CHAPTER II
AT HALF-PAST ten this morning we parted, the best of friends, and I dropped a good-bye kiss into the deep black gorge between the promontories of Beau's velvet forehead and plush nose.
We 'd had breakfast together, Miss Paget and I, to say nothing of the dog, and I felt rather cheerful. Of course I dreaded the Princess; but I always did like adventures, and it appeared to me distinctly an adventure to be a companion, even in misery. Besides, it was nice to have come away from Monsieur Charretier, and to feel that not only did he not know where I was, but that he was n't likely to find out. Poor me! I little guessed what an adventure on a grand scale I was in for. Already this morning seems a long time ago; a year at the Convent used to seem shorter.
I drove up to the hotel in the omnibus which was at the station, and asked at the office for the Princess Boriskoff. I said that I was Mademoiselle d'Angely, and would they please send word to the Princess, because she was expecting me.
It was a young assistant manager who received me, and he gave me a very queer, startled sort of look when I said this, as if I were a suspicious person, and he did n't quite know whether it would be better to answer me or call for help. "I have n't made a mistake, have I?" I asked, beginning to be anxious. "This is the hotel where the Princess is staying, is n't it?"
"She was staying here," the youth admitted. "But ⸺"
"Has she gone?"
"Not exactly."
"She must be either here or gone."
Again he regarded me with suspicion, as if he did not agree with my statement.
"Are you a relative of the Princess?" he inquired.
"No, I 'm engaged to be her companion."
"Oh! If that is all! But perhaps, in any case, it will be better to wait for the manager. He will be here presently. I do not like to take the responsibility."
"The responsibility of what?" I persisted, my heart beginning to feel like a patter of rain on a tin roof.
"Of telling you what has happened."
"If something has happened, I can't wait to hear it. I must know at once," I said, with visions of all sorts of horrid things: that the Princess had decided not to have a companion, and was going to disown me; that my cousin Madame Milvaine had somehow found out everything; that Monsieur Charretier had got on my track, and was here in advance waiting to pounce upon me.
"It is a thing which we do not want to have talked about in the hotel," the young man hesitated.
"I assure you I won't talk to any one. I don't know any one to talk to."
"It is very distressing, but the Princess Boriskoff died about four o'clock this morning, of heart failure."
"Oh!". . . I could not get out another word.
"These things are not liked in hotels, even when not contagious."
The assistant manager looked gloomily at me, as if I might be held responsible for the inconvenient event; but still I could not speak.
"Especially in the high season. It is being kept secret. That is the custom. In some days, or less, it will leak out, but not till the Princess has—been removed. You will kindly not mention it, mademoiselle. This is very bad for us."
No, I would kindly not mention it, but it was worse for me than for them. The Hotel Majestic Palace looked rich; very, very rich. It had heaps of splendid mirrors and curtains, and imitation Louis XVI. sofas, and everything that a hotel needs to make it happy and successful, while I had nothing in the world except what I stood up in, one fitted bag, one small box, and thirty-two francs. I did n't quite see, at first sight, what I was to do; but neither did the assistant manager see what that had to do with him.
Once I knew a girl who was an actress, and on tour in the country she nearly drowned herself one day. When the star heard of it, he said: "How should we have played to-night if you 'd been dead—without an understudy, too?"
At this moment I knew just how the girl must have felt when the star said that.
"I—I think I must stay here a day or two, until I can—arrange things," I managed to stammer. "Have you a small single room disengaged?"
"We have one or two small north rooms which are usually occupied by valets and maids," the young man informed me. "They are twelve francs a day."
"I 'll take one," I replied. And then I added anxiously: "Have any relatives of the Princess come?"
"None have come; and certainly none will come, as it would now be too late. Her death was very sudden. The Princess's maid knows what to do. She is an elderly woman, experienced. The suite occupied by Her Highness will be free to-morrow."
"Oh! And had she no friends here?"
"I do not think the Princess was a lady who made friends. She was very proud and considered herself above other people. Would you like to see your room, mademoiselle? I will send some one to take you up to it. It will be on the top floor."
