The bed she was lying in was the bed that once had supported Dan O'Connell's portly person. The tent-like curtains had been removed, so that one could breathe in it, but the pillars remained, and the headpiece and the carvings. It was less a bed than a coign of history, and more conducive to thought than sleep.
From this bed and its suggestions, from Drumgool, from Ireland, the delightful Tartarin led Miss Grimshaw to the land of plane-trees and blue sky. Mock heroics are the finest antidote for tragic thoughts, and they fitted the situation now, had she known it, to a charm.
Now she was at Tarascon. Tartarin, leaving his house in the moonlight, armed to the teeth against imaginary foes, led her down the white road, past the little gardens, odorous as bouquets, to the house of Mme. Bézuguet, whence issued the voices of Costecalde, the gunmaker, and the tinkling of the Nimes piano.
Now she was seated beside him, and his guns and implements of the chase, in the old dusty African stage coach, bound for Blidah, listening to the old coach's complaining voice.
"Ah! my good Monsieur Tartarin, I did not come out here of my own free will, I assure you. Once the railway to Beaucaire was finished, I was of no more use there, and they packed me off to Africa."
Miss Grimshaw paused in her reading. Was that a shout from the night outside? The clock on the landing, gathering itself up for the business of striking with a deep humming sound, began to strike. It struck twelve, and at the last leisurely and sledge-hammer stroke resumed its monotonous ticking. The faint boom of the sea filled the night, but all else was silence, and the old stage-coach continued her complaint.
"And now I have to sleep in the open air, in the courtyard of a caravanserai, exposed to all the winds of heaven. At night jackals and hyenas come sniffing round my boxes, and tramps, who fear the evening dew, seek refuge in my compartments. Such is the life I lead, my worthy friend, and I suppose it will continue till the day when, blistered by the sun and rotted by the damp, I shall fall to pieces, a useless heap, on some bit of road, when the Arabs will make use of the remains of my old carcase to boil their kousskouss."
"Blidah! Blidah!" shouted the conductor as he opened the door.
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