The Carnival
That Dorris Boundrish was an exceedingly pretty girl her severest
critics could not deny, nor could her greatest admirers refrain from
a suspicion that she was scarcely as irresistible or as brilliant as
she imagined. Her mouth was like pink coral, small and sweet, but
with hints of peevishness and discontent in the corners; her face had
wild-rose tints; her eyes were clear, speedwell blue, but a little
hard at times; something on her velvety forehead said, "Not much in
here." Of that deficiency poor Miss Dorris was wholly unaware; on
the contrary, she supposed the premises to be unusually spacious and
well-stocked, and in this persuasion was benignantly given to impart
her superfluous knowledge to an ungrateful world to an extent that
sometimes made people thankful to be spared such information as that
sea-water is too strong of salt to make a pleasant drink, or that two
and two amount together to the round number of four.
All evils have their compensations; and this amiable weakness of Miss
Dorris sometimes became a source of joy to the community of Les
Oliviers, when properly manipulated by M. Isidore, for example. For
it was the especial delight of this fair young creature to impart
recently acquired knowledge to her neighbours, and recently acquired
knowledge being undigested, and in many cases hastily and
inaccurately received, sometimes emerges from its temporary lodging
in the brain in a changed, even unrecognizable, form. Moreover, M.
Isidore, having an imagination of unusual fertility and an impish
delight in mischief, was tempted to confide myths having only a
poetic and ideal foundation in fact, to the ear of Dorris, in the
sure anticipation of hearing them issue in some novel form from the
pink coral lips at _table d'hôte_; always providing he listened, as
he frequently did, unseen behind an open door, to the general buzz of
table talk, above which Miss Boundrish's arrogant treble shrilled
high and incessant. When the intelligence conveyed by the pink coral
lips was very wildly improbable, that every conscript, for example,
during his first month of service, was dieted entirely on frogs to
inspire him with martial courage, the thin man, usually silent,
would, very gently expressing astonishment, venture to ask the source
of Miss Boundrish's information.
"Oh, it's perfectly true, Mr. Welbourne," the overbearing treble
would scream down the table, "I had it from a man who had been in the
French army himself. The frogs are those little green things in the
tanks, that are beginning to make such a croaking every night. Of
course, you know that Mont Agel is _terrain militaire_, where nobody
is allowed to go for fear of disturbing these frogs, which are kept
in tanks on purpose. The diet is so stimulating, you know, it makes
the soldiers long to fight."
"Really?" the thin man would murmur pensively. "How very
interesting! What a remarkably ingenious people the French are!
Would such an idea ever occur to the dull British brain, do you
suppose?"
Then a smile would go round the table, and coughs and suppressed
chokings would be heard, and M. Isidore would dance with rapture in
the corridor outside, and, on being severely interrogated by
Ermengarde and the thin man afterwards, would truthfully say that he
only asked Mademoiselle if she had heard of this curious custom of
dieting on frogs for courage, and with regard to Mont Agel had
chanced to mention that the public were excluded from that, as from
all terrain militaire, and that many tanks containing frogs were
there, as everywhere in the hills.
"The imagination of Mademoiselle," he would observe innocently,
"invests things with a magic of its own. In short, she is a poet."
Then he would laugh gently, and Ermengarde would shudder for his
future, though she was not above suggesting to him themes similar to
the results of a frog diet for Miss Boundrish's imagination to
develop. So that _table d'hôte_ was sometimes the scene of some
remarkable additions to human knowledge.
To account for her various and invincible charms, speculation as to
where Miss Boundrish had been dragged up was frequent and diverse.
