The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  Gertrude frowned slightly. She detested Mrs. Rivière with all the power with which a healthy, honest mind can detest mondaines of a certain description.

  “Did you say we would come?” she asked.

  “Why, of course I did. I suppose you don’t want to go now. Really, considering what I have to go through, it might be expected that my only daughter would not object to coming with me for a picnic, where perhaps I may get a little distraction. And the doctor particularly told me to get up in the hills now and then.”

  “Mother, why do you judge me so hastily?” said Gertrude. “Of course I will come; I only asked you whether you had accepted. What time shall we start? It will be delicious up there. Must I put on my very best frock?”

  “Gracious me, yes,” said Mrs. Carston. “I wish you had a better. And you’re getting dreadfully brown. Gertrude, I wish you would take a little more care of your complexion. You won’t be fit to be seen in a low dress when we get back to England. Ah, there’s the bell. Give me your arm, dear, I am a mass of aches today. Have you heard from Reggie this morning?”

  “No, there were no letters for me today,” said Gertrude, cheerfully. “I shall have to blow Reggie up when I write again. Or shall I not write until he writes to me?”

  “I forget whether you know Princess Villari,” asked her mother. “You’ve seen the Prince, haven’t you?”

  “I never spoke to her,” said Gertrude. “But I saw her last night at the Cercle; she was going into the baccarat room, talking at the top of her voice, and smoking.”

  “It’s becoming quite the thing to smoke,” remarked Mrs. Carston. “I should smoke, if I were you, this afternoon, if everybody else does. It is no use making an obvious exception of oneself. It looks so odd.”

  “Oh! I think it’s horrid for women to smoke,” said Gertrude. “It’s unfeminine. Don’t you think it is?”

  “Nonsense; I wish you would, if others do,” said her mother; “but you are always so determined. If you don’t wish to do a thing, you won’t do it. Take me to that seat at the small table. I can’t talk to Mrs. Mumford any more.”

  The rest of the party were all coming from the “Splendide,” the great hotel at the top of the hill overlooking Aix, and as the road from there went by the Beau Site, where Gertrude and her mother were staying, it had been arranged that the party from the upper hotel should call for them as they passed, and pick them up. Mrs. Carston told Gertrude that they were going to drive down to the lake in the Prince’s four-in-hand, take boats there, and walk up to the Monastery, where they would have tea.

  Gertrude and her mother were sitting in the verandah, facing the road, after lunch, when the brake drew up at the entrance to the hotel. A woman, brilliantly beautiful and marvellously dressed, was driving, whom Gertrude recognised as the Princess. She was smoking a cigarette, and held her whip and reins in the most professional manner. By her side sat Mrs. Rivière, and, in the centre of the seat just behind, a handsome, foreign-looking man, who, when they stopped, and he saw Gertrude and her mother coming down the steps, leaned forward to the Princess, and said—

  “Who is that very handsome girl there, Mimi? Is she coming with us?”

  The Princess turned to look, and gave a shrill, voluble greeting to Mrs. Carston.

  “Charmed to see you! Get up and sit next my husband. Villari, you know Mrs. Carston, don’t you? And is that your daughter with you? I am so glad you were able to come, too. Steady, you brutes! Bring the steps, quick! These animals won’t stand quiet. Villari, get down and help them up.”

  “It’s Miss Carston,” she said to him, as he passed her; “isn’t she handsome? Very ingénue, I imagine. Do you know her, Mrs. Rivière?”

  “I met her the other day,” she replied. “I don’t think they’ve been here very long. How beautifully you drive!”

  “That’s one of my English accomplishments,” said the Princess; “and I haven’t forgotten it, you see. Dear me! It’s more than a year since I’ve been to England. We’re going in November. Villari’s bought a country place there, you know. Are you right behind there? Go on, you brutes, then! Ah! You would, would you?”

  The Princess gave a savage cut with her whip at one of the leaders, who appeared to want to go home, and they started off at a hand-gallop.

  “For God’s sake, take care, Mimi!” said the Prince, leaning forward, as they swung round a corner with about three-quarters of an inch to spare; “the streets will be full today—it’s Saturday.”

