THE COMMON PUMP IN ACTION.
THE square party of pedestrians turned away along the sea-front, and then, taking the main road toward Nice, struck off for the basking, olive-covered promontory of Cap Martin. Thistleton led the way with the Pennsylvanian heiress; Paul and Armitage followed more slowly at a little distance. Isabel Boyton had arranged this order of malice prepense; for she was a mischievous girl, like most of her countrywomen, and, though not inquisitive enough herself to assist in the process of pumping Paul, she was by no means averse to see that application of social hydraulics put into practice for the general benefit by a third person.
“Queer sort of body, that little Mme. Ceriolo!” Armitage began as soon as they were out of earshot. He was one of that large class of people who can seldom talk about anything on earth except some other human being. Personalities largely outweigh generalities in their conversation. With all the world to choose from, with sun, moon, and stars, and heavenly bodies, sea, and land, and air, and ether, stone, and soil, and plant, and animal, history and science, and art and letters, to form the text of a possible talk, they can find nothing to discuss except some petty detail in the trivial life of some other fellow-creature. That Mrs. Jones has quarrelled with Mrs. Brown, or that Smith has been blackballed at the Cheyne Row Club, seems to them a far more important and interesting fact than an eruption of Vesuvius or a cataclysm at St. Petersburg.
“She seems good-natured,” Paul answered, without profoundly gauging the depths of the subject. It was the most charitable thing he could find in his heart to say about her.
“Oh, good-natured enough, no doubt,” Armitage went on confidentially. “But what a curious person for a man of the world to think of intrusting the care of his daughter to!”
“Perhaps Mr. Blair’s not a man of the world,” the younger speaker replied, with rare sagacity for his age. “Country parsons are often very simple-minded people.”
“He must be precious simple-minded if he took the Ceriolo for anything but what she is,” Armitage continued, sneering. “A brazen-faced specimen of the cosmopolitan adventuress, if ever there was one. But how clever, too! how immensely clever! Ton my soul, I admire her ingenuity! Having accepted a situation as guardian of the morals of an English young lady, she rises to the full height of her post with astonishing success and astonishing dignity. Her simulation of virtue’s something quite sublime in its own way. Why, you’d hardly believe it; I attempted to flirt with her in the mildest possible manner — I, who am the discreetest and least compromising of mankind — a mountain of prudence — and the British indignation and icy coldness with which she repelled my gentle advances was truly edifying. No Belgravian mamma that ever lived could have done it more beautifully.”
“Perhaps she didn’t care for you,” Paul suggested dryly. “Even a born flirt doesn’t want to flirt with everybody indiscriminately.”
“Perhaps that may be it,” Armitage echoed, somewhat crestfallen. He was over thirty, and he took it ill that a young fellow barely of age as yet should thus calmly snub his pretensions to the rôle of lady-killer. “But, at any rate, her respectability is beyond reproach. Being cast for her part by pure force of circumstances, she accepts the situation and plays it to perfection.”
“She’s quite right to respect Miss Blair’s youth and innocence,” Paul answered quietly. “As far as that goes, I think all the better of her for it. Even if she is an adventuress, as you say, she’s bound, as things stand, to do the very best she can for her present employer.”
“Oh, of course — of course. You speak like a book, a nice little Sunday-school book, with a picture on the cover. But, from the other point of view, you know, the thing’s so ludicrous. Her careful assumption of the highest morality’s so transparently absurd. Whenever she delivers herself of one of her little copy-book platitudes, I always feel inclined to put my tongue in my cheek and wink gently. There’s no doubt about it, though, she’s devilish clever. She can talk every blessed European language with equal ease. She seems, like the famous prima donna in the story, to have swindled in every civilized country of the world — and also in Germany.”
Paul smiled. —
“Her French is certainly admirable,” he said. “Her accent’s so good. She speaks like a Parisian.”
Armitage darted a hasty glance at him sideways. So the fellow pretended to be a judge of French accents, did he? That was certainly remarkable. A scallywag on accent! “But her English, too,” he persisted once more; “what’s still odder is her English. She rolls her rs a little, to be sure, and she slurs her ths; that’s only natural; but what admirable fluency and what perfect command she has of even our slang and our stock quotations? She can pun and jest and bandy chaff in English, French, Italian, and German. She can bully a cabman or browbeat a landlord in ten languages. If her name’s really Ceriolo — which Heaven only knows — the way she’s learnt English alone is something to my mind truly miraculous.”
