Not until he was dressing, and the
contents of his pockets were spread on a table, did
Medenham remember Dale’s commission. It
was quite true, as he told Mrs. Devar, that he had
backed Vendetta for a small stake on his own account.
But that was an afterthought, and the bet was made
with another bookmaker at reduced odds. Altogether,
including the few sovereigns in his possession at
the beginning of the day, he counted nearly fifty
pounds in gold, an exceptionally large amount to be
carried in England, where considerations of weight
alone render banknotes preferable.
He slipped Dale’s money into
an envelope, and took thirty pounds to be exchanged
for notes by the hotel’s cashier. At the
same time he wrote a telegram to his father, destroying
two drafts before he evolved something that left his
story untold while quieting any scruples as to lack
of candor. It was not that the Earl would resent
his unexpected disappearance after nearly four years’
absence from home, because father and son had met
in South Africa during the war, and were together
in Cannes and Paris subsequently. His difficulty
was to explain this freak journey satisfactorily.
The Earl of Fairholme held feudal views anent the
place occupied in the world by the British aristocracy.
His own hot youth was crowded with episodes that Medenham
might regard with disdain, yet he would be shocked
out of his well-fed cynicism by the notion that his
son was gallivanting round the country as the chauffeur
of an unconventional American girl and a middle-aged
harpy like Mrs. Devar.
So Medenham’s message was non-committal.
Aunt Susan was unable
to come Epsom to-day. Have taken car
to Brighton, and Bournemouth.
Home Saturday, perhaps
earlier. GEORGE.
Of course, he meant to fill in details
verbally. It was possible in conversation to
impart a jesting turn to an adventure which would be
unconvincing and ambiguous in the bald phrases of a
telegram.
Then he dined, filled a cigarette
case from the box of Salonikas which Tomkinson had
not omitted to pack with his clothes, and strolled
out, bare-headed, to enrich Dale. He could trust
his man absolutely, and was quite sure that the Mercury
would then be in the drying stage after a thorough
cleaning. Thus far he was justified, but he had
not counted on the pride of the born mechanic.
Though the car was housed for the night, when he entered
the garage the hood was off, and Dale was annoying
two brothers of the craft by explaining the superiority
of his engine to every other type of engine.
All three were bent over the cylinders,
and Dale was saying:
“Just take a squint at them
valves, will you? ever seen anything like
’em before? Of course you haven’t.
Don’t look like valves, eh? Can you break
’em, can you warp ’em, can you pit ’em?
D’ye twig how the mixture reaches the cylinder?
None of your shoulders or kinks to choke it up is
there? and the same with the exhaust.
Would you ever have a mushroom valve again after you’ve
once cast your peepers over this arrangement?
Now, if I took up areonotting if I
wanted to fly the Channel ”
He stopped abruptly, having seen his
master standing in the open doorway.
“By gad, Dale,” cried
Medenham, “I have never heard your tongue wagging
in that fashion before.”
Dale was flustered.
“Beg pardon, my lord, but I was only ”
he began.
“Only using the cut-out, I fancy. Come
here, I want you a minute.”
The other chauffeurs suddenly discovered
that they had urgent business elsewhere. They
vanished. Dale thought it necessary to explain.
“One of them chaps has a new
French car, my lord, and he was blowing so loudly
about it that I had to take him down a peg or two.”
Medenham grew interested. Like
every keen motorist, he could “talk shop”
at all times.
“What sort of car?”
“A 59 Du Vallon, my lord.
It is the first of its class in England, and I rather
think his guv’nor is running it on show.”
“Indeed. Who is he?”
“A count Somebody-or-other, my lord. I
did hear his name ”
“Not Count Edouard Marigny?”
said Medenham, with a sharp emphasis that startled
Dale.
“That’s him, my lord. I hope I haven’t
done anything wrong.”
Medenham, early in life, had formed
the habit of not expressing his feelings when really
vexed, and it stood him in good stead now. Dale’s
blunder was almost irreparable, yet he could not find
it in his heart to blame the man for being an enthusiast.
“You have put me in a deuce
of a fix,” he said at last. “This
Frenchman is acquainted with Miss Vanrenen. He
knows she is here, and will probably see her off in
the morning. If his chauffeur recognizes the
car he will be sure to speak of it. That gives
the whole show away.”
