Chapter V
On the Ridge
The moving palace of luxury that had conveyed her in so few hours through so many dreams of magic and visions of faery, rumbled slowly out of the spacious hall of idleness commonly known as Mentone Station, but more nearly resembling a Home of Rest for railway officials. There it left Ermengarde, dizzy, bewildered, and solitary, planted by the luggage, that in some magical and mysterious way had suddenly been restored to her, and looking vacantly across the rails at a group of sturdy palms and a purple rim of sea.
Then it was that the melancholy spirit named home-sickness suddenly fell upon, seized, and rent her.
She would see the woman of mystery no more—so forlorn were her feelings that it was grief to part even with this probably suspicious character and possible assassinator of her nocturnal imaginings—she was going all alone to an unknown foreign house full of strangers, with not a soul to meet her or speak to her; perhaps to one of those hostelries so often met with on lonely moors in historic romance, that exist only as traps to rob and murder wayfarers.
"Quel est l'hôtel de Madame?" had several times been addressed to unheeding ears before she recovered enough from these dismal forebodings to reply; whereupon she soon found herself under the broad bright sky outside, stepping into one of the twenty or thirty omnibuses drawn up in line before the station, each with the name of its house in shining gold upon it. It was reassuring to see Les Oliviers legibly inscribed upon a veritable, unromantic bus; it was broad day; there was clearly no question of sinister-looking hovels with one-eyed landlords intent on murder and robbery—in these days they do the work more slowly; in the kitchens and on the bills—but she did wish she had been able to do her hair and tidy herself.
"I shall have to strap-hang, and there's no strap, and I couldn't if there was," was her mournful reflection, on finding the interior of this vehicle overflowing with hand-baggage and a lady of ample proportions on one side, and with a fair-sized gentleman, evidently a portion of the ample lady's baggage, and a thin gentleman and more hand-baggage, on the other. All were English, and all looked at her with the deadly animosity our countrymen accord to strangers. The whole world being the exclusive heritage of the travelling Briton, he naturally looks upon all other travellers as intruders. The appearance of a moustached face, with laughing dark eyes and a gay smile, at the window, followed by a request in a velvety voice, half-pleading, half-humorous, of "Place pour Madame, Messieurs et Madame, s'il vous plait," and accompanied by a forcible transposition of some of these mountains of parcels, resulted in a clearance of about six inches of cushion, upon which Ermengarde accommodated as much of a wearied frame as circumstances permitted; and then, with much furious but innocuous whip-cracking and many strange anathemas, the omnibus jolted and rumbled off, Ermengarde feeling more of a pariah with every jolt, hurled now into the indignant arms of the fair-sized gentleman and now upon the towering parcels of the lady of ample proportions, and profusely and irrationally apologizing in German, of which her fellow-voyagers understood nothing but that it was German, and therefore detestable. Why she spoke German at that precise moment of her existence she had no idea, except that it was the only foreign language that happened to turn up, and that she was obsessed by a vague notion that English was unsuitable to the surroundings. So, try as she would, she continued to speak German all the way to the hotel, to the great inconvenience and mystification of everybody, including herself. Her German was not quite perfect.
The lady of ample proportions meanwhile expressed herself strongly in very plain English upon the unpleasantness of having to "herd" with Germans, and said with bitter reproach to the fair-sized man that she had understood Les Oliviers to be an English house; while the thin man, who was helplessly pinned in the inmost corner by packages, vainly tried in a gentle, ineffectual voice, totally ignored by the stout lady, to pacify her apprehensions; and the fair-sized man entreated Ermengarde almost with tears to "parlez Français," of which she was just then totally incapable from sheer fatigue.
But not too tired to perceive that they were jolting along a level road, shaded by grey and leafless planes unreal and dreamlike in the marvellously clear sunlight, along a torrent bed, that was threaded by a stream, in which women were washing linen, kneeling in tubs or on the bare, shingly bed, just as she remembered them in Swiss torrents when a girl; or to catch a glimpse on the other side of marvellous villa gardens ablaze with scarlet salvias and giant geraniums, and glowing with orange-trees in fruit. It was "roses, roses all the way," while, high above in the dazzling sky, soared bare mountain peaks, warm grey, veined with amethyst and streaked with snow, jewel-like, wonderful. They had left the town far behind, and seemed to have jogged an immense distance inland by the torrent bed, before they reached a little blue house at the foot of a steep mountain ridge, cultivated or wooded to the very top, turned in at a gate, and stopped. Then Ermengarde's heart, lightened by the foreign charm and beauty of the road, sank once more. Could this small and homely cultivator's house be Les Oliviers? Not at all; the hotel was high up out of sight, they were informed, while being gently requested to alight.
"Mais pourquoi descendre, Messieurs et Mesdames? But quite simply, because here the road ceases to exist. It is now necessary to mount," was the alarming pronouncement of the driver.