AT THE THREE KINGS
“What’s the best hotel in the place?” I inquired somewhat dubiously. The
man in the blouse, who had performed the three functions of opening my
compartment-door, carrying my bag to the gate, and relieving me of my
ticket, achieved a thoroughly Gallic shrug.
“Monsieur,” said he, “what shall I tell you? The best hotel, the worst
hotel--these are one. There is only the Hotel des Trois Rois in the town
of Bleau. Let monsieur proceed by the street of the Three Kings and he
will reach it. Formerly there was an omnibus, but now the horses are
taken. And if they remained, who could drive them with all the men at
the war?”
Carrying my bag and feeling none too amiable, I set off along the
indicated route. In Paris, rushing from the rue St.-Dominique to Cook’s
office, from that office to the hotel, from the hotel to the _gare_, I
had been a sort of whirling dervish with no time for sober thought.
My trip of four hours on a slow, stuffy, crowded train had, however,
afforded me ample leisure; and I had spent the time in grimly envisaging
the possibilities that, I decided, were most likely to befall.
First and foremost disagreeable; that the men in the gray automobile
were helping Miss Falconer in some nefarious business. In this case, it
would be up to me to fight the gentlemen single-handed, rescue the girl,
and escort her back to Paris, all without scandal. Easier said than
done!
Second possibility: that Miss falconer, pausing at Bleau only en route,
might already have departed, and that I would be left with my journey
for my pains.
Third: that the gray car had no connection with her; that she had some
entirely blameless errand. I hoped so, I was sure. If this proved true,
I was bound to stand branded as a meddling, officious idiot, one who, in
defiance of the most elementary social rules, persisted in trailing her
against her will. Vastly pleasant, indeed!
Fuming, I shifted my bag from one hand to the other and walked faster.
Night was falling, but it was not yet really dark, and I formed a
clear enough notion of the village as I traversed it. It was one of the
hundreds of its kind which make an artists’ paradise of France. Entirely
unmodernized, it was the more picturesque for that. If I tripped
sometimes on the roughly paved street I could console myself with the
knowledge that these cobbles, like the odd, jutting houses rising on
both sides of them, were at least three hundred years old. Green woods,
clear against a background of rosy sunset, ran up to the very borders of
the town. I passed a little, gray old church. I crossed a quaint bridge
built over a winding stream lined with dwellings and broken by mossy
washing-stones. It was all very peaceful, very simple, and very rustic.
Without second sight I could not possibly have visioned the grim little
drama for which it was to serve as setting.
A blue sign with gilded letters beckoned me, and I paused to read it.
The Touring Club of France recommended to the passing stranger the Hotel
of the Three Kings. Here I was, then. From the street a dark, arched,
stone passage of distinctly _moyen-age_ flavor led me into a courtyard
paved with great square cobbles, round the four sides of which were
built the walls of the inn. Winding, somewhat crazy-looking, stone
staircases ran up to the galleries from which the bedroom doors
informally opened; vines, as yet leafless, wreathed the gray walls and
framed the shuttered windows; before me I glimpsed a kitchen with a
magnificent oaken ceiling and a medieval fireplace in which a fire
roared redly; and at my right yawned what had doubtless been a stable
once upon a time, but with the advent of the motor, had become a
primitive garage.
I took the liberty of peering inside. Eureka! There, resting comfortably
from its day’s labors, stood a dark-blue automobile. If this was not the
motor that had brought Miss Falconer from the rue St.-Dominique, it was
its twin.
“You’ll notice it’s alone, though,” I told myself. “Where’s the gray
car?”
My mood was grumpy in the extreme. The inn was charming, but I knew from
sad experience that no place combines all attractions, and that a spot
so picturesque as this would probably lack running water and electric
light.
“_Bonsoir, Monsieur!_”
A buxom, smiling, bare-armed woman had emerged from the kitchen door.
She was plainly the hostess. I set down my bag and removed my hat.
“Madame,” I responded, “I wish you a good evening. I desire a room for
the night in the Hotel of the Three Kings.”
“To accommodate monsieur,” she assured me warmly, “will be a pleasure.
Monsieur is an artist without doubt?”
I wanted to say “_Et tu, Brute!_” but I didn’t. When one came to think
of it, I had no very good reason to advance for having appeared at
Bleau. It wasn’t the sort of place into which one would drop from
the skies by pure chance, either. I was lucky to find a ready-made
explanation.
“But assuredly,” said I.
She disappeared into the kitchen, returned immediately with a candle,
and led me up the stone staircase on the left of the courtyard, talking
volubly all the while.
“We have had many artists here,” she declared; “many friends of
monsieur, doubtless. Since monsieur is of that fine profession, his
room will be but four francs daily; his dinner, three francs; his little
breakfast, a franc alone.”
“Madame,” I responded, “it is plain that the high cost of living, which
terrorizes my country, does not exist at Bleau.”
Equally plain, I thought pessimistically, was the explanation. My
saddest forebodings were realized; if the name of the hotel meant
anything and three kings ever tarried here, that conjunction of
sovereigns had put up with housing of a distinctly primitive sort. My
room was clean, I acknowledged thankfully, but that was all I could say
for it. I eyed the bowl and pitcher gloomily, the hard-looking bed, the
tiny square of carpeting in the center of the stone floor.
“Your house, Madame,” I suggested craftily, with a view to
reconnoissance, “is, of course, full?”
She heaved a sigh.