Yet her parents were there in attendance upon her, harmless, worthy
people of the comfortable, Philistine, mid-middle class, the father
rather deaf--he had registered her with two r's, because her mother
insisted on the short o in Doris, and the man was too logical to
leave his child with insufficient letters--the mother placidly
content with the wildest utterances of her only child, and both well
trained in the ways in which modern parents are expected to go. That
no subject was too abstruse for Dorris's discussion, and that nothing
could be spoken of upon which she was not quite as well informed as
anyone present, or better, caused them no apparent surprise. But
Miss Boundrish's father was a little deaf, and Miss Boundrish's
mother once confided to the thin man that it was a little tiring to
be the mother of an exceptionally gifted and accomplished child, and
that a few days' visit to Nice, contemplated by Dorris, would afford
her a welcome opportunity of taking a "much-needed" rest. "I should
like," she sighed, "to have two solid days to do nothing in and to
think nothing in--and," she added, after a pause, "to _fear_ nothing
in."
"So that one hopes the fair Dorris doesn't beat her," the thin man
commented to Ermengarde, who thought her quite capable of it. But
Agatha suggested that even Miss Boundrish's mother might not be quite
insensible to the fury some of her little ways evoked from the
community; that pretty little way of drawing up a chair or of walking
up and stopping dead for the express purpose of breaking into
intimate or interesting dialogue, that even prettier way of pursuing
people bent on solitude, dual or otherwise, to pleasant points of
view, and pouring out entirely familiar, guide-book information.
As, for instance, when the setting sun brought the craggy peaks that
wall the high hill-village of St. Agnes into unusual beauty, and a
party coming home from an excursion and another drawn out to the
mountain from the hotel, stood silently enjoying it, and Dorris's
high voice suddenly rang over the gorge with the history of the
walled hill-villages, of the abduction of the innocent young Agnes by
Saracens in one of their raids, and of the miracle wrought by her
faith, which resulted in the conversion of many, the restoration of
St. Agnes to her home among the crags, and a yearly commemoration of
the event to this day by a procession of villagers.
"Why," murmured the thin man on that occasion, "why are there no
Saracens to-day?"
"There are plenty, Mr. Welbourne," cried the shrill voice
unexpectedly. "I saw some Moors in the town yesterday. They're all
the same, you know."
"But they don't----" the thin man paused, allowing a daring word to
die on his lips. "That is--the great days of old--the days of daring
and romance--are over. We live in a degenerate age."
He spoke so mournfully that Miss Boundrish was much moved, and joined
him in lamentation over the past, while every heart present echoed
his unspoken thought, that a Saracen raid upon the Riviera might
involve the abduction of Miss Boundrish, the mere idea of which
filled them with joy. They were sure that she would have pleased the
Saracenic taste, and doubted if her prayers would work a miracle.
"Where on earth did you pick up that Somers girl, Mrs. Allonby?" the
sweet girl asked one day with pleasing directness and candour. It
was during a descent upon the town to see the Carnival, arranged
between the thin man, Ermengarde, and Agatha. Miss Boundrish,
overhearing this arrangement the night before--she always overheard
everything--had offered to make a fourth in the party, so suddenly,
so loudly, and with such a certainty of conferring a favour, and also
so immediately in the hearing of her mother, that neither of the
three was ready with a civil excuse for declining the honour, though
each said sadly to the others afterwards, "Why are there no Saracens
now?"
"That Somers girl," Ermengarde repeated slowly and thoughtfully, as
if wondering to whom she referred.
"_I_ don't think much of her," continued Dorris. "You know you can't
be too particular who you get to know in places like this. Very
queer people in these cheap Continental pensions."
"How true!" Ermengarde murmured thoughtfully. "I've never seen a
Carnival, have you?"
"You ought to see the Nice Carnival; this is a very one-horse thing.
Did you know Miss Somers in England?"
"Did you?"
"Not exactly, but I knew of her. That is, I knew the man she was
supposed to be engaged to. I--I knew him rather well, in fact."
Miss Boundrish's smile suggested worlds.
"Were you engaged to him, as well?"
"Well--not exactly engaged. Poor Ivor!" with the usual gurgle.
"Such an escape for him."--So Ermengarde thought.--"They say his
people knew nothing about it. So you picked her up abroad?"
"She--if you mean Miss Somers--picked me up once, on the floor of a
corridor carriage. Not pleasant to tumble down in a faint on the
floor of a train. One is thankful to be picked up and taken care
of----"
"By anybody, of course," with the gurgle so familiar at Les Oliviers.
