Part 8

Now, most patient gentleman, at last I've finished my harangue. I'm ashamed to think how long it is, but I'm writing wrapped up in a warm coat, under a _tilleul_ in the Chateau garden, where I've been allowed to bring my campstool. Do you know what a _tilleul_ is? I don't believe you do. I didn't till the other day; but I shan't tell you, except that the very name suggests to me leisured ease and sauntering courtiers. You must come over to France and find out--and incidentally fetch me home--only not yet, please, oh, not yet. As for the _tilleul_, if you've any romance left in your dear old body you'd love sitting under it, even in winter. If it were summer, with the limes in blossom--well, the best way to express my feeling is to remark that if, in June moonlight, under a _tilleul_, a man I hated should propose to me, I'd believe for the moment I loved him and say "Yes--yes!" But you need not be frightened; it _isn't_ summer or moonlight, and there's no man except Brown within a hundred miles of your silly

Molly.

MOLLY RANDOLPH TO HER FATHER

Tours, _December 3_.

Three days since I wrote, blessed old Thing, but it seems three times three, for all the hours have been as cramfull as you used to fill my stocking at Christmas.

We couldn't get away from Amboise, as we expected, because the tyres didn't arrive till late in the evening. I knew it must be a long, tedious business fixing them on, so I never dreamed of starting next morning; but when morning came, and with it the chambermaid and my bath, there was a note from Brown, written in a hand a lot nicer than my poor "fist," announcing that the car was ready, and if I would like a surprise, might he "respectfully suggest" that I should come downstairs as soon as possible. You can imagine that I didn't "stand on the order of my going." My hair crinkled with surprise at being done so quickly, and I was in such a hurry that I nearly--but not quite--slid down the balusters.

Brown was at the front door, with the car all politely polished, and seeming to stand upon tiptoe on its big new tyres. But smart as the car was, it was nothing to the _chauffeur_. He looked like a sort of male Cinderella just after the fairy godmother had waved her wand; only instead of a ball dress she had given him, in place of his black leather, a suit of grey clothes; one of those high, turnover collars I love on a good-looking man; a dark necktie, and what _we_ call a "Derby" hat and the English call a "bowler." He was nice! I don't know if I'm a judge of a man's clothes, but to me they seemed as good form as any tailor in the world could cut. Perhaps the Honourable John gave them to him. Poor dear! he's far too fine a fellow really to have to wear another man's cast-off garments; but I suppose Providence must know best, and, anyhow, I'm sure the H. J. never looked half as nice in the things.

Brown had on also a mysterious air, which seemed to go with the clothes, and he asked if I'd mind taking a short run with him, without knowing beforehand where I was going. I said that, on the contrary, I should _like_ it. That seemed to please him. He helped me in (not that I needed it), the car started with a touch, and we began to thread the streets of the town behind the Chateau, I wondering _what_ was going to happen. When I had been in this car before, it was to travel "on the rims," you know. Now, on our four-plump new Michelins from Paris it was like being in a balloon, so easy was the motion even over the badly paved streets.

We wound round under the high wall of the Chateau, and came in a few minutes to a huge gateway. As we slowed down this gateway opened mysteriously from within to show a dim corkscrew of a road winding upward. I opened my mouth to ask an astonished question; then I thought better of it and kept still, though I know my eyes must have been snapping when Brown actually drove the car in. The gateway clanged behind us, as if by enchantment, shutting us into a twilight region, and behold, we were mounting the incline of the great tower, up which, perhaps, nobody had ever driven since the days of Mary Stuart.

Wasn't it _kind_ of Brown to remember my wish (which even I had forgotten!) to drive up the tower? I could hardly thank him enough for such a new and thrilling sensation as it was, twisting up and up, seeming to float in the vast hollow of the passage, the exquisite carved and vaulted roof giving back a rhythmical reverberation of the throbbing of our motor.

I couldn't even say "thank you," though, except in my thoughts, till we got to the top (which we did much too soon), for somehow it would have broken the charm to speak. But I think Brown understood that I appreciated it all, and what he had done.

At the top a big doorway stood open, and by it one of the delightful, grizzled, dignified old dears who must have been made guardians of the Chateau, because they fit so well into the picture. I thought, though, that this one looked different from before, for some reason quite flurried and almost scared. I suppose it must have been the car and the unusualness that upset him; but Brown drove out splendidly, stopping in the terrace-garden.

