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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol, by 
+William J. Locke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol
+
+Author: William J. Locke
+
+Release Date: July 31, 2008 [EBook #26154]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Anne Storer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Table of Contents added.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+ IDOLS
+ SEPTIMUS
+ DERELICTS
+ THE USURPER
+ WHERE LOVE IS
+ THE WHITE DOVE
+ SIMON THE JESTER
+ A STUDY IN SHADOWS
+ A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY
+ THE BELOVÈD VAGABOND
+ AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA
+ THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE
+ THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE
+ THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA
+
+
+
+
+ [Illustration: AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FOURTH KISS OUT CAME HER FATHER
+                                                           _See page 34_]
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+ JOYOUS ADVENTURES
+ OF ARISTIDE PUJOL
+
+ BY
+ WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+
+ ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+ ALEC BALL
+
+
+ NEW YORK
+ JOHN LANE COMPANY
+ MCMXII
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     I  THE ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR PATRONNE
+    II  THE ADVENTURE OF THE ARLÉSIENNE
+   III  THE ADVENTURE OF THE KIND MR. SMITH
+    IV  THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING
+     V  THE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG'S HEAD
+    VI  THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE
+   VII  THE ADVENTURE OF THE MIRACLE
+  VIII  THE ADVENTURE OF THE FICKLE GODDESS
+    IX  THE ADVENTURE OF A SAINT MARTIN'S SUMMER
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                     FACING
+                                                      PAGE
+
+ At the Beginning of the Fourth Kiss Out Came Her
+   Father                           _Frontispiece_
+
+ I Had Knocked Him Down on Purpose. He Was
+   Crippled for Life                                     14
+
+ Anything Less Congruous as the Bride-Elect of the
+   Debonair Aristide Pujol it Was Impossible to
+   Imagine                                               22
+
+ Had Straightway Poured His Grievances into a
+   Feminine Ear                                          32
+
+ I Found Both Tyres Had Been Punctured in a Hundred
+   Places                                                40
+
+ "Madame," said Aristide, "You Are Adorable, and
+   I Love You to Distraction"                            50
+
+ "The Villain Was a Traveller in Buttons--Buttons!"      60
+
+ He Burst into Shrieks of Laughter                       64
+
+ "And You!" shouted Bocardon, Falling on Aristide;
+   "I Must Embrace You Also"                             68
+
+ Standing on the Arrival Platform of Euston Station      78
+
+ "Ah! the Pictures," cried Aristide, with a Wide
+   Sweep of His Arms                                     88
+
+ "I'll Take Five Hundred Pounds," said He, "to
+   Stay in"                                              96
+
+ Between the Folds of a Blanket Peeped the Face of
+   a Sleeping Child                                     110
+
+ He Demonstrated the Proper Application of the Cure     120
+
+ It is a Fearsome Thing for a Man to be Left Alone in
+   the Dead of Night with a Young Baby                  124
+
+ One of the Little Girls in Pigtails Was Holding
+   Him, While Miss Anne Administered the Feeding-Bottle 134
+
+ He Must Have Dealt Out Paralyzing Information          180
+
+ Fleurette Danced with Aristide, as Light as an
+   Autumn Leaf Tossed by the Wind                       188
+
+ Aristide Practised His Many Queer Accomplishments      200
+
+ He Read It, and Blinked in Amazement                   208
+
+ He Might as Well Have Pointed Out the Marvels
+   of Kubla Khan's Pleasure-Dome to a Couple of
+   Guinea-Pigs                                          216
+
+ "I've Caught You! At Last, After Twenty Years,
+   I've Caught You"                                     234
+
+ There He Saw a Sight Which for a Moment Paralyzed Him  238
+
+ Mr. Ducksmith Seized Him by the Lapels of His Coat     242
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+ JOYOUS ADVENTURES
+ OF
+ ARISTIDE PUJOL
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+#The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol#
+
+I
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR PATRONNE
+
+
+In narrating these few episodes in the undulatory, not to say
+switchback, career of my friend Aristide Pujol, I can pretend to no
+chronological sequence. Some occurred before he (almost literally)
+crossed my path for the first time, some afterwards. They have been
+related to me haphazard at odd times, together with a hundred other
+incidents, just as a chance tag of association recalled them to his
+swift and picturesque memory. He would, indeed, make a show of fixing
+dates by reference to his temporary profession; but so Protean seem to
+have been his changes of fortune in their number and rapidity that I
+could never keep count of them or their order. Nor does it matter. The
+man's life was as disconnected as a pack of cards.
+
+My first meeting with him happened in this wise.
+
+I had been motoring in a listless, solitary fashion about Languedoc. A
+friend who had stolen a few days from anxious business in order to
+accompany me from Boulogne through Touraine and Guienne had left me at
+Toulouse; another friend whom I had arranged to pick up at Avignon on
+his way from Monte Carlo was unexpectedly delayed. I was therefore
+condemned to a period of solitude somewhat irksome to a man of a
+gregarious temperament. At first, for company's sake, I sat in front
+by my chauffeur, McKeogh. But McKeogh, an atheistical Scotch mechanic
+with his soul in his cylinders, being as communicative as his own
+differential, I soon relapsed into the equal loneliness and greater
+comfort of the back.
+
+In this fashion I left Montpellier one morning on my leisurely eastward
+journey, deciding to break off from the main road, striking due south,
+and visit Aigues-Mortes on the way.
+
+Aigues-Mortes was once a flourishing Mediterranean town. St. Louis and
+his Crusaders sailed thence twice for Palestine; Charles V. and Francis
+I. met there and filled the place with glittering state. But now its
+glory has departed. The sea has receded three or four miles, and left
+it high and dry in the middle of bleak salt marshes, useless, dead and
+desolate, swept by the howling mistral and scorched by the blazing sun.
+The straight white ribbon of road which stretched for miles through the
+plain, between dreary vineyards--some under water, the black shoots of
+the vines appearing like symmetrical wreckage above the surface--was at
+last swallowed up by the grim central gateway of the town, surmounted
+by its frowning tower. On each side spread the brown machicolated
+battlements that vainly defended the death-stricken place. A soft
+northern atmosphere would have invested it in a certain mystery of
+romance, but in the clear southern air, the towers and walls standing
+sharply defined against the blue, wind-swept sky, it looked naked and
+pitiful, like a poor ghost caught in the daylight.
+
+At some distance from the gate appeared the usual notice as to
+speed-limit. McKeogh, most scrupulous of drivers, obeyed. As there was a
+knot of idlers underneath and beyond the gate he slowed down to a crawl,
+sounding a patient and monotonous horn. We advanced; the peasant folk
+cleared the way sullenly and suspiciously. Then, deliberately, an
+elderly man started to cross the road, and on the sound of the horn
+stood stock still, with resentful defiance on his weather-beaten face.
+McKeogh jammed on the brakes. The car halted. But the infinitesimal
+fraction of a second before it came to a dead stop the wing over the
+near front wheel touched the elderly person and down he went on the
+ground. I leaped from the car, to be instantly surrounded by an
+infuriated crowd, which seemed to gather from all the quarters of
+the broad, decaying square. The elderly man, helped to his feet by
+sympathetic hands, shook his knotted fists in my face. He was a dour and
+ugly peasant, of splendid physique, as hard and discoloured as the walls
+of Aigues-Mortes; his cunning eyes were as clear as a boy's, his lined,
+clean-shaven face as rigid as a gargoyle; and the back of his neck,
+above the low collar of his jersey, showed itself seamed into glazed
+irregular lozenges, like the hide of a crocodile. He cursed me and my
+kind healthily in very bad French and apostrophized his friends in
+Provençal, who in Provençal and bad French made responsive clamour. I
+had knocked him down on purpose. He was crippled for life. Who was I to
+go tearing through peaceful towns with my execrated locomotive and
+massacring innocent people? I tried to explain that the fault was his,
+and that, after all, to judge by the strength of his lungs, no great
+damage had been inflicted. But no. They would not let it go like that.
+There were the gendarmes--I looked across the square and saw two
+gendarmes striding portentously towards the scene--they would see
+justice done. The law was there to protect poor folk. For a certainty I
+would not get off easily.
+
+ [Illustration: I HAD KNOCKED HIM DOWN ON PURPOSE. HE WAS CRIPPLED
+                FOR LIFE]
+
+I knew what would happen. The gendarmes would submit McKeogh and myself
+to a _procès-verbal_. They would impound the car. I should have to go
+to the Mairie and make endless depositions. I should have to wait,
+Heaven knows how long, before I could appear before the _juge de paix_.
+I should have to find a solicitor to represent me. In the end I should
+be fined for furious driving--at the rate, when the accident happened,
+of a mile an hour--and probably have to pay a heavy compensation to the
+wilful and uninjured victim of McKeogh's impeccable driving. And all the
+time, while waiting for injustice to take its course, I should be the
+guest of a hostile population. I grew angry. The crowd grew angrier. The
+gendarmes approached with an air of majesty and fate. But just before
+they could be acquainted with the brutal facts of the disaster a
+singularly bright-eyed man, wearing a hard felt hat and a blue serge
+suit, flashed like a meteor into the midst of the throng, glanced with
+an amazing swiftness at me, the car, the crowd, the gendarmes and the
+victim, ran his hands up and down the person of the last mentioned, and
+then, with a frenzied action of a figure in a bad cinematograph rather
+than that of a human being, subjected the inhabitants to an infuriated
+philippic in Provençal, of which I could not understand one word. The
+crowd, with here and there a murmur of remonstrance, listened to him in
+silence. When he had finished they hung their heads, the gendarmes
+shrugged their majestic and fateful shoulders and lit cigarettes, and
+the gargoyle-visaged ancient with the neck of crocodile hide turned
+grumbling away. I have never witnessed anything so magical as the effect
+produced by this electric personage. Even McKeogh, who during the
+previous clamour had sat stiff behind his wheel, keeping expressionless
+eyes fixed on the cap of the radiator, turned his head two degrees of a
+circle and glanced at his surroundings.
+
+The instant peace was established our rescuer darted up to me with the
+directness of a dragon-fly and shook me warmly by the hand. As he had
+done me a service, I responded with a grateful smile; besides, his
+aspect was peculiarly prepossessing. I guessed him to be about
+five-and-thirty. He had a clear olive complexion, black moustache and
+short silky vandyke beard, and the most fascinating, the most humorous,
+the most mocking, the most astonishingly bright eyes I have ever seen in
+my life. I murmured a few expressions of thanks, while he prolonged the
+handshake with the fervour of a long-lost friend.
+
+"It's all right, my dear sir. Don't worry any more," he said in
+excellent English, but with a French accent curiously tinged with
+Cockney. "The old gentleman's as sound as a bell--not a bruise on his
+body." He pushed me gently to the step of the car. "Get in and let me
+guide you to the only place where you can eat in this accursed town."
+
+Before I could recover from my surprise, he was by my side in the car
+shouting directions to McKeogh.
+
+"Ah! These people!" he cried, shaking his hands with outspread fingers
+in front of him. "They have no manners, no decency, no self-respect.
+It's a regular trade. They go and get knocked down by automobiles on
+purpose, so that they can claim indemnity. They breed dogs especially
+and train them to commit suicide under the wheels so that they can get
+compensation. There's one now--_ah, sacrée bête!_" He leaned over the
+side of the car and exchanged violent objurgation with the dog. "But
+never mind. So long as I am here you can run over anything you like with
+impunity."
+
+"I'm very much obliged to you," said I. "You've saved me from a deal of
+foolish unpleasantness. From the way you handled the old gentleman I
+should guess you to be a doctor."
+
+"That's one of the few things I've never been," he replied. "No; I'm not
+a doctor. One of these days I'll tell you all about myself." He spoke
+as if our sudden acquaintance would ripen into life-long friendship.
+"There's the hotel--the Hôtel Saint-Louis," he pointed to the sign a
+little way up the narrow, old-world, cobble-paved street we were
+entering. "Leave it to me; I'll see that they treat you properly."
+
+The car drew up at the doorway. My electric friend leaped out and met
+the emerging landlady.
+
+"_Bonjour, madame._ I've brought you one of my very good friends,
+an English gentleman of the most high importance. He will have
+_déjeuner--tout ce qu'il y a de mieux_. None of your cabbage-soup and
+eels and _andouilles_, but a good omelette, some fresh fish, and a bit
+of very tender meat. Will that suit you?" he asked, turning to me.
+
+"Excellently," said I, smiling. "And since you've ordered me so charming
+a _déjeuner_, perhaps you'll do me the honour of helping me to eat it?"
+
+"With the very greatest pleasure," said he, without a second's
+hesitation.
+
+We entered the small, stuffy dining-room, where a dingy waiter, with a
+dingier smile, showed us to a small table by the window. At the long
+table in the middle of the room sat the half-dozen frequenters of the
+house, their napkins tucked under their chins, eating in gloomy silence
+a dreary meal of the kind my new friend had deprecated.
+
+"What shall we drink?" I asked, regarding with some disfavour the thin
+red and white wines in the decanters.
+
+"Anything," said he, "but this _piquette du pays_. It tastes like a
+mixture of sea-water and vinegar. It produces the look of patient
+suffering that you see on those gentlemen's faces. You, who are not
+used to it, had better not venture. It would excoriate your throat. It
+would dislocate your pancreas. It would play the very devil with you.
+Adolphe"--he beckoned the waiter--"there's a little white wine of the
+Côtes du Rhone----" He glanced at me.
+
+"I'm in your hands," said I.
+
+As far as eating and drinking went I could not have been in better. Nor
+could anyone desire a more entertaining chance companion of travel. That
+he had thrust himself upon me in the most brazen manner and taken
+complete possession of me there could be no doubt. But it had all been
+done in the most irresistibly charming manner in the world. One entirely
+forgot the impudence of the fellow. I have since discovered that he did
+not lay himself out to be agreeable. The flow of talk and anecdote, the
+bright laughter that lit up a little joke, making it appear a very
+brilliant joke indeed, were all spontaneous. He was a man, too, of some
+cultivation. He knew France thoroughly, England pretty well; he had a
+discriminating taste in architecture, and waxed poetical over the
+beauties of Nature.
+
+"It strikes me as odd," said I at last, somewhat ironically, "that so
+vital a person as yourself should find scope for your energies in this
+dead-and-alive place."
+
+He threw up his hands. "I live here? I crumble and decay in
+Aigues-Mortes? For whom do you take me?"
+
+I replied that, not having the pleasure of knowing his name and quality,
+I could only take him for an enigma.
+
+He selected a card from his letter-case and handed it to me across the
+table. It bore the legend:--
+
+             ARISTIDE PUJOL,
+                 Agent.
+    213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré, Paris.
+
+"That address will always find me," he said.
+
+Civility bade me give him my card, which he put carefully in his
+letter-case.
+
+"I owe my success in life," said he, "to the fact that I have never lost
+an opportunity or a visiting-card."
+
+"Where did you learn your perfect English?" I asked.
+
+"First," said he, "among English tourists at Marseilles. Then in
+England. I was Professor of French at an academy for young ladies."
+
+"I hope you were a success?" said I.
+
+He regarded me drolly.
+
+"Yes--and no," said he.
+
+The meal over, we left the hotel.
+
+"Now," said he, "you would like to visit the towers on the ramparts. I
+would dearly love to accompany you, but I have business in the town. I
+will take you, however, to the _gardien_ and put you in his charge."
+
+He raced me to the gate by which I had entered. The _gardien des
+remparts_ issued from his lodge at Aristide Pujol's summons and listened
+respectfully to his exhortation in Provençal. Then he went for his keys.
+
+"I'll not say good-bye," Aristide Pujol declared, amiably. "I'll get
+through my business long before you've done your sight-seeing, and
+you'll find me waiting for you near the hotel. _Au revoir, cher ami._"
+
+He smiled, lifted his hat, waved his hand in a friendly way, and darted
+off across the square. The old _gardien_ came out with the keys and took
+me off to the Tour de Constance, where Protestants were imprisoned
+pell-mell after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; thence to the
+Tour des Bourguignons, where I forget how many hundred Burgundians were
+massacred and pickled in salt; and, after these cheery exhibitions,
+invited me to walk round the ramparts and inspect the remaining eighteen
+towers of the enceinte. As the mistral, however, had sprung up and was
+shuddering across the high walls, I declined, and, having paid him his
+fee, descended to the comparative shelter of the earth.
+
+There I found Aristide Pujol awaiting me at the corner of the narrow
+street in which the hotel was situated. He was wearing--like most of
+the young bloods of Provence in winter-time--a short, shaggy, yet natty
+goat-skin coat, ornamented with enormous bone buttons, and a little cane
+valise stood near by on the kerb of the square.
+
+He was not alone. Walking arm in arm with him was a stout, elderly woman
+of swarthy complexion and forbidding aspect. She was attired in a
+peasant's or small shopkeeper's rusty Sunday black and an old-fashioned
+black bonnet prodigiously adorned with black plumes and black roses.
+Beneath this bonnet her hair was tightly drawn up from her forehead;
+heavy eyebrows overhung a pair of small, crafty eyes, and a tuft of hair
+grew on the corner of a prognathous jaw. She might have been about
+seven-and-forty.
+
+Aristide Pujol, unlinking himself from this unattractive female,
+advanced and saluted me with considerable deference.
+
+"Monseigneur----" said he.
+
+As I am neither a duke nor an archbishop, but a humble member of the
+lower automobiling classes, the high-flown title startled me.
+
+"Monseigneur, will you permit me," said he, in French, "to present to
+you Mme. Gougasse? Madame is the _patronne_ of the Café de l'Univers, at
+Carcassonne, which doubtless you have frequented, and she is going to do
+me the honour of marrying me to-morrow."
+
+ [Illustration: ANYTHING LESS CONGRUOUS AS THE BRIDE-ELECT OF THE
+                DEBONAIR ARISTIDE PUJOL IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO IMAGINE]
+
+The unexpectedness of the announcement took my breath away.
+
+"Good heavens!" said I, in a whisper.
+
+Anyone less congruous as the bride-elect of the debonair Aristide Pujol
+it was impossible to imagine. However, it was none of my business. I
+raised my hat politely to the lady.
+
+"Madame, I offer you my sincere felicitations. As an entertaining
+husband I am sure you will find M. Aristide Pujol without a rival."
+
+"_Je vous remercie, monseigneur_," she replied, in what was obviously
+her best company manner. "And if ever you will deign to come again to
+the Café de l'Univers at Carcassonne we will esteem it a great honour."
+
+"And so you're going to get married to-morrow?" I remarked, by way of
+saying something. To congratulate Aristide Pujol on his choice lay
+beyond my power of hypocrisy.
+
+"To-morrow," said he, "my dear Amélie will make me the happiest of men."
+
+"We start for Carcassonne by the three-thirty train," said Mme.
+Gougasse, pulling a great silver watch from some fold of her person.
+
+"Then there is time," said I, pointing to a little weather-beaten café
+in the square, "to drink a glass to your happiness."
+
+"_Bien volontiers_," said the lady.
+
+"_Pardon, chère amie_," Aristide interposed, quickly. "Unless
+monseigneur and I start at once for Montpellier, I shall not have time
+to transact my little affairs before your train arrives there."
+
+Parenthetically, I must remark that all trains going from Aigues-Mortes
+to Carcassonne must stop at Montpellier.
+
+"That's true," she agreed, in a hesitating manner. "But----"
+
+"But, idol of my heart, though I am overcome with grief at the idea of
+leaving you for two little hours, it is a question of four thousand
+francs. Four thousand francs are not picked up every day in the street.
+It's a lot of money."
+
+Mme. Gougasse's little eyes glittered.
+
+"_Bien sûr._ And it's quite settled?"
+
+"Absolutely."
+
+"And it will be all for me?"
+
+"Half," said Aristide.
+
+"You promised all to me for the redecoration of the ceiling of the
+café."
+
+"Three thousand will be sufficient, dear angel. What? I know these
+contractors and decorators. The more you pay them, the more abominable
+will they make the ceiling. Leave it to me. I, Aristide, will guarantee
+you a ceiling like that of the Sistine Chapel for two thousand francs."
+
+She smiled and bridled, so as to appear perfectly well-bred in my
+presence. The act of smiling caused the tuft of hair on her jaw to
+twitch horribly. A cold shiver ran down my back.
+
+"Don't you think, monseigneur," she asked, archly, "that M. Pujol should
+give me the four thousand francs as a wedding-present?"
+
+"Most certainly," said I, in my heartiest voice, entirely mystified by
+the conversation.
+
+"Well, I yield," said Aristide. "Ah, women, women! They hold up their
+little rosy finger, and the bravest of men has to lie down with his chin
+on his paws like a good old watch-dog. You agree, then, monseigneur, to
+my giving the whole of the four thousand francs to Amélie?"
+
+"More than that," said I, convinced that the swarthy lady of the
+prognathous jaw was bound to have her own way in the end where money was
+concerned, and yet for the life of me not seeing how I had anything to
+do with the disposal of Aristide Pujol's property--"More than that,"
+said I; "I command you to do it."
+
+"_C'est bien gentil de votre part_," said madame.
+
+"And now the café," I suggested, with chattering teeth. We had been
+standing all the time at the corner of the square, while the mistral
+whistled down the narrow street. The dust was driven stingingly into our
+faces, and the women of the place who passed us by held their black
+scarves over their mouths.
+
+"Alas, monseigneur," said Mme. Gougasse, "Aristide is right. You must
+start now for Montpellier in the automobile. I will go by the train for
+Carcassonne at three-thirty. It is the only train from Aigues-Mortes.
+Aristide transacts his business and joins me in the train at
+Montpellier. You have not much time to spare."
+
+I was bewildered. I turned to Aristide Pujol, who stood, hands on hips,
+regarding his prospective bride and myself with humorous benevolence.
+
+"My good friend," said I in English, "I've not the remotest idea of what
+the two of you are talking about; but I gather you have arranged that I
+should motor you to Montpellier. Now, I'm not going to Montpellier. I've
+just come from there, as I told you at _déjeuner_. I'm going in the
+opposite direction."
+
+He took me familiarly by the arm, and, with a "_Pardon, chère amie_," to
+the lady, led me a few paces aside.
+
+"I beseech you," he whispered; "it's a matter of four thousand francs, a
+hundred and sixty pounds, eight hundred dollars, a new ceiling for the
+Café de l'Univers, the dream of a woman's life, and the happiest omen
+for my wedded felicity. The fair goddess Hymen invites you with uplifted
+torch. You can't refuse."
+
+He hypnotized me with his bright eyes, overpowered my will by his
+winning personality. He seemed to force me to desire his companionship.
+I weakened. After all, I reflected, I was at a loose end, and where I
+went did not matter to anybody. Aristide Pujol had also done me a
+considerable service, for which I felt grateful. I yielded with good
+grace.
+
+He darted back to Mme. Gougasse, alive with gaiety.
+
+"_Chère amie_, if you were to press monseigneur, I'm sure he would come
+to Carcassonne and dance at our wedding."
+
+"Alas! That," said I, hastily, "is out of the question. But," I added,
+amused by a humorous idea, "why should two lovers separate even for a
+few hours? Why should not madame accompany us to Montpellier? There is
+room in my auto for three, and it would give me the opportunity of
+making madame's better acquaintance."
+
+"There, Amélie!" cried Aristide. "What do you say?"
+
+"Truly, it is too much honour," murmured Mme. Gougasse, evidently
+tempted.
+
+"There's your luggage, however," said Aristide. "You would bring that
+great trunk, for which there is no place in the automobile of
+monseigneur."
+
+"That's true--my luggage."
+
+"Send it on by train, _chère amie_."
+
+"When will it arrive at Carcassonne?"
+
+"Not to-morrow," said Pujol, "but perhaps next week or the week after.
+Perhaps it may never come at all. One is never certain with these
+railway companies. But what does that matter?"
+
+"What do you say?" cried the lady, sharply.
+
+"It may arrive or it may not arrive; but you are rich enough, _chère
+amie_, not to think of a few camisoles and bits of jewellery."
+
+"And my lace and my silk dress that I have brought to show your parents.
+_Merci!_" she retorted, with a dangerous spark in her little eyes. "You
+think one is made of money, eh? You will soon find yourself mistaken, my
+friend. I would give you to understand----". She checked herself
+suddenly. "Monseigneur"--she turned to me with a resumption of the
+gracious manner of her bottle-decked counter at the Café de
+l'Univers--"you are too amiable. I appreciate your offer infinitely; but
+I am not going to entrust my luggage to the kind care of the railway
+company. _Merci, non._ They are robbers and thieves. Even if it did
+arrive, half the things would be stolen. Oh, I know them."
+
+She shook the head of an experienced and self-reliant woman. No doubt,
+distrustful of banks as of railway companies, she kept her money hidden
+in her bedroom. I pitied my poor young friend; he would need all his
+gaiety to enliven the domestic side of the Café de l'Univers.
+
+The lady having declined my invitation, I expressed my regrets; and
+Aristide, more emotional, voiced his sense of heart-rent desolation,
+and in a resigned tone informed me that it was time to start. I left the
+lovers and went to the hotel, where I paid the bill, summoned McKeogh,
+and lit a companionable pipe.
+
+The car backed down the narrow street into the square and took up its
+position. We entered. McKeogh took charge of Aristide's valise, tucked
+us up in the rug, and settled himself in his seat. The car started and
+we drove off, Aristide gallantly brandishing his hat and Mme. Gougasse
+waving her lily hand, which happened to be hidden in an ill-fitting
+black glove.
+
+"To Montpellier, as fast as you can!" he shouted at the top of his lungs
+to McKeogh. Then he sighed as he threw himself luxuriously back. "Ah,
+this is better than a train. Amélie doesn't know what a mistake she has
+made!"
+
+The elderly victim of my furious entry was lounging, in spite of the
+mistral, by the grim machicolated gateway. Instead of scowling at me he
+raised his hat respectfully as we passed. I touched my cap, but Aristide
+returned the salute with the grave politeness of royalty.
+
+"This is a place," said he, "which I would like never to behold again."
+
+In a few moments we were whirling along the straight, white road between
+the interminable black vineyards, and past the dilapidated homesteads
+of the vine-folk and wayside cafés that are scattered about this
+unjoyous corner of France.
+
+"Well," said he, suddenly, "what do you think of my _fiancée_?"
+
+Politeness and good taste forbade expression of my real opinion. I
+murmured platitudes to the effect that she seemed to be a most sensible
+woman, with a head for business.
+
+"She's not what we in French call _jolie, jolie_; but what of that?
+What's the good of marrying a pretty face for other men to make love to?
+And, as you English say, there's none of your confounded sentiment about
+her. But she has the most flourishing café in Carcassonne; and, when the
+ceiling is newly decorated, provided she doesn't insist on too much gold
+leaf and too many naked babies on clouds--it's astonishing how women
+love naked babies on clouds--it will be the snuggest place in the world.
+May I ask for one of your excellent cigarettes?"
+
+I handed him the case from the pocket of the car.
+
+"It was there that I made her acquaintance," he resumed, after having
+lit the cigarette from my pipe. "We met, we talked, we fixed it up. She
+is not the woman to go by four roads to a thing. She did me the honour
+of going straight for me. Ah, but what a wonderful woman! She rules that
+café like a kingdom; a Semiramis, a Queen Elizabeth, a Catherine de'
+Medici. She sits enthroned behind the counter all day long and takes the
+money and counts the saucers and smiles on rich clients, and if a waiter
+in a far corner gives a bit of sugar to a dog she spots it, and the
+waiter has a deuce of a time. That woman is worth her weight in
+thousand-franc notes. She goes to bed every night at one, and gets up in
+the morning at five. And virtuous! Didn't Solomon say that a virtuous
+woman was more precious than rubies? That's the kind of wife the wise
+man chooses when he gives up the giddy ways of youth. Ah, my dear sir,
+over and over again these last two or three days my dear old parents--I
+have been on a visit to them in Aigues-Mortes--have commended my wisdom.
+Amélie, who is devoted to me, left her café in Carcassonne to make their
+acquaintance and receive their blessing before our marriage, also to
+show them the lace on her _dessous_ and her new silk dress. They are too
+old to take the long journey to Carcassonne. 'My son,' they said, 'you
+are making a marriage after our own hearts. We are proud of you. Now we
+can die perfectly content.' I was wrong, perhaps, in saying that Amélie
+has no sentiment," he continued, after a short pause. "She adores me. It
+is evident. She will not allow me out of her sight. Ah, my dear friend,
+you don't know what a happy man I am."
+
+For a brilliant young man of five-and-thirty, who was about to marry a
+horrible Megæra ten or twelve years his senior, he looked unhealthily
+happy. There was no doubt that his handsome roguery had caught the
+woman's fancy. She was at the dangerous age, when even the most
+ferro-concrete-natured of women are apt to run riot. She was
+comprehensible, and pardonable. But the man baffled me. He was obviously
+marrying her for her money; but how in the name of Diogenes and all the
+cynics could he manage to look so confoundedly joyful about it?
+
+The mistral blew bitterly. I snuggled beneath the rug and hunched up my
+shoulders so as to get my ears protected by my coat-collar. Aristide,
+sufficiently protected by his goat's hide, talked like a shepherd on a
+May morning. Why he took for granted my interest in his unromantic, not
+to say sordid, courtship I knew not; but he gave me the whole history of
+it from its modest beginnings to its now penultimate stage. From what I
+could make out--for the mistral whirled many of his words away over
+unheeding Provence--he had entered the Café de l'Univers one evening, a
+human derelict battered by buffeting waves of Fortune, and, finding a
+seat immediately beneath Mme. Gougasse's _comptoir_, had straightway
+poured his grievances into a feminine ear and, figuratively speaking,
+rested his weary heart upon a feminine bosom. And his buffetings and
+grievances and wearinesses? Whence came they? I asked the question
+point-blank.
+
+ [Illustration: HAD STRAIGHTWAY POURED HIS GRIEVANCES INTO A
+                FEMININE EAR]
+
+"Ah, my dear friend," he answered, kissing his gloved finger-tips, "she
+was adorable!"
+
+"Who?" I asked, taken aback. "Mme. Gougasse?"
+
+"_Mon Dieu_, no!" he replied. "Not Mme. Gougasse. Amélie is solid, she
+is virtuous, she is jealous, she is capacious; but I should not call her
+adorable. No; the adorable one was twenty--delicious and English; a
+peach-blossom, a zephyr, a summer night's dream, and the most provoking
+little witch you ever saw in your life. Her father and herself and six
+of her compatriots were touring through France. They had circular
+tickets. So had I. In fact, I was a miniature Thomas Cook and Son to the
+party. I provided them with the discomforts of travel and supplied
+erroneous information. _Que voulez-vous?_ If people ask you for the
+history of a pair of Louis XV. corsets, in a museum glass case, it's
+much better to stimulate their imagination by saying that they were worn
+by Joan of Arc at the Battle of Agincourt than to dull their minds by
+your ignorance. _Eh bien_, we go through the châteaux of the Loire,
+through Poitiers and Angoulême, and we come to Carcassonne. You know
+Carcassonne? The great grim _cité_, with its battlements and bastions
+and barbicans and fifty towers on the hill looking over the rubbishy
+modern town? We were there. The rest of the party were buying picture
+postcards of the _gardien_ at the foot of the Tour de l'Inquisition. The
+man who invented picture postcards ought to have his statue on the top
+of the Eiffel Tower. The millions of headaches he has saved! People go
+to places now not to exhaust themselves by seeing them, but to buy
+picture postcards of them. The rest of the party, as I said, were deep
+in picture postcards. Mademoiselle and I promenaded outside. We often
+promenaded outside when the others were buying picture postcards," he
+remarked, with an extra twinkle in his bright eyes. "And the result? Was
+it my fault? We leaned over the parapet. The wind blew a confounded
+_mèche_--what do you call it----?"
+
+"Strand?"
+
+"Yes--strand of her hair across her face. She let it blow and laughed
+and did not move. Didn't I say she was a little witch? If there's a
+Provençal ever born who would not have kissed a girl under such
+provocation I should like to have his mummy. I kissed her. She kept on
+laughing. I kissed her again. I kissed her four times. At the beginning
+of the fourth kiss out came her father from the postcard shop. He waited
+till the end of it and then announced himself. He announced himself in
+such ungentlemanly terms that I was forced to let the whole party,
+including the adorable little witch, go on to Pau by themselves, while
+I betook my broken heart to the Café de l'Univers."
+
+"And there you found consolation?"
+
+"I told my sad tale. Amélie listened and called the manager to take
+charge of the _comptoir_, and poured herself out a glass of Frontignan.
+Amélie always drinks Frontignan when her heart is touched. I came the
+next day and the next. It was pouring with rain day and night--and
+Carcassonne in rain is like Hades with its furnaces put out by human
+tears--and the Café de l'Univers like a little warm corner of Paradise
+stuck in the midst of it."
+
+"And so that's how it happened?"
+
+"That's how it happened. _Ma foi!_ When a lady asks a _galant homme_ to
+marry her, what is he to do? Besides, did I not say that the Café de
+l'Univers was the most prosperous one in Carcassonne? I'm afraid you
+English, my dear friend, have such sentimental ideas about marriage.
+Now, we in France----_Attendez, attendez!_" He suddenly broke off his
+story, lurched forward, and gripped the back of the front seat.
+
+"To the right, man, to the right!" he cried excitedly to McKeogh.
+
+We had reached the point where the straight road from Aigues-Mortes
+branches into a fork, one road going to Montpellier, the other to Nîmes.
+Montpellier being to the west, McKeogh had naturally taken the left
+fork.
+
+"To the right!" shouted Aristide.
+
+McKeogh pulled up and turned his head with a look of protesting inquiry.
+I intervened with a laugh.
+
+"You're wrong in your geography, M. Pujol. Besides, there is the
+signpost staring you in the face. This is the way to Montpellier."
+
+"But, my dear, heaven-sent friend, I no more want to go to Montpellier
+than you do!" he cried. "Montpellier is the last place on earth I desire
+to visit. You want to go to Nîmes, and so do I. To the right,
+chauffeur."
+
+"What shall I do, sir?" asked McKeogh.
+
+I was utterly bewildered. I turned to the goat-skin-clad,
+pointed-bearded, bright-eyed Aristide, who, sitting bolt upright in the
+car, with his hands stretched out, looked like a parody of the god Pan
+in a hard felt hat.
+
+"You don't want to go to Montpellier?" I asked, stupidly.
+
+"No--ten thousand times no; not for a king's ransom."
+
+"But your four thousand francs--your meeting Mme. Gougasse's train--your
+getting on to Carcassonne?"
+
+"If I could put twenty million continents between myself and Carcassonne
+I'd do it," he explained, with frantic gestures. "Don't you understand?
+The good Lord who is always on my side sent you especially to deliver
+me out of the hands of that unspeakable Xantippe. There are no four
+thousand francs. I'm not going to meet her train at Montpellier, and if
+she marries anyone to-morrow at Carcassonne it will not be Aristide
+Pujol."
+
+I shrugged my shoulders.
+
+"We'll go to Nîmes."
+
+"Very good, sir," said McKeogh.
+
+"And now," said I, as soon as we had started on the right-hand road,
+"will you have the kindness to explain?"
+
+"There's nothing to explain," he cried, gleefully. "Here am I delivered.
+I am free. I can breathe God's good air again. I'm not going to marry
+Yum-Yum, Yum-Yum. I feel ten years younger. Oh, I've had a narrow
+escape. But that's the way with me. I always fall on my feet. Didn't I
+tell you I've never lost an opportunity? The moment I saw an Englishman
+in difficulties, I realized my opportunity of being delivered out of the
+House of Bondage. I took it, and here I am! For two days I had been
+racking my brains for a means of getting out of Aigues-Mortes, when
+suddenly you--a _Deus ex machina_--a veritable god out of the
+machine--come to my aid. Don't say there isn't a Providence watching
+over me."
+
+I suggested that his mode of escape seemed somewhat elaborate and
+fantastic. Why couldn't he have slipped quietly round to the railway
+station and taken a ticket to any haven of refuge he might have
+fancied?
+
+"For the simple reason," said he, with a gay laugh, "that I haven't a
+single penny piece in the world."
+
+He looked so prosperous and untroubled that I stared incredulously.
+
+"Not one tiny bronze sou," said he.
+
+"You seem to take it pretty philosophically," said I.
+
+"_Les gueux, les gueux, sont des gens heureux_," he quoted.
+
+"You're the first person who has made me believe in the happiness of
+beggars."
+
+"In time I shall make you believe in lots of things," he retorted. "No.
+I hadn't one sou to buy a ticket, and Amélie never left me. I spent my
+last franc on the journey from Carcassonne to Aigues-Mortes. Amélie
+insisted on accompanying me. She was taking no chances. Her eyes never
+left me from the time we started. When I ran to your assistance she was
+watching me from a house on the other side of the _place_. She came to
+the hotel while we were lunching. I thought I would slip away unnoticed
+and join you after you had made the _tour des remparts_. But no. I must
+present her to my English friend. And then--_voyons_--didn't I tell you
+I never lost a visiting-card? Look at this?"
+
+He dived into his pocket, produced the letter-case, and extracted a
+card.
+
+"_Voilà._"
+
+I read: "The Duke of Wiltshire."
+
+"But, good heavens, man," I cried, "that's not the card I gave you."
+
+"I know it isn't," said he; "but it's the one I showed to Amélie."
+
+"How on earth," I asked, "did you come by the Duke of Wiltshire's
+visiting-card?"
+
+He looked at me roguishly.
+
+"I am--what do you call it?--a--a 'snapper up of unconsidered trifles.'
+You see I know my Shakespeare. I read 'The Winter's Tale' with some
+French pupils to whom I was teaching English. I love Autolycus. _C'est
+un peu moi, hein?_ Anyhow, I showed the Duke's card to Amélie."
+
+I began to understand. "That was why you called me 'monseigneur'?"
+
+"Naturally. And I told her that you were my English patron, and would
+give me four thousand francs as a wedding present if I accompanied you
+to your agent's at Montpellier, where you could draw the money. Ah! But
+she was suspicious! Yesterday I borrowed a bicycle. A friend left it in
+the courtyard. I thought, 'I will creep out at dead of night, when
+everyone's asleep, and once on my _petite bicyclette, bonsoir la
+compagnie_.' But, would you believe it? When I had dressed and crept
+down, and tried to mount the bicycle, I found both tyres had been
+punctured in a hundred places with the point of a pair of scissors. What
+do you think of that, eh? Ah, _là, là!_ it has been a narrow escape.
+When you invited her to accompany us to Montpellier my heart was in my
+mouth."
+
+"It would have served you right," I said, "if she had accepted."
+
+He laughed as though, instead of not having a penny, he had not a care
+in the world. Accustomed to the geometrical conduct of my well-fed
+fellow-Britons, who map out their lives by rule and line, I had no
+measure whereby to gauge this amazing and inconsequential person. In one
+way he had acted abominably. To leave an affianced bride in the lurch in
+this heartless manner was a most ungentlemanly proceeding. On the other
+hand, an unscrupulous adventurer would have married the woman for her
+money and chanced the consequences. In the tussle between Perseus and
+the Gorgon the odds are all in favour of Perseus. Mercury and Minerva,
+the most sharp-witted of the gods, are helping him all the time--to say
+nothing of the fact that Perseus starts out by being a notoriously
+handsome fellow. So a handsome rogue can generally wheedle an elderly,
+ugly wife into opening her money-bags, and, if successful, leads the
+enviable life of a fighting-cock. It was very much to his credit that
+this kind of life was not to the liking of Aristide Pujol.
+
+ [Illustration: "I FOUND BOTH TYRES HAD BEEN PUNCTURED IN A
+                HUNDRED PLACES"]
+
+Indeed, speaking from affectionate knowledge of the man, I can declare
+that the position in which he, like many a better man, had placed
+himself was intolerable. Other men of equal sensitiveness would have
+extricated themselves in a more commonplace fashion; but the dramatic
+appealed to my rascal, and he has often plumed himself on his calculated
+_coup de théâtre_ at the fork of the roads. He was delighted with it.
+Even now I sometimes think that Aristide Pujol will never grow up.
+
+"There's one thing I don't understand," said I, "and that is your
+astonishing influence over the populace at Aigues-Mortes. You came upon
+them like a firework--a devil-among-the-tailors--and everybody,
+gendarmes and victim included, became as tame as sheep. How was it?"
+
+He laughed. "I said you were my very old and dear friend and patron, a
+great English duke."
+
+"I don't quite see how that explanation satisfied the pig-headed old
+gentleman whom I knocked down."
+
+"Oh, that," said Aristide Pujol, with a look of indescribable
+drollery--"that was my old father."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE ARLÉSIENNE
+
+
+Aristide Pujol bade me a sunny farewell at the door of the Hôtel du
+Luxembourg at Nîmes, and, valise in hand, darted off, in his impetuous
+fashion, across the Place de l'Esplanade. I felt something like a pang
+at the sight of his retreating figure, as, on his own confession, he had
+not a penny in the world. I wondered what he would do for food and
+lodging, to say nothing of tobacco, _apéritifs_, and other such
+necessaries of life. The idea of so gay a creature starving was
+abhorrent. Yet an invitation to stay as my guest at the hotel until
+he saw an opportunity of improving his financial situation he had
+courteously declined.
+
+Early next morning I found him awaiting me in the lounge and smoking an
+excellent cigar. He explained that so dear a friend as myself ought to
+be the first to hear the glad tidings. Last evening, by the grace of
+Heaven, he had run across a bare acquaintance, a manufacturer of nougat
+at Montélimar; had spent several hours in his company, with the result
+that he had convinced him of two things: first, that the dry,
+crumbling, shortbread-like nougat of Montélimar was unknown in England,
+where the population subsisted on a sickly, glutinous mess whereto the
+medical faculty had ascribed the prevalent dyspepsia of the population;
+and, secondly, that the one Heaven-certified apostle who could spread
+the glorious gospel of Montélimar nougat over the length and breadth of
+Great Britain and Ireland was himself, Aristide Pujol. A handsome
+salary had been arranged, of which he had already drawn something on
+account--_hinc ille Colorado_--and he was to accompany his principal the
+next day to Montélimar, _en route_ for the conquest of Britain. In the
+meantime he was as free as the winds, and would devote the day to
+showing me the wonders of the town.
+
+I congratulated him on his almost fantastic good fortune and gladly
+accepted his offer.
+
+"There is one thing I should like to ask you," said I, "and it is this.
+Yesterday afternoon you refused my cordially-offered hospitality, and
+went away without a sou to bless yourself with. What did you do? I ask
+out of curiosity. How does a man set about trying to subsist on nothing
+at all?"
+
+"It's very simple," he replied. "Haven't I told you, and haven't you
+seen for yourself, that I never lose an opportunity? More than that. It
+has been my rule in life either to make friends with the Mammon of
+Unrighteousness--he's a muddle-headed ass is Mammon, and you can steer
+clear of his unrighteousness if you're sharp enough--or else to cast my
+bread upon the waters in the certainty of finding it again after many
+days. In the case in question I took the latter course. I cast my bread
+a year or two ago upon the waters of the Roman baths, which I will have
+the pleasure of showing you this morning, and I found it again last
+night at the Hôtel de la Curatterie."
+
+In the course of the day he related to me the following artless history.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aristide Pujol arrived at Nîmes one blazing day in July. He had money in
+his pocket and laughter in his soul. He had also deposited his valise at
+the Hôtel du Luxembourg, which, as all the world knows, is the most
+luxurious hotel in the town. Joyousness of heart impelled him to a
+course of action which the good Nîmois regard as maniacal in the
+sweltering July heat--he walked about the baking streets for his own
+good pleasure.
+
+Aristide Pujol was floating a company, a process which afforded him as
+much delirious joy as the floating, for the first time, of a toy yacht
+affords a child. It was a company to build an hotel in Perpignan, where
+the recent demolition of the fortifications erected by the Emperor
+Charles V. had set free a vast expanse of valuable building ground on
+the other side of the little river on which the old town is situated.
+The best hotel in Perpignan being one to get away from as soon as
+possible, owing to restriction of site, Aristide conceived the idea of
+building a spacious and palatial hostelry in the new part of the town,
+which should allure all the motorists and tourists of the globe to that
+Pyrenean Paradise. By sheer audacity he had contrived to interest an
+eminent Paris architect in his project. Now the man who listened to
+Aristide Pujol was lost. With the glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner
+he combined the winning charm of a woman. For salvation, you either had
+to refuse to see him, as all the architects to the end of the R's in the
+alphabetical list had done, or put wax, Ulysses-like, in your ears, a
+precaution neglected by the eminent M. Say. M. Say went to Perpignan and
+returned in a state of subdued enthusiasm.
+
+A limited company was formed, of which Aristide Pujol, man of vast
+experience in affairs, was managing director. But money came in slowly.
+A financier was needed. Aristide looked through his collection of
+visiting-cards, and therein discovered that of a deaf ironmaster at St.
+Étienne whose life he had once saved at a railway station by dragging
+him, as he was crossing the line, out of the way of an express train
+that came thundering through. Aristide, man of impulse, went straight
+to St. Étienne, to work upon the ironmaster's sense of gratitude.
+Meanwhile, M. Say, man of more sober outlook, bethought him of a client,
+an American millionaire, passing through Paris, who had speculated
+considerably in hotels. The millionaire, having confidence in the
+eminent M. Say, thought well of the scheme. He was just off to Japan,
+but would drop down to the Pyrenees the next day and look at the
+Perpignan site before boarding his steamer at Marseilles. If his
+inquiries satisfied him, and he could arrange matters with the managing
+director, he would not mind putting a million dollars or so into the
+concern. You must kindly remember that I do not vouch for the literal
+accuracy of everything told me by Aristide Pujol.
+
+The question of the all-important meeting between the millionaire and
+the managing director then arose. As Aristide was at St. Étienne it
+was arranged that they should meet at a halfway stage on the latter's
+journey from Perpignan to Marseilles. The Hôtel du Luxembourg at Nîmes
+was the place, and two o'clock on Thursday the time appointed.
+
+Meantime Aristide had found that the deaf ironmaster had died months
+ago. This was a disappointment, but fortune compensated him. This part
+of his adventure is somewhat vague, but I gathered that he was lured
+by a newly made acquaintance into a gambling den, where he won the
+prodigious sum of two thousand francs. With this wealth jingling and
+crinkling in his pockets he fled the town and arrived at Nîmes on
+Wednesday morning, a day before his appointment.
+
+That was why he walked joyously about the blazing streets. The tide had
+turned at last. Of the success of his interview with the millionaire he
+had not the slightest doubt. He walked about building gorgeous castles
+in Perpignan--which, by the way, is not very far from Spain. Besides, as
+you shall hear later, he had an account to settle with the town of
+Perpignan. At last he reached the Jardin de la Fontaine, the great,
+stately garden laid out in complexity of terrace and bridge and
+balustraded parapet over the waters of the old Roman baths by the master
+hand to which Louis XIV. had entrusted the Garden of Versailles.
+
+Aristide threw himself on a bench and fanned himself with his straw hat.
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_ it's hot!" he remarked to another occupant of the seat.
+
+This was a woman, and, as he saw when she turned her face towards him,
+an exceedingly handsome woman. Her white lawn and black silk headdress,
+coming to a tiny crown just covering the parting of her full, wavy hair,
+proclaimed her of the neighboring town of Arles. She had all the
+Arlésienne's Roman beauty--the finely chiselled features, the calm,
+straight brows, the ripe lips, the soft oval contour, the clear olive
+complexion. She had also lustrous brown eyes; but these were full of
+tears. She only turned them on him for a moment; then she resumed her
+apparently interrupted occupation of sobbing. Aristide was a
+soft-hearted man. He drew nearer.
+
+"Why, you're crying, madame!" said he.
+
+"Evidently," murmured the lady.
+
+"To cry scalding tears in this weather! It's too hot! Now, if you could
+only cry iced water there would be something refreshing in it."
+
+"You jest, monsieur," said the lady, drying her eyes.
+
+"By no means," said he. "The sight of so beautiful a woman in distress
+is painful."
+
+"Ah!" she sighed. "I am very unhappy."
+
+Aristide drew nearer still.
+
+"Who," said he, "is the wretch that has dared to make you so?"
+
+"My husband," replied the lady, swallowing a sob.
+
+"The scoundrel!" said Aristide.
+
+The lady shrugged her shoulders and looked down at her wedding-ring,
+which gleamed on a slim, brown, perfectly kept hand. Aristide prided
+himself on being a connoisseur in hands.
+
+"There never was a husband yet," he added, "who appreciated a beautiful
+wife. Husbands only deserve harridans."
+
+"That's true," said the Arlésienne, "for when the wife is good-looking
+they are jealous."
+
+"Ah, that is the trouble, is it?" said Aristide. "Tell me all about it."
+
+The beautiful Arlésienne again contemplated her slender fingers.
+
+"I don't know you, monsieur."
+
+"But you soon will," said Aristide, in his pleasant voice and with a
+laughing, challenging glance in his bright eyes. She met it swiftly and
+sidelong.
+
+"Monsieur," she said, "I have been married to my husband for four years,
+and have always been faithful to him."
+
+"That's praiseworthy," said Aristide.
+
+"And I love him very much."
+
+"That's unfortunate!" said Aristide.
+
+"Unfortunate?"
+
+"Evidently!" said Aristide.
+
+Their eyes met. They burst out laughing. The lady quickly recovered and
+the tears sprang again.
+
+"One can't jest with a heavy heart; and mine is very heavy." She broke
+down through self-pity. "Oh, I am ashamed!" she cried.
+
+She turned away from him, burying her face in her hands. Her dress,
+cut low, showed the nape of her neck as it rose gracefully from her
+shoulders. Two little curls had rebelled against being drawn up with the
+rest of her hair. The back of a dainty ear, set close to the head, was
+provoking in its pink loveliness. Her attitude, that of a youthful
+Niobe, all tears, but at the same time all curves and delicious
+contours, would have played the deuce with an anchorite.
+
+Aristide, I would have you remember, was a child of the South. A child
+of the North, regarding a bewitching woman, thinks how nice it would be
+to make love to her, and wastes his time in wondering how he can do it.
+A child of the South neither thinks nor wonders; he makes love straight
+away.
+
+"Madame," said Aristide, "you are adorable, and I love you to
+distraction."
+
+She started up. "Monsieur, you forget yourself!"
+
+"If I remember anything else in the wide world but you, it would be a
+poor compliment. I forget everything. You turn my head, you ravish my
+heart, and you put joy into my soul."
+
+He meant it--intensely--for the moment.
+
+"I ought not to listen to you," said the lady, "especially when I am so
+unhappy."
+
+"All the more reason to seek consolation," replied Aristide.
+
+"Monsieur," she said, after a short pause, "you look good and loyal. I
+will tell you what is the matter. My husband accuses me wrongfully,
+although I know that appearances are against me. He only allows me in
+the house on sufferance, and is taking measures to procure a divorce."
+
+ [Illustration: "MADAME," SAID ARISTIDE, "YOU ARE ADORABLE, AND I
+                LOVE YOU TO DISTRACTION"]
+
+"_A la bonne heure!_" cried Aristide, excitedly casting away his
+straw hat, which an unintentional twist of the wrist caused to skim
+horizontally and nearly decapitate a small and perspiring soldier who
+happened to pass by. "_A la bonne heure!_ Let him divorce you. You are
+then free. You can be mine without any further question."
+
+"But I love my husband," she smiled, sadly.
+
+"Bah!" said he, with the scepticism of the lover and the Provençal.
+"And, by the way, who is your husband?"
+
+"He is M. Émile Bocardon, proprietor of the Hôtel de la Curatterie."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I am Mme. Bocardon," she replied, with the faintest touch of roguery.
+
+"But your Christian name? How is it possible for me to think of you as
+Mme. Bocardon?"
+
+They argued the question. Eventually she confessed to the name of Zette.
+
+Her confidence not stopping there, she told him how she came by the
+name; how she was brought up by her Aunt Léonie at Raphèle, some five
+miles from Arles, and many other unexciting particulars of her early
+years. Her baptismal name was Louise. Her mother, who died when she was
+young, called her Louisette. Aunt Léonie, a very busy woman, with no
+time for superfluous syllables, called her Zette.
+
+"Zette!" He cast up his eyes as if she had been canonized and he was
+invoking her in rapt worship. "Zette, I adore you!"
+
+Zette was extremely sorry. She, on her side, adored the cruel M.
+Bocardon. Incidentally she learned Aristide's name and quality. He was
+an _agent d'affaires_, extremely rich--had he not two thousand francs
+and an American millionaire in his pocket?
+
+"M. Pujol," she said, "the earth holds but one thing that I desire, the
+love and trust of my husband."
+
+"The good Bocardon is becoming tiresome," said Aristide.
+
+Zette's lips parted, as she pointed to a black speck at the iron
+entrance gates.
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_ there he is!"
+
+"He has become tiresome," said Aristide.
+
+She rose, displaying to its full advantage her supple and stately
+figure. She had a queenly poise of the head. Aristide contemplated her
+with the frankest admiration.
+
+"One would say Juno was walking the earth again."
+
+Although Zette had never heard of Juno, and was as miserable and heavy
+hearted a woman as dwelt in Nîmes, a flush of pleasure rose to her
+cheeks. She too was a child of the South, and female children of the
+South love to be admired, no matter how frankly. I have heard of
+Daughters of the Snows not quite averse to it. She sighed.
+
+"I must go now, monsieur. He must not find me here with you. I am
+suffering enough already from his reproaches. Ah! it is unjust--unjust!"
+she cried, clenching her hands, while the tears again started into her
+eyes, and the corners of her pretty lips twitched with pain. "Indeed,"
+she added, "I know it has been wrong of me to talk to you like this. But
+_que voulez-vous?_ It was not my fault. Adieu, monsieur."
+
+At the sight of her standing before him in her woeful beauty, Aristide's
+pulses throbbed.
+
+"It is not adieu--it is _au revoir_, Mme. Zette," he cried.
+
+She protested tearfully. It was farewell. Aristide darted to his
+rejected hat and clapped it on the back of his head. He joined her and
+swore that he would see her again. It was not Aristide Pujol who would
+allow her to be rent in pieces by the jaws of that crocodile, M.
+Bocardon. Faith, he would defend her to the last drop of his blood. He
+would do all manner of gasconading things.
+
+"But what can you do, my poor M. Pujol?" she asked.
+
+"You will see," he replied.
+
+They parted. He watched her until she became a speck and, having joined
+the other speck, her husband, passed out of sight. Then he set out
+through the burning gardens towards the Hôtel du Luxembourg, at the
+other end of the town.
+
+Aristide had fallen in love. He had fallen in love with Provençal fury.
+He had done the same thing a hundred times before; but this, he told
+himself, was the _coup de foudre_--the thunderbolt. The beautiful
+Arlésienne filled his brain and his senses. Nothing else in the wide
+world mattered. Nothing else in the wide world occupied his mind. He
+sped through the hot streets like a meteor in human form. A stout man,
+sipping syrup and water in the cool beneath the awning of the Café de la
+Bourse, rose, looked wonderingly after him, and resumed his seat, wiping
+a perspiring brow.
+
+A short while afterwards Aristide, valise in hand, presented himself at
+the bureau of the Hôtel de la Curatterie. It was a shabby little hotel,
+with a shabby little oval sign outside, and was situated in the narrow
+street of the same name. Within, it was clean and well kept. On the
+right of the little dark entrance-hall was the _salle à manger_, on
+the left the bureau and an unenticing hole labelled _salon de
+correspondance_. A very narrow passage led to the kitchen, and the rest
+of the hall was blocked by the staircase. An enormous man with a simple,
+woe-begone fat face and a head of hair like a circular machine-brush was
+sitting by the bureau window in his shirt-sleeves. Aristide addressed
+him.
+
+"M. Bocardon?"
+
+"At your service, monsieur."
+
+"Can I have a bedroom?"
+
+"Certainly." He waved a hand towards a set of black sample boxes studded
+with brass nails and bound with straps that lay in the hall. "The
+omnibus has brought your boxes. You are M. Lambert?"
+
+"M. Bocardon," said Aristide, in a lordly way, "I am M. Aristide Pujol,
+and not a commercial traveller. I have come to see the beauties of
+Nîmes, and have chosen this hotel because I have the honour to be a
+distant relation of your wife, Mme. Zette Bocardon, whom I have not seen
+for many years. How is she?"
+
+"Her health is very good," replied M. Bocardon, shortly. He rang a bell.
+
+A dilapidated man in a green baize apron emerged from the dining-room
+and took Aristide's valise.
+
+"No. 24," said M. Bocardon. Then, swinging his massive form halfway
+through the narrow bureau door, he called down the passage, "Euphémie!"
+
+A woman's voice responded, and in a moment the woman herself appeared, a
+pallid, haggard, though more youthful, replica of Zette, with the dark
+rings of sleeplessness or illness beneath her eyes which looked
+furtively at the world.
+
+"Tell your sister," said M. Bocardon, "that a relation of yours has
+come to stay in the hotel."
+
+He swung himself back into the bureau and took no further notice of the
+guest.
+
+"A relation?" echoed Euphémie, staring at the smiling, lustrous-eyed
+Aristide, whose busy brain was wondering how he could mystify this
+unwelcome and unexpected sister.
+
+"Why, yes. Aristide, cousin to your good Aunt Léonie at Raphèle. Ah--but
+you are too young to remember me."
+
+"I will tell Zette," she said, disappearing down the narrow passage.
+
+Aristide went to the doorway, and stood there looking out into the not
+too savoury street. On the opposite side, which was in the shade, the
+tenants of the modest little shops sat by their doors or on chairs on
+the pavement. There was considerable whispering among them and various
+glances were cast at him. Presently footsteps behind caused him to turn.
+There was Zette. She had evidently been weeping since they had parted,
+for her eyelids were red. She started on beholding him.
+
+"You?"
+
+He laughed and shook her hesitating hands.
+
+"It is I, Aristide. But you have grown! _Pécaïre!_ How you have grown!"
+He swung her hands apart and laughed merrily in her bewildered eyes.
+"To think that the little Zette in pigtails and short check skirt
+should have grown into this beautiful woman! I compliment you on your
+wife, M. Bocardon."
+
+M. Bocardon did not reply, but Aristide's swift glance noticed a spasm
+of pain shoot across his broad face.
+
+"And the good Aunt Léonie? Is she well? And does she still make her
+_matelotes_ of eels? Ah, they were good, those _matelotes_."
+
+"Aunt Léonie died two years ago," said Zette.
+
+"The poor woman! And I who never knew. Tell me about her."
+
+The _salle à manger_ door stood open. He drew her thither by his curious
+fascination. They entered, and he shut the door behind them.
+
+"_Voilà!_" said he. "Didn't I tell you I should see you again?"
+
+"_Vous avez un fameux toupet, vous!_" said Zette, half angrily.
+
+He laughed, having been accused of confounded impudence many times
+before in the course of his adventurous life.
+
+"If I told my husband he would kill you."
+
+"Precisely. So you're not going to tell him. I adore you. I have come to
+protect you. _Foi de Provençal._"
+
+"The only way to protect me is to prove my innocence."
+
+"And then?"
+
+She drew herself up and looked him straight between the eyes.
+
+"I'll recognize that you have a loyal heart, and will be your very good
+friend."
+
+"Mme. Zette," cried Aristide, "I will devote my life to your service.
+Tell me the particulars of the affair."
+
+"Ask M. Bocardon." She left him, and sailed out of the room and past the
+bureau with her proud head in the air.
+
+If Aristide Pujol had the rapturous idea of proving the innocence of
+Mme. Zette, triumphing over the fat pig of a husband, and eventually, in
+a fantastic fashion, carrying off the insulted and spotless lady to some
+bower of delight (the castle in Perpignan--why not?), you must blame,
+not him, but Provence, whose sons, if not devout, are frankly pagan.
+Sometimes they are both.
+
+M. Bocardon sat in his bureau, pretending to do accounts and tracing
+columns of figures with a huge, trembling forefinger. He looked the
+picture of woe. Aristide decided to bide his opportunity. He went out
+into the streets again, now with the object of killing time. The
+afternoon had advanced, and trees and buildings cast cool shadows in
+which one could walk with comfort; and Nîmes, clear, bright city of wide
+avenues and broad open spaces, instinct too with the grandeur that was
+Rome's, is an idler's Paradise. Aristide knew it well; but he never
+tired of it. He wandered round the Maison Carrée, his responsive nature
+delighting in the splendour of the Temple, with its fluted Corinthian
+columns, its noble entablature, its massive pediment, its perfect
+proportions; reluctantly turned down the Boulevard Victor Hugo, past the
+Lycée and the Bourse, made the circuit of the mighty, double-arched oval
+of the Arena, and then retraced his steps. As he expected, M. Bocardon
+had left the bureau. It was the hour of absinthe. The porter named M.
+Bocardon's habitual café. There, in a morose corner of the terrace,
+Aristide found the huge man gloomily contemplating an absurdly small
+glass of the bitters known as Dubonnet. Aristide raised his hat, asked
+permission to join him, and sat down.
+
+"M. Bocardon," said he, carefully mixing the absinthe which he had
+ordered, "I learn from my fair cousin that there is between you a
+regrettable misunderstanding, for which I am sincerely sorry."
+
+"She calls it a misunderstanding?" He laughed mirthlessly. "Women have
+their own vocabulary. Listen, my good sir. There is infamy between us.
+When a wife betrays a man like me--kind, indulgent, trustful, who
+has worshipped the ground she treads on--it is not a question of
+misunderstanding. It is infamy. If she had anywhere to lay her head, I
+would turn her out of doors to-night. But she has not. You, who are her
+relative, know I married her without a dowry. You alone of her family
+survive."
+
+It was on the tip of Aristide's impulsive tongue to say that he would be
+only too willing to shelter her, but prudently he refrained.
+
+"She has broken my heart," continued Bocardon.
+
+Aristide asked for details of the unhappy affair. The large man
+hesitated for a moment and glanced suspiciously at his companion; but,
+fascinated by the clear, luminous eyes, he launched with Southern
+violence into a whirling story. The villain was a traveller in
+buttons--_buttons!_ To be wronged by a traveller in diamonds might have
+its compensations--but buttons! Linen buttons, bone buttons, brass
+buttons, _trouser buttons!_ To be a traveller in the inanity of
+buttonholes was the only lower degradation. His name was Bondon--he
+uttered it scathingly, as if to decline from a Bocardon to a Bondon was
+unthinkable. This Bondon was a regular client of the hotel, and such a
+client!--who never ordered a bottle of _vin cacheté_ or coffee or
+cognac. A contemptible creature. For a long time he had his suspicions.
+Now he was certain. He tossed off his glass of Dubonnet, ordered
+another, and spoke incoherently of the opening and shutting of doors,
+whisperings, of a dreadful incident, the central fact of which was a
+glimpse of Zette gliding wraith-like down a corridor. Lastly, there was
+the culminating proof, a letter found that morning in Zette's room.
+He drew a crumpled sheet from his pocket and handed it to Aristide.
+
+ [Illustration: "THE VILLAIN WAS A TRAVELLER IN BUTTONS--BUTTONS!"]
+
+It was a crude, flaming, reprehensible, and entirely damning epistle.
+Aristide turned cold, shivering at the idea of the superb and dainty
+Zette coming in contact with such abomination. He hated Bondon with a
+murderous hate. He drank a great gulp of absinthe and wished it were
+Bondon's blood. Great tears rolled down Bocardon's face, and gathering
+at the ends of his scrubby moustache dripped in splashes on the marble
+table.
+
+"I loved her so tenderly, monsieur," said he.
+
+The cry, so human, went straight to Aristide's heart. A sympathetic tear
+glistened in his bright eyes. He was suddenly filled with an immense
+pity for this grief-stricken, helpless giant. An odd feminine streak ran
+through his nature and showed itself in queer places. Impulsively he
+stretched out his hand.
+
+"You're going?" asked Bocardon.
+
+"No. A sign of good friendship."
+
+They gripped hands across the table. A new emotion thrilled through the
+facile Aristide.
+
+"Bocardon, I devote myself to you," he cried, with a flamboyant gesture.
+"What can I do?"
+
+"Alas, nothing," replied the other, miserably.
+
+"And Zette? What does she say to it all?"
+
+The mountainous shoulders heaved with a shrug. "She denies everything.
+She had never seen the letter until I showed it to her. She did not
+know how it came into her room. As if that were possible!"
+
+"It's improbable," said Aristide, gloomily.
+
+They talked. Bocardon, in a choking voice, told the simple tale of their
+married happiness. It had been a love-match, different from the ordinary
+marriages of reason and arrangement. Not a cloud since their
+wedding-day. They were called the turtle-doves of the Rue de la
+Curatterie. He had not even manifested the jealousy justifiable in the
+possessor of so beautiful a wife. He had trusted her implicitly. He was
+certain of her love. That was enough. They had had one child, who died.
+Grief had brought them even nearer each other. And now this stroke had
+been dealt. It was a knife being turned round in his heart. It was
+agony.
+
+They walked back to the hotel together. Zette, who was sitting by the
+desk in the bureau, rose and, without a word or look, vanished down
+the passage. Bocardon, with a great sigh, took her place. It was
+dinner-time. The half-dozen guests and frequenters filled for a moment
+the little hall, some waiting to wash their hands at the primitive
+_lavabo_ by the foot of the stairs. Aristide accompanied them into the
+_salle à manger_, where he dined in solemn silence. The dinner over he
+went out again, passing by the bureau where Bocardon, in its dim
+recesses, was eating a sad meal brought to him by the melancholy
+Euphémie. Zette, he conjectured, was dining in the kitchen. An
+atmosphere of desolation impregnated the place, as though a corpse were
+somewhere in the house.
+
+Aristide drank his coffee at the nearest café in a complicated state of
+mind. He had fallen furiously in love with the lady, believing her to be
+the victim of a jealous husband. In an outburst of generous emotion he
+had taken the husband to his heart, seeing that he was a good man
+stricken to death. Now he loved the lady, loved the husband, and hated
+the villain Bondon. What Aristide felt, he felt fiercely. He would
+reconcile these two people he loved, and then go and, if not assassinate
+Bondon, at least do him some bodily injury. With this idea in his head,
+he paid for his coffee and went back to the hotel.
+
+He found Zette taking her turn at the bureau, for clients have to be
+attended to, even in the most distressing circumstances. She was talking
+to a new arrival, trying to smile a welcome. Aristide, loitering near,
+watched her beautiful face, to which the perfect classic features gave
+an air of noble purity. His soul revolted at the idea of her mixing
+herself up with a sordid wretch like Bondon. It was unbelievable.
+
+"_Eh bien_?" she said as soon as they were alone.
+
+"Mme. Zette, to-day I called your husband a scoundrel and a crocodile. I
+was wrong. I find him a man with a beautiful nature."
+
+"You needn't tell me that, M. Aristide."
+
+"You are breaking his heart, Mme. Zette."
+
+"And is he not breaking mine? He has told you, I suppose. Am I
+responsible for what I know nothing more about than a babe unborn? You
+don't believe I am speaking the truth? Bah! And your professions this
+afternoon? Wind and gas, like the words of all men."
+
+"Mme. Zette," cried Aristide, "I said I would devote my life to your
+service, and so I will. I'll go and find Bondon and kill him."
+
+He watched her narrowly, but she did not grow pale like a woman whose
+lover is threatened with mortal peril. She said dryly:--
+
+"You had better have some conversation with him first."
+
+"Where is he to be found?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders. "How do I know? He left by the early train
+this morning that goes in the direction of Tarascon."
+
+"Then to-morrow," said Aristide, who knew the ways of commercial
+travellers, "he will be at Tarascon, or at Avignon, or at Arles."
+
+"I heard him say that he had just done Arles."
+
+"_Tant mieux._ I shall find him either at Tarascon or Avignon. And by
+the Tarasque of Sainte-Marthe, I'll bring you his head and you can
+put it up outside as a sign and call the place the 'Hôtel de la Tête
+Bondon.'"
+
+ [Illustration: HE BURST INTO SHRIEKS OF LAUGHTER]
+
+Early the next morning Aristide started on his quest, without informing
+the good Bocardon of his intentions. He would go straight to Avignon, as
+the more likely place. Inquiries at the various hotels would soon enable
+him to hunt down his quarry; and then--he did not quite know what would
+happen then--but it would be something picturesque, something entirely
+unforeseen by Bondon, something to be thrillingly determined by the
+inspiration of the moment. In any case he would wipe the stain from the
+family escutcheon. By this time he had convinced himself that he
+belonged to the Bocardon family.
+
+The only other occupant of the first-class compartment was an elderly
+Englishwoman of sour aspect. Aristide, his head full of Zette and
+Bondon, scarcely noticed her. The train started and sped through the
+sunny land of vine and olive.
+
+They had almost reached Tarascon when a sudden thought hit him between
+the eyes, like the blow of a fist. He gasped for a moment, then he burst
+into shrieks of laughter, kicking his legs up and down and waving his
+arms in maniacal mirth. After that he rose and danced. The sour-faced
+Englishwoman, in mortal terror, fled into the corridor. She must have
+reported Aristide's behaviour to the guard, for in a minute or two that
+official appeared at the doorway.
+
+"_Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?_"
+
+Aristide paused in his demonstrations of merriment. "Monsieur," said he,
+"I have just discovered what I am going to do to M. Bondon."
+
+Delight bubbled out of him as he walked from the Avignon Railway Station
+up the Cours de la République. The wretch Bondon lay at his mercy. He
+had not proceeded far, however, when his quick eye caught sight of an
+object in the ramshackle display of a curiosity dealer's. He paused in
+front of the window, fascinated. He rubbed his eyes.
+
+"No," said he; "it is not a dream. The _bon Dieu_ is on my side."
+
+He went into the shop and bought the object. It was a pair of handcuffs.
+
+At a little after three o'clock the small and dilapidated hotel omnibus
+drove up before the Hôtel de la Curatterie, and from it descended
+Aristide Pujol, radiant-eyed, and a scrubby little man with a goatee
+beard, pince-nez, and a dome-like forehead, who, pale and trembling,
+seemed stricken with a great fear. It was Bondon. Together they entered
+the little hall. As soon as Bocardon saw his enemy his eyes blazed with
+fury, and, uttering an inarticulate roar, he rushed out of the bureau
+with clenched fists murderously uplifted. The terrified Bondon shrank
+into a corner, protected by Aristide, who, smiling like an angel of
+peace, intercepted the onslaught of the huge man.
+
+"Be calm, my good Bocardon, be calm."
+
+But Bocardon would not be calm. He found his voice.
+
+"Ah, scoundrel! Miscreant! Wretch! Traitor!" When his vocabulary of
+vituperation and his breath failed him, he paused and mopped his
+forehead.
+
+Bondon came a step or two forward.
+
+"I know, monsieur, I have all the wrong on my side. Your anger is
+justifiable. But I never dreamt of the disastrous effect of my acts. Let
+me see her, my good M. Bocardon, I beseech you."
+
+"Let you see her?" said Bocardon, growing purple in the face.
+
+At this moment Zette came running up the passage.
+
+"What is all this noise about?"
+
+"Ah, madame!" cried Bondon, eagerly, "I am heart-broken. You who are so
+kind--let me see her."
+
+"_Hein_?" exclaimed Bocardon, in stupefaction.
+
+"See whom?" asked Zette.
+
+"My dear dead one. My dear Euphémie, who has committed suicide."
+
+"But he's mad!" shouted Bocardon, in his great voice. "Euphémie!
+Euphémie! Come here!"
+
+At the sight of Euphémie, pale and shivering with apprehension, Bondon
+sank upon a bench by the wall. He stared at her as if she were a ghost.
+
+"I don't understand," he murmured, faintly, looking like a trapped hare
+at Aristide Pujol, who, debonair, hands on hips, stood a little way
+apart.
+
+"Nor I, either," cried Bocardon.
+
+A great light dawned on Zette's beautiful face. "I do understand." She
+exchanged glances with Aristide. He came forward.
+
+"It's very simple," said he, taking the stage with childlike exultation.
+"I go to find Bondon this morning to kill him. In the train I have a
+sudden inspiration, a revelation from Heaven. It is not Zette but
+Euphémie that is the _bonne amie_ of Bondon. I laugh, and frighten a
+long-toothed English old maid out of her wits. Shall I get out at
+Tarascon and return to Nîmes and tell you, or shall I go on? I decide to
+go on. I make my plan. Ah, but when I make a plan, it's all in a second,
+a flash, _pfuit!_ At Avignon I see a pair of handcuffs. I buy them. I
+spend hours tracking that animal there. At last I find him at the
+station about to start for Lyon. I tell him I am a police agent. I let
+him see the handcuffs, which convince him. I tell him Euphémie, in
+consequence of the discovery of his letter, has committed suicide. There
+is a _procès-verbal_ at which he is wanted. I summon him to accompany me
+in the name of the law--and there he is."
+
+ [Illustration: "AND YOU!" SHOUTED BOCARDON, FALLING ON ARISTIDE; "I MUST
+                EMBRACE YOU ALSO"]
+
+"Then that letter was not for my wife?" said Bocardon, who was not
+quick-witted.
+
+"But, no, imbecile!" cried Aristide.
+
+Bocardon hugged his wife in his vast embrace. The tears ran down his
+cheeks.
+
+"Ah, my little Zette, my little Zette, will you ever pardon me?"
+
+"_Oui, je te pardonne, gros jaloux_," said Zette.
+
+"And you!" shouted Bocardon, falling on Aristide; "I must embrace you
+also." He kissed him on both cheeks, in his expansive way, and thrust
+him towards Zette.
+
+"You can also kiss my wife. It is I, Bocardon, who command it."
+
+The fire of a not ignoble pride raced through Aristide's veins. He was a
+hero. He knew it. It was a moment worth living.
+
+The embraces and other expressions of joy and gratitude being
+temporarily suspended, attention was turned to the unheroic couple who
+up to then had said not one word to each other. The explanation of their
+conduct, too, was simple, apparently. They were in love. She had no
+dowry. He could not marry her, as his parents would not give their
+consent. She, for her part, was frightened to death by the discovery of
+the letter, lest Bocardon should turn her out of the house.
+
+"What dowry will satisfy your parents?"
+
+"Nothing less than twelve thousand francs."
+
+"I give it," said Bocardon, reckless in his newly-found happiness.
+"Marry her."
+
+The clock in the bureau struck four. Aristide pulled out his watch.
+
+"_Saperlipopette!_" he cried, and disappeared like a flash into the
+street.
+
+"But what's the matter with him?" shouted Bocardon, in amazement.
+
+Zette went to the door. "He's running as if he had the devil at his
+heels."
+
+"Was he always like that?" asked her husband.
+
+"How always?"
+
+"_Parbleu!_ When you used to see him at your Aunt Léonie's."
+
+Zette flushed red. To repudiate the saviour of her entire family were an
+act of treachery too black for her ingenuous heart.
+
+"Ah, yes," she replied, calmly, coming back into the hall. "We used to
+call him Cousin Quicksilver."
+
+In the big avenue Aristide hailed a passing cab.
+
+"To the Hôtel du Luxembourg--at a gallop!"
+
+In the joyous excitement of the past few hours this child of impulse
+and sunshine, this dragon-fly of a man, had entirely forgotten the
+appointment at two o'clock with the American millionaire and the fortune
+that depended on it. He would be angry at being kept waiting. Aristide
+had met Americans before. His swift brain invented an elaborate excuse.
+
+He leaped from the cab and entered the vestibule of the hotel.
+
+"Can I see M. Congleton?" he asked at the bureau.
+
+"An American gentleman? He has gone, monsieur. He left by the
+three-thirty train. Are you M. Pujol? There is a letter for you."
+
+With a sinking heart he opened it and read:--
+
+     DEAR SIR,--I was in this hotel at two o'clock, according to
+     arrangement. As my last train to Japan leaves at three-thirty, I
+     regret I cannot await your convenience. The site of the hotel is
+     satisfactory. Your business methods are not. I am sorry, therefore,
+     not to be able to entertain the matter further.--Faithfully,
+
+     WILLIAM B. CONGLETON.
+
+He stared at the words for a few paralyzed moments. Then he stuffed the
+letter into his pocket and broke into a laugh.
+
+"_Zut!_" said he, using the inelegant expletive whereby a Frenchman most
+adequately expresses his scorn of circumstance. "_Zut!_ If I have lost a
+fortune, I have gained two devoted friends, so I am the winner on the
+day's work."
+
+Whereupon he returned gaily to the bosom of the Bocardon family and
+remained there, its Cousin Quicksilver and its entirely happy and
+idolized hero, until the indignation of the eminent M. Say summoned him
+to Paris.
+
+And that is how Aristide Pujol could live thenceforward on nothing at
+all at Nîmes, whenever it suited him to visit that historic town.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE KIND MR. SMITH
+
+
+Aristide Pujol started life on his own account as a _chasseur_ in a Nice
+café--one of those luckless children tightly encased in bottle-green
+cloth by means of brass buttons, who earn a sketchy livelihood by
+enduring with cherubic smiles the continuous maledictions of the
+establishment. There he soothed his hours of servitude by dreams of
+vast ambitions. He would become the manager of a great hotel--not a
+contemptible hostelry where commercial travellers and seedy Germans were
+indifferently bedded, but one of those white palaces where milords
+(English) and millionaires (American) paid a thousand francs a night
+for a bedroom and five louis for a glass of beer. Now, in order to
+derive such profit from the Anglo-Saxon a knowledge of English was
+indispensable. He resolved to learn the language. How he did so, except
+by sheer effrontery, taking linguistic toll of frequenters of the café,
+would be a mystery to anyone unacquainted with Aristide. But to his
+friends his mastery of the English tongue in such circumstances is
+comprehensible. To Aristide the impossible was ever the one thing easy
+of attainment; the possible the one thing he never could achieve.
+That was the paradoxical nature of the man. Before his days of
+hunted-little-devildom were over he had acquired sufficient knowledge of
+English to carry him, a few years later, through various vicissitudes in
+England, until, fired by new social ambitions and self-educated in a
+haphazard way, he found himself appointed Professor of French in an
+academy for young ladies.
+
+One of these days, when I can pin my dragon-fly friend down to a plain,
+unvarnished autobiography, I may be able to trace some chronological
+sequence in the kaleidoscopic changes in his career. But hitherto, in
+his talks with me, he flits about from any one date to any other during
+a couple of decades, in a manner so confusing that for the present I
+abandon such an attempt. All I know of the date of the episode I am
+about to chronicle is that it occurred immediately after the termination
+of his engagement at the academy just mentioned. Somehow, Aristide's
+history is a category of terminations.
+
+If the head mistress of the academy had herself played dragon at his
+classes, all would have gone well. He would have made his pupils
+conjugate irregular verbs, rendered them adepts in the mysteries of the
+past participle and the subjunctive mood, and turned them out quite
+innocent of the idiomatic quaintnesses of the French tongue. But _dis
+aliter visum_. The gods always saw wrong-headedly otherwise in the case
+of Aristide. A weak-minded governess--and in a governess a sense of
+humour and of novelty is always a sign of a weak mind--played dragon
+during Aristide's lessons. She appreciated his method, which was
+colloquial. The colloquial Aristide was jocular. His lessons therefore
+were a giggling joy from beginning to end. He imparted to his pupils
+delicious knowledge. _En avez-vous des-z-homards? Oh, les sales bêtes,
+elles ont du poil aux pattes_, which, being translated, is: "Have you
+any lobsters? Oh, the dirty animals, they have hair on their feet"--a
+catch phrase which, some years ago, added greatly to the gaiety of
+Paris, but in which I must confess to seeing no gleam of wit--became the
+historic property of the school. He recited to them, till they were
+word-perfect, a music-hall ditty of the early 'eighties--_Sur le bi,
+sur le banc, sur le bi du bout du banc_, and delighted them with
+dissertations on Mme. Yvette Guilbert's earlier repertoire. But for him
+they would have gone to their lives' end without knowing that _pognon_
+meant money; _rouspétance_, assaulting the police; _thune_, a five-franc
+piece; and _bouffer_, to take nourishment. He made (according to his own
+statement) French a living language. There was never a school in Great
+Britain, the Colonies, or America on which the Parisian accent was so
+electrically impressed. The retort, _Eh! ta soeur_, was the purest
+Montmartre; also _Fich'-moi la paix, mon petit_, and _Tu as un toupet,
+toi_; and the delectable locution, _Allons étrangler un perroquet_ (let
+us strangle a parrot), employed by Apaches when inviting each other to
+drink a glass of absinthe, soon became current French in the school for
+invitations to surreptitious cocoa-parties.
+
+The progress that academy made in a real grip of the French language was
+miraculous; but the knowledge it gained in French grammar and syntax was
+deplorable. A certain mid-term examination--the paper being set by a
+neighbouring vicar--produced awful results. The phrase, "How do you do,
+dear?" which ought, by all the rules of Stratford-atte-Bowe, to be
+translated by _Comment vous portez-vous, ma chère?_ was rendered by most
+of the senior scholars _Eh, ma vieille, ca boulotte?_ One innocent and
+anachronistic damsel, writing on the execution of Charles I., declared
+that he _cracha dans le panier_ in 1649, thereby mystifying the good
+vicar, who was unaware that "to spit into the basket" is to be
+guillotined. This wealth of vocabulary was discounted by abject poverty
+in other branches of the language. No one could give a list of the words
+in "_al_" that took "_s_" in the plural, no one knew anything at all
+about the defective verb _échoir_, and the orthography of the school
+would have disgraced a kindergarten. The head mistress suspected a lack
+of method in the teaching of M. Pujol, and one day paid his class a
+surprise visit.
+
+The sight that met her eyes petrified her. The class, including the
+governess, bubbled and gurgled and shrieked with laughter. M. Pujol, his
+bright eyes agleam with merriment and his arms moving in frantic
+gestures, danced about the platform. He was telling them a story--and
+when Aristide told a story, he told it with the eloquence of his entire
+frame. He bent himself double and threw out his hands.
+
+"_Il était saoûl comme un porc_," he shouted.
+
+And then came the hush of death. The rest of the artless tale about the
+man as drunk as a pig was never told. The head mistress, indignant
+majesty, strode up the room.
+
+"M. Pujol, you have a strange way of giving French lessons."
+
+"I believe, madame," said he, with a polite bow, "in interesting my
+pupils in their studies."
+
+"Pupils have to be taught, not interested," said the head mistress.
+"Will you kindly put the class through some irregular verbs."
+
+So for the remainder of the lesson Aristide, under the freezing eyes of
+the head mistress, put his sorrowful class through irregular verbs, of
+which his own knowledge was singularly inexact, and at the end received
+his dismissal. In vain he argued. Outraged Minerva was implacable. Go he
+must.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We find him, then, one miserable December evening, standing on the
+arrival platform of Euston Station (the academy was near Manchester), an
+unwonted statue of dubiety. At his feet lay his meagre valise; in his
+hand was an enormous bouquet, a useful tribute of esteem from his
+disconsolate pupils; around him luggage-laden porters and passengers
+hurried; in front were drawn up the long line of cabs, their drivers'
+waterproofs glistening with wet; and in his pocket rattled the few
+paltry coins that, for Heaven knew how long, were to keep him from
+starvation. Should he commit the extravagance of taking a cab or should
+he go forth, valise in hand, into the pouring rain? He hesitated.
+
+"_Sacré mille cochons! Quel chien de climat!_" he muttered.
+
+A smart footman standing by turned quickly and touched his hat.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir; I'm from Mr. Smith."
+
+"I'm glad to hear it, my friend," said Aristide.
+
+"You're the French gentleman from Manchester?"
+
+"Decidedly," said Aristide.
+
+ [Illustration: STANDING ON THE ARRIVAL PLATFORM OF EUSTON STATION]
+
+"Then, sir, Mr. Smith has sent the carriage for you."
+
+"That's very kind of him," said Aristide.
+
+The footman picked up the valise and darted down the platform. Aristide
+followed. The footman held invitingly open the door of a cosy brougham.
+Aristide paused for the fraction of a second. Who was this hospitable
+Mr. Smith?
+
+"Bah!" said he to himself, "the best way of finding out is to go and
+see."
+
+He entered the carriage, sank back luxuriously on the soft cushions, and
+inhaled the warm smell of leather. They started, and soon the pelting
+rain beat harmlessly against the windows. Aristide looked out at the
+streaming streets, and, hugging himself comfortably, thanked Providence
+and Mr. Smith. But who was Mr. Smith? _Tiens_, thought he, there were
+two little Miss Smiths at the academy; he had pitied them because they
+had chilblains, freckles, and perpetual colds in their heads; possibly
+this was their kind papa. But, after all, what did it matter whose papa
+he was? He was expecting him. He had sent the carriage for him.
+Evidently a well-bred and attentive person. And _tiens!_ there was even
+a hot-water can on the floor of the brougham. "He thinks of everything,
+that man," said Aristide. "I feel I am going to like him."
+
+The carriage stopped at a house in Hampstead, standing, as far as he
+could see in the darkness, in its own grounds. The footman opened the
+door for him to alight and escorted him up the front steps. A neat
+parlour-maid received him in a comfortably-furnished hall and took his
+hat and greatcoat and magnificent bouquet.
+
+"Mr. Smith hasn't come back yet from the City, sir; but Miss Christabel
+is in the drawing-room."
+
+"Ah!" said Aristide. "Please give me back my bouquet."
+
+The maid showed him into the drawing-room. A pretty girl of
+three-and-twenty rose from a fender-stool and advanced smilingly to meet
+him.
+
+"Good afternoon, M. le Baron. I was wondering whether Thomas would spot
+you. I'm so glad he did. You see, neither father nor I could give him
+any description, for we had never seen you."
+
+This fitted in with his theory. But why Baron? After all, why not? The
+English loved titles.
+
+"He seems to be an intelligent fellow, mademoiselle."
+
+There was a span of silence. The girl looked at the bouquet, then at
+Aristide, who looked at the girl, then at the bouquet, then at the girl
+again.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said he, "will you deign to accept these flowers as a
+token of my respectful homage?"
+
+Miss Christabel took the flowers and blushed prettily. She had dark hair
+and eyes and a fascinating, upturned little nose, and the kindest
+little mouth in the world.
+
+"An Englishman would not have thought of that," she said.
+
+Aristide smiled in his roguish way and raised a deprecating hand.
+
+"Oh, yes, he would. But he would not have had--what you call the cheek
+to do it."
+
+Miss Christabel laughed merrily, invited him to a seat by the fire,
+and comforted him with tea and hot muffins. The frank charm of his
+girl-hostess captivated Aristide and drove from his mind the riddle of
+his adventure. Besides, think of the Arabian Nights' enchantment of the
+change from his lonely and shabby bed-sitting-room in the Rusholme Road
+to this fragrant palace with princess and all to keep him company! He
+watched the firelight dancing through her hair, the dainty play of
+laughter over her face, and decided that the brougham had transported
+him to Bagdad instead of Hampstead.
+
+"You have the air of a veritable princess," said he.
+
+"I once met a princess--at a charity bazaar--and she was a most
+matter-of-fact, businesslike person."
+
+"Bah!" said Aristide. "A princess of a charity bazaar! I was talking of
+the princess in a fairytale. They are the only real ones."
+
+"Do you know," said Miss Christabel, "that when men pay such compliments
+to English girls they are apt to get laughed at?"
+
+"Englishmen, yes," replied Aristide, "because they think over a
+compliment for a week, so that by the time they pay it, it is addled,
+like a bad egg. But we of Provence pay tribute to beauty straight out of
+our hearts. It is true. It is sincere. And what comes out of the heart
+is not ridiculous."
+
+Again the girl coloured and laughed. "I've always heard that a Frenchman
+makes love to every woman he meets."
+
+"Naturally," said Aristide. "If they are pretty. What else are pretty
+women for? Otherwise they might as well be hideous."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, to whom this Provençal point of view had not
+occurred.
+
+"So, if I make love to you, it is but your due."
+
+"I wonder what my fiancé would say if he heard you?"
+
+"Your----?"
+
+"My fiancé! There's his photograph on the table beside you. He is six
+foot one, and so jealous!" she laughed again.
+
+"The Turk!" cried Aristide, his swiftly-conceived romance crumbling into
+dust. Then he brightened up. "But when this six feet of muscle and
+egotism is absent, surely other poor mortals can glean a smile?"
+
+"You will observe that I'm not frowning," said Miss Christabel. "But you
+must not call my fiancé a Turk, for he's a very charming fellow whom I
+hope you'll like very much."
+
+Aristide sighed. "And the name of this thrice-blessed mortal?"
+
+Miss Christabel told his name--one Harry Ralston--and not only his name,
+but, such was the peculiar, childlike charm of Aristide Pujol, also many
+other things about him. He was the Honourable Harry Ralston, the heir
+to a great brewery peerage, and very wealthy. He was a member of
+Parliament, and but for Parliamentary duties would have dined there that
+evening; but he was to come in later, as soon as he could leave the
+House. He also had a house in Hampshire, full of the most beautiful
+works of art. It was through their common hobby that her father and
+Harry had first made acquaintance.
+
+"We're supposed to have a very fine collection here," she said, with a
+motion of her hand.
+
+Aristide looked round the walls and saw them hung with pictures in gold
+frames. In those days he had not acquired an extensive culture. Besides,
+who having before him the firelight gleaming through Miss Christabel's
+hair could waste his time over painted canvas? She noted his cursory
+glance.
+
+"I thought you were a connoisseur?"
+
+"I am," said Aristide, his bright eyes fixed on her in frank admiration.
+
+She blushed again; but this time she rose.
+
+"I must go and dress for dinner. Perhaps you would like to be shown your
+room?"
+
+He hung his head on one side.
+
+"Have I been too bold, mademoiselle?"
+
+"I don't know," she said. "You see, I've never met a Frenchman before."
+
+"Then a world of undreamed-of homage is at your feet," said he.
+
+A servant ushered him up broad, carpeted staircases into a bedroom such
+as he had never seen in his life before. It was all curtains and
+hangings and rugs and soft couches and satin quilts and dainty
+writing-tables and subdued lights, and a great fire glowed red and
+cheerful, and before it hung a clean shirt. His poor little toilet
+apparatus was laid on the dressing-table, and (with a tact which he did
+not appreciate, for he had, sad to tell, no dress-suit) the servant had
+spread his precious frock-coat and spare pair of trousers on the bed. On
+the pillow lay his night-shirt, neatly folded.
+
+"Evidently," said Aristide, impressed by these preparations, "it is
+expected that I wash myself now and change my clothes, and that I sleep
+here for the night. And for all that the ravishing Miss Christabel is
+engaged to her honourable Harry, this is none the less a corner of
+Paradise."
+
+So Aristide attired himself in his best, which included a white tie and
+a pair of nearly new brown boots--a long task, as he found that his
+valise had been spirited away and its contents, including the white
+tie of ceremony (he had but one), hidden in unexpected drawers and
+wardrobes--and eventually went downstairs into the drawing-room. There
+he found Miss Christabel and, warming himself on the hearthrug, a
+bald-headed, beefy-faced Briton, with little pig's eyes and a hearty
+manner, attired in a dinner-suit.
+
+"My dear fellow," said this personage, with outstretched hand, "I'm
+delighted to have you here. I've heard so much about you; and my little
+girl has been singing your praises."
+
+"Mademoiselle is too kind," said Aristide.
+
+"You must take us as you find us," said Mr. Smith. "We're just ordinary
+folk, but I can give you a good bottle of wine and a good cigar--it's
+only in England, you know, that you can get champagne fit to drink and
+cigars fit to smoke--and I can give you a glimpse of a modest English
+home. I believe you haven't a word for it in French."
+
+"_Ma foi_, no," said Aristide, who had once or twice before heard this
+lunatic charge brought against his country. "In France the men all live
+in cafés, the children are all put out to nurse, and the women, saving
+the respect of mademoiselle--well, the less said about them the better."
+
+"England is the only place, isn't it?" Mr. Smith declared, heartily. "I
+don't say that Paris hasn't its points. But after all--the Moulin Rouge
+and the Folies Bergères and that sort of thing soon pall, you know--soon
+pall."
+
+"Yet Paris has its serious side," argued Aristide. "There is always the
+tomb of Napoleon."
+
+"Papa will never take me to Paris," sighed the girl.
+
+"You shall go there on your honeymoon," said Mr. Smith.
+
+Dinner was announced. Aristide gave his arm to Miss Christabel, and
+proud not only of his partner, but also of his frock-coat, white tie,
+and shiny brown boots, strutted into the dining-room. The host sat at
+the end of the beautifully set table, his daughter on his right,
+Aristide on his left. The meal began gaily. The kind Mr. Smith was in
+the best of humours.
+
+"And how is our dear old friend, Jules Dancourt?" he asked.
+
+"_Tiens!_" said Aristide, to himself, "we have a dear friend Jules
+Dancourt. Wonderfully well," he replied at a venture, "but he suffers
+terribly at times from the gout."
+
+"So do I, confound it!" said Mr. Smith, drinking sherry.
+
+"You and the good Jules were always sympathetic," said Aristide. "Ah! he
+has spoken to me so often about you, the tears in his eyes."
+
+"Men cry, my dear, in France," Mr. Smith explained. "They also kiss each
+other."
