On the Ridge
The moving palace of luxury that had conveyed her in so few hours
through so many dreams of magic and visions of faery, rumbled slowly
out of the spacious hall of idleness commonly known as Mentone
Station, but more nearly resembling a Home of Rest for railway
officials. There it left Ermengarde, dizzy, bewildered, and
solitary, planted by the luggage, that in some magical and mysterious
way had suddenly been restored to her, and looking vacantly across
the rails at a group of sturdy palms and a purple rim of sea.
Then it was that the melancholy spirit named home-sickness suddenly
fell upon, seized, and rent her.
She would see the woman of mystery no more--so forlorn were her
feelings that it was grief to part even with this probably suspicious
character and possible assassinator of her nocturnal imaginings--she
was going all alone to an unknown foreign house full of strangers,
with not a soul to meet her or speak to her; perhaps to one of those
hostelries so often met with on lonely moors in historic romance,
that exist only as traps to rob and murder wayfarers.
"Quel est l'hôtel de Madame?" had several times been addressed to
unheeding ears before she recovered enough from these dismal
forebodings to reply; whereupon she soon found herself under the
broad bright sky outside, stepping into one of the twenty or thirty
omnibuses drawn up in line before the station, each with the name of
its house in shining gold upon it. It was reassuring to see Les
Oliviers legibly inscribed upon a veritable, unromantic bus; it was
broad day; there was clearly no question of sinister-looking hovels
with one-eyed landlords intent on murder and robbery--in these days
they do the work more slowly; in the kitchens and on the bills--but
she did wish she had been able to do her hair and tidy herself.
"I shall have to strap-hang, and there's no strap, and I couldn't if
there was," was her mournful reflection, on finding the interior of
this vehicle overflowing with hand-baggage and a lady of ample
proportions on one side, and with a fair-sized gentleman, evidently a
portion of the ample lady's baggage, and a thin gentleman and more
hand-baggage, on the other. All were English, and all looked at her
with the deadly animosity our countrymen accord to strangers. The
whole world being the exclusive heritage of the travelling Briton, he
naturally looks upon all other travellers as intruders. The
appearance of a moustached face, with laughing dark eyes and a gay
smile, at the window, followed by a request in a velvety voice,
half-pleading, half-humorous, of "Place pour Madame, Messieurs et
Madame, _s'il vous plait_," and accompanied by a forcible
transposition of some of these mountains of parcels, resulted in a
clearance of about six inches of cushion, upon which Ermengarde
accommodated as much of a wearied frame as circumstances permitted;
and then, with much furious but innocuous whip-cracking and many
strange anathemas, the omnibus jolted and rumbled off, Ermengarde
feeling more of a pariah with every jolt, hurled now into the
indignant arms of the fair-sized gentleman and now upon the towering
parcels of the lady of ample proportions, and profusely and
irrationally apologizing in German, of which her fellow-voyagers
understood nothing but that it was German, and therefore detestable.
Why she spoke German at that precise moment of her existence she had
no idea, except that it was the only foreign language that happened
to turn up, and that she was obsessed by a vague notion that English
was unsuitable to the surroundings. So, try as she would, she
continued to speak German all the way to the hotel, to the great
inconvenience and mystification of everybody, including herself. Her
German was not quite perfect.
The lady of ample proportions meanwhile expressed herself strongly in
very plain English upon the unpleasantness of having to "herd" with
Germans, and said with bitter reproach to the fair-sized man that she
had understood Les Oliviers to be an English house; while the thin
man, who was helplessly pinned in the inmost corner by packages,
vainly tried in a gentle, ineffectual voice, totally ignored by the
stout lady, to pacify her apprehensions; and the fair-sized man
entreated Ermengarde almost with tears to "parlez Français," of which
she was just then totally incapable from sheer fatigue.