"At that door," said the charming old fellow, "Francis the First of France received Henry the Eighth of England, who with a train of a hundred knights rode up the sloping way in the tower. To-day is the first time that an automobile has ever been inside the doors; therefore, mademoiselle, you have just been making history." And he bowed so deliciously that I could have cried, because I hadn't my purse with me to give him a "guerdon"; that would have been the only word, if I had had it. Fortunately Brown had. Something yellow glittered as it passed from hand to hand, and the old Frenchman (so dramatic, like most of his countrymen) bowed again and took off his hat with a flourish. If the something hadn't been yellow, but only white, I wonder if he would have let us make that splendid, sweeping circle round the gardens before we plunged back into the cool gloom of the tower?

Oh, that descent! I feel breathless, just remembering it, but it was a glorious kind of breathlessness, like you feel when you go tobogganing--only more so. Brown took it at tremendous speed, but I wasn't a bit afraid, for I trust him utterly as a driver. If he said he could take me safely over Niagara Falls, and looked straight at me in a way he has when he said it, I believe I'd go--unless, of course, you objected!

I found myself thinking of Poe's descent of the Maelstrom, and when I said so to Brown afterwards, it turned out that he'd read it. He had the car perfectly in hand, and steered it to a hair's breadth. We were down in a moment--or it seemed so; and coming out into the bright little streets was like waking up after a strange dream. In three minutes more we were at the door of our hotel, and I really _was_ asking myself if I had dreamed it.

"Brown," said I, "I told you once before that you were a leather angel. Now I believe you are a grey tweed Genie. This has been the nicest morning of my life. But you really must tell me how much you paid that custodian, and let me give you back the money at once."

He interrupted himself in the midst of a beaming smile to wrinkle his eyebrows together. "It's been a nice morning for me, too, miss," said he quite humbly; "but it will half spoil it if you won't let it stand as it is. It was only a few francs, and as you pay me a good screw, I can well afford it. You're always so good, that I know you'd be sorry to hurt my feelings."

Well, of course I would; so I couldn't say any more, could I? Though before all these motor-car wonders began it would have felt odd to take a "treat" from one's servant.

Now, Dad, I'm getting conscience-stricken, and keep wondering with every paragraph (especially what I call my "descriptive" paragraphs) if I'm boring you. I won't give you our daily programme _en masse_. I'll just sum things up by saying that we've simply lived, moved, and had our being in, on, or at castles. This country of the Loire is a sort of fairyland, where everybody had a castle, or at the very least a lordly dwelling-place that was more fortress than private house. You can't look up or down the river but that on every hill you see a chateau, with enough history clustering about it to make up a fat volume. How they all escaped the Revolution is a marvel. But they have; and if they've been much restored, it is so cleverly done that the most critical eyes are deceived.

If I could live in one of the "show" chateaux, I'd choose Chenonceaux. We drove to it on the day of the Tower, as I've labelled it in my book of memory, "taking it in" on our way to Tours. It's no use your making a note of that wish of mine, though Dad, and trying to buy it, because somebody else has done that already. But if you can find a river as pretty as the Cher (an appropriate name for the little daughter of the Loire, on which--_over_ which, literally, Chenonceaux stands), you might build me one on the same pattern, so I'll give you a general idea of what the castle is like.

Let me see, what _is_ it like? To make a comparison would be giving to an airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Not that Chenonceaux is _nothing_--quite the opposite; but it leaves in the mind an impression of airiness and gaiety, sweet and elusive as one of those quaint French _chansons_ you like me to sing you, with my guitar, on a summer evening. I think, even if I hadn't been told, I should have felt instinctively that it must have been built to please a pretty, capricious woman. If such a woman could be turned into a house, she would look like Chenonceaux, and wouldn't suffer by the change. Perhaps Diane de Poitiers isn't a proper object of sympathy for a well-brought-up young lady like Chauncy Randolph's daughter; but I can't help pitying her, because that horrid old frump of a Catherine de Medici grabbed it away from her before Henry the Second was hardly cold in his grave. Think how Diane, who had loved the place, must have felt to fancy that stuffy Catherine in her everlasting black dresses, squatting in her beautiful rooms! We saw those rooms, by the way, for we came on one of the days when people are allowed to go through the Chateau (Brown had planned that), and the clever millionaires who own it have had the sense and the grace to leave everything just as it was, at least in Catherine's time. And one can take the bad, Catherine taste out of one's mouth by thinking of lovely little Mary Stuart singing like a lark through the rooms, and living there and in the garden the happiest days that she was ever to know.

One wouldn't suppose that a gloomy, plotting mind like Catherine's would have had a place in it for creating beauty; but it had its one ornamental corner, or she couldn't have thought out the bridge-gallery thrown across the Cher, springing from the original building and spanning the river to the farther shore.

