The Motor Maid | Page 8

so that I knew she must be considered a person worth conciliating.
Shut up in my ten-by-six-foot room, I tried to compose myself and make plans; but to make plans on thirty-two francs, when you've no home, and would be far from it even if you had one; when you've nobody to help you, and wouldn't want to ask them if you had--is about as hard as to play the piano brilliantly without ever having taken a lesson. With Princess Boriskoff dead, with Pamela de Nesle sailing for New York to-morrow morning, and no other intimate friends rich enough to do anything for me, even if they were willing to help me fly in the face of Providence and Madame Milvaine, it did seem (as Pamela herself would say) as though I were rather "up against it."
The thought of Miss Paget suddenly jumped into my head, and the wish that, somehow, I had kept her up my sleeve as a last resort, in case she really were in earnest about her offer. But she hadn't told me where she was going in Italy, and it would be of no use writing to one of her English addresses, as I couldn't stop on where I was, waiting for an answer.
Altogether things were very bad with me.
After I had sat down and thought for a while, I rang, and asked for the housekeeper. A hint or two revealed that she was aware of what had happened, and, explaining that I was to have been Princess Boriskoff's companion, I said that I must see the Princess's maid. She must come to my room. I must have a talk with her.
Presently, after an interval which may have been meant to emphasize her dignity, appeared a pale, small Russian woman whose withered face was as tragic and remote from the warmth of daily life as that of the eldest Fate.
She could speak French, and we talked together. Yes, her mistress had died very suddenly, but she and the doctors had always known that it might happen so, at any moment. It was hard for me, but--what would you? Life was hard. It might have been that I would have found life hard with Her Highness. What was to be, would be. I must write to my friends. It was not in her power to do anything for me. Her Highness had left no instructions. These things happened. Well! one made the best of them. There was nothing more to say.
So we said nothing more, and the woman moved away silently, as if to funeral music, to prepare for her journey to Russia. I--went down to luncheon.
One always does go down to luncheon while one is still inclined to keep up appearances before oneself; but the restaurant was large and terribly magnificent, with a violent rose-coloured carpet, and curtains which made me, in my frightened pallor, with my pale yellow hair and my gray travelling dress, feel like a poor little underground celery-stalk flung into a sunlit strawberry-bed, amid a great humming of bees.
The vast rosy sea was thickly dotted with many small table-islands that glittered appetizingly with silver and glass; but I could not have afforded to acknowledge an appetite even if I'd had one.
My conversation with the Russian woman had made me rather late. Most of the islands were inhabited, and as I was piloted past them by a haughty head waiter I heard people talking about golf, tennis, croquet, bridge, reminding me that I was in a place devoted to the pursuit of pleasure.
The most desirable islands were next the windows, therefore the one at which I dropped anchor (for I'd changed from a celery-stalk into a little boat now) was exactly in the middle of the room, with no view save of faces and backs of heads.
One of the faces was that of the lady who had gone up with me in the lift; and now and then, from across the distance that separated us, I saw her glance at me. She sat alone at a table that had beautiful roses on it, and she read a book as she ate.
One ordered here _à la carte_: there was no _déjeuner à prix fixe_; and it took courage to tell a waiter who looked like a weary young duke that I would have _consommé_ and bread, with nothing, no, nothing to follow.
Oh! the look he gave me, as if I had annexed the table under false pretences!
Suddenly the chorus of an American song ran with mocking echoes through my brain. I had heard Pamela sing it at the Convent:
The waiter roared it through the hall: "We don't give bread with one fish-ball! We-don't-_give_-bread with one fish-_ba-a-ll_!"
I half expected some such crushing protest, and it was only when the weary duke had turned his back,