
cool and contemptuous stare, observed in a patronizing tone that the
morning was warm, and went back to her work without another word, to
the poor lady's speechless amazement.  A passing thought of asking
her young friend if she could spare one of the easy-chairs and take a
plain one for her feet was abandoned in sudden indignation at this
heartless piece of impudence, and, being unable to accommodate
herself to the hard iron bars and high seats of the straight chairs
without actual pain, and seeing no one near to fetch her a less
penitential seat, the invalid was obliged to beat a retreat with as
little loss of dignity as possible, resting once more under the olive
on her way, and then very slowly climbing down the marble steps.

There she met M. Isidore, fury firing his eyes and bristling his
moustache, but gentleness in his voice when he spoke to her,
relieving her of her encumbrances and giving her an arm to a less
desirable shelter in the sun, where he surrounded her with every
available comfort.

"I go now," he said with a very sweet smile, before vanishing, "to
settle the other lady.  She will have some fun, that one."

With this he sped across the grounds in all directions and thence
into the house, whispering a word of power into the ears of those he
met, and then sped back to the rear of the rye-straw shelter, where
he had been sorting seeds, while the invalid, lulled by the warmth
and beauty, and occupied with her needle, soon forgot her annoyance,
and commented to a neighbouring lotus-eater on the pleasantness of
that young man's manner, and the great addition he made to the charm
and convenience of the house.  "And I don't believe a word of what
they say about him," she added indignantly; "he's just as nice to the
old ladies as to the young ones--and a great deal nicer, too."

Meanwhile, the fair Dorris, munching chocolates, and nestling in her
two easy-chairs, grew drowsy with warmth and comfort; her novel
slipped from her fingers and her eyes closed; her flower-like head
drooped on the slender stalk, her neck; she would soon have been in
the land of dreams but for the sound of a cheery whistle on the
mule-path, at which her blue eyes opened wide, and she started up,
alert and listening, under her huge sunshade.  Only a careless
whistling of that catchy tune played at the Carnival.  It broke off
in the middle, but soon began again in a cheery tenor, brokenly
still, and she recognized the voice of young Trevor, the Oxonian,
staying in these parts to recover from something, whether from too
much work, or too much play, was not clearly understood.

"No," she heard him say, in intervals of switching a juniper-bush on
the brink with his stick, "I can't say I admire that black-a-vized
style.  I like 'em fresh and fair, curds and cream mixed with
roses--like Miss Boundrish--_she's_ a ripper and no mistake."

A sweet smile illumined the curds and cream features of the ripper at
this; she looked pensively at her hands, and wondered at the round
whiteness of her wrists, and thought regretfully of the loveliness of
her present pose, wasted upon empty air, and held her breath to
listen and sniff more incense.

A female voice with an American accent rebuked the youth for levity
in commenting upon feminine beauty in the concrete; he was told that
he should confine his observations to the abstract.

"Well, but you can't say she isn't ripping," he remonstrated, "and
why on earth shouldn't you mention a girl's name among her friends?
You wouldn't discuss her in public, and you couldn't tell it to her
face; but I bet anything she wouldn't mind the way I spoke of her, if
she could only hear it."

Something unintelligible followed in a low voice, that Dorris
recognized as the thin man's, and a light gush of laughter ensued.

"Well, and whose character is being thrown to the lions now?  Oh,
don't tell me, I know from the sound of that laugh that scandal's
about.  Is it poor me?" cried the cheerful voice of Mrs. Allonby at
this juncture.  She was rather breathless, as if she had just climbed
up from somewhere.

"You scented the battle from afar, Mrs. Allonby.  Well, you shall
have your share of the spoil," said the Oxonian.  "Here's a nice soft
stone for a seat.  It's only the beauty of Miss Boundrish that's on
toast.  I say she's ripping, and they say I'm rude to say it."

"I think her perfectly lovely.  Those coral lips, that velvet
brow----"

"Ah, you're charring now, Mrs. Allonby----"

"No, I really do admire the girl's face immensely if only----"

"Ah!" interjected the thin man piously, "that fatal 'if,' that always
qualifies the admiration of ladies for each other!"

"Well, anyhow I guess it's a pretty big if this time, ain't it, Mrs.
Allonby?" Mrs. Dinwiddie asked.

"Beasts," reflected the fair being above them.  "Of course, all the
men are for me and all the women against!"

"I was only about to regret," Ermengarde replied meekly, "that
manners in that quarter scarcely match the beauty of the face."

"Manners?" cried the thin man enigmatically.  "Ah, if you want
manners!"

"Oh! manners," echoed the boy, "that's another matter.  I was talking
of beauty, and if that girl isn't a clinker----"

"'Manners makyth man,' as I trust all Wykehamists know----"

"Well, now, Mr. Welbourne, if manners makyth woman too," Mrs.
Dinwiddie put in, "I judge that poor Boundrish gell wants making
some.  The way she'll take the only comfortable chairs."

"I'll poor-Boundrish-girl her as soon as I get the chance!" reflected
the fair object of the discussion, her eyes winking with wrath.

"My dear lady," expostulated the boy, "we were speaking of beauty.
You, who come from the country _par excellence_ of fair women, can
you, even in comparison with your peerless countrywomen, deny that
Miss Boundrish is a clinker?"

"Ah!" sighed poor Dorris, "I always thought Bertie Trevor as nice as
they make them."

"Land's sake, Mr. Trevor, she clinks fast enough; she goes solid for
beauty, if that's what you mean, and I guess she'd go for me if I
darst deny it.  But what, did Solomon say, is a beautiful woman
without discretion?"

"Surely his was a somewhat jaundiced view of the sex, Mrs.
Dinwiddie----"

"Anyhow, 'twas pretty extensive.  He'd ought to know 'em if anybody
did.  He'd sampled 'em pretty well all round.  King Solomon's
reckoned about the most married man in history."

"But _is_ the poor girl wanting in discretion?" asked Ermengarde's
most dulcet tones.

"Not," replied Agatha, who had silently stolen into the circle, "if
it is discreet to shout exaggerated scandal in public places"--in
some occult way Agatha knew of Dorris's misadventure at Turbia--"or
to make mischief between friends and breed dissension in families, by
the most odious misrepresentations and insinuations.  Not if it is
discreet to catch up half a misunderstood tale and repeat it with a
twist--

"I say, Miss Somers, hadn't you better hold up.  The lady might be
coming round the corner," remonstrated Bertie in an anxious voice.

"She can't.  She's gone to Nice to see her aunt.  So she told me at
breakfast----"

"Gone to Nice!" came in a chorus of irrepressible ecstasy.  "If she
would only _stay_ at Nice."

"Too good to be true!" complained a male voice, that Dorris
conjectured to be that of a certain Major Norris, whom she had more
than once publicly appropriated as lawful spoil of her charms, and
inveigled into winding and solitary walks alone with her.

"Couldn't somebody persuade her that Nice is the only spot on earth
for the complexion?" asked one.

"She'd swallow any rot.  That story of the frogs--feeding the
conscripts with frogs to give them courage!  Too bad to stuff her
like that," said another.

"Surely you must acknowledge that the presence of our young friend at
least makes for mirth at table," reproved the thin man's plaintive
tones.

"You hypocritical old owl, you!" muttered Dorris, clenching her small
fists and twisting them as if a gentle fancy had involved them in Mr.
Welbourne's hair, which was artistically grown.

"Say," cried Mrs. Dinwiddie with sudden inspiration, "what was M.
Isidore's _mot_ on the Boundrish gell?"

"Ah!  M. Isidore's _mot_," echoed Ermengarde, "how did it run?"

"To be sure, M. Isidore's _mot_," went from mouth to mouth, ending in
a general shout of laughter and ejaculations of ecstasy; but what the
_mot_ was poor Dorris never heard, for the simple and sufficient
reason that M. Isidore was entirely innocent of having so much as
imagined one, and was at that moment bending over the rose-covered
rail above the path, with gesticulations expressive of mingled
delight and resentment at the liberty taken with his name, to the
great joy of Bertie Trevor, who made gestures of defiance at him in
return.  At this, M. Isidore, shaking his head as if in despair of
the group below, turned his attention to Dorris--whom he could see
through a chink in the rye-straw partition, and whose reception of
public incense he had watched with tender, if spasmodic, interest
from time to time--and was rewarded by perceiving symptoms of severe
internal perturbation in the fair lady's demeanour.

The good-hearted little man had substantial and most bitter cause to
dislike Dorris and all her ways; few things would have given him
greater satisfaction than her instant and final disappearance from
Les Oliviers, from France, from any and every place in which he might
henceforth walk all his life long; but he had a heart and a soft one;
he had also a French tenderness for the smaller woes of women, and
what he saw through the chink smote him with such compunction that he
left his seeds, leapt lightly down from the platform and ran round to
the path, where the group of traducers were loitering, holding out
his hands in appeal.

"Mais, mais, mesdames, messieurs! c'est un peu fort!" he cried; "does
one talk so of ladies?"

"We were only admiring the dear girl's little ways," Ermengarde
explained, "and her beauty."

"I do love her little way of listening to people talking among
themselves, and picking their brains and passing their things off as
her own," Major Norris said.  "And that of patronizing her betters
and flatly contradicting people on subjects she hasn't had the chance
of understanding--even if she had the brains."

"The way she explained to me how we run elections in the States,"
added Mrs. Dinwiddie's husband, a humble, unconsidered dependent,
occasionally found handy to fetch and carry for his liege lady.
"She'd just as soon tell the Almighty the way to run the Universe,
you bet----"

"But that charming laugh, Mr. Dinwiddie, surely that atones for
much," murmured Lady Seaton, arriving from the convent to the
Carnival tune that Bertie Trevor was whistling, as he had done at
intervals during the whole interview, to the deep disgust and
irritation of Dorris, who was more impatient than most people of
tiresome tricks like humming and whistling--tricks she arrogated to
herself as the peculiar privilege of one too lovely and attractive
not to be always sure to please whatever she did.  Dorris was, of
course, not aware that whenever anyone came down the path or up the
path or from the convent steep, Bertie, standing out on a little jut
of rock, looking idly about, instantly began that Carnival tune,
unless it was a stranger.  In that case he whistled the Marseillaise
and the talk paused.