+
+"_Ah, mais c'est un beau pays, mademoiselle!_" cried Aristide, and he
+began to talk of France and to draw pictures of his country which set
+the girl's eyes dancing. After that he told some of the funny little
+stories which had brought him disaster at the academy. Mr. Smith, with
+jovial magnanimity, declared that he was the first Frenchman he had ever
+met with a sense of humour.
+
+"But I thought, Baron," said he, "that you lived all your life shut up
+in that old château of yours?"
+
+"_Tiens!_" thought Aristide. "I am still a Baron, and I have an old
+château."
+
+"Tell us about the château. Has it a fosse and a drawbridge and a Gothic
+chapel?" asked Miss Christabel.
+
+"Which one do you mean?" inquired Aristide, airily. "For I have two."
+
+When relating to me this Arabian Nights' adventure, he drew my special
+attention to his astuteness.
+
+His host's eye quivered in a wink. "The one in Languedoc," said he.
+
+Languedoc! Almost Pujol's own country! With entire lack of morality, but
+with picturesque imagination, Aristide plunged into a description of
+that non-existent baronial hall. Fosse, drawbridge, Gothic chapel were
+but insignificant features. It had tourelles, emblazoned gateways,
+bastions, donjons, barbicans; it had innumerable rooms; in the _salle
+des chevaliers_ two hundred men-at-arms had his ancestors fed at a
+sitting. There was the room in which François Premier had slept, and one
+in which Joan of Arc had almost been assassinated. What the name of
+himself or of his ancestors was supposed to be Aristide had no ghost of
+an idea. But as he proceeded with the erection of his airy palace he
+gradually began to believe in it. He invested the place with a living
+atmosphere; conjured up a staff of family retainers, notably one
+Marie-Joseph Loufoque, the wizened old major-domo, with his long white
+whiskers and blue and silver livery. There were also Madeline Mioulles,
+the cook, and Bernadet the groom, and La Petite Fripette the goose girl.
+Ah! they should see La Petite Fripette! And he kept dogs and horses and
+cows and ducks and hens--and there was a great pond whence frogs were
+drawn to be fed for the consumption of the household.
+
+Miss Christabel shivered. "I should not like to eat frogs."
+
+"They also eat snails," said her father.
+
+"I have a snail farm," said Aristide. "You never saw such interesting
+little animals. They are so intelligent. If you're kind to them they
+come and eat out of your hand."
+
+ [Illustration: "AH! THE PICTURES," CRIED ARISTIDE, WITH A WIDE SWEEP
+                OF HIS ARMS]
+
+"You've forgotten the pictures," said Mr. Smith.
+
+"Ah! the pictures," cried Aristide, with a wide sweep of his arms.
+"Galleries full of them. Raphael, Michael Angelo, Wiertz, Reynolds----"
+
+He paused, not in order to produce the effect of a dramatic aposiopesis,
+but because he could not for the moment remember other names of
+painters.
+
+"It is a truly historical château," said he.
+
+"I should love to see it," said the girl.
+
+Aristide threw out his arms across the table. "It is yours,
+mademoiselle, for your honeymoon," said he.
+
+Dinner came to an end. Miss Christabel left the gentlemen to their wine,
+an excellent port whose English qualities were vaunted by the host.
+Aristide, full of food and drink and the mellow glories of the castle in
+Languedoc, and smoking an enormous cigar, felt at ease with all the
+world. He knew he should like the kind Mr. Smith, hospitable though
+somewhat insular man. He could stay with him for a week--or a month--why
+not a year?
+
+After coffee and liqueurs had been served Mr. Smith rose and switched on
+a powerful electric light at the end of the large room, showing a
+picture on an easel covered by a curtain. He beckoned to Aristide to
+join him and, drawing the curtain, disclosed the picture.
+
+"There!" said he. "Isn't it a stunner?"
+
+It was a picture all grey skies and grey water and grey feathery trees,
+and a little man in the foreground wore a red cap.
+
+"It is beautiful, but indeed it is magnificent!" cried Aristide, always
+impressionable to things of beauty.
+
+"Genuine Corot, isn't it?"
+
+"Without doubt," said Aristide.
+
+His host poked him in the ribs. "I thought I'd astonish you. You
+wouldn't believe Gottschalk could have done it. There it is--as large as
+life and twice as natural. If you or anyone else can tell it from a
+genuine Corot I'll eat my hat. And all for eight pounds."
+
+Aristide looked at the beefy face and caught a look of cunning in the
+little pig's eyes.
+
+"Now are you satisfied?" asked Mr. Smith.
+
+"More than satisfied," said Aristide, though what he was to be satisfied
+about passed, for the moment, his comprehension.
+
+"If it was a copy of an existing picture, you know--one might have
+understood it--that, of course, would be dangerous--but for a man to go
+and get bits out of various Corots and stick them together like this is
+miraculous. If it hadn't been for a matter of business principle I'd
+have given the fellow eight guineas instead of pounds--hanged if I
+wouldn't! He deserves it."
+
+"He does indeed," said Aristide Pujol.
+
+"And now that you've seen it with your own eyes, what do you think you
+might ask me for it? I suggested something between two and three
+thousand--shall we say three? You're the owner, you know." Again the
+process of rib-digging. "Came out of that historic château of yours. My
+eye! you're a holy terror when you begin to talk. You almost persuaded
+me it was real."
+
+"_Tiens!_" said Aristide to himself. "I don't seem to have a château
+after all."
+
+"Certainly three thousand," said he, with a grave face.
+
+"That young man thinks he knows a lot, but he doesn't," said Mr. Smith.
+
+"Ah!" said Aristide, with singular laconicism.
+
+"Not a blooming thing," continued his host. "But he'll pay three
+thousand, which is the principal, isn't it? He's partner in the show,
+you know, Ralston, Wiggins, and Wix's Brewery"--Aristide pricked up his
+ears--"and when his doddering old father dies he'll be Lord Ranelagh and
+come into a million of money."
+
+"Has he seen the picture?" asked Aristide.
+
+"Oh, yes. Regards it as a masterpiece. Didn't Brauneberger tell you of
+the Lancret we planted on the American?" Mr. Smith rubbed hearty hands
+at the memory of the iniquity. "Same old game. Always easy. I have
+nothing to do with the bargaining or the sale. Just an old friend of
+the ruined French nobleman with the historic château and family
+treasures. He comes along and fixes the price. I told our friend
+Harry----"
+
+"Good," thought Aristide. "This is the same Honourable Harry, M.P., who
+is engaged to the ravishing Miss Christabel."
+
+"I told him," said Mr. Smith, "that it might come to three or four
+thousand. He jibbed a bit--so when I wrote to you I said two or three.
+But you might try him with three to begin with."
+
+Aristide went back to the table and poured himself out a fresh glass of
+his kind host's 1865 brandy and drank it off.
+
+"Exquisite, my dear fellow," said he. "I've none finer in my historic
+château."
+
+"Don't suppose you have," grinned the host, joining him. He slapped him
+on the back. "Well," said he, with a shifty look in his little pig's
+eyes, "let us talk business. What do you think would be your fair
+commission? You see, all the trouble and invention have been mine. What
+do you say to four hundred pounds?"
+
+"Five," said Aristide, promptly.
+
+A sudden gleam came into the little pig's eyes.
+
+"Done!" said Mr. Smith, who had imagined that the other would demand a
+thousand and was prepared to pay eight hundred. "Done!" said he again.
+
+They shook hands to seal the bargain and drank another glass of old
+brandy. At that moment, a servant, entering, took the host aside.
+
+"Please excuse me a moment," said he, and went with the servant out of
+the room.
+
+Aristide, left alone, lighted another of his kind host's fat cigars
+and threw himself into a great leathern arm-chair by the fire, and
+surrendered himself deliciously to the soothing charm of the moment. Now
+and then he laughed, finding a certain comicality in his position. And
+what a charming father-in-law, this kind Mr. Smith!
+
+His cheerful reflections were soon disturbed by the sudden irruption of
+his host and a grizzled, elderly, foxy-faced gentleman with a white
+moustache, wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honour in the buttonhole
+of his overcoat.
+
+"Here, you!" cried the kind Mr. Smith, striding up to Aristide, with a
+very red face. "Will you have the kindness to tell me who the devil you
+are?"
+
+Aristide rose, and, putting his hands behind the tails of his
+frock-coat, stood smiling radiantly on the hearthrug. A wit much less
+alert than my irresponsible friend's would have instantly appreciated
+the fact that the real Simon Pure had arrived on the scene.
+
+"I, my dear friend," said he, "am the Baron de Je ne Sais Plus."
+
+"You're a confounded impostor," spluttered Mr. Smith.
+
+"And this gentleman here to whom I have not had the pleasure of being
+introduced?" asked Aristide, blandly.
+
+"I am M. Poiron, monsieur, the agent of Messrs. Brauneberger and
+Compagnie, art dealers, of the Rue Notre Dame des Petits Champs of
+Paris," said the new-comer, with an air of defiance.
+
+"Ah, I thought you were the Baron," said Aristide.
+
+"There's no blooming Baron at all about it!" screamed Mr. Smith. "Are
+you Poiron, or is he?"
+
+"I would not have a name like Poiron for anything in the world," said
+Aristide. "My name is Aristide Pujol, soldier of fortune, at your
+service."
+
+"How the blazes did you get here?"
+
+"Your servant asked me if I was a French gentleman from Manchester. I
+was. He said that Mr. Smith had sent his carriage for me. I thought it
+hospitable of the kind Mr. Smith. I entered the carriage--_et voilà!_"
+
+"Then clear out of here this very minute," said Mr. Smith, reaching
+forward his hand to the bell-push.
+
+Aristide checked his impulsive action.
+
+"Pardon me, dear host," said he. "It is raining dogs and cats outside. I
+am very comfortable in your luxurious home. I am here, and here I
+stay."
+
+"I'm shot if you do," said the kind Mr. Smith, his face growing redder
+and uglier. "Now, will you go out, or will you be thrown out?"
+
+Aristide, who had no desire whatever to be ejected from this snug nest
+into the welter of the wet and friendless world, puffed at his cigar,
+and looked at his host with the irresistible drollery of his eyes.
+
+"You forget, _mon cher ami_," said he, "that neither the beautiful Miss
+Christabel nor her affianced, the Honourable Harry, M.P., would care to
+know that the talented Gottschalk got only eight pounds, not even
+guineas, for painting that three-thousand-pound picture."
+
+"So it's blackmail, eh?"
+
+"Precisely," said Aristide, "and I don't blush at it."
+
+"You infernal little blackguard!"
+
+"I seem to be in congenial company," said Aristide. "I don't think our
+friend M. Poiron has more scruples than he has right to the ribbon of
+the Legion of Honour which he is wearing."
+
+"How much will you take to go out? I have a cheque-book handy."
+
+Mr. Smith moved a few steps from the hearthrug. Aristide sat down in the
+arm-chair. An engaging, fantastic impudence was one of the charms of
+Aristide Pujol.
+
+"I'll take five hundred pounds," said he, "to stay in."
+
+"Stay in?" Mr. Smith grew apoplectic.
+
+"Yes," said Aristide. "You can't do without me. Your daughter and your
+servants know me as M. le Baron--by the way, what is my name? And where
+is my historic château in Languedoc?"
+
+"Mireilles," said M. Poiron, who was sitting grim and taciturn on one of
+the dining-room chairs. "And the place is the same, near Montpellier."
+
+"I like to meet an intelligent man," said Aristide.
+
+"I should like to wring your infernal neck," said the kind Mr. Smith.
+"But, by George, if we do let you in you'll have to sign me a receipt
+implicating yourself up to the hilt. I'm not going to be put into the
+cart by you, you can bet your life."
+
+"Anything you like," said Aristide, "so long as we all swing together."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, when Aristide Pujol arrived at this point in his narrative I, his
+chronicler, who am nothing if not an eminently respectable, law-abiding
+Briton, took him warmly to task for his sheer absence of moral sense.
+His eyes, as they sometimes did, assumed a luminous pathos.
+
+ [Illustration: "I'LL TAKE FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS," SAID HE, "TO STAY IN"]
+
+"My dear friend," said he, "have you ever faced the world in a foreign
+country in December with no character and fifteen pounds five and
+three-pence in your pocket? Five hundred pounds was a fortune. It is
+one now. And to be gained just by lending oneself to a good farce, which
+didn't hurt anybody. You and your British morals! Bah!" said he, with a
+fine flourish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aristide, after much parleying, was finally admitted into the nefarious
+brotherhood. He was to retain his rank as the Baron de Mireilles, and
+play the part of the pecuniarily inconvenienced nobleman forced to sell
+some of his rare collection. Mr. Smith had heard of the Corot through
+their dear old common friend, Jules Dancourt of Rheims, had mentioned it
+alluringly to the Honourable Harry, had arranged for the Baron, who was
+visiting England, to bring it over and dispatch it to Mr. Smith's house,
+and on his return from Manchester to pay a visit to Mr. Smith, so that
+he could meet the Honourable Harry in person. In whatever transaction
+ensued Mr. Smith, so far as his prospective son-in-law was concerned,
+was to be the purely disinterested friend. It was Aristide's wit which
+invented a part for the supplanted M. Poiron. He should be the eminent
+Parisian expert who, chancing to be in London, had been telephoned for
+by the kind Mr. Smith.
+
+"It would not be wise for M. Poiron," said Aristide, chuckling inwardly
+with puckish glee, "to stay here for the night--or for two or three
+days--or a week--like myself. He must go back to his hotel when the
+business is concluded."
+
+"_Mais, pardon!_" cried M. Poiron, who had been formally invited, and
+had arrived late solely because he had missed his train at Manchester,
+and come on by the next one. "I cannot go out into the wet, and I have
+no hotel to go to."
+
+Aristide appealed to his host. "But he is unreasonable, _cher ami_. He
+must play his _rôle_. M. Poiron has been telephoned for. He can't
+possibly stay here. Surely five hundred pounds is worth one little night
+of discomfort? And there are a legion of hotels in London."
+
+"Five hundred pounds!" exclaimed M. Poiron. "_Qu'est-ce que vous chantez
+là?_ I want more than five hundred pounds."
+
+"Then you're jolly well not going to get it," cried Mr. Smith, in a
+rage. "And as for you"--he turned on Aristide--"I'll wring your infernal
+neck yet."
+
+"Calm yourself, calm yourself!" smiled Aristide, who was enjoying
+himself hugely.
+
+At this moment the door opened and Miss Christabel appeared. On seeing
+the decorated stranger she started with a little "Oh!" of surprise.
+
+"I beg your pardon."
+
+Mr. Smith's angry face wreathed itself in smiles.
+
+"This, my darling, is M. Poiron, the eminent Paris expert, who has been
+good enough to come and give us his opinion on the picture."
+
+M. Poiron bowed. Aristide advanced.
+
+"Mademoiselle, your appearance is like a mirage in a desert."
+
+She smiled indulgently and turned to her father. "I've been wondering
+what had become of you. Harry has been here for the last half-hour."
+
+"Bring him in, dear child, bring him in!" said Mr. Smith, with all the
+heartiness of the fine old English gentleman. "Our good friends are
+dying to meet him."
+
+The girl flickered out of the room like a sunbeam (the phrase is
+Aristide's), and the three precious rascals put their heads together in
+a hurried and earnest colloquy. Presently Miss Christabel returned, and
+with her came the Honourable Harry Ralston, a tall, soldierly fellow,
+with close-cropped fair curly hair and a fair moustache, and frank blue
+eyes that, even in Parliament, had seen no harm in his fellow-creatures.
+Aristide's magical vision caught him wincing ever so little at Mr.
+Smith's effusive greeting and overdone introductions. He shook Aristide
+warmly by the hand.
+
+"You have a beauty there, Baron, a perfect beauty," said he, with the
+insane ingenuousness of youth. "I wonder how you can manage to part with
+it."
+
+"_Ma foi_," said Aristide, with his back against the end of the
+dining-table and gazing at the masterpiece. "I have so many at the
+Château de Mireilles. When one begins to collect, you know--and when
+one's grandfather and father have had also the divine mania----"
+
+"You were saying, M. le Baron," said M. Poiron of Paris, "that your
+respected grandfather bought this direct from Corot himself."
+
+"A commission," said Aristide. "My grandfather was a patron of Corot."
+
+"Do you like it, dear?" asked the Honourable Harry.
+
+"Oh, yes!" replied the girl, fervently. "It is beautiful. I feel like
+Harry about it." She turned to Aristide. "How can you part with it? Were
+you really in earnest when you said you would like me to come and see
+your collection?"
+
+"For me," said Aristide, "it would be a visit of enchantment."
+
+"You must take me, then," she whispered to Harry. "The Baron has been
+telling us about his lovely old château."
+
+"Will you come, monsieur?" asked Aristide.
+
+"Since I'm going to rob you of your picture," said the young man, with
+smiling courtesy, "the least I can do is to pay you a visit of apology.
+Lovely!" said he, going up to the Corot.
+
+Aristide took Miss Christabel, now more bewitching than ever with the
+glow of young love in her eyes and a flush on her cheek, a step or two
+aside and whispered:--
+
+"But he is charming, your fiancé! He almost deserves his good fortune."
+
+"Why almost?" she laughed, shyly.
+
+"It is not a man, but a demi-god, that would deserve you, mademoiselle."
+
+M. Poiron's harsh voice broke out.
+
+"You see, it is painted in the beginning of Corot's later manner--it is
+1864. There is the mystery which, when he was quite an old man, became a
+trick. If you were to put it up to auction at Christie's it would fetch,
+I am sure, five thousand pounds."
+
+"That's more than I can afford to give," said the young man, with a
+laugh. "Mr. Smith mentioned something between three and four thousand
+pounds. I don't think I can go above three."
+
+"I have nothing to do with it, my dear boy, nothing whatever," said Mr.
+Smith, rubbing his hands. "You wanted a Corot. I said I thought I could
+put you on to one. It's for the Baron here to mention his price. I
+retire now and for ever."
+
+"Well, Baron?" said the young man, cheerfully. "What's your idea?"
+
+Aristide came forward and resumed his place at the end of the table. The
+picture was in front of him beneath the strong electric light; on his
+left stood Mr. Smith and Poiron, on his right Miss Christabel and the
+Honourable Harry.
+
+"I'll not take three thousand pounds for it," said Aristide. "A picture
+like that! Never!"
+
+"I assure you it would be a fair price," said Poiron.
+
+"You mentioned that figure yourself only just now," said Mr. Smith, with
+an ugly glitter in his little pig's eyes.
+
+"I presume, gentlemen," said Aristide, "that this picture is my own
+property." He turned engagingly to his host. "Is it not, _cher ami_?"
+
+"Of course it is. Who said it wasn't?"
+
+"And you, M. Poiron, acknowledge formally that it is mine," he asked, in
+French.
+
+"_Sans aucun doute._"
+
+"_Eh bien_," said Aristide, throwing open his arms and gazing round
+sweetly. "I have changed my mind. I do not sell the picture at all."
+
+"Not sell it? What the--what do you mean?" asked Mr. Smith, striving to
+mellow the gathering thunder on his brow.
+
+"I do not sell," said Aristide. "Listen, my dear friends!" He was in the
+seventh heaven of happiness--the principal man, the star, taking the
+centre of the stage. "I have an announcement to make to you. I have
+fallen desperately in love with mademoiselle."
+
+There was a general gasp. Mr. Smith looked at him, red-faced and
+open-mouthed. Miss Christabel blushed furiously and emitted a sound half
+between a laugh and a scream. Harry Ralston's eyes flashed.
+
+"My dear sir----" he began.
+
+"Pardon," said Aristide, disarming him with the merry splendour of his
+glance. "I do not wish to take mademoiselle from you. My love is
+hopeless! I know it. But it will feed me to my dying day. In return for
+the joy of this hopeless passion I will not sell you the picture--I give
+it to you as a wedding present."
+
+He stood, with the air of a hero, both arms extended towards the amazed
+pair of lovers.
+
+"I give it to you," said he. "It is mine. I have no wish but for your
+happiness. In my Château de Mireilles there are a hundred others."
+
+"This is madness!" said Mr. Smith, bursting with suppressed indignation,
+so that his bald head grew scarlet.
+
+"My dear fellow!" said Mr. Harry Ralston. "It is unheard-of generosity
+on your part. But we can't accept it."
+
+"Then," said Aristide, advancing dramatically to the picture, "I take it
+under my arm, I put it in a hansom cab, and I go with it back to
+Languedoc."
+
+Mr. Smith caught him by the wrist and dragged him out of the room.
+
+"You little brute! Do you want your neck broken?"
+
+"Do you want the marriage of your daughter with the rich and Honourable
+Harry broken?" asked Aristide.
+
+"Oh, damn! Oh, damn! Oh, damn!" cried Mr. Smith, stamping about
+helplessly and half weeping.
+
+Aristide entered the dining-room and beamed on the company.
+
+"The kind Mr. Smith has consented. Mr. Honourable Harry and Miss
+Christabel, there is your Corot. And now, may I be permitted?" He rang
+the bell. A servant appeared.
+
+"Some champagne to drink to the health of the fiancés," he cried. "Lots
+of champagne."
+
+Mr. Smith looked at him almost admiringly.
+
+"By Jove!" he muttered. "You _have_ got a nerve."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Voilà!_" said Aristide, when he had finished the story.
+
+"And did they accept the Corot?" I asked.
+
+"Of course. It is hanging now in the big house in Hampshire. I stayed
+with the kind Mr. Smith for six weeks," he added, doubling himself up in
+his chair and hugging himself with mirth, "and we became very good
+friends. And I was at the wedding."
+
+"And what about their honeymoon visit to Languedoc?"
+
+"Alas!" said Aristide. "The morning before the wedding I had a
+telegram--it was from my old father at Aigues-Mortes--to tell me that
+the historic Château de Mireilles, with my priceless collection of
+pictures, had been burned to the ground."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING
+
+
+There was a time when Aristide Pujol, in sole charge of an automobile,
+went gaily scuttering over the roads of France. I use the word
+advisedly. If you had heard the awful thing as it passed by you would
+agree that it is the only word adequate to express its hideous mode of
+progression. It was a two-seated, scratched, battered, ramshackle tin
+concern of hoary antiquity, belonging to the childhood of the race. Not
+only horses, but other automobiles shied at it. It was a vehicle of
+derision. Yet Aristide regarded it with glowing pride and drove it with
+such daredevilry that the parts must have held together only through
+sheer breathless wonder. Had it not been for the car, he told me, he
+would not have undertaken the undignified employment in which he was
+then engaged--the mountebank selling of a corn-cure in the public places
+of small towns and villages. It was not a fitting pursuit for a late
+managing director of a public company and an ex-Professor of French in
+an English Academy for Young Ladies. He wanted to rise, _ma foi_, not
+descend in the social scale. But when hunger drives--_que voulez-vous_?
+Besides, there was the automobile. It is true he had bound himself by
+his contract to exhibit a board at the back bearing a flaming picture of
+the success of the cure and a legend: "_Guérissez vos cors_," and to
+display a banner with the same device, when weather permitted. But,
+still, there was the automobile.
+
+It had been lying for many motor-ages in the shed of the proprietors of
+the cure, the Maison Hiéropath of Marseilles, neglected, forlorn, eaten
+by rust and worm, when suddenly an idea occurred to their business
+imagination. Why should they not use the automobile to advertise and
+sell the cure about the country? The apostle in charge would pay for his
+own petrol, take a large percentage on sales, and the usual traveller's
+commission on orders that he might place. But where to find an apostle?
+Brave and desperate men came in high hopes, looked at the car, and,
+shaking their heads sorrowfully, went away. At last, at the loosest of
+ends, came Aristide. The splendour of the idea--a poet, in his way, was
+Aristide, and the Idea was the thing that always held him captive--the
+splendour of the idea of dashing up to hotels in his own automobile
+dazed him. He beheld himself doing his hundred kilometres an hour and
+trailing clouds of glory whithersoever he went. To a child a moth-eaten
+rocking-horse is a fiery Arab of the plains; to Aristide Pujol this
+cheat of the scrap-heap was a sixty-horse-power thunderer and devourer
+of space.
+
+How they managed to botch up her interior so that she moved unpushed
+is a mystery which Aristide, not divining, could not reveal; and when
+and where he himself learned to drive a motor-car is also vague. I
+believe the knowledge came by nature. He was a fellow of many weird
+accomplishments. He could conjure; he could model birds and beasts out
+of breadcrumb; he could play the drum--so well that he had a kettle-drum
+hanging round his neck during most of his military service; he could
+make omelettes and rabbit-hutches; he could imitate any animal that ever
+emitted sound--a gift that endeared him to children; he could do almost
+anything you please--save stay in one place and acquire material
+possessions. The fact that he had never done a thing before was to him
+no proof of his inability to do it. In his superb self-confidence he
+would have undertaken to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden or
+navigate a liner across the Atlantic. Knowing this, I cease to bother my
+head about so small a matter as the way in which he learned to drive a
+motor-car.
+
+Behold him, then, one raw March morning, scuttering along the road that
+leads from Arles to Salon, in Provence. He wore a goat-skin coat and a
+goat-skin cap drawn down well over his ears. His handsome bearded face,
+with its lustrous, laughing eyes, peeped out curiously human amid the
+circumambient shagginess. There was not a turn visible in the long,
+straight road that lost itself in the far distant mist; not a speck on
+it signifying cart or creature. Aristide Pujol gave himself up to the
+delirium of speed and urged the half-bursting engine to twenty miles an
+hour. In spite of the racing-track surface, the crazy car bumped and
+jolted; the sides of the rickety bonnet clashed like cymbals; every
+valve wheezed and squealed; every nut seemed to have got loose and
+terrifically clattered; rattling noises, grunting noises, screeching
+noises escaped from every part; it creaked and clanked like an
+over-insured tramp-steamer in a typhoon; it lurched as though afflicted
+with loco-motor ataxy; and noisome vapours belched forth from the open
+exhaust-pipe as though the car were a Tophet on wheels. But all was
+music in the ears of Aristide. The car was going (it did not always go),
+the road scudded under him, and the morning air dashed stingingly into
+his face. For the moment he desired nothing more of life.
+
+This road between Arles and Salon runs through one of the most desolate
+parts of France: a long, endless plain, about five miles broad, lying
+between two long low ranges of hills. It is strewn like a monstrous
+Golgotha, not with skulls, but with huge smooth pebbles, as massed
+together as the shingle on a beach. Rank grass shoots up in what
+interstices it finds; but beyond this nothing grows. Nothing can grow.
+On a sunless day under a lowering sky it is a land accursed. Mile after
+mile for nearly twenty miles stretches this stony and barren waste. No
+human habitation cheers the sight, for from such a soil no human hand
+could wrest a sustenance. Only the rare traffic going from Arles to
+Salon and from Salon to Arles passes along the road. The cheery passing
+show of the live highway is wanting; there are no children, no dogs,
+no ducks and hens, no men and women lounging to their work; no
+red-trousered soldiers on bicycles, no blue-bloused, weather-beaten
+farmers jogging along in their little carts. As far as the eye can reach
+nothing suggestive of man meets the view. Nothing but the infinite
+barrenness of the plain, the ridges on either side, the long, straight,
+endless road cleaving through this abomination of desolation.
+
+To walk through it would be a task as depressing as mortal could
+execute. But to the speed-drunken motorist it is a realization of dim
+and tremulous visions of Paradise. What need to look to right or left
+when you are swallowing up free mile after mile of dizzying road?
+Aristide looked neither to right nor left, and knew this was heaven at
+last.
+
+ [Illustration: BETWEEN THE FOLDS OF THE BLANKET PEEPED THE FACE OF A
+                SLEEPING CHILD]
+
+Suddenly, however, he became aware of a small black spot far ahead in
+the very middle of the unencumbered track. As he drew near it looked
+like a great stone. He swerved as he passed it, and, looking, saw that
+it was a bundle wrapped in a striped blanket. It seemed so odd that it
+should be lying there that, his curiosity being aroused, he pulled up
+and walked back a few yards to examine it. The nearer he approached the
+less did it resemble an ordinary bundle. He bent down, and lo! between
+the folds of the blanket peeped the face of a sleeping child.
+
+"_Nom de Dieu!_" cried Aristide. "_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"
+
+He ought not to have said it, but his astonishment was great. He stared
+at the baby, then up and down the road, then swept the horizon. Not a
+soul was visible. How did the baby get there? The heavens, according to
+history, have rained many things in their time: bread, quails, blood,
+frogs, and what not; but there is no mention of them ever having rained
+babies. It could not, therefore, have come from the clouds. It could not
+even have fallen from the tail of a cart, for then it would have been
+killed, or at least have broken its bones and generally been rendered a
+different baby from the sound, chubby mite sleeping as peacefully as
+though the Golgotha of Provence had been its cradle from birth. It could
+not have come there accidentally. Deliberate hands had laid it down; in
+the centre of the road, too. Why not by the side, where it would have
+been out of the track of thundering automobiles? When the murderous
+intent became obvious Aristide shivered and felt sick. He breathed
+fierce and honest anathema on the heads of the bowelless fiends who had
+abandoned the babe to its doom. Then he stooped and picked up the bundle
+tenderly in his arms.
+
+The wee face puckered for a moment and the wee limbs shot out
+vigorously; then the dark eyes opened and stared Aristide solemnly and
+wonderingly in the face. So must the infant Remus have first regarded
+his she-wolf mother. Having ascertained, however, that it was not going
+to be devoured, it began to cry lustily, showing two little white specks
+of teeth in the lower gum.
+
+"_Mon pauvre petit_, you are hungry," said Aristide, carrying it to the
+car racked by the clattering engine. "I wonder when you last tasted
+food? If I only had a little biscuit and wine to give you; but, alas!
+there's nothing but petrol and corn-cure, neither of which, I believe,
+is good for babies. Wait, wait, _mon chèri_, until we get to Salon.
+There I promise you proper nourishment."
+
+He danced the baby up and down in his arms and made half-remembered and
+insane noises, which eventually had the effect of reducing it to its
+original calm stare of wonderment.
+
+"_Voilà_," said Aristide, delighted. "Now we can advance."
+
+He deposited it on the vacant seat, clambered up behind the wheel, and
+started. But not at the break-neck speed of twenty miles an hour. He
+went slowly and carefully, his heart in his mouth at every lurch of the
+afflicted automobile, fearful lest the child should be precipitated from
+its slippery resting-place. But, alas! he did not proceed far. At the
+end of a kilometre the engine stopped dead. He leaped out to see what
+had happened, and, after a few perplexed and exhausting moments,
+remembered. He had not even petrol to offer to the baby, having
+omitted--most feather-headed of mortals--to fill up his tank before
+starting, and forgotten to bring a spare tin. There was nothing to be
+done save wait patiently until another motorist should pass by from whom
+he might purchase the necessary amount of essence to carry him on to
+Salon. Meanwhile the baby would go breakfastless. Aristide clambered
+back to his seat, took the child on his knees, and commiserated it
+profoundly. Sitting there on his apparently home-made vehicle, in the
+midst of the unearthly silence of the sullen and barren wilderness,
+attired in his shaggy goat-skin cap and coat, he resembled an up-to-date
+Robinson Crusoe dandling an infant Friday.
+
+The disposal of the child at Salon would be simple. After having it fed
+and tended at an hotel, he would make his deposition to the police, who
+would take it to the Enfants Trouvés, the department of State which
+provides fathers and mothers and happy homes for foundlings at a cost to
+the country of twenty-five francs a month per foundling. It is true that
+the parents so provided think more of the twenty-five francs than they
+do of the foundling. But that was the affair of the State, not of
+Aristide Pujol. In the meanwhile he examined the brat curiously. It was
+dressed in a coarse calico jumper, very unclean. The striped blanket was
+full of holes and smelled abominably. Some sort of toilet appeared
+essential. He got down and from his valise took what seemed necessary to
+the purpose. The jumper and blanket he threw far on the pebbly waste.
+The baby, stark naked for a few moments, crowed and laughed and
+stretched like a young animal, revealing itself to be a sturdy boy about
+nine months old. When he seemed fit to be clad Aristide tied him up in
+the lower part of a suit of pyjamas, cutting little holes in the sides
+for his tiny arms; and, further, with a view to cheating his hunger,
+provided him with a shoe-horn. The defenceless little head he managed to
+squeeze into the split mouth of a woollen sock. Aristide regarded him in
+triumph. The boy chuckled gleefully. Then Aristide folded him warm in
+his travelling-rug and entered into an animated conversation.
+
+Now it happened that, at the most interesting point of the talk, the
+baby clutched Aristide's finger in his little brown hand. The tiny
+fingers clung strong.
+
+A queer thrill ran through the impressionable man. The tiny fingers
+seemed to close round his heart.... It was a bonny, good-natured,
+gurgling scrap--and the pure eyes looked truthfully into his soul.
+
+"Poor little wretch!" said Aristide, who, peasant's son that he was,
+knew what he was talking about. "Poor little wretch! If you go into the
+Enfants Trouvés you'll have a devil of a time of it."
+
+The tiny clasp tightened. As if the babe understood, the chuckle died
+from his face.
+
+"You'll be cuffed and kicked and half starved, while your adopted mother
+pockets her twenty-five francs a month, and you'll belong to nobody, and
+wonder why the deuce you're alive, and wish you were dead; and, if you
+remember to-day, you'll curse me for not having had the decency to run
+over you."
+
+The clasp relaxed, puckers appeared at the corners of the dribbling
+mouth, and a myriad tiny horizontal lines of care marked the sock-capped
+brow.
+
+"Poor little devil!" said Aristide. "My heart bleeds for you, especially
+now that you're dressed in my sock and pyjama, and are sucking the only
+shoe-horn I ever possessed."
+
+A welcome sound caused Aristide to leap into the middle of the road. He
+looked ahead, and there, in a cloud of dust, a thing like a torpedo came
+swooping down. He held up both his arms, the signal of a motorist in
+distress. The torpedo approached with slackened speed, and stopped. It
+was an evil-looking, drab, high-powered racer, and two bears with
+goggles sat in the midst thereof. The bear at the wheel raised his cap
+and asked courteously:--
+
+"What can we do for you, monsieur?"
+
+At that moment the baby broke into heart-rending cries. Aristide took
+off his goat-skin cap and, remaining uncovered, looked at the bear, then
+at the baby, then at the bear again.
+
+"Monsieur," said he, "I suppose it's useless to ask you whether you have
+any milk and a feeding-bottle?"
+
+"_Mais dites donc!_" shouted the bear, furiously, his hand on the brake.
+"Stop an automobile like this on such a pretext----?"
+
+Aristide held up a protesting hand, and fixed the bear with the
+irresistible roguery of his eyes.
+
+"Pardon, monsieur, I am also out of petrol. Forgive a father's feelings.
+The baby wants milk and I want petrol, and I don't know whose need is
+the more imperative. But if you could sell me enough petrol to carry me
+to Salon I should be most grateful."
+
+The request for petrol is not to be refused. To supply it, if possible,
+is the written law of motordom. The second bear slid from his seat and
+extracted a tin from the recesses of the torpedo, and stood by while
+Aristide filled his tank, a process that necessitated laying the baby on
+the ground. He smiled.
+
+"You seem amused," said Aristide.
+
+"_Parbleu!_" said the motorist. "You have at the back of your auto a
+placard telling people to cure their corns, and in front you carry a
+baby."
+
+"That," replied Aristide, "is easily understood. I am the agent of the
+Maison Hiéropath of Marseilles, and the baby, whom I, its father, am
+carrying from a dead mother to an invalid aunt, I am using as an
+advertisement. As he luckily has no corns, I can exhibit his feet as a
+proof of the efficacy of the corn-cure."
+
+The bear laughed and joined his companion, and the torpedo thundered
+away. Aristide replaced the baby, and with a complicated arrangement of
+string fastened it securely to the seat. The baby, having ceased crying,
+clutched his beard as he bent over, and "goo'd" pleasantly. The tug was
+at his heart-strings. How could he give so fascinating, so valiant a
+mite over to the Enfants Trouvés? Besides, it belonged to him. Had he
+not in jest claimed paternity? It had given him a new importance. He
+could say "_mon fils_," just as he could say (with equal veracity) "_mon
+automobile_." A generous thrill ran through him. He burst into a loud
+laugh, clapped his hands, and danced before the delighted babe.
+
+"_Mon petit Jean_," said he, with humorous tenderness, "for I suppose
+your name is Jean; I will rend myself in pieces before I let the
+Administration board you out among the wolves. You shall not go to the
+Enfants Trouvés. I myself will adopt you, _mon petit Jean_."
+
+As Aristide had no fixed abode whatever, the address on his
+visiting-card, "213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré, Paris," being that of an old
+greengrocer woman of his acquaintance, with whom he lodged when he
+visited the metropolis, there was a certain amount of rashness in the
+undertaking. But when was Aristide otherwise than rash? Had prudence
+been his guiding principle through life he would not have been selling
+corn-cure for the Maison Hiéropath, and consequently would not have
+discovered the child at all.
+
+In great delight at this satisfactory settlement of little Jean's
+destiny, he started the ramshackle engine and drove triumphantly on his
+way. Jean, fatigued by the emotions of the last half-hour, slumbered
+peacefully.
+
+"The little angel!" said Aristide.
+
+The sun was shining when they arrived at Salon, the gayest, the most
+coquettish, the most laughing little town in Provence. It is a place all
+trees and open spaces, and fountains and cafés, and sauntering people.
+The only thing grim about it is the solitary machicolated tower in the
+main street, the last vestige of ancient ramparts; and even that, close
+cuddled on each side by prosperous houses with shops beneath, looks
+like an old, old, wrinkled grandmother smiling amid her daintier
+grandchildren. Everyone seemed to be in the open air. Those who kept
+shops stood at the doorways. The prospect augured well for the Maison
+Hiéropath.
+
+Aristide stopped before an hotel, disentangled Jean, to the mild
+interest of the passers-by, and, carrying him in, delivered him into the
+arms of the landlady.
+
+"Madame," he said, "this is my son. I am taking him from his mother, who
+is dead, to an aunt who is an invalid. So he is alone on my hands. He is
+very hungry, and I beseech you to feed him at once."
+
+The motherly woman received the babe instinctively and cast aside the
+travelling-rug in which he was enveloped. Then she nearly dropped him.
+
+"_Mon Dieu! Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?_"
+
+She stared in stupefaction at the stocking-cap and at the long flannel
+pyjama legs that depended from the body of the infant, around whose
+neck the waist was tightly drawn. Never since the world began had babe
+masqueraded in such attire. Aristide smiled his most engaging smile.
+
+"My son's luggage has unfortunately been lost. His portmanteau, _pauvre
+petit_, was so small. A poor widower, I did what I could. I am but a
+mere man, madame."
+
+"Evidently," said the woman, with some asperity.
+
+Aristide took a louis from his purse. "If you will purchase him some
+necessary articles of costume while I fulfil my duties towards the
+Maison Hiéropath of Marseilles, which I represent, you will be doing me
+a kindness."
+
+The landlady took the louis in a bewildered fashion. Allowing for the
+baby's portmanteau to have gone astray, what, she asked, had become
+of the clothes he must have been wearing? Aristide entered upon a
+picturesque and realistic explanation. The landlady was stout, she was
+stupid, she could not grasp the fantastic.
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_" she said. "To think that there are Christians who dress
+their children like this!" She sighed exhaustively, and, holding the
+grotesque infant close to her breast, disappeared indignantly to
+administer the very greatly needed motherment.
+
+ [Illustration: HE DEMONSTRATED THE PROPER APPLICATION OF THE CURE]
+
+Aristide breathed a sigh of relief, and after a well-earned _déjeuner_
+went forth with the car into the Place des Arbres and prepared to ply
+his trade. First he unfurled the Hiéropath banner, which floated
+proudly in the breeze. Then on a folding table he displayed his
+collection of ointment-boxes (together with pills and a toothache-killer
+which he sold on his own account) and a wax model of a human foot on
+which were grafted putty corns in every stage of callosity. As soon as
+half-a-dozen idlers collected he commenced his harangue. When their
+numbers increased he performed prodigies of chiropody on the putty
+corns, and demonstrated the proper application of the cure. He talked
+incessantly all the while. He has told me, in the grand manner, that
+this phase of his career was distasteful to him. But I scarcely believe
+it. If ever a man loved to talk, it was Aristide Pujol; and what
+profession, save that of an advocate, offers more occasion for wheedling
+loquacity than that of a public vendor of quack medicaments? As a matter
+of fact, he revelled in it. When he offered a free box of the cure to
+the first lady who confessed the need thereof, and a blushing wench came
+forward, the rascal revelled in the opportunity for badinage which set
+the good-humoured crowd in a roar. He loved to exert his half-mesmeric
+power. He had not the soul of a mountebank, for Aristide's soul had its
+high and generous dwelling-place; but he had the puckish swiftness and
+mischief of which the successful mountebank is made. And he was a
+success because he treated it as an art, thinking nothing during its
+practice of the material gain, laughing whole-heartedly, like his great
+predecessor Tabarin of imperishable memory, and satisfying to the full
+his instinct for the dramatic. On the other hand, ever since he started
+life in the brass-buttoned shell-jacket of a _chasseur_ in a Marseilles
+café, and dreamed dreams of the fairytale lives of the clients who
+came in accompanied by beautifully dressed ladies, he had social
+ambitions--and the social status of the mountebank is, to say the least
+of it, ambiguous. Ah me! What would man be without the unattainable?
+
+Aristide pocketed his takings, struck his flag, dismantled his table,
+and visited the shops of Salon in the interests of the Maison Hiéropath.
+The day's work over, he returned to inquire for his supposititious
+offspring. The landlady, all smiles, presented him with a transmogrified
+Jean, cleansed and powdered, arrayed in the smug panoply of bourgeois
+babyhood. Shoes with a pompon adorned his feet, and a rakish cap
+decorated with white satin ribbons crowned his head. He also wore an
+embroidered frock and a pelisse trimmed with rabbit-fur. Jean grinned
+and dribbled self-consciously, and showed his two little teeth to the
+proudest father in the world. The landlady invited the happy parent into
+her little dark parlour beyond the office, and there exhibited a parcel
+containing garments and implements whose use was a mystery to Aristide.
+She also demanded the greater part of another louis. Aristide began to
+learn that fatherhood is expensive. But what did it matter?
+
+After all, here was a babe equipped to face the exigencies of a
+censorious world; in looks and apparel a credit to any father. As the
+afternoon was fine, and as it seemed a pity to waste satin and
+rabbit-fur on the murky interior of the hotel, Aristide borrowed a
+perambulator from the landlady, and, joyous as a schoolboy, wheeled the
+splendid infant through the sunny avenues of Salon.
+
+That evening a bed was made up for the child in Aristide's room, which,
+until its master retired for the night, was haunted by the landlady, the
+chambermaids and all the kitchen wenches in the hotel. Aristide had to
+turn them out and lock his door.
+
+"This is excellent," said he, apostrophizing the thoroughly fed, washed,
+and now sleeping child. "This is superb. As in every hotel there are
+women, and as every woman thinks she can be a much better mother than I,
+so in every hotel we visit we shall find a staff of trained and
+enthusiastic nurses. Jean, you will live like a little _coq en pâté_."
+
+The night passed amid various excursions on the part of Aristide and
+alarms on the part of Jean. Sometimes the child lay so still that
+Aristide arose to see whether he was alive. Sometimes he gave such
+proofs of vitality that Aristide, in terror lest he should awaken the
+whole hotel, walked him about the room chanting lullabies. This was in
+accordance with Jean's views on luxury. He "goo'd" with joy. When
+Aristide put him back to bed he howled. Aristide snatched him up and
+he "goo'd" again. At last Aristide fed him desperately, dandled him
+eventually to sleep, and returned to an excited pillow. It is a fearsome
+thing for a man to be left alone in the dead of night with a young baby.
+
+"I'll get used to it," said Aristide.
+
+The next morning he purchased a basket, which he lashed ingeniously on
+the left-hand seat of the car, and a cushion, which he fitted into the
+basket. The berth prepared, he deposited the sumptuously-apparelled Jean
+therein and drove away, amid the perplexed benisons of the landlady and
+her satellites.
+
+Thus began the oddest Odyssey on which ever mortals embarked. The man
+with the automobile, the corn-cure, and the baby grew to be legendary in
+the villages of Provence. When the days were fine, Jean in his basket
+assisted at the dramatic performance in the market-place. Becoming a
+magnet for the women, and being of a good-humoured and rollicking
+nature, he helped on the sale of the cure prodigiously. He earned his
+keep, as Aristide declared in exultation. Soon Aristide formed a
+collection of his tricks and doings wherewith he would entertain the
+chance acquaintances of his vagabondage. To a permanent companion he
+would have grown insufferable. He invented him a career from the day of
+his birth, chronicled the coming of the first tooth, wept over the
+demise of the fictitious mother, and, in his imaginative way, convinced
+himself of his fatherhood. And every day the child crept deeper into the
+man's sunny heart.
+
+ [Illustration: IT IS A FEARSOME THING FOR A MAN TO BE LEFT ALONE IN THE
+                DEAD OF NIGHT WITH A YOUNG BABY]
+
+Together they had many wanderings and many adventures. The wheezy, crazy
+mechanism of the car went to bits in unexpected places. They tobogganed
+down hills without a brake at the imminent peril of their lives. They
+suffered the indignity of being towed by wine-wagons. They spent hours
+by the wayside while Aristide took her to pieces and, sometimes with the
+help of a passing motorist, put her together again. Sometimes, too, an
+inn boasted no landlady, only a dishevelled and over-driven chambermaid,
+who refused to wash Jean. Aristide washed and powdered Jean himself, the
+landlord lounging by, pipe in mouth, administering suggestions. Once
+Jean grew ill, and Aristide in terror summoned the doctor, who told him
+that he had filled the child up with milk to bursting-point. Yet, in
+spite of heterogeneous nursing and exposure to sun and rain and piercing
+mistral, Jean throve exceedingly, and, to Aristide's delight, began to
+cut another tooth. The vain man began to regard himself as an expert in
+denticulture.
+
+At the end of a fairly-wide circuit, Aristide, with empty store-boxes
+and pleasantly-full pockets, arrived at the little town of
+Aix-en-Provence. He had arrived there not without difficulty. On the
+outskirts the car, which had been coaxed reluctantly along for many
+weary kilometres, had groaned, rattled, whirred, given a couple of
+convulsive leaps, and stood stock-still. This was one of her pretty
+ways. He was used to them, and hitherto he had been able to wheedle
+her into resumed motion. But this time, with all his cunning and
+perspiration, he could not induce another throb in the tired engines.
+A friendly motorist towed them to the Hôtel de Paris in the Cours
+Mirabeau. Having arranged for his room and given Jean in charge of the
+landlady, he procured some helping hands, and pushed the car to the
+nearest garage. There he gave orders for the car to be put into running
+condition for the following morning, and returned to the hotel.
+
+He found Jean in the vestibule, sprawling sultanesquely on the
+landlady's lap, the centre of an admiring circle which consisted of two
+little girls in pigtails, an ancient peasant-woman, and two English
+ladies of obvious but graceful spinsterhood.
+
+"Here is the father," said the landlady.
+
+He had already explained Jean to the startled woman--landladies were
+always startled at Jean's unconventional advent. "Madame," he had said,
+according to rigid formula, "this is my son. I am taking him from his
+mother, who is dead, to an aunt who is an invalid, so he is alone on my
+hands. I beseech you to let some kind woman attend to his necessities."
+
+There was no need for further explanation. Aristide, thus introduced,
+bowed politely, removed his Crusoe cap, and smiled luminously at the
+assembled women. They resumed their antiphonal chorus of worship. The
+brown, merry, friendly brat had something of Aristide's personal charm.
+He had a bubble and a "goo" for everyone. Aristide looked on in great
+delight. Jean was a son to be proud of.
+
+"_Ah! qu'il est fort--fort comme un Turc._"
+
+"_Regardez ses dents._"
+
+"The darling thing!"
+
+"_Il est_--oh, dear!--_il est ravissante!_"--with a disastrous plunge
+into gender.
+
+"_Tiens! il rit. C'est moi qui le fais rire._"
+
+"To think," said the younger Englishwoman to her sister, "of this wee
+mite travelling about in an open motor!"
+
+"He's having the time of his life. He enjoys it as much as I do," said
+Aristide, in his excellent English.
+
+The lady started. She was a well-bred, good-humoured woman in the early
+thirties, stout, with reddish hair, and irregular though comely
+features. Her sister was thin, faded, sandy, and kind-looking.
+
+"I thought you were French," she said, apologetically.
+
+"So I am," replied Aristide. "Provençal of Provence, Méridional of the
+Midi, Marseillais of Marseilles."
+
+"But you talk English perfectly."
+
+"I've lived in your beautiful country," said Aristide.
+
+"You have the bonniest boy," said the elder lady. "How old is he?"
+
+"Nine months, three weeks and a day," said Aristide, promptly.
+
+The younger lady bent over the miraculous infant.
+
+"Can I take him? _Est-ce que je puis_--oh, dear!" She turned a whimsical
+face to Aristide.
+
+He translated. The landlady surrendered the babe. The lady danced him
+with the spinster's charming awkwardness, yet with instinctive feminine
+security, about the hall, while the little girls in pigtails, daughters
+of the house, followed like adoratory angels in an altar-piece, and the
+old peasant-woman looked benignly on, a myriad-wrinkled St. Elizabeth.
+Aristide had seen Jean dandled by dozens of women during their brief
+comradeship; he had thought little of it, as it was the natural thing
+for women to do; but when this sweet English lady mothered Jean it
+seemed to matter a great deal. She lifted Jean and himself to a higher
+plane. Her touch was a consecration.
+
+It was the hour of the day when infants of nine months should be washed
+and put to bed. The landlady, announcing the fact, held out her arms.
+Jean clung to his English nurse, who played the fascinating game of
+pretending to eat his hand. The landlady had not that accomplishment.
+She was dull and practical.
+
+"Come and be washed," she said.
+
+"Oh, do let me come, too," cried the English lady.
+
+"_Bien volontiers, mademoiselle_," said the other. "_C'est par ici._"
+
+The English lady held Jean out for the paternal good-night. Aristide
+kissed the child in her arms. The action brought about, for the moment,
+a curious and sweet intimacy.
+
+"My sister is passionately fond of children," said the elder lady, in
+smiling apology.
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I, too. But Anne--my sister--will not let me have a chance when she is
+by."
+
+After dinner Aristide went up, as usual, to his room to see that Jean
+was alive, painless, and asleep. Finding him awake, he sat by his side
+and, with the earnestness of a nursery-maid, patted him off to slumber.
+Then he crept out on tiptoe and went downstairs. Outside the hotel he
+came upon the two sisters sitting on a bench and drinking coffee. The
+night was fine, the terraces of the neighbouring cafés were filled with
+people, and all the life of Aix not at the cafés promenaded up and down
+the wide and pleasant avenue. The ladies smiled. How was the boy? He
+gave the latest news. Permission to join them at their coffee was
+graciously given. A waiter brought a chair and he sat down. Conversation
+drifted from the baby to general topics. The ladies told the simple
+story of their tour. They had been to Nice and Marseilles, and they were
+going on the next day to Avignon. They also told their name--Honeywood.
+He gathered that the elder was Janet, the younger Anne. They lived at
+Chislehurst when they were in England, and often came up to London to
+attend the Queen's Hall concerts and the dramatic performances at His
+Majesty's Theatre. As guileless, though as self-reliant, gentlewomen
+as sequestered England could produce. Aristide, impressionable and
+responsive, fell at once into the key of their talk. He has told me that
+their society produced on him the effect of the cool hands of saints
+against his cheek.
+
+At last the conversation inevitably returned to Jean. The landlady had
+related the tragic history of the dead mother and the invalid aunt. They
+deplored the orphaned state of the precious babe. For he was precious,
+they declared. Miss Anne had taken him to her heart.
+
+"If only you had seen him in his bath, Janet!"
+
+She turned to Aristide. "I'm afraid," she said, very softly, hesitating
+a little--"I'm afraid this must be a sad journey for you."
+
+He made a wry mouth. The sympathy was so sincere, so womanly. That which
+was generous in him revolted against acceptance.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said he, "I can play a farce with landladies--it happens
+to be convenient--in fact, necessary. But with you--no. You are
+different. Jean is not my child, and who his parents are I've not the
+remotest idea."
+
+"Not your child?" They looked at him incredulously.
+
+"I will tell you--in confidence," said he.
+
+Jean's history was related in all its picturesque details; the horrors
+of the life of an _enfant trouvé_ luridly depicted. The sisters listened
+with tears in their foolish eyes. Behind the tears Anne's grew bright.
+When he had finished she stretched out her hand impulsively.
+
+"Oh, I call it splendid of you!"
+
+He took the hand and, in his graceful French fashion, touched it with
+his lips. She flushed, having expected, in her English way, that he
+would grasp it.
+
+"Your commendation, mademoiselle, is sweet to hear," said he.
+
+"I hope he will grow up to be a true comfort to you, M. Pujol," said
+Miss Janet.
+
+"I can understand a woman doing what you've done, but scarcely a man,"
+said Miss Anne.
+
+"But, dear mademoiselle," cried Aristide, with a large gesture, "cannot
+a man have his heart touched, his--his--_ses entrailles, enfin_--stirred
+by baby fingers? Why should love of the helpless and the innocent be
+denied him?"
+
+"Why, indeed?" said Miss Janet.
+
+Miss Anne said, humbly: "I only meant that your devotion to Jean was all
+the more beautiful, M. Pujol."
+
+Soon after this they parted, the night air having grown chill. Both
+ladies shook hands with him warmly.
+
+Anne's hand lingered the fraction of a second longer in his than
+Janet's. She had seen Jean in his bath.
+
+Aristide wandered down the gay avenue into the open road and looked at
+the stars, reading in their splendour a brilliant destiny for Jean. He
+felt, in his sensitive way, that the two sweet-souled Englishwomen had
+deepened and sanctified his love for Jean. When he returned to the hotel
+he kissed his incongruous room-mate with the gentleness of a woman.
+
+In the morning he went round to the garage. The foreman mechanician
+advanced to meet him.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"There is nothing to be done, monsieur."
+
+"What do you mean by 'nothing to be done'?" asked Aristide.
+
+The other shrugged his sturdy shoulders.
+
+"She is worn out. She needs new carburation, new cylinders, new
+water-circulation, new lubrication, new valves, new brakes, new
+ignition, new gears, new bolts, new nuts, new everything. In short, she
+is not repairable."
+
+Aristide listened in incredulous amazement. His automobile, his
+wonderful, beautiful, clashing, dashing automobile unrepairable! It was
+impossible. But a quarter of an hour's demonstration by the foreman
+convinced him. The car was dead. The engine would never whir again. All
+the petrol in the world would not stimulate her into life. Never again
+would he sit behind that wheel rejoicing in the insolence of speed. The
+car, which, in spite of her manifold infirmities, he had fondly imagined
+to be immortal, had run her last course. Aristide felt faint.
+
+"And there is nothing to be done?"
+
+"Nothing, monsieur. Fifty francs is all that she is worth."
+
+"At any rate," said Aristide, "send the basket to the Hôtel de Paris."
+
+He went out of the garage like a man in a dream. At the door he turned
+to take a last look at the Pride of his Life. Her stern was towards him,
+and all he saw of her was the ironical legend, "Cure your Corns."
+
+At the hotel he found the bench outside occupied chiefly by Jean. One
+of the little girls in pigtails was holding him, while Miss Anne
+administered the feeding-bottle. Provincial France is the happiest
+country in the world--in that you can live your intimate, domestic life
+in public, and nobody heeds.
+
+"I hope you've not come to tell Jean to boot and saddle," said Miss
+Anne, a smile on her roughly-hewn, comely face.
+
+"Alas!" said Aristide, cheered by the charming spectacle before him. "I
+don't know when we can get away. My auto has broken down hopelessly. I
+ought to go at once to my firm in Marseilles"--he spoke as if he were a
+partner in the Maison Hiéropath--"but I don't quite know what to do with
+Jean."
+
+"Oh, I'll look after Jean."
+
+"But you said you were leaving for Avignon to-day."
+
+ [Illustration: ONE OF THE LITTLE GIRLS IN PIGTAILS WAS HOLDING HIM,
+                WHILE MISS ANNE ADMINISTERED THE FEEDING-BOTTLE]
+
+She laughed, holding the feeding-bottle. "The Palace of the Popes has
+been standing for six centuries, and it will be still standing
+to-morrow; whereas Jean----" Here Jean, for some reason known to
+himself, grinned wet and wide. "Isn't he the most fascinating thing of
+the twentieth century?" she cried, logically inconsequential, like most
+of her sex. "You go to Marseilles, M. Pujol."
+
+So Aristide took the train to Marseilles--a half-hour's journey--and in
+a quarter of the city resembling a fusion of Jarrow, an unfashionable
+part of St. Louis, and a brimstone-manufacturing suburb of Gehenna, he
+interviewed the high authorities of the Maison Hiéropath. His cajolery
+could lead men into diverse lunacies, but it could not induce the
+hard-bitten manufacturer of quack remedies to provide a brand-new
+automobile for his personal convenience. The old auto had broken down.
+The manufacturer shrugged his shoulders. The mystery was that it had
+lasted as long as it did. He had expected it to explode the first
+day. The idea had originally been that of the junior partner, a
+scatter-brained youth whom at times they humoured. Meanwhile, there
+being no beplacarded and beflagged automobile, there could be no
+advertisement; therefore they had no further use for M. Pujol's
+services.
+
+"Good," said Aristide, when he reached the evil thoroughfare. "It was a
+degraded occupation, and I am glad I am out of it. Meanwhile, here is
+Marseilles before me, and it will be astonishing if I do not find some
+fresh road to fortune before the day is out."
+
+Aristide tramped and tramped all day through the streets of Marseilles,
+but the road he sought he did not find. He returned to Aix in dire
+perplexity. He was used to finding himself suddenly cut off from the
+means of livelihood. It was his chronic state of being. His gay
+resourcefulness had always carried him through. But then there had been
+only himself to think of. Now there was Jean. For the first time for
+many years the dragon-fly's wings grew limp. Jean--what could he do with
+Jean?
+
+Jean had already gone to sleep when he arrived. All day he had been as
+good as gold, so Miss Anne declared. For herself, she had spent the
+happiest day of her life.
+
+"I don't wonder at your being devoted to him, M. Pujol," she said. "He
+has the most loving ways of any baby I ever met."
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle," replied Aristide, with an unaccustomed huskiness in
+his voice, "I am devoted to him. It may seem odd for a man to be wrapped
+up in a baby of nine months old--but--it's like that. It's true. _Je
+l'adore de tout mon coeur, de tout mon être_," he cried, in a sudden
+gust of passion.
+
+Miss Anne smiled kindly, not dreaming of his perplexity, amused by his
+Southern warmth. Miss Janet joined them in the hall. They went in to
+dinner, Aristide sitting at the central _table d'hôte_, the ladies at a
+little table by themselves. After dinner they met again outside the
+hotel, and drank coffee and talked the evening away. He was not as
+bright a companion as on the night before. His gaiety was forced. He
+talked about everything else in the world but Jean. The temptation to
+pour his financial troubles into the sympathetic ears of these two dear
+women he resisted. They regarded him as on a social equality, as a man
+of means engaged in some sort of business at Marseilles; they had
+invited him to bring Jean to see them at Chislehurst when he should
+happen to be in England again. Pride forbade him to confess himself a
+homeless, penniless vagabond. The exquisite charm of their frank
+intimacy would be broken. Besides, what could they do?
+
+They retired early. Aristide again sought the message of the stars; but
+the sky was clouded over, and soon a fine rain began to fall. A bock at
+a café brought him neither comfort nor inspiration. He returned to the
+hotel, and, eluding a gossip-seeking landlady, went up to his room.
+
+What could be done? Neither the sleeping babe nor himself could offer
+any suggestion. One thing was grimly inevitable. He and Jean must part.
+To carry him about like an infant prince in an automobile had, after
+all, been a simple matter; to drag him through Heaven knew what
+hardships in his makeshift existence was impossible. In his childlike,
+impulsive fashion he had not thought of the future when he adopted Jean.
+Aristide always regarded the fortune of the moment as if it would last
+forever. Past deceptions never affected his incurable optimism. Now Jean
+and he must part. Aristide felt that the end of the world had come. His
+pacing to and fro awoke the child, who demanded, in his own way, the
+soothing rocking of his father's arms. There he bubbled and "goo'd" till
+Aristide's heart nearly broke.
+
+"What can I do with you, _mon petit Jean_?"
+
+The Enfants Trouvés, after all? He thought of it with a shudder.
+
+The child asleep again, he laid it on its bed, and then sat far into the
+night thinking barrenly. At last one of his sudden gleams of inspiration
+illuminated his mind. It was the only way. He took out his watch. It was
+four o'clock. What had to be done must be done swiftly.
+
+In the travelling-basket, which had been sent from the garage, he placed
+a pillow, and on to the pillow he transferred with breathless care the
+sleeping Jean, and wrapped him up snug and warm in bedclothes. Then he
+folded the tiny day-garments that lay on a chair, collected the little
+odds and ends belonging to the child, took from his valise the rest of
+Jean's little wardrobe, and laid them at the foot of the basket. The
+most miserable man in France then counted up his money, divided it into
+two parts, and wrote a hasty letter, which, with the bundle of notes, he
+enclosed in an envelope.
+
+"My little Jean," said he, laying the envelope on the child's breast.
+"Here is a little more than half my fortune. Half is for yourself and
+the little more to pay your wretched father's hotel bill. Good-bye, my
+little Jean. _Je t'aime bien, tu sais_--and don't reproach me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About an hour afterwards Miss Anne awoke and listened, and in a moment
+or two Miss Janet awoke also.
+
+"Janet, do you hear that?"
+
+"It's a child crying. It's just outside the door."
+
+"It sounds like Jean."
+
+"Nonsense, my dear!"
+
+But Anne switched on the light and went to see for herself; and there,
+in the tiny anteroom that separated the bedroom from the corridor, she
+found the basket--a new Pharoah's daughter before a new little Moses in
+the bulrushes. In bewilderment she brought the ark into the room, and
+read the letter addressed to Janet and herself. She burst into tears.
+All she said was:--
+
+"Oh, Janet, why couldn't he have told us?"
+
+And then she fell to hugging the child to her bosom.
+
+Meanwhile Aristide Pujol, clad in his goat-skin cap and coat, valise in
+hand, was plodding through the rain in search of the elusive phantom,
+Fortune; gloriously certain that he had assured Jean's future, yet with
+such a heartache as he had never had in his life before.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG'S HEAD
+
+
+Once upon a time Aristide Pujol found himself standing outside his Paris
+residence, No. 213 _bis_, Rue Saint Honoré, without a penny in the
+world. His last sou had gone to Madame Bidoux, who kept a small green
+grocer's shop at No. 213 _bis_ and rented a ridiculously small back room
+for a ridiculously small weekly sum to Aristide whenever he honoured the
+French capital with his presence. During his absence she forwarded him
+such letters as might arrive for him; and as this was his only permanent
+address, and as he let Madame Bidoux know his whereabouts only at vague
+intervals of time, the transaction of business with Aristide Pujol,
+"Agent, No. 213 _bis_, Rue Saint Honoré, Paris," by correspondence was
+peculiarly difficult.
+
+He had made Madame Bidoux's acquaintance in the dim past; and he had
+made it in his usual direct and electric manner. Happening to walk down
+the Rue Saint Honoré, he had come upon tragedy. Madame Bidoux, fat, red
+of face, tearful of eye and strident of voice, held in her arms a
+little mongrel dog--her own precious possession--which had just been run
+over in the street, and the two of them filled the air with wailings and
+vociferation. Aristide uncovered his head, as though he were about to
+address a duchess, and smiled at her engagingly.
+
+"Madame," said he, "I perceive that your little dog has a broken leg. As
+I know all about dogs, I will, with your permission, set the limb, put
+it into splints and guarantee a perfect cure. Needless to say, I make no
+charge for my services."
+
+Snatching the dog from the arms of the fascinated woman, he darted in
+his dragon-fly fashion into the shop, gave a hundred orders to a
+stupefied assistant, and--to cut short a story which Aristide told me
+with great wealth of detail--mended the precious dog and gained Madame
+Bidoux's eternal gratitude. For Madame Bidoux the world held no more
+remarkable man than Aristide Pujol; and for Aristide the world held no
+more devoted friend than Madame Bidoux. Many a succulent meal, at the
+widow's expense--never more enjoyable than in summer time when she set a
+little iron table and a couple of iron chairs on the pavement outside
+the shop--had saved him from starvation; and many a gewgaw sent from
+London or Marseilles or other such remote latitudes filled her heart
+with pride. Since my acquaintance with Aristide I myself have called on
+this excellent woman, and I hope I have won her esteem, though I have
+never had the honour of eating pig's trotters and chou-croûte with her
+on the pavement of the Rue Saint Honoré. It is an honour from which,
+being an unassuming man, I shrink.
+
+Unfortunately Madame Bidoux has nothing further to do with the story I
+am about to relate, save in one respect:--
+
+There came a day--it was a bleak day in November, when Madame Bidoux's
+temporary financial difficulties happened to coincide with Aristide's.
+To him, unsuspicious of coincidence, she confided her troubles. He
+emptied the meagre contents of his purse into her hand.
+
+"Madame Bidoux," said he with a flourish, and the air of a prince, "why
+didn't you tell me before?" and without waiting for her blessing he went
+out penniless into the street.
+
+Aristide was never happier than when he had not a penny piece in the
+world. He believed, I fancy, in a dim sort of way, in God and the Virgin
+and Holy Water and the Pope; but the faith that thrilled him to
+exaltation was his faith in the inevitable happening of the unexpected.
+He marched to meet it with the throbbing pulses of a soldier rushing to
+victory or a saint to martyrdom. He walked up the Rue Saint Honoré, the
+Rue de la Paix, along the Grands Boulevards, smiling on a world which
+teemed with unexpectednesses, until he reached a café on the Boulevard
+des Bonnes Filles de Calvaire. Here he was arrested by Fate, in the form
+of a battered man in black, who, springing from the solitary frostiness
+of the terrace, threw his arms about him and kissed him on both cheeks.
+
+"_Mais, c'est toi, Pujol!_"
+
+"_C'est toi, Roulard!_"
+
+Roulard dragged Aristide to his frosty table and ordered drinks. Roulard
+had played the trumpet in the regimental band in which Aristide had
+played the kettle drum. During their military service they had been
+inseparables. Since those happy and ear-splitting days they had not met.
+They looked at each other and laughed and thumped each other's
+shoulders.
+
+"_Ce vieux Roulard!_"
+
+"_Ce sacré Pujol._"
+
+"And what are you doing?" asked Aristide, after the first explosions of
+astonishment and reminiscence.
+
+A cloud overspread the battered man's features. He had a wife and five
+children and played in theatre orchestras. At the present time he was
+trombone in the "Tournée Gulland," a touring opera company. It was not
+gay for a sensitive artist like him, and the trombone gave one a thirst
+which it took half a week's salary to satisfy. _Mais enfin, que
+veux-tu?_ It was life, a dog's life, but life was like that. Aristide,
+he supposed, was making a fortune. Aristide threw back his head, and
+laughed at the exquisite humour of the hypothesis, and gaily disclosed
+his Micawberish situation. Roulard sat for a while thoughtful and
+silent. Presently a ray of inspiration dispelled the cloud from the
+features of the battered man.
+
+"_Tiens, mon vieux_," said he, "I have an idea."
+
+It was an idea worthy of Aristide's consideration. The drum of the
+Tournée Gulland had been dismissed for drunkenness. The vacancy had not
+been filled. Various executants who had drummed on approval--this being
+an out-week of the tour--had driven the chef d'orchestre to the verge of
+homicidal mania. Why should not Aristide, past master in drumming, find
+an honourable position in the orchestra of the Tournée Gulland?
+
+Aristide's eyes sparkled, his fingers itched for the drumsticks, he
+started to his feet.
+
+"_Mon vieux Roulard!_" he cried, "you have saved my life. More than
+that, you have resuscitated an artist. Yes, an artist. _Sacré nom de
+Dieu!_ Take me to this chef d'orchestre."
+
+So Roulard, when the hour of rehearsal drew nigh, conducted Aristide to
+the murky recesses of a dirty little theatre in the Batignolles, where
+Aristide performed such prodigies of repercussion that he was forthwith
+engaged to play the drum, the kettle-drum, the triangle, the cymbals,
+the castagnettes and the tambourine, in the orchestra of the Tournée
+Gulland at the dazzling salary of thirty francs a week.
+
+To tell how Aristide drummed and cymballed the progress of Les
+Huguenots, Carmen, La Juive, La Fille de Madame Angot and L'Arlésienne
+through France would mean the rewriting of a "Capitaine Fracasse." To
+hear the creature talk about it makes my mouth as a brick kiln and my
+flesh as that of a goose. He was the Adonis, the Apollo, the Don Juan,
+the Irresistible of the Tournée. Fled truculent bass and haughty tenor
+before him; from diva to moustachioed contralto in the chorus, all the
+ladies breathlessly watched for the fall of his handkerchief; he was
+recognized, in fact, as a devil of a fellow. But in spite of these
+triumphs, the manipulation of the drum, kettle-drum, triangle, cymbals,
+castagnettes and tambourine, which at first had given him intense and
+childish delight, at last became invested with a mechanical monotony
+that almost drove him mad. All day long the thought of the ill-lit
+corner, on the extreme right of the orchestra, garnished with the
+accursed instruments of noise to which duty would compel him at eight
+o'clock in the evening hung over him like a hideous doom. Sweet singers
+of the female sex were powerless to console. He passed them by, and
+haughty tenor and swaggering basso again took heart of grace.
+
+"_Mais, mon Dieu, c'est le métier!_" expostulated Roulard.
+
+"_Sale métier!_" cried Aristide, who was as much fitted for the
+merciless routine of a theatre orchestra as a quagga for the shafts of
+an omnibus. "A beast of a trade! One is no longer a man. One is just an
+automatic system of fog-signals!"
+
+In this depraved state of mind he arrived at Perpignan, where that
+befell him which I am about to relate.
+
+Now, Perpignan is the last town of France on the Gulf of Lions, a few
+miles from the Spanish border. From it you can see the great white
+monster of Le Canigou, the pride of the Eastern Pyrenees, far, far away,
+blocking up the valley of the Tet, which flows sluggishly past the
+little town. The Quai Sadi-Carnot (is there a provincial town in France
+which has not a _something_ Sadi-Carnot in it?) is on the left bank
+of the Tet; at one end is the modern Place Arago, at the other Le
+Castillet, a round, castellated red-brick fortress with curiously long
+and deep machicolations of the 14th century with some modern additions
+of Louis XI, who also built the adjoining Porte Notre Dame which gives
+access to the city. Between the Castillet and the Place Arago, the Quai
+Sadi-Carnot is the site of the Prefecture, the Grand Hôtel, various
+villas and other resorts of the aristocracy. Any little street off it
+will lead you into the seething centre of Perpignan life--the Place de
+la Loge, which is a great block of old buildings surrounded on its four
+sides by narrow streets of shops, cafés, private houses, all with
+balconies and jalousies, all cramped, crumbling, Spanish, picturesque.
+The oldest of this conglomerate block is a corner building, the Loge de
+Mer, a thirteenth century palace, the cloth exchange in the glorious
+days when Perpignan was a seaport and its merchant princes traded with
+Sultans and Doges and such-like magnificoes of the Mediterranean. But
+nowadays its glory has departed. Below the great gothic windows spreads
+the awning of a café, which takes up all the ground floor. Hugging it
+tight is the Mairie, and hugging that, the Hôtel de Ville. Hither does
+every soul in the place, at some hour or other of the day, inevitably
+gravitate. Lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, merchants, lovers,
+soldiers, market-women, loafers, horses, dogs, wagons, all crowd in a
+noisy medley the narrow cobble-paved streets around the Loge. Of course
+there are other streets, tortuous, odorous and cool, intersecting the
+old town, and there are various open spaces, one of which is the broad
+market square on one side flanked by the Théâtre Municipal.
+
+From the theatre Aristide Pujol issued one morning after rehearsal,
+and, leaving his colleagues, including the ever-thirsty Roulard, to
+refresh themselves at a humble café hard by, went forth in search of
+distraction. He idled about the Place de la Loge, passed the time of day
+with a café waiter until the latter, with a disconcerting "_Voilà!
+Voilà!_" darted off to attend to a customer, and then strolled through
+the Porte Notre Dame onto the Quai Sadi-Carnot. There a familiar sound
+met his ears--the roll of a drum followed by an incantation in a
+quavering, high-pitched voice. It was the Town Crier, with whom, as with
+a brother artist, he had picked acquaintance the day before.
+
+They met by the parapet of the Quai, just as Père Bracasse had come to
+the end of his incantation. The old man, grizzled, tanned and seamed,
+leant weakly against the parapet.
+
+"How goes it, Père Bracasse?"
+
+"Alas, mon bon Monsieur, it goes from bad to worse," sighed the old man.
+"I am at the end of my strength. My voice has gone and the accursed
+rheumatism in my shoulder gives me atrocious pain whenever I beat the
+drum."
+
+"How much more of your round have you to go?" asked Aristide.
+
+"I have only just begun," said Père Bracasse.
+
+The Southern sun shone from a cloudless sky; a light, keen wind blowing
+from the distant snow-clad Canigou set the blood tingling. A lunatic
+idea flashed through Aristide's mind. He whipped the drum strap over the
+old man's head.
+
+"Père Bracasse," said he, "you are suffering from rheumatism,
+bronchitis, fever and corns, and you must go home to bed. I will finish
+your round for you. Listen," and he beat such a tattoo as Père Bracasse
+had never accomplished in his life. "Where are your words?"
+
+The old man, too weary to resist and fascinated by Aristide's laughing
+eyes, handed him a dirty piece of paper. Aristide read, played a
+magnificent roll and proclaimed in a clarion voice that a gold bracelet
+having been lost on Sunday afternoon in the Avenue des Platanes, whoever
+would deposit it at the Mairie would receive a reward.
+
+"That's all?" he enquired.
+
+"That's all," said Père Bracasse. "I live in the Rue Petite-de-la-Réal,
+No. 4, and you will bring me back the drum when you have finished."
+
+Aristide darted off like a dragon-fly in the sunshine, as happy as a
+child with a new toy. Here he could play the drum to his heart's content
+with no score or conductor's bâton to worry him. He was also the one and
+only personage in the drama, concentrating on himself the attention of
+the audience. He pitied poor Roulard, who could never have such an
+opportunity with his trombone....
+
+The effect of his drumming before the Café de la Loge was electric.
+Shopkeepers ran out of their shops, housewives craned over their
+balconies to listen to him. By the time he had threaded the busy strip
+of the town and emerged on to the Place Arago he had collected an
+admiring train of urchins. On the Place Arago he halted on the fringe of
+a crowd surrounding a cheap-jack whose vociferations he drowned in a
+roll of thunder. He drummed and drummed till he became the centre of the
+throng. Then he proclaimed the bracelet. He had not enjoyed himself so
+much since he left Paris.
+
+He was striding away, merry-eyed and happy, followed by his satellites
+when a prosperous-looking gentleman with a very red face, a prosperous
+roll of fat above the back of his collar, and the ribbon of the Legion
+of Honour in his buttonhole, descending the steps of the great
+glass-covered café commanding the Place, hurried up and laid his finger
+on his arm.
+
+"Pardon, my friend," said he, "what are you doing there?"
+
+"You shall hear, monsieur," replied Aristide, clutching the drumsticks.
+
+"For the love of Heaven!" cried the other hastily interrupting. "Tell me
+what are you doing?"
+
+"I am crying the loss of a bracelet, monsieur!"
+
+"But who are you?"
+
+"I am Aristide Pujol, and I play the drum, kettle-drum, triangle,
+cymbals, castagnettes and tambourine in the orchestra of the Tournée
+Gulland. And now, in my turn, may I ask to whom I have the honour of
+speaking?"
+
+"I am the Mayor of Perpignan."
+
+Aristide raised his hat politely. "I hope to have the pleasure," said
+he, "of Monsieur le Maire's better acquaintance."
+
+The Mayor, attracted by the rascal's guileless mockery, laughed.
+
+"You will, my friend, if you go on playing that drum. You are not the
+Town Crier."
+
+Aristide explained. Père Bracasse was ill, suffering from rheumatism,
+bronchitis, fever and corns. He was replacing him. The Mayor retorted
+that Père Bracasse being a municipal functionary could not transmit his
+functions except through the Administration. Monsieur Pujol must desist
+from drumming and crying. Aristide bowed to authority and unstrung his
+drum.
+
+"But I was enjoying myself so much, Monsieur le Maire. You have spoiled
+my day," said he.
+
+The Mayor laughed again. There was an irresistible charm and roguishness
+about the fellow, with his intelligent oval face, black Vandyke beard
+and magically luminous eyes.
+
+"I should have thought you had enough of drums in your orchestra."
+
+"Ah! there I am cramped!" cried Aristide. "I have it in horror, in
+detestation. Here I am free. I can give vent to all the aspirations of
+my soul!"
+
+The Mayor mechanically moved from the spot where they had been standing.
+Aristide, embroidering his theme, mechanically accompanied him; and,
+such is democratic France, and also such was the magnetic, Ancient
+Mariner-like power of Aristide--did not I, myself, on my first meeting
+with him at Aigues-Mortes fall helplessly under the spell--that, in a
+few moments, the amateur Town Crier and the Mayor were walking together,
+side by side, along the Quai Sadi-Carnot, engaged in amiable converse.
+Aristide told the Mayor the story of his life--or such incidents of it
+as were meet for Mayoral ears--and when they parted--the Mayor to lunch,
+Aristide to yield up the interdicted drum to Père Bracasse--they shook
+hands warmly and mutually expressed the wish that they would soon meet
+again.
+
+They met again; Aristide saw to that. They met again that very afternoon
+in the café on the Place Arago. When Aristide entered he saw the Mayor
+seated at a table in the company of another prosperous, red-ribboned
+gentleman. Aristide saluted politely and addressed the Mayor. The Mayor
+saluted and presented him to Monsieur Quérin, the President of the
+Syndicat d'Initiative of the town of Perpignan. Monsieur Quérin saluted
+and declared himself enchanted at the encounter. Aristide stood
+gossiping until the Mayor invited him to take a place at the table and
+consume liquid refreshment. Aristide glowingly accepted the invitation
+and cast a look of triumph around the café. Not to all mortals is it
+given to be the boon companion of a Mayor and a President of the
+Syndicat d'Initiative!
+
+Then ensued a conversation momentous in its consequences.
+
+The Syndicat d'Initiative is a semi-official body existing in most
+provincial towns in France for the purpose of organising public
+festivals for the citizens and developing the resources and
+possibilities of the town for the general amenity of visitors. Now
+Perpignan is as picturesque, as sun-smitten and, in spite of the icy
+tramontana, even as joyous a place as tourist could desire; and the
+Carnival of Perpignan, as a spontaneous outburst of gaiety and
+pageantry, is unique in France. But Perpignan being at the end of
+everywhere and leading nowhere attracts very few visitors. Biarritz is
+on the Atlantic coast at the other end of the Pyrenees; Hyères, Cannes
+and Monte Carlo on the other side of the Gulf of Lions. No English or
+Americans--the only visitors of any account in the philosophy of
+provincial France--flock to Perpignan. This was a melancholy fact
+bewailed by Monsieur Quérin. The town was perishing from lack of
+Anglo-Saxon support. Monsieur Coquereau, the Mayor, agreed. If the
+English and Americans came in their hordes to this paradise of mimosa,
+fourteenth century architecture, sunshine and unique Carnival, the
+fortunes of all the citizens would be assured. Perpignan would out-rival
+Nice. But what could be done?
+
+"Advertise it," said Aristide. "Flood the English-speaking world with
+poetical descriptions of the place. Build a row of palatial hotels in
+the new part of the town. It is not known to the Anglo-Saxons."
+
+"How can you be certain of that?" asked Monsieur Quérin.
+
+"_Parbleu!_" he cried, with a wide gesture. "I have known the English
+all my life. I speak their language as I speak French or my native
+Provençal. I have taught in schools in England. I know the country and
+the people like my pocket. They have never heard of Perpignan."
+
+His companions acquiesced sadly. Aristide, aglow with a sudden impudent
+inspiration, leant across the marble table.
+
+"Monsieur le Maire and Monsieur le Président du Syndicat d'Initiative, I
+am sick to death of playing the drum, the kettle-drum, the triangle, the
+cymbals, the castagnettes and the tambourine in the Tournée Gulland. I
+was born to higher things. Entrust to me"--he converged the finger-tips
+of both hands to his bosom--"to me, Aristide Pujol, the organisation of
+Perpignan-Ville de Plaisir, and you will not regret it."
+
+The Mayor and the President laughed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But my astonishing friend prevailed--not indeed to the extent of being
+appointed a Petronius, _arbiter élegantiarum_, of the town of Perpignan;
+but to the extent of being employed, I fear in a subordinate capacity,
+by the Mayor and the Syndicat in the work of propagandism. The Tournée
+Gulland found another drum and went its tuneful but weary way; and
+Aristide remained gloriously behind and rubbed his hands with glee. At
+last he had found permanence in a life where heretofore had been naught
+but transience. At last he had found a sphere worthy of his genius. He
+began to nourish insensate ambitions. He would be the Great Benefactor
+of Perpignan. All Roussillon should bless his name. Already he saw his
+statue on the Quai Sadi-Carnot.
+
+His rise in the social scale of the town was meteoric, chiefly owing to
+the goodwill of Madame Coquereau, the widowed mother of the Mayor. She
+was a hard-featured old lady, with a face that might have been made of
+corrugated iron painted yellow and with the eyes of an old hawk. She
+dressed always in black, was very devout and rich and narrow and
+iron-willed. Aristide was presented to her one Sunday afternoon at the
+Café on the Place Arago--where on Sunday afternoons all the fashion of
+Perpignan assembles--and--need I say it?--she fell at once a helpless
+victim to his fascination. Accompanying her grandmother was Mademoiselle
+Stéphanie Coquereau, the Mayor's niece (a wealthy orphan, as Aristide
+soon learned), nineteen, pretty, demure, perfectly brought up, who said
+"_Oui, Monsieur_" and "_Non, Monsieur_" with that quintessence of modest
+grace which only a provincial French Convent can cultivate.
+
+Aristide's heart left his body and rolled at the feet of Mademoiselle
+Stéphanie. It was a way with Aristide's heart. It was always doing that.
+He was of Provence and not of Peckham Rye or Hoboken, and he could not
+help it.
+
+Aristide called on Madame Coquereau, who entertained him with sweet
+Frontignan wine, dry sponge cakes and conversation. After a while he was
+invited to dinner. In a short space of time he became the intimate
+friend of the house, and played piquet with Madame Coquereau, and grew
+familiar with the family secrets. First he learned that Mademoiselle
+Stéphanie would go to a husband with two hundred and fifty thousand
+francs. Aristide's heart panted at the feet of Mademoiselle Stéphanie.
+Further he gathered that, though Monsieur Coquereau was a personage of
+great dignity and importance in civic affairs, he was as but a little
+child in his own house. Madame Coquereau held the money-bags. Her son
+had but little personal fortune. He had reached the age of forty-five
+without being able to marry. Marriage unauthorized by Madame Coquereau
+meant immediate poverty and the testamentary assignment of Madame
+Coquereau's fortune to various religious establishments. None of the
+objects of Monsieur Coquereau's matrimonial desire had pleased Madame
+Coquereau, and none of Madame Coquereau's blushing candidates had caused
+a pulse in Monsieur Coquereau's being to beat the faster. The Mayor held
+his mother in professed adoration and holy terror. She held him in
+abject subjection. Aristide became the confidant, in turn, of Madame's
+sour philosophy of life and of Monsieur's impotence and despair. As for
+Mademoiselle Stéphanie, she kept on saying "_Oui, Monsieur_" and "_Non,
+Monsieur_," in a crescendo of maddening demureness.
+
+So passed the halcyon hours. During the day time Aristide in a corner of
+the Mayor's office, drew up flamboyant circulars in English which would
+have put a pushing Land and Estate Agent in the New Jerusalem to the
+blush, and in the evening played piquet with Madame Coquereau, while
+Mademoiselle Stéphanie, model of modest piety, worked pure but nameless
+birds and flowers on her embroidery frame. Monsieur le Maire, of course,
+played his game of manilla at the café, after dinner, and generally
+came home just before Aristide took his leave. If it had not been for
+the presence of Mademoiselle Stéphanie, it would not have been gay for
+Aristide. But love gilded the moments.
+
+On the first evening of the Carnival, which lasts nearly a fortnight in
+Perpignan, Aristide, in spite of a sweeter "_Oui, Monsieur_" than ever
+from Mademoiselle Stéphanie, made an excuse to slip away rather earlier
+than usual, and, front door having closed behind him, crossed the strip
+of gravel with a quick step and flung out of the iron gates. Now the
+house had an isolated position in the new quarter of the town. It was
+perky and modern and defaced by all sorts of oriel windows and tourelles
+and pinnacles which gave it a top-heavy appearance, and it was
+surrounded by a low brick wall. Aristide, on emerging through the iron
+gates, heard the sound of scurrying footsteps on the side of the wall
+nearest to the town, and reached the corner, just in time to see a
+masquer, attired in a Pierrot costume and wearing what seemed to be a
+pig's head, disappear round the further angle. Paying no heed to this
+phenomenon, Aristide lit a cigarette and walked, in anticipation of
+enjoyment, to the great Avenue des Plantanes where the revelry of the
+Carnival was being held. Aristide was young, he loved flirtation, and
+flirtation flourished in the Avenue des Plantanes.
+
+The next morning the Mayor entered his office with a very grave face.
+
+"Do you know what has happened? My house was broken into last night. The
+safe in my study was forced open, and three thousand francs and some
+valuable jewelry were stolen. _Quel malheur!_" he cried, throwing
+himself into a chair, and wiping his forehead. "It is not I who can
+afford to lose three thousand francs at once. If they had robbed _maman_
+it would have been a different matter."
+
+Aristide expressed his sympathy.
+
+"Whom do you suspect?" he asked.
+
+"A robber, _parbleu!_" said the Mayor. "The police are even now making
+their investigations."
+
+The door opened and a plain clothes detective entered the office.
+
+"Monsieur le Maire," said he, with an air of triumph, "I know a
+burglar."
+
+Both men leapt to their feet.
+
+"Ah!" said Aristide.
+
+"_A la bonne heure!_" cried the Mayor.
+
+"Arrest him at once," said Aristide.
+
+"Alas, Monsieur," said the detective, "that I cannot do. I have called
+on him this morning and his wife tells me that he left for the North
+yesterday afternoon. But it is José Puégas that did it. I know his
+ways."
+
+"_Tiens!_" said the Mayor, reflectively. "I know him also, an evil
+fellow."
+
+"But why are you not looking for him?" exclaimed Aristide.
+
+"Arrangements have been made," replied the detective coldly.
+
+Aristide suddenly bethought him of the furtive masquer of the night
+before.
+
+"I can put you on his track," said he, and related what he knew.
+
+The Mayor looked dubious. "It wasn't he," he remarked.
+
+"José Puégas, Monsieur, would not commit a burglary in a pig's head,"
+said the policeman, with the cutting contempt of the expert.
+
+"It was a vow, I suppose," said Aristide, stung to irony. "I've always
+heard he was a religious man."
+
+The detective did not condescend to reply.
+
+"Monsieur le Maire," said he, "I should like to examine the premises,
+and beg that you will have the kindness to accompany me."
+
+"With the permission of Monsieur le Maire," said Aristide. "I too will
+come."
+
+"Certainly," said the Mayor. "The more intelligences concentrated on the
+affair the better."
+
+"I am not of that opinion," said the detective.
+
+"It is the opinion of Monsieur le Maire," said Aristide rebukingly, "and
+that is enough."
+
+When they reached the house--distances are short in Perpignan--they
+found policemen busily engaged with tape measures around the premises.
+Old Madame Coquereau in a clean white linen dressing jacket,
+bare-headed, defying the keen air, stood grim and eager in the midst of
+them.
+
+"Good morning, Monsieur Pujol, what do you think of this?"
+
+"A veritable catastrophe," said Aristide.
+
+She shrugged her iron shoulders. "I tell him it serves him right," she
+said, cuttingly. "A sensible person keeps his money under his mattress
+and not in a tin machine by a window which anyone can get at. I wonder
+we've not been murdered in our beds before."
+
+"_Ah, Maman!_" expostulated the Mayor of Perpignan.
+
+But she turned her back on him and worried the policemen. They, having
+probed, and measured, and consulted with the detective, came to an exact
+conclusion. The thief had climbed over the back wall--there were his
+footsteps. He had entered by the kitchen door--there were the marks of
+infraction. He had broken open the safe--there was the helpless
+condition of the lock. No one in Perpignan, but José Puégas, with his
+bad, socialistic, Barcelona blood, could have done it. These brilliant
+results were arrived at after much clamour and argument and imposing
+_procès verbal_. Aristide felt strangely depressed. He had narrated his
+story of the pig-headed masquer to unresponsive ears. Here was a
+melodramatic scene in which he not only was not playing a leading part,
+but did not even carry a banner. To be less than a super in life's
+pageant was abhorrent to the nature of Aristide Pujol.
+
+Moodily he wandered away from the little crowd. He hated the police and
+their airs of gods for whom exists no mystery. He did not believe in the
+kitchen-door theory. Why should not the thief have simply entered by the
+window of the study, which like the kitchen, was on the ground floor? He
+went round the house and examined the window by himself. No; there were
+no traces of burglary. The fastenings of the outside shutters and the
+high window were intact. The police were right.
+
+Suddenly his quick eye lit on something in the gravel path and his heart
+gave a great leap. It was a little round pink disc of confetti.
+
+Aristide picked it up and began to dance and shake his fist at the
+invisible police.
+
+"Aha!" he cried, "now we shall see who is right and who is wrong!"
+
+He began to search and soon found another bit of confetti. A little
+further along he discovered a third and a fourth. By using his walking
+stick he discovered that they formed a trail to a point in the wall. He
+examined the wall. There, if his eyes did not deceive him, were
+evidences of mortar dislodged by nefarious toes. And there, _mirabile
+visu!_ at the very bottom of the wall lay a little woollen pompon or
+tassel, just the kind of pompon that gives a finish to a pierrot's
+shoes. Evidently the scoundrel had scraped it off against the bricks
+while clambering over.
+
+The pig-headed masquer stood confessed.
+
+A less imaginative man than Aristide would have immediately acquainted
+the police with his discovery. But Aristide had been insulted. A dull,
+mechanical bureaucrat who tried to discover crime with a tape-measure
+had dared to talk contemptuously of his intelligence! On his wooden head
+should be poured the vials of his contempt.
+
+"_Tron de l'air!_" cried Aristide--a Provençal oath which he only used
+on sublime occasions--"It is I who will discover the thief and make the
+whole lot of you the laughing-stock of Perpignan."
+
+So did my versatile friend, joyously confident in his powers, start on
+his glorious career as a private detective.
+
+"Madame Coquereau," said he, that evening, while she was dealing a hand
+at piquet, "what would you say if I solved this mystery and brought the
+scoundrel to justice?"
+
+"To say that you would have more sense than the police, would be a poor
+compliment," said the old lady.
+
+Stéphanie raised cloistral eyes from her embroidery frame. She sat in a
+distant corner of the formal room discreetly lit by a shaded lamp.
+
+"You have a clue, Monsieur?" she asked with adorable timidity.
+
+Aristide tapped his forehead with his forefinger. "All is there,
+Mademoiselle."
+
+They exchanged a glance--the first they had exchanged--while Madame
+Coquereau was frowning at her cards; and Aristide interpreted the glance
+as the promise of supreme reward for great deeds accomplished.
+
+The mayor returned early from the café, a dejected man. The loss of his
+hundred and twenty pounds weighed heavily on his mind. He kissed his
+mother sorrowfully on the cheek, his niece on the brow, held out a
+drooping hand to Aristide, and, subsiding into a stiff imitation Louis
+XVI chair, rested his elbows on its unconsoling arms and hid his face in
+his hands.
+
+"My poor uncle! You suffer so much?" breathed Stéphanie, in divine
+compassion.
+
+"Little Saint!" murmured Aristide devoutly, as he declared four aces and
+three queens.
+
+The Mayor moved his head sympathetically. He was suffering from the
+sharpest pain in his pocket he had felt for many a day. Madame
+Coquereau's attention wandered from the cards.
+
+"_Dis donc_, Fernand," she said sharply. "Why are you not wearing your
+ring?"
+
+The Mayor looked up.
+
+"_Maman_," said he, "it is stolen."
+
+"Your beautiful ring?" cried Aristide.
+
+The Mayor's ring, which he usually wore, was a remarkable personal
+adornment. It consisted in a couple of snakes in old gold clenching an
+enormous topaz between their heads. Only a Mayor could have worn it with
+decency.
