Chapter II

An Innocent Very Much Abroad

Having once conceded the point, Arthur did all he could to forward the foreign trip. Ermengarde must go by Calais; on those splendid turbine vessels people couldn't be ill if they tried during the whole fifty minutes across, and she hardly thought she should try. Besides, in fifty minutes there was hardly time to settle oneself comfortably; while as for being tired or faint in that short crossing, the idea was absurd; a deck-chair and the gentle lulling of the turbine's swift and smooth motion was superior to any bed, while the _Train de Luxe_ was simply an invitation to repose. Some one suggested rocking as an accompaniment to ultra-rapid motion, but that idea was scouted; great speed means smooth motion; does a humming-top wobble before it slackens speed? Besides, how could it be a _Train de Luxe_ if it caused train-sickness or any discomfort? And it undoubtedly was a _Train de Luxe_, her brother-in-law maintained--in cost.

If the price was too luxurious, why not go second-class? Ermengarde had already learnt from the paternal omniscience of Cook that foreign express trains carried second as well as first class fares. Then the startling intelligence, that not only _Trains de Luxe_, but _Rapides_ and other special quick trains to the Riviera, were only for the lordly first-class traveller, broke upon her, and fresh sums in compound addition had to be cast up before an idea of the total cost could be gained. "And every time I do it the sum total is bigger," she sighed, "though, to be sure, one great saving in going by this first-class train is that you have no hotel expenses; you pass the night in the train, instead of driving in an expensive cab to a hotel, and giving Heaven knows how much for being in Heaven knows how uncomfortable rooms."

"But you've left out the feeding," her brother-in-law objected.

"Not at all; the train has its own restaurant-car," she returned with the triumph of recent knowledge.

"You blessed innocent, you don't suppose you are going to be fed free gratis for twenty-four hours," he shouted, with a vulgar and jarring mirth that was indecently echoed by Arthur; "a train isn't a prison or a workhouse."

"It certainly is not," she returned with dignity; "it's a train. As you see, 'the waiters will bring things to the compartments if necessary.' Besides, how can it be a _Train de Luxe_ if it gives you nothing to eat all that time? Just listen to the description. 'On waking the traveller rings his bell to----' Oh yes--I see, you do pay. 'The tariff of prices is in full view in the carriages. Tea, tenpence,' etc. Now I shall have to do another sum. But I need only dine, and have a cup of tea in the afternoon. Lunch I shall carry with me. And, as you see, there's the picture of people breakfasting next morning in the Riviera Palace Hotel at Monte Carlo."

"Benighted infant, it's _déjeuner_ they're having at midday. You really must have a companion."

"Not at all. I've never done any travelling pays before, and it's high time I learnt how to. Why do the stupid people say breakfast when they mean lunch? Another tenpenneth of tea and the biscuits I carry will do for my breakfast. So only dinner need count. Really the cost of going all that distance is absurdly small when one thinks of it. And then the saving of night travel, besides the comfort of having a proper bed without the trouble of going to it."

"Still, you pay pretty high for the comfort."

"Only the usual first-class fare. There it is, written down plainly; just read the advertisement, Herbert: 'Monte Carlo and Sunshine--as easy as going to Brighton. The train, with special new bogie corridor carriages'--I shan't like the bogie part, though--'leaves Victoria at 11 a.m.' H'm, h'm--'you land at Calais in less than an hour'--just fancy!--h'm--'no scrambling for meals or seats, your places have been reserved, and you walk in as you would to your stall at a theatre.'"

"Matinée Hats and all?" interjected Arthur with brutal levity, haughtily ignored but not unnoted.

"'Separate staterooms'--now I shall know what a stateroom is like--'artistically furnished and decorated, warmed, lighted by electricity, and each provided with a dressing-room with hot and cold water.' Now, Herbert, isn't it wonderful? And besides all that, just listen: 'Perfect meals are served, and the sleeping accommodation is _magnificent_.' Now, I should be quite content with the artistic stateroom and the separate dressing-room, shouldn't you? H'm--h'm--h'm. 'And you arrive, not fatigued, but _refreshed_, at Nice at 10.32 a.m., so that'--h'm--h'm--h'm--'you may be taking your _déjeuner_'--h'm--h'm--'_bathed in sunlight_,' etc., 'in about twenty-four hours after leaving the fogs of London.' Bathed in sunlight," she sighed with luxurious rapture.

"Why have we never done this thing before?" asked Herbert. "Far from being expensive, the journey appears positively to enrich you. Still, I advise you to take some soap and a towel, and a few odd louis and a handful of francs. But, my poor child, observe this little item, 'Supplemental charges' for the sleeping-cars."

