Cynthia's Chauffeur
to the right one. But to be treated like a serf?--no, not if Simmonds
knew it!
The car stopped with a jerk. Out leaped the driver.
"Now you can walk to the hotel," he said, though he distinguished the
hotel by an utterly inappropriate adjective.
The more sudden the crisis the more prepared was Vanrenen--that was
his noted characteristic, whether dealing with men or money.
"What has bitten _you_?" he demanded calmly.
"You must find somebody else to do your detective work, that is all,"
came the stolid answer.
"Don't be a mule."
"I'm not a mule. You're makin' a d----d row about nothing. Viscount
Medenham is a gentleman to his finger tips, and if you were one you'd
know that he wouldn't hurt a hair of Miss Vanrenen's head, or any
lady's, for that matter."
"Where my daughter is concerned I am not a gentleman, or a viscount,
or a person who makes d----d rows. I am just a father--a plain, simple
father--who thinks more of his girl than of any other object in this
wide world. If I have hurt your feelings I am sorry. If I am
altogether mistaken I'll apologize and pay. I'm paying now. This trip
will probably cost me fifty thousand dollars that I would have
scooped in were I in Paris to-morrow. Your game is to attend to the
benzine buzz part of the contract and leave the rest to me. Shove
ahead, and step lively!"
To his lasting credit, Simmonds obeyed: but the row had cleared the
air; Vanrenen liked the man, and felt now that his original estimate
of his worth was justified.
At the hotel, of course, he had much more to learn than he expected.
Oddly enough, the praises showered on "Fitzroy" confirmed him in the
opinion that Cynthia was the victim of a clever knave, be he titled
aristocrat or mere adventurer. For the first time, too, he began to
suspect Mrs. Devar of complicity in the plot!
A nice kind of chaperon she must be to let his girl go boating with a
chauffeur on the Wye! And her Sunday's illness was a palpable
pretense--an arranged affair, no doubt, to permit more boating and
dallying in this fairyland of forest and river. What thanks he owed to
that Frenchman, Marigny!
Indeed, it was easy to hoodwink this hard-headed man in aught that
affected Cynthia. Count Edouard displayed a good deal of tact when he
called at the Savoy Hotel late the previous night, but his obvious
relief at finding Vanrenen in London had induced the latter to depart
for Bristol by a midnight train rather than trust wholly to Mrs.
Leland's leisured strategy.
He did not go straight to Hereford for the best of reasons. He had
told Cynthia of Mrs. Leland's coming, and had heard of if not from
her in response to his letter. If he rushed off now to intercept the
motorists at Hereford he would defeat the very purpose he had in view,
which was to interpose an effectual shield between the scoundrelly
lordling and his prey, while avoiding any risk of hurting his
daughter's feelings. Moreover, he was eminently a just man. Hearing
from Marigny that Simmonds, the original cause of all the trouble, was
skulking at Bristol, to Bristol he went. From that starting-point,
with his knowledge of Cynthia's probable route, he could surely pick
up traces of the predatory car at most towns through which it passed.
Moreover, he could choose his own time for joining the party in front,
which by this time he was fully resolved on, either at Chester or
farther north.
Transcending these minor features of a disturbing affair was his
self-confessed fear of Cynthia. In the unfathomed deeps of a father's
love for such a daughter there is ever an element of fear. Not for all
his wealth would Vanrenen cast a shadow on the unsullied intimacy of
their affection. Therefore, he would be wary, circumspect, ready to
accept as most credible theories which he would scout in any other
conditions, quick to discern the truth, slow to point out wherein an
inexperienced girl had erred, but merciless to the fortune-hunter who
had so jeopardized Cynthia's happiness and his own.
Hence, his appearance at the Symon's Yat Hotel seemed to have no more
serious import than a father's wish to delight his daughter by an
unexpected participation in her holiday. No secret had been made as to
the Mercury's halting-place that day. Cynthia herself had written the
address in the hotel register, adding a request that letters, if any,
were to be forwarded to Windermere.
By chance, the smiling landlady's curiosity as to "Fitzroy" raised a
new specter.
"He must be a gentleman," she said, "because he belongs to the Thames
Rowing Club; he also spoke and acted like one. Why did he employ an
assistant chauffeur? That is most unusual."
Vanrenen could only explain that arrangements for the tour were made
during his absence in France, so he was not fully posted as to
details.
"Oh, they did not intend to remain here on Saturday, but Miss Vanrenen
liked the place, and seemed to be rather taken with the hotel----"
whereat the millionaire nodded his complete agreement--"so Mr. Fitzroy
telegraphed for a man named Dale to come to Hereford. There was some
misunderstanding, however, and Dale only arrived yesterday in the car.
He left by an early train this morning, after doing the garage work."
Simmonds, candor itself about Medenham, had said no word of the Earl
of Fairholme or of Dale. Marigny, of course, was silent as to the
Earl, since it might have ruined his last faint hope of success had
the two perplexed fathers met; Simmonds's recent outburst opposed an
effectual bar to farther questioning; so Vanrenen was free to deduce
all sorts of possibilities from the existence of yet another
villainous chauffeur.