+
+"You did not tell me, Fernand," rasped the old lady. "You did not
+mention it to me as being one of the stolen objects."
+
+The Mayor rose wearily. "It was to avoid giving you pain, _maman_. I
+know what a value you set upon the ring of my good Aunt Philomène."
+
+"And now it is lost," said Madame Coquereau, throwing down her cards. "A
+ring that belonged to a saint. Yes, Monsieur Pujol, a saint, though she
+was my sister. A ring that had been blessed by His Holiness the
+Pope----"
+
+"But, _maman_," expostulated the Mayor, "that was an imagination of Aunt
+Philomène. Just because she went to Rome and had an audience like anyone
+else----"
+
+"Silence, impious atheist that you are!" cried the old lady. "I tell you
+it was blessed by His Holiness--and when I tell you a thing it is true.
+That is the son of to-day. He will call his mother a liar as soon as
+look at her. It was a ring beyond price. A ring such as there are few in
+the world. And instead of taking care of this precious heirloom, he goes
+and locks it away in a safe. Ah! you fill me with shame. Monsieur Pujol,
+I am sorry I can play no more, I must retire. Stéphanie, will you
+accompany me?"
+
+And gathering up Stéphanie like a bunch of snowdrops, the yellow,
+galvanized iron old lady swept out of the room.
+
+The Mayor looked at Aristide and moved his arms dejectedly.
+
+"Such are women," said he.
+
+"My own mother nearly broke her heart because I would not become a
+priest," said Aristide.
+
+"I wish I were a Turk," said the Mayor.
+
+"I, too," said Aristide.
+
+He took pouch and papers and rolled a cigarette.
+
+"If there is a man living who can say he has not felt like that at least
+once in his life he ought to be exhibited at a fair."
+
+"How well you understand me, my good Pujol," said Monsieur Coquereau.
+
+The next few days passed busily for Aristide. He devoted every spare
+hour to his new task. He scrutinized every inch of ground between the
+study window and the wall; he drew radiating lines from the point of
+the wall whence the miscreant had started homeward and succeeded in
+finding more confetti. He cross-examined every purveyor of pierrot shoes
+and pig's heads in Perpignan. His researches soon came to the ears of
+the police, still tracing the mysterious José Puégas. A certain
+good-humoured brigadier whose Catalan French Aristide found difficult to
+understand, but with whom he had formed a derisory kind of friendship,
+urged him to desist from the hopeless task.
+
+"_Jamais de la vie!_" he cried--"The honour of Aristide Pujol is at
+stake."
+
+The thing became an obsession. Not only his honour but his future was at
+stake. If he discovered the thief, he would be the most talked of person
+in Perpignan. He would know how to improve his position. He would rise
+to dizzy heights. Perpignan-Ville de Plaisir would acclaim him as its
+saviour. The Government would decorate him. And finally, both the Mayor
+and Madame Coquereau would place the blushing and adorable Mademoiselle
+Stéphanie in his arms and her two hundred and fifty thousand francs
+dowry in his pocket. Never before had so dazzling a prize shimmered
+before him in the near distance.
+
+On the last Saturday night of the Carnival, there was a special _corso_
+for the populace in the Avenue des Plantanes, the long splendid Avenue
+of plane trees just outside the Porte Notre Dame, which is the special
+glory of Perpignan. The masquers danced to three or four bands. They
+threw confetti and _serpentins_. They rode hobby-horses and beat each
+other with bladders. They joined in bands of youths and maidens and
+whirled down the Avenue in Bacchic madness. It was a _corso blanc_, and
+everyone wore white--chiefly modifications of Pierrot costume--and
+everyone was masked. Chinese lanterns hung from the trees and in
+festoons around the bandstands and darted about in the hands of the
+revellers. Above, great standard electric lamps shed their white glare
+upon the eddying throng casting a myriad of grotesque shadows. Shouts
+and laughter and music filled the air.
+
+Aristide in a hideous red mask and with a bag of confetti under his arm,
+plunged with enthusiasm into the revelry. To enjoy yourself you only had
+to throw your arm round a girl's waist and swing her off wildly to the
+beat of the music. If you wanted to let her go you did so; if not, you
+talked in the squeaky voice that is the recognized etiquette of the
+carnival. On the other hand any girl could catch you in her grip and
+sweep you along with her. Your mad career generally ended in a crowd and
+a free fight of confetti. There was one fair masquer, however, to whom
+Aristide became peculiarly attracted. Her movements were free, her
+figure dainty and her repartee, below her mask, more than usually
+piquant.
+
+"This hurly-burly," said he, drawing her into a quiet eddy of the
+stream, "is no place for the communion of two twin souls."
+
+"_Beau masque_," said she, "I perceive that you are a man of much
+sensibility."
+
+"Shall we find a spot where we can mingle the overflow of our exquisite
+natures?"
+
+"As you like."
+
+"_Allons! Hop!_" cried he, and seizing her round the waist danced
+through the masquers to the very far end of the Avenue.
+
+"There is a sequestered spot round here," he said.
+
+They turned. The sequestered spot, a seat beneath a plane tree, with a
+lonesome arc-lamp shining full upon it, was occupied.
+
+"It's a pity!" said the fair unknown.
+
+But Aristide said nothing. He stared. On the seat reposed an amorous
+couple. The lady wore a white domino and a black mask. The cavalier,
+whose arm was around the lady's waist, wore a pig's head, and a clown or
+Pierrot's dress.
+
+Aristide's eyes fell upon the shoes. On one of them the pompon was
+missing.
+
+The lady's left hand tenderly patted the cardboard snout of her lover.
+The fierce light of the arc lamp caught the hand and revealed, on the
+fourth finger, a topaz ring, the topaz held in its place by two snakes'
+heads.
+
+Aristide stared for two seconds; it seemed to him two centuries. Then he
+turned simply, caught his partner again, and with a "_Allons, Hop!_"
+raced back to the middle of the throng. There, in the crush, he
+unceremoniously lost her, and sped like a maniac to the entrance gates.
+His friend the brigadier happened to be on duty. He unmasked himself,
+dragged the police agent aside, and breathless, half-hysterical,
+acquainted him with the astounding discovery.
+
+"I was right, _mon vieux!_ There at the end of the Avenue you will find
+them. The pig-headed prowler I saw, with _my_ pompon missing from his
+shoe, and his _bonne amie_ wearing the stolen ring. Ah! you police
+people with your tape-measures and your José Puégas! It is I, Aristide
+Pujol, who have to come to Perpignan to teach you your business!"
+
+"What do you want me to do?" asked the brigadier stolidly.
+
+"Do?" cried Aristide. "Do you think I want you to kiss them and cover
+them with roses? What do you generally do with thieves in Perpignan?"
+
+"Arrest them," said the brigadier.
+
+"_Eh bien!_" said Aristide. Then he paused--possibly the drama of the
+situation striking him. "No, wait. Go and find them. Don't take your
+eyes off them. I will run and fetch Monsieur le Maire and he will
+identify his property--_et puis nous aurons la scène à faire_."
+
+The stout brigadier grunted an assent and rolled monumentally down the
+Avenue. Aristide, his pulses throbbing, his heart exulting, ran to the
+Mayor's house. He was rather a panting triumph than a man. He had beaten
+the police of Perpignan. He had discovered the thief. He was the hero of
+the town. Soon would the wedding bells be playing.... He envied the
+marble of the future statue. He would like to be on the pedestal
+himself.
+
+He dashed past the maid-servant who opened the door and burst into the
+prim salon. Madame Coquereau was alone, just preparing to retire for the
+night. Mademoiselle Stéphanie had already gone to bed.
+
+"_Mon Dieu_, what is all this?" she cried.
+
+"Madame," shouted he, "glorious news. I have found the thief!"
+
+He told his tale. Where was Monsieur le Maire?
+
+"He has not yet come back from the café."
+
+"I'll go and find him," said Aristide.
+
+"And waste time? Bah!" said the iron-faced old lady, catching up a black
+silk shawl. "I will come with you and identify the ring of my sainted
+sister Philomène. Who should know it better than I?"
+
+"As you like, Madame," said Aristide.
+
+Two minutes found them on their journey. Madame Coquereau, in spite of
+her sixty-five years trudged along with springing step.
+
+"They don't make metal like me, nowadays," she said scornfully.
+
+When they arrived at the gate of the Avenue, the police on guard
+saluted. The mother of Monsieur le Maire was a power in Perpignan.
+
+"Monsieur," said Aristide, in lordly fashion, to a policeman, "will you
+have the goodness to make a passage through the crowd for Madame
+Coquereau, and then help the Brigadier Pésac to arrest the burglar who
+broke into the house of Monsieur le Maire?"
+
+The man obeyed, went ahead clearing the path with the unceremoniousness
+of the law, and Aristide giving his arm to Madame Coquereau followed
+gloriously. As the impressive progress continued the revellers ceased
+their revels and followed in the wake of Aristide. At the end of the
+Avenue Brigadier Pésac was on guard. He approached.
+
+"They are still there," he said.
+
+"Good," said Aristide.
+
+The two police-officers, Aristide and Madame Coquereau turned the
+corner. At the sight of the police the guilty couple started to their
+feet. Madame Coquereau pounced like a hawk on the masked lady's hand.
+
+"I identify it," she cried. "Brigadier, give these people in charge for
+theft."
+
+The white masked crowd surged around the group, in the midst of which
+stood Aristide transfigured. It was his supreme moment. He flourished in
+one hand his red mask and in the other a pompon which he had extracted
+from his pocket.
+
+"This I found," said he, "beneath the wall of Monsieur le Maire's
+garden. Behold the shoe of the accused."
+
+The crowd murmured their applause and admiration. Neither of the
+prisoners stirred. The pig's head grinned at the world with its inane,
+painted leer. A rumbling voice beneath it said:
+
+"We will go quietly."
+
+"_Attention s'il vous plaît_," said the policemen, and each holding a
+prisoner by the arm they made a way through the crowd. Madame Coquereau
+and Aristide followed close behind.
+
+"What did I tell you?" cried Aristide to the brigadier.
+
+"It's Puégas, all the same," said the brigadier, over his shoulder.
+
+"I bet you it's not," said Aristide, and striding swiftly to the back of
+the male prisoner whipped off the pig's head, and revealed to the
+petrified throng the familiar features of the Mayor of Perpignan.
+
+Aristide regarded him for two or three seconds open-mouthed, and then
+fell back into the arms of the Brigadier Pésac screaming with convulsive
+laughter. The crowd caught the infection of merriment. Shrieks filled
+the air. The vast mass of masqueraders held their sides, swayed
+helplessly, rolled in heaps, men and women, tearing each other's
+garments as they fell.
+
+Aristide, deposited on the ground by the Brigadier Pésac laughed and
+laughed. When he recovered some consciousness of surroundings, he found
+the Mayor bending over him and using language that would have made
+Tophet put its fingers in its ears. He rose. Madame Coquereau shook her
+thin fists in his face.
+
+"Imbecile! Triple fool!" she cried.
+
+Aristide turned tail and fled. There was nothing else to do.
+
+And that was the end of his career at Perpignan. Vanished were the
+dreams of civic eminence; melted into thin air the statue on the Quai
+Sadi-Carnot; faded, too, the vision of the modest Stéphanie crowned with
+orange-blossom; gone forever the two hundred and fifty thousand francs.
+Never since Alnaschar kicked over his basket of crockery was there such
+a hideous welter of shattered hopes.
+
+If the Mayor had been allowed to go disguised to the Police Station, he
+could have disclosed his identity and that of the lady in private to
+awe-stricken functionaries. He might have forgiven Aristide. But
+Aristide had exposed him to the derision of the whole of Roussillon and
+the never ending wrath of Madame Coquereau. Ruefully Aristide asked
+himself the question: why had the Mayor not taken him into the
+confidence of his masquerading escapade? Why had he not told him of the
+pretty widow, whom, unknown to his mother, he was courting? Why had he
+permitted her to wear the ring which he had given her so as to spite his
+sainted Aunt Philomène? And why had he gone on wearing the pig's head
+after Aristide had told him of his suspicions? Ruefully Aristide found
+no answers save in the general chuckle-headedness of mankind.
+
+"If it hadn't been such a good farce I should have wept like a cow,"
+said Aristide, after relating this story. "But every time I wanted to
+cry, I laughed. _Nom de Dieu!_ You should have seen his face! And the
+face of Madame Coquereau! She opened her mouth wide showing ten yellow
+teeth and squealed like a rabbit! Oh, it was a good farce! He was very
+cross with me," he added after a smiling pause, "and when I got back to
+Paris I tried to pacify him."
+
+"What did you do?" I asked.
+
+"I sent him my photograph," said Aristide.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE
+
+
+One day, when Aristide was discoursing on the inexhaustible subject of
+woman, I pulled him up.
+
+"My good friend," said I, "you seem to have fallen in love with every
+woman you have ever met. But for how many of them have you really
+cared?"
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_ For all of them!" he cried, springing from his chair and
+making a wind-mill of himself.
+
+"Come, come," said I; "all that amorousness is just Gallic exuberance.
+Have you ever been really in love in your life?"
+
+"How should I know?" said he. But he lit a cigarette, turned away, and
+looked out of window.
+
+There was a short silence. He shrugged his shoulders, apparently in
+response to his own thoughts. Then he turned again suddenly, threw his
+cigarette into the fire, and thrust his hands into his pockets. He
+sighed.
+
+"Perhaps there was Fleurette," said he, not looking at me. "_Est-ce
+qu'on sait jamais?_ That wasn't her real name--it was Marie-Joséphine;
+but people called her Fleurette. She looked like a flower, you know."
+
+I nodded in order to signify my elementary acquaintance with the French
+tongue.
+
+"The most delicate little flower you can conceive," he continued.
+"_Tiens_, she was a slender lily--so white, and her hair the flash of
+gold on it--and she had eyes--_des yeux de pervenche_, as we say in
+French. What is _pervenche_ in English--that little pale-blue flower?"
+
+"Periwinkle," said I.
+
+"Periwinkle eyes! My God, what a language! Ah, no! She had _des yeux de
+pervenche_.... She was _diaphane_, diaphanous ... impalpable as
+cigarette-smoke ... a little nose like nothing at all, with nostrils
+like infinitesimal sea-shells. Anyone could have made a mouthful of
+her.... Ah! _Cré nom d'un chien!_ Life is droll. It has no common sense.
+It is the game of a mountebank.... I've never told you about Fleurette.
+It was this way."
+
+And the story he narrated I will do my best to set down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The good M. Bocardon, of the Hôtel de la Curatterie at Nîmes, whose
+grateful devotion to Aristide has already been recorded, had a brother
+in Paris who managed the Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse (strange
+conjuncture), a flourishing third-rate hostelry in the neighbourhood of
+the Halles Centrales. Thither flocked sturdy Britons in knickerbockers,
+stockings, and cloth caps, Teutons with tin botanizing boxes (for lunch
+transportation), and American school-marms realizing at last the dream
+of their modest and laborious lives. Accommodation was cheap, manners
+were easy, and knowledge of the gay city less than rudimentary.
+
+To M. Bocardon of Paris Aristide, one August morning, brought glowing
+letters of introduction from M. and Mme. Bocardon of Nîmes. M. Bocardon
+of Paris welcomed Aristide as a Provençal and a brother. He brought out
+from a cupboard in his private bureau an hospitable bottle of old
+Armagnac, and discoursed with Aristide on the seductions of the South.
+It was there that he longed to retire--to a dainty little hotel of his
+own with a smart clientèle. The clientèle of the Hôtel du Soleil et de
+l'Ecosse was not to his taste. He spoke slightingly of his guests.
+
+"There are people who know how to travel," said he, "and people who
+don't. These lost muttons here don't, and they make hotel-keeping a
+nightmare instead of a joy. A hundred times a day have I to tell them
+the way to Notre Dame. _Pouah!_" said he, gulping down his disgust and
+the rest of his Armagnac, "it is back-breaking."
+
+"_Tu sais, mon vieux_," cried Aristide--he had the most lightning way of
+establishing an intimacy--"I have an idea. These lost sheep need a
+shepherd."
+
+"_Eh bien?_" said M. Bocardon.
+
+"_Eh bien_," said Aristide. "Why should not I be the shepherd, the
+official shepherd attached to the Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse?"
+
+"Explain yourself," said M. Bocardon.
+
+Aristide, letting loose his swift imagination, explained copiously, and
+hypnotized M. Bocardon with his glittering eye, until he had assured to
+himself a means of livelihood. From that moment he became the familiar
+genius of the hotel. Scorning the title of "guide," lest he should be
+associated in the minds of the guests with the squalid scoundrels who
+infest the Boulevard, he constituted himself "Directeur de l'Agence
+Pujol." An obfuscated Bocardon formed the rest of the agency and
+pocketed a percentage of Aristide's earnings, and Aristide, addressed as
+"Director" by the Anglo-Saxons, "M. le Directeur" by the Latins, and
+"Herr Direktor" by the Teutons, walked about like a peacock in a
+barn-yard.
+
+ [Illustration: HE MUST HAVE DEALT OUT PARALYZING INFORMATION]
+
+At that period, and until he had learned up Baedeker by heart, a process
+which nearly gave him brain-fever, and still, he declares, brings terror
+into his slumbers, he knew little more of the history, topography, and
+art-treasures of Paris than the flock he shepherded. He must have
+dealt out paralyzing information. The Britons and the Germans seemed not
+to heed; but now and then the American school-marms unmasked the
+charlatan. On such occasions his unfaltering impudence reached heights
+truly sublime. The sharp-witted ladies looked in his eyes, forgot their
+wrongs, and, if he had told them that the Eiffel Tower had been erected
+by the Pilgrim Fathers, would have accepted the statement meekly.
+
+"My friend," said Aristide, with Provençal flourish and braggadocio, "I
+never met a woman that would not sooner be misled by me than be taught
+by the whole Faculty of the Sorbonne."
+
+He had been practising this honourable profession for about a month,
+lodging with the good Mme. Bidoux at 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré, when,
+one morning, in the vestibule of the hotel, he ran into his old friend
+Batterby, whom he had known during the days of his professorship of
+French at the Academy for Young Ladies in Manchester. The pair had been
+fellow-lodgers in the same house in the Rusholme Road; but, whereas
+Aristide lived in one sunless bed-sitting-room looking on a forest of
+chimney-pots, Batterby, man of luxury and ease, had a suite of
+apartments on the first floor and kept an inexhaustible supply of
+whisky, cigars, and such-like etceteras of the opulent, and the very
+ugliest prize bull-pup you can imagine. Batterby, in gaudy raiment,
+went to an office in Manchester; in gaudier raiment he often attended
+race meetings. He had rings and scarf-pins and rattled gold in his
+trousers pockets. He might have been an insufferable young man for a
+poverty-stricken teacher of French to have as a fellow-lodger; but he
+was not. Like all those born to high estate, he made no vulgar parade of
+his wealth, and to Aristide he showed the most affable hospitality. A
+friendship had arisen between them, which the years had idealized rather
+than impaired. So when they met that morning in the vestibule of the
+Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse their greetings were fervent and
+prolonged.
+
+In person Batterby tended towards burliness. He had a red, jolly face,
+divided unequally by a great black moustache, and his manner was hearty.
+He slapped Aristide on the back many times and shook him by the
+shoulders.
+
+"We must have a drink on this straight away, old man," said he.
+
+"You're so strange, you English," said Aristide. "The moment you have an
+emotion you must celebrate it by a drink. 'My dear fellow, I've just
+come into a fortune; let us have a drink.' Or, 'My friend, my poor old
+father has just been run over by an omnibus; let us have a drink.' My
+good Reginald, look at the clock. It is only nine in the morning."
+
+"Rot!" said Reginald. "Drink is good at any time."
+
+They went into the dark and deserted smoking-room, where Batterby
+ordered Scotch and soda and Aristide, an abstemious man, a plain
+vermouth.
+
+"What's that muck?" asked Batterby, when the waiter brought the drinks.
+Aristide explained. "Whisky's good enough for me," laughed the other.
+Aristide laughed too, out of politeness and out of joy at meeting his
+old friend.
+
+"With you playing at guide here," said Batterby, when he had learned
+Aristide's position in the hotel, "it seems I have come to the right
+shop. There are no flies on me, you know, but when a man comes to Paris
+for the first time he likes to be put up to the ropes."
+
+"Your first visit to Paris?" cried Aristide. "_Mon vieux_, what wonders
+are going to ravish your eyes! What a time you are going to have!"
+
+Batterby bit off the end of a great black cigar.
+
+"If the missus will let me," said he.
+
+"Missus? Your wife? You are married, my dear Reginald?" Aristide leaped,
+in his unexpected fashion, from his chair and almost embraced him. "Ah,
+but you are happy, you are lucky. It was always like that. You open your
+mouth and the larks fall ready roasted into it! My congratulations. And
+she is here, in this hotel, your wife? Tell me about her."
+
+Batterby lit his cigar. "She's nothing to write home about," he said,
+modestly. "She's French."
+
+"French? No--you don't say so!" exclaimed Aristide, in ecstasy.
+
+"Well, she was brought up in France from her childhood, but her parents
+were Finns. Funny place for people to come from--Finland--isn't it? You
+could never expect it--might just as well think of 'em coming from
+Lapland. She's an orphan. I met her in London."
+
+"But that's romantic! And she is young, pretty?"
+
+"Oh, yes; in a way," said the proprietary Briton.
+
+"And her name?"
+
+"Oh, she has a fool name--Fleurette. I wanted to call her Flossie, but
+she didn't like it."
+
+"I should think not," said Aristide. "Fleurette is an adorable name."
+
+"I suppose it's right enough," said Batterby. "But if I want to call her
+good old Flossie, why should she object? You married, old man? No? Well,
+wait till you are. You think women are angels all wrapped up in feathers
+and wings beneath their toggery, don't you? Well, they're just blooming
+porcupines, all bristling with objections."
+
+"_Mais, allons, donc!_" cried Aristide. "You love her, your beautiful
+Finnish orphan brought up in France and romantically met in London, with
+the adorable name?"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said the easy Batterby, lifting his half-emptied
+glass. "Here's luck!"
+
+"Ah--no!" said Aristide, leaning forward and clinking his wineglass
+against the other's tumbler. "Here is to madame."
+
+When they returned to the vestibule they found Mrs. Batterby patiently
+awaiting her lord. She rose from her seat at the approach of the two
+men, a fragile flower of a girl, about three-and-twenty, pale as a lily,
+with exquisite though rather large features, and with eyes of the blue
+of the _pervenche_ (in deference to Aristide I use the French name),
+which seemed to smile trustfully through perpetual tears. She was
+dressed in pale, shadowy blue--graceful, impalpable, like the smoke,
+said Aristide, curling upwards from a cigarette.
+
+"Reggie has spoken of you many times, monsieur," said Fleurette, after
+the introduction had been effected.
+
+Aristide was touched. "Fancy him remembering me! _Ce bon vieux
+Reginald._ Madame," said he, "your husband is the best fellow in the
+world."
+
+"Feed him with sugar and he won't bite," said Batterby; whereat they all
+laughed, as if it had been a very good joke.
+
+"Well, what about this Paris of yours?" he asked, after a while. "The
+missus knows as little of it as I do."
+
+"Really?" asked Aristide.
+
+"I lived all my life in Brest before I went to England," she said,
+modestly.
+
+"She wants to see all the sights, the Louvre, the Morgue, the Cathedral
+of What's-its-name that you've got here. I've got to go round, too.
+Pleases her and don't hurt me. You must tote us about. We'll have a cab,
+old girl, as you can't do much walking, and good old Pujol will come
+with us."
+
+"But that is ideal!" cried Aristide, flying to the door to order the
+cab; but before he could reach it he was stopped by three or four
+waiting tourists, who pointed, some to the clock, some to the wagonette
+standing outside, and asked the director when the personally-conducted
+party was to start. Aristide, who had totally forgotten the
+responsibilities attached to the directorship of the Agence Pujol and,
+but for this reminder, would have blissfully left his sheep to err and
+stray over Paris by themselves, returned crestfallen to his friends and
+explained the situation.
+
+"But we'll join the party," said the cheery Batterby. "The more the
+merrier--good old bean-feast! Will there be room?"
+
+"Plenty," replied Aristide, brightening. "But would it meet the wishes
+of madame?" Her pale face flushed ever so slightly and the soft eyes
+fluttered at him a half-astonished, half-grateful glance.
+
+"With my husband and you, monsieur, I should love it," she said.
+
+So Mr. and Mrs. Batterby joined the personally-conducted party, as they
+did the next morning, and the next, and several mornings after, and
+received esoteric information concerning the monuments of Paris that is
+hidden even from the erudite. The evenings, however, Aristide, being off
+duty, devoted to their especial entertainment. He took them to riotous
+and perspiring restaurants where they dined gorgeously for three francs
+fifty, wine included; to open-air _cafés-concerts_ in the Champs
+Elysées, which Fleurette found infinitely diverting, but which bored
+Batterby, who knew not French, to stertorous slumber; to crowded
+brasseries on the Boulevard, where Batterby awakened, under a steady
+flow of whisky, to appreciative contemplation of Paris life. As in the
+old days of the Rusholme Road, Batterby flung his money about with
+unostentatious generosity. He was out for a beano, he declared, and hang
+the expense! Aristide, whose purse, scantily filled (truth to say) by
+the profits of the Agence Pujol, could contribute but modestly to this
+reckless expenditure, found himself forced to accept his friend's lavish
+hospitality. Once or twice, delicately, he suggested withdrawal from the
+evening's dissipation.
+
+"But, my good M. Pujol," said Fleurette, with childish tragicality in
+her _pervenche_ eyes, "without you we shall be lost. We shall not enjoy
+ourselves at all, at all."
+
+So Aristide, out of love for his friend, and out of he knew not what for
+his friend's wife, continued to show them the sights of Paris. They went
+to the cabarets of Montmartre--the _Ciel_, where one is served by
+angels; the _Enfer_, where one is served by red devils in a Tartarean
+lighting; the _Néant_, where one has coffins for tables--than all of
+which vulgarity has imagined no more joy-killing dreariness, but which
+caused Fleurette to grip Aristide's hand tight in scared wonderment and
+Batterby to chuckle exceedingly. They went to the Bal Bullier and to
+various other balls undreamed of by the tourist, where Fleurette danced
+with Aristide, as light as an autumn leaf tossed by the wind, and
+Batterby absorbed a startling assortment of alcohols. In a word,
+Aristide procured for his friends prodigious diversion.
+
+"How do you like this, old girl?" Batterby asked one night, at the
+Moulin de la Galette, a dizzying, not very decorous, and to the
+unsophisticated visitor a dangerous place of entertainment. "Better than
+Great Coram Street, isn't it?"
+
+She smiled and laid her hand on his. She was a woman of few words but of
+many caressing actions.
+
+"I ought to let you into a secret," said he. "This is our honeymoon."
+
+"Who would have thought it?"
+
+ [Illustration: FLEURETTE DANCED WITH ARISTIDE, AS LIGHT AS AN AUTUMN
+                LEAF TOSSED BY THE WIND]
+
+"A fortnight ago she was being killed in a Bloomsbury boarding-house.
+There were two of 'em--she and a girl called Carrie. I used to call 'em
+Fetch and Carrie. This one was Fetch. Well, she fetched me, didn't you,
+old girl? And now you're Mrs. Reginald Batterby, living at your ease,
+eh?"
+
+"Madame would grace any sphere," said Aristide.
+
+"I wish I had more education," said Fleurette, humbly. "M. Pujol and
+yourself are so clever that you must laugh at me."
+
+"We do sometimes, but you mustn't mind us. Remember--at the
+what-you-call-it--the little shanty at Versailles----?"
+
+"The Grand Trianon," replied Aristide.
+
+"That's it. When you were showing us the rooms. 'What is the Empress
+Josephine doing now?'" He mimicked her accent. "Ha! ha! And the poor
+soul gone to glory a couple of hundred years ago."
+
+The little mouth puckered at the corners and moisture gathered in the
+blue eyes.
+
+"_Mais, mon Dieu_, it was natural, the mistake," cried Aristide,
+gallantly. "The Empress Eugénie, the wife of another Napoleon, is still
+living."
+
+"_Bien sûr_," said Fleurette. "How was I to know?"
+
+"Never mind, old girl," said Batterby. "You're living all right, and out
+of that beastly boarding-house, and that's the chief thing. Another
+month of it would have killed her. She had a cough that shook her to
+bits. She's looking better already, isn't she, Pujol?"
+
+After this Aristide learned much of her simple history, which she, at
+first, had been too shy to reveal. The child of Finnish sea-folk who had
+drifted to Brest and died there, she had been adopted by an old Breton
+sea-dog and his wife. On their death she had entered, as maid, the
+service of an English lady residing in the town, who afterwards had
+taken her to England. After a while reverses of fortune had compelled
+the lady to dismiss her, and she had taken the situation in the
+boarding-house, where she had ruined her health and met the opulent and
+conquering Batterby. She had not much chance, poor child, of acquiring a
+profound knowledge of the history of the First Empire; but her manners
+were refined and her ways gentle and her voice was soft; and Aristide,
+citizen of the world, for whom caste distinctions existed not, thought
+her the most exquisite flower grown in earth's garden. He told her so,
+much to her blushing satisfaction.
+
+One night, about three weeks after the Batterbys' arrival in Paris,
+Batterby sent his wife to bed and invited Aristide to accompany him for
+half an hour to a neighbouring café. He looked grave and troubled.
+
+"I've been upset by a telegram," said he, when drinks had been ordered.
+"I'm called away to New York on business. I must catch the boat from
+Cherbourg to-morrow evening. Now, I can't take Fleurette with me. Women
+and business don't mix. She has jolly well got to stay here. I sha'n't
+be away more than a month. I'll leave her plenty of money to go on with.
+But what's worrying me is--how is she going to stick it? So look here,
+old man, you're my pal, aren't you?"
+
+He stretched out his hand. Aristide grasped it impulsively.
+
+"Why, of course, _mon vieux!_"
+
+"If I felt that I could leave her in your charge, all on the square, as
+a real straight pal--I should go away happy."
+
+"She shall be my sister," cried Aristide, "and I shall give her all the
+devotion of a brother.... I swear it--_tiens_--what can I swear it on?"
+He flung out his arms and looked round the café as if in search of an
+object. "I swear it on the head of my mother. Have no fear. I, Aristide
+Pujol, have never betrayed the sacred obligations of friendship. I
+accept her as a consecrated trust."
+
+"You only need to have said 'Right-o,' and I would have believed you,"
+said Batterby. "I haven't told her yet. There'll be blubbering all
+night. Let us have another drink."
+
+When Aristide arrived at the Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse at nine
+o'clock the next morning he found that Batterby had left Paris by an
+early train. Fleurette he did not meet until he brought back the
+sight-seers to the fold in the evening. She had wept much during the
+day; but she smiled bravely on Aristide. A woman could not stand in the
+way of her husband's business.
+
+"By the way, what is Reginald's business?" Aristide asked.
+
+She did not know. Reginald never spoke to her of such things; perhaps
+she was too ignorant to understand.
+
+"But he will make a lot of money by going to America," she said. Then
+she was silent for a few moments. "_Mon Dieu!_" she sighed, at last.
+"How long the day has been!"
+
+It was the beginning of many long days for Fleurette. Reginald did not
+write from Cherbourg or cable from New York, as he had promised, and the
+return American mail brought no letter. The days passed drearily.
+Sometimes, for the sake of human society, she accompanied the tourist
+parties of the Agence Pujol; but the thrill had passed from the Morgue
+and the glory had departed from Versailles. Sometimes she wandered
+out by herself into the streets and public gardens; but, pretty,
+unprotected, and fragile, she attracted the attention of evil or
+careless men, which struck cold terror into her heart. Most often she
+sat alone and listless in the hotel, reading the feuilleton of the
+_Petit Journal_, and waiting for the post to bring her news.
+
+"_Mon Dieu_, M. Pujol, what can have happened?"
+
+"Nothing at all, _chère petite madame_"--question and answer came many
+times a day. "Only some foolish mischance which will soon be explained.
+The good Reginald has written and his letter has been lost in the post.
+He has been obliged to go on business to San Francisco or Buenos
+Ayres--_et, que voulez-vous?_ one cannot have letters from those places
+in twenty-four hours."
+
+"If only he had taken me with him!"
+
+"But, dear Mme. Fleurette, he could not expose you to the hardships
+of travel. You, who are as fragile as a cobweb, how could you go to
+Patagonia or Senegal or Baltimore, those wild places where there are no
+comforts for women? You must be reasonable. I am sure you will get a
+letter soon--or else in a day or two he will come, with his good, honest
+face as if nothing had occurred--these English are like that--and call
+for whisky and soda. Be comforted, _chère petite madame_."
+
+Aristide did his best to comfort her, threw her in the companionship of
+decent women staying at the hotel, and devoted his evenings to her
+entertainment. But the days passed, and Reginald Batterby, with the
+good, honest face, neither wrote nor ordered whisky and soda. Fleurette
+began to pine and fade.
+
+One day she came to Aristide.
+
+"M. Pujol, I have no more money left."
+
+"_Bigre!_" said Pujol. "The good Bocardon will have to give you credit.
+I'll arrange it."
+
+"But I already owe for three weeks," said Fleurette.
+
+Aristide sought Bocardon. One week more was all the latter dared allow.
+
+"But her husband will return and pay you. He is my old and intimate
+friend. I make myself hoarse in telling it to you, wooden-head that you
+are!"
+
+But Bocardon, who had to account to higher powers, the proprietors of
+the hotel, was helpless. At the end of the week Fleurette was called
+upon to give up her room. She wept with despair; Aristide wept with
+fury; Bocardon wept out of sympathy. Already, said Bocardon, the
+proprietors would blame him for not using the legal right to detain
+madame's luggage.
+
+"_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ what is to become of me?" wailed Fleurette.
+
+"You forget, madame," said Aristide, with one of his fine flourishes,
+"that you are the sacred trust of Aristide Pujol."
+
+"But I can't accept your money," objected Fleurette.
+
+"_Tron de l'air!_" he cried. "Did your husband put you in my charge or
+did he not? Am I your legal guardian, or am I not? If I am your legal
+guardian, what right have you to question the arrangements made by your
+husband? Answer me that."
+
+Fleurette, too gentle and too miserable for intricate argument, sighed.
+
+"But it is your money, all the same."
+
+Aristide turned to Bocardon. "Try," said he, "to convince a woman! Do
+you want proofs? Wait there a minute while I get them from the safe of
+the Agence Pujol."
+
+He disappeared into the bureau, where, secure from observation, he tore
+an oblong strip from a sheet of stiff paper, and, using an indelible
+pencil, wrote out something fantastic halfway between a cheque and a
+bill of exchange, forged as well as he could from memory the signature
+of Reginald Batterby--the imitation of handwriting was one of Aristide's
+many odd accomplishments--and made the document look legal by means of a
+receipt stamp, which he took from Bocardon's drawer. He returned to the
+vestibule with the strip folded and somewhat crumpled in his hand.
+"_Voilà_," said he, handing it boldly to Fleurette. "Here is your
+husband's guarantee to me, your guardian, for four thousand francs."
+
+Fleurette examined the forgery. The stamp impressed her. For the simple
+souls of France there is magic in _papier timbré_.
+
+"It was my husband who wrote this?" she asked, curiously.
+
+"_Mais, oui_," said Aristide, with an offended air of challenge.
+
+Fleurette's eyes filled again with tears.
+
+"I only inquired," she said, "because this is the first time I have seen
+his handwriting."
+
+"_Ma pauvre petite_," said Aristide.
+
+"I will do whatever you tell me, M. Pujol," said Fleurette, humbly.
+
+"Good! That is talking like _une bonne petite dame raisonnable_. Now, I
+know a woman made up of holy bread whom St. Paul and St. Peter are
+fighting to have next them when she goes to Paradise. Her name is Mme.
+Bidoux, and she sells cabbages and asparagus and charcoal at No. 213
+bis, Rue Saint-Honoré. She will arrange our little affair. Bocardon,
+will you have madame's trunks sent to that address?"
+
+He gave his arm to Fleurette, and walked out of the hotel, with serene
+confidence in the powers of the sainted Mme. Bidoux. Fleurette
+accompanied him unquestioningly. Of course she might have said: "If you
+hold negotiable security from my husband to the amount of four thousand
+francs, why should I exchange the comforts of the hotel for the doubtful
+accommodation of the sainted Mme. Bidoux who sells cabbages?" But I
+repeat that Fleurette was a simple soul who took for granted the wisdom
+of so flamboyant and virile a creature as Aristide Pujol.
+
+Away up at the top of No. 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honoré, was a little
+furnished room to let, and there Aristide installed his sacred charge.
+Mme. Bidoux, who, as she herself maintained, would have cut herself into
+four pieces for Aristide--did he not save her dog's life? Did he not
+marry her daughter to the brigadier of gendarmes (_sale voyou!_), who
+would otherwise have left her lamenting? Was he not the most wonderful
+of God's creatures?--Mme. Bidoux, although not quite appreciating
+Aristide's quixotic delicacy, took the forlorn and fragile wisp of
+misery to her capacious bosom. She made her free of the cabbages and
+charcoal. She provided her, at a risible charge, with succulent meals.
+She told her tales of her father and mother, of her neighbours, of the
+domestic differences between the concierge and his wife (soothing idyll
+for an Ariadne!), of the dirty thief of a brigadier of gendarmes, of her
+bodily ailments--her body was so large that they were many; of the
+picturesque death, through apoplexy, of the late M. Bidoux; the brave
+woman, in short, gave her of her heart's best. As far as human hearts
+could provide a bed for Fleurette, that bed was of roses. As a matter of
+brutal fact, it was narrow and nubbly, and the little uncarpeted room
+was ten feet by seven; but to provide it Aristide went to his own bed
+hungry. And if the bed of a man's hunger is not to be accounted as one
+of roses, there ought to be a vote for the reduction of the Recording
+Angel's salary.
+
+It must not be imagined that Fleurette thought the bed hard. Her bed of
+life from childhood had been nubbly. She never dreamed of complaining of
+her little room under the stars, and she sat among the cabbages like a
+tired lily, quite contented with her material lot. But she drooped and
+drooped, and the cough returned and shook her; and Aristide, realizing
+the sacredness of his charge, became a prey to anxious terrors.
+
+"Mère Bidoux," said he, "she must have lots of good, nourishing, tender,
+underdone beef, good fillets, and _entrecôtes saignantes_."
+
+Mme. Bidoux sighed. She had a heart, but she also had a pocket which,
+like Aristide's, was not over-filled. "That costs dear, my poor friend,"
+she said.
+
+"What does it matter what it costs? It is I who provide," said Aristide,
+grandly.
+
+And Aristide gave up tobacco and coffee and the mild refreshment at
+cafés essential to the existence of every Frenchman, and degraded his
+soul by taking half-franc tips from tourists--a source of income which,
+as Director, M. le Directeur, Herr Direktor of the Agence Pujol, he had
+hitherto scorned haughtily--in order to provide Fleurette with underdone
+beefsteaks.
+
+All his leisure he devoted to her. She represented something that
+hitherto had not come into his life--something delicate, tender,
+ethereal, something of woman that was exquisitely adorable, apart from
+the flesh. Once, as he was sitting in the little shop, she touched his
+temple lightly with her fingers.
+
+"Ah, you are good to me, Aristide."
+
+He felt a thrill such as no woman's touch had ever caused to pass
+through him--far, far sweeter, cleaner, purer. If the _bon Dieu_ could
+have given her to him then and there to be his wife, what bond could
+have been holier? But he had bound himself by a sacred obligation. His
+friend on his return should find him loyal.
+
+"Who could help being good to you, little Fleurette?" said he. "Even an
+Apache would not tread on a lily of the valley!"
+
+"But you put me in water and tend me so carefully."
+
+"So that you can be fresh whenever the dear Reginald comes back."
+
+She sighed. "Tell me what I can do for you, my good Aristide."
+
+"Keep well and happy and be a valiant little woman," said he.
+
+Fleurette tried hard to be valiant; but the effort exhausted her
+strength. As the days went on, even Aristide's inexhaustible
+conversation failed to distract her from brooding. She lost the trick of
+laughter. In the evenings, when he was most with her, she would sit,
+either in the shop or in the little room at the back, her blue childish
+eyes fixed on him wistfully. At first he tried to lure her into the gay
+street; but walking tired her. He encouraged her to sit outside on the
+pavement of the Rue Saint-Honoré and join with Mme. Bidoux in the gossip
+of neighbours; but she listened to them with uncomprehending ears. In
+despair Aristide, to coax a smile from her lips, practised his many
+queer accomplishments. He conjured with cards; he juggled with oranges;
+he had a mountebank's trick of putting one leg round his neck; he
+imitated the voices of cats and pigs and ducks, till Mme. Bidoux held
+her sides with mirth. He spent time and thought in elaborating what he
+called _bonnes farces_, such as dressing himself up in Mme. Bidoux's
+raiment and personifying a crabbed customer.
+
+Fleurette smiled but listlessly at all these comicalities.
+
+One day she was taken ill. A doctor, summoned, said many learned words
+which Aristide and Mme. Bidoux tried hard to understand.
+
+"But, after all, what is the matter with her?"
+
+ [Illustration: ARISTIDE PRACTISED HIS MANY QUEER ACCOMPLISHMENTS]
+
+"She has no strength to struggle. She wants happiness."
+
+"Can you tell me the druggist's where that can be procured?" asked
+Aristide.
+
+The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "I tell you the truth. It is one of
+those pulmonary cases. Happy, she will live; unhappy, she will die."
+
+"My poor Mme. Bidoux, what is to be done?" asked Aristide, after the
+doctor had gone off with his modest fee. "How are we to make her happy?"
+
+"If only she could have news of her husband!" replied Mme. Bidoux.
+
+Aristide's anxieties grew heavier. It was November, when knickerbockered
+and culture-seeking tourists no longer fill the cheap hotels of Paris.
+The profits of the Agence Pujol dwindled. Aristide lived on bread and
+cheese, and foresaw the time when cheese would be a sinful luxury.
+Meanwhile Fleurette had her nourishing food, and grew more like the
+ghost of a lily every day. But her eyes followed Aristide, wherever he
+went in her presence, as if he were the god of her salvation.
+
+One day Aristide, with an unexpected franc or two in his pocket,
+stopped in front of a _bureau de tabac_. A brown packet of caporal and
+a book of cigarette-papers--a cigarette rolled--how good it would be!
+He hesitated, and his glance fell on a collection of foreign stamps
+exposed in the window. Among them were twelve Honduras stamps all
+postmarked. He stared at them, fascinated.
+
+"_Mon brave Aristide!_" he cried. "If the _bon Dieu_ does not send you
+these vibrating inspirations, it is because you yourself have already
+conceived them!"
+
+He entered the shop and emerged, not with caporal and cigarette-papers,
+but with the twelve Honduras stamps.
+
+That night he sat up in his little bedroom at No. 213 bis, Rue
+Saint-Honoré, until his candle failed, inditing a letter in English to
+Fleurette. At the head of his paper he wrote "Hotel Rosario, Honduras."
+And at the end of the letter he signed the name of Reginald Batterby.
+Where Honduras was, he had but a vague idea. For Fleurette, at any rate,
+it would be somewhere at the other end of the world, and she would not
+question any want of accuracy in local detail. Just before the light
+went out he read the letter through with great pride. Batterby alluded
+to the many letters he had posted from remote parts of the globe, gave
+glowing forecasts of the fortune that Honduras had in store for him,
+reminded her that he had placed sufficient funds for her maintenance in
+the hands of Aristide Pujol, and assured her that the time was not far
+off when she would be summoned to join her devoted husband.
+
+"Mme. Bidoux was right," said he, before going to sleep. "This is the
+only way to make her happy."
+
+The next day Fleurette received the letter. The envelope bore the
+postmarked Honduras stamp. It had been rubbed on the dusty pavement to
+take off the newness. It was in her husband's handwriting. There was no
+mistake about it--it was a letter from Honduras.
+
+"Are you happier now, little doubting female St. Thomas that you are?"
+cried Aristide when she had told him the news.
+
+She smiled at him out of grateful eyes, and touched his hand.
+
+"Much happier, _mon bon ami_," she said, gently.
+
+Later in the day she handed him a letter addressed to Batterby. It had
+no stamp.
+
+"Will you post this for me, Aristide?"
+
+Aristide put the letter in his pocket and turned sharply away, lest she
+should see a sudden rush of tears. He had not counted on this innocent
+trustfulness. He went to his room. The poor little letter! He had not
+the heart to destroy it. No; he would keep it till Batterby came; it was
+not his to destroy. So he threw it into a drawer.
+
+Having once begun the deception, however, he thought it necessary to
+continue. Every week, therefore, he invented a letter from Batterby. To
+interest her he drew upon his Provençal imagination. He described
+combats with crocodiles, lion-hunts, feasts with terrific savages from
+the interior, who brought their lady wives chastely clad in petticoats
+made out of human teeth; he drew pictures of the town, a kind of
+palm-shaded Paris by the sea, where one ate ortolans and oysters as big
+as soup-plates, and where Chinamen with pigtails rode about the streets
+on camels. It was not a correct description of Honduras, but, all the
+same, an exotic atmosphere stimulating and captivating rose from the
+pages. With this it was necessary to combine expressions of affection.
+At first it was difficult. Essential delicacy restrained him. He had
+also to keep in mind Batterby's vernacular. To address Fleurette,
+impalpable creation of fairyland, as "old girl" was particularly
+distasteful. By degrees, however, the artist prevailed. And then at last
+the man himself took to forgetting the imaginary writer and poured out
+words of love, warm, true, and passionate.
+
+And every week Fleurette would smile and tell him the wondrous news, and
+would put into his hands an unstamped letter to post, which he, with a
+wrench of the heart, would add to the collection in the drawer.
+
+Once she said, diffidently, with an unwonted blush and her pale blue
+eyes swimming: "I write English so badly. Won't you read the letter and
+correct my mistakes?"
+
+But Aristide laughed and licked the flap of the envelope and closed it.
+"What has love to do with spelling and grammar? The good Reginald would
+prefer your bad English to all the turned phrases of the Académie
+Française."
+
+"It is as you like, Aristide," said Fleurette, with wistful eyes.
+
+Yet, in spite of the weekly letters, Fleurette continued to droop. The
+winter came, and Fleurette was no longer able to stay among the cabbages
+of Mme. Bidoux. She lay on her bed in the little room, ten feet by
+seven, away, away at the top of the house in the Rue Saint Honoré. The
+doctor, informed of her comparative happiness, again shrugged his
+shoulders. There was nothing more to be done.
+
+"She is dying, monsieur, for want of strength to live."
+
+Then Aristide went about with a great heartache. Fleurette would die;
+she would never see the man she loved again. What would he say when he
+returned and learned the tragic story? He would not even know that
+Aristide, loving her, had been loyal to him. When the Director of the
+Agence Pujol personally conducted the clients of the Hôtel du Soleil et
+de l'Ecosse to the Grand Trianon and pointed out the bed of the Empress
+Josephine he nearly broke down.
+
+"What is the Empress doing now?"
+
+What was Fleurette doing now? Going to join the Empress in the world of
+shadows.
+
+The tourists talked after the manner of their kind.
+
+"She must have found the bed very hard, poor dear."
+
+"Give me an iron bedstead and a good old spring mattress."
+
+"Ah, but, my dear sir, you forget. The Empress's bed was slung on the
+back of tame panthers which Napoleon brought from Egypt."
+
+It was hard to jest convincingly to the knickerbockered with death in
+one's soul.
+
+"Most belovèd little Flower," ran the last letter that Fleurette
+received, "I have just had a cable from Aristide saying that you are
+very ill. I will come to you as soon as I can. _Ces petits yeux de
+pervenche_--I am learning your language here, you see--haunt me day and
+night ..." etcetera, etcetera.
+
+Aristide went up to her room with a great bunch of chrysanthemums. The
+letter peeped from under the pillow. Fleurette was very weak. Mme.
+Bidoux, who, during Fleurette's illness, had allowed her green grocery
+business to be personally conducted to the deuce by a youth of sixteen
+very much in love with the lady who sold sausages and other
+_charcuterie_ next door, had spread out the fortune-telling cards on
+the bed and was prophesying mendaciously. Fleurette took the flowers
+and clasped them to her bosom.
+
+"No letter for _ce cher Reginald_?"
+
+She shook her head. "I can write no more," she whispered.
+
+She closed her eyes. Presently she said, in a low voice:--
+
+"Aristide--if you kiss me, I think I can go to sleep."
+
+He bent down to kiss her forehead. A fragile arm twined itself about his
+neck and he kissed her on the lips.
+
+"She is sleeping," said Mme. Bidoux, after a while.
+
+Aristide tiptoed out of the room.
+
+And so died Fleurette. Aristide borrowed money from the kind-hearted
+Bocardon for a beautiful funeral, and Mme. Bidoux and Bocardon and a few
+neighbours and himself saw her laid to rest. When they got back to the
+Rue Saint Honoré he told Mme. Bidoux about the letters. She wept and
+clasped him, weeping too, in her kind, fat old arms.
+
+The next evening Aristide, coming back from his day's work at the Hôtel
+du Soleil et de l'Ecosse, was confronted in the shop by Mme. Bidoux,
+hands on broad hips.
+
+"_Tiens, mon petit_," she said, without preliminary greeting. "You are
+an angel. I knew it. But that a man's an angel is no reason for his
+being an imbecile. Read this."
+
+She plucked a paper from her apron pocket and thrust it into his hand.
+He read it, and blinked in amazement.
+
+"Where did you get this, Mère Bidoux?"
+
+"Where I got many more. In your drawer. The letters you were saving for
+this infamous scoundrel. I wanted to know what she had written to him."
+
+"Mère Bidoux!" cried Aristide. "Those letters were sacred!"
+
+"Bah!" said Mme. Bidoux, unabashed. "There is nothing sacred to a sapper
+or an old grandmother who loves an imbecile. I have read the letters,
+_et voilà, et voilà, et voilà!_" And she emptied her pockets of all the
+letters, minus the envelopes, that Fleurette had written.
+
+And, after one swift glance at the first letter, Aristide had no
+compunction in reading. They were all addressed to himself.
+
+They were very short, ill-written in a poor little uncultivated hand.
+But they all contained one message, that of her love for Aristide.
+Whatever illusions she may have had concerning Batterby had soon
+vanished. She knew, with the unerring instinct of woman, that he had
+betrayed and deserted her. Aristide's pious fraud had never deceived her
+for a second. Too gentle, too timid to let him know what was in her
+heart, she had written the secret patiently week after week, hoping
+every time that curiosity, or pity, or something--she knew not
+what--would induce him to open the idle letter, and wondering in her
+simple peasant's soul at the delicacy that caused him to refrain. Once
+she had boldly given him the envelope unclosed.
+
+ [Illustration: HE READ IT, AND BLINKED IN AMAZEMENT]
+
+"She died for want of love, _parbleu_," said Aristide, "and there was
+mine quivering in my heart and trembling on my lips all the time.... She
+had _des yeux de pervenche_. Ah! _nom d'un chien!_ It is only with me
+that Providence plays such tricks."
+
+He walked to the window and looked out into the grey street. Presently I
+heard him murmuring the words of the old French song:--
+
+    Elle est morte en février;
+        Pauvre Colinette!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE MIRACLE
+
+
+You have seen how Aristide, by attaching himself to the Hôtel du Soleil
+et de l'Ecosse as a kind of glorified courier, had founded the Agence
+Pujol. As he, personally, was the Agence, and the Agence was he, it
+happened that when he was not in attendance at the hotel, the Agence
+faded into space, and when he made his appearance in the vestibule and
+hung up his placard by the bureau, the Agence at once burst again into
+the splendour of existence. Apparently the fitful career of the Agence
+Pujol lasted some years. Whenever a chance of more remunerative
+employment turned up, Aristide took it and dissolved the Agence.
+Whenever outrageous fortune chivied him with slings and arrows penniless
+to Paris, there was always the Agence waiting to be resuscitated.
+
+It was during one of these periodic flourishings of the Agence Pujol
+that Aristide met the Ducksmiths.
+
+Business was slack, few guests were at the hotel, and of those few none
+desired to be personally conducted to the Louvre or Notre Dame or the
+monument in the Place de la Bastille. They mostly wore the placid
+expression of folks engaged in business affairs instead of the worried
+look of pleasure-seekers.
+
+"My good Bocardon," said Aristide, lounging by the bureau and addressing
+his friend the manager, "this is becoming desperate. In another minute I
+shall take you out by main force and show you the Pont Neuf."
+
+At that moment the door of the stuffy salon opened, and a travelling
+Briton, whom Aristide had not seen before, advanced to the bureau and
+inquired his way to the Madeleine. Aristide turned on him like a flash.
+
+"Sir," said he, extracting documents from his pockets with lightning
+rapidity, "nothing would give me greater pleasure than to conduct you
+thither. My card. My tariff. My advertisement." He pointed to the
+placard. "I am the managing director of the Agence Pujol, under the
+special patronage of this hotel. I undertake all travelling
+arrangements, from the Moulin Rouge to the Pyramids, and, as you see, my
+charges are moderate."
+
+The Briton, holding the documents in a pudgy hand, looked at the
+swift-gestured director with portentous solemnity. Then, with equal
+solemnity, he looked at Bocardon.
+
+"Monsieur Ducksmith," said the latter, "you can repose every confidence
+in Monsieur Aristide Pujol."
+
+"Umph!" said Mr. Ducksmith.
+
+After another solemn inspection of Aristide, he stuck a pair of
+gold-rimmed glasses on his fleshy nose and perused the documents. He was
+a fat, heavy man of about fifty years of age, and his scanty hair was
+turning grey. His puffy cheeks hung jowl-like, giving him the appearance
+of some odd dog--a similarity greatly intensified by the eye-sockets,
+the lower lids of which were dragged down in the middle, showing the red
+like a bloodhound's; but here the similarity ended, for the man's eyes,
+dull and blue, had the unspeculative fixity of a rabbit's. His mouth,
+small and weak, dribbled away at the corners into the jowls which, in
+their turn, melted into two or three chins. He was decently dressed in
+grey tweeds, and wore a diamond ring on his little finger.
+
+"Umph!" said he, at last; and went back to the salon.
+
+As soon as the door closed behind him Aristide sprang into an attitude
+of indignation.
+
+"Did you ever see such a bear! If I ever saw a bigger one I would eat
+him without salt or pepper. _Mais nom d'un chien_, such people ought to
+be made into sausages!"
+
+"_Flègme britannique!_" laughed Bocardon.
+
+Half an hour passed, and Mr. Ducksmith made no reappearance from the
+salon. In the forlorn hope of a client Aristide went in after him. He
+found Mr. Ducksmith, glasses on nose, reading a newspaper, and a plump,
+black-haired lady, with an expressionless face, knitting a grey woollen
+sock. Why they should be spending their first morning--and a crisp,
+sunny morning, too--in Paris in the murky staleness of this awful little
+salon, Aristide could not imagine. As he entered, Mr. Ducksmith regarded
+him vacantly over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses.
+
+"I have looked in," said Aristide, with his ingratiating smile, "to see
+whether you are ready to go to the Madeleine."
+
+"Madeleine?" the lady inquired, softly, pausing in her knitting.
+
+"Madame," Aristide came forward, and, hand on heart, made her the lowest
+of bows. "Madame, have I the honour of speaking to Madame Ducksmith?
+Enchanted, madame, to make your acquaintance," he continued, after a
+grunt from Mr. Ducksmith had assured him of the correctness of his
+conjecture. "I am Monsieur Aristide Pujol, director of the Agence Pujol,
+and my poor services are absolutely at your disposal."
+
+He drew himself up, twisted his moustache, and met her eyes--they were
+rather sad and tired--with the roguish mockery of his own. She turned to
+her husband.
+
+"Are you thinking of going to the Madeleine, Bartholomew?"
+
+"I am, Henrietta," said he. "I have decided to do it. And I have also
+decided to put ourselves in the charge of this gentleman. Mrs. Ducksmith
+and I are accustomed to all the conveniences of travel--I may say that
+we are great travellers--and I leave it to you to make the necessary
+arrangements. I prefer to travel at so much per head per day."
+
+He spoke in a wheezy, solemn monotone, from which all elements of life
+and joy seemed to have been eliminated. His wife's voice, though softer
+in timbre, was likewise devoid of colour.
+
+"My husband finds that it saves us from responsibilities," she remarked.
+
+"And over-charges, and the necessity of learning foreign languages,
+which at our time of life would be difficult. During all our travels we
+have not been to Paris before, owing to the impossibility of finding a
+personally-conducted tour of an adequate class."
+
+"Then, my dear sir," cried Aristide, "it is Providence itself that has
+put you in the way of the Agence Pujol. I will now conduct you to the
+Madeleine without the least discomfort or danger."
+
+"Put on your hat, Henrietta," said Mr. Ducksmith, "while this gentleman
+and I discuss terms."
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith gathered up her knitting and retired, Aristide dashing
+to the door to open it for her. This gallantry surprised her ever so
+little, for a faint flush came into her cheek and the shadow of a smile
+into her eyes.
+
+"I wish you to understand, Mr. Pujol," said Mr. Ducksmith, "that being,
+I may say, a comparatively rich man, I can afford to pay for certain
+luxuries; but I made a resolution many years ago, which has stood me in
+good stead during my business life, that I would never be cheated. You
+will find me liberal but just."
+
+He was as good as his word. Aristide, who had never in his life
+exploited another's wealth to his own advantage, suggested certain
+terms, on the basis of so much per head per day, which Mr. Ducksmith
+declared, with a sigh of relief, to be perfectly satisfactory.
+
+"Perhaps," said he, after further conversation, "you will be good enough
+to schedule out a month's railway tour through France, and give me an
+inclusive estimate for the three of us. As I say, Mrs. Ducksmith and I
+are great travellers--we have been to Norway, to Egypt, to Morocco and
+the Canaries, to the Holy Land, to Rome, and lovely Lucerne--but we find
+that attention to the trivial detail of travel militates against our
+enjoyment."
+
+"My dear sir," said Aristide, "trust in me, and your path and that of
+the charming Mrs. Ducksmith will be strewn with roses."
+
+Whereupon Mrs. Ducksmith appeared, arrayed for walking out, and
+Aristide, having ordered a cab, drove with them to the Madeleine. They
+alighted in front of the majestic flight of steps. Mr. Ducksmith stared
+at the classical portico supported on its Corinthian columns with his
+rabbit-like, unspeculative gaze--he had those filmy blue eyes that never
+seem to wink--and after a moment or two turned away.
+
+"Umph!" said he.
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith, dutiful and silent, turned away also.
+
+"This sacred edifice," Aristide began, in his best cicerone manner, "was
+built, after a classic model, by the great Napoleon, as a Temple of
+Fame. It was afterwards used as a church. You will observe--and, if you
+care to, you can count, as a conscientious American lady did last
+week--the fifty-six Corinthian columns. You will see they are Corinthian
+by the acanthus leaves on the capitals. For the vulgar, who have no
+architectural knowledge, I have _memoria technica_ for the instant
+recognition of the three orders--Cabbages, Corinthian; horns, Ionic;
+anything else, Doric. We will now mount the steps and inspect the
+interior."
+
+He was dashing off in his eager fashion, when Mr. Ducksmith laid a
+detaining hand on his arm.
+
+"No," said he, solemnly. "I disapprove of Popish interiors. Take us to
+the next place."
+
+ [Illustration: HE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE POINTED OUT THE MARVELS OF KUBLA
+                KHAN'S PLEASURE-DOME TO A COUPLE OF GUINEA-PIGS]
+
+He entered the waiting victoria. His wife meekly followed.
+
+"I suppose the Louvre is the next place?" said Aristide.
+
+"I leave it to you," said Mr. Ducksmith.
+
+Aristide gave the order to the cabman and took the little seat in the
+cab facing his employers. On the way down the Rue Royale and the Rue de
+Rivoli he pointed out the various buildings of interest--Maxim's, the
+Cercle Royal, the Ministère de la Marine, the Hôtel Continental. Two
+expressionless faces, two pairs of unresponsive eyes, met his merry
+glance. He might as well have pointed out the marvels of Kubla Khan's
+pleasure-dome to a couple of guinea-pigs.
+
+The cab stopped at the entrance to the galleries of the Louvre. They
+entered and walked up the great staircase on the turn of which the
+Winged Victory stands, with the wind of God in her vesture, proclaiming
+to each beholder the deathless, ever-soaring, ever-conquering spirit of
+man, and heralding the immortal glories of the souls, wind-swept
+likewise by the wind of God, that are enshrined in the treasure-houses
+beyond.
+
+"There!" said Aristide.
+
+"Umph! No head," said Mr. Ducksmith, passing it by with scarcely a
+glance.
+
+"Would it cost very much to get a new one?" asked Mrs. Ducksmith,
+timidly. She was three or four paces behind her spouse.
+
+"It would cost the blood and tears and laughter of the human race," said
+Aristide.
+
+("That was devilish good, wasn't it?" remarked Aristide, when telling me
+this story. He always took care not to hide his light under the least
+possibility of a bushel.)
+
+The Ducksmiths looked at him in their lacklustre way, and allowed
+themselves to be guided into the picture-galleries, vaguely hearing
+Aristide's comments, scarcely glancing at the pictures, and
+manifesting no sign of interest in anything whatever. From the Louvre
+they drove to Notre Dame, where the same thing happened. The venerable
+pile, standing imperishable amid the vicissitudes of centuries (the
+phrase was that of the director of the Agence Pujol), stirred in their
+bosoms no perceptible emotion. Mr. Ducksmith grunted and declined to
+enter; Mrs. Ducksmith said nothing.
+
+As with pictures and cathedrals, so it was with their food at lunch.
+Beyond a solemn statement to the effect that in their quality of
+practised travellers they made a point of eating the food and drinking
+the wine of the country, Mr. Ducksmith did not allude to the meal. At
+any rate, thought Aristide, they don't clamour for underdone chops and
+tea. So far they were human. Nor did they maintain an awful silence
+during the repast. On the contrary, Mr. Ducksmith loved to talk--in a
+dismal, pompous way--chiefly of British politics. His method of
+discourse was to place himself in the position of those in authority and
+to declare what he would do in any given circumstances. Now, unless the
+interlocutor adopts the same method and declares what _he_ would do,
+conversation is apt to become one-sided. Aristide, having no notion of a
+policy should he find himself exercising the functions of the British
+Chancellor of the Exchequer, cheerfully tried to change the ground of
+debate.
+
+"What would you do, Mr. Ducksmith, if you were King of England?"
+
+"I should try to rule the realm like a Christian statesman," replied Mr.
+Ducksmith.
+
+"I should have a devil of a time!" said Aristide.
+
+"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Ducksmith.
+
+"I should have a--ah, I see--_pardon_. I should----" He looked from
+one paralyzing face to the other, and threw out his arms. "_Parbleu!_"
+said he, "I should decapitate your Mrs. Grundy, and make it compulsory
+for bishops to dance once a week in Trafalgar Square. _Tiens!_ I would
+have it a capital offence for any English cook to prepare hashed
+mutton without a license, and I would banish all the bakers of the
+kingdom to Siberia--ah! your English bread, which you have to eat
+stale so as to avoid a horrible death!--and I would open two hundred
+thousand _cafés_--_mon Dieu!_ how thirsty I have been there!--and I
+would make every English work-girl do her hair properly, and I would
+ordain that everybody should laugh three times a day, under pain of
+imprisonment for life."
+
+"I am afraid, Mr. Pujol," remarked Mr. Ducksmith, seriously, "you would
+not be acting as a constitutional monarch. There is such a thing as the
+British Constitution, which foreigners are bound to admire, even though
+they may not understand."
+
+"To be a king must be a great responsibility," said Mrs. Ducksmith.
+
+"Madame," said Aristide, "you have uttered a profound truth." And to
+himself he murmured, though he should not have done so, "_Nom de Dieu!
+Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"
+
+After lunch they drove to Versailles, which they inspected in the same
+apathetic fashion; then they returned to the hotel, where they
+established themselves for the rest of the day in the airless salon, Mr.
+Ducksmith reading English newspapers and his wife knitting a grey
+woollen sock.
+
+"_Mon vieux!_" said Aristide to Bocardon, "they are people of a
+nightmare. They are automata endowed with the faculty of digestion. _Ce
+sont des gens invraisemblables._"
+
+Paris providing them, apparently, with no entertainment, they started,
+after a couple of days, _Aristide duce et auspice Pujol_, on their
+railway tour through France, to Aristide a pilgrimage of unimaginable
+depression. They began with Chartres, continued with the Châteaux of the
+Loire, and began to work their way south. Nothing that Aristide could do
+roused them from their apathy. They were exasperatingly docile, made few
+complaints, got up, entrained, detrained, fed, excursioned, slept, just
+as they were bidden. But they looked at nothing, enjoyed nothing (save
+perhaps English newspapers and knitting), and uttered nothing by way of
+criticism or appreciation when Aristide attempted to review the wonders
+through which they had passed. They did not care to know the history,
+authentic or Pujolic, of any place they visited; they were impressed by
+no scene of grandeur, no corner of exquisite beauty. To go on and on, in
+a dull, non-sentient way, so long as they were spared all forethought,
+all trouble, all afterthought, seemed to be their ideal of travel.
+Sometimes Aristide, after a fruitless effort to capture their interest,
+would hold his head, wondering whether he or the Ducksmith couple were
+insane. It was a dragon-fly personally conducting two moles through a
+rose-garden.
+
+Once only, during the early part of their journey, did a gleam of
+joyousness pierce the dull glaze of Mr. Ducksmith's eyes. He had
+procured from the bookstall of a station a pile of English newspapers,
+and was reading them in the train, while his wife knitted the
+interminable sock. Suddenly he folded a _Daily Telegraph_, and handed
+it over to Aristide so that he should see nothing but a half-page
+advertisement. The great capitals leaped to Aristide's eyes:--
+
+                 "DUCKSMITH'S DELICATE JAMS."
+
+"I am _the_ Ducksmith," said he. "I started and built up the business.
+When I found that I could retire, I turned it into a limited liability
+company, and now I am free and rich and able to enjoy the advantages of
+foreign travel."
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith started, sighed, and dropped a stitch.
+
+"Did you also make pickles?" asked Aristide.
+
+"I did manufacture pickles, but I made my name in jam. In the trade you
+will find it an honoured one."
+
+"It is that in every nursery in Europe," Aristide declared, with polite
+hyperbole.
+
+"I have done my best to deserve my reputation," said Mr. Ducksmith, as
+impervious to flattery as to impressions of beauty.
+
+"_Pécaïre!_" said Aristide to himself, "how can I galvanize these
+corpses?"
+
+As the soulless days went by this problem grew to be Aristide's main
+solicitude. He felt strangled, choked, borne down by an intolerable
+weight. What could he do to stir their vitality? Should he fire off
+pistols behind them, just to see them jump? But would they jump? Would
+not Mr. Ducksmith merely turn his rabbit-eyes, set in their bloodhound
+sockets, vacantly on him, and assume that the detonations were part of
+the tour's programme? Could he not fill him up with conflicting
+alcohols, and see what inebriety would do for him? But Mr. Ducksmith
+declined insidious potations. He drank only at meal-times, and
+sparingly. Aristide prayed that some Thaïs might come along, cast her
+spell upon him, and induce him to wink. He himself was powerless. His
+raciest stories fell on dull ears; none of his jokes called forth a
+smile. At last, having taken them to nearly all the historic châteaux of
+Touraine, without eliciting one cry of admiration, he gave Mr. Ducksmith
+up in despair and devoted his attention to the lady.
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith parted her smooth black hair in the middle and fastened
+it in a knob at the back of her head. Her clothes were good and new, but
+some desolate dressmaker had contrived to invest them with an air of
+hopeless dowdiness. At her bosom she wore a great brooch, containing
+intertwined locks of a grandfather and grandmother long since defunct.
+Her mind was as drearily equipped as her person. She had a vague idea
+that they were travelling in France; but if Aristide had told her that
+it was Japan she would have meekly accepted the information. She had no
+opinions. Still she was a woman, and Aristide, firm in his conviction
+that when it comes to love-making all women are the same, proceeded
+forthwith to make love to her.
+
+"Madame," said he, one morning--she was knitting in the vestibule of the
+Hôtel du Faisan at Tours, Mr. Ducksmith being engaged, as usual, in the
+salon with his newspapers--"how much more charming that beautiful grey
+dress would be if it had a spot of colour."
+
+His audacious hand placed a deep crimson rose against her corsage, and
+he stood away at arm's length, his head on one side, judging the effect.
+
+"Magnificent! If madame would only do me the honour to wear it."
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith took the flower hesitatingly.
+
+"I'm afraid my husband does not like colour," she said.
+
+"He must be taught," cried Aristide. "You must teach him. I must teach
+him. Let us begin at once. Here is a pin."
+
+He held the pin delicately between finger and thumb, and controlled her
+with his roguish eyes. She took the pin and fixed the rose to her dress.
+
+"I don't know what Mr. Ducksmith will say."
+
+"What he ought to say, madame, is 'Bountiful Providence, I thank Thee
+for giving me such a beautiful wife.'"
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith blushed and, to conceal her face, bent it over her
+resumed knitting. She made woman's time-honoured response.
+
+"I don't think you ought to say such things, Mr. Pujol."
+
+"Ah, madame," said he, lowering his voice; "I have tried not to; but,
+_que voulez-vous_, it was stronger than I. When I see you going about
+like a little grey mouse"--the lady weighed at least twelve stone--"you,
+who ought to be ravishing the eyes of mankind, I feel indignation
+here"--he thumped his chest; "my Provençal heart is stirred. It is
+enough to make one weep."
+
+"I don't quite understand you, Mr. Pujol," she said, dropping stitches
+recklessly.
+
+"Ah, madame," he whispered--and the rascal's whisper on such occasions
+could be very seductive--"that I will never believe."
+
+"I am too old to dress myself up in fine clothes," she murmured.
+
+"That's an illusion," said he, with a wide-flung gesture, "that will
+vanish at the first experiment."
+
+Mr. Ducksmith emerged from the salon, _Daily Telegraph_ in hand. Mrs.
+Ducksmith shot a timid glance at him and the knitting needles clicked
+together nervously. But the vacant eyes of the heavy man seemed no more
+to note the rose on her bosom than they noted any point of beauty in
+landscape or building.
+
+Aristide went away chuckling, highly diverted by the success of his
+first effort. He had touched some hidden springs of feeling. Whatever
+might happen, at any rate, for the remainder of the tour he would not
+have to spend his emotional force in vain attempts to knock sparks out
+of a jelly-fish. He noticed with delight that at dinner that evening
+Mrs. Ducksmith, still wearing the rose, had modified the rigid sweep
+of her hair from the mid-parting. It gave just a wavy hint of
+coquetry. He made her a little bow and whispered, "Charming!"
+Whereupon she coloured and dropped her eyes. And during the meal,
+while Mr. Ducksmith discoursed on bounty-fed sugar, his wife and
+Aristide exchanged, across the table, the glances of conspirators.
+After dinner he approached her.
+
+"Madame, may I have the privilege of showing you the moon of Touraine?"
+
+She laid down her knitting. "Bartholomew, will you come out?"
+
+He looked at her over his glasses and shook his head.
+
+"What is the good of looking at moonshine? The moon itself I have
+already seen."
+
+So Aristide and Mrs. Ducksmith sat by themselves outside the hotel, and
+he expounded to her the beauty of moonlight and its intoxicating effect
+on folks in love.
+
+"Wouldn't you like," said he, "to be lying on that white burnished cloud
+with your beloved kissing your feet?"
+
+"What odd things you think of."
+
+"But wouldn't you?" he insinuated.
+
+Her bosom heaved and swelled on a sigh. She watched the strip of silver
+for a while and then murmured a wistful "Yes."
+
+"I can tell you of many odd things," said Aristide. "I can tell you how
+flowers sing and what colour there is in the notes of birds. And how a
+cornfield laughs, and how the face of a woman who loves can outdazzle
+the sun. _Chère madame_," he went on, after a pause, touching her little
+plump hand, "you have been hungering for beauty and thirsting for
+sympathy all your life. Isn't that so?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"You have always been misunderstood."
+
+A tear fell. Our rascal saw the glistening drop with peculiar
+satisfaction. Poor Mrs. Ducksmith! It was a child's game. _Enfin_,
+what woman could resist him? He had, however, one transitory qualm of
+conscience, for, with all his vagaries, Aristide was a kindly and
+honest man. Was it right to disturb those placid depths? Was it right
+to fill this woman with romantic aspirations that could never be
+gratified? He himself had not the slightest intention of playing
+Lothario and of wrecking the peace of the Ducksmith household. The
+realization of the saint-like purity of his aims reassured him. When
+he wanted to make love to a woman, _pour tout de bon_, it would not be
+to Mrs. Ducksmith.
+
+"Bah!" said he to himself. "I am doing a noble and disinterested act. I
+am restoring sight to the blind. I am giving life to one in a state of
+suspended animation. _Tron de l'Air!_ I am playing the part of a
+soul-reviver! And, _parbleu!_ it isn't Jean or Jacques that can do that.
+It takes an Aristide Pujol!"
+
+So, having persuaded himself, in his Southern way, that he was executing
+an almost divine mission, he continued, with a zest now sharpened by an
+approving conscience, to revive Mrs. Ducksmith's soul.
+
+The poor lady, who had suffered the blighting influence of Mr. Ducksmith
+for twenty years with never a ray of counteracting warmth from the
+outside, expanded like a flower to the sun under the soul-reviving
+process. Day by day she exhibited some fresh timid coquetry in dress and
+manner. Gradually she began to respond to Aristide's suggestions of
+beauty in natural scenery and exquisite building. On the ramparts of
+Angoulême, daintiest of towns in France, she gazed at the smiling
+valleys of the Charente and the Son stretching away below, and of her
+own accord touched his arm lightly and said: "How beautiful!" She
+appealed to her husband.
+
+"Umph!" said he.
+
+Once more (it had become a habit) she exchanged glances with Aristide.
+He drew her a little farther along, under pretext of pointing out the
+dreamy sweep of the Charente.
+
+"If he appreciates nothing at all, why on earth does he travel?"
+
+Her eyelids fluttered upwards for a fraction of a second.
+
+"It's his mania," she said. "He can never rest at home. He must always
+be going on--on."
+
+"How can you endure it?" he asked.
+
+She sighed. "It is better now that you can teach me how to look at
+things."
+
+"Good!" thought Aristide. "When I leave them she can teach him to look
+at things and revive his soul. Truly I deserve a halo."
+
+As Mr. Ducksmith appeared to be entirely unperceptive of his wife's
+spiritual expansion, Aristide grew bolder in his apostolate. He
+complimented Mrs. Ducksmith to his face. He presented her daily with
+flowers. He scarcely waited for the heavy man's back to be turned to
+make love to her. If she did not believe that she was the most
+beautiful, the most ravishing, the most delicate-souled woman in the
+world, it was through no fault of Aristide. Mr. Ducksmith went his
+pompous, unseeing way. At every stopping-place stacks of English
+daily papers awaited him. Sometimes, while Aristide was showing them
+the sights of a town--to which, by the way, he insisted on being
+conducted--he would extract a newspaper from his pocket and read with
+dull and dogged stupidity. Once Aristide caught him reading the
+advertisements for cooks and housemaids. In these circumstances Mrs.
+Ducksmith spiritually expanded at an alarming rate; and,
+correspondingly, dwindled the progress of Mr. Ducksmith's sock.
+
+They arrived at Perigueux, in Perigord, land of truffles, one morning,
+in time for lunch. Towards the end of the meal the _maître d'hôtel_
+helped them to great slabs of _pâté de foie gras_, made in the
+house--most of the hotel-keepers in Perigord make _pâté de foie gras_,
+both for home consumption and for exportation--and waited expectant of
+their appreciation. He was not disappointed. Mr. Ducksmith, after a
+hesitating glance at the first mouthful, swallowed it, greedily devoured
+his slab, and, after pointing to his empty plate, said, solemnly:--
+
+"_Plou._"
+
+Like Oliver, he asked for more.
+
+"_Tiens!_" thought Aristide, astounded. "Is he, too, developing a soul?"
+
+But, alas! there were no signs of it when they went their dreary round
+of the town in the usual ramshackle open cab. The cathedral of
+Saint-Front, extolled by Aristide and restored by Abadie--a terrible
+fellow who has capped with tops of pepper-castors every pre-Gothic
+building in France--gave him no thrill; nor did the picturesque,
+tumble-down ancient buildings on the banks of the Dordogne, nor the
+delicate Renaissance façades in the cool, narrow Rue du Lys.
+
+"We will now go back to the hotel," said Mr. Ducksmith.
+
+"But have we seen it all?" asked his wife.
+
+"By no means," said Aristide.
+
+"We will go back to the hotel," repeated her husband, in his
+expressionless tones. "I have seen enough of Perigueux."
+
+This was final. They drove back to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith, without a
+word, went straight into the salon, leaving Aristide and his wife
+standing in the vestibule.
+
+"And you, madame," said Aristide; "are you going to sacrifice the glory
+of God's sunshine to the manufacture of woollen socks?"
+
+She smiled--she had caught the trick at last--and said, in happy
+submission: "What would you have me do?"
+
+With one hand he clasped her arm; with the other, in a superb gesture,
+he indicated the sunlit world outside.
+
+"Let us drain together," cried he, "the loveliness of Perigueux to its
+dregs!"
+
+Greatly daring, she followed him. It was a rapturous escapade--the
+first adventure of her life. She turned her comely face to him and he
+saw smiles round her lips and laughter in her eyes. Aristide, worker
+of miracles, strutted by her side choke-full of vanity. They wandered
+through the picturesque streets of the old town with the gaiety of
+truant children, peeping through iron gateways into old courtyards,
+venturing their heads into the murk of black stairways, talking (on
+the part of Aristide) with mothers who nursed chuckling babes on their
+doorsteps, crossing the thresholds, hitherto taboo, of churches, and
+meeting the mystery of coloured glass and shadows and the heavy smell
+of incense.
+
+Her hand was on his arm when they entered the flagged courtyard of an
+ancient palace, a stately medley of the centuries, with wrought
+ironwork in the balconies, tourelles, oriels, exquisite Renaissance
+ornaments on architraves, and a great central Gothic doorway, with
+great window-openings above, through which was visible the stone
+staircase of honour leading to the upper floors. In a corner stood a
+mediæval well, the sides curiously carved. One side of the courtyard
+blazed in sunshine, the other lay cool and grey in shadow. Not a human
+form or voice troubled the serenity of the spot. On a stone bench
+against the shady wall Aristide and Mrs. Ducksmith sat down to rest.
+
+"_Voilà!_" said Aristide. "Here one can suck in all the past like an
+omelette. They had the feeling for beauty, those old fellows."
+
+"I have wasted twenty years of my life," said Mrs. Ducksmith, with a
+sigh. "Why didn't I meet someone like you when I was young? Ah, you
+don't know what my life has been, Mr. Pujol."
+
+"Why not Aristide when we are alone? Why not, Henriette?"
+
+He too had the sense of adventure, and his eyes were more than usually
+compelling and his voice more seductive. For some reason or other,
+undivined by Aristide--over-excitement of nerves, perhaps--she burst
+into tears.
+
+"_Henriette! Henriette, ne pleurez pas._"
+
+His arm crept round her--he knew not how; her head sank on his shoulder,
+she knew not why--faithlessness to her lord was as far from her thoughts
+as murder or arson; but for one poor little moment in a lifetime it is
+good to weep on someone's shoulder and to have someone's sympathetic arm
+around one's waist.
+
+"_Pauvre petite femme!_ And is it love she is pining for?"
+
+She sobbed; he lifted her chin with his free hand--and what less could
+mortal apostle do?--he kissed her on her wet cheek.
+
+A bellow like that of an angry bull caused them to start asunder. They
+looked up, and there was Mr. Ducksmith within a few yards of them, his
+face aflame, his rabbit's eyes on fire with rage. He advanced, shook his
+fists in their faces.
+
+"I've caught you! At last, after twenty years, I've caught you!"
+
+"Monsieur," cried Aristide, starting up, "allow me to explain."
+
+He swept Aristide aside like an intercepting willow-branch, and poured
+forth a torrent of furious speech upon his wife.
+
+"I have hated you for twenty years. Day by day I have hated you more.
+I've watched you, watched you, watched you! But, you sly jade, you've
+been too clever for me till now. Yes; I followed you from the hotel. I
+dogged you. I foresaw what would happen. Now the end has come. I've
+hated you for twenty years--ever since you first betrayed me----"
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith, who had sat with overwhelmed head in her hands, started
+bolt upright, and looked at him like one thunderstruck.
+
+"I betrayed you?" she gasped, in bewilderment. "My God! When? How? What
+do you mean?"
+
+He laughed--for the first time since Aristide had known him--but it was
+a ghastly laugh, that made the jowls of his cheeks spread horribly to
+his ears; and again he flooded the calm, stately courtyard with the
+raging violence of words. The veneer of easy life fell from him. He
+became the low-born, petty tradesman, using the language of the hands
+of his jam factory. No, he had never told her. He had awaited his
+chance. Now he had found it. He called her names....
+
+ [Illustration: "I'VE CAUGHT YOU! AT LAST, AFTER TWENTY YEARS, I'VE
+                CAUGHT YOU!"]
+
+Aristide interposed, his Southern being athrob with the insults heaped
+upon the woman.
+
+"Say that again, monsieur," he shouted, "and I will take you up in my
+arms like a sheep and throw you down that well."
+
+The two men glared at one another, Aristide standing bent, with crooked
+fingers, ready to spring at the other's throat. The woman threw herself
+between them.
+
+"For Heaven's sake," she cried, "listen to me! I have done no wrong. I
+have done no wrong now--I never did you wrong, so help me God!"
+
+Mr. Ducksmith laughed again, and his laugh re-echoed round the quiet
+walls and up the vast staircase of honour.
+
+"You'd be a fool not to say it. But now I've done with you. Here, you,
+sir. Take her away--do what you like with her; I'll divorce her. I'll
+give you a thousand pounds never to see her again."
+
+"_Goujat! Triple goujat!_" cried Aristide, more incensed than ever at
+this final insult.
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith, deadly white, swayed sideways, and Aristide caught her
+in his arms and dragged her to the stone bench. The fat, heavy man
+looked at them for a second, laughed again, and sped through the
+_porte-cochère_. Mrs. Ducksmith quickly recovered from her fainting
+attack, and gently pushed the solicitous Aristide away.
+
+"Merciful Heaven!" she murmured. "What is to become of me?"
+
+The last person to answer the question was Aristide. For once in his
+adventurous life resource failed him. He stared at the woman for whom he
+cared not the snap of a finger, and who, he knew, cared not the snap of
+a finger for him, aghast at the havoc he had wrought. If he had set out
+to arouse emotion in these two sluggish breasts he had done so with a
+vengeance. He had thought he was amusing himself with a toy cannon, and
+he had fired a charge of dynamite.
+
+He questioned her almost stupidly--for a man in the comic mask does not
+readily attune himself to tragedy. She answered with the desolate
+frankness of a lost soul. And then the whole meaning--or the lack of
+meaning--of their inanimate lives was revealed to him. Absolute
+estrangement had followed the birth of their child nearly twenty years
+ago. The child had died after a few weeks. Since then he saw--and the
+generous blood of his heart froze as the vision came to him--that the
+vulgar, half-sentient, rabbit-eyed bloodhound of a man had nursed an
+unexpressed, dull, implacable resentment against the woman. It did not
+matter that the man's suspicion was vain. To Aristide the woman's blank
+amazement at the preposterous charge was proof enough; to the man the
+thing was real. For nearly twenty years the man had suffered the cancer
+to eat away his vitals, and he had watched and watched his blameless
+wife, until now, at last, he had caught her in this folly. No wonder he
+could not rest at home; no wonder he was driven, Io-wise, on and on,
+although he hated travel and all its discomforts, knew no word of a
+foreign language, knew no scrap of history, had no sense of beauty, was
+utterly ignorant, as every single one of our expensively State-educated
+English lower classes is, of everything that matters on God's earth; no
+wonder that, in the unfamiliarity of foreign lands, feeling as helpless
+as a ballet-dancer in a cavalry charge, he looked to Cook, or Lunn, or
+the Agence Pujol to carry him through his uninspired pilgrimage. For
+twenty years he had shown no sign of joy or sorrow or anger, scarcely
+even of pleasure or annoyance. A tortoise could not have been more
+unemotional. The unsuspected volcano had slumbered. To-day came
+disastrous eruption. And what was a mere laughing, crying child of
+a man like Aristide Pujol in front of a Ducksmith volcano?
+
+"What is to become of me?" wailed Mrs. Ducksmith again.
+
+"_Ma foi!_" said Aristide, with a shrug of his shoulders. "What's going
+to become of anyone? Who can foretell what will happen in a minute's
+time? _Tiens!_" he added, kindly laying his hand on the sobbing woman's
+shoulder. "Be comforted, my poor Henriette. Just as nothing in this
+world is as good as we hope, so nothing is as bad as we fear. _Voyons!_
+All is not lost yet. We must return to the hotel."
+
+She weepingly acquiesced. They walked through the quiet streets like
+children whose truancy had been discovered and who were creeping back to
+condign punishment at school. When they reached the hotel, Mrs.
+Ducksmith went straight up to the woman's haven, her bedroom.
+
+Aristide tugged at his Vandyke beard in dire perplexity. The situation
+was too pregnant with tragedy for him to run away and leave the pair
+to deal with it as best they could. But what was he to do? He sat down
+in the vestibule and tried to think. The landlord, an unstoppable
+gramophone of garrulity, entering by the street-door and bearing down
+upon him, put him to flight. He, too, sought his bedroom, a cool
+apartment with a balcony outside the French window. On this balcony,
+which stretched along the whole range of first-floor bedrooms, he
+stood for a while, pondering deeply. Then, in an absent way, he
+overstepped the limit of his own room-frontage. A queer sound startled
+him. He paused, glanced through the open window, and there he saw a
+sight which for the moment paralyzed him.
+
+ [Illustration: THERE HE SAW A SIGHT WHICH FOR THE MOMENT PARALYZED HIM]
+
+Recovering command of his muscles, he tiptoed his way back. He
+remembered now that the three rooms adjoined. Next to his was Mr.
+Ducksmith's, and then came Mrs. Ducksmith's. It was Mr. Ducksmith whom
+he had seen. Suddenly his dark face became luminous with laughter, his
+eyes glowed, he threw his hat in the air and danced with glee about the
+room. Having thus worked off the first intoxication of his idea, he
+flung his few articles of attire and toilet necessaries into his bag,
+strapped it, and darted, in his dragon-fly way, into the corridor and
+tapped softly at Mrs. Ducksmith's door. She opened it. He put his finger
+to his lips.
+
+"Madame," he whispered, bringing to bear on her all the mocking
+magnetism of his eyes, "if you value your happiness you will do exactly
+what I tell you. You will obey me implicitly. You must not ask
+questions. Pack your trunks at once. In ten minutes' time the porter
+will come for them."
+
+She looked at him with a scared face. "But what am I going to do?"
+
+"You are going to revenge yourself on your husband."
+
+"But I don't want to," she replied, piteously.
+
+"I do," said he. "Begin, _chère madame_. Every moment is precious."
+
+In a state of stupefied terror the poor woman obeyed him. He saw her
+start seriously on her task and then went downstairs, where he held a
+violent and gesticulatory conversation with the landlord and with a man
+in a green baize apron summoned from some dim lair of the hotel. After
+that he lit a cigarette and smoked feverishly, walking up and down the
+pavement. In ten minutes' time his luggage with that of Mrs. Ducksmith
+was placed upon the cab. Mrs. Ducksmith appeared trembling and
+tear-stained in the vestibule.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The man in the green baize apron knocked at Mr. Ducksmith's door and
+entered the room.
+
+"I have come for the baggage of monsieur," said he.
+
+"Baggage? What baggage?" asked Mr. Ducksmith, sitting up.
+
+"I have descended the baggage of Monsieur Pujol," said the porter in his
+stumbling English, "and of madame, and put them in a cab, and I
+naturally thought monsieur was going away, too."
+
+"Going away!" He rubbed his eyes, glared at the porter, and dashed into
+his wife's room. It was empty. He dashed into Aristide's room. It was
+empty, too. Shrieking inarticulate anathema, he rushed downstairs, the
+man in the green baize apron following at his heels.
+
+Not a soul was in the vestibule. No cab was at the door. Mr. Ducksmith
+turned upon his stupefied satellite.
+
+"Where are they?"
+
+"They must have gone already. I filled the cab. Perhaps Monsieur Pujol
+and madame have gone before to make arrangements."
+
+"Where have they gone to?"
+
+"In Perigueux there is nowhere to go to with baggage but the railway
+station."
+
+A decrepit vehicle with a gaudy linen canopy hove in sight. Mr.
+Ducksmith hailed it as the last victims of the Flood must have hailed
+the Ark. He sprang into it and drove to the station.
+
+There, in the _salle d'attente_, he found Aristide mounting guard over
+his wife's luggage. He hurled his immense bulk at his betrayer.
+
+"You blackguard! Where is my wife?"
+
+"Monsieur," said Aristide, puffing a cigarette, sublimely impudent and
+debonair, "I decline to answer any questions. Your wife is no longer
+your wife. You offered me a thousand pounds to take her away. I am
+taking her away. I did not deign to disturb you for such a trifle as a
+thousand pounds, but, since you are here----"
+
+He smiled engagingly and held out his curved palm. Mr. Ducksmith foamed
+at the corners of the small mouth that disappeared into the bloodhound
+jowls.
+
+"My wife!" he shouted. "If you don't want me to throw you down and
+trample on you."
+
+A band of loungers, railway officials, peasants, and other travellers
+awaiting their trains, gathered round. As the altercation was conducted
+in English, which they did not understand, they could only hope for the
+commencement of physical hostilities.
+
+"My dear sir," said Aristide, "I do not understand you. For twenty years
+you hold an innocent and virtuous woman under an infamous suspicion. She
+meets a sympathetic soul, and you come across her pouring into his ear
+the love and despair of a lifetime. You have more suspicion. You tell me
+you will give me a thousand pounds to go away with her. I take you at
+your word. And now you want to stamp on me. _Ma foi!_ it is not
+reasonable."
+
+Mr. Ducksmith seized him by the lapels of his coat. A gasp of
+expectation went round the crowd. But Aristide recognized an agonized
+appeal in the eyes now bloodshot.
+
+"My wife!" he said hoarsely. "I want my wife. I can't live without her.
+Give her back to me. Where is she?"
+
+"You had better search the station," said Aristide.
+
+The heavy man unconsciously shook him in his powerful grasp, as a child
+might shake a doll.
+
+"Give her to me! Give her to me, I say! She won't regret it."
+
+ [Illustration: MR. DUCKSMITH SEIZED HIM BY THE LAPELS OF HIS COAT]
+
+"You swear that?" asked Aristide, with lightning quickness.
+
+"I swear it, by God! Where is she?"
+
+Aristide disengaged himself, waved his hand airily towards Perigueux,
+and smiled blandly.
+
+"In the salon of the hotel, waiting for you to prostrate yourself on
+your knees before her."
+
+Mr. Ducksmith gripped him by the arm.
+
+"Come back with me. If you're lying I'll kill you."
+
+"The luggage?" queried Aristide.
+
+"Confound the luggage!" said Mr. Ducksmith, and dragged him out of the
+station.
+
+A cab brought them quickly to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith bolted like an
+obese rabbit into the salon. A few moments afterwards Aristide,
+entering, found them locked in each other's arms.
+
+They started alone for England that night, and Aristide returned to the
+directorship of the Agence Pujol. But he took upon himself enormous
+credit for having worked a miracle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"One thing I can't understand," said I, after he had told me the story,
+"is what put this sham elopement into your crazy head. What did you see
+when you looked into Mr. Ducksmith's bedroom?"
+
+"Ah, _mon vieux_, I did not tell you. If I had told you, you would not
+have been surprised at what I did. I saw a sight that would have melted
+the heart of a stone. I saw Ducksmith wallowing on his bed and sobbing
+as if his heart would break. It filled my soul with pity. I said: 'If
+that mountain of insensibility can weep and sob in such agony, it is
+because he loves--and it is I, Aristide, who have reawakened that
+love.'"
+
+"Then," said I, "why on earth didn't you go and fetch Mrs. Ducksmith and
+leave them together?"
+
+He started from his chair and threw up both hands.
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_" cried he. "You English! You are a charming people, but you
+have no romance. You have no dramatic sense. I will help myself to a
+whisky and soda."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE FICKLE GODDESS
+
+
+It may be remembered that Aristide Pujol had aged parents, browned and
+wrinkled children of the soil, who had passed all their days in the
+desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the
+salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same
+unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus
+butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide
+soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the
+mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed
+without Aristide struggling somehow south to visit _ses vieux_, as he
+affectionately called them, and whenever Fortune shed a few smiles on
+him, one or two at least were sure to find their way to Aigues-Mortes in
+the shape of, say, a silver-mounted umbrella for his father or a deuce
+of a Paris hat for the old lady's Sunday wear. Monsieur and Madame Pujol
+had a sacred museum of these unused objects--the pride of their lives.