"Well, you'd better be on your guard, that's all. Did you lose any
money, anything of value on the way?"
"Miss Boundrish, what are you talking about?" was the sharp rejoinder.
"Only that, going about in the world, I get to know a lot of things.
There are so many sharpers about on the Continent--gangs of them in
league together. They follow people to Nice and Monte Carlo, and all
these places, and rook them in all sorts of ways. They are regular
birds of prey, living by their wits. Some think the police are in
their pay. Robbery after robbery takes place in trains and
custom-houses; at least, jewels, money, and letters of credit
disappear from locked and registered luggage, and the thieves are
scarcely ever found out. I say, where do you think she spent the
afternoon of the day she came to Les Oliviers?--Ah! here they are,"
as Miss Somers and the thin man came in sight of the waiting-place in
the Jardins Publics. "Poor Mr. Welbourne, he's quite gone on her
already. She can't leave him alone a minute."
"Four seats on the stand, but not together," said the thin man,
unconscious of personal comment. "How shall we divide?"
Although Ermengarde had by this time made some progress in the art of
sticking on to a perpendicular donkey acting as an intermittent
see-saw, somebody having given her some lessons on the most
gentle-paced beast to be found, she was not enamoured of that form of
gymnastic, and of two evils had thought a descent by a shorter path
through gardens and woods on foot with Miss Boundrish, the less,
leaving Miss Somers to ride down the longer mule-path with the thin
man, whose slight lameness made him a poor pedestrian. But her
feeling of relief when the other two came up brought her to the
conclusion that even donkeys were preferable to Dorris. Yet the
hints from the pink coral lips were not without effect upon her,
chiming as they did with her own inferences, and she was dying to
know where Agatha had spent the afternoon of that first day, which
Dorris had also passed away from the hotel.
The party being now complete, they left the gardens and wound through
the holiday streets in the sunshine, now jostled by a cheerful and
apologizing devil, black from head to heel, with bat-wings of black
crape stretched on cane; now mixed up in a flock of geese with human
legs and monstrous cackling beaks; now avoiding the attentions of
dominos flinging paper serpents and trying to draw them into
impromptu dances whenever a band was heard along the street.
How gay and odd and foolish and delightful it was to unsophisticated
Ermengarde! The narrow, foreign streets, palms closing their vistas,
great hotels, in gardens glowing with gorgeous exotics and flowers,
breaking their lines here and there; the warm deep purple of the sea
barring every side street on one hand; the picturesque old Italian
town climbing the wooded hill-spur and cresting it with its tower on
the other; and the great mountain amphitheatre stretching far up
beyond that, with bare peaks, violet-veined, crystalline, drawn clear
and sharp on the deep, clear, velvety sky; the motley crowd of mad
masks and dominos, cheaply gaudy, childishly absurd, helplessly gay;
the rippling laughter and confused babble of local dialect and
foreign tongues on the liquid air; the droll family parties,
transparently disguised, even the babies, in coloured calico; the
trim little mountain soldiers, bright-eyed and smiling, keeping the
streets; the hawkers of toys, sacks of confetti, and endless paper
coils; the vendors of strange local pastry and sweets on little
standings; the look of expectant enjoyment on every face, especially
the broad and business-like bourgeois countenance; the atmosphere of
spontaneous gaiety, sunshine, and enjoyment, all went to English
Ermengarde's head. Old life-long artificial restraints gave way; the
joy of life sprang up; she could almost have taken hands and danced
with the maskers dancing along the street. The eternal child,
dormant in us all, was awake and happy in her.
It was not the show, that was poor and disappointing, all its cheap
and tawdry vanities blotting the pure beauty of atmosphere and
setting, that gave this new vivid sense of unconstrained gladness.
Perhaps she had never seen people madly, spontaneously, and yet
decorously gay before. The Carnival folk were all, young and old,
rich and poor, merry and not wise and bent upon being merry and not
wise, and yet they were not in the least ashamed or conscious of any
cause for shame. Even some Americans, a people never young but aged
and biases from their cradles, snatched a brief hour of long-deferred
childhood, and a few self-conscious Britons, their gloomy national
pride concealed in dominos, condescended to diversions that in their
own personality they scorned as only fit for foreigners and fools.