"O Lord, that everlasting gurgle," growled the Major; "it's all over
the place from morning till night.  What the dickens does she do it
for?"

Dorris's fists clenched themselves; she remembered bare-faced
admiration of that charming laugh, and other tributes to her
fascination, bold almost to impudence not a week old, from this false
man.

"Well," replied Mrs. Dinwiddie, "I judge the poor gell can't so much
as go to sleep without acting.  She's just made up of affectations
right through, top skirt and lining, inside and out.  I should be
surprised if her mother _didn't_ get headache and her father the
hump."

"I don't care," Bertie began doggedly, "if she has got the voice of a
screech-owl----"

"Oh, come now, Mr. Trevor, her voice is well enough, poor girl, if
she wouldn't always yell at the top of it."

"Beauty is beauty, however soulless," he continued stolidly.  "And if
she does strut like a peacock----"

"Et tu, Bertie!" the poor peacock sighed metaphorically.

"--She's got the peacock's justification.  Her hair is perfectly
stunning."

"So is her voice," muttered the Major.

"Assez, assez! cette pauvre demoiselle," M. Isidore remonstrated, as
he had continued to do at intervals.

"And she can't help it," added the chivalrous Bertie.

"Very true," returned Mr. Welbourne, solemnly misunderstanding him.
"Our young friend should not be judged harshly for what is misfortune
rather than fault.  What is to be expected of an ignorant and
entirely brainless girl, vain and thoughtless, who has evidently
never been in any decent society?  She is too young and too
inexperienced to be aware of her own defects, to which her kind and
indulgent parents are affectionately blind----"

"I've seen her momma squirm at her antics more than once," Mrs.
Dinwiddie put in.

"If some kind and judicious friend could but tell her----"

"But who'll bell the cat?  Nobody wants to be clawed."

"--She would doubtless correct herself--she is young."

"Not she; she's a heartless little cat.  So spiteful," cried a female
voice.

"If somebody would only lock her up while she's correcting herself,"
sighed Ermengarde, eliciting variously expressed but unanimous
agreement in her suggestion.

In the meantime M. Isidore had stolen one more glance at the victim
on the block, discovering the mournful spectacle of Dorris on her
knees between the two nefariously appropriated chairs, her arms on
the seat of one, her face in her hands, trying to stifle bitter sobs.

Her position was truly unfortunate.  A comfortable matron had
appropriated a seat at the foot of the steps, and was tranquilly
perusing a paper through the glasses she held, occasionally looking
up and expressing mild wonder to a daughter a little way off at the
continuous talk and merriment going on outside on the path--this lady
even audibly entertained the idea of going out to see for herself
what was forward--and, besides not being able to leave her now
distasteful eminence without passing her, poor Dorris feared she
would come up to her, little knowing that the good lady was purposely
stationed there to cut off her retreat and ensure her sufficient
castigation.

The sight was more than the kind-hearted little Frenchman could bear.
Once more he sprang down and ran into the midst of the gossipers,
whispering to one after the other, "Mais elle pleure, elle pleure à
chaudes larmes."

"After all," commented the thin man with unconscious cruelty, in the
sudden silence that followed these words: "vulgarity is not vice.  It
is involuntary and unconscious."

That was the last, worst stripe of all, that and M. Isidore's
knowledge and compassionate betrayal of her sufferings.  "Vulgarity."
The word blistered her ears; she caught up a scarf, threw it over her
face, and fled down the marble steps, past the comfortable matron,
nearly upsetting her, and through the grounds, dashing in her wild
career against some one, she neither knew nor cared whom.

Mr. Welbourne himself felt the vitriol of his ill-considered speech
the moment it was spoken, but knew it to be past mending, and groaned
audibly, while every member of the group, with the exception of Major
Norris, who was a disciplinarian and a thoroughly good hater when
once he began, was more or less visited by compunction.

"After all, it was beastly mean of us," Bertie Trevor said, turning
away with a sullen face, when the flight of the victim was known.

"'Twas the way she acted to the lame lady set up my back," Mrs.
Dinwiddie confessed.

"And quite right too," the Major rejoined; "the girl was a positive
pest to everybody in the house."

"But at least," came in French, in a deep contralto voice from the
spot whence the sufferer had fled, causing every eye to be raised to
that eminence, to perceive the majestic figure of Madame Bontemps, a
large cauliflower tucked under each arm, an apron full of
fresh-gathered lemons and oranges, and a sharp bright knife
threateningly flourished in her hand.  "At least, this demoiselle was
not chased from the house for inveigling the fiancé and breaking the
heart of an innocent young girl."

Having thus spoken, Madame turned and receded majestically from
sight, leaving the conspirators petrified with amazement.

"What on earth is she driving at?" asked Ermengarde, looking straight
at M. Isidore, a sudden flood of enlightenment rushing in crimson
over her face and throat even as she spoke, and leaving her
death-pale and trembling.

M. Isidore's face, from which she quickly withdrew her gaze, was
marble in its rigid impenetrability.  He made no reply, beyond a
faint shrug of ignorance, but turned and offered some slight service
to the lady standing next him.  Then the group, which had been
shifting the whole time, soon melted quietly away, each member with a
feeling of having done an indifferent morning's work in this
long-threatened and carefully planned conspiracy of rough justice.

That morning's _déjeuner_ was singularly devoid of gaiety.  The
conspirators looked guiltily at poor Dorris's empty place.  Those of
her father and mother were expected to be empty, else the execution
could not have taken place.  The lame lady innocently wondered what
had become of Miss Boundrish, and mentioned having seen her in the
grounds that morning.  Even Major Norris enjoyed the absence of the
strident voice and gurgling laugh less than he expected, and found
fault with the weather, which was perfect, and the salad, which was
not, characterizing both as rotten.  The thin man, openly but
dejectedly, laid a bunch of roses by the woman of mystery's plate,
and observed plaintively to Ermengarde more than once upon the
undesirability of lynch law, and the mistaken estimate by average
Britons of the salutary effect of ragging on immature character.

"It is often unjust," he said, "and always goes too far.  Though I
don't know what we should have done at Winchester without it--even
without the injustice and occasional savagery.  Yes, Mrs. Allonby,
the savagery.  But that, I hear, is now very rare.  You need not
shrink from sending your boy to Winchester.  It will make a man of
him; though he will be let down very gently to what we were."

It was during this discourse that Ermengarde discovered what she had
been too much preoccupied while assisting at the execution of Miss
Boundrish to think out before, though all the time she had been
conscious of a subtle change in the thin man's appearance--a change
so great that every one who saw him that morning was so much struck
by it as to look twice, even three times at him--his beard was gone.
Now why, she pondered, had Mr. Welbourne's beard taken sudden flight?
Had he foreboded a personal encounter with Miss Boundrish, and
thought it well to give as little hold to her vengeance as possible?

"Ah!" she said, suddenly divining another cause, "I see that you are
no longer afraid of sore throat, Mr. Welbourne.  That is good.
First, because it means that your health is restored, secondly,
because it is a portent of spring."

"Sore throat?" he murmured, bewildered.  "The Riviera throat only
comes in the first weeks.  But----" his hand suddenly went up to the
newly reaped chin, when crimson of the deepest dye suffused and
betrayed him.  "Quite so," he added vaguely--"yes; it--it was a
protection--oh!--the _mistral_--ah--invalid ways--indolence----"

"I congratulate you on all counts," she said in a kind voice,
wondering who was the object of Mr. Welbourne's passion, a sudden
paralyzing fear suggesting herself.  But no; that would be too
terrible; M. Isidore, the Anarchist and the thin man, in those few,
short weeks--Fate could hardly be so cruel as all that!  And at his
age!  But he looked horribly young without the beard, and there was a
certain gallant and knightly suggestion in the elegantly trimmed
moustache left.  There was no doubt that the thin man--no longer so
thin and not at all so lame--was going forth in that moustache,
conquering and to conquer.  He had been heard to condemn the present
clean-shaven mode as womanish.  She had perhaps been too filial, too
confiding with him, under the shadow of that venerable beard, and he
had mistaken her.  Then her eyes fell on the roses by Agatha's plate;
she remembered that those two had often been elaborately unconscious
of each other's presence lately; she remembered a long succession of
gentle judgments on the woman of mystery's vagaries, and many
delicate allusions to her beauty and charm, and in a flash she knew.
Poor Mr. Welbourne!  This was indeed tragedy.

After a sketchy and unsatisfactory _déjeuner_, during which appetite
and peace were alike annihilated by that dread pronouncement of
Madame Bontemps "inveigling the fiancé and breaking the heart of an
innocent young girl," ringing through her brain, Ermengarde,
renouncing her intention of looking for quarters in Mentone, and
thinking that San Remo would now be the nearest place in which she
could venture to hide her diminished head and reflect upon the
spitefulness of perverse fate, fled upstairs to her room to take
counsel of solitude.

But in this she was balked before reaching her sanctuary by the
encounter of Mrs. Boundrish, round-eyed and in very unfinished
toilet, hurrying along the corridor in the greatest perturbation.

"Oh dear, Mrs. Allonby!" she cried in agitated _accellerando_ that
admitted of no stops, "what _shall_ I do?  Dorris is in _such_ a
state.  I can't make anything of her.  She was never taken like this
before and this dreadful spotted fever about nobody knows how it
begins but of course their poor brains and foreign doctors and
chiefly the young and they go off so soon and so infectious and
Boundrish at Nice oh dear!  She won't speak."

"But _is_ she spotted?" Ermengarde asked solemnly.

"She won't say; she won't speak," the poor woman sobbed, and Agatha,
arriving then, bore her back to her room, while Ermengarde, hastily
upsetting eau-de-Cologne in every direction, and holding a
handkerchief soaked in it to her face to keep off infection, stole
into the chamber of the unfortunate Dorris, trying to remember when
and where and how the spots characterizing this terrible disease were
to be expected.

