"I won't stop in town," said I to myself, "to be chaffed by all the
fellows at the club and in the master's room at St. Martin's. I'll run
over on the Continent until the wags (confound them) have forgotten all
about it. I'm a sensitive man, and if there's anything on earth I hate
it's cheap and easy joking and punning on a name or a personal
peculiarity which lays itself open obviously to stupid buffoonery. Of
course I shall chuck up the schoolmastering now;--it's an odious trade
at any time--and I may as well take a pleasant holiday while I'm about
it. Let me see--Nice or Cannes or Florence would be the best thing at
this time of year. Escape the November fogs and January frosts. Let's
make it Cannes, then, and try the first effect of my new name upon the
_corpus vile_ of the Cannois."
So I packed up my portmanteau hurriedly, took the 7.45 to Paris, and
that same evening found myself comfortably ensconced in a _wagon lit_,
making my way as fast as the Lyons line would carry me _en route_ for
the blue Mediterranean.
The Hotel du Paradis at Cannes is a very pleasant and well managed
place, where I succeeded in making myself perfectly at home. I gave my
full name to the _concierge_ boldly. "Thank Heaven," I thought,
"Aikin-Payne will sound to her just as good a label to one's back as
Howard or Cholmondely. She won't see the absurdity of the combination."
She was a fat Vaudoise Swiss by origin, and she took it without moving a
muscle. But she answered me in very tolerable English--me, who thought
my Parisian accent unimpeachable! "Vary well, sirr, your lettares shall
be sent to your apartments." I saw there was the faintest twinkle of a
smile about the corner of her mouth, and I felt that even she, a mere
foreigner, a Swiss _concierge_, perceived at once the incongruity of
the two surnames. Incongruity! that's the worst of it! Would that they
were incongruous! But it's their fatal and obvious congruity with one
another that makes their juxtaposition so ridiculous. Call a man Payne,
and I venture to say, though I was to the manner born, and it's me that
says it as oughtn't to say it, you couldn't find a neater or more
respectable surname in all England: call him plain Aikin, and though
that perhaps is less aristocratic, it's redeemed by all the associations
of childhood with the earliest literature we imbibed through the
innocuous pages of "Evenings at Home:" but join the two together, in the
order of alphabetical precedence, and you get an Aikin-Payne, which is a
thing to make a sensitive man, compelled to bear it for a lifetime, turn
permanently red like a boiled lobster. My uncle must have done it on
purpose, in order to inflict a deadly blow on what he would doubtless
have called my confounded self-conceit!
However, I changed my tourist suit for a black cutaway, and made my way
down to the _salle-a-manger_. The dinner was good in itself, and was
enlivened for me by the presence of an extremely pretty girl of, say
nineteen, who sat just opposite, and whose natural protector I soon
managed to draw casually into a general conversation. I say her natural
protector, because, though I took him at the time for her father, I
discovered afterwards that he was really her uncle. Experience has
taught me that when you sit opposite a pretty girl at an hotel, you
ought not to open fire by directing your observations to herself in
person; you should begin diplomatically by gaining the confidence of her
male relations through the wisdom or the orthodoxy of your political and
social opinions. Mr. Shackleford--that, I found afterwards, was the
uncle's name--happened to be a fiery Tory, while I have the personal
misfortune to be an equally rabid Radical: but on this occasion I
successfully dissembled, acquiescing with vague generality in his
denunciation of my dearest private convictions; and by the end of dinner
we had struck up quite an acquaintance with one another.
"Ruby," said the aunt to the pretty girl, as soon as dinner was over,
"shall we take a stroll out in the gardens?"
Ruby! what a charming name really. I wonder, now, what is her surname?
And what a beautiful graceful figure, as she rises from the table, and
throws her little pale blue Indian silk scarf around her pretty
shoulders! Clearly, Ruby is a person whose acquaintance I ought to
cultivate.
"Uncle won't come, of course," said Ruby, with a pleasant smile (what
teeth!). "The evening air would be too much for him. You know," she
added, looking across to me, "almost everybody at Cannes is in the
invalid line, and mustn't stir out after sunset. Aunt and I are
unfashionable enough to be quite strong, and to go in for a stroll by
moonlight."
"I happen to be equally out of the Cannes fashion," I said, directing my
observation, with great strategic skill, rather to the aunt than to Miss
Ruby in person; "and if you will allow me I should be very glad to
accompany you."
