begging your ladyship's pardon," I ventured, "I understand that the chauffeur is to go because he stopped at Les Baux to look for me. As he very likely saved my life, I couldn't be so ungrateful as to stay on in my situation when he is losing his for my sake."
"What nonsense!" snapped her ladyship. "As if that had anything to do with you, and if it has, it oughtn't. Besides, if he will apologize, he can stop. Sir Samuel says so."
"He doesn't seem to think he was in the wrong, my lady," said I. "As your ladyship will probably be at Avignon some time before finding another chauffeur, it will be easy to look for a maid at the same time."
"Be here some time!" she cried. "I won't! We want to get on to a château where my stepson's visiting."
"I should be delighted to offer your ladyship two of the lucky coins for nothing," said I, my impertinence wrapped in honey, "if she would persuade Sir Samuel to ask the chauffeur to stay."
"Why, that's just what Sir Samuel wants to do, if I would hear of it!" The words popped out before she had stopped to think.
"It might be too late after this evening," I suggested. "The chauffeur will perhaps take steps at once to secure some other engagement; and I fear that a good man is always in great demand. I hope that your ladyship will kindly understand that it would be nothing to me, if he hadn't got into trouble for my sake."
"You can leave the coins, and call Sir Samuel, who is in his room next door," remarked Lady Turnour with dignity. "I will talk with him."
The greedy creature was delighted to have the coins without paying for them, and delighted with the excuse to do what she would have liked to do without an excuse, if obstinacy had not forbidden. I kept one coin for my own luck; I called Sir Samuel, who was sulking in his den, was dismissed with an order for her ladyship's dinner, which she would have in bed, and told to return with the menu.
A few minutes later, coming back, I met Mr. Jack Dane in the corridor.
"Have you seen Sir Samuel yet?" I inquired.
"No. He's sent for me, and I'm on my way to him now."
"He's going to ask you to stay," I said.
"I think you're mistaken there," replied the chauffeur. "The old boy himself has a strong sense of justice, and would like to make everything all right, no doubt, but his wife would give him no peace if he did."
"If he does, though, what shall you do?" I inquired anxiously.
Mr. Dane looked into space. "I think I'd better go in any case."
"Why?"
If he'd been a woman, I think he would have answered "Because," but being a man he reflected a few seconds, and said he thought it would be better for him in the end.
"Do you want to go?" I asked, drearily.
"No. But I ought to want to."
"Please stay," I begged. "Please—brother."
"Sir Samuel mayn't ask me; and you wouldn't have me crawl to him?"
"But if he does ask you."
"I'll stay," he said.
Impulsively, I held out my hand. He took it, and pressed it so hard that it hurt, then dropped it suddenly. His manner is certainly very odd sometimes. I suppose he doesn't want me to flatter myself that I am of any importance in his scheme of existence. But he needn't worry. He has shown me very plainly that he is one of those typical, unsusceptible Englishmen French writers put in their books, men with hearts whose every compartment is warranted love-tight.
Chapter XVII
Lady Turnour opened her heart and her wardrobe and gave me a blouse the first thing in the morning, which act of generosity was the more remarkable as morning is not her best time. I have found that it is the early maid who catches the first snub, which otherwise might fall innocuously upon a husband. The blouse was one which I had heard her ladyship say she hated; but then her idea of true charity, combined, as it should be, with economy, is always to give to the poor what you wouldn't be found dead in yourself, because it is more blessed to give than to receive badly made things. On the same principle I immediately passed the gift on to a chambermaid of the hotel, who perhaps in her turn dropped it a grade lower in the social scale, and so it may go on forever, blouse without end; but all that is apart from the point. The important part of the transaction was the token that the dead past was to bury its dead; and possibly Sir Samuel timidly offered a waistcoat or a pair of boots to the chauffeur.
Instead of lying in bed, as Lady Turnour had threatened to do for a week, she was up earlier than usual, as well as ever she had been, and not more than half as disagreeable. Although the sky looked as if it might burst into tears at any moment, and although Orange has nothing but historic remains and historic records to show, she was ready to start, almost cheerfully, at ten o'clock.
I was allowed to be of the party, laden with mackintoshes for my master and mistress; and I didn't admire the triumphal arch at Orange nearly as much as I had admired the smaller and older one at St. Remy. But Lady Turnour admired it far more, and was so nice to Sir Samuel that he thought it the arch of the world. They put their heads together over the same volume of Baedeker, which was an exquisite pleasure to the poor man, and he was so pathetic I could have cried into his footsteps, as he read (pronouncing almost everything wrong) about the building of the Arch of Tiberius. "Why, that's just like a sweet little statuette I used to have standing on a table in my drawing-room window!" exclaimed Lady Turnour, looking up at the beautiful Winged Victory. "You might think it was a copy!"
Although the histories say Orange wasn't very important in Roman days, it has taken revenge by letting everything not Roman fall into decay, except, of course, its memories of the family through which William the Silent of Holland became William of Orange. The house of the first William of Orange, the hero of song who rode back wounded from Roncesvalles to his waiting wife, is gone now, save for a wall and a buttress or two on a lonely hill of the old town; yet the arch, which was old when his château was begun, still towers dark yellow as tarnished Etruscan gold against the sky; and the Roman theatre is the grandest out of Italy. Lady Turnour could not see why the Comédie Française should produce plays there, even once a year, when they could do it so much more comfortably at any modern theatre in the provinces if they must travel; and as to the gathering of the Felibres, she didn't even know what Felibres were, nor did she care, as she was unlikely to meet any in society. She would have proposed going on somewhere else, as there was so "little to see in Orange," but that rain came sweeping down, cold from the east, when I had followed the pair a quarter of a mile from the motor. They fled into their mackintoshes as a hermit-crab flees into his borrowed shell, and I was the only one the worse for wear when we reached the car. I didn't much mind the wetting, but it was rather nice to be fussed over by a brother, and forced into a coat of his, whether I liked or not. "The quality" must have seen me in it, through the glass, but Lady Turnour ignored the sight. Altogether, everything was agreeable, and the thunder-storm of last night, in clearing, had turned us into quite a happy family party.
It rained all day, and I sat in my room before a blazing fire of olive wood which a dear old waiter, exactly like a confidential servant of a pope, bestowed upon me out of sheer Provençal good nature. As he's been in the hotel for thirty years, he is a privileged person, and can do what he likes.
Lady Turnour gave me a pile of stockings to look over, lest Satan should find some more ornamental use for my idle hands; so I asked Mr. Dane for his socks too; and pretended that I should consider it a slight upon my skill if he refused.
That was our last night at Avignon, and early in the morning I packed for Arles, where we would sleep. But on the way we stopped at Tarascon, so splendid with its memories of Du Guesclin, and the towers of King René's great château reflected in a water-mirror, that no Tartarin could be blamed if he were born with a boasting spirit. And there are other things