+Aristide was entirely incomprehensible, but he was a good son. A bad son
+in France is rare.
+
+But once Aristide nearly killed his old people outright. An envelope
+from him contained two large caressive slips of bluish paper, which when
+scrutinized with starting eyes turned out to be two one-thousand-franc
+notes. Mon Dieu! What had happened? Had Aristide been robbing the Bank
+of France? They stood paralyzed and only recovered motive force when a
+neighbour suggested their reading the accompanying letter. It did not
+explain things very clearly. He was in Aix-les-Bains, a place which they
+had never heard of, making his fortune. He was staying at the Hôtel de
+l'Europe, where Queen Victoria (they had heard of Queen Victoria) had
+been contented to reside, he was a glittering figure in a splendid
+beau-monde, and if _ses vieux_ would buy a few cakes and a bottle of vin
+cacheté with the enclosed trifle, to celebrate his prosperity, he would
+deem it the privilege of a devoted son. But Pujol senior, though
+wondering where the devil he had fished all that money from, did not
+waste it in profligate revelry. He took the eighty pounds to the bank
+and exchanged the perishable paper for one hundred solid golden louis
+which he carried home in a bag curiously bulging beneath his woollen
+jersey and secreted it with the savings of his long life in the mattress
+of the conjugal bed.
+
+"If only he hasn't stolen it," sighed the mother.
+
+"What does it matter, since it is sewn up there all secure?" said the
+old man. "No one can find it."
+
+The Provençal peasant is as hard-headed and practical as a Scottish
+miner, and if left alone by the fairies would produce no imaginative
+effect whatever upon his generation; but in his progeniture he is more
+preposterously afflicted with changelings than any of his fellows the
+world over, which, though ethnologically an entirely new proposition,
+accounts for a singular number of things and _inter alia_ for my
+dragon-fly friend, Aristide Pujol.
+
+Now, Aristide, be it said at the outset, had not stolen the money. It
+(and a vast amount more) had been honestly come by. He did not lie when
+he said that he was staying at the Hôtel de l'Europe, Aix-les-Bains,
+honoured by the late Queen Victoria (pedantic accuracy requires the
+correction that the august lady rented the annexe, the Villa Victoria,
+on the other side of the shady way--but no matter--an hotel and its
+annexe are the same thing) nor did he lie in boasting of his prodigious
+prosperity. Aristide was in clover. For the first, and up to now as I
+write, the only, time in his life he realized the gorgeous visions of
+pallid years. He was leading the existence of the amazing rich. He could
+drink champagne--not your miserable _tisane_ at five francs a quart--but
+real champagne, with year of vintage and _gôut américan_ or _gôut
+anglais_ marked on label, fabulously priced; he could dine lavishly at
+the Casino restaurants or at Nikola's, prince of restaurateurs, among
+the opulent and the fair; he could clothe himself in attractive raiment;
+he could step into a fiacre and bid the man drive and not care whither
+he went or what he paid; he could also distribute five-franc pieces to
+lame beggars. He scattered his money abroad with both hands, according
+to his expansive temperament; and why not, when he was drawing wealth
+out of an inexhaustible fount? The process was so simple, so sure. All
+you had to do was to believe in the cards on which you staked your
+money. If you knew you were going to win, you won. Nothing could be
+easier.
+
+He had drifted into Aix-les-Bains from Geneva on the lamentable
+determination of a commission agency in the matter of some patent fuel,
+with a couple of louis in his pocket forlornly jingling the tale of his
+entire fortune. As this was before the days when you had to exhibit
+certificates of baptism, marriage, sanity and bank-balance before being
+allowed to enter the baccarat rooms, Aristide paid his two francs and
+made a bee line for the tables. I am afraid Aristide was a gambler. He
+was never so happy as when taking chances; his whole life was a gamble,
+with Providence holding the bank. Before the night was over he had
+converted his two louis into fifty. The next day they became five
+hundred. By the end of a week his garments were wadded with bank notes
+whose value amounted to a sum so stupendous as to be beyond need of
+computation. He was a celebrity in the place and people nudged each
+other as he passed by. And Aristide passed by with a swagger, his head
+high and the end of his pointed beard sticking joyously up in the air.
+
+We see him one August morning, in the plentitude of his success,
+lounging in a wicker chair on the shady lawn of the Hôtel de l'Europe.
+He wore white buckskin shoes--I begin with these as they were the first
+point of his person to attract the notice of the onlooker--lilac silk
+socks, a white flannel suit with a zig-zag black stripe, a violet tie
+secured by a sapphire and diamond pin, and a rakish panama hat. On his
+knees lay the _Matin_; the fingers of his left hand held a fragrant
+corona; his right hand was uplifted in a gesture, for he was talking. He
+was talking to a couple of ladies who sat near by, one a mild-looking
+Englishwoman of fifty, dressed in black, the other, her daughter, a
+beautiful girl of twenty-four. That Aristide should fly to feminine
+charms, like moth to candle, was a law of his being; that he should lie,
+with shriveled wings, at Miss Errington's feet was the obvious result.
+Her charms were of the winsome kind to which he was most susceptible.
+She had an oval face, a little mouth like crumpled rose petals (so
+Aristide himself described it), a complexion the mingling of ivory and
+peach blossom (Aristide again), a straight little nose, appealing eyes
+of the deepest blue veiled by sweeping lashes and fascinating fluffiness
+of dark hair over a pure brow. She had a graceful figure, and the
+slender foot below her white piqué skirt was at once the envy and
+admiration of Aix-les-Bains.
+
+Aristide talked. The ladies listened, with obvious amusement. In the
+easy hotel way he had fallen into their acquaintance. As the man of
+wealth, the careless player who took five-hundred-louis banks at the
+table with the five-louis minimum, and cleared out the punt, he felt it
+necessary to explain himself. I am afraid he deviated from the narrow
+path of truth.
+
+"What perfect English you speak," Miss Errington remarked, when he had
+finished his harangue and had put the corona between his lips. Her voice
+was a soft contralto.
+
+"I have mixed much in English society, since I was a child," replied
+Aristide, in his grandest manner. "Fortune has made me know many of your
+county families and members of Parliament."
+
+Miss Errington laughed. "Our M. P.'s are rather a mixed lot, Monsieur
+Pujol."
+
+"To me an English Member of Parliament is a high-bred conservative. I
+do not recognize the others," said Aristide.
+
+"Unfortunately we have to recognize them," said the elder lady with a
+smile.
+
+"Not socially, madame. They exist as mechanical factors of the
+legislative machine; but that is all." He swelled as if the blood of the
+Montmorencys and the Colignys boiled in his veins. "We do not ask them
+into our drawing rooms. We do not allow them to marry our daughters. We
+only salute them with cold politeness when we pass them in the street."
+
+"It's astonishing," said Miss Errington, "how strongly the aristocratic
+principle exists in republican France. Now, there's our friend, the
+Comte de Lussigny, for instance----"
+
+A frown momentarily darkened the cloudless brow of Aristide Pujol. He
+did not like the Comte de Lussigny----
+
+"With Monsieur de Lussigny," he interposed, "it is a matter of
+prejudice, not of principle."
+
+"And with you?"
+
+"The reasoned philosophy of a lifetime, mademoiselle," answered
+Aristide. He turned to Mrs. Errington.
+
+"How long have you known Monsieur de Lussigny, madame?"
+
+She looked at her daughter. "It was in Monte Carlo the winter before
+last, wasn't it, Betty? Since then we have met him frequently in
+England and Paris. We came across him, just lately, at Trouville. I
+think he's charming, don't you?"
+
+"He's a great gambler," said Aristide.
+
+Betty Errington laughed again. "But so are you. So is mamma. So am I, in
+my poor little way."
+
+"We gamble for amusement," said Aristide loftily.
+
+"I'm sure I don't," cried Miss Betty, with merry eyes--and she looked
+adorable--"When I put my despised five-franc piece down on the table I
+want desperately to win, and when the horrid croupier rakes it up I want
+to hit him--Oh! I want to hit him hard."
+
+"And when you win?"
+
+"I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Miss Betty.
+
+Her mother smiled indulgently and exchanged a glance with Aristide.
+This pleased him; there was an agreeable little touch of intimacy in
+it. It confirmed friendly relations with the mother. What were his
+designs as regards the daughter he did not know. They were not evil,
+certainly. For all his southern blood, Latin traditions and
+devil-may-care upbringing, Aristide, though perhaps not reaching our
+divinely set and therefore unique English standard of morality, was a
+decent soul; further, partly through his pedagogic sojourn among them,
+and partly through his childish adoration of the frank, fair-cheeked,
+northern goddesses talking the quick, clear speech, who passed him by
+when he was a hunted little devil of a _chasseur_ in the Marseilles
+café, he had acquired a peculiarly imaginative reverence for English
+girls. The reverence, indeed, extended to English ladies generally.
+Owing to the queer circumstances of his life they were the only women
+of a class above his own, with whom he had associated on terms of
+equality. He had, then, no dishonorable designs as regards Miss Betty
+Errington. On the other hand, the thoughts of marriage had as yet not
+entered his head. You see, a Frenchman and an Englishman or an
+American, view marriage from entirely different angles. The
+Anglo-Saxon of honest instincts, attracted towards a pretty girl at
+once thinks of the possibilities of marriage; if he finds them
+infinitely remote, he makes romantic love to her in the solitude of
+his walks abroad or of his sleepless nights, and, in her presence, is
+as dumb and dismal as a freshly hooked trout. The equally honest Gaul
+does nothing of the kind. The attraction in itself is a stimulus to
+adventure. He makes love to her, just because it is the nature of a
+lusty son of Adam to make love to a pretty daughter of Eve. He lives
+in the present. The rest doesn't matter. He leaves it to chance. I am
+speaking, be it understood, not of deep passions--that is a different
+matter altogether--but of the more superficial sexual attractions
+which we, as a race, take so seriously and puritanically, often to our
+most disastrous undoing, and which the Latin light-heartedly regards
+as essential, but transient phenomena of human existence. Aristide
+made the most respectful love in the world to Betty Errington, because
+he could not help himself. "_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" he cried when from my
+Britannic point of view, I talked to him on the subject. "You English
+whom I try to understand and can never understand are so funny! It
+would have been insulting to Miss Betty Errington--_tiens!_--a purple
+hyacinth of spring--that was what she was--not to have made love to
+her. Love to a pretty woman is like a shower of rain to hyacinths. It
+passes, it goes. Another one comes. _Qu'importe?_ But the shower is
+necessary--Ah! _sacré gredin_, when will you comprehend?"
+
+All this to make as clear as an Englishman, in the confidence of a
+changeling child of Provence can hope to do, the attitude of Aristide
+Pujol towards the sweet and innocent Betty Errington with her mouth like
+crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and peach-blossom complexion, her soft
+contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald
+description, and as per what can, by imaginative effort, be pictured
+from the Pujolic hyperbole, by which I, the unimportant narrator of
+these chronicles, was dazzled and overwhelmed.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Betty.
+
+"Do you think of no one who brings you good fortune?" asked Aristide. He
+threw the _Matin_ on the grass, and, doubling himself up in his chair
+regarded her earnestly. "Last night you put five louis into my bank----"
+
+"And I won forty. I could have hugged you."
+
+"Why didn't you? Ah!" His arms spread wide and high. "What I have lost!"
+
+"Betty!" cried Mrs. Errington.
+
+"Alas, Madame," said Aristide, "that is the despair of our artificial
+civilization. It prohibits so much spontaneous expression of emotion."
+
+"You'll forgive me, Monsieur Pujol," said Mrs. Errington dryly, "but I
+think our artificial civilization has its advantages."
+
+"If you will forgive me, in your turn," said Aristide, "I see a doubtful
+one advancing."
+
+A man approached the group and with profuse gestures took off a straw
+hat which he thrust under his right arm, exposing an amazingly flat head
+on which the closely cropped hair stood brush-fashion upright. He had an
+insignificant pale face to which a specious individuality was given by a
+moustache with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a monocle with a
+tortoise shell rim. He was dressed (his valet had misjudged things--and
+valets like the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a fairly
+white flannel suit.
+
+"Madame--Mademoiselle." He shook hands with charming grace. "Monsieur."
+He bowed stiffly. Aristide doffed his Panama hat with adequate ceremony.
+"May I be permitted to join you?"
+
+"With pleasure, Monsieur de Lussigny," said Mrs. Errington.
+
+Monsieur de Lussigny brought up a chair and sat down.
+
+"What time did you get to bed, last night?" asked Betty Errington. She
+spoke excellently pure French, and so did her mother.
+
+"Soon after we parted, mademoiselle, quite early for me but late for
+you. And you look this morning as if you had gone to bed at sundown and
+got up at dawn."
+
+Miss Betty's glance responsive to the compliment filled Aristide with
+wrath. What right had the Comte de Lussigny, a fellow who consorted with
+Brazilian Rastaquouères and perfumed Levantine nondescripts, to win such
+a glance from Betty Errington?
+
+"If Mademoiselle can look so fresh," said he, "in the artificial
+atmosphere of Aix, what is there of adorable that she must not resemble
+in the innocence of her Somersetshire home?"
+
+"You cannot imagine it, Monsieur," said the Count; "but I have had the
+privilege to see it."
+
+"I hope Monsieur Pujol will visit us also in our country home, when we
+get back," said Mrs. Errington with intent to pacificate. "It is modest,
+but it is old-world and has been in our family for hundreds of years."
+
+"Ah, these old English homes!" said Aristide.
+
+"Would you care to hear about it?"
+
+"I should," said he.
+
+He drew his chair courteously a foot or so nearer that of the mild lady;
+Monsieur de Lussigny took instant advantage of the move to establish
+himself close to Miss Betty. Aristide turned one ear politely to Mrs.
+Errington's discourse, the other ragingly and impotently to the
+whispered conversation between the detached pair.
+
+Presently a novel fell from the lady's lap. Aristide sprang to his feet
+and restored it. He remained standing. Mrs. Errington consulted a watch.
+It was nearing lunch time. She rose, too. Aristide took her a pace or
+two aside.
+
+"My dear Mrs. Errington," said he, in English. "I do not wish to be
+indiscreet--but you come from your quiet home in Somerset and your
+beautiful daughter is so young and inexperienced, and I am a man of the
+world who has mingled in all the society of Europe--may I warn you
+against admitting the Comte de Lussigny too far into your intimacy."
+
+She turned an anxious face. "Monsieur Pujol, is there anything against
+the Count?"
+
+Aristide executed the large and expressive shrug of the Southerner.
+
+"I play high at the tables for my amusement--I know the principal
+players, people of high standing. Among them Monsieur de Lussigny's
+reputation is not spotless."
+
+"You alarm me very much," said Mrs. Errington, troubled.
+
+"I only put you on your guard," said he.
+
+The others who had risen and followed, caught them up. At the entrance
+to the hotel the ladies left the men elaborately saluting. The latter,
+alone, looked at each other.
+
+"Monsieur."
+
+"Monsieur."
+
+Each man raised his hat, turned on his heel and went his way. Aristide
+betook himself to the café on the Place Carnot on the side of the square
+facing the white Etablissement des Bains, with a stern sense of having
+done his duty. It was monstrous that this English damask rose should
+fall a prey to so detestable a person as the Comte de Lussigny. He
+suspected him of disgraceful things. If only he had proof. Fortune, ever
+favoring him, stood at his elbow. She guided him straight to a table in
+the front row of the terrace where sat a black-haired, hard-featured
+though comely youth deep in thought, in front of an untouched glass of
+beer. At Aristide's approach he raised his head, smiled, nodded and
+said: "Good morning, sir. Will you join me?"
+
+Aristide graciously accepted the invitation and sat down. The young
+man was another hotel acquaintance, one Eugene Miller of Atlanta,
+Georgia, a curious compound of shrewdness and simplicity, to whom
+Aristide had taken a fancy. He was twenty-eight and ran a colossal
+boot-factory in partnership with another youth and had a consuming
+passion for stained-glass windows. From books he knew every square
+foot of old stained-glass in Europe. But he had crossed the Atlantic
+for the first time only six weeks before, and having indulged his
+craving immoderately, had rested for a span at Aix-les-Bains to
+recover from æsthetic indigestion. He had found these amenities
+agreeable to his ingenuous age. He had also, quite recently, come
+across the Comte de Lussigny. Hence the depth of thought in which
+Aristide discovered him. Now, the fact that North is North and South
+is South and that never these twain shall meet is a proposition all
+too little considered. One of these days when I can retire from the
+dull but exacting avocation of tea-broking in the City, I think I
+shall write a newspaper article on the subject. Anyhow, I hold
+the theory that the Northerners of all nations have a common
+characteristic and the Southerners of all nations have a common
+characteristic, and that it is this common characteristic in each
+case that makes North seek and understand North and South seek and
+understand South. I will not go further into the general proposition;
+but as a particular instance I will state that the American of the
+South and the Frenchman of the South found themselves in essential
+sympathy. Eugene Miller had the unfearing frankness of Aristide Pujol.
+
+"I used rather to look down upon Europe as a place where people knew
+nothing at all," said he. "We're sort of trained to think it's an
+extinct volcano, but it isn't. It's alive. My God! It's alive. It's Hell
+in the shape of a Limburger cheese. I wish the whole population of
+Atlanta, Georgia, would come over and just see. There's a lot to be
+learned. I thought I knew how to take care of myself, but this
+tortoise-shell-eyed Count taught me last night that I couldn't. He
+cleaned me out of twenty-five hundred dollars----"
+
+"How?" asked Aristide, sharply.
+
+"Ecarté."
+
+Aristide brought his hand down with a bang on the table and uttered
+anathemas in French and Provençal entirely unintelligible to Eugene
+Miller; but the youth knew by instinct that they were useful,
+soul-destroying curses and he felt comforted.
+
+"Ecarté! You played ecarté with Lussigny? But my dear young friend, do
+you know anything of ecarté?"
+
+"Of course," said Miller. "I used to play it as a child with my
+sisters."
+
+"Do you know the _jeux de règle_?"
+
+"The what?"
+
+"The formal laws of the game--the rules of discards----"
+
+"Never heard of them," said Eugene Miller.
+
+"But they are as absolute as the Code Napoléon," cried Aristide. "You
+can't play without knowing them. You might as well play chess without
+knowing the moves."
+
+"Can't help it," said the young man.
+
+"Well, don't play ecarté any more."
+
+"I must," said Miller.
+
+"_Comment?_"
+
+"I must. I've fixed it up to get my revenge this afternoon--in my
+sitting room at the hotel."
+
+"But it's imbecile!"
+
+The sweep of Aristide's arm produced prismatic chaos among a tray-full
+of drinks which the waiter was bringing to the family party at the next
+table. "It's imbecile," he cried, as soon as order was apologetically
+and pecuniarily restored. "You are a little mutton going to have its
+wool taken off."
+
+"I've fixed it up," said Miller. "I've never gone back on an engagement
+yet in my own country and I'm not going to begin this side."
+
+Aristide argued. He argued during the mechanical absorption of four
+glasses of _vermouth-cassis_--after which prodigious quantity of black
+currant syrup he rose and took the Gadarene youth to Nikola's where he
+continued the argument during déjeuner. Eugene Miller's sole concession
+was that Aristide should be present at the encounter and, backing his
+hand, should have the power (given by the rules of the French game) to
+guide his play. Aristide agreed and crammed his young friend with the
+_jeux de règle_ and _pâté de foie gras_.
+
+The Count looked rather black when he found Aristide Pujol in Miller's
+sitting room. He could not, however, refuse him admittance to the game.
+The three sat down, Aristide by Miller's side, so that he could overlook
+the hand and, by pointing, indicate the cards that it was advisable to
+play. The game began. Fortune favored Mr. Eugene Miller. The Count's
+brow grew blacker.
+
+"You are bringing your own luck to our friend, Monsieur Pujol," said he,
+dealing the cards.
+
+"He needs it," said Aristide.
+
+"_Le roi_," said the Count, turning up the king.
+
+The Count won the vole, or all five tricks, and swept the stakes towards
+him. Then, fortune quickly and firmly deserted Mr. Miller. The Count
+besides being an amazingly fine player, held amazingly fine hands. The
+pile of folded notes in front of him rose higher and higher. Aristide
+tugged at his beard in agitation. Suddenly, as the Count dealt a king as
+trump card, he sprang to his feet knocking over the chair behind him.
+
+"You cheat, monsieur. You cheat!"
+
+"Monsieur!" cried the outraged dealer.
+
+"What has he done?"
+
+"He has been palming kings and neutralizing the cut. I've been watching.
+Now I catch him," cried Aristide in great excitement. "_Ah, sale voleur!
+Maintenant je vous tiens!_"
+
+"Monsieur," said the Comte de Lussigny with dignity, stuffing his
+winnings into his jacket pocket. "You insult me. It is an infamy. Two of
+my friends will call upon you."
+
+"And Monsieur Miller and I will kick them over Mont Revard."
+
+"You cannot treat _gens d'honneur_ in such a way, monsieur." He turned
+to Miller, and said haughtily in his imperfect English, "Did you see the
+cheat, you?"
+
+"I can't say that I did," replied the young man. "On the other hand that
+torch-light procession of kings doesn't seem exactly natural."
+
+"But you did not see anything! _Bon!_"
+
+"But I saw. Isn't that enough, _hein_?" shouted Aristide brandishing his
+fingers in the Count's face. "You come here and think there's nothing
+easier than to cheat young foreigners who don't know the rules of
+ecarté. You come here and think you can carry off rich young English
+misses. Ah, _sale escroc!_ You never thought you would have to reckon
+with Aristide Pujol. You call yourself the Comte de Lussigny. Bah! I
+know you----" he didn't, but that doesn't matter--"your _dossier_ is in
+the hands of the prefect of Police. I am going to get that _dossier_.
+Monsieur Lepine is my intimate friend. Every autumn we shoot together.
+Aha! You send me your two galley-birds and see what I do to them."
+
+The Comte de Lussigny twirled the tips of his moustache almost to his
+forehead and caught up his hat.
+
+"My friends shall be officers in the uniform of the French Army," he
+said, by the door.
+
+"And mine shall be two gendarmes," retorted Aristide. "_Nom de Dieu!_"
+he cried, after the other had left the room. "We let him take the
+money!"
+
+"That's of no consequence. He didn't get away with much anyway," said
+young Miller. "But he would have if you hadn't been here. If ever I can
+do you a return service, just ask."
+
+Aristide went out to look for the Erringtons. But they were not to be
+found. It was only late in the afternoon that he met Mrs. Errington in
+the hall of the hotel. He dragged her into a corner and in his
+impulsive fashion told her everything. She listened white faced, in
+great distress.
+
+"My daughter's engaged to him. I've only just learned," she faltered.
+
+"Engaged? _Sacrebleu!_ Ah, _le goujat!_"--for the second he was
+desperately, furiously, jealously in love with Betty Errington. "_Ah, le
+sale type! Voyons!_ This engagement must be broken off. At once! You are
+her mother."
+
+"She will hear of nothing against him."
+
+"You will tell her this. It will be a blow; but----"
+
+Mrs. Errington twisted a handkerchief between helpless fingers. "Betty
+is infatuated. She won't believe it." She regarded him piteously. "Oh,
+Monsieur Pujol, what can I do? You see she has an independent fortune
+and is over twenty-one. I am powerless."
+
+"I will meet his two friends," exclaimed Aristide magnificently--"and I
+will kill him. _Voilà!_"
+
+"Oh, a duel? No! How awful!" cried the mild lady horror-stricken.
+
+He thrust his cane dramatically through a sheet of a newspaper, which he
+had caught up from a table. "I will run him through the body like
+that"--Aristide had never handled a foil in his life--"and when he is
+dead, your beautiful daughter will thank me for having saved her from
+such an execrable fellow."
+
+"But you mustn't fight. It would be too dreadful. Is there no other
+way?"
+
+"You must consult first with your daughter," said Aristide.
+
+He dined in the hotel with Eugene Miller. Neither the Erringtons nor the
+Comte de Lussigny were anywhere to be seen. After dinner, however, he
+found the elder lady waiting for him in the hall. They walked out into
+the quiet of the garden. She had been too upset to dine, she explained,
+having had a terrible scene with Betty. Nothing but absolute proofs of
+her lover's iniquity would satisfy her. The world was full of slanderous
+tongues; the noblest and purest did not escape. For herself, she had
+never been comfortable with the Comte de Lussigny. She had noticed too
+that he had always avoided the best French people in hotels. She would
+give anything to save her daughter. She wept.
+
+"And the unhappy girl has written him compromising letters," she
+lamented.
+
+"They must be got back."
+
+"But how? Oh, Monsieur Pujol, do you think he would take money for
+them?"
+
+"A scoundrel like that would take money for his dead mother's shroud,"
+said Aristide.
+
+"A thousand pounds?"
+
+She looked very haggard and helpless beneath the blue arc-lights.
+Aristide's heart went out to her. He knew her type--the sweet
+gentlewoman of rural England who comes abroad to give her pretty
+daughter a sight of life, ingenuously confident that foreign
+watering-places are as innocent as her own sequestered village.
+
+"That is much money, _chère madame_," said Aristide.
+
+"I am fairly well off," said Mrs. Errington.
+
+Aristide reflected. At the offer of a smaller sum the Count would
+possibly bluff. But to a Knight of Industry, as he knew the Count to be,
+a certain thousand pounds would be a great temptation. And after all to
+a wealthy Englishwoman what was a thousand pounds?
+
+"Madame," said he, "if you offer him a thousand pounds for the letters,
+and a written confession that he is not the Comte de Lussigny, but a
+common adventurer, I stake my reputation that he will accept."
+
+They walked along for a few moments in silence; the opera had begun at
+the adjoining Villa des Fleurs and the strains floated through the still
+August air. After a while she halted and laid her hand on his sleeve.
+
+"Monsieur Pujol, I have never been faced with such a thing, before. Will
+you undertake for me this delicate and difficult business?"
+
+"Madame," said he, "my life is at the service of yourself and your most
+exquisite daughter." She pressed his hand. "Thank God, I've got a friend
+in this dreadful place," she said brokenly. "Let me go in." And when
+they reached the lounge, she said, "Wait for me here."
+
+She entered the lift. Aristide waited. Presently the lift descended and
+she emerged with a slip of paper in her hand.
+
+"Here is a bearer cheque, Monsieur Pujol, for a thousand pounds. Get the
+letters and the confession if you can, and a mother's blessing will go
+with you."
+
+She left him and went upstairs again in the lift. Aristide athirst with
+love, living drama and unholy hatred of the Comte de Lussigny, cocked
+his black, soft-felt evening hat at an engaging angle on his head and
+swaggered into the Villa des Fleurs. As he passed the plebeian crowd
+round the petits-chevaux table--these were the days of little horses and
+not the modern equivalent of _la boule_--he threw a louis on the square
+marked 5, waited for the croupier to push him his winnings, seven louis
+and his stake on the little white horse, and walked into the baccarat
+room. A bank was being called for thirty louis at the end table.
+
+"_Quarante_," said Aristide.
+
+"_Ajugé à quarante louis_," cried the croupier, no one bidding higher.
+
+Aristide took the banker's seat and put down his forty louis. Looking
+round the long table he saw the Comte de Lussigny sitting in the punt.
+The two men glared at each other defiantly. Someone went "banco."
+Aristide won. The fact of his holding the bank attracted a crowd round
+the table. The regular game began. Aristide won, lost, won again. Now it
+must be explained, without going into the details of the game, that the
+hand against the bank is played by the members of the punt in turn.
+
+Suddenly, before dealing the cards, Aristide asked, "_A qui la main?_"
+
+"_C'est à Monsieur_," said the croupier, indicating Lussigny.
+
+"_Il y a une suite_," said Aristide, signifying, as was his right, that
+he would retire from the bank with his winnings. "The face of that
+gentleman does not please me."
+
+There was a hush at the humming table. The Count grew dead white and
+looked at his fingernails. Aristide superbly gathered up his notes and
+gold, and tossing a couple of louis to the croupiers, left the table,
+followed by all eyes. It was one of the thrilling moments of Aristide's
+life. He had taken the stage, commanded the situation. He had publicly
+offered the Comte de Lussigny the most deadly insult and the Comte de
+Lussigny sat down beneath it like a lamb. He swaggered slowly through
+the crowded room, twirling his moustache, and went into the cool of the
+moonlit deserted garden beyond, where he waited gleefully. He had a
+puckish knowledge of human nature. After a decent interval, and during
+the absorbing interest of the newly constituted bank, the Comte de
+Lussigny slipped unnoticed from the table and went in search of
+Aristide. He found him smoking a large corona and lounging in one wicker
+chair with his feet on another, beside a very large whisky and soda.
+
+"Ah, it's you," said he without moving.
+
+"Yes," said the Count furiously.
+
+"I haven't yet had the pleasure of kicking your friends over Mont
+Revard," said Aristide.
+
+"Look here, _mon petit_, this has got to finish," cried the Count.
+
+"_Parfaitement._ I should like nothing better than to finish. But let us
+finish like well-bred people," said Aristide suavely. "We don't want the
+whole Casino as witnesses. You'll find a chair over there. Bring it up."
+
+He was enjoying himself immensely. The Count glared at him, turned and
+banged a chair over by the side of the table.
+
+"Why do you insult me like this?"
+
+"Because," said Aristide, "I've talked by telephone this evening with my
+good friend Monsieur Lepine, Prefect of Police of Paris."
+
+"You lie," said the Count.
+
+"_Vous verrez._ In the meantime, perhaps we might have a little
+conversation. Will you have a whisky and soda? It is one of my English
+habits."
+
+"No," said the Count emphatically.
+
+"You permit me then?" He drank a great draught. "You are wrong. It helps
+to cool one's temper. _Eh bien_, let us talk."
+
+He talked. He put before the Count the situation of the beautiful Miss
+Errington. He conducted the scene like the friend of the family whose
+astuteness he had admired as a boy in the melodramas that found their
+way to Marseilles.
+
+"Look," said he, at last, having vainly offered from one hundred to
+eight hundred pounds for poor Betty Errington's compromising letters.
+"Look----" He drew the cheque from his note-case. "Here are twenty-five
+thousand francs. The signature is that of the charming Madame Errington
+herself. The letters, and a little signed word, just a little word.
+'Mademoiselle, I am a _chevalier d'industrie_. I have a wife and five
+children. I am not worthy of you. I give you back your promise.' Just
+that. And twenty-five thousand francs, _mon ami_."
+
+"Never in life!" exclaimed the Count rising. "You continue to insult
+me."
+
+Aristide for the first time abandoned his lazy and insolent attitude and
+jumped to his feet.
+
+"And I'll continue to insult you, _canaille_ that you are, all through
+that room," he cried, with a swift-flung gesture towards the brilliant
+doorway. "You are dealing with Aristide Pujol. Will you never
+understand? The letters and a confession for twenty-five thousand
+francs."
+
+"Never in life," said the Count, and he moved swiftly away.
+
+Aristide caught him by the collar as he stood on the covered terrace, a
+foot or two from the threshold of the gaming-room.
+
+"I swear to you, I'll make a scandal that you won't survive."
+
+The Count stopped and pushed Aristide's hand away.
+
+"I admit nothing," said he. "But you are a gambler and so am I. I will
+play you for those documents against twenty-five thousand francs."
+
+"Eh?" said Aristide, staggered for the moment.
+
+The Comte de Lussigny repeated his proposition.
+
+"_Bon_," said Aristide. "_Trés bon. C'est entendu. C'est fait._"
+
+If Beelzebub had arisen and offered to play beggar-my-neighbour for his
+soul, Aristide would have agreed; especially after the large whisky and
+soda and the Mumm Cordon Rouge and the Napoleon brandy which Eugene
+Miller had insisted on his drinking at dinner.
+
+"I have a large room at the hotel," said he.
+
+"I will join you," said the Count. "Monsieur," he took off his hat very
+politely. "Go first. I will be there in three minutes."
+
+Aristide trod on air during the two minutes' walk to the Hôtel de
+l'Europe. At the bureau he ordered a couple of packs of cards and a
+supply of drinks and went to his palatial room on the ground floor. In a
+few moments the Comte de Lussigny appeared. Aristide offered him a two
+francs corona which was ceremoniously accepted. Then he tore the
+wrapping off one of the packs of cards and shuffled.
+
+"Monsieur," said he, still shuffling. "I should like to deal two hands
+at ecarté. It signifies nothing. It is an experiment. Will you cut?"
+
+"_Volontiers_," said the Count.
+
+Aristide took up the pack, dealt three cards to the Count, three cards
+to himself, two cards to the Count, two to himself and turned up the
+King of Hearts as the eleventh card.
+
+"Monsieur," said he, "expose your hand and I will expose mine."
+
+Both men threw their hands face uppermost on the table. Aristide's was
+full of trumps, the Count's of valueless cards.
+
+He looked at his adversary with his roguish, triumphant smile. The Count
+looked at him darkly.
+
+"The ordinary card player does not know how to deal like that," he said
+with sinister significance.
+
+"But I am not ordinary in anything, my dear sir," laughed Aristide, in
+his large boastfulness. "If I were, do you think I would have agreed to
+your absurd proposal? _Voyons_, I only wanted to show you that in
+dealing cards I am your equal. Now, the letters----" The Count threw a
+small packet on the table. "You will permit me? I do not wish to read
+them. I verify only. Good," said he. "And the confession?"
+
+"What you like," said the Count, coldly. Aristide scribbled a few lines
+that would have been devastating to the character of a Hyrcanean tiger
+and handed the paper and fountain pen to the Count.
+
+"Will you sign?"
+
+The Count glanced at the words and signed.
+
+"_Voilà_," said Aristide, laying Mrs. Errington's cheque beside the
+documents. "Now let us play. The best of three games?"
+
+"Good," said the Count. "But you will excuse me, monsieur, if I claim to
+play for ready money. The cheque will take five days to negotiate and if
+I lose, I shall evidently have to leave Aix to-morrow morning."
+
+"That's reasonable," said Aristide.
+
+He drew out his fat note-case and counted twenty-five one-thousand-franc
+notes on to the table. And then began the most exciting game of cards he
+had ever played. In the first place he was playing with another person's
+money for a fantastic stake, a girl's honour and happiness. Secondly he
+was pitted against a master of ecarté. And thirdly he knew that his
+adversary would cheat if he could and that his adversary suspected him
+of fraudulent designs. So as they played, each man craned his head
+forward and looked at the other man's fingers with fierce intensity.
+
+Aristide lost the first game. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. In
+the second game, he won the vole in one hand. The third and final game
+began. They played slowly, carefully, with keen quick eyes. Their
+breathing came hard. The Count's lips parted beneath his uptwisted
+moustache showed his teeth like a cat's. Aristide lost sense of all
+outer things in the thrill of the encounter. They snarled the
+stereotyped phrases necessary for the conduct of the game. At last the
+points stood at four for Aristide and three for his adversary. It was
+Aristide's deal. Before turning up the eleventh card he paused for the
+fraction of a second. If it was the King, he had won. He flicked it
+neatly face upward. It was not the King.
+
+_"J'en donne."_
+
+_"Non. Le roi."_
+
+The Count played and marked the King. Aristide had no trumps. The game
+was lost.
+
+He sat back white, while the Count smiling gathered up the bank-notes.
+
+"And now, Monsieur Pujol," said he impudently, "I am willing to sell
+you this rubbish for the cheque."
+
+Aristide jumped to his feet. "Never!" he cried. Madness seized him.
+Regardless of the fact that he had nothing like another thousand pounds
+left wherewith to repay Mrs. Errington if he lost, he shouted: "I will
+play again for it. Not ecarté. One cut of the cards. Ace lowest."
+
+"All right," said the Count.
+
+"Begin, you."
+
+Aristide watched his hand like cat, as he cut. He cut an eight. Aristide
+gave a little gasp of joy and cut quickly. He held up a Knave and
+laughed aloud. Then he stopped short as he saw the Count about to pounce
+on the documents and the cheque. He made a swift movement and grabbed
+them first, the other man's hand on his.
+
+"_Canaille!_"
+
+He dashed his free hand into the adventurer's face. The man staggered
+back. Aristide pocketed the precious papers. The Count scowled at him
+for an undecided second, and then bolted from the room.
+
+"Whew!" said Aristide, sinking into his chair and wiping his face. "That
+was a narrow escape."
+
+He looked at his watch. It was only ten o'clock. It had seemed as if his
+game with Lussigny had lasted for hours. He could not go to bed and
+stood confronted with anti-climax. After a while he went in search of
+Eugene Miller and having found him in solitary meditation on stained
+glass windows in the dim-lit grounds of the Villa, sat down by his side
+and for the rest of the evening poured his peculiar knowledge of Europe
+into the listening ear of the young man from Atlanta.
+
+On the following morning, as soon as he was dressed, he learned from the
+Concierge that the Comte de Lussigny had left for Paris by the early
+train.
+
+"Good," said Aristide.
+
+A little later Mrs. Errington met him in the lounge and accompanied him
+to the lawn where they had sat the day before.
+
+"I have no words to thank you, Monsieur Pujol," she said with tears in
+her eyes. "I have heard how you shamed him at the tables. It was brave
+of you."
+
+"It was nothing." He shrugged his shoulders as if he were in the habit
+of doing deeds like that every day of his life. "And your exquisite
+daughter, Madame?"
+
+"Poor Betty! She is prostrate. She says she will never hold up her head
+again. Her heart is broken."
+
+"It is young and will be mended," said Aristide.
+
+She smiled sadly. "It will be a question of time. But she is grateful to
+you, Monsieur Pujol. She realizes from what a terrible fate you have
+saved her." She sighed. There was a brief silence.
+
+"After this," she continued, "a further stay in Aix would be too
+painful. We have decided to take the Savoy express this evening and get
+back to our quiet home in Somerset."
+
+"Ah, madame," said Aristide earnestly. "And shall I not have the
+pleasure of seeing the charming Miss Betty again?"
+
+"You will come and stay with us in September. Let me see? The fifteenth.
+Why not fix a date? You have my address? No? Will you write it down?"
+she dictated: "Wrotesly Manor, Burnholme, Somerset. There I'll try to
+show you how grateful I am."
+
+She extended her hand. He bowed over it and kissed it in his French way
+and departed a very happy man.
+
+The Erringtons left that evening. Aristide waylaid them as they were
+entering the hotel omnibus, with a preposterous bouquet of flowers which
+he presented to Betty, whose pretty face was hidden by a motor-veil. He
+bowed, laid his hand on his heart and said: "_Adieu, mademoiselle._"
+
+"No," she said in a low voice, but most graciously, "_Au revoir_,
+Monsieur Pujol."
+
+For the next few days Aix seemed to be tame and colourless. In an
+inexplicable fashion, too, it had become unprofitable. Aristide no
+longer knew that he was going to win; and he did not win. He lost
+considerably. So much so that on the morning when he was to draw the
+cash for the cheque, at the Crédit Lyonnais, he had only fifty pounds
+and some odd silver left. Aristide looking at the remainder rather
+ruefully made a great resolution. He would gamble no more. Already he
+was richer than he had ever been in his life. He would leave Aix.
+_Tiens!_ why should he not go to his good friends the Bocardons at
+Nîmes, bringing with him a gold chain for Bocardon and a pair of
+ear-rings for the adorable Zette? There he would look about him. He
+would use the thousand pounds as a stepping-stone to legitimate fortune.
+Then he would visit the Erringtons in England, and if the beautiful Miss
+Betty smiled on him--why, after all, _sacrebleu_ he was an honest man,
+without a feather on his conscience.
+
+So, jauntily swinging his cane, he marched into the office of the Crédit
+Lyonnais, went into the inner room and explained his business.
+
+"Ah, your cheque, monsieur, that we were to collect. I am sorry. It has
+come back from the London bankers."
+
+"How come back?"
+
+"It has not been honoured. See, monsieur. 'Not known. No account.'" The
+cashier pointed to the grim words across the cheque.
+
+"_Comprends pas_," faltered Aristide.
+
+"It means that the person who gave you the cheque has no account at this
+bank."
+
+Aristide took the cheque and looked at it in a dazed way.
+
+"Then I do not get my twenty-five thousand francs?"
+
+"Evidently not," said the cashier.
+
+Aristide stood for a while stunned. What did it mean? His thousand
+pounds could not be lost. It was impossible. There was some mistake. It
+was an evil dream. With a heavy weight on the top of his head, he went
+out of the Crédit Lyonnais and mechanically crossed the little street
+separating the Bank from the café on the Place Carnot. There he sat
+stupidly and wondered. The waiter hovered in front of him. "_Monsieur
+désire?_" Aristide waved him away absently. Yes, it was some mistake.
+Mrs. Errington in her agitation must have used the wrong cheque book.
+But even rich English people do not carry about with them a circulating
+library assortment of cheque books. It was incomprehensible--and
+meanwhile, his thousand pounds....
+
+The little square blazed before him in the August sunshine. Opposite
+flashed the white mass of the Etablissement des Bains. There was the old
+Roman Arch of Titus, gray and venerable. There were the trees of the
+gardens in riotous greenery. There on the right marking the hour of
+eleven on its black face was the clock of the Comptoir National. It was
+Aix; familiar Aix; not a land of dreams. And there coming rapidly across
+from the Comptoir National was the well knit figure of the young man
+from Atlanta.
+
+"_Nom de Dieu_," murmured Aristide. "_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"
+
+Eugene Miller, in a fine frenzy, threw himself into a chair beside
+Aristide.
+
+"See here. Can you understand this?"
+
+He thrust into his hand a pink strip of paper. It was a cheque for a
+hundred pounds, made payable to Eugene Miller, Esquire, signed by Mary
+Errington, and marked "Not known. No account."
+
+"_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" cried Aristide. "How did you get this?"
+
+"How did I get it? I cashed it for her--the day she went away. She said
+urgent affairs summoned her from Aix--no time to wire for funds--wanted
+to pay her hotel bill--and she gave me the address of her old English
+home in Somerset and invited me to come there in September. Fifteenth of
+September. Said that you were coming. And now I've got a bum cheque. I
+guess I can't wander about this country alone. I need blinkers and
+harness and a man with a whip."
+
+He went on indignantly. Aristide composed his face into an expression of
+parental interest; but within him there was shivering and sickening
+upheaval. He saw it all, the whole mocking drama....
+
+He, Aristide Pujol, was the most sweetly, the most completely swindled
+man in France.
+
+The Comte de Lussigny, the mild Mrs. Errington and the beautiful Betty
+were in league together and had exquisitely plotted. They had conspired,
+as soon as he had accused the Count of cheating. The rascal must have
+gone straight to them from Miller's room. No wonder that Lussigny, when
+insulted at the tables, had sat like a tame rabbit and had sought him in
+the garden. No wonder he had accepted the accusation of adventurer. No
+wonder he had refused to play for the cheque which he knew to be
+valueless. But why, thought Aristide, did he not at once consent to sell
+the papers on the stipulation that he should be paid in notes? Aristide
+found an answer. He wanted to get everything for nothing, afraid of the
+use that Aristide might make of a damning confession, and also relying
+for success on his manipulation of the cards. Finally he had desired to
+get hold of a dangerous cheque. In that he had been foiled. But the trio
+has got away with his thousand pounds, his wonderful thousand pounds. He
+reflected, still keeping an attentive eye on young Eugene Miller and
+interjecting a sympathetic word, that after he had paid his hotel bill,
+he would be as poor on quitting Aix-les-Bains as he was when he had
+entered it. _Sic transit_.... As it was in the beginning with Aristide
+Pujol, is now and ever shall be....
+
+"But I have my clothes--such clothes as I've never had in my life,"
+thought Aristide. "And a diamond and sapphire tie-pin and a gold watch,
+and all sorts of other things. _Tron de l'air_, I'm still rich."
+
+"Who would have thought she was like that?" said he. "And a hundred
+pounds, too. A lot of money."
+
+For nothing in the world would he have confessed himself a
+fellow-victim.
+
+"I don't care a cent for the hundred pounds," cried the young man. "Our
+factory turns out seven hundred and sixty-seven million pairs of boots
+per annum." (Aristide, not I, is responsible for the statistics.) "But I
+have a feeling that in this hoary country I'm just a little toddling
+child. And I hate it. I do, sir. I want a nurse to take me round."
+
+Aristide flashed the lightning of his wit upon the young man from
+Atlanta, Georgia.
+
+"You do, my dear young friend. I'll be your nurse, at a weekly
+salary--say a hundred francs--it doesn't matter. We will not quarrel."
+Eugene Miller was startled. "Yes," said Aristide, with a convincing
+flourish. "I'll clear robbers and sirens and harpies from your path.
+I'll show you things in Europe--from Tromsö to Cap Spartivento that you
+never dreamed of. I'll lead you to every stained glass window in the
+world. I know them all."
+
+"I particularly want to see those in the church of St. Sebald in
+Nuremberg."
+
+"I know them like my pocket," said Aristide. "I will take you there. We
+start to-day."
+
+"But, Mr. Pujol," said the somewhat bewildered Georgian. "I thought you
+were a man of fortune."
+
+"I am more than a man. I am a soldier. I am a soldier of Fortune. The
+fickle goddess has for the moment deserted me. But I am loyal. I have
+for all worldly goods, two hundred and fifty dollars, with which I shall
+honorably pay my hotel bill. I say I am a soldier of Fortune. But," he
+slapped his chest, "I am the only honorable one on the Continent of
+Europe."
+
+The young man fixed upon him the hard blue eyes, not of the enthusiast
+for stained glass windows, but of the senior partner in the boot factory
+of Atlanta, Georgia.
+
+"I believe you," said he. "It's a deal. Shake."
+
+"And now," said Aristide, after having shaken hands, "come and lunch
+with me at Nikola's for the last time."
+
+He rose, stretched out both arms in a wide gesture and smiled with his
+irresistible Ancient Mariner's eyes at the young man.
+
+"We lunch. We eat ambrosia. Then we go out together and see the
+wonderful world through the glass-blood of saints and martyrs and
+apostles and the good Father Abraham and Louis Quatorze. _Viens, mon
+cher ami._ It is the dream of my life."
+
+Practically penniless and absolutely disillusioned, the amazing man was
+radiantly happy.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF A SAINT MARTIN'S SUMMER
+
+
+My good friend Blessington, who is a mighty man in the Bordeaux
+wine-trade, happening one day to lament the irreparable loss of a
+deceased employé, an Admirable Crichton of a myriad accomplishments and
+linguistic attainments whose functions it had been, apparently, to
+travel about between London, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Algiers, I
+immediately thought of a certain living and presumably unemployed
+paragon of my acquaintance.
+
+"I know the very man you're looking for," said I.
+
+"Who is he?"
+
+"He's a kind of human firework," said I, "and his name is Aristide
+Pujol."
+
+I sketched the man--in my desire to do a good turn to Aristide, perhaps
+in exaggerated colour.
+
+"Let me have a look at him," said Blessington.
+
+"He may be anywhere on the continent of Europe," said I. "How long can
+you give me to produce him?"
+
+"A week. Not longer."
+
+"I'll do my best," said I.
+
+By good luck my telegram, sent off about four o'clock, found him at 213
+_bis_ Rue Saint-Honoré. He had just returned to Paris after some mad
+dash for fortune (he told me afterwards a wild and disastrous story of a
+Russian Grand-Duke, a Dancer and a gold mine in the Dolomites) and had
+once more resumed the dreary conduct of the Agence Pujol at the Hôtel du
+Soleil et de l'Ecosse. My summons being imperative, he abandoned the
+Agence Pujol as a cat jumps off a wall, and, leaving the guests of the
+Hotel guideless, to the indignation of Monsieur Bocardon, whom he had
+served this trick several times before, paid his good landlady, Madam
+Bidoux, what he owed her, took a third-class ticket to London, bought,
+lunatic that he was, a ripe Brie cheese, a foot in diameter, a present
+to myself, which he carried in his hand most of the journey, and turned
+up at my house at eight o'clock the next morning with absolutely empty
+pockets and the happiest and most fascinating smile that ever irradiated
+the face of man. As a matter of fact, he burst his way past my
+scandalized valet into my bedroom and woke me up.
+
+"Here I am, my dear friend, and here is something French you love that I
+have brought you," and he thrust the Brie cheese under my nose.
+
+"-- -- --," said I.
+
+If you were awakened by a Brie cheese, an hour before your time, you
+would say the same. Aristide sat at the foot of the bed and laughed till
+the tears ran down his beard.
+
+As soon as it was decent I sent him into the city to interview
+Blessington. Three hours afterward he returned more radiant than ever.
+He threw himself into my arms; before I could disentagle myself, he
+kissed me on both cheeks; then he danced about the room.
+
+"_Me voici_," he said, "accredited representative of the great Maison
+Dulau et Compagnie. I have hundreds of pounds a year. I go about. I
+watch. I control. I see that the Great British Public can assuage its
+thirst with the pure juice of the grape and not with the dregs of a
+laboratory. I test vintages. I count barrels. I enter them in books. I
+smile at Algerian wine growers and say, 'Ha! ha! none of your _petite
+piquette frélateé_ for me but good sound wine.' It is diplomacy. It is
+as simple as kissing hands. And I have a sustained income. Now I can be
+_un bon bourgeois_ instead of a stray cat. And all due to you, _mon cher
+ami_. I am grateful--_voyons_--if anybody ever says Aristide Pujol is
+ungrateful, he is a liar. You believe me! Say you believe me."
+
+He looked at me earnestly.
+
+"I do, old chap," said I.
+
+I had known Aristide for some years, and in all kinds of little ways he
+had continuously manifested his gratitude for the trifling service I had
+rendered him, at our first meeting, in delivering him out of the hands
+of the horrific Madam Gougasse. That gratitude is the expectation of
+favors to come was, in the case of Aristide, a cynical and inapplicable
+proposition. And here, as this (as far as I can see) is the last of
+Aristide's adventures I have to relate, let me make an honest and
+considered statement:--
+
+During the course of an interesting and fairly prosperous life, I have
+made many delightful Bohemian, devil-may-care acquaintances, but among
+them all Aristide stands as the one bright star who has never asked me
+to lend him money. I have offered it times without number, but he has
+refused. I believe there is no man living to whom Aristide is in debt.
+In the depths of the man's changeling and feckless soul is a principle
+which has carried him untarnished through many a wild adventure. If
+he ever accepted money--money to the Provençal peasant is the
+transcendental materialised, and Aristide (save by the changeling
+theory) was Provençal peasant bone and blood--it was always for what he
+honestly thought was value received. If he met a man who wanted to take
+a mule ride among the Mountains of the Moon, Aristide would at once have
+offered himself as guide. The man would have paid him; but Aristide, by
+some quaint spiritual juggling, would have persuaded him that the
+ascent of Primrose Hill was equal to any lunar achievement, seeing that,
+himself, Aristide Pujol, was keeper of the Sun, Moon and Seven Stars;
+and the gift to that man of Aristide's dynamic personality would have
+been well worth anything that he would have found in the extinct volcano
+we know to be the moon.
+
+"The only thing I would suggest, if you would allow me to do so," said
+I, "is not to try to make the fortune of Messrs. Dulau & Co. by some
+dazzling but devastating _coup_ of your own."
+
+He looked at me in his bright, shrewd way. "You think it time I
+restrained my imagination?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"I will read The Times and buy a family Bible," said Aristide.
+
+A week after he had taken up his work in the City, under my friend
+Blessington, I saw the delighted and prosperous man again. It was a
+Saturday and he came to lunch at my house.
+
+"_Tiens!_" said he, when he had recounted his success in the office, "it
+is four years since I was in England?"
+
+"Yes," said I, with a jerk of memory. "Time passes quickly."
+
+"It is three years since I lost little Jean."
+
+"Who is little Jean?" I asked.
+
+"Did I not tell you when I saw you last in Paris?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It is strange. I have been thinking about him and my heart has been
+aching for him all the time. You must hear. It is most important." He
+lit a cigar and began.
+
+It was then that he told me the story of which I have already related
+in these chronicles:[A] how he was scouring France in a ramshackle
+automobile as the peripatetic vendor of a patent corn cure and found a
+babe of nine months lying abandoned in the middle of that silent road
+through the wilderness between Salon and Arles; how instead of
+delivering it over to the authorities, he adopted it and carried it
+about with him from town to town, a motor accessory sometimes
+embarrassing, but always divinely precious; how an evil day came upon
+him at Aix-en-Provence when, the wheezing automobile having uttered
+its last gasp, he found his occupation gone; how, no longer being able
+to care for _le petit_ Jean, he left him with a letter and half his
+fortune outside the door of a couple of English maiden ladies who,
+staying in the same hotel, had manifested great interest in the baby
+and himself; and how, in the dead of the night, he had tramped away
+from Aix-en-Provence in the rain, his pockets light and his heart as
+heavy as lead.
+
+ [A] The Adventures of the Foundling.
+
+"And I have never heard of my little Jean again," said Aristide.
+
+"Why didn't you write?" I asked.
+
+"I knew their names, Honeywood; Miss Janet was the elder, Miss Anne the
+younger. But the name of the place they lived at I have never been able
+to remember. It was near London--they used to come up by train to
+matinées and afternoon concerts. But what it is called, _mon Dieu_, I
+have racked my brain for it. _Sacré mille tonnerres!_" He leaped to his
+feet in his unexpected, startling way, and pounced on a Bradshaw's
+Railway Guide lying on my library table. "Imbecile, pig, triple ass that
+I am! Why did I not think of this before? It is near London. If I look
+through all the stations near London on every line, I shall find it."
+
+"All right," said I, "go ahead."
+
+I lit a cigarette and took up a novel. I had not read very far when a
+sudden uproar from the table caused me to turn round. Aristide danced
+and flourished the Bradshaw over his head.
+
+"Chislehurst! Chislehurst! Ah, _mon ami_, now I am happy. Now I have
+found my little Jean. You will forgive me--but I must go now and embrace
+him."
+
+He held out his hand.
+
+"Where are you off to?" I demanded.
+
+"The Chislehurst, where else?"
+
+"My dear fellow," said I, rising, "do you seriously suppose that these
+two English maiden ladies have taken on themselves the responsibility of
+that foreign brat's upbringing?"
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_" said he taken aback for the moment, hypothesis having
+entered his head. Then, with a wide gesture, he flung the preposterous
+idea to the winds. "Of course. They have hearts, these English women.
+They have maternal instincts. They have money." He looked at Bradshaw
+again, then at his watch. "I have just time to catch a train. _Au
+revoir, mon vieux._"
+
+"But," I objected, "why don't you write? It's the natural thing to do."
+
+"Write? _Bah!_ Did you ever hear of a Provençal writing when he could
+talk?" He tapped his lips, and in an instant, like a whirlwind, he
+passed from my ken.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aristide on his arrival at Chislehurst looked about the pleasant, leafy
+place--it was a bright October afternoon and the wooded hillside blazed
+in russet and gold--and decided it was the perfect environment for Miss
+Janet and Miss Anne, to say nothing of little Jean. A neat red brick
+house with a trim garden in front of it looked just the kind of a house
+wherein Miss Janet and Miss Anne would live. He rang the bell. A
+parlour-maid, in spotless black and white, tutelary nymph of Suburbia,
+the very parlour-maid who would minister to Miss Janet and Miss Anne,
+opened the door.
+
+"Miss Honeywood?" he inquired.
+
+"Not here, sir," said the parlour-maid.
+
+"Where is she? I mean, where are they?"
+
+"No one of that name lives here," said the parlour-maid.
+
+"Who does live here?"
+
+"Colonel Brabazon."
+
+"And where do the two Miss Honeywood live?" he asked with his engaging
+smile.
+
+But English suburban parlour-maids are on their guard against smiles, no
+matter how engaging. She prepared to shut the door.
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"How can I find out?"
+
+"You might enquire among the tradespeople."
+
+"Thank you, mademoiselle, you are a most intelligent young----"
+
+The door shut in his face. Aristide frowned. She was a pretty
+parlour-maid, and Aristide didn't like to be so haughtily treated by a
+pretty woman. But his quest being little Jean and not the eternal
+feminine, he took the maid's advice and made enquiries at the prim and
+respectable shops.
+
+"Oh, yes," said a comely young woman in a fragrant bakers' and
+confectioners'. "They were two ladies, weren't they? They lived at Hope
+Cottage. We used to supply them. They left Chislehurst two years ago."
+
+"_Sacré nom d'un chien!_" said Aristide.
+
+"Beg pardon?" asked the young woman.
+
+"I am disappointed," said Aristide. "Where did they go to?"
+
+"I'm sure I can't tell you."
+
+"Do you remember whether they had a baby?"
+
+"They were maiden ladies," said the young woman rebukingly.
+
+"But anybody can keep a baby without being its father or mother. I want
+to know what has become of the baby."
+
+The young woman gazed through the window.
+
+"You had better ask the policeman."
+
+"That's an idea," said Aristide, and, leaving her, he caught up the
+passing constable.
+
+The constable knew nothing of maiden ladies with a baby, but he directed
+him to Hope Cottage. He found a pretty half-timber house lying back from
+the road, with a neat semi-circular gravelled path leading to a porch
+covered thick with Virginia creeper. Even more than the red brick
+residence of Colonel Brabazon did it look, with its air of dainty
+comfort, the fitting abode of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. He rang the bell
+and interviewed another trim parlour-maid. More susceptible to smiles
+than the former, she summoned her master, a kindly, middle-aged man, who
+came out into the porch. Yes, Honeywood was the name of the previous
+tenants. Two ladies, he believed. He had never seen them and knew
+nothing about a child. Messrs. Tompkin & Briggs, the estate agents in
+the High Street, could no doubt give him information. Aristide thanked
+him and made his way to Messrs. Tompkin & Briggs. A dreary spectacled
+youth in resentful charge of the office--his principals, it being
+Saturday afternoon, were golfing the happy hours away--professed blank
+ignorance of everything. Aristide fixed him with his glittering eye and
+flickered his fingers and spoke richly. The youth in a kind of mesmeric
+trance took down a battered, dog's eared book and turned over the pages.
+
+"Honeywood--Miss--Beverly Stoke--near St. Albans--Herts. That's it," he
+said.
+
+Aristide made a note of the address. "Is that all you can tell me?"
+
+"Yes," said the youth.
+
+"I thank you very much, my young friend," said Aristide, raising his
+hat, "and here is something to buy a smile with," and, leaving a
+sixpence on the table to shimmer before the youth's stupefied eyes,
+Aristide strutted out of the office.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You had much better have written," said I, when he came back and told
+me of his experiences. "The post-office would have done all that for
+you."
+
+"You have no idea of business, _mon cher ami_"--(I--a successful
+tea-broker of twenty-five years' standing!--the impudence of the
+fellow!)--"If I had written to-day, the letter would have reached
+Chislehurst on Monday morning. It would be redirected and reach
+Hertfordshire on Tuesday. I should not get any news till Wednesday. I go
+down to Beverly Stoke to-morrow, and then I find at once Miss Janet and
+Miss Anne and my little Jean! The secret of business men, and I am a
+business man, the accredited representative of Dulau et Compagnie--never
+forget that--the secret of business is no delay."
+
+He darted across the room to Bradshaw.
+
+"For God's sake," said I, "put that nightmare of perpetual motion in
+your pocket and go mad over it in the privacy of your own chamber."
+
+"Very good," said he, tucking the brain-convulsing volume under his arm.
+"I will put it on top of The Times and the family Bible and I will say
+'Ha! now I am British. Now I am very respectable!' What else can I do?"
+
+"Rent a pew in a Baptist chapel," said I.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a three-mile trudge from St. Albans Aristide, following
+directions, found himself on a high road running through the middle of a
+straggy common decked here and there with great elms splendid in autumn
+bravery, and populated chiefly by geese, who when he halted in some
+perplexity--for on each side, beyond the green, were indications of a
+human settlement--advanced in waddling flocks towards him and signified
+their disapproval of his presence. A Sundayfied youth in a rainbow tie
+rode past on a bicycle. Aristide took off his hat. The youth nearly fell
+off the bicycle, but British doggedness saved him from disaster.
+
+"Beverly Stoke? Will you have the courtesy----"
+
+"Here," bawled the youth, with a circular twist of his head, and, eager
+to escape from a madman, he rode on furiously.
+
+Aristide looked to left and right at the little houses beyond the
+green--some white and thatched and dilapidated, others horridly new and
+perky--but all poor and insignificant. As his eyes became accustomed to
+the scene they were aware of human forms dotted sparsely about the
+common. He struck across and accosted one, an elderly woman with a
+prayer-book. "Miss Honeywood? A lady from London?"
+
+"That house over there--the third beyond the poplar."
+
+"And little Jean--a beautiful child about four years old?"
+
+"That I don't know, sir. I live at Wilmer's End, a good half mile from
+here."
+
+Aristide made for the third house past the poplar. First there was a
+plank bridge across a grass-grown ditch; then a tiny patch of garden;
+then a humble whitewashed cottage with a small leaded casement window on
+each side of the front door. Unlike Hope Cottage, it did not look at all
+the residence of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. Its appearance, indeed, was
+woe-begone. Aristide, however, went up to the door; as there was neither
+knocker nor bell, he rapped with his knuckles. The door opened, and
+there, poorly dressed in blouse and skirt, stood Miss Anne.
+
+She regarded him for a moment in a bewildered way, then, recognizing
+him, drew back into the stone flagged passage with a sharp cry.
+
+"You? You--Mr. Pujol?"
+
+"_Oui, Mademoiselle, c'est moi._ It is I, Aristide Pujol."
+
+She put her hands on her bosom. "It is rather a shock seeing you--so
+unexpectedly. Will you come in?"
+
+She led the way into a tiny parlour, very clean, very simple with its
+furniture of old oak and brass, and bade him sit. She looked a little
+older than when he had seen her at Aix-en-Provence. A few lines had
+marred the comely face and there was here and there a touch of grey in
+the reddish hair, and, though still buxom, she had grown thinner. Care
+had set its stamp upon her.
+
+"Miss Honeywood," said Aristide. "It is on account of little Jean that I
+have come----"
+
+She turned on him swiftly. "Not to take him away!"
+
+"Then he is here!" He jumped to his feet and wrung both her hands and
+kissed them to her great embarrassment. "Ah, mademoiselle, I knew it. I
+felt it. When such an inspiration comes to a man, it is the _bon Dieu_
+who sends it. He is here, actually here, in this house?"
+
+"Yes," said Miss Anne.
+
+Aristide threw out his arms. "Let me see him. _Ah, le cher petit!_ I
+have been yearning after him for three years. It was my heart that I
+ripped out of my body that night and laid at your threshold."
+
+"Hush!" said Miss Anne, with an interrupting gesture. "You must not talk
+so loud. He is asleep in the next room. You mustn't wake him. He is very
+ill."
+
+"Ill? Dangerously ill?"
+
+"I'm afraid so."
+
+"_Mon Dieu_," said he, sitting down again in the oak settle. To Aristide
+the emotion of the moment was absorbing, overwhelming. His attitude
+betokened deepest misery and dejection.
+
+"And I expected to see him full of joy and health!"
+
+"It is not my fault, Mr. Pujol," said Miss Anne.
+
+He started. "But no. How could it be? You loved him when you first set
+eyes on him at Aix-en-Provence."
+
+Miss Anne began to cry. "God knows," said she, "what I should do without
+him. The dear mite is all that is left to me."
+
+"All? But there is your sister, the dear Miss Janet."
+
+Miss Anne's eyes were hidden in her handkerchief. "My poor sister died
+last year, Mr. Pujol."
+
+"I am very sorry. I did not know," said Aristide gently.
+
+There was a short silence. "It was a great sorrow to you," he said.
+
+"It was God's will," said Anne. Then, after another pause, during which
+she dried her eyes, she strove to smile. "Tell me about yourself. How do
+you come to be here?"
+
+Aristide replied in a hesitating way. He was in the presence of grief
+and sickness and trouble; the Provençal braggadocio dropped from him and
+he became the simple and childish creature that he was. He accounted
+very truthfully, very convincingly, for his queer life; for his
+abandonment of little Jean, for his silence, for his sudden and
+unexpected appearance. During the ingenuous _apologia pro vita sua_ Miss
+Anne regarded him with her honest candour.
+
+"Janet and I both understood," she said. "Janet was gifted with a divine
+comprehension and pity. The landlady at the hotel, I remember, said some
+unkind things about you; but we didn't believe them. We felt that you
+were a good man--no one but a good man could have written that
+letter--we cried over it--and when she tried to poison our minds we said
+to each other: 'What does it matter? Here God in his mercy has given us
+a child.' But, Mr. Pujol, why didn't you take us into your confidence?"
+
+"My dear Miss Anne," said Aristide, "we of the South do things
+impulsively, by lightning flashes. An idea comes suddenly. _Vlan!_ we
+carry it out in two seconds. We are not less human than the Northerner,
+who reflects two months."
+
+"That is almost what dear, wise Janet told me," said Miss Anne.
+
+"Then you know in your heart," said Aristide, after a while, "that if I
+had not been only a football at the feet of fortune, I should never have
+deserted little Jean?"
+
+"I do, Mr. Pujol. My sister and I have been footballs, too." She added
+with a change of tone: "You tell me you saw our dear home at
+Chislehurst?"
+
+"Yes," said Aristide.
+
+"And you see this. There is a difference."
+
+"What has happened?" asked Aristide.
+
+She told him the commonplace pathetic story. Their father had left them
+shares in the company of which he had been managing director. For many
+years they had enjoyed a comfortable income. Then the company had become
+bankrupt and only a miserable ninety pounds a year had been saved from
+the wreckage. The cottage at Beverly Stoke belonging to them--it had
+been their mother's--they had migrated thither with their fallen
+fortunes and little Jean. And then Janet had died. She was delicate and
+unaccustomed to privation and discomfort--and the cottage had its
+disadvantages. She, Anne herself, was as strong as a horse and had never
+been ill in her life, but others were not quite so hardy. "However"--she
+smiled--"one has to make the best of things."
+
+"_Parbleu_," said Aristide.
+
+Miss Anne went on to talk of Jean, a miraculous infant of infinite
+graces and accomplishments. Up to now he had been the sturdiest and
+merriest fellow.
+
+"At nine months old he saw that life was a big joke," said Aristide.
+"How he used to laugh."
+
+"There's not much laugh left in him, poor darling," she sighed. And she
+told how he had caught a chill which had gone to his lungs and how the
+night before last she thought she had lost him.
+
+She sat up and listened. "Will you excuse me for a moment?"
+
+She went out and presently returned, standing at the doorway. "He is
+still asleep. Would you like to see him? Only"--she put her fingers on
+her lips--"you must be very, very quiet."
+
+He followed her into the next room and looked about him shyly,
+recognizing that it was Miss Anne's own bedroom; and there, lying in a
+little cot beside the big bed, he saw the sleeping child, his brown face
+flushed with fever. He had a curly shock of black hair and well formed
+features. An old woolly lamb nose to nose with him shared his pillow.
+Aristide drew from his pocket a Teddy bear, and, having asked Miss
+Anne's permission with a glance, laid it down gently on the coverlid.
+
+His eyes were wet when they returned to the parlour. So were Miss
+Anne's. The Teddy bear was proof of the simplicity of his faith in her.
+
+After a while, conscious of hunger, he rose to take leave. He must be
+getting back to St. Albans. But might he be permitted to come back later
+in the afternoon? Miss Anne reddened. It outraged her sense of
+hospitality to send a guest away from her house on a three-mile walk for
+food. And yet----
+
+"Mr. Pujol," she said bravely, "I would ask you to stay to luncheon if I
+had anything to offer you. But I am single handed, and, with Jean's
+illness, I haven't given much thought to housekeeping. The woman who
+does some of the rough work won't be back till six. I hate to let you go
+all those miles--I am so distressed----"
+
+"But, mademoiselle," said Aristide. "You have some bread. You have
+water. It has been a banquet many a day to me, and this time it would
+be the most precious banquet of all."
+
+"I can do a little better than that," faltered Miss Anne. "I have plenty
+of eggs and there is bacon."
+
+"Eggs--bacon!" cried Aristide, his bright eyes twinkling and his hands
+going up in the familiar gesture. "That is superb. _Tiens!_ you shall
+not do the cooking. You shall rest. I will make you an _omelette au
+lard_--_ah!_"--he kissed the tips of his fingers--"such an omelette as
+you have not eaten since you were in France--and even there I doubt
+whether you have ever eaten an omelette like mine." His soul simmering
+with omelette, he darted towards the door. "The kitchen--it is this
+way?"
+
+"But, Mr. Pujol----!" Miss Anne laughed, protestingly. Who could be
+angry with the vivid and impulsive creature?
+
+"It is the room opposite Jean's--not so?"
+
+She followed him into the clean little kitchen, half amused, half
+flustered. Already he had hooked off the top of the kitchen range. "Ah!
+a good fire. And your frying-pan?" He dived into the scullery.
+
+"Please don't be in such a hurry," she pleaded. "You will have made the
+omelette before I've had time to lay the cloth, and it will get cold.
+Besides, I want to learn how to do it."
+
+"_Trés bien_," said Aristide, laying down the frying-pan. "You shall see
+how it is made--the omelette of the universe."
+
+So he helped Miss Anne to lay the cloth on the gate-legged oak table in
+the parlour and to set it out with bread and butter and the end of a
+tinned tongue and a couple of bottles of stout. After which they went
+back to the little kitchen, where in a kind of giggling awe she watched
+him shred the bacon and break the eggs with his thin, skilful fingers
+and perform his magic with the frying-pan and turn out the great golden
+creation into the dish.
+
+"Now," said he, pulling her in his enthusiasm, "to table while it is
+hot."
+
+Miss Anne laughed. She lost her head ever so little. The days had been
+drab and hopeless of late and she was still young; so, if she felt
+excited at this unhoped for inrush of life and colour, who shall blame
+her? The light sparkled once more in her eyes and the pink of her
+naturally florid complexion shone on her cheek as they sat down to
+table.
+
+"It is I who help it," said Aristide. "Taste that." He passed the plate
+and waited, with the artist's expectation for her approval.
+
+"It's delicious."
+
+It was indeed the perfection of omelette, all its suave juiciness
+contained in film as fine as goldbeater's skin.
+
+"Yes, it's good." He was delighted, childlike, at the success of his
+cookery. His gaiety kept the careworn woman in rare laughter during the
+meal. She lost all consciousness that he was a strange man plunged down
+suddenly in the midst of her old maidish existence--and a strange man,
+too, who had once behaved in a most outrageous fashion. But that was
+ever the way of Aristide. The moment you yielded to his attraction he
+made you feel that you had known him for years. His fascination
+possessed you.
+
+"Miss Anne," said he, smoking a cigarette, at her urgent invitation, "is
+there a poor woman in Beverly Stoke with whom I could lodge?"
+
+She gasped. "You lodge in Beverly Stoke?"
+
+"Why yes," said Aristide, as if it were the most natural thing in the
+world. "I am engaged in the city from ten to five every day. I can't
+come here and go back to London every night, and I can't stay a whole
+week without my little Jean. And I have my duty to Jean. I stand to him
+in the relation of a father. I must help you to nurse him and make him
+better. I must give him soup and apples and ice cream and----"
+
+"You would kill the darling in five minutes," interrupted Miss Anne.
+
+He waved his forefinger in the air. "No, no, I have nursed the sick in
+my time. My dear friend," said he, with a change of tone, "when did you
+go to bed last?"
+
+"I don't know," she answered in some confusion. "The district nurse has
+helped me--and the doctor has been very good. Jean has turned the corner
+now. Please don't worry. And as for your coming to live down here, it's
+absurd."
+
+"Of course, if you formally forbid me to do so, mademoiselle, and if you
+don't want to see me----"
+
+"How can you say a thing like that? Haven't I shown you to-day that you
+are welcome?"
+
+"Dear Miss Anne," said he, "forgive me. But what is that great vast town
+of London to me who know nobody there? Here in this tiny spot is
+concentrated all I care for in the world. Why shouldn't I live in it?"
+
+"You would be so dreadfully uncomfortable," said Miss Anne, weakly.
+
+"Bah!" cried Aristide. "You talk of discomfort to an old client of
+_L'Hôtel de la Belle Étoile_?"
+
+"The Hotel of the Beautiful Star? Where is that?" asked the innocent
+lady.
+
+"Wherever you like," said Aristide. "Your bed is dry leaves and your
+bed-curtains, if you demand luxury, are a hedge, and your ceiling, if
+you are fortunate, is ornamented with stars."
+
+She looked at him wide-eyed, in great concern.
+
+"Do you mean that you have ever been homeless?"
+
+He laughed. "I think I've been everything imaginable, except married."
+
+"Hush!" she said. "Listen!" Her keen ear had caught a child's cry. "It's
+Jean. I must go."
+
+She hurried out. Aristide prepared to light another cigarette. But a
+second before the application of the flaring match an idea struck him.
+He blew out the match, replaced the cigarette in his case, and with a
+dexterity that revealed the professional of years ago, began to clear
+the table. He took the things noiselessly into the kitchen, shut the
+door, and master of the kitchen and scullery washed up. Then, the most
+care-free creature in the world, he stole down the stone passage into
+the wilderness of Beverly Stoke.
+
+An hour afterwards he knocked at the front door, Anne Honeywood admitted
+him.
+
+"I have arranged with the good Mrs. Buttershaw. She lives a hundred
+yards down the road. I bring my baggage to-morrow evening."
+
+Anne regarded him in a humorous, helpless way. "I can't prevent you,"
+she said, "but I can give you a piece of advice."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Don't wash up for Mrs. Buttershaw."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So it came to pass that Aristide Pujol took up his residence at
+Beverly Stoke, trudging every morning three miles to catch his
+business train at St. Albans, and trudging back every evening three
+miles to Beverly Stoke. Every morning he ran into the cottage for a
+sight of little Jean and every evening after a digestion-racking meal
+prepared by Mrs. Buttershaw he went to the cottage armed with toys
+and weird and injudicious food for little Jean and demanded an account
+of the precious infant's doings during the day. Gradually Jean
+recovered of his congestion, being a sturdy urchin, and, to Aristide's
+delight, resumed the normal life of childhood.
+
+"_Moi, je suis papa_," said Aristide. "He has got to speak French, and
+he had better begin at once. It is absurd that anyone born between Salon
+and Arles should not speak French and Provençal; we'll leave Provençal
+till later. _Moi, je suis papa, Jean._ Say _papa_."
+
+"I don't quite see how he can call you that, Mr. Pujol," said Anne, with
+the suspicion of a flush on her cheek.
+
+"And why not? Has the poor child any other papa in the whole wide world?
+And at four years old not to have a father is heart-breaking. Do you
+want us to bring him up an orphan? No. You shan't be an orphan, _mon
+brave_," he continued, bending over the child and putting his little
+hands against his bearded face, "you couldn't bear such a calamity,
+could you? And so you will call me _papa_."
+
+"_Papa_," said Jean, with a grin.
+
+"There, he has settled it," said Aristide. "_Moi je suis papa._ And you,
+mademoiselle?"
+
+"I am Auntie Anne," she replied demurely.
+
+Saturday afternoons and Sundays were Aristide's days of delight. He
+could devote himself entirely to Jean. The thrill of the weeks when he
+had paraded the child in the market places of France while he sold his
+corn cure again ran through his veins. The two rows of cottages
+separated by the common, which was the whole of Beverly Stoke, became
+too small a theatre for his parental pride. He bewailed the loss of his
+automobile that had perished of senile decay at Aix-en-Provence. If he
+only had it now he could exhibit Jean to the astonished eyes of St.
+Albans, Watford--nay London itself!
+
+"I wish I could take him to Dulau & Company," said he.
+
+"Good Heavens!" cried Miss Anne in alarm, for Aristide was capable of
+everything. "What in the world would you do with him there?"
+
+"What would I do with him?" replied Aristide, picking the child up in
+his arms--the three were strolling on the common--"_Parbleu!_ I would
+use him to strike the staff of Dulau & Company green with envy. Do you
+think the united efforts of the whole lot of them, from the good Mr.
+Blessington to the office boy, could produce a hero like this? You are a
+hero, Jean, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes, papa," said Jean.
+
+"He knows it," shouted Aristide with a delighted gesture which nearly
+cast Jean to the circumambient geese. "Miss Anne, we have the most
+wonderful child in the universe."
+
+This, as far as Anne was concerned, was a proposition which for the past
+three years she had regarded as incontrovertible. She smiled at
+Aristide, who smiled at her, and Jean, seeing them happy, smiled largely
+at them both.
+
+In a very short time Aristide, who could magically manufacture boats
+and cocks and pigs and giraffes out of bits of paper, who could bark
+like a dog and quack like a goose, who could turn himself into a horse
+or a bear at a minute's notice, whose pockets were a perennial mine of
+infantile ecstasy, established himself in Jean's mind as a kind of
+tame, necessary and beloved jinn. Being a loyal little soul, the child
+retained his affection for Auntie Anne, but he was swept off his
+little feet by his mirific parent. The time came when, if he was not
+dressed in his tiny woollen jersey and knee breeches and had not his
+nose glued against the parlour window in readiness to scramble to the
+front door for Aristide's morning kiss, he would have thought that
+chaos had come again. And Anne, humouring the child, hastened to get
+him washed and dressed in time; until at last, so greatly was she
+affected by his obsession, she got into the foolish habit of watching
+the clock and saying to herself: "In another minute he will be here,"
+or: "He is a minute late. What can have happened to him?"
+
+So Aristide, in his childlike way, found remarkable happiness in
+Beverly Stoke. A very wet summer had been followed by a dry and mellow
+autumn. Aristide waxed enthusiastic over the English climate and
+rejoiced in the mild country air. He was also happy under my friend
+Blessington, who spoke of him to me in glowing terms. At the back of
+all Aristide's eccentricities was the Provençal peasant's shrewdness.
+He realized that, for the first time in his life, he had taken up a
+sound and serious avocation. Also, he was no longer irresponsible. He
+had found little Jean. Jean's future was in his hands. Jean was to be
+an architect--God knows why--but Aristide settled it, definitely,
+off-hand. He would have to be educated. "And, my dear friend," said
+he, when we were discussing Jean--and for months I heard nothing but
+Jean, Jean, Jean, so that I loathed the brat, until I met the
+brown-skinned, black-eyed, merry little wretch and fell, like
+everybody else, fatuously in love with him--"my dear friend," said he,
+"an architect, to be the architect that I mean him to be, must have
+universal knowledge. He must know the first word of the classic, the
+last word of the modern. He must be steeped in poetry, his brain must
+vibrate with science. He must be what you call in England a gentleman.
+He must go to one of your great public schools--Eton, Winchester,
+Rugby, Harrow--you see I know them all--he must go to Cambridge or
+Oxford. Ah, I tell you, he is to be a big man. I, Aristide Pujol, did
+not pick him up on that deserted road, in the Arabia Petrea of
+Provence, between Salon and Arles, for nothing. He was wrapped, as I
+have told you, in an old blanket--and _ma foi_ it smelt bad--and I
+dressed him in my pyjamas and made a Neapolitan cap for him out of one
+of my socks. The _bon Dieu_ sent him, and I shall arrange just as the
+_bon Dieu_ intended. Poor Miss Anne Honeywood with her ninety pounds a
+year, what can she do? Pouf! It is for me to look after the future of
+little Jean."
+
+By means of such discourse he convinced Miss Anne that Jean was
+predestined to greatness and that Providence had appointed him,
+Aristide, as the child's agent in advance. Very much bewildered by his
+riotous flow of language and very reluctant to sacrifice her woman's
+pride, she agreed to allow him to contribute towards Jean's upbringing.
+
+"Dear Miss Anne," said he, "it is my right. It is Jean's right. You
+would love to put him on top of the pinnacle of fame, would you not?"
+
+"Of course," said Miss Anne.
+
+"_Eh bien!_ we will work together. You will give him what can be given
+by a beautiful and exquisite woman, and I will do all that can be done
+by the accredited agent of Dulau et Compagnie, Wine Shippers of
+Bordeaux."
+
+So, I repeat, Aristide was entirely happy. His waking dreams were of the
+four-year-old child. The glad anticipation of the working day in Great
+Tower St., E. C., was the evening welcome from the simple but capable
+gentlewoman and the sense of home and intimacy in her little parlour no
+bigger than the never-entered and nerve-destroying salon of his parents
+at Aigues Mortes, but smiling with the grace of old oak and faded
+chintz. At Aigues Mortes the salon was a comfortless, tasteless
+convention, set apart for the celebrations of baptisms and marriages and
+deaths, a pride and a terror to the inhabitants. But here everything
+seemed to be as much a warm bit of Anne Honeywood as the tortoise-shell
+comb in her hair and the square of Brussels lace that rose and fell on
+the bosom of her old evening frock. For, you see, since she expected a
+visitor in the evenings, Anne had taken to dressing for her sketch of a
+dinner. For all her struggle with poverty she had retained the charm
+that four years before had made her touch upon Jean seem a consecration
+to the impressionable man. And now that he entered more deeply into her
+life and thoughts, he found himself in fragrant places that were very
+strange to him. He discovered, too, with some surprise, that a man who
+has been at fierce grips with Fortune all his life from ten to forty is
+ever so little tired in spirit and is glad to rest. In the tranquility
+of Anne Honeywood's presence his soul was singularly at peace. He also
+wondered why Anne Honeywood seemed to grow younger, and, in her gentle
+fashion, more laughter-loving, every day.
+
+The Saint Martin's summer lasted to the beginning of December, and then
+it came to an end, and with it the idyll of Aristide and Anne Honeywood.
+
+One Saturday afternoon, when the rain was falling dismally, she received
+him with an embarrassment she could scarcely conceal. The usual
+heightened colour no longer gave youth to her cheek; an anxious frown
+knitted her candid brows; and there was no laughter in her eyes. He
+looked at her questioningly. Was anything the matter with Jean? But Jean
+answered the question for himself by running down the passage and
+springing like a puppy into Aristide's arms. Anne turned her face away,
+as if the sight pained her, and, pleading a headache and the desire to
+lie down, she left the two together. Returning after a couple of hours
+with the tea-tray, she found them on the floor breathlessly absorbed in
+the erection of card pagodas. She bit her lip and swallowed a sob.
+Aristide jumped up and took the tray. Was not the headache better? He
+was so grieved. Jean must be very quiet and drink up his milk quietly
+like a hero because Auntie was suffering. Tea was a very subdued affair.
+Then Anne carried off Jean to bed, refusing Aristide's helpful
+ministrations. It was his Saturday and Sunday joy to bath Jean amid a
+score of crawly tin insects which he had provided for the child's
+ablutionary entertainment, and it formed the climax of Jean's blissful
+day. But this afternoon Anne tore the twain asunder. Aristide looked
+mournfully over the rain-swept common through the leaded panes, and
+speculated on the enigma of woman. A man, feeling ill, would have been
+only too glad for somebody to do his work; but a woman, just because she
+was ill, declined assistance. Surely women were an intellect-baffling
+sex.
+
+She came back, having put Jean to bed.
+
+"My dear friend," she said, with a blurt of bravery, "I have something
+very hard to say, but I must say it. You must go away from Beverly
+Stoke."
+
+"Ah!" cried Aristide, "is it I, then, that give you a headache?"
+
+"It's not your fault," she said gently. "You have been everything that a
+loyal gentleman could be--and it's because you're a loyal gentleman that
+you must go."
+
+"I don't understand," said he, puzzled. "I must go away because I give
+you a headache, although it is not my fault."
+
+"It's nothing to do with headaches," she explained. "Don't you see?
+People around here are talking."
+
+"About you and me?"
+
+"Yes," said Miss Anne, faintly.
+
+"_Saprelotte!_" cried Aristide, with a fine flourish, "let them talk!"
+
+"Against Jean and myself?"
+
+The reproach brought him to his feet. "No," said he. "No. Sooner than
+they should talk, I would go out and strangle every one of them. But it
+is infamous. What do they say?"
+
+"How can I tell you? What would they say in your own country?"
+
+"France is France and England is England."
+
+"And a little cackling village is the same all the world over. No, my
+dear friend--for you are my dear friend--you must go back to London, for
+the sake of my good name and Jean's."
+
+"But let us leave the cackling village."
+
+"There are geese on every common," said Anne.
+
+"_Nom de Dieu!_" muttered Aristide, walking about the tiny parlour.
+"_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_" He stood in front of her and flung out
+his arms wide. "But without Jean and you life will have no meaning for
+me. I shall die. I shall fade away. I shall perish. Tell me, dear Miss
+Anne, what they are saying, the miserable peasants with souls of mud."
+
+But Anne could tell him no more. It had been hateful and degrading to
+tell him so much. She shivered through all her purity. After a barren
+discussion she held out her hand, large and generous like herself.
+
+"Good-bye"--she hesitated for the fraction of a second--"Good-bye,
+Aristide. I promise you shall provide for Jean's future. I will bring
+him up to London now and then to see you. We will find some way out of
+the difficulty. But you see, don't you, that you must leave Beverly
+Stoke?"
+
+Aristide went back to his comfortless lodgings aflame with bewilderment,
+indignation and despair. He fell upon Mrs. Buttershaw, a slatternly and
+sour-visaged woman, and hurled at her a tornado of questions. She
+responded with the glee of a hag, and Aristide learned the amazing fact
+that in the matter of sheer uncharitableness, unkindness and foulness of
+thought Beverly Stoke, with its population of three hundred hinds, could
+have brought down upon it the righteous indignation of Sodom, Gomorrah,
+Babylon, Paris, and London. For a fortnight or so Anne Honeywood's life
+in the village had been that of a pariah dog.
+
+"And now you've spoke of it yourself," said Mrs. Buttershaw, her hands
+on her hips, "I'm glad. I'm a respectable woman, I am, and go to church
+regularly, and I don't want to be mixed up in such goings on. And I
+never have held with foreigners, anyway. And the sooner you find other
+lodgings, the better."
+
+For the first and only time in his life words failed Aristide Pujol. He
+stood in front of the virtuous harridan, his lips working, his fingers
+convulsively clutching the air.
+
+"You--you--you--you naughty woman!" he gasped, and, sweeping her away
+from the doorway of his box of a sitting-room, he rushed up to his
+tinier bedroom and in furious haste packed his portmanteau.
+
+"I would rather die than sleep another night beneath your slanderous
+roof," he cried at the foot of the stairs. "Here is more than your
+week's money." He flung a couple of gold coins on the floor and dashed
+out into the darkness and the rain.
+
+He hammered at Anne Honeywood's door. She opened it in some alarm.
+
+"You?--but----" she stammered.
+
+"I have come," said he, dumping his portmanteau in the passage, "to take
+you and Jean away from this abomination of a place. It is a Tophet
+reserved for those who are not good enough for hell. In hell there is
+dignity, _que diable!_ Here there is none. I know what you have
+suffered. I know how they insult you. I know what they say. You cannot
+stay one more night here. Pack up all your things. Pack up all Jean's
+things. I have my valise here. I walk to St. Albans and I come back for
+you in an automobile. You lock up the door. I tell the policeman to
+guard the cottage. You come with me. We take a train to London. You and
+Jean will stay at a hotel. I will go to my good friend who saved me
+from Madam Gougasse. After that we will think."
+
+"That's just like you," she said, smiling in spite of her trouble, "you
+act first and think afterwards. Unfortunately I'm in the habit of doing
+the reverse."
+
+"But it's I who am doing all the thinking for you. I have thought till
+my brain is red hot." He laughed in his luminous and excited way, and,
+seizing both her hands, kissed them one after the other. "There!" said
+he, "be ready by the time I return. Do not hesitate. Do not look back.
+Remember Lot's wife!" He flourished his hat and was gone like a flash
+into the heavy rain and darkness of the December evening. Anne cried
+after him, but he too remembering Lot's wife would not turn. He marched
+on buoyantly, heedless of the wet and the squirting mud from unseen
+puddles. It was an adventure such as he loved. It was a knightly errand,
+_parbleu!_ Was he not delivering a beautiful lady from the dragon of
+calumny? And in an automobile, too! His imagination fondled the idea.
+
+At a garage in St. Albans he readily found a car for hire. He was all
+for driving it himself--that is how he had pictured the rescue--but the
+proprietor, dull and unimaginative tradesman, declined firmly. It was a
+hireling who drove the car to Beverly Stoke. Anne, unhatted and
+uncloaked, admitted him.
+
+"You are not ready?"
+
+"My dear friend, how can I----?"
+
+"You are not coming?" His hands dropped to his sides and his face was
+the incarnation of disappointment.
+
+"Let us talk things over reasonably," she urged, opening the parlour
+door.
+
+"But I have brought the automobile."
+
+"He can wait for five minutes, can't he?"
+
+"He can wait till Doomsday," said Aristide.
+
+"Take off your dripping coat. You must be wet through. Oh, how impulsive
+you are!"
+
+He took off his overcoat dejectedly and followed her into the parlour,
+where she tried to point out the impossibility of his scheme. How could
+she abandon her home at a moment's notice? Failing to convince him, she
+said at last in some embarrassment, but with gentle dignity: "Suppose we
+did run away together in your romantic fashion, would it not confirm the
+scandal in the eyes of this wretched village?"
+
+"You are right," said Aristide. "I had not thought of it."
+
+He knew himself to be a madman. It was not thus that ladies were rescued
+from calumny. But to leave her alone to face it for time indefinite was
+unthinkable. And, meanwhile, what would become of him severed from her
+and little Jean? He sighed and looked around the little room where he
+had been so happy, and at the sweet-faced woman whose companionship had
+been so dear to him. And then the true meaning of all the precious
+things that had been his life for the past two months appeared before
+him like a smiling valley hitherto hidden and now revealed by dissolving
+mist. A great gladness gathered round his heart. He leaned across the
+table by which he was sitting and looked at her and for the first time
+noticed that her eyes were red.
+
+"You have been crying, dear Anne," said he, using her name boldly.
+"Why?"
+
+A man ought not to put a question like that at a woman's head and bid
+her stand and deliver. How is she to answer? Anne felt Aristide's bright
+eyes upon her and the colour mounted and mounted and deepened on her
+cheeks and brow.
+
+"I don't like changes," she said in a low voice.
+
+Aristide slipped noiselessly to the side of her chair and knelt on one
+knee and took her hand.
+
+"Anne--my beloved Anne!" said he.
+
+And Anne neither moved nor protested, but looked away from him into the
+fire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And that is all that Aristide told me. There are sacred and beautiful
+things in life that one man does not tell to another. He did, however,
+mention that they forgot all about the unfortunate chauffeur sitting in
+the rain till about three hours afterwards, when Aristide sped away to a
+St. Albans hotel in joyous solitude.
+
+The very next day he burst in upon me in a state of bliss bordering on
+mania.
+
+"But there is a tragic side to it," he said when the story was over.
+"For half the year I shall be exiled to Bordeaux, Marseilles and Algiers
+as the representative of Dulau et Compagnie."
+
+"The very best thing that could happen for your domestic happiness,"
+said I.
+
+"What? With my heart"--he thumped his heart--"with my heart hurting like
+the devil all the time?"
+
+"So long as your heart hurts," said I, "you know it isn't dead."
+
+A short while afterwards they were married in London. I was best man and
+Jean, specklessly attired, was page of honour, and the vicar of her own
+church at Chislehurst performed the ceremony. The most myopic of
+creatures could have seen that Anne was foolishly in love with her
+rascal husband. How could she help it?
+
+As soon as the newly wedded pair had received the exhortation, Aristide,
+darting to the altar-rail, caught Jean up in his arms, and, to the
+consternation of the officiating clergy, the verger, and Anne's
+conventional friends, cried out exultingly:
+
+"_Ah, mon petit._ It was a lucky day for both of us when I picked you
+up on the road between Salon and Arles. Put your hands together as you
+do when you're saying your prayers, _mon brave_, and say, 'God bless
+father and mother.'"
+
+Jean obediently adopted the attitude of the infant Samuel in the
+pictures.
+
+"God bless father and mother," said he, and the childish treble rang out
+queerly in the large, almost empty church.
+
+There was a span of silence and then all the women-folk fell on little
+Jean and that was the end of that wedding.
+
+
+                                THE END.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA
+ BY
+ William J. Locke
+
+ Author of "The Belovèd Vagabond," "Simon the Jester," etc.