  “Blow the horn, old boy!” remarked the Princess. “Tell them we’re coming. I must go fast through here, you know, because I’ve got the reputation of driving like the son of Nimshi. Do you know who the son of Nimshi was, Mrs. Rivière? He comes in the Bible.”

  By about an equal mixture of the favour of Providence and the dexterity of the Princess, they got through the town in safety, without impairing the reputation of the latter as being a furious driver, and the horses settled down to a steady pace on the road to the lake.

  The Prince had managed to seat himself next Gertrude, leaving Mrs. Carston to the attentions of Mr. Rivière. The rest of the party were composed of English visitors staying at the “Splendide,” and the whole party numbered ten or twelve. A second glance assured him that she was even handsomer than he supposed, and, as it was one of the Princess’s maxims that husband and wife were, both of them, perfectly free to receive or administer any attentions they pleased, without injuring their mutual relations, it followed, naturally, that he made himself agreeable.

  “I hope you and your mother are not given to nervousness,” he asked, when it was plain that the Princess intended to keep her reputation up, “for my wife is a perfectly reckless driver. However, she is also the best driver I ever saw, and she has never had an accident yet.”

  Gertrude shrank from his somewhat familiar scrutiny of her face, and she answered him coldly—

  “Oh no, thanks. I am never nervous, and my mother is not either. Are you, mother?” she asked, leaning back, and addressing her directly.

  “Not when the Princess is driving,” said Mrs. Carston, graciously, smiling at the Prince.

  “I was just telling Miss Carston there was no need to be when my wife is driving. I acknowledge it doesn’t look the safest form of amusement. Mimi, you’ll have a wheel off presently.”

  “Then we’ll go like a fox terrier when it wants to show off,” remarked Mimi. “It would look rather nice, I think.”

  “I saw you two nights ago at the Cercle,” continued the Prince to Gertrude. “I wanted my wife to introduce me, but she didn’t know you, she said. I suppose you haven’t been here very long.”

  “No; only a week,” she said, again feeling a little uneasy.

  “Then, of course, we may hope that you will still remain here a considerable time.”

  “I shall be here about a fortnight or three weeks more.”

  “Ah! You stop here about as long as we shall,” he said; “personally, I would stop longer, but we have to go back to Vienna for a time, and we go to England in November.”

  “You hunt, I suppose,” said Gertrude, carelessly.

  “My wife is very fond of it, and that is reason enough for our going. She is half English, you know,” said the Prince, making concessions to ingenuousness. “Here we are at the lake; let me help you down; the boats are waiting, I see. Let me give you my hand.”

  “Thanks, I can manage for myself,” said Gertrude, preparing to dismount.

  She turned round to catch hold of the rail, and in doing so, somehow, her foot slipped off the step. The Prince had already dismounted, and was standing below. He made a sudden, quick movement towards her, and just saved her a rather nasty fall, by catching her strongly round the waist and lowering her to the ground. Poor Gertrude was furious with herself, and flushed deeply.

  “I hope you are not hurt,” he said, bending towards her. “I was very fortunate in being able to save you.”

  Mrs. Carston saw what had happened from the top of
the drag.

  “Dear Gertrude,” she cried, “you are always so precipitous—why don’t you thank the Prince?”

  “As long as Miss Carston was not precipitated, her precipitousness is harmless,” said the Prince. “I am afraid you are shaken,” he said to Gertrude.

  “Villari, you must not try to make puns in English,” screamed Mimi; “go and hold the horses a minute till they’ve taken out the baskets. There’s no such word as precipitousness.”

  Meanwhile Gertrude had recovered her equanimity, and confessed to herself that the Prince had merely chosen between letting herself be hurt or not hurt, and that it was hard to say why she was angry with him. She walked to where he was standing at the horses’ heads.

  “I am so grateful to you,” she said; “you saved me a very bad fall.”

  “Please don’t thank me for the privilege I have had. It is for me to thank you.”

  Gertrude made a great effort to conquer her increasing aversion to him, which was quite inexplicable, even to herself, and smiled.

  “You are very unselfish. Do you always find it a privilege to help other people?”

  “Decidedly not,” said he, looking straight at her.