Dorris had flung herself face downwards on her bed, and was sobbing
faintly; the room was in great disorder, drawers open and clothing
tossed recklessly about.  Some scraps of torn paper, an open
blotting-book, and pens and ink on the table, pointed to the writing
and tearing up of letters.

At the sound of Ermengarde's cautious entrance the poor girl turned
quickly, showing a tear-washed, wild-eyed and miserable, but quite
spotless, face.

"Go away, go away!  Oh, why can't I die?" she cried wildly, turning
back to her original posture, while Ermengarde, carefully keeping the
handkerchief to her face, felt her pulse and touched her brow softly,
and asked where the pain was and what was the matter.

"And you can ask?" she moaned, "when you were there, and as bad as
any of them.  Somebody might have told me--privately--I didn't know.
They all hate and despise me.  I can never--never--nev-nev--never----"

"Dear Miss Boundrish, I _am_ so sorry," cried Ermengarde, suddenly
dropping her handkerchief, her terrors, and her precautions, and
putting a caressing arm round the sobbing figure on the bed.  "We
didn't mean it--at least, not more than a quarter of it.  It was more
than half in joke.  And if you hadn't been rude to poor Mrs.
Lamb--that put us up--and then we were carried away--forgot
ourselves--everybody went one better than everybody else--you know
how it is in a game like that.  Think no more about it."

"But you do-do-do-don't--think me quite--such
a--bib-bib-bibby--beast?"

"Certainly not," firmly and decisively.

"A scrik-scrik-screech-owl?" she sobbed; "a bun-bun-bun-bundle of
aff-fec-fec-fectation?  So-so-so-soulless----"

"Not in the least, dear child.  It was all put on--at least, half
was--just our fun.  We knew you were a spoilt child, and wanted to
give you a lesson, that was all.  You are very young, my dear."

Then poor Dorris, touched more by the voice than the words, threw
herself into Ermengarde's arms, confessed some of her sins, and
acknowledged herself--after consenting to a cup of tea, made on the
spot and administered by Ermengarde, and much petting, rose-water and
eau-de-Cologne--a sadder, a humbler, and a wiser girl.

But her place at table knew her no more, and the familiar gurgle and
strident voice never again troubled the air of Les Oliviers.  A few
days later her parents followed her to Cannes; Dorris, they said,
required younger and gayer society.




Chapter XX

The Necklace Again

"After all," Ivor said, as he walked with the Anarchist through the
gardens of the Casino, now sleeping with doubled magic under a starry
sky, "this isn't such a beastly hole.  I've had a ripping time
altogether."

De Konski looked at the bright-eyed, smiling face in amazed
curiosity, touched with pity.  He thought the look directed towards
the lighted Casino somewhat wistful, and reflected that only an hour
or two and the sumptuous farewell dinner they had just had at Giro's
together divided this light-hearted youth from the despairing and
perverse prodigal of the afternoon.  The storm that had rushed up in
a moment in indigo shadow from behind Bordighera had not passed more
quickly than this young man's anguish and inward conflict.

"Thanks to you, I've come through this rotten business without a
scratch," the laughing lips added.  "If only----"

"If only?" echoed the Anarchist.  "Ah! well for you that your word is
given.  Nothing short of that would keep you straight--off that rock."

"Oh, that's all right, thanks to you."

"And to no one else, Ivor?  That was a long talk in the gardens this
afternoon."

"Oh well, we had been teaing at Rumpelmayer's with that pretty little
Mrs. Allonby--awfully jolly little woman--"

"Eh? what?" growled the Anarchist, an angry flame in his eye.

"--She's in an awful hole, that little woman.  Turned out of her
hotel, and can't find fresh quarters anywhere.  I was recommending
Villa Gilardoni."

"What do you mean by turned out?" cried the Anarchist savagely.

"The poor little woman took it very pluckily--she told it as a
ripping joke.  She doesn't suspect your Turbia friend's tongue may
have had a hand in it"--an inarticulate snarl broke from the
Anarchist--"the hotel people simply told her to clear out, bag and
baggage.  She's been to every blessed hotel in Mentone this
afternoon, and found them all crammed full----"

"Ah!  And you were discussing that lady's affairs with Miss Somers in
the gardens?"

"I was showing Miss Somers the way to the Villa.  I say, what the
deuce is the matter, de Konski?"

"Nothing, nothing.  Except that I must be off or lose the last lift.
Goodnight.  If only--remember."

But there was another and very different _if_ to what the Anarchist
suspected in the young man's heart.  If Agatha had only stooped to
pick him up!  Her cruelty spoilt all.  He had certainly asked much of
her, he acknowledged to himself, but less would have been nothing,
for love, he told himself, gives all or nothing.  While the
countess----

On reaching his hotel he found a letter from his mother, and read it
more than once.  What there was in that letter more than in countless
others she had written, he could not say; it was tender and warm and
intimate with a sort of gay comradeship infrequent in maternal
letters--but so were all her letters.  Still, in this he found
something that brought the water to his eyes, and the old childish
confidence and comfort to his heart, and made him very glad and
thankful to have signed that paper in the afternoon.  There was a
little folded slip from a sister inside the envelope.  "So glad you
are coming home," it said; "mother is counting the days.  She is not
quite herself lately, and seems to be fretting for you."

After all, there is no love like a mother's, especially when life is
hard and hearts are wounded and sore.

The poor countess's image had already grown dim and indistinct; it
seemed ages since that morning's scene; the fumes of that
intoxication had almost evaporated; the evil enchantment nearly
faded.  He wondered at having been so much moved by that passionate,
self-abnegating devotion, when a vague memory of it flitted across
his mind, with a pity that was more akin to contempt than love.  Of
course Agatha had been right in reminding him of his mother's
objection to his choice of herself; but equally of course, had she
cared for him, all that would have been thrown to the winds.
People's relations--especially mothers--always make a point of
objecting to and hindering the course of true love, while lovers
always make a point of overriding all such hindrances and defying all
such objections--it was an accepted part of the game, absolutely
orthodox.

Flinging things into suit-cases and kit-bags next morning, he
remembered that he had no little keepsake to take home to the mother,
and ran out to ransack the shops crammed with glittering inutilities
for something to please her.  Under present impecunious
circumstances, this could only be done by going home second-class,
and Monte Carlo shops scarcely lend themselves to modest gifts;
customers in that City of Dis are expected to reckon in golden
four-louis pieces.  It was a bewildering and irritating thing to a
hurried man to review those windows, ablaze with diamonds and glowing
with rubies, piled with rich-scented russia leathers, clasped and
bound and fitted with gold and silver inconveniences of every
description, or run the eye over daintily carved ivories, costly
bric-à-brac, gorgeous apparel, and priceless lace, in search of
something at once exquisite, suitable, and inexpensive.

He was consigning the total merchandise of Monte Carlo to perdition,
in a last and frantically hopeless marshalling of a jeweller's
window, when his eye was caught by a necklace of costly gems and
beautiful workmanship, at which he gazed in open-mouthed amazement
for some seconds.  The design, unusual and unmistakable, the
jewels--sapphires set with diamonds--all were familiar and
recognizable at a glance.  It was an exact duplicate of the Somers
sapphires, the necklace inherited by Agatha, and constituting her
chief fortune, of the value of some thousands of pounds--the necklace
she had often been counselled by outsiders to sell, but never by the
family--and had always consistently refused to part with.  She had
worn that necklace at his coming-of-age dance, the day on which he
had definitely recognized the nature of his feelings for her.  It was
spoken of in the family as her dowry.  There it lay, sparkling and
quivering in the clear morning sunlight, among stars, tiaras,
collars, and _rivières_ of diamonds, and ornaments set with every
known jewel.  It shone out with a distinction all its own from these
splendid and costly things, an exact counterpart of Agatha's
necklace, here for sale, in this very Monte Carlo shop before his
dazed eyes; the gems, winking and sparkling with many colours, seemed
alive and beckoning to him, burdened with secrets they longed to
tell.  In a moment he was in the shop, stammering in unintelligible
French, and pointing to the necklace.

"Oui, oui, M'sieur; the sapphires are exceptionally fine and the
diamonds of good water," the lady at the counter acknowledged; "the
value being so great we are willing to take much less than they are
worth.  Yes; it is fresh in the window this morning.  Second-hand?
But naturally; the workmanship, very fine and of exquisite art, is
long out of date.  Such things are no longer made.  It is absolutely
unique."

"It came from England?" he asked in his native tongue.  "It must have
come from England.  It is known; it has a history.  There is but one
necklace like that, and I've known it all my life."

"On the contrary," said the proprietor, stepping across from the
other side of the shop, and desirous of showing his undoubted right
to it, "the necklace was sold to me only yesterday by M. Mosson, the
well-known M. Mosson, with whom we frequently have dealings of this
kind.  Sometimes we sell them on commission, sometimes we buy them
outright.  But M. Mosson is careful in the extreme.  He takes nothing
of which the proprietorship is doubtful.  The history of this
beautiful and unique specimen of jeweller's art is well-known to him.
But Monsieur is suffering?  A glass of water?  Cognac?"

Ivor, white and dizzy, had dropped into an armchair in the middle of
the shop, and was staring stupidly before him, trying to piece the
thing out in his mind, and realize what it meant, while the jeweller,
who had paid a sum down, instead of selling on commission this time,
was a little anxious lest the astute Mosson should have made a
mistake.  He remembered that the sum the usurer had taken was known
by both of them to be far under the real value, and that he had
seemed anxious to have the money without delay.  It was unlike that
benefactor of his species to betray anxiety on any subject.

"Has Mosson come back?" Ivor gasped presently, "or is he still at
that place up in the mountains?" and learnt in reply that Mr. Mosson
had so far refreshed himself by his stay in that sequestered region
that he had returned to his well-known villa hard by, upon hearing
which Ivor at once rushed from the shop and hurried in the direction
of the villa, to the disquietude of the jeweller, who repaired
without loss of time to a private room to discuss the matter with
Madame.

