Chapter VIII

The Carnival

That Dorris Boundrish was an exceedingly pretty girl her severest critics could not deny, nor could her greatest admirers refrain from a suspicion that she was scarcely as irresistible or as brilliant as she imagined. Her mouth was like pink coral, small and sweet, but with hints of peevishness and discontent in the corners; her face had wild-rose tints; her eyes were clear, speedwell blue, but a little hard at times; something on her velvety forehead said, "Not much in here." Of that deficiency poor Miss Dorris was wholly unaware; on the contrary, she supposed the premises to be unusually spacious and well-stocked, and in this persuasion was benignantly given to impart her superfluous knowledge to an ungrateful world to an extent that sometimes made people thankful to be spared such information as that sea-water is too strong of salt to make a pleasant drink, or that two and two amount together to the round number of four.

All evils have their compensations; and this amiable weakness of Miss Dorris sometimes became a source of joy to the community of Les Oliviers, when properly manipulated by M. Isidore, for example. For it was the especial delight of this fair young creature to impart recently acquired knowledge to her neighbours, and recently acquired knowledge being undigested, and in many cases hastily and inaccurately received, sometimes emerges from its temporary lodging in the brain in a changed, even unrecognizable, form. Moreover, M. Isidore, having an imagination of unusual fertility and an impish delight in mischief, was tempted to confide myths having only a poetic and ideal foundation in fact, to the ear of Dorris, in the sure anticipation of hearing them issue in some novel form from the pink coral lips at _table d'hôte_; always providing he listened, as he frequently did, unseen behind an open door, to the general buzz of table talk, above which Miss Boundrish's arrogant treble shrilled high and incessant. When the intelligence conveyed by the pink coral lips was very wildly improbable, that every conscript, for example, during his first month of service, was dieted entirely on frogs to inspire him with martial courage, the thin man, usually silent, would, very gently expressing astonishment, venture to ask the source of Miss Boundrish's information.

"Oh, it's perfectly true, Mr. Welbourne," the overbearing treble would scream down the table, "I had it from a man who had been in the French army himself. The frogs are those little green things in the tanks, that are beginning to make such a croaking every night. Of course, you know that Mont Agel is _terrain militaire_, where nobody is allowed to go for fear of disturbing these frogs, which are kept in tanks on purpose. The diet is so stimulating, you know, it makes the soldiers long to fight."

"Really?" the thin man would murmur pensively. "How very interesting! What a remarkably ingenious people the French are! Would such an idea ever occur to the dull British brain, do you suppose?"

Then a smile would go round the table, and coughs and suppressed chokings would be heard, and M. Isidore would dance with rapture in the corridor outside, and, on being severely interrogated by Ermengarde and the thin man afterwards, would truthfully say that he only asked Mademoiselle if she had heard of this curious custom of dieting on frogs for courage, and with regard to Mont Agel had chanced to mention that the public were excluded from that, as from all terrain militaire, and that many tanks containing frogs were there, as everywhere in the hills.

"The imagination of Mademoiselle," he would observe innocently, "invests things with a magic of its own. In short, she is a poet." Then he would laugh gently, and Ermengarde would shudder for his future, though she was not above suggesting to him themes similar to the results of a frog diet for Miss Boundrish's imagination to develop. So that _table d'hôte_ was sometimes the scene of some remarkable additions to human knowledge.

To account for her various and invincible charms, speculation as to where Miss Boundrish had been dragged up was frequent and diverse. Yet her parents were there in attendance upon her, harmless, worthy people of the comfortable, Philistine, mid-middle class, the father rather deaf--he had registered her with two r's, because her mother insisted on the short o in Doris, and the man was too logical to leave his child with insufficient letters--the mother placidly content with the wildest utterances of her only child, and both well trained in the ways in which modern parents are expected to go. That no subject was too abstruse for Dorris's discussion, and that nothing could be spoken of upon which she was not quite as well informed as anyone present, or better, caused them no apparent surprise. But Miss Boundrish's father was a little deaf, and Miss Boundrish's mother once confided to the thin man that it was a little tiring to be the mother of an exceptionally gifted and accomplished child, and that a few days' visit to Nice, contemplated by Dorris, would afford her a welcome opportunity of taking a "much-needed" rest. "I should like," she sighed, "to have two solid days to do nothing in and to think nothing in--and," she added, after a pause, "to _fear_ nothing in."