Unhappily, he availed himself of the opportunity to the full. The fair
countryside and the good food of the March counties made little or no
appeal to him thenceforth. He pined to be in Chester, yet restrained
the impulse that urged a frenzied scurry to the Banks of the Dee, for
he was adamant in his resolve not to seem to have pursued Cynthia, but
rather to have joined her as the outcome of a mere whim after she had
met Mrs. Leland.
The Mercury arrived at Ludlow long before Vanrenen crossed the Wye
Bridge at Hereford. Medenham stopped the car at "The Feathers,"
that famous magpie among British Inns, where Cynthia admired and
photographed some excellent woodcarving, and saw an iron-studded front
door which has shut out revellers and the night on each alternate
round of the clock since 1609, if not longer.
If they hurried over luncheon they were content to dawdle in the
picturesque streets, and Cynthia was reluctant to leave the fine old
castle, in which Milton's "Masque of Comus" was first played on
Michaelmas night of 1634. At first, she yielded only to the flood of
memories pent in every American brain when the citizen of the New
World stands in one of these treasure-houses of history and feels the
passing of its dim pageants; when they stood together in the ruined
banqueting hall, Medenham gave play to his imagination, and strove to
reconstruct a scene once spread before the bright eyes of a maiden
long since dead.
"You will please regard yourself," he said, "as the Lady Alice
Egerton, daughter of the Earl of Bridgwater, Lord President of the
Marches of Wales, who, with her two brothers, was benighted in the
Forest of Heywood while riding to Ludlow to witness her father's
installation in his high office. Milton was told of her adventures by
Henry Lawes, the musician, and he wrote the 'Masque of Comus' to
delight her and her friends. Have you read 'Comus'?"
"No," said Cynthia, almost timidly, for she was beginning to fear this
masterful man whose enthusiasm caught her to his very soul at such
moments.
"Ah, but you shall. It ranks high among the miracles of English poetry
wrought by Milton. Many a mile from Ludlow have I called to mind one
of its incomparable passages:
A thousand phantasies
Begin to throng into my memory--
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.
And now you, the heroine of the masque, must try to imagine that you
are lost in a wild wood represented by a carpet spread here, in the
center of the hall. Seated there on a dais, is your father the Earl,
surrounded by his officers and retainers. Near you are your brothers,
Lord Brackley and Thomas Egerton, so blinded by sprites that they
cannot see you, though keen enough to note the bright eyes and
flushed cheeks of other ladies of high degree bidden to Ludlow from
neighboring shires for the merry-making. And mark you, this is no rude
gathering of unlettered squires and rough men-at-arms. How is it
possible that an uncultured throng should listen rapturously to the
noblest performance of the kind that exists in any language, wherein
each speech is a majestic soliloquy, eloquent, sublime, with an
uncloying word-music acclaimed by three centuries?"
The sheer wonder in Cynthia's face warned him that this brief
excursion into the pages of Macaulay had better cease, so he focused
his thoughts on the actual representation of the masque in which he
had taken part ten years ago at Fairholme.
"I must ask you to concede that the lords and ladies, the civic
dignitaries and their wives, for whose amusement Milton spread the
pinions of his genius, were far better equipped to understand his
lyric flights than any similar assemblage that could be collected
haphazard in some modern castle. They did not pretend--they knew.
Even you, Lady Alice, could frame a neat verse in Latin and cap some
pleasant jest with a line from Homer. When Milton dreamed aloud of
bathing in the Elysian dew of the rainbow, of inhaling the scents of
nard and cassia, 'which the musky wings of the Zepyhr scatter through
the cedared alleys of the Hesperides,' they followed each turn and
swoop of his fancy with an active sense of its truth and beauty. And
what a brilliant company! How the red flare of torch and cresset would
flicker on the sheen of silk, the luster of velvet, the polished
brightness of morion and spear. I think I can see those gallant
gentlemen and fine ladies grouped round the players who told of the
strange pranks played by the God of Mirth. Perhaps that same fair
Alice, who supplied the motive of the masque as well as its leading
lady, may be linked with you by stronger ties than those of mere
feminine grace----"
Cynthia did not blush: she grew white, but shook her head.
"You cannot tell," he said. "'Comus' was played in Ludlow only
fourteen years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New
England, and I would remind you that we stocked the new nation in the
west with some of the bluest blood in Britain. Even in this hall there
were Puritans whose ascetic tastes disapproved of Milton's imageries,
of children play-acting, of the brave show made by the gentry----"
"My mother's people lived in Pennsylvania for generations," she broke
in with a strange wistfulness.
"I knew it," he cried in triumph. "Tell me the names of the
first-nighters at the Milton Theater, Ludlow, on that autumn evening
in 1634, and warrant me to find you an authentic ancestor."
Cynthia bent a puzzled brow at him.
"After this, I shall apply myself to 'Comus' with added
comprehension," she said. "But--you take my breath away; have you,
then, delved so deep in the mine of English history that you can
people 'most every ruined pile in Britain with the men and women of
the dead years?"
He laughed, and colored a little, with true British confusion at
having been caught in an extravagant mood.
"There you lay bare the mummer," he said. "What clever fellows actors
would be if they grasped the underlying realities of all the fine