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.