“Yes, I shall be ever so much happier with her, should things come to the worst”—her eyes brimmed over with sudden tears at the thought—“it will be so much to be with her—to know that we have made her quite happy.”
They went to Haslemere next morning, and there was a grand scene with Peggy, who screamed with rapture on hearing that Eve and Jack were going to take her to Cannes their very own selves. She, who fancied she had lost Eve for ever, was to live with her, to sleep in the next room to her, to see her every day and all day long.
Then came the journey—the long, long journey, which made Eve and Peggy open wondering eyes at the width of France from sea to sea. They travelled with all those luxuries which modern civilization provides for the traveller who is able and willing to pay. And every detail of the journey was a surprise and a joy for Peggy, who brought upon herself more than one bad fit of coughing by her irrepressible raptures. The luncheon and dinner on board the rushing Rapide; the comfortable wagon-lit to retire to at Lyons, when darkness had fallen over the monotony of the landscape—and anon the surprise of awaking at midnight in a large bright room where two small beds were veiled like brides in white net curtains, and where piled up pine-logs blazed on a wide open hearth, such as Peggy only knew of in fairy tales.
How comforting was the basin of hot soup which Peggy sipped, squatting beside this cavernous chimney, while Benson, the courier-maid, skilled in nursing invalids, who had been engaged chiefly to wait upon Peggy, unpacked the Gladstone bag, and made everything comfortable for the night. Peggy had slept fitfully all the way from Lyons, hearing as in a dream the porters shouting “Avignon,” at a place where they stopped in the winter darkness, and faintly remembering having heard of a city where Popes lived and tortured people once upon a time. She woke now and again in her white-curtained bed at Marseilles; for however happy her days might be her nights were generally restless and troubled. The new maid was very attentive to her, and gave her lemonade when her throat was parched, but the maid was able to sleep soundly between whiles, when Peggy was lying awake gazing through the white net curtains, and half expecting Robin Goodfellow to come creeping out of the wide black chimney, where the spark had faded from the heap of pale grey ashes on the hearth.
Towards morning Peggy fell into a refreshing slumber, and when she opened her eyes again the room was full of sunshine, and there was a band playing the “Faust Waltz” in the public gardens below.
“Why, it’s summer!” cried Peggy, clapping her hands, and leaping out of the parted white curtains, and rushing to the open window.
The maid was dressed, and Peggy’s breakfast was ready for her. “Oh, such delicious coffee!” she told Eve afterwards, “in a sweet little copper pot, and rolls such as were never made in humdrum England.”
Yes, it was summer, the February summer of that lovely shore. The Vansittarts stayed nearly a week at Marseilles, to rest Peggy after her forty-eight hours’ journey; and to see the Votive Church on the hill, and that famous dungeon on the rock which owes more of its renown to fiction than to fact; and the parting of the ways where the ships sail east and west, to Orient or Afric, the two wonder-worlds for the untravelled European. Eve and Peggy looked longingly at the great steamers vanishing on the horizon, hardly knowing whether, if the choice were put to them, they would go right or left—to the country were the Great Moguls, the jewelled temples, the tiger hunts, the palanquins, the tame elephants with castles on their backs are to be found; or to the country where the Moors live, and where modern civilization camps gipsy-fashion among the vestiges of earth’s most ancient people.
“Where would you like to go best, India or Africa?” asked Eve, as she and Peggy sat side by side in a fairy-like yawl, that went dipping and dancing over those summer waves, and seemed like a toy boat as it sailed under the lee of an Orient steamer bound for Alexandria.
“Oh, I think I would rather go up a pyramid than anything,” gasped Peggy, breathless at the mere thought. “Don’t you remember ‘Belzoni’s Travels,’ that tattered little old book which once was mother’s, and how they used to grope about, Belzoni and his people, and lose themselves in dark passages, and make discoveries inside the Pyramids? And then the Nile, and the crocodiles, which one could always run away from, because they can’t turn, don’t you know? Oh, I think Egypt must be best of all.”