“I’m very sorry, my lord ”
“Dash it all, there you go again.
But it is largely my own fault. I ought to have
warned you, though I little expected this sort of a
mix-up. In future, Dale, while this trip lasts,
you must forget my title. Look here, I have brought
you your winnings over Eyot can’t
you rig up some sort of a yarn that I am a sporting
friend of yours, and that you were just trying to
be funny when you addressed me as ’my lord’?
If you have an opportunity, tell Count Marigny’s
man that your job is taken temporarily by a driver
named Fitzroy. By the way, is the chauffeur a
Frenchman, too?”
“No, my l .”
Dale caught Medenham’s eye, a very cold eye at
that instant. “No, sir. He’s
just a fitter from the London agency.”
“Well, we must trust to luck.
He may not remember me in my chauffeur’s kit,
which is beastly uncomfortable, by the way. I
must get you a summer rig. Here is your money five
to one I took. Don’t lose sight of those
two fellows, and spend this half sovereign on them.
If you can fill that chap with beer to-night he may
have a head in the morning that will keep him in bed
too late to cause any mischief. When we meet
in Bournemouth and Bristol, say nothing to anybody
about either the car or me.”
Dale was a model of sobriety, but
the excitement of “fives” when he looked
for “threes” was too much for him.
“I’ll tank him all right,
my l , I mean, sir,” he vowed
cheerfully.
Medenham lit a new cigarette and strolled
out of the yard.
From the corner of his eye he saw
Marigny’s helper looking at him. Without
undue exaggeration, he craned his neck, rounded his
shoulders, and carried himself with the listless air
of a Piccadilly idler. He reflected, too, that
a bare-headed man in evening dress would not readily
be identified with a leather-coated chauffeur, and
Dale, he hoped, was sufficiently endowed with mother
wit to frame a story plausible enough to account for
his unforeseen appearance. On the whole, the
position was not so bad as it seemed in that first
moment when the owner of the 59 Du Vallon was revealed
in the handsome Count. In any event, what did
it matter if his harmless subterfuge were revealed?
The girl would surely laugh, while Mrs. Devar would
squirm. So now for a turn along the front, and
then to bed.
It was a perfect June evening, the
fitting sequel to a day of unbroken sunshine.
A marvelous amber light hovered beyond the level line
of the sea to the west; an exquisite blue suffused
the horizon from south to east, deepening from sapphire
to ultramarine as it blended with the soft shadows
of a summer’s night. He found himself comparing
the sky’s southeasterly tint with the azure
depths of Cynthia Vanrenen’s eyes, but he shook
off that fantasy quickly, crossed the roadway and
promenade, and, propping himself against the railings,
turned a resolute back on romance. He did not
gain a great deal by this maneuver, since his next
active thought was centered in a species of quest
for the particular window among all those storeyed
rows through which Cynthia Vanrenen might even then
be gazing at the shining ocean.
He looked at his watch. Half-past nine.
“I am behaving like a blithering
idiot,” he told himself. “Miss Vanrenen
and her friends are either on the pier listening to
the band, or sitting over their coffee in the glass
cage behind there. I’ll wire Simmonds in
the morning to hurry up.”
A man descended the steps of the hotel
and walked straight across King’s Road.
A light gray overcoat, thrown wide on his shoulders,
gave a lavish display of frilled shirt, and a gray
Homburg hat was set rakishly on one side of his head.
In the half light Medenham at once discerned the regular,
waxen-skinned features of Count Marigny, and during
the next few seconds it really seemed as if the Frenchman
were making directly for him. But another man,
short, rotund, very erect of figure, and strutting
in gait, came from the interior of a “shelter”
that stood a little to the right of Medenham’s
position on the rails.
“Hello, Marigny,” said he jauntily.
The Count looked back towards the
hotel. His tubby acquaintance chuckled.
The effort squeezed an eyeglass out of his right eye.
“Aie pas peur,
mon vieux!” cried he in very colloquial
French. “My mother sent a note to say that
the fair Cynthia has retired to her room to write
letters. I have been waiting here ten minutes.”