+
+ _Cloth_      _12mo_      _$1.30 net_      _Postage 12 cents_
+
+ Illustrations by Arthur I. Keller
+
+"Mr. Locke has succeeded in uniting with the firm carefulness of his
+early work the rapid, fluent, vibrating style that makes his later books
+so delightful; therefore it is easy to make the deduction that
+'Clementina' is the best piece of work he has done."--_New York Evening
+Sun_
+
+"Among the novels of the past five years no books have more consistently
+produced an effect at once certain, satisfactory and delightful than
+those of William J. Locke. This latest addition to his shelf is full of
+life and laughter and the love not only of man for woman but of man for
+man and for humanity. Mr. Locke is a born story-teller and a master of
+the art of expression."--_The Outlook_
+
+"The book contains a mass of good material, with original
+characterization, and is written in a style piquant and clever."--_The
+Literary Digest_
+
+"A story containing the essence of humanity, with an abundance of
+sensible and sensitive, casual and unobtrusive commentary upon life and
+man, and especially upon woman."--_Boston Evening Transcript_
+
+"It contains even more of the popular qualities than are usually
+associated with the writings of this noted author."--_Boston Times_
+
+"Mr. Locke's flights into the realms of fancy have been a delight to
+many readers. He has a lightness of touch that is entirely captivating,
+and his remarkable characterization of inconsequent people gives them a
+reality that is very insistent."--_Baltimore Evening Sun_
+
+"Never has he drawn so deeply from that well that is the human heart;
+never so near those invisible heights which are the soul; and, if we are
+not altogether mistaken, 'The Glory of Clementina' will also prove to be
+that of its author."--_Baltimore News_
+
+"A fascinating story with delicate, whimsical touches."--_Albany
+Times-Union_
+
+"The book seems destined to live longer than any written by the author
+to date, because it is so sane and so fundamentally
+true."--_Philadelphia Enquirer_
+
+
+JOHN LANE CO., NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+ MANALIVE
+ BY
+ Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+ Author of "The Innocence of Father Brown," "Heretics," "Orthodoxy," etc.
+
+ _Cloth_      _12mo_      _$1.30 net_      _Postage 12 cents_
+
+ Frontispiece and Jacket Illustration by Will Foster
+
+"Mr. Chesterton has undertaken in this quaint narrative to make
+burlesque the vehicle of a sermon and a philosophy. It is all a part of
+the author's war upon artificial attitudes which enclose the living men
+like a shell and make for human purposes a dead man of him. He speaks
+here in a parable--a parable of his own kind, having about it a broad
+waggishness like that of Mr. Punch and a distinct flavor of that sort of
+low comedy which one finds in Dickens and Shakespeare. You are likely to
+find, before you are done with the parable, that there has been forced
+upon your attention a possible view of the life worth living. 'Manalive'
+is a 'Peterpantheistic' novel full of Chestertonisms."--_New York Times_
+
+"One of the oddest books Mr. Chesterton has yet given us."--_New York
+Evening Globe_
+
+"The fun of the book (and there is plenty of it) comes quite as much
+from the extraordinary and improbable characters as from the situations.
+Epigrams, witticisms, odd fancies, queer conceits, singular whimsies,
+follow after one another in quick succession."--_Brooklyn Eagle_
+
+
+"One of the most humorous tales of modern fiction, combined with a very
+tender and appealing love story."--_Cleveland Plain Dealer_
+
+"The book is certain to have a wide circulation, not only because of the
+name of the author attached to it, but because of its own intrinsic
+worth."--_Buffalo Commercial_
+
+"There can be no doubt as to the iridescent brilliance of the book. Page
+after page--full of caustic satire, humorous sally and profound
+epigram--fairly bristles with merriment. The book is a compact mass of
+scintillating wit."--_Philadelphia Public Ledger_
+
+
+JOHN LANE CO., NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol, by 
+William J. Locke
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+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL ***
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Joyous Adventures Of Aristide Pujol, by William J. Locke.
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol, by 
+William J. Locke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol
+
+Author: William J. Locke
+
+Release Date: July 31, 2008 [EBook #26154]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Anne Storer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p class="notes"><strong>Transcriber&#8217;s Note: Table of Contents added.</strong></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 376px;">
+<img src="images/imgcover.jpg" width="376" height="588" alt="Cover" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="box">
+
+<h3><em>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</em></h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Idols</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Septimus</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Derelicts</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Usurper</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Where Love Is</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The White Dove</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Simon the Jester</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Study in Shadows</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Christmas Mystery</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Belov&egrave;d Vagabond</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">At the Gate of Samaria</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Demagogue and Lady Phayre</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Glory of Clementina</span></p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="box1">
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+
+<a name="img003" id="img003"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 404px;">
+<img src="images/img003.jpg" width="404" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+</div>
+<p class="center"><span class="caption">at the beginning of the fourth kiss
+out came her father</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;"><strong><em>See page <a href="#Page_34">34</a></em></strong></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE</h2>
+<h6>JOYOUS ADVENTURES</h6>
+<h6>OF ARISTIDE PUJOL</h6>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+<h2>WILLIAM J. LOCKE</h2>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Illustrations by</span></h4>
+<h2>ALEC BALL</h2>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>NEW YORK<br />
+JOHN LANE COMPANY<br />
+MCMXII</strong></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="7" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr>  <td align='right'><a href="#I">I</a></td>  <td align='left'>THE ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR PATRONNE</td>  </tr>
+<tr>  <td align='right'><a href="#II">II</a></td>  <td align='left'>THE ADVENTURE OF THE ARL&Eacute;SIENNE</td>  </tr>
+<tr>  <td align='right'><a href="#III">III</a></td>  <td align='left'>THE ADVENTURE OF THE KIND MR. SMITH</td>  </tr>
+<tr>  <td align='right'><a href="#IV">IV</a></td>  <td align='left'>THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING</td>  </tr>
+<tr>  <td align='right'><a href="#V">V</a></td>  <td align='left'>THE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG&#8217;S HEAD</td>  </tr>
+<tr>  <td align='right'><a href="#VI">VI</a></td>  <td align='left'>THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE</td>  </tr>
+<tr>  <td align='right'><a href="#VII">VII</a></td>  <td align='left'>THE ADVENTURE OF THE MIRACLE</td>  </tr>
+<tr>  <td align='right'><a href="#VIII">VIII</a></td>  <td align='left'>THE ADVENTURE OF THE FICKLE GODDESS</td>  </tr>
+<tr>  <td align='right'><a href="#IX">IX</a></td>  <td align='left'>THE ADVENTURE OF A SAINT MARTIN&#8217;S SUMMER</td>  </tr>
+
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="7" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>At the Beginning of the Fourth Kiss Out Came Her Father</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img003"><em>Frontispiece</em></a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>I Had Knocked Him Down on Purpose. He Was Crippled<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2em;">for Life</span></td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img14">14</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>Anything Less Congruous as the Bride-Elect of the Debonair<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2em;">Aristide Pujol it Was Impossible to Imagine</span></td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img24">22</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>Had Straightway Poured His Grievances into a Feminine Ear</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img36">32</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>I Found Both Tyres Had Been Punctured in a Hundred Places</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img46">40</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;You Are Adorable, and I Love You to<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2em;">Distraction&rdquo;</span></td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img58">50</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>&ldquo;The Villain Was a Traveller in Buttons&mdash;Buttons!&rdquo;</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img70">60</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>He Burst into Shrieks of Laughter</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img76">64</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>&ldquo;And You!&rdquo; shouted Bocardon, Falling on Aristide; &ldquo;I Must Embrace<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2em;">You Also&rdquo;</span></td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img82">68</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>Standing on the Arrival Platform of Euston Station</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img94">78</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>&ldquo;Ah! the Pictures,&rdquo; cried Aristide, with a Wide Sweep of His Arms</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img106">88</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>&ldquo;I&#8217;ll Take Five Hundred Pounds,&rdquo; said He, &ldquo;to Stay in&rdquo;</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img116">96</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>Between the Folds of a Blanket Peeped the Face of a Sleeping Child</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img132">110</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>He Demonstrated the Proper Application of the Cure</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img144">120</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>It is a Fearsome Thing for a Man to be Left Alone in the Dead<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2em;">of Night with a Young Baby</span></td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img150">124</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>One of the Little Girls in Pigtails Was Holding Him, While Miss<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2em;">Anne Administered the Feeding-Bottle</span></td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img162">134</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>He Must Have Dealt Out Paralyzing Information</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img210">180</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>Fleurette Danced with Aristide, as Light as an Autumn Leaf<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2em;">Tossed by the Wind</span></td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img220">188</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>Aristide Practised His Many Queer Accomplishments</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img234">200</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>He Read It, and Blinked in Amazement</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img244">208</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>He Might as Well Have Pointed Out the Marvels of Kubla Khan&#8217;s<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2em;">Pleasure-Dome to a Couple of Guinea-Pigs</span></td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img254">216</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>&ldquo;I&#8217;ve Caught You! At Last, After Twenty Years, I&#8217;ve Caught You&rdquo;</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img274">234</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>There He Saw a Sight Which for a Moment Paralyzed Him</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img280">238</a></td>  </tr>
+
+<tr>  <td align='left'>Mr. Ducksmith Seized Him by the Lapels of His Coat</td>
+              <td align='right'><a href="#img286">242</a></td>  </tr>
+
+</table></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE<br />
+JOYOUS ADVENTURES<br />
+OF<br />
+ARISTIDE PUJOL</h1>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol</h2>
+
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>THE ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR PATRONNE</strong></p>
+
+
+<p>In narrating these few episodes in the undulatory,
+not to say switchback, career of my
+friend Aristide Pujol, I can pretend to no
+chronological sequence. Some occurred before he
+(almost literally) crossed my path for the first
+time, some afterwards. They have been related to
+me haphazard at odd times, together with a hundred
+other incidents, just as a chance tag of association
+recalled them to his swift and picturesque
+memory. He would, indeed, make a show of fixing
+dates by reference to his temporary profession; but
+so Protean seem to have been his changes of fortune
+in their number and rapidity that I could never
+keep count of them or their order. Nor does it
+matter. The man&#8217;s life was as disconnected as a
+pack of cards.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+My first meeting with him happened in this wise.</p>
+
+<p>I had been motoring in a listless, solitary fashion
+about Languedoc. A friend who had stolen a few
+days from anxious business in order to accompany
+me from Boulogne through Touraine and Guienne
+had left me at Toulouse; another friend whom I
+had arranged to pick up at Avignon on his way
+from Monte Carlo was unexpectedly delayed. I
+was therefore condemned to a period of solitude
+somewhat irksome to a man of a gregarious temperament.
+At first, for company&#8217;s sake, I sat in
+front by my chauffeur, McKeogh. But McKeogh,
+an atheistical Scotch mechanic with his soul in his
+cylinders, being as communicative as his own differential,
+I soon relapsed into the equal loneliness
+and greater comfort of the back.</p>
+
+<p>In this fashion I left Montpellier one morning on
+my leisurely eastward journey, deciding to break
+off from the main road, striking due south, and visit
+Aigues-Mortes on the way.</p>
+
+<p>Aigues-Mortes was once a flourishing Mediterranean
+town. St. Louis and his Crusaders sailed
+thence twice for Palestine; Charles V. and Francis
+I. met there and filled the place with glittering
+state. But now its glory has departed. The sea
+has receded three or four miles, and left it high
+and dry in the middle of bleak salt marshes, useless,
+dead and desolate, swept by the howling mistral
+and scorched by the blazing sun. The straight
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+white ribbon of road which stretched for miles
+through the plain, between dreary vineyards&mdash;some
+under water, the black shoots of the vines appearing
+like symmetrical wreckage above the surface&mdash;was
+at last swallowed up by the grim central
+gateway of the town, surmounted by its frowning
+tower. On each side spread the brown machicolated
+battlements that vainly defended the death-stricken
+place. A soft northern atmosphere would
+have invested it in a certain mystery of romance,
+but in the clear southern air, the towers and walls
+standing sharply defined against the blue, wind-swept
+sky, it looked naked and pitiful, like a poor
+ghost caught in the daylight.</p>
+
+<p>At some distance from the gate appeared the
+usual notice as to speed-limit. McKeogh, most
+scrupulous of drivers, obeyed. As there was a knot
+of idlers underneath and beyond the gate he slowed
+down to a crawl, sounding a patient and monotonous
+horn. We advanced; the peasant folk cleared
+the way sullenly and suspiciously. Then, deliberately,
+an elderly man started to cross the road,
+and on the sound of the horn stood stock still, with
+resentful defiance on his weather-beaten face. McKeogh
+jammed on the brakes. The car halted.
+But the infinitesimal fraction of a second before it
+came to a dead stop the wing over the near front
+wheel touched the elderly person and down he went
+on the ground. I leaped from the car, to be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+instantly surrounded by an infuriated crowd, which
+seemed to gather from all the quarters of the broad,
+decaying square. The elderly man, helped to his
+feet by sympathetic hands, shook his knotted fists
+in my face. He was a dour and ugly peasant, of
+splendid physique, as hard and discoloured as the
+walls of Aigues-Mortes; his cunning eyes were as
+clear as a boy&#8217;s, his lined, clean-shaven face as
+rigid as a gargoyle; and the back of his neck, above
+the low collar of his jersey, showed itself seamed
+into glazed irregular lozenges, like the hide of a
+crocodile. He cursed me and my kind healthily in
+very bad French and apostrophized his friends in
+Proven&ccedil;al, who in Proven&ccedil;al and bad French made
+responsive clamour. I had knocked him down on
+purpose. He was crippled for life. Who was
+I to go tearing through peaceful towns with my
+execrated locomotive and massacring innocent people?
+I tried to explain that the fault was his, and
+that, after all, to judge by the strength of his
+lungs, no great damage had been inflicted. But no.
+They would not let it go like that. There were the
+gendarmes&mdash;I looked across the square and saw
+two gendarmes striding portentously towards the
+scene&mdash;they would see justice done. The law was
+there to protect poor folk. For a certainty I would
+not get off easily.</p>
+
+<a name="img14" id="img14"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/img014.jpg" width="600" height="454" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">i had knocked him down on purpose. he was crippled for life</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I knew what would happen. The gendarmes
+would submit McKeogh and myself to a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+<em>proc&egrave;s-verbal</em>. They would impound the car. I should
+have to go to the Mairie and make endless depositions.
+I should have to wait, Heaven knows how
+long, before I could appear before the <em>juge de paix</em>.
+I should have to find a solicitor to represent me.
+In the end I should be fined for furious driving&mdash;at
+the rate, when the accident happened, of a mile
+an hour&mdash;and probably have to pay a heavy compensation
+to the wilful and uninjured victim of
+McKeogh&#8217;s impeccable driving. And all the time,
+while waiting for injustice to take its course,
+I should be the guest of a hostile population. I
+grew angry. The crowd grew angrier. The gendarmes
+approached with an air of majesty and
+fate. But just before they could be acquainted with
+the brutal facts of the disaster a singularly bright-eyed
+man, wearing a hard felt hat and a blue serge
+suit, flashed like a meteor into the midst of the
+throng, glanced with an amazing swiftness at me,
+the car, the crowd, the gendarmes and the victim,
+ran his hands up and down the person of the last
+mentioned, and then, with a frenzied action of a
+figure in a bad cinematograph rather than that of a
+human being, subjected the inhabitants to an infuriated
+philippic in Proven&ccedil;al, of which I could
+not understand one word. The crowd, with here
+and there a murmur of remonstrance, listened to
+him in silence. When he had finished they hung
+their heads, the gendarmes shrugged their majestic
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+and fateful shoulders and lit cigarettes, and the
+gargoyle-visaged ancient with the neck of crocodile
+hide turned grumbling away. I have never witnessed
+anything so magical as the effect produced
+by this electric personage. Even McKeogh, who
+during the previous clamour had sat stiff behind his
+wheel, keeping expressionless eyes fixed on the cap
+of the radiator, turned his head two degrees of a
+circle and glanced at his surroundings.</p>
+
+<p>The instant peace was established our rescuer
+darted up to me with the directness of a dragon-fly
+and shook me warmly by the hand. As he had
+done me a service, I responded with a grateful
+smile; besides, his aspect was peculiarly prepossessing.
+I guessed him to be about five-and-thirty. He
+had a clear olive complexion, black moustache and
+short silky vandyke beard, and the most fascinating,
+the most humorous, the most mocking, the
+most astonishingly bright eyes I have ever seen in
+my life. I murmured a few expressions of thanks,
+while he prolonged the handshake with the fervour
+of a long-lost friend.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s all right, my dear sir. Don&#8217;t worry any
+more,&rdquo; he said in excellent English, but with a
+French accent curiously tinged with Cockney. &ldquo;The
+old gentleman&#8217;s as sound as a bell&mdash;not a bruise on
+his body.&rdquo; He pushed me gently to the step of the
+car. &ldquo;Get in and let me guide you to the only
+place where you can eat in this accursed town.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+Before I could recover from my surprise, he was
+by my side in the car shouting directions to
+McKeogh.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah! These people!&rdquo; he cried, shaking his hands
+with outspread fingers in front of him. &ldquo;They have
+no manners, no decency, no self-respect. It&#8217;s a regular
+trade. They go and get knocked down by
+automobiles on purpose, so that they can claim indemnity.
+They breed dogs especially and train
+them to commit suicide under the wheels so that
+they can get compensation. There&#8217;s one now&mdash;<em>ah,
+sacr&eacute;e b&ecirc;te!</em>&rdquo; He leaned over the side of the car
+and exchanged violent objurgation with the dog.
+&ldquo;But never mind. So long as I am here you can
+run over anything you like with impunity.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;m very much obliged to you,&rdquo; said I. &ldquo;You&#8217;ve
+saved me from a deal of foolish unpleasantness.
+From the way you handled the old gentleman I
+should guess you to be a doctor.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s one of the few things I&#8217;ve never been,&rdquo;
+he replied. &ldquo;No; I&#8217;m not a doctor. One of these
+days I&#8217;ll tell you all about myself.&rdquo; He spoke as
+if our sudden acquaintance would ripen into life-long
+friendship. &ldquo;There&#8217;s the hotel&mdash;the H&ocirc;tel
+Saint-Louis,&rdquo; he pointed to the sign a little way up
+the narrow, old-world, cobble-paved street we were
+entering. &ldquo;Leave it to me; I&#8217;ll see that they treat
+you properly.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The car drew up at the doorway. My electric
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+friend leaped out and met the emerging landlady.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Bonjour, madame.</em> I&#8217;ve brought you one of my
+very good friends, an English gentleman of the
+most high importance. He will have <em>d&eacute;jeuner&mdash;tout
+ce qu&#8217;il y a de mieux</em>. None of your cabbage-soup
+and eels and <em>andouilles</em>, but a good omelette,
+some fresh fish, and a bit of very tender meat. Will
+that suit you?&rdquo; he asked, turning to me.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Excellently,&rdquo; said I, smiling. &ldquo;And since
+you&#8217;ve ordered me so charming a <em>d&eacute;jeuner</em>, perhaps
+you&#8217;ll do me the honour of helping me to eat it?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;With the very greatest pleasure,&rdquo; said he, without
+a second&#8217;s hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>We entered the small, stuffy dining-room, where
+a dingy waiter, with a dingier smile, showed us to
+a small table by the window. At the long table in
+the middle of the room sat the half-dozen frequenters
+of the house, their napkins tucked under
+their chins, eating in gloomy silence a dreary meal
+of the kind my new friend had deprecated.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What shall we drink?&rdquo; I asked, regarding with
+some disfavour the thin red and white wines in the
+decanters.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Anything,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;but this <em>piquette du pays</em>.
+It tastes like a mixture of sea-water and vinegar.
+It produces the look of patient suffering that you
+see on those gentlemen&#8217;s faces. You, who are not
+used to it, had better not venture. It would excoriate
+your throat. It would dislocate your
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+pancreas. It would play the very devil with you.
+Adolphe&rdquo;&mdash;he beckoned the waiter&mdash;&ldquo;there&#8217;s a little
+white wine of the C&ocirc;tes du Rhone&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; He
+glanced at me.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;m in your hands,&rdquo; said I.</p>
+
+<p>As far as eating and drinking went I could not
+have been in better. Nor could anyone desire a
+more entertaining chance companion of travel.
+That he had thrust himself upon me in the most
+brazen manner and taken complete possession of
+me there could be no doubt. But it had all been
+done in the most irresistibly charming manner in the
+world. One entirely forgot the impudence of the
+fellow. I have since discovered that he did not lay
+himself out to be agreeable. The flow of talk and
+anecdote, the bright laughter that lit up a little
+joke, making it appear a very brilliant joke indeed,
+were all spontaneous. He was a man, too, of some
+cultivation. He knew France thoroughly, England
+pretty well; he had a discriminating taste in architecture,
+and waxed poetical over the beauties of
+Nature.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It strikes me as odd,&rdquo; said I at last, somewhat
+ironically, &ldquo;that so vital a person as yourself should
+find scope for your energies in this dead-and-alive
+place.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He threw up his hands. &ldquo;I live here? I crumble
+and decay in Aigues-Mortes? For whom do you
+take me?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+I replied that, not having the pleasure of knowing
+his name and quality, I could only take him for an
+enigma.</p>
+
+<p>He selected a card from his letter-case and
+handed it to me across the table. It bore the
+legend:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+              <span class="smcap">Aristide Pujol</span>,<br />
+                      Agent.<br />
+          213 bis, Rue Saint-Honor&eacute;, Paris.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That address will always find me,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+
+<p>Civility bade me give him my card, which he put
+carefully in his letter-case.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I owe my success in life,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;to the fact
+that I have never lost an opportunity or a visiting-card.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Where did you learn your perfect English?&rdquo;
+I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;First,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;among English tourists at
+Marseilles. Then in England. I was Professor of
+French at an academy for young ladies.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I hope you were a success?&rdquo; said I.</p>
+
+<p>He regarded me drolly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes&mdash;and no,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>The meal over, we left the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;you would like to visit the
+towers on the ramparts. I would dearly love to
+accompany you, but I have business in the town.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+I will take you, however, to the <em>gardien</em> and put
+you in his charge.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He raced me to the gate by which I had entered.
+The <em>gardien des remparts</em> issued from his lodge at
+Aristide Pujol&#8217;s summons and listened respectfully
+to his exhortation in Proven&ccedil;al. Then he went for
+his keys.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;ll not say good-bye,&rdquo; Aristide Pujol declared,
+amiably. &ldquo;I&#8217;ll get through my business long before
+you&#8217;ve done your sight-seeing, and you&#8217;ll find
+me waiting for you near the hotel. <em>Au revoir, cher
+ami.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He smiled, lifted his hat, waved his hand in a
+friendly way, and darted off across the square. The
+old <em>gardien</em> came out with the keys and took me
+off to the Tour de Constance, where Protestants
+were imprisoned pell-mell after the revocation of
+the Edict of Nantes; thence to the Tour des Bourguignons,
+where I forget how many hundred Burgundians
+were massacred and pickled in salt; and,
+after these cheery exhibitions, invited me to walk
+round the ramparts and inspect the remaining
+eighteen towers of the enceinte. As the mistral,
+however, had sprung up and was shuddering across
+the high walls, I declined, and, having paid him his
+fee, descended to the comparative shelter of the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>There I found Aristide Pujol awaiting me at the
+corner of the narrow street in which the hotel was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+situated. He was wearing&mdash;like most of the young
+bloods of Provence in winter-time&mdash;a short, shaggy,
+yet natty goat-skin coat, ornamented with enormous
+bone buttons, and a little cane valise stood near by
+on the kerb of the square.</p>
+
+<p>He was not alone. Walking arm in arm with
+him was a stout, elderly woman of swarthy complexion
+and forbidding aspect. She was attired in
+a peasant&#8217;s or small shopkeeper&#8217;s rusty Sunday
+black and an old-fashioned black bonnet prodigiously
+adorned with black plumes and black roses.
+Beneath this bonnet her hair was tightly drawn up
+from her forehead; heavy eyebrows overhung a
+pair of small, crafty eyes, and a tuft of hair grew
+on the corner of a prognathous jaw. She might
+have been about seven-and-forty.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide Pujol, unlinking himself from this unattractive
+female, advanced and saluted me with
+considerable deference.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monseigneur&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>As I am neither a duke nor an archbishop, but
+a humble member of the lower automobiling classes,
+the high-flown title startled me.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monseigneur, will you permit me,&rdquo; said he, in
+French, &ldquo;to present to you Mme. Gougasse? Madame
+is the <em>patronne</em> of the Caf&eacute; de l&#8217;Univers, at
+Carcassonne, which doubtless you have frequented,
+and she is going to do me the honour of marrying
+me to-morrow.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img24" id="img24"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img24.jpg" width="500" height="424" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">anything less congruous as the bride-elect of the
+debonair aristide pujol it was impossible to imagine</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+The unexpectedness of the announcement took
+my breath away.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good heavens!&rdquo; said I, in a whisper.</p>
+
+<p>Anyone less congruous as the bride-elect of the
+debonair Aristide Pujol it was impossible to imagine.
+However, it was none of my business. I
+raised my hat politely to the lady.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame, I offer you my sincere felicitations.
+As an entertaining husband I am sure you will find
+M. Aristide Pujol without a rival.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Je vous remercie, monseigneur</em>,&rdquo; she replied, in
+what was obviously her best company manner.
+&ldquo;And if ever you will deign to come again to the
+Caf&eacute; de l&#8217;Univers at Carcassonne we will esteem
+it a great honour.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And so you&#8217;re going to get married to-morrow?&rdquo;
+I remarked, by way of saying something.
+To congratulate Aristide Pujol on his choice lay
+beyond my power of hypocrisy.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;To-morrow,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;my dear Am&eacute;lie will
+make me the happiest of men.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;We start for Carcassonne by the three-thirty
+train,&rdquo; said Mme. Gougasse, pulling a great silver
+watch from some fold of her person.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then there is time,&rdquo; said I, pointing to a little
+weather-beaten caf&eacute; in the square, &ldquo;to drink a glass
+to your happiness.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Bien volontiers</em>,&rdquo; said the lady.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Pardon, ch&egrave;re amie</em>,&rdquo; Aristide interposed,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+quickly. &ldquo;Unless monseigneur and I start at once
+for Montpellier, I shall not have time to transact
+my little affairs before your train arrives
+there.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Parenthetically, I must remark that all trains
+going from Aigues-Mortes to Carcassonne must
+stop at Montpellier.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s true,&rdquo; she agreed, in a hesitating manner.
+&ldquo;But&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, idol of my heart, though I am overcome
+with grief at the idea of leaving you for two little
+hours, it is a question of four thousand francs.
+Four thousand francs are not picked up every day
+in the street. It&#8217;s a lot of money.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mme. Gougasse&#8217;s little eyes glittered.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Bien s&ucirc;r.</em> And it&#8217;s quite settled?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Absolutely.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And it will be all for me?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Half,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You promised all to me for the redecoration
+of the ceiling of the caf&eacute;.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Three thousand will be sufficient, dear angel.
+What? I know these contractors and decorators.
+The more you pay them, the more abominable will
+they make the ceiling. Leave it to me. I, Aristide,
+will guarantee you a ceiling like that of the
+Sistine Chapel for two thousand francs.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She smiled and bridled, so as to appear perfectly
+well-bred in my presence. The act of smiling
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+caused the tuft of hair on her jaw to twitch horribly.
+A cold shiver ran down my back.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Don&#8217;t you think, monseigneur,&rdquo; she asked,
+archly, &ldquo;that M. Pujol should give me the four
+thousand francs as a wedding-present?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Most certainly,&rdquo; said I, in my heartiest voice,
+entirely mystified by the conversation.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I yield,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Ah, women,
+women! They hold up their little rosy finger, and
+the bravest of men has to lie down with his chin
+on his paws like a good old watch-dog. You agree,
+then, monseigneur, to my giving the whole of the
+four thousand francs to Am&eacute;lie?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;More than that,&rdquo; said I, convinced that the
+swarthy lady of the prognathous jaw was bound to
+have her own way in the end where money was
+concerned, and yet for the life of me not seeing
+how I had anything to do with the disposal of
+Aristide Pujol&#8217;s property&mdash;&ldquo;More than that,&rdquo; said
+I; &ldquo;I command you to do it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>C&#8217;est bien gentil de votre part</em>,&rdquo; said madame.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And now the caf&eacute;,&rdquo; I suggested, with chattering
+teeth. We had been standing all the time at
+the corner of the square, while the mistral whistled
+down the narrow street. The dust was driven
+stingingly into our faces, and the women of the
+place who passed us by held their black scarves
+over their mouths.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Alas, monseigneur,&rdquo; said Mme. Gougasse,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Aristide is right. You must start now for Montpellier
+in the automobile. I will go by the train
+for Carcassonne at three-thirty. It is the only train
+from Aigues-Mortes. Aristide transacts his business
+and joins me in the train at Montpellier. You
+have not much time to spare.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I was bewildered. I turned to Aristide Pujol,
+who stood, hands on hips, regarding his prospective
+bride and myself with humorous benevolence.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My good friend,&rdquo; said I in English, &ldquo;I&#8217;ve not
+the remotest idea of what the two of you are talking
+about; but I gather you have arranged that I
+should motor you to Montpellier. Now, I&#8217;m not
+going to Montpellier. I&#8217;ve just come from there,
+as I told you at <em>d&eacute;jeuner</em>. I&#8217;m going in the opposite
+direction.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He took me familiarly by the arm, and, with a
+&ldquo;<em>Pardon, ch&egrave;re amie</em>,&rdquo; to the lady, led me a few
+paces aside.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I beseech you,&rdquo; he whispered; &ldquo;it&#8217;s a matter of
+four thousand francs, a hundred and sixty pounds,
+eight hundred dollars, a new ceiling for the Caf&eacute;
+de l&#8217;Univers, the dream of a woman&#8217;s life, and the
+happiest omen for my wedded felicity. The fair
+goddess Hymen invites you with uplifted torch.
+You can&#8217;t refuse.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He hypnotized me with his bright eyes, overpowered
+my will by his winning personality. He
+seemed to force me to desire his companionship. I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+weakened. After all, I reflected, I was at a loose
+end, and where I went did not matter to anybody.
+Aristide Pujol had also done me a considerable
+service, for which I felt grateful. I yielded with
+good grace.</p>
+
+<p>He darted back to Mme. Gougasse, alive with
+gaiety.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ch&egrave;re amie</em>, if you were to press monseigneur,
+I&#8217;m sure he would come to Carcassonne and dance
+at our wedding.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Alas! That,&rdquo; said I, hastily, &ldquo;is out of the question.
+But,&rdquo; I added, amused by a humorous idea,
+&ldquo;why should two lovers separate even for a few
+hours? Why should not madame accompany us to
+Montpellier? There is room in my auto for three,
+and it would give me the opportunity of making
+madame&#8217;s better acquaintance.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There, Am&eacute;lie!&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;What do you
+say?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Truly, it is too much honour,&rdquo; murmured Mme.
+Gougasse, evidently tempted.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There&#8217;s your luggage, however,&rdquo; said Aristide.
+&ldquo;You would bring that great trunk, for which there
+is no place in the automobile of monseigneur.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s true&mdash;my luggage.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Send it on by train, <em>ch&egrave;re amie</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;When will it arrive at Carcassonne?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Not to-morrow,&rdquo; said Pujol, &ldquo;but perhaps next
+week or the week after. Perhaps it may never come
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+at all. One is never certain with these railway companies.
+But what does that matter?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What do you say?&rdquo; cried the lady, sharply.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It may arrive or it may not arrive; but you
+are rich enough, <em>ch&egrave;re amie</em>, not to think of a few
+camisoles and bits of jewellery.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And my lace and my silk dress that I have
+brought to show your parents. <em>Merci!</em>&rdquo; she retorted,
+with a dangerous spark in her little eyes.
+&ldquo;You think one is made of money, eh? You will
+soon find yourself mistaken, my friend. I would
+give you to understand&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;. She checked herself
+suddenly. &ldquo;Monseigneur&rdquo;&mdash;she turned to me with
+a resumption of the gracious manner of her bottle-decked
+counter at the Caf&eacute; de l&#8217;Univers&mdash;&ldquo;you are
+too amiable. I appreciate your offer infinitely; but I
+am not going to entrust my luggage to the kind
+care of the railway company. <em>Merci, non.</em> They
+are robbers and thieves. Even if it did arrive,
+half the things would be stolen. Oh, I
+know them.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She shook the head of an experienced and self-reliant
+woman. No doubt, distrustful of banks as
+of railway companies, she kept her money hidden
+in her bedroom. I pitied my poor young friend;
+he would need all his gaiety to enliven the domestic
+side of the Caf&eacute; de l&#8217;Univers.</p>
+
+<p>The lady having declined my invitation, I expressed
+my regrets; and Aristide, more emotional,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+voiced his sense of heart-rent desolation, and in a
+resigned tone informed me that it was time to start.
+I left the lovers and went to the hotel, where I
+paid the bill, summoned McKeogh, and lit a companionable
+pipe.</p>
+
+<p>The car backed down the narrow street into the
+square and took up its position. We entered. McKeogh
+took charge of Aristide&#8217;s valise, tucked us
+up in the rug, and settled himself in his seat. The
+car started and we drove off, Aristide gallantly
+brandishing his hat and Mme. Gougasse waving her
+lily hand, which happened to be hidden in an ill-fitting
+black glove.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;To Montpellier, as fast as you can!&rdquo; he shouted
+at the top of his lungs to McKeogh. Then he
+sighed as he threw himself luxuriously back. &ldquo;Ah,
+this is better than a train. Am&eacute;lie doesn&#8217;t know
+what a mistake she has made!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The elderly victim of my furious entry was
+lounging, in spite of the mistral, by the grim machicolated
+gateway. Instead of scowling at me he
+raised his hat respectfully as we passed. I touched
+my cap, but Aristide returned the salute with the
+grave politeness of royalty.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;This is a place,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;which I would like
+never to behold again.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>In a few moments we were whirling along the
+straight, white road between the interminable black
+vineyards, and past the dilapidated homesteads of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+the vine-folk and wayside caf&eacute;s that are scattered
+about this unjoyous corner of France.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said he, suddenly, &ldquo;what do you think
+of my <em>fianc&eacute;e</em>?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Politeness and good taste forbade expression of
+my real opinion. I murmured platitudes to the
+effect that she seemed to be a most sensible woman,
+with a head for business.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She&#8217;s not what we in French call <em>jolie, jolie</em>;
+but what of that? What&#8217;s the good of marrying
+a pretty face for other men to make love to? And,
+as you English say, there&#8217;s none of your confounded
+sentiment about her. But she has the
+most flourishing caf&eacute; in Carcassonne; and, when
+the ceiling is newly decorated, provided she doesn&#8217;t
+insist on too much gold leaf and too many naked
+babies on clouds&mdash;it&#8217;s astonishing how women love
+naked babies on clouds&mdash;it will be the snuggest place
+in the world. May I ask for one of your excellent
+cigarettes?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I handed him the case from the pocket of the
+car.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It was there that I made her acquaintance,&rdquo; he
+resumed, after having lit the cigarette from my
+pipe. &ldquo;We met, we talked, we fixed it up. She is
+not the woman to go by four roads to a thing. She
+did me the honour of going straight for me. Ah,
+but what a wonderful woman! She rules that caf&eacute;
+like a kingdom; a Semiramis, a Queen Elizabeth,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+a Catherine de&#8217; Medici. She sits enthroned behind
+the counter all day long and takes the money and
+counts the saucers and smiles on rich clients, and
+if a waiter in a far corner gives a bit of sugar to a
+dog she spots it, and the waiter has a deuce of a
+time. That woman is worth her weight in thousand-franc
+notes. She goes to bed every night at
+one, and gets up in the morning at five. And
+virtuous! Didn&#8217;t Solomon say that a virtuous
+woman was more precious than rubies? That&#8217;s the
+kind of wife the wise man chooses when he gives
+up the giddy ways of youth. Ah, my dear sir,
+over and over again these last two or three days
+my dear old parents&mdash;I have been on a visit to them
+in Aigues-Mortes&mdash;have commended my wisdom.
+Am&eacute;lie, who is devoted to me, left her caf&eacute; in Carcassonne
+to make their acquaintance and receive
+their blessing before our marriage, also to show
+them the lace on her <em>dessous</em> and her new silk
+dress. They are too old to take the long journey
+to Carcassonne. &lsquo;My son,&rsquo; they said, &lsquo;you are
+making a marriage after our own hearts. We are
+proud of you. Now we can die perfectly content.&rsquo;
+I was wrong, perhaps, in saying that Am&eacute;lie has
+no sentiment,&rdquo; he continued, after a short pause.
+&ldquo;She adores me. It is evident. She will not allow
+me out of her sight. Ah, my dear friend, you don&#8217;t
+know what a happy man I am.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>For a brilliant young man of five-and-thirty, who
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+was about to marry a horrible Meg&aelig;ra ten or twelve
+years his senior, he looked unhealthily happy.
+There was no doubt that his handsome roguery had
+caught the woman&#8217;s fancy. She was at the dangerous
+age, when even the most ferro-concrete-natured
+of women are apt to run riot. She was
+comprehensible, and pardonable. But the man baffled
+me. He was obviously marrying her for her
+money; but how in the name of Diogenes and all
+the cynics could he manage to look so confoundedly
+joyful about it?</p>
+
+<p>The mistral blew bitterly. I snuggled beneath
+the rug and hunched up my shoulders so as to get
+my ears protected by my coat-collar. Aristide, sufficiently
+protected by his goat&#8217;s hide, talked like a
+shepherd on a May morning. Why he took for
+granted my interest in his unromantic, not to say
+sordid, courtship I knew not; but he gave me the
+whole history of it from its modest beginnings to
+its now penultimate stage. From what I could make
+out&mdash;for the mistral whirled many of his words
+away over unheeding Provence&mdash;he had entered the
+Caf&eacute; de l&#8217;Univers one evening, a human derelict
+battered by buffeting waves of Fortune, and, finding
+a seat immediately beneath Mme. Gougasse&#8217;s
+<em>comptoir</em>, had straightway poured his grievances
+into a feminine ear and, figuratively speaking,
+rested his weary heart upon a feminine bosom.
+And his buffetings and grievances and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+wearinesses? Whence came they? I asked the question
+point-blank.</p>
+
+<a name="img36" id="img36"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 429px;">
+<img src="images/img036.jpg" width="429" height="500" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">had straightway poured his grievances into a feminine ear</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, my dear friend,&rdquo; he answered, kissing his
+gloved finger-tips, &ldquo;she was adorable!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Who?&rdquo; I asked, taken aback. &ldquo;Mme. Gougasse?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu</em>, no!&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;Not Mme. Gougasse.
+Am&eacute;lie is solid, she is virtuous, she is
+jealous, she is capacious; but I should not call her
+adorable. No; the adorable one was twenty&mdash;delicious
+and English; a peach-blossom, a zephyr, a
+summer night&#8217;s dream, and the most provoking
+little witch you ever saw in your life. Her father
+and herself and six of her compatriots were touring
+through France. They had circular tickets.
+So had I. In fact, I was a miniature Thomas Cook
+and Son to the party. I provided them with the
+discomforts of travel and supplied erroneous information.
+<em>Que voulez-vous?</em> If people ask you
+for the history of a pair of Louis XV. corsets, in
+a museum glass case, it&#8217;s much better to stimulate
+their imagination by saying that they were worn
+by Joan of Arc at the Battle of Agincourt than to
+dull their minds by your ignorance. <em>Eh bien</em>, we go
+through the ch&acirc;teaux of the Loire, through Poitiers
+and Angoul&ecirc;me, and we come to Carcassonne.
+You know Carcassonne? The great grim <em>cit&eacute;</em>, with
+its battlements and bastions and barbicans and fifty
+towers on the hill looking over the rubbishy modern
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+town? We were there. The rest of the party were
+buying picture postcards of the <em>gardien</em> at the foot
+of the Tour de l&#8217;Inquisition. The man who invented
+picture postcards ought to have his statue
+on the top of the Eiffel Tower. The millions of
+headaches he has saved! People go to places now
+not to exhaust themselves by seeing them, but to
+buy picture postcards of them. The rest of the
+party, as I said, were deep in picture postcards.
+Mademoiselle and I promenaded outside. We often
+promenaded outside when the others were buying
+picture postcards,&rdquo; he remarked, with an extra
+twinkle in his bright eyes. &ldquo;And the result? Was
+it my fault? We leaned over the parapet. The
+wind blew a confounded <em>m&egrave;che</em>&mdash;what do you call
+it&mdash;&mdash;?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Strand?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes&mdash;strand of her hair across her face. She
+let it blow and laughed and did not move. Didn&#8217;t
+I say she was a little witch? If there&#8217;s a Proven&ccedil;al
+ever born who would not have kissed a girl under
+such provocation I should like to have his mummy.
+I kissed her. She kept on laughing. I kissed her
+again. I kissed her four times. At the beginning
+of the fourth kiss out came her father from the
+postcard shop. He waited till the end of it and then
+announced himself. He announced himself in such
+ungentlemanly terms that I was forced to let the
+whole party, including the adorable little witch, go
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+on to Pau by themselves, while I betook my broken
+heart to the Caf&eacute; de l&#8217;Univers.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And there you found consolation?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I told my sad tale. Am&eacute;lie listened and called
+the manager to take charge of the <em>comptoir</em>, and
+poured herself out a glass of Frontignan. Am&eacute;lie
+always drinks Frontignan when her heart is touched.
+I came the next day and the next. It was pouring
+with rain day and night&mdash;and Carcassonne in rain
+is like Hades with its furnaces put out by human
+tears&mdash;and the Caf&eacute; de l&#8217;Univers like a little warm
+corner of Paradise stuck in the midst of it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And so that&#8217;s how it happened?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s how it happened. <em>Ma foi!</em> When a lady
+asks a <em>galant homme</em> to marry her, what is he to
+do? Besides, did I not say that the Caf&eacute; de l&#8217;Univers
+was the most prosperous one in Carcassonne? I&#8217;m
+afraid you English, my dear friend, have such sentimental
+ideas about marriage. Now, we in France&mdash;&mdash; <em>Attendez,
+attendez!</em>&rdquo; He suddenly broke off
+his story, lurched forward, and gripped the back
+of the front seat.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;To the right, man, to the right!&rdquo; he cried excitedly
+to McKeogh.</p>
+
+<p>We had reached the point where the straight road
+from Aigues-Mortes branches into a fork, one road
+going to Montpellier, the other to N&icirc;mes. Montpellier
+being to the west, McKeogh had naturally
+taken the left fork.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+&ldquo;To the right!&rdquo; shouted Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>McKeogh pulled up and turned his head with a
+look of protesting inquiry. I intervened with a
+laugh.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&#8217;re wrong in your geography, M. Pujol.
+Besides, there is the signpost staring you in the
+face. This is the way to Montpellier.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, my dear, heaven-sent friend, I no more
+want to go to Montpellier than you do!&rdquo; he cried.
+&ldquo;Montpellier is the last place on earth I desire to
+visit. You want to go to N&icirc;mes, and so do I. To
+the right, chauffeur.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What shall I do, sir?&rdquo; asked McKeogh.</p>
+
+<p>I was utterly bewildered. I turned to the goat-skin-clad,
+pointed-bearded, bright-eyed Aristide,
+who, sitting bolt upright in the car, with his hands
+stretched out, looked like a parody of the god Pan
+in a hard felt hat.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You don&#8217;t want to go to Montpellier?&rdquo; I asked,
+stupidly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;No&mdash;ten thousand times no; not for a king&#8217;s
+ransom.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But your four thousand francs&mdash;your meeting
+Mme. Gougasse&#8217;s train&mdash;your getting on to Carcassonne?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If I could put twenty million continents between
+myself and Carcassonne I&#8217;d do it,&rdquo; he explained,
+with frantic gestures. &ldquo;Don&#8217;t you understand?
+The good Lord who is always on my side
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+sent you especially to deliver me out of the hands
+of that unspeakable Xantippe. There are no four
+thousand francs. I&#8217;m not going to meet her train
+at Montpellier, and if she marries anyone to-morrow
+at Carcassonne it will not be Aristide Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I shrugged my shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;We&#8217;ll go to N&icirc;mes.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Very good, sir,&rdquo; said McKeogh.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And now,&rdquo; said I, as soon as we had started
+on the right-hand road, &ldquo;will you have the kindness
+to explain?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There&#8217;s nothing to explain,&rdquo; he cried, gleefully.
+&ldquo;Here am I delivered. I am free. I can breathe
+God&#8217;s good air again. I&#8217;m not going to marry
+Yum-Yum, Yum-Yum. I feel ten years younger.
+Oh, I&#8217;ve had a narrow escape. But that&#8217;s the way
+with me. I always fall on my feet. Didn&#8217;t I tell
+you I&#8217;ve never lost an opportunity? The moment I
+saw an Englishman in difficulties, I realized my opportunity
+of being delivered out of the House of
+Bondage. I took it, and here I am! For two days
+I had been racking my brains for a means of getting
+out of Aigues-Mortes, when suddenly you&mdash;a
+<em>Deus ex machina</em>&mdash;a veritable god out of the machine&mdash;come
+to my aid. Don&#8217;t say there isn&#8217;t a
+Providence watching over me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I suggested that his mode of escape seemed somewhat
+elaborate and fantastic. Why couldn&#8217;t he
+have slipped quietly round to the railway station
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+and taken a ticket to any haven of refuge he might
+have fancied?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;For the simple reason,&rdquo; said he, with a gay
+laugh, &ldquo;that I haven&#8217;t a single penny piece in the
+world.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He looked so prosperous and untroubled that I
+stared incredulously.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Not one tiny bronze sou,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You seem to take it pretty philosophically,&rdquo;
+said I.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Les gueux, les gueux, sont des gens heureux</em>,&rdquo;
+he quoted.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&#8217;re the first person who has made me believe
+in the happiness of beggars.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;In time I shall make you believe in lots of
+things,&rdquo; he retorted. &ldquo;No. I hadn&#8217;t one sou to
+buy a ticket, and Am&eacute;lie never left me. I spent my
+last franc on the journey from Carcassonne to
+Aigues-Mortes. Am&eacute;lie insisted on accompanying
+me. She was taking no chances. Her eyes never
+left me from the time we started. When I ran to
+your assistance she was watching me from a house
+on the other side of the <em>place</em>. She came to the
+hotel while we were lunching. I thought I would
+slip away unnoticed and join you after you had
+made the <em>tour des remparts</em>. But no. I must present
+her to my English friend. And then&mdash;<em>voyons</em>&mdash;didn&#8217;t
+I tell you I never lost a visiting-card?
+Look at this?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+He dived into his pocket, produced the letter-case,
+and extracted a card.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Voil&agrave;.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I read: &ldquo;The Duke of Wiltshire.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, good heavens, man,&rdquo; I cried, &ldquo;that&#8217;s not
+the card I gave you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I know it isn&#8217;t,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;but it&#8217;s the one I
+showed to Am&eacute;lie.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How on earth,&rdquo; I asked, &ldquo;did you come by the
+Duke of Wiltshire&#8217;s visiting-card?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He looked at me roguishly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am&mdash;what do you call it?&mdash;a&mdash;a &lsquo;snapper up of
+unconsidered trifles.&rsquo; You see I know my Shakespeare.
+I read &lsquo;The Winter&#8217;s Tale&rsquo; with some
+French pupils to whom I was teaching English.
+I love Autolycus. <em>C&#8217;est un peu moi, hein?</em> Anyhow,
+I showed the Duke&#8217;s card to Am&eacute;lie.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I began to understand. &ldquo;That was why you
+called me &lsquo;monseigneur&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Naturally. And I told her that you were my
+English patron, and would give me four thousand
+francs as a wedding present if I accompanied you
+to your agent&#8217;s at Montpellier, where you could
+draw the money. Ah! But she was suspicious!
+Yesterday I borrowed a bicycle. A friend left it in
+the courtyard. I thought, &lsquo;I will creep out at dead
+of night, when everyone&#8217;s asleep, and once on my
+<em>petite bicyclette, bonsoir la compagnie</em>.&rsquo; But,
+would you believe it? When I had dressed and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+crept down, and tried to mount the bicycle, I found
+both tyres had been punctured in a hundred places
+with the point of a pair of scissors. What do
+you think of that, eh? Ah, <em>l&agrave;, l&agrave;!</em> it has been a
+narrow escape. When you invited her to accompany
+us to Montpellier my heart was in my
+mouth.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It would have served you right,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if she
+had accepted.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He laughed as though, instead of not having a
+penny, he had not a care in the world. Accustomed
+to the geometrical conduct of my well-fed fellow-Britons,
+who map out their lives by rule and line,
+I had no measure whereby to gauge this amazing
+and inconsequential person. In one way he had
+acted abominably. To leave an affianced bride in
+the lurch in this heartless manner was a most ungentlemanly
+proceeding. On the other hand, an
+unscrupulous adventurer would have married the
+woman for her money and chanced the consequences.
+In the tussle between Perseus and the
+Gorgon the odds are all in favour of Perseus. Mercury
+and Minerva, the most sharp-witted of the
+gods, are helping him all the time&mdash;to say nothing
+of the fact that Perseus starts out by being a notoriously
+handsome fellow. So a handsome rogue
+can generally wheedle an elderly, ugly wife into
+opening her money-bags, and, if successful, leads
+the enviable life of a fighting-cock. It was very
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+much to his credit that this kind of life was not to
+the liking of Aristide Pujol.</p>
+
+<a name="img46" id="img46"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 303px;">
+<img src="images/img046.jpg" width="303" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&ldquo;i found both tyres had been punctured in a hundred places&rdquo;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Indeed, speaking from affectionate knowledge of
+the man, I can declare that the position in which he,
+like many a better man, had placed himself was intolerable.
+Other men of equal sensitiveness would
+have extricated themselves in a more commonplace
+fashion; but the dramatic appealed to my rascal,
+and he has often plumed himself on his calculated
+<em>coup de th&eacute;&acirc;tre</em> at the fork of the roads. He was
+delighted with it. Even now I sometimes think that
+Aristide Pujol will never grow up.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There&#8217;s one thing I don&#8217;t understand,&rdquo; said I,
+&ldquo;and that is your astonishing influence over the
+populace at Aigues-Mortes. You came upon them
+like a firework&mdash;a devil-among-the-tailors&mdash;and
+everybody, gendarmes and victim included, became
+as tame as sheep. How was it?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He laughed. &ldquo;I said you were my very old and
+dear friend and patron, a great English duke.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t quite see how that explanation satisfied
+the pig-headed old gentleman whom I knocked
+down.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, that,&rdquo; said Aristide Pujol, with a look of
+indescribable drollery&mdash;&ldquo;that was my old father.&rdquo;</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>THE ADVENTURE OF THE ARL&Eacute;SIENNE</strong></p>
+
+
+<p>Aristide Pujol bade me a sunny farewell
+at the door of the H&ocirc;tel du Luxembourg at
+N&icirc;mes, and, valise in hand, darted off, in his
+impetuous fashion, across the Place de l&#8217;Esplanade.
+I felt something like a pang at the sight of his retreating
+figure, as, on his own confession, he had
+not a penny in the world. I wondered what he
+would do for food and lodging, to say nothing of
+tobacco, <em>ap&eacute;ritifs</em>, and other such necessaries of life.
+The idea of so gay a creature starving was abhorrent.
+Yet an invitation to stay as my guest at the
+hotel until he saw an opportunity of improving his
+financial situation he had courteously declined.</p>
+
+<p>Early next morning I found him awaiting me in
+the lounge and smoking an excellent cigar. He
+explained that so dear a friend as myself ought to
+be the first to hear the glad tidings. Last evening,
+by the grace of Heaven, he had run across a bare
+acquaintance, a manufacturer of nougat at Mont&eacute;limar;
+had spent several hours in his company, with
+the result that he had convinced him of two things:
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+first, that the dry, crumbling, shortbread-like nougat
+of Mont&eacute;limar was unknown in England, where
+the population subsisted on a sickly, glutinous mess
+whereto the medical faculty had ascribed the prevalent
+dyspepsia of the population; and, secondly, that
+the one Heaven-certified apostle who could spread
+the glorious gospel of Mont&eacute;limar nougat over the
+length and breadth of Great Britain and Ireland
+was himself, Aristide Pujol. A handsome salary
+had been arranged, of which he had already drawn
+something on account&mdash;<em>hinc ille Colorado</em>&mdash;and he
+was to accompany his principal the next day to
+Mont&eacute;limar, <em>en route</em> for the conquest of Britain.
+In the meantime he was as free as the winds, and
+would devote the day to showing me the wonders
+of the town.</p>
+
+<p>I congratulated him on his almost fantastic good
+fortune and gladly accepted his offer.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There is one thing I should like to ask you,&rdquo;
+said I, &ldquo;and it is this. Yesterday afternoon you
+refused my cordially-offered hospitality, and went
+away without a sou to bless yourself with. What
+did you do? I ask out of curiosity. How does a
+man set about trying to subsist on nothing at all?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s very simple,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;Haven&#8217;t I told
+you, and haven&#8217;t you seen for yourself, that I never
+lose an opportunity? More than that. It has been
+my rule in life either to make friends with the
+Mammon of Unrighteousness&mdash;he&#8217;s a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+muddle-headed ass is Mammon, and you can steer clear of
+his unrighteousness if you&#8217;re sharp enough&mdash;or else
+to cast my bread upon the waters in the certainty
+of finding it again after many days. In the case
+in question I took the latter course. I cast my
+bread a year or two ago upon the waters of the
+Roman baths, which I will have the pleasure of
+showing you this morning, and I found it again last
+night at the H&ocirc;tel de la Curatterie.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>In the course of the day he related to me the
+following artless history.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Aristide Pujol arrived at N&icirc;mes one blazing day
+in July. He had money in his pocket and laughter
+in his soul. He had also deposited his valise at
+the H&ocirc;tel du Luxembourg, which, as all the world
+knows, is the most luxurious hotel in the town.
+Joyousness of heart impelled him to a course of
+action which the good N&icirc;mois regard as maniacal
+in the sweltering July heat&mdash;he walked about the
+baking streets for his own good pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide Pujol was floating a company, a process
+which afforded him as much delirious joy as the
+floating, for the first time, of a toy yacht affords a
+child. It was a company to build an hotel in Perpignan,
+where the recent demolition of the fortifications
+erected by the Emperor Charles V. had set
+free a vast expanse of valuable building ground on
+the other side of the little river on which the old
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+town is situated. The best hotel in Perpignan
+being one to get away from as soon as possible,
+owing to restriction of site, Aristide conceived the
+idea of building a spacious and palatial hostelry
+in the new part of the town, which should allure
+all the motorists and tourists of the globe to that
+Pyrenean Paradise. By sheer audacity he had contrived
+to interest an eminent Paris architect in his
+project. Now the man who listened to Aristide
+Pujol was lost. With the glittering eye of the
+Ancient Mariner he combined the winning charm
+of a woman. For salvation, you either had to refuse
+to see him, as all the architects to the end of
+the R&#8217;s in the alphabetical list had done, or put
+wax, Ulysses-like, in your ears, a precaution neglected
+by the eminent M. Say. M. Say went to
+Perpignan and returned in a state of subdued enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>A limited company was formed, of which Aristide
+Pujol, man of vast experience in affairs, was
+managing director. But money came in slowly. A
+financier was needed. Aristide looked through his
+collection of visiting-cards, and therein discovered
+that of a deaf ironmaster at St. &Eacute;tienne whose life
+he had once saved at a railway station by dragging
+him, as he was crossing the line, out of the way of
+an express train that came thundering through.
+Aristide, man of impulse, went straight to St.
+&Eacute;tienne, to work upon the ironmaster&#8217;s sense of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+gratitude. Meanwhile, M. Say, man of more sober
+outlook, bethought him of a client, an American
+millionaire, passing through Paris, who had speculated
+considerably in hotels. The millionaire, having
+confidence in the eminent M. Say, thought well
+of the scheme. He was just off to Japan, but would
+drop down to the Pyrenees the next day and look
+at the Perpignan site before boarding his steamer
+at Marseilles. If his inquiries satisfied him, and he
+could arrange matters with the managing director,
+he would not mind putting a million dollars or so
+into the concern. You must kindly remember that
+I do not vouch for the literal accuracy of everything
+told me by Aristide Pujol.</p>
+
+<p>The question of the all-important meeting between
+the millionaire and the managing director
+then arose. As Aristide was at St. &Eacute;tienne it was
+arranged that they should meet at a halfway stage
+on the latter&#8217;s journey from Perpignan to Marseilles.
+The H&ocirc;tel du Luxembourg at N&icirc;mes was
+the place, and two o&#8217;clock on Thursday the time
+appointed.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime Aristide had found that the deaf ironmaster
+had died months ago. This was a disappointment,
+but fortune compensated him. This
+part of his adventure is somewhat vague, but I
+gathered that he was lured by a newly made acquaintance
+into a gambling den, where he won the
+prodigious sum of two thousand francs. With this
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+wealth jingling and crinkling in his pockets he fled
+the town and arrived at N&icirc;mes on Wednesday
+morning, a day before his appointment.</p>
+
+<p>That was why he walked joyously about the
+blazing streets. The tide had turned at last. Of
+the success of his interview with the millionaire he
+had not the slightest doubt. He walked about
+building gorgeous castles in Perpignan&mdash;which, by
+the way, is not very far from Spain. Besides, as
+you shall hear later, he had an account to settle
+with the town of Perpignan. At last he reached
+the Jardin de la Fontaine, the great, stately garden
+laid out in complexity of terrace and bridge
+and balustraded parapet over the waters of the
+old Roman baths by the master hand to which
+Louis XIV. had entrusted the Garden of Versailles.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide threw himself on a bench and fanned
+himself with his straw hat.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu!</em> it&#8217;s hot!&rdquo; he remarked to another
+occupant of the seat.</p>
+
+<p>This was a woman, and, as he saw when she
+turned her face towards him, an exceedingly handsome
+woman. Her white lawn and black silk headdress,
+coming to a tiny crown just covering the
+parting of her full, wavy hair, proclaimed her of the
+neighboring town of Arles. She had all the
+Arl&eacute;sienne&#8217;s Roman beauty&mdash;the finely chiselled
+features, the calm, straight brows, the ripe lips, the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+soft oval contour, the clear olive complexion. She
+had also lustrous brown eyes; but these were full of
+tears. She only turned them on him for a moment;
+then she resumed her apparently interrupted
+occupation of sobbing. Aristide was a soft-hearted
+man. He drew nearer.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why, you&#8217;re crying, madame!&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Evidently,&rdquo; murmured the lady.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;To cry scalding tears in this weather! It&#8217;s too
+hot! Now, if you could only cry iced water there
+would be something refreshing in it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You jest, monsieur,&rdquo; said the lady, drying her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;By no means,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;The sight of so beautiful
+a woman in distress is painful.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; she sighed. &ldquo;I am very unhappy.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide drew nearer still.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Who,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;is the wretch that has dared to
+make you so?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My husband,&rdquo; replied the lady, swallowing a
+sob.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The scoundrel!&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>The lady shrugged her shoulders and looked
+down at her wedding-ring, which gleamed on a
+slim, brown, perfectly kept hand. Aristide prided
+himself on being a connoisseur in hands.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There never was a husband yet,&rdquo; he added,
+&ldquo;who appreciated a beautiful wife. Husbands only
+deserve harridans.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+&ldquo;That&#8217;s true,&rdquo; said the Arl&eacute;sienne, &ldquo;for when the
+wife is good-looking they are jealous.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, that is the trouble, is it?&rdquo; said Aristide.
+&ldquo;Tell me all about it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The beautiful Arl&eacute;sienne again contemplated her
+slender fingers.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t know you, monsieur.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But you soon will,&rdquo; said Aristide, in his pleasant
+voice and with a laughing, challenging glance in his
+bright eyes. She met it swiftly and sidelong.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I have been married to
+my husband for four years, and have always been
+faithful to him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s praiseworthy,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And I love him very much.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s unfortunate!&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Unfortunate?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Evidently!&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes met. They burst out laughing. The
+lady quickly recovered and the tears sprang again.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;One can&#8217;t jest with a heavy heart; and mine is
+very heavy.&rdquo; She broke down through self-pity.
+&ldquo;Oh, I am ashamed!&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+
+<p>She turned away from him, burying her face in
+her hands. Her dress, cut low, showed the nape
+of her neck as it rose gracefully from her shoulders.
+Two little curls had rebelled against being drawn
+up with the rest of her hair. The back of a dainty
+ear, set close to the head, was provoking in its
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+pink loveliness. Her attitude, that of a youthful
+Niobe, all tears, but at the same time all curves and
+delicious contours, would have played the deuce
+with an anchorite.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide, I would have you remember, was a child
+of the South. A child of the North, regarding a
+bewitching woman, thinks how nice it would be to
+make love to her, and wastes his time in wondering
+how he can do it. A child of the South neither
+thinks nor wonders; he makes love straight away.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;you are adorable, and
+I love you to distraction.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She started up. &ldquo;Monsieur, you forget yourself!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If I remember anything else in the wide world
+but you, it would be a poor compliment. I forget
+everything. You turn my head, you ravish my
+heart, and you put joy into my soul.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He meant it&mdash;intensely&mdash;for the moment.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I ought not to listen to you,&rdquo; said the lady,
+&ldquo;especially when I am so unhappy.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;All the more reason to seek consolation,&rdquo; replied
+Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; she said, after a short pause, &ldquo;you
+look good and loyal. I will tell you what is the
+matter. My husband accuses me wrongfully, although
+I know that appearances are against me.
+He only allows me in the house on sufferance, and
+is taking measures to procure a divorce.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img58" id="img58"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 413px;">
+<img src="images/img058.jpg" width="413" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&ldquo;madame,&rdquo; said aristide, &ldquo;you are adorable, and i love you
+to distraction&rdquo;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+&ldquo;<em>A la bonne heure!</em>&rdquo; cried Aristide, excitedly casting
+away his straw hat, which an unintentional
+twist of the wrist caused to skim horizontally and
+nearly decapitate a small and perspiring soldier
+who happened to pass by. &ldquo;<em>A la bonne heure!</em>
+Let him divorce you. You are then free. You
+can be mine without any further question.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I love my husband,&rdquo; she smiled, sadly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; said he, with the scepticism of the lover
+and the Proven&ccedil;al. &ldquo;And, by the way, who is your
+husband?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He is M. &Eacute;mile Bocardon, proprietor of the
+H&ocirc;tel de la Curatterie.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am Mme. Bocardon,&rdquo; she replied, with the
+faintest touch of roguery.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But your Christian name? How is it possible
+for me to think of you as Mme. Bocardon?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>They argued the question. Eventually she confessed
+to the name of Zette.</p>
+
+<p>Her confidence not stopping there, she told him
+how she came by the name; how she was brought
+up by her Aunt L&eacute;onie at Raph&egrave;le, some five miles
+from Arles, and many other unexciting particulars
+of her early years. Her baptismal name was
+Louise. Her mother, who died when she was
+young, called her Louisette. Aunt L&eacute;onie, a very
+busy woman, with no time for superfluous syllables,
+called her Zette.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Zette!&rdquo; He cast up his eyes as if she had been
+canonized and he was invoking her in rapt worship.
+&ldquo;Zette, I adore you!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Zette was extremely sorry. She, on her side,
+adored the cruel M. Bocardon. Incidentally she
+learned Aristide&#8217;s name and quality. He was an
+<em>agent d&#8217;affaires</em>, extremely rich&mdash;had he not two
+thousand francs and an American millionaire in
+his pocket?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;M. Pujol,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;the earth holds but one
+thing that I desire, the love and trust of my husband.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The good Bocardon is becoming tiresome,&rdquo; said
+Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>Zette&#8217;s lips parted, as she pointed to a black speck
+at the iron entrance gates.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu!</em> there he is!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He has become tiresome,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>She rose, displaying to its full advantage her
+supple and stately figure. She had a queenly poise
+of the head. Aristide contemplated her with the
+frankest admiration.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;One would say Juno was walking the earth
+again.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Although Zette had never heard of Juno, and
+was as miserable and heavy hearted a woman as
+dwelt in N&icirc;mes, a flush of pleasure rose to her
+cheeks. She too was a child of the South, and
+female children of the South love to be admired, no
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+matter how frankly. I have heard of Daughters of
+the Snows not quite averse to it. She sighed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I must go now, monsieur. He must not find
+me here with you. I am suffering enough already
+from his reproaches. Ah! it is unjust&mdash;unjust!&rdquo;
+she cried, clenching her hands, while the tears again
+started into her eyes, and the corners of her pretty
+lips twitched with pain. &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;I
+know it has been wrong of me to talk to you like
+this. But <em>que voulez-vous?</em> It was not my fault.
+Adieu, monsieur.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>At the sight of her standing before him in her
+woeful beauty, Aristide&#8217;s pulses throbbed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is not adieu&mdash;it is <em>au revoir</em>, Mme. Zette,&rdquo; he
+cried.</p>
+
+<p>She protested tearfully. It was farewell. Aristide
+darted to his rejected hat and clapped it on
+the back of his head. He joined her and swore
+that he would see her again. It was not Aristide
+Pujol who would allow her to be rent in pieces by
+the jaws of that crocodile, M. Bocardon. Faith,
+he would defend her to the last drop of his blood.
+He would do all manner of gasconading things.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But what can you do, my poor M. Pujol?&rdquo; she
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You will see,&rdquo; he replied.</p>
+
+<p>They parted. He watched her until she became
+a speck and, having joined the other speck, her
+husband, passed out of sight. Then he set out
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+through the burning gardens towards the H&ocirc;tel
+du Luxembourg, at the other end of the town.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide had fallen in love. He had fallen in
+love with Proven&ccedil;al fury. He had done the same
+thing a hundred times before; but this, he told himself,
+was the <em>coup de foudre</em>&mdash;the thunderbolt.
+The beautiful Arl&eacute;sienne filled his brain and his
+senses. Nothing else in the wide world mattered.
+Nothing else in the wide world occupied his mind.
+He sped through the hot streets like a meteor in
+human form. A stout man, sipping syrup and
+water in the cool beneath the awning of the Caf&eacute;
+de la Bourse, rose, looked wonderingly after him,
+and resumed his seat, wiping a perspiring brow.</p>
+
+<p>A short while afterwards Aristide, valise in hand,
+presented himself at the bureau of the H&ocirc;tel de la
+Curatterie. It was a shabby little hotel, with a
+shabby little oval sign outside, and was situated in
+the narrow street of the same name. Within, it was
+clean and well kept. On the right of the little dark
+entrance-hall was the <em>salle &agrave; manger</em>, on the left the
+bureau and an unenticing hole labelled <em>salon de
+correspondance</em>. A very narrow passage led to the
+kitchen, and the rest of the hall was blocked by the
+staircase. An enormous man with a simple, woe-begone
+fat face and a head of hair like a circular
+machine-brush was sitting by the bureau window
+in his shirt-sleeves. Aristide addressed him.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;M. Bocardon?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+&ldquo;At your service, monsieur.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Can I have a bedroom?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo; He waved a hand towards a set of
+black sample boxes studded with brass nails and
+bound with straps that lay in the hall. &ldquo;The omnibus
+has brought your boxes. You are M. Lambert?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;M. Bocardon,&rdquo; said Aristide, in a lordly way, &ldquo;I
+am M. Aristide Pujol, and not a commercial
+traveller. I have come to see the beauties of N&icirc;mes,
+and have chosen this hotel because I have the
+honour to be a distant relation of your wife, Mme.
+Zette Bocardon, whom I have not seen for many
+years. How is she?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Her health is very good,&rdquo; replied M. Bocardon,
+shortly. He rang a bell.</p>
+
+<p>A dilapidated man in a green baize apron
+emerged from the dining-room and took Aristide&#8217;s
+valise.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;No. 24,&rdquo; said M. Bocardon. Then, swinging
+his massive form halfway through the narrow
+bureau door, he called down the passage, &ldquo;Euph&eacute;mie!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A woman&#8217;s voice responded, and in a moment the
+woman herself appeared, a pallid, haggard, though
+more youthful, replica of Zette, with the dark
+rings of sleeplessness or illness beneath her eyes
+which looked furtively at the world.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Tell your sister,&rdquo; said M. Bocardon, &ldquo;that a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+relation of yours has come to stay in the
+hotel.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He swung himself back into the bureau and took
+no further notice of the guest.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A relation?&rdquo; echoed Euph&eacute;mie, staring at the
+smiling, lustrous-eyed Aristide, whose busy brain
+was wondering how he could mystify this unwelcome
+and unexpected sister.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why, yes. Aristide, cousin to your good Aunt
+L&eacute;onie at Raph&egrave;le. Ah&mdash;but you are too young
+to remember me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I will tell Zette,&rdquo; she said, disappearing down
+the narrow passage.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide went to the doorway, and stood there
+looking out into the not too savoury street. On
+the opposite side, which was in the shade, the
+tenants of the modest little shops sat by their doors
+or on chairs on the pavement. There was considerable
+whispering among them and various
+glances were cast at him. Presently footsteps behind
+caused him to turn. There was Zette. She
+had evidently been weeping since they had parted,
+for her eyelids were red. She started on beholding
+him.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He laughed and shook her hesitating hands.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is I, Aristide. But you have grown! <em>P&eacute;ca&iuml;re!</em>
+How you have grown!&rdquo; He swung her hands apart
+and laughed merrily in her bewildered eyes. &ldquo;To
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+think that the little Zette in pigtails and short check
+skirt should have grown into this beautiful woman!
+I compliment you on your wife, M. Bocardon.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>M. Bocardon did not reply, but Aristide&#8217;s swift
+glance noticed a spasm of pain shoot across his
+broad face.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And the good Aunt L&eacute;onie? Is she well? And
+does she still make her <em>matelotes</em> of eels? Ah,
+they were good, those <em>matelotes</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Aunt L&eacute;onie died two years ago,&rdquo; said Zette.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The poor woman! And I who never knew.
+Tell me about her.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The <em>salle &agrave; manger</em> door stood open. He drew
+her thither by his curious fascination. They entered,
+and he shut the door behind them.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Voil&agrave;!</em>&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Didn&#8217;t I tell you I should
+see you again?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Vous avez un fameux toupet, vous!</em>&rdquo; said Zette,
+half angrily.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed, having been accused of confounded
+impudence many times before in the course of his
+adventurous life.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If I told my husband he would kill you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Precisely. So you&#8217;re not going to tell him. I
+adore you. I have come to protect you. <em>Foi de
+Proven&ccedil;al.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The only way to protect me is to prove my innocence.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And then?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+She drew herself up and looked him straight between
+the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;ll recognize that you have a loyal heart, and
+will be your very good friend.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mme. Zette,&rdquo; cried Aristide, &ldquo;I will devote my
+life to your service. Tell me the particulars of the
+affair.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ask M. Bocardon.&rdquo; She left him, and sailed out
+of the room and past the bureau with her proud
+head in the air.</p>
+
+<p>If Aristide Pujol had the rapturous idea of proving
+the innocence of Mme. Zette, triumphing over
+the fat pig of a husband, and eventually, in a fantastic
+fashion, carrying off the insulted and spotless
+lady to some bower of delight (the castle in Perpignan&mdash;why
+not?), you must blame, not him, but
+Provence, whose sons, if not devout, are frankly
+pagan. Sometimes they are both.</p>
+
+<p>M. Bocardon sat in his bureau, pretending to do
+accounts and tracing columns of figures with a
+huge, trembling forefinger. He looked the picture
+of woe. Aristide decided to bide his opportunity.
+He went out into the streets again, now with the
+object of killing time. The afternoon had advanced,
+and trees and buildings cast cool shadows
+in which one could walk with comfort; and N&icirc;mes,
+clear, bright city of wide avenues and broad open
+spaces, instinct too with the grandeur that was
+Rome&#8217;s, is an idler&#8217;s Paradise. Aristide knew it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+well; but he never tired of it. He wandered round
+the Maison Carr&eacute;e, his responsive nature delighting
+in the splendour of the Temple, with its fluted Corinthian
+columns, its noble entablature, its massive
+pediment, its perfect proportions; reluctantly turned
+down the Boulevard Victor Hugo, past the Lyc&eacute;e
+and the Bourse, made the circuit of the mighty,
+double-arched oval of the Arena, and then retraced
+his steps. As he expected, M. Bocardon had left
+the bureau. It was the hour of absinthe. The
+porter named M. Bocardon&#8217;s habitual caf&eacute;. There,
+in a morose corner of the terrace, Aristide found the
+huge man gloomily contemplating an absurdly small
+glass of the bitters known as Dubonnet. Aristide
+raised his hat, asked permission to join him, and
+sat down.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;M. Bocardon,&rdquo; said he, carefully mixing the
+absinthe which he had ordered, &ldquo;I learn from my
+fair cousin that there is between you a regrettable
+misunderstanding, for which I am sincerely sorry.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She calls it a misunderstanding?&rdquo; He laughed
+mirthlessly. &ldquo;Women have their own vocabulary.
+Listen, my good sir. There is infamy between us.
+When a wife betrays a man like me&mdash;kind, indulgent,
+trustful, who has worshipped the ground she
+treads on&mdash;it is not a question of misunderstanding.
+It is infamy. If she had anywhere to lay her
+head, I would turn her out of doors to-night. But
+she has not. You, who are her relative, know I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+married her without a dowry. You alone of her
+family survive.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It was on the tip of Aristide&#8217;s impulsive tongue
+to say that he would be only too willing to shelter
+her, but prudently he refrained.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She has broken my heart,&rdquo; continued Bocardon.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide asked for details of the unhappy affair.
+The large man hesitated for a moment and glanced
+suspiciously at his companion; but, fascinated by
+the clear, luminous eyes, he launched with Southern
+violence into a whirling story. The villain was a
+traveller in buttons&mdash;<em>buttons!</em> To be wronged by
+a traveller in diamonds might have its compensations&mdash;but
+buttons! Linen buttons, bone buttons,
+brass buttons, <em>trouser buttons!</em> To be a traveller
+in the inanity of buttonholes was the only lower
+degradation. His name was Bondon&mdash;he uttered
+it scathingly, as if to decline from a Bocardon to a
+Bondon was unthinkable. This Bondon was a regular
+client of the hotel, and such a client!&mdash;who
+never ordered a bottle of <em>vin cachet&eacute;</em> or coffee or
+cognac. A contemptible creature. For a long time
+he had his suspicions. Now he was certain. He
+tossed off his glass of Dubonnet, ordered another,
+and spoke incoherently of the opening and shutting
+of doors, whisperings, of a dreadful incident, the
+central fact of which was a glimpse of Zette gliding
+wraith-like down a corridor. Lastly, there
+was the culminating proof, a letter found that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+morning in Zette&#8217;s room. He drew a crumpled
+sheet from his pocket and handed it to Aristide.</p>
+
+<a name="img70" id="img70"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 427px;">
+<img src="images/img070.jpg" width="427" height="500" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&ldquo;the villain was a traveller in buttons&mdash;buttons!&rdquo;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was a crude, flaming, reprehensible, and entirely
+damning epistle. Aristide turned cold, shivering
+at the idea of the superb and dainty Zette
+coming in contact with such abomination. He
+hated Bondon with a murderous hate. He drank
+a great gulp of absinthe and wished it were Bondon&#8217;s
+blood. Great tears rolled down Bocardon&#8217;s
+face, and gathering at the ends of his scrubby
+moustache dripped in splashes on the marble table.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I loved her so tenderly, monsieur,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>The cry, so human, went straight to Aristide&#8217;s
+heart. A sympathetic tear glistened in his bright
+eyes. He was suddenly filled with an immense pity
+for this grief-stricken, helpless giant. An odd feminine
+streak ran through his nature and showed
+itself in queer places. Impulsively he stretched out
+his hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&#8217;re going?&rdquo; asked Bocardon.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;No. A sign of good friendship.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>They gripped hands across the table. A new
+emotion thrilled through the facile Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Bocardon, I devote myself to you,&rdquo; he cried,
+with a flamboyant gesture. &ldquo;What can I do?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Alas, nothing,&rdquo; replied the other, miserably.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And Zette? What does she say to it all?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The mountainous shoulders heaved with a shrug.
+&ldquo;She denies everything. She had never seen the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+letter until I showed it to her. She did not know
+how it came into her room. As if that were possible!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s improbable,&rdquo; said Aristide, gloomily.</p>
+
+<p>They talked. Bocardon, in a choking voice, told
+the simple tale of their married happiness. It had
+been a love-match, different from the ordinary marriages
+of reason and arrangement. Not a cloud
+since their wedding-day. They were called the turtle-doves
+of the Rue de la Curatterie. He had not
+even manifested the jealousy justifiable in the possessor
+of so beautiful a wife. He had trusted her
+implicitly. He was certain of her love. That was
+enough. They had had one child, who died. Grief
+had brought them even nearer each other. And
+now this stroke had been dealt. It was a
+knife being turned round in his heart. It was
+agony.</p>
+
+<p>They walked back to the hotel together. Zette,
+who was sitting by the desk in the bureau, rose and,
+without a word or look, vanished down the passage.
+Bocardon, with a great sigh, took her place. It
+was dinner-time. The half-dozen guests and frequenters
+filled for a moment the little hall, some
+waiting to wash their hands at the primitive <em>lavabo</em>
+by the foot of the stairs. Aristide accompanied
+them into the <em>salle &agrave; manger</em>, where he dined in
+solemn silence. The dinner over he went out again,
+passing by the bureau where Bocardon, in its dim
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+recesses, was eating a sad meal brought to him by
+the melancholy Euph&eacute;mie. Zette, he conjectured,
+was dining in the kitchen. An atmosphere of desolation
+impregnated the place, as though a corpse
+were somewhere in the house.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide drank his coffee at the nearest caf&eacute; in
+a complicated state of mind. He had fallen furiously
+in love with the lady, believing her to be the
+victim of a jealous husband. In an outburst of
+generous emotion he had taken the husband to his
+heart, seeing that he was a good man stricken to
+death. Now he loved the lady, loved the husband,
+and hated the villain Bondon. What Aristide felt,
+he felt fiercely. He would reconcile these two
+people he loved, and then go and, if not assassinate
+Bondon, at least do him some bodily injury. With
+this idea in his head, he paid for his coffee and went
+back to the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>He found Zette taking her turn at the bureau,
+for clients have to be attended to, even in the most
+distressing circumstances. She was talking to a
+new arrival, trying to smile a welcome. Aristide,
+loitering near, watched her beautiful face, to which
+the perfect classic features gave an air of noble
+purity. His soul revolted at the idea of her mixing
+herself up with a sordid wretch like Bondon. It
+was unbelievable.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Eh bien</em>?&rdquo; she said as soon as they were
+alone.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Mme. Zette, to-day I called your husband a
+scoundrel and a crocodile. I was wrong. I find
+him a man with a beautiful nature.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You needn&#8217;t tell me that, M. Aristide.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You are breaking his heart, Mme. Zette.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And is he not breaking mine? He has told you,
+I suppose. Am I responsible for what I know
+nothing more about than a babe unborn? You
+don&#8217;t believe I am speaking the truth? Bah! And
+your professions this afternoon? Wind and gas,
+like the words of all men.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mme. Zette,&rdquo; cried Aristide, &ldquo;I said I would
+devote my life to your service, and so I will. I&#8217;ll
+go and find Bondon and kill him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He watched her narrowly, but she did not grow
+pale like a woman whose lover is threatened with
+mortal peril. She said dryly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You had better have some conversation with
+him first.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Where is he to be found?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders. &ldquo;How do I know?
+He left by the early train this morning that goes
+in the direction of Tarascon.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then to-morrow,&rdquo; said Aristide, who knew the
+ways of commercial travellers, &ldquo;he will be at Tarascon,
+or at Avignon, or at Arles.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I heard him say that he had just done Arles.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tant mieux.</em> I shall find him either at Tarascon
+or Avignon. And by the Tarasque of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+Sainte-Marthe, I&#8217;ll bring you his head and you can put it
+up outside as a sign and call the place the &lsquo;H&ocirc;tel
+de la T&ecirc;te Bondon.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img76" id="img76"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 454px;">
+<img src="images/img076.jpg" width="454" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">he burst into shrieks of laughter</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Early the next morning Aristide started on his
+quest, without informing the good Bocardon of
+his intentions. He would go straight to Avignon,
+as the more likely place. Inquiries at the various
+hotels would soon enable him to hunt down his
+quarry; and then&mdash;he did not quite know what
+would happen then&mdash;but it would be something
+picturesque, something entirely unforeseen by Bondon,
+something to be thrillingly determined by the
+inspiration of the moment. In any case he would
+wipe the stain from the family escutcheon. By this
+time he had convinced himself that he belonged to
+the Bocardon family.</p>
+
+<p>The only other occupant of the first-class compartment
+was an elderly Englishwoman of sour
+aspect. Aristide, his head full of Zette and Bondon,
+scarcely noticed her. The train started and
+sped through the sunny land of vine and olive.</p>
+
+<p>They had almost reached Tarascon when a sudden
+thought hit him between the eyes, like the blow
+of a fist. He gasped for a moment, then he burst
+into shrieks of laughter, kicking his legs up and
+down and waving his arms in maniacal mirth.
+After that he rose and danced. The sour-faced
+Englishwoman, in mortal terror, fled into the corridor.
+She must have reported Aristide&#8217;s behaviour
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+to the guard, for in a minute or two that official
+appeared at the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Qu&#8217;est-ce qu&#8217;il y a?</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide paused in his demonstrations of merriment.
+&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I have just discovered
+what I am going to do to M. Bondon.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Delight bubbled out of him as he walked from
+the Avignon Railway Station up the Cours de
+la R&eacute;publique. The wretch Bondon lay at his
+mercy. He had not proceeded far, however, when
+his quick eye caught sight of an object in the ramshackle
+display of a curiosity dealer&#8217;s. He paused
+in front of the window, fascinated. He rubbed
+his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;it is not a dream. The <em>bon Dieu</em>
+is on my side.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He went into the shop and bought the object.
+It was a pair of handcuffs.</p>
+
+<p>At a little after three o&#8217;clock the small and dilapidated
+hotel omnibus drove up before the H&ocirc;tel de
+la Curatterie, and from it descended Aristide Pujol,
+radiant-eyed, and a scrubby little man with a
+goatee beard, pince-nez, and a dome-like forehead,
+who, pale and trembling, seemed stricken with a
+great fear. It was Bondon. Together they entered
+the little hall. As soon as Bocardon saw his
+enemy his eyes blazed with fury, and, uttering an
+inarticulate roar, he rushed out of the bureau
+with clenched fists murderously uplifted. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+terrified Bondon shrank into a corner, protected by
+Aristide, who, smiling like an angel of peace, intercepted
+the onslaught of the huge man.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Be calm, my good Bocardon, be calm.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But Bocardon would not be calm. He found
+his voice.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, scoundrel! Miscreant! Wretch! Traitor!&rdquo;
+When his vocabulary of vituperation and his breath
+failed him, he paused and mopped his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>Bondon came a step or two forward.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I know, monsieur, I have all the wrong on my
+side. Your anger is justifiable. But I never
+dreamt of the disastrous effect of my acts. Let
+me see her, my good M. Bocardon, I beseech you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Let you see her?&rdquo; said Bocardon, growing purple
+in the face.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Zette came running up the passage.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What is all this noise about?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, madame!&rdquo; cried Bondon, eagerly, &ldquo;I am
+heart-broken. You who are so kind&mdash;let me see
+her.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Hein</em>?&rdquo; exclaimed Bocardon, in stupefaction.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;See whom?&rdquo; asked Zette.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear dead one. My dear Euph&eacute;mie, who
+has committed suicide.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But he&#8217;s mad!&rdquo; shouted Bocardon, in his great
+voice. &ldquo;Euph&eacute;mie! Euph&eacute;mie! Come here!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>At the sight of Euph&eacute;mie, pale and shivering
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+with apprehension, Bondon sank upon a bench by
+the wall. He stared at her as if she were a ghost.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t understand,&rdquo; he murmured, faintly,
+looking like a trapped hare at Aristide Pujol, who,
+debonair, hands on hips, stood a little way apart.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Nor I, either,&rdquo; cried Bocardon.</p>
+
+<p>A great light dawned on Zette&#8217;s beautiful face.
+&ldquo;I do understand.&rdquo; She exchanged glances with
+Aristide. He came forward.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s very simple,&rdquo; said he, taking the stage with
+childlike exultation. &ldquo;I go to find Bondon this
+morning to kill him. In the train I have a sudden
+inspiration, a revelation from Heaven. It is not
+Zette but Euph&eacute;mie that is the <em>bonne amie</em> of Bondon.
+I laugh, and frighten a long-toothed English
+old maid out of her wits. Shall I get out at Tarascon
+and return to N&icirc;mes and tell you, or shall
+I go on? I decide to go on. I make my plan. Ah,
+but when I make a plan, it&#8217;s all in a second, a flash,
+<em>pfuit!</em> At Avignon I see a pair of handcuffs. I
+buy them. I spend hours tracking that animal
+there. At last I find him at the station about to
+start for Lyon. I tell him I am a police agent.
+I let him see the handcuffs, which convince him.
+I tell him Euph&eacute;mie, in consequence of the discovery
+of his letter, has committed suicide. There
+is a <em>proc&egrave;s-verbal</em> at which he is wanted. I summon
+him to accompany me in the name of the law&mdash;and
+there he is.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img82" id="img82"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 449px;">
+<img src="images/img082.jpg" width="449" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&ldquo;and you!&rdquo; shouted bocardon, falling on aristide; &ldquo;i must
+embrace you also&rdquo;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Then that letter was not for my wife?&rdquo; said
+Bocardon, who was not quick-witted.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, no, imbecile!&rdquo; cried Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>Bocardon hugged his wife in his vast embrace.
+The tears ran down his cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, my little Zette, my little Zette, will you
+ever pardon me?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Oui, je te pardonne, gros jaloux</em>,&rdquo; said Zette.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And you!&rdquo; shouted Bocardon, falling on Aristide;
+&ldquo;I must embrace you also.&rdquo; He kissed him
+on both cheeks, in his expansive way, and thrust
+him towards Zette.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You can also kiss my wife. It is I, Bocardon,
+who command it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The fire of a not ignoble pride raced through
+Aristide&#8217;s veins. He was a hero. He knew it. It
+was a moment worth living.</p>
+
+<p>The embraces and other expressions of joy and
+gratitude being temporarily suspended, attention
+was turned to the unheroic couple who up to then
+had said not one word to each other. The explanation
+of their conduct, too, was simple, apparently.
+They were in love. She had no dowry. He could
+not marry her, as his parents would not give their
+consent. She, for her part, was frightened to
+death by the discovery of the letter, lest Bocardon
+should turn her out of the house.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What dowry will satisfy your parents?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing less than twelve thousand francs.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+&ldquo;I give it,&rdquo; said Bocardon, reckless in his newly-found
+happiness. &ldquo;Marry her.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The clock in the bureau struck four. Aristide
+pulled out his watch.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Saperlipopette!</em>&rdquo; he cried, and disappeared like
+a flash into the street.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But what&#8217;s the matter with him?&rdquo; shouted Bocardon,
+in amazement.</p>
+
+<p>Zette went to the door. &ldquo;He&#8217;s running as if he
+had the devil at his heels.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Was he always like that?&rdquo; asked her husband.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How always?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Parbleu!</em> When you used to see him at your
+Aunt L&eacute;onie&#8217;s.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Zette flushed red. To repudiate the saviour of
+her entire family were an act of treachery too
+black for her ingenuous heart.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, yes,&rdquo; she replied, calmly, coming back
+into the hall. &ldquo;We used to call him Cousin Quicksilver.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>In the big avenue Aristide hailed a passing cab.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;To the H&ocirc;tel du Luxembourg&mdash;at a gallop!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>In the joyous excitement of the past few hours
+this child of impulse and sunshine, this dragon-fly
+of a man, had entirely forgotten the appointment
+at two o&#8217;clock with the American millionaire and
+the fortune that depended on it. He would be
+angry at being kept waiting. Aristide had met
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+Americans before. His swift brain invented an
+elaborate excuse.</p>
+
+<p>He leaped from the cab and entered the vestibule
+of the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Can I see M. Congleton?&rdquo; he asked at the bureau.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;An American gentleman? He has gone, monsieur.
+He left by the three-thirty train. Are you
+M. Pujol? There is a letter for you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>With a sinking heart he opened it and read:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p><span class="smcap">Dear Sir</span>,&mdash;I was in this hotel at two o&#8217;clock,
+according to arrangement. As my last train to
+Japan leaves at three-thirty, I regret I cannot await
+your convenience. The site of the hotel is satisfactory.
+Your business methods are not. I am
+sorry, therefore, not to be able to entertain the
+matter further.&mdash;Faithfully,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;" class="smcap">William B. Congleton.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>He stared at the words for a few paralyzed moments.
+Then he stuffed the letter into his pocket
+and broke into a laugh.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Zut!</em>&rdquo; said he, using the inelegant expletive
+whereby a Frenchman most adequately expresses
+his scorn of circumstance. &ldquo;<em>Zut!</em> If I have lost
+a fortune, I have gained two devoted friends, so
+I am the winner on the day&#8217;s work.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon he returned gaily to the bosom of
+the Bocardon family and remained there, its Cousin
+Quicksilver and its entirely happy and idolized hero,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+until the indignation of the eminent M. Say summoned
+him to Paris.</p>
+
+<p>And that is how Aristide Pujol could live thenceforward
+on nothing at all at N&icirc;mes, whenever it
+suited him to visit that historic town.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>THE ADVENTURE OF THE KIND MR. SMITH</strong></p>
+
+
+<p>Aristide Pujol started life on his own
+account as a <em>chasseur</em> in a Nice caf&eacute;&mdash;one
+of those luckless children tightly encased
+in bottle-green cloth by means of brass buttons,
+who earn a sketchy livelihood by enduring with
+cherubic smiles the continuous maledictions of the
+establishment. There he soothed his hours of servitude
+by dreams of vast ambitions. He would become
+the manager of a great hotel&mdash;not a contemptible
+hostelry where commercial travellers and
+seedy Germans were indifferently bedded, but one
+of those white palaces where milords (English) and
+millionaires (American) paid a thousand francs a
+night for a bedroom and five louis for a glass of
+beer. Now, in order to derive such profit from the
+Anglo-Saxon a knowledge of English was indispensable.
+He resolved to learn the language. How
+he did so, except by sheer effrontery, taking linguistic
+toll of frequenters of the caf&eacute;, would be a
+mystery to anyone unacquainted with Aristide. But
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+to his friends his mastery of the English tongue
+in such circumstances is comprehensible. To Aristide
+the impossible was ever the one thing easy of
+attainment; the possible the one thing he never
+could achieve. That was the paradoxical nature
+of the man. Before his days of hunted-little-devildom
+were over he had acquired sufficient knowledge
+of English to carry him, a few years later,
+through various vicissitudes in England, until, fired
+by new social ambitions and self-educated in a
+haphazard way, he found himself appointed Professor
+of French in an academy for young ladies.</p>
+
+<p>One of these days, when I can pin my dragon-fly
+friend down to a plain, unvarnished autobiography,
+I may be able to trace some chronological
+sequence in the kaleidoscopic changes in his career.
+But hitherto, in his talks with me, he flits about from
+any one date to any other during a couple of decades,
+in a manner so confusing that for the present
+I abandon such an attempt. All I know of the
+date of the episode I am about to chronicle is that
+it occurred immediately after the termination of
+his engagement at the academy just mentioned.
+Somehow, Aristide&#8217;s history is a category of terminations.</p>
+
+<p>If the head mistress of the academy had herself
+played dragon at his classes, all would have gone
+well. He would have made his pupils conjugate
+irregular verbs, rendered them adepts in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+mysteries of the past participle and the subjunctive
+mood, and turned them out quite innocent of the
+idiomatic quaintnesses of the French tongue. But
+<em>dis aliter visum</em>. The gods always saw wrong-headedly
+otherwise in the case of Aristide. A
+weak-minded governess&mdash;and in a governess a
+sense of humour and of novelty is always a sign
+of a weak mind&mdash;played dragon during Aristide&#8217;s
+lessons. She appreciated his method, which was
+colloquial. The colloquial Aristide was jocular.
+His lessons therefore were a giggling joy from beginning
+to end. He imparted to his pupils delicious
+knowledge. <em>En avez-vous des-z-homards?
+Oh, les sales b&ecirc;tes, elles ont du poil aux pattes</em>,
+which, being translated, is: &ldquo;Have you any lobsters?
+Oh, the dirty animals, they have hair on
+their feet&rdquo;&mdash;a catch phrase which, some years ago,
+added greatly to the gaiety of Paris, but in which
+I must confess to seeing no gleam of wit&mdash;became
+the historic property of the school. He recited to
+them, till they were word-perfect, a music-hall ditty
+of the early &#8217;eighties&mdash;<em>Sur le bi, sur le banc, sur
+le bi du bout du banc</em>, and delighted them with dissertations
+on Mme. Yvette Guilbert&#8217;s earlier repertoire.
+But for him they would have gone to their
+lives&#8217; end without knowing that <em>pognon</em> meant
+money; <em>rousp&eacute;tance</em>, assaulting the police; <em>thune</em>,
+a five-franc piece; and <em>bouffer</em>, to take nourishment.
+He made (according to his own statement) French
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+a living language. There was never a school in
+Great Britain, the Colonies, or America on which
+the Parisian accent was so electrically impressed.
