“Come, Milly,” he said to his daughter, “let’s be going.”
Milly had sat by his side the entire evening, in stealthy enjoyment of secular music, performed for the first time in her hearing on the Lord’s day. She was a pale, freckled girl, with hair of the shade of Bavarian beer. She was not beautiful, but then she was good—a sort of angel bound in calf.
When Milly and her father had disappeared, Maida turned to her husband again. “Do you mind leaving Baden?” she asked.
Mr. Incoul eyed her a moment. “Why?” he asked. He had a trick of answering one question with another, yet for the moment she wondered whether he too had heard the conversation behind them, and then comforted by the thought that in any case the name of Lenox Leigh could convey but little to him, she shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said; “I don’t like it; it’s hot and crowded. I think I would like the seashore better.”
“Very good,” he answered; “whatever you prefer. I will speak to Karl tonight.” (Karl was the courier.) “I don’t suppose,” he added, reflectively, “that you would care for Trouville—I know I should not.”
He had risen, and Maida, who had risen with him, was looking down at the gravel, which she toyed nervously with her foot. The opera that had been given that evening was evidently over. A stream of people were coming from the direction of the theatre, and among them was the Prince. He was chatting with his companions, but his trained eye had marked Mrs. Incoul, and when he reached the place where she stood he stopped again.
“You didn’t go in tonight,” he said, collectively. “It was rather good, too.” And then, without waiting for an answer, he continued: “Won’t you both dine with us tomorrow?”
“Oh, we can’t,” Maida answered. She was tormented with the thought that at any moment Lenox might appear. “We can’t; we are going away.”
The Prince smiled in his brown beard. Americans were popular with him. He liked their freedom. There was, he knew, barely one woman in Baden, not utterly bedridden, who would have taken his invitation so lightly. “I am sorry,” he said, and he spoke sincerely. Like any other sensible man, he liked beauty and he liked it near him. He knew that Mrs. Incoul had been recently married, and in his own sagacious way, il posait des jalons. “You are to be at Ballaster in the autumn, I hear.” Ballaster was a commodious shooting-box in Scotland, the possession of an hospitable peer.
“Yes, I believe we are,” Maida answered.
“I hope to see you there,” and with these historic words, Prince Charming departed.
VI
Biarritz
After a frühstück of coffee and honey, to which the innkeeper, out of compliment to the nationality of his guest, had added an ear of green corn—a combination, be it said, that no one but a German could have imagined—Mr. Incoul went in search of his friend.
He had questioned Karl, and the courier had spoken of Ostend with such enthusiasm that his employer suspected him of some personal interest in the place and struck it at once from the list of possible resorts which he had been devising. On the subject of other bains de mer the man was less communicative. There was, he said, nothing attractive about Travemunde, except the name; Scheveningen was apt to be chilly; Trouville he rather favored, but to his thinking Ostend was preferable.
When the courier had gone Mr. Incoul ran his eye down a mental map of the coast of France, and just as it reached the Spanish frontier he remembered that someone in his hearing had recently sounded the attractions of Biarritz. On that seaboard he ultimately decided, and it was with the idea that Blydenburg might go further and fare worse that he sought his friend and suggested the advantages of a trip to the Basque country.
Mr. Blydenburg had few objections to make. He had taken very kindly to the consumption of beer, but beer had not agreed with him, and he admitted, did he stay in Baden, that, in spite of the ill effects, he would still be unable to resist the allurements of that insidious beverage. “Act like a man, then,” said Mr. Incoul, encouragingly; “act like a man and flee from it.”
There was no gainsaying the value of this advice, but between its adoption and a journey to Biarritz the margin was wide. “It is true,” he said, reflectively, “I could study the language at the fountainhead.” (Mr. Blydenburg, it may be explained, was a gentleman who plumed himself on his familiarity with recondite tongues, but one whose knowledge of the languages that are current in polite society was such as is gleaned from the appendices of guidebooks.)
Mr. Incoul nodded approvingly, “Certainly there would be no difficulty about that.”
Blydenburg looked at him musingly for a moment and nodded, too. “The name Biarritz,” he said, “comes, I am inclined to believe, from bi haritz—two oaks. Minucius thinks that it comes from bi harri—two rocks; but I have detected Minucius in certain errors which has made me wary of accepting his opinion. For instance, he claims that the Basques are descendants of the Phoenicians. Nothing could be more preposterous. They are purely Iberian, and probably the most ancient race in Europe. Why, you would be surprised—”
Mr. Incoul interrupted him cruelly—“I often am,” he said; “now tell me, will you be ready this afternoon?”
“The laundress has just taken my things.”
“Send after them, then. I make no doubt that there you can find another on the