Now, it chanced that Medenham’s
widespread touring in France had rubbed up his knowledge
of the language. It is ever the ear that needs
training more than the tongue, and in all likelihood
he would not have caught the exact meaning of the
words were it not for the hap of recent familiarity
with the accents of all sorts and conditions of French-speaking
folk.
“Jimmy Devar!” he breathed,
and his amazement lost him Marigny’s muttered
answer.
But he heard Devar’s confident
outburst as the two walked off together in the direction
of the West Pier.
“You are growing positively
nervous, my dear Edouard. And why? The affair
arranges itself admirably. I shall be always on
hand, ready to turn up exactly at the right moment.
What the deuce, this is the luck of a lifetime....”
The squeaky, high-pitched voice a
masculine variant of Mrs. Devar’s ultra-fashionable
intonation died away midst the chatter and
laughter of other promenaders. Medenham’s
first impulse was to follow and listen, since Devar
had yielded to the common delusion of imagining that
none except his companion on the sea-front that night
understood a foreign language. But he swept the
notion aside ere it had well presented itself as a
means of solving an astounding puzzle.
“No, dash it all, I’m
not a private detective,” he muttered angrily.
“Why should I interfere? Confound Simmonds,
and d n that railway van!
I have a good mind to hand the car over to Dale in
the morning and return to town by the first train.”
If he really meant what he said he
ought to have gone back to his hotel, played billiards
for an hour, and sought his bedroom with an easy conscience.
He was debating the point when the conceit intruded
itself that Cynthia’s pretty head was at that
moment bent over a writing-table in a certain well-lighted
corner apartment of the second floor, so he compromised
with his half-formed intent, whisked round to face
the sea again, and lighted another cigarette from the
glowing end of its predecessor. Some part of
his unaccountable irritation took wings with the cloud
of smoke.
“Blessed if I can tell why I
should worry,” he communed. “Never
saw the girl before to-day ... shall never see her
again if I put Dale in charge.... Her father
must be a special sort of fool, though, to trust her
to the care of the Devar woman.... What was it
that rotter said? ’The affair arranges
itself admirably.’ And he would be ’always
on hand.’ What is arranging itself?...
And why should Jimmy Devar be ready, if need be, ‘to
turn up exactly at the right moment?’ I suppose
the answer to the first bit of the acrostic is simple
enough. Cynthia Vanrenen is to become the Countess
Marigny, and the Devar gang stands in on the cash
proceeds. Oh, a nice scheme! This Frenchman
is posted as to the tour. By the most curious
of coincidences he will reappear at Bournemouth, or
Bristol, or in the Wye Valley. What more natural
than a day’s run in company?... Ah, I’ve
got it! Jimmy is to come along when Marigny thinks
that Cynthia will take a seat in the 59 Du Vallon
for a change just to try the new French
car.... By gad, I shall have a word to say there....
Steady, now, George Augustus! Woa, my boy; keep
a tight hand on the reins. Why in thunder should
you concern yourself with the wretched business, anyhow?”
It was a marvelously still night.
Beneath him, on an asphalted path nearly level with
the stone-strewed beach, passed a young couple.
The man’s voice came up to him.
“Jones expects to be taken into
partnership after this season, and I am pretty certain
to be given the management of the woolen department.
If that comes off, no more long hours in the shop for
you, Lucy, but a nice little house up there on the
hill, just as quick as we can find it.”
“Oh, Charlie dear, I shall never be tired then....”
A black arm was suddenly silhouetted
across the shoulders of a white blouse, whose wearer
received a reassuring hug.
“Let’s reckon up,”
said the owner of the arm “July, August,
September three months, sweetheart....”
Medenham had never given a thought
to marrying until his father hinted at the notion
during dinner the previous evening, and he had laughed
at it, being absolutely heart-whole. There was
something irresistibly comical then about the Earl’s
bland theory that Fairholme House needed a sprightly
viscountess, yet now, twenty-four hours later, he could
extract no shred of humor from the idyl of a draper’s
assistant. It seemed to be a perfectly natural
thing that these lovers should talk of mating.
Of what else should they whisper on this midsummer’s
night, when the gloaming already bore the promise
of dawn, and the glory of the sea and sky spread quiet
harmonies through the silent air?
