Olive, advised by a clerk in Cook's office, had taken a through ticket
to Siena, third class to Dover, first on the boat, second in France
and Italy. She got to Victoria in good time, had her luggage labelled,
secured a corner seat, and, having twenty minutes to spare, strolled
round the bookstall, eyeing the illustrated weeklies and the cheap
reprints. The blue and gold of a shilling edition of Keats lay ready
to her hand and she picked it up and opened it.
The girl, true lover of all beauty, flushed with pleasure at the dear,
familiar word music, the sound of Arcadian pipes heard faintly for a
moment above the harsh roar of London. For her the dead poet's voice
rose clearly through the clamour of the living; it was like the silver
wailing of a violin in a blaring discord of brass instruments.
She laid down the book reluctantly, and turning, met the eager eyes of
the man who stood beside her. He had just bought an armful of current
literature, and his business at the bookstall was evidently done, yet
he lingered for an appreciable instant. He, too, was a lover of
beauty, and in his heart he was saying, "Oh, English rose!"
He did not look English himself. He wore his black hair rather longer
than is usual in this country, and there was a curiously vivid look, a
suggestion of fire about him, which is conspicuously lacking in the
average Briton, whose ambition it is to look as cool as possible. His
face was thin and his eyes were deep set, like those of Julius
Caesar--in fact, the girl was strongly reminded of the emperor's bust
in the British Museum. He looked about thirty-five, but might have
been older.
All this Olive saw in the brief instant during which they stood there
together and aware of each other. When he turned away she bought some
magazines, without any great regard for their interest or suitability,
and went to take her place in the third-class compartment she had
selected.
He would travel first, of course. She watched his leisurely progress
along the platform, and noted that he was taller than any of the other
men there, and better-looking. His thin, clean-shaven face compelled
attention; she saw some women looking at him, and was pleased to
observe that he did not even glance at them. Then people came hurrying
up to the door of her compartment to say good-bye to some of her
fellow-travellers, and she lost sight of him.
The train started and passed through the arid wilderness of backyards
that lies between each one of the London termini and the clean green
country.
Olive fluttered the pages of her magazine, but she felt disinclined
to read. She was pretty; her brown hair framed a rose-tinted face, her
smile was charming, her blue eyes were gay and honest and kind. Men
often looked at her, and it cannot be denied that the swift
appraisement of masculine eyes, the momentary homage of a glance that
said "you are fair," meant something to her. Such tributes to her
beauty were minor joys, to be classed with the pleasure to be derived
from _marrons glaces_ or the scent of violets, but the remembrance of
them did not often make her dream by day or bring a flush to her
cheeks.
She roused herself presently and began to look out of the window with
the remorseful feeling of one who has been neglecting an old friend
for an acquaintance. After all, this was England, where she was born
and where her mother had died, and she was leaving it perhaps for
ever. She tried to fix the varying aspects of the spring in her mind
for future reference; the tender green of the young larches in the
plantation, the pale gold of the primroses, and the flowering gorse
close to the line, the square grey towers of the village churches,
even the cold, pinched faces of the people waiting on the platforms of
the little stations. Italy would be otherwise, and she might never see
these familiar things again.
When the train rushed out on to the pier at Dover she dared not look
back at the white cliffs, but kept her eyes resolutely seaward. The
wind was high, and she heard that the crossing would be rough. Caesar
was close behind her, and she caught a glimpse of him going aft as she
made her way to the ladies' cabin.
She lay down on one of the red velvet divans in the stuffy saloon, and
closed her eyes as she had been advised to do, and in ten minutes her
misery was complete.
"If you are going to be ill nothing will stop you," observed the
sympathetic stewardess. "It is like Monte Carlo. Most people have a
system, and sometimes they win, but they are bound to lose in the end.
Champagne, munching biscuits, patent medicines, lying down as you are
now. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit, my dear."
Olive joined feebly in her laugh. "I feel better now. Are we nearly
there?"
"Just coming into harbour."
"Thank heaven!"
When Olive crawled up on deck her one idea, after her luggage, was to
avoid anyone who had seemed to admire her. She could not bear that the
man should see her green face, and she was grateful to him for keeping
his distance in the crush to get off the boat, and for disappearing
altogether in the station. A porter in a blue linen blouse piloted her
to the waiting train, and she climbed into the compartment labelled
"Turin," and settled herself in a window seat.
The country between Calais and Paris can only be described as flat,
stale and unprofitable by a beauty lover panting for the light and
glow and colour of the South, and Olive soon got a book out of her bag
and began to read. Her only fellow-passenger, a middle-aged English
lady with an indefinite face, spoke to her presently. "You are reading
a French novel?"