"What? Five pounds practically! Then I'll just not have a sleeping-car at all, but tuck myself up in the artistically furnished, warmed, and lighted stateroom for the night."

"Alas! I regret to say that the staterooms and sleeping-rooms are one and indivisible."

"Then," said Ermengarde, with deep and indignant conviction, "it's a shame and a swindle. And I'll go by a _Rapide_, and make myself up in a corner with cushions. Providing I face the engine and have a corner seat, I can always sleep in a train."

A cumulative family veto promptly negatived this mad resolve, and Ermengarde's sum total for the single journey leapt up accordingly, till, what with booking fees, registrations, insurances, tips, and those supplemental charges that bristle all over Continental time-tables, it doubled her original estimate, and she began to think that, if hotel expenses bounded up in the same proportion, it might be the more prudent course to stay at home.

But the very word home came with a shock that showed the impossibility of that course. She must forget certain things, and grow accustomed to certain daily deepening pangs, and steep her thoughts in other atmospheres, and so take breath and strength for the newer, darker aspects of life confronting her. Especially she must forget the experience of a certain dark and dreadful night. On that occasion she had dined at her father's house, and growing weary of the musical evening that followed, and eschewing the delights of bridge in a dim and distant room clandestinely devoted to that pastime, had cabbed quietly home at eleven and let herself in with a latchkey.

The house was silent; the servants evidently had gone to bed; a candle and matches under a still burning gas-bracket awaited her; but the light under the study door showed that the master of the house had come home, presumably to the heavy evening's work that had been his excuse for not dining at Onslow Gardens. Thinking to just let him know she was in, without interrupting his work, she stepped softly to the study, and as softly opened the door and looked in.

The room was partly in shadow, lighted by fire-gleams. Over the writing-table was a shaded lamp, in the interrupted light of which she saw the slender, bowed figure of a woman sitting, with her face hidden by her hands. Beside her, and bending slightly over her, stood Arthur, his face in shadow, his hand on her shoulder, which quivered with restrained sobs; he was speaking in a low, earnest voice words inaudible at the door at the other end of the room.

For a moment Ermengarde stood at gaze, transfixed, a curious strangling sensation in her throat, and a feeling like hot wires burning her eyes. Then, very softly, almost unconsciously, she closed the door, and, after a moment's pause, turned, carefully gathering up her skirts from their silken rustle on the floor, and went to the table, whence she took the unlighted candle, and walked upstairs with a slow, tired step and a strange proud quiver of lips.

Presently she heard the street door opened, the shrilling of a cab-whistle and answering trot of a horse, some murmured voices, followed by hoof-beats dying away, and the sound of shutting the door, bolts driven, and chain put up. Half an hour later the study door, opening, let out the scent of a cigar, and Arthur came up.

"You came home early?" he asked indifferently, and she said "Yes," trying to force herself to make some matter-of-fact allusion to the friend in the study, but not succeeding till next day, when her easy observation, "Were you alone when I came in last night?" produced the unembarrassed reply, "No; a secretary was with me. I had rather a heavy night."

"So had I," she thought with growing bitterness.

But afterwards she stooped to a thing that lowered her in her own sight, while something stronger than herself drove her to do it.

"By the way, I thought I heard voices in the study when I came home last night," she said carelessly to the parlourmaid. "Did anyone call while I was out?"

"No, ma'am," with some hesitation. "At least--only the--the young lady."

"The _young lady_, Rushton? What young lady?" sharply.

"Please, m'm, the young lady that comes for master. I never can remember her name. She came last time you went to Onslow Gardens, and when you were ill--and----"

"Of course, Rushton, of course--" she interrupted, the blood throbbing in her temples and a mist coming before her eyes. "How stupid I am! I had quite forgotten. Yes--yes. Be sure you remember about the table-centre to-night. And sweet geranium leaves in the finger-bowls. Yes--yes."

That was the tragic note jarring all the music of life; it was that she wished to forget. There was no doubt of the meaning of that scene; it could be nothing else, and whatever its meaning might have been, she could not stoop to ask any solution. And being what she thought, there was no appeal, no help; nothing for it but stoic endurance and averted eyes. Often she had listened to the bitter, godless creed that no man is without reproach, none proof against one form of temptation; that women can only wait and look away till that trouble is over-past; and insensibly the dogma had sunk into her mind, neither welcomed nor repelled, only put out of sight in the brightness and gaiety of a safe and sunny life.

But would she so readily have grasped the situation except for those hats? and would he have sneered at those unlucky pieces of costume had his heart been where it should be?

