When the train crept out of Euston into the wet night the Marchesa
Soderrelli sat for a considerable time quite motionless in the corner
of her compartment. The lights, straggling northward out of London,
presently vanished. The hum and banging of passing engines ceased. The
darkness, attended by a rain, descended.
Beside the Marchesa, on the compartment seat, as the one piece of
visible luggage, except the two rugs about her feet, was a square green
leather bag, with a flat top, on which were three gold letters under a
coronet. It was perhaps an hour before the Marchesa Soderrelli moved.
Then it was to open this bag, get out a cigarette case, select
a cigarette, light it, and resume her place in the corner of the
compartment. She was evidently engaged with some matter to be deeply
considered; her eyes widened and narrowed, and the muscles of her
forehead gathered and relaxed.
The woman was somewhere in that indefinite age past forty. Her figure,
straight and supple, was beginning at certain points to take on that
premonitory plumpness, realized usually in middle life; her hair, thick
and heavy, was her one unchanged heritage of youth; her complexion, once
tender and delicate, was depending now somewhat on the arts. The woman
was coming lingeringly to autumn. Her face, in repose, showed the
freshness of youth gone out; the mouth, straightened and somewhat
hardened; the chin firmer; there was a vague irregular line, common
to persons of determination, running from the inner angle of the eye
downward and outward to the corner of the mouth; the eyes were drawn
slightly at the outer corners, making there a drooping angle.
Her dress was evidently continental, a coat and skirt of gray cloth; a
hat of gray straw, from which fell a long gray veil; a string of pearls
around her neck, and drop pearl earrings.
As she smoked, the Marchesa continued with the matter that perplexed
her. For a time she carried the cigarette mechanically to her lips, then
the hand holding it dropped on the arm of the compartment seat beside
her. There the cigarette burned, sending up a thin wisp of smoke.
The train raced north, gliding in and out of wet blinking towns, where
one caught for a moment a dimly flashing picture of a wet platform a few
trucks, a smoldering lamp or two a weary cab horse plodding slowly up
a phantom street, a wooden guard, motionless as though posed before
a background of painted card board, or a little party of travelers,
grouped wretchedly together at a corner of the train shed, like poor
actors playing at conspirators in some first rehearsal.
Finally the fire of the cigarette touched her fingers. She ground the
end of it against the compartment window, sat up, took off her hat
and placed it in the rack above her head; then she lifted up the arm
dividing her side of the compartment into two seats, rolled one of her
rugs into a pillow, lay down, and covering herself closely with the
remaining rug, was almost immediately asleep.
The train arrived at Stirling about 7:30 the following morning. The
Marchesa Soderrelli got out there, walked across the dirty wooden
platform--preempted almost exclusively by a flaming book stall, where
the best English author finds-himself in the same sixpenny shirt
with the worst--out a narrow way by the booking office, and up a long
cobble-paved street to an inn that was doubtless sitting, as it now
sits, in the day of the Pretender.
A maid who emerged from some hidden quarter of this place at the
Marchesa's knocking on the window of the office led the way to a
little room in the second story of the inn, set the traveler's bag on
a convenient chair, and, as if her duties were then ended, inquired if
Madam wished any further attendance. The Marchesa Soderrelli wished
a much further attendance, in fact, a continual attendance, until her
breakfast should be served at nine o'clock. The tin bath tub, round like
a flat-bottomed porringer, was taken from its decorative place against
the wall and set on a blanket mat. The pots over the iron crane in
the kitchen of the inn were emptied of hot water. The maid was set to
brushing the traveler's wrinkled gown. The stable boy was sent to the
chemist to fetch spirits of wine for Madam's toilet lamp. The very
proprietor sat by the kitchen fire polishing the Marchesa Soderrelli's
boots. The whole inn, but the moment before a place abandoned, now
hummed and clattered under the various requirements of this traveler's
toilet.
The very details of this exacting service impressed the hostelry with
the importance of its guest. The usual custom of setting the casual
visitor down to a breakfast of tea, boiled eggs, finnan haddock, or some
indefinite dish with curry, in the common dining room with the flotsam
of lowland farmers, was at once abandoned. A white cloth was laid in
the long dining room of the second floor, open only from June until
September, while the tourist came to do Stirling Castle under the lines
of Ms Baedeker, a room salted for the tourist, as a Colorado mine is
salted for an Eastern investor. No matter in what direction one looked
he met instantly some picture of Queen Mary, some old print, some dingy
steel engraving. No two of these presented to the eye the same face
or figure of this unhappy woman, until the observer came presently to
realize that the Scottish engraver, when drawing the features of his
central figure, like the Madonna painters of Italy, availed himself of a
large and catholic collection.
