BEHIND THE SCENES.
THREE days later, Paul and his companion turned their backs on Mentone en route for England. Scallywag as he was, Paul had so far succeeded in interesting the little world of the Rives d’Or that Mme. Ceriolo and Nea Blair, and Isabel Boyton and her mamma, and even the great Armitage himself — the leader of the coterie — came down to the station to see him off. Armitage thought it was always well to fall in with the general opinion of society upon anybody or anything. But just before they bade their last adieus at the barrier, a tidy little Frenchwoman in a plain black dress pushed her way to the front with a bouquet in her hand of prodigious dimensions. The Ceriolo recognized her in a moment again. It was that compromising little lady’s maid at the Iles Britanniques.
“Comment, c’est vous, Mlle. Clarice!” Paul cried, taking her hand with perfect empressement, though he blushed a little before the faces of all his fine acquaintances. “How kind of you to come and see me off! I called last night at your hotel, but they told me you were engaged and couldn’t see me.”
“Justement, je faisais la coiffure de Madame,” Mlle. Clarice answered, unabashed by the presence of the Ceriolo and so much good society. “But, cher M. Paul, I couldn’t let you go and leave Mentone sans vous serrer la main — moi qui vous ai connu quand vous étiez tout petit, tout petit, tout petit — mais tout petit comme ça, monsieur. And I do myself the pleasure of bringing you a bouquet for cette chère maman. You will make her my compliments, cette chère maman. Tell her it has been so delightful to see you again. It has recalled those so happy days at Hillborough.”
Paul took the big bouquet without any display of? mauvaise honte, and thanked the voluble little Mile. Clarice for it in French as fluent almost as her own. Mlle. Clarice had tears in her eyes. “And to hear you talk that beautiful language,” she cried, “cette belle langue que je vous ai enseignée moi-même — ah, que c’est charmant!” She stooped forward irresistibly, and kissed him on both cheeks. Mlle. Clarice was forty, but plump and well-preserved. Paul accepted the kisses with a very good grace, as well as the two hands, with which she bid him farewell. “And now I must run back,” she said, “I must run back this minute. Madame m’attend — elle s’empatiente tant, Madame!” And with another good kiss and two shakes of the hand she was gone; and Paul was left standing alone beside the barrier.
“What a strange creature!” Mme. Ceriolo cried, putting up those long-handled tortoiseshell eyeglasses of hers and following the impressionable Frenchwoman with her stony glance as she left the station. “Who is she, Mr. Gascoyne, and how on earth did you ever come to know her?”
“She’s an old friend of my mother’s,” Paul answered once more, blurting out the whole simple truth; “and she taught me French at Hillborough when I was a little chap, for she was lady’s maid at a house where my father was coachman.” And then, without waiting to observe the effect of this painful Parthian shot, delivered trembling, he raised his hat, and bidding a comprehensive good-by to all, at once took refuge with Thistleton behind the passengers’ barrier.
“Goodness gracious!” Mme. Ceriolo cried, looking round with an astonished air of surprise to Armitage; “did you ever in your life see anything so funny? One would have thought the woman would have had good feeling and good sense enough not to inflict herself upon him in the present company. She may have been a friend of his mother’s, of course, and all that sort of thing; but if she wanted to see him, she should have gone to his hotel and seen him quietly. She ought to remember that now he’s heir to a baronetcy and a member of a university, and admitted as such into good society.” For since Mentone had decided upon adopting Paul, and had therefore backed him up for every possible virtue, it had been madame’s cue to insist most strenuously upon the genealogical fact that wherever a person of noble race may happen to be born, or whatever position he may happen to fill, he retains his sixteen quarters of nobility intact for all that. This was one for Paul, and two for Mme. Ceriolo.
“Why, I thought it was so nice of her,” Nea objected with her simple English tenderheartedness, “to come down and see him off so simply before us all, and to bring him those flowers, and, in the simplicity of her heart, to fall on his neck and kiss him openly. Her eyes were quite full of tears, too. I’m sure, Mme. Ceriolo, she’s very fond of him.”