Perhaps he sighed as he turned away,
but his own evidence on that point would be inconclusive,
since the first object his wondering eyes dwelt on
was the graceful figure of Cynthia Vanrenen. There
was no possibility of error. An arc lamp blazed
overhead, and, to make assurance doubly sure, his
recognition of Cynthia was obviously duplicated by
Cynthia’s recognition of her deputy chauffeur.
In the girl’s case some degree
of surprise was justified. It is a truism of
social life that far more distinctiveness is attached
to the seemingly democratic severity of evening dress
than to any other class of masculine garniture.
Medenham now looked exactly what he was a
man born and bred in the purple. No one could
possibly mistake this well-groomed soldier for Dale
or Simmonds. His clever, resourceful face, his
erect carriage, the very suggestion of mess uniform
conveyed by his clothing, told of lineage and a career.
He might, in sober earnest, have been compelled to
earn a living by driving a motor-car, but no freak
of fortune could rob him of his birthright as an aristocrat.
Of course, Cynthia was easily first
in the effort to recover disturbed wits.
“Like myself, you have been
tempted out by this beautiful night, Mr. Fitzroy,”
she said.
Then “Mr.” was a concession
to his attire; somehow she imagined it would savor
of presumption if she addressed him as an inferior.
She could not define her mental attitude in words,
but her quick intelligence responded to its subtle
influence as a mirrored lake records the passing of
a breeze. Very dainty and self-possessed she
looked as she stood there smiling at him. Her
motor dust-coat was utilized as a wrap. Beneath
it she wore a white muslin dress of a studied simplicity
that, to another woman’s assessing gaze, would
reveal its expensiveness. She had tied a veil
of delicate lace around her hair and under her chin,
and Medenham noted, with a species of awe, that her
eyes, so vividly blue in daylight, were now dark as
the sky at night.
And he was strangely tongue-tied.
He found nothing to say until after a pause that verged
on awkwardness. Then he floundered badly.
“I am prepared to vouch for
any explanation so long as it brings you here, Miss
Vanrenen,” he said.
Cynthia wanted to laugh. It was
sufficiently ridiculous to be compelled, as it were,
to treat a paid servant as an equal, but it savored
of madness to find him verging on the perilous borderland
of a flirtation.
“Do you wish, then, to consult
me on any matter?” she asked, with American
directness.
“I was standing here and thinking
of you,” he said. “Perhaps that accounts
for your appearance. Since you have visited India
you may have heard that the higher Buddhists, when
they are anxious that another person shall act according
to their desire, remain motionless in front of that
person’s residence and concentrate ardent thought
on their fixed intent.... Sitting in dhurma
on a man, they call it. I suppose the same principle
applies to a woman.”
“It follows that you are a higher
Buddhist, and that you willed I should come out.
Your theory of sitting on the door-mat, is it? wobbles
a bit in practice, because I really ran downstairs
to tell Mrs. Devar something I had forgotten previously.
Not finding her, I decided on a stroll. Instead
of crossing the road I walked up to the left a couple
of blocks. Then I noticed the pier, and meant
to have a look at it before returning to the hotel.
Anyhow, you wanted me, Mr. Fitzroy, and here I am.
What can I do for you?”
Her tone of light raillery, supplemented
by that truly daring adaptation of the method of gaining
a cause favored by the esoteric philosophy of the
East, went far to restore Medenham’s wandering
faculties.
“I wanted to ask you a few questions,
Miss Vanrenen,” he explained.
“Pray do, as they say in Boston.”
But he was not quite himself yet.
He noticed that the lights were extinguished in the
corner of the second floor.
“Is that your room?” he asked, pointing
to it.
“Yes.”
Her air of blank amazement supplied a further tonic.
“Queer thing!” he said.
“I thought so. More of the occult, I suppose.
But I really wished to speak to you about Mrs. Devar.”
Cynthia was obviously relieved.
“Dear me!” she cried.
“You two have taken a violent dislike to each
other. You see, Mr. Fitzroy, we Americans are
rather pleased than otherwise if a man acts and speaks
like a gentleman even though he has to earn a living
by hustling an automobile, but your sure-enough British
dames exact a kind of servility from a chauffeur
that doesn’t seem to fit in with your make-up.
