I
Matthew Lanfear had stopped off, between Genoa and Nice, at San Remo in
the interest of a friend who had come over on the steamer with him, and
who wished him to test the air before settling there for the winter with
an invalid wife. She was one of those neurasthenics who really carry
their climate--always a bad one--with them, but she had set her mind on
San Remo; and Lanfear was willing to pass a few days in the place making
the observations which he felt pretty sure would be adverse.
His train was rather late, and the sunset was fading from the French sky
beyond the Italian shore when he got out of his car and looked round for
a porter to take his valise. His roving eye lighted on the anxious
figure, which as fully as the anxious face, of a short, stout, elderly
man expressed a sort of distraction, as he stood loaded down with
umbrellas, bags, bundles, and wraps, and seemed unable to arrest the
movements of a tall young girl, with a travelling-shawl trailing from
her arm, who had the effect of escaping from him towards a bench beside
the door of the waiting-room. When she reached it, in spite of his
appeals, she sat down with an absent air, and looked as far withdrawn
from the bustle of the platform and from the snuffling train as if on
some quiet garden seat along with her own thoughts.
In his fat frenzy, which Lanfear felt to be pathetic, the old gentleman
glanced at him, and then abruptly demanded: "Are you an American?"
We knew each other abroad in some mystical way, and Lanfear did not try
to deny the fact.
"Oh, well, then," the stranger said, as if the fact made everything
right, "will you kindly tell my daughter, on that bench by the door
yonder"--he pointed with a bag, and dropped a roll of rugs from under
his arm--"that I'll be with her as soon as I've looked after the trunks?
Tell her not to move till I come. Heigh! Here! Take hold of these, will
you?" He caught the sleeve of a _facchino_ who came wandering by, and
heaped him with his burdens, and then pushed ahead of the man in the
direction of the baggage-room with a sort of mastery of the situation
which struck Lanfear as springing from desperation rather than
experience.
Lanfear stood a moment hesitating. Then a glance at the girl on the
bench, drooping a little forward in freeing her face from the veil that
hung from her pretty hat, together with a sense of something quaintly
charming in the confidence shown him on such purely compatriotic
grounds, decided him to do just what he had been asked. The girl had got
her veil up by this time, and as he came near, she turned from looking
at the sunset over the stretch of wall beyond the halting train, and met
his dubious face with a smile.
"It _is_ beautiful, isn't it?" she said. "I know I shall get well, here,
if they have such sunsets every day."
There was something so convincingly normal in her expression that
Lanfear dismissed a painful conjecture. "I beg your pardon," he said.
"I am afraid there's some mistake. I haven't the pleasure--You must
excuse me, but your father wished me to ask you to wait here for him
till he had got his baggage--"
"My father?" the girl stopped him with a sort of a frowning perplexity
in the stare she gave him. "My father isn't here!"
"I beg your pardon," Lanfear said. "I must have misunderstood. A
gentleman who got out of the train with you--a short, stout gentleman
with gray hair--I understood him to say you were his daughter--requested
me to bring this message--"