An Episode of Travel
By LUCY COPINGER
"In the words of Macaulay this, ladies and gentleman, is the saddest spot on earth." The white-haired old Tower guard in charge of the little chapel of Saint Peter waved his hand impressively toward the open door. "Through that door"—the heads of the American tourists who were doing the Tower all turned in unison—"you may see the block upon which many a royal head has rested, and beneath these very stones lie buried two dukes between two queens—Dukes of Northumberland and of Somerset, with the Queens Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard—all beheaded."
The chapel was a crypt-like place, windowless, dark, and musty, and at this mournful climax one of the tourists who was nervous moved suddenly off that particular stone upon which she had been standing; the school teachers out for self-improvement began to write it all in their note-books, while a stout matron evidently of good old Dutch stock looked sadly down at the flat, gray stones. "Poor things!" she murmured, "and there ain't one of them got a respectable white tombstone with a wreath carved on it." Then, in their usual two-by-two line, the party moved down the aisle wearily, but triumphant in the fact that they had succeeded in doing the Tower, the Abbey, and the Museum all in one day. Peggy Wynne, in demurely severe blue suit and jaunty panama, lagged at the end of the line while she looked critically at her compatriots.
"The animals went out two by two,
The elephant and the kangaroo,"
she murmured to herself, "and I'm so tired of playing Noah's Ark or a Christian Association out for a lark," she continued in unconscious poetical despair. Then, warned by the attitude of the guard, that wonderful attitude of the haughty Briton in hopes of a tip, she opened her ridiculously tiny gold-linked purse and gave herself up to the absorbing question as to which of the pieces therein was a shilling. Having at last decided this, she presented it to the guard with a dazzling smile. It had been so long since Peggy had had an opportunity to smile at anything masculine that the smile was unusually bright.
She had already passed through the little door when she suddenly turned back. The other tourists, noses in Baedekers, were hurrying on before, the guard was busily counting his sixpences, and she slipped back into the dim chapel unperceived.
"They'll think I've gone back to those dingy lodgings," she reflected, as she groped her way between the benches into an even more shadowy corner—a little recess, with a tiny niche in the wall, that had probably been the sanctuary of some pious king. She seated herself comfortably behind the pillar in the corner and gazed pensively at the stones.
"Tombs and tombs and tombs!" she murmured mournfully, "even in Paris, instead of Maxim's and the cafes, nothing but tombs! The next time I want to see where anybody is buried I will just go out to the cemetery instead of coming across that dreadful ocean. Oh, just to have one adventure before I go home!" she continued with a long sigh, "a real adventure with a real man in it—not a horrid, womanish Frenchman or a stolid, conceited Britisher, but a nice, safe American—like—like—like—my American."
Then the dimple in her right cheek that was probably responsible for the calling her Peggy, in spite of her many protests for her rightful dignity of "Margaret," came out suddenly as it always did when she thought of her American. She had called him that from the time when, in the midst of the perplexities of the English luggage system, she had looked up and found him watching her. The cut of his gray suit and his shoes had told her his nationality at once, and they had looked for a moment at each other with that peculiar friendliness that compatriots in a strange land always feel. She had forgotten him until, leaning from a taxi-cab in the Rue de la Paix, she had met the same eyes, this time so unrefrainedly joyful in their recognition that she had suddenly blushed. When, a week later at Calais, as she stood by the rail of the departing Channel steamer she caught a glimpse of him on the dock, he had seemed like an old friend, and before she had thought she had smiled in answer to his lifted hat. She had grown so sure of seeing him that now when they had been in London a week and he had not appeared she found herself suddenly sick of tombs and tourists.