There are two storeys over the bridge, long corridors, all windows, and lovely green and gold river lights, netted over the floors and walls--the most exquisite effect. I walked there, calling up the spirits of vanished queens and princesses--the "dear, dead women," seeing "all the gold that used to fall and hang about their shoulders." Oh, I've got the quotation wrong, but it's Aunt Mary's fault, for at this very minute she's reading aloud to herself in a guide-book about Rousseau and a lot of other shining lights who used to visit Chenonceaux when it belonged to Monsieur and Madame Dupin; but those days were comparatively modern, so I don't take much interest. Nothing at Chenonceaux seems worth while unless it happened before the days of Charles the Ninth.

Tours looked at first sight very sedate and grey, after Chenonceaux, for the airy picture of the castle had kept floating before my eyes during our run. It seems to me we are always on the other side of the river from things, and have to get to them by crossing long bridges. We did it again at Tours, and it was particularly long, and very fine. But it was evening, and dim and bitterly cold; and I'm afraid I shouldn't have paid as much attention to it as I did if Brown hadn't said that Balzac called it "one of the finest monuments of France." And then in a minute, at the entrance to the town, we saw two ghostly white statues glimmering in a wide, green _place_. "There, miss, are the two tutelary geniuses of this part of France," said Brown; "Rabelais and Descartes." By that time we had flashed past, but I screwed my neck round to look back at them till I got a "crick" in it. Have you ever noticed that most of the things people tell you to look at, or that you particularly want to see in life, are always behind your back or on one side, as if to give you the greatest possible trouble? It seems as if there must be a "moral in it," as Alice's Duchess would have said.

Tours appeared _that_ evening (I have a motive for the emphasis) to consist of one long, straight street; and turning to the left at the end, we pulled up at the door of a hotel. Just an ordinary-looking hotel it was on the outside, and I little thought what my impressions of it would be by-and-by.

I was tired, not so much physically from what we had done, but with the feeling that my capacity for admiring and enjoying things had been filled up and brimmed over, so that a drop more in would actually hurt. Do you know that sensation? It was just the mood to appreciate warmth and cosiness. We got both. Aunt Mary and I had two bedrooms opening off a sitting-room; dear, old-fashioned rooms, and, above all, _French_ old-fashioned, which to me is fascinating. We made ourselves as pretty as Nature ordained us severally to be, and went downstairs. The dining-room was our first big surprise. It was almost worthy of one of the chateaux, with its dignified tapestried and wainscotted walls, and its big, branching candelabra. I'm sure if we'd been dining at a chateau we shouldn't have got a better dinner. I don't think anything ever tasted so good to me in my life, and I couldn't help wondering how poor, tired Brown was faring while we lazy ones feasted in state in the _salle a manger_. I thought of you, too, for you would have loved the things to eat. They were rich and Southern, and tasted in one's mouth just the way the word "Provence" sounds in one's ear. Aunt Mary had read in one of her ubiquitous guide-books that Touraine as well as Provence is famous for its "succulent cooking," and for once a guide-book seems to be right. They had all sorts of tricky, rich little dishes for dinner--_rillettes_ and other things which would have made your mouth water (though if it did, and I were by, I'd shut my eyes), and the head waiter told me when I asked, that they were specialties of Tours and of the hotel. I think _he_ must be a specialty of Tours and the hotel too. He has the softest, most engaging, yet dignified manner; and the way he has of setting down a dish before you seems to season it and give you a double appetite. There's another man in the hotel, too, who adds to the "aroma"; he's like a "bush to wine," or something I've heard you say. By day he's _valet de chambre_, in a scarlet waistcoat no brighter than his cheeks and eyes; at dinner he's a waiter in correct "dress" clothes, and then he goes back to valeting again till midnight. He would put me in a good temper if I had started out to murder someone, and when he brought us the wine list, waiting with a cherry-cheeked smile to see what we would choose, nothing seemed worthy of him except champagne; but champagne looked so dissipated for two lone females. However, I had decided to have some, to drink the health of the new car, and perhaps--a little--to shock Aunt Mary, when the diamond-eyed one respectfully inquired, in nice Southern French, how we would like to try a "little wine of the country, sparkling Vouvray; quite a ladies' wine." So we compromised with Vouvray. It was too ridiculously cheap, but it had a delicious flavour, and Aunt Mary and I, being merely females, agreed that it was more delicate than any champagne we had ever tasted. We drank your health and the car's, and then I had a sudden inspiration. "To the 'Lightning Conductor'!" said I, raising my glass.

