SOUTHWARD.
Theodore Trist had not over-estimated his powers in informing Brenda
that he had some influence with the newspapers. The story of Captain
Huston's sudden death never became public property; indeed, there was
no mention made of the inquest. The result of an accident was all
detail vouchsafed to the public. There was, by the way, some
virtuous indignation expressed in the columns of a halfpenny weekly
publication possessing a small circulation in the neighbourhood of
the West India Dock Road. This just wrath was excited by the evident
suppression of detail, and the scant courtesy with which their
representative had been received by a gentleman--himself a
journalist--who was closely connected with the disgraceful death of
this British officer. In cheap type, upon a poor quality of paper,
and in vile English, this self-constituted representative of the
thirsting British public demanded further details. He expressed
himself surprised that an enlightened nation should stand idly by
while the aristocracy of the overburthened land deliberately plotted
to screen its own debauched proceedings from public censure. The
enlightened nation either failed to spend a halfpenny foolishly (thus
neglecting its own interests), or it preferred to continue standing
by. Moreover, the debauched aristocracy showed no signs of quailing
beneath the lash of a relentless press. It is just possible,
however, that they had neither seen the newspaper in question nor
heard of its existence.
The demand for further details must have failed to reach the
delinquents concerned. At all events, there was no reply, the error
was never repaired, and the _Times_ failed to take up the cudgels and
fight for their common rights side by side with its powerful
contemporary.
So Alfred Woodruff Charles Huston was laid, not with his own, but
with the forefathers of someone else in Willesden Cemetery. Poor
fellow! he came from a military stock, brave men and true, who had
fought and drunk and finally deposited their bones in many parts of
the globe. I am not by habit a sentimental person--moonlight over
water, for instance, or the whisper of the pine-trees, has a certain
quieting effect upon me, though it does not make me drivel; but I see
the great silent pathos of our huge graveyards. If I never pitied
Alfred Huston when he was alive, I pity him now in his narrow
bed--one of many--an insignificant volume in God's book-shelf. Thus
the Almighty is pleased to shelve us in rows. Sometimes He
classifies us, and we are labelled with a title somewhat similar to
that on the stones near at hand; but nowadays we stray away from the
original corner of the library, and when the end comes we find
ourselves among strangers. In some country churchyard it is sad
enough to see a cluster of mouldering stones all bearing the same
name, but infinitely more pathetic is it to wander through the
serried ranks of the dead at Brookwood, Willesden, or Brompton. It
is like a 'sundry' shelf, where all odd volumes are hastily thrust
and soon forgotten; for poetry is side by side with commerce, fame
elbows obscurity, youth lies by age. We scan the names, and find no
connection. Truly these are among strangers--they sleep not with
their fathers. And the shelves fill up, showing nought but titles.
The books are closed, the tale is told, and so it moulders until the
leaves shall flutter again beneath the searching finger of the
Almighty. Sooner be buried in the common ditch beneath a weight of
red-coated humanity than amidst these unknown thousands--sooner, a
thousand times sooner, lie in patient solitude on untrodden rocks
beneath the wave!
Alfred Huston's name is doubtless to be found in Willesden Cemetery
to-day, though I do not know of anyone who will care to seek it. His
wife caused it to be recorded in imperishable letters of lead, as if,
_mes frères_, it had not as well been writ in water. It stands,
moreover, in the State archives amidst a long record of heroes who
drew their pay with remarkable regularity, and did little else. It
was very good of her to go to the expense of those leaden letters,
considering what an enormous number of mourning garments she was
absolutely compelled to buy. The thought even is worthy of praise,
because her mind was fully occupied with questions of crape and caps.
Let us, therefore, give full credit to this widow who, in order to do
more honour to her husband's memory, sent some of her dresses back
four times to the milliners because the bodice would not fit.
One December morning three ladies dressed in black (two, indeed, wore
widows' weeds) left Charing Cross Station for Paris. Mrs. Wylie, in
her wisdom, had decreed a short banishment.
'Let us,' she said cheerily, the day after Captain Huston's
semi-surreptitious funeral--'let us get away from all this fog and
cold and misery. I want sunshine. Let us go south--Nice, Biarritz,
Arcachon! Which shall it be?'
'We might,' suggested Alice Huston, 'stay a few days in Paris on the
way.'
Brenda was reading, and before taking note of these remarks she
finished a page, which she turned slowly, as one turns the page of a
thoughtful book requiring slow perusal. She looked up at the clock
upon the mantelpiece, and then her pensive gaze wandered towards Mrs.
Wylie's face.
'Not the Riviera,' she said persuasively. 'It is like beef-tea when
one is in rude health.'
'I must say,' observed Mrs. Wylie, after a pause, 'that I prefer the
Atlantic to the Mediterranean.'
'Let us stay a little time in Paris first,' said Alice eagerly, 'and
go on to Arcachon, or somewhere for Christmas. We might hear in
Paris of nice people going South.'
The expression of the elder widow's face was not quite so sympathetic
as might have been expected upon sentimental grounds.
'Why,' she inquired, with dangerous suavity, 'why are you so anxious
to stay in Paris? It is no better than London in winter.'
Mrs. Huston shrugged her shoulders with childlike inconsequence. It
was rather hard to expect her to have definite reasons ready for
production.
'Oh, I don't know,' she answered. 'It would be a nice change. I
think we would all find a place like Biarritz or Arcachon intolerably
slow. We want taking out of ourselves.'
Mrs. Wylie nodded in a moderately sympathetic way. The three ladies
knew that Theodore Trist was in Paris, and Mrs. Wylie, without
looking in Brenda's direction, had seen a change come over the girl's
face at the mention of the word. A singular change it was for so
young a face--rather unpleasant, too, in its effect. For a moment
her features appeared to contract, and a gray set look came into her
eyes. This singular effect was slowly fading when Alice again
mentioned Paris, and instantaneously the apathetic chill seemed to
spread over Brenda's being again.