Servility is a hard word, but it is the best I can
throw on the screen at the moment, and I’m real
sorry if I have hurt your feelings by using it.”
Medenham smiled. Each instant
his calmer judgment showed more and more clearly that
he could not offer any valid excuse for interference
in the girl’s affairs. For all he knew
to the contrary, she might be tremulous with delight
at the prospect of becoming a French countess; if
that were so, the fact that he disapproved of Mrs.
Devar’s matchmaking tactics would be received
very coldly. Cynthia’s natural interpretation
of his allusion to her chaperon offered a means of
escape from a difficult position.
“I am greatly obliged by your
hint,” he said. “Not that my lack
of good manners is of much account, seeing that I
am only a stop gap for the courtly Simmonds, but I
shall endeavor to profit by it in my next situation.”
“Now you are getting at me,”
cried Cynthia, her eyes sparkling somewhat. “Do
you know, Mr. Fitzroy, I am inclined to think you are
not a chauffeur at all.”
“I assure you there is not a
man living who understands my special type of car
better,” he protested.
“That isn’t what I mean,
so don’t wriggle. You met Simmonds when
he was in trouble, and just offered to take his place
for a day or so, thereby doing him a good turn isn’t
that the truth?”
“Yes.”
“And you are not in the automobile business?”
“I am, for the time being.”
“Well, I am glad to hear it.
I was shy of telling you when we reached the hotel,
but you understand, of course, that I pay your expenses
during this trip. The arrangement with Simmonds
was that my father ante’d for petrol and allowed
twelve shillings a day for the chauffeur’s meals
and lodgings. Is that satisfactory?”
“Quite satisfactory, Miss Vanrenen,”
said Medenham, fully alive to the girl’s effective
ruse for the re-establishment of matters on a proper
footing.
“So you don’t need to
worry about Mrs. Devar. In any event, since you
refused my offer to hire you for the tour, you will
not see a great deal of her,” she went on, a
trifle hurriedly.
“There only remains one other
point,” he said, trying to help her. “Would
you mind giving me Mr. Vanrenen’s address in
Paris?”
“He is staying at the Ritz but
why do you want to know that?” she demanded
with a sudden lifting of eyebrows, for the hope was
strong in her that he might be induced to change his
plans so far as the next nine days were concerned.
“A man in my present position
ought always to ascertain the whereabouts of millionaires
interested in motoring,” he answered promptly.
“And now, pardon me for advising you not to walk
towards the pier alone.”
“Gracious me! Why not?”
“There is a certain class of
boisterous holiday-maker who might annoy you not
by downright ill-behavior, but by exercising a crude
humor which is deemed peculiarly suitable to the seaside,
though it would be none the less distressing to you.”
“In the States that sort of
man gets shot,” she said, and her cheeks glowed
with a rush of color.
“Here, on the contrary, he often
takes the young lady’s arm and walks off with
her,” persisted Medenham.
“I’m going to that pier,”
she announced. “Guess you’d better
escort me, Mr. Fitzroy.”
“Fate closes every door in my
face,” he said sadly. “I cannot go
with you in that direction.”
“Well, of all the odd people! why
not that way, if any other?”
“Because Count Edouard Marigny,
the gentleman whose name I could not help overhearing
to-day, has just gone there with another
man.”
“Have you a grudge against him, too?”
“I never set eyes on him before
six o’clock this evening, but I imagine you
would not care to have him see you walking with your
chauffeur.”
Cynthia looked up and down the broad
sea front, with its thousands of lamps and droves
of promenaders.
“At last I am beginning to size
up this dear little island,” she said.
“I may go with you to a racetrack, I may sit
by your side for days in an automobile, I may even
eat your luncheon and drink your aunt’s St.
Galmier, but I may not ask you to accompany me a hundred
yards from my hotel to a pier. Very well, I’ll
quit. But before I go, do tell me one thing.
Did you really mean to bring your aunt to Epsom to-day?”
“Yes.”
“A mother’s sister sort of aunt a
nice old lady with white hair?”
“One would almost fancy you had met her, Miss
Vanrenen.”
“Perhaps I may, some day.
