The Bellevue Plotline

The Bellevue, when Gardiner first set eyes on it, was a cross between a hostelry and a farm, tumbled round three sides of a quadrangle where black-and-white pigs rooted and grunted, among middens and mangy grass, under the windows of the dining-room zendikosano. The Ardennes hotel of those days had no drains, no baths, no basins bigger than soup-plates and not many towels, no easy-chairs, no salons; in fact, none of the comforts of a refined home. There would be middens outside and the odor of the cow-stable within. On the other hand, the rooms would be clean, the beds comfortable, the food abundant, if peculiar; and the friendly welcome which met the traveler made up for many discomforts.

In all his former ventures Gardiner had been a tenant; the Bellevue was his own. He had bought the freehold with an opportune legacy, and was spending on it his savings of ten years. According to his usual plan, he went to work first to make the outside attractive. The quadrangle where the pigs had fed was now a lawn, laid out with flower-beds. Of the dilapidated out-buildings, some had been pulled down, others built up and turned into additional bedrooms. Round the three sides of the court ran a piazza with easy-chairs, and tables, and ever more flowers, sure attraction to an English eye. Inside, his alterations had been more costly. He had put in baths; he had laid on electric light; he had partially refurnished the house—not, however, with conventional "suites" from Liège. They would not have suited the heterogeneous old mansion, on whose lintel was[Pg 62] carved the date 1548, and which had been successively convent, country house, farm, and inn. For those who had eyes to see, there was in those days a good deal of fine old furniture, carved presses, beds, and so forth, to be picked up in the farms and the villages. It had been a labor of love for Gardiner to go round bargaining for these things, and bringing them home in triumph to his picturesque old rooms. He made a play of his work, and a pet of his home; he grudged no labor spent in beautifying it; he enjoyed dressing it up, as a child dresses up a doll. In the end, what with polished floors, casement curtains, and Noah's Ark plants in pots, the place looked like a garden-city house, as Lettice unkindly remarked. There was nothing like it in the Ardennes.

His next step was to advertise, a branch of their business on which hotel-keepers in general do not seem to spend their brains. Gardiner did not want a mixed clientèle, he was out to attract the poorer gentry, parsons, doctors, schoolmasters, retired colonels and commanders, literary men—the class which he had found pleasantest to deal with. Therefore he put his discreet little paragraphs into such papers as The Guardian, The Church Times, The Author, The Journal of Education, The Spectator, and various ladies' periodicals. Each advertisement was worded differently, to suit its audience, but all wound up with the formula: "Inclusive terms, 4s. 6d. per day. Fifteen-day excursions, Dover—Rochehaut, second class, £1. 8s. 3d. Exact directions as to journey given." And to meet the demand which arose, he had leaflets printed, giving alternative routes by day or night, plans of stations, prices in detail, travel hints, the minute advice of an old traveler who knows every trick of the journey; leaflets which enabled the greenest novice to face the douane, and change at the right places, and catch the right trains. This branch of his work alone kept him busy, for he was his own secretary. But it gained him what he wanted, and filled his house. Satan had not much chance of finding Gardiner's hands at his disposal. Nevertheless, in those summer days he found time to get into mischief.

[Pg 63]

Lettice was enjoying herself very much in her own fashion, though to more adventurous souls her daily round might have seemed dull. She came down to breakfast at nine, and then crawled out half-a-mile to a certain brushwood pile in the forest, commanding the view over Frahan. There she sat down, the faggots providing a comfortable seat with a back. She took a work-bag and a Latin grammar, and spent her morning alternately in setting slow stitches in a green tablecloth and in learning Latin verbs from the volume open on her knee. After lunch she retired to her room in company with a sheaf of foolscap. If she wrung out one whole line in a day, she considered herself to have done brilliantly. After tea came a solemn constitutional with Denis, which, as her chronic tiredness wore off, extended from two miles to six, or even ten. Then followed dinner; and after dinner, bed at nine o'clock.

One morning about three weeks after her arrival she was starting on her customary crawl to the wood pile, when Dorothea jumped up from her seat on the terrasse.

"Are you going for a walk? May I come too?"

"I'm not going far," Lettice warned her in a discouraging hurry.

"I know; you go into the woods and sit down, don't you? I'll bring my book."

"That will be very nice," declared Lettice. Any one who knew the A B C of her expressions must have seen that she was, to put it prettily, as cross as two sticks. Dorothea was not blind; nevertheless, she persisted. They walked in silence, Dorothea now a little ahead, now checking herself back to her companion's unalterable crawl. Arrived at the wood pile, Lettice sat down on the identical bundle of sticks which she had picked out for herself seventeen days before. She was conservative as a cat in all her ways.

The morning was hazy. Round them the woods had been cleared of forest trees; there was a carpet of reddish leathery leaves, across which the great silver boles lay forlorn, amid the white chips of their slaughter. Low bushes were green, and there were leaves overhead, a thin tracery; but [Pg 64]elsewhere only russet tones and gray, gray-stemmed saplings and grayish mists. Gray too was Frahan in the valley, softly molded in haze, white the river circling its utterly improbable peninsula, gray the far mountains, pearl-gray and silver, losing themselves in silvery sky. Between her participles and her stitches Lettice would often lift up her eyes to the hills; she dearly loved a distant view. But to-day she was watching her companion.