Cynthia's Chauffeur

Of course, Cynthia was easily first in the effort to recover disturbed wits.

“Like myself, you have been tempted out by this beautiful night, Mr. Fitzroy,” she said.

Then “Mr.” was a concession to his attire; somehow she imagined it would savor of presumption if she addressed him as an inferior. She could not define her mental attitude in words, but her quick intelligence responded to its subtle influence as a mirrored lake records the passing of a breeze. Very dainty and self-possessed she looked as she stood there smiling at him. Her motor dust-coat was utilized as a wrap. Beneath it she wore a white muslin dress of a studied simplicity that, to another woman’s assessing gaze, would reveal its expensiveness. She had tied a veil of delicate lace around her hair and under her chin, and Medenham noted, with a species of awe, that her eyes, so vividly blue in daylight, were now dark as the sky at night.

And he was strangely tongue-tied. He found nothing to say until after a pause that verged on awkwardness. Then he floundered badly.

“I am prepared to vouch for any explanation so long as it brings you here, Miss Vanrenen,” he said.

Cynthia wanted to laugh. It was sufficiently ridiculous to be compelled, as it were, to treat a paid servant as an equal, but it savored of madness to find him verging on the perilous borderland of a flirtation.

“Do you wish, then, to consult me on any matter?” she asked, with American directness.

“I was standing here and thinking of you,” he said. “Perhaps that accounts for your appearance. Since you have visited India you may have heard that the higher Buddhists, when they are anxious that another person shall act according to their desire, remain motionless in front of that person’s residence and concentrate ardent thought on their fixed intent… Sitting in dhurma on a man, they call it. I suppose the same principle applies to a woman.”

“It follows that you are a higher Buddhist, and that you willed I should come out. Your theory of sitting on the door-mat, is it? wobbles a bit in practice, because I really ran downstairs to tell Mrs. Devar something I had forgotten previously. Not finding her, I decided on a stroll. Instead of crossing the road I walked up to the left a couple of blocks. Then I noticed the pier, and meant to have a look at it before returning to the hotel. Anyhow, you wanted me, Mr. Fitzroy, and here I am. What can I do for you?”

Her tone of light raillery, supplemented by that truly daring adaptation of the method of gaining a cause favored by the esoteric philosophy of the East, went far to restore Medenham’s wandering faculties.

“I wanted to ask you a few questions, Miss Vanrenen,” he explained.

“Pray do, as they say in Boston.”

But he was not quite himself yet. He noticed that the lights were extinguished in the corner of the second floor.

“Is that your room?” he asked, pointing to it.

“Yes.”

Her air of blank amazement supplied a further tonic.

“Queer thing!” he said. “I thought so. More of the occult, I suppose. But I really wished to speak to you about Mrs. Devar.”

Cynthia was obviously relieved.

“Dear me!” she cried. “You two have taken a violent dislike to each other. You see, Mr. Fitzroy, we Americans are rather pleased than otherwise if a man acts and speaks like a gentleman even though he has to earn a living by hustling an automobile, but your sure-enough British dames exact a kind of servility from a chauffeur that doesn’t seem to fit in with your make-up. Servility is a hard word, but it is the best I can throw on the screen at the moment, and I’m real sorry if I have hurt your feelings by using it.”

Medenham smiled. Each instant his calmer judgment showed more and more clearly that he could not offer any valid excuse for interference in the girl’s affairs. For all he knew to the contrary, she might be tremulous with delight at the prospect of becoming a French countess; if that were so, the fact that he disapproved of Mrs. Devar’s matchmaking tactics would be received very coldly. Cynthia’s natural interpretation of his allusion to her chaperon offered a means of escape from a difficult position.

“I am greatly obliged by your hint,” he said. “Not that my lack of good manners is of much account, seeing that I am only a stop gap for the courtly Simmonds, but I shall endeavor to profit by it in my next situation.”

“Now you are getting at me,” cried Cynthia, her eyes sparkling somewhat. “Do you know, Mr. Fitzroy, I am inclined to think you are not a chauffeur at all.”

“I assure you there is not a man living who understands my special type of car better,” he protested.

“That isn’t what I mean, so don’t wriggle. You met Simmonds when he was in trouble, and just offered to take his place for a day or so, thereby doing him a good turn – isn’t that the truth?”