To this room the innkeeper, having finished the Marchesa's boots, and
while the maid still clattered up and down to her door, brought now the
dishes of her breakfast. Porridge and a jug of cream, a dripping comb of
heather honey, hot scones, a light white roll, called locally a "bap,"
and got but a moment before from the nearest baker, a mutton cutlet,
a pot of tea, and a brown trout that but yesterday was swimming in the
Forth.
When the Marchesa came in at nine o'clock to this excellent breakfast,
every mark of fatigue had wholly vanished. Youth, vigor, freshness,
ladies, once in waiting to this woman, ravished from her train by the
savage days, were now for a period returned, as by some special, marked
concession. The maid following behind her, the obsequious innkeeper,
bowing by the door, saw and knew instantly that their estimate of the
traveler was not a whit excessive. This guest was doubtless a great
foreign lady come to visit the romantic castle on the hill, perhaps
crossed from France with no object other than this pilgrimage.
The innkeeper waited, loitering about the room, moving here a
candlestick and there a pot, until his prints, crowded on the walls,
should call forth some comment. But he waited to disappointment. The
great lady attended wholly to her breakfast. The "bap," the trout, the
cutlet shared no interest with the prints. This man, skilled in
divining the interests of the tourist, moved his pots without avail, his
candlesticks to no seeming purpose. The Marchesa Soderrelli was wholly
unaware of his designing presence.
Presently, when the Marchesa had finished with her breakfast, she took
up the silver case, which, in entering, she had put down by her plate,
and rolling a cigarette a moment between her thumb and finger, looked
about inquiringly for a means to light it. The innkeeper, marking now
the arrival of his moment, came forward with a burning match and held
it over the table--breaking on the instant, with no qualm, the fourth
of his printed rules, set out for warning on the corner of his mantel
shelf. He knew now that his guest would speak, and he sorted quickly his
details of Queen Mary for an impressive answer. The Marchesa did speak,
but not to that cherished point.
"Can you tell me," she said, "how near I am to Doune in Perthshire?"
The innkeeper, set firmly in his theory, concluded that his guest wished
to visit the neighboring castle after doing the one at Stirling, and
answered, out of the invidious distinctions of a local pride.
"Quite near, my Lady, twenty minutes by rail, but the castle there is
not to be compared with ours. When you have seen Stirling Castle, and
perhaps Edinburgh Castle, the others are not worth a visit. I have never
heard that any royal person was ever housed at Doune. Sir Walter, I
believe, gives it a bit of mention in 'Waverley,' but the great Bruce
was in our castle and Mary Queen of Scots."
He spoke the last sentence with uncommon gravity, and, swinging on his
heel, indicated his engravings with a gesture. Again these prints failed
him. The Marchesa's second query was a bewildering tangent.
"Have you learned," she said, "whether or not the Duke of Dorset is in
Perthshire?"
"The Duke of Dorset," he repeated, "the Duke of Dorset is dead, my
Lady."
"I do not mean the elder Duke of Dorset," replied the Marchesa, "I
am quite aware of his death within the year. I am speaking of the new
Duke."
The innkeeper came with difficulty from that subject with which his guns
were shotted, and, like all persons of his class, when turned abruptly
to the consideration of another, he went back to some familiar point,
from which to approach, in easy stages, the immediate inquiry.
"The estates of the Duke of Dorset," he began, "are on the south coast,
and are the largest in England. The old Duke was a great man, my Lady,
a great man. He wanted to make every foreigner who brought anything over
here, pay the government something for the right to sell it. I think
that was it; I heard him speak to the merchants of Glasgow about it.
It was a great speech, my Lady--I seemed to understand it then," and
he scratched his head. "He would have done it, too, everybody says, if
something hadn't broken in him one afternoon when he was with the King
down at Ascot. But he never married. You know, my Lady, every once in a
while, there is a Duke of Dorset who does not marry. They say that long
ago, one of them saw a heathen goddess in a bewitched city by the sea,
but something happened, and he never got her."
"That is very sad," said the Marehesa, "a fairy story should turn out
better."
"But that is not the end of the story, my Lady," continued the
innkeeper. "Right along after that, every other Duke has seen her, and
won't have any mortal woman for a wife." The Marehesa was amused. "So
fine a devotion," she said, "ought to receive some compensation from
heaven."