“Her mother was English, she says,” Paul suggested in his simplicity. “A clergyman’s daughter, she told me; a dean something or other.”
The older hand laughed at him to his face. “Do you really mean to say,” he cried with an amused air, “you believe all that? Oh, what charming simplicity! Why, you might as well believe in the countess’s coronet, and the family legend, and the late lamented count who was killed at the head of his noble troop of Austrain sympathizers by an infuriated Turk in the war in Servia. No, no, my dear fellow; don’t you see how cleverly all that’s been arranged? Madame has to deal with a respected papa who happens to be an English clergyman. Whatever or whoever the Ceriolo may be, she thoroughly understands our English philistinism and our English prejudices. The respected papa won’t intrust his precious budding daughter to anybody who’s not a highly respectable married woman and a member of the Church of England as by law established. Very well, then; we can easily manage that for you; madame’s mamma was an English lady — Anglican of course — yes, and clerical too — a dean’s daughter; and madame herself, though born at the ancestral Schloss in the Austrian Tyrol, was brought up by agreement in her mother’s religion. Could anything be simpler, more natural, or more convincing? And how very well planned! French and German with the Paris accent and the Viennese culture, and yet all the advantages of an English lady’s care and the precise and particular type of Christendom exactly adapted to the needs and requirements of a country clergyman’s daughter! By George, she’s deep — extremely deep. But if it were a Frenchwoman of clerical sympathies she had to deal with, I bet you she’d be a Parisian and a fervent Catholic. Not too devote, you know, nor austerely rigorous, but as Catholic as a dame du monde ought to be.”
Paul shifted a little uncomfortably in his pea-jacket. This cynic had clearly devoted all his energies to the study and comprehension of his fellow-creatures, and he read them, it seemed, a trifle too easily In such a man’s hands, who was safe for a moment? Paul was afraid what the fellow might screw and worm out of him.
“The funniest thing of all.” Armitage went on, after a short pause, “is that she speaks all languages well, but none exactly like a born native. Her English’s splendid; but her rs and ths are a trifle German. Her French is good; but her us and her eus are a trifle English. Her German’s prodigious; but her chs and her final gs are scarcely Hanoverian. And she can’t talk in any one of those languages for five minutes at a stretch without helping herself out now and again quite naturally by a word from another.”
“Perhaps,” Paul said, “she lived as a child in all three countries.”
“Perhaps so,” Annitage repeated. “But there’s no evidence. However, I mean in my case to clear up her history. I was writing last night to a friend of mine, a parson, who knows Mr. Blair — he’s the vicar of Hipsley near Hillborough, in Surrey—” he eyed his man close to see the effect upon him—” and I’ve asked him to find out all he can about her.”
“Indeed!” Paul said, never showing surprise by a muscle of his face. “I wonder you care to take so much pains about so unimportant a piece of intelligence.”
“Oh, for the girl’s sake, don’t you know,” Armitage added hastily. “Of course, she’s hardly a proper person to have charge of a young lady alone on the Continent. Besides, one naturally likes to know what sort of company one’s committing oneself to, doesn’t one?”
“I don’t think it much matters, as long as they’re decent people,” Paul answered evasively.
“Ah, but that’s just the question at issue,” Armitage went on, trying another tack. “My manat Hillborough will hunt it all up. He’s a capital hand at tracking people down. He ought to have been a detective. By the way, I fancy I heard Miss Blair say you came yourself from somewhere near Hillborough.”
“I came from Hillborough town,” Paul answered shortly. “Then you know Rimington, of course.”
“No, I’ve never met him.”
“Dear me, how odd! He’s a vicar at Hipsley. And he’s so very much répandu, as the French say. Spread about at every tea-fight and lunch and garden-party for twenty miles everywhere around Hillborough.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, really. You must have seen him. Though perhaps, you took him for a layman or a trainer’s assistant. A bulldoggy-looking parson — a regular slogger, with a taste for loud tweeds and a most unclerical necktie.”
“Oh, I know him well by sight,” Paul answered in haste. “I only meant I’d never spoken to him.”
Armitage altered the venue once more. “I’ve been down in that part of the world myself,” he went on reflectively, “and I don’t remember to have met any Gascoynes there.”
“Most likely not,” Paul answered with energy.
“You spell your name like the Pembrokeshire people,” his persecutor went on. “It’s a very rare way. Do you happen to be related to them?”
Thus brought to bay, Paul answered “Yes,” with a very great effort, and then relapsed into silence.
But Armitage was not going to let him off so cheap. “You don’t mean to say so!” he exclaimed, with real interest, for the scent was growing very warm now. “Then what relation are you to the present baronet?”