“Yes.”

“And you are not in the automobile business?”

“I am, for the time being.”

“Well, I am glad to hear it. I was shy of telling you when we reached the hotel, but you understand, of course, that I pay your expenses during this trip. The arrangement with Simmonds was that my father ante’d for petrol and allowed twelve shillings a day for the chauffeur’s meals and lodgings. Is that satisfactory?”

“Quite satisfactory, Miss Vanrenen,” said Medenham, fully alive to the girl’s effective ruse for the re-establishment of matters on a proper footing.

“So you don’t need to worry about Mrs. Devar. In any event, since you refused my offer to hire you for the tour, you will not see a great deal of her,” she went on, a trifle hurriedly.

“There only remains one other point,” he said, trying to help her. “Would you mind giving me Mr. Vanrenen’s address in Paris?”

“He is staying at the Ritz – but why do you want to know that?” she demanded with a sudden lifting of eyebrows, for the hope was strong in her that he might be induced to change his plans so far as the next nine days were concerned.

“A man in my present position ought always to ascertain the whereabouts of millionaires interested in motoring,” he answered promptly. “And now, pardon me for advising you not to walk towards the pier alone.”

“Gracious me! Why not?”

“There is a certain class of boisterous holiday-maker who might annoy you – not by downright ill-behavior, but by exercising a crude humor which is deemed peculiarly suitable to the seaside, though it would be none the less distressing to you.”

“In the States that sort of man gets shot,” she said, and her cheeks glowed with a rush of color.

“Here, on the contrary, he often takes the young lady’s arm and walks off with her,” persisted Medenham.

“I’m going to that pier,” she announced. “Guess you’d better escort me, Mr. Fitzroy.”

“Fate closes every door in my face,” he said sadly. “I cannot go with you – in that direction.”

“Well, of all the odd people! – why not that way, if any other?”

“Because Count Edouard Marigny, the gentleman whose name I could not help overhearing to-day, has just gone there – with another man.”

“Have you a grudge against him, too?”

“I never set eyes on him before six o’clock this evening, but I imagine you would not care to have him see you walking with your chauffeur.”

Cynthia looked up and down the broad sea front, with its thousands of lamps and droves of promenaders.

“At last I am beginning to size up this dear little island,” she said. “I may go with you to a racetrack, I may sit by your side for days in an automobile, I may even eat your luncheon and drink your aunt’s St. Galmier, but I may not ask you to accompany me a hundred yards from my hotel to a pier. Very well, I’ll quit. But before I go, do tell me one thing. Did you really mean to bring your aunt to Epsom to-day?”

“Yes.”

“A mother’s sister sort of aunt – a nice old lady with white hair?”

“One would almost fancy you had met her, Miss Vanrenen.”

“Perhaps I may, some day. Father and I are going to Scotland for a month from the twelfth of August. After that we shall be in the Savoy Hotel about six weeks. Bring her to see me.”

Medenham almost jumped when he heard of the projected visit to the Highlands, but some demon of mischief urged him to say:

“Let’s reckon up. July, August, September – three months – ”

He stopped with a jerk. Cynthia, already aware of some vague power she possessed of stirring this man’s emotions, did not fail to detect his air of restraint.

“It isn’t a proposition that calls for such a lot of calculation,” she said sharply. “Good-night, Mr. Fitzroy. I hope you are punctual morning-time. When there is a date to be kept, I’m a regular alarm clock, my father says.”

She sped across the road, and into the hotel. Then Medenham noticed how dark it had become – reminded him of the tropics, he thought – and made for his own caravanserai, while his brain was busy with a number of disturbing but nebulous problems that seemed to be pronounced in character yet singularly devoid of a beginning, a middle, or an end. Indeed, so puzzling and contradictory were they that he soon fell asleep. When he rose at seven o’clock next morning the said problems had vanished. They must have been part and parcel with the glamor of a June night, and a starlit sky, and the blue depths of the sea and of a girl’s eyes, for the wizard sun had dispelled them long ere he awoke. But he did not telegraph to Simmonds.

Dale brought the car to the Grand Hotel in good time, and Medenham ran it some distance along the front before drawing up at the Metropole. By that means he dissipated any undue curiosity that might be experienced by some lounger on the pavement who happened to notice the change of chauffeurs, while he avoided a prolonged scrutiny by the visitors already packed in chairs on both sides of the porch. He kept his face hidden during the luggage strapping process, and professed not to be aware of Cynthia’s presence until she bade him a cheery “Good-morning.”

