The Motor Maid Part 14

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

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

"I'll sit by n.o.body," I managed to answer, this time in French. "Please take your seats. I will have a chair at the other end of the table."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One was a selfish one, and the other, I hope, unselfish."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't you think you might adopt me, once for all, in that relationship?

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

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

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

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

"In a friend or a lover, they'd be unbearable, of course; I know that,"

he broke in. "But who'd want me for a friend? And as for a lover, why, I'm struck off the list of eligibles, forever--if I was ever on it."

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

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

(Evidently my brother pa.s.sed through Aix, as well as along the Corniche, under "different circ.u.mstances!")

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I do, but don't be so despairing. I told them I thought I'd better look the car over, and wasn't quite ready. That's always true, you know.

A motor's like a pretty woman; never objects to being looked at. So they said 'd.a.m.n,' and strolled off to buy chocolates."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was her mood when getting out of the car, but inside the quaint and charming house a look at the visitors' register changed it in a flash.

There was one prince and one duke; there were several counts; and as to barons, they were peppered about in rich profusion. Each n.o.ble being was accompanied by his chauffeur, so evidently it was the "thing" to stop in the Hotel de l'Europe, and the _haut monde_ considered Avignon worth wasting time upon. Instantly her ladyship resolved to recover gracefully from her fatigue, and descend to the public dining-room for dinner.

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

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

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

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