So we turned out on the terrace of the Paradis, and walked among the
date-palms and prickly pears that fill the pretty tropical garden. It
was a lovely moonlight evening in October; and October is still almost a
summer month in the Riviera. The feathery branches of the palms stood
out in clear-cut outline against the pale moonlit sky; the white houses
of Cannes gleamed with that peculiarly soft greenish Mediterranean tint
in the middle distance; and the sea reflected the tremulous shimmer in
the background, between the jagged sierra of the craggy Esterel and the
long low outline of the Ile Ste. Marguerite. Altogether, it was an
ideal poet's evening, the very evening to stroll for the first time with
a beautiful girl through the charmed alleys of a Provencal garden!
Ruby Estcourt--she gave me her name before long--was quite as pleasant
to talk to as she was beautiful and graceful to behold. Fortunately, her
aunt was not one of the race of talkative old ladies, and she left the
mass of the conversation entirely to Ruby and myself. In the course of
half an hour or so spent in pacing up and down that lovely terrace, I
had picked out, bit by bit, all that I most wanted to know about Ruby
Estcourt. She was an orphan, without brothers or sisters, and evidently
without any large share of this world's goods; and she lived with her
aunt and uncle, who were childless people, and who usually spent the
summer in Switzerland, retiring to the Riviera every winter for the
benefit of Mr. Shackleford's remaining lung. Quite simple and unaffected
Ruby seemed, though she had passed most of her lifetime in the
too-knowing atmosphere of Continental hotels, among that cosmopolitan
public which is so very sharp-sighted that it fancies it can see
entirely through such arrant humbug as honour in men and maidenly
reserve in women. Still, from that world Ruby Estcourt had somehow
managed to keep herself quite unspotted; and a simpler, prettier, more
natural little fairy you wouldn't find anywhere in the English villages
of half a dozen counties.
It was all so fresh and delightful to me--the palms, the Mediterranean,
the balmy evening air, the gleaming white town, and pretty Ruby
Estcourt--that I walked up and down on the terrace as long as they would
let me; and I was really sorry when good Mrs. Shackleford at last
suggested that it was surely getting time for uncle's game of cribbage.
As they turned to go, Ruby said good evening, and then, hesitating for a
moment as to my name, said quite simply and naturally, "Why, you haven't
yet told us who you are, have you?"
I coloured a little--happily invisible by moonlight--as I answered,
"That was an omission on my part, certainly. When you told me you were
Miss Estcourt, I ought to have mentioned in return that my own name was
Aikin-Payne, Theodore Aikin-Payne, if you please: may I give you a
card?"
"Aching Pain!" Ruby said, with a smile. "Did I hear you right? Aching
Pain, is it? Oh, what a very funny name!"
I drew myself up as stiffly as I was able. "Not Aching Pain," I said,
with a doleful misgiving in my heart--it was clear everybody would put
that odd misinterpretation upon it for the rest of my days. "Not Aching
Pain, but Aikin-Payne, Miss Estcourt. A-i-k-i-n, Aikin, the Aikins of
Staffordshire; P-a-y-n-e, Payne, the Paynes of Surrey. My original
surname was Payne, a surname that I venture to say I'm a little proud
of; but my uncle, Mr. Aikin, from whom I inherit property," I thought
that was rather a good way of putting it, "wished me to adopt his family
name in addition to my own--in fact, made it a condition, _sine qua
non_, of my receiving the property."
"Payne--Aikin," Ruby said, turning the names over to herself slowly.
"Ah, yes, I see. Excuse my misapprehension, Mr.--Mr. Aikin-Payne. It was
very foolish of me; but really, you know, it _does_ sound so very
ludicrous, doesn't it now?"
I bit my lip, and tried to smile back again. Absurd that a man should be
made miserable about such a trifle; and yet I will freely confess that
at that moment, in spite of my uncle's twelve hundred a year, I felt
utterly wretched. I bowed to pretty little Ruby as well as I was able,
and took a couple more turns by myself hurriedly around the terrace.
Was it only fancy, or did I really detect, as Ruby Estcourt said the two
names over to herself just now, that she seemed to find the combination
a familiar one? I really didn't feel sure about it; but it certainly
did sound as if she had once known something about the Paynes or the
Aikins. Ah, well! there are lots of Paynes and Aikins in the world, no
doubt; but alas! there is only one of them doomed to go through life
with the absurd label of an Aikin-Payne fastened upon his unwilling
shoulders.