Of course, Marigny was there, and Mrs. Devar gushed loudly for the benefit of the other people while settling herself comfortably in the tonneau.

“It was awfully devey of you, Count Edouard, to enliven our first evening away from town. No such good fortune awaits us in Bournemouth, I am afraid.”

“If I am to accept that charming reference as applying to myself, I can only say that my good fortune has exhausted itself already, madame,” said the Frenchman. “When do you return to London?”

“About the end of next week,” put in Cynthia.

“And your father – that delightful Monsieur Vanrenen,” said the Count, breaking into French, “he will join you there?”

“Oh, yes. My father and I are seldom separated a whole fortnight.”

“Then I shall have the pleasure of seeing you there. I go to-day to Salisbury – after that, to Hereford and Liverpool.”

“Why, we shall be in Hereford one day soon. What fun if we met again!”

Marigny looked to heaven, or as far in the direction popularly assigned to heaven as the porch of the Metropole would permit. He was framing a suitable speech, but the Mercury shot out into the open road with a noiseless celerity that disconcerted him.

Medenham at once slackened speed and leaned back.

“I’m very sorry,” he said, “but I clean forgot to ask if you were quite ready to start.”

Cynthia laughed.

“Go right ahead, Fitzroy,” she cried. “Guess the Count is pretty mad, anyhow. He was telling us last night that his Du Vallon is the only car that can hit up twenty at the first buzz.”

“Unpardonable rudeness,” murmured Mrs. Devar.

“On the Count’s part?” asked the girl demurely.

“No, of course not – on the part of this chauffeur person.”

“Oh, I like him,” was the candid answer. “He is a chauffeur of moods, but he can make this car hum. He and I had quite a long chat last night after dinner.”

Mrs. Devar sat up quickly.

“After dinner – last night!” she gasped.

“Yes – I ran into him outside the hotel.”

“At what time?”

“About ten o’clock. I came to the lounge, but you had vanished, and the wonderful light on the sea drew me out of doors.”

“My dear Cynthia!”

“Well, go on; that sounds like the beginning of a letter.”

Mrs. Devar suddenly determined not to feel scandalized.

“Ah, well!” she sighed, “one must relax a little when touring, but you Americans have such free and easy manners that we staid Britons are apt to lose our breath occasionally when we hear of something out of the common.”

“From what Fitzroy said when I told him I was going as far as the pier unaccompanied it seems to me that you staid Britons can be freer if not easier,” retorted Miss Vanrenen.

Her friend smiled sourly.

“If he disapproved he was right, I admit,” she purred.

Cynthia withheld any further confidences.

“What a splendid morning!” she said. “England is marvelously attractive on a day like this. And now, where is the map? I didn’t look up our route yesterday evening. But Fitzroy has it. We lunch at Winchester, I know, and there I see my first English Cathedral. Father advised me to leave St. Paul’s until I visit it with him. He says it is the most perfect building in the world architecturally, but that no one would realize it unless the facts were pointed out. When we were in Rome he said that St. Peter’s, grand as it is, is all wrong in construction. The thrust downwards from the dome is false, it seems.”

“Really,” said Mrs. Devar, who had just caught sight of Lady Somebody-or-other at the window of a house in Hove, and hoped that her ladyship’s eyes were sufficiently good to distinguish at least one occupant of the car.

“Yes; and Sir Christopher Wren mixed beams of oak with the stonework of his pillars, too. It gave them strength, he believed, though Michael Angelo had probably never heard of such a thing.”

“You don’t say so.”

The other woman had traveled far on similar conversational counters. They would have failed with Cynthia, but the girl had opened the map, and talk lagged for the moment.

Leaving the coast at Shoreham, Medenham turned the car northward at Bramber, with its stone-roofed cottages gilded with lichen, its tiny gardens gay with flowers, and the ruins of its twelfth-century castle frowning from the crest of an elm-clothed hill. Two miles to the northwest they came upon ancient Steyning, now a sleepy country town, but of greater importance than Bath or Birmingham or Southampton in the days of the Confessor, and redolent of the past by reason of its church, with an early Norman chancel, its houses bearing stone moldings and window mullions of the Elizabethan period, and its quaint street names, such as Dog Lane, Sheep-pen Street, and Chantry Green, where two martyrs were burnt.

