My Friend the Chauffeur
boy I've known you these eighteen months, and you've never failed me
yet. Don't fail me now. I depend on you, you know, and you _must_ do
something--anything--for the honour of the house."
"Does Monsieur think I can command tea, cakes, and cream from the tiles
of the kitchen floor?"
"No; but I firmly believe you can evolve them out of your inner
consciousness. You wouldn't have me lose faith in you?"
"No," said Felicite, whose eyes suddenly brightened with the rapt look
of one inspired. "No; I would not have Monsieur lose faith. I will do
what I can, as Monsieur says, for the honour of the house. Let him go
now to his friends, and make his mind easy. In a quarter of an hour, or
twenty minutes at most, he shall have a feef o'clocky for which he need
not blush."
"Angel!" I ejaculated fervently, patting the substantial shoulder, so
much to be depended upon. Then with a buoyant step I hastened round the
house to rejoin the party in the front garden, where, I anxiously
realized, the tables might have been completely turned during my
absence.
Ready to hurl myself into the breach, if there were one, I came round
the corner of the villa, to meet the unexpected. I had left Terry with
three ladies; I found him with seven.
Evidently he had gone into the drawing-room and fetched chairs, for they
were all sitting down, but they were not being sociable. Mrs. Kidder's
round chin was in the air, and she wore an "I'm as good as you are, if
not better" expression. The imps in Beechy's eyes were critically
cataloguing each detail of the strangers' costumes, and Miss Destrey was
interested in the yellow cat, who had come to tell her the tragic tale
of the stolen mouse.
The new arrivals were English. I can't explain exactly how I knew that,
the moment I clapped eyes on them, but I did; and I felt sure their
nearest male relative must have made money in beer, pickles, or it might
have been corsets or soap. They were that kind; and they had a great
many teeth, especially the daughters, who all three looked exactly
thirty, no more and no less, and were apparently pleasantly conscious of
superlative virtue.
I could see the house they lived in, in England. It would be in
Surbiton, of course, with "extensive grounds." There would be a
Debrett's "Peerage," and a Burke's "Landed Gentry," and a volume of
"Etiquette of Smart Society" on the library shelves, if there was
nothing else; and in the basket on the hall table the visiting cards of
any titled beings of the family's acquaintance would invariably rise to
the top like cream.
"I understand from your friend that it is your advertisement which
appears in _The Riviera Sun_ to-day," began the Mother, whose aspect
demanded a capital M. "You are Sir Ralph Moray, I believe?"
I acknowledged my identity, and the lady continued: "I am Mrs.
Fox-Porston. You will have heard of my husband, no doubt, and I daresay
we know a great many of the same People at Home." (This with a
dust-brush glance which swept the Americans out of the field.) "I think
it is a very excellent idea of yours, Sir Ralph, to travel about the
Continent on your motor-car with a few congenial companions, and I have
brought my daughters with me to-day in the hope that we may arrange a
delightful little tour which--"
"Ting-a-ling" at the gate bell robbed us of Mrs. Fox-Porston's remaining
hope, and gave us two more visitors.
Little had I known what the consequences of one small, pink
advertisement would be! Apparently it bade fair to let loose upon us,
not the dogs of war, but the whole floating feminine population of the
French Riviera. Something must be done, and done promptly, to stem the
rising tide of ladies, or the Chalet des Pins and Terry and I with it,
would be swamped.
I looked at Terry, he looked at me, as we rose like mechanical figures
to indicate our hosthood to the new arrivals.
They were Americans; I could tell by their chins. They had no
complexions and no particular age; they wore blue tissue veils, and
little jingling bags on their belts, which showed that they were not
married, because if they had been, their husbands would have ordered the
little jingling bags into limbo, wherever that may be.
"Good-afternoon," said the leading Blue Veil. "I am Miss Carrie Hood
Woodall, the lady lawyer from Hoboken, who had such a nice little
paragraph in _The Riviera Sun_, close to your advertisement; and this is
my chaperone, Mrs. Elizabeth Boat Cully. We're touring Europe, and we
want to take a trip with you in your automobile, if--"
"Unfortunately, ladies," said I, "the services of--er--my car are
already engaged to Mrs. Kidder, of Colorado, and her party. Isn't it so,
Barrymore?"
"Yes," replied Terry stoutly. And that "yes" even if inadvertent, was
equivalent I considered, to sign and seal.
Mrs. Kidder beamed like an understudy for _The Riviera Sun_. Beechy
twinkled demurely, and tossed her plaits over her shoulder. Even Miss
Destrey, the white goddess, deigned to smile, straight at Terry and no
other.
At this moment Felicite appeared with a tray. Whipped cream frothed over
the brow of a brown jug like a white wig on the forehead of a judge;
lettuce showed pale green through filmy sandwiches; small round cakes
were piled, crisp and appetizing, on a cracked Sevres dish; early
strawberries glowed red among their own leaves. Talk of the marengo
trick! It was nothing to this. The miracle had been duly performed;
but--there were only five cups.
Mrs. Fox-Porston and her daughters, Miss Carrie Hood Woodall and her
chaperone, took the hint and their leave; and the companions of the
future were left alone together to talk over their plans.
"Lock the gate, Felicite," said I. "Do make haste!" And she did. Dear
Felicite!