"So that one hopes the fair Dorris doesn't beat her," the thin man commented to Ermengarde, who thought her quite capable of it. But Agatha suggested that even Miss Boundrish's mother might not be quite insensible to the fury some of her little ways evoked from the community; that pretty little way of drawing up a chair or of walking up and stopping dead for the express purpose of breaking into intimate or interesting dialogue, that even prettier way of pursuing people bent on solitude, dual or otherwise, to pleasant points of view, and pouring out entirely familiar, guide-book information.

As, for instance, when the setting sun brought the craggy peaks that wall the high hill-village of St. Agnes into unusual beauty, and a party coming home from an excursion and another drawn out to the mountain from the hotel, stood silently enjoying it, and Dorris's high voice suddenly rang over the gorge with the history of the walled hill-villages, of the abduction of the innocent young Agnes by Saracens in one of their raids, and of the miracle wrought by her faith, which resulted in the conversion of many, the restoration of St. Agnes to her home among the crags, and a yearly commemoration of the event to this day by a procession of villagers.

"Why," murmured the thin man on that occasion, "why are there no Saracens to-day?"

"There are plenty, Mr. Welbourne," cried the shrill voice unexpectedly. "I saw some Moors in the town yesterday. They're all the same, you know."

"But they don't----" the thin man paused, allowing a daring word to die on his lips. "That is--the great days of old--the days of daring and romance--are over. We live in a degenerate age."

He spoke so mournfully that Miss Boundrish was much moved, and joined him in lamentation over the past, while every heart present echoed his unspoken thought, that a Saracen raid upon the Riviera might involve the abduction of Miss Boundrish, the mere idea of which filled them with joy. They were sure that she would have pleased the Saracenic taste, and doubted if her prayers would work a miracle.

"Where on earth did you pick up that Somers girl, Mrs. Allonby?" the sweet girl asked one day with pleasing directness and candour. It was during a descent upon the town to see the Carnival, arranged between the thin man, Ermengarde, and Agatha. Miss Boundrish, overhearing this arrangement the night before--she always overheard everything--had offered to make a fourth in the party, so suddenly, so loudly, and with such a certainty of conferring a favour, and also so immediately in the hearing of her mother, that neither of the three was ready with a civil excuse for declining the honour, though each said sadly to the others afterwards, "Why are there no Saracens now?"

"That Somers girl," Ermengarde repeated slowly and thoughtfully, as if wondering to whom she referred.

"_I_ don't think much of her," continued Dorris. "You know you can't be too particular who you get to know in places like this. Very queer people in these cheap Continental pensions."

"How true!" Ermengarde murmured thoughtfully. "I've never seen a Carnival, have you?"

"You ought to see the Nice Carnival; this is a very one-horse thing. Did you know Miss Somers in England?"

"Did you?"

"Not exactly, but I knew of her. That is, I knew the man she was supposed to be engaged to. I--I knew him rather well, in fact." Miss Boundrish's smile suggested worlds.

"Were you engaged to him, as well?"

"Well--not exactly engaged. Poor Ivor!" with the usual gurgle. "Such an escape for him."--So Ermengarde thought.--"They say his people knew nothing about it. So you picked her up abroad?"

"She--if you mean Miss Somers--picked me up once, on the floor of a corridor carriage. Not pleasant to tumble down in a faint on the floor of a train. One is thankful to be picked up and taken care of----"

"By anybody, of course," with the gurgle so familiar at Les Oliviers. "Well, you'd better be on your guard, that's all. Did you lose any money, anything of value on the way?"

