The Motor Maid Part 28

"Alais," was the answer the chauffeur made with his lips, while his eyebrows said "I told you so!" to me.

"I think we'd better lunch here," Sir Samuel went on. And the arrival of a princely blue motor car at the nearest inn was such a shock to the nerves of the landlady and her staff that the interval before lunch was as long and solemn as the Dead March in Saul. To show what he could do in an emergency, the chef slaughtered and cooked every animal within reach for miles around.

They appeared in a procession, according to their kind, when necessary disguised in rich and succulent sauces which did credit to the creator's imagination; and there were reserve forces of cakes, preserves, and puddings, all of which coldly furnished forth the servants' meal when they had served our betters.

It was nearly three o'clock when we were ready to leave Alais, and the chauffeur had on his bronze-statue expression as he took his seat beside me after starting the car.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Nothing," said he, "except that I don't know where we're likely to lay our heads to-night."

"Where do you want to lay them?" I inquired flippantly. "Any gorge will do for mine."

"It won't for Lady Turnour's. But it may have to, and in that case she will probably snap yours off."

"Cousin Catherine has often told me it was of no use to me, except to show my hair. But aren't there hotels in the gorge of the Tarn?"

"There are in summer, but they're not open yet, and the inns--well, if Fate casts us into one, Lady Turnour will have a fit. My idea was: a splendid run through some of the wildest and most wonderful scenery of France--little known to tourists, too--and then to get out of the Tarn region before dark. We may do it yet, but if we have any more trouble--"

He didn't finish the sentence, because, as if he had been calling for it, the trouble came. I thought that an invisible enemy had fired a revolver at us from behind a tree, but it was only a second tyre, bursting out loud, instead of in a ladylike whisper, like the other.

Down got Mr. Dane, with the air of a condemned criminal who wants every one to believe that he is delighted to be hanged. Down got I also, to relieve the car of my weight during the weird process of "jacking up,"

though the chauffeur a.s.sured me that I didn't matter any more than a fly on the wheel. Our birds of paradise remained in their cage, however, Lady Turnour glaring whenever she caught a glimpse of the chauffeur's head, as if he had bitten that hole in the tyre. But before us loomed mountains--disagreeable-looking mountains--more like _embonpoints_ growing out of the earth's surface than ornamental elevations. On the tops there was something white, and I preferred having Lady Turnour glare at the chauffeur, no matter how unjustly, than that her attention should be caught by that far, silver glitter.

Suddenly my brother paused in his work, unbent his back, stood up, and regarded his thumb with as much intentness as if he were an Indian fakir pledged to look at nothing else for a stated number of years. He pinched the nail, shook his hand, and then, abandoning it as an object of interest, was about to inflate the mended tyre when I came forward.

"You've hurt yourself," I said.

"I didn't know you were looking," he replied, fixing the air-pump. "Your back seemed to be turned."

"A girl who hasn't got eyes in the back of her head is incomplete. What have you done to your hand?"

"Nothing much. Only picked up a splinter somehow. I tried to get it out and couldn't. It will do when we arrive somewhere."

"Let me try," I said.

"Nonsense! A little flower of a thing like you! Why, you'd faint at the sight of blood."

"Oh, is it bleeding?" I asked, horrified, and forgetting to hide my horror.

He laughed. "Only a drop or two. Why, you're as white as your name, child."

"That's only at the thought," I said. "I don't mind the _sight_, although I _do_ think if Providence had made blood a pale green or a pretty blue it would have been less startling than bright red. However, it's too late to change that now. And if you don't show me your thumb, I'll have hysterics instantly, and perhaps be discharged by Lady Turnour on the spot."

At this awful threat, which I must have looked terribly capable of carrying out, he obeyed without a word.

A horrid little, thin slip of iron had gone deep down between the nail and the flesh, and large drops of the most sensational crimson were splashing down on to the ground.

"The idea of your driving like that!" I exclaimed fiercely. But my voice quivered. "One, two, three!" I said to myself, and then pulled. I wanted to shut my eyes, but pride forbade, so I kept them as wide open as if my lids had been propped up with matches. Out came the splinter of metal, and seeing it in my hand--so long, so sharp--things swam in rainbow colours for a few seconds; but I was outwardly calm as a Stoic, and wrapped the thumb in my handkerchief despite my brother's protests.

"Brave child," he said. "Thank you."

I looked up at him, and his eyes had such a beautiful expression that a queer tenderness began stirring in my heart, just as a young bird stirs in a nest when it wakes up. I couldn't help having the impression that he felt the same thing for me at the moment. It was as if our thoughts rushed together, and then flew away in a hurry, frightened at something they'd seen. He dashed back to his tyre pumping, and I pranced away down the road to look intently at a small white stone, as if it had been a pearl of price.

Afterward I stooped and picked it up. "You're a kind of little milestone in my life," I said to it. "I think I'd like to keep you, I hardly know why." And I slipped it into the pocket of my coat.