There was no escape from it any longer. Paul gasped for breath. “Mr. Armitage,” he said, turning suddenly upon him, like a hunted creature at bay, “you’ve no right to question a stranger like this. My private affairs are my private affairs. I refuse to answer. I decline to say what relation I am to the present Sir Emery.”
He slipped out the words without weighing them well. Armitage leapt upon them with the true joy of the chase. “The present Sir Emery!” he exclaimed with much irony. “Why, that’s a queer thing to say. You must be very ill-informed as to the history of your own family, it seems, Gascoyne. I should be sorry to pit my information against yours; but I was under the impression, shared I believe by society at large, that the late Sir Emery was the last of the name, and that the property in Pembrokeshire had gone to a distant cousin, who’s not a baronet at all, Mrs. Newton tells me.”
No man can stand having his veracity impugned by such an obvious innuendo of falsehood as that. Paul Gascoyne drew a deep breath once more and answered warmly, “There you have been misinformed. It’s not my business to set you right. You can correct your mistake by looking in a peerage. But if you must know, the present baronet is my father, Sir Emery Gascoyne, and he lives at Hillborough.”
Armitage gazed at the flushed young face and angry eyes in blank astonishment. Apparently, the fellow believed what he said; but how absurd, how incredible! This scallywag the heir to the Gascoyne baronetcy and the Pembrokeshire estates! What blunder could he have made? What error of identity? What mistake of fact? What confusion of persons?
However, being a very politic young man, and having now obtained all the information he wanted or was likely to get, he hastened to answer, in his most soothing tones, “Dear me! I must have been misinformed. I fancied I’d heard so. A very great family, the Gascoynes of Pembrokeshire. I stopped once down at — at your uncle’s place,” and he glanced inquiringly at Paul, who fronted him angrily; “what a magnificent house and so well kept, too, with such lovely gardens!”
“Old Sir Emery was not my uncle,” Paul answered curtly. “I never saw him. But the subject’s one I don’t care to talk about.”
At the top of the hill they changed partners. Armitage, all agog with his news, took Isabel Boyton ahead quickly. “Well, I’ve found out who he is,” he cried, with triumph in his face; “or, at least, what he calls himself. Now’s your chance for that English title, after all, Miss Boyton. He tells me his father’s a real live baronet.”
“He’s quite nice,” Isabel answered, gravely digesting the news, “and I don’t know that he mightn’t fit the place. I hook on to him, Mr. Armitage.”
The Englishman smiled at her credulous simplicity. A baronet’s son! That threadbare scallywag!
They returned by the inland road in varying moods. Paul, hot with the thought that that horrid secret would now get abroad all over Mentone and make him the laughing-stock of the Promenade du Midi, went home alone to the Hôtel Continental. Armitage burst radiant into the Jardin Public, big with his latest item of gossip.
He found Mme. Ceriolo equally excited with her own discovery.
“Just fancy,” she said, as he sat down by her side; “figurezvous, mon ami, you saw that woman Mr. Gascoyne bowed to the moment he left us? Well, who in the world do you suppose she is? A lady’s maid — a lady’s maid at the Iles Britanniques! And he raised his hat to her exactly like an equal!”
“And who do you think he is himself?” Armitage cried, all eagerness. “You’ll never guess. It’s too absurd. He says his father’s a British baronet.”
“Oh, no,” Nea Blair exclaimed, flushing hot with a burst of sympathetic shame. “He never said that! He told me quite the contrary. It can’t be possible.”
“He did, honor bright, I give you my word for it,” Armitage answered, exploding. “He’s the heir to the finest estate in all South Wales, and he’s the last descendant of an ancient and noble family that came over, like the Slys, with Richard the Conqueror.”
“I don’t believe it,” Nea exclaimed stoutly; meaning, not that she disbelieved Paul, but disbelieved the report of his ever having said so.
“No more do I, Miss Blair, if you ask my honest opinion,” Armitage answered, laughing. “I expect his uncle’s the same sort of baronet as the unfortunate nobleman who lately languished so long in Portland Prison.”
“There’s a good deal of doubt about baronetcies, I believe,” Mme. Ceriolo mused to herself aloud. “They’re not so regularly looked into as peerages. And I’m given to understand there are a great many baronets knocking about loose on the world at present, who have no more claim to be called Sir Somebody So-and-so, than I have to be called — well, the Queen of England.”
Very dangerous ground for you, Mme. Ceriolo!