CHAPTER V.

SOUTHWARD.

Theodore Trist had not over-estimated his powers in informing Brenda that he had some influence with the newspapers. The story of Captain Huston's sudden death never became public property; indeed, there was no mention made of the inquest. The result of an accident was all detail vouchsafed to the public. There was, by the way, some virtuous indignation expressed in the columns of a halfpenny weekly publication possessing a small circulation in the neighbourhood of the West India Dock Road. This just wrath was excited by the evident suppression of detail, and the scant courtesy with which their representative had been received by a gentleman--himself a journalist--who was closely connected with the disgraceful death of this British officer. In cheap type, upon a poor quality of paper, and in vile English, this self-constituted representative of the thirsting British public demanded further details. He expressed himself surprised that an enlightened nation should stand idly by while the aristocracy of the overburthened land deliberately plotted to screen its own debauched proceedings from public censure. The enlightened nation either failed to spend a halfpenny foolishly (thus neglecting its own interests), or it preferred to continue standing by. Moreover, the debauched aristocracy showed no signs of quailing beneath the lash of a relentless press. It is just possible, however, that they had neither seen the newspaper in question nor heard of its existence.

The demand for further details must have failed to reach the delinquents concerned. At all events, there was no reply, the error was never repaired, and the _Times_ failed to take up the cudgels and fight for their common rights side by side with its powerful contemporary.

So Alfred Woodruff Charles Huston was laid, not with his own, but with the forefathers of someone else in Willesden Cemetery. Poor fellow! he came from a military stock, brave men and true, who had fought and drunk and finally deposited their bones in many parts of the globe. I am not by habit a sentimental person--moonlight over water, for instance, or the whisper of the pine-trees, has a certain quieting effect upon me, though it does not make me drivel; but I see the great silent pathos of our huge graveyards. If I never pitied Alfred Huston when he was alive, I pity him now in his narrow bed--one of many--an insignificant volume in God's book-shelf. Thus the Almighty is pleased to shelve us in rows. Sometimes He classifies us, and we are labelled with a title somewhat similar to that on the stones near at hand; but nowadays we stray away from the original corner of the library, and when the end comes we find ourselves among strangers. In some country churchyard it is sad enough to see a cluster of mouldering stones all bearing the same name, but infinitely more pathetic is it to wander through the serried ranks of the dead at Brookwood, Willesden, or Brompton. It is like a 'sundry' shelf, where all odd volumes are hastily thrust and soon forgotten; for poetry is side by side with commerce, fame elbows obscurity, youth lies by age. We scan the names, and find no connection. Truly these are among strangers--they sleep not with their fathers. And the shelves fill up, showing nought but titles. The books are closed, the tale is told, and so it moulders until the leaves shall flutter again beneath the searching finger of the Almighty. Sooner be buried in the common ditch beneath a weight of red-coated humanity than amidst these unknown thousands--sooner, a thousand times sooner, lie in patient solitude on untrodden rocks beneath the wave!

Alfred Huston's name is doubtless to be found in Willesden Cemetery to-day, though I do not know of anyone who will care to seek it. His wife caused it to be recorded in imperishable letters of lead, as if, _mes frères_, it had not as well been writ in water. It stands, moreover, in the State archives amidst a long record of heroes who drew their pay with remarkable regularity, and did little else. It was very good of her to go to the expense of those leaden letters, considering what an enormous number of mourning garments she was absolutely compelled to buy. The thought even is worthy of praise, because her mind was fully occupied with questions of crape and caps. Let us, therefore, give full credit to this widow who, in order to do more honour to her husband's memory, sent some of her dresses back four times to the milliners because the bodice would not fit.

One December morning three ladies dressed in black (two, indeed, wore widows' weeds) left Charing Cross Station for Paris. Mrs. Wylie, in her wisdom, had decreed a short banishment.

'Let us,' she said cheerily, the day after Captain Huston's semi-surreptitious funeral--'let us get away from all this fog and cold and misery. I want sunshine. Let us go south--Nice, Biarritz, Arcachon! Which shall it be?'

'We might,' suggested Alice Huston, 'stay a few days in Paris on the way.'

Brenda was reading, and before taking note of these remarks she finished a page, which she turned slowly, as one turns the page of a thoughtful book requiring slow perusal. She looked up at the clock upon the mantelpiece, and then her pensive gaze wandered towards Mrs. Wylie's face.

'Not the Riviera,' she said persuasively. 'It is like beef-tea when one is in rude health.'

'I must say,' observed Mrs. Wylie, after a pause, 'that I prefer the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.'

'Let us stay a little time in Paris first,' said Alice eagerly, 'and go on to Arcachon, or somewhere for Christmas. We might hear in Paris of nice people going South.'

The expression of the elder widow's face was not quite so sympathetic as might have been expected upon sentimental grounds.

'Why,' she inquired, with dangerous suavity, 'why are you so anxious to stay in Paris? It is no better than London in winter.'

Mrs. Huston shrugged her shoulders with childlike inconsequence. It was rather hard to expect her to have definite reasons ready for production.

'Oh, I don't know,' she answered. 'It would be a nice change. I think we would all find a place like Biarritz or Arcachon intolerably slow. We want taking out of ourselves.'

Mrs. Wylie nodded in a moderately sympathetic way. The three ladies knew that Theodore Trist was in Paris, and Mrs. Wylie, without looking in Brenda's direction, had seen a change come over the girl's face at the mention of the word. A singular change it was for so young a face--rather unpleasant, too, in its effect. For a moment her features appeared to contract, and a gray set look came into her eyes. This singular effect was slowly fading when Alice again mentioned Paris, and instantaneously the apathetic chill seemed to spread over Brenda's being again.