+The retort, <em>Eh! ta s&oelig;ur</em>, was the purest Montmartre;
+also <em>Fich&#8217;-moi la paix, mon petit</em>, and <em>Tu as
+un toupet, toi</em>; and the delectable locution, <em>Allons
+&eacute;trangler un perroquet</em> (let us strangle a parrot),
+employed by Apaches when inviting each other to
+drink a glass of absinthe, soon became current
+French in the school for invitations to surreptitious
+cocoa-parties.</p>
+
+<p>The progress that academy made in a real grip
+of the French language was miraculous; but the
+knowledge it gained in French grammar and syntax
+was deplorable. A certain mid-term examination&mdash;the
+paper being set by a neighbouring vicar&mdash;produced
+awful results. The phrase, &ldquo;How do you do,
+dear?&rdquo; which ought, by all the rules of Stratford-atte-Bowe,
+to be translated by <em>Comment vous portez-vous,
+ma ch&egrave;re?</em> was rendered by most of the
+senior scholars <em>Eh, ma vieille, ca boulotte?</em> One
+innocent and anachronistic damsel, writing on the
+execution of Charles I., declared that he <em>cracha
+dans le panier</em> in 1649, thereby mystifying the good
+vicar, who was unaware that &ldquo;to spit into the basket&rdquo;
+is to be guillotined. This wealth of vocabulary
+was discounted by abject poverty in other
+branches of the language. No one could give a list
+of the words in &ldquo;<em>al</em>&rdquo; that took &ldquo;<em>s</em>&rdquo; in the plural,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+no one knew anything at all about the defective
+verb <em>&eacute;choir</em>, and the orthography of the school
+would have disgraced a kindergarten. The head
+mistress suspected a lack of method in the teaching
+of M. Pujol, and one day paid his class a surprise
+visit.</p>
+
+<p>The sight that met her eyes petrified her. The
+class, including the governess, bubbled and gurgled
+and shrieked with laughter. M. Pujol, his bright
+eyes agleam with merriment and his arms moving
+in frantic gestures, danced about the platform. He
+was telling them a story&mdash;and when Aristide told
+a story, he told it with the eloquence of his entire
+frame. He bent himself double and threw out his
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Il &eacute;tait sao&ucirc;l comme un porc</em>,&rdquo; he shouted.</p>
+
+<p>And then came the hush of death. The rest of
+the artless tale about the man as drunk as a pig
+was never told. The head mistress, indignant majesty,
+strode up the room.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;M. Pujol, you have a strange way of giving
+French lessons.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I believe, madame,&rdquo; said he, with a polite bow,
+&ldquo;in interesting my pupils in their studies.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Pupils have to be taught, not interested,&rdquo; said
+the head mistress. &ldquo;Will you kindly put the class
+through some irregular verbs.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So for the remainder of the lesson Aristide, under
+the freezing eyes of the head mistress, put his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+sorrowful class through irregular verbs, of which
+his own knowledge was singularly inexact, and at
+the end received his dismissal. In vain he argued.
+Outraged Minerva was implacable. Go he must.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We find him, then, one miserable December evening,
+standing on the arrival platform of Euston
+Station (the academy was near Manchester), an
+unwonted statue of dubiety. At his feet lay his
+meagre valise; in his hand was an enormous bouquet,
+a useful tribute of esteem from his disconsolate
+pupils; around him luggage-laden porters
+and passengers hurried; in front were drawn up the
+long line of cabs, their drivers&#8217; waterproofs glistening
+with wet; and in his pocket rattled the few
+paltry coins that, for Heaven knew how long, were
+to keep him from starvation. Should he commit
+the extravagance of taking a cab or should he go
+forth, valise in hand, into the pouring rain? He
+hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Sacr&eacute; mille cochons! Quel chien de climat!</em>&rdquo;
+he muttered.</p>
+
+<p>A smart footman standing by turned quickly
+and touched his hat.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Beg pardon, sir; I&#8217;m from Mr. Smith.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;m glad to hear it, my friend,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&#8217;re the French gentleman from Manchester?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Decidedly,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<a name="img94" id="img94"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 311px;">
+<img src="images/img094.jpg" width="311" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">standing on the arrival platform of euston station</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Then, sir, Mr. Smith has sent the carriage for
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s very kind of him,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>The footman picked up the valise and darted
+down the platform. Aristide followed. The footman
+held invitingly open the door of a cosy
+brougham. Aristide paused for the fraction of
+a second. Who was this hospitable Mr. Smith?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; said he to himself, &ldquo;the best way of
+finding out is to go and see.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He entered the carriage, sank back luxuriously
+on the soft cushions, and inhaled the warm smell
+of leather. They started, and soon the pelting rain
+beat harmlessly against the windows. Aristide
+looked out at the streaming streets, and, hugging
+himself comfortably, thanked Providence and Mr.
+Smith. But who was Mr. Smith? <em>Tiens</em>, thought
+he, there were two little Miss Smiths at the academy;
+he had pitied them because they had chilblains,
+freckles, and perpetual colds in their heads;
+possibly this was their kind papa. But, after all,
+what did it matter whose papa he was? He was
+expecting him. He had sent the carriage for him.
+Evidently a well-bred and attentive person. And
+<em>tiens!</em> there was even a hot-water can on the floor
+of the brougham. &ldquo;He thinks of everything, that
+man,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;I feel I am going to like
+him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The carriage stopped at a house in Hampstead,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+standing, as far as he could see in the darkness,
+in its own grounds. The footman opened the door
+for him to alight and escorted him up the front
+steps. A neat parlour-maid received him in a comfortably-furnished
+hall and took his hat and greatcoat
+and magnificent bouquet.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Smith hasn&#8217;t come back yet from the City,
+sir; but Miss Christabel is in the drawing-room.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Please give me back my
+bouquet.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The maid showed him into the drawing-room.
+A pretty girl of three-and-twenty rose from a fender-stool
+and advanced smilingly to meet him.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good afternoon, M. le Baron. I was wondering
+whether Thomas would spot you. I&#8217;m so glad he
+did. You see, neither father nor I could give him
+any description, for we had never seen you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This fitted in with his theory. But why Baron?
+After all, why not? The English loved titles.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He seems to be an intelligent fellow, mademoiselle.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>There was a span of silence. The girl looked
+at the bouquet, then at Aristide, who looked at the
+girl, then at the bouquet, then at the girl again.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mademoiselle,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;will you deign to accept
+these flowers as a token of my respectful
+homage?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Christabel took the flowers and blushed
+prettily. She had dark hair and eyes and a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
+fascinating, upturned little nose, and the kindest little
+mouth in the world.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;An Englishman would not have thought of
+that,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide smiled in his roguish way and raised a
+deprecating hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes, he would. But he would not have
+had&mdash;what you call the cheek to do it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Christabel laughed merrily, invited him
+to a seat by the fire, and comforted him with
+tea and hot muffins. The frank charm of his girl-hostess
+captivated Aristide and drove from his
+mind the riddle of his adventure. Besides, think of
+the Arabian Nights&#8217; enchantment of the change
+from his lonely and shabby bed-sitting-room in the
+Rusholme Road to this fragrant palace with
+princess and all to keep him company! He watched
+the firelight dancing through her hair, the dainty
+play of laughter over her face, and decided that
+the brougham had transported him to Bagdad instead
+of Hampstead.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You have the air of a veritable princess,&rdquo; said
+he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I once met a princess&mdash;at a charity bazaar&mdash;and
+she was a most matter-of-fact, businesslike
+person.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;A princess of a charity
+bazaar! I was talking of the princess in a fairytale.
+They are the only real ones.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; said Miss Christabel, &ldquo;that
+when men pay such compliments to English girls
+they are apt to get laughed at?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Englishmen, yes,&rdquo; replied Aristide, &ldquo;because
+they think over a compliment for a week, so that
+by the time they pay it, it is addled, like a bad egg.
+But we of Provence pay tribute to beauty straight
+out of our hearts. It is true. It is sincere. And
+what comes out of the heart is not ridiculous.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Again the girl coloured and laughed. &ldquo;I&#8217;ve always
+heard that a Frenchman makes love to every
+woman he meets.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Naturally,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;If they are pretty.
+What else are pretty women for? Otherwise they
+might as well be hideous.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said the girl, to whom this Proven&ccedil;al
+point of view had not occurred.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;So, if I make love to you, it is but your due.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder what my fianc&eacute; would say if he heard
+you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Your&mdash;&mdash;?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My fianc&eacute;! There&#8217;s his photograph on the
+table beside you. He is six foot one, and so jealous!&rdquo;
+she laughed again.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The Turk!&rdquo; cried Aristide, his swiftly-conceived
+romance crumbling into dust. Then he brightened
+up. &ldquo;But when this six feet of muscle and egotism
+is absent, surely other poor mortals can glean a
+smile?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+&ldquo;You will observe that I&#8217;m not frowning,&rdquo; said
+Miss Christabel. &ldquo;But you must not call my fianc&eacute;
+a Turk, for he&#8217;s a very charming fellow whom I
+hope you&#8217;ll like very much.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide sighed. &ldquo;And the name of this thrice-blessed
+mortal?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Christabel told his name&mdash;one Harry Ralston&mdash;and
+not only his name, but, such was the
+peculiar, childlike charm of Aristide Pujol, also
+many other things about him. He was the Honourable
+Harry Ralston, the heir to a great brewery
+peerage, and very wealthy. He was a member
+of Parliament, and but for Parliamentary duties
+would have dined there that evening; but he
+was to come in later, as soon as he could leave the
+House. He also had a house in Hampshire, full of
+the most beautiful works of art. It was through
+their common hobby that her father and Harry had
+first made acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;We&#8217;re supposed to have a very fine collection
+here,&rdquo; she said, with a motion of her hand.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide looked round the walls and saw them
+hung with pictures in gold frames. In those days
+he had not acquired an extensive culture. Besides,
+who having before him the firelight gleaming
+through Miss Christabel&#8217;s hair could waste his
+time over painted canvas? She noted his cursory
+glance.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I thought you were a connoisseur?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+&ldquo;I am,&rdquo; said Aristide, his bright eyes fixed on
+her in frank admiration.</p>
+
+<p>She blushed again; but this time she rose.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I must go and dress for dinner. Perhaps you
+would like to be shown your room?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He hung his head on one side.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Have I been too bold, mademoiselle?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t know,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You see, I&#8217;ve never
+met a Frenchman before.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then a world of undreamed-of homage is at
+your feet,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>A servant ushered him up broad, carpeted staircases
+into a bedroom such as he had never seen in
+his life before. It was all curtains and hangings
+and rugs and soft couches and satin quilts and
+dainty writing-tables and subdued lights, and a
+great fire glowed red and cheerful, and before it
+hung a clean shirt. His poor little toilet apparatus
+was laid on the dressing-table, and (with a
+tact which he did not appreciate, for he had, sad
+to tell, no dress-suit) the servant had spread his
+precious frock-coat and spare pair of trousers on
+the bed. On the pillow lay his night-shirt, neatly
+folded.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Evidently,&rdquo; said Aristide, impressed by these
+preparations, &ldquo;it is expected that I wash myself
+now and change my clothes, and that I sleep here
+for the night. And for all that the ravishing
+Miss Christabel is engaged to her honourable
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+Harry, this is none the less a corner of Paradise.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So Aristide attired himself in his best, which
+included a white tie and a pair of nearly new brown
+boots&mdash;a long task, as he found that his valise
+had been spirited away and its contents, including
+the white tie of ceremony (he had but one), hidden
+in unexpected drawers and wardrobes&mdash;and eventually
+went downstairs into the drawing-room. There
+he found Miss Christabel and, warming himself on
+the hearthrug, a bald-headed, beefy-faced Briton,
+with little pig&#8217;s eyes and a hearty manner, attired
+in a dinner-suit.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear fellow,&rdquo; said this personage, with outstretched
+hand, &ldquo;I&#8217;m delighted to have you here.
+I&#8217;ve heard so much about you; and my little girl
+has been singing your praises.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mademoiselle is too kind,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You must take us as you find us,&rdquo; said Mr.
+Smith. &ldquo;We&#8217;re just ordinary folk, but I can give
+you a good bottle of wine and a good cigar&mdash;it&#8217;s
+only in England, you know, that you can get champagne
+fit to drink and cigars fit to smoke&mdash;and I
+can give you a glimpse of a modest English home.
+I believe you haven&#8217;t a word for it in French.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ma foi</em>, no,&rdquo; said Aristide, who had once or
+twice before heard this lunatic charge brought
+against his country. &ldquo;In France the men all live in
+caf&eacute;s, the children are all put out to nurse, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+the women, saving the respect of mademoiselle&mdash;well,
+the less said about them the better.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;England is the only place, isn&#8217;t it?&rdquo; Mr. Smith
+declared, heartily. &ldquo;I don&#8217;t say that Paris hasn&#8217;t
+its points. But after all&mdash;the Moulin Rouge and
+the Folies Berg&egrave;res and that sort of thing soon
+pall, you know&mdash;soon pall.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yet Paris has its serious side,&rdquo; argued Aristide.
+&ldquo;There is always the tomb of Napoleon.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Papa will never take me to Paris,&rdquo; sighed the
+girl.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You shall go there on your honeymoon,&rdquo; said
+Mr. Smith.</p>
+
+<p>Dinner was announced. Aristide gave his arm
+to Miss Christabel, and proud not only of his partner,
+but also of his frock-coat, white tie, and shiny
+brown boots, strutted into the dining-room. The
+host sat at the end of the beautifully set table, his
+daughter on his right, Aristide on his left. The
+meal began gaily. The kind Mr. Smith was in the
+best of humours.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And how is our dear old friend, Jules Dancourt?&rdquo;
+he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tiens!</em>&rdquo; said Aristide, to himself, &ldquo;we have a
+dear friend Jules Dancourt. Wonderfully well,&rdquo; he
+replied at a venture, &ldquo;but he suffers terribly at times
+from the gout.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;So do I, confound it!&rdquo; said Mr. Smith, drinking
+sherry.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+&ldquo;You and the good Jules were always sympathetic,&rdquo;
+said Aristide. &ldquo;Ah! he has spoken to me
+so often about you, the tears in his eyes.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Men cry, my dear, in France,&rdquo; Mr. Smith explained.
+&ldquo;They also kiss each other.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ah, mais c&#8217;est un beau pays, mademoiselle!</em>&rdquo;
+cried Aristide, and he began to talk of France and
+to draw pictures of his country which set the girl&#8217;s
+eyes dancing. After that he told some of the funny
+little stories which had brought him disaster at the
+academy. Mr. Smith, with jovial magnanimity,
+declared that he was the first Frenchman he had
+ever met with a sense of humour.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I thought, Baron,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;that you lived
+all your life shut up in that old ch&acirc;teau of yours?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tiens!</em>&rdquo; thought Aristide. &ldquo;I am still a Baron,
+and I have an old ch&acirc;teau.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Tell us about the ch&acirc;teau. Has it a fosse and
+a drawbridge and a Gothic chapel?&rdquo; asked Miss
+Christabel.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Which one do you mean?&rdquo; inquired Aristide,
+airily. &ldquo;For I have two.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>When relating to me this Arabian Nights&#8217; adventure,
+he drew my special attention to his astuteness.</p>
+
+<p>His host&#8217;s eye quivered in a wink. &ldquo;The one in
+Languedoc,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>Languedoc! Almost Pujol&#8217;s own country! With
+entire lack of morality, but with picturesque
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+imagination, Aristide plunged into a description of that
+non-existent baronial hall. Fosse, drawbridge,
+Gothic chapel were but insignificant features. It
+had tourelles, emblazoned gateways, bastions, donjons,
+barbicans; it had innumerable rooms; in the
+<em>salle des chevaliers</em> two hundred men-at-arms had
+his ancestors fed at a sitting. There was the room
+in which Fran&ccedil;ois Premier had slept, and one in
+which Joan of Arc had almost been assassinated.
+What the name of himself or of his ancestors was
+supposed to be Aristide had no ghost of an idea.
+But as he proceeded with the erection of his airy
+palace he gradually began to believe in it. He invested
+the place with a living atmosphere; conjured
+up a staff of family retainers, notably one Marie-Joseph
+Loufoque, the wizened old major-domo,
+with his long white whiskers and blue and silver
+livery. There were also Madeline Mioulles, the
+cook, and Bernadet the groom, and La Petite Fripette
+the goose girl. Ah! they should see La
+Petite Fripette! And he kept dogs and horses and
+cows and ducks and hens&mdash;and there was a great
+pond whence frogs were drawn to be fed for the
+consumption of the household.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Christabel shivered. &ldquo;I should not like
+to eat frogs.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;They also eat snails,&rdquo; said her father.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have a snail farm,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;You never
+saw such interesting little animals. They are so
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+intelligent. If you&#8217;re kind to them they come and
+eat out of your hand.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img106" id="img106"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/img106.jpg" width="600" height="424" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&ldquo;ah! the pictures,&rdquo; cried aristide, with a wide sweep of his arms</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&#8217;ve forgotten the pictures,&rdquo; said Mr. Smith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah! the pictures,&rdquo; cried Aristide, with a wide
+sweep of his arms. &ldquo;Galleries full of them.
+Raphael, Michael Angelo, Wiertz, Reynolds&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He paused, not in order to produce the effect of
+a dramatic aposiopesis, but because he could not
+for the moment remember other names of painters.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is a truly historical ch&acirc;teau,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I should love to see it,&rdquo; said the girl.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide threw out his arms across the table.
+&ldquo;It is yours, mademoiselle, for your honeymoon,&rdquo;
+said he.</p>
+
+<p>Dinner came to an end. Miss Christabel left
+the gentlemen to their wine, an excellent port whose
+English qualities were vaunted by the host. Aristide,
+full of food and drink and the mellow glories
+of the castle in Languedoc, and smoking an enormous
+cigar, felt at ease with all the world. He
+knew he should like the kind Mr. Smith, hospitable
+though somewhat insular man. He could stay with
+him for a week&mdash;or a month&mdash;why not a year?</p>
+
+<p>After coffee and liqueurs had been served Mr.
+Smith rose and switched on a powerful electric
+light at the end of the large room, showing a picture
+on an easel covered by a curtain. He beckoned
+to Aristide to join him and, drawing the curtain,
+disclosed the picture.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+&ldquo;There!&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Isn&#8217;t it a stunner?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It was a picture all grey skies and grey water
+and grey feathery trees, and a little man in the
+foreground wore a red cap.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is beautiful, but indeed it is magnificent!&rdquo;
+cried Aristide, always impressionable to things of
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Genuine Corot, isn&#8217;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Without doubt,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>His host poked him in the ribs. &ldquo;I thought I&#8217;d
+astonish you. You wouldn&#8217;t believe Gottschalk
+could have done it. There it is&mdash;as large as life
+and twice as natural. If you or anyone else can
+tell it from a genuine Corot I&#8217;ll eat my hat. And
+all for eight pounds.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide looked at the beefy face and caught a
+look of cunning in the little pig&#8217;s eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Now are you satisfied?&rdquo; asked Mr. Smith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;More than satisfied,&rdquo; said Aristide, though what
+he was to be satisfied about passed, for the moment,
+his comprehension.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If it was a copy of an existing picture, you
+know&mdash;one might have understood it&mdash;that, of
+course, would be dangerous&mdash;but for a man to go
+and get bits out of various Corots and stick them
+together like this is miraculous. If it hadn&#8217;t been
+for a matter of business principle I&#8217;d have given
+the fellow eight guineas instead of pounds&mdash;hanged
+if I wouldn&#8217;t! He deserves it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+&ldquo;He does indeed,&rdquo; said Aristide Pujol.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And now that you&#8217;ve seen it with your own
+eyes, what do you think you might ask me for it?
+I suggested something between two and three
+thousand&mdash;shall we say three? You&#8217;re the owner,
+you know.&rdquo; Again the process of rib-digging.
+&ldquo;Came out of that historic ch&acirc;teau of yours. My
+eye! you&#8217;re a holy terror when you begin to talk.
+You almost persuaded me it was real.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tiens!</em>&rdquo; said Aristide to himself. &ldquo;I don&#8217;t seem
+to have a ch&acirc;teau after all.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly three thousand,&rdquo; said he, with a grave
+face.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That young man thinks he knows a lot, but he
+doesn&#8217;t,&rdquo; said Mr. Smith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Aristide, with singular laconicism.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Not a blooming thing,&rdquo; continued his host.
+&ldquo;But he&#8217;ll pay three thousand, which is the principal,
+isn&#8217;t it? He&#8217;s partner in the show, you know,
+Ralston, Wiggins, and Wix&#8217;s Brewery&rdquo;&mdash;Aristide
+pricked up his ears&mdash;&ldquo;and when his doddering old
+father dies he&#8217;ll be Lord Ranelagh and come into
+a million of money.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Has he seen the picture?&rdquo; asked Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes. Regards it as a masterpiece. Didn&#8217;t
+Brauneberger tell you of the Lancret we planted
+on the American?&rdquo; Mr. Smith rubbed hearty hands
+at the memory of the iniquity. &ldquo;Same old game.
+Always easy. I have nothing to do with the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+bargaining or the sale. Just an old friend of the
+ruined French nobleman with the historic ch&acirc;teau
+and family treasures. He comes along and fixes
+the price. I told our friend Harry&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good,&rdquo; thought Aristide. &ldquo;This is the same
+Honourable Harry, M.P., who is engaged to the
+ravishing Miss Christabel.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I told him,&rdquo; said Mr. Smith, &ldquo;that it might
+come to three or four thousand. He jibbed a bit&mdash;so
+when I wrote to you I said two or three. But
+you might try him with three to begin with.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide went back to the table and poured himself
+out a fresh glass of his kind host&#8217;s 1865 brandy
+and drank it off.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Exquisite, my dear fellow,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I&#8217;ve
+none finer in my historic ch&acirc;teau.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Don&#8217;t suppose you have,&rdquo; grinned the host, joining
+him. He slapped him on the back. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo;
+said he, with a shifty look in his little pig&#8217;s eyes,
+&ldquo;let us talk business. What do you think would
+be your fair commission? You see, all the trouble
+and invention have been mine. What do you say
+to four hundred pounds?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Five,&rdquo; said Aristide, promptly.</p>
+
+<p>A sudden gleam came into the little pig&#8217;s eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Done!&rdquo; said Mr. Smith, who had imagined that
+the other would demand a thousand and was prepared
+to pay eight hundred. &ldquo;Done!&rdquo; said he
+again.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+They shook hands to seal the bargain and drank
+another glass of old brandy. At that moment, a
+servant, entering, took the host aside.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Please excuse me a moment,&rdquo; said he, and went
+with the servant out of the room.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide, left alone, lighted another of his kind
+host&#8217;s fat cigars and threw himself into a great
+leathern arm-chair by the fire, and surrendered himself
+deliciously to the soothing charm of the moment.
+Now and then he laughed, finding a certain
+comicality in his position. And what a charming
+father-in-law, this kind Mr. Smith!</p>
+
+<p>His cheerful reflections were soon disturbed by
+the sudden irruption of his host and a grizzled, elderly,
+foxy-faced gentleman with a white moustache,
+wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honour
+in the buttonhole of his overcoat.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Here, you!&rdquo; cried the kind Mr. Smith, striding
+up to Aristide, with a very red face. &ldquo;Will you
+have the kindness to tell me who the devil you
+are?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide rose, and, putting his hands behind the
+tails of his frock-coat, stood smiling radiantly on
+the hearthrug. A wit much less alert than my irresponsible
+friend&#8217;s would have instantly appreciated
+the fact that the real Simon Pure had arrived
+on the scene.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I, my dear friend,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;am the Baron de
+Je ne Sais Plus.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+&ldquo;You&#8217;re a confounded impostor,&rdquo; spluttered Mr.
+Smith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And this gentleman here to whom I have not
+had the pleasure of being introduced?&rdquo; asked Aristide,
+blandly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am M. Poiron, monsieur, the agent of
+Messrs. Brauneberger and Compagnie, art dealers,
+of the Rue Notre Dame des Petits Champs of
+Paris,&rdquo; said the new-comer, with an air of defiance.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, I thought you were the Baron,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There&#8217;s no blooming Baron at all about it!&rdquo;
+screamed Mr. Smith. &ldquo;Are you Poiron, or is he?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I would not have a name like Poiron for anything
+in the world,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;My name is
+Aristide Pujol, soldier of fortune, at your service.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How the blazes did you get here?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Your servant asked me if I was a French gentleman
+from Manchester. I was. He said that Mr.
+Smith had sent his carriage for me. I thought it
+hospitable of the kind Mr. Smith. I entered the
+carriage&mdash;<em>et voil&agrave;!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then clear out of here this very minute,&rdquo; said
+Mr. Smith, reaching forward his hand to the bell-push.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide checked his impulsive action.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Pardon me, dear host,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;It is raining
+dogs and cats outside. I am very comfortable in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+your luxurious home. I am here, and here I stay.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;m shot if you do,&rdquo; said the kind Mr. Smith,
+his face growing redder and uglier. &ldquo;Now, will
+you go out, or will you be thrown out?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide, who had no desire whatever to be
+ejected from this snug nest into the welter of the
+wet and friendless world, puffed at his cigar, and
+looked at his host with the irresistible drollery of
+his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You forget, <em>mon cher ami</em>,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;that neither
+the beautiful Miss Christabel nor her affianced,
+the Honourable Harry, M.P., would care to know
+that the talented Gottschalk got only eight
+pounds, not even guineas, for painting that three-thousand-pound
+picture.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;So it&#8217;s blackmail, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;and I don&#8217;t blush
+at it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You infernal little blackguard!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I seem to be in congenial company,&rdquo; said Aristide.
+&ldquo;I don&#8217;t think our friend M. Poiron has more
+scruples than he has right to the ribbon of the Legion
+of Honour which he is wearing.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How much will you take to go out? I have a
+cheque-book handy.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Smith moved a few steps from the hearthrug.
+Aristide sat down in the arm-chair. An engaging,
+fantastic impudence was one of the charms
+of Aristide Pujol.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+&ldquo;I&#8217;ll take five hundred pounds,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;to
+stay in.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Stay in?&rdquo; Mr. Smith grew apoplectic.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;You can&#8217;t do without me.
+Your daughter and your servants know me as M. le
+Baron&mdash;by the way, what is my name? And where
+is my historic ch&acirc;teau in Languedoc?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mireilles,&rdquo; said M. Poiron, who was sitting
+grim and taciturn on one of the dining-room chairs.
+&ldquo;And the place is the same, near Montpellier.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I like to meet an intelligent man,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I should like to wring your infernal neck,&rdquo; said
+the kind Mr. Smith. &ldquo;But, by George, if we do
+let you in you&#8217;ll have to sign me a receipt implicating
+yourself up to the hilt. I&#8217;m not going to be
+put into the cart by you, you can bet your life.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Anything you like,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;so long as
+we all swing together.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Now, when Aristide Pujol arrived at this point
+in his narrative I, his chronicler, who am nothing
+if not an eminently respectable, law-abiding Briton,
+took him warmly to task for his sheer absence of
+moral sense. His eyes, as they sometimes did, assumed
+a luminous pathos.</p>
+
+<a name="img116" id="img116"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 491px;">
+<img src="images/img116.jpg" width="491" height="500" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&ldquo;i&#8217;ll take five hundred pounds,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;to stay in&rdquo;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear friend,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;have you ever faced
+the world in a foreign country in December with
+no character and fifteen pounds five and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+three-pence in your pocket? Five hundred pounds was
+a fortune. It is one now. And to be gained just
+by lending oneself to a good farce, which didn&#8217;t
+hurt anybody. You and your British morals! Bah!&rdquo;
+said he, with a fine flourish.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Aristide, after much parleying, was finally admitted
+into the nefarious brotherhood. He was to
+retain his rank as the Baron de Mireilles, and play
+the part of the pecuniarily inconvenienced nobleman
+forced to sell some of his rare collection. Mr.
+Smith had heard of the Corot through their dear
+old common friend, Jules Dancourt of Rheims, had
+mentioned it alluringly to the Honourable Harry,
+had arranged for the Baron, who was visiting England,
+to bring it over and dispatch it to Mr. Smith&#8217;s
+house, and on his return from Manchester to pay
+a visit to Mr. Smith, so that he could meet the
+Honourable Harry in person. In whatever transaction
+ensued Mr. Smith, so far as his prospective
+son-in-law was concerned, was to be the purely
+disinterested friend. It was Aristide&#8217;s wit which
+invented a part for the supplanted M. Poiron. He
+should be the eminent Parisian expert who, chancing
+to be in London, had been telephoned for by
+the kind Mr. Smith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It would not be wise for M. Poiron,&rdquo; said Aristide,
+chuckling inwardly with puckish glee, &ldquo;to stay
+here for the night&mdash;or for two or three days&mdash;or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+a week&mdash;like myself. He must go back to his hotel
+when the business is concluded.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mais, pardon!</em>&rdquo; cried M. Poiron, who had been
+formally invited, and had arrived late solely because
+he had missed his train at Manchester, and
+come on by the next one. &ldquo;I cannot go out into
+the wet, and I have no hotel to go to.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide appealed to his host. &ldquo;But he is unreasonable,
+<em>cher ami</em>. He must play his <em>r&ocirc;le</em>. M.
+Poiron has been telephoned for. He can&#8217;t possibly
+stay here. Surely five hundred pounds is worth one
+little night of discomfort? And there are a legion
+of hotels in London.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Five hundred pounds!&rdquo; exclaimed M. Poiron.
+&ldquo;<em>Qu&#8217;est-ce que vous chantez l&agrave;?</em> I want more than
+five hundred pounds.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then you&#8217;re jolly well not going to get it,&rdquo;
+cried Mr. Smith, in a rage. &ldquo;And as for you&rdquo;&mdash;he
+turned on Aristide&mdash;&ldquo;I&#8217;ll wring your infernal
+neck yet.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Calm yourself, calm yourself!&rdquo; smiled Aristide,
+who was enjoying himself hugely.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment the door opened and Miss Christabel
+appeared. On seeing the decorated stranger
+she started with a little &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; of surprise.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I beg your pardon.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Smith&#8217;s angry face wreathed itself in
+smiles.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;This, my darling, is M. Poiron, the eminent
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+Paris expert, who has been good enough to come
+and give us his opinion on the picture.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>M. Poiron bowed. Aristide advanced.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mademoiselle, your appearance is like a mirage
+in a desert.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She smiled indulgently and turned to her father.
+&ldquo;I&#8217;ve been wondering what had become of you.
+Harry has been here for the last half-hour.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Bring him in, dear child, bring him in!&rdquo; said
+Mr. Smith, with all the heartiness of the fine old
+English gentleman. &ldquo;Our good friends are dying
+to meet him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The girl flickered out of the room like a sunbeam
+(the phrase is Aristide&#8217;s), and the three precious
+rascals put their heads together in a hurried
+and earnest colloquy. Presently Miss Christabel
+returned, and with her came the Honourable Harry
+Ralston, a tall, soldierly fellow, with close-cropped
+fair curly hair and a fair moustache, and frank
+blue eyes that, even in Parliament, had seen no
+harm in his fellow-creatures. Aristide&#8217;s magical
+vision caught him wincing ever so little at Mr.
+Smith&#8217;s effusive greeting and overdone introductions.
+He shook Aristide warmly by the hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You have a beauty there, Baron, a perfect
+beauty,&rdquo; said he, with the insane ingenuousness of
+youth. &ldquo;I wonder how you can manage to part
+with it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ma foi</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide, with his back against
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+the end of the dining-table and gazing at the masterpiece.
+&ldquo;I have so many at the Ch&acirc;teau de Mireilles.
+When one begins to collect, you know&mdash;and
+when one&#8217;s grandfather and father have had
+also the divine mania&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You were saying, M. le Baron,&rdquo; said M. Poiron
+of Paris, &ldquo;that your respected grandfather bought
+this direct from Corot himself.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A commission,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;My grandfather
+was a patron of Corot.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Do you like it, dear?&rdquo; asked the Honourable
+Harry.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes!&rdquo; replied the girl, fervently. &ldquo;It is
+beautiful. I feel like Harry about it.&rdquo; She turned
+to Aristide. &ldquo;How can you part with it? Were
+you really in earnest when you said you would like
+me to come and see your collection?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;For me,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;it would be a visit
+of enchantment.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You must take me, then,&rdquo; she whispered to
+Harry. &ldquo;The Baron has been telling us about
+his lovely old ch&acirc;teau.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Will you come, monsieur?&rdquo; asked Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Since I&#8217;m going to rob you of your picture,&rdquo;
+said the young man, with smiling courtesy, &ldquo;the
+least I can do is to pay you a visit of apology.
+Lovely!&rdquo; said he, going up to the Corot.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide took Miss Christabel, now more bewitching
+than ever with the glow of young love in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+her eyes and a flush on her cheek, a step or two
+aside and whispered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But he is charming, your fianc&eacute;! He almost
+deserves his good fortune.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why almost?&rdquo; she laughed, shyly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is not a man, but a demi-god, that would
+deserve you, mademoiselle.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>M. Poiron&#8217;s harsh voice broke out.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You see, it is painted in the beginning of Corot&#8217;s
+later manner&mdash;it is 1864. There is the mystery
+which, when he was quite an old man, became
+a trick. If you were to put it up to auction at
+Christie&#8217;s it would fetch, I am sure, five thousand
+pounds.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s more than I can afford to give,&rdquo; said
+the young man, with a laugh. &ldquo;Mr. Smith mentioned
+something between three and four thousand
+pounds. I don&#8217;t think I can go above
+three.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have nothing to do with it, my dear boy,
+nothing whatever,&rdquo; said Mr. Smith, rubbing his
+hands. &ldquo;You wanted a Corot. I said I thought I
+could put you on to one. It&#8217;s for the Baron here
+to mention his price. I retire now and for ever.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well, Baron?&rdquo; said the young man, cheerfully.
+&ldquo;What&#8217;s your idea?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide came forward and resumed his place at
+the end of the table. The picture was in front of
+him beneath the strong electric light; on his left
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+stood Mr. Smith and Poiron, on his right Miss
+Christabel and the Honourable Harry.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;ll not take three thousand pounds for it,&rdquo;
+said Aristide. &ldquo;A picture like that! Never!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I assure you it would be a fair price,&rdquo; said
+Poiron.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You mentioned that figure yourself only just
+now,&rdquo; said Mr. Smith, with an ugly glitter in his
+little pig&#8217;s eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I presume, gentlemen,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;that this
+picture is my own property.&rdquo; He turned engagingly
+to his host. &ldquo;Is it not, <em>cher ami</em>?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Of course it is. Who said it wasn&#8217;t?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And you, M. Poiron, acknowledge formally that
+it is mine,&rdquo; he asked, in French.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Sans aucun doute.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Eh bien</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide, throwing open his arms
+and gazing round sweetly. &ldquo;I have changed my
+mind. I do not sell the picture at all.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Not sell it? What the&mdash;what do you mean?&rdquo;
+asked Mr. Smith, striving to mellow the gathering
+thunder on his brow.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I do not sell,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Listen, my dear
+friends!&rdquo; He was in the seventh heaven of happiness&mdash;the
+principal man, the star, taking the centre
+of the stage. &ldquo;I have an announcement to make
+to you. I have fallen desperately in love with
+mademoiselle.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>There was a general gasp. Mr. Smith looked at
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+him, red-faced and open-mouthed. Miss Christabel
+blushed furiously and emitted a sound half between
+a laugh and a scream. Harry Ralston&#8217;s eyes
+flashed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear sir&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; he began.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Pardon,&rdquo; said Aristide, disarming him with the
+merry splendour of his glance. &ldquo;I do not wish to
+take mademoiselle from you. My love is hopeless!
+I know it. But it will feed me to my dying day.
+In return for the joy of this hopeless passion I will
+not sell you the picture&mdash;I give it to you as a wedding
+present.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He stood, with the air of a hero, both arms extended
+towards the amazed pair of lovers.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I give it to you,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;It is mine. I have
+no wish but for your happiness. In my Ch&acirc;teau
+de Mireilles there are a hundred others.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;This is madness!&rdquo; said Mr. Smith, bursting
+with suppressed indignation, so that his bald head
+grew scarlet.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear fellow!&rdquo; said Mr. Harry Ralston. &ldquo;It
+is unheard-of generosity on your part. But we
+can&#8217;t accept it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then,&rdquo; said Aristide, advancing dramatically
+to the picture, &ldquo;I take it under my arm, I put it in
+a hansom cab, and I go with it back to Languedoc.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Smith caught him by the wrist and dragged
+him out of the room.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+&ldquo;You little brute! Do you want your neck
+broken?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Do you want the marriage of your daughter
+with the rich and Honourable Harry broken?&rdquo;
+asked Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, damn! Oh, damn! Oh, damn!&rdquo; cried Mr.
+Smith, stamping about helplessly and half weeping.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide entered the dining-room and beamed on
+the company.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The kind Mr. Smith has consented. Mr. Honourable
+Harry and Miss Christabel, there is your
+Corot. And now, may I be permitted?&rdquo; He rang
+the bell. A servant appeared.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Some champagne to drink to the health of the
+fianc&eacute;s,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Lots of champagne.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Smith looked at him almost admiringly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;By Jove!&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;You <em>have</em> got a
+nerve.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Voil&agrave;!</em>&rdquo; said Aristide, when he had finished the
+story.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And did they accept the Corot?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Of course. It is hanging now in the big house
+in Hampshire. I stayed with the kind Mr. Smith
+for six weeks,&rdquo; he added, doubling himself up in
+his chair and hugging himself with mirth, &ldquo;and
+we became very good friends. And I was at the
+wedding.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+&ldquo;And what about their honeymoon visit to Languedoc?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Alas!&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;The morning before the
+wedding I had a telegram&mdash;it was from my old
+father at Aigues-Mortes&mdash;to tell me that the historic
+Ch&acirc;teau de Mireilles, with my priceless collection
+of pictures, had been burned to the ground.&rdquo;</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING</strong></p>
+
+
+<p>There was a time when Aristide Pujol, in
+sole charge of an automobile, went gaily
+scuttering over the roads of France. I
+use the word advisedly. If you had heard the awful
+thing as it passed by you would agree that it is the
+only word adequate to express its hideous mode of
+progression. It was a two-seated, scratched, battered,
+ramshackle tin concern of hoary antiquity,
+belonging to the childhood of the race. Not only
+horses, but other automobiles shied at it. It was
+a vehicle of derision. Yet Aristide regarded it
+with glowing pride and drove it with such daredevilry
+that the parts must have held together only
+through sheer breathless wonder. Had it not been
+for the car, he told me, he would not have undertaken
+the undignified employment in which he was
+then engaged&mdash;the mountebank selling of a corn-cure
+in the public places of small towns and villages.
+It was not a fitting pursuit for a late managing
+director of a public company and an ex-Professor
+of French in an English Academy for Young
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+Ladies. He wanted to rise, <em>ma foi</em>, not descend in the
+social scale. But when hunger drives&mdash;<em>que voulez-vous</em>?
+Besides, there was the automobile. It is
+true he had bound himself by his contract to exhibit
+a board at the back bearing a flaming picture
+of the success of the cure and a legend: &ldquo;<em>Gu&eacute;rissez
+vos cors</em>,&rdquo; and to display a banner with the
+same device, when weather permitted. But, still,
+there was the automobile.</p>
+
+<p>It had been lying for many motor-ages in the
+shed of the proprietors of the cure, the Maison
+Hi&eacute;ropath of Marseilles, neglected, forlorn, eaten
+by rust and worm, when suddenly an idea occurred
+to their business imagination. Why should they
+not use the automobile to advertise and sell the cure
+about the country? The apostle in charge would
+pay for his own petrol, take a large percentage on
+sales, and the usual traveller&#8217;s commission on orders
+that he might place. But where to find an
+apostle? Brave and desperate men came in high
+hopes, looked at the car, and, shaking their heads
+sorrowfully, went away. At last, at the loosest
+of ends, came Aristide. The splendour of the idea&mdash;a
+poet, in his way, was Aristide, and the Idea
+was the thing that always held him captive&mdash;the
+splendour of the idea of dashing up to hotels in his
+own automobile dazed him. He beheld himself
+doing his hundred kilometres an hour and trailing
+clouds of glory whithersoever he went. To a child
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+a moth-eaten rocking-horse is a fiery Arab of the
+plains; to Aristide Pujol this cheat of the scrap-heap
+was a sixty-horse-power thunderer and devourer of
+space.</p>
+
+<p>How they managed to botch up her interior so
+that she moved unpushed is a mystery which Aristide,
+not divining, could not reveal; and when and
+where he himself learned to drive a motor-car is
+also vague. I believe the knowledge came by nature.
+He was a fellow of many weird accomplishments.
+He could conjure; he could model birds
+and beasts out of breadcrumb; he could play the
+drum&mdash;so well that he had a kettle-drum hanging
+round his neck during most of his military service;
+he could make omelettes and rabbit-hutches; he
+could imitate any animal that ever emitted sound&mdash;a
+gift that endeared him to children; he could
+do almost anything you please&mdash;save stay in one
+place and acquire material possessions. The fact
+that he had never done a thing before was to him
+no proof of his inability to do it. In his superb
+self-confidence he would have undertaken to conduct
+the orchestra at Covent Garden or navigate
+a liner across the Atlantic. Knowing this, I cease
+to bother my head about so small a matter as the
+way in which he learned to drive a motor-car.</p>
+
+<p>Behold him, then, one raw March morning, scuttering
+along the road that leads from Arles to
+Salon, in Provence. He wore a goat-skin coat and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+a goat-skin cap drawn down well over his ears.
+His handsome bearded face, with its lustrous,
+laughing eyes, peeped out curiously human amid the
+circumambient shagginess. There was not a turn
+visible in the long, straight road that lost itself in
+the far distant mist; not a speck on it signifying
+cart or creature. Aristide Pujol gave himself up
+to the delirium of speed and urged the half-bursting
+engine to twenty miles an hour. In spite of the
+racing-track surface, the crazy car bumped and
+jolted; the sides of the rickety bonnet clashed like
+cymbals; every valve wheezed and squealed; every
+nut seemed to have got loose and terrifically clattered;
+rattling noises, grunting noises, screeching
+noises escaped from every part; it creaked and
+clanked like an over-insured tramp-steamer in a
+typhoon; it lurched as though afflicted with loco-motor
+ataxy; and noisome vapours belched forth
+from the open exhaust-pipe as though the car were
+a Tophet on wheels. But all was music in the ears
+of Aristide. The car was going (it did not always
+go), the road scudded under him, and the morning
+air dashed stingingly into his face. For the moment
+he desired nothing more of life.</p>
+
+<p>This road between Arles and Salon runs through
+one of the most desolate parts of France: a long,
+endless plain, about five miles broad, lying between
+two long low ranges of hills. It is strewn like a
+monstrous Golgotha, not with skulls, but with huge
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+smooth pebbles, as massed together as the shingle
+on a beach. Rank grass shoots up in what interstices
+it finds; but beyond this nothing grows.
+Nothing can grow. On a sunless day under a lowering
+sky it is a land accursed. Mile after mile
+for nearly twenty miles stretches this stony and
+barren waste. No human habitation cheers the sight,
+for from such a soil no human hand could wrest
+a sustenance. Only the rare traffic going from
+Arles to Salon and from Salon to Arles passes along
+the road. The cheery passing show of the live
+highway is wanting; there are no children, no dogs,
+no ducks and hens, no men and women lounging to
+their work; no red-trousered soldiers on bicycles,
+no blue-bloused, weather-beaten farmers jogging
+along in their little carts. As far as the eye can
+reach nothing suggestive of man meets the view.
+Nothing but the infinite barrenness of the plain, the
+ridges on either side, the long, straight, endless
+road cleaving through this abomination of desolation.</p>
+
+<p>To walk through it would be a task as depressing
+as mortal could execute. But to the speed-drunken
+motorist it is a realization of dim and
+tremulous visions of Paradise. What need to look
+to right or left when you are swallowing up
+free mile after mile of dizzying road? Aristide
+looked neither to right nor left, and knew this was
+heaven at last.</p>
+
+<a name="img132" id="img132"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img132.jpg" width="500" height="444" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">between the folds of the blanket peeped the face<br />
+of a sleeping child</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+Suddenly, however, he became aware of a small
+black spot far ahead in the very middle of the unencumbered
+track. As he drew near it looked like
+a great stone. He swerved as he passed it, and,
+looking, saw that it was a bundle wrapped in a
+striped blanket. It seemed so odd that it should
+be lying there that, his curiosity being aroused, he
+pulled up and walked back a few yards to examine
+it. The nearer he approached the less did it resemble
+an ordinary bundle. He bent down, and lo!
+between the folds of the blanket peeped the face
+of a sleeping child.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Nom de Dieu!</em>&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;<em>Nom de Dieu
+de nom de Dieu!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He ought not to have said it, but his astonishment
+was great. He stared at the baby, then up
+and down the road, then swept the horizon. Not a
+soul was visible. How did the baby get there?
+The heavens, according to history, have rained
+many things in their time: bread, quails, blood,
+frogs, and what not; but there is no mention of
+them ever having rained babies. It could not,
+therefore, have come from the clouds. It could not
+even have fallen from the tail of a cart, for then
+it would have been killed, or at least have broken
+its bones and generally been rendered a different
+baby from the sound, chubby mite sleeping as peacefully
+as though the Golgotha of Provence had been
+its cradle from birth. It could not have come there
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+accidentally. Deliberate hands had laid it down;
+in the centre of the road, too. Why not by the
+side, where it would have been out of the track of
+thundering automobiles? When the murderous intent
+became obvious Aristide shivered and felt sick.
+He breathed fierce and honest anathema on the
+heads of the bowelless fiends who had abandoned
+the babe to its doom. Then he stooped and picked
+up the bundle tenderly in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>The wee face puckered for a moment and the
+wee limbs shot out vigorously; then the dark eyes
+opened and stared Aristide solemnly and wonderingly
+in the face. So must the infant Remus have
+first regarded his she-wolf mother. Having ascertained,
+however, that it was not going to be devoured,
+it began to cry lustily, showing two little
+white specks of teeth in the lower gum.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon pauvre petit</em>, you are hungry,&rdquo; said Aristide,
+carrying it to the car racked by the clattering
+engine. &ldquo;I wonder when you last tasted food? If
+I only had a little biscuit and wine to give you;
+but, alas! there&#8217;s nothing but petrol and corn-cure,
+neither of which, I believe, is good for babies.
+Wait, wait, <em>mon ch&egrave;ri</em>, until we get to Salon. There
+I promise you proper nourishment.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He danced the baby up and down in his arms and
+made half-remembered and insane noises, which
+eventually had the effect of reducing it to its original
+calm stare of wonderment.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+&ldquo;<em>Voil&agrave;</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide, delighted. &ldquo;Now we can
+advance.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He deposited it on the vacant seat, clambered
+up behind the wheel, and started. But not at the
+break-neck speed of twenty miles an hour. He went
+slowly and carefully, his heart in his mouth at every
+lurch of the afflicted automobile, fearful lest the
+child should be precipitated from its slippery resting-place.
+But, alas! he did not proceed far. At
+the end of a kilometre the engine stopped dead.
+He leaped out to see what had happened, and, after
+a few perplexed and exhausting moments, remembered.
+He had not even petrol to offer to the baby,
+having omitted&mdash;most feather-headed of mortals&mdash;to
+fill up his tank before starting, and forgotten to
+bring a spare tin. There was nothing to be done
+save wait patiently until another motorist should
+pass by from whom he might purchase the necessary
+amount of essence to carry him on to Salon.
+Meanwhile the baby would go breakfastless. Aristide
+clambered back to his seat, took the child on
+his knees, and commiserated it profoundly. Sitting
+there on his apparently home-made vehicle, in
+the midst of the unearthly silence of the sullen and
+barren wilderness, attired in his shaggy goat-skin
+cap and coat, he resembled an up-to-date Robinson
+Crusoe dandling an infant Friday.</p>
+
+<p>The disposal of the child at Salon would be simple.
+After having it fed and tended at an hotel,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+he would make his deposition to the police, who
+would take it to the Enfants Trouv&eacute;s, the department
+of State which provides fathers and mothers
+and happy homes for foundlings at a cost to the
+country of twenty-five francs a month per foundling.
+It is true that the parents so provided think
+more of the twenty-five francs than they do of the
+foundling. But that was the affair of the State,
+not of Aristide Pujol. In the meanwhile he examined
+the brat curiously. It was dressed in a coarse
+calico jumper, very unclean. The striped blanket
+was full of holes and smelled abominably. Some
+sort of toilet appeared essential. He got down and
+from his valise took what seemed necessary to the
+purpose. The jumper and blanket he threw far on
+the pebbly waste. The baby, stark naked for a
+few moments, crowed and laughed and stretched
+like a young animal, revealing itself to be a sturdy
+boy about nine months old. When he seemed fit to
+be clad Aristide tied him up in the lower part of
+a suit of pyjamas, cutting little holes in the sides
+for his tiny arms; and, further, with a view to
+cheating his hunger, provided him with a shoe-horn.
+The defenceless little head he managed to squeeze
+into the split mouth of a woollen sock. Aristide regarded
+him in triumph. The boy chuckled gleefully.
+Then Aristide folded him warm in his travelling-rug
+and entered into an animated conversation.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>
+Now it happened that, at the most interesting
+point of the talk, the baby clutched Aristide&#8217;s finger
+in his little brown hand. The tiny fingers
+clung strong.</p>
+
+<p>A queer thrill ran through the impressionable
+man. The tiny fingers seemed to close round his
+heart.... It was a bonny, good-natured,
+gurgling scrap&mdash;and the pure eyes looked truthfully
+into his soul.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Poor little wretch!&rdquo; said Aristide, who, peasant&#8217;s
+son that he was, knew what he was talking
+about. &ldquo;Poor little wretch! If you go into the
+Enfants Trouv&eacute;s you&#8217;ll have a devil of a time
+of it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The tiny clasp tightened. As if the babe understood,
+the chuckle died from his face.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&#8217;ll be cuffed and kicked and half starved,
+while your adopted mother pockets her twenty-five
+francs a month, and you&#8217;ll belong to nobody, and
+wonder why the deuce you&#8217;re alive, and wish you
+were dead; and, if you remember to-day, you&#8217;ll
+curse me for not having had the decency to run
+over you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The clasp relaxed, puckers appeared at the corners
+of the dribbling mouth, and a myriad tiny
+horizontal lines of care marked the sock-capped
+brow.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Poor little devil!&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;My heart
+bleeds for you, especially now that you&#8217;re dressed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+in my sock and pyjama, and are sucking the only
+shoe-horn I ever possessed.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A welcome sound caused Aristide to leap into the
+middle of the road. He looked ahead, and there,
+in a cloud of dust, a thing like a torpedo came
+swooping down. He held up both his arms, the
+signal of a motorist in distress. The torpedo approached
+with slackened speed, and stopped. It was
+an evil-looking, drab, high-powered racer, and two
+bears with goggles sat in the midst thereof. The
+bear at the wheel raised his cap and asked courteously:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What can we do for you, monsieur?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the baby broke into heart-rending
+cries. Aristide took off his goat-skin cap and,
+remaining uncovered, looked at the bear, then at the
+baby, then at the bear again.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I suppose it&#8217;s useless to
+ask you whether you have any milk and a feeding-bottle?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mais dites donc!</em>&rdquo; shouted the bear, furiously,
+his hand on the brake. &ldquo;Stop an automobile like
+this on such a pretext&mdash;&mdash;?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide held up a protesting hand, and fixed the
+bear with the irresistible roguery of his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Pardon, monsieur, I am also out of petrol.
+Forgive a father&#8217;s feelings. The baby wants milk
+and I want petrol, and I don&#8217;t know whose need
+is the more imperative. But if you could sell me
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+enough petrol to carry me to Salon I should be
+most grateful.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The request for petrol is not to be refused. To
+supply it, if possible, is the written law of motordom.
+The second bear slid from his seat and extracted
+a tin from the recesses of the torpedo, and
+stood by while Aristide filled his tank, a process
+that necessitated laying the baby on the ground.
+He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You seem amused,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Parbleu!</em>&rdquo; said the motorist. &ldquo;You have at the
+back of your auto a placard telling people to cure
+their corns, and in front you carry a baby.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That,&rdquo; replied Aristide, &ldquo;is easily understood.
+I am the agent of the Maison Hi&eacute;ropath of Marseilles,
+and the baby, whom I, its father, am carrying
+from a dead mother to an invalid aunt, I am
+using as an advertisement. As he luckily has no
+corns, I can exhibit his feet as a proof of the efficacy
+of the corn-cure.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The bear laughed and joined his companion, and
+the torpedo thundered away. Aristide replaced the
+baby, and with a complicated arrangement of string
+fastened it securely to the seat. The baby, having
+ceased crying, clutched his beard as he bent over,
+and &ldquo;goo&#8217;d&rdquo; pleasantly. The tug was at his heart-strings.
+How could he give so fascinating, so valiant
+a mite over to the Enfants Trouv&eacute;s? Besides,
+it belonged to him. Had he not in jest claimed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+paternity? It had given him a new importance. He
+could say &ldquo;<em>mon fils</em>,&rdquo; just as he could say (with
+equal veracity) &ldquo;<em>mon automobile</em>.&rdquo; A generous
+thrill ran through him. He burst into a loud laugh,
+clapped his hands, and danced before the delighted
+babe.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon petit Jean</em>,&rdquo; said he, with humorous tenderness,
+&ldquo;for I suppose your name is Jean; I will
+rend myself in pieces before I let the Administration
+board you out among the wolves. You shall
+not go to the Enfants Trouv&eacute;s. I myself will adopt
+you, <em>mon petit Jean</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>As Aristide had no fixed abode whatever, the
+address on his visiting-card, &ldquo;213 bis, Rue Saint-Honor&eacute;,
+Paris,&rdquo; being that of an old greengrocer
+woman of his acquaintance, with whom he lodged
+when he visited the metropolis, there was a certain
+amount of rashness in the undertaking. But when
+was Aristide otherwise than rash? Had prudence
+been his guiding principle through life he would not
+have been selling corn-cure for the Maison Hi&eacute;ropath,
+and consequently would not have discovered
+the child at all.</p>
+
+<p>In great delight at this satisfactory settlement
+of little Jean&#8217;s destiny, he started the ramshackle
+engine and drove triumphantly on his way. Jean,
+fatigued by the emotions of the last half-hour,
+slumbered peacefully.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The little angel!&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+The sun was shining when they arrived at Salon,
+the gayest, the most coquettish, the most laughing
+little town in Provence. It is a place all trees
+and open spaces, and fountains and caf&eacute;s, and
+sauntering people. The only thing grim about it
+is the solitary machicolated tower in the main street,
+the last vestige of ancient ramparts; and even that,
+close cuddled on each side by prosperous houses
+with shops beneath, looks like an old, old, wrinkled
+grandmother smiling amid her daintier grandchildren.
+Everyone seemed to be in the open air.
+Those who kept shops stood at the doorways. The
+prospect augured well for the Maison Hi&eacute;ropath.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide stopped before an hotel, disentangled
+Jean, to the mild interest of the passers-by, and,
+carrying him in, delivered him into the arms of
+the landlady.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this is my son. I am taking
+him from his mother, who is dead, to an aunt
+who is an invalid. So he is alone on my hands. He
+is very hungry, and I beseech you to feed him at
+once.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The motherly woman received the babe instinctively
+and cast aside the travelling-rug in which he
+was enveloped. Then she nearly dropped him.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu! Qu&#8217;est-ce que c&#8217;est que &ccedil;a?</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She stared in stupefaction at the stocking-cap
+and at the long flannel pyjama legs that depended
+from the body of the infant, around whose neck
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+the waist was tightly drawn. Never since the world
+began had babe masqueraded in such attire. Aristide
+smiled his most engaging smile.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My son&#8217;s luggage has unfortunately been lost.
+His portmanteau, <em>pauvre petit</em>, was so small. A
+poor widower, I did what I could. I am but a
+mere man, madame.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Evidently,&rdquo; said the woman, with some asperity.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide took a louis from his purse. &ldquo;If you
+will purchase him some necessary articles of costume
+while I fulfil my duties towards the Maison
+Hi&eacute;ropath of Marseilles, which I represent, you
+will be doing me a kindness.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The landlady took the louis in a bewildered fashion.
+Allowing for the baby&#8217;s portmanteau to have
+gone astray, what, she asked, had become of the
+clothes he must have been wearing? Aristide entered
+upon a picturesque and realistic explanation.
+The landlady was stout, she was stupid, she could
+not grasp the fantastic.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu!</em>&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;To think that there are
+Christians who dress their children like this!&rdquo; She
+sighed exhaustively, and, holding the grotesque infant
+close to her breast, disappeared indignantly to
+administer the very greatly needed motherment.</p>
+
+<a name="img144" id="img144"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 443px;">
+<img src="images/img144.jpg" width="443" height="500" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">he demonstrated the proper application of the cure</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Aristide breathed a sigh of relief, and after a
+well-earned <em>d&eacute;jeuner</em> went forth with the car into
+the Place des Arbres and prepared to ply his trade.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+First he unfurled the Hi&eacute;ropath banner, which
+floated proudly in the breeze. Then on a folding
+table he displayed his collection of ointment-boxes
+(together with pills and a toothache-killer which
+he sold on his own account) and a wax model of a
+human foot on which were grafted putty corns in
+every stage of callosity. As soon as half-a-dozen
+idlers collected he commenced his harangue. When
+their numbers increased he performed prodigies
+of chiropody on the putty corns, and demonstrated
+the proper application of the cure. He talked incessantly
+all the while. He has told me, in the
+grand manner, that this phase of his career was
+distasteful to him. But I scarcely believe it. If
+ever a man loved to talk, it was Aristide Pujol;
+and what profession, save that of an advocate, offers
+more occasion for wheedling loquacity than
+that of a public vendor of quack medicaments? As
+a matter of fact, he revelled in it. When he offered
+a free box of the cure to the first lady who
+confessed the need thereof, and a blushing wench
+came forward, the rascal revelled in the opportunity
+for badinage which set the good-humoured
+crowd in a roar. He loved to exert his half-mesmeric
+power. He had not the soul of a mountebank,
+for Aristide&#8217;s soul had its high and generous dwelling-place;
+but he had the puckish swiftness and
+mischief of which the successful mountebank is
+made. And he was a success because he treated
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+it as an art, thinking nothing during its practice
+of the material gain, laughing whole-heartedly,
+like his great predecessor Tabarin of imperishable
+memory, and satisfying to the full his instinct for
+the dramatic. On the other hand, ever since he
+started life in the brass-buttoned shell-jacket of a
+<em>chasseur</em> in a Marseilles caf&eacute;, and dreamed dreams
+of the fairytale lives of the clients who came in
+accompanied by beautifully dressed ladies, he had
+social ambitions&mdash;and the social status of the mountebank
+is, to say the least of it, ambiguous. Ah
+me! What would man be without the unattainable?</p>
+
+<p>Aristide pocketed his takings, struck his flag, dismantled
+his table, and visited the shops of Salon
+in the interests of the Maison Hi&eacute;ropath. The day&#8217;s
+work over, he returned to inquire for his supposititious
+offspring. The landlady, all smiles, presented
+him with a transmogrified Jean, cleansed
+and powdered, arrayed in the smug panoply of
+bourgeois babyhood. Shoes with a pompon adorned
+his feet, and a rakish cap decorated with white
+satin ribbons crowned his head. He also wore
+an embroidered frock and a pelisse trimmed
+with rabbit-fur. Jean grinned and dribbled
+self-consciously, and showed his two little teeth
+to the proudest father in the world. The
+landlady invited the happy parent into her little
+dark parlour beyond the office, and there exhibited
+a parcel containing garments and implements whose
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+use was a mystery to Aristide. She also demanded
+the greater part of another louis. Aristide began
+to learn that fatherhood is expensive. But what
+did it matter?</p>
+
+<p>After all, here was a babe equipped to face the
+exigencies of a censorious world; in looks and apparel
+a credit to any father. As the afternoon was
+fine, and as it seemed a pity to waste satin and
+rabbit-fur on the murky interior of the hotel, Aristide
+borrowed a perambulator from the landlady,
+and, joyous as a schoolboy, wheeled the splendid
+infant through the sunny avenues of Salon.</p>
+
+<p>That evening a bed was made up for the child
+in Aristide&#8217;s room, which, until its master retired
+for the night, was haunted by the landlady, the
+chambermaids and all the kitchen wenches in the
+hotel. Aristide had to turn them out and lock his
+door.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;This is excellent,&rdquo; said he, apostrophizing the
+thoroughly fed, washed, and now sleeping child.
+&ldquo;This is superb. As in every hotel there are women,
+and as every woman thinks she can be a much better
+mother than I, so in every hotel we visit we
+shall find a staff of trained and enthusiastic nurses.
+Jean, you will live like a little <em>coq en p&acirc;t&eacute;</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The night passed amid various excursions on
+the part of Aristide and alarms on the part of Jean.
+Sometimes the child lay so still that Aristide arose
+to see whether he was alive. Sometimes he gave
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+such proofs of vitality that Aristide, in terror lest
+he should awaken the whole hotel, walked him about
+the room chanting lullabies. This was in accordance
+with Jean&#8217;s views on luxury. He &ldquo;goo&#8217;d&rdquo;
+with joy. When Aristide put him back to bed he
+howled. Aristide snatched him up and he &ldquo;goo&#8217;d&rdquo;
+again. At last Aristide fed him desperately, dandled
+him eventually to sleep, and returned to an
+excited pillow. It is a fearsome thing for a man
+to be left alone in the dead of night with a young
+baby.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;ll get used to it,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning he purchased a basket, which
+he lashed ingeniously on the left-hand seat of the
+car, and a cushion, which he fitted into the basket.
+The berth prepared, he deposited the sumptuously-apparelled
+Jean therein and drove away, amid the
+perplexed benisons of the landlady and her satellites.</p>
+
+<p>Thus began the oddest Odyssey on which ever
+mortals embarked. The man with the automobile,
+the corn-cure, and the baby grew to be legendary in
+the villages of Provence. When the days were
+fine, Jean in his basket assisted at the dramatic
+performance in the market-place. Becoming a magnet
+for the women, and being of a good-humoured
+and rollicking nature, he helped on the sale of the
+cure prodigiously. He earned his keep, as Aristide
+declared in exultation. Soon Aristide formed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+a collection of his tricks and doings wherewith he
+would entertain the chance acquaintances of his
+vagabondage. To a permanent companion he
+would have grown insufferable. He invented him
+a career from the day of his birth, chronicled the
+coming of the first tooth, wept over the demise of
+the fictitious mother, and, in his imaginative way,
+convinced himself of his fatherhood. And every
+day the child crept deeper into the man&#8217;s sunny
+heart.</p>
+
+<a name="img150" id="img150"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 355px;">
+<img src="images/img150.jpg" width="355" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">it is a fearsome thing for a man to be left alone in the
+dead of night with a young baby</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Together they had many wanderings and many
+adventures. The wheezy, crazy mechanism of the
+car went to bits in unexpected places. They tobogganed
+down hills without a brake at the imminent
+peril of their lives. They suffered the indignity
+of being towed by wine-wagons. They spent hours
+by the wayside while Aristide took her to pieces
+and, sometimes with the help of a passing motorist,
+put her together again. Sometimes, too, an
+inn boasted no landlady, only a dishevelled and
+over-driven chambermaid, who refused to wash
+Jean. Aristide washed and powdered Jean himself,
+the landlord lounging by, pipe in mouth, administering
+suggestions. Once Jean grew ill, and
+Aristide in terror summoned the doctor, who told
+him that he had filled the child up with milk to
+bursting-point. Yet, in spite of heterogeneous
+nursing and exposure to sun and rain and piercing
+mistral, Jean throve exceedingly, and, to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+Aristide&#8217;s delight, began to cut another tooth. The vain
+man began to regard himself as an expert in denticulture.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of a fairly-wide circuit, Aristide, with
+empty store-boxes and pleasantly-full pockets, arrived
+at the little town of Aix-en-Provence. He
+had arrived there not without difficulty. On the
+outskirts the car, which had been coaxed reluctantly
+along for many weary kilometres, had
+groaned, rattled, whirred, given a couple of convulsive
+leaps, and stood stock-still. This was one of
+her pretty ways. He was used to them, and hitherto
+he had been able to wheedle her into resumed
+motion. But this time, with all his cunning and
+perspiration, he could not induce another throb in
+the tired engines. A friendly motorist towed them
+to the H&ocirc;tel de Paris in the Cours Mirabeau. Having
+arranged for his room and given Jean in charge
+of the landlady, he procured some helping hands,
+and pushed the car to the nearest garage. There he
+gave orders for the car to be put into running condition
+for the following morning, and returned to
+the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>He found Jean in the vestibule, sprawling sultanesquely
+on the landlady&#8217;s lap, the centre of an
+admiring circle which consisted of two little girls in
+pigtails, an ancient peasant-woman, and two English
+ladies of obvious but graceful spinsterhood.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Here is the father,&rdquo; said the landlady.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+He had already explained Jean to the startled
+woman&mdash;landladies were always startled at Jean&#8217;s
+unconventional advent. &ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; he had said,
+according to rigid formula, &ldquo;this is my son. I am
+taking him from his mother, who is dead, to an
+aunt who is an invalid, so he is alone on my hands.
+I beseech you to let some kind woman attend to
+his necessities.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>There was no need for further explanation.
+Aristide, thus introduced, bowed politely, removed
+his Crusoe cap, and smiled luminously at the assembled
+women. They resumed their antiphonal
+chorus of worship. The brown, merry, friendly
+brat had something of Aristide&#8217;s personal charm.
+He had a bubble and a &ldquo;goo&rdquo; for everyone. Aristide
+looked on in great delight. Jean was a son to
+be proud of.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ah! qu&#8217;il est fort&mdash;fort comme un Turc.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Regardez ses dents.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The darling thing!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Il est</em>&mdash;oh, dear!&mdash;<em>il est ravissante!</em>&rdquo;&mdash;with a
+disastrous plunge into gender.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tiens! il rit. C&#8217;est moi qui le fais rire.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;To think,&rdquo; said the younger Englishwoman to
+her sister, &ldquo;of this wee mite travelling about in an
+open motor!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He&#8217;s having the time of his life. He enjoys
+it as much as I do,&rdquo; said Aristide, in his excellent
+English.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+The lady started. She was a well-bred, good-humoured
+woman in the early thirties, stout, with
+reddish hair, and irregular though comely features.
+Her sister was thin, faded, sandy, and kind-looking.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I thought you were French,&rdquo; she said, apologetically.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;So I am,&rdquo; replied Aristide. &ldquo;Proven&ccedil;al of
+Provence, M&eacute;ridional of the Midi, Marseillais of
+Marseilles.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But you talk English perfectly.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;ve lived in your beautiful country,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You have the bonniest boy,&rdquo; said the elder lady.
+&ldquo;How old is he?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Nine months, three weeks and a day,&rdquo; said
+Aristide, promptly.</p>
+
+<p>The younger lady bent over the miraculous infant.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Can I take him? <em>Est-ce que je puis</em>&mdash;oh, dear!&rdquo;
+She turned a whimsical face to Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>He translated. The landlady surrendered the
+babe. The lady danced him with the spinster&#8217;s
+charming awkwardness, yet with instinctive feminine
+security, about the hall, while the little girls in
+pigtails, daughters of the house, followed like adoratory
+angels in an altar-piece, and the old peasant-woman
+looked benignly on, a myriad-wrinkled St.
+Elizabeth. Aristide had seen Jean dandled by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+dozens of women during their brief comradeship; he
+had thought little of it, as it was the natural thing
+for women to do; but when this sweet English lady
+mothered Jean it seemed to matter a great deal.
+She lifted Jean and himself to a higher plane. Her
+touch was a consecration.</p>
+
+<p>It was the hour of the day when infants of nine
+months should be washed and put to bed. The
+landlady, announcing the fact, held out her arms.
+Jean clung to his English nurse, who played the
+fascinating game of pretending to eat his hand.
+The landlady had not that accomplishment. She
+was dull and practical.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Come and be washed,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, do let me come, too,&rdquo; cried the English
+lady.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Bien volontiers, mademoiselle</em>,&rdquo; said the other.
+&ldquo;<em>C&#8217;est par ici.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The English lady held Jean out for the paternal
+good-night. Aristide kissed the child in her arms.
+The action brought about, for the moment, a curious
+and sweet intimacy.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My sister is passionately fond of children,&rdquo; said
+the elder lady, in smiling apology.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I, too. But Anne&mdash;my sister&mdash;will not let me
+have a chance when she is by.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>After dinner Aristide went up, as usual, to his
+room to see that Jean was alive, painless, and asleep.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+Finding him awake, he sat by his side and, with
+the earnestness of a nursery-maid, patted him off
+to slumber. Then he crept out on tiptoe and went
+downstairs. Outside the hotel he came upon the
+two sisters sitting on a bench and drinking coffee.
+The night was fine, the terraces of the neighbouring
+caf&eacute;s were filled with people, and all the
+life of Aix not at the caf&eacute;s promenaded up and
+down the wide and pleasant avenue. The ladies
+smiled. How was the boy? He gave the latest
+news. Permission to join them at their coffee was
+graciously given. A waiter brought a chair and
+he sat down. Conversation drifted from the baby
+to general topics. The ladies told the simple story
+of their tour. They had been to Nice and Marseilles,
+and they were going on the next day to
+Avignon. They also told their name&mdash;Honeywood.
+He gathered that the elder was Janet, the younger
+Anne. They lived at Chislehurst when they were
+in England, and often came up to London to attend
+the Queen&#8217;s Hall concerts and the dramatic performances
+at His Majesty&#8217;s Theatre. As guileless,
+though as self-reliant, gentlewomen as sequestered
+England could produce. Aristide, impressionable
+and responsive, fell at once into the key of their
+talk. He has told me that their society produced
+on him the effect of the cool hands of saints against
+his cheek.</p>
+
+<p>At last the conversation inevitably returned to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+Jean. The landlady had related the tragic history
+of the dead mother and the invalid aunt. They
+deplored the orphaned state of the precious babe.
+For he was precious, they declared. Miss Anne
+had taken him to her heart.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If only you had seen him in his bath, Janet!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She turned to Aristide. &ldquo;I&#8217;m afraid,&rdquo; she said,
+very softly, hesitating a little&mdash;&ldquo;I&#8217;m afraid this
+must be a sad journey for you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He made a wry mouth. The sympathy was so
+sincere, so womanly. That which was generous
+in him revolted against acceptance.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mademoiselle,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I can play a farce
+with landladies&mdash;it happens to be convenient&mdash;in
+fact, necessary. But with you&mdash;no. You are different.
+Jean is not my child, and who his parents
+are I&#8217;ve not the remotest idea.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Not your child?&rdquo; They looked at him incredulously.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I will tell you&mdash;in confidence,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>Jean&#8217;s history was related in all its picturesque
+details; the horrors of the life of an <em>enfant trouv&eacute;</em>
+luridly depicted. The sisters listened with tears
+in their foolish eyes. Behind the tears Anne&#8217;s grew
+bright. When he had finished she stretched out her
+hand impulsively.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I call it splendid of you!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He took the hand and, in his graceful French
+fashion, touched it with his lips. She flushed,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+having expected, in her English way, that he would
+grasp it.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Your commendation, mademoiselle, is sweet to
+hear,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I hope he will grow up to be a true comfort to
+you, M. Pujol,&rdquo; said Miss Janet.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I can understand a woman doing what you&#8217;ve
+done, but scarcely a man,&rdquo; said Miss Anne.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, dear mademoiselle,&rdquo; cried Aristide, with a
+large gesture, &ldquo;cannot a man have his heart touched,
+his&mdash;his&mdash;<em>ses entrailles, enfin</em>&mdash;stirred by baby fingers?
+Why should love of the helpless and the
+innocent be denied him?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why, indeed?&rdquo; said Miss Janet.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Anne said, humbly: &ldquo;I only meant that
+your devotion to Jean was all the more beautiful,
+M. Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Soon after this they parted, the night air having
+grown chill. Both ladies shook hands with
+him warmly.</p>
+
+<p>Anne&#8217;s hand lingered the fraction of a second
+longer in his than Janet&#8217;s. She had seen Jean in
+his bath.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide wandered down the gay avenue into the
+open road and looked at the stars, reading in their
+splendour a brilliant destiny for Jean. He felt, in
+his sensitive way, that the two sweet-souled Englishwomen
+had deepened and sanctified his love for
+Jean. When he returned to the hotel he kissed his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+incongruous room-mate with the gentleness of a
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning he went round to the garage. The
+foreman mechanician advanced to meet him.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There is nothing to be done, monsieur.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean by &lsquo;nothing to be done&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+asked Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>The other shrugged his sturdy shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She is worn out. She needs new carburation,
+new cylinders, new water-circulation, new lubrication,
+new valves, new brakes, new ignition, new
+gears, new bolts, new nuts, new everything. In
+short, she is not repairable.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide listened in incredulous amazement. His
+automobile, his wonderful, beautiful, clashing,
+dashing automobile unrepairable! It was impossible.
+But a quarter of an hour&#8217;s demonstration by
+the foreman convinced him. The car was dead.
+The engine would never whir again. All the petrol
+in the world would not stimulate her into life.
+Never again would he sit behind that wheel rejoicing
+in the insolence of speed. The car, which,
+in spite of her manifold infirmities, he had fondly
+imagined to be immortal, had run her last course.
+Aristide felt faint.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And there is nothing to be done?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing, monsieur. Fifty francs is all that she
+is worth.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+&ldquo;At any rate,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;send the basket to
+the H&ocirc;tel de Paris.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He went out of the garage like a man in a dream.
+At the door he turned to take a last look at the
+Pride of his Life. Her stern was towards him,
+and all he saw of her was the ironical legend, &ldquo;Cure
+your Corns.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>At the hotel he found the bench outside occupied
+chiefly by Jean. One of the little girls in pigtails
+was holding him, while Miss Anne administered
+the feeding-bottle. Provincial France is the happiest
+country in the world&mdash;in that you can live
+your intimate, domestic life in public, and nobody
+heeds.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I hope you&#8217;ve not come to tell Jean to boot
+and saddle,&rdquo; said Miss Anne, a smile on her
+roughly-hewn, comely face.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Alas!&rdquo; said Aristide, cheered by the charming
+spectacle before him. &ldquo;I don&#8217;t know when we can
+get away. My auto has broken down hopelessly.
+I ought to go at once to my firm in Marseilles&rdquo;&mdash;he
+spoke as if he were a partner in the Maison
+Hi&eacute;ropath&mdash;&ldquo;but I don&#8217;t quite know what to do
+with Jean.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I&#8217;ll look after Jean.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But you said you were leaving for Avignon
+to-day.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img162" id="img162"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 463px;">
+<img src="images/img162.jpg" width="463" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">one of the little girls in pigtails was holding him, while
+miss anne administered the feeding-bottle</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>She laughed, holding the feeding-bottle. &ldquo;The
+Palace of the Popes has been standing for six
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+centuries, and it will be still standing to-morrow;
+whereas Jean&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; Here Jean, for some reason
+known to himself, grinned wet and wide. &ldquo;Isn&#8217;t
+he the most fascinating thing of the twentieth century?&rdquo;
+she cried, logically inconsequential, like
+most of her sex. &ldquo;You go to Marseilles, M.
+Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So Aristide took the train to Marseilles&mdash;a half-hour&#8217;s
+journey&mdash;and in a quarter of the city resembling
+a fusion of Jarrow, an unfashionable
+part of St. Louis, and a brimstone-manufacturing
+suburb of Gehenna, he interviewed the high authorities
+of the Maison Hi&eacute;ropath. His cajolery could
+lead men into diverse lunacies, but it could not
+induce the hard-bitten manufacturer of quack remedies
+to provide a brand-new automobile for his
+personal convenience. The old auto had broken
+down. The manufacturer shrugged his shoulders.
+The mystery was that it had lasted as long as it
+did. He had expected it to explode the first day.
+The idea had originally been that of the junior
+partner, a scatter-brained youth whom at times they
+humoured. Meanwhile, there being no beplacarded
+and beflagged automobile, there could be no advertisement;
+therefore they had no further use for
+M. Pujol&#8217;s services.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good,&rdquo; said Aristide, when he reached the evil
+thoroughfare. &ldquo;It was a degraded occupation, and
+I am glad I am out of it. Meanwhile, here is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+Marseilles before me, and it will be astonishing
+if I do not find some fresh road to fortune before
+the day is out.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide tramped and tramped all day through
+the streets of Marseilles, but the road he sought
+he did not find. He returned to Aix in dire perplexity.
+He was used to finding himself suddenly
+cut off from the means of livelihood. It was his
+chronic state of being. His gay resourcefulness
+had always carried him through. But then there
+had been only himself to think of. Now there
+was Jean. For the first time for many years the
+dragon-fly&#8217;s wings grew limp. Jean&mdash;what could
+he do with Jean?</p>
+
+<p>Jean had already gone to sleep when he arrived.
+All day he had been as good as gold, so Miss Anne
+declared. For herself, she had spent the happiest
+day of her life.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t wonder at your being devoted to him, M.
+Pujol,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He has the most loving ways
+of any baby I ever met.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, mademoiselle,&rdquo; replied Aristide, with an
+unaccustomed huskiness in his voice, &ldquo;I am devoted
+to him. It may seem odd for a man to be wrapped
+up in a baby of nine months old&mdash;but&mdash;it&#8217;s like
+that. It&#8217;s true. <em>Je l&#8217;adore de tout mon c&oelig;ur, de
+tout mon &ecirc;tre</em>,&rdquo; he cried, in a sudden gust of passion.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Anne smiled kindly, not dreaming of his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+perplexity, amused by his Southern warmth. Miss
+Janet joined them in the hall. They went in to
+dinner, Aristide sitting at the central <em>table d&#8217;h&ocirc;te</em>,
+the ladies at a little table by themselves. After
+dinner they met again outside the hotel, and drank
+coffee and talked the evening away. He was not
+as bright a companion as on the night before. His
+gaiety was forced. He talked about everything else
+in the world but Jean. The temptation to pour his
+financial troubles into the sympathetic ears of these
+two dear women he resisted. They regarded him
+as on a social equality, as a man of means engaged
+in some sort of business at Marseilles; they
+had invited him to bring Jean to see them at Chislehurst
+when he should happen to be in England
+again. Pride forbade him to confess himself a
+homeless, penniless vagabond. The exquisite
+charm of their frank intimacy would be broken.
+Besides, what could they do?</p>
+
+<p>They retired early. Aristide again sought the
+message of the stars; but the sky was clouded over,
+and soon a fine rain began to fall. A bock at a
+caf&eacute; brought him neither comfort nor inspiration.
+He returned to the hotel, and, eluding a gossip-seeking
+landlady, went up to his room.</p>
+
+<p>What could be done? Neither the sleeping babe
+nor himself could offer any suggestion. One thing
+was grimly inevitable. He and Jean must part.
+To carry him about like an infant prince in an
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+automobile had, after all, been a simple matter; to
+drag him through Heaven knew what hardships in
+his makeshift existence was impossible. In his
+childlike, impulsive fashion he had not thought of
+the future when he adopted Jean. Aristide always
+regarded the fortune of the moment as if it would
+last forever. Past deceptions never affected his
+incurable optimism. Now Jean and he must part.
+Aristide felt that the end of the world had come.
+His pacing to and fro awoke the child, who demanded,
+in his own way, the soothing rocking of
+his father&#8217;s arms. There he bubbled and &ldquo;goo&#8217;d&rdquo;
+till Aristide&#8217;s heart nearly broke.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What can I do with you, <em>mon petit Jean</em>?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Enfants Trouv&eacute;s, after all? He thought of
+it with a shudder.</p>
+
+<p>The child asleep again, he laid it on its bed, and
+then sat far into the night thinking barrenly. At
+last one of his sudden gleams of inspiration illuminated
+his mind. It was the only way. He took out
+his watch. It was four o&#8217;clock. What had to be
+done must be done swiftly.</p>
+
+<p>In the travelling-basket, which had been sent
+from the garage, he placed a pillow, and on to the
+pillow he transferred with breathless care the sleeping
+Jean, and wrapped him up snug and warm in
+bedclothes. Then he folded the tiny day-garments
+that lay on a chair, collected the little odds and ends
+belonging to the child, took from his valise the rest
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+of Jean&#8217;s little wardrobe, and laid them at the
+foot of the basket. The most miserable man
+in France then counted up his money, divided
+it into two parts, and wrote a hasty letter,
+which, with the bundle of notes, he enclosed
+in an envelope.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My little Jean,&rdquo; said he, laying the envelope on
+the child&#8217;s breast. &ldquo;Here is a little more than half
+my fortune. Half is for yourself and the little
+more to pay your wretched father&#8217;s hotel bill.
+Good-bye, my little Jean. <em>Je t&#8217;aime bien, tu sais</em>&mdash;and
+don&#8217;t reproach me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>About an hour afterwards Miss Anne awoke and
+listened, and in a moment or two Miss Janet awoke
+also.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Janet, do you hear that?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s a child crying. It&#8217;s just outside the door.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It sounds like Jean.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Nonsense, my dear!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But Anne switched on the light and went to see
+for herself; and there, in the tiny anteroom that
+separated the bedroom from the corridor, she found
+the basket&mdash;a new Pharoah&#8217;s daughter before a
+new little Moses in the bulrushes. In bewilderment
+she brought the ark into the room, and read the
+letter addressed to Janet and herself. She burst
+into tears. All she said was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Janet, why couldn&#8217;t he have told us?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+And then she fell to hugging the child to her
+bosom.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Aristide Pujol, clad in his goat-skin
+cap and coat, valise in hand, was plodding through
+the rain in search of the elusive phantom, Fortune;
+gloriously certain that he had assured Jean&#8217;s future,
+yet with such a heartache as he had never had
+in his life before.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>THE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG&#8217;S HEAD</strong></p>
+
+
+<p>Once upon a time Aristide Pujol found himself
+standing outside his Paris residence,
+No. 213 <em>bis</em>, Rue Saint Honor&eacute;, without a
+penny in the world. His last sou had gone to
+Madame Bidoux, who kept a small green grocer&#8217;s
+shop at No. 213 <em>bis</em> and rented a ridiculously small
+back room for a ridiculously small weekly sum to
+Aristide whenever he honoured the French capital
+with his presence. During his absence she forwarded
+him such letters as might arrive for him;
+and as this was his only permanent address, and as
+he let Madame Bidoux know his whereabouts only
+at vague intervals of time, the transaction of business
+with Aristide Pujol, &ldquo;Agent, No. 213 <em>bis</em>, Rue
+Saint Honor&eacute;, Paris,&rdquo; by correspondence was peculiarly
+difficult.</p>
+
+<p>He had made Madame Bidoux&#8217;s acquaintance in
+the dim past; and he had made it in his usual direct
+and electric manner. Happening to walk down the
+Rue Saint Honor&eacute;, he had come upon tragedy.
+Madame Bidoux, fat, red of face, tearful of eye
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+and strident of voice, held in her arms a little
+mongrel dog&mdash;her own precious possession&mdash;which
+had just been run over in the street, and the two
+of them filled the air with wailings and vociferation.
+Aristide uncovered his head, as though he were
+about to address a duchess, and smiled at her
+engagingly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I perceive that your little
+dog has a broken leg. As I know all about dogs,
+I will, with your permission, set the limb, put it
+into splints and guarantee a perfect cure. Needless
+to say, I make no charge for my services.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Snatching the dog from the arms of the fascinated
+woman, he darted in his dragon-fly fashion
+into the shop, gave a hundred orders to a stupefied
+assistant, and&mdash;to cut short a story which Aristide
+told me with great wealth of detail&mdash;mended the
+precious dog and gained Madame Bidoux&#8217;s eternal
+gratitude. For Madame Bidoux the world held no
+more remarkable man than Aristide Pujol; and for
+Aristide the world held no more devoted friend
+than Madame Bidoux. Many a succulent meal, at
+the widow&#8217;s expense&mdash;never more enjoyable than
+in summer time when she set a little iron table and
+a couple of iron chairs on the pavement outside the
+shop&mdash;had saved him from starvation; and many a
+gewgaw sent from London or Marseilles or other
+such remote latitudes filled her heart with pride.
+Since my acquaintance with Aristide I myself have
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+called on this excellent woman, and I hope I have
+won her esteem, though I have never had the
+honour of eating pig&#8217;s trotters and chou-cro&ucirc;te with
+her on the pavement of the Rue Saint Honor&eacute;.
+It is an honour from which, being an unassuming
+man, I shrink.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately Madame Bidoux has nothing
+further to do with the story I am about to relate,
+save in one respect:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>There came a day&mdash;it was a bleak day in November,
+when Madame Bidoux&#8217;s temporary financial
+difficulties happened to coincide with Aristide&#8217;s.
+To him, unsuspicious of coincidence, she confided
+her troubles. He emptied the meagre contents of
+his purse into her hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame Bidoux,&rdquo; said he with a flourish, and
+the air of a prince, &ldquo;why didn&#8217;t you tell me before?&rdquo;
+and without waiting for her blessing he went out
+penniless into the street.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide was never happier than when he had
+not a penny piece in the world. He believed, I
+fancy, in a dim sort of way, in God and the Virgin
+and Holy Water and the Pope; but the faith that
+thrilled him to exaltation was his faith in the inevitable
+happening of the unexpected. He marched
+to meet it with the throbbing pulses of a soldier
+rushing to victory or a saint to martyrdom. He
+walked up the Rue Saint Honor&eacute;, the Rue de la
+Paix, along the Grands Boulevards, smiling on a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+world which teemed with unexpectednesses, until
+he reached a caf&eacute; on the Boulevard des Bonnes
+Filles de Calvaire. Here he was arrested by Fate,
+in the form of a battered man in black, who, springing
+from the solitary frostiness of the terrace, threw
+his arms about him and kissed him on both cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mais, c&#8217;est toi, Pujol!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>C&#8217;est toi, Roulard!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Roulard dragged Aristide to his frosty table and
+ordered drinks. Roulard had played the trumpet
+in the regimental band in which Aristide had played
+the kettle drum. During their military service they
+had been inseparables. Since those happy and ear-splitting
+days they had not met. They looked at
+each other and laughed and thumped each other&#8217;s
+shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ce vieux Roulard!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ce sacr&eacute; Pujol.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And what are you doing?&rdquo; asked Aristide, after
+the first explosions of astonishment and reminiscence.</p>
+
+<p>A cloud overspread the battered man&#8217;s features.
+He had a wife and five children and played in
+theatre orchestras. At the present time he was
+trombone in the &ldquo;Tourn&eacute;e Gulland,&rdquo; a touring opera
+company. It was not gay for a sensitive artist
+like him, and the trombone gave one a thirst which
+it took half a week&#8217;s salary to satisfy. <em>Mais enfin,
+que veux-tu?</em> It was life, a dog&#8217;s life, but life was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+like that. Aristide, he supposed, was making a
+fortune. Aristide threw back his head, and laughed
+at the exquisite humour of the hypothesis, and gaily
+disclosed his Micawberish situation. Roulard sat
+for a while thoughtful and silent. Presently a ray
+of inspiration dispelled the cloud from the features
+of the battered man.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tiens, mon vieux</em>,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I have an idea.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It was an idea worthy of Aristide&#8217;s consideration.
+The drum of the Tourn&eacute;e Gulland had been dismissed
+for drunkenness. The vacancy had not been
+filled. Various executants who had drummed on
+approval&mdash;this being an out-week of the tour&mdash;had
+driven the chef d&#8217;orchestre to the verge of homicidal
+mania. Why should not Aristide, past master
+in drumming, find an honourable position in the
+orchestra of the Tourn&eacute;e Gulland?</p>
+
+<p>Aristide&#8217;s eyes sparkled, his fingers itched for
+the drumsticks, he started to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon vieux Roulard!</em>&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;you have saved
+my life. More than that, you have resuscitated an
+artist. Yes, an artist. <em>Sacr&eacute; nom de Dieu!</em> Take
+me to this chef d&#8217;orchestre.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So Roulard, when the hour of rehearsal drew
+nigh, conducted Aristide to the murky recesses of
+a dirty little theatre in the Batignolles, where Aristide
+performed such prodigies of repercussion that
+he was forthwith engaged to play the drum, the
+kettle-drum, the triangle, the cymbals, the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+castagnettes and the tambourine, in the orchestra of the
+Tourn&eacute;e Gulland at the dazzling salary of thirty
+francs a week.</p>
+
+<p>To tell how Aristide drummed and cymballed
+the progress of Les Huguenots, Carmen, La Juive,
+La Fille de Madame Angot and L&#8217;Arl&eacute;sienne
+through France would mean the rewriting of a
+&ldquo;Capitaine Fracasse.&rdquo; To hear the creature talk
+about it makes my mouth as a brick kiln and
+my flesh as that of a goose. He was the
+Adonis, the Apollo, the Don Juan, the Irresistible
+of the Tourn&eacute;e. Fled truculent bass and haughty
+tenor before him; from diva to moustachioed contralto
+in the chorus, all the ladies breathlessly
+watched for the fall of his handkerchief; he was
+recognized, in fact, as a devil of a fellow. But in
+spite of these triumphs, the manipulation of the
+drum, kettle-drum, triangle, cymbals, castagnettes
+and tambourine, which at first had given him intense
+and childish delight, at last became invested
+with a mechanical monotony that almost drove him
+mad. All day long the thought of the ill-lit corner,
+on the extreme right of the orchestra, garnished
+with the accursed instruments of noise to which
+duty would compel him at eight o&#8217;clock in the evening
+hung over him like a hideous doom. Sweet
+singers of the female sex were powerless to console.
+He passed them by, and haughty tenor and
+swaggering basso again took heart of grace.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+&ldquo;<em>Mais, mon Dieu, c&#8217;est le m&eacute;tier!</em>&rdquo; expostulated
+Roulard.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Sale m&eacute;tier!</em>&rdquo; cried Aristide, who was as much
+fitted for the merciless routine of a theatre orchestra
+as a quagga for the shafts of an omnibus.
+&ldquo;A beast of a trade! One is no longer a man.
+One is just an automatic system of fog-signals!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>In this depraved state of mind he arrived at
+Perpignan, where that befell him which I am about
+to relate.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Perpignan is the last town of France on
+the Gulf of Lions, a few miles from the Spanish
+border. From it you can see the great white
+monster of Le Canigou, the pride of the Eastern
+Pyrenees, far, far away, blocking up the valley
+of the Tet, which flows sluggishly past the little
+town. The Quai Sadi-Carnot (is there a provincial
+town in France which has not a <em>something</em> Sadi-Carnot
+in it?) is on the left bank of the Tet; at
+one end is the modern Place Arago, at the other
+Le Castillet, a round, castellated red-brick fortress
+with curiously long and deep machicolations of
+the 14th century with some modern additions of
+Louis XI, who also built the adjoining Porte Notre
+Dame which gives access to the city. Between the
+Castillet and the Place Arago, the Quai Sadi-Carnot
+is the site of the Prefecture, the Grand H&ocirc;tel,
+various villas and other resorts of the aristocracy.
+Any little street off it will lead you into the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+seething centre of Perpignan life&mdash;the Place de la Loge,
+which is a great block of old buildings surrounded
+on its four sides by narrow streets of shops, caf&eacute;s,
+private houses, all with balconies and jalousies, all
+cramped, crumbling, Spanish, picturesque. The
+oldest of this conglomerate block is a corner building,
+the Loge de Mer, a thirteenth century palace,
+the cloth exchange in the glorious days when
+Perpignan was a seaport and its merchant princes
+traded with Sultans and Doges and such-like magnificoes
+of the Mediterranean. But nowadays its
+glory has departed. Below the great gothic windows
+spreads the awning of a caf&eacute;, which takes up
+all the ground floor. Hugging it tight is the
+Mairie, and hugging that, the H&ocirc;tel de Ville.
+Hither does every soul in the place, at some hour
+or other of the day, inevitably gravitate. Lawyers
+and clients, doctors and patients, merchants, lovers,
+soldiers, market-women, loafers, horses, dogs,
+wagons, all crowd in a noisy medley the narrow
+cobble-paved streets around the Loge. Of course
+there are other streets, tortuous, odorous and cool,
+intersecting the old town, and there are various
+open spaces, one of which is the broad market
+square on one side flanked by the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Municipal.</p>
+
+<p>From the theatre Aristide Pujol issued one morning
+after rehearsal, and, leaving his colleagues, including
+the ever-thirsty Roulard, to refresh
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+themselves at a humble caf&eacute; hard by, went forth in
+search of distraction. He idled about the Place de
+la Loge, passed the time of day with a caf&eacute; waiter
+until the latter, with a disconcerting &ldquo;<em>Voil&agrave;! Voil&agrave;!</em>&rdquo;
+darted off to attend to a customer, and then strolled
+through the Porte Notre Dame onto the Quai Sadi-Carnot.
+There a familiar sound met his ears&mdash;the
+roll of a drum followed by an incantation in a
+quavering, high-pitched voice. It was the Town
+Crier, with whom, as with a brother artist, he had
+picked acquaintance the day before.</p>
+
+<p>They met by the parapet of the Quai, just as
+P&egrave;re Bracasse had come to the end of his incantation.
