This feeling increased almost to sulkiness when the Boy was invited to take a seat in the carriage beside the gloomy Baron, and accepted promptly.
The driving party had been delayed a long time in starting, Gaetà explained, making large eyes which blamed her friends for everything; and the driver had brought his horses slowly, oh, so slowly, up the long hill, the stupid fellow. But now the carriage flashed ahead, and I was left to tramp on alone, while the Contessa and the Boy flirted, and Joseph and Innocentina bickered, all alike unmindful of me.
We lunched at the Col de Forclaz, where the hill, tired of going up, ran down to another valley. There was a godlike assemblage of mountains, white and blue, mountains as far as the eye could reach, and I had a thought or two which I would have liked to exchange for some of the Boy's. But if he had ever really had any thoughts, save for the fun of the moment, he had the air of forgetting them all for Gaetà. When, in a tone of unenthusiastic politeness, she asked if I would not take my friend's place in the carriage for a while when we started on again, out of pure spite against the little wretch who had dropped me for her I said that I would.
I could not see the Boy's face, to make sure if he were disappointed, but I hoped it. As for myself, I would fain have walked. In a scene of such exalted beauty, Gaetà's little quips and quirks struck a wrong note. Sitting with my back to the horses, I could see the Boy walking on behind, his face raised mountain-ward and sky-ward, and I longed to know of what he was thinking, for evidently he had left his aggravating, "awfully-jolly-don't-you-know" mood in the carriage with the Contessa.
The Baron and his wife disputed volubly about the date of one of Paolo's grand dinners in Paris; Gaetà yawned, and I was stricken with dumbness. I could think of nothing to say which she would think worth hearing. Soon, the tremendously steep descent into the valley gave me the best of excuses to jump down and relieve the horses, which the coachman was leading. Somehow, I don't quite know how, I fell back a good distance behind the carriage, and then I found myself so near the Boy, who had been slowly following, that it would have been rude not to join him. After all, we had no quarrel, yet oddly enough we could not take up the thread of our intercourse exactly where it had been broken off. There seemed to be a knot or a tangle in it, which would have to be smoothed out.
It was a wholly irrelevant incident which untied the knot, and left us as we had been, though there was no reason for it but a laugh which we had together.
The thing came about in this wise. We arrived at a small hotel which boasted a garden, and was famous as a view-point. From the door a carriage containing a man was about to drive away. The man was approaching middle age, and had an air of quiet self-reliance which redeemed him from insignificance. He was plainly dressed, in clothes which were not new, and altogether he did not appear to be a personage who, from the hotel-keeper's point of view, would be of supreme importance. Yet the landlord and another besieged the quiet man with compliments and pleadings, to which he did not seem inclined to listen. Bowing gravely, he told his coachman to drive on, and in a moment had passed us as we stood in the road.
But when he had gone, the landlord and his assistant still had no eyes for us. "Mark my words," exclaimed the former, in a tone of anguish, "we shall lose our star."
Were they astrologers, that they should fear this fate?