But not too tired to perceive that they were jolting along a level
road, shaded by grey and leafless planes unreal and dreamlike in the
marvellously clear sunlight, along a torrent bed, that was threaded
by a stream, in which women were washing linen, kneeling in tubs or
on the bare, shingly bed, just as she remembered them in Swiss
torrents when a girl; or to catch a glimpse on the other side of
marvellous villa gardens ablaze with scarlet salvias and giant
geraniums, and glowing with orange-trees in fruit. It was "roses,
roses all the way," while, high above in the dazzling sky, soared
bare mountain peaks, warm grey, veined with amethyst and streaked
with snow, jewel-like, wonderful. They had left the town far behind,
and seemed to have jogged an immense distance inland by the torrent
bed, before they reached a little blue house at the foot of a steep
mountain ridge, cultivated or wooded to the very top, turned in at a
gate, and stopped. Then Ermengarde's heart, lightened by the foreign
charm and beauty of the road, sank once more. Could this small and
homely cultivator's house be Les Oliviers? Not at all; the hotel was
high up out of sight, they were informed, while being gently
requested to alight.
"Mais pourquoi descendre, Messieurs et Mesdames? But quite simply,
because here the road ceases to exist. It is now necessary to
mount," was the alarming pronouncement of the driver.
To mount--and to mount a wooded precipice with an invisible summit,
after all the jolting and shaking of the long journey. Ermengarde at
once decided that the only possible course was to lie down and die
then and there. The woman of substance, on the other hand, with
sound practical common sense demanded to be told what she was to
mount, and was politely informed that she might take her choice, with
a wave of the hand towards a string of mules and donkeys amiably
blinking in the sunshine beneath a jutting rock, that was almost
hidden in hanging drapery of sarsaparilla, honeysuckle, and bramble,
and topped by pines and great bushes of white heath in flower.
"Mount _them_!" shrieked the poor lady, surveying the unconscious
animals through her lorgnette. "Merciful Heavens!"
"But, one at a time, not all at once," the driver explained with
gestures of deprecation.
"This is infamous!" thundered the fair-sized man, recovering from
partial suffocation and upon the verge of apoplexy. "My wife's
minimum weight is fourteen stone! Infamous! Besides, she can't
ride. Atrocious!"
"Unless Madame prefers to mount on foot."
"Unfortunately," the thin man meekly put in, "there is no other
alternative, the hotel being on the top of the ridge and accessible
only by a mule-path."
"What?" cried another British matron of majestic girth, who was
alighting with her daughter from a fly laden with luggage large and
small. "No road to this place? It is a positive swindle. The
people should be exposed at once. Besides, even if those wretched
donkeys manage to carry us up, how on earth are we to get down again?
And what is to be done with the luggage?"
"Mais," replied the driver, with a large circular sweep of both arms,
obviously intended as a conclusive and satisfactory settlement of all
difficulties.
"_Abscheulich!_" shrilled in Berlin accents from a plump and
comfortable Frau, who had arrived upon the scene in another fiacre,
containing a husband, a daughter, and a few other properties.
"_Undenkbar!_"
At this the owner of the dark eyes, moustache and engaging smile
looked with an expressive twinkle and shrug at Ermengarde (who was
sufficiently refreshed and gladdened by the sight of the stout lady's
difficulties to renounce her intention of lying down and dying for
the present), and came forward with the explanation that the little
climb was nothing; the animals were strong and accustomed to heavy
burdens; the luggage would be carried by pack-mules, and the heavier
passengers by the strongest of the saddle-mules; that no horsemanship
was necessary; both donkeys and mules were to be regarded simply as
ambulant easy-chairs, on which it was possible to doze and dream, to
compose poetry, and evolve philosophic systems and scientific
theories, "as Monsieur does," he added, gracefully indicating the
thin man, who was lame, and having been hoisted on to the largest and
most handsome of the engaging, soft-eyed donkeys, was reclining
wearily with one arm on the velvet back of the saddle.
"Na, Hedwig," growled the tranquil German in the fly, "disturb
thyself not! There are many hotels in Menton, _Zuruck_!