"What, again?" the philanthropist asked with a cynical smile, when
his young client burst in upon his pious reflections and
calculations; "and accounts closed only yesterday?  Now this is most
unfortunate--because I am not in a position to accommodate you at
present, M. Paul."

"The necklace," the boy gasped, "the necklace?"

"H'm?"

"Where did you get that sapphire and diamond necklace that you sold
to M. Strozzi yesterday?"

"That, my young friend, is entirely my affair."

"Look here, Mosson, somebody, some friend of mine, yesterday, wiped
off what I owed you to the last penny."

"Quite so.  An unknown friend--on conditions.  Now that is done.
Good morning.  Au revoir, I must not say."

"That friend was the owner of the necklace."

"If you say so, I must believe it."

"You can't deny that she was.  Besides, there can't be a
duplicate--that's beyond a coincidence."

"If Monsieur is so well informed on a subject that I confess has
little interest for me, why waste valuable time in vain
interrogations?  For the rest, with regard to the debt and
conditions, the transaction was confidential, the person who
negotiated it having ensured my silence upon the matter.  So once
more, M. Paul, I wish you good day, and better luck at the game of
life than you have had of late at roulette."

Ivor looked steadily at the sharp features and cold glittering eyes,
not unconscious of the cynical tolerant contempt expressed in the
thin, tight-drawn lips, and was quite sure.

Perhaps, after all, he was having better luck at the game of life
than he had hoped or deserved; perhaps, after all, she had picked him
out of the gutter, though she would not risk the slightest splash on
her own white raiment to save him.  Perhaps.  His head went round
dizzily as he walked blindly from the usurer's house, trying to
realize what this meant for both of them.  She had set him free; had
already done it yesterday, when she had seemed so hard and pitiless,
and upbraided him so hotly and sternly; she had set him free at the
sacrifice of her one earthly treasure, her little fortune, at the
cost of who knows what repulsion and disgust in dealing with the
notorious Spider.  _Could_ she have approached the man personally?
Yet how else could she have effected this?  She had loved those
jewels; they had meant so much for her; their history, their
associations, the tradition of good fortune they brought to their
owner--all had been discussed and laughed over and made a handle for
teasing, many and many a time, from the days when they were children
at play.  Then a cold shiver went through him at the sudden thought
that she was herself in straits--working for money--she might have
pledged them for her own needs.  But they had not been pledged,
unless to Mosson.  Yes, that might be; Mosson was such a beast, they
being pledged to him and unredeemed, he might have realized his debt
upon them.  Again, no--what need could she possibly have of such a
sum of money as that?  Oh no, there could be no doubt, none whatever.
The necklace had been sold for _him_.  De Konski knew; but there was
no time to get at him.  He sat on a bench under a palm, with his face
in his hands, staring into the clear brook that rippled among
water-lilies and maidenhair over an artificial rock-bed, and thought.

Hard work this thinking to the poor, light-hearted lad.  He had
thought more in the last few days than ever in his life before, and
it had taken the rounded outlines of youth from his face, deepened
his eyes, made shadows under them, and given firmness to a too facile
mouth.  What a beast he had been yesterday in the gardens when the
storm was coming up over Bordighera; no wonder she had been repelled;
no wonder such selfish madness had been flouted and condemned.  He
seemed to be waking out of a long, fantastic dream or some wild,
prolonged delirium to a sober, sane view of life.  Tears came into
his eyes, and dropped slowly on the gravel between his feet.  A
memory of the countess yesterday, with glowing eyes and thrilling
voice, made him shiver; the thought of her beauty gave him a
sensation of physical nausea.  But yesterday, as yesterdays sometimes
are, was long and long ago.  And here he was, with scarcely two hours
to spare before catching the last possible train home.  And there was
only one thing to be done, and that was impossible.

Agatha, in the meantime, had no suspicion of what was passing in her
prodigal's mind.  She had made her last throw for him and lost.  She
could only bow her head before an unsearchable dispensation and wait.
Her first fierce participation in the execution of the unfortunate
Dorris had soon given place to a compunction which prompted her to
withdraw, after a vain attempt to stem the torrent of the long-pent
wrath of the hotel.  She therefore had a quieter conscience than some
of the rest, and quickly dismissed the business from her mind.  She
had quieted Mrs. Boundrish's fears of spotted fever by persuading her
that the sweet child was only a little hysterical, a view of the case
shortly afterwards confirmed by Mrs. Allonby, who recommended
solitude and cheerfully prophesied slumber.  This charitable office
accomplished, the woman of mystery fared forth in the afternoon
sunshine to resume the visit of inquiry to Villa Gilardoni,
interrupted by the storm on the previous day, taking with her some
papers in the cipher that stamped her with Heaven knows what
iniquities in the eyes of Ermengarde, and consulting them as she went
down the mule-path, as if they contained instructions or indications
of what to do next.

The convent walk was no longer a sanctuary for meditation; she had
been there in the morning and found men busy opening and cleaning and
setting in order both the church and the monastery.  At their
suggestion she had gone in, inspected the empty cells, simply but
sufficiently furnished with bed and table, desk and bookshelf--a book
here, a pen there, pointed to recent suddenly interrupted
occupation--and wondered over the quiet, harmless, and probably happy
and useful lives of the men who had been thrust out, and how they
fared now in the loud, perplexing world, and what disgust or
disappointment might have driven some of them into this haven of
stillness.

She had inspected and admired the church, beautifully and lovingly
adorned, though so plain outside, and beautifully kept as if in
constant use, and had been touched by the votive offerings hung about
on the walls--ships chiefly, with here a gun, here a crutch and there
a heart--all so quaint to unaccustomed eyes; and the thought of all
the unsuspected heart-breaks and secret agonies of prayer, in that
quiet mountain solitude alone, besides those throbbing and aching in
the great, lonely, million-peopled world outside, rolled up like a
huge tidal wave and crashed upon her heart.  But that some prayers
were answered, some secret agonies had happy ending, the quaint
votive offerings bore witness, filling her with a hope full of peace,
and assuring her that some day, ever so distant perhaps, but some
day, before the ending of time, all humble, heartfelt prayers of
earnest faith and unselfish love would at last bring forth some fruit.

What a different world to-day, sunning itself in splendour of blue
and gold and green, to that of yesterday, when the darkness of storm
and the chill lash of hail had been over all.  Everything seemed made
for happiness; the gladness of flowers blooming in every crack and
crevice, pink rock-roses creeping about the rocky path, white and
pink cistus starring the bushes on every slope, lavender spikes here,
and tall purple and black iris there, masses of peach-bloom edging
olive-woods, with many an unknown, unconsidered blossom, all turned
sweet faces in gladness to the sunshine; all the deep dark verdure of
gorge and mountain-flank, with vine and garden-growth about terrace
and house, seemed as if breathing a deep and joyous and peaceful life
round village and cot, while ever-soaring sunlit mountain-peaks
rushed up with glad and silent aspiration into the pure dark sky, the
hill-spurs at their feet thrusting many a noble, firm-based buttress
far out into the dark splendour of a sapphire and turquoise sea.
Even the clean-walled, smokeless town and white ribbon of road, over
which toy vehicles and horses and tiny doll-men crawled along the
torrent-brink, in oleander shade far below, seemed much too gay and
gladsome to admit any shadow of tragedy or sting of pain.

And yet what heart-break, what despair, what loneliness of heart
might be--nay, must be--there, hidden and silently borne with more or
less valour; and how the very gladsomeness and glory of all this
lovely earth seemed to put a sharper knife-edge on the pain, that
turned and turned insupportably in the heart, Agatha mused in the
weariness and dull apathy weighing her down after yesterday's sharp
suffering.

What was life worth, after all, at best?  How could people go on,
year in, year out, under their tragic burdens and sordid pains?  How
many a weary year of sunless, monotonous suffering she would have to
drag out, unless some merciful mischance befell her body and released
her soul, she sighed, with a great yearning for the peace of not
being--in the strong deep agony of youth, that has so many
prospective years to endure in.  And then, suddenly, at the turn
leading to the convent cross, she came face to face with a figure
hurrying with springing steps up the path by the deserted shrines,
and the simultaneous surprised cry of "Ivor!" and "Agatha!" and the
look flashed from eye to eye in one moment changed all the world and
made everything clear to each, as they stood silent, each with both
hands outstretched and clasping the other's.

There was a look never seen before in Ivor's face, and a soft
gladness unknown in Agatha's; both faces were in clear sunlight
outlined upon a rock-wall overhung by the quaint, goblin-handed
boughs of prickly pear.

"Aggie," he cried, "dear, dearest Aggie, I was a beast yesterday.  I
_was_ a beast!  You were right.  All you said was true.  I had no
right to ask such things of you--no man has of any woman.  Yet you
_had_ saved me, you _had_ picked me out of the gutter all the time.
No, it's no use saying anything.  I saw the necklace and guessed.
The beast sold it to Strozzi--and made upon it, trust him!  It's in
Strozzi's window.  Aggie, how could you?  The dear old necklace!  I'm
not worth it, my dear--no, not worth picking out of the mud.  But I
will be--at least, I won't be the cur I've been.  And some day--some
day, perhaps--at least, if you're not bound to the long
artist-man--perhaps--oh!  I shall never be fit to look to you--Don't
talk of my mother--she'll be ready for anything after this.  I wish I
hadn't been such a brute to you.  It's--it's as if I had been drunk
all along--but not with wine; and now, now at last I've waked up,
sober--quite sober, Aggie--darling."

What she said, or if she said anything, she knew not and never knew;
nor did he.  There was one kiss, too spontaneous, reciprocal and
inevitable to be thought of except as a matter of course, though the
first since the old baby-kissing days; and then he was gone, racing
for his train, that was perilously near the starting-time now.  But
he turned suddenly by the shrine where she had seen him on that first
evening with the countess, for one last look.  "Don't have the long
painter-man," he cried; "he's too old; he really is; de Vieuxbois
told me.  And nobody's good enough for you, no, not by half."  Then,
with some of the old boyish gaiety lighting his face again, he
vanished in the soft olive-shadows, racing for dear life.

