Delphi collected works o.., p.322
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 322
Your obedient servant, JUDAH P. SOLOMONS.
Paul laid down the letter with a sigh of relief. It was a comfort, at any rate, to know he had not done wrong in paying five francs for the beast which, as luck would have it, he had never ridden. He entered it without one qualm of conscience on his accounts. “Donkey for picnic, 4s. 2d.” The item might pass. If Mr. Solomons approved, his mind was easy.
CHAPTER V.
GOSSIP.
“I THINK, for my part,” Nea said decisively, enforcing her remark with a dig of her parasol into the gravel walk, “the scallywag’s much the nicest of the two. But, then, you know I always did like scallywags. They’ve got so much more humanity and reality about them than — than most other people.”
They were seated once more, the morning after the picnic, on the Promenade du Midi, very stiff from their ride, and full of mutual notes of last night’s entertainment. Mme.
Ceriolo smiled her conventional smile, as she replied obliquely. “And yet the other one — je ne me rappelle plus son nom — oh, yes. Mr. Thistleton, he’s very agreeable too, and probably, I should say, an excellent parti.”
“Oh, he aint much,” Isabel Boyton answered with Yankee directness. “He’s a lot too like a piece of putty for me. Of course, he’s a fine big boy, and pretty nice to look at; but there’s nothing in him. I’m down on mind, I am, and the scallywag’s got three times as much of that as Mr. Thistleton.”
“He’s clever, I think,” Nea assented with a nod.
“Oh, you needn’t talk, Nea,” the American put in with a mock injured air. “I call it real mean the way you walked off with my young man, that I’d invited on purpose for my own amusement, and left me to talk half the day to that pappy, sappy, vappy big Englishman, with no more conversation in his six feet six than a ship’s figurehead. It was jest downright ugly of her, wasn’t it, mamma?”
Mrs. Boyton was a dried-up old lady of the mummified American order — there are two classes of American old ladies: the plentiful and the very skimpy — who seldom contributed much to the interchange of thought, save when her daughter called upon her to confirm her own opinion; and she murmured now dutifully, “If you asked him for yourself, Izzy, you’d a right to his attentions; but, perhaps, he most thrust himself upon Miss Blair.”
“He was very kind and attentive to us all,” Nea answered. “In fact, he did more than anybody else to make everything go off smoothly.”
“I can’t find out who the dickens he is, though,” Armitage broke in with a sigh. He was an old habitué of the Riviera and had imbibed all the true Rivieran love for scandal-mongering and inquisitiveness, “He beats me quite. I never was so utterly nonplussed in all my life. I’ve tried my hardest to draw him out, but I can get nothing out of him. He shifts, and evades, and prevaricates, and holds his tongue. He won’t be pumped, however skillfully you work the handle.”
And Armitage flung himself back in a despairing attitude.
Nea smiled.
“That’s not unnatural,” she remarked in parenthesis.
“The worst of it is, though, the other fellow’s just as reticent as he is,” Armitage went on, unheeding her remarks. “Not about himself, I don’t mean — that’s all plain sailing: Thistleton pére’s a master cutler at Sheffield, who manufactures razors by appointment to Her Majesty (odd implements for Her Majesty!), and is as rich as they make them — but about this man Gascoyne, whom you call ‘the scallywag—’”
“Oh, say!” Isabel Boyton interposed frankly, “if that aint real good now. It was you yourself that taught us the word — we innocent lambs had never even heard of it — and now you want to go and father it upon us!”
“Well, anyhow, Gascoyne seems to have put Thistleton up to it to keep all dark, for when I try to pump him about his tutor he shuts his big mouth, and looks sheepishly foolish, and can’t be got to say a single word about him.”
“What was that Mrs. Newton was saying to you yesterday about there being a Sir Somebody Gascoyne somewhere down in South Wales?” Mme. Ceriolo asked with languid interest.
For a foreigner, born and bred abroad, Mme. Ceriolo’s acquaintance with English life and English topography was certainly something quite surprising. But then, you see, her dear mamma, as she was careful always to explain to strangers, was English born, the daughter of a dean and niece of a viscount. Very well connected person on every side, little Mme. Ceriolo! And a dean is such a capital card to play in society!