I was in a mood not to care if it had been on the roof, or in the cellar. I hardly knew where I was going, as a few minutes later a still younger youth piloted me across a large square hall toward a lift; but I was vaguely conscious that a good many smart-looking people were sitting or standing about, and that they glanced at me as I went by. I hoped dimly that I did n't appear conspicuously pale and stricken.
Just in front of the lift door a tall woman was talking to a little man. There was an instant of delay while my guide and I waited for them to move, and before they realized that we were waiting.
"They say the poor thing is no worse than yesterday, however, my maid tells me "The lady had begun in a low, mysterious tone, but broke off suddenly when it dawned upon her that she was obstructing the way.
I knew instinctively who was the subject of the whispered conversation, and I could n't help fixing my eyes almost appealingly on the tall woman; for though she was middle-aged and not pretty, her voice was so nice and she looked so kind that I felt a longing to have her for a friend. She had probably been acquainted with Princess Boriskoff, I said to myself, or she would not be talking of her now, with bated breath, as a "poor thing."
Evidently the lady had been waiting for the lift to come down, for when my guide rang and it descended she took a step forward, giving a friendly little nod to her companion, and saying, "Well, I must go. I feel sure it 's true about her."
Then, instead of sailing ahead of me into the lift, as she had a perfect right to do, being much older and far more important than I, and the first comer as well, she hesitated with a pleasant half smile, as much as to say, "You 're a stranger. I give up my right to you."
"Oh, please!" I said, stepping aside to let her pass, which she did, making room for me to sit down beside her on the narrow plush-covered seat. But I did n't care to sit. I was so crushed, it seemed that, if once I sat down I should n't have courage to rise up again and wrestle with the difficulties of life.
The lady got out on the second floor, throwing back a kindly glance, as if she took a little interest in me, and wanted me to know it. I suppose it must have been because I was tired and nervous after a whole night without sleep that the shock I 'd just received was too much for me. Anyway, that kind glance made a lump rise in my throat, and the lump forced tears into my eyes. I looked down instantly, so that she should n't see them and think me an idiot, but I was afraid she did.
The young man who was taking me up to the top floor, and treating me rather nonchalantly because I was a North Roomer and a Twelve Francer, waved the lift boy aside to open the door himself for the lady; so that I knew she must be considered a person worth conciliating.
Shut up in my ten-by-six-foot room, I tried to compose myself and make plans; but to make plans on thirty-two francs, when you 've no home, and would be far from it even if you had one; when you 've nobody to help you, and would n't want to ask them if you had—is about as hard as to play the piano brilliantly without ever having taken a lesson. With Princess Boriskoff dead, with Pamela de Nesle sailing for New York to-morrow morning, and no other intimate friends rich enough to do anything for me, even if they were willing to help me fly in the face of Providence and Madame Milvaine, it did seem (as Pamela herself would say) as though I were rather "up against it."
The thought of Miss Paget suddenly jumped into my head, and the wish that, somehow, I had kept her up my sleeve as a last resort, in case she really were in earnest about her offer. But she had n't told me where she was going in Italy, and it would be of no use writing to one of her English addresses, as I could n't stop on where I was, waiting for an answer.
Altogether things were very bad with me.
After I had sat down and thought for a while, I rang, and asked for the housekeeper. A hint or two revealed that she was aware of what had happened, and, explaining that I was to have been Princess Boriskoff's companion, I said that I must see the Princess's maid. She must come to my room. I must have a talk with her.
Presently, after an interval which may have been meant to emphasize her dignity, appeared a pale, small Russian woman whose withered face was as tragic and remote from the warmth of daily life as that of the eldest Fate.
She could speak French, and we talked together. Yes, her mistress had died very suddenly, but she and the doctors had always known that it might happen so, at any moment. It was hard for me, but—what would you? Life was hard. It might have been that I would have found life hard with Her Highness. What was to be, would be. I must write to my friends. It was not in her power to do anything for me. Her Highness had left no instructions. These things happened. Well! one made the best of them. There was nothing more to say.
So we said nothing more, and the woman moved away silently, as if to funeral music, to prepare for her journey to Russia. I—went down to luncheon.