The woman of mystery, bewildered and half stunned, and vaguely
wondering who de Vieuxbois was, and what he had told Ivor, and what
would happen if Ivor lost his train and so broke his leave, and how
much Ivor's mother would know of the transaction of the necklace, and
seeing a deeper, purer blue on the velvet calm of the windless sea,
and a more golden depth in the warm sunlight, and a greater gladness
and glory on everything, went quietly on her way to Villa Gilardoni.

As to Ermengarde, on whose behalf Villa Gilardoni was to be
inspected, she no longer wished to go anywhere except home--that is
to say, somewhere within reach of Charlie and her mother.  Those two
she instinctively longed for and no others; the boy, because his
ignorance and childish selfishness made him uncritical and kept his
clinging affection unimpaired; the mother, because the sympathetic
insight and indestructible unselfishness of the love that protects
and cherishes can be trusted to know the worst, and only grow deeper
and more pitiful with the knowledge.  As for Arthur, his image
inspired a mixture of terror and resentment.  His unkindness, his
want of feeling and sympathy, had sent her all alone into a far-off,
unfamiliar, incomprehensible world, in which she had made stupid
mistakes, played the fool generally, and proved herself quite unfit
to be alone and unguided.  If there had been anyone near to confide
in, to point things out, to discuss things frankly, she could never
have made such a fool of herself.

And where was Arthur all this time?  Arthur, the poor man, who six
weeks ago could afford no holiday jaunt either for wife or
self--until she was fairly out of the way.  Then he had suddenly
flamed across the sky, a meteor of literary brilliance, and betaken
himself to mysterious regions of private enjoyment, whence only the
most meagre accounts of his goings on were allowed to trickle at wide
intervals--that he was well and _busy_ and uncertain in his
movements, that he hoped she was stronger, and was glad she appeared
to be enjoying the foreign trip, and advised her to be careful not to
risk chills in sudden changes of climate--nothing more.  Apparently
Arthur had done with her, and, casting off all domestic ties, was
recklessly plunging into wild, unknown vortices of pleasure, Heaven
only knew where, but, presumably, where there were no post-offices.

When Mrs. Allonby left the unlucky Dorris smothering her sobs and
confessing her follies that sunny sweet afternoon, she felt
exceedingly cheap and small--even cheaper and smaller than when she
had unexpectedly closed an afternoon of shocked moralizing on the
sinful pleasures of gambling and pigeon-shooting by landing herself
on the Casino steps, too completely cleaned out by roulette to have
the price of a cup of tea left.  Madame Bontemps' gratuitous
information that morning had greatly enlightened her on many
subjects.  She knew now the meaning of many once incomprehensible
things, and especially why she had been asked to leave the
hotel--yes; and she remembered that the woman of mystery, whose
fallen nature was to have been uplifted by the example and infection
of her own exalted and unspotted disposition, and Ivor Paul, the
wastrel, had looked as if they perfectly understood the cause of the
mischance that she had so light-heartedly and recklessly related to
them at Rumpelmayer's--the half-smile on each face was guarantee of
that--yes; and she remembered that when Agatha learnt that the fury
of Madame had been preceded by an Italian lesson, raked by the fire
of eyes from the office window, she at once recognized the cause of
that fury.  And now Madame Bontemps' violent words over the
balustrade had made all patent and clear to everybody in the place.
This was much worse than roulette.  She could never face any of them
again.

She would fly to the paternal arms of the great Cook, and take
counsel and tickets of him for the home journey to-morrow.  She would
give out to her friends that the climate was killing her--she was
being slowly but surely poisoned by hotel food--devoured by
mosquitoes--reduced to the verge of insanity by sleepless and
ever-croaking frogs--go home and pour all her follies, mischances and
miseries into the ever-sympathetic, ever-comforting bosom of her
mother--but not of her father.  No; he must be put off with
mosquitoes, frogs, poisonous food and murderous climates.  And, above
all, Arthur must never, never be made acquainted with the melancholy
nature of her recent experiences.  To be sure, there was one comfort,
unless some officious creature told him, he would never want to know
the nature of those recent sorrows; his interest in her affairs was
far too slight.  Oh yes, that was a very great comfort indeed, she
reflected, with a great choke that testified to her joy, and obliged
momentary recourse to a pocket-handkerchief that suddenly became wet
through.

The thin man had called himself a fool seven times in sight of his
looking-glass the night before; but Ermengarde must have applied the
name to herself seventy times seven that afternoon, when, after
tucking Dorris up in eider-downs, comforting her with eau-de-Cologne,
and leaving her to slumber and the digestion of good counsel, she
fled blindly out to the mountain-path, whither she neither knew nor
cared.  But as you had--owing to the narrowness of the ridge behind
the hotel--only two possible ways to go, one up and one down, she
instinctively took the upper, as leading farther from the haunts of
mankind, which had in the mass suddenly become distasteful and
abhorrent to her.

Yes; she saw it all now--the Carnival incidents, the scene at dawn on
the brink of the ravine, the Malmaison episode, M. Isidore's
impassioned declaration during the Italian lesson watched by
Geneviève, and avenged upon herself by instant sentence of expulsion
from the little mountain paradise.  Everybody had fooled her--she
herself most of all.  Fool, not seven times, nor seventy, but seventy
times seven!  Even the woman of mystery, for all the darkness of her
suppositions cloud of strange, unknown sins, had tried to warn her
from her folly.  The bitterness of being warned, and vainly warned,
by such as she!  To be patronized, protected, and advised, to owe
anything to the good-nature, the compassion even of an unfortunate
young person, whose undesirable companionship would never have been
tolerated, except for the pity she inspired and the capacity for
better things she occasionally showed.  Red horror flushed her cheeks
at the thought of what inferences M. Isidore might have drawn from
her tacit acceptance of his supposed homage.  The little traitor, the
coxcomb!  No; never again--from a Frenchman.  What heavenly comfort
in the thought that Arthur would never know the true history of those
few weeks--at least, not unless he turned quite nice and sympathetic,
when both were grey and old, and preparing to end their days.  Then
it might be safe to tell him, not before.

An Italian afternoon sun smote upon the rock-hewn path with lances of
fire; shadow there was none; the way was steep; her wild flight had
carried her hardly farther than the end of the hotel precincts to the
sudden, bold little eminence topped by pine-trees, round which the
path wound.  Here a jutting rock, half buried in undergrowth of
juniper, rosemary, and such-like, offered a broad seat, sheltered
from view by the turn of the pine-topped steep to those mounting the
ridge, but fully exposed to the broad sun-blaze beating on the
mule-path; and here she subsided, looking across the shadowy blue of
the ravine through wet eyes, and propping herself by clutching at the
lichen-embroidered edge of the rock, a prey to these mournful
reflections, when something stirred under the feathery bunch of pines
overhead, some pebbles and earth came rattling down, there was a
light thud on the path beside her, and there, with melancholy eyes
and a face expressive of the utmost concern, stood M. Isidore,
handsome as ever.  She looked up with a little cry, and dashed the
tears from her face; but, before English lips could frame a syllable,
an overwhelming torrent of eloquent French apology broke forth from
the gallant Gaul, sweeping everything before it in its rushing course.

That he should have been the innocent and unwitting cause of insult
and inconvenience to Madame broke his heart and drove him to
distraction, she heard.  He was ready to do anything in expiation and
amendment; if, indeed, any were possible; she might command him; he
was there, at her service absolutely.  Did she wish apartments,
pension, anything, elsewhere?  He would fly to the ends of the earth
to secure them; he would telegraph north, south, east, and west; let
her but name her locality, her terms, and her aspect, they should be
hers.  She could, of course, not remain an hour under that roof after
such an insult.  What broke his heart most severely and drove him to
uttermost distraction and maddest desire to slay himself, was the
thought of Madame's invariable and continuous kindness to himself.
At this a deepening crimson obliged Madame to spread a damp and
flimsy wisp of handkerchief over as much of her face as circumstances
permitted, attempting some faint murmurs of deprecation; she had only
been decently civil, as to others.  How he should have fared in the
agonizing vicissitudes by which his bosom had been so cruelly
furrowed and torn, without the unvarying sympathy and counsel Madame
was good enough to extend to him, M. Isidore shuddered to think.
Enough; she had saved him, she had recalled him to manhood and
enabled him to endure, even to hope.  In return for this she had
suffered outrage, insult, desecration, from a breast of granite, from
the impure rage of a hyena heart.  She had been involved in the
persecutions and maledictions of a ferocious fate that had blasted
and blighted him from earliest youth--he looked about eighteen as he
spoke--the poison of his misery had infected her.  He wondered why he
had been born, and rejoiced that it was not impossible for a brave
man to die.  In the meantime, and before resorting to this ultimate
course of action, he had a favour to ask, an enormous favour, that
nothing but previous experience of the inexhaustible goodness, the
boundless tenderness, of Madame emboldened him to implore.  She was
aware of the misconstructions that a viperous and impure nature had
cast upon the kindness and good counsel, he might almost say, despite
her youth, the maternal counsel of Madame.  He was powerless to
explain these misconstructions, or remove the venomous suspicions
with which a guileless and loving ear had been systematically and
fatally poisoned.  Madame alone had power to do this.  Five words
face to face with Mlle. Bontemps alone could effect it.
Mademoiselle, prejudiced, poisoned against him, shuddering under base
imputations to him of a terrible perfidy, reluctantly persuaded by
venomous tongues, by the hissings of human serpents, of basest
betrayal on the part of one she trusted to the utmost, wounded, as
she imagined, by the hand she loved most, transfixed to the heart's
core, bleeding from the stab of a supposed treachery without
parallel, and almost lifeless, Mademoiselle absolutely refused to
admit him to her adored presence, whence he was pitilessly chased by
the entire Bontemps family.  Madame was acquainted with the history
of his devouring passion for this young girl, to win whose love he
had stooped to serve, as Jupiter and other gods in like cases had so
frequently done, assuming the form of a river, a bull, a shower of
gold--what you will.  The tenderness of Mademoiselle had been kindled
by the amazing fire of his devotion, the marble prejudices even of
her stony-hearted parents had been shattered after her rescue from
the violence of a---- in short, after her rescue had been effected at
the Carnival in the disguise of a crocodile; and, as Madame was
doubtless aware, he had, in consequence of that, been permitted to
salute Mlle. Geneviève as his betrothed.  Of venomous and absurd
misconceptions, partly due in all cases to his own folly and
indiscretion, Madame was but too well aware.  Would she have the
extreme complaisance to explain this both to Mlle. Bontemps and to
her iron-breasted parents?