'I hate Paris in winter!' said Mrs. Wylie decisively. 'The wind is
cutting, the streets are crowded with excited women carrying larger
parcels, and more of them, than their limbs were intended to carry,
and altogether it is horrible. We will stay one night if you like,
but not more. In coming back we can stop perhaps. Besides ...
Alice, I do not think it would do for you to be seen in Paris just
now.'
Alice did not meet her friend's gaze. There was an unpleasant
silence of some moments' duration, and then she murmured in a
prettily petulant way:
'It is rather hard that I should be expected to bury myself alive.'
In this wise it was settled, and the three ladies passed through
Paris without seeing aught of the cosmopolitan journalist, whose
presence in the French capital was a matter of public discussion.
Some papers even went so far as to refer to it as the immediate
precursor of an outbreak of hostilities between France and Germany,
and took the opportunity of reminding the citizens that every
Frenchman thirsted for the gory cup of vengeance.
Mrs. Wylie was fully aware of the fact that had Theodore Trist so
desired, he would have managed to see them somehow in passing; but
she opined that he would not do so, and in this she was right. He
actually knew that they were in Paris, but avoided them with an ease
which showed his intimate acquaintance with the ways of the French
capital.
Alice Huston made no attempt to disguise her contempt for Bordeaux,
where a halt of one night was necessary, and arrived at mid-day at
Arcachon with the full intention of disliking the place heartily.
Personally, I have no interest in the town, not holding any shares in
the Casino, nor claiming relationship with persons keeping hotels
there; but it shall always be my honest endeavour to treat people and
places alike with justice. There is no denying the fact that certain
parts of the little French watering-place, more especially towards La
Teste, are not savoury of odour; but Alice was hardly justified in
the use of the word 'disgusting' in this respect. It happened to be
blowing steadily from the westward, and, in consequence, the air was
heavy with the distant continuous roar of Atlantic breakers surging
on to the deserted shore across the Bassin.
'I know what that is,' said Alice impatiently on hearing it, which
they did not fail to do as soon as they were out of the train; 'that
is surf. It is the same as at Madras. Horrid! I never slept a
wink.'
It was only to be heard during certain winds--a very rare direction
of the wind, explained the hotel porter, who understood enough
English to catch what was being said. He had explained only that
morning to a sentimental English lady of uncertain age, who loved the
sad song of the waves with all the gushing ardour of her poetic soul,
that the said song was always there, floating in the air above the
pines. Besides, knowing the times of the trains and the price of
hired carriages, this man was by no means ignorant in the ways of
sweet deception. He was a good hotel-porter, and could lie with
conviction when he tried.
Imagine a fishing village shaken up in a huge box with a fashionable
watering-place, and set down pell-mell at the edge of a large inlet
of the sea, and you have Arcachon. Amidst the pines, on the slopes
behind the town, are villas, where hypochondriacs live and imbibe the
wondrous breath of the maritime pine. Oysters are cheap, and the air
is invigorating. From the westward the wind blows directly across
the broad Atlantic; from the east it sighs through trackless forests.
Beyond that there is little to recommend this southern town, though
some of us may think highly of such important adjuncts to human
happiness as oysters and atmosphere.
A certain spasmodic sociability flickers through the small English
colony, consisting, as most of our Continental colonies do, of
military men and retired civil servants suffering either from slender
purses or unsatisfactory lungs. Among these the advent of the three
ladies caused a distinct flutter, and I have reason to believe that
several dresses, and not a few bonnets, were subsequently rebuilt
upon new and approved lines.
The flutter was scarcely reciprocal. Brenda was not at this period
inclined to indiscriminate sociability. She was in a critical frame
of mind, and the intellectual standard of the average Briton residing
abroad will not bear criticism. Alice found the retired civil
servants intolerably trivial and dull. The old soldiers were men of
a bygone day when the army had not gone to the dogs, which departure
seemed to date from the time of their several resignations.
Mrs. Wylie noted these things, and took them with her usual placid
cheerfulness. She had not expected much, and was in nowise
disappointed--the blessed privilege of pessimists. She looked upon
the three weeks spent at Arcachon as an unpleasant interlude,
necessary and unavoidable, and while there made herself as
comfortable as circumstances allowed, according to her wont.
Thus Christmas with its forced festivity was tided over. I sometimes
wonder why that happy season in each recurring year stands out upon
the road of life like public-houses on the roads we tread here below.
Wise men direct Jehu by the Spotted Dog or the Marquis of Granby, and
I think most of us divide our journey into stages (some consciously,
others without realizing it), marked and defined by the Christmas Day
at the end of each. It is the 25th of December that stands clearly
marked in my memory as having been passed in some outlying corner of
the world in each successive year. There is no record of the 24th or
the 26th. Having devoted some thought to this matter, I have
concluded that the memory is closely connected with the appetite.
There are certain dishes set apart for consumption on Christmas Day,
and the absence or presence in perfection of these remains indelibly
engraved on the mind.
It must be confessed that the Christmas spent at Arcachon by the
three ladies was not of a very festive character; but it should be
remembered that two of them were widows, and the third a thoughtful
young person of by no means a gay and lightsome heart.
Early in January they turned their faces homeward, and by mutual
tacit consent parted company in Paris. It happened that Alice Huston
met some friends there, who pressed her to stay on with them,
pleading to Mrs. Wylie that a change would be beneficial to the
spirits of the young widow. Brenda returned to Suffolk Mansions with
the Admiral's widow.