“Oh, there was a Sir Emery Gascoyne at Gascoyne Manor, down near Haverfordwest,” Armitage explained glibly; “a very rich old gentleman of sensitive tastes and peculiar opinions. I stopped there once when I was an undergraduate. Splendid old place — Elizabethan house — delightful park — square miles of pheasants; but ill-tempered, very. If this young fellow’s related to him — his next-of-kin, heir-at-law, executor, assign, and so forth — now’s your chance, Miss Boyton, to pick up that English title I heard you say yesterday you’d set your susceptible American heart upon.”
The golden-haired Pennsylvanian smiled resignedly. “I can never — never — never be, Lady Isabel,” she observed with pathos. “And yet I feel somehow like running a coronet!”
“I don’t think Mr. Gascoyne can be in any way connected with these Pembrokeshire people,” Nea Blair put in, without the slightest intention of contributing at all to the general gossip. “He told me his family lived in Surrey — and,” she added after a moment’s faint hesitation, “he implied they were by no means either rich or distinguished.”
“In Surrey? Where — where?” urged a general chorus, in which Armitage’s voice and Mme. Ceriolo’s were by far the most conspicuous.
“I don’t know whether I ought to say,” Nea answered simply. “I dragged it out of him rather, and he told me in confidence.” —
“Oh, if it’s got to telling you things in confidence already,” Armitage retorted with a very meaning smile, “I wouldn’t for worlds dream of inquiring any further into the matter. Eh, Mme. Ceriolo? What do you think about it?”
Thus goaded to a reply, Nea answered at once with a very red face, “It wasn’t so very much in confidence as all that comes to. He lives in Hillborough.”
“Hillborough,” Armitage repeated, with a very abstruse air. “Then that’ll exactly do. A friend of mine’s a vicar near Hillborough — the very next parish, in fact, a place called Hipsley — and I’ll write and ask him this very day all about the mysterious stranger. For when a man possesses a social mystery, it’s a sort of duty one owes to society to turn him inside out and unravel him entirely. Fellows have no right to set us double acrostics in their own persons, and then omit to supply the solution.”
“Here they come,” Mme. Ceriolo cried. “The two Oxonians! You’ll have an opportunity now to try your hand again at him.”
Armitage’s eye gleamed like a setter’s on the trail of quarry.
“I’ll have one more try, at any rate,” he said with an air of virtuous resolution; “his birth shall no longer be ‘wropped in mystery,’ like Jeames de la Pluche’s. He shall tell us all. He shall be forced against his will to confess his secret.”
The blond young man approached them carelessly.
“Morning, Armitage,” he said with an easy nod. Then he lifted his hat, “Good-morning, Mme. Ceriolo. Miss Boyton, I hope your mamma’s not overtired this morning.”
“We’re all too stiff to do anything on earth but sit still and scandalize,” the pretty American answered with pert fluency. “We were scandalizing you two when you hove in sight round the next block. I guess you must have felt your ears tingle.”
Paul felt his tingling at that precise moment.
“What were you saying about us?” he inquired eagerly.
Miss Boyton made a graceful and ladylike, though faint variation on a common gesture of street-boy derision.
“Wouldn’t you just like to know?” she responded saucily. “You can’t tell what things we’ve all been hearing about you.”
“You can hardly have heard much that was true,” Paul retorted with some annoyance. “Nobody here at Mentone knows anything of my family?”
“What, have you no friends here?” Mme. Ceriolo inquired, astonished. “How very odd! I thought everybody knocked up against somebody they knew in Mentone. The world’s so absurdly small nowadays.” And she sighed feelingly.
Paul hesitated.
“Only one lady,” he answered, after a brief pause. “A friend of my mother’s. And I’m sure you haven’t any of you met her, or else she’d have told me so.”
“Are you all of you game for a brisk walk to Cap Martin?” Thistleton put in abruptly, with a jerk of his thumb in the direction indicated. “We must do something to work off the effects of that infernal jolting.”
“Bar the swear-word, I quite coincide,” Isabel Boyton answered.
“The rest of us are too tired, I think,” Mme. Ceriolo yawned, gazing around her affectedly, and darting a very meaning glance at Armitage.
“I’ll go,” that inquiring soul responded promptly, “catching on to it,” as Miss Boyton afterward observed, like a detective to the traces of a supposed forger.