"M. Isidore, I will do what I can.  But how can I?" she faltered,
having fresh recourse to the sadly inefficient handkerchief, now more
like a wet sponge.  "But they won't believe me.  And I am so sorry
about the--the It-It-Italian lessons you were goo-good enough to give
me, never dreaming----"

"_And_ the Monte Carlo incident," added M. Isidore, who was eminently
practical.  "Ah, Madame!" he cried, sinking with infinite grace and
dexterity on one knee on a comparatively soft piece of rock, "you are
acquainted with the depth of my passion, my infatuation, the agony,
with which my bosom is torn.  Grant me this one favour--only this
one.  I know that I am asking much--but consider my passion--have
pity on my despair----"

"Stop that," suddenly growled a bass voice in British accents, as the
tall figure and picturesque untidiness of the Anarchist appeared from
round the corner of the pine-topped bluff, to the stupefaction of M.
Isidore, who sprang to his feet with a deep involuntary "Mon Dieu!"
and of Ermengarde, who removed the wet wisp from her face with a
little stifled shriek, and gazed horror-struck on the intruder, who
had the satisfaction of spoiling this moving scene of a weeping lady
sadly resisting the passionate importunity of a kneeling,
supplicating cavalier.

"Que diable voulez-vous ici, de Konski?" cried M. Isidore, quickly
recovering himself, and fiercely and haughtily twirling his moustache.

"What the devil are you doing here, de Vieuxbois?" retorted the
Anarchist in French.  "What do you mean by masquerading as a waiter
in a hotel?  Stop annoying this lady at once."

"It is, on the contrary, Monsieur, you that annoy Madame.  Have the
complaisance to leave us without delay," commanded M. Isidore, his
moustache stiff with rage.

"Oh, please go away," cried Ermengarde distractedly, shivering and
white--"go at once, all of you--all of you!"

For herself the luckless Ermengarde had no option; she was totally
incapable of flight, the path being narrow, and blocked on the one
hand by M. Isidore and on the other by M. de Konski, while the bluff
towered steeply above her and the ravine fell abruptly below.  She
wished the rock-path would split open and swallow her up, that the
bluff would topple down and bury her under it, that she could get
past the antagonists and fall headlong down the ravine, down to the
very bed of the torrent below; in fact, she hardly knew what she
wished in her desperation.

"Leave this lady, Vicomte," thundered the Anarchist.  "Go, at once,
before I make you!"

The little Frenchman turned, bowing respectfully to the trembling,
almost weeping, Ermengarde.  "Madame," he said mournfully, "I regret
deeply.  One moment, and you are disembarrassed from the
unwarrantable intrusion of this person.  Go you, M. de Konski," he
added, facing about with gestures of command, "before I hurl you to
the depths below.  Is it probable that I permit a stranger to molest
with his undesired presence a lady who honours me with her
acquaintance and commands my protection?"

"No more of that, de Vieuxbois," came the stern retort.  "You have
annoyed this lady more than enough.  Off with you."

"And pray, M. de Konski," demanded M. Isidore, with flaming glance
and fierce accent, "what is Madame to you, that you thus arrogantly
dare to essay to chase people from her presence?"

"Oh, not much," the Anarchist replied bitterly--"not much.
Only--only a--connexion--by marriage."

At this moment a wild cry from the distressed lady, followed by the
sudden and precipitate descent of the Anarchist's beard down the
ravine, a similar flight of his broad felt hat and goggles in the
same direction, sequent on the uprising from her rocky seat of
Ermengarde, who, indeed, had initiated the movements of these things,
with the terrified exclamation of "Arthur!" struck M. Isidore dumb
with amazement for about the space of seven seconds, at the end of
which he observed with a gentle smile, "Pardon, Monsieur, I was
mistaken; I had not understood.  The connexion appears to be somewhat
intimate.  I congratulate," and airily raising his hat, he slipped
lightly up the path to where it was possible to scale the cliff, up
which he sprang, vanishing in the clump of pines on the top.




Chapter XXI

Connexions by Marriage

Ermengarde always maintained afterwards that she had suspected the
Anarchist's identity from the first, though this assertion scarcely
agreed with the descriptions she had written of that baleful person
in letters still extant.

She would have been more accurate in saying that the sudden
exclamation of "Stop that!" in a perfectly undisguised and familiar
voice had first conveyed a suspicion of the awful truth to her mind
in a paroxysm of terror and bewilderment, and that not until the
Anarchist's sarcastic assertion that she was only a connexion by
marriage had the terrified suspicion become a dread certainty, and
moved her to tear off his disguise.

"Well," said Arthur, standing grim and gaunt before her in his proper
person, after the considerate departure of M. Isidore had left the
connexions by marriage in possession of the field, dropping his cloak
and looking some inches taller in consequence.  "Well, Ermengarde?"

He was looking straight and stern in her face, with eyes coldly
blazing and full of reproof, indignation and condemnation, but no
relenting.  Ermengarde's spirit rose at the injustice of the implied
condemnation; she returned his gaze steadily, unflinchingly, and
silently, bracing herself to face the situation and on no account
give in.

"Well?" she returned coolly, at the end of a long, searching,
unblenching gaze.

"You little fool!" he said, withdrawing his eyes after a time, with a
curious little laugh.

"I certainly have been a fool--in more ways than one," she returned
calmly.  "And how about yourself?"

"I find you in a nice predicament," he replied.  "I hear casually
yesterday that you are turned out of your hotel, treating the matter
as a joke, and relating it as an amusing story to absolute
strangers--turned out--how can I say it, Ermengarde? for silly--for
compromising intimacy--ugh!--with the hotel-keeper's daughter's
fiancé----"

"Really?  Much obliged for your kind interest in my affairs.
Slater's detectives?  Most ingenious.  And, of course, you believed
all you were told by your Sherlock Holmes's and Paul Prys."

"And," he continued, ignoring these sarcasms, "to-day I come
personally to see for myself----"

"In the disguise of a Polish Anarchist----"

"And find you with that accursed young French idiot at your feet----"

"Young French idiots fall at people's feet on very small provocation."

"Making violent love to you--apparently."

"Ah!  It's just as well you put in that 'apparently'," she commented
quite tranquilly, though all the time she was saying to herself,
"Bluff, Ermengarde, bluff! it's your only chance."

"You were crying----"

"Probably; I've had a good deal to cry about of late----"  She looked
down as she spoke to arrange the set of her blouse, and gave her
drapery a few careful little pats.

"--Agitated.  Perhaps you will offer some explanation of this?"

"Perhaps.  In the meantime, perhaps you will offer some explanation
of your conduct."  She looked up, quite satisfied now with the set of
the blouse belt.

"My dear child, this folly must end; this is a serious matter and not
an amateur farce.  You have landed yourself in a most compromising
situation, made yourself the cause, the patent, acknowledged, loudly
proclaimed cause, of an engagement being broken off; and you simply
laugh at the whole thing."

"And if I have, as you say, brought myself into such a situation,
pray, whose fault was it?"

"Whose should it be but your own, your own folly and wilfulness and
insane disregard of common proprieties and decent conventions."

She had always understood that the Socratic method of conducting an
argument consisted in asking, and never answering, perpetual
questions, and being under the impression that Socrates was a person
of quite remarkable sagacity, resolved to employ it.  As on this wise.

"Who refused to take me abroad for my health when I needed it, and
then followed me secretly in disguise to spy out and magnify every
mistake I might make?  Who employed spies about me to report and
distort every incident of my life here?  Who had grown so cold and
cruel and faithless to me at home that it was no home any more, and I
felt I could endure it no longer?  Who was too busy and too poor to
send his wife to the South after illness, when he had just made a
great success and was planning a tour of his own to the very place he
actually followed her to, disguised as a spy?  Who kept all his good
fortune from his wife's knowledge?"  A faint sob, disguised as a
cough, interrupted this interrogatory.

"Good Heavens!  Ermengarde," cried Arthur, the expression of whose
face had undergone a variety of changes, mostly merging into one of
stupefaction, during this address, "what can you mean?  What can you
have taken into your head?  What on earth do you mean by faithless?"

"What," she cried, losing her head suddenly, and throwing prudence
and pride to the winds, though still adhering to the Socratic
method--"what did you mean by that scene in your study, the night I
came home early with a headache from my mother's, and looked in?"

"Scene in my study?  There was never any scene in my study.  What
night are you talking of?  Look into my study whenever you like, and
you'll see nothing there but a man working or smoking, or both."

At this the Socratic method went by the board as well as pride and
prudence.

"The night--after--after--you had been so unkik-kik-kind about my
ha-ha-hats and gug-gug-gug-going abroad," she gasped, "the night
the--the woman was there--cry-crying--and being com-com-comforted?"

"Woman crying?" he muttered, puzzled.  "Women don't come and cry in
my study.  What on earth have you been imagining?  Women don't
come--except, of course, the secretary--at all.  You can't mean Miss
Scott?  By George, now I come to think of it, she did come and cry
there once, poor girl.  And of course, I tried to comfort her."

"Oh, _of course_!"

"Ermengarde!  How can you?"

"How coo-coo-coo-could _you_?"

"Really one might almost suppose you had lowered yourself to some
vulgar suspicions----"

They had now arrived by slow degrees, and after various stops and
turns to emphasize rhetoric, at a place where the top of the ridge
widened, and the path ran between pine-woods clothing the side of the
ravine, that here sloped steeply instead of falling perpendicularly.

