Cynthia's Chauffeur Part 10

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 Sh.o.r.eham, 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 Suss.e.x, 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 pa.s.s 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?"

CHAPTER IV

SHADOWS--WITH OCCASIONAL GLEAMS

Mrs. Devar ate her soup in petrified silence. Among the diners were at least two peers and a countess, all of whom she knew slightly; at no other time during the last twenty years would she have missed such an opportunity of impressing the company in general and her companion in particular by waddling from table to table and greeting these acquaintances with shrill volubility.

But to-night she was beginning to be alarmed. Her youthful protegee was carrying democratic training too far; it was quite possible that a request to modify an unconventional freedom of manner where Fitzroy was concerned would meet with a blank refusal. That threatened a real difficulty in the near future, and she was much perturbed by being called on to decide instantly on a definite course of action. Too strong a line might have worse consequences than a _laissez faire_ att.i.tude. As matters stood, the girl was eminently plastic, her naturally gentle disposition inducing respect for the opinions and wishes of an older and more experienced woman, yet there was a fearlessness, a frank candor of thought, in Cynthia's character that awed and perplexed Mrs. Devar, in whom the unending struggle to keep afloat in the swift and relentless torrent of social existence had atrophied every sense save that of self-preservation. An open rupture, such as she feared might take place if she a.s.serted her shadowy authority, was not to be dreamed of. What was to be done? Small wonder, then, that she should tackle her fish vindictively.

"Are you angry because Fitzroy is occupying the same hotel as ourselves?" asked Cynthia at last.

The girl had amused herself by watching the small coteries of stiff and starched Britons scattered throughout the room; she was endeavoring to cla.s.sify the traveled and the untraveled by varying degrees of frigidity. As it happened, she was wholly wrong in her rough a.n.a.lysis. The Englishman who has wandered over the map is, if anything, more self-contained than his stay-at-home brother. He is often a stranger in his own land, and the dozen most reserved men present that evening were probably known by name and deed throughout the widest bounds of the empire.

But, though eyes and brain were busy, she could not help noticing Mrs.

Devar's taciturn mood. That a born gossip, a retailer of personal reminiscences confined exclusively to "the best people," should eat stolidly for five consecutive minutes, seemed somewhat of a miracle, and Cynthia, as was her habit, came straight to the point.

Mrs. Devar managed to smile, pouting her lips in wry mockery of the suggestion that a chauffeur's affairs should cause her any uneasiness whatsoever.

"I was really thinking of our tour," she lied glibly. "I am so sorry you missed seeing Salisbury Cathedral. Why was the route altered?"

"Because Fitzroy remarked that the cathedral would always remain at Salisbury, whereas a perfect June day in the New Forest does not come once in a blue moon when one really wants it."

"For a person of his cla.s.s he appears to say that sort of thing rather well."

Cynthia's arched eyebrows were raised a little.

"Why do you invariably insist on the cla.s.s distinction?" she cried.