His Own People | Page 5

make his bow before a thin, dark, charmingly
pretty young woman, who smiled up at him from her deck-chair
through an enhancing mystery of veils; and presently he found himself
sitting beside her. He could not help trembling slightly at first, but he
would have giving a great deal if, by some miraculous vision, Mary
Kramer and other friends of his in Cranston could have seen him
engaged in what he thought of as "conversational badinage" with the
Comtesse de Vaurigard.
Both the lady and her name thrilled him. He thought he remembered
the latter in Froissart: it conjured up "baronial halls" and "donjon
keeps," rang resonantly in his mind like "Let the portcullis fall!" At
home he had been wont to speak of the "oldest families in Cranston,"
complaining of the invasions of "new people" into the social territory of
the McCords and Mellins and Kramers--a pleasant conception which
the presence of a De Vaurigard revealed to him as a petty and shameful
fiction; and yet his humility, like his little fit of trembling, was of short
duration, for gay geniality of Madame de Vaurigard put him amazingly
at ease.
At Calais young Cooley (with a matter-of-course air, and not seeming
to feel the need of asking permission) accompanied her to a
compartment, and Mellin walked with them to the steps of the coach,
where he paused, murmuring some words of farewell.
Madame de Vaurigard turned to him with a prettily assumed dismay.
"What! You stay at Calais?" she cried, pausing with one foot on the
step to ascend. "Oh! I am sorry for you. Calais is ter-rible!"
"No. I am going on to Paris."

"So? You have frien's in another coach which you wish to be wiz?"
"No, no, indeed," he stammered hastily.
"Well, my frien'," she laughed gayly, "w'y don' you come wiz us?"
Blushing, he followed Cooley into the coach, to spend five happy hours,
utterly oblivious of the bright French landscape whirling by outside the
window.
There ensued a month of conscientious sightseeing in Paris, and that
unfriendly city afforded him only one glimpse of the Countess. She
whizzed by him in a big touring-car one afternoon as he stood on an
"isle of safety" at the foot of the Champs Elysees. Cooley was driving
the car. The raffish, elderly Englishman (whose name, Mellin knew,
was Sneyd) sat with him, and beside Madame de Vaurigard in the
tonneau lolled a gross-looking man--unmistakably an American--with a
jovial, red, smooth-shaven face and several chins. Brief as the glimpse
was, Mellin had time to receive a distinctly disagreeable impression of
this person, and to wonder how Heaven could vouchsafe the society of
Madame de Vaurigard to so coarse a creature.
All the party were dressed as for the road, gray with dust, and to all
appearances in a merry mood. Mellin's heart gave a leap when he saw
that the Countess recognized him. Her eyes, shining under a white veil,
met his for just the instant before she was quite by, and when the
machine had passed a little handkerchief waved for a moment from the
side of the tonneau where she sat.
With that he drew the full breath of Romance.
He had always liked to believe that ~"grandes dames"~ leaned back in
the luxurious upholstery of their victorias, landaulettes, daumonts or
automobiles with an air of inexpressible though languid hauteur. The
Newport letter in the Cranston Telegraph often referred to it. But the
gayety of that greeting from the Countess' little handkerchief was
infinitely refreshing, and Mellin decided that animation was more
becoming than hauteur--even to a ~"grande dame."~
That night he wrote (almost without effort) the verses published in the
Cranston Telegraph two weeks later. They began:
~Marquise, ma belle~, with your kerchief of lace Awave from your
flying car, And your slender hand--
The hand to which he referred was the same which had arrested his
gondola and his heart simultaneously, five days ago, in Venice. He was

on his way to the station when Madame de Vaurigard's gondola shot
out into the Grand Canal from a narrow channel, and at her signal both
boats paused.
"Ah! but you fly away!" she cried, lifting her eyebrows mournfully, as
she saw the steamer-trunk in his gondola. "You are goin' return to
America?"
"No. I'm just leaving for Rome."
"Well, in three day' I am goin' to Rome!" She clapped her hands lightly
and laughed. "You know this is three time' we meet jus' by chance,
though that second time it was so quick--~pff~! like that-- we didn't
talk much togezzer! Monsieur Mellin," she laughed again, "I think we
mus' be frien's. Three time'--an' we are both goin' to Rome! Monsieur
Mellin, you believe in ~Fate~?"
With a beating heart he did.
Thence came the invitation to meet