II
A CHAPTER OF PLANS
So it is that Fate calmly arranges our lives in spite of us. Although no
details of the coming trip were settled during what remained of our new
employers' visit, that was their fault and the fault of a singularly
premature sunset, rather than mine, or even Terry's; and we both felt
that it came to the same thing. We were in honour bound to "personally
conduct" Mrs. Kidder, Miss Beechy Kidder, and Miss Destrey towards
whatever point of the compass a guiding finger of theirs should signify.
It has always been my motto to take Father Time by the fore-lock, for
fear he should cut it off, or get away, or play some other trick upon
me, which the cantankerous old chap (no parent of mine!) is fond
of doing. Therefore, if I could, I would have had terms, destination,
day and hour of starting definitely arranged before that
miraculously-produced tea of Felicite's had turned to tannin. But man
may not walk through a solid wall, or strive against such conversational
gifts as those of Mrs. Kidder.
She could and would keep to anything except the point. That, whatever
its nature, she avoided as she would an indelicacy.
"Well, now, Mrs. Kidder," I began, "if you really want us to organize
this tour, don't you think we'd better discuss--"
"Of _course_ we want you to!" she broke in. "We all think it's just
awfully good of you to bother with us when you must have so many friends
who want you to take them--English people in your own set. By the way,
do you know the Duchess of Carborough?"
"I know very few duchesses or other Americans," I replied. Whereupon
Miss Kidder's imp laughed, though her mother remained grave, and even
looked mildly disappointed.
"That's a funny way of putting it," said Beechy. "One would think it was
quite an American habit, being a Duchess."
"So it is, isn't it?" I asked. "The only reason we needn't fear its
growing like the Yellow Peril is because there aren't enough dukes. I've
always thought the American nation the most favoured in the world.
Aren't all your girls brought up to expect to be duchesses, and your men
presidents?"
"_I_ wasn't," snapped Beechy. "If there was a duke anywhere around,
Mamma would take him, if she had to snatch him out of my mouth. What are
English girls brought up to expect?"
"Hope for, not expect," I corrected her. "Any leavings there are in the
way of marquesses or earls; or if none, a mere bishop or a C. B."
"What's a C. B.?" asked Mrs. Kidder anxiously.
"A Companion of the Bath."
"My goodness! Whose bath?"
"The Bath of Royalty. We say it with a capital B."
"My! How awkward for your King. And what was done about it when you had
only a Queen on the throne?"
"You must inquire of the chamberlains," I replied. "But about that trip
of ours. The--er--my car is in a garage not far away, and it can be
ready when--"
"Oh, I hope it's a _red_ car, with your coat of arms on it. I do so
admire red for an automobile. We could all fix ourselves up in red
cloaks and hats to match, and make ourselves look awfully swell--"
"Everybody'd call us 'The Crimson Ramblers,' or 'The Scarlet Runners,'
or something else horrid," tittered that precocious child Beechy.
"It isn't red, it's grey," Terry managed hastily to interpolate; which
settled one burning question, the first which had been settled or seemed
likely to be settled at our present rate of progress.
"If you are keen on starting--" I essayed again, hope triumphing over
experience.
"Yes, I'm just looking forward to that start," Mrs. Kidder caught me up.
"We _shall_ make a sensation. We're neighbours of yours, you know. We're
at the Cap Martin Hotel. Isn't it perfectly lovely there, with that big
garden, the woods and all? When we were coming to the Riviera, I told
the man at Cook's that we wanted to go to the grandest hotel there was,
where we could feel we were getting our money's worth; and he said all
the kings and princes, and queens and princesses went to the Cap Martin,
so--"
"We thought it might be good enough for us," capped Beechy.
"It's as full of royalties, as--as--"
"As a pack of cards," I suggested.
"And some of them have splendid automobiles. I've been envying them; and
only this morning I was saying to my little girl, what a lot of nice
things there are that women and children can't do, travelling
alone--automobiling for one. Then, when I came on that advertisement of
yours, I just _screamed_. It did seem as if the Hand of Providence must
have been pointing it out. And it was so funny your home being on the
Cap, too, within ten minutes' walk of our hotel. I'm sure it was
_meant_, aren't you?"
"Absolutely certain," I responded, with a glance at Terry, who was not
showing himself off to any advantage in this scene although he ought to
have been the leading actor. He did nothing but raise his eyebrows when
he thought that no one was looking, or tug at his moustache most
imprudently when somebody was. Or else he handed the cakes to Miss
Destrey, and forgot to offer them to her far more important relatives.
"I'm so sure of it," I went on, "that I think we had better arrange--"
"Yes, indeed. Of course your ch--Mr. Barrymore (or did I hear you say
Terrymore?) is a very experienced driver? We've never been in an
automobile yet, any of us, and I'm afraid, though it will be perfectly
lovely as soon as we're used to it, that we may be a little scary at
first. So it would be nice to know for sure that the driver understood
how to act in any emergency. I should _hate_ to be killed in an
automobile. It would be such--such an _untidy_ death to die, judging
from what you read in the papers sometimes."
"I should prefer it, myself," I said, "but that's a matter of taste, and
you may trust Terry--Mr. Barrymore. What he doesn't know about a
motor-car and its inner and outer workings isn't worth knowing. So when
we go--"
"Aunt K--I mean Kittie, don't you think we ought to go home to the
hotel?" asked Miss Destrey, who had scarcely spoken until now, except to