Lady Larkspur | Page 5

not only possible at Barton, but it was the only life that could be lived there. Plenty of exercise in the open and regular habits would, I had been assured, set me up again, and my leisure I meant to employ in beginning a novel that had been teasing me ever since I sailed for home.
Of my uncle Bash I had only the happiest and most grateful memories. Quite naturally it had occurred to me at times, and my friends had encouraged the idea, that my uncle would die some day and leave me his money. There was no particular reason why he should do so, as he had never manifested any unusual affection for me and I had certainly never done anything for him.
Antoine was at the Barton station with the touring-car Uncle Bash had bought to establish communication with the village. Flynn, the big Irishman who had been the doorman at the Tyringham for years and retired because of rheumatism acquired from long exposure to the elements at the hostelry's portals, was at the wheel.
Antoine greeted me with that air of lofty condescension tempered with a sincere kindliness that had made him a prince among head waiters. As I shook hands with him his lips quivered and tears came to his eyes. Flynn, standing beside the car, saluted with a welcoming grin.
"Very glad to see you, sorr. The trunk came this mornin' all right, sorr, and we put it in your room."
I bade Antoine join me in the back seat that he might the more easily bring me up to date as to affairs on the estate.
"It must be a little slow up here after the years you lived in town," I suggested, "but of course you're all old friends."
"Well, yes; all friends," he acquiesced, but with so little enthusiasm that I glanced at him quickly. He pretended to be absorbed in the flying landscape at the moment. Flynn, I noticed, was giving ear to our conversation from the wheel.
"It was sad, very sad, Mr. Bashford passing away so far from home, sir. It was a great shock. And he had looked forward for years to a quiet life abroad. It must have been ten years ago he first mentioned his hope of retiring to Japan."
Uncle Bash had given me no such forecast of his intentions, and I felt humble before this proof of Antoine's greater intimacy. Once at the beginning of our acquaintance, when I had complimented Antoine on his English, he explained that he was born in England of French parents. His father had been chef and his mother housekeeper for an American banker who lived for many years in London. Antoine's speech was that of a well-trained English upper servant, and I imagined that in his youth he had taken some English butler as his model. He used to pretend that he knew French very imperfectly, and I was surprised when he now addressed me quite fluently in that language.
"You have been with the armies of dear France," he remarked. "The war is very dreadful. My parents were of Verdun; it grieves me to know of the suffering in the land of my people."
As I replied sympathetically in French I saw Flynn straighten himself at the wheel with an impatient fling of his head. Antoine indicated him with a contemptuous nod: "Married Elsie, the German woman who worked in the linen-room at the Tyringham! This has caused some trouble, and there is a pantry girl, Gretchen, who was ill a long time before the master left, and he sent her here for the country air. She is a little devil with her dear Fatherland."
I laughed at the old fellow's gravity and earnestness. That the war should be making itself felt on the quiet acres at Barton-on-the-Sound was absurd.
"But there can be no trouble; everything is peaceful, of course, save for a little foolish talk----"
The Gaul asserted itself in a shrug, a form of expression rare in him. I was pondering the recrudescence of race hatreds due to the upheaval in Europe when he startled me by a statement uttered close to my ear:
"There have been inquiries for the widow; these have caused me much anxiety."
"Widow! Whose widow?"
"Madame, the widow of the dear master. It seems that there are persons anxious to see her. There have been inquiries, one--two--three times."
"Probably some of her American friends anxious to pay their respects, or some of the neighbors making calls of courtesy," I suggested.
"A foreign gentleman who acts very queerly," Antoine persisted.
My uncle's widow was a vague, unknown being whom I had never expected to cross my horizons. If she meditated a descent upon Barton-on-the-Sound, the trust company would certainly have had some hint of her approach, but Torrence clearly had had no tidings of her beyond her last