“Nea, my dear,” Mme. Ceriolo remarked severely, with the precise smile of the British matron, “your views are really quite revolutionary. There should be natural lines between the various classes. People mustn’t all get mixed up promiscuously. Even if she liked him, she shouldn’t let her feelings get the better of her. She should always remember to keep her proper place, no matter what her private sentiments may prompt her to.”
And, indeed, in Mme. Ceriolo’s family they managed these things a great deal better.
For, as Nea and Mme. Ceriolo were coming to Mentone that very autumn, a little episode had occurred in a coffee room at Marseilles which may be here related, as flashing a ray of incidental light on the character of Mme. Ceriolo’s aristocratic antecedents.
They reached Marseilles late in the evening, and drove at once to the Hotel du Louvre — it was part of madame’s cue that she knew the best and most luxurious hotel at every town in Europe — where they went down in their traveling dress to the restaurant for supper. As they entered, they found they had the room to themselves, and an obsequious waiter, in an irreproachable white tie and with a spotless napkin hanging gracefully on his arm, motioned them over without a word to a table near the fireplace. For the indivisible moment of time while they took their seats an observant spectator might just have noted a flash of recognition in madame’s eyes, and an answering flash that twinkled silently in the obsequious waiter’s. But neither spoke a word of any sort to the other, save in the way of business. Madame took the carte that the waiter handed her with a stifled yawn, and ordered an omelette and a bottle of Beaujolais with the same careless air with which she would have ordered it from any other young man in a similar position. —
At the end of the supper, however, she sent Nea up to get her necessaries for the night unpacked, and waited down herself to ask a few questions, to make quite sure, she said, about the trains to-morrow.
As soon as Nea had left the room, the obsequious waiter approached a little nearer, and, still with his unequivocally respectful air and his spotless napkin hanging gracefully over his arm, stood evidently awaiting Mme. Ceriolo’s orders.
Madame eyed him a moment with a perfect calm through those aristocratic glasses, and then observed quietly, “Tiens, c’est toi” without moving at all from the position she occupied when Nea left her.
“Yes, it’s me, Polly,” the irreproachable waiter answered, in his native English, straight and stiff as ever.
“I thought you were going to make the season at Pau this winter,” Mme. Ceriolo remarked in an arid tone of voice, a little sour about the upper notes, and crumbling her bread with one hand uneasily.
“I was,” the irreproachable waiter replied, without moving a muscle, “but I aint now. The governor and me had a blow-up about terms. So I gave him the slip, and engaged on here — extra hand for the Riviera season.”
“You made the summer at Scheveningen, I think?” Mme. Ceriolo remarked languidly, as one discusses the affairs of an indifferent acquaintance.
The irreproachable waiter bowed his stiff, official bow.
“At the Hôtel des Anglais,” he answered, in his unvarying hotel tone.
“Good business?”
“No; beastly. All Dutch and German. Them gentlemen button up their pockets too tight. If it hadn’t been for a family or two of English and American dropping in casual, the tips wouldn’t so much as have paid for my washing. Dickeys and cuffs come dear at Scheveningen.”
There was a slight pause. Then Mme. Ceriolo spoke again.
“Tom.”
“Yes, Polly.”
“Where’s Karl?”
“With a variety troup at Berlin, when I last heard from him.”
“Doing well?”
“Pretty well, I believe. Feathering his nest. But banjos aint anything like what they’d used to be. The line’s overstocked, that’s the long and the short of it.”
“How’s mother?” Mme. Ceriolo asked carelessly.
“Drunk,” the irreproachable waiter responded, re-arranging his tie. “Drunk, as usual.”
“Still at the Dials?”
The waiter nodded. “She can’t go far from dear old Drury,” he answered vaguely.