Father and I are going to Scotland for a month from
the twelfth of August. After that we shall be
in the Savoy Hotel about six weeks. Bring her
to see me.”
Medenham almost jumped when he heard
of the projected visit to the Highlands, but some
demon of mischief urged him to say:
“Let’s reckon up.
July, August, September three months ”
He stopped with a jerk. Cynthia,
already aware of some vague power she possessed of
stirring this man’s emotions, did not fail to
detect his air of restraint.
“It isn’t a proposition
that calls for such a lot of calculation,” she
said sharply. “Good-night, Mr. Fitzroy.
I hope you are punctual morning-time. When there
is a date to be kept, I’m a regular alarm clock,
my father says.”
She sped across the road, and into
the hotel. Then Medenham noticed how dark it
had become reminded him of the tropics,
he thought and made for his own caravanserai,
while his brain was busy with a number of disturbing
but nebulous problems that seemed to be pronounced
in character yet singularly devoid of a beginning,
a middle, or an end. Indeed, so puzzling and
contradictory were they that he soon fell asleep.
When he rose at seven o’clock next morning the
said problems had vanished. They must have been
part and parcel with the glamor of a June night, and
a starlit sky, and the blue depths of the sea and of
a girl’s eyes, for the wizard sun had dispelled
them long ere he awoke. But he did not telegraph
to Simmonds.
Dale brought the car to the Grand
Hotel in good time, and Medenham ran it some distance
along the front before drawing up at the Metropole.
By that means he dissipated any undue curiosity that
might be experienced by some lounger on the pavement
who happened to notice the change of chauffeurs, while
he avoided a prolonged scrutiny by the visitors already
packed in chairs on both sides of the porch. He
kept his face hidden during the luggage strapping
process, and professed not to be aware of Cynthia’s
presence until she bade him a cheery “Good-morning.”
Of course, Marigny was there, and
Mrs. Devar gushed loudly for the benefit of the other
people while settling herself comfortably in the tonneau.
“It was awfully devey of you,
Count Edouard, to enliven our first evening away from
town. No such good fortune awaits us in Bournemouth,
I am afraid.”
“If I am to accept that charming
reference as applying to myself, I can only say that
my good fortune has exhausted itself already,
madame,” said the Frenchman. “When
do you return to London?”
“About the end of next week,” put in Cynthia.
“And your father that
delightful Monsieur Vanrenen,” said the Count,
breaking into French, “he will join you there?”
“Oh, yes. My father and
I are seldom separated a whole fortnight.”
“Then I shall have the pleasure
of seeing you there. I go to-day to Salisbury after
that, to Hereford and Liverpool.”
“Why, we shall be in Hereford
one day soon. What fun if we met again!”
Marigny looked to heaven, or as far
in the direction popularly assigned to heaven as the
porch of the Metropole would permit. He was
framing a suitable speech, but the Mercury shot out
into the open road with a noiseless celerity that
disconcerted him.
Medenham at once slackened speed and leaned back.
“I’m very sorry,”
he said, “but I clean forgot to ask if you were
quite ready to start.”
Cynthia laughed.
“Go right ahead, Fitzroy,”
she cried. “Guess the Count is pretty mad,
anyhow. He was telling us last night that his
Du Vallon is the only car that can hit up twenty at
the first buzz.”
“Unpardonable rudeness,” murmured Mrs.
Devar.
“On the Count’s part?” asked the
girl demurely.
“No, of course not on the part of
this chauffeur person.”
“Oh, I like him,” was
the candid answer. “He is a chauffeur of
moods, but he can make this car hum. He and I
had quite a long chat last night after dinner.”
Mrs. Devar sat up quickly.
“After dinner last night!”
she gasped.
“Yes I ran into him outside the hotel.”
“At what time?”
“About ten o’clock.
I came to the lounge, but you had vanished, and the
wonderful light on the sea drew me out of doors.”
“My dear Cynthia!”
“Well, go on; that sounds like the beginning
of a letter.”
Mrs. Devar suddenly determined not to feel scandalized.
“Ah, well!” she sighed,
“one must relax a little when touring, but you
Americans have such free and easy manners that we staid
Britons are apt to lose our breath occasionally when
we hear of something out of the common.”