“It is war-time, Monsieur,” she lamented. “None travel now. Yet why
should I mourn, since I make enough to keep me till the war is ended
and my man comes home? There are those who eat here daily at the noon
hour--the cure, the mayor, the mayor’s secretary, sometimes the notary
of the town, as well. And to-night I have two guests, monsieur and the
young lady--the nurse who goes to the hospital at Carrefonds with the
great new remedy for burns and scars. _Au revoir, Monsieur_. In one
little moment I will send the hot water, and in half an hour monsieur
shall dine.”
I closed the door behind her and flung down my bag, fuming. So Miss
Falconer was a nurse, carrying a panacea to the wounded, doubtless a
specimen of the sensational new remedy just recognized by the medical
authorities, of which the one newspaper I had glanced through in Paris
had been full. The masquerade was too preposterous to gain an instant’s
credence. It gave me, as the French say, furiously to think; it resolved
all doubts.
I felt inexplicably angry, then preternaturally cool and competent. For
the first time since the Modane episode I was my clear-sighted self.
I had been trying futilely to blindfold my eyes, to explain the
inexplicable, to be unaware of the obvious. Now with a sort of grim
relief I looked the facts in the face.
My hot water appearing, I made a sketchy toilet, and then descended to
the courtyard where I lounged and smoked. My state of mind was peculiar.
As I struck a match I noticed with a queer pride that my hand was
steady. With a cold, almost sardonic clarity, I thought of Miss
Falconer. First a prosperous tourist, next a dweller in an aristocratic
French mansion, then a nurse. She equaled, I told myself, certain
heroines of our Sunday supplements, queens of the smugglers, moving
spirits of the diamond ring.
Upstairs in the right-hand gallery a door opened. A light footstep
sounded on the winding stairs. The critical moment was upon me; she was
coming. I threw away my cigarette and advanced.
She was playing her part, I saw, with due regard for detail. Now that
her furs were off she stood forth in the white costume, the flowing
head-dress, the red cross--all the panoply of the _infirmiere_. She
came half-way down the stairs before perceiving me; then, with a low
exclamation, grasping the balustrade, she stood still.
I didn’t even pretend surprise. What was the use of it?
“Good-evening, Miss Falconer,” was all I said.
It seemed a long time before she answered. Rigid, uncompromising, she
faced me; and I read storm signals in the deep flush of her cheeks, the
gray flash of her eyes, the stiffness of her white-draped head.
“Oh, Lord!” I groaned to myself in cold compassion, “she means to bluff
it! Can’t she see that the game’s played out?”
“This is very strange, Mr. Bayne,” she was saying idly. “I understood
that you were to drive an ambulance at the Front.”
How young, how lovely, how glowing she looked as she stood there in her
snowy dress. I found myself wondering impersonally what had led her to
these devious paths.
“So I am,” I responded with accentuated coolness. “My time is valuable;
it was a sacrifice to come to Bleau; but I had no choice. What’s wrong,
Miss Falconer? You don’t object to my presence surely? If you go on
freezing me like this, I shall think there’s something about my turning
up here that worries you--upon my soul I shall!”
She should by rights have been trembling, but her eyes blazed at me
disdainfully. I felt almost like a caitiff, whatever that may be.
“It doesn’t worry me,” she denied, with the same crisp iciness, “but it
does surprise me. Will you tell me, please, what you are doing here?”
Should I return, “And you?” in a voice of obvious meaning? Should I take
a leaf from the book of my hostess and say: “I’m a bit of an artist.
I’ve sketched all over Europe, and I’ve come to have a go at the old
mill that so many fellows try?” Such a claim would just match the
assumption of her costume. But no.
“The fact is,” I said serenely, “I came straight from the rue
St. Dominique to keep the appointment you forgot.”
The announcement, it was plain, exasperated her, for slightly, but
undeniably, she stamped one arched, slender, attractively shod foot.
“Mr. Bayne,” she demanded, “are you a secret-service agent?”
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, startled. “No!”
“Then I’m sorry. That would have been a better reason for following me
than--than the only one there is,” she swept on stormily. “You knew I
didn’t wish to see any one at present. I said so in the note I left. Yet
you spied on me and you tracked me deliberately, when I had trusted
you with my address. It’s outrageous of you. You ought to be ashamed of
doing it, Mr. Bayne.”
A stunned realization burst on me of the line that she was taking, the
position into which, willy-nilly, she was crowding me. I had trailed her
here, she assumed, to thrust my company on her; and, upon the surface,
I had to own that my behavior really had that air. If I had followed her
with equal brazenness along Fifth Avenue, I should have had a chance to
explain my conduct to the first police officer who noticed it, later
to an indignant magistrate. But, heavens and earth! She knew why I had
come. And knowing, how did she dare defy me? I retained just sufficient
presence of mind to stare back impassively and to mumble with feeble
sarcasm:
“I’m very sorry you think so.”
She came down a step.
“Are you?” she asked imperiously. “Then--will you prove it? Will you go
back to Paris by to-night’s train?”
I had recovered myself.
“There isn’t any train to-night,” I protested, civil, but adamant.
“And--I’m sorry, but if there was I wouldn’t take it--not until I’ve
accomplished what I came to do!”
The girl seemed to concentrate all the world’s disdain in the look that
measured me, running from my head to my unoffending feet, from my feet
back to my head.
“Most men would go, Mr. Bayne,” she flung at me, her red lips scornful.
“But then, most men wouldn’t have come, of course. And all you will
accomplish is to make me dine up here in this--this wretched, stuffy
room.” Before I could lift a hand in protest, she had turned, mounted
the stairs again, and vanished. The door--shall I own it?--slammed.