"Quite well," Pauline replied.
"Well, you see, miss, I"ve been here a long time, and I am a great favourite with the English visitors. It would never do to tell them that I"m a Scotsman, and that my real name is Jock. You see, they like to practise their French on me. The management always send me to wait upon English visitors. Of course, I can understand what they mean, and it flatters them to think that they"re really speaking French. I heard an old lady the other day talking to her daughter. "My dear," she said, "those extra French lessons at the High School have not been wasted.
That nice, attentive French waiter understands you perfectly"; and so I did of course, miss, though when she wanted the mussels she said, "Esker voos avvy des moulins?" And when she wanted the pastry she called it "tap.i.s.serie" instead of "patisserie." So you see my French name is one of my great a.s.sets, though you, mademoiselle, saw through me very easily." Here the waiter once more relapsed into his best French manner and made a flourishing little bow. "Do you stay long in Paris, mademoiselle?" he asked, going back to the table and beginning to remove the dishes.
"I can"t say," Pauline replied. "As a matter of fact, we are here quite by accident. We are really going to Switzerland."
"The wrong train?" inquired the waiter.
"Yes, that was it," Pauline answered. "We took the wrong train, and our party got divided somewhere."
"What bad luck!" Jacques answered. Then he gave a rather searching glance at Pauline. "But surely M. Collingwood knows the Continent?" he asked.
The maid gave an almost imperceptible start, and went up to the fireplace, where she began to pull about the flowers in one of the vases. "Oh yes, I think so," she answered, in a voice which strove to appear quite indifferent to the question.
"Well, I can tell you," the waiter went on--"I can tell you that M.
Collingwood knows the Continent as well as a Cook"s agent. He"s always travelling about. You can see his name in the Riviera lists, in the Paris _Daily Mail_ or the _New York Herald_. He"s at Nice for the races.
He"s at Monte Carlo for the pigeon-shooting. He"s at Marienbad for a cure, or climbing mountains in the Bernese Oberland. He is everywhere, is M. Collingwood. He was staying here last year, for instance."
The maid turned slowly from the fire and looked towards the supper-table.
"Yes, yes?" she said with some eagerness. "He is here often? At this hotel?"
"I can remember him being here three times," the man replied. And there was something rather furtive in his look, something which seemed to speak of a suppressed curiosity and watchfulness. Many waiters in smart hotels, both in London and in Paris, have this look--the veritable expression of Paul Pry. "Have you been long with Mr. and Mrs. Admaston?"
"I"ve been many years with madame," Pauline replied. And then, speaking rather suddenly, "You seem to have a very good memory, Mr. Jock Jacques."
"It is necessary," the man answered, with all the dryness of a Scotsman.
"And yet sometimes," Pauline replied, "it is necessary not to have a good memory."
"Perhaps," the waiter answered. "Certainly sometimes discretion is the better part of recollection," giving her a look of great slyness as he spoke.
Pauline shrugged her shoulders. There was a note of veiled contempt in her voice. "To forget easily is sometimes very convenient, n"est-ce pas?" she said.
"When it is worth more than a good memory," he answered.
"Doubtless you are very well off, Mr. Jock," Pauline continued, and this time the sneer in her voice was hardly veiled.
At this the waiter began brushing the crumbs from the table very vigorously. "I"m only a poor waiter," he said.
"Then surely that must be your own fault? There ought to be many opportunities in a hotel of this sort of making a good use of a convenient memory?"
"Well, yes, you"re right there," came from the man, with a rather ill-favoured leer. "But, you see, I am too sentimental for that."
Pauline laughed in answer, and not very pleasantly. "Don"t tell me," she said. "I"ve been in Scotland for the shooting of the grouse. There is no Scotsman too sentimental to make money. What part of Scotland did you say you came from? La! la! la! And at your age, too!"
"On the contrary, the older I grow the more sentimental I become."
Pauline shook her head. "Mon Dieu!" she said; "every one knows that sentiment ends at forty."
The waiter, a quick-witted rogue enough, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying this midnight conversation. He stood with one arm akimbo, the other resting on the table, and grinned like a vulgar Mephistopheles.
"If sentiment ends at forty," he said, "you, mademoiselle, will suffer from it for a long time to come."
"Ma foi, no! No suffering for me," Pauline replied. "I"m a very practical person. It would take a great deal to make me sentimental."
"I wonder how much?" the man answered. "A nice little hotel with a good trade, say?"
Pauline shrugged her shoulders. "No, that would mean work. I am used to seeing a life of sentiment without work."
The waiter once more began to clear the table. "It is a pity we see so much of what we cannot have," he answered, rattling the coffee-cups and silver.
Pauline made no reply to this, but stood by the fireplace in silence watching the waiter, and showing plainly by her manner that the conversation was over and that she was waiting for him to go.
Suddenly she started violently, as Jacques did also.
The heavy mahogany door leading to the corridor outside was flung open, and a short, thick-set, bearded Frenchman came briskly into the room.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about him. He might have been an ordinary commercial traveller, save for a pair of singularly alert eyes, which glanced rapidly hither and thither and took in the whole room in one comprehensive sweep. This was done with lightning-like rapidity, and then the fellow"s face a.s.sumed an expression of great surprise--a little bit overdone and too forced to seem real.
"A thousand pardons!" he said, with a bow. "The wrong room! My mistake!
I am very sorry. Accept my apologies."
With that he once more glanced round the room and left it, though with not quite the alacrity of his entrance, closing the door quietly behind him.
But into the quiet room something strangely disturbing had come.
It was no longer a confidential maid gossiping with the casual waiter of a smart hotel. The air, which had before been charged with little suspicions, toy fencings, as it were, between people of no great importance, was now informed with something more pressing, more imminent, more real.
Pauline herself positively staggered back from the fireplace towards the table, and nearer to the waiter. Her brown face became grey, she seemed for a moment to lose control of herself, while the ferret eyes of the waiter watched her with an excited glitter in them.
"That man!" ... The exclamation came from Pauline almost like a cry.
"That man!"
Jacques was all bent to attention. He hurried up to the woman. "Yes, yes?" he said.
"Do you know who he is?" Pauline asked. "Have you seen him before, M.
Jacques?"
The man watched her keenly. "I don"t know, mademoiselle," he answered in a guarded voice.
"That man, I say--have you seen him before?... I remember."
The waiter hastened to agree, obviously wishing to discover the reason of Pauline"s agitation.
"Yes," he said. "Now you mention it, mademoiselle, I remember too. He was outside--there--in the corridor--just after I had shown M.
Collingwood and you and madame to your rooms."
"Was that when we arrived?" Pauline asked. Her brown hands were trembling, her eyes were informed with anxiety.