“You won’t come, Nea?” the American asked as she rose to go.
“I don’t think I can,” Nea answered hurriedly, looking down at her feet: “I don’t feel up to it.” As a matter of fact, nothing on earth would have pleased her better; but she didn’t like to walk with Paul after Armitage’s insinuations that he had been quick in taking her into his youthful confidence.
“Well, let’s start at once, then,” the blond young man remarked cheerfully; he was always as cheerful as health and wealth and good humor can make one. “We’ve got no time to lose, I expect, if we mean to walk out to the point and back before lunch-time.”
As they turned to set out, a woman passed them very unobtrusively; a Frenchwoman, as it seemed, neatly but by no means fashionably dressed, and carrying in her hand a small market-basket. She looked at Paul very hard as she went by, but evidently had not the least intention of recognizing him. The young man, however, gazed at her for a moment in obvious doubt: then something within him seemed to get the better of him. He raised his hat, and said “Bon jour, Mademoiselle,” with marked politeness.
“Bon jour, M. Paul,” the Frenchwoman answered with a respectful smile, evidently pleased at his recognition. And they both passed on upon their respective errands.
But as soon as they were gone, Mme. Ceriolo put up her tortoiseshell-eyeglass — the eyeglass she reserved for her most insolent stares — and regarded the unobtrusive Frenchwoman from a distance with a prolonged scrutiny. “Nea,” she said, turning round to her charge with the air of one who has made a profound discovery, “did you take it all in, cette petite comédie-là? How simple! How comical! How charmingly idyllic! He didn’t know whether to bow to her or not, in such good company; but at the last moment he was afraid to cut her. Poor little simpleton! How very fresh of him! This is evidently the lady who was his mother’s friend, I suppose. She would have saved him the exposure if she could. But he hadn’t the tact or the good sense to perceive it.”
“He was quite right to bow,” Nea answered, growing hot, “whoever she may be; and I respect him all the more for it.”
“But do you know who she is?” madame persisted, all overflowing with suppressed amusement.
“No, I don’t,” Nea answered; “and it doesn’t much matter.”
Madame braced herself up, like a British matron compelled to announce a most shocking truth. “She’s a lady’s maid with a family at the Iles Britanniques,” she answered shortly.
There was a brief pause after the explosion, in the course of which Nea and Isabel Boyton’s mamma each digested by degrees this startling item of information. Then Nea murmured aloud once more, “I always did, and always shall, like scallywags. I’m glad Mr. Gascoyne wasn’t ashamed to acknowledge her.”
CHAPTER VI.
THE COMMON PUMP IN ACTION.
THE square party of pedestrians turned away along the sea-front, and then, taking the main road toward Nice, struck off for the basking, olive-covered promontory of Cap Martin. Thistleton led the way with the Pennsylvanian heiress; Paul and Armitage followed more slowly at a little distance. Isabel Boyton had arranged this order of malice prepense; for she was a mischievous girl, like most of her countrywomen, and, though not inquisitive enough herself to assist in the process of pumping Paul, she was by no means averse to see that application of social hydraulics put into practice for the general benefit by a third person.
“Queer sort of body, that little Mme. Ceriolo!” Armitage began as soon as they were out of earshot. He was one of that large class of people who can seldom talk about anything on earth except some other human being. Personalities largely outweigh generalities in their conversation. With all the world to choose from, with sun, moon, and stars, and heavenly bodies, sea, and land, and air, and ether, stone, and soil, and plant, and animal, history and science, and art and letters, to form the text of a possible talk, they can find nothing to discuss except some petty detail in the trivial life of some other fellow-creature. That Mrs. Jones has quarrelled with Mrs. Brown, or that Smith has been blackballed at the Cheyne Row Club, seems to them a far more important and interesting fact than an eruption of Vesuvius or a cataclysm at St. Petersburg.
“She seems good-natured,” Paul answered, without profoundly gauging the depths of the subject. It was the most charitable thing he could find in his heart to say about her.
“Oh, good-natured enough, no doubt,” Armitage went on confidentially. “But what a curious person for a man of the world to think of intrusting the care of his daughter to!”
“Perhaps Mr. Blair’s not a man of the world,” the younger speaker replied, with rare sagacity for his age. “Country parsons are often very simple-minded people.”