No wonder that the sparkling sunny sea-air and atmosphere of
infectious enjoyment dissipated light-hearted Ermengarde's insular
self-consciousness, and she suddenly discovered that there is more
enjoyment in life than is commonly supposed.
What was the mad tune band after band kept playing as the huge cars,
grotesquely laden, filed slowly past; it was jingly and poor, but so
crazily full of headlong mirth--La Mattschiche? Long afterwards it
gave her a pleasant thrill to hear it shouted by street boys, thumped
on pianos and street organs, and blared on brass bands. It was "full
of the warm South" for her.
Mr. Welbourne, an artist and no Philistine, though a true-born
Englishman, public-school-milled, politely and unobtrusively bored,
was agreeably surprised by his countrywoman's interest in the show;
it was like taking a child--a real old-fashioned child--to a
pantomime. Even Agatha observed her with grave but pleased surprise.
Dorris, when not explaining things in a loud voice, expressed
unmitigated contempt for everything; yet Ermengarde, though she
longed for Saracenic invasions when the gurgle was too persistent,
scarcely knew that Miss Boundrish was sitting beside her on the stand
erected in front of the Mairie, the thin man and Agatha being in the
row behind them. Mr. Welbourne, though simple and honest in his
ways, had sufficient guile to contrive that.
The stout elderly _bourgeoise_ with a bad cold and strong scent of
garlic, sitting next Ermengarde, had come, she told her, from Monte
Carlo, under sad anxiety lest the bad cold should keep her at home,
and never stopped showering confetti on everybody that passed, always
missing them, yet wrought to ecstasy when confetti were thrown to
her, and pleased as a child when her paper serpents caught in the
snapping jaws of the crocodile on a car full of these creatures of
all sizes.
Another very dowdy old dame in front was quite as active; she was as
thickly snowed over with confetti and wound about with paper serpents
as Lot's wife in her salt.
"I say, Mrs. Allonby," Dorris suddenly hissed in her ear, "look
behind, quick!" And Ermengarde, obeying at once, saw nothing but the
woman of mystery, unwinding a paper serpent coiled round her neck by
a man with a huge false nose in a smart carriage full of silk dominos.
"The sting is in the tail," murmured Dorris, and Ermengarde became
aware of a small packet at the end of the coil, that Agatha hastily
glanced at and slid into her hand-bag, her cheek flushing when she
looked up and caught eyes upon her.
Ermengarde sighed madly for Saracens. "How could you?" she
reproached Dorris, who became mysterious and full of dark hints.
Then a serpent was coiled round Mrs. Allonby's neck, and looking up
at the thrower, she recognized a Spanish cavalier on a mule, who had
already thrown her confetti and bouquets several times in passing the
Mairie. She had scattered most of the flowers on the crowd, but kept
some especially sweet tea-roses, also a bunch of Parma violets,
thrown from the car that carried a few family parties of crocodiles,
opening and shutting their long jaws, to the great delight of the
populace.
There was something in the Spaniard, a flash of the eyes under the
broad sombrero, that made her heart beat. Where and when could she
have seen that whiskered face? He threw both serpents and confetti
freely as he passed, but no flowers, except to her. Very few flowers
were thrown by anyone.
When the serpent was unwound, there was a little weight at the end of
the coil. A letter? A bomb? Perhaps only chocolate. This was
thrilling and mysterious, but entirely delightful--a thing that could
not possibly happen at home--at least, not with propriety. The
weight turned out to be a morocco box wrapped in tissue paper. The
man had evidently taken her for somebody else--a respectable somebody
else, it was to be hoped; she had dropped into the middle of some
romantic entanglement, or some dreadful Anarchist or Nihilist plot.
