My Friend the Chauffeur
Miss Destrey, I've found you at last. Your cousin asked me to look for
you and bring you back as soon as possible. You are urgently wanted for
something, though what was not confided to me."
The Prince used to be troublesome when he first attached himself to our
party. If ever he happened to meet me in the big hall or the garden of
the hotel at Cap Martin, when neither Aunt Kathryn nor Beechy was with
me, he always made some pretext to talk and pay me stupid compliments,
though he would flee if my relations came in sight. After the trip
began, however, his manner was suddenly different, and he showed no more
desire for my society than I for his; therefore I was surprised by an
equally sudden change this morning. It was hardly to be defined in
words, but it was very noticeable. Even his way of looking at me was not
the same. At Cap Martin it used to be rather bold, as if I were the kind
of person who ought to be flattered by any attention from a Prince
Dalmar-Kalm. Later, if he glanced at me at all, it was with an odd
expression, as if he wished me to regret something, I really couldn't
imagine what. But now there was a sort of reverence in his gaze and
manner, as if I were a queen and he were one of my courtiers. As I'm not
a queen, and wouldn't care to have him for a courtier if I were, I
wasn't pleased when he attempted to keep at my side going down by the
narrow path up which Mr. Barrymore and I had walked together. He didn't
precisely thrust Mr. Barrymore out of the way, but seemed to take it for
granted, as it were by right of his rank, that it was for him, not the
others to walk beside me.
I resented this, for to my mind it is horribly caddish for a person to
snub another not his equal in fortune; and as Mr. Barrymore never pushes
himself forward when people behave as if he were their inferior, I
determined to show unmistakably which man I valued more. Consequently,
when the Prince persisted in keeping at my shoulder, I turned and talked
over it to Mr. Barrymore following behind. But on the terrace level with
the hotel he had to leave us, for the automobile was to be shipped on
board a cargo-boat that sailed for Varenna some time before ours.
"Why are you always unkind to me? Have I been so unfortunate as to vex
you in any way?" asked the Prince, when we were alone.
"I am neither kind nor unkind," I replied in a practical, dry sort of
tone. "I am going in now to see why they want me."
"Please don't be in such a hurry," said the Prince. "Perhaps I made Miss
Beechy's message too urgent, for I had seen you with the chauffeur, and
I could not bear that you should be alone with him."
"It is stupid to speak of Mr. Barrymore as the chauffeur," I exclaimed
in a rage. "And it's not your affair Prince, to concern yourself with my
actions."
With that I darted into the long corridor that opens from the terrace,
and left him furiously tugging at his moustache.
"Did you send the Prince to call me in, Beechy?" I asked, after I had
tapped at her door.
"I happened to see the Prince and have a little talk with him in the
garden a few minutes ago," said she, "and I told him if he saw you he
might say we'd be glad if you'd come. Mamma's in such a stew finishing
her packing, and it would be nice if you'd help shut the dressing-bag."
Aunt Kathryn hadn't been herself, it seemed to me, during our two days
at Bellagio. This morning she had a headache, and though I'd hoped that
she would walk down to the boat with the Prince, she decided to take the
hotel omnibus, so I was pestered with him once more. Beechy and Sir
Ralph were having an argument of some sort (in which I heard that funny
nickname "the Chauffeulier" occur several times), and as Mr. Barrymore
had gone ahead with the car and our luggage, the Prince kept with me all
the way through the terraced garden, then down the quaint street of
steps past the bright-coloured silk-shops, to the crowded little quay. I
should have thought that after my last words he would have avoided me,
but apparently he hadn't understood that he was being snubbed. He even
put himself out to be nice to the black dog from Airole, which is my
shadow now, and detests the Prince as openly as he secretly detests it.
It was scarcely half an hour's sail to Varenna, and ten minutes after
landing there, we were in the car, bowling smoothly along a charming
road close by the side of Lecco, the eastern arm of the triple lake of
Como.
For a time we ran opposite the promontory of Bellagio, with the white
crescent of the Villa Serbelloni conspicuous on the darkly wooded
hillside. Near us was an electric railway which burrowed into tunnels,
as did our own road now and then, to save itself from extinction in a
wall of rock. As we went on, we found the scenery of Lecco more wild and
rugged than that of Como with its many villas, each one of which might
have been Claude Melnotte's. Villages were sparsely scattered on the
sides of high, sheer mountains which reared their bared shoulders up to
a sky of pure ultramarine, but Lecco itself was big and not picturesque,
taking an air of up-to-date importance from the railway station which
connects this magic land with the rest of Italy.
"I shouldn't care to stop in this town," said Beechy, when Mr. Barrymore
slowed down before an imposing glass-fronted hotel with gorgeous
ornamentations of iron and a wonderful gateway. "After what we've come
from, Lecco _does_ look unromantic and prosaic, though I daresay this
hotel is nice and will give us a good lunch."
"Nevertheless it's the _Promessi Sposi_ country," answered Mr.
Barrymore.