One always does go down to luncheon while one is still inclined to keep up appearances before oneself; but the restaurant was large and terribly magnificent, with a violent rose-coloured carpet, and curtains which made me, in my frightened pallor, with my pale yellow hair and my gray travelling dress, feel like a poor little underground celery-stalk flung into a sunlit strawberry-bed, amid a great humming of bees.
The vast rosy sea was thickly dotted with many small table-islands that glittered appetizingly with silver and glass; but I could not have afforded to acknowledge an appetite even if I 'd had one.
My conversation with the Russian woman had made me rather late. Most of the islands were inhabited, and as I was piloted past them by a haughty head waiter I heard people talking about golf, tennis, croquet, bridge, reminding me that I was in a place devoted to the pursuit of pleasure.
The most desirable islands were next the windows, therefore the one at which I dropped anchor (for I 'd changed from a celery-stalk into a little boat now) was exactly in the middle of the room, with no view save of faces and backs of heads.
One of the faces was that of the lady who had gone up with me in the lift; and now and then, from across the distance that separated us, I saw her glance at me. She sat alone at a table that had beautiful roses on it, and she read a book as she ate.
One ordered here á la carte: there was no déjeuner à prix fixe; and it took courage to tell a waiter who looked like a weary young duke that I would have consommé and bread, with nothing, no, nothing to follow.
Oh! the look he gave me, as if I had annexed the table under false pretences!
Suddenly the chorus of an American song ran with mocking echoes through my brain. I had heard Pamela sing it at the Convent:
The waiter roared it through the hall:
"We don't give bread with one fish-ball!
We-don't-give-bread with one fish-ba-a-ll!"
I half expected some such crushing protest, and it was only when the weary duke had turned his back, presumably to execute my order, that I sank into my chair with a sigh of relief after strain.
Just at that moment I met the eye of the lady of the lift, and when the waiter reappeared with a small cup, on a charger large enough to have upheld the head of John the Baptist, she looked again. In five minutes I had finished the consommé, and it became painful to linger. Rising, I made for the door, which seemed a mile away, and I did not lift my head in passing the table where the lady sat behind her roses. I heard a rustling as I went by, however, a crisp rustling like flower-leaves whispering in a breeze, or a woman's silk ruffles stroking each other, which followed me out into the hall.
Then the pleasant voice I had heard near the lift spoke behind me:
"Won't you have your coffee with me in the garden?"
I could hardly believe at first that it was for me the invitation was intended, but turning with a little start, I saw it repeated in a pair of gentle gray eyes set rather wide apart in a delicate, colourless face.
"Oh! thank you!" I hesitated. "I ⸺"
"Do forgive me," went on the lady, "but your face interested me this morning, and as we 're all rather curious about strangers—we idle ones here—I took the liberty of asking the manager who you were. He told me ⸺"
"About the Princess?" I asked, when she paused as if slightly embarrassed.
"He told me that you said you had come to Cannes to be her companion. He did n't tell me she was dead, poor woman, but—there are some things one knows by instinct, by intuition, are n't there? And then—I could n't help seeing, or perhaps only imagining, that you looked sad and worried. You are very young, and are here all alone, and so—I thought perhaps you would n't mind my speaking to you?"
"I 'm very grateful," I said, "for your interest. And it 's so good of you to ask me to have coffee with you." (I was almost sure, too, that she had hurried away in the midst of her luncheon to do this deed of kindness.)
"Perhaps, after all, you 'll come with me to my own sitting-room," she suggested. "We can talk more quietly there; and though the garden 's quite lovely, it 's rather too glaring at this time of day."
We went up in the lift together, and the moment she opened the door of her sitting-room I saw that she had contrived to make it look like herself. She talked only about her books and photographs and flowers until the coffee had come, and we seemed better acquainted. Then she told me that she was Lady Kilmarny—"Irish in every drop in her veins"; and presently set herself to draw me out.
I began by making up my mind not to pour forth all my troubles, lest she should think that I wanted to take advantage of her kindness and sponge upon her for help; but she was irresistible, as only a true Irishwoman can be, and the first thing I knew, I had emptied my heart of its worries.