"Miss Boundrish, what are you talking about?" was the sharp rejoinder.

"Only that, going about in the world, I get to know a lot of things. There are so many sharpers about on the Continent--gangs of them in league together. They follow people to Nice and Monte Carlo, and all these places, and rook them in all sorts of ways. They are regular birds of prey, living by their wits. Some think the police are in their pay. Robbery after robbery takes place in trains and custom-houses; at least, jewels, money, and letters of credit disappear from locked and registered luggage, and the thieves are scarcely ever found out. I say, where do you think she spent the afternoon of the day she came to Les Oliviers?--Ah! here they are," as Miss Somers and the thin man came in sight of the waiting-place in the Jardins Publics. "Poor Mr. Welbourne, he's quite gone on her already. She can't leave him alone a minute."

"Four seats on the stand, but not together," said the thin man, unconscious of personal comment. "How shall we divide?"

Although Ermengarde had by this time made some progress in the art of sticking on to a perpendicular donkey acting as an intermittent see-saw, somebody having given her some lessons on the most gentle-paced beast to be found, she was not enamoured of that form of gymnastic, and of two evils had thought a descent by a shorter path through gardens and woods on foot with Miss Boundrish, the less, leaving Miss Somers to ride down the longer mule-path with the thin man, whose slight lameness made him a poor pedestrian. But her feeling of relief when the other two came up brought her to the conclusion that even donkeys were preferable to Dorris. Yet the hints from the pink coral lips were not without effect upon her, chiming as they did with her own inferences, and she was dying to know where Agatha had spent the afternoon of that first day, which Dorris had also passed away from the hotel.

The party being now complete, they left the gardens and wound through the holiday streets in the sunshine, now jostled by a cheerful and apologizing devil, black from head to heel, with bat-wings of black crape stretched on cane; now mixed up in a flock of geese with human legs and monstrous cackling beaks; now avoiding the attentions of dominos flinging paper serpents and trying to draw them into impromptu dances whenever a band was heard along the street.

How gay and odd and foolish and delightful it was to unsophisticated Ermengarde! The narrow, foreign streets, palms closing their vistas, great hotels, in gardens glowing with gorgeous exotics and flowers, breaking their lines here and there; the warm deep purple of the sea barring every side street on one hand; the picturesque old Italian town climbing the wooded hill-spur and cresting it with its tower on the other; and the great mountain amphitheatre stretching far up beyond that, with bare peaks, violet-veined, crystalline, drawn clear and sharp on the deep, clear, velvety sky; the motley crowd of mad masks and dominos, cheaply gaudy, childishly absurd, helplessly gay; the rippling laughter and confused babble of local dialect and foreign tongues on the liquid air; the droll family parties, transparently disguised, even the babies, in coloured calico; the trim little mountain soldiers, bright-eyed and smiling, keeping the streets; the hawkers of toys, sacks of confetti, and endless paper coils; the vendors of strange local pastry and sweets on little standings; the look of expectant enjoyment on every face, especially the broad and business-like bourgeois countenance; the atmosphere of spontaneous gaiety, sunshine, and enjoyment, all went to English Ermengarde's head. Old life-long artificial restraints gave way; the joy of life sprang up; she could almost have taken hands and danced with the maskers dancing along the street. The eternal child, dormant in us all, was awake and happy in her.

It was not the show, that was poor and disappointing, all its cheap and tawdry vanities blotting the pure beauty of atmosphere and setting, that gave this new vivid sense of unconstrained gladness. Perhaps she had never seen people madly, spontaneously, and yet decorously gay before. The Carnival folk were all, young and old, rich and poor, merry and not wise and bent upon being merry and not wise, and yet they were not in the least ashamed or conscious of any cause for shame. Even some Americans, a people never young but aged and biases from their cradles, snatched a brief hour of long-deferred childhood, and a few self-conscious Britons, their gloomy national pride concealed in dominos, condescended to diversions that in their own personality they scorned as only fit for foreigners and fools. No wonder that the sparkling sunny sea-air and atmosphere of infectious enjoyment dissipated light-hearted Ermengarde's insular self-consciousness, and she suddenly discovered that there is more enjoyment in life than is commonly supposed.

