One December morning three ladies dressed in black (two, indeed, wore widows’ weeds) left Charing Cross Station for Paris. Mrs. Wylie, in her wisdom, had decreed a short banishment.
“Let us,” she said cheerily, the day after Captain Huston’s semi-surreptitious funeral—“let us get away from all this fog and cold and misery. I want sunshine. Let us go south—Nice, Biarritz, Arcachon! Which shall it be?”
“We might,” suggested Alice Huston, “stay a few days in Paris on the way.”
Brenda was reading, and before taking note of these remarks she finished a page, which she turned slowly, as one turns the page of a thoughtful book requiring slow perusal. She looked up at the clock upon the mantelpiece, and then her pensive gaze wandered towards Mrs. Wylie’s face.
“Not the Riviera,” she said persuasively. “It is like beef-tea when one is in rude health.”
“I must say,” observed Mrs. Wylie, after a pause, “that I prefer the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.”
“Let us stay a little time in Paris first,” said Alice eagerly, “and go on to Arcachon, or somewhere for Christmas. We might hear in Paris of nice people going South.”
The expression of the elder widow’s face was not quite so sympathetic as might have been expected upon sentimental grounds.
“Why,” she inquired, with dangerous suavity, “why are you so anxious to stay in Paris? It is no better than London in winter.”
Mrs. Huston shrugged her shoulders with childlike inconsequence. It was rather hard to expect her to have definite reasons ready for production.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered. “It would be a nice change. I think we would all find a place like Biarritz or Arcachon intolerably slow. We want taking out of ourselves.”
Mrs. Wylie nodded in a moderately sympathetic way. The three ladies knew that Theodore Trist was in Paris, and Mrs. Wylie, without looking in Brenda’s direction, had seen a change come over the girl’s face at the mention of the word. A singular change it was for so young a face—rather unpleasant, too, in its effect. For a moment her features appeared to contract, and a gray set look came into her eyes. This singular effect was slowly fading when Alice again mentioned Paris, and instantaneously the apathetic chill seemed to spread over Brenda’s being again.
“I hate Paris in winter!” said Mrs. Wylie decisively. “The wind is cutting, the streets are crowded with excited women carrying larger parcels, and more of them, than their limbs were intended to carry, and altogether it is horrible. We will stay one night if you like, but not more. In coming back we can stop perhaps. Besides … Alice, I do not think it would do for you to be seen in Paris just now.”
Alice did not meet her friend’s gaze. There was an unpleasant silence of some moments’ duration, and then she murmured in a prettily petulant way:
“It is rather hard that I should be expected to bury myself alive.”
In this wise it was settled, and the three ladies passed through Paris without seeing aught of the cosmopolitan journalist, whose presence in the French capital was a matter of public discussion. Some papers even went so far as to refer to it as the immediate precursor of an outbreak of hostilities between France and Germany, and took the opportunity of reminding the citizens that every Frenchman thirsted for the gory cup of vengeance.
Mrs. Wylie was fully aware of the fact that had Theodore Trist so desired, he would have managed to see them somehow in passing; but she opined that he would not do so, and in this she was right. He actually knew that they were in Paris, but avoided them with an ease which showed his intimate acquaintance with the ways of the French capital.
Alice Huston made no attempt to disguise her contempt for Bordeaux, where a halt of one night was necessary, and arrived at midday at Arcachon with the full intention of disliking the place heartily. Personally, I have no interest in the town, not holding any shares in the Casino, nor claiming relationship with persons keeping hotels there; but it shall always be my honest endeavour to treat people and places alike with justice. There is no denying the fact that certain parts of the little French watering-place, more especially towards La Teste, are not savoury of odour; but Alice was hardly justified in the use of the word “disgusting” in this respect. It happened to be blowing steadily from the westward, and, in consequence, the air was heavy with the distant continuous roar of Atlantic breakers surging on to the deserted shore across the Bassin.
“I know what that is,” said Alice impatiently on hearing it, which they did not fail to do as soon as they were out of the train; “that is surf. It is the same as at Madras. Horrid! I never slept a wink.”
It was only to be heard during certain winds—a very rare direction of the wind, explained the hotel porter, who understood enough English to catch what was being said. He had explained only that morning to a sentimental English lady of uncertain age, who loved the sad song of the waves with all the gushing ardour of her poetic soul, that the said song was always there, floating in the air above the pines. Besides, knowing the times of the trains and the price of hired carriages, this man was by no means ignorant in the ways of sweet deception. He was a good hotel-porter, and could lie with conviction when he tried.
Imagine a fishing village shaken up in a huge box with a fashionable watering-place, and set down pell-mell at the edge of a large inlet of the sea, and you have Arcachon. Amidst the pines, on the slopes behind the town, are villas, where hypochondriacs live and