_Geschwindt!_"
And back they went straightway, impervious to the pleading of the
dark-eyed man, who too late discovered that the senior partner in
that domestic firm was not of the persuadable female sex. Then,
recognizing Mrs. Allonby to be of more ductile material than the
other two, he devoted his persuasive powers to the woman of substance
and the British matron, whose stern brows soon relaxed beneath his
sunny smile and pleading glances; the woman of substance finding
herself in a trice, she hardly knew how, accommodated with an
improvised _chaise à porteurs_, consisting of a perilously aged
basket-chair and two hoe-handles borne on the shoulders of two
handsome Italian workmen, whose teeth glistened with fun and the
prospect of five-franc pieces to come, while the fair-sized man and
the other matron were mounted each on a strong mule, and before they
could utter a syllable of remonstrance, the mystic word "jay" came
from the mule-driver, and they found themselves bumped out of sight
up the narrow path, which, consisting of steep steps made of huge
cobbles, or, rather, small crags, compelled them to devote their
whole energies to avoid being shot over the mules' tails, as the
animals reared on end with a jerk at each stony stair.
The remaining travellers, having been distributed among the other
mules and donkeys, were soon mounting, nolens-volens and with
inconvenient rapidity, the cobbled stairs, that at first threaded a
sort of chimney in the ridge, and, later, reached a narrow, winding
ledge with a perpendicular drop on one or either side, on the extreme
edges of which the animals took a fiendish pleasure in balancing
themselves, while their miserable riders shut their eyes and clung on
for dear life, vainly imploring the mule-drivers to stop them. But
the merciless drivers, deaf to entreaty, did nothing but urge the
laggard beasts on with strange sounds, in which the word "jay" alone
was intelligible (suggesting to the thoughtful mind a probable Aryan
root signifying to proceed, from which this vocable and the Hindoo
_fao_ and the British gee are alike derived). Because whenever a
driver said "jay," every donkey and mule went, and whenever any rider
said anything to the drivers (and some of them said a good deal in
different tongues), these at once cried "jay," bringing out the vowel
sound sharply and leaving off before they had quite finished it.
It was during this ascent that the fold of Ermengarde's brain in
which the French language was located suddenly became accessible, and
she implored them in choicest Parisian to stop, to take her off, to
allow her to fall in some soft place, anywhere, with the sole result
of bringing a fresh shower of twig-blows and _jays_ from these
harmless people, who only understood the Italian patois of the
district, and supposed from her agonized voice and gestures that she
was anxious to ascend more quickly, whereas her one consuming desire
was to get off her ambulant armchair at any price. It was some years
since the unfortunate Ermengarde had ridden at all, and then it had
been upon an average Christian horse, and only those who have been
borne unwillingly by a series of bone-dislocating rears and jerks up
endless staircases enclosed in rock-walls, and along knife-edged
ledges overhanging abysmal nothingness, upon animals that understand
no civilized language, and answer to no bit or bridle, and whose sole
form of obedience is to run away from whoever pronounces the word
"jay" in their rear, can imagine the complicated anguish of such
riding. Nothing but the delight inherent to fallen nature at the
spectacle of the misfortunes of others enabled Ermengarde to endure
this singular form of torture; but when she witnessed the spluttering
indignation of the British matron of majestic girth at being
constantly, either crushed between the thin man and the adjacent
rock-wall, or edged perilously over the precipice by his donkey, and
his agonized attempts to avoid this unseemly proximity, with his wild
and ineffectual endeavours to explain his own innocence and the
friendly relations existing between their respective beasts, who
could by no human means be induced to travel apart, she became
uplifted in spirit and capable of enduring anything. Especially when
the thin man weakly tried to apologize in French, of which he was
hopelessly incapable, thus exasperating the woman of majestic girth
to madness at the idea of being taken for a foreigner.
It was not until the handsome and stalwart donkey that bore the
tortured form of Ermengarde took advantage of some mischance to the
driver's apparel to dart up a side staircase, bordered by succulent
grasses, with a suddenness that extracted an involuntary shriek from
his hapless burden, that her woes came to pause, and, like Balaam's,
her donkey found the path between the vineyards barred by the sudden
apparition, not, indeed, of an angel with a sword, but of a
comfortably real figure, with a walking-stick and two laughing dark
eyes. He had dropped from heaven knew whence, and understood
Parisian French even on English lips.
"If I don't stop I shall certainly die," gasped Ermengarde, suddenly
relapsing into German, which presented no difficulty to the owner of
the laughing eyes. "Never in my life have I had to climb a broken
staircase on a wild ass before. It's like a nightmare."