What was the mad tune band after band kept playing as the huge cars, grotesquely laden, filed slowly past; it was jingly and poor, but so crazily full of headlong mirth--La Mattschiche? Long afterwards it gave her a pleasant thrill to hear it shouted by street boys, thumped on pianos and street organs, and blared on brass bands. It was "full of the warm South" for her.

Mr. Welbourne, an artist and no Philistine, though a true-born Englishman, public-school-milled, politely and unobtrusively bored, was agreeably surprised by his countrywoman's interest in the show; it was like taking a child--a real old-fashioned child--to a pantomime. Even Agatha observed her with grave but pleased surprise. Dorris, when not explaining things in a loud voice, expressed unmitigated contempt for everything; yet Ermengarde, though she longed for Saracenic invasions when the gurgle was too persistent, scarcely knew that Miss Boundrish was sitting beside her on the stand erected in front of the Mairie, the thin man and Agatha being in the row behind them. Mr. Welbourne, though simple and honest in his ways, had sufficient guile to contrive that.

The stout elderly _bourgeoise_ with a bad cold and strong scent of garlic, sitting next Ermengarde, had come, she told her, from Monte Carlo, under sad anxiety lest the bad cold should keep her at home, and never stopped showering confetti on everybody that passed, always missing them, yet wrought to ecstasy when confetti were thrown to her, and pleased as a child when her paper serpents caught in the snapping jaws of the crocodile on a car full of these creatures of all sizes.

Another very dowdy old dame in front was quite as active; she was as thickly snowed over with confetti and wound about with paper serpents as Lot's wife in her salt.

"I say, Mrs. Allonby," Dorris suddenly hissed in her ear, "look behind, quick!" And Ermengarde, obeying at once, saw nothing but the woman of mystery, unwinding a paper serpent coiled round her neck by a man with a huge false nose in a smart carriage full of silk dominos.

"The sting is in the tail," murmured Dorris, and Ermengarde became aware of a small packet at the end of the coil, that Agatha hastily glanced at and slid into her hand-bag, her cheek flushing when she looked up and caught eyes upon her.

Ermengarde sighed madly for Saracens. "How could you?" she reproached Dorris, who became mysterious and full of dark hints.

Then a serpent was coiled round Mrs. Allonby's neck, and looking up at the thrower, she recognized a Spanish cavalier on a mule, who had already thrown her confetti and bouquets several times in passing the Mairie. She had scattered most of the flowers on the crowd, but kept some especially sweet tea-roses, also a bunch of Parma violets, thrown from the car that carried a few family parties of crocodiles, opening and shutting their long jaws, to the great delight of the populace.

There was something in the Spaniard, a flash of the eyes under the broad sombrero, that made her heart beat. Where and when could she have seen that whiskered face? He threw both serpents and confetti freely as he passed, but no flowers, except to her. Very few flowers were thrown by anyone.

When the serpent was unwound, there was a little weight at the end of the coil. A letter? A bomb? Perhaps only chocolate. This was thrilling and mysterious, but entirely delightful--a thing that could not possibly happen at home--at least, not with propriety. The weight turned out to be a morocco box wrapped in tissue paper. The man had evidently taken her for somebody else--a respectable somebody else, it was to be hoped; she had dropped into the middle of some romantic entanglement, or some dreadful Anarchist or Nihilist plot. Heavens! it might have been meant for her mysterious fellow-traveller, and contain a signal for the instant assassination of some distinguished statesman or royal person recognized through his disguise, or for the blowing up of the whole place. The spring tentatively and gingerly touched, the lid flew up, but--though she shut her eyes for quite two seconds--nothing whatever happened, nothing went off, nobody was killed; there was neither explosive nor written instruction inside--nothing but a thin gold chain, its delicate links separated at every inch by pearls or diamonds, daintily coiled on the violet velvet lining. Could it be poisoned, or charged with accumulated electricity to a deadly extent? A dainty toy it looked; she had seen and longed for one just like it at Spink's, not long ago. "Well, when the money-ship comes home," Arthur had growled; and that, of course, meant never.

