Chapter XXII
Lady Auriol, myself and the car met punctually at the hotel door at ten o'clock. There was also a chasseur with Lady Auriol's dust-coat and binoculars, and a concierge with advice. We waited for Bakkus. Auriol, suddenly bethinking herself of plain chocolate, to the consumption of which she was addicted on the grounds of its hunger-satisfying qualities, although I guaranteed her a hearty midday meal on the occasion of the present adventure, we went down the street to the Marquise de Sévigné shop and bought some. This took time, because she lingered over several varieties devastating to the appetite. I paid gladly. If we all had the same ideas as to the employment of a happy day, it would be a dull world. We went back to the car. Still no Bakkus. We waited again. I railed at the artistic temperament. Pure, sheer bone idleness, said I.
"But what can he be doing?" asked Auriol.
I, who had received through Lackaday many lights on Bakkus's character, was at no loss to reply.
"Doing? Why, snoring. He'll awake at midday, stroll round here and expect to find us smiling on the pavement. We give him five more minutes."
At the end of the five minutes I sent the concierge off for a guide-book; much more accurate, I declared, than Bakkus was likely to be, and at half-past ten by my watch we started. Although I railed at the sloth of Bakkus, I rejoiced in his absence. My over-night impression had not been dissipated by slumber.
"I'm not sorry," said I, as we drove along. "Our friend is rather too much of a professed conversationalist."
"You also have a comfortable seat which possibly you would have had to give up to your guest," said Auriol.
"How you know me, my dear," said I, and we rolled along very happily.
I think it was one of the pleasantest days I have ever passed in the course of a carefully spent life. Auriol was at her best. She had thrown off the harried woman of affairs. She had put a nice little tombstone over the grave of her romance, thus apparently reducing to beautiful simplicity her previous complicated frame of mind. For aught I could have guessed, not a cloud had ever dimmed the Diana serenity of her soul. If I said that she laid herself out to be the most charming of companions, I should be accusing her of self-consciousness. Rather, let me declare her to have been so instinctively. Vanity apart, I stood for something tangible in her life. She could not remember the time when I had not been her firm friend. Between my first offering of chocolates and my last over a quarter of a century had lapsed. As far as a young woman can know a middle-aged man, she knew me outside in. If she came to me for my sympathy, she knew that she had the right. If she twitted me on my foibles, she knew that I granted her the privilege, with affectionate indulgence.