My Friend the Chauffeur
Out of it a voice spoke--an American voice; and then, with a lacy whirl,
a parasol rose like a stage curtain. The green wave was a lady; a
marvellous lady. The pink wave was a child with a brown face, two long
brown plaits, and pink silk legs, also pink shoes.
"We've come in answer to X. Y. Z.'s advertisement in this morning's
_Riviera Sun_. Now which of you two gentlemen put it in?" began the
lady, with gay coquetry which played over each of us in turn. Oh yes,
she was wonderful. She had hair of the brightest auburn that ever
crowned a human head. It was done in undulations, with a fat ring in the
middle of her forehead, between two beautifully arched black eyebrows.
Her skin was very white, her cheeks were very pink, and her lips were
very coralline. Everything about her was "very." Out of a plump face,
with a small nose that turned up and a chin which was over-round, looked
a pair of big, good-natured, nondescript-coloured eyes, and flashed a
pair of pleasant dimples. At first glance you said "a stout girl of
twenty-five." At the second, you were not sure that the lady wasn't ten
years older. But her waist was so slender that she panted a little in
coming up the path, though the path was by no means steep, and her heels
were so high that there was a suspicion of limp in her walk.
Even to me the lady and her announcement gave a shock, which must have
doubled its effect upon Terry. I was collecting my forces for a reply
when the little brown girl giggled, and I lost myself again. It was only
for an instant, but Terry basely took advantage of that instant in a way
of which I would not have believed him capable.
"You must address yourself to my friend, Sir Ralph Moray," said the
wretched fellow glibly. "His are the car and the title mentioned in the
advertisement of _The Riviera Sun_, which he owns."
My title indeed! A baronetical crumb flung to my father because of a
service to his political party. It had never done anything for me,
except to add ten per cent to my bills at hotels. Now, before I could
speak a word of contradiction, Terry went on. "I am only Mr. Barrymore,"
said he, and he grinned a malicious grin, which said as plainly as
words, "Aha, my boy, I think _that_ rips your little scheme to
smithereens, eh?"
But my presence of mind doesn't often fail for long. "It's Mr. Barrymore
who drives my car for me," I explained. "He's cleverer at it than I, and
he comes cheaper than a professional."
The wonderful white and pink and auburn lady had been looking at Terry
with open admiration; but now the light of interest faded from the
good-natured face under the girlish hat. "O-oh," she commented in a tone
of ingenuous disappointment, "you're only the--the chawffur, then."
I didn't want Terry to sink too low in these possible clients'
estimation, for my canny Scotch mind was working round the fact that
they were probably American heiresses, and an heiress of some sort was a
necessity for the younger brother of that meanest of bachelor peers, the
Marquis of Innisfallen. "He's an amateur chauffeur," I hastened to
explain. "He only does it for me because we're friends, you know; but,"
I added, with a stern and meaning glance at Terry, "I'm unable to
undertake any tours without his assistance. So if we--er--arrange
anything, _Mr. Barrymore_ will be of our party."
"Unfortunately I have an engagement in South Af--" began Terry, when the
parasol of the third member of the party (the one who had lagged behind,
stopping to examine, or seeming to examine a rose-bush) was laid back
upon her white muslin shoulders.
Somehow Terry forgot to finish his sentence, and I forgot to wonder what
the end was to be.
She was only a tall, white girl, simply dressed; yet suddenly the little
garden of the Chalet des Pins, with its high wall draped with crimson
bougainvilla, became a setting for a picture.
The new vision was built on too grand a scale for me, because I stand
only five foot eight in my boots, while she was five foot seven if she
was an inch, but she might have been made expressly for Terry, and he
for her. There was something of the sweet, youthful dignity of Giovanni
Bellini's Madonnas of the Trees about the girl's bearing and the pose of
the white throat; but the face was almost childlike in the candour and
virginal innocence of its large brown eyes. The pure forehead had a halo
of yellow-brown hair, burnished gold where the sun touched it; the lips
were red, with an adorable droop in the corners, and the skin had that
flower-fairness of youth which makes older women's faces look either
sallow or artificial. If we--Terry and I--had not already divined that
the auburn lady got her complexion out of bottles and boxes, we would
have known it with the lifting of that white girl's parasol.
Can a saintly virgin on a golden panel look sulky? I'm not sure, but
this virgin gave the effect of having been reluctantly torn from such a
background, and she looked distinctly sulky, even angelically cross. She
had not wanted to come into my garden, that was plain; and she lagged
behind the others to gaze at a rose-bush, by way of a protest against
the whole expedition. What she saw to disapprove of in me I was at a
loss to guess, but that she did disapprove was evident. The dazzling
brown eyes, with the afternoon sun glinting between their thick dark
fringes, hated me for something;--was it my existence, or my
advertisement? Then they wandered to Terry, and pitied, rather than
spurned. "You poor, handsome, big fellow," they seemed so say, "so you
are that miserable little man's chauffeur! You must be very unfortunate,
or you would have found a better career. I'm so sorry for you."
"Do sit down, please," I said, lest after all it should occur to Terry
to finish that broken sentence of his. "These chairs will be more
comfortable if I straighten their backs up a little. And this seat round
the tree isn't bad. I--I'll tell my servant to send out tea--we were
going to have it soon--and we can talk things over. It will be
pleasanter."