"Yet Madame sits beautifully, is a good rider?"
"Oh, I can ride--horses--not nightmares, not wild donkeys up endless
chimneys."
Then it was that this man of infinite resource came to the rescue.
He took the donkey's short bridle--too short to be used by the
rider--in one hand, and passing his other arm behind the saddle
brought the lawless animal into subjection, and diverted the rider's
attention from her misadventures to the splendour of the prospect,
which was unfolding beneath them with every step they mounted, but
which she had been totally unable to see because it was all behind.
Then, after a short rest and rearrangement of the Bond Street hat,
which, besides having been slept upon, was obviously not intended to
ride donkeys up precipices in, he personally conducted donkey and
rider for the remainder of the ascent, making Ermengarde's hair stand
on end by disputing edges of precipices with the animal, and
preserving her in violent and unexpected jerks by the support of his
arm.
"But how will you ever face the miserable people you have fastened
upon wild animals against their will, when we get to the top--that
is, if there is any top, and we ever get there?" she asked.
"Ah, Madame," he replied with twinkling eyes and a small shrug, "I am
discreet. I do not face them, especially the fat lady, till they
have been fed. But--she is a _drôlesse_, that stout one. Imagine to
yourself, her porters have already dropped her twice _à force de
rire_ simply. They fall soft, those padded ones. And she is now
happily safe on high."
"But can they be expected to stay in your house after being captured
and carried up by force?"
This youth pleased Ermengarde; she told herself, while looking kindly
into his sunny, smiling eyes, that he was a dear boy. Foreign
subordinates, especially French, she had always understood, are very
different from our clumsy, self-conscious countrymen; no need to keep
them at such a distance; they can be amusing and companionable
without being impertinent or vulgar. And this one had the bearing of
a prince in disguise.
"But they are obliged to stay, Madame; for, look you, once there,
they cannot get down again. Besides, it is so charming on high that
no one ever wishes to. Moreover, it is not, as Madame supposes, my
house."
"No? You are--who are you, then--not the proprietor?"
"Heaven forbid! I am quite simply--they call me--Monsieur Isidore,
at your service."
"Son?" she pondered silently, "secretary--or _maitre-d'hotel_?"
They were now winding round a rocky steep, crowned by a plain white
building, half hidden by cypresses, the flickering, flame-like points
of which surprised her by their solemn and symbolic beauty. Making a
sudden sharp turn they found themselves in a sunny, open garden,
ablaze with flowers of summer sweetness, shaded by orange, olive, and
palm trees, planted sparsely upon a ridge summit, and commanding a
glorious, wide, and open prospect ending in the warm, deep blue of
the sea.
All round and far up behind the house towered a vast amphitheatre of
mountains clothed in every spur and gorge with wood or terraced
orchard, and crested by towered villages almost to their tossing
peaks, uplifted, bare, and beautiful, with amethyst veining and
delicate snow-streaks, into the intense velvety blue sky. Except
where the ridge ran up behind the house into a little crest topped by
dark green pines glowing vividly on the vivid sky, and then plunged
on into the mountains' heart, the garden stood isolated on the edge
of the sheer ridge that fell from the sun-facing front in steep
terraces of lemon orchard, vineyard, and garden down to the torrent
bed, crawling slowly, slowly, among houses and gardens half hidden in
trees, to the mass of clean, red-brown roofs, that lay with never a
smoke-stain among trees by the sea, like an estuary of masonry.
Thence on the East a hill-spur suddenly rose and ran back into the
mountains, hiding from view the harbour with its shipping and all the
old town, except one church-tower raised above the hill and outlined
upon the sea. And on every hill-slope and steep, terrace after
terrace of vine, and olive, and lemon with golden fruit, and mimosa
in golden bloom, or pine woods in clefts and on abrupt steeps. And
everywhere small houses, growing smaller as they rose on the heights,
with ruddy brown roofs and walls of clean pink and blue and white;
and all this bathed and flooded and steeped in such transparence and
clarity of sunlight as the Children of the Mist see never in their
own dim poetic shores.