"No, it is in Italian. _La Citta Morta_, by Gabriele D'Annunzio. I
want to rub up my few words of the language."
"Is he not a very terrible writer?"
Olive was so tired of the disapproving note. "He writes very well, and
his descriptions are gorgeous. Of course he is horrid sometimes, but
one can skip those parts."
"Do you?"
Olive smiled. "No, I do not," she said frankly, "but I don't enjoy
them. They make me tired of life."
"Is not that rather a pity?"
"Perhaps; but you have to sift dirt to find diamonds, don't you? And
this man says things that are worth tiaras sometimes."
"Surely there must be Italian authors who write books suitable for
young people in a pretty style?"
"A pretty style? No doubt. But I don't read them."
The older woman sighed, and then smiled quite pleasantly. "I suppose
you are clever. One of my nieces is, and they find her rather a
handful. Will you try one of my sandwiches?"
Olive produced her biscuits and bananas, and they munched together in
amity. After all, an aunt might be worse than stupid, and this one was
quite good-natured, and so kind that her taste in literature might be
excused. There were affectionate farewells at the Paris station, where
she got out with all her accumulation of bags and bundles.
The train rushed on through the woods of Fontainebleau and across wide
plains intersected by poplar-fringed canals. As the evening mists rose
lights began to twinkle in cottage windows, and in the villages the
church bells were ringing the prayer to the Virgin. Olive had laid
aside her book some time since, and now, wearying of the grey twilit
world, she fell asleep.
Jean Avenel, too, had watched the waning of the day from his place in
a smoking first for a while, before he got up and began to prowl
restlessly about the corridors. "She will be so tired if she does not
eat," he said to himself. "They ought not to let a child like that
travel alone. I wonder--" He walked down the corridor again, but this
time he looked into each compartment. He saw three Englishmen and an
American playing whist, Germans eating, and French people sleeping,
and at last he came upon his rose. A small man, mean-featured and
scrubby-haired, was seated opposite to her, and his shining eyes were
fixed upon her face. She had taken off her hat and was holding it on
her lap, and Jean saw that she was clutching at it nervously, and
that she was pale. He understood that it was probably her first
experience of the Italian stare, deliberate, merciless, and
indefinitely prolonged. She flushed as he came forward, and her eyes
were eloquent as they met his. He sat down beside her.
"Please forgive me," he said quietly, "but I can see this man is
annoying you. Shall I glare him out of the place? I can."
"Oh, please do," she answered. "He has frightened me so. He was
talking before you came."
The culprit already looked disconcerted and rather foolish, and now,
as Jean leant forward and seemed about to speak to him, he began to be
frightened. He fidgeted, thrusting his hands in his pockets, looking
out of the window, humming a tune. His ears grew red. He tried to meet
the other man's level gaze and failed. He got up rather hurriedly. The
brown eyes watched him slinking out before they allowed themselves a
second sight of the rose.
"Thank you so much," said Olive. "I feel as if you had killed a spider
for me, or an earwig. He was more like an earwig. He must have come in
here while I was asleep."
"A deported waiter going back to his native Naples, I imagine," Jean
said. "They ought not to have let you travel alone."
She smiled. "I am a law unto myself."
"That is a pity. Will you think me very impertinent if I confess that
I have been watching over you--at a respectful distance--ever since we
left Victoria? I do not approve of children wandering--"
She tilted her pretty chin at him. "Children! So you have made
yourself into a sort of G.F.S. for me?"
"You know," he said gravely, "we have a mutual friend." He drew a blue
and gold volume from an inner pocket.
Olive flushed scarlet, but she only said, "Oh, Keats!"
She looked at his hands as they turned the pages; they were clever and
kind, she thought, and she wondered if he was an artist or a doctor.
Those fingers might set a butterfly's wing, and yet they seemed very
strong. She did not know she had sighed until he said, "Am I boring
you?"
"Oh, no," she answered eagerly. "Please don't go yet unless you want
to. But tell me why you bought that book?"
"If you could have seen yourself as I saw you, you would understand,"
he answered. "I once saw a woman on my brother's estate pick up a
piece of gold on the road. She had never had so much money without
earning it in her life before, I suppose. At any rate she kissed it,
and her face was radiant. She was old and ugly and worn by her long
days of toil in the fields, and you-- Well, in spite of the
differences you reminded me of her, and I am curious to know which
poem of Keats brought that swift, rapt light of joy."
"It was 'White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine'--"
Jean found the place and marked the passage before returning the book
to his pocket. "Now," he said, "you will come with me and have some
dinner."