“Well, I love the Lane myself,” Mme. Ceriolo responded. “It’s a rare old place. I never was happier, Tom, in all my life, than in the days when I was on, long ago, in the pantomime.”
“You’re on the quiet, now, I see,” the waiter remarked, with a respectful inclination — in case anybody should happen to see him through the glass doors that opened on to the corridor.
Mme. Ceriolo bent her head. “On the strict quiet,” she responded coldly.
“Governess?”
“Well, pretty much that sort of thing, you know. Companion. Chaperon.”
“To an English young lady, I gathered?”
“Yes. Clergyman’s daughter.”
The waiter’s face almost relaxed into a broad smile. “Well, you always were a clever one, Polly!” he exclaimed, delighted.
Mme. Ceriolo drew herself up very stiff, as one who prefers to discourage levity in the lower classes. “I hope I know how to behave myself in whatever society I may happen to be placed,” she answered chillily.
“You do,” the waiter replied. “You’re a rare one at that. I wish I could make as much out of the French and German as you and Karl do. Mine’s all thrown away — all waiters speak the lot. Say, though: what are you now — I mean in the way of name and nation?”
“Toujours Ceriolo” madame answered, with a quiet smile. “After all, it’s safer. If anybody who knew you before comes up and calls you by a different name when you’ve taken an alias, how awfully awkward! And really, if it comes to that, Ceriolo’s as good a name for a person to own as any I could invent. It’s suggestive of anything on earth but organ grinding.”
For, in truth, madame’s father, the reputed count, had really earned a precarious livelihood by the production of sweet music on that despised instrument.
The irreproachable waiter smiled an immaculate smile. “And are you Italian or what?” he asked, always respectful.
“Tyrolese,” madame answered carelessly: “it’s better so. Widow of a count in the Austrian service. Mother an English woman — which is true for once, you see — brought up in Vienna in the English Church by special agreement — to suit the clergyman.”
“And how much are you going to stand me for my discreet silence?” the waiter asked, coming half a step nearer, and assuming a less agreeable tone of countenance.
Madame pulled out ten francs from her dainty purse, and laid the coin gingerly on the edge of the table.
“Won’t do,” the waiter observed, shaking his head solemnly. “Not enough by a long way. Won’t do at all When an affectionate brother meets his sister again, whom he hasn’t seen for more’n a twelvemonth — and keeps her secrets — he can’t be put off with half a napoleon. No, no, Polly; you must stand me a sovereign.”
“It’s an imposition,” Mme. Ceriolo remarked, growing very red in the face, but remembering even so to preserve her blandest tone, and drawing the sum in question unwillingly from her pocket, “Tom, I call it a perfect imposition.”
“All right, my angel,” the waiter replied calmly, slipping the coin at once into his pocket. “I’ve done as much more’n once before for you, Polly, when you were hard up; and, after all, it aint often we meet now, is it, my chicken?”
“You’re rude and coarse,” Mme. Ceriolo answered, rising to go. “I wonder you dare address me in such vulgar language.”
“Well, considering you’re a countess, it is rather cheeky,” the waiter replied, smiling, but still with the imperturbable attitude of the well-bred servant. “You see, Polly, we aint all like you. I wish we were! We aint all learnt to speak the Queen’s English with ease and correctness from the elocution master at Drury.” —
At that moment, before he could reveal any further items of domestic history, a head appeared at the door, and the waiter, without altering a shade of his tone, continued respectfully in fluent French, “Très bien, madame. The omnibus will be here to take down your luggage to the 11.40.”
All which will suggest to the intelligent reader’s mind the fact that in Mme. Ceriolo’s family the distinctions of rank were duly observed, and that no member of that noble and well-bred house ever allowed his feelings of affection or of contempt, or anger or of laughter, to get the better at any time of his sober judgment.
But this had happened three months before the moment when Paul Gascoyne and Charlie Thistleton were seen out of the station, away down at Mentone, by Mlle. Clarice, the lady’s maid.