Ermengarde was speechless, all eye and ear, breathing in the warm,
spiced, exhilarating air, that never a ruffle stirred, as if it were
life for both soul and body, and not knowing how she had parted
company with the gentle, soft-eyed creature that had borne her up
into this paradise. Something cool touched her cheek; it was a lemon
hanging from a dark-leaved branch. Her skirts swept a little forest
of scented oak-leaf geranium, so sturdy and compact of growth one
could almost stand on it; then they brushed a border thick-set with
double stocks one mass of solid bloom. Here were geraniums, trees,
not plants, with hard stems, their velvety leaves crimson, olive, and
orange; here on a wall strong almond perfume gave token of a curtain
of heliotrope in flower; and, as in the road below, "it was roses,
roses all the way," from marble-stepped terrace to terrace, on bush
and trellis and wall and balustrade.
"Will they want to assassinate me for this, Madame?" M. Isidore
asked, regarding her with amused satisfaction. "When one reaches
paradise, does one quarrel with the paths to it?"
"How can I tell; I was never there; but--I've known people capable of
it." She thought of the woman of substance and of Arthur's eldest
aunt. "Where are all the people?" she asked, becoming aware that the
paradise was tenanted solely by a Swiss porter with a bristling
moustache standing at the door of the plain, square villa. Empty
garden-seats, cane lounges, and a pile of trunks by a side door bore
witness to human occupation, though no soul stirred.
"They are happy, Madame; they breakfast. I am without fear as
without reproach."
He laid a cluster of tea-roses in her hand, and she turned with a
smile of thanks and a little sigh of content, to perceive that the
view seawards to the west was blocked by a sudden rise of the ridge,
round which they had just travelled, the villa and garden sitting
down upon the hollow back in a sort of saddle. On the crest of this
rise, as if emerging from the pine-woods clothing the steep flank,
gleamed the white walls and little bell-gable of a convent,
surrounded by cypress and eucalyptus, all in shadow and etched
sharply upon that marvellous sky, that before nightfall would be
gold, like an early Italian background, or lemon, or one chrysolite,
or rose-crimson mingled with orange and green.
This gave the last consecrating touch. Thence the Angelus would
float down over vineyard and olive-garden, at morning, noon, and
evening, and break in soft music across the ravine and over the hill
to the hidden town, all the towers of which would take it up in rich
confused melody, repeated and heard far out at sea.
"But no," she heard; "the convent is now subject to the closure. The
fraternity is dispersed. The house is private property."
The subject appeared distasteful to her guide. She turned and went
into the cool, fresh house, finding the shadow and coolness of the
broad, stencilled corridors welcome, and forgetting the ice and fog
and shivering of yesterday, and the picture of the thin, starved boy,
blue and shuddering on the bleak station, as if they had never been.
But she did not forget the roses coloured like a sunset, that this
man of resource had laid in her hand. They reposed in water, while
the weary traveller, refreshed by hot water and soap more than by
food, laid her aching limbs at last in a stationary and silent bed,
and slept with a vigour that excluded dreams and every sensation but
one of bitter hostility to the chambermaid when she came, as straitly
charged, and roused her with equal vigour in time for dinner. Then
the roses were promoted to a place of honour in the simplest of
demi-toilets, and she made her way to the dining-room, with a
strange, lost feeling at having to sit at meat with total strangers,
every one of whom had something to say to every one but herself, and
all of whom appeared to regard her with a savage animosity and
depreciation, under which she found herself quailing to such an
extent, that to assert herself she was obliged to demand salt of her
next neighbour in aggressively firm tones, and, though she was
unaware of it, in her best German.
The dining-room was not as pleasant now as when, after a slight
temporary acquaintance with soap and water, she had taken her
solitary _déjeuner_ there in the morning. It was empty then, and her
seat faced a row of windows looking across the ravine, all powdery on
the opposite side with blue bloom of pine and olive, much alike in
the strong sunlight. Through the window just opposite, the white
village of Castellare gleamed on a hill-crest, above which the bare
peaks of the Berceau glowed jewel-like in a pure, deep sky. Then the
masses of flowers, fresh from the garden, gathered, not bought, such
flowers, so full and rich and joyous of growth, and the fruit--orange
and lemon, just off the bough, with the dark leaves clinging to
them--how fragrant, poetic, and beautiful the whole had been. That
first _déjeuner_ was a poem, contrasted with the prosaic
luncheon-tables of the City of Perpetual Fog.