“He must be precious simple-minded if he took the Ceriolo for anything but what she is,” Armitage continued, sneering. “A brazen-faced specimen of the cosmopolitan adventuress, if ever there was one. But how clever, too! how immensely clever! Ton my soul, I admire her ingenuity! Having accepted a situation as guardian of the morals of an English young lady, she rises to the full height of her post with astonishing success and astonishing dignity. Her simulation of virtue’s something quite sublime in its own way. Why, you’d hardly believe it; I attempted to flirt with her in the mildest possible manner — I, who am the discreetest and least compromising of mankind — a mountain of prudence — and the British indignation and icy coldness with which she repelled my gentle advances was truly edifying. No Belgravian mamma that ever lived could have done it more beautifully.”
“Perhaps she didn’t care for you,” Paul suggested dryly. “Even a born flirt doesn’t want to flirt with everybody indiscriminately.”
“Perhaps that may be it,” Armitage echoed, somewhat crestfallen. He was over thirty, and he took it ill that a young fellow barely of age as yet should thus calmly snub his pretensions to the rôle of lady-killer. “But, at any rate, her respectability is beyond reproach. Being cast for her part by pure force of circumstances, she accepts the situation and plays it to perfection.”
“She’s quite right to respect Miss Blair’s youth and innocence,” Paul answered quietly. “As far as that goes, I think all the better of her for it. Even if she is an adventuress, as you say, she’s bound, as things stand, to do the very best she can for her present employer.”
“Oh, of course — of course. You speak like a book, a nice little Sunday-school book, with a picture on the cover. But, from the other point of view, you know, the thing’s so ludicrous. Her careful assumption of the highest morality’s so transparently absurd. Whenever she delivers herself of one of her little copy-book platitudes, I always feel inclined to put my tongue in my cheek and wink gently. There’s no doubt about it, though, she’s devilish clever. She can talk every blessed European language with equal ease. She seems, like the famous prima donna in the story, to have swindled in every civilized country of the world — and also in Germany.”
Paul smiled. —
“Her French is certainly admirable,” he said. “Her accent’s so good. She speaks like a Parisian.”
Armitage darted a hasty glance at him sideways. So the fellow pretended to be a judge of French accents, did he? That was certainly remarkable. A scallywag on accent! “But her English, too,” he persisted once more; “what’s still odder is her English. She rolls her rs a little, to be sure, and she slurs her ths; that’s only natural; but what admirable fluency and what perfect command she has of even our slang and our stock quotations? She can pun and jest and bandy chaff in English, French, Italian, and German. She can bully a cabman or browbeat a landlord in ten languages. If her name’s really Ceriolo — which Heaven only knows — the way she’s learnt English alone is something to my mind truly miraculous.”
“Her mother was English, she says,” Paul suggested in his simplicity. “A clergyman’s daughter, she told me; a dean something or other.”
The older hand laughed at him to his face. “Do you really mean to say,” he cried with an amused air, “you believe all that? Oh, what charming simplicity! Why, you might as well believe in the countess’s coronet, and the family legend, and the late lamented count who was killed at the head of his noble troop of Austrain sympathizers by an infuriated Turk in the war in Servia. No, no, my dear fellow; don’t you see how cleverly all that’s been arranged? Madame has to deal with a respected papa who happens to be an English clergyman. Whatever or whoever the Ceriolo may be, she thoroughly understands our English philistinism and our English prejudices. The respected papa won’t intrust his precious budding daughter to anybody who’s not a highly respectable married woman and a member of the Church of England as by law established. Very well, then; we can easily manage that for you; madame’s mamma was an English lady — Anglican of course — yes, and clerical too — a dean’s daughter; and madame herself, though born at the ancestral Schloss in the Austrian Tyrol, was brought up by agreement in her mother’s religion. Could anything be simpler, more natural, or more convincing? And how very well planned! French and German with the Paris accent and the Viennese culture, and yet all the advantages of an English lady’s care and the precise and particular type of Christendom exactly adapted to the needs and requirements of a country clergyman’s daughter! By George, she’s deep — extremely deep. But if it were a Frenchwoman of clerical sympathies she had to deal with, I bet you she’d be a Parisian and a fervent Catholic. Not too devote, you know, nor austerely rigorous, but as Catholic as a dame du monde ought to be.”