"Just look," she cried, holding it up in the sunshine. "I had no idea people threw things like this to strangers."

"They don't," Dorris said grimly. "It was carefully aimed."

"Then it can't be for me," she mused, and turned back to Agatha, who was reading the folded paper flung in the end of her coil, her hand shielding her face from the sun, which struck full upon her. Just then such volleys of confetti came broadside from a high car representing a ship that nothing but defence could be thought of, and the chain was slipped into a purse and forgotten. And when Ermengarde turned again to Agatha, she saw her, to her unspeakable amazement, bending over the side of the stand, speaking to the Spaniard--now dismounted and stopping on his way through a lane at the corner of the stand.

This incident had not escaped Miss Boundrish, who smiled acidly at Ermengarde's look of surprise. "Now we can guess the true destination of the chain," she whispered.

But the sudden spectacle of the thin man across the road biding the pelting of a pitiless storm of confetti from three several silken dominos at once, with bent head and a face of resigned anguish, was so joyous that Ermengarde forgot her momentary desire to murder Dorris; and when Mr. Welbourne had taken refuge in such flight in an opposite direction as his infirmity permitted, the temporary blinding and partial choking of Miss Boundrish, who had received a dexterous handful while enjoying a hearty, but unconcealed, yawn, further blunted the edge of her murderous desires, and made her offer Eau de Cologne instead of poison, with whole-hearted enjoyment of the damsel's spluttering indignation and vehement assertions that she was poisoned.

"In that case," it was suggested, "best take an emetic at once," a proposition received with scorn and fury, and further declarations that she was blinded for life, and wondered why there were no gens d'armes, and considered that the least Mrs. Allonby could have done was to give the beast into custody, and she wished she had brought her father.

"But you can't give a large green frog on the top of a mountain on wheels into custody, dear Miss Boundrish--Oh! pff!"

It was now Ermengarde's turn to be pelted by a Cyrano de Bergerac, whose enormous nose was in striking contrast to his slender, elastic figure. The Cyrano, who had been one of the party in the carriage whence the serpent with the letter in its tail was thrown to Agatha, soon tired of raining paper on to a steadily held sunshade, and went away, finding better sport in a silken domino, one of a group walking in the road, who showed fight gallantly, revealing a pair of dark eyes flashing with spirit and challenge. After a sharp engagement, the domino's ammunition having run out, she turned and ran, pursued and stopped by the Cyrano, who pelted her unmercifully in the face, even holding a fold of the domino and spirting the confetti under it to make her uncover, till at last he brought her to bay just under the side of the stand, off the street.

"Beast!" muttered Ermengarde, her indignation intensified by the English accent of the unchivalrous Cyrano. She would actually have rushed to the assistance of the wronged lady, but that help came from another quarter in the shape of a crocodile, which suddenly descended in a series of astonishingly agile leaps from the very top of the great, shell-shaped car of crocodiles, that was lumbering by, and, seizing the Cyrano de Bergerac by the scruff of his neck, shook him like a rat till he was forced to let go the lady, just as she slipped the domino back, discovering the indignant, tearful face and blazing eyes of Mlle. Bontemps. This revelation was evidently more discomfiting to the Cyrano than the furious assault of the crocodile, from the slit-open throat of which glared the face of M. Isidore, white with fury.