Thence the way lay through the leafy wonderland of West Sussex, when the Mercury crept softly through Midhurst and Petersfield into Hampshire, and so to Winchester, where Cynthia, enraptured with the cathedral, used up a whole reel of films, and bought some curios carved out of oak imbedded in the walls when the Conqueror held England in his firm grip.

They lunched at a genuine old coaching-house in the main street, and Medenham persuaded the girl to turn aside from Salisbury in order to pass through the heart of the New Forest. She sat with him in front then, and their talk dealt more with the magnificent scenery than with personal matters until they reached Ringwood, where they halted for tea.

Before alighting at the inn there she asked him where he meant to stay in Bournemouth. He answered the one question by another.

“You put up at the Bath Hotel, I think?” he said.

“Yes. Someone told me it was more like a Florentine picture gallery than a hotel. Is that true?”

“I have not been to Florence, but the picture gallery notion is all right. When I was a youngster I came here often, and my – my people always – well, you see – ”

He nibbled his mustache in dismay, for it was hard to keep up a pretense when Cynthia was so near. She ended the sentence for him.

“You came to the Bath Hotel. Why not stay there to-night?”

“I would like it very much, if you have no objection.”

“Just the opposite. But – please forgive me for touching on money matters – the charges may be rather dear. Won’t you let me tell the head waiter to – to include your bill with ours?”

“On the strict condition that you deduct twelve shillings from my account,” he said, stealing a glance at her.

“I shall be quite business-like, I promise.”

She was smiling at the landscape, or at some fancy that took her, perhaps. But it followed that a messenger was sent for Dale to the hostelry where he had booked a room for his master, and that Mrs. Devar, after one stony and indignant glare, whispered to Cynthia in the dining-room:

“Can that man in evening dress, sitting alone near the window, by any possibility be our chauffeur?”

“Yes,” laughed the girl. “That is Fitzroy. Say, doesn’t he look fine and dandy? Don’t you wish he was with us – to order the wine? And, by the way, is there a pier at Bournemouth?”

CHAPTER IV

SHADOWS – WITH OCCASIONAL GLEAMS

Mrs. Devar ate her soup in petrified silence. Among the diners were at least two peers and a countess, all of whom she knew slightly; at no other time during the last twenty years would she have missed such an opportunity of impressing the company in general and her companion in particular by waddling from table to table and greeting these acquaintances with shrill volubility.

But to-night she was beginning to be alarmed. Her youthful protégée was carrying democratic training too far; it was quite possible that a request to modify an unconventional freedom of manner where Fitzroy was concerned would meet with a blank refusal. That threatened a real difficulty in the near future, and she was much perturbed by being called on to decide instantly on a definite course of action. Too strong a line might have worse consequences than a laissez faire attitude. As matters stood, the girl was eminently plastic, her naturally gentle disposition inducing respect for the opinions and wishes of an older and more experienced woman, yet there was a fearlessness, a frank candor of thought, in Cynthia’s character that awed and perplexed Mrs. Devar, in whom the unending struggle to keep afloat in the swift and relentless torrent of social existence had atrophied every sense save that of self-preservation. An open rupture, such as she feared might take place if she asserted her shadowy authority, was not to be dreamed of. What was to be done? Small wonder, then, that she should tackle her fish vindictively.

“Are you angry because Fitzroy is occupying the same hotel as ourselves?” asked Cynthia at last.

The girl had amused herself by watching the small coteries of stiff and starched Britons scattered throughout the room; she was endeavoring to classify the traveled and the untraveled by varying degrees of frigidity. As it happened, she was wholly wrong in her rough analysis. The Englishman who has wandered over the map is, if anything, more self-contained than his stay-at-home brother. He is often a stranger in his own land, and the dozen most reserved men present that evening were probably known by name and deed throughout the widest bounds of the empire.

But, though eyes and brain were busy, she could not help noticing Mrs. Devar’s taciturn mood. That a born gossip, a retailer of personal reminiscences confined exclusively to “the best people,” should eat stolidly for five consecutive minutes, seemed somewhat of a miracle, and Cynthia, as was her habit, came straight to the point.