"You were, at any rate, landed in a most _compromising situation_,"
she broke in, recovering her calm, "_a nice predicament_," she added,
stepping from the path into the wood among aromatic undergrowth and
tall white heath.  "And when that predicament is satisfactorily
explained, it will be time----"

"You poor little fool!" he cried, suddenly turning, taking both her
hands and looking straight into her eyes, "you must have been off
your head----"

"Arthur, how dare you!"

"Regularly off your head to stoop to such miserable suspicions----"

She wrenched her hands away.  "I, at least, never spied on you.  I
had no wish to verify any suspicions--I had seen more than enough,"
she said scornfully.

"You could have falsified them at once with one question?"

"I--I couldn't--stoop--to that," she wept.

"My child, you must have had hysteria rather badly.  I must have been
brutally impatient; I was so rushed just then.  Poor Miss Scott
brought some typing that night and wrote shorthand notes until she
was tired out.  Then I just happened to ask her a question about a
family trouble I knew was worrying her--you remember I engaged her on
a family recommendation; her people are old friends of mine--my
question was an unlucky one, and the poor girl broke down; she was so
thoroughly tired out.  You must have chosen that exact moment to open
the door----"

"I didn't at least go up on purpose, and come suddenly round a corner
in disguise," she protested.

"Most unfortunately you did not.  But--Ermengarde----"

"And if I had stooped to ask explanations," she interrupted; "I ask
none; I wish none now; I merely suggest that before you demand
explanations of what you must know can have been nothing you could
possibly complain of, certain little eccentricities on your own part
require to be cleared up.  What, for instance, took place under the
olives yonder only yesterday morning?  Why all those secret meetings
and communications in cipher with a young woman of doubtful
antecedents, of mysteries, of evasions, of perpetual assignations and
private interviews with notorious usurers and pretended cousins?  I
don't wish to know--but--I resent the imputations you cast upon my
intercourse with a young man who is half secretary and half waiter at
this house, and at the beck and call of all here alike.  I might,"
she added, "go further, and ask why you chose to follow me about in a
ridiculous disguise, and worry and frighten me to death by spying on
me and posing as an Anarchist and conspirator?"

"Because I was an ass, probably.  And when did I pose as anything but
a foreigner?  Except at the Carnival, which is all masquerade"--"The
Carnival?" she murmured, puzzled--"We have both been infernal idiots,
Ermengarde.  We quarrelled about nothing in particular to begin
with----"

"If you call sarcasm, neglect, unkindness, coldness--nothing----"

"I certainly was a beast.  Such a rush of work had come all at once,
and I hadn't time to consider that that infernal Flu had made you
hysterical.  And you did cut into me about going abroad on your own
finance.  But look here, Ermengarde, how could I have let you go
alone, weak as you were?  First I got Miss Scott to go and look after
you as your companion----"

"Miss Scott?  Why, I never saw the woman in my life--except her back
in the study that night--if it was she--and as for a companion, I
never had such a thing in my life----"

"My dear child, Miss Somers _is_ Miss Scott----"

"Oh-o-o-o-oh!  The woman of mystery?--my companion?"

"She doesn't care to typewrite and do secretary under her own name,
but, coming here with you, and having relations she was bound to meet
all over the place----"

"Ah--a-a-a-ah!  Aunts?  Step-cousins?  Ivor Paul?"

"Yes; her cousin, her uncle's stepson--she had to go back to her own
name.  And then, that blessed book coming out and at once promising a
boom, unexpectedly put me in funds to come and look after you myself.
I was a good deal used-up, and ordered a rest-cure.  As intelligence
officer and paper correspondent I've done disguises before--the only
way to get information--and incidentally I've picked up a lot of copy
and been able to help Agatha Somers in that family trouble, too.  I
didn't mean to keep up the disguise more than to see you safe here at
first.  But it turned out to be so useful.  And, I say, look here,
you little silly; don't let's quarrel any more."

It was pleasant on the wooded steep; myrtle-bushes gave out a
delicious aroma; innumerable bees made an organ-bourdon in grey
masses of rosemary-bloom; grasshoppers chirped in shrill pleasure;
loveliest tints and shadows were tangled in drooping olive-foliage;
rugged peaks, soaring far above gorge and ridge, ran up into a
velvety blue sky; and, looking far down the ravine's course, the
connexions by marriage caught the deep warm bloom of a peacock-blue
sea, glowing in full sunshine and crossed by silvery sails and long
black hulls of steam vessels.

After all, a good hard shoulder is a pleasanter thing to lean one's
head upon than a cold, sharp rock or a rough and turpentiny
tree-trunk; and any more comfortable place to have a really good cry
on has never yet been imagined.  Besides, however perverse and
exasperating they may be, husbands occasionally come in handy, when
things suited to their obtuse intellects have to be done--bills
paid--insolent landladies tackled--hotel accommodation provided.

So it was in a very light-hearted mood that Mrs. Allonby stepped out
into the olive-grove and walked along the mule-path, when the sun was
declining and western valleys were filling with purple shadow, and
the light pad-pad of a patient, soft-eyed mule warned them to step
aside, on pain of being jostled by his laden panniers, giving
opportunity of answering a dark-eyed peasant woman's "Buon sera," and
admiring her pleasant smile and white teeth, as she passed on,
bearing her own burden behind her four-legged slave's.

"I always wanted to show you this bit," Ermengarde said, when the
woods parted and sank at the top of the ridge and a sudden burst of
broad purple sea glowed to the east, where the gorge opened, and a
smaller bay disclosed itself on the west, all golden shimmer under a
rose-gold sun.  "And you had been seeing it all the time.  What a
fraud you are!"

"I tell you what, Ermengarde; let's have the boy out when your mother
comes later on.  She can bring him.  Easter falls early; and, after
all, the little chap might as well miss the fag-end of the term.
That'll set the old lady up, eh?  Italian lakes on the way home, or a
look at Florence, or what?"

When they reached the hotel-gate, a woman with a tired, but serene
and sweet, face came down the twisted pine-root steps from the
convent, with a little start and flush of surprise at seeing
them--the ex-anarchist now a respectable, clean-shaven Briton, with a
stable-cap in place of the broad felt hat, and the cloak rolled in a
neatly strapped bundle.

"Aha, my dear woman of mystery!" cried Ermengarde gaily, with open
hands.  "Found out at last!  All your machinations unmasked and
exposed!  How are you?  My best respects to you.  I hear that you
have been looking after a certain Mrs. Allonby--connected with _the_
Allonby, don't you know--kind of dry-nursing the poor thing!  If I'm
not mistaken, you found her a pretty good handful, didn't you?"

"Well, pretty fair at times," she admitted, observing that Mrs.
Allonby wore a diamond and pearl chain, closely resembling that flung
to her by the Spaniard at the Carnival, and afterwards exposed for
sale in a Monte Carlo window.

"Dear Miss Somers, I was a beast about the necklace.  I am so sorry."

"Thought you'd sneaked the thing," Arthur blurted out with a grin, in
that exasperating way of his.

"I didn't," she stoutly contradicted; "I thought he had sneaked it
and made _you_ the cat's paw to sell it.  And, oh, my goodness, Miss
Somers!" she laughed out suddenly, "if I didn't think at one time
that you were this man's wife!  And didn't I pity you, just!  But we
are not going to act charades any longer.  Nobody is to be anybody
else any more; no, not even that wretched young Isidore, the fraud!
Ah!  I wonder if Mr. Welbourne will turn out to be some discontented
duke in disguise," she cried, suddenly becoming aware of the
mystified countenance of the thin man, who had come by the mule-path
round the convent; "I'm not cracked, Mr. Welbourne, only a little
crazy.  Let me introduce my husband--just arrived."

The thin man congratulated and opined that the arrival was singularly
opportune under the circumstances, while Arthur confessed that Mr.
Welbourne's virtues had long been familiar to him through
correspondence.

And then, after proper comments on the weather, Arthur, with no
outward sign of terror, whatever he felt, sought the awful presence
of Madame Bontemps, while Ermengarde, with her heart in her mouth,
and cold chills running all over her, tried to be admitted to private
conference with Mlle. Geneviève, the woman of mystery acting as
intermediary in this difficult piece of diplomacy.

"The chain was from Spink's, after all," Mrs. Allonby admitted with a
blush, observing Agatha's glance upon it, "and people with glass
houses shouldn't throw stones.  My husband saw the thing for sale at
Poupart's, and went in and redeemed it.  He knew it by a flaw in a
pearl.  And you may imagine I've had to sing pretty small, smaller
than even the poor Boundrish this afternoon--and with better reason,
I'm afraid."

"You have sung very sweetly to me, dear Mrs. Allonby, and, after all,
I must have been a horrid nuisance----"

"You certainly were.  But my husband, poor man, has to reckon with me
for that."

"Mine was not the easiest position; to act companion anonymously----"

"And be taken for a spy, a conspirator----"

"And thief----"

"No, no; but that miserable man of mine pays the bill for _all_.  And
when you marry, dear Miss Somers, take my advice; keep him well in
hand, but never let it come to a long sulk.  Whatever it is, have it
out with him at once and have done with it."

In the meantime, Madame Bontemps, all unsuspicious of what was
coming, was sitting peacefully in the office, casting up the columns
of the weekly bills with one part of her sane and practical mind, and
gloating in memory over her powerful remarks of the morning in the
garden with another; while with a third she threw out staccato
commands and observations to M. Bontemps, who was placidly smoking a
cigarette over his _Petit Niçois_ on the sofa, when a tall,
clean-shaven, respectable Briton, with a keen, unflinching eye, and
the usual British air of holding a subject universe in fee, walked in
and bid her good evening in excellent French.

"This is without doubt Madame Bontemps," he said, introducing himself
as the husband of a lady staying in the house, a Mrs. Arthur Allonby,
and handing her his card, on reading which all Madame's bristles
rose, and she prepared herself for the battle she felt to be imminent
and also pregnant with victory to her side.  Politely, but sadly, she
desired her guest to be seated in a chair handed him at a sign from
her by M. Bontemps, who smiled pleasantly to himself, expecting to be
agreeably diverted by the forthcoming combat.