Heavens! it might have been meant for her mysterious
fellow-traveller, and contain a signal for the instant assassination
of some distinguished statesman or royal person recognized through
his disguise, or for the blowing up of the whole place. The spring
tentatively and gingerly touched, the lid flew up, but--though she
shut her eyes for quite two seconds--nothing whatever happened,
nothing went off, nobody was killed; there was neither explosive nor
written instruction inside--nothing but a thin gold chain, its
delicate links separated at every inch by pearls or diamonds,
daintily coiled on the violet velvet lining. Could it be poisoned,
or charged with accumulated electricity to a deadly extent? A dainty
toy it looked; she had seen and longed for one just like it at
Spink's, not long ago. "Well, when the money-ship comes home,"
Arthur had growled; and that, of course, meant never.
"Just look," she cried, holding it up in the sunshine. "I had no
idea people threw things like this to strangers."
"They don't," Dorris said grimly. "It was carefully aimed."
"Then it can't be for me," she mused, and turned back to Agatha, who
was reading the folded paper flung in the end of her coil, her hand
shielding her face from the sun, which struck full upon her. Just
then such volleys of confetti came broadside from a high car
representing a ship that nothing but defence could be thought of, and
the chain was slipped into a purse and forgotten. And when
Ermengarde turned again to Agatha, she saw her, to her unspeakable
amazement, bending over the side of the stand, speaking to the
Spaniard--now dismounted and stopping on his way through a lane at
the corner of the stand.
This incident had not escaped Miss Boundrish, who smiled acidly at
Ermengarde's look of surprise. "Now we can guess the true
destination of the chain," she whispered.
But the sudden spectacle of the thin man across the road biding the
pelting of a pitiless storm of confetti from three several silken
dominos at once, with bent head and a face of resigned anguish, was
so joyous that Ermengarde forgot her momentary desire to murder
Dorris; and when Mr. Welbourne had taken refuge in such flight in an
opposite direction as his infirmity permitted, the temporary blinding
and partial choking of Miss Boundrish, who had received a dexterous
handful while enjoying a hearty, but unconcealed, yawn, further
blunted the edge of her murderous desires, and made her offer Eau de
Cologne instead of poison, with whole-hearted enjoyment of the
damsel's spluttering indignation and vehement assertions that she was
poisoned.
"In that case," it was suggested, "best take an emetic at once," a
proposition received with scorn and fury, and further declarations
that she was blinded for life, and wondered why there were no gens
d'armes, and considered that the least Mrs. Allonby could have done
was to give the beast into custody, and she wished she had brought
her father.
"But you can't give a large green frog on the top of a mountain on
wheels into custody, dear Miss Boundrish--Oh! pff!"
It was now Ermengarde's turn to be pelted by a Cyrano de Bergerac,
whose enormous nose was in striking contrast to his slender, elastic
figure. The Cyrano, who had been one of the party in the carriage
whence the serpent with the letter in its tail was thrown to Agatha,
soon tired of raining paper on to a steadily held sunshade, and went
away, finding better sport in a silken domino, one of a group walking
in the road, who showed fight gallantly, revealing a pair of dark
eyes flashing with spirit and challenge. After a sharp engagement,
the domino's ammunition having run out, she turned and ran, pursued
and stopped by the Cyrano, who pelted her unmercifully in the face,
even holding a fold of the domino and spirting the confetti under it
to make her uncover, till at last he brought her to bay just under
the side of the stand, off the street.
"Beast!" muttered Ermengarde, her indignation intensified by the
English accent of the unchivalrous Cyrano. She would actually have
rushed to the assistance of the wronged lady, but that help came from
another quarter in the shape of a crocodile, which suddenly descended
in a series of astonishingly agile leaps from the very top of the
great, shell-shaped car of crocodiles, that was lumbering by, and,
seizing the Cyrano de Bergerac by the scruff of his neck, shook him
like a rat till he was forced to let go the lady, just as she slipped
the domino back, discovering the indignant, tearful face and blazing
eyes of Mlle. Bontemps. This revelation was evidently more
discomfiting to the Cyrano than the furious assault of the crocodile,
from the slit-open throat of which glared the face of M. Isidore,
white with fury.
