The Motor Maid. C. N. Williamson

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      She could speak French, and we talked together. Yes, her mistress had died very suddenly, but she and the doctors had always known that it might happen so, at any moment. It was hard for me, but—what would you? Life was hard. It might have been that I would have found life hard with Her Highness. What was to be, would be. I must write to my friends. It was not in her power to do anything for me. Her Highness had left no instructions. These things happened. Well! one made the best of them. There was nothing more to say.

      So we said nothing more, and the woman moved away silently, as if to funeral music, to prepare for her journey to Russia. I—went down to luncheon.

      One always does go down to luncheon while one is still inclined to keep up appearances before oneself; but the restaurant was large and terribly magnificent, with a violent rose-coloured carpet, and curtains which made me, in my frightened pallor, with my pale yellow hair and my gray travelling dress, feel like a poor little underground celery-stalk flung into a sunlit strawberry-bed, amid a great humming of bees.

      The vast rosy sea was thickly dotted with many small table-islands that glittered appetizingly with silver and glass; but I could not have afforded to acknowledge an appetite even if I'd had one.

      My conversation with the Russian woman had made me rather late. Most of the islands were inhabited, and as I was piloted past them by a haughty head waiter I heard people talking about golf, tennis, croquet, bridge, reminding me that I was in a place devoted to the pursuit of pleasure.

      The most desirable islands were next the windows, therefore the one at which I dropped anchor (for I'd changed from a celery-stalk into a little boat now) was exactly in the middle of the room, with no view save of faces and backs of heads.

      One of the faces was that of the lady who had gone up with me in the lift; and now and then, from across the distance that separated us, I saw her glance at me. She sat alone at a table that had beautiful roses on it, and she read a book as she ate.

      One ordered here à la carte: there was no déjeuner à prix fixe; and it took courage to tell a waiter who looked like a weary young duke that I would have consommé and bread, with nothing, no, nothing to follow.

      Oh! the look he gave me, as if I had annexed the table under false pretences!

      Suddenly the chorus of an American song ran with mocking echoes through my brain. I had heard Pamela sing it at the Convent:

      The waiter roared it through the hall:

      "We don't give bread with one fish-ball!

      We-don't-give-bread with one fish-ba-a-ll!"

      I half expected some such crushing protest, and it was only when the weary duke had turned his back, presumably to execute my order, that I sank into my chair with a sigh of relief after strain.

      Just at that moment I met the eye of the lady of the lift, and when the waiter reappeared with a small cup, on a charger large enough to have upheld the head of John the Baptist, she looked again. In five minutes I had finished the consommé, and it became painful to linger. Rising, I made for the door, which seemed a mile away, and I did not lift my head in passing the table where the lady sat behind her roses. I heard a rustling as I went by, however, a crisp rustling like flower-leaves whispering in a breeze, or a woman's silk ruffles stroking each other, which followed me out into the hall.

      Then the pleasant voice I had heard near the lift spoke behind me:

      "Won't you have your coffee with me in the garden?"

      I could hardly believe at first that it was for me the invitation was intended, but turning with a little start, I saw it repeated in a pair of gentle gray eyes set rather wide apart in a delicate, colourless face.

      "Oh! thank you!" I hesitated. "I—"

      "Do forgive me," went on the lady, "but your face interested me this morning, and as we're all rather curious about strangers—we idle ones here—I took the liberty of asking the manager who you were. He told me—"

      "About the Princess?" I asked, when she paused as if slightly embarrassed.

      "He told me that you said you had come to Cannes to be her companion. He didn't tell me she was dead, poor woman, but—there are some things one knows by instinct, by intuition, aren't there? And then—I couldn't help seeing, or perhaps only imagining, that you looked sad and worried. You are very young, and are here all alone, and so—I thought perhaps you wouldn't mind my speaking to you?"

      "I'm very grateful," I said, "for your interest. And it's so good of you to ask me to have coffee with you." (I was almost sure, too, that she had hurried away in the midst of her luncheon to do this deed of kindness.)

      "Perhaps, after all, you'll come with me to my own sitting-room," she suggested. "We can talk more quietly there; and though the garden's quite lovely, it's rather too glaring at this time of day."

      We went up in the lift together, and the moment she opened the door of her sitting-room I saw that she had contrived to make it look like herself. She talked only about her books and photographs and flowers until the coffee had come, and we seemed better acquainted. Then she told me that she was Lady Kilmarny—"Irish in every drop in her veins"; and presently set herself to draw me out.

      I began by making up my mind not to pour forth all my troubles, lest she should think that I wanted to take advantage of her kindness and sponge upon her for help; but she was irresistible, as only a true Irishwoman can be, and the first thing I knew, I had emptied my heart of its worries.

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      "You will have to go back to the cousins you've been living with in Paris," pronounced Lady Kilmarny. "You're much too young and pretty to be anywhere alone."

      "I can't go on living with them unless I promise to marry Monsieur Charretier," I explained. "I'd rather scrub floors than marry Monsieur Charretier."

      "You'd never finish one floor. The second would finish you. I thought French girls—well, then, half French girls—usually let their people arrange their marriages."

      "Perhaps I'm not usual. I hope Monsieur Charretier isn't."

      "Is he such a monster?"

      "He is fat, especially in all the places he oughtn't to be fat. And old. But worse than his embonpoint and his nose, he made his money in—you could never guess."

      "I see by your face, my poor child: it was Liver Pills."

      "Something far more dreadful."

      "Are there lower depths?"

      "There are—Corn Plasters."

      "Oh, my dear, you are quite right! You couldn't marry him."

      "Thank you so much! Then, I can't go back to my cousins. They—they take Monsieur Charretier seriously. I think they even take his plasters—gratuitously."

      "Is he СКАЧАТЬ