But Mr. Allonby, declining the chair, much to Madame's regret, as she
found it easier to heckle opponents sitting than standing, began to
address her sternly but gently, more in sorrow than anger, and always
with that air of surprised dignity and unabated command.  He had been
led to suppose, he said very politely, that Les Oliviers was an
exceptionally well-managed and high-class hotel, else, as Madame
might easily surmise, he would never have selected it for the
temporary sojourn of his wife while waiting till he would be able to
join her.  What, then, was his astonishment on learning that Mrs.
Allonby had actually been requested to leave the house?  Such a thing
was outrageous, unheard-of, and must be apologized for without delay.

"Now for the fun!" reflected Monsieur, languidly adjusting a fresh
cigarette, while Madame promptly seized her chance of returning fire,
and turning about with expansive gestures and fluent delivery, poured
in a steady and powerful broadside calculated to silence the
Englishman's guns and shatter his forces beyond recovery.

What Monsieur had observed concerning Les Oliviers was absolutely
correct, she replied.  The proceeding alluded to was undoubtedly
unheard-of, unparalleled, without precedent in the annals of that
house--to which only persons of absolutely irreproachable character
and assured position were admitted.  Madame was filled with the
profoundest compassion for Monsieur; her bosom was torn for him; she
regretted from the profoundest depths of her being the necessity of
inflicting upon him an immeasurable pain.  But she was woman; more
than that, she asserted brokenly and with deep sobs, she was
_mother_.  One's children were one's life.  What mother could view
the silent, corroding anguish, could witness the perfidious betrayal
of a child, a guileless, a trusting, an adored child, unmoved?  What
fiend in human shape could stand by in icy indifference and look upon
the gradual, irreparable blighting of a cherished daughter's life,
the slow destruction of her every hope, the corrosive agony
perpetually gnawing at her breaking heart, the withering, in short,
of the pure and maidenly flower of her youth, and raise no hand,
utter no word, in her defence?  Madame Bontemps was the unfortunate
possessor neither of a bosom of adamant nor of a heart of granite;
she possessed, on the contrary, those of a mother; with a sacred fury
and a noble indignation she chased from her hearth the serpent whose
envenomed tooth had poisoned the happiness of her child and ruined
the tranquillity of a cheerful and affectionate family circle.  That
the serpent in question, whose wiles had been daily employed before
her very eyes in beguiling the youthful and pardonably sensitive
affections of M. Isidore from their lawful and pledged object, should
be in effect the wife of Monsieur, was for him, she admitted, a
circumstance of supreme misfortune and profoundly to be deplored, and
upon which, from the depths of her woman's breast, she offered him
condolences of the deepest and most sincere nature.

Here M. Bontemps, profoundly touched by his wife's eloquence, dashed
his cigarette despairingly to the floor, threw out his arms with
gestures of despair, and groaned aloud, while Madame sought relief in
tears.  "Ma fille, ma Geneviève," she wailed, wildly smiting her
breast, "mon enfant!"

But the stolid Englishman, surveying the afflicted parents with that
direct, undauntable soldier-look of his, appeared to be entirely
unmoved and awaiting further remarks from Madame Bontemps; and as
these were not after some seconds forthcoming, he ventured to
represent to Madame with infinite courtesy that she appeared to be
the victim of an absurd misapprehension, which, in a woman of her
intellect and capacity, paralyzed him with amazement.  She had
possibly taken some exaggerated statements uttered in the course of a
lover's quarrel literally.  Madame's words almost pointed to some
vague suspicion that his wife--"my little wife," he repeated,
smiling--had perturbed the relations between those young people, such
a very droll supposition.  If--as Madame here hastened to assert--M.
le Vicomte de Vieuxbois, whose father had been a friend of his own,
had been observed to converse in an agitated manner with Mrs.
Allonby, to whom, as to other pensionnaires, the Vicomte had
obligingly given Italian lessons, what more natural--Mrs. Allonby was
herself a mother, the wife of the Vicomte's father's friend; she was
older than she appeared, while M. de Vieuxbois was younger--what more
natural than for a young man, suffering from the apparent coldness
and misunderstandings of his betrothed, and far from his own mother,
to seek counsel and comfort of a lady by her age and experience
eminently calculated to give them?  As a simple matter of fact, he
was aware of all that had occurred; he had been deeply interested in
the course of the young man's love, which had met with unusual, but
not unnatural, obstacles, triumphantly and happily surmounted, until
this unfortunate, but truly absurd, little misunderstanding arose.
Madame probably knew that _English_ wives had no secrets from their
husbands, so that for M. de Vieuxbois to confide in Mrs. Allonby the
depth of his passion and the misfortune of the various obstacles to
its fulfilment, was in effect to confide in himself.  What a pity to
let suspicions so absurd divide two young and loving hearts!
Mademoiselle's ear had doubtless been abused by mischievous,
misunderstood tittle-tattle.  Girls were like that, he knew from
experience, and, having had the good fortune to win the best and most
charming of wives himself, it hurt him to think of M. de Vieuxbois
missing such a blessing--merely because of a little misconception of
his conduct--a misconception absolutely incredible in a person of
Madame's sagacity and knowledge of the world.  In his anxiety for the
young people's happiness, he actually found himself forgetting the
necessity for extracting an apology for an unwarrantable act of
incivility to his wife, the necessity of which both Monsieur and
Madame Bontemps would at once admit.

They did at once admit it, and with a celerity and sudden change of
front that not only took Mr. Allonby's breath away, but also that of
M. Isidore, who happened--no doubt by the merest chance--to be
lounging outside the ever open office door, intently studying the
_Figaro_, and who also happened to have dispatched Heinrich, the
porter, on an errand, by the latter deemed trivial and unnecessary to
the last degree.

What M. Allonby had had the complaisance to observe, Madame Bontemps
blandly stated in reply, put an entirely different complexion on the
whole matter.  She deeply regretted having, even in thought, wronged
Madame or M. Isidore, whom she embraced as a son--he made a grimace
over his _Figaro_ outside at this remark--she deplored the
inconvenience suffered by Madame Allonby, and she should for the rest
of her life cherish the memory of M. Allonby as that of a valued, a
beloved, an inestimable, friend of the whole of her family.

M. Bontemps corroborated these assertions with tears of a noble and
profound emotion; Mlle. Geneviève (just then at the climax of an
explanatory and embarrassing interview with Mrs. Allonby) was
promptly summoned from the depths of the back premises at the very
moment when M. le Vicomte Isidore Augustin René Joseph Marie de
Beauregard de Vieuxbois was making a dramatic entrance from the front
hall; and all was joy, reconciliation, effusion, tears, transport,
intoxication.

"It was all that little cat, Dorris," Ermengarde confided afterwards
to those fellow-conspirators, the ex-Anarchist and the woman of
mystery; "so that what she got this morning was perhaps not
altogether wasted.  Only I wish she hadn't had it quite so hot."

"My conscience pricks me about de Vieuxbois' people," Arthur
confessed, when gratuitous champagne unexpectedly crowned the banquet
in the evening, and the visitors were asked by Madame Bontemps to
drink to the betrothal of M. Isidore and Mlle. Geneviève.  "They
won't thank me for this afternoon's work.  Just fancy a man in de
Vieuxbois' position falling in love with a girl like Mlle. Bontemps,
and taking a post as general utility person in a small hotel for her
sake.  Romantic young ass!  The girl showed her sense in refusing
him.  His mother is distracted.  The whole family have been at him
about it!  But the little chap would have her--Madame la Vicomtesse!"

And when next day pack-mules waited by the place of Dorris's
execution, laden with Ermengarde's belongings, and she herself stood
by the lemon-laden trees and took a last view of the magnificent
sweep of sea below, and the splendid amphitheatre of encircling
mountains above, grasping a huge presentation bunch of roses,
carnations, and heliotrope, with a last lingering bough of mimosa
bloom and one of lemon flower, and receiving the farewells of the
visitors, the salutations of the family and the betrothed pair, and
dazzling smiles from the well-tipped Heinrich, waiters and
chambermaids at windows, Ermengarde's heart rose in her throat; she
squeezed the thin man's hand to agony point; kissed Mrs. Dinwiddie,
Lady Seaton, and Miss Boundrish's mother; nodded to the young lady's
father, Major Norris and Bertie Trevor, turned and fled through the
lemon-orchard path so that Arthur could not overtake her till she
came out upon the rock-hewn road far below, where she was discovered
gazing over the clean red roofs and dark-leaved groves of Mentone out
to sea, and unobtrusively restoring a handkerchief to its pocket.

"It--it really was such a very lovely place--such a unique charm
about it," she said in apology.

"Tell you what, old lady, we'll come again next year if the boom
keeps up," Arthur replied, lighting his pipe in the shelter of a
rocky scarp.  "But I bar squabbles first."

Before them the slender tower of St. Michel, just topping the
mountain spur that hides the Old Town, gleamed white on a clear blue
sea; it had rained during the night, and some cloud-wreaths still
floated round the craggy summits, leaving light veinings of snow on
the amethystine peaks; cheery voices and sounds rose from the
saw-mill niched in the bottom of a little gorge across the torrent;
the plane avenue was alive with passing wheels and steps and people
of every sort and kind, but all gay as if they had never known a
care; the sea had richer and deeper hues, the sun a warmer gold, the
soaring mountains a more majestic outline, vegetation a more varied
luxuriance and colouring; and Ermengarde, listening to Arthur's
familiar, intermittent growl, and imparting pleasant secrets to him,
was lighter of heart than ever before.  The full magic and splendour
of the azure shore was at last upon her, and the exhilaration and the
pure joy of living went to her head, sparkled in her eyes, glowed in
her cheeks, and thrilled her to the very finger-tips.

And yet she was at heart, if not a sadder, at least a wiser, and
hoped to be a better, woman than before those joyous adventures on
the Côte d'Azur.



THE END



BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD











*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUSPICIONS OF ERMENGARDE ***


    

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