  Gertrude turned away, and he followed her to join the others, who were standing at a little distance.

  “There are the boats,” explained the Princess, “and as there are ten of us and three of them, we’ll divide ourselves between them. We’d better take a man each to do the rowing, and if any of us like we can take an oar. I love rowing, and I know you row, Miss Carston. Your mother was telling me you were out this morning. Shall you and I go in a little boat by ourselves, and row across? Let’s do that.”

  The Prince remonstrated.

  “Mimi, you mustn’t take Miss Carston off all by yourself like that. It isn’t fair on the rest of us.”

  Mimi looked at him with malicious amusement in her eyes.

  “Miss Carston shall decide for herself,” she said. “Will you offend me or offend the Prince?”

  Poor Gertrude was not used to a world where chaff and seriousness seemed so muddled up together, and where nobody cared whether you were serious or not. She was accustomed to mean what she said, and not to say a good many things she meant, whereas these people seemed to say all they meant, and only half to mean a good many things they said.

  “I’m very fond of rowing,” she said simply. “I should like to go with you.”

  Princess Mimi looked mischievously at her husband, and Gertrude, not knowing exactly what to do with her eyes, glanced at him too. He was waiting for that, and as their eyes met he said—

  “You are very cruel; your thanks to me do not go beyond words.”

  The Princess came to her rescue.

  “Come, Miss Carston, you and I will set off. There’s a sweet little boat there, which will suit us beautifully.”

  The Princess’s method of rowing was to dip her oar into the water like a spoon very rapidly, for spasms which lasted about half a minute. In the intervals she talked to Gertrude.

  “I am so glad to be coming to England again,” she said. “Villari has had a lot of tiresome business which has kept him at Vienna during this last year, and we haven’t set foot in it for sixteen months. I am tremendously patriotic; nothing in the world gives me so much pleasure as the sight of those hop-fields of Kent, with the little sheds up for hop-pickers, and the red petticoats hanging out to dry. I think I shall go and live in one. Do you suppose it would be very full of fleas? I shall build it of Keating’s powder, solidified by the Mimi process, and then it will be all right. Do come and live with me, Miss Carston. Do you know, we’ve taken a tremendous fancy to you. May I call you Gertrude? Thanks, how sweet of you. Of course you must call me Mimi.”

  It was quite true that she had taken a great fancy to Gertrude, and Gertrude, in turn, felt attracted by her. She, like others, began to discount the fact that she smoked and screamed and drove four-in-hand, in the presence of the vitality to which such things were natural and unpremeditated. There was certainly no affectation in them; she did not do them because she wished to be fast, or wished to be thought fast, but because she was fast. Between her and Mrs. Rivière, Gertrude could already see, there was a great gulf fixed.

  Later on in the afternoon the two strolled up higher than the others on the green slopes that rise above the Monastery, and sat down by a spring that gushed out of a rock, making a shallow, sparkling channel for itself down to the lake. The Princess had what she called a “fit of rusticity,” which expressed itself at tea in a rapid, depreciatory sketch of all town life, in removing flies from the cream with consideration for their wings, and watching them clean themselves with sympathetic attention, and, more than all, in her taking a walk with Gertrude up the mountain side, instead of smoking cigarettes. Prince Villari had asked if he might come too, but Mimi gave him an emphatic “No.” Nobody had ever accused Prince Villari of having the least touch, much less a fit, of rusticity.

  The Princess had the gift of prompting people so delicately, that it could hardly be called forcing, to confide in her, and so it came about that before very long she knew of the existence of our Reginald Davenport, and his relation to her companion.

  Then Gertrude said suddenly—

  “Do you know Lady Hayes?”

  Mimi was startled. The question had been very irrelevant. But she answered with a laugh—

  “No; but I am told I should not like her. They say she is too like me. But why do you ask?”

  “Reggie wrote to me about her this morning. He says she is delightful.”

  “Oh! I don’t say she isn’t,” said the other, “but you see there isn’t room or time for two people like me in one place. I never have time to say all I want, and if there was somebody else like that, we shouldn’t get on at all.”

  “Oh! But Lady Hayes is usually very silent, I believe,” said Gertrude.