The fruit and flowers were still there, a great bank of spiced double
stocks totally effaced the thin man plaintively sipping his soup
opposite. People were squeezing fresh lemons into their glasses most
temptingly, but the mountains were blotted out, and the table was
ringed with human faces, alien, unfriendly, grim of glance. It was
the hapless Ermengarde's first appearance alone at a _table d'hote_
(Arthur always insisted on a private table in public); she was
unaware that a new-comer in a pension is considered as a heathen man
and a publican, an unwarrantable intruder, an encroacher upon vested
rights, a probable pickpocket, a possible escaped lunatic--especially
if a foreigner in British company--most especially if German.
Not knowing this, she drew the inference that something in her
appearance incited public hostility. The whole of her hair was grown
upon the premises; there she was founded on rock, impregnable. But,
before retiring to rest after _déjeuner_, she had availed herself of
the convenience of Hinde's curlers. Could she have left any in?
What is all the beauty of the Riviera--or of all the world--to a
woman who, through inadvertence or the malice of demons, finds
herself dining publicly in Hinde's curlers? Or had that horrible
fastened-behind blouse come undone again? Was there a smut on her
nose? Had she contracted a sudden squint from excessive fatigue?
People had been known to do so. Perhaps her features resembled those
of some notorious, and probably improper, woman. Or she had suddenly
broken out into a rash--she felt her cheeks burning--and people
thought her infectious, and that was why the woman of substance,
instead of passing the salt, only glared at her and drew her
impeccable skirts away from contact with hers.
Having reduced the waiter, who happened to be an Italian, to the
verge of imbecility by demanding salt of him in this same German
tongue, and aggravated his confusion by a further request for bread,
in reply to which he brought mustard, pepper, and lemons in
succession, she was at last rescued by the thin man, who, divining
her wants by the light of reason and supplying them, plaintively
explained the waiter's nationality and ignorance of German from
behind the stocks, which he pushed aside, suspecting that they
concealed a better view.
Amply rewarded by a smile and a "_Danke sehr_," the thin man ventured
upon a hope that the donkey-ride had turned out better than it looked.
"How it looked I don't know," she said, "but it couldn't possibly
have looked worse than it felt," and was met by the cheerful
assurance that the anguish of riding donkeys up stone stairs was
nothing to the torture of riding them down. Then, cheered by the
persuasion that the thin man could appreciate beauty, even with a
smut on its nose or curlers in its hair, she drew from him that he
had already spent a couple of weeks at Les Oliviers, and asked what
kind of weather had prevailed, and how far they were from shops, in
her native tongue, until a bowl of salad travelling in the rear of a
dish of chicken came to a dead stop near the woman of substance,
whereupon terror of the latter's disapproving eye threw her back to
the brain-fold in which her German was located, and she meekly asked
for the salad in that tongue.
"I suppose you mean salad," was the severe reply that accompanied the
plumping of the bowl on the table by her side. "You seem to speak
English fairly well. Where did you pick up that accent?"
"I--I really don't know," she faltered. "I didn't know I had an
accent. But I came quite honestly by it," she added hastily.
Just then a sound from some one dining at a little table immediately
behind her, something between a splutter, a cough, and a chuckle,
made her turn sharply, with a gasp that began by being a suppressed
cry, and look straight into the bearded, goggled face of that
miserable Anarchist, whose sinister gaze fell before the fearless
interrogation of hers. As she wrote afterwards to her husband, it
was a very damaging feature in his character that this truculent
creature could never look her straight in the face.
"Then the woman of mystery can't be far off," she reflected, after
recovering from the first shock of being pursued by this
objectionable person to her remote mountain fastness. "But I leave
the place to-morrow, if I have to ride down those rocks on a
rhinoceros. He gives me the creeps, glowering at me behind those
horrid goggles."