"What a _lovely_ idea!" exclaimed the auburn lady. "Why, of course we
will. Beechy, you take one of those steamer-chairs. I like a high seat
myself. Come, Maida; the gentlemen have asked us to stay to tea, and
we're going to."
Beechy--the little brown girl--subsided with a babyish meekness that
contradicted a wicked laughing imp in her eyes, into one of the _chaises
longues_ which I had brought up from its knees to a sort of "stand and
deliver" attitude. But the tall white girl (the name of "Maida" suited
her singularly well) did not stir an inch. "I think I'll go on if you
don't mind, Aunt Ka--I mean, Kittie," she said in a soft voice that was
as American in its way as the auburn lady's, but a hundred and fifty
times sweeter. I rather fancied that it must have been grown somewhere
in the South, where the sun was warm, and the flowers as luxuriant as
our Riviera blossoms.
"You will do nothing of the kind," retorted her relative peremptorily.
"You'll just stay here with Beechy and me, till we've done our
business."
"But I haven't anything to do with--"
"You're going with us on the trip, anyhow, if we go. Now, come along and
don't make a fuss."
For a moment "Maida" hesitated, then she did come along, and as
obediently as the brown child, though not so willingly, sat down in the
_chaise longue_, carefully arranged for her reception by Terry.
"Evidently a poor relation, or she wouldn't submit to being ordered
about like that," I thought. "Of course, any one might see that she's
too pretty to be an heiress. They don't make them like that. Such
beauties never have a penny to bless themselves with. Just Terry's luck
if he falls in love with her, after all I've done for him, too! But if
this tour does come off, I must try to block _that_ game."
"I expect I'd better introduce myself and my little thirteen-year-old
daughter, and my niece," said the auburn lady, putting down her parasol,
and opening a microscopic fan. "I'm Mrs. Kathryn Stanley Kidder, of
Denver, Colorado. My little girl, here--she's all I've got in the world
since Mr. Kidder died--is Beatrice, but we call her Beechy for short. We
used to spell it B-i-c-e, which Mr. Kidder said was Italian; but people
_would_ pronounce it to rhyme with mice, so now we make it just like the
tree, and then there can't be any mistake. Miss Madeleine Destrey is the
daughter of my dead sister, who was _ever_ so much older than I am of
course; and the way she happened to come over with Beechy and me is
quite a romance; but I guess you'll think I've told you enough about
ourselves."
"It's like the people in old comic pictures who have kind of balloon
things coming out of their mouths, with a verse thoroughly explaining
who they are, isn't it?" remarked Miss Beechy in a little soft, childish
voice, and at least a dozen imps looking out of her eyes all at once.
"Mamma's balloon never collapses."
To break the awkward silence following upon this frank comparison, I
bustled away with hospitable murmurs concerning tea. But, my back once
turned upon the visitors, the pink, white, and green glamour of their
presence floated away from before my eyes like a radiant mist, and I saw
plain fact instead.
By plain fact I mean to denote Felicite, my French cook-housekeeper, my
all of domesticity in the Chalet des Pins.
Felicite might be considered plain by strangers, and thank heaven she is
a fact, or life at my little villa on the Riviera would be a hundred
times less pleasant than it is; but she is nevertheless as near to being
an angel as a fat, elderly, golden-hearted, sweet-natured,
profane-speaking, hot-tempered peasant woman of Provence can possibly
be. Whatever the greatest geniuses of the kitchen can do, Felicite can
and will do, and she has a loyal affection for her undeserving master,
which leads her to attempt miracles and almost invariably to accomplish
them.
There are, however, things which even Felicite cannot do; and it had
suddenly struck me coldly in the sunshine that to produce proper cakes
and rich cream at ten minutes' notice in a creamless and cakeless
bachelor villa, miles from anywhere in particular, might be beyond even
her genius.
I found her in the back garden, forcibly separating the family pet, a
somewhat moth-eaten duck, from the yellow cat whose mouse he had just
annexed by violence.
With language which told me that a considerable quantity of pepper had
got into her disposition (as it does with most cooks, according to my
theory) she was admonishing the delinquent, whom she mercilessly
threatened to behead and cook for dinner that evening. "You have been
spared too long; the best place for you is on the table," I heard her
lecturing the evil cannibal, "though the saints know that you are as
tough as you are wicked, and all the sauce in the Alpes Maritimes would
not make of you a pleasant morsel, especially since you have taken to
eating the cat's mice."
"Felicite," I broke in upon her flood of eloquence, in my most winning
tones. "Something has happened. Three ladies have come unexpectedly to
tea."
The round body straightened itself and stood erect. "Monsieur well knows
that there is no tea; neither he nor the other milord ever take anything
but coffee and whisk--"
"Never mind," said I hastily. "There must be tea, because I asked the
ladies to have some, and they have said yes. There must also be lettuce
sandwiches, and cakes, and cream--plenty, lots, heaps, for five people."
"As well ask that serpent of wickedness, your duck, to lay you five eggs
in as many minutes."
"He isn't my duck; he's yours. You won him in a raffle and adopted him.
I suspect it's a physical impossibility for him to lay eggs; but look
here, Felicite, dear, kind, good Felicite, don't go back on me. Man and