"What's that?" asked Beechy and Aunt Kathryn together. But I knew; for
in the garret at home there's an old, old copy of "The Betrothed," which
is Manzoni's _I Promessi Sposi_ in English, and I found and read it when
I was a small girl. It was very long, and perhaps I should find it a
little dull now though I hope not, for I loved it then, reading in
delicious secrecy and stealth, because the Sisterhood doesn't allow
youthful pupils to batten on love stories, no matter how old-fashioned.
I hadn't thought of the book for years; but evidently its story had been
lying all this time carefully put away in a parcel, gathering dust on
some forgotten shelf in my brain, for down it tumbled at the mention of
the name. As Mr. Barrymore explained to Aunt Kathryn that this was the
country of _I Promessi Sposi_ because the scenes of Manzoni's romance
had been laid in the neighbourhood, I could see as plainly as if they
lay before my eyes the quaint woodcuts representing the beautiful
heroine, Lucia, her lover, Renzo, and the wicked Prince Innominato.
Nevertheless I took some credit to myself for remembering the old book
so well, and fancied that there weren't many other travellers nowadays
who would have it. But pride usually goes before a fall, as hard-hearted
nurses tell vain little girls who have come to grief in their prettiest
dresses; and at lunch it appeared that the humblest, most youthful
waiter at Lecco knew more about the classic romance of the country than
I did. Indeed, not a character in the book that wasn't well represented
in a picture on the wall or a painted post-card, and all seemed at
least as real to the people of Lecco as any of their modern
fellow-citizens.
The landlord was so shocked at the idea of our going on without driving
a few kilometres to Acquate, the village where Renzo and Lucia had
lived, and visiting the wayside shrine where Don Roderigo accosted
Lucia, that Aunt Kathryn was fired with a desire to go, though the
Prince (who had come the same way we had) would have dissuaded her by
saying there was nothing worth seeing. "I believe you don't approve of
stories about wicked Princes like Innominato," said Beechy, "and that's
why you don't want us to go. You're afraid we'll get suspicious if we
know too much about them." After that speech the Prince didn't object
any more, and even went with us in his car, when we had rounded off our
lunch with the Robiolo cheese of the country.
It was a short drive to Lucia's village; we could have walked in less
than an hour, but that wouldn't have pleased Aunt Kathryn.
Appropriately, we passed a statue of Manzoni on the way--a delightful
Manzoni seated comfortably on a monument (with sculptured medallions
from scenes in his books) almost within sight of the road to Acquate,
and quite within sight of Monte Resegno, where the castle of wicked
Innominato still stands. Then no sooner had we turned into the narrow
road leading up to the little mountain hamlet than our intentions became
the property of every passer-by, every peasant, every worker from the
wire factories.
"_I Promessi Sposi_," they would say to each other in a matter-of-course
way, with an accompanying nod that settled our destination without a
loophole of doubt.
In Acquate itself, a tiny but picturesque old village (draped with
wistaria from end to end, as if it were _en fete_), everything was
reminiscent and commemorative of the romance that had made its fame.
Here was Via Cristoforo; there Via Renzo; while naturally Via Lucia led
us up to the ancient grey _osteria_ where the virtuous heroine was born
and lived. We went in, of course, and Sir Ralph ordered red wine of the
country, to give us an excuse to sit and stare at the coloured
lithographs and statuettes of the lovers, and to peep into the really
beautiful old kitchen with the ruddy gleams of copper in its dusky
shadows, its bright bits of painted china, its pretty window and huge
fireplace.
On a shelf close by the fire sat a cat, and I attempted to stroke it,
for it looked old enough and important enough to have belonged to Lucia
herself. But I might have known that it would not suffer my caresses,
for it's nearly always so with foreign cats and dogs, I find. The lack
of confidence in their own attractions which they show is as pathetic as
that of a neglected wife; they never seem to think of themselves as
pets.
Aunt Kathryn would persist in talking of Innominato as "Abominato"
(which was after all more appropriate), and the generous display of
Lucia's charms in the pictures caused her basely to doubt that most
virtuous maiden's genuine merit. "If the girl hadn't worn such dresses,
they wouldn't have painted her in them," she argued. "If she _did_ wear
them, she was a minx who got no more than she might have expected,
prancing about lonely mountain roads in such shameless things. And I
don't want a piece of wood from the shutter of her bedroom to take away
with me. I should be mortified to tell any ladies in Denver what it was;
and what's the good of carting souvenirs of your travels around with
you, if you can't tell people about them?"
We got back to our lakeside hotel sooner than we had thought, and the
landlord prayed us to see one more of Lecco's great sights. "It is not
as if I asked you to go out of your way to look at some fine old ruin or
a beautiful view," he pleaded. "You have seen many such on your journey,
and you will see many more; but this thing to which I would send you is
unique. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world; and to go
will take you five minutes."
This excited Aunt Kathryn's curiosity, but when she heard that "it" was
only a wonderful model of the cathedral at Milan, exact in every
smallest detail and made by one man, she thought that she would seize
the opportunity of lying down while the others went, and be fresh for
our start, in an hour's time.
The idea of a model in wood of such a masterpiece as the Milan Cathedral
didn't particularly recommend itself to me; but when we had arrived at a
curiosity shop, and been ushered into a huge inner room, I suddenly
changed my mind, for what I saw there was wonderful--as wonderful in its
way as the great Cathedral itself.