"Miss Boundrish, what are you talking about?" was the sharp rejoinder.
"Only that, going about in the world, I get to know a lot of things. There are so many sharpers about on the Continent—gangs of them in league together. They follow people to Nice and Monte Carlo, and all these places, and rook them in all sorts of ways. They are regular birds of prey, living by their wits. Some think the police are in their pay. Robbery after robbery takes place in trains and custom-houses; at least, jewels, money, and letters of credit disappear from locked and registered luggage, and the thieves are scarcely ever found out. I say, where do you think she spent the afternoon of the day she came to Les Oliviers?—Ah! here they are," as Miss Somers and the thin man came in sight of the waiting-place in the Jardins Publics. "Poor Mr. Welbourne, he's quite gone on her already. She can't leave him alone a minute."
"Four seats on the stand, but not together," said the thin man, unconscious of personal comment. "How shall we divide?"
Although Ermengarde had by this time made some progress in the art of sticking on to a perpendicular donkey acting as an intermittent see-saw, somebody having given her some lessons on the most gentle-paced beast to be found, she was not enamoured of that form of gymnastic, and of two evils had thought a descent by a shorter path through gardens and woods on foot with Miss Boundrish, the less, leaving Miss Somers to ride down the longer mule-path with the thin man, whose slight lameness made him a poor pedestrian. But her feeling of relief when the other two came up brought her to the conclusion that even donkeys were preferable to Dorris. Yet the hints from the pink coral lips were not without effect upon her, chiming as they did with her own inferences, and she was dying to know where Agatha had spent the afternoon of that first day, which Dorris had also passed away from the hotel.
The party being now complete, they left the gardens and wound through the holiday streets in the sunshine, now jostled by a cheerful and apologizing devil, black from head to heel, with bat-wings of black crape stretched on cane; now mixed up in a flock of geese with human legs and monstrous cackling beaks; now avoiding the attentions of dominos flinging paper serpents and trying to draw them into impromptu dances whenever a band was heard along the street.
How gay and odd and foolish and delightful it was to unsophisticated Ermengarde! The narrow, foreign streets, palms closing their vistas, great hotels, in gardens glowing with gorgeous exotics and flowers, breaking their lines here and there; the warm deep purple of the sea barring every side street on one hand; the picturesque old Italian town climbing the wooded hill-spur and cresting it with its tower on the other; and the great mountain amphitheatre stretching far up beyond that, with bare peaks, violet-veined, crystalline, drawn clear and sharp on the deep, clear, velvety sky; the motley crowd of mad masks and dominos, cheaply gaudy, childishly absurd, helplessly gay; the rippling laughter and confused babble of local dialect and foreign tongues on the liquid air; the droll family parties, transparently disguised, even the babies, in coloured calico; the trim little mountain soldiers, bright-eyed and smiling, keeping the streets; the hawkers of toys, sacks of confetti, and endless paper coils; the vendors of strange local pastry and sweets on little standings; the look of expectant enjoyment on every face, especially the broad and business-like bourgeois countenance; the atmosphere of spontaneous gaiety, sunshine, and enjoyment, all went to English Ermengarde's head. Old life-long artificial restraints gave way; the joy of life sprang up; she could almost have taken hands and danced with the maskers dancing along the street. The eternal child, dormant in us all, was awake and happy in her.
It was not the show, that was poor and disappointing, all its cheap and tawdry vanities blotting the pure beauty of atmosphere and setting, that gave this new vivid sense of unconstrained gladness. Perhaps she had never seen people madly, spontaneously, and yet decorously gay before. The Carnival folk were all, young and old, rich and poor, merry and not wise and bent upon being merry and not wise, and yet they were not in the least ashamed or conscious of any cause for shame. Even some Americans, a people never young but aged and biases from their cradles, snatched a brief hour of long-deferred childhood, and a few self-conscious Britons, their gloomy national pride concealed in dominos, condescended to diversions that in their own personality they scorned as only fit for foreigners and fools. No wonder that the sparkling sunny sea-air and atmosphere of infectious enjoyment dissipated light-hearted Ermengarde's insular self-consciousness, and she suddenly discovered that there is more enjoyment in life than is commonly supposed.
What was the mad tune band after band kept playing as the huge cars, grotesquely laden, filed slowly past; it was jingly and poor, but so crazily full of headlong mirth—La Mattschiche? Long afterwards it gave her a pleasant thrill to hear it shouted by street boys, thumped on pianos and street organs, and blared on brass bands. It was "full of the warm South" for her.
Mr. Welbourne, an artist and no Philistine, though a true-born Englishman, public-school-milled, politely and unobtrusively bored, was agreeably surprised by his countrywoman's interest in the show; it was like taking a child—a real old-fashioned child—to a pantomime. Even Agatha observed her with grave but pleased surprise. Dorris, when not explaining things in a loud voice, expressed unmitigated contempt for everything; yet Ermengarde, though she longed for Saracenic invasions when the gurgle was too persistent, scarcely knew that Miss Boundrish was sitting beside her on the stand erected in front of the Mairie, the thin man and Agatha being in the row behind them. Mr. Welbourne, though simple and honest in his ways, had sufficient guile to contrive that.
The stout elderly bourgeoise with a bad cold and strong scent of garlic, sitting next Ermengarde, had come, she told her, from Monte Carlo, under sad anxiety lest the bad cold should keep her at home, and never stopped showering confetti on everybody that passed, always missing them, yet wrought to ecstasy when confetti were thrown to her, and pleased as a child when her paper serpents caught in the snapping jaws of the crocodile on a car full of these creatures of all sizes.