THE WHODUNIT COLLECTION: British Murder Mysteries (15 Novels in One Volume)
Instead of feeling flattered, St. Christopher would have a right to be annoyed, and perhaps to punish. Recklessly I passed across the counter ten francs, and made the coveted saint mine. Then I darted out, just in time to meet Mr. Dane at the door of the restaurant.
"This is for you," I said. "It's to give you luck."
I pressed the coin into his hand, and he looked at it on his open palm. For an instant I was afraid he was going to make fun of it, and my superstition concerning it, which I couldn't quite deny if cross-questioned. But his smile didn't mean that.
"You've just bought this—to give to me?" he asked.
"Yes," I nodded.
"Why? Not because you want to 'pay me back' for asking you to lunch—or any such villainous thing, I hope, because—"
I shook my head. "I didn't think of that. I got it because I wanted to bring you luck."
Then he slipped the coin into an inside pocket of his coat. "Thank you," he said. "But didn't I tell you that you'd brought me something better than luck already?"
"What is better than luck?"
"An interest in life. And the privilege of being a brother."
Chapter XII
It would be a singularly hard-headed, cold-hearted person who could set out for Vaucluse without the smallest thrill; and hard heads and cold hearts don't "run in our family." As we spun away from the Hotel de l'Europe soon after two o'clock that afternoon I felt that I was largely composed of thrill. Cold as the wind had grown, the thrill kept me warm, mingling in my veins with ozone.
Inside the car the middle-aged honeymooners had an air of desperate resignation which the consciousness of doing their duty according to Baedeker gives to tourists. The tap was turned on in the newly invented heating-apparatus in the car floor, through which hot water from the radiator can be made to circulate; and I wondered, if this extreme measure were resorted to already, what would be left to do when we reached those high, white altitudes of which the chauffeur had been speaking. I prayed that Lady Turnour might not read in the papers about the "phenomenal fall of snow" in those regions, for if she did I was afraid that even Mr. Dane's magnetic powers of persuasion might fail to get her there. He might dangle Queen Margherita of Italy over her head in vain, if worst came to worst: for what are queens to the most inveterate tuft-hunters if the feet be cold? Yet now that "adventures" were vaguely prophesied, I felt I could not give up the promised gorges and mountains.
Out of Avignon we slid, past the old, old ramparts and the newer but impressive walls, and turned at the right into the Marseilles road. "Vaucluse!" said a kilometre-stone, and then another and another repeated that enchanted and enchanting word, as we flew onward between the Rhône and the Durance.
This was our own old way again, as far as the Pont de Bonpas; then our road wound to the northeast, away from the world we knew—I said to myself—and into a world of romance, a world created by the love of Petrarch for Laura, and sacred to those two for ever more.
The ruined castle, with machicolated towers and haughty buttresses, on the great rampart of a hill, was for me the porter's lodge at the entrance gate of an enchanted garden, where poetic flowers of love bloomed through seasons and centuries; laurels, roses, and lilies, and pansies for remembrance. We didn't see those flowers with our bodies' eyes, but what of that? What did it matter that to the Turnours in their splendid glass cage this was just a road, with queer little gnome dwellings scooped out of solid rock to redeem it from common-placeness, with a fringe of deserted cottages farther on, and some ugly brickworks? My spirit's eyes saw the flowers, and they clustered thicker and brighter about Pieverde, where I insisted to Mr. Dane that Laura had been born.
He was inclined to dispute this at first, and bring up the horrid theory that the pure white star of Petrarch's life had been a mere Madame de Sade, with a drove of uninteresting children. But eagerly I quoted Petrarch himself, using all the arguments on which Pamela and I prided ourselves at the Convent; and by the time we had got as far as that sweet "little Venice full of water wheels," L'Isle, I'd persuaded him to agree with me. In the midst of all that lovely, liquid music of running, trickling, fluting water, who could go on callously insisting that Laura resisted Petrarch merely because she was a fat married woman with a large family?
All was green and pastoral here, and we seemed to have come into eternal spring after the bleak, windy plains encircling Avignon. It was beautiful to remember Petrarch's description of his golden-haired, dark-eyed love, fair and tall as a lily, sitting in the grass among the violets, where her bare feet gleamed whiter than the daisies when she took off her sandals. Even Nicolete, flower of Provençal song, had no whiter feet than Laura, I am sure!
We were slipping past the banks of a little river, clear as sapphires and emeralds melted and mingled together. The sound of its singing drowned the sound of the motor, so that we seemed to glide toward Vaucluse noiselessly and reverently.
At the Inn of Petrarch and Laura the car had to stop; and looking up, we could see on the height above the castle home of Petrarch's dearest friend, Philippe de Cabassole, guardian of Queen Jeanne of Naples. Up there on the cliff Petrarch's eyes must often have turned toward Pieverde with longing thoughts of Laura, that "white dove" who was always for him sixteen, as when he met her first.
No farther than the inn could any wheeled thing go; and having justified my presence by buttoning Lady Turnour up in her coat, and finding her muff under several rugs, I stood by the car, gazing after the couple as they trudged off along the path to the hidden fairy fountain of Vaucluse. When they should have got well ahead I meant to go too, for if a cat may look at a king, a lady's maid may try to drink—if she can—a few drops from the cup of a great poet's inspiration. At first I resented those two ample, richly clad, prosaic backs marching sturdily toward the magic fountain; then suddenly the back of Sir Samuel became pathetic in my eyes. Hadn't he, I asked myself, loved his Emily ("Emmie, pet," as I've heard him call her) as long and faithfully as Petrarch loved his Laura? Perhaps, after all, he had earned the right to visit this shrine.
Rocks shut out from our sight the distant fountain, and the last windings of the path that led to it, clasping the secret with great stone arms, like those of an Othello jealously guarding his young wife's beauty from eyes profane.
"Aren't you going now?" asked my brother, with a certain wistfulness.
"Ye-es. But what about you?"
"Oh, I've been here before, you know."
"Don't you believe in second times? Or is a second time always second best?"
"Not when—Of course I want to go. But I can't leave the car alone."
My eyes wandered toward the inn door. "There's a boy there who looks as if he were born to be a watch-dog," said I, basely tempting him. "Couldn't you—"
"No, I couldn't," he said decidedly. "At a place like this, where there are a lot of tourists about, it wouldn't be right. It was different at Valescure, when I took you in to lunch."
"You mean I mustn't make that a precedent."
"I don't mean anything conceited."
"But you won't desert Mr. Micawber. I believe I shall name the car Micawber! Well, then, I must go by myself—and if I should fall into the fountain and be drowned—"
"Don't talk nonsense, and don't do anything foolish," said Mr. Dane, sternly, whereupon I turned my back upon him, and plunged into the cool shadows of the gorge. The great white cliff of limestone was my goal, and always it towered ahead, as I followed the narrow pathway above the singing water. I sighed as I paused to look at a garden which maybe once was Petrarch's, for it was sad to find my way to fairyland, alone. Even a brother's company would have been better than none, I thought!
Soon I met my master and mistress coming back.
There