“From what Fitzroy said when
I told him I was going as far as the pier unaccompanied
it seems to me that you staid Britons can be freer
if not easier,” retorted Miss Vanrenen.
Her friend smiled sourly.
“If he disapproved he was right, I admit,”
she purred.
Cynthia withheld any further confidences.
“What a splendid morning!”
she said. “England is marvelously attractive
on a day like this. And now, where is the map?
I didn’t look up our route yesterday evening.
But Fitzroy has it. We lunch at Winchester, I
know, and there I see my first English Cathedral.
Father advised me to leave St. Paul’s until
I visit it with him. He says it is the most perfect
building in the world architecturally, but that no
one would realize it unless the facts were pointed
out. When we were in Rome he said that St. Peter’s,
grand as it is, is all wrong in construction.
The thrust downwards from the dome is false, it seems.”
“Really,” said Mrs. Devar,
who had just caught sight of Lady Somebody-or-other
at the window of a house in Hove, and hoped that her
ladyship’s eyes were sufficiently good to distinguish
at least one occupant of the car.
“Yes; and Sir Christopher Wren
mixed beams of oak with the stonework of his pillars,
too. It gave them strength, he believed, though
Michael Angelo had probably never heard of such a thing.”
“You don’t say so.”
The other woman had traveled far on
similar conversational counters. They would have
failed with Cynthia, but the girl had opened the map,
and talk lagged for the moment.
Leaving the coast at Shoreham, Medenham
turned the car northward at Bramber, with its stone-roofed
cottages gilded with lichen, its tiny gardens gay
with flowers, and the ruins of its twelfth-century
castle frowning from the crest of an elm-clothed hill.
Two miles to the northwest they came upon ancient
Steyning, now a sleepy country town, but of greater
importance than Bath or Birmingham or Southampton in
the days of the Confessor, and redolent of the past
by reason of its church, with an early Norman chancel,
its houses bearing stone moldings and window mullions
of the Elizabethan period, and its quaint street names,
such as Dog Lane, Sheep-pen Street, and Chantry Green,
where two martyrs were burnt.
Thence the way lay through the leafy
wonderland of West Sussex, when the Mercury crept
softly through Midhurst and Petersfield into Hampshire,
and so to Winchester, where Cynthia, enraptured with
the cathedral, used up a whole reel of films, and
bought some curios carved out of oak imbedded in the
walls when the Conqueror held England in his firm
grip.
They lunched at a genuine old coaching-house
in the main street, and Medenham persuaded the girl
to turn aside from Salisbury in order to pass through
the heart of the New Forest. She sat with him
in front then, and their talk dealt more with the
magnificent scenery than with personal matters until
they reached Ringwood, where they halted for tea.
Before alighting at the inn there
she asked him where he meant to stay in Bournemouth.
He answered the one question by another.
“You put up at the Bath Hotel, I think?”
he said.
“Yes. Someone told me it
was more like a Florentine picture gallery than a
hotel. Is that true?”
“I have not been to Florence,
but the picture gallery notion is all right.
When I was a youngster I came here often, and my my
people always well, you see ”
He nibbled his mustache in dismay,
for it was hard to keep up a pretense when Cynthia
was so near. She ended the sentence for him.
“You came to the Bath Hotel.
Why not stay there to-night?”
“I would like it very much, if you have no objection.”
“Just the opposite. But please
forgive me for touching on money matters the
charges may be rather dear. Won’t you let
me tell the head waiter to to include your
bill with ours?”
“On the strict condition that
you deduct twelve shillings from my account,”
he said, stealing a glance at her.
“I shall be quite business-like, I promise.”
She was smiling at the landscape,
or at some fancy that took her, perhaps. But
it followed that a messenger was sent for Dale to the
hostelry where he had booked a room for his master,
and that Mrs. Devar, after one stony and indignant
glare, whispered to Cynthia in the dining-room:
“Can that man in evening dress,
sitting alone near the window, by any possibility
be our chauffeur?”
“Yes,” laughed the girl.
“That is Fitzroy. Say, doesn’t he
look fine and dandy? Don’t you wish he
was with us to order the wine? And,
by the way, is there a pier at Bournemouth?”