The Guests Of Hercules. C. N. Williamson
Читать онлайн книгу.
before it was light, she arose noiselessly, bathed as well as she could, and dressed, so as to be able to look out at Marseilles. Miss Wardropp was asleep, and as the train slowed into the big station in the pale glimmer of the winter morning, Mary walked to the end of the car. The stop would be twenty minutes, and as the train gave its last jerk Mary jumped on to the platform.
The sky was of a faint, milky blue, like the blue that moves under the white cloud in a moonstone, and the first far down ray of morning sun, coming up with the balmy wind from still, secret places where the youth of the world slept, shimmered golden as a buttercup held under the pearly chin of a child. This was only Marseilles, but already the smell of the south was in the air, the scent of warm salt sea, of eucalyptus logs burning, and pine trees and invisible orange groves. On the platform, osier baskets packed full of flowers sent out wafts of perfume; and as Mary stood gazing over the heads of the crowd at the lightening sky, she thought the dawn rushed up the east like a torchbearer, bringing good news. Just for a moment she forgot everybody, and could have sung for joy of life—a feeling new to her, though something deep down in herself had whispered that it was there and she might know it if she would. It was such faint whisperings as this which, repeated often, had driven her from the convent.
"How young I am!" she thought, for once actively self-conscious. "How young I am, and how young the world is!"
She let her eyes fall from the sky and plunge into the turmoil of the station, turmoil of people getting in and out of trains, of porters running with luggage, of restaurant employés wheeling stands of food through the crowd, piled oranges and mandarines, and white grapes, decorated with leaves and a few flowers; soldiers arriving or saying goodbye, jolly dark youths in red and blue; an Arab trying to sell scarfs from Algiers; a Turkish family travelling; English men and women newly landed, with P. & O. labels large on their hand-bags; French bonnes wearing quaint stiff caps and large floating ribbons; Indian ayahs wrapped in shawls. Mary gazed at the scene as if it were a panorama, and scarcely dwelt upon individuals until her eyes were drawn by the eyes of a man.
It was when she had mounted the steps of her own car, and turned once more before going in. So she looked down at the man looking up.
She blushed under the eyes, for there was something like adoration in them, romantic admiration such as a man may feel for the picture of a lovely saint against a golden background, or the poetic heroine of a classic legend. They were extraordinarily handsome eyes, dark and mysterious as only Italian eyes can be, though Mary Grant did not know this, having gazed into few men's eyes, and none that were Italian.
"Looking up so, his face is like what Romeo's must have been," she said to herself with an answering romantic impulse. "Surely he is Italian!"
And he, looking up at her, said, "What a picture of Giulietta on the balcony! Is she French, Italian, Russian?"
The man was a Roman, whose American mother had not robbed him of an ardent temperament that leaned toward romance; and he had just come back to the west across the sea, from a romantic mission in the east. He had not exchanged words with a woman for months, in the desert where he had been living. For this reason, perhaps, he was the readier to find romance in any lovely pair of eyes; but it seemed to him that there never had been such eyes as these. For always, in a man's life, there must be one pair of eyes which are transcendent stars, even if they are seen but once, then lost forever.
This was not his train, for the luxe does not take local passengers, in the season when every place is filled between Paris and Nice; but because of Mary's face, he wished to travel with her, and look into her eyes again, in order to make sure if they really held the magic of that first glance.
He found a train-attendant and spoke with him rapidly, in a low voice, making at the same time a suggestive chinking of gold and silver with one hand in his pocket.
IV
Under the golden sunshine, the luxe steamed on: after Toulon no longer tearing through the country with few pauses, but stopping at many stations. For the first time Mary saw olive trees, spouting silver like great fountains, and palms stretching out dark green hands of Fatma against blue sky and bluer sea. For the first time she saw the Mediterranean that she had dreamed of in her cold, dim room at the convent. This was like the dreams and the stories told by Peter, only better; for nothing could give a true idea of the glimmering olive groves. Under the silvery branches delicate as smoke-wreaths, and among the gnarled gray trunks, it seemed that at any moment a band of nymphs or dryads might pass, streaming away in fear from the noises of civilization.
At St. Raphael and Fréjus colossal legs of masonry strode across the green meadows, and Mary knew that they had been built by Romans. Pine trees like big, open umbrellas were black against a curtain of azure. Acres of terraces were planted with rows of flowers like straightened rainbows: young roses, carnations, pinky white stock and blue and purple hyacinths; and over the coral or gamboge painted walls of little railway stations bougainvillea poured cataracts of crimson. By and by, the train ran close to the sea, and miniature waves blue as melted turquoise curled on amber sands, shafts of gilded light glinting through the crest of each roller where the crystal arch was shattered into foam.
Then came the wonderful red rocks which Peter had described; ruddy monsters of incredible shapes which had crawled down to drink, and lay basking in the clear water, their huge rounded backs bright as copper where the westerly sun smote them; for by this time it was afternoon. At Cannes, yachts sat high in the quaint harbour like proud white swans: mysterious islands slept on the calm surface of the sea, dreaming of their own reflections; and a company of blue-clad mountains, strangely crowned, were veiled below their foreheads like harem women with delicate fabric of cloud, thin as fine muslin.
After Cannes, appeared Antibes, with its peninsula of palms and pines, its old harbour, town, and white lighthouse; and at last, Nice.
Many people whose faces Mary had seen at dinner the night before, and again at luncheon, left the train at Nice; and on the platforms, waiting for local trains, she saw girls in flowery hats, and white or pale tinted serge dresses, such as they might wear on a cool day of an English summer. They could not be travelling far, in such frocks and hats, and Mary wondered where they were going, with their little plump hand-bags of netted gold or embroidered velvet.
By and by a train moved in, also on its way to Monte Carlo. Women and men suddenly surged together in a compact wave, and struggled with each other at the doors of the corridor carriages. Fat men had no hesitation in pushing themselves in front of thin women; robust females dashed little men aside, and mounted triumphantly. All were eager, and bent upon some object in which they refused to be thwarted.
The beauty of the coast was dreamlike to Mary, who had lived ever since she could remember in the north of Scotland, among moorland and hills whose only intrinsic brilliance of colour came at the time of heather. She had loved the browns and cloudy grays, and the deep blue of the lake and the pensive violet shadows; but this was like a burst of gorgeous day after an existence in sweet, pale twilight. She rejoiced that she had persisted in seeing the Riviera before passing into Italy.
It seemed that, after Nice, each stopping-place was prettier and more flowery than the one before. She had no one to admire them with her, for since luncheon, which Mary had taken early, Miss Wardropp had been in another compartment playing the game with the little wheel and spinning ivory ball. But after passing Villefranche harbour, Beaulieu drowned in olives, and Eze under its old hill-village on a horn of rock, the Australian girl came back, to exchange a cap of purple suède for her cartwheel of a hat.
"The next station where the train stops will be Monaco," she announced.
"Oh, then you'll be getting out almost at once?" And Mary prepared to say goodbye.
"Not yet. The station after Monaco: Monte Carlo—darling place! But the principality begins at Monaco of course. I told you how I stayed three days before I went to England. Almost everybody who lands at Marseilles wants to run on to Monte for a flutter, in season