"And so it does, my Lady," cried the innkeeper, "and so it does. The
brother's son who comes into the title, is always exactly like the old
childless Duke--just as though he were reborn somehow." Then a light
came beaming into his face. "My Lady!" he cried, like one arrived
suddenly upon a splendid recollection. "I have a print of the old Duke
just over the fireplace in the kitchen; I will fetch it. Janet, the
cook, says that the new Duke is exactly like him."
The Marehesa stopped him. "No," she said, "I would not for the world
disturb the decorations of your kitchen."
The thwarted host returned, rubbing his chin. A moment or two he
puzzled, then he ventured another hesitating service.
"If it please your Ladyship, I will ask Janet, the cook, about the new
Duke of Dorset. Janet reads all about them every Sunday in the _Gentle
Lady_, and she sticks a pin in the map to remind her where the nicest
ones are."
Before the smiling guest could interfere with a further negative, the
obliging host had departed in search of that higher authority, presiding
thus learnedly among his pots. The Marchesa, left to her devices, looked
about for the first time at the innkeeper's precious prints. But she
looked leisurely, without an attaching interest, until she chanced upon
a little wood engraving of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, half hidden
behind a luster bowl on the sideboard. She arose, took up the print, and
returning to her chair, set it down on the cloth beside her. She was
in leisurely contemplation of this picture when the innkeeper returned,
sunning, from his interview with Janet. On the forty-three steps of his
stairway the good man unfortunately lost the details of Janet's diction,
but he came forth triumphant with the substance of her story.
The new Duke of Dorset was, at this hour, in Perthshire. He was not the
son of the old Duke, but an only nephew, brought forth from some distant
country to inherit his uncle's shoes. His father had married some
Austrian, or Russian, or Italian--Janet was a bit uncertain on this
trivial point. For the last half dozen years the young Duke had been
knocking about the far-off edges of Asia. There had been fuss about his
succession, and there might have been a kettle of trouble, but it came
out that he had been of a lot of service to the government in effecting
the Japanese alliance. He had somehow gotten at the inside of things in
the East. So the foreign office was at his back. He had given up, too,
some princely station in his mother's country; a station of which Janet
was not entirely clear, but, in her mind, somehow, equal to a kingdom.
But he gave it up to be a peer of England, as, in Janet's opinion, any
reasonable person would. My Lady was rightly on her way, if she wished
to see this new Duke.
The Doune Castle and the neighboring estate were shooting property of
his father. This property, added to the vast holdings of the old Duke,
made the new once perhaps the richest peer in England. He looked the
part, too; more splendidly fit than any of his class coming under
Janet's discriminating eye. She had gone with Christobel MacIntyre to
see him pass through Stirling some weeks earlier. And he was one of the
"nicest of them." Janet's pin had been sticking in Doune since August.
The Marchesa did not attempt to interrupt this pleasing flow of data.
The innkeeper delivered it with a variety of bows, certain decorative,
mincing steps, and illustrative gestures. It came forth, too, with that
modicum of pride natural to one who housed, thus opportunely, so nice an
observer as this Janet. He capped it at the end with a comment on this
Japanese alliance. It did not please him. They were not white, these
Japanese. And this alliance--it was against nature. His nephew, Donald
MacKensie, had been with the army in China, when the powers marched on
Pekin, and there the British Tommy had divided the nations of the earth
into three grand divisions, namely, niggers, white men, and dagoes.
There were two kinds of niggers--real niggers, and faded-out niggers;
there were four kinds of dagoes--vodka dagoes, beer-drinking dagoes,
frog-eating dagoes, and the macaroni dagoes; but there was only one kind
of white men--"Us," he said, "and the Americans."
The Marchesa laughed, and the innkeeper rounded off his speech with
a suggestion of convenient trains, in case my Lady was pleased to go
to-morrow or the following day to Doune. A good express left the station
here at ten o'clock, and one could return--he marked especially
the word--at one's pleasure. The schedule of returning trains was
beautifully appointed.
He had arranged, too, in the interval of absence, for the Marchesa's
comfort in the morning visit to Stirling Castle. A carriage would take
her up the long hill; a guide, whom he could unreservedly recommend,
would be there for any period at her service--a pensioned sergeant who
had gone into the Zulu rush at Rorke's Drift, and come out somewhat
fragmentary. Then he stepped back with a larger bow, like an orator come
finally to his closing sentence. Was my Lady pleased to go now?
The Marchesa was pleased to go, but not upon the way so delicately
smoothed for her. She arose, went at once to her room, got her hand bag
and coat, paid the good man his charges, and walked out of the door,
past the cab driver, to her train, leaving that expectant public
servant, like the young man who had great possessions, sorrowing.