  “Yes; but you have to listen to the silence of some people, just as you have to listen to the talk of others. It takes just as much time. I expect she is one of those.”

  The Princess looked at the figure beside her.

  “How happy you must be,” she said with something like envy; “and I think you will continue to be happy. And Mr. Davenport is coming here, is he? You must introduce me at once, and I will give you both my blessing. That’s something to look forward to. Come, we must go down, the others will be waiting.”

  Mimi was rather less noisy on the way home than usual. Prince Villari remarked it, and supposed that the fit of rusticity was not yet over. She bid a very affectionate good-night to Gertrude at the door of her hotel, and asked her to come and see her in the morning, and then altered the terms of the visit, and said she would come down to their hotel herself, and hoped to find Gertrude ready for a stroll before lunch.

  She remained silent at dinner, and afterwards, when she and her husband were sitting in their room by the window, to let in the cool evening breeze, he felt enough curiosity to ask—

  “What is the matter with my charming wife that she is so silent?”

  “I was thinking about Gertrude Carston,” said Mimi. “She is engaged to be married.”

  Prince Villari puffed his cigar in silence for a few moments.

  “Ah! That is interesting,” he said at length. “I shall come with you tomorrow to offer my felicitations. How very handsome she is.”

  “I wish you would do nothing of the sort, Villari,” said his wife. “Flirt with somebody else, if you must flirt with somebody. Flirt with me, if you like.”

  “That is a most original idea,” he said. “I never heard of a husband flirting with his wife before.”

  “It’s no manner of use trying to flirt with Gertrude Carston, my dear boy; so I warn you solemnly. She is awfully in love with her intended, and, in any case, she wouldn’t flirt. She will only get angry with you.”

  “She would look splendid when she was angry,” said the Prince meditatively.

  Mimi got up from her s
eat.

  “Look here, Villari,” she said, “I don’t often ask a favour of you, and I am not particular in general as to how you conduct yourself. I am never jealous, you know, and we have ceased to be lovers—we are excellent friends, which I think is better. As a friend, I ask you to leave her alone.”

  “I never suspected you of jealousy,” he said; “but you ought to explain to me exactly why you wish this, if you want me to do as you ask.”

  “Benevolent motives, pure and simple,” said Mimi at once. “You won’t get any amusement out of it.”

  “Never mind me,” murmured he.

  “Very good,” continued Mimi. “I cancel that—and she will hate it. Just leave her alone. Flirt with Mrs. Rivière. She would enjoy it. You were rude to her today; you never spoke a word to her—good, bad or indifferent.”

  “Mimi, you are inimitable,” said the Prince, looking at her with satisfaction. “Really, you never disappoint one. I expected to find all sorts of surprises in you; but it seems I haven’t got to the end of them yet. To discover such a spring of benevolence in you now is charming. Do you know I feel like your lover still.”

  “Then will you do what I ask?”

  “Yes; I think I will,” said he. “After all, I shall flirt with my wife a little longer.”

  He rose up from his chair, and took her hand in his, and raised it, lover-like, to his lips.

  “You’re a very good old boy, Villari,” she said. “We’ve never yet come near the edge of a quarrel, and we’ve been married, oh! ever so long. How wise we are, aren’t we? Let me go, please. I want to write some letters. You told Mrs. Rivière you’d go to the Casino with her. It’s time you were off. Be awfully charming to her, will you?”

  “I’ll let her show me to all her acquaintances, and be introduced to them all, if that will do,” said the Prince.

  “That’s a dear,” remarked Mimi. “That’ll do beautifully. Trot along!”

  CHAPTER II.

  Gertrude’s pleasure at receiving the telegram announcing Reggie’s immediate arrival was not untouched by surprise. The vague thoughts, which for very loyalty she would not allow to take shape in her mind, in connection with Lady Hayes, formed themselves into a dark cloud on the horizon, distant but potentially formidable. But when she came downstairs on the morning of his arrival, and saw him standing in the hall, with the early morning sunlight falling on his tall, well-made form and towering, sunny head, there was no room in her mind for more than one feeling, and she was content. He had not seen her coming downstairs, and on the bottom step she paused, held out her hands, and said—