Cynthia's Chauffeur 3Some Emotions--Without a Moral
18
Literature · Romance
Cynthia's Chauffeur 3
Some Emotions--Without a Moral
TracyEnglish
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:
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?"