"Why, it's the very crocodile who threw you the violets," shouted Dorris. "I thought I recognized him, and that plain and frumpish Bontemps girl!"

If only the Boundrish had been effectually choked! Why had a weak and culpable sympathy comforted her with Eau de Cologne?

The Cyrano was not to be shaken to death like a rat without showing fight; in the tussle that ensued his rich costume suffered considerably before the crocodile let him go; and what the one said and the other gasped and growled in reply, though not intelligible through the din of bands and crowds, was presumably of an uncomplimentary character.

Finally, flinging the long-nosed masquer from him, M. Isidore, his crocodile head thrown back like a hood and helplessly wobbling behind him, drew the insulted domino's hand through his arm with an air of possession and protection, the rescued damsel clinging to him with evident confidence and gratitude, and the two men, unconscious in their passion of their absurd appearance, the crocodile pale and calm, the long-nose red with confusion and fury and haughtily apologetic, stood glaring fiercely at each other with question, accusation, and explanation.

Presently the long-nose, as if at the crocodile's request, produced a small white square from the recesses of his sumptuous dress; the crocodile handed him a similar square in return; they bowed and separated. M. Isidore led Mlle. Bontemps away on his arm towards a blue glimpse of sea at the end of a side-street, and the Cyrano, removing his plumed cap, and with it his great nose, that had become very shaky in the course of the fray, disclosed to Ermengarde's astonished gaze the features of the young Englishman of Monte Carlo.

It was but a moment before the nose was hastily replaced, and its owner turned back into the main street, where he stood talking to a Pierrot, immediately in front of the stand, behind a soldier keeping the road.

"Thought you'd have known better than that," the Pierrot grumbled. "It wasn't playing the game."

"I could have sworn it was the Countess," the Cyrano was heard to say dejectedly. "And after yesterday--well, I didn't feel bound to play the game with her. Besides, _she_ wouldn't have cared."

"Let us go," said Ermengarde, suddenly sick of the fooling, and worried by the band's mad tune repeated over and over again; but, looking round for Agatha, she found her place empty, and Mr. Welbourne, who had returned to his seat, unable to give any account of her.

Many thoughts were in Ermengarde's heart, while in response to the thin man's timely suggestion of tea at Rumpelmayer's, they slipped out of the press to the comparative quiet of the promenade by the sea, that glowed like a peacock's velvety throat on the horizon, with the near shallows of turquoise, and broke with a deep soft boom in snowy surf on the rocks.

She was glad of the fresh sea-breath and the beauty of the bay's broad sweep between the purple headland of Bordighera and the craggy bluffs above Monte Carlo. And when they turned into the Gardens under the tall eucalyptus, the appearance of the woman of mystery coming down an avenue of palms was a great relief. But a flush on Agatha's cheek and a vision of the Spaniard rapidly disappearing under palms in the opposite direction, filled her with misgiving again. What could all this atmosphere of intrigue and mystification portend? Certainly nothing praiseworthy.

"It was so hot and dusty on the stand," Agatha said, to explain her sudden disappearance, upon which Dorris alone had commented.

That evening, when they had gone to their rooms for the night, Ermengarde knocked at Agatha's door and handed her the little box containing the chain. "I think this must be yours, Miss Somers," she said. "_Your friend the Spaniard_ threw it, and it caught round my neck by mistake."

"My friend?" she asked, confused. "Oh, you mean the Spaniard who stopped by the stand to ask the way to the sea?"

"Yes, the Spaniard, not the Cyrano de Bergerac."

The flush died from the woman of mystery's cheek, and the stone mask settled upon it. She returned the chain, saying coldly it could not be intended for her, and that she knew nothing about it.

"The Cyrano," Ermengarde observed casually, as she turned from the door, "turned out to be the young Englishman of Monte Carlo, the same who was overheard offering money to the foreign Countess."

"Did he?" she replied, without interest. "Good night, dear Mrs. Allonby. You look tired."