"What lightning conductor? And what do you mean?" inquired Aunt Mary.

"The one and only Lightning Conductor--Brown," I explained. "I have just thought of that as a good name for him, now that he has a chance to spin us across the world at such a pace with a new car."

"I do hope, my dear Molly," severely remarked Aunt Mary, setting down her glass with an indignant little thud, "you will not call that young man any such thing to his face. He has already been allowed far too many liberties, and though I must say he has not to any great extent taken undue advantage of them so far, he may _break out_ at any moment."

I'm sorry to tell you, Dad, that I said "Pooh!" and asked her if she thought Brown were an active volcano. Anyway, whether I call him so "to his face" or not, the "Lightning Conductor" he is, and will remain for me, though perhaps he wouldn't be flattered at being "launched and christened" with mere Vouvray.

I didn't expect to like Tours half as much as I do. But we have been here for three days, and though I thought at first there was only one long street, we've found something interesting to see every hour of daylight--so I write in the evenings in our cosy sitting-room. Or if I don't write, I read Balzac. I never appreciated him as I do here, on his "native heath." I have begged Brown to name his master's car "Balzac," because it, too, is a "violent and complicated genius." I've gazed at the house where Balzac was born; I've photographed the Balzac medallion; I've stuffed my trunks with illustrated editions of Balzac's books; and I've gone to see everything I could find, which he ever spoke about. His _Cure de Tours_ is the most harrowing story I ever read; and the strange little house in the shadow of the cathedral, with one of the great buttresses planting its enormous foot in the wee garden, fascinates me. There lived the horrible Mademoiselle Gamard, and there, with her, lodged the wicked Cure, and the poor, good little Cure, over whose childlike, gentle stupidity and agony I half cried my eyes out last night. But Balzac's French discourages me. He must have had a wonderful vocabulary. I am always finding words on every page which I never saw before.

I don't like cathedrals much as a rule, unless there's something really extraordinary about them; but I love the big, grey, Gothic cathedral of Tours. It seems a different grey from any other, not cold and forbidding, but warm and very soft, as if it were made of sealskin. I suppose that is partly the effect of the beautiful carvings of the tall, tall front. I feel as if I should like to smooth and caress it with my hand. And it is beautiful inside. Somehow it is so individual that it gives you a welcome, as if it meant to be your friend.

The streets of _old_ Tours are so intricate that Aunt Mary and I would never have known where to go, but Brown, who has been here before, has guided us everywhere. He took us to see the house of Tristan the Hermit, and an adorable little convent, which is called the Petit St. Martin, with lovely Renaissance carving, and actually a _tilleul_. He showed us the oldest house in Tours, the quaintest building you could imagine, standing on a corner, with lots of other very old houses on the same street. And the Charlemagne Tower--I'm not sure, but I liked that the best of all--and a marvellous fourteenth-century house, a perfect lacework of carving, which has been restored, and is called the Maison Gouin, after the rich man who lives in it. Oh, I forgot to tell you, I have bought your favourite _Quentin Durward_, and am sandwiching him with Balzac. Reading him over again in this country was Brown's idea for me, and I'm obliged to him for the "tip." Speaking of tips reminds me I really ought to give _him_ one--a very large one, I'm sure. And yet it will be awkward offering it, I'm afraid. I know I shall stammer and be an idiot generally; but I shall prop my courage with the reflection that, after all, he _is_ a _chauffeur_, and perhaps has, in his heart, been wondering why I haven't given him anything before.

Yesterday I saw palm trees, growing in the _place_, and kissed my hand to them, because they told me that we were on the threshold of the South. Another thing in Tours which suggests the South, I think, is the _patisserie_. Aunt Mary and I have discovered a confectioner's to conjure with; but Tours seems to have discovered him long ago, for all the "beauty and fashion" of the town go there for coffee and cakes in the afternoon. We do likewise--when we have time; and yesterday Aunt Mary ate twelve little cakes, each one different from the other. You see, they are so good, and she said, as a conscientious tourist, she thought she ought to try every kind in the shop, so as to know which was nicest. But she felt odd afterwards, and refused one or two of the best courses at dinner.

The way that we have used our time at Tours is very much to our credit, I think--or rather to the Lightning Conductor's. In the mornings Brown has taken us on excursions outside the town, and in the afternoons, before dark, we have "done" the town itself, as Aunt Mary would say, though I hate the expression myself. But one whole day out of our three we spent in running with the car to Langeais and Azay-le-Rideau.