placidly heedless of the fact that the Treasure, with his moustache twisted up to his eyes, from the very extremity of gallantry, was posed beside her, with his fat arm round her neck. Thus they were photographed, and as the words ‘C’est fait’ were uttered, the Treasure’s hat was raised with a flourish, and a ponderous kiss was deposited upon the cheek of beauty. There was a roar of delight from the luncheon party under the penthouse; even the photographers so far forgot themselves as to titter sympathetically, and as our cocher whipped up his horse, and swung out of the yard on two wheels, he turned to us and winked with an intimacy that made my cousin take out her most unbecoming pair of spectacles and put them on, in order to sustain the character of the expedition.
After this the events of the day became blended into a monotony of hot green vineyards, with pink and white houses on the hazy horizon; narrow roads, without a fence between their warm yellow gravel and the yellow gravel in which the vines grow; gangs of
FAWN-COLOURED OXEN.
vintagers stooping among the plants; fawn-coloured oxen pacing at ease with their loads; the clack and twang of Bordelais tongues; and, most prominent of all ingredients, the heat and the Kodak. Every friend of the cocher was found and photographed, the sketch-book was utilised for those who insisted on an immediate result, and, as the afternoon sun began to drop towards the western uplands, we hoped that we might, in the fulness of time, be permitted to go home. But the Treasure had yet another friend, one who lived still farther away from Pauillac, and it was not till we had driven for half an hour that we saw in front of us the now familiar chai, with its arched opening into the cuvier, and its magenta-legged proprietor standing inside in the juice, shovel in hand. It was becoming too late in the day for the Kodak, and the cocher desired that a sketch should be made of this most particular friend, and also of the friend’s wife, whom, in the twinkling of an eye, he had fetched from her house and placed on the edge of the pressoir in utter absurdity and incongruity. But the artist was too completely subjugated to remonstrate; even when the sketch-book was snatched from her by the cocher and deposited in the vinous fingers of the grape treader with long and loud explanation of every page, she merely sank back in voiceless despair.
We heard without interest or emotion that we were to be driven home by a different and longer way. Our only articulate longing was for tea, but that being a mere vision, as impossible as beautiful, we gradually took refuge in fatalism, telling ourselves that if we got home that night, well and good; if not, we could sleep in the wagonette, waking up obediently at intervals to make moonlight sketches of such of the cocher’s friends as he chose to summon from their beds for the purpose. We were in the act of dividing our last gingerbread, while the cool breath of the Médoc evening gave us its first nip, and the vines became fragrant in the dew, and the chorus of cigales in the roadside grass sounded like the rhythmic reeling of line off innumerable trout-rods, when I was thrown violently against my cousin by the collapse of the wagonette on one side, and after an instant of extreme anxiety and discomfort, we found ourselves rolled out in a heap into the vines, with the cigales’ note at our very ears, and the hind wheel of the wagonette finding a bed for itself in the shallow ditch beside us.
THE COCHER MADE LIGHT OF IT.