Every sort of work that you do on a motor-car always seems to take exactly half an hour. You may _think_ it will be twenty minutes, but you know in your heart that it will be thirty, to the last second. The people in the gla.s.s-house lost count of time after the first, through playing some ghastly kind of double dummy bridge, and as they seemed cheerful Lady Turnour and her dummy were evidently winning. But Mr. Dane did not lose count, I was sure; and when we had started again, and got a mile or two beyond Alais, he looked somewhat sternly at the mountains which no longer appeared ill-shapen. We mounted toward them over the heads of their children the foothills, and came into a region which promised wild picturesqueness. There was an extra thrill, too, because the mountains were the Cevennes, where Robert Louis Stevenson wandered with his Modestine, and slept under the stars. Judging from the gravity of the chauffeur's face he was not sure that we, too, might not have to sleep under the stars (if any), a far less care-free company than "R.L.S." and his donkey.

Sir Samuel has now exchanged cards for a Taride map, which he often studied with no particular result beyond mental satisfaction, as he generally held it upside down and got his information by contraries. But at a straggling hillside village where two roads bifurcated he suddenly became excited. Down went the window, and out popped his head.

"You go to the left here!" he shouted, as the Aigle was winging gracefully to the right.

"I think you're mistaken, sir," replied the chauffeur, stopping while the car panted reproachfully. "I know the 'Routes de France' says left, but they told me at Alais a new road had now been finished, and the old one condemned."

"Well, I'd take anything I heard there with a grain of salt," said Sir Samuel. "How should they know? Motor-cars are strange animals to them.

If there were a new road the 'Routes' would give it, and _I_ vote for the left."

"Whose car is it, anyway?" Lady Turnour was heard to murmur, not having forgiven my Fellow Worm two burst tyres and a broken chain.

Since chauffeurs should be seen and not heard, Mr. Jack Dane looked volumes and said not a word. Backing the big Aigle, who was sulking in her bonnet, he put her nose to the left. Now we were making straight, almost as the crow flies, for the Cevennes; but luckily for Lady Turnour's peace of mind the snowy tops were hidden from sight behind other mountains' shoulders as we approached. A warning chill was in the air, like the breath of a ghost; but it could not find its way through the gla.s.s; and a few cartloads of oranges which we pa.s.sed opportunely looked warm and attractive, giving a delusive suggestion of the south to our road.

It was gipsy-land, too, for we met several tramping families: boldly handsome women, tall, dark men and boys with eagle eyes, and big silver b.u.t.tons so well cared for they must have been precious heirlooms.

"'Steal all you can, and keep your b.u.t.tons bright,' is a gipsy father's advice to his son," said Jack Dane, as we wormed up the road toward a pa.s.s where the brown mountains seemed to open a narrow, mysterious doorway. So, fold upon fold shut us in, as if we had entered a vast maze from which we might never find our way out; and soon there was no trace of man's work anywhere, except the zigzag lines of road which, as we glanced up or down, looked like thin, pale brown string tied as a child ties a "cat's-cradle." We were in the ancient fastnesses of the Camisards; and this world of dark rock under clouding sky was so stern, so wildly impressive, that it seemed a country hewn especially for religious martyrs, a last stand for such men as fought and died praying, calling themselves "enfants de Dieu." Bending out from the front seat of the motor, my gaze plunged far down into the beds of foaming rivers, or soared far up to the dazzling white world of snow and steely sky toward which we steadily forged on. Oh, there was no hope of hiding the snow now from those whom it might concern! But Lady Turnour still believed, perhaps, that we should avoid it.

The higher the Aigle rose, climbing the wonderful road of snakelike twistings and turnings above sheer precipices, the more thrilling was the effect of the savage landscape upon our souls--those of us who consciously possess souls.

We had met n.o.body for a long time now; for, since leaving the region of pines, we seemed to have pa.s.sed beyond the road-mender zone, and the zone of waggons loaded with dry branches like piled elks' horns. Still, as one could never be sure what might not be lurking behind some rocky shoulder, where the road turned like a tight belt, our musical siren sang at each turn its gay little mocking notes.

After a lonely mountain village, named St. Germain-en-Calberte, and famous only because the tyrant-priest Chayla was burned there, the surface of the road changed with startling abruptness. Till this moment we'd known no really bad roads anywhere, and almost all had been as white as snow, as pink as rose leaves, and smooth as velvet; but suddenly the Aigle sank up to her expensive ankles in deep, thick mud.

"Hullo, what's this b.u.mping? Anything wrong with the car?"

Out popped Sir Samuel's anxious head from its luxurious cage.

"The trouble is with the road," answered the chauffeur, without so much as an "I told you so!" expression on his face. "I'm afraid we've come to that _decla.s.see_ part."

Poor Sir Samuel looked so humble and sad that I was sorry for him. "My mistake!" he murmured meekly. "Had we better turn after all?"

"I fear we can't turn, or even run back, sir," said Mr. Dane. "The road's so bad and so narrow, it would be rather risky."

This was a mild way of putting it; and he was considerate in not mentioning the precipice which fell abruptly down under the uneven shelf he generously called a road.

Sir Samuel gave a wary glance down, and said no more. Luckily Lady Turnour, sitting inside her cage, on the side of the rock wall we were following up the mountains, could not see that unpleasant drop under the shelf, or even quite realize that she was on a shelf at all. Her husband sat down by her side, more quietly than he had got up, even forgetting to shut the window; but he was soon reminded of that duty.

"Are you frightened?" the chauffeur asked me; and I thought it no harm to answer: "Not when you're driving."

"Do you mean that? Or is it only an empty little compliment?" he catechized me, though his eyes did not leave the narrow slippery road, up which he was steering with a skill of a woman who aims for the eye of a delicate needle with the end of a thread a size too big.