No, not a lost spirit, after all; only a sleepy man in a blouse, crying the name of some town—was it Dijon?—through the echoing emptiness of a dimly lighted station, and through the window a glimpse of sky full of stars looking down in peace. They had come to somewhere else, whither they had flown during the delicious sleep into which she had fallen. There is nothing more delightful than that feeling of having come to somewhere else without effort and without thought, in the stillness of night and sleep.
If only one had on one's own legs and feet, and no hairpins and no close-fitting day clothes, pinching in wrong places, or if only one could find a pocket-handkerchief or a smelling-bottle, or look at one's watch, without fear of waking the woman of mystery, and so hastening the hour of assassination by turning on the light; the presence of which, the latter had averred, was absolutely destructive of her chances of sleep.
But the winged steeds begin to snort and pant, stamping, and clashing their harness, and, with a sudden clatter of trampling hoofs, are off again into the waste places of midnight, through which a star glances intermittently and kindly, and Ermengarde remembers that she has not yet been murdered, but is almost too drowsy to hope she has not been robbed, feeling blindly for the gold sewn into her clothes and not finding it, and not knowing that an excruciating pain under the ribs is what she vainly seeks and is lying upon, or that acute discomfort in other regions means that her hat, a really becoming one, has tumbled off its hook and constituted itself a portion of her couch, which is no longer a bed of roses.
Surely the winged steeds are now tearing away at increasing, headlong speed, and their way is rougher, up hill and down dale, over crag and boulder and chasm; the cradle is rocked less gently, and the rhythm of the rapid gallop is not so smooth, else it would be heavenly to fly thus between the pinions of the fiery coursers through centuries of calm content, unvexed by thought or care; and surely the cadence that seemed, now music, now the burden of some sweet, old ballad of forgotten days, had declined to the double knock of civilization and hourly postal deliveries; to file-firing, to the racket of the housemaid's morning broom and furniture destruction, to summer thunder, to Portsmouth guns? No; silence on a sudden, and stillness, and once more the drowsy cry of some place-name through the echoing emptiness of a dim-lighted building. Again she had arrived somewhere else in sleep—could it be Valence, or Vence, enchanted names? Or rather some city of faery, beleaguered by visions, or dumbed by spells of sweet strong magic; it could be no earthly town; it must be the place of all men's longing, the land of Somewhere Else, of somewhere
"afar
From the sphere of our sorrow—"
Oddly enough, Arthur was there and Charlie; the woman of mystery had disappeared, and the man with her, and the wild, winged horses were galloping faster and faster through the night, which was no longer black, but pale grey, shot with faint lemon; and there, through the window, glanced and quivered one large, lustrous white star—and—of course, it was fairyland again or some region of old romance, because, where the star had been faintly traced upon the luminous twilight sky, was strange oriental foliage, palm-tops, olive-boughs, fading and passing.
"Shall we switch off the light?" asked a clear cold voice from above; and Ermengarde, springing up with a start, realized that day was breaking and the fear of assassination past.
"Where is Marseilles?" she murmured drowsily, wondering if it were hairpins, or only headache, piercing her skull and brain, and heard that Marseilles was past and the present combination of dock, arsenal and dwelling, was Toulon, and marvelled at the clear pale light and the serene beauty and freshness of the morning.
The train had stopped and turned; the orange glow in the cloudy sky had paled; the sea was visible; pale blue like English sea, but marvellously clear and pure and free of mist, and its breath so sweet. And this was the Mediterranean? And those bushy bluish evergreens in the gardens among aloes, pines and palms, why—they must be olives! Well!——
Still, in spite of splitting headache, sealike qualms, and racked limbs, and the probability of being lamed for life in consequence of sleeping in boots of elegance pointed in the latest mode; in spite of squalid horrors of waiting in a queue of either sex for the chance of even the most hurried sponging of face and hands; in spite of the rift in the home lute, which had seemed to narrow with every mile from home—in spite of all, it was solid invincible joy to glide through this new, strange country in the rich, romantic South, this country of clear and vivid light and colour, of semi-oriental foliage, and foreign buildings, sun-shuttered, square and white.