"Why, it's the very crocodile who threw you the violets," shouted
Dorris. "I thought I recognized him, and that plain and frumpish
Bontemps girl!"
If only the Boundrish had been effectually choked! Why had a weak
and culpable sympathy comforted her with Eau de Cologne?
The Cyrano was not to be shaken to death like a rat without showing
fight; in the tussle that ensued his rich costume suffered
considerably before the crocodile let him go; and what the one said
and the other gasped and growled in reply, though not intelligible
through the din of bands and crowds, was presumably of an
uncomplimentary character.
Finally, flinging the long-nosed masquer from him, M. Isidore, his
crocodile head thrown back like a hood and helplessly wobbling behind
him, drew the insulted domino's hand through his arm with an air of
possession and protection, the rescued damsel clinging to him with
evident confidence and gratitude, and the two men, unconscious in
their passion of their absurd appearance, the crocodile pale and
calm, the long-nose red with confusion and fury and haughtily
apologetic, stood glaring fiercely at each other with question,
accusation, and explanation.
Presently the long-nose, as if at the crocodile's request, produced a
small white square from the recesses of his sumptuous dress; the
crocodile handed him a similar square in return; they bowed and
separated. M. Isidore led Mlle. Bontemps away on his arm towards a
blue glimpse of sea at the end of a side-street, and the Cyrano,
removing his plumed cap, and with it his great nose, that had become
very shaky in the course of the fray, disclosed to Ermengarde's
astonished gaze the features of the young Englishman of Monte Carlo.
It was but a moment before the nose was hastily replaced, and its
owner turned back into the main street, where he stood talking to a
Pierrot, immediately in front of the stand, behind a soldier keeping
the road.
"Thought you'd have known better than that," the Pierrot grumbled.
"It wasn't playing the game."
"I could have sworn it was the Countess," the Cyrano was heard to say
dejectedly. "And after yesterday--well, I didn't feel bound to play
the game with her. Besides, _she_ wouldn't have cared."
"Let us go," said Ermengarde, suddenly sick of the fooling, and
worried by the band's mad tune repeated over and over again; but,
looking round for Agatha, she found her place empty, and Mr.
Welbourne, who had returned to his seat, unable to give any account
of her.
Many thoughts were in Ermengarde's heart, while in response to the
thin man's timely suggestion of tea at Rumpelmayer's, they slipped
out of the press to the comparative quiet of the promenade by the
sea, that glowed like a peacock's velvety throat on the horizon, with
the near shallows of turquoise, and broke with a deep soft boom in
snowy surf on the rocks.
She was glad of the fresh sea-breath and the beauty of the bay's
broad sweep between the purple headland of Bordighera and the craggy
bluffs above Monte Carlo. And when they turned into the Gardens
under the tall eucalyptus, the appearance of the woman of mystery
coming down an avenue of palms was a great relief. But a flush on
Agatha's cheek and a vision of the Spaniard rapidly disappearing
under palms in the opposite direction, filled her with misgiving
again. What could all this atmosphere of intrigue and mystification
portend? Certainly nothing praiseworthy.
"It was so hot and dusty on the stand," Agatha said, to explain her
sudden disappearance, upon which Dorris alone had commented.
That evening, when they had gone to their rooms for the night,
Ermengarde knocked at Agatha's door and handed her the little box
containing the chain. "I think this must be yours, Miss Somers," she
said. "_Your friend the Spaniard_ threw it, and it caught round my
neck by mistake."
"My friend?" she asked, confused. "Oh, you mean the Spaniard who
stopped by the stand to ask the way to the sea?"
"Yes, the Spaniard, not the Cyrano de Bergerac."
The flush died from the woman of mystery's cheek, and the stone mask
settled upon it. She returned the chain, saying coldly it could not
be intended for her, and that she knew nothing about it.
"The Cyrano," Ermengarde observed casually, as she turned from the
door, "turned out to be the young Englishman of Monte Carlo, the same
who was overheard offering money to the foreign Countess."
"Did he?" she replied, without interest. "Good night, dear Mrs.
Allonby. You look tired."