The Motor Maid Part 3

The a.s.sistant 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 didn't quite see, at first sight, what I was to do; but neither did the a.s.sistant 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 didn'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 couldn'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 pa.s.s, which she did, making room for me to sit down beside her on the narrow plush-covered seat. But I didn't care to sit. I was so crushed, it seemed that, if once I sat down I shouldn'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 shouldn'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 n.o.body to help you, and wouldn'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 hadn'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 couldn'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 gla.s.s; but I could not have afforded to acknowledge an appet.i.te 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 _a la carte_: there was no _dejeuner a prix fixe_; and it took courage to tell a waiter who looked like a weary young duke that I would have _consomme_ 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 _consomme_, 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 pa.s.sing 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 embarra.s.sed.

"He told me that you said you had come to Cannes to be her companion. He didn't tell me she was dead, poor woman, but--there are some things one knows by instinct, by intuition, aren't there? And then--I couldn'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 wouldn'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.)