Cynthia's Chauffeur. Tracy Louis
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?”
CHAPTER IV
SHADOWS – WITH OCCASIONAL GLEAMS
Mrs. Devar ate her soup in petrified silence. Among the diners were at least two peers and a countess, all of whom she knew slightly; at no other time during the last twenty years would she have missed such an opportunity of impressing the company in general and her companion in particular by waddling from table to table and greeting these acquaintances with shrill volubility.
But to-night she was beginning to be alarmed. Her youthful protégée was carrying democratic training too far; it was quite possible that a request to modify an unconventional freedom of manner where Fitzroy was concerned would meet with a blank refusal. That threatened a real difficulty in the near future, and she was much perturbed by being called on to decide instantly on a definite course of action. Too strong a line might have worse consequences than a laissez faire attitude. As matters stood, the girl was eminently plastic, her naturally gentle disposition inducing respect for the opinions and wishes of an older and more experienced woman, yet there was a fearlessness, a frank candor of thought, in Cynthia’s character that awed and perplexed Mrs. Devar, in whom the unending struggle to keep afloat in the swift and relentless torrent of social existence had atrophied every sense save that of self-preservation. An open rupture, such as she feared might take place if she asserted her shadowy authority, was not to be dreamed of. What was to be done? Small wonder, then, that she should tackle her fish vindictively.
“Are you angry because Fitzroy is occupying the same hotel as ourselves?” asked Cynthia at last.
The girl had amused herself by watching the small coteries of stiff and starched Britons scattered throughout the room; she was endeavoring to classify the traveled and the untraveled by varying degrees of frigidity. As it happened, she was wholly wrong in her rough analysis. The Englishman who has wandered over the map is, if anything, more self-contained than his stay-at-home brother. He is often a stranger in his own land, and the dozen most reserved men present that evening were probably known by name and deed throughout the widest bounds of the empire.
But, though eyes and brain were busy, she could not help noticing Mrs. Devar’s taciturn mood. That a born gossip, a retailer of personal reminiscences confined exclusively to “the best people,” should eat stolidly for five consecutive minutes, seemed somewhat of a miracle, and Cynthia, as was her habit, came straight to the point.
Mrs. Devar managed to smile, pouting her lips in wry mockery of the suggestion that a chauffeur’s affairs should cause her any uneasiness whatsoever.
“I was really thinking of our tour,” she lied glibly. “I am so sorry you missed seeing Salisbury Cathedral. Why was the route altered?”
“Because Fitzroy remarked that the cathedral would always remain at Salisbury, whereas a perfect June day in the New Forest does not come once in a blue moon when one really wants it.”
“For a person of his class he appears to say that sort of thing rather well.”
Cynthia’s arched eyebrows were raised a little.
“Why do you invariably insist on the class distinction?” she cried. “I have always been taught that in England the barrier of rank is being broken down more and more every day. Your society is the easiest in the world to enter. You tolerate people in the highest circles who would certainly suffer from cold feet if they showed up too prominently in New York or Philadelphia; isn’t it rather out of fashion to be so exclusive?”
“Our aristocracy has such an assured position that it can afford to unbend,” quoted the other.
“Oh, is that it? I heard my father say the other day that it has often made him tired to see the way in which some of your titled nonentities grovel before a Lithuanian Jew who is a power on the Rand. But unbending is a different thing to groveling, perhaps?”
Mrs. Devar sighed, yet she gave a moment’s scrutiny to a wine-list brought by the head waiter.
“A small bottle of 61, please,” she said in an undertone.
Then she sighed again, deprecating the Vanrenen directness.
“Unfortunately, my dear, few of our set can avoid altogether the worship of the golden calf.”
Cynthia thrust an obstinate chin into the argument.
“People will do things for bread and butter that they would shy at if independent,” she said. “I can understand the calf proposition much more easily than the snobbishness that would forbid a gentleman like Fitzroy from eating a meal in the same apartment as his employers, simply because he earns money by driving an automobile.”
In her earnestness, Cynthia had gone just a little beyond the bounds of fair comment, and Mrs. Devar