Not that Ermengarde admitted this to herself. "O for the wings of a dove!" she cried in her heart, and explained to herself that the Influenza demon had weakened and depressed her, that the beginning of Charlie's first term at school had made the house a desert solitude, and that she had come to realize the melancholy fact that her married life had reached the inevitable stage of monotonous indifference and mutual irritation, of which no poet sings, but ordinary mortals discourse in very plain, unvarnished prose. Once she had accustomed herself to it, no doubt she would be able to put up with it, as other women did. So far had she travelled from the petulant security of the days before the arraignment of the five rejected hats.

It must have been Herbert who made the unlucky suggestion that the train-booking should be done through Cook, and the services of his interpreters secured. To this Ermengarde readily agreed, though her French was above the British average. "I'll write to-night," she said.

Then it was that Arthur observed that it might be well before buying tickets to decide where she was going. That horrid sarcastic style of his was so immeasurably irritating.

"Since you wish to know," she replied haughtily, "my destination is Nice."

And when asked why, unready with an answer, having settled on the spur of the moment upon the first name that came up, she said lamely, "It's--it's the centre of everything."

"But why choose the coldest and dustiest place on the Riviera?" her mother asked over the afternoon teacups.

"And the resort of the rowdiest lot of visitors and haunt of native and foreign sharpers," added a woman, who had just appeared, full of the grievance of being packed and ready and at the last moment denied a ticket till after the next ten days, every place till then being booked ahead. "Besides, if you want quiet and scenery, you hardly go to a big town."

Somebody else suggested that what had been good enough for Queen Victoria was good enough for her, and painted the beauties of Cimiez in glowing colours. "And think of the Opera and the Theatre at Nice. And the Battle of Flowers and the Carnival. To see those properly you must go to Nice."

Then Ermengarde decided on Hyères, for scenery, good air, and romantic associations; and, having penned her letter to Cook, heard from one whose pilgrimage had been to that shrine, that there was absolutely nothing to do at Hyères and no society whatever, and that the climate and also that of Costebelle was positively murderous. Why not try San Remo or Alassio? or Pegli, with the advantage of being practically at Genoa? Each of these being in turn decided on, some dreadful defect in each was in turn discovered. Everybody Ermengarde knew had been everywhere and knew everything about it, and as each had entirely different views of every place, it was a little bewildering to an unbiased mind.

Bordighera was at last chosen, as being a place of palms, and associated with Ruffini's charming story, Dr. Antonio. Then it turned out that Bordighera was the windiest spot in Europe, and absolutely without shelter, and that the palms, being tied up like lettuces for the market, were an abomination of desolation; besides, crossing the frontier involved another custom-house worry, and the loss of an hour at Ventimiglia.

So at last Mentone, chosen more than once from rapturous reports of friends and the charm of Bennett's description in his Mediterranean book, and more than once abandoned on account of dismal tales of bad sanitation, heat, damp, and relaxing air, was finally decided upon--a stern and unanimous family veto having been pronounced against both Monte Carlo and Monaco--and a seat booked ten days in advance.

"A seat," Ermengarde observed with a deep sigh of content; "rather an exquisite boudoir"--"'Artistically furnished and decorated,'" her husband muttered--"with a most luxurious sofa, little tables, and every comfort, and 'through the window a moving panorama of lovely, sunlit scenery.' How restful! With books, papers, letters to write, when the outlook palls. All the comfort of a private room in a first-class hotel, with no stairs and constant change of scene. I could travel for weeks in such circumstances. The only trouble is the fellow-traveller. How nice it would be to be able to take two places!"

Female friends urged the necessity of summer frocks and shady hats; Arthur was strong upon furs and wraps. Monte Carlo would involve great splendour of evening toilette, and summer hues and textures by day. Tailor-mades by artists of renown would be _chic_, but only of superfine faced-cloth, so Herbert said, quoting with the pride of recent knowledge from the _Queen_, while as to hats--

"Don't speak of them. My wife is like Mr. Toots, who, you remember, was fond of waistcoats," interposed Arthur; "she has a weakness for hats."

"Out of compassion to you, to give you something to sneer at," she flashed out, bit her lips, and turned the subject, while Arthur, dumbfounded, and cudgelling his brains to discover the rock of his offence, remembered the five discarded hats, and fumed with annoyance.

Victoria at eleven in the morning, when some ruddy gold sunbeams were struggling through clinging folds of mist, presented a lively spectacle, something between an Ascot day and a cheap excursion. Shepherded by men in and out of livery and lady's-maids engaging in fierce combat with porters and guards, fur-clad dames of high and low degree, decked with flowers, and with fur-coated squires to match them, sailed majestically in the path of advancing towers of luggage, and impeded progress in every direction by standing in picturesque groups at the doors of carriages, or exactly in front of moving crowds, to exchange inane smiles, minute bows and meaningless small talk, impervious to the hoarse shouts of hot and panting porters, stonily unconscious of civil requests from fellow-travellers looking for hat-boxes, friends, trunks, mistresses, hand-baggage, servants, and such oddments, in the hurrying melée among toppling towers of trunks.

