Part 27 (1/2)
Nature had gone back to the simple apparel of her youth, here. She was idyllic and charming, but we were not to ask of her any more sensational splendours, by way of costume, for she had not brought them with her in her dress-basket. There were near green hills, and far blue mountains, and certain rocky eminences in the middle distance, but nothing of grandeur. Poplars marched along with us on either side, primly on guard, and puritanical, though all the while their myriad little fingers seemed to twinkle over the keyboard of an invisible piano, playing a rapid waltz.
Then we came at last into Aix-les-Bains, where I had spent a merry month during a ”long,” in Oxford days. I had not been back since.
Already the height of the season was over, for it was September now, but the gay little watering-place seemed crowded still, and in our knickerbockers, with our pack-mule and donkeys, and their attendants, we must have added a fantastic note to the dance-music which the very breezes play among tree-branches at light-hearted Aix.
”Pretty, isn't it?” I remarked indifferently, as we pa.s.sed through some of the most fas.h.i.+onable streets.
”Yes, very pretty,” said the Boy. ”But what is there that one misses?
There's something--I'm not sure what. Is it that the place looks huddled together? You can't see its face, for its features. There are people like that. You are introduced to them; you think them charming; yet when you've been away for a little while you couldn't for your life recall the shape of their nose, or mouth, or eyes. I feel it is going to be so with Aix, for me.”
The villa which the Contessa had taken for a few weeks before her annual flitting for Monte Carlo, was on the way to Marlioz, and we had been told exactly how to find it. Still silent as to my ultimate intentions, I tramped along with the Boy beside me, Joseph and Innocentina bringing up the rear. We would know the villa from the description we had been given, and having pa.s.sed out of the town, we presently saw it; a little dun-coloured house, standing up slender and graceful among trees, like a charming grey rabbit on the watch by its hidden warren in the woods.
”I'm tired, aren't you?” asked the Boy. ”I shall be glad to rest.”
Now was my time. ”I shan't be able to rest quite yet,” said I, with a careless air. ”I shall see you in, say 'How-de-do' to the Contessa, and then I must be off to the hotel where I used to stop. I remember it as delightful.”
”Why,” exclaimed the Boy blankly, ”but I thought--I thought we were going to stay with the Contessa!”
”You are, but I'm not,” I explained calmly. ”My friends the Winstons may very likely turn up at the same hotel” (this was true on the principle that anything, no matter how unexpected, _may_ happen); ”and if they should, I'd want to be on the spot to give them a welcome. I wouldn't miss them for the world.”
”The Contessa will be disappointed,” said the Boy slowly.
”Oh no, I don't think so; and if she is, a little, you will easily console her.”
”If I had dreamed that you wouldn't----” The Boy began his sentence hastily, then cut it as quickly short.
I opened the gate. We pa.s.sed in together, Joseph remaining outside according to my directions, keeping f.a.n.n.y-anny as well as Finois, while Innocentina followed the Boy with the pack-donkey.
A turn in the path brought us suddenly upon a lawn, surrounded with shrubbery which at first had hidden it from our view. There, under a huge crimson umbrella, rising flowerlike by its long slender stem from the smooth-shaven gra.s.s, sat four persons in basket chairs, round a small tea table. Gaeta, in green as pale as Undine's draperies, sprang up with a glad little cry to greet us. The Baron and Baronessa smiled bleak ”society smiles,” and a handsome, fair young man frankly glared.
Evidently this was the great Paolo, master of the air and s.h.i.+ps that sail therein; and as evidently he had heard of us.
Now I knew what the Baron had meant when he said to his wife: ”Something _shall_ happen, my dear.” He had telegraphed a danger-signal to Paolo, and Paolo had lost not a moment in responding.
This looked as if Paolo meant business in deadly earnest, where the Contessa was concerned; for how many dinners and medals must he not have missed in Paris, how many important persons in the air-world must he not have offended, by breaking his engagements in the hope of making one here?
He was fair, with a Latin fairness, this famous young man. There was nothing Saxon or Anglo-Saxon about him. No one could possibly bestow him--in a guess--upon any other country than his native Italy. He was thirty-one or two perhaps, long-limbed and wolfishly spare, like his elder brother, whom he resembled thus only. He had an eagle nose, prominent red lips, sulky and sensuous, a fine though narrow forehead under brown hair cut _en brosse_, a shade darker than the small, waxed moustache and pointed beard. His brows turned up slightly at the outer corners, and his heavy-lidded, tobacco-coloured eyes were bold, insolent, and pa.s.sionate at the same time.
This was the man who wished to marry b.u.t.terfly Gaeta, and who had come on the wings of the wind, in an airs.h.i.+p ”shod with fire,” or in the _train de luxe_, to defend his rights against marauders.
His look, travelling from me to the Boy, and from the Boy to Innocentina and meek grey Souris, was so eloquent of contempt pa.s.sing words, that I should have wanted to knock the sprawling flannelled figure out of the basket chair, if I had not wanted still more to yell with laughter.
He, the Boy and I were like dogs from rival kennels eyeing each other over, and thinking poorly of the other's points. Paolo di Nivoli was doubtless saying to himself what a splendid fellow he was, and how well dressed and famous; also how absurd it really would be to fear one of us dusty, knickerbockered, thick-booted, panama-hatted louts, in the tournament of love. The donkey, too, with its pack, and Innocentina with her toadstool hat, must have added for the aeronaut the last touch of shame to our environment.
As for us,--if I may judge the Boy by myself,--we were totting up against the Italian his stiff crest of hair, for all the world like a toothbrush, rampant, gules; the smear of wax on the spikes of his unnecessarily fierce moustache; the ridiculous pinpoints of his narrow brown shoes; the flaunting newness of his white flannels: the detestable little tucks in his s.h.i.+rt; his pink necktie.
In fact, each was despising the other for that on which the other prided himself.
All this pa.s.sed in a glance, but the frigid atmosphere grew no warmer for the introduction hastily effected by Gaeta. To be sure, the Boy bowed, I bowed, and Paolo bowed the lowest of the trio, so that we saw the parting in his hair; but three honest snorts of defiance would have been no more unfriendly than our courtesies.