Mrs. Devar managed to smile, pouting her lips in wry mockery of the suggestion that a chauffeur’s affairs should cause her any uneasiness whatsoever.

“I was really thinking of our tour,” she lied glibly. “I am so sorry you missed seeing Salisbury Cathedral. Why was the route altered?”

“Because Fitzroy remarked that the cathedral would always remain at Salisbury, whereas a perfect June day in the New Forest does not come once in a blue moon when one really wants it.”

“For a person of his class he appears to say that sort of thing rather well.”

Cynthia’s arched eyebrows were raised a little.

“Why do you invariably insist on the class distinction?” she cried. “I have always been taught that in England the barrier of rank is being broken down more and more every day. Your society is the easiest in the world to enter. You tolerate people in the highest circles who would certainly suffer from cold feet if they showed up too prominently in New York or Philadelphia; isn’t it rather out of fashion to be so exclusive?”

“Our aristocracy has such an assured position that it can afford to unbend,” quoted the other.

“Oh, is that it? I heard my father say the other day that it has often made him tired to see the way in which some of your titled nonentities grovel before a Lithuanian Jew who is a power on the Rand. But unbending is a different thing to groveling, perhaps?”

Mrs. Devar sighed, yet she gave a moment’s scrutiny to a wine-list brought by the head waiter.

“A small bottle of 61, please,” she said in an undertone.

Then she sighed again, deprecating the Vanrenen directness.

“Unfortunately, my dear, few of our set can avoid altogether the worship of the golden calf.”

Cynthia thrust an obstinate chin into the argument.

“People will do things for bread and butter that they would shy at if independent,” she said. “I can understand the calf proposition much more easily than the snobbishness that would forbid a gentleman like Fitzroy from eating a meal in the same apartment as his employers, simply because he earns money by driving an automobile.”

In her earnestness, Cynthia had gone just a little beyond the bounds of fair comment, and Mrs. Devar was quick to seize the advantage thus offered.

“From some points of view, Fitzroy and I are in the same boat,” she said quietly. “Still, I cannot agree that it is snobbish to regard a groom or a coachman as a social inferior. I have been told that there are several broken-down gentlemen driving omnibuses in London, but that is no reason why one should ask one of them to dinner, even though his taste in wine might be beyond dispute.”

Cynthia had already regretted her impulsive outburst. Her vein of romance was imbedded in a rock of good sense, and she took the implied reproof penitently.

“I am afraid my sympathies rather ran away with my manners,” she said. “Please forgive me. I really didn’t mean to charge you with being a snob. The absurdity of the statement carries its own refutation. I spoke in general terms, and I am willing to admit that I was wrong in asking the man to come here to-night. But the incident happened quite naturally. He mentioned the fact that he often stayed in the hotel as a boy – ”

“Very probably,” agreed Mrs. Devar cheerfully. “We are all subject to ups and downs. For my part, I was speaking à la chaperon, my sole thought being to safeguard you from the disagreeable busy-bodies who misconstrue one’s motives. And now, let us talk of something more amusing. You see that woman in old rose brocade – she is sitting with a bald-headed man at the third table on your left. Well, that is the Countess of Porthcawl, and the man with her is Roger Ducrot, the banker. Porthcawl is a most complaisant husband. He never comes within a thousand miles of Millicent. She is awfully nice; clever, and witty, and the rest of it – quite a man’s woman. We are sure to meet her in the lounge after dinner and I will introduce you.”

Cynthia said she would be delighted. Reading between the lines of Mrs. Devar’s description, it was not easy to comprehend the distinction that forbade friendship with Fitzroy while offering it with Millicent, Countess of Porthcawl. But the girl was resolved not to open a new rift. In her heart she longed for the day that would reunite her to her father; meanwhile, Mrs. Devar must be dealt with gently.

Despite its tame ending, this unctuous discussion on social ethics led to wholly unforeseen results.

The allusion to a possible pier at Bournemouth meant more than Mrs. Devar imagined, but Cynthia resisted the allurements of another entrancing evening, went early to her room, and wrote duty letters for a couple of hours. The excuse served to cut short her share of the Countess’s brilliant conversation, though Mr. Ducrot tried to make himself very agreeable when he heard the name of Vanrenen.