"Condescension is an excellent thing; but it is strange
how one-sided the pleasure of it is."
—R.L. Stevenson.
After I went to bed that night, I thought long and bitterly of the Little Pal's defection. Mentally I addressed him as a young gazelle who had gladdened me with his soft dark eye, only to withdraw the light of that orb when it was most needed. As he apparently wished me to understand that, now he was on with Gaetà, he would fain be off with me, I would take him not only at his word, but before it. I would make an excuse to avoid stopping at the Contessa's villa, but would let him revel there alone in his glory; if one did not count the Di Nivolis.
Next morning we met by appointment at eight o'clock, and tried to behave as if nothing had happened; but I realised that I would have been a dead failure as an actor. I was grumpy and glum, and the coaxing, child-like ways which the Boy used for my beguiling were in vain. I did not say anything about my change of plans for Aix, but I brooded darkly upon them throughout the day, my mood eating away all pleasure in the charming scenery through which we passed, as a black worm eats into the heart of a cherry.
We had about twenty-nine kilometres to go, and by the time that the shadows were growing long and blue, we were approaching Aix-les-Bains. Nature had gone back to the simple apparel of her youth, here. She was idyllic and charming, but we were not to ask of her any more sensational splendours, by way of costume, for she had not brought them with her in her dress-basket. There were near green hills, and far blue mountains, and certain rocky eminences in the middle distance, but nothing of grandeur. Poplars marched along with us on either side, primly on guard, and puritanical, though all the while their myriad little fingers seemed to twinkle over the keyboard of an invisible piano, playing a rapid waltz.
Then we came at last into Aix-les-Bains, where I had spent a merry month during a "long," in Oxford days. I had not been back since.
Already the height of the season was over, for it was September now, but the gay little watering-place seemed crowded still, and in our knickerbockers, with our pack-mule and donkeys, and their attendants, we must have added a fantastic note to the dance-music which the very breezes play among tree-branches at light-hearted Aix.
"Pretty, isn't it?" I remarked indifferently, as we passed through some of the most fashionable streets.
"Yes, very pretty," said the Boy. "But what is there that one misses? There's something—I'm not sure what. Is it that the place looks huddled together? You can't see its face, for its features. There are people like that. You are introduced to them; you think them charming; yet when you've been away for a little while you couldn't for your life recall the shape of their nose, or mouth, or eyes. I feel it is going to be so with Aix, for me."
The villa which the Contessa had taken for a few weeks before her annual flitting for Monte Carlo, was on the way to Marlioz, and we had been told exactly how to find it. Still silent as to my ultimate intentions, I tramped along with the Boy beside me, Joseph and Innocentina bringing up the rear. We would know the villa from the description we had been given, and having passed out of the town, we presently saw it; a little dun-coloured house, standing up slender and graceful among trees, like a charming grey rabbit on the watch by its hidden warren in the woods.
"I'm tired, aren't you?" asked the Boy. "I shall be glad to rest."