"Half London and the whole of the suburbs seem to be going by the twelve-fifty boat," Ermengarde said, unmoved by all this hurry and confusion in the happy security of a corner seat facing the engine, and booked by Cook. She was glad that Arthur was unable to see her off, he having had an unexpected business call to one of the South Coast summer resorts, she had forgotten which, the day before, so that only Herbert, her mother, and some half-dozen intimate friends, were saying good-bye and preventing her from looking after her luggage.

"Look here, there's some mistake about this ticket," cried Herbert presently, emerging from an arduous and prolonged struggle all down the long train and back again. "No seat is booked for you in this train, but at last I've found an empty corner, if you come quick before it's snapped up."

Ermengarde, speechless with amazement and indignation, and clinging to Herbert's hand, somehow threaded the mazes of the crowd that surged among laden trunks, staggering porters, hurrying servants with hand-baggage, imperious conductors and omnipotent guards, all talking and giving orders at once, while bells rang and whistles shrilled. She observed, as she struggled through in her brother-in-law's wake, that every seat was ticketed, and by this time most were occupied, if not by travellers, by their hand-baggage, and at last found herself in a corner facing the engine, but without any hand-baggage, hers having been variously confided piece-meal to porters and friends.

She began to picture the possibilities of twenty-four hours of empty-handed travel with some sinking of heart, while Herbert bestowed silver and injunctions for her comfort on the conductor, and five heavy trucks bearing trunks like Noah's Arks, each inscribed in large letters "The Lady Emily Appleton," and accompanied by cockaded men, wedged their way past her door, and were followed at uncertain intervals by her mother, panting and anxious, with a lunch package, and her half-dozen friends, each with the same number of papers, periodicals, baskets of fruit and bouquets, and, finally, after prolonged skirmishing, a porter with a hold-all and a dressing-bag. Herbert had vanished to get a ticket for himself and accompany her to Dover, much moved by the forlorn and bewildered expression on poor untravelled Ermengarde's face, when she looked from her window (the door being hopelessly blocked by fellow-travellers and their followings of friends); and occasionally darted forward to catch a paper or a flower from a friend's hand outstretched over the heads of the crowd blocking the door; or tried to hear some shouted assurance that her ticket was at least all right for the Calais train, that the sea was like glass, and the sun coming out. Her seat not being reserved, she dared not leave it to say the innumerable last words that rise to the lips of lady householders at such moments, and could only make signs to an anxious and much hustled mother in the far distance, who responded without in the least knowing what it was all about.

The tumult was subsiding, travellers were being respectfully but firmly recommended to take places, and Ermengarde was about to make one last wild effort to say good-bye to her mother, when a distracted female wedged herself up to the carriage, gold-handled eyeglass in hand, and anxiously sought for her name and number, which the conductor found for her above the seat in the corner opposite Ermengarde's, to the lady's great indignation and despair. She had expressly written "to face the engine," she cried. But this was abominable; she could not possibly travel backwards; she must have a forward corner; the man might look at the ticket, and so forth and so forth, with a much-burdened maid and a porter waiting behind her. The conductor was sorry, he told Ermengarde, but there had been some mistake, the other lady was unfortunately entitled to the corner, whence Ermengarde was obliged to move, finding, luckily for her, a middle seat, but losing all possibility of any but signalled farewells, and seeing Herbert no more at all.

The sunlight broadened, the fog thinned, as the long train left dear, dirty, smoky London behind, and the squalor of endless suburb diminished, and the smell of country air came through a chink of opened window. But Ermengarde's heart sank, and she felt herself a lone, lorn female, utterly incapable of confronting the unknown perils and discomforts of travel after this bad beginning. She was pulling herself together with delicious dreams of the artistic _Train de Luxe_, when the lady who had ejected her from her corner, and who evidently regarded her with wrath and indignation as an interloper and semi-swindler, suddenly shivered and commanded her maid, sitting opposite, to shut the little saving chink in the window.

Ermengarde's doom was now sealed; she would be train-sick.

She counted the minutes to be gasped through till Dover, and nerved herself to ask the least forbidding of the two laced and furred dames dragoning the windows for a little air before things reached a fatal crisis. But even at that dread moment the fascinating vision of the _Train de Luxe_, with its sofa, and wide window at command, its flying landscape, little tables, artistic furniture and decorations, warmth and electric lights, came like balm to her troubled breast.