'I hate Paris in winter!' said Mrs. Wylie decisively. 'The wind is cutting, the streets are crowded with excited women carrying larger parcels, and more of them, than their limbs were intended to carry, and altogether it is horrible. We will stay one night if you like, but not more. In coming back we can stop perhaps. Besides ... Alice, I do not think it would do for you to be seen in Paris just now.'

Alice did not meet her friend's gaze. There was an unpleasant silence of some moments' duration, and then she murmured in a prettily petulant way:

'It is rather hard that I should be expected to bury myself alive.'

In this wise it was settled, and the three ladies passed through Paris without seeing aught of the cosmopolitan journalist, whose presence in the French capital was a matter of public discussion. Some papers even went so far as to refer to it as the immediate precursor of an outbreak of hostilities between France and Germany, and took the opportunity of reminding the citizens that every Frenchman thirsted for the gory cup of vengeance.

Mrs. Wylie was fully aware of the fact that had Theodore Trist so desired, he would have managed to see them somehow in passing; but she opined that he would not do so, and in this she was right. He actually knew that they were in Paris, but avoided them with an ease which showed his intimate acquaintance with the ways of the French capital.

Alice Huston made no attempt to disguise her contempt for Bordeaux, where a halt of one night was necessary, and arrived at mid-day at Arcachon with the full intention of disliking the place heartily. Personally, I have no interest in the town, not holding any shares in the Casino, nor claiming relationship with persons keeping hotels there; but it shall always be my honest endeavour to treat people and places alike with justice. There is no denying the fact that certain parts of the little French watering-place, more especially towards La Teste, are not savoury of odour; but Alice was hardly justified in the use of the word 'disgusting' in this respect. It happened to be blowing steadily from the westward, and, in consequence, the air was heavy with the distant continuous roar of Atlantic breakers surging on to the deserted shore across the Bassin.

'I know what that is,' said Alice impatiently on hearing it, which they did not fail to do as soon as they were out of the train; 'that is surf. It is the same as at Madras. Horrid! I never slept a wink.'

It was only to be heard during certain winds--a very rare direction of the wind, explained the hotel porter, who understood enough English to catch what was being said. He had explained only that morning to a sentimental English lady of uncertain age, who loved the sad song of the waves with all the gushing ardour of her poetic soul, that the said song was always there, floating in the air above the pines. Besides, knowing the times of the trains and the price of hired carriages, this man was by no means ignorant in the ways of sweet deception. He was a good hotel-porter, and could lie with conviction when he tried.

Imagine a fishing village shaken up in a huge box with a fashionable watering-place, and set down pell-mell at the edge of a large inlet of the sea, and you have Arcachon. Amidst the pines, on the slopes behind the town, are villas, where hypochondriacs live and imbibe the wondrous breath of the maritime pine. Oysters are cheap, and the air is invigorating. From the westward the wind blows directly across the broad Atlantic; from the east it sighs through trackless forests. Beyond that there is little to recommend this southern town, though some of us may think highly of such important adjuncts to human happiness as oysters and atmosphere.

A certain spasmodic sociability flickers through the small English colony, consisting, as most of our Continental colonies do, of military men and retired civil servants suffering either from slender purses or unsatisfactory lungs. Among these the advent of the three ladies caused a distinct flutter, and I have reason to believe that several dresses, and not a few bonnets, were subsequently rebuilt upon new and approved lines.

The flutter was scarcely reciprocal. Brenda was not at this period inclined to indiscriminate sociability. She was in a critical frame of mind, and the intellectual standard of the average Briton residing abroad will not bear criticism. Alice found the retired civil servants intolerably trivial and dull. The old soldiers were men of a bygone day when the army had not gone to the dogs, which departure seemed to date from the time of their several resignations.

Mrs. Wylie noted these things, and took them with her usual placid cheerfulness. She had not expected much, and was in nowise disappointed--the blessed privilege of pessimists. She looked upon the three weeks spent at Arcachon as an unpleasant interlude, necessary and unavoidable, and while there made herself as comfortable as circumstances allowed, according to her wont.

Thus Christmas with its forced festivity was tided over. I sometimes wonder why that happy season in each recurring year stands out upon the road of life like public-houses on the roads we tread here below. Wise men direct Jehu by the Spotted Dog or the Marquis of Granby, and I think most of us divide our journey into stages (some consciously, others without realizing it), marked and defined by the Christmas Day at the end of each. It is the 25th of December that stands clearly marked in my memory as having been passed in some outlying corner of the world in each successive year. There is no record of the 24th or the 26th. Having devoted some thought to this matter, I have concluded that the memory is closely connected with the appetite. There are certain dishes set apart for consumption on Christmas Day, and the absence or presence in perfection of these remains indelibly engraved on the mind.

It must be confessed that the Christmas spent at Arcachon by the three ladies was not of a very festive character; but it should be remembered that two of them were widows, and the third a thoughtful young person of by no means a gay and lightsome heart.

Early in January they turned their faces homeward, and by mutual tacit consent parted company in Paris. It happened that Alice Huston met some friends there, who pressed her to stay on with them, pleading to Mrs. Wylie that a change would be beneficial to the spirits of the young widow. Brenda returned to Suffolk Mansions with the Admiral's widow.