+The old man, grizzled, tanned and seamed,
+leant weakly against the parapet.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How goes it, P&egrave;re Bracasse?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Alas, mon bon Monsieur, it goes from bad to
+worse,&rdquo; sighed the old man. &ldquo;I am at the end
+of my strength. My voice has gone and the accursed
+rheumatism in my shoulder gives me
+atrocious pain whenever I beat the drum.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How much more of your round have you to
+go?&rdquo; asked Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have only just begun,&rdquo; said P&egrave;re Bracasse.</p>
+
+<p>The Southern sun shone from a cloudless sky; a
+light, keen wind blowing from the distant snow-clad
+Canigou set the blood tingling. A lunatic idea
+flashed through Aristide&#8217;s mind. He whipped the
+drum strap over the old man&#8217;s head.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+&ldquo;P&egrave;re Bracasse,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;you are suffering from
+rheumatism, bronchitis, fever and corns, and you
+must go home to bed. I will finish your round for
+you. Listen,&rdquo; and he beat such a tattoo as P&egrave;re
+Bracasse had never accomplished in his life.
+&ldquo;Where are your words?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The old man, too weary to resist and fascinated
+by Aristide&#8217;s laughing eyes, handed him a dirty
+piece of paper. Aristide read, played a magnificent
+roll and proclaimed in a clarion voice that a gold
+bracelet having been lost on Sunday afternoon in
+the Avenue des Platanes, whoever would deposit it
+at the Mairie would receive a reward.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s all?&rdquo; he enquired.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s all,&rdquo; said P&egrave;re Bracasse. &ldquo;I live in the
+Rue Petite-de-la-R&eacute;al, No. 4, and you will
+bring me back the drum when you have
+finished.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide darted off like a dragon-fly in the sunshine,
+as happy as a child with a new toy. Here he
+could play the drum to his heart&#8217;s content with no
+score or conductor&#8217;s b&acirc;ton to worry him. He was
+also the one and only personage in the drama, concentrating
+on himself the attention of the audience.
+He pitied poor Roulard, who could never have such
+an opportunity with his trombone....</p>
+
+<p>The effect of his drumming before the Caf&eacute; de
+la Loge was electric. Shopkeepers ran out of their
+shops, housewives craned over their balconies to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+listen to him. By the time he had threaded the busy
+strip of the town and emerged on to the Place
+Arago he had collected an admiring train of
+urchins. On the Place Arago he halted on the
+fringe of a crowd surrounding a cheap-jack whose
+vociferations he drowned in a roll of thunder. He
+drummed and drummed till he became the centre
+of the throng. Then he proclaimed the bracelet.
+He had not enjoyed himself so much since he left
+Paris.</p>
+
+<p>He was striding away, merry-eyed and happy,
+followed by his satellites when a prosperous-looking
+gentleman with a very red face, a prosperous
+roll of fat above the back of his collar, and
+the ribbon of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole,
+descending the steps of the great glass-covered
+caf&eacute; commanding the Place, hurried up and laid
+his finger on his arm.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Pardon, my friend,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;what are you
+doing there?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You shall hear, monsieur,&rdquo; replied Aristide,
+clutching the drumsticks.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;For the love of Heaven!&rdquo; cried the other hastily
+interrupting. &ldquo;Tell me what are you doing?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am crying the loss of a bracelet, monsieur!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But who are you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am Aristide Pujol, and I play the drum,
+kettle-drum, triangle, cymbals, castagnettes and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+tambourine in the orchestra of the Tourn&eacute;e Gulland.
+And now, in my turn, may I ask to whom
+I have the honour of speaking?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am the Mayor of Perpignan.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide raised his hat politely. &ldquo;I hope to have
+the pleasure,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;of Monsieur le Maire&#8217;s better
+acquaintance.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor, attracted by the rascal&#8217;s guileless
+mockery, laughed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You will, my friend, if you go on playing that
+drum. You are not the Town Crier.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide explained. P&egrave;re Bracasse was ill, suffering
+from rheumatism, bronchitis, fever and
+corns. He was replacing him. The Mayor retorted
+that P&egrave;re Bracasse being a municipal functionary
+could not transmit his functions except
+through the Administration. Monsieur Pujol must
+desist from drumming and crying. Aristide bowed
+to authority and unstrung his drum.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I was enjoying myself so much, Monsieur
+le Maire. You have spoiled my day,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor laughed again. There was an irresistible
+charm and roguishness about the fellow, with
+his intelligent oval face, black Vandyke beard and
+magically luminous eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I should have thought you had enough of drums
+in your orchestra.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah! there I am cramped!&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;I
+have it in horror, in detestation. Here I am free.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+I can give vent to all the aspirations of my
+soul!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor mechanically moved from the spot
+where they had been standing. Aristide, embroidering
+his theme, mechanically accompanied him;
+and, such is democratic France, and also such was
+the magnetic, Ancient Mariner-like power of Aristide&mdash;did
+not I, myself, on my first meeting with
+him at Aigues-Mortes fall helplessly under the spell&mdash;that,
+in a few moments, the amateur Town Crier
+and the Mayor were walking together, side by side,
+along the Quai Sadi-Carnot, engaged in amiable
+converse. Aristide told the Mayor the story of his
+life&mdash;or such incidents of it as were meet for
+Mayoral ears&mdash;and when they parted&mdash;the Mayor
+to lunch, Aristide to yield up the interdicted drum
+to P&egrave;re Bracasse&mdash;they shook hands warmly and
+mutually expressed the wish that they would soon
+meet again.</p>
+
+<p>They met again; Aristide saw to that. They met
+again that very afternoon in the caf&eacute; on the Place
+Arago. When Aristide entered he saw the Mayor
+seated at a table in the company of another prosperous,
+red-ribboned gentleman. Aristide saluted
+politely and addressed the Mayor. The Mayor saluted
+and presented him to Monsieur Qu&eacute;rin, the
+President of the Syndicat d&#8217;Initiative of the town
+of Perpignan. Monsieur Qu&eacute;rin saluted and declared
+himself enchanted at the encounter. Aristide
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+stood gossiping until the Mayor invited him
+to take a place at the table and consume liquid refreshment.
+Aristide glowingly accepted the invitation
+and cast a look of triumph around the caf&eacute;.
+Not to all mortals is it given to be the boon companion
+of a Mayor and a President of the Syndicat
+d&#8217;Initiative!</p>
+
+<p>Then ensued a conversation momentous in its
+consequences.</p>
+
+<p>The Syndicat d&#8217;Initiative is a semi-official body
+existing in most provincial towns in France for the
+purpose of organising public festivals for the
+citizens and developing the resources and possibilities
+of the town for the general amenity of
+visitors. Now Perpignan is as picturesque, as sun-smitten
+and, in spite of the icy tramontana, even as
+joyous a place as tourist could desire; and the Carnival
+of Perpignan, as a spontaneous outburst of
+gaiety and pageantry, is unique in France. But
+Perpignan being at the end of everywhere and leading
+nowhere attracts very few visitors. Biarritz
+is on the Atlantic coast at the other end of the
+Pyrenees; Hy&egrave;res, Cannes and Monte Carlo on the
+other side of the Gulf of Lions. No English or
+Americans&mdash;the only visitors of any account in the
+philosophy of provincial France&mdash;flock to Perpignan.
+This was a melancholy fact bewailed by
+Monsieur Qu&eacute;rin. The town was perishing from
+lack of Anglo-Saxon support. Monsieur Coquereau,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+the Mayor, agreed. If the English and Americans
+came in their hordes to this paradise of mimosa,
+fourteenth century architecture, sunshine and
+unique Carnival, the fortunes of all the citizens
+would be assured. Perpignan would out-rival Nice.
+But what could be done?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Advertise it,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Flood the English-speaking
+world with poetical descriptions of
+the place. Build a row of palatial hotels in the
+new part of the town. It is not known to the
+Anglo-Saxons.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How can you be certain of that?&rdquo; asked Monsieur
+Qu&eacute;rin.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Parbleu!</em>&rdquo; he cried, with a wide gesture. &ldquo;I
+have known the English all my life. I speak their
+language as I speak French or my native Proven&ccedil;al.
+I have taught in schools in England. I know the
+country and the people like my pocket. They have
+never heard of Perpignan.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>His companions acquiesced sadly. Aristide, aglow
+with a sudden impudent inspiration, leant across the
+marble table.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur le Maire and Monsieur le Pr&eacute;sident
+du Syndicat d&#8217;Initiative, I am sick to death of playing
+the drum, the kettle-drum, the triangle, the
+cymbals, the castagnettes and the tambourine in the
+Tourn&eacute;e Gulland. I was born to higher things.
+Entrust to me&rdquo;&mdash;he converged the finger-tips of
+both hands to his bosom&mdash;&ldquo;to me, Aristide Pujol,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+the organisation of Perpignan-Ville de Plaisir, and
+you will not regret it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor and the President laughed.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>But my astonishing friend prevailed&mdash;not indeed
+to the extent of being appointed a Petronius, <em>arbiter
+&eacute;legantiarum</em>, of the town of Perpignan; but to
+the extent of being employed, I fear in a subordinate
+capacity, by the Mayor and the Syndicat
+in the work of propagandism. The Tourn&eacute;e Gulland
+found another drum and went its tuneful but
+weary way; and Aristide remained gloriously behind
+and rubbed his hands with glee. At last he
+had found permanence in a life where heretofore
+had been naught but transience. At last he had
+found a sphere worthy of his genius. He began
+to nourish insensate ambitions. He would be the
+Great Benefactor of Perpignan. All Roussillon
+should bless his name. Already he saw his statue
+on the Quai Sadi-Carnot.</p>
+
+<p>His rise in the social scale of the town was
+meteoric, chiefly owing to the goodwill of Madame
+Coquereau, the widowed mother of the Mayor. She
+was a hard-featured old lady, with a face that might
+have been made of corrugated iron painted yellow
+and with the eyes of an old hawk. She dressed
+always in black, was very devout and rich and
+narrow and iron-willed. Aristide was presented
+to her one Sunday afternoon at the Caf&eacute; on the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+Place Arago&mdash;where on Sunday afternoons all the
+fashion of Perpignan assembles&mdash;and&mdash;need I say
+it?&mdash;she fell at once a helpless victim to his fascination.
+Accompanying her grandmother was
+Mademoiselle St&eacute;phanie Coquereau, the Mayor&#8217;s
+niece (a wealthy orphan, as Aristide soon learned),
+nineteen, pretty, demure, perfectly brought up, who
+said &ldquo;<em>Oui, Monsieur</em>&rdquo; and &ldquo;<em>Non, Monsieur</em>&rdquo; with
+that quintessence of modest grace which only a provincial
+French Convent can cultivate.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide&#8217;s heart left his body and rolled at the
+feet of Mademoiselle St&eacute;phanie. It was a way with
+Aristide&#8217;s heart. It was always doing that. He
+was of Provence and not of Peckham Rye or Hoboken,
+and he could not help it.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide called on Madame Coquereau, who entertained
+him with sweet Frontignan wine, dry
+sponge cakes and conversation. After a while he
+was invited to dinner. In a short space of time
+he became the intimate friend of the house, and
+played piquet with Madame Coquereau, and grew
+familiar with the family secrets. First he learned
+that Mademoiselle St&eacute;phanie would go to a husband
+with two hundred and fifty thousand francs. Aristide&#8217;s
+heart panted at the feet of Mademoiselle St&eacute;phanie.
+Further he gathered that, though Monsieur
+Coquereau was a personage of great dignity and
+importance in civic affairs, he was as but a little
+child in his own house. Madame Coquereau held
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+the money-bags. Her son had but little personal
+fortune. He had reached the age of forty-five without
+being able to marry. Marriage unauthorized
+by Madame Coquereau meant immediate poverty
+and the testamentary assignment of Madame Coquereau&#8217;s
+fortune to various religious establishments.
+None of the objects of Monsieur Coquereau&#8217;s
+matrimonial desire had pleased Madame
+Coquereau, and none of Madame Coquereau&#8217;s
+blushing candidates had caused a pulse in Monsieur
+Coquereau&#8217;s being to beat the faster. The Mayor
+held his mother in professed adoration and holy
+terror. She held him in abject subjection. Aristide
+became the confidant, in turn, of Madame&#8217;s
+sour philosophy of life and of Monsieur&#8217;s impotence
+and despair. As for Mademoiselle St&eacute;phanie,
+she kept on saying &ldquo;<em>Oui, Monsieur</em>&rdquo; and &ldquo;<em>Non,
+Monsieur</em>,&rdquo; in a crescendo of maddening demureness.</p>
+
+<p>So passed the halcyon hours. During the day
+time Aristide in a corner of the Mayor&#8217;s office,
+drew up flamboyant circulars in English which
+would have put a pushing Land and Estate Agent
+in the New Jerusalem to the blush, and in the evening
+played piquet with Madame Coquereau, while
+Mademoiselle St&eacute;phanie, model of modest piety,
+worked pure but nameless birds and flowers on her
+embroidery frame. Monsieur le Maire, of course,
+played his game of manilla at the caf&eacute;, after dinner,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+and generally came home just before Aristide
+took his leave. If it had not been for the presence
+of Mademoiselle St&eacute;phanie, it would not have
+been gay for Aristide. But love gilded the moments.</p>
+
+<p>On the first evening of the Carnival, which lasts
+nearly a fortnight in Perpignan, Aristide, in spite
+of a sweeter &ldquo;<em>Oui, Monsieur</em>&rdquo; than ever from
+Mademoiselle St&eacute;phanie, made an excuse to slip
+away rather earlier than usual, and, front door having
+closed behind him, crossed the strip of gravel
+with a quick step and flung out of the iron gates.
+Now the house had an isolated position in the new
+quarter of the town. It was perky and modern and
+defaced by all sorts of oriel windows and tourelles
+and pinnacles which gave it a top-heavy appearance,
+and it was surrounded by a low brick wall.
+Aristide, on emerging through the iron gates, heard
+the sound of scurrying footsteps on the side of the
+wall nearest to the town, and reached the corner,
+just in time to see a masquer, attired in a Pierrot
+costume and wearing what seemed to be a pig&#8217;s
+head, disappear round the further angle. Paying no
+heed to this phenomenon, Aristide lit a cigarette
+and walked, in anticipation of enjoyment, to the
+great Avenue des Plantanes where the revelry of
+the Carnival was being held. Aristide was young,
+he loved flirtation, and flirtation flourished in the
+Avenue des Plantanes.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+The next morning the Mayor entered his office
+with a very grave face.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know what has happened? My house
+was broken into last night. The safe in my study
+was forced open, and three thousand francs and
+some valuable jewelry were stolen. <em>Quel malheur!</em>&rdquo;
+he cried, throwing himself into a chair, and
+wiping his forehead. &ldquo;It is not I who can afford
+to lose three thousand francs at once. If they had
+robbed <em>maman</em> it would have been a different matter.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide expressed his sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Whom do you suspect?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A robber, <em>parbleu!</em>&rdquo; said the Mayor. &ldquo;The
+police are even now making their investigations.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The door opened and a plain clothes detective
+entered the office.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur le Maire,&rdquo; said he, with an air of triumph,
+&ldquo;I know a burglar.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Both men leapt to their feet.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>A la bonne heure!</em>&rdquo; cried the Mayor.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Arrest him at once,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Alas, Monsieur,&rdquo; said the detective, &ldquo;that I
+cannot do. I have called on him this morning and
+his wife tells me that he left for the North yesterday
+afternoon. But it is Jos&eacute; Pu&eacute;gas that did it.
+I know his ways.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+&ldquo;<em>Tiens!</em>&rdquo; said the Mayor, reflectively. &ldquo;I know
+him also, an evil fellow.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But why are you not looking for him?&rdquo; exclaimed
+Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Arrangements have been made,&rdquo; replied the detective
+coldly.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide suddenly bethought him of the furtive
+masquer of the night before.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I can put you on his track,&rdquo; said he, and related
+what he knew.</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor looked dubious. &ldquo;It wasn&#8217;t he,&rdquo; he
+remarked.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Jos&eacute; Pu&eacute;gas, Monsieur, would not commit a
+burglary in a pig&#8217;s head,&rdquo; said the policeman, with
+the cutting contempt of the expert.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It was a vow, I suppose,&rdquo; said Aristide, stung
+to irony. &ldquo;I&#8217;ve always heard he was a religious
+man.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The detective did not condescend to reply.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur le Maire,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I should like to
+examine the premises, and beg that you will have
+the kindness to accompany me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;With the permission of Monsieur le Maire,&rdquo;
+said Aristide. &ldquo;I too will come.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said the Mayor. &ldquo;The more intelligences
+concentrated on the affair the better.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am not of that opinion,&rdquo; said the detective.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is the opinion of Monsieur le Maire,&rdquo; said
+Aristide rebukingly, &ldquo;and that is enough.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+When they reached the house&mdash;distances are
+short in Perpignan&mdash;they found policemen busily
+engaged with tape measures around the premises.
+Old Madame Coquereau in a clean white linen
+dressing jacket, bare-headed, defying the keen air,
+stood grim and eager in the midst of them.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good morning, Monsieur Pujol, what do you
+think of this?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A veritable catastrophe,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>She shrugged her iron shoulders. &ldquo;I tell him it
+serves him right,&rdquo; she said, cuttingly. &ldquo;A sensible
+person keeps his money under his mattress and
+not in a tin machine by a window which anyone
+can get at. I wonder we&#8217;ve not been murdered in
+our beds before.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ah, Maman!</em>&rdquo; expostulated the Mayor of Perpignan.</p>
+
+<p>But she turned her back on him and worried the
+policemen. They, having probed, and measured,
+and consulted with the detective, came to an exact
+conclusion. The thief had climbed over the back
+wall&mdash;there were his footsteps. He had entered
+by the kitchen door&mdash;there were the marks of infraction.
+He had broken open the safe&mdash;there was
+the helpless condition of the lock. No one in Perpignan,
+but Jos&eacute; Pu&eacute;gas, with his bad, socialistic,
+Barcelona blood, could have done it. These brilliant
+results were arrived at after much clamour
+and argument and imposing <em>proc&egrave;s verbal</em>. Aristide
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+felt strangely depressed. He had narrated his
+story of the pig-headed masquer to unresponsive
+ears. Here was a melodramatic scene in which he
+not only was not playing a leading part, but did not
+even carry a banner. To be less than a super in
+life&#8217;s pageant was abhorrent to the nature of Aristide
+Pujol.</p>
+
+<p>Moodily he wandered away from the little crowd.
+He hated the police and their airs of gods for whom
+exists no mystery. He did not believe in the
+kitchen-door theory. Why should not the thief
+have simply entered by the window of the study,
+which like the kitchen, was on the ground floor?
+He went round the house and examined the window
+by himself. No; there were no traces of burglary.
+The fastenings of the outside shutters and
+the high window were intact. The police were
+right.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly his quick eye lit on something in the
+gravel path and his heart gave a great leap. It was
+a little round pink disc of confetti.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide picked it up and began to dance and
+shake his fist at the invisible police.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Aha!&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;now we shall see who is right
+and who is wrong!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He began to search and soon found another bit
+of confetti. A little further along he discovered
+a third and a fourth. By using his walking stick
+he discovered that they formed a trail to a point in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+the wall. He examined the wall. There, if his eyes
+did not deceive him, were evidences of mortar dislodged
+by nefarious toes. And there, <em>mirabile visu!</em>
+at the very bottom of the wall lay a little woollen
+pompon or tassel, just the kind of pompon that
+gives a finish to a pierrot&#8217;s shoes. Evidently the
+scoundrel had scraped it off against the bricks
+while clambering over.</p>
+
+<p>The pig-headed masquer stood confessed.</p>
+
+<p>A less imaginative man than Aristide would
+have immediately acquainted the police with his
+discovery. But Aristide had been insulted. A dull,
+mechanical bureaucrat who tried to discover crime
+with a tape-measure had dared to talk contemptuously
+of his intelligence! On his wooden head
+should be poured the vials of his contempt.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tron de l&#8217;air!</em>&rdquo; cried Aristide&mdash;a Proven&ccedil;al
+oath which he only used on sublime occasions&mdash;&ldquo;It
+is I who will discover the thief and make the
+whole lot of you the laughing-stock of Perpignan.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So did my versatile friend, joyously confident in
+his powers, start on his glorious career as a private
+detective.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame Coquereau,&rdquo; said he, that evening,
+while she was dealing a hand at piquet, &ldquo;what
+would you say if I solved this mystery and brought
+the scoundrel to justice?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;To say that you would have more sense than
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+the police, would be a poor compliment,&rdquo; said the
+old lady.</p>
+
+<p>St&eacute;phanie raised cloistral eyes from her embroidery
+frame. She sat in a distant corner
+of the formal room discreetly lit by a shaded
+lamp.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You have a clue, Monsieur?&rdquo; she asked with
+adorable timidity.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide tapped his forehead with his forefinger.
+&ldquo;All is there, Mademoiselle.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>They exchanged a glance&mdash;the first they had exchanged&mdash;while
+Madame Coquereau was frowning
+at her cards; and Aristide interpreted the glance
+as the promise of supreme reward for great deeds
+accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>The mayor returned early from the caf&eacute;, a dejected
+man. The loss of his hundred and twenty
+pounds weighed heavily on his mind. He kissed
+his mother sorrowfully on the cheek, his niece on
+the brow, held out a drooping hand to Aristide,
+and, subsiding into a stiff imitation Louis XVI
+chair, rested his elbows on its unconsoling arms and
+hid his face in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My poor uncle! You suffer so much?&rdquo; breathed
+St&eacute;phanie, in divine compassion.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Little Saint!&rdquo; murmured Aristide devoutly, as
+he declared four aces and three queens.</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor moved his head sympathetically. He
+was suffering from the sharpest pain in his pocket
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+he had felt for many a day. Madame Coquereau&#8217;s
+attention wandered from the cards.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Dis donc</em>, Fernand,&rdquo; she said sharply. &ldquo;Why
+are you not wearing your ring?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor looked up.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Maman</em>,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;it is stolen.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Your beautiful ring?&rdquo; cried Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor&#8217;s ring, which he usually wore, was
+a remarkable personal adornment. It consisted in
+a couple of snakes in old gold clenching an enormous
+topaz between their heads. Only a Mayor
+could have worn it with decency.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You did not tell me, Fernand,&rdquo; rasped the old
+lady. &ldquo;You did not mention it to me as being one
+of the stolen objects.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor rose wearily. &ldquo;It was to avoid giving
+you pain, <em>maman</em>. I know what a value you
+set upon the ring of my good Aunt Philom&egrave;ne.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And now it is lost,&rdquo; said Madame Coquereau,
+throwing down her cards. &ldquo;A ring that belonged
+to a saint. Yes, Monsieur Pujol, a saint, though
+she was my sister. A ring that had been blessed
+by His Holiness the Pope&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, <em>maman</em>,&rdquo; expostulated the Mayor, &ldquo;that
+was an imagination of Aunt Philom&egrave;ne. Just because
+she went to Rome and had an audience like
+anyone else&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Silence, impious atheist that you are!&rdquo; cried the
+old lady. &ldquo;I tell you it was blessed by His
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+Holiness&mdash;and when I tell you a thing it is true. That
+is the son of to-day. He will call his mother a
+liar as soon as look at her. It was a ring beyond
+price. A ring such as there are few in the world.
+And instead of taking care of this precious heirloom,
+he goes and locks it away in a safe. Ah!
+you fill me with shame. Monsieur Pujol, I am
+sorry I can play no more, I must retire. St&eacute;phanie,
+will you accompany me?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>And gathering up St&eacute;phanie like a bunch of
+snowdrops, the yellow, galvanized iron old lady
+swept out of the room.</p>
+
+<p>The Mayor looked at Aristide and moved his
+arms dejectedly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Such are women,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My own mother nearly broke her heart because
+I would not become a priest,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I wish I were a Turk,&rdquo; said the Mayor.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I, too,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>He took pouch and papers and rolled a cigarette.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If there is a man living who can say he has
+not felt like that at least once in his life he ought
+to be exhibited at a fair.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How well you understand me, my good Pujol,&rdquo;
+said Monsieur Coquereau.</p>
+
+<p>The next few days passed busily for Aristide.
+He devoted every spare hour to his new task. He
+scrutinized every inch of ground between the study
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+window and the wall; he drew radiating lines from
+the point of the wall whence the miscreant had
+started homeward and succeeded in finding more
+confetti. He cross-examined every purveyor of
+pierrot shoes and pig&#8217;s heads in Perpignan. His
+researches soon came to the ears of the police, still
+tracing the mysterious Jos&eacute; Pu&eacute;gas. A certain
+good-humoured brigadier whose Catalan French
+Aristide found difficult to understand, but with
+whom he had formed a derisory kind of friendship,
+urged him to desist from the hopeless task.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Jamais de la vie!</em>&rdquo; he cried&mdash;&ldquo;The honour of
+Aristide Pujol is at stake.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The thing became an obsession. Not only his
+honour but his future was at stake. If he discovered
+the thief, he would be the most talked of person
+in Perpignan. He would know how to improve
+his position. He would rise to dizzy heights. Perpignan-Ville
+de Plaisir would acclaim him as its
+saviour. The Government would decorate him.
+And finally, both the Mayor and Madame Coquereau
+would place the blushing and adorable Mademoiselle
+St&eacute;phanie in his arms and her two hundred
+and fifty thousand francs dowry in his pocket.
+Never before had so dazzling a prize shimmered
+before him in the near distance.</p>
+
+<p>On the last Saturday night of the Carnival, there
+was a special <em>corso</em> for the populace in the Avenue
+des Plantanes, the long splendid Avenue of plane
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+trees just outside the Porte Notre Dame, which is
+the special glory of Perpignan. The masquers
+danced to three or four bands. They threw confetti
+and <em>serpentins</em>. They rode hobby-horses and
+beat each other with bladders. They joined in
+bands of youths and maidens and whirled down
+the Avenue in Bacchic madness. It was a <em>corso
+blanc</em>, and everyone wore white&mdash;chiefly modifications
+of Pierrot costume&mdash;and everyone was
+masked. Chinese lanterns hung from the trees and
+in festoons around the bandstands and darted about
+in the hands of the revellers. Above, great standard
+electric lamps shed their white glare upon the
+eddying throng casting a myriad of grotesque
+shadows. Shouts and laughter and music filled
+the air.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide in a hideous red mask and with a bag
+of confetti under his arm, plunged with enthusiasm
+into the revelry. To enjoy yourself you only had
+to throw your arm round a girl&#8217;s waist and swing
+her off wildly to the beat of the music. If you
+wanted to let her go you did so; if not, you talked
+in the squeaky voice that is the recognized etiquette
+of the carnival. On the other hand any
+girl could catch you in her grip and sweep you
+along with her. Your mad career generally ended
+in a crowd and a free fight of confetti. There
+was one fair masquer, however, to whom Aristide
+became peculiarly attracted. Her movements were
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+free, her figure dainty and her repartee, below her
+mask, more than usually piquant.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;This hurly-burly,&rdquo; said he, drawing her into a
+quiet eddy of the stream, &ldquo;is no place for the communion
+of two twin souls.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Beau masque</em>,&rdquo; said she, &ldquo;I perceive that you
+are a man of much sensibility.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Shall we find a spot where we can mingle the
+overflow of our exquisite natures?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;As you like.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Allons! Hop!</em>&rdquo; cried he, and seizing her round
+the waist danced through the masquers to the very
+far end of the Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There is a sequestered spot round here,&rdquo; he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>They turned. The sequestered spot, a seat beneath
+a plane tree, with a lonesome arc-lamp shining
+full upon it, was occupied.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s a pity!&rdquo; said the fair unknown.</p>
+
+<p>But Aristide said nothing. He stared. On the
+seat reposed an amorous couple. The lady wore a
+white domino and a black mask. The cavalier,
+whose arm was around the lady&#8217;s waist, wore a
+pig&#8217;s head, and a clown or Pierrot&#8217;s dress.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide&#8217;s eyes fell upon the shoes. On one of
+them the pompon was missing.</p>
+
+<p>The lady&#8217;s left hand tenderly patted the cardboard
+snout of her lover. The fierce light of the
+arc lamp caught the hand and revealed, on the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+fourth finger, a topaz ring, the topaz held in its
+place by two snakes&#8217; heads.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide stared for two seconds; it seemed to
+him two centuries. Then he turned simply, caught
+his partner again, and with a &ldquo;<em>Allons, Hop!</em>&rdquo; raced
+back to the middle of the throng. There, in the
+crush, he unceremoniously lost her, and sped like
+a maniac to the entrance gates. His friend the
+brigadier happened to be on duty. He unmasked
+himself, dragged the police agent aside, and
+breathless, half-hysterical, acquainted him with the
+astounding discovery.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I was right, <em>mon vieux!</em> There at the end of
+the Avenue you will find them. The pig-headed
+prowler I saw, with <em>my</em> pompon missing from his
+shoe, and his <em>bonne amie</em> wearing the stolen ring.
+Ah! you police people with your tape-measures and
+your Jos&eacute; Pu&eacute;gas! It is I, Aristide Pujol, who
+have to come to Perpignan to teach you your business!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What do you want me to do?&rdquo; asked the brigadier
+stolidly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Do?&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;Do you think I want
+you to kiss them and cover them with roses? What
+do you generally do with thieves in Perpignan?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Arrest them,&rdquo; said the brigadier.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Eh bien!</em>&rdquo; said Aristide. Then he paused&mdash;possibly
+the drama of the situation striking him.
+&ldquo;No, wait. Go and find them. Don&#8217;t take your
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
+eyes off them. I will run and fetch Monsieur le
+Maire and he will identify his property&mdash;<em>et puis
+nous aurons la sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The stout brigadier grunted an assent and rolled
+monumentally down the Avenue. Aristide, his
+pulses throbbing, his heart exulting, ran to the
+Mayor&#8217;s house. He was rather a panting triumph
+than a man. He had beaten the police of
+Perpignan. He had discovered the thief. He was
+the hero of the town. Soon would the wedding
+bells be playing.... He envied the marble
+of the future statue. He would like to be on the
+pedestal himself.</p>
+
+<p>He dashed past the maid-servant who opened the
+door and burst into the prim salon. Madame Coquereau
+was alone, just preparing to retire for the
+night. Mademoiselle St&eacute;phanie had already gone
+to bed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu</em>, what is all this?&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; shouted he, &ldquo;glorious news. I have
+found the thief!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He told his tale. Where was Monsieur le Maire?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He has not yet come back from the caf&eacute;.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;ll go and find him,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And waste time? Bah!&rdquo; said the iron-faced
+old lady, catching up a black silk shawl. &ldquo;I will
+come with you and identify the ring of my sainted
+sister Philom&egrave;ne. Who should know it better than
+I?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+&ldquo;As you like, Madame,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>Two minutes found them on their journey. Madame
+Coquereau, in spite of her sixty-five years
+trudged along with springing step.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;They don&#8217;t make metal like me, nowadays,&rdquo;
+she said scornfully.</p>
+
+<p>When they arrived at the gate of the Avenue,
+the police on guard saluted. The mother
+of Monsieur le Maire was a power in Perpignan.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; said Aristide, in lordly fashion,
+to a policeman, &ldquo;will you have the goodness to
+make a passage through the crowd for Madame
+Coquereau, and then help the Brigadier P&eacute;sac to
+arrest the burglar who broke into the house of
+Monsieur le Maire?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The man obeyed, went ahead clearing the path
+with the unceremoniousness of the law, and Aristide
+giving his arm to Madame Coquereau followed
+gloriously. As the impressive progress continued
+the revellers ceased their revels and followed
+in the wake of Aristide. At the end of the
+Avenue Brigadier P&eacute;sac was on guard. He approached.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;They are still there,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>The two police-officers, Aristide and Madame
+Coquereau turned the corner. At the sight of the
+police the guilty couple started to their feet. Madame
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+Coquereau pounced like a hawk on the
+masked lady&#8217;s hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I identify it,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Brigadier, give these
+people in charge for theft.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The white masked crowd surged around the
+group, in the midst of which stood Aristide transfigured.
+It was his supreme moment. He flourished
+in one hand his red mask and in the other
+a pompon which he had extracted from his
+pocket.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;This I found,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;beneath the wall of
+Monsieur le Maire&#8217;s garden. Behold the shoe of
+the accused.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The crowd murmured their applause and admiration.
+Neither of the prisoners stirred. The pig&#8217;s
+head grinned at the world with its inane, painted
+leer. A rumbling voice beneath it said:</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;We will go quietly.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Attention s&#8217;il vous pla&icirc;t</em>,&rdquo; said the policemen,
+and each holding a prisoner by the arm they made
+a way through the crowd. Madame Coquereau
+and Aristide followed close behind.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What did I tell you?&rdquo; cried Aristide to the
+brigadier.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s Pu&eacute;gas, all the same,&rdquo; said the brigadier,
+over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I bet you it&#8217;s not,&rdquo; said Aristide, and striding
+swiftly to the back of the male prisoner whipped
+off the pig&#8217;s head, and revealed to the petrified
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+throng the familiar features of the Mayor of Perpignan.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide regarded him for two or three seconds
+open-mouthed, and then fell back into the arms of
+the Brigadier P&eacute;sac screaming with convulsive
+laughter. The crowd caught the infection of merriment.
+Shrieks filled the air. The vast mass of
+masqueraders held their sides, swayed helplessly,
+rolled in heaps, men and women, tearing each
+other&#8217;s garments as they fell.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide, deposited on the ground by the Brigadier
+P&eacute;sac laughed and laughed. When he recovered
+some consciousness of surroundings, he found
+the Mayor bending over him and using language
+that would have made Tophet put its fingers in
+its ears. He rose. Madame Coquereau shook her
+thin fists in his face.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Imbecile! Triple fool!&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide turned tail and fled. There was nothing
+else to do.</p>
+
+<p>And that was the end of his career at Perpignan.
+Vanished were the dreams of civic eminence;
+melted into thin air the statue on the Quai Sadi-Carnot;
+faded, too, the vision of the modest St&eacute;phanie
+crowned with orange-blossom; gone forever
+the two hundred and fifty thousand francs. Never
+since Alnaschar kicked over his basket of crockery
+was there such a hideous welter of shattered hopes.</p>
+
+<p>If the Mayor had been allowed to go disguised
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+to the Police Station, he could have disclosed his
+identity and that of the lady in private to awe-stricken
+functionaries. He might have forgiven
+Aristide. But Aristide had exposed him to the derision
+of the whole of Roussillon and the never ending
+wrath of Madame Coquereau. Ruefully Aristide
+asked himself the question: why had the Mayor not
+taken him into the confidence of his masquerading
+escapade? Why had he not told him of the pretty
+widow, whom, unknown to his mother, he was
+courting? Why had he permitted her to wear the
+ring which he had given her so as to spite his
+sainted Aunt Philom&egrave;ne? And why had he gone
+on wearing the pig&#8217;s head after Aristide had told
+him of his suspicions? Ruefully Aristide found
+no answers save in the general chuckle-headedness
+of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If it hadn&#8217;t been such a good farce I should
+have wept like a cow,&rdquo; said Aristide, after relating
+this story. &ldquo;But every time I wanted to cry,
+I laughed. <em>Nom de Dieu!</em> You should have seen
+his face! And the face of Madame Coquereau!
+She opened her mouth wide showing ten yellow
+teeth and squealed like a rabbit! Oh, it was a
+good farce! He was very cross with me,&rdquo; he
+added after a smiling pause, &ldquo;and when I got back
+to Paris I tried to pacify him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What did you do?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I sent him my photograph,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE</strong></p>
+
+
+<p>One day, when Aristide was discoursing on
+the inexhaustible subject of woman, I
+pulled him up.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My good friend,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;you seem to have
+fallen in love with every woman you have ever met.
+But for how many of them have you really cared?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu!</em> For all of them!&rdquo; he cried, springing
+from his chair and making a wind-mill of himself.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Come, come,&rdquo; said I; &ldquo;all that amorousness is
+just Gallic exuberance. Have you ever been really
+in love in your life?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How should I know?&rdquo; said he. But he lit a
+cigarette, turned away, and looked out of window.</p>
+
+<p>There was a short silence. He shrugged his
+shoulders, apparently in response to his own
+thoughts. Then he turned again suddenly, threw
+his cigarette into the fire, and thrust his hands into
+his pockets. He sighed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps there was Fleurette,&rdquo; said he, not looking
+at me. &ldquo;<em>Est-ce qu&#8217;on sait jamais?</em> That wasn&#8217;t
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+her real name&mdash;it was Marie-Jos&eacute;phine; but people
+called her Fleurette. She looked like a flower, you
+know.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I nodded in order to signify my elementary acquaintance
+with the French tongue.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The most delicate little flower you can conceive,&rdquo;
+he continued. &ldquo;<em>Tiens</em>, she was a slender lily&mdash;so
+white, and her hair the flash of gold on it&mdash;and
+she had eyes&mdash;<em>des yeux de pervenche</em>, as we
+say in French. What is <em>pervenche</em> in English&mdash;that
+little pale-blue flower?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Periwinkle,&rdquo; said I.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Periwinkle eyes! My God, what a language!
+Ah, no! She had <em>des yeux de pervenche</em>....
+She was <em>diaphane</em>, diaphanous ... impalpable
+as cigarette-smoke ... a little nose like nothing
+at all, with nostrils like infinitesimal sea-shells.
+Anyone could have made a mouthful of her....
+Ah! <em>Cr&eacute; nom d&#8217;un chien!</em> Life is droll. It has no
+common sense. It is the game of a mountebank....
+I&#8217;ve never told you about Fleurette. It
+was this way.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>And the story he narrated I will do my best to
+set down.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The good M. Bocardon, of the H&ocirc;tel de
+la Curatterie at N&icirc;mes, whose grateful devotion
+to Aristide has already been recorded, had
+a brother in Paris who managed the H&ocirc;tel du
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+Soleil et de l&#8217;Ecosse (strange conjuncture), a
+flourishing third-rate hostelry in the neighbourhood
+of the Halles Centrales. Thither flocked sturdy
+Britons in knickerbockers, stockings, and cloth caps,
+Teutons with tin botanizing boxes (for lunch transportation),
+and American school-marms realizing
+at last the dream of their modest and laborious
+lives. Accommodation was cheap, manners were
+easy, and knowledge of the gay city less than rudimentary.</p>
+
+<p>To M. Bocardon of Paris Aristide, one August
+morning, brought glowing letters of introduction
+from M. and Mme. Bocardon of N&icirc;mes. M. Bocardon
+of Paris welcomed Aristide as a Proven&ccedil;al
+and a brother. He brought out from a cupboard in
+his private bureau an hospitable bottle of old Armagnac,
+and discoursed with Aristide on the seductions
+of the South. It was there that he longed
+to retire&mdash;to a dainty little hotel of his own with
+a smart client&egrave;le. The client&egrave;le of the H&ocirc;tel du
+Soleil et de l&#8217;Ecosse was not to his taste. He spoke
+slightingly of his guests.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There are people who know how to travel,&rdquo;
+said he, &ldquo;and people who don&#8217;t. These lost muttons
+here don&#8217;t, and they make hotel-keeping a
+nightmare instead of a joy. A hundred times a
+day have I to tell them the way to Notre Dame.
+<em>Pouah!</em>&rdquo; said he, gulping down his disgust and
+the rest of his Armagnac, &ldquo;it is back-breaking.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+&ldquo;<em>Tu sais, mon vieux</em>,&rdquo; cried Aristide&mdash;he had
+the most lightning way of establishing an intimacy&mdash;&ldquo;I
+have an idea. These lost sheep need a shepherd.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Eh bien?</em>&rdquo; said M. Bocardon.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Eh bien</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Why should not I
+be the shepherd, the official shepherd attached to
+the H&ocirc;tel du Soleil et de l&#8217;Ecosse?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Explain yourself,&rdquo; said M. Bocardon.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide, letting loose his swift imagination, explained
+copiously, and hypnotized M. Bocardon
+with his glittering eye, until he had assured to himself
+a means of livelihood. From that moment he
+became the familiar genius of the hotel. Scorning
+the title of &ldquo;guide,&rdquo; lest he should be associated in
+the minds of the guests with the squalid scoundrels
+who infest the Boulevard, he constituted himself
+&ldquo;Directeur de l&#8217;Agence Pujol.&rdquo; An obfuscated Bocardon
+formed the rest of the agency and pocketed
+a percentage of Aristide&#8217;s earnings, and Aristide,
+addressed as &ldquo;Director&rdquo; by the Anglo-Saxons, &ldquo;M.
+le Directeur&rdquo; by the Latins, and &ldquo;Herr Direktor&rdquo;
+by the Teutons, walked about like a peacock in a
+barn-yard.</p>
+
+<a name="img210" id="img210"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/img210.jpg" width="600" height="422" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">he must have dealt out paralyzing information</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>At that period, and until he had learned up Baedeker
+by heart, a process which nearly gave him
+brain-fever, and still, he declares, brings terror
+into his slumbers, he knew little more of the history,
+topography, and art-treasures of Paris than
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+the flock he shepherded. He must have dealt out
+paralyzing information. The Britons and the Germans
+seemed not to heed; but now and then the
+American school-marms unmasked the charlatan.
+On such occasions his unfaltering impudence
+reached heights truly sublime. The sharp-witted
+ladies looked in his eyes, forgot their wrongs, and,
+if he had told them that the Eiffel Tower had been
+erected by the Pilgrim Fathers, would have accepted
+the statement meekly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My friend,&rdquo; said Aristide, with Proven&ccedil;al flourish
+and braggadocio, &ldquo;I never met a woman that
+would not sooner be misled by me than be taught
+by the whole Faculty of the Sorbonne.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He had been practising this honourable profession
+for about a month, lodging with the good
+Mme. Bidoux at 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honor&eacute;, when,
+one morning, in the vestibule of the hotel, he ran
+into his old friend Batterby, whom he had known
+during the days of his professorship of French at
+the Academy for Young Ladies in Manchester.
+The pair had been fellow-lodgers in the same house
+in the Rusholme Road; but, whereas Aristide lived
+in one sunless bed-sitting-room looking on a forest
+of chimney-pots, Batterby, man of luxury and ease,
+had a suite of apartments on the first floor and kept
+an inexhaustible supply of whisky, cigars, and such-like
+etceteras of the opulent, and the very ugliest
+prize bull-pup you can imagine. Batterby, in gaudy
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+raiment, went to an office in Manchester; in gaudier
+raiment he often attended race meetings. He
+had rings and scarf-pins and rattled gold in his
+trousers pockets. He might have been an insufferable
+young man for a poverty-stricken teacher
+of French to have as a fellow-lodger; but he was
+not. Like all those born to high estate, he made
+no vulgar parade of his wealth, and to Aristide he
+showed the most affable hospitality. A friendship
+had arisen between them, which the years had
+idealized rather than impaired. So when they met
+that morning in the vestibule of the H&ocirc;tel du
+Soleil et de l&#8217;Ecosse their greetings were fervent
+and prolonged.</p>
+
+<p>In person Batterby tended towards burliness. He
+had a red, jolly face, divided unequally by a great
+black moustache, and his manner was hearty. He
+slapped Aristide on the back many times and shook
+him by the shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;We must have a drink on this straight away,
+old man,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&#8217;re so strange, you English,&rdquo; said Aristide.
+&ldquo;The moment you have an emotion you must celebrate
+it by a drink. &lsquo;My dear fellow, I&#8217;ve just
+come into a fortune; let us have a drink.&rsquo; Or,
+&lsquo;My friend, my poor old father has just been
+run over by an omnibus; let us have a drink.&rsquo; My
+good Reginald, look at the clock. It is only nine
+in the morning.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Rot!&rdquo; said Reginald. &ldquo;Drink is good at any
+time.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>They went into the dark and deserted smoking-room,
+where Batterby ordered Scotch and soda and
+Aristide, an abstemious man, a plain vermouth.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What&#8217;s that muck?&rdquo; asked Batterby, when the
+waiter brought the drinks. Aristide explained.
+&ldquo;Whisky&#8217;s good enough for me,&rdquo; laughed the other.
+Aristide laughed too, out of politeness and out of
+joy at meeting his old friend.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;With you playing at guide here,&rdquo; said Batterby,
+when he had learned Aristide&#8217;s position in the hotel,
+&ldquo;it seems I have come to the right shop. There
+are no flies on me, you know, but when a man
+comes to Paris for the first time he likes to be put
+up to the ropes.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Your first visit to Paris?&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;<em>Mon
+vieux</em>, what wonders are going to ravish your eyes!
+What a time you are going to have!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Batterby bit off the end of a great black cigar.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If the missus will let me,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Missus? Your wife? You are married, my
+dear Reginald?&rdquo; Aristide leaped, in his unexpected
+fashion, from his chair and almost embraced him.
+&ldquo;Ah, but you are happy, you are lucky. It was
+always like that. You open your mouth and the
+larks fall ready roasted into it! My congratulations.
+And she is here, in this hotel, your wife?
+Tell me about her.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+Batterby lit his cigar. &ldquo;She&#8217;s nothing to write
+home about,&rdquo; he said, modestly. &ldquo;She&#8217;s French.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;French? No&mdash;you don&#8217;t say so!&rdquo; exclaimed
+Aristide, in ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well, she was brought up in France from her
+childhood, but her parents were Finns. Funny place
+for people to come from&mdash;Finland&mdash;isn&#8217;t it? You
+could never expect it&mdash;might just as well think of
+&#8217;em coming from Lapland. She&#8217;s an orphan. I
+met her in London.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But that&#8217;s romantic! And she is young,
+pretty?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes; in a way,&rdquo; said the proprietary Briton.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And her name?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, she has a fool name&mdash;Fleurette. I wanted
+to call her Flossie, but she didn&#8217;t like it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I should think not,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Fleurette
+is an adorable name.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose it&#8217;s right enough,&rdquo; said Batterby.
+&ldquo;But if I want to call her good old Flossie, why
+should she object? You married, old man? No?
+Well, wait till you are. You think women are
+angels all wrapped up in feathers and wings beneath
+their toggery, don&#8217;t you? Well, they&#8217;re just
+blooming porcupines, all bristling with objections.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mais, allons, donc!</em>&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;You love
+her, your beautiful Finnish orphan brought up in
+France and romantically met in London, with the
+adorable name?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Oh, that&#8217;s all right,&rdquo; said the easy Batterby,
+lifting his half-emptied glass. &ldquo;Here&#8217;s luck!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah&mdash;no!&rdquo; said Aristide, leaning forward and
+clinking his wineglass against the other&#8217;s tumbler.
+&ldquo;Here is to madame.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>When they returned to the vestibule they found
+Mrs. Batterby patiently awaiting her lord. She
+rose from her seat at the approach of the two men,
+a fragile flower of a girl, about three-and-twenty,
+pale as a lily, with exquisite though rather large
+features, and with eyes of the blue of the <em>pervenche</em>
+(in deference to Aristide I use the French name),
+which seemed to smile trustfully through perpetual
+tears. She was dressed in pale, shadowy blue&mdash;graceful,
+impalpable, like the smoke, said Aristide,
+curling upwards from a cigarette.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Reggie has spoken of you many times, monsieur,&rdquo;
+said Fleurette, after the introduction had
+been effected.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide was touched. &ldquo;Fancy him remembering
+me! <em>Ce bon vieux Reginald.</em> Madame,&rdquo; said he,
+&ldquo;your husband is the best fellow in the world.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Feed him with sugar and he won&#8217;t bite,&rdquo; said
+Batterby; whereat they all laughed, as if it had
+been a very good joke.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well, what about this Paris of yours?&rdquo; he asked,
+after a while. &ldquo;The missus knows as little of it
+as I do.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Really?&rdquo; asked Aristide.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+&ldquo;I lived all my life in Brest before I went to
+England,&rdquo; she said, modestly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She wants to see all the sights, the Louvre, the
+Morgue, the Cathedral of What&#8217;s-its-name that
+you&#8217;ve got here. I&#8217;ve got to go round, too. Pleases
+her and don&#8217;t hurt me. You must tote us about.
+We&#8217;ll have a cab, old girl, as you can&#8217;t do much
+walking, and good old Pujol will come with us.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But that is ideal!&rdquo; cried Aristide, flying to the
+door to order the cab; but before he could reach
+it he was stopped by three or four waiting tourists,
+who pointed, some to the clock, some to the wagonette
+standing outside, and asked the director
+when the personally-conducted party was to start.
+Aristide, who had totally forgotten the responsibilities
+attached to the directorship of the Agence
+Pujol and, but for this reminder, would have blissfully
+left his sheep to err and stray over Paris by
+themselves, returned crestfallen to his friends and
+explained the situation.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But we&#8217;ll join the party,&rdquo; said the cheery Batterby.
+&ldquo;The more the merrier&mdash;good old bean-feast!
+Will there be room?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Plenty,&rdquo; replied Aristide, brightening. &ldquo;But
+would it meet the wishes of madame?&rdquo; Her pale
+face flushed ever so slightly and the soft eyes fluttered
+at him a half-astonished, half-grateful glance.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;With my husband and you, monsieur, I should
+love it,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+So Mr. and Mrs. Batterby joined the personally-conducted
+party, as they did the next morning, and
+the next, and several mornings after, and received
+esoteric information concerning the monuments of
+Paris that is hidden even from the erudite. The
+evenings, however, Aristide, being off duty, devoted
+to their especial entertainment. He took them to
+riotous and perspiring restaurants where they dined
+gorgeously for three francs fifty, wine included;
+to open-air <em>caf&eacute;s-concerts</em> in the Champs Elys&eacute;es,
+which Fleurette found infinitely diverting, but
+which bored Batterby, who knew not French, to
+stertorous slumber; to crowded brasseries on the
+Boulevard, where Batterby awakened, under a
+steady flow of whisky, to appreciative contemplation
+of Paris life. As in the old days of the Rusholme
+Road, Batterby flung his money about with
+unostentatious generosity. He was out for a beano,
+he declared, and hang the expense! Aristide,
+whose purse, scantily filled (truth to say) by the
+profits of the Agence Pujol, could contribute but
+modestly to this reckless expenditure, found himself
+forced to accept his friend&#8217;s lavish hospitality.
+Once or twice, delicately, he suggested withdrawal
+from the evening&#8217;s dissipation.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, my good M. Pujol,&rdquo; said Fleurette, with
+childish tragicality in her <em>pervenche</em> eyes, &ldquo;without
+you we shall be lost. We shall not enjoy ourselves
+at all, at all.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+So Aristide, out of love for his friend, and out
+of he knew not what for his friend&#8217;s wife, continued
+to show them the sights of Paris. They went
+to the cabarets of Montmartre&mdash;the <em>Ciel</em>, where
+one is served by angels; the <em>Enfer</em>, where one is
+served by red devils in a Tartarean lighting; the
+<em>N&eacute;ant</em>, where one has coffins for tables&mdash;than all of
+which vulgarity has imagined no more joy-killing
+dreariness, but which caused Fleurette to grip Aristide&#8217;s
+hand tight in scared wonderment and Batterby
+to chuckle exceedingly. They went to the
+Bal Bullier and to various other balls undreamed of
+by the tourist, where Fleurette danced with Aristide,
+as light as an autumn leaf tossed by the wind,
+and Batterby absorbed a startling assortment of
+alcohols. In a word, Aristide procured for his
+friends prodigious diversion.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How do you like this, old girl?&rdquo; Batterby asked
+one night, at the Moulin de la Galette, a dizzying,
+not very decorous, and to the unsophisticated visitor
+a dangerous place of entertainment. &ldquo;Better
+than Great Coram Street, isn&#8217;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She smiled and laid her hand on his. She was
+a woman of few words but of many caressing
+actions.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I ought to let you into a secret,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;This
+is our honeymoon.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Who would have thought it?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img220" id="img220"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 401px;">
+<img src="images/img220.jpg" width="401" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">fleurette danced with aristide, as light as an autumn leaf
+tossed by the wind</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A fortnight ago she was being killed in a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+Bloomsbury boarding-house. There were two of
+&#8217;em&mdash;she and a girl called Carrie. I used to call
+&#8217;em Fetch and Carrie. This one was Fetch. Well,
+she fetched me, didn&#8217;t you, old girl? And now
+you&#8217;re Mrs. Reginald Batterby, living at your ease,
+eh?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame would grace any sphere,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I wish I had more education,&rdquo; said Fleurette,
+humbly. &ldquo;M. Pujol and yourself are so clever that
+you must laugh at me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;We do sometimes, but you mustn&#8217;t mind us.
+Remember&mdash;at the what-you-call-it&mdash;the little
+shanty at Versailles&mdash;&mdash;?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The Grand Trianon,&rdquo; replied Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s it. When you were showing us the
+rooms. &lsquo;What is the Empress Josephine doing
+now?&rsquo;&rdquo; He mimicked her accent. &ldquo;Ha! ha! And
+the poor soul gone to glory a couple of hundred
+years ago.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The little mouth puckered at the corners and
+moisture gathered in the blue eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mais, mon Dieu</em>, it was natural, the mistake,&rdquo;
+cried Aristide, gallantly. &ldquo;The Empress Eug&eacute;nie,
+the wife of another Napoleon, is still living.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Bien s&ucirc;r</em>,&rdquo; said Fleurette. &ldquo;How was I to
+know?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Never mind, old girl,&rdquo; said Batterby. &ldquo;You&#8217;re
+living all right, and out of that beastly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+boarding-house, and that&#8217;s the chief thing. Another month
+of it would have killed her. She had a cough that
+shook her to bits. She&#8217;s looking better already,
+isn&#8217;t she, Pujol?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>After this Aristide learned much of her simple
+history, which she, at first, had been too shy to
+reveal. The child of Finnish sea-folk who had
+drifted to Brest and died there, she had been
+adopted by an old Breton sea-dog and his wife.
+On their death she had entered, as maid, the service
+of an English lady residing in the town, who afterwards
+had taken her to England. After a while
+reverses of fortune had compelled the lady to dismiss
+her, and she had taken the situation in the
+boarding-house, where she had ruined her health
+and met the opulent and conquering Batterby.
+She had not much chance, poor child, of acquiring
+a profound knowledge of the history of the First
+Empire; but her manners were refined and her ways
+gentle and her voice was soft; and Aristide, citizen
+of the world, for whom caste distinctions existed
+not, thought her the most exquisite flower grown in
+earth&#8217;s garden. He told her so, much to her blushing
+satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>One night, about three weeks after the Batterbys&#8217;
+arrival in Paris, Batterby sent his wife to bed
+and invited Aristide to accompany him for half
+an hour to a neighbouring caf&eacute;. He looked grave
+and troubled.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+&ldquo;I&#8217;ve been upset by a telegram,&rdquo; said he, when
+drinks had been ordered. &ldquo;I&#8217;m called away to New
+York on business. I must catch the boat from
+Cherbourg to-morrow evening. Now, I can&#8217;t take
+Fleurette with me. Women and business don&#8217;t mix.
+She has jolly well got to stay here. I sha&#8217;n&#8217;t be
+away more than a month. I&#8217;ll leave her plenty
+of money to go on with. But what&#8217;s worrying me
+is&mdash;how is she going to stick it? So look here, old
+man, you&#8217;re my pal, aren&#8217;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He stretched out his hand. Aristide grasped it
+impulsively.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why, of course, <em>mon vieux!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If I felt that I could leave her in your charge,
+all on the square, as a real straight pal&mdash;I should
+go away happy.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She shall be my sister,&rdquo; cried Aristide, &ldquo;and I
+shall give her all the devotion of a brother....
+I swear it&mdash;<em>tiens</em>&mdash;what can I swear it on?&rdquo; He
+flung out his arms and looked round the caf&eacute; as
+if in search of an object. &ldquo;I swear it on the head
+of my mother. Have no fear. I, Aristide Pujol,
+have never betrayed the sacred obligations of
+friendship. I accept her as a consecrated trust.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You only need to have said &lsquo;Right-o,&rsquo; and I
+would have believed you,&rdquo; said Batterby. &ldquo;I
+haven&#8217;t told her yet. There&#8217;ll be blubbering all
+night. Let us have another drink.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>When Aristide arrived at the H&ocirc;tel du Soleil
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+et de l&#8217;Ecosse at nine o&#8217;clock the next morning he
+found that Batterby had left Paris by an early
+train. Fleurette he did not meet until he brought
+back the sight-seers to the fold in the evening. She
+had wept much during the day; but she smiled
+bravely on Aristide. A woman could not stand in
+the way of her husband&#8217;s business.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;By the way, what is Reginald&#8217;s business?&rdquo;
+Aristide asked.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know. Reginald never spoke to
+her of such things; perhaps she was too ignorant
+to understand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But he will make a lot of money by going to
+America,&rdquo; she said. Then she was silent for a
+few moments. &ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu!</em>&rdquo; she sighed, at last.
+&ldquo;How long the day has been!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It was the beginning of many long days for
+Fleurette. Reginald did not write from Cherbourg
+or cable from New York, as he had promised,
+and the return American mail brought no
+letter. The days passed drearily. Sometimes, for
+the sake of human society, she accompanied the
+tourist parties of the Agence Pujol; but the thrill
+had passed from the Morgue and the glory had
+departed from Versailles. Sometimes she wandered
+out by herself into the streets and public
+gardens; but, pretty, unprotected, and fragile, she
+attracted the attention of evil or careless men,
+which struck cold terror into her heart. Most
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+often she sat alone and listless in the hotel, reading
+the feuilleton of the <em>Petit Journal</em>, and waiting
+for the post to bring her news.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu</em>, M. Pujol, what can have happened?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing at all, <em>ch&egrave;re petite madame</em>&rdquo;&mdash;question
+and answer came many times a day. &ldquo;Only some
+foolish mischance which will soon be explained.
+The good Reginald has written and his letter has
+been lost in the post. He has been obliged to go
+on business to San Francisco or Buenos Ayres&mdash;<em>et,
+que voulez-vous?</em> one cannot have letters from
+those places in twenty-four hours.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If only he had taken me with him!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, dear Mme. Fleurette, he could not expose
+you to the hardships of travel. You, who are as
+fragile as a cobweb, how could you go to Patagonia
+or Senegal or Baltimore, those wild places
+where there are no comforts for women? You
+must be reasonable. I am sure you will get a letter
+soon&mdash;or else in a day or two he will come,
+with his good, honest face as if nothing had occurred&mdash;these
+English are like that&mdash;and call for
+whisky and soda. Be comforted, <em>ch&egrave;re petite madame</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide did his best to comfort her, threw her
+in the companionship of decent women staying at
+the hotel, and devoted his evenings to her entertainment.
+But the days passed, and Reginald Batterby,
+with the good, honest face, neither wrote
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+nor ordered whisky and soda. Fleurette began
+to pine and fade.</p>
+
+<p>One day she came to Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;M. Pujol, I have no more money left.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Bigre!</em>&rdquo; said Pujol. &ldquo;The good Bocardon will
+have to give you credit. I&#8217;ll arrange it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I already owe for three weeks,&rdquo; said Fleurette.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide sought Bocardon. One week more was
+all the latter dared allow.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But her husband will return and pay you. He
+is my old and intimate friend. I make myself
+hoarse in telling it to you, wooden-head that you
+are!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But Bocardon, who had to account to higher
+powers, the proprietors of the hotel, was helpless.
+At the end of the week Fleurette was called upon
+to give up her room. She wept with despair; Aristide
+wept with fury; Bocardon wept out of sympathy.
+Already, said Bocardon, the proprietors
+would blame him for not using the legal right to
+detain madame&#8217;s luggage.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!</em> what is to become of
+me?&rdquo; wailed Fleurette.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You forget, madame,&rdquo; said Aristide, with one
+of his fine flourishes, &ldquo;that you are the sacred
+trust of Aristide Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I can&#8217;t accept your money,&rdquo; objected Fleurette.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+&ldquo;<em>Tron de l&#8217;air!</em>&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Did your husband
+put you in my charge or did he not? Am I your
+legal guardian, or am I not? If I am your legal
+guardian, what right have you to question the arrangements
+made by your husband? Answer me
+that.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Fleurette, too gentle and too miserable for intricate
+argument, sighed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But it is your money, all the same.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide turned to Bocardon. &ldquo;Try,&rdquo; said he,
+&ldquo;to convince a woman! Do you want proofs?
+Wait there a minute while I get them from the
+safe of the Agence Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He disappeared into the bureau, where, secure
+from observation, he tore an oblong strip from a
+sheet of stiff paper, and, using an indelible pencil,
+wrote out something fantastic halfway between a
+cheque and a bill of exchange, forged as well as
+he could from memory the signature of Reginald
+Batterby&mdash;the imitation of handwriting was one
+of Aristide&#8217;s many odd accomplishments&mdash;and made
+the document look legal by means of a receipt
+stamp, which he took from Bocardon&#8217;s drawer. He
+returned to the vestibule with the strip folded and
+somewhat crumpled in his hand. &ldquo;<em>Voil&agrave;</em>,&rdquo; said
+he, handing it boldly to Fleurette. &ldquo;Here is your
+husband&#8217;s guarantee to me, your guardian, for four
+thousand francs.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Fleurette examined the forgery. The stamp
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+impressed her. For the simple souls of France there
+is magic in <em>papier timbr&eacute;</em>.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It was my husband who wrote this?&rdquo; she asked,
+curiously.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mais, oui</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide, with an offended air
+of challenge.</p>
+
+<p>Fleurette&#8217;s eyes filled again with tears.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I only inquired,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;because this is the
+first time I have seen his handwriting.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ma pauvre petite</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I will do whatever you tell me, M. Pujol,&rdquo;
+said Fleurette, humbly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good! That is talking like <em>une bonne petite
+dame raisonnable</em>. Now, I know a woman made
+up of holy bread whom St. Paul and St. Peter
+are fighting to have next them when she goes to
+Paradise. Her name is Mme. Bidoux, and she
+sells cabbages and asparagus and charcoal at No.
+213 bis, Rue Saint-Honor&eacute;. She will arrange our
+little affair. Bocardon, will you have madame&#8217;s
+trunks sent to that address?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He gave his arm to Fleurette, and walked out of
+the hotel, with serene confidence in the powers of
+the sainted Mme. Bidoux. Fleurette accompanied
+him unquestioningly. Of course she might have
+said: &ldquo;If you hold negotiable security from my
+husband to the amount of four thousand francs,
+why should I exchange the comforts of the hotel
+for the doubtful accommodation of the sainted
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+Mme. Bidoux who sells cabbages?&rdquo; But I repeat
+that Fleurette was a simple soul who took for
+granted the wisdom of so flamboyant and virile a
+creature as Aristide Pujol.</p>
+
+<p>Away up at the top of No. 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honor&eacute;,
+was a little furnished room to let, and
+there Aristide installed his sacred charge. Mme.
+Bidoux, who, as she herself maintained, would
+have cut herself into four pieces for Aristide&mdash;did
+he not save her dog&#8217;s life? Did he not marry her
+daughter to the brigadier of gendarmes (<em>sale
+voyou!</em>), who would otherwise have left her lamenting?
+Was he not the most wonderful of God&#8217;s
+creatures?&mdash;Mme. Bidoux, although not quite appreciating
+Aristide&#8217;s quixotic delicacy, took the forlorn
+and fragile wisp of misery to her capacious
+bosom. She made her free of the cabbages and
+charcoal. She provided her, at a risible charge,
+with succulent meals. She told her tales of her
+father and mother, of her neighbours, of the domestic
+differences between the concierge and his
+wife (soothing idyll for an Ariadne!), of the dirty
+thief of a brigadier of gendarmes, of her bodily
+ailments&mdash;her body was so large that they were
+many; of the picturesque death, through apoplexy,
+of the late M. Bidoux; the brave woman, in short,
+gave her of her heart&#8217;s best. As far as human
+hearts could provide a bed for Fleurette, that bed
+was of roses. As a matter of brutal fact, it was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+narrow and nubbly, and the little uncarpeted room
+was ten feet by seven; but to provide it Aristide
+went to his own bed hungry. And if the bed of a
+man&#8217;s hunger is not to be accounted as one of roses,
+there ought to be a vote for the reduction of the
+Recording Angel&#8217;s salary.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be imagined that Fleurette thought
+the bed hard. Her bed of life from childhood had
+been nubbly. She never dreamed of complaining
+of her little room under the stars, and she sat
+among the cabbages like a tired lily, quite contented
+with her material lot. But she drooped and
+drooped, and the cough returned and shook her;
+and Aristide, realizing the sacredness of his charge,
+became a prey to anxious terrors.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;M&egrave;re Bidoux,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;she must have lots
+of good, nourishing, tender, underdone beef, good
+fillets, and <em>entrec&ocirc;tes saignantes</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mme. Bidoux sighed. She had a heart, but
+she also had a pocket which, like Aristide&#8217;s, was
+not over-filled. &ldquo;That costs dear, my poor friend,&rdquo;
+she said.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What does it matter what it costs? It is I who
+provide,&rdquo; said Aristide, grandly.</p>
+
+<p>And Aristide gave up tobacco and coffee and
+the mild refreshment at caf&eacute;s essential to the existence
+of every Frenchman, and degraded his soul
+by taking half-franc tips from tourists&mdash;a source
+of income which, as Director, M. le Directeur,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+Herr Direktor of the Agence Pujol, he had hitherto
+scorned haughtily&mdash;in order to provide Fleurette
+with underdone beefsteaks.</p>
+
+<p>All his leisure he devoted to her. She represented
+something that hitherto had not come into
+his life&mdash;something delicate, tender, ethereal, something
+of woman that was exquisitely adorable,
+apart from the flesh. Once, as he was sitting in
+the little shop, she touched his temple lightly with
+her fingers.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, you are good to me, Aristide.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He felt a thrill such as no woman&#8217;s touch had
+ever caused to pass through him&mdash;far, far sweeter,
+cleaner, purer. If the <em>bon Dieu</em> could have given
+her to him then and there to be his wife, what bond
+could have been holier? But he had bound himself
+by a sacred obligation. His friend on his return
+should find him loyal.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Who could help being good to you, little Fleurette?&rdquo;
+said he. &ldquo;Even an Apache would not tread
+on a lily of the valley!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But you put me in water and tend me so carefully.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;So that you can be fresh whenever the dear
+Reginald comes back.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She sighed. &ldquo;Tell me what I can do for you,
+my good Aristide.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Keep well and happy and be a valiant little
+woman,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+Fleurette tried hard to be valiant; but the effort
+exhausted her strength. As the days went on, even
+Aristide&#8217;s inexhaustible conversation failed to distract
+her from brooding. She lost the trick of
+laughter. In the evenings, when he was most
+with her, she would sit, either in the shop or in the
+little room at the back, her blue childish eyes fixed
+on him wistfully. At first he tried to lure her into
+the gay street; but walking tired her. He encouraged
+her to sit outside on the pavement of the
+Rue Saint-Honor&eacute; and join with Mme. Bidoux
+in the gossip of neighbours; but she listened to
+them with uncomprehending ears. In despair Aristide,
+to coax a smile from her lips, practised his
+many queer accomplishments. He conjured with
+cards; he juggled with oranges; he had a mountebank&#8217;s
+trick of putting one leg round his neck; he
+imitated the voices of cats and pigs and ducks,
+till Mme. Bidoux held her sides with mirth. He
+spent time and thought in elaborating what he
+called <em>bonnes farces</em>, such as dressing himself up
+in Mme. Bidoux&#8217;s raiment and personifying a
+crabbed customer.</p>
+
+<p>Fleurette smiled but listlessly at all these comicalities.</p>
+
+<p>One day she was taken ill. A doctor, summoned,
+said many learned words which Aristide and Mme.
+Bidoux tried hard to understand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, after all, what is the matter with her?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img234" id="img234"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/img234.jpg" width="400" height="500" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">aristide practised his many queer accomplishments</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+&ldquo;She has no strength to struggle. She wants
+happiness.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Can you tell me the druggist&#8217;s where that can
+be procured?&rdquo; asked Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;I tell you
+the truth. It is one of those pulmonary cases.
+Happy, she will live; unhappy, she will die.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My poor Mme. Bidoux, what is to be done?&rdquo;
+asked Aristide, after the doctor had gone off with
+his modest fee. &ldquo;How are we to make her happy?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If only she could have news of her husband!&rdquo;
+replied Mme. Bidoux.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide&#8217;s anxieties grew heavier. It was November,
+when knickerbockered and culture-seeking
+tourists no longer fill the cheap hotels of Paris.
+The profits of the Agence Pujol dwindled. Aristide
+lived on bread and cheese, and foresaw the
+time when cheese would be a sinful luxury. Meanwhile
+Fleurette had her nourishing food, and grew
+more like the ghost of a lily every day. But her
+eyes followed Aristide, wherever he went in her
+presence, as if he were the god of her salvation.</p>
+
+<p>One day Aristide, with an unexpected franc or
+two in his pocket, stopped in front of a <em>bureau de
+tabac</em>. A brown packet of caporal and a book of
+cigarette-papers&mdash;a cigarette rolled&mdash;how good it
+would be! He hesitated, and his glance fell on a
+collection of foreign stamps exposed in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+window. Among them were twelve Honduras stamps
+all postmarked. He stared at them, fascinated.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon brave Aristide!</em>&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;If the <em>bon
+Dieu</em> does not send you these vibrating inspirations,
+it is because you yourself have already conceived
+them!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He entered the shop and emerged, not with caporal
+and cigarette-papers, but with the twelve Honduras
+stamps.</p>
+
+<p>That night he sat up in his little bedroom at
+No. 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honor&eacute;, until his candle
+failed, inditing a letter in English to Fleurette.
+At the head of his paper he wrote &ldquo;Hotel Rosario,
+Honduras.&rdquo; And at the end of the letter he signed
+the name of Reginald Batterby. Where Honduras
+was, he had but a vague idea. For Fleurette, at
+any rate, it would be somewhere at the other end
+of the world, and she would not question any want
+of accuracy in local detail. Just before the light
+went out he read the letter through with great
+pride. Batterby alluded to the many letters he
+had posted from remote parts of the globe, gave
+glowing forecasts of the fortune that Honduras
+had in store for him, reminded her that he had
+placed sufficient funds for her maintenance in the
+hands of Aristide Pujol, and assured her that the
+time was not far off when she would be summoned
+to join her devoted husband.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mme. Bidoux was right,&rdquo; said he, before going
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+to sleep. &ldquo;This is the only way to make her happy.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The next day Fleurette received the letter. The
+envelope bore the postmarked Honduras stamp. It
+had been rubbed on the dusty pavement to take
+off the newness. It was in her husband&#8217;s handwriting.
+There was no mistake about it&mdash;it was
+a letter from Honduras.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Are you happier now, little doubting female
+St. Thomas that you are?&rdquo; cried Aristide when
+she had told him the news.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled at him out of grateful eyes, and
+touched his hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Much happier, <em>mon bon ami</em>,&rdquo; she said, gently.</p>
+
+<p>Later in the day she handed him a letter addressed
+to Batterby. It had no stamp.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Will you post this for me, Aristide?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide put the letter in his pocket and turned
+sharply away, lest she should see a sudden rush
+of tears. He had not counted on this innocent
+trustfulness. He went to his room. The poor
+little letter! He had not the heart to destroy it.
+No; he would keep it till Batterby came; it was not
+his to destroy. So he threw it into a drawer.</p>
+
+<p>Having once begun the deception, however, he
+thought it necessary to continue. Every week,
+therefore, he invented a letter from Batterby. To
+interest her he drew upon his Proven&ccedil;al imagination.
+He described combats with crocodiles, lion-hunts,
+feasts with terrific savages from the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+interior, who brought their lady wives chastely clad
+in petticoats made out of human teeth; he drew
+pictures of the town, a kind of palm-shaded Paris
+by the sea, where one ate ortolans and oysters as
+big as soup-plates, and where Chinamen with pigtails
+rode about the streets on camels. It was not
+a correct description of Honduras, but, all the
+same, an exotic atmosphere stimulating and captivating
+rose from the pages. With this it was necessary
+to combine expressions of affection. At
+first it was difficult. Essential delicacy restrained
+him. He had also to keep in mind Batterby&#8217;s vernacular.
+To address Fleurette, impalpable creation
+of fairyland, as &ldquo;old girl&rdquo; was particularly distasteful.
+By degrees, however, the artist prevailed.
+And then at last the man himself took to forgetting
+the imaginary writer and poured out words of love,
+warm, true, and passionate.</p>
+
+<p>And every week Fleurette would smile and tell
+him the wondrous news, and would put into his
+hands an unstamped letter to post, which he, with
+a wrench of the heart, would add to the collection
+in the drawer.</p>
+
+<p>Once she said, diffidently, with an unwonted
+blush and her pale blue eyes swimming: &ldquo;I write
+English so badly. Won&#8217;t you read the letter and
+correct my mistakes?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But Aristide laughed and licked the flap of the
+envelope and closed it. &ldquo;What has love to do with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+spelling and grammar? The good Reginald would
+prefer your bad English to all the turned phrases
+of the Acad&eacute;mie Fran&ccedil;aise.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is as you like, Aristide,&rdquo; said Fleurette, with
+wistful eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in spite of the weekly letters, Fleurette continued
+to droop. The winter came, and Fleurette
+was no longer able to stay among the cabbages of
+Mme. Bidoux. She lay on her bed in the little
+room, ten feet by seven, away, away at the top of
+the house in the Rue Saint Honor&eacute;. The doctor,
+informed of her comparative happiness, again
+shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing more
+to be done.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She is dying, monsieur, for want of strength
+to live.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Then Aristide went about with a great heartache.
+Fleurette would die; she would never see
+the man she loved again. What would he say when
+he returned and learned the tragic story? He
+would not even know that Aristide, loving her, had
+been loyal to him. When the Director of the
+Agence Pujol personally conducted the clients of
+the H&ocirc;tel du Soleil et de l&#8217;Ecosse to the Grand
+Trianon and pointed out the bed of the Empress
+Josephine he nearly broke down.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What is the Empress doing now?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>What was Fleurette doing now? Going to join
+the Empress in the world of shadows.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+The tourists talked after the manner of their
+kind.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She must have found the bed very hard, poor
+dear.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Give me an iron bedstead and a good old spring
+mattress.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, but, my dear sir, you forget. The Empress&#8217;s
+bed was slung on the back of tame panthers
+which Napoleon brought from Egypt.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It was hard to jest convincingly to the knickerbockered
+with death in one&#8217;s soul.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Most belov&egrave;d little Flower,&rdquo; ran the last letter
+that Fleurette received, &ldquo;I have just had a cable
+from Aristide saying that you are very ill. I will
+come to you as soon as I can. <em>Ces petits yeux de
+pervenche</em>&mdash;I am learning your language here, you
+see&mdash;haunt me day and night ...&rdquo; etcetera,
+etcetera.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide went up to her room with a great bunch
+of chrysanthemums. The letter peeped from under
+the pillow. Fleurette was very weak. Mme. Bidoux,
+who, during Fleurette&#8217;s illness, had allowed
+her green grocery business to be personally conducted
+to the deuce by a youth of sixteen very
+much in love with the lady who sold sausages and
+other <em>charcuterie</em> next door, had spread out the
+fortune-telling cards on the bed and was prophesying
+mendaciously. Fleurette took the flowers and
+clasped them to her bosom.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+&ldquo;No letter for <em>ce cher Reginald</em>?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. &ldquo;I can write no more,&rdquo; she
+whispered.</p>
+
+<p>She closed her eyes. Presently she said, in a
+low voice:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Aristide&mdash;if you kiss me, I think I can go to
+sleep.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He bent down to kiss her forehead. A fragile
+arm twined itself about his neck and he kissed her
+on the lips.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She is sleeping,&rdquo; said Mme. Bidoux, after a
+while.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide tiptoed out of the room.</p>
+
+<p>And so died Fleurette. Aristide borrowed money
+from the kind-hearted Bocardon for a beautiful
+funeral, and Mme. Bidoux and Bocardon and a
+few neighbours and himself saw her laid to rest.
+When they got back to the Rue Saint Honor&eacute; he
+told Mme. Bidoux about the letters. She wept and
+clasped him, weeping too, in her kind, fat old arms.</p>
+
+<p>The next evening Aristide, coming back from his
+day&#8217;s work at the H&ocirc;tel du Soleil et de l&#8217;Ecosse,
+was confronted in the shop by Mme. Bidoux,
+hands on broad hips.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tiens, mon petit</em>,&rdquo; she said, without preliminary
+greeting. &ldquo;You are an angel. I knew it. But
+that a man&#8217;s an angel is no reason for his being an
+imbecile. Read this.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She plucked a paper from her apron pocket and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+thrust it into his hand. He read it, and blinked in
+amazement.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Where did you get this, M&egrave;re Bidoux?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Where I got many more. In your drawer.
+The letters you were saving for this infamous
+scoundrel. I wanted to know what she had written
+to him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;M&egrave;re Bidoux!&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;Those letters
+were sacred!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; said Mme. Bidoux, unabashed. &ldquo;There
+is nothing sacred to a sapper or an old grandmother
+who loves an imbecile. I have read the letters, <em>et
+voil&agrave;, et voil&agrave;, et voil&agrave;!</em>&rdquo; And she emptied her
+pockets of all the letters, minus the envelopes, that
+Fleurette had written.</p>
+
+<p>And, after one swift glance at the first letter,
+Aristide had no compunction in reading. They
+were all addressed to himself.</p>
+
+<p>They were very short, ill-written in a poor little
+uncultivated hand. But they all contained one message,
+that of her love for Aristide. Whatever illusions
+she may have had concerning Batterby had
+soon vanished. She knew, with the unerring instinct
+of woman, that he had betrayed and deserted
+her. Aristide&#8217;s pious fraud had never deceived her
+for a second. Too gentle, too timid to let him
+know what was in her heart, she had written the
+secret patiently week after week, hoping every time
+that curiosity, or pity, or something&mdash;she knew not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+what&mdash;would induce him to open the idle letter, and
+wondering in her simple peasant&#8217;s soul at the
+delicacy that caused him to refrain. Once she had
+boldly given him the envelope unclosed.</p>
+
+<a name="img244" id="img244"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 465px;">
+<img src="images/img244.jpg" width="465" height="500" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">he read it, and blinked in amazement</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She died for want of love, <em>parbleu</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide,
+&ldquo;and there was mine quivering in my heart
+and trembling on my lips all the time.... She
+had <em>des yeux de pervenche</em>. Ah! <em>nom d&#8217;un chien!</em>
+It is only with me that Providence plays such
+tricks.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He walked to the window and looked out into
+the grey street. Presently I heard him murmuring
+the words of the old French song:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+Elle est morte en f&eacute;vrier;<br />
+    Pauvre Colinette!</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>THE ADVENTURE OF THE MIRACLE</strong></p>
+
+
+<p>You have seen how Aristide, by attaching
+himself to the H&ocirc;tel du Soleil et de l&#8217;Ecosse
+as a kind of glorified courier, had founded
+the Agence Pujol. As he, personally, was the
+Agence, and the Agence was he, it happened that
+when he was not in attendance at the hotel, the
+Agence faded into space, and when he made his
+appearance in the vestibule and hung up his placard
+by the bureau, the Agence at once burst again into
+the splendour of existence. Apparently the fitful
+career of the Agence Pujol lasted some years.
+Whenever a chance of more remunerative employment
+turned up, Aristide took it and dissolved the
+Agence. Whenever outrageous fortune chivied
+him with slings and arrows penniless to Paris, there
+was always the Agence waiting to be resuscitated.</p>
+
+<p>It was during one of these periodic flourishings
+of the Agence Pujol that Aristide met the Ducksmiths.</p>
+
+<p>Business was slack, few guests were at the hotel,
+and of those few none desired to be personally
+conducted to the Louvre or Notre Dame or the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+monument in the Place de la Bastille. They mostly
+wore the placid expression of folks engaged in business
+affairs instead of the worried look of pleasure-seekers.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My good Bocardon,&rdquo; said Aristide, lounging
+by the bureau and addressing his friend the manager,
+&ldquo;this is becoming desperate. In another
+minute I shall take you out by main force and show
+you the Pont Neuf.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the door of the stuffy salon
+opened, and a travelling Briton, whom Aristide
+had not seen before, advanced to the bureau and
+inquired his way to the Madeleine. Aristide turned
+on him like a flash.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; said he, extracting documents from his
+pockets with lightning rapidity, &ldquo;nothing would
+give me greater pleasure than to conduct you
+thither. My card. My tariff. My advertisement.&rdquo;
+He pointed to the placard. &ldquo;I am the managing director
+of the Agence Pujol, under the special patronage
+of this hotel. I undertake all travelling arrangements,
+from the Moulin Rouge to the Pyramids,
+and, as you see, my charges are moderate.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Briton, holding the documents in a pudgy
+hand, looked at the swift-gestured director with
+portentous solemnity. Then, with equal solemnity,
+he looked at Bocardon.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur Ducksmith,&rdquo; said the latter, &ldquo;you can
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+repose every confidence in Monsieur Aristide
+Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Umph!&rdquo; said Mr. Ducksmith.</p>
+
+<p>After another solemn inspection of Aristide, he
+stuck a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on his fleshy
+nose and perused the documents. He was a fat,
+heavy man of about fifty years of age, and his
+scanty hair was turning grey. His puffy cheeks
+hung jowl-like, giving him the appearance of some
+odd dog&mdash;a similarity greatly intensified by the
+eye-sockets, the lower lids of which were dragged
+down in the middle, showing the red like a bloodhound&#8217;s;
+but here the similarity ended, for the
+man&#8217;s eyes, dull and blue, had the unspeculative
+fixity of a rabbit&#8217;s. His mouth, small and weak,
+dribbled away at the corners into the jowls which,
+in their turn, melted into two or three chins. He
+was decently dressed in grey tweeds, and wore a
+diamond ring on his little finger.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Umph!&rdquo; said he, at last; and went back to the
+salon.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the door closed behind him Aristide
+sprang into an attitude of indignation.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Did you ever see such a bear! If I ever saw
+a bigger one I would eat him without salt or pepper.
+<em>Mais nom d&#8217;un chien</em>, such people ought to
+be made into sausages!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Fl&egrave;gme britannique!</em>&rdquo; laughed Bocardon.</p>
+
+<p>Half an hour passed, and Mr. Ducksmith made
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+no reappearance from the salon. In the forlorn
+hope of a client Aristide went in after him. He
+found Mr. Ducksmith, glasses on nose, reading a
+newspaper, and a plump, black-haired lady, with an
+expressionless face, knitting a grey woollen sock.
+Why they should be spending their first morning&mdash;and
+a crisp, sunny morning, too&mdash;in Paris in the
+murky staleness of this awful little salon, Aristide
+could not imagine. As he entered, Mr. Ducksmith
+regarded him vacantly over the top of his gold-rimmed
+glasses.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have looked in,&rdquo; said Aristide, with his ingratiating
+smile, &ldquo;to see whether you are ready to
+go to the Madeleine.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madeleine?&rdquo; the lady inquired, softly, pausing
+in her knitting.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; Aristide came forward, and, hand
+on heart, made her the lowest of bows. &ldquo;Madame,
+have I the honour of speaking to Madame Ducksmith?
+Enchanted, madame, to make your acquaintance,&rdquo;
+he continued, after a grunt from Mr.
+Ducksmith had assured him of the correctness of
+his conjecture. &ldquo;I am Monsieur Aristide Pujol,
+director of the Agence Pujol, and my poor services
+are absolutely at your disposal.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He drew himself up, twisted his moustache, and
+met her eyes&mdash;they were rather sad and tired&mdash;with
+the roguish mockery of his own. She turned
+to her husband.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Are you thinking of going to the Madeleine,
+Bartholomew?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am, Henrietta,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I have decided to
+do it. And I have also decided to put ourselves
+in the charge of this gentleman. Mrs. Ducksmith
+and I are accustomed to all the conveniences of
+travel&mdash;I may say that we are great travellers&mdash;and
+I leave it to you to make the necessary arrangements.
+I prefer to travel at so much per head per
+day.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He spoke in a wheezy, solemn monotone, from
+which all elements of life and joy seemed to have
+been eliminated. His wife&#8217;s voice, though softer
+in timbre, was likewise devoid of colour.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My husband finds that it saves us from responsibilities,&rdquo;
+she remarked.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And over-charges, and the necessity of learning
+foreign languages, which at our time of life would
+be difficult. During all our travels we have not
+been to Paris before, owing to the impossibility of
+finding a personally-conducted tour of an adequate
+class.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then, my dear sir,&rdquo; cried Aristide, &ldquo;it is Providence
+itself that has put you in the way of the
+Agence Pujol. I will now conduct you to the
+Madeleine without the least discomfort or danger.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Put on your hat, Henrietta,&rdquo; said Mr. Ducksmith,
+&ldquo;while this gentleman and I discuss terms.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducksmith gathered up her knitting and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+retired, Aristide dashing to the door to open it for
+her. This gallantry surprised her ever so little, for
+a faint flush came into her cheek and the shadow of
+a smile into her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I wish you to understand, Mr. Pujol,&rdquo; said Mr.
+Ducksmith, &ldquo;that being, I may say, a comparatively
+rich man, I can afford to pay for certain luxuries;
+but I made a resolution many years ago, which has
+stood me in good stead during my business life,
+that I would never be cheated. You will find me
+liberal but just.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He was as good as his word. Aristide, who had
+never in his life exploited another&#8217;s wealth to his
+own advantage, suggested certain terms, on the
+basis of so much per head per day, which Mr.
+Ducksmith declared, with a sigh of relief, to be
+perfectly satisfactory.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; said he, after further conversation,
+&ldquo;you will be good enough to schedule out a month&#8217;s
+railway tour through France, and give me an inclusive
+estimate for the three of us. As I say, Mrs.
+Ducksmith and I are great travellers&mdash;we have
+been to Norway, to Egypt, to Morocco and the
+Canaries, to the Holy Land, to Rome, and lovely
+Lucerne&mdash;but we find that attention to the trivial
+detail of travel militates against our enjoyment.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;trust in me, and
+your path and that of the charming Mrs. Ducksmith
+will be strewn with roses.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+Whereupon Mrs. Ducksmith appeared, arrayed
+for walking out, and Aristide, having ordered a
+cab, drove with them to the Madeleine. They
+alighted in front of the majestic flight of steps.
+Mr. Ducksmith stared at the classical portico supported
+on its Corinthian columns with his rabbit-like,
+unspeculative gaze&mdash;he had those filmy blue
+eyes that never seem to wink&mdash;and after a moment
+or two turned away.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Umph!&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducksmith, dutiful and silent, turned away
+also.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;This sacred edifice,&rdquo; Aristide began, in his best
+cicerone manner, &ldquo;was built, after a classic model,
+by the great Napoleon, as a Temple of Fame. It
+was afterwards used as a church. You will observe&mdash;and,
+if you care to, you can count, as a conscientious
+American lady did last week&mdash;the fifty-six
+Corinthian columns. You will see they are Corinthian
+by the acanthus leaves on the capitals. For
+the vulgar, who have no architectural knowledge,
+I have <em>memoria technica</em> for the instant recognition
+of the three orders&mdash;Cabbages, Corinthian; horns,
+Ionic; anything else, Doric. We will now mount
+the steps and inspect the interior.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He was dashing off in his eager fashion, when
+Mr. Ducksmith laid a detaining hand on his arm.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said he, solemnly. &ldquo;I disapprove of
+Popish interiors. Take us to the next place.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img254" id="img254"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/img254.jpg" width="400" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">he might as well have pointed out the marvels of kubla khan&#8217;s
+pleasure-dome to a couple of guinea-pigs</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+He entered the waiting victoria. His wife
+meekly followed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose the Louvre is the next place?&rdquo; said
+Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I leave it to you,&rdquo; said Mr. Ducksmith.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide gave the order to the cabman and took
+the little seat in the cab facing his employers. On
+the way down the Rue Royale and the Rue de
+Rivoli he pointed out the various buildings of interest&mdash;Maxim&#8217;s,
+the Cercle Royal, the Minist&egrave;re
+de la Marine, the H&ocirc;tel Continental. Two expressionless
+faces, two pairs of unresponsive eyes, met
+his merry glance. He might as well have pointed
+out the marvels of Kubla Khan&#8217;s pleasure-dome to
+a couple of guinea-pigs.</p>
+
+<p>The cab stopped at the entrance to the galleries
+of the Louvre. They entered and walked up the
+great staircase on the turn of which the Winged
+Victory stands, with the wind of God in her vesture,
+proclaiming to each beholder the deathless,
+ever-soaring, ever-conquering spirit of man,
+and heralding the immortal glories of the souls,
+wind-swept likewise by the wind of God,
+that are enshrined in the treasure-houses beyond.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There!&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Umph! No head,&rdquo; said Mr. Ducksmith, passing
+it by with scarcely a glance.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Would it cost very much to get a new one?&rdquo;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
+asked Mrs. Ducksmith, timidly. She was three or
+four paces behind her spouse.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It would cost the blood and tears and laughter
+of the human race,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>(&ldquo;That was devilish good, wasn&#8217;t it?&rdquo; remarked
+Aristide, when telling me this story. He always
+took care not to hide his light under the least possibility
+of a bushel.)</p>
+
+<p>The Ducksmiths looked at him in their lacklustre
+way, and allowed themselves to be guided
+into the picture-galleries, vaguely hearing Aristide&#8217;s
+comments, scarcely glancing at the pictures,
+and manifesting no sign of interest in anything
+whatever. From the Louvre they drove to Notre
+Dame, where the same thing happened. The
+venerable pile, standing imperishable amid the vicissitudes
+of centuries (the phrase was that of the
+director of the Agence Pujol), stirred in their
+bosoms no perceptible emotion. Mr. Ducksmith
+grunted and declined to enter; Mrs. Ducksmith
+said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>As with pictures and cathedrals, so it was with
+their food at lunch. Beyond a solemn statement
+to the effect that in their quality of practised
+travellers they made a point of eating the food and
+drinking the wine of the country, Mr. Ducksmith
+did not allude to the meal. At any rate, thought
+Aristide, they don&#8217;t clamour for underdone chops
+and tea. So far they were human. Nor did they
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+maintain an awful silence during the repast. On
+the contrary, Mr. Ducksmith loved to talk&mdash;in a
+dismal, pompous way&mdash;chiefly of British politics.
+His method of discourse was to place himself in
+the position of those in authority and to declare
+what he would do in any given circumstances.
+Now, unless the interlocutor adopts the same
+method and declares what <em>he</em> would do, conversation
+is apt to become one-sided. Aristide, having
+no notion of a policy should he find himself exercising
+the functions of the British Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, cheerfully tried to change the ground
+of debate.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What would you do, Mr. Ducksmith, if you
+were King of England?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I should try to rule the realm like a Christian
+statesman,&rdquo; replied Mr. Ducksmith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I should have a devil of a time!&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I beg your pardon?&rdquo; said Mr. Ducksmith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I should have a&mdash;ah, I see&mdash;<em>pardon</em>. I
+should&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; He looked from one paralyzing face
+to the other, and threw out his arms. &ldquo;<em>Parbleu!</em>&rdquo;
+said he, &ldquo;I should decapitate your Mrs. Grundy,
+and make it compulsory for bishops to dance once
+a week in Trafalgar Square. <em>Tiens!</em> I would have
+it a capital offence for any English cook to prepare
+hashed mutton without a license, and I would banish
+all the bakers of the kingdom to Siberia&mdash;ah!
+your English bread, which you have to eat stale
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+so as to avoid a horrible death!&mdash;and I would open
+two hundred thousand <em>caf&eacute;s</em>&mdash;<em>mon Dieu!</em> how
+thirsty I have been there!&mdash;and I would make
+every English work-girl do her hair properly, and
+I would ordain that everybody should laugh three
+times a day, under pain of imprisonment for life.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am afraid, Mr. Pujol,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Ducksmith,
+seriously, &ldquo;you would not be acting as a constitutional
+monarch. There is such a thing as the
+British Constitution, which foreigners are bound
+to admire, even though they may not understand.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;To be a king must be a great responsibility,&rdquo;
+said Mrs. Ducksmith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;you have uttered a
+profound truth.&rdquo; And to himself he murmured,
+though he should not have done so, &ldquo;<em>Nom de Dieu!
+Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>After lunch they drove to Versailles, which they
+inspected in the same apathetic fashion; then they
+returned to the hotel, where they established themselves
+for the rest of the day in the airless salon,
+Mr. Ducksmith reading English newspapers and
+his wife knitting a grey woollen sock.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon vieux!</em>&rdquo; said Aristide to Bocardon, &ldquo;they
+are people of a nightmare. They are automata endowed
+with the faculty of digestion. <em>Ce sont des
+gens invraisemblables.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Paris providing them, apparently, with no entertainment,
+they started, after a couple of days,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+<em>Aristide duce et auspice Pujol</em>, on their railway tour
+through France, to Aristide a pilgrimage of unimaginable
+depression. They began with Chartres,
+continued with the Ch&acirc;teaux of the Loire, and began
+to work their way south. Nothing that Aristide
+could do roused them from their apathy. They
+were exasperatingly docile, made few complaints,
+got up, entrained, detrained, fed, excursioned, slept,
+just as they were bidden. But they looked at nothing,
+enjoyed nothing (save perhaps English newspapers
+and knitting), and uttered nothing by way
+of criticism or appreciation when Aristide attempted
+to review the wonders through which they
+had passed. They did not care to know the history,
+authentic or Pujolic, of any place they visited; they
+were impressed by no scene of grandeur, no corner
+of exquisite beauty. To go on and on, in a dull,
+non-sentient way, so long as they were spared all
+forethought, all trouble, all afterthought, seemed to
+be their ideal of travel. Sometimes Aristide, after
+a fruitless effort to capture their interest, would
+hold his head, wondering whether he or the Ducksmith
+couple were insane. It was a dragon-fly personally
+conducting two moles through a rose-garden.</p>
+
+<p>Once only, during the early part of their journey,
+did a gleam of joyousness pierce the dull
+glaze of Mr. Ducksmith&#8217;s eyes. He had procured
+from the bookstall of a station a pile of English
+newspapers, and was reading them in the train,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+while his wife knitted the interminable sock. Suddenly
+he folded a <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, and handed it
+over to Aristide so that he should see nothing but a
+half-page advertisement. The great capitals leaped
+to Aristide&#8217;s eyes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+&ldquo;DUCKSMITH&#8217;S DELICATE JAMS.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am <em>the</em> Ducksmith,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I started and
+built up the business. When I found that I could
+retire, I turned it into a limited liability company,
+and now I am free and rich and able to enjoy the
+advantages of foreign travel.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducksmith started, sighed, and dropped a
+stitch.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Did you also make pickles?&rdquo; asked Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I did manufacture pickles, but I made my name
+in jam. In the trade you will find it an honoured
+one.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is that in every nursery in Europe,&rdquo; Aristide
+declared, with polite hyperbole.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have done my best to deserve my reputation,&rdquo;
+said Mr. Ducksmith, as impervious to flattery as to
+impressions of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>P&eacute;ca&iuml;re!</em>&rdquo; said Aristide to himself, &ldquo;how can I
+galvanize these corpses?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>As the soulless days went by this problem grew
+to be Aristide&#8217;s main solicitude. He felt strangled,
+choked, borne down by an intolerable weight.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+What could he do to stir their vitality? Should he
+fire off pistols behind them, just to see them jump?
+But would they jump? Would not Mr. Ducksmith
+merely turn his rabbit-eyes, set in their bloodhound
+sockets, vacantly on him, and assume that the detonations
+were part of the tour&#8217;s programme?
+Could he not fill him up with conflicting alcohols,
+and see what inebriety would do for him? But
+Mr. Ducksmith declined insidious potations. He
+drank only at meal-times, and sparingly. Aristide
+prayed that some Tha&iuml;s might come along, cast her
+spell upon him, and induce him to wink. He himself
+was powerless. His raciest stories fell on dull
+ears; none of his jokes called forth a smile. At
+last, having taken them to nearly all the historic
+ch&acirc;teaux of Touraine, without eliciting one cry of
+admiration, he gave Mr. Ducksmith up in despair
+and devoted his attention to the lady.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducksmith parted her smooth black hair in
+the middle and fastened it in a knob at the back of
+her head. Her clothes were good and new, but
+some desolate dressmaker had contrived to invest
+them with an air of hopeless dowdiness. At her
+bosom she wore a great brooch, containing intertwined
+locks of a grandfather and grandmother
+long since defunct. Her mind was as drearily
+equipped as her person. She had a vague idea that
+they were travelling in France; but if Aristide had
+told her that it was Japan she would have meekly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+accepted the information. She had no opinions.
+Still she was a woman, and Aristide, firm in his
+conviction that when it comes to love-making all
+women are the same, proceeded forthwith to make
+love to her.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; said he, one morning&mdash;she was knitting
+in the vestibule of the H&ocirc;tel du Faisan at
+Tours, Mr. Ducksmith being engaged, as usual, in
+the salon with his newspapers&mdash;&ldquo;how much more
+charming that beautiful grey dress would be if it
+had a spot of colour.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>His audacious hand placed a deep crimson rose
+against her corsage, and he stood away at arm&#8217;s
+length, his head on one side, judging the effect.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Magnificent! If madame would only do me
+the honour to wear it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducksmith took the flower hesitatingly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;m afraid my husband does not like colour,&rdquo;
+she said.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He must be taught,&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;You
+must teach him. I must teach him. Let us begin
+at once. Here is a pin.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He held the pin delicately between finger and
+thumb, and controlled her with his roguish eyes.
+She took the pin and fixed the rose to her dress.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t know what Mr. Ducksmith will say.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What he ought to say, madame, is &lsquo;Bountiful
+Providence, I thank Thee for giving me such a
+beautiful wife.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+Mrs. Ducksmith blushed and, to conceal her face,
+bent it over her resumed knitting. She made
+woman&#8217;s time-honoured response.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t think you ought to say such things, Mr.
+Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, madame,&rdquo; said he, lowering his voice; &ldquo;I
+have tried not to; but, <em>que voulez-vous</em>, it was
+stronger than I. When I see you going about like
+a little grey mouse&rdquo;&mdash;the lady weighed at least
+twelve stone&mdash;&ldquo;you, who ought to be ravishing the
+eyes of mankind, I feel indignation here&rdquo;&mdash;he
+thumped his chest; &ldquo;my Proven&ccedil;al heart is stirred.
+It is enough to make one weep.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t quite understand you, Mr. Pujol,&rdquo; she
+said, dropping stitches recklessly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, madame,&rdquo; he whispered&mdash;and the rascal&#8217;s
+whisper on such occasions could be very seductive&mdash;&ldquo;that
+I will never believe.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am too old to dress myself up in fine clothes,&rdquo;
+she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s an illusion,&rdquo; said he, with a wide-flung
+gesture, &ldquo;that will vanish at the first experiment.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ducksmith emerged from the salon, <em>Daily
+Telegraph</em> in hand. Mrs. Ducksmith shot a timid
+glance at him and the knitting needles clicked together
+nervously. But the vacant eyes of the heavy
+man seemed no more to note the rose on her bosom
+than they noted any point of beauty in landscape or
+building.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+Aristide went away chuckling, highly diverted
+by the success of his first effort. He had touched
+some hidden springs of feeling. Whatever might
+happen, at any rate, for the remainder of the tour
+he would not have to spend his emotional force in
+vain attempts to knock sparks out of a jelly-fish.
+He noticed with delight that at dinner that evening
+Mrs. Ducksmith, still wearing the rose, had modified
+the rigid sweep of her hair from the mid-parting.
+It gave just a wavy hint of coquetry. He
+made her a little bow and whispered, &ldquo;Charming!&rdquo;
+Whereupon she coloured and dropped her eyes.
+And during the meal, while Mr. Ducksmith discoursed
+on bounty-fed sugar, his wife and Aristide
+exchanged, across the table, the glances
+of conspirators. After dinner he approached
+her.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame, may I have the privilege of showing
+you the moon of Touraine?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She laid down her knitting. &ldquo;Bartholomew,
+will you come out?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her over his glasses and shook his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What is the good of looking at moonshine?
+The moon itself I have already seen.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So Aristide and Mrs. Ducksmith sat by themselves
+outside the hotel, and he expounded to her
+the beauty of moonlight and its intoxicating effect
+on folks in love.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Wouldn&#8217;t you like,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;to be lying on
+that white burnished cloud with your beloved kissing
+your feet?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What odd things you think of.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But wouldn&#8217;t you?&rdquo; he insinuated.</p>
+
+<p>Her bosom heaved and swelled on a sigh. She
+watched the strip of silver for a while and then
+murmured a wistful &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I can tell you of many odd things,&rdquo; said Aristide.
+&ldquo;I can tell you how flowers sing and what
+colour there is in the notes of birds. And how a
+cornfield laughs, and how the face of a woman
+who loves can outdazzle the sun. <em>Ch&egrave;re madame</em>,&rdquo;
+he went on, after a pause, touching her little plump
+hand, &ldquo;you have been hungering for beauty and
+thirsting for sympathy all your life. Isn&#8217;t that
+so?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You have always been misunderstood.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A tear fell. Our rascal saw the glistening drop
+with peculiar satisfaction. Poor Mrs. Ducksmith!
+It was a child&#8217;s game. <em>Enfin</em>, what woman could
+resist him? He had, however, one transitory
+qualm of conscience, for, with all his vagaries,
+Aristide was a kindly and honest man. Was it
+right to disturb those placid depths? Was it right
+to fill this woman with romantic aspirations that
+could never be gratified? He himself had not the
+slightest intention of playing Lothario and of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+wrecking the peace of the Ducksmith household.
+The realization of the saint-like purity of his aims
+reassured him. When he wanted to make love to a
+woman, <em>pour tout de bon</em>, it would not be to Mrs.
+Ducksmith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; said he to himself. &ldquo;I am doing a noble
+and disinterested act. I am restoring sight to the
+blind. I am giving life to one in a state of suspended
+animation. <em>Tron de l&#8217;Air!</em> I am playing
+the part of a soul-reviver! And, <em>parbleu!</em> it isn&#8217;t
+Jean or Jacques that can do that. It takes an Aristide
+Pujol!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So, having persuaded himself, in his Southern
+way, that he was executing an almost divine mission,
+he continued, with a zest now sharpened by
+an approving conscience, to revive Mrs. Ducksmith&#8217;s
+soul.</p>
+
+<p>The poor lady, who had suffered the blighting
+influence of Mr. Ducksmith for twenty years with
+never a ray of counteracting warmth from the outside,
+expanded like a flower to the sun under the
+soul-reviving process. Day by day she exhibited
+some fresh timid coquetry in dress and manner.
+Gradually she began to respond to Aristide&#8217;s suggestions
+of beauty in natural scenery and exquisite
+building. On the ramparts of Angoul&ecirc;me, daintiest
+of towns in France, she gazed at the smiling
+valleys of the Charente and the Son stretching
+away below, and of her own accord touched his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+arm lightly and said: &ldquo;How beautiful!&rdquo; She appealed
+to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Umph!&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>Once more (it had become a habit) she exchanged
+glances with Aristide. He drew her a little farther
+along, under pretext of pointing out the dreamy
+sweep of the Charente.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If he appreciates nothing at all, why on earth
+does he travel?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Her eyelids fluttered upwards for a fraction of
+a second.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s his mania,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He can never rest
+at home. He must always be going on&mdash;on.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How can you endure it?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She sighed. &ldquo;It is better now that you can
+teach me how to look at things.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good!&rdquo; thought Aristide. &ldquo;When I leave them
+she can teach him to look at things and revive his
+soul. Truly I deserve a halo.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>As Mr. Ducksmith appeared to be entirely unperceptive
+of his wife&#8217;s spiritual expansion, Aristide
+grew bolder in his apostolate. He complimented
+Mrs. Ducksmith to his face. He presented
+her daily with flowers. He scarcely waited for
+the heavy man&#8217;s back to be turned to make love to
+her. If she did not believe that she was the most
+beautiful, the most ravishing, the most delicate-souled
+woman in the world, it was through no fault
+of Aristide. Mr. Ducksmith went his pompous,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+unseeing way. At every stopping-place stacks of
+English daily papers awaited him. Sometimes,
+while Aristide was showing them the sights of a
+town&mdash;to which, by the way, he insisted on being
+conducted&mdash;he would extract a newspaper from his
+pocket and read with dull and dogged stupidity.
+Once Aristide caught him reading the advertisements
+for cooks and housemaids. In these circumstances
+Mrs. Ducksmith spiritually expanded at an
+alarming rate; and, correspondingly, dwindled the
+progress of Mr. Ducksmith&#8217;s sock.</p>
+
+<p>They arrived at Perigueux, in Perigord, land of
+truffles, one morning, in time for lunch. Towards
+the end of the meal the <em>ma&icirc;tre d&#8217;h&ocirc;tel</em> helped them
+to great slabs of <em>p&acirc;t&eacute; de foie gras</em>, made in the
+house&mdash;most of the hotel-keepers in Perigord make
+<em>p&acirc;t&eacute; de foie gras</em>, both for home consumption and
+for exportation&mdash;and waited expectant of their appreciation.
+He was not disappointed. Mr. Ducksmith,
+after a hesitating glance at the first mouthful,
+swallowed it, greedily devoured his slab, and,
+after pointing to his empty plate, said, solemnly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Plou.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Like Oliver, he asked for more.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tiens!</em>&rdquo; thought Aristide, astounded. &ldquo;Is he,
+too, developing a soul?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But, alas! there were no signs of it when they
+went their dreary round of the town in the usual
+ramshackle open cab. The cathedral of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+Saint-Front, extolled by Aristide and restored by Abadie&mdash;a
+terrible fellow who has capped with tops of pepper-castors
+every pre-Gothic building in France&mdash;gave
+him no thrill; nor did the picturesque, tumble-down
+ancient buildings on the banks of the Dordogne,
+nor the delicate Renaissance fa&ccedil;ades in the
+cool, narrow Rue du Lys.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;We will now go back to the hotel,&rdquo; said Mr.
+Ducksmith.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But have we seen it all?&rdquo; asked his wife.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;By no means,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;We will go back to the hotel,&rdquo; repeated her
+husband, in his expressionless tones. &ldquo;I have seen
+enough of Perigueux.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This was final. They drove back to the hotel.
+Mr. Ducksmith, without a word, went straight into
+the salon, leaving Aristide and his wife standing in
+the vestibule.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And you, madame,&rdquo; said Aristide; &ldquo;are you
+going to sacrifice the glory of God&#8217;s sunshine to
+the manufacture of woollen socks?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She smiled&mdash;she had caught the trick at last&mdash;and
+said, in happy submission: &ldquo;What would you
+have me do?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>With one hand he clasped her arm; with the
+other, in a superb gesture, he indicated the sunlit
+world outside.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Let us drain together,&rdquo; cried he, &ldquo;the loveliness
+of Perigueux to its dregs!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+Greatly daring, she followed him. It was a
+rapturous escapade&mdash;the first adventure of her life.
+She turned her comely face to him and he saw
+smiles round her lips and laughter in her eyes.
+Aristide, worker of miracles, strutted by her side
+choke-full of vanity. They wandered through the
+picturesque streets of the old town with the gaiety
+of truant children, peeping through iron gateways
+into old courtyards, venturing their heads into the
+murk of black stairways, talking (on the part
+of Aristide) with mothers who nursed chuckling
+babes on their doorsteps, crossing the thresholds,
+hitherto taboo, of churches, and meeting the mystery
+of coloured glass and shadows and the heavy
+smell of incense.</p>
+
+<p>Her hand was on his arm when they entered the
+flagged courtyard of an ancient palace, a stately
+medley of the centuries, with wrought ironwork in
+the balconies, tourelles, oriels, exquisite Renaissance
+ornaments on architraves, and a great central
+Gothic doorway, with great window-openings
+above, through which was visible the stone staircase
+of honour leading to the upper floors. In a corner
+stood a medi&aelig;val well, the sides curiously carved.
+One side of the courtyard blazed in sunshine, the
+other lay cool and grey in shadow. Not a human
+form or voice troubled the serenity of the spot. On
+a stone bench against the shady wall Aristide and
+Mrs. Ducksmith sat down to rest.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+&ldquo;<em>Voil&agrave;!</em>&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Here one can suck in
+all the past like an omelette. They had the feeling
+for beauty, those old fellows.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have wasted twenty years of my life,&rdquo; said
+Mrs. Ducksmith, with a sigh. &ldquo;Why didn&#8217;t I meet
+someone like you when I was young? Ah, you
+don&#8217;t know what my life has been, Mr. Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why not Aristide when we are alone? Why
+not, Henriette?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He too had the sense of adventure, and his eyes
+were more than usually compelling and his voice
+more seductive. For some reason or other, undivined
+by Aristide&mdash;over-excitement of nerves,
+perhaps&mdash;she burst into tears.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Henriette! Henriette, ne pleurez pas.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>His arm crept round her&mdash;he knew not how; her
+head sank on his shoulder, she knew not why&mdash;faithlessness
+to her lord was as far from her
+thoughts as murder or arson; but for one poor
+little moment in a lifetime it is good to weep on
+someone&#8217;s shoulder and to have someone&#8217;s sympathetic
+arm around one&#8217;s waist.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Pauvre petite femme!</em> And is it love she is
+pining for?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She sobbed; he lifted her chin with his free hand&mdash;and
+what less could mortal apostle do?&mdash;he kissed
+her on her wet cheek.</p>
+
+<p>A bellow like that of an angry bull caused them
+to start asunder. They looked up, and there was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+Mr. Ducksmith within a few yards of them, his
+face aflame, his rabbit&#8217;s eyes on fire with rage. He
+advanced, shook his fists in their faces.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;ve caught you! At last, after twenty years,
+I&#8217;ve caught you!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; cried Aristide, starting up, &ldquo;allow
+me to explain.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He swept Aristide aside like an intercepting
+willow-branch, and poured forth a torrent of
+furious speech upon his wife.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have hated you for twenty years. Day by
+day I have hated you more. I&#8217;ve watched you,
+watched you, watched you! But, you sly jade,
+you&#8217;ve been too clever for me till now. Yes; I
+followed you from the hotel. I dogged you. I
+foresaw what would happen. Now the end has
+come. I&#8217;ve hated you for twenty years&mdash;ever since
+you first betrayed me&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducksmith, who had sat with overwhelmed
+head in her hands, started bolt upright, and looked
+at him like one thunderstruck.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I betrayed you?&rdquo; she gasped, in bewilderment.
+&ldquo;My God! When? How? What do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He laughed&mdash;for the first time since Aristide had
+known him&mdash;but it was a ghastly laugh, that made
+the jowls of his cheeks spread horribly to his ears;
+and again he flooded the calm, stately courtyard
+with the raging violence of words. The veneer of
+easy life fell from him. He became the low-born,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+petty tradesman, using the language of the hands
+of his jam factory. No, he had never told her.
+He had awaited his chance. Now he had found it.
+He called her names....</p>
+
+<a name="img274" id="img274"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 461px;">
+<img src="images/img274.jpg" width="461" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&ldquo;i&#8217;ve caught you! at last, after twenty years,<br />
+i&#8217;ve caught you!&rdquo;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Aristide interposed, his Southern being athrob
+with the insults heaped upon the woman.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Say that again, monsieur,&rdquo; he shouted, &ldquo;and I
+will take you up in my arms like a sheep and
+throw you down that well.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The two men glared at one another, Aristide
+standing bent, with crooked fingers, ready to spring
+at the other&#8217;s throat. The woman threw herself
+between them.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;For Heaven&#8217;s sake,&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;listen to me!
+I have done no wrong. I have done no wrong now&mdash;I
+never did you wrong, so help me God!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ducksmith laughed again, and his laugh re-echoed
+round the quiet walls and up the vast staircase
+of honour.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&#8217;d be a fool not to say it. But now I&#8217;ve
+done with you. Here, you, sir. Take her away&mdash;do
+what you like with her; I&#8217;ll divorce her. I&#8217;ll
+give you a thousand pounds never to see her
+again.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Goujat! Triple goujat!</em>&rdquo; cried Aristide, more
+incensed than ever at this final insult.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducksmith, deadly white, swayed sideways,
+and Aristide caught her in his arms and dragged
+her to the stone bench. The fat, heavy man looked
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+at them for a second, laughed again, and sped
+through the <em>porte-coch&egrave;re</em>. Mrs. Ducksmith quickly
+recovered from her fainting attack, and gently
+pushed the solicitous Aristide away.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Merciful Heaven!&rdquo; she murmured. &ldquo;What is
+to become of me?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The last person to answer the question was
+Aristide. For once in his adventurous life resource
+failed him. He stared at the woman for
+whom he cared not the snap of a finger, and who,
+he knew, cared not the snap of a finger for him,
+aghast at the havoc he had wrought. If he had
+set out to arouse emotion in these two sluggish
+breasts he had done so with a vengeance. He had
+thought he was amusing himself with a toy cannon,
+and he had fired a charge of dynamite.</p>
+
+<p>He questioned her almost stupidly&mdash;for a man
+in the comic mask does not readily attune himself
+to tragedy. She answered with the desolate frankness
+of a lost soul. And then the whole meaning&mdash;or
+the lack of meaning&mdash;of their inanimate lives
+was revealed to him. Absolute estrangement had
+followed the birth of their child nearly twenty years
+ago. The child had died after a few weeks. Since
+then he saw&mdash;and the generous blood of his heart
+froze as the vision came to him&mdash;that the vulgar,
+half-sentient, rabbit-eyed bloodhound of a man
+had nursed an unexpressed, dull, implacable resentment
+against the woman. It did not matter
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+that the man&#8217;s suspicion was vain. To Aristide
+the woman&#8217;s blank amazement at the preposterous
+charge was proof enough; to the man the
+thing was real. For nearly twenty years the man
+had suffered the cancer to eat away his vitals, and
+he had watched and watched his blameless wife,
+until now, at last, he had caught her in this folly.
+No wonder he could not rest at home; no wonder
+he was driven, Io-wise, on and on, although he
+hated travel and all its discomforts, knew no word
+of a foreign language, knew no scrap of history,
+had no sense of beauty, was utterly ignorant, as
+every single one of our expensively State-educated
+English lower classes is, of everything that matters
+on God&#8217;s earth; no wonder that, in the unfamiliarity
+of foreign lands, feeling as helpless as a ballet-dancer
+in a cavalry charge, he looked to Cook, or
+Lunn, or the Agence Pujol to carry him through
+his uninspired pilgrimage. For twenty years he
+had shown no sign of joy or sorrow or anger,
+scarcely even of pleasure or annoyance. A tortoise
+could not have been more unemotional. The unsuspected
+volcano had slumbered. To-day came
+disastrous eruption. And what was a mere laughing,
+crying child of a man like Aristide Pujol in
+front of a Ducksmith volcano?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What is to become of me?&rdquo; wailed Mrs. Ducksmith
+again.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ma foi!</em>&rdquo; said Aristide, with a shrug of his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+shoulders. &ldquo;What&#8217;s going to become of anyone?
+Who can foretell what will happen in a minute&#8217;s
+time? <em>Tiens!</em>&rdquo; he added, kindly laying his hand
+on the sobbing woman&#8217;s shoulder. &ldquo;Be comforted,
+my poor Henriette. Just as nothing in this world
+is as good as we hope, so nothing is as bad as we
+fear. <em>Voyons!</em> All is not lost yet. We must return
+to the hotel.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She weepingly acquiesced. They walked through
+the quiet streets like children whose truancy had
+been discovered and who were creeping back to
+condign punishment at school. When they reached
+the hotel, Mrs. Ducksmith went straight up to the
+woman&#8217;s haven, her bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide tugged at his Vandyke beard in dire
+perplexity. The situation was too pregnant with
+tragedy for him to run away and leave the pair to
+deal with it as best they could. But what was he
+to do? He sat down in the vestibule and tried to
+think. The landlord, an unstoppable gramophone
+of garrulity, entering by the street-door and bearing
+down upon him, put him to flight. He, too,
+sought his bedroom, a cool apartment with a balcony
+outside the French window. On this balcony,
+which stretched along the whole range of
+first-floor bedrooms, he stood for a while, pondering
+deeply. Then, in an absent way, he overstepped the
+limit of his own room-frontage. A queer sound
+startled him. He paused, glanced through the open
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+window, and there he saw a sight which for the
+moment paralyzed him.</p>
+
+<a name="img280" id="img280"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 334px;">
+<img src="images/img280.jpg" width="334" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">there he saw a sight which for the moment paralyzed him</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Recovering command of his muscles, he tiptoed
+his way back. He remembered now that the three
+rooms adjoined. Next to his was Mr. Ducksmith&#8217;s,
+and then came Mrs. Ducksmith&#8217;s. It was Mr. Ducksmith
+whom he had seen. Suddenly his dark face
+became luminous with laughter, his eyes glowed, he
+threw his hat in the air and danced with glee about
+the room. Having thus worked off the first intoxication
+of his idea, he flung his few articles of
+attire and toilet necessaries into his bag, strapped
+it, and darted, in his dragon-fly way, into the corridor
+and tapped softly at Mrs. Ducksmith&#8217;s
+door. She opened it. He put his finger to
+his lips.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; he whispered, bringing to bear on
+her all the mocking magnetism of his eyes, &ldquo;if you
+value your happiness you will do exactly what I
+tell you. You will obey me implicitly. You must
+not ask questions. Pack your trunks at once. In
+ten minutes&#8217; time the porter will come for them.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with a scared face. &ldquo;But
+what am I going to do?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You are going to revenge yourself on your
+husband.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I don&#8217;t want to,&rdquo; she replied, piteously.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I do,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Begin, <em>ch&egrave;re madame</em>. Every
+moment is precious.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+In a state of stupefied terror the poor woman
+obeyed him. He saw her start seriously on her task
+and then went downstairs, where he held a violent
+and gesticulatory conversation with the landlord
+and with a man in a green baize apron summoned
+from some dim lair of the hotel. After that he
+lit a cigarette and smoked feverishly, walking up
+and down the pavement. In ten minutes&#8217; time his
+luggage with that of Mrs. Ducksmith was placed
+upon the cab. Mrs. Ducksmith appeared trembling
+and tear-stained in the vestibule.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The man in the green baize apron knocked at
+Mr. Ducksmith&#8217;s door and entered the room.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have come for the baggage of monsieur,&rdquo;
+said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Baggage? What baggage?&rdquo; asked Mr. Ducksmith,
+sitting up.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have descended the baggage of Monsieur Pujol,&rdquo;
+said the porter in his stumbling English, &ldquo;and
+of madame, and put them in a cab, and I naturally
+thought monsieur was going away, too.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Going away!&rdquo; He rubbed his eyes, glared at
+the porter, and dashed into his wife&#8217;s room. It
+was empty. He dashed into Aristide&#8217;s room. It
+was empty, too. Shrieking inarticulate anathema,
+he rushed downstairs, the man in the green baize
+apron following at his heels.</p>
+
+<p>Not a soul was in the vestibule. No cab was at
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+the door. Mr. Ducksmith turned upon his stupefied
+satellite.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Where are they?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;They must have gone already. I filled the
+cab. Perhaps Monsieur Pujol and madame have
+gone before to make arrangements.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Where have they gone to?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;In Perigueux there is nowhere to go to with
+baggage but the railway station.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A decrepit vehicle with a gaudy linen canopy
+hove in sight. Mr. Ducksmith hailed it
+as the last victims of the Flood must have
+hailed the Ark. He sprang into it and drove to
+the station.</p>
+
+<p>There, in the <em>salle d&#8217;attente</em>, he found Aristide
+mounting guard over his wife&#8217;s luggage. He hurled
+his immense bulk at his betrayer.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You blackguard! Where is my wife?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; said Aristide, puffing a cigarette,
+sublimely impudent and debonair, &ldquo;I decline to answer
+any questions. Your wife is no longer your
+wife. You offered me a thousand pounds to take
+her away. I am taking her away. I did not deign
+to disturb you for such a trifle as a thousand
+pounds, but, since you are here&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He smiled engagingly and held out his curved
+palm. Mr. Ducksmith foamed at the corners of the
+small mouth that disappeared into the bloodhound
+jowls.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+&ldquo;My wife!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;If you don&#8217;t want
+me to throw you down and trample on you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A band of loungers, railway officials, peasants,
+and other travellers awaiting their trains, gathered
+round. As the altercation was conducted in English,
+which they did not understand, they could only
+hope for the commencement of physical hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;I do not understand
+you. For twenty years you hold an innocent
+and virtuous woman under an infamous suspicion.
+She meets a sympathetic soul, and you come across
+her pouring into his ear the love and despair of a
+lifetime. You have more suspicion. You tell me
+you will give me a thousand pounds to go away
+with her. I take you at your word. And now you
+want to stamp on me. <em>Ma foi!</em> it is not reasonable.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ducksmith seized him by the lapels of his
+coat. A gasp of expectation went round the crowd.
+But Aristide recognized an agonized appeal in the
+eyes now bloodshot.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My wife!&rdquo; he said hoarsely. &ldquo;I want my wife.
+I can&#8217;t live without her. Give her back to me.
+Where is she?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You had better search the station,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>The heavy man unconsciously shook him in his
+powerful grasp, as a child might shake a doll.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Give her to me! Give her to me, I say! She
+won&#8217;t regret it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<a name="img286" id="img286"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 370px;">
+<img src="images/img286.jpg" width="370" height="600" alt="image" title="" />
+<span class="caption">mr. ducksmith seized him by the lapels of his coat</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+&ldquo;You swear that?&rdquo; asked Aristide, with lightning
+quickness.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I swear it, by God! Where is she?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide disengaged himself, waved his hand
+airily towards Perigueux, and smiled blandly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;In the salon of the hotel, waiting for you to
+prostrate yourself on your knees before her.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ducksmith gripped him by the arm.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Come back with me. If you&#8217;re lying I&#8217;ll kill
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The luggage?&rdquo; queried Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Confound the luggage!&rdquo; said Mr. Ducksmith,
+and dragged him out of the station.</p>
+
+<p>A cab brought them quickly to the hotel. Mr.
+Ducksmith bolted like an obese rabbit into the salon.
+A few moments afterwards Aristide, entering,
+found them locked in each other&#8217;s arms.</p>
+
+<p>They started alone for England that night, and
+Aristide returned to the directorship of the Agence
+Pujol. But he took upon himself enormous credit
+for having worked a miracle.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>&ldquo;One thing I can&#8217;t understand,&rdquo; said I, after he
+had told me the story, &ldquo;is what put this sham
+elopement into your crazy head. What did you see
+when you looked into Mr. Ducksmith&#8217;s bedroom?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, <em>mon vieux</em>, I did not tell you. If
+I had told you, you would not have been
+surprised at what I did. I saw a sight that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+would have melted the heart of a stone. I
+saw Ducksmith wallowing on his bed and sobbing
+as if his heart would break. It filled my soul with
+pity. I said: &lsquo;If that mountain of insensibility can
+weep and sob in such agony, it is because he loves&mdash;and
+it is I, Aristide, who have reawakened that
+love.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;why on earth didn&#8217;t you go and
+fetch Mrs. Ducksmith and leave them together?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He started from his chair and threw up both
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu!</em>&rdquo; cried he. &ldquo;You English! You are
+a charming people, but you have no romance. You
+have no dramatic sense. I will help myself to a
+whisky and soda.&rdquo;</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>THE ADVENTURE OF THE FICKLE GODDESS</strong></p>
+
+
+<p>It may be remembered that Aristide Pujol had
+aged parents, browned and wrinkled children
+of the soil, who had passed all their days in
+the desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified,
+derelict city in the salt marshes of Provence. Although
+they regarded him with the same unimaginative
+wonder as a pair of alligators might regard
+an Argus butterfly, their undoubted but
+freakish progeny, and although Aristide soared high
+above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion,
+the mutual ties remained strong and perdurable.
+Scarcely a year passed without Aristide
+struggling somehow south to visit <em>ses vieux</em>, as he
+affectionately called them, and whenever Fortune
+shed a few smiles on him, one or two at least were
+sure to find their way to Aigues-Mortes in the shape
+of, say, a silver-mounted umbrella for his father or
+a deuce of a Paris hat for the old lady&#8217;s Sunday
+wear. Monsieur and Madame Pujol had a sacred
+museum of these unused objects&mdash;the pride of their
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>
+lives. Aristide was entirely incomprehensible, but
+he was a good son. A bad son in France is rare.</p>
+
+<p>But once Aristide nearly killed his old people
+outright. An envelope from him contained two
+large caressive slips of bluish paper, which when
+scrutinized with starting eyes turned out to be two
+one-thousand-franc notes. Mon Dieu! What had
+happened? Had Aristide been robbing the Bank
+of France? They stood paralyzed and only recovered
+motive force when a neighbour suggested
+their reading the accompanying letter. It did not
+explain things very clearly. He was in Aix-les-Bains,
+a place which they had never heard of, making
+his fortune. He was staying at the H&ocirc;tel de
+l&#8217;Europe, where Queen Victoria (they had heard
+of Queen Victoria) had been contented to reside,
+he was a glittering figure in a splendid beau-monde,
+and if <em>ses vieux</em> would buy a few cakes and a bottle
+of vin cachet&eacute; with the enclosed trifle, to celebrate
+his prosperity, he would deem it the privilege of a
+devoted son. But Pujol senior, though wondering
+where the devil he had fished all that money from,
+did not waste it in profligate revelry. He took the
+eighty pounds to the bank and exchanged the perishable
+paper for one hundred solid golden louis
+which he carried home in a bag curiously bulging
+beneath his woollen jersey and secreted it with the
+savings of his long life in the mattress of the conjugal
+bed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+&ldquo;If only he hasn&#8217;t stolen it,&rdquo; sighed the mother.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What does it matter, since it is sewn up there
+all secure?&rdquo; said the old man. &ldquo;No one can
+find it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Proven&ccedil;al peasant is as hard-headed and
+practical as a Scottish miner, and if left alone by
+the fairies would produce no imaginative effect
+whatever upon his generation; but in his progeniture
+he is more preposterously afflicted with changelings
+than any of his fellows the world over, which,
+though ethnologically an entirely new proposition,
+accounts for a singular number of things and <em>inter
+alia</em> for my dragon-fly friend, Aristide Pujol.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Aristide, be it said at the outset, had not
+stolen the money. It (and a vast amount more)
+had been honestly come by. He did not lie when
+he said that he was staying at the H&ocirc;tel de l&#8217;Europe,
+Aix-les-Bains, honoured by the late Queen Victoria
+(pedantic accuracy requires the correction that
+the august lady rented the annexe, the Villa Victoria,
+on the other side of the shady way&mdash;but no
+matter&mdash;an hotel and its annexe are the same
+thing) nor did he lie in boasting of his prodigious
+prosperity. Aristide was in clover. For the first,
+and up to now as I write, the only, time in his life
+he realized the gorgeous visions of pallid years.
+He was leading the existence of the amazing rich.
+He could drink champagne&mdash;not your miserable
+<em>tisane</em> at five francs a quart&mdash;but real champagne,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+with year of vintage and <em>g&ocirc;ut am&eacute;rican</em> or <em>g&ocirc;ut
+anglais</em> marked on label, fabulously priced; he
+could dine lavishly at the Casino restaurants or at
+Nikola&#8217;s, prince of restaurateurs, among the opulent
+and the fair; he could clothe himself in attractive
+raiment; he could step into a fiacre and bid the
+man drive and not care whither he went or what
+he paid; he could also distribute five-franc pieces
+to lame beggars. He scattered his money abroad
+with both hands, according to his expansive temperament;
+and why not, when he was drawing
+wealth out of an inexhaustible fount? The process
+was so simple, so sure. All you had to do was
+to believe in the cards on which you staked your
+money. If you knew you were going to win, you
+won. Nothing could be easier.</p>
+
+<p>He had drifted into Aix-les-Bains from Geneva on
+the lamentable determination of a commission agency
+in the matter of some patent fuel, with a couple of
+louis in his pocket forlornly jingling the tale of his
+entire fortune. As this was before the days when
+you had to exhibit certificates of baptism, marriage,
+sanity and bank-balance before being allowed to
+enter the baccarat rooms, Aristide paid his two
+francs and made a bee line for the tables. I am
+afraid Aristide was a gambler. He was never so
+happy as when taking chances; his whole life was a
+gamble, with Providence holding the bank. Before
+the night was over he had converted his two
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+louis into fifty. The next day they became five
+hundred. By the end of a week his garments were
+wadded with bank notes whose value amounted to
+a sum so stupendous as to be beyond need of computation.
+He was a celebrity in the place and
+people nudged each other as he passed by. And
+Aristide passed by with a swagger, his head high
+and the end of his pointed beard sticking joyously
+up in the air.</p>
+
+<p>We see him one August morning, in the plentitude
+of his success, lounging in a wicker chair on
+the shady lawn of the H&ocirc;tel de l&#8217;Europe. He wore
+white buckskin shoes&mdash;I begin with these as they
+were the first point of his person to attract the
+notice of the onlooker&mdash;lilac silk socks, a white
+flannel suit with a zig-zag black stripe, a violet tie
+secured by a sapphire and diamond pin, and a rakish
+panama hat. On his knees lay the <em>Matin</em>; the fingers
+of his left hand held a fragrant corona; his
+right hand was uplifted in a gesture, for he was
+talking. He was talking to a couple of ladies who
+sat near by, one a mild-looking Englishwoman of
+fifty, dressed in black, the other, her daughter, a
+beautiful girl of twenty-four. That Aristide should
+fly to feminine charms, like moth to candle, was a
+law of his being; that he should lie, with shriveled
+wings, at Miss Errington&#8217;s feet was the obvious result.
+Her charms were of the winsome kind to
+which he was most susceptible. She had an oval
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>
+face, a little mouth like crumpled rose petals (so
+Aristide himself described it), a complexion the
+mingling of ivory and peach blossom (Aristide
+again), a straight little nose, appealing eyes of the
+deepest blue veiled by sweeping lashes and fascinating
+fluffiness of dark hair over a pure brow.
+She had a graceful figure, and the slender foot below
+her white piqu&eacute; skirt was at once the envy and
+admiration of Aix-les-Bains.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide talked. The ladies listened, with obvious
+amusement. In the easy hotel way he had
+fallen into their acquaintance. As the man of
+wealth, the careless player who took five-hundred-louis
+banks at the table with the five-louis minimum,
+and cleared out the punt, he felt it necessary to explain
+himself. I am afraid he deviated from the
+narrow path of truth.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What perfect English you speak,&rdquo; Miss Errington
+remarked, when he had finished his harangue
+and had put the corona between his lips. Her
+voice was a soft contralto.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have mixed much in English society, since I
+was a child,&rdquo; replied Aristide, in his grandest
+manner. &ldquo;Fortune has made me know many
+of your county families and members of Parliament.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Errington laughed. &ldquo;Our M. P.&#8217;s are rather
+a mixed lot, Monsieur Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;To me an English Member of Parliament is a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+high-bred conservative. I do not recognize the
+others,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Unfortunately we have to recognize them,&rdquo; said
+the elder lady with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Not socially, madame. They exist as mechanical
+factors of the legislative machine; but that is
+all.&rdquo; He swelled as if the blood of the Montmorencys
+and the Colignys boiled in his veins. &ldquo;We
+do not ask them into our drawing rooms. We do
+not allow them to marry our daughters. We only
+salute them with cold politeness when we pass them
+in the street.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s astonishing,&rdquo; said Miss Errington, &ldquo;how
+strongly the aristocratic principle exists in republican
+France. Now, there&#8217;s our friend, the Comte de
+Lussigny, for instance&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A frown momentarily darkened the cloudless
+brow of Aristide Pujol. He did not like the
+Comte de Lussigny&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;With Monsieur de Lussigny,&rdquo; he interposed, &ldquo;it
+is a matter of prejudice, not of principle.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And with you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The reasoned philosophy of a lifetime, mademoiselle,&rdquo;
+answered Aristide. He turned to Mrs.
+Errington.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How long have you known Monsieur de Lussigny,
+madame?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She looked at her daughter. &ldquo;It was in Monte
+Carlo the winter before last, wasn&#8217;t it, Betty?
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>
+Since then we have met him frequently in England
+and Paris. We came across him, just lately, at
+Trouville. I think he&#8217;s charming, don&#8217;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He&#8217;s a great gambler,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>Betty Errington laughed again. &ldquo;But so are
+you. So is mamma. So am I, in my poor little
+way.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;We gamble for amusement,&rdquo; said Aristide
+loftily.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;m sure I don&#8217;t,&rdquo; cried Miss Betty, with merry
+eyes&mdash;and she looked adorable&mdash;&ldquo;When I put my
+despised five-franc piece down on the table I want
+desperately to win, and when the horrid croupier
+rakes it up I want to hit him&mdash;Oh! I want to hit
+him hard.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And when you win?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;m afraid I don&#8217;t think of the croupier at all,&rdquo;
+said Miss Betty.</p>
+
+<p>Her mother smiled indulgently and exchanged a
+glance with Aristide. This pleased him; there was
+an agreeable little touch of intimacy in it. It confirmed
+friendly relations with the mother. What
+were his designs as regards the daughter he did not
+know. They were not evil, certainly. For all his
+southern blood, Latin traditions and devil-may-care
+upbringing, Aristide, though perhaps not reaching
+our divinely set and therefore unique English standard
+of morality, was a decent soul; further, partly
+through his pedagogic sojourn among them, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>
+partly through his childish adoration of the frank,
+fair-cheeked, northern goddesses talking the quick,
+clear speech, who passed him by when he was a
+hunted little devil of a <em>chasseur</em> in the Marseilles
+caf&eacute;, he had acquired a peculiarly imaginative reverence
+for English girls. The reverence, indeed,
+extended to English ladies generally. Owing to
+the queer circumstances of his life they were the
+only women of a class above his own, with whom
+he had associated on terms of equality. He had,
+then, no dishonorable designs as regards Miss Betty
+Errington. On the other hand, the thoughts of
+marriage had as yet not entered his head. You
+see, a Frenchman and an Englishman or an American,
+view marriage from entirely different angles.
+The Anglo-Saxon of honest instincts, attracted towards
+a pretty girl at once thinks of the possibilities
+of marriage; if he finds them infinitely remote,
+he makes romantic love to her in the solitude of his
+walks abroad or of his sleepless nights, and, in
+her presence, is as dumb and dismal as a freshly
+hooked trout. The equally honest Gaul does
+nothing of the kind. The attraction in itself
+is a stimulus to adventure. He makes love to her,
+just because it is the nature of a lusty son of Adam
+to make love to a pretty daughter of Eve. He lives
+in the present. The rest doesn&#8217;t matter. He leaves
+it to chance. I am speaking, be it understood, not
+of deep passions&mdash;that is a different matter
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+altogether&mdash;but of the more superficial sexual attractions
+which we, as a race, take so seriously and
+puritanically, often to our most disastrous undoing,
+and which the Latin light-heartedly regards as
+essential, but transient phenomena of human existence.
+Aristide made the most respectful love in
+the world to Betty Errington, because he could not
+help himself. &ldquo;<em>Tonnerre de Dieu!</em>&rdquo; he cried when
+from my Britannic point of view, I talked to him
+on the subject. &ldquo;You English whom I try to understand
+and can never understand are so funny!
+It would have been insulting to Miss Betty Errington&mdash;<em>tiens!</em>&mdash;a
+purple hyacinth of spring&mdash;that was
+what she was&mdash;not to have made love to her. Love
+to a pretty woman is like a shower of rain to hyacinths.
+It passes, it goes. Another one comes.
+<em>Qu&#8217;importe?</em> But the shower is necessary&mdash;Ah!
+<em>sacr&eacute; gredin</em>, when will you comprehend?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>All this to make as clear as an Englishman, in
+the confidence of a changeling child of Provence
+can hope to do, the attitude of Aristide Pujol towards
+the sweet and innocent Betty Errington with
+her mouth like crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and
+peach-blossom complexion, her soft contralto voice,
+et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald
+description, and as per what can, by imaginative
+effort, be pictured from the Pujolic hyperbole, by
+which I, the unimportant narrator of these chronicles,
+was dazzled and overwhelmed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
+&ldquo;I&#8217;m afraid I don&#8217;t think of the croupier at all,&rdquo;
+said Betty.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Do you think of no one who brings you good
+fortune?&rdquo; asked Aristide. He threw the <em>Matin</em> on
+the grass, and, doubling himself up in his chair
+regarded her earnestly. &ldquo;Last night you put five
+louis into my bank&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And I won forty. I could have hugged
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why didn&#8217;t you? Ah!&rdquo; His arms spread wide
+and high. &ldquo;What I have lost!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Betty!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Errington.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Alas, Madame,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;that is the despair
+of our artificial civilization. It prohibits so
+much spontaneous expression of emotion.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&#8217;ll forgive me, Monsieur Pujol,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Errington dryly, &ldquo;but I think our artificial civilization
+has its advantages.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If you will forgive me, in your turn,&rdquo; said Aristide,
+&ldquo;I see a doubtful one advancing.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A man approached the group and with profuse
+gestures took off a straw hat which he thrust under
+his right arm, exposing an amazingly flat head on
+which the closely cropped hair stood brush-fashion
+upright. He had an insignificant pale face to
+which a specious individuality was given by a moustache
+with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a
+monocle with a tortoise shell rim. He was dressed
+(his valet had misjudged things&mdash;and valets like
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>
+the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a
+fairly white flannel suit.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame&mdash;Mademoiselle.&rdquo; He shook hands with
+charming grace. &ldquo;Monsieur.&rdquo; He bowed stiffly.
+Aristide doffed his Panama hat with adequate
+ceremony. &ldquo;May I be permitted to join you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;With pleasure, Monsieur de Lussigny,&rdquo; said
+Mrs. Errington.</p>
+
+<p>Monsieur de Lussigny brought up a chair and
+sat down.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What time did you get to bed, last night?&rdquo;
+asked Betty Errington. She spoke excellently pure
+French, and so did her mother.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Soon after we parted, mademoiselle, quite early
+for me but late for you. And you look this morning
+as if you had gone to bed at sundown and got
+up at dawn.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Betty&#8217;s glance responsive to the compliment
+filled Aristide with wrath. What right had the
+Comte de Lussigny, a fellow who consorted with
+Brazilian Rastaquou&egrave;res and perfumed Levantine
+nondescripts, to win such a glance from Betty Errington?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If Mademoiselle can look so fresh,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;in
+the artificial atmosphere of Aix, what is there of
+adorable that she must not resemble in the innocence
+of her Somersetshire home?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You cannot imagine it, Monsieur,&rdquo; said the
+Count; &ldquo;but I have had the privilege to see it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+&ldquo;I hope Monsieur Pujol will visit us also in our
+country home, when we get back,&rdquo; said Mrs. Errington
+with intent to pacificate. &ldquo;It is modest,
+but it is old-world and has been in our family for
+hundreds of years.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, these old English homes!&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Would you care to hear about it?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I should,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>He drew his chair courteously a foot or so
+nearer that of the mild lady; Monsieur de
+Lussigny took instant advantage of the move
+to establish himself close to Miss Betty. Aristide
+turned one ear politely to Mrs. Errington&#8217;s
+discourse, the other ragingly and impotently to the
+whispered conversation between the detached
+pair.</p>
+
+<p>Presently a novel fell from the lady&#8217;s lap. Aristide
+sprang to his feet and restored it. He remained
+standing. Mrs. Errington consulted a
+watch. It was nearing lunch time. She rose, too.
+Aristide took her a pace or two aside.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear Mrs. Errington,&rdquo; said he, in English.
+&ldquo;I do not wish to be indiscreet&mdash;but you come from
+your quiet home in Somerset and your beautiful
+daughter is so young and inexperienced, and I am
+a man of the world who has mingled in all the
+society of Europe&mdash;may I warn you against admitting
+the Comte de Lussigny too far into your intimacy.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+She turned an anxious face. &ldquo;Monsieur Pujol,
+is there anything against the Count?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide executed the large and expressive shrug
+of the Southerner.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I play high at the tables for my amusement&mdash;I
+know the principal players, people of high standing.
+Among them Monsieur de Lussigny&#8217;s reputation
+is not spotless.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You alarm me very much,&rdquo; said Mrs. Errington,
+troubled.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I only put you on your guard,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>The others who had risen and followed, caught
+them up. At the entrance to the hotel the ladies
+left the men elaborately saluting. The latter, alone,
+looked at each other.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Each man raised his hat, turned on his heel and
+went his way. Aristide betook himself to the caf&eacute;
+on the Place Carnot on the side of the square facing
+the white Etablissement des Bains, with a stern
+sense of having done his duty. It was monstrous
+that this English damask rose should fall a prey to
+so detestable a person as the Comte de Lussigny.
+He suspected him of disgraceful things. If only he
+had proof. Fortune, ever favoring him, stood at
+his elbow. She guided him straight to a table in
+the front row of the terrace where sat a black-haired,
+hard-featured though comely youth deep
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+in thought, in front of an untouched glass of beer.
+At Aristide&#8217;s approach he raised his head, smiled,
+nodded and said: &ldquo;Good morning, sir. Will you
+join me?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide graciously accepted the invitation and
+sat down. The young man was another hotel acquaintance,
+one Eugene Miller of Atlanta, Georgia,
+a curious compound of shrewdness and simplicity,
+to whom Aristide had taken a fancy. He was
+twenty-eight and ran a colossal boot-factory in
+partnership with another youth and had a consuming
+passion for stained-glass windows. From books
+he knew every square foot of old stained-glass in
+Europe. But he had crossed the Atlantic for the
+first time only six weeks before, and having indulged
+his craving immoderately, had rested for a
+span at Aix-les-Bains to recover from &aelig;sthetic indigestion.
+He had found these amenities agreeable
+to his ingenuous age. He had also, quite recently,
+come across the Comte de Lussigny. Hence
+the depth of thought in which Aristide discovered
+him. Now, the fact that North is North and South
+is South and that never these twain shall meet is
+a proposition all too little considered. One of these
+days when I can retire from the dull but exacting
+avocation of tea-broking in the City, I think I shall
+write a newspaper article on the subject. Anyhow,
+I hold the theory that the Northerners of all nations
+have a common characteristic and the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+Southerners of all nations have a common characteristic,
+and that it is this common characteristic in each
+case that makes North seek and understand North
+and South seek and understand South. I will not
+go further into the general proposition; but as a
+particular instance I will state that the American
+of the South and the Frenchman of the South
+found themselves in essential sympathy. Eugene
+Miller had the unfearing frankness of Aristide
+Pujol.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I used rather to look down upon Europe as a
+place where people knew nothing at all,&rdquo; said he.
+&ldquo;We&#8217;re sort of trained to think it&#8217;s an extinct volcano,
+but it isn&#8217;t. It&#8217;s alive. My God! It&#8217;s alive.
+It&#8217;s Hell in the shape of a Limburger cheese. I
+wish the whole population of Atlanta, Georgia,
+would come over and just see. There&#8217;s a lot to be
+learned. I thought I knew how to take care of
+myself, but this tortoise-shell-eyed Count taught me
+last night that I couldn&#8217;t. He cleaned me out of
+twenty-five hundred dollars&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How?&rdquo; asked Aristide, sharply.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ecart&eacute;.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide brought his hand down with a bang on
+the table and uttered anathemas in French and
+Proven&ccedil;al entirely unintelligible to Eugene Miller;
+but the youth knew by instinct that they were
+useful, soul-destroying curses and he felt comforted.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Ecart&eacute;! You played ecart&eacute; with Lussigny?
+But my dear young friend, do you know anything
+of ecart&eacute;?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Miller. &ldquo;I used to play it as
+a child with my sisters.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know the <em>jeux de r&egrave;gle</em>?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The what?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The formal laws of the game&mdash;the rules of discards&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Never heard of them,&rdquo; said Eugene Miller.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But they are as absolute as the Code Napol&eacute;on,&rdquo;
+cried Aristide. &ldquo;You can&#8217;t play without knowing
+them. You might as well play chess without knowing
+the moves.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Can&#8217;t help it,&rdquo; said the young man.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well, don&#8217;t play ecart&eacute; any more.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I must,&rdquo; said Miller.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Comment?</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I must. I&#8217;ve fixed it up to get my revenge
+this afternoon&mdash;in my sitting room at the hotel.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But it&#8217;s imbecile!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The sweep of Aristide&#8217;s arm produced prismatic
+chaos among a tray-full of drinks which the waiter
+was bringing to the family party at the next table.
+&ldquo;It&#8217;s imbecile,&rdquo; he cried, as soon as order was
+apologetically and pecuniarily restored. &ldquo;You are
+a little mutton going to have its wool taken
+off.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;ve fixed it up,&rdquo; said Miller. &ldquo;I&#8217;ve never gone
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>
+back on an engagement yet in my own country
+and I&#8217;m not going to begin this side.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide argued. He argued during the mechanical
+absorption of four glasses of <em>vermouth-cassis</em>&mdash;after
+which prodigious quantity of black
+currant syrup he rose and took the Gadarene youth
+to Nikola&#8217;s where he continued the argument during
+d&eacute;jeuner. Eugene Miller&#8217;s sole concession was that
+Aristide should be present at the encounter and,
+backing his hand, should have the power (given by
+the rules of the French game) to guide his play.
+Aristide agreed and crammed his young friend
+with the <em>jeux de r&egrave;gle</em> and <em>p&acirc;t&eacute; de foie gras</em>.</p>
+
+<p>The Count looked rather black when he found
+Aristide Pujol in Miller&#8217;s sitting room. He could
+not, however, refuse him admittance to the game.
+The three sat down, Aristide by Miller&#8217;s side, so
+that he could overlook the hand and, by pointing,
+indicate the cards that it was advisable to play.
+The game began. Fortune favored Mr. Eugene
+Miller. The Count&#8217;s brow grew blacker.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You are bringing your own luck to our friend,
+Monsieur Pujol,&rdquo; said he, dealing the cards.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He needs it,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Le roi</em>,&rdquo; said the Count, turning up the king.</p>
+
+<p>The Count won the vole, or all five tricks, and
+swept the stakes towards him. Then, fortune
+quickly and firmly deserted Mr. Miller. The Count
+besides being an amazingly fine player, held
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+amazingly fine hands. The pile of folded notes in front
+of him rose higher and higher. Aristide tugged at
+his beard in agitation. Suddenly, as the Count
+dealt a king as trump card, he sprang to his feet
+knocking over the chair behind him.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You cheat, monsieur. You cheat!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur!&rdquo; cried the outraged dealer.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What has he done?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He has been palming kings and neutralizing the
+cut. I&#8217;ve been watching. Now I catch him,&rdquo; cried
+Aristide in great excitement. &ldquo;<em>Ah, sale voleur!
+Maintenant je vous tiens!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; said the Comte de Lussigny with
+dignity, stuffing his winnings into his jacket pocket.
+&ldquo;You insult me. It is an infamy. Two of my
+friends will call upon you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And Monsieur Miller and I will kick them over
+Mont Revard.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You cannot treat <em>gens d&#8217;honneur</em> in such a way,
+monsieur.&rdquo; He turned to Miller, and said haughtily
+in his imperfect English, &ldquo;Did you see the cheat,
+you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I can&#8217;t say that I did,&rdquo; replied the young man.
+&ldquo;On the other hand that torch-light procession of
+kings doesn&#8217;t seem exactly natural.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But you did not see anything! <em>Bon!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I saw. Isn&#8217;t that enough, <em>hein</em>?&rdquo; shouted
+Aristide brandishing his fingers in the Count&#8217;s face.
+&ldquo;You come here and think there&#8217;s nothing easier
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+than to cheat young foreigners who don&#8217;t know the
+rules of ecart&eacute;. You come here and think you can
+carry off rich young English misses. Ah, <em>sale
+escroc!</em> You never thought you would have to
+reckon with Aristide Pujol. You call yourself
+the Comte de Lussigny. Bah! I know you&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+he didn&#8217;t, but that doesn&#8217;t matter&mdash;&ldquo;your <em>dossier</em>
+is in the hands of the prefect of Police. I am
+going to get that <em>dossier</em>. Monsieur Lepine is my
+intimate friend. Every autumn we shoot together.
+Aha! You send me your two galley-birds and see
+what I do to them.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Comte de Lussigny twirled the tips of his
+moustache almost to his forehead and caught up his
+hat.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My friends shall be officers in the uniform of
+the French Army,&rdquo; he said, by the door.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And mine shall be two gendarmes,&rdquo; retorted
+Aristide. &ldquo;<em>Nom de Dieu!</em>&rdquo; he cried, after the
+other had left the room. &ldquo;We let him take the
+money!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s of no consequence. He didn&#8217;t get away
+with much anyway,&rdquo; said young Miller. &ldquo;But
+he would have if you hadn&#8217;t been here. If ever
+I can do you a return service, just ask.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide went out to look for the Erringtons.
+But they were not to be found. It was only late
+in the afternoon that he met Mrs. Errington in the
+hall of the hotel. He dragged her into a corner
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>
+and in his impulsive fashion told her everything.
+She listened white faced, in great distress.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My daughter&#8217;s engaged to him. I&#8217;ve only just
+learned,&rdquo; she faltered.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Engaged? <em>Sacrebleu!</em> Ah, <em>le goujat!</em>&rdquo;&mdash;for
+the second he was desperately, furiously, jealously
+in love with Betty Errington. &ldquo;<em>Ah, le sale type!
+Voyons!</em> This engagement must be broken off.
+At once! You are her mother.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;She will hear of nothing against him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You will tell her this. It will be a blow;
+but&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Errington twisted a handkerchief between
+helpless fingers. &ldquo;Betty is infatuated. She won&#8217;t
+believe it.&rdquo; She regarded him piteously. &ldquo;Oh,
+Monsieur Pujol, what can I do? You see she has
+an independent fortune and is over twenty-one. I
+am powerless.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I will meet his two friends,&rdquo; exclaimed Aristide
+magnificently&mdash;&ldquo;and I will kill him. <em>Voil&agrave;!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, a duel? No! How awful!&rdquo; cried the mild
+lady horror-stricken.</p>
+
+<p>He thrust his cane dramatically through a sheet
+of a newspaper, which he had caught up from a
+table. &ldquo;I will run him through the body like that&rdquo;&mdash;Aristide
+had never handled a foil in his life&mdash;&ldquo;and
+when he is dead, your beautiful daughter will
+thank me for having saved her from such an execrable
+fellow.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>
+&ldquo;But you mustn&#8217;t fight. It would be too dreadful.
+Is there no other way?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You must consult first with your daughter,&rdquo;
+said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>He dined in the hotel with Eugene Miller. Neither
+the Erringtons nor the Comte de Lussigny
+were anywhere to be seen. After dinner, however,
+he found the elder lady waiting for him in the hall.
+They walked out into the quiet of the garden. She
+had been too upset to dine, she explained, having
+had a terrible scene with Betty. Nothing but absolute
+proofs of her lover&#8217;s iniquity would satisfy her.
+The world was full of slanderous tongues; the
+noblest and purest did not escape. For herself, she
+had never been comfortable with the Comte de Lussigny.
+She had noticed too that he had always
+avoided the best French people in hotels. She
+would give anything to save her daughter. She
+wept.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And the unhappy girl has written him compromising
+letters,&rdquo; she lamented.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;They must be got back.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But how? Oh, Monsieur Pujol, do you think
+he would take money for them?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A scoundrel like that would take money for his
+dead mother&#8217;s shroud,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A thousand pounds?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She looked very haggard and helpless beneath
+the blue arc-lights. Aristide&#8217;s heart went out to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+her. He knew her type&mdash;the sweet gentlewoman
+of rural England who comes abroad to give her
+pretty daughter a sight of life, ingenuously confident
+that foreign watering-places are as innocent
+as her own sequestered village.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That is much money, <em>ch&egrave;re madame</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am fairly well off,&rdquo; said Mrs. Errington.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide reflected. At the offer of a smaller sum
+the Count would possibly bluff. But to a Knight
+of Industry, as he knew the Count to be, a certain
+thousand pounds would be a great temptation. And
+after all to a wealthy Englishwoman what was a
+thousand pounds?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;if you offer him a thousand
+pounds for the letters, and a written confession
+that he is not the Comte de Lussigny, but a common
+adventurer, I stake my reputation that he will
+accept.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>They walked along for a few moments in silence;
+the opera had begun at the adjoining Villa des
+Fleurs and the strains floated through the still August
+air. After a while she halted and laid her
+hand on his sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur Pujol, I have never been faced with
+such a thing, before. Will you undertake for me
+this delicate and difficult business?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;my life is at the service
+of yourself and your most exquisite daughter.&rdquo;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>
+She pressed his hand. &ldquo;Thank God, I&#8217;ve got a
+friend in this dreadful place,&rdquo; she said brokenly.
+&ldquo;Let me go in.&rdquo; And when they reached the
+lounge, she said, &ldquo;Wait for me here.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She entered the lift. Aristide waited. Presently
+the lift descended and she emerged with a slip of
+paper in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Here is a bearer cheque, Monsieur Pujol, for
+a thousand pounds. Get the letters and the confession
+if you can, and a mother&#8217;s blessing will go
+with you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She left him and went upstairs again in the lift.
+Aristide athirst with love, living drama and unholy
+hatred of the Comte de Lussigny, cocked his black,
+soft-felt evening hat at an engaging angle on his
+head and swaggered into the Villa des Fleurs. As
+he passed the plebeian crowd round the petits-chevaux
+table&mdash;these were the days of little horses
+and not the modern equivalent of <em>la boule</em>&mdash;he
+threw a louis on the square marked 5, waited for
+the croupier to push him his winnings, seven louis
+and his stake on the little white horse, and walked
+into the baccarat room. A bank was being called
+for thirty louis at the end table.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Quarante</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ajug&eacute; &agrave; quarante louis</em>,&rdquo; cried the croupier, no
+one bidding higher.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide took the banker&#8217;s seat and put down his
+forty louis. Looking round the long table he saw
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>
+the Comte de Lussigny sitting in the punt. The
+two men glared at each other defiantly. Someone
+went &ldquo;banco.&rdquo; Aristide won. The fact of his
+holding the bank attracted a crowd round the table.
+The regular game began. Aristide won, lost, won
+again. Now it must be explained, without going
+into the details of the game, that the hand against
+the bank is played by the members of the punt in
+turn.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, before dealing the cards, Aristide
+asked, &ldquo;<em>A qui la main?</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>C&#8217;est &agrave; Monsieur</em>,&rdquo; said the croupier, indicating
+Lussigny.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Il y a une suite</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide, signifying, as
+was his right, that he would retire from the bank
+with his winnings. &ldquo;The face of that gentleman
+does not please me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>There was a hush at the humming table. The
+Count grew dead white and looked at his fingernails.
+Aristide superbly gathered up his notes and
+gold, and tossing a couple of louis to the croupiers,
+left the table, followed by all eyes. It was one
+of the thrilling moments of Aristide&#8217;s life. He had
+taken the stage, commanded the situation. He had
+publicly offered the Comte de Lussigny the most
+deadly insult and the Comte de Lussigny sat down
+beneath it like a lamb. He swaggered slowly
+through the crowded room, twirling his moustache,
+and went into the cool of the moonlit deserted
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+garden beyond, where he waited gleefully. He
+had a puckish knowledge of human nature. After
+a decent interval, and during the absorbing interest
+of the newly constituted bank, the Comte de Lussigny
+slipped unnoticed from the table and went in
+search of Aristide. He found him smoking a large
+corona and lounging in one wicker chair with his
+feet on another, beside a very large whisky and
+soda.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, it&#8217;s you,&rdquo; said he without moving.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Count furiously.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&#8217;t yet had the pleasure of kicking your
+friends over Mont Revard,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Look here, <em>mon petit</em>, this has got to finish,&rdquo;
+cried the Count.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Parfaitement.</em> I should like nothing better than
+to finish. But let us finish like well-bred people,&rdquo;
+said Aristide suavely. &ldquo;We don&#8217;t want the whole
+Casino as witnesses. You&#8217;ll find a chair over there.
+Bring it up.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He was enjoying himself immensely. The Count
+glared at him, turned and banged a chair over by
+the side of the table.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why do you insult me like this?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Because,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;I&#8217;ve talked by telephone
+this evening with my good friend Monsieur
+Lepine, Prefect of Police of Paris.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You lie,&rdquo; said the Count.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Vous verrez.</em> In the meantime, perhaps we
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+might have a little conversation. Will you have a
+whisky and soda? It is one of my English habits.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the Count emphatically.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You permit me then?&rdquo; He drank a great
+draught. &ldquo;You are wrong. It helps to cool one&#8217;s
+temper. <em>Eh bien</em>, let us talk.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He talked. He put before the Count the situation
+of the beautiful Miss Errington. He conducted
+the scene like the friend of the family whose
+astuteness he had admired as a boy in the melodramas
+that found their way to Marseilles.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Look,&rdquo; said he, at last, having vainly offered
+from one hundred to eight hundred pounds for poor
+Betty Errington&#8217;s compromising letters. &ldquo;Look&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+He drew the cheque from his note-case.
+&ldquo;Here are twenty-five thousand francs. The signature
+is that of the charming Madame Errington
+herself. The letters, and a little signed word, just
+a little word. &lsquo;Mademoiselle, I am a <em>chevalier d&#8217;industrie</em>.
+I have a wife and five children. I am not
+worthy of you. I give you back your promise.&rsquo;
+Just that. And twenty-five thousand francs, <em>mon
+ami</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Never in life!&rdquo; exclaimed the Count rising.
+&ldquo;You continue to insult me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide for the first time abandoned his lazy
+and insolent attitude and jumped to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And I&#8217;ll continue to insult you, <em>canaille</em> that
+you are, all through that room,&rdquo; he cried, with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+a swift-flung gesture towards the brilliant doorway.
+&ldquo;You are dealing with Aristide Pujol. Will
+you never understand? The letters and a confession
+for twenty-five thousand francs.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Never in life,&rdquo; said the Count, and he moved
+swiftly away.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide caught him by the collar as he stood on
+the covered terrace, a foot or two from the
+threshold of the gaming-room.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I swear to you, I&#8217;ll make a scandal that you
+won&#8217;t survive.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Count stopped and pushed Aristide&#8217;s hand
+away.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I admit nothing,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;But you are a gambler
+and so am I. I will play you for those documents
+against twenty-five thousand francs.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Eh?&rdquo; said Aristide, staggered for the moment.</p>
+
+<p>The Comte de Lussigny repeated his proposition.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Bon</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;<em>Tr&eacute;s bon. C&#8217;est entendu.
+C&#8217;est fait.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>If Beelzebub had arisen and offered to play
+beggar-my-neighbour for his soul, Aristide would
+have agreed; especially after the large whisky and
+soda and the Mumm Cordon Rouge and the Napoleon
+brandy which Eugene Miller had insisted on
+his drinking at dinner.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have a large room at the hotel,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I will join you,&rdquo; said the Count. &ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+he took off his hat very politely. &ldquo;Go first. I
+will be there in three minutes.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide trod on air during the two minutes&#8217; walk
+to the H&ocirc;tel de l&#8217;Europe. At the bureau he ordered
+a couple of packs of cards and a supply of
+drinks and went to his palatial room on the ground
+floor. In a few moments the Comte de Lussigny
+appeared. Aristide offered him a two francs corona
+which was ceremoniously accepted. Then he tore
+the wrapping off one of the packs of cards and
+shuffled.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; said he, still shuffling. &ldquo;I should
+like to deal two hands at ecart&eacute;. It signifies nothing.
+It is an experiment. Will you cut?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Volontiers</em>,&rdquo; said the Count.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide took up the pack, dealt three cards to
+the Count, three cards to himself, two cards to the
+Count, two to himself and turned up the King of
+Hearts as the eleventh card.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;expose your hand and I
+will expose mine.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Both men threw their hands face uppermost on
+the table. Aristide&#8217;s was full of trumps, the Count&#8217;s
+of valueless cards.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at his adversary with his roguish, triumphant
+smile. The Count looked at him darkly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The ordinary card player does not know how
+to deal like that,&rdquo; he said with sinister significance.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I am not ordinary in anything, my dear
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>
+sir,&rdquo; laughed Aristide, in his large boastfulness.
+&ldquo;If I were, do you think I would have agreed to
+your absurd proposal? <em>Voyons</em>, I only wanted to
+show you that in dealing cards I am your equal.
+Now, the letters&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; The Count threw a small
+packet on the table. &ldquo;You will permit me? I do
+not wish to read them. I verify only. Good,&rdquo;
+said he. &ldquo;And the confession?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What you like,&rdquo; said the Count, coldly. Aristide
+scribbled a few lines that would have been
+devastating to the character of a Hyrcanean tiger
+and handed the paper and fountain pen to the
+Count.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Will you sign?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Count glanced at the words and signed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Voil&agrave;</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide, laying Mrs. Errington&#8217;s
+cheque beside the documents. &ldquo;Now let us play.
+The best of three games?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good,&rdquo; said the Count. &ldquo;But you will excuse
+me, monsieur, if I claim to play for ready money.
+The cheque will take five days to negotiate and if
+I lose, I shall evidently have to leave Aix to-morrow
+morning.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s reasonable,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>He drew out his fat note-case and counted
+twenty-five one-thousand-franc notes on to the table.
+And then began the most exciting game of
+cards he had ever played. In the first place he was
+playing with another person&#8217;s money for a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+fantastic stake, a girl&#8217;s honour and happiness. Secondly
+he was pitted against a master of ecart&eacute;.
+And thirdly he knew that his adversary would cheat
+if he could and that his adversary suspected him of
+fraudulent designs. So as they played, each man
+craned his head forward and looked at the other
+man&#8217;s fingers with fierce intensity.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide lost the first game. He wiped the sweat
+from his forehead. In the second game, he won
+the vole in one hand. The third and final game began.
+They played slowly, carefully, with keen
+quick eyes. Their breathing came hard. The
+Count&#8217;s lips parted beneath his uptwisted moustache
+showed his teeth like a cat&#8217;s. Aristide lost
+sense of all outer things in the thrill of the encounter.
+They snarled the stereotyped phrases necessary
+for the conduct of the game. At last the
+points stood at four for Aristide and three for his
+adversary. It was Aristide&#8217;s deal. Before turning
+up the eleventh card he paused for the fraction of
+a second. If it was the King, he had won. He
+flicked it neatly face upward. It was not the King.</p>
+
+<p><em>&ldquo;J&#8217;en donne.&rdquo;</em></p>
+
+<p><em>&ldquo;Non. Le roi.&rdquo;</em></p>
+
+<p>The Count played and marked the King. Aristide
+had no trumps. The game was lost.</p>
+
+<p>He sat back white, while the Count smiling gathered
+up the bank-notes.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And now, Monsieur Pujol,&rdquo; said he impudently,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+&ldquo;I am willing to sell you this rubbish for the
+cheque.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide jumped to his feet. &ldquo;Never!&rdquo; he cried.
+Madness seized him. Regardless of the fact that
+he had nothing like another thousand pounds left
+wherewith to repay Mrs. Errington if he lost, he
+shouted: &ldquo;I will play again for it. Not ecart&eacute;.
+One cut of the cards. Ace lowest.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said the Count.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Begin, you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide watched his hand like cat, as he cut.
+He cut an eight. Aristide gave a little gasp of
+joy and cut quickly. He held up a Knave and
+laughed aloud. Then he stopped short as he saw
+the Count about to pounce on the documents and
+the cheque. He made a swift movement and
+grabbed them first, the other man&#8217;s hand on his.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Canaille!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He dashed his free hand into the adventurer&#8217;s
+face. The man staggered back. Aristide pocketed
+the precious papers. The Count scowled at him for
+an undecided second, and then bolted from the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Whew!&rdquo; said Aristide, sinking into his chair
+and wiping his face. &ldquo;That was a narrow escape.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He looked at his watch. It was only ten o&#8217;clock.
+It had seemed as if his game with Lussigny had
+lasted for hours. He could not go to bed and
+stood confronted with anti-climax. After a while
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+he went in search of Eugene Miller and having
+found him in solitary meditation on stained glass
+windows in the dim-lit grounds of the Villa,
+sat down by his side and for the rest of the
+evening poured his peculiar knowledge of Europe
+into the listening ear of the young man
+from Atlanta.</p>
+
+<p>On the following morning, as soon as he was
+dressed, he learned from the Concierge that the
+Comte de Lussigny had left for Paris by the early
+train.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>A little later Mrs. Errington met him in the
+lounge and accompanied him to the lawn where
+they had sat the day before.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have no words to thank you, Monsieur Pujol,&rdquo;
+she said with tears in her eyes. &ldquo;I have heard how
+you shamed him at the tables. It was brave of
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It was nothing.&rdquo; He shrugged his shoulders
+as if he were in the habit of doing deeds like that
+every day of his life. &ldquo;And your exquisite daughter,
+Madame?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Poor Betty! She is prostrate. She says she
+will never hold up her head again. Her heart is
+broken.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is young and will be mended,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled sadly. &ldquo;It will be a question of time.
+But she is grateful to you, Monsieur Pujol. She
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+realizes from what a terrible fate you have saved
+her.&rdquo; She sighed. There was a brief silence.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;After this,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;a further stay in
+Aix would be too painful. We have decided to
+take the Savoy express this evening and get back
+to our quiet home in Somerset.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, madame,&rdquo; said Aristide earnestly. &ldquo;And
+shall I not have the pleasure of seeing the charming
+Miss Betty again?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You will come and stay with us in September.
+Let me see? The fifteenth. Why not fix a date?
+You have my address? No? Will you write it
+down?&rdquo; she dictated: &ldquo;Wrotesly Manor, Burnholme,
+Somerset. There I&#8217;ll try to show you how
+grateful I am.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She extended her hand. He bowed over it and
+kissed it in his French way and departed a very
+happy man.</p>
+
+<p>The Erringtons left that evening. Aristide waylaid
+them as they were entering the hotel omnibus,
+with a preposterous bouquet of flowers which he
+presented to Betty, whose pretty face was hidden
+by a motor-veil. He bowed, laid his hand on his
+heart and said: &ldquo;<em>Adieu, mademoiselle.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said in a low voice, but most graciously,
+&ldquo;<em>Au revoir</em>, Monsieur Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>For the next few days Aix seemed to be tame
+and colourless. In an inexplicable fashion, too, it
+had become unprofitable. Aristide no longer knew
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+that he was going to win; and he did not win. He
+lost considerably. So much so that on the morning
+when he was to draw the cash for the cheque,
+at the Cr&eacute;dit Lyonnais, he had only fifty pounds
+and some odd silver left. Aristide looking at the
+remainder rather ruefully made a great resolution.
+He would gamble no more. Already he was richer
+than he had ever been in his life. He would leave
+Aix. <em>Tiens!</em> why should he not go to his good
+friends the Bocardons at N&icirc;mes, bringing with him
+a gold chain for Bocardon and a pair of ear-rings
+for the adorable Zette? There he would look about
+him. He would use the thousand pounds as a stepping-stone
+to legitimate fortune. Then he would
+visit the Erringtons in England, and if the beautiful
+Miss Betty smiled on him&mdash;why, after all, <em>sacrebleu</em>
+he was an honest man, without a feather on
+his conscience.</p>
+
+<p>So, jauntily swinging his cane, he marched into
+the office of the Cr&eacute;dit Lyonnais, went into the
+inner room and explained his business.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, your cheque, monsieur, that we were to collect.
+I am sorry. It has come back from the London
+bankers.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How come back?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It has not been honoured. See, monsieur. &lsquo;Not
+known. No account.&rsquo;&rdquo; The cashier pointed to the
+grim words across the cheque.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Comprends pas</em>,&rdquo; faltered Aristide.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+&ldquo;It means that the person who gave you the
+cheque has no account at this bank.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide took the cheque and looked at it in a
+dazed way.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then I do not get my twenty-five thousand
+francs?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Evidently not,&rdquo; said the cashier.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide stood for a while stunned. What did
+it mean? His thousand pounds could not be lost.
+It was impossible. There was some mistake. It
+was an evil dream. With a heavy weight on the
+top of his head, he went out of the Cr&eacute;dit Lyonnais
+and mechanically crossed the little street separating
+the Bank from the caf&eacute; on the Place Carnot.
+There he sat stupidly and wondered. The
+waiter hovered in front of him. &ldquo;<em>Monsieur d&eacute;sire?</em>&rdquo;
+Aristide waved him away absently. Yes,
+it was some mistake. Mrs. Errington in her agitation
+must have used the wrong cheque book. But
+even rich English people do not carry about with
+them a circulating library assortment of cheque
+books. It was incomprehensible&mdash;and meanwhile,
+his thousand pounds....</p>
+
+<p>The little square blazed before him in the August
+sunshine. Opposite flashed the white mass of the
+Etablissement des Bains. There was the old Roman
+Arch of Titus, gray and venerable. There were
+the trees of the gardens in riotous greenery. There
+on the right marking the hour of eleven on its
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+black face was the clock of the Comptoir National.
+It was Aix; familiar Aix; not a land of dreams.
+And there coming rapidly across from the Comptoir
+National was the well knit figure of the young man
+from Atlanta.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Nom de Dieu</em>,&rdquo; murmured Aristide. &ldquo;<em>Nom de
+Dieu de nom de Dieu!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Eugene Miller, in a fine frenzy, threw himself
+into a chair beside Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;See here. Can you understand this?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He thrust into his hand a pink strip of paper.
+It was a cheque for a hundred pounds, made payable
+to Eugene Miller, Esquire, signed by Mary Errington,
+and marked &ldquo;Not known. No account.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tonnerre de Dieu!</em>&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;How did
+you get this?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How did I get it? I cashed it for her&mdash;the day
+she went away. She said urgent affairs summoned
+her from Aix&mdash;no time to wire for funds&mdash;wanted
+to pay her hotel bill&mdash;and she gave me the address
+of her old English home in Somerset and invited
+me to come there in September. Fifteenth of September.
+Said that you were coming. And now
+I&#8217;ve got a bum cheque. I guess I can&#8217;t wander
+about this country alone. I need blinkers and harness
+and a man with a whip.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He went on indignantly. Aristide composed his
+face into an expression of parental interest; but
+within him there was shivering and sickening
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+upheaval. He saw it all, the whole mocking drama....</p>
+
+<p>He, Aristide Pujol, was the most sweetly, the
+most completely swindled man in France.</p>
+
+<p>The Comte de Lussigny, the mild Mrs.
+Errington and the beautiful Betty were in league
+together and had exquisitely plotted. They had
+conspired, as soon as he had accused the Count
+of cheating. The rascal must have gone straight
+to them from Miller&#8217;s room. No wonder that Lussigny,
+when insulted at the tables, had sat like a
+tame rabbit and had sought him in the garden. No
+wonder he had accepted the accusation of adventurer.
+No wonder he had refused to play for the
+cheque which he knew to be valueless. But why,
+thought Aristide, did he not at once consent to sell
+the papers on the stipulation that he should be paid
+in notes? Aristide found an answer. He wanted
+to get everything for nothing, afraid of the use
+that Aristide might make of a damning confession,
+and also relying for success on his manipulation of
+the cards. Finally he had desired to get hold of a
+dangerous cheque. In that he had been foiled.
+But the trio has got away with his thousand
+pounds, his wonderful thousand pounds. He reflected,
+still keeping an attentive eye on young Eugene
+Miller and interjecting a sympathetic word,
+that after he had paid his hotel bill, he would be
+as poor on quitting Aix-les-Bains as he was when
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>
+he had entered it. <em>Sic transit</em>.... As it was
+in the beginning with Aristide Pujol, is now and
+ever shall be....</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I have my clothes&mdash;such clothes as I&#8217;ve
+never had in my life,&rdquo; thought Aristide. &ldquo;And a
+diamond and sapphire tie-pin and a gold watch, and
+all sorts of other things. <em>Tron de l&#8217;air</em>, I&#8217;m still
+rich.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Who would have thought she was like that?&rdquo;
+said he. &ldquo;And a hundred pounds, too. A lot of
+money.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>For nothing in the world would he have confessed
+himself a fellow-victim.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t care a cent for the hundred pounds,&rdquo;
+cried the young man. &ldquo;Our factory turns out seven
+hundred and sixty-seven million pairs of boots per
+annum.&rdquo; (Aristide, not I, is responsible for the
+statistics.) &ldquo;But I have a feeling that in this
+hoary country I&#8217;m just a little toddling child. And
+I hate it. I do, sir. I want a nurse to take me
+round.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide flashed the lightning of his wit upon
+the young man from Atlanta, Georgia.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You do, my dear young friend. I&#8217;ll be your
+nurse, at a weekly salary&mdash;say a hundred francs&mdash;it
+doesn&#8217;t matter. We will not quarrel.&rdquo; Eugene
+Miller was startled. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Aristide, with a
+convincing flourish. &ldquo;I&#8217;ll clear robbers and sirens
+and harpies from your path. I&#8217;ll show you things
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+in Europe&mdash;from Troms&ouml; to Cap Spartivento that
+you never dreamed of. I&#8217;ll lead you to every
+stained glass window in the world. I know them
+all.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I particularly want to see those in the church of
+St. Sebald in Nuremberg.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I know them like my pocket,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;I
+will take you there. We start to-day.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, Mr. Pujol,&rdquo; said the somewhat bewildered
+Georgian. &ldquo;I thought you were a man of fortune.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am more than a man. I am a soldier. I am
+a soldier of Fortune. The fickle goddess has for
+the moment deserted me. But I am loyal. I have
+for all worldly goods, two hundred and fifty dollars,
+with which I shall honorably pay my hotel
+bill. I say I am a soldier of Fortune. But,&rdquo; he
+slapped his chest, &ldquo;I am the only honorable one on
+the Continent of Europe.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The young man fixed upon him the hard blue
+eyes, not of the enthusiast for stained glass windows,
+but of the senior partner in the boot factory
+of Atlanta, Georgia.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I believe you,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;It&#8217;s a deal. Shake.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And now,&rdquo; said Aristide, after having shaken
+hands, &ldquo;come and lunch with me at Nikola&#8217;s for
+the last time.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He rose, stretched out both arms in a wide gesture
+and smiled with his irresistible Ancient Mariner&#8217;s
+eyes at the young man.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>
+&ldquo;We lunch. We eat ambrosia. Then we go out
+together and see the wonderful world through the
+glass-blood of saints and martyrs and apostles and
+the good Father Abraham and Louis Quatorze.
+<em>Viens, mon cher ami.</em> It is the dream of my life.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Practically penniless and absolutely disillusioned,
+the amazing man was radiantly happy.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>THE ADVENTURE OF A SAINT MARTIN&#8217;S SUMMER</strong></p>
+
+
+<p>My good friend Blessington, who is a mighty
+man in the Bordeaux wine-trade, happening
+one day to lament the irreparable loss
+of a deceased employ&eacute;, an Admirable Crichton of
+a myriad accomplishments and linguistic attainments
+whose functions it had been, apparently, to travel
+about between London, Bordeaux, Marseilles and
+Algiers, I immediately thought of a certain living
+and presumably unemployed paragon of my acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I know the very man you&#8217;re looking for,&rdquo; said I.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Who is he?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He&#8217;s a kind of human firework,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;and
+his name is Aristide Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I sketched the man&mdash;in my desire to do a good
+turn to Aristide, perhaps in exaggerated colour.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Let me have a look at him,&rdquo; said Blessington.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He may be anywhere on the continent of
+Europe,&rdquo; said I. &ldquo;How long can you give me to
+produce him?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+&ldquo;A week. Not longer.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;ll do my best,&rdquo; said I.</p>
+
+<p>By good luck my telegram, sent off about four
+o&#8217;clock, found him at 213 <em>bis</em> Rue Saint-Honor&eacute;.
+He had just returned to Paris after some mad dash
+for fortune (he told me afterwards a wild and disastrous
+story of a Russian Grand-Duke, a Dancer
+and a gold mine in the Dolomites) and had once
+more resumed the dreary conduct of the Agence
+Pujol at the H&ocirc;tel du Soleil et de l&#8217;Ecosse. My
+summons being imperative, he abandoned the
+Agence Pujol as a cat jumps off a wall, and,
+leaving the guests of the Hotel guideless, to
+the indignation of Monsieur Bocardon, whom he
+had served this trick several times before, paid his
+good landlady, Madam Bidoux, what he owed her,
+took a third-class ticket to London, bought, lunatic
+that he was, a ripe Brie cheese, a foot in diameter,
+a present to myself, which he carried in his hand
+most of the journey, and turned up at my house at
+eight o&#8217;clock the next morning with absolutely
+empty pockets and the happiest and most fascinating
+smile that ever irradiated the face of man. As a
+matter of fact, he burst his way past my scandalized
+valet into my bedroom and woke me up.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Here I am, my dear friend, and here is something
+French you love that I have brought you,&rdquo;
+and he thrust the Brie cheese under my nose.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;&mdash;&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;&mdash;,&rdquo; said I.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+If you were awakened by a Brie cheese, an hour
+before your time, you would say the same. Aristide
+sat at the foot of the bed and laughed till the tears
+ran down his beard.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as it was decent I sent him into the city
+to interview Blessington. Three hours afterward
+he returned more radiant than ever. He threw
+himself into my arms; before I could disentagle
+myself, he kissed me on both cheeks; then he danced
+about the room.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Me voici</em>,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;accredited representative of
+the great Maison Dulau et Compagnie. I have
+hundreds of pounds a year. I go about. I watch.
+I control. I see that the Great British Public can
+assuage its thirst with the pure juice of the grape
+and not with the dregs of a laboratory. I test vintages.
+I count barrels. I enter them in books. I
+smile at Algerian wine growers and say, &lsquo;Ha! ha!
+none of your <em>petite piquette fr&eacute;late&eacute;</em> for me but
+good sound wine.&rsquo; It is diplomacy. It is as simple
+as kissing hands. And I have a sustained income.
+Now I can be <em>un bon bourgeois</em> instead of a stray
+cat. And all due to you, <em>mon cher ami</em>. I am grateful&mdash;<em>voyons</em>&mdash;if
+anybody ever says Aristide Pujol
+is ungrateful, he is a liar. You believe me! Say
+you believe me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He looked at me earnestly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I do, old chap,&rdquo; said I.</p>
+
+<p>I had known Aristide for some years, and in all
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+kinds of little ways he had continuously manifested
+his gratitude for the trifling service I had rendered
+him, at our first meeting, in delivering him out of
+the hands of the horrific Madam Gougasse. That
+gratitude is the expectation of favors to come was,
+in the case of Aristide, a cynical and inapplicable
+proposition. And here, as this (as far as I can
+see) is the last of Aristide&#8217;s adventures I have to
+relate, let me make an honest and considered statement:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>During the course of an interesting and fairly
+prosperous life, I have made many delightful Bohemian,
+devil-may-care acquaintances, but among
+them all Aristide stands as the one bright star who
+has never asked me to lend him money. I have
+offered it times without number, but he has refused.
+I believe there is no man living to whom Aristide
+is in debt. In the depths of the man&#8217;s changeling
+and feckless soul is a principle which has carried
+him untarnished through many a wild adventure.
+If he ever accepted money&mdash;money to the Proven&ccedil;al
+peasant is the transcendental materialised, and Aristide
+(save by the changeling theory) was Proven&ccedil;al
+peasant bone and blood&mdash;it was always for what he
+honestly thought was value received. If he met
+a man who wanted to take a mule ride among the
+Mountains of the Moon, Aristide would at once
+have offered himself as guide. The man would
+have paid him; but Aristide, by some quaint spiritual
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+juggling, would have persuaded him that the
+ascent of Primrose Hill was equal to any lunar
+achievement, seeing that, himself, Aristide Pujol,
+was keeper of the Sun, Moon and Seven Stars; and
+the gift to that man of Aristide&#8217;s dynamic personality
+would have been well worth anything that he
+would have found in the extinct volcano we know
+to be the moon.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The only thing I would suggest, if you would
+allow me to do so,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;is not to try to make
+the fortune of Messrs. Dulau &amp; Co. by some dazzling
+but devastating <em>coup</em> of your own.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He looked at me in his bright, shrewd way. &ldquo;You
+think it time I restrained my imagination?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Exactly.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I will read The Times and buy a family Bible,&rdquo;
+said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>A week after he had taken up his work in
+the City, under my friend Blessington, I saw
+the delighted and prosperous man again. It
+was a Saturday and he came to lunch at my
+house.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tiens!</em>&rdquo; said he, when he had recounted his success
+in the office, &ldquo;it is four years since I was in
+England?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said I, with a jerk of memory. &ldquo;Time
+passes quickly.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is three years since I lost little Jean.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Who is little Jean?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>
+&ldquo;Did I not tell you when I saw you last in
+Paris?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is strange. I have been thinking about him
+and my heart has been aching for him all the time.
+You must hear. It is most important.&rdquo; He lit a
+cigar and began.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that he told me the story of which
+I have already related in these
+chronicles:<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a>
+how he was scouring France in a ramshackle automobile
+as the peripatetic vendor of a patent corn cure
+and found a babe of nine months lying abandoned
+in the middle of that silent road through the
+wilderness between Salon and Arles; how instead
+of delivering it over to the authorities, he adopted
+it and carried it about with him from town to town,
+a motor accessory sometimes embarrassing, but always
+divinely precious; how an evil day came upon
+him at Aix-en-Provence when, the wheezing automobile
+having uttered its last gasp, he found his
+occupation gone; how, no longer being able to care
+for <em>le petit</em> Jean, he left him with a letter and half
+his fortune outside the door of a couple of English
+maiden ladies who, staying in the same hotel, had
+manifested great interest in the baby and himself;
+and how, in the dead of the night, he had tramped
+away from Aix-en-Provence in the rain, his pockets
+light and his heart as heavy as lead.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+&ldquo;And I have never heard of my little Jean
+again,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why didn&#8217;t you write?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I knew their names, Honeywood; Miss Janet
+was the elder, Miss Anne the younger. But the
+name of the place they lived at I have never been
+able to remember. It was near London&mdash;they used
+to come up by train to matin&eacute;es and afternoon concerts.
+But what it is called, <em>mon Dieu</em>, I have racked
+my brain for it. <em>Sacr&eacute; mille tonnerres!</em>&rdquo; He leaped
+to his feet in his unexpected, startling way, and
+pounced on a Bradshaw&#8217;s Railway Guide lying on
+my library table. &ldquo;Imbecile, pig, triple ass that I
+am! Why did I not think of this before? It is near
+London. If I look through all the stations near
+London on every line, I shall find it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;go ahead.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I lit a cigarette and took up a novel. I had not
+read very far when a sudden uproar from the
+table caused me to turn round. Aristide
+danced and flourished the Bradshaw over his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Chislehurst! Chislehurst! Ah, <em>mon ami</em>, now
+I am happy. Now I have found my little Jean.
+You will forgive me&mdash;but I must go now and embrace
+him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He held out his hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Where are you off to?&rdquo; I demanded.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The Chislehurst, where else?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>
+&ldquo;My dear fellow,&rdquo; said I, rising, &ldquo;do you
+seriously suppose that these two English maiden
+ladies have taken on themselves the responsibility
+of that foreign brat&#8217;s upbringing?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu!</em>&rdquo; said he taken aback for the moment,
+hypothesis having entered his head. Then, with
+a wide gesture, he flung the preposterous idea to
+the winds. &ldquo;Of course. They have hearts, these
+English women. They have maternal instincts.
+They have money.&rdquo; He looked at Bradshaw again,
+then at his watch. &ldquo;I have just time to catch a
+train. <em>Au revoir, mon vieux.</em>&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But,&rdquo; I objected, &ldquo;why don&#8217;t you write? It&#8217;s
+the natural thing to do.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Write? <em>Bah!</em> Did you ever hear of a Proven&ccedil;al
+writing when he could talk?&rdquo; He tapped his
+lips, and in an instant, like a whirlwind, he passed
+from my ken.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Aristide on his arrival at Chislehurst looked
+about the pleasant, leafy place&mdash;it was a bright
+October afternoon and the wooded hillside blazed
+in russet and gold&mdash;and decided it was the perfect
+environment for Miss Janet and Miss Anne,
+to say nothing of little Jean. A neat red brick
+house with a trim garden in front of it looked
+just the kind of a house wherein Miss Janet and
+Miss Anne would live. He rang the bell. A parlour-maid,
+in spotless black and white, tutelary
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+nymph of Suburbia, the very parlour-maid who
+would minister to Miss Janet and Miss Anne,
+opened the door.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Miss Honeywood?&rdquo; he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Not here, sir,&rdquo; said the parlour-maid.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Where is she? I mean, where are they?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;No one of that name lives here,&rdquo; said the parlour-maid.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Who does live here?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Colonel Brabazon.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And where do the two Miss Honeywood live?&rdquo;
+he asked with his engaging smile.</p>
+
+<p>But English suburban parlour-maids are on their
+guard against smiles, no matter how engaging. She
+prepared to shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t know.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How can I find out?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You might enquire among the tradespeople.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you, mademoiselle, you are a most intelligent
+young&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The door shut in his face. Aristide frowned. She
+was a pretty parlour-maid, and Aristide didn&#8217;t like
+to be so haughtily treated by a pretty woman. But
+his quest being little Jean and not the eternal feminine,
+he took the maid&#8217;s advice and made enquiries
+at the prim and respectable shops.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; said a comely young woman in a fragrant
+bakers&#8217; and confectioners&#8217;. &ldquo;They were two
+ladies, weren&#8217;t they? They lived at Hope Cottage.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+We used to supply them. They left Chislehurst
+two years ago.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Sacr&eacute; nom d&#8217;un chien!</em>&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Beg pardon?&rdquo; asked the young woman.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am disappointed,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Where
+did they go to?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;m sure I can&#8217;t tell you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Do you remember whether they had a baby?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;They were maiden ladies,&rdquo; said the young
+woman rebukingly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But anybody can keep a baby without being its
+father or mother. I want to know what has become
+of the baby.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The young woman gazed through the window.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You had better ask the policeman.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s an idea,&rdquo; said Aristide, and, leaving her,
+he caught up the passing constable.</p>
+
+<p>The constable knew nothing of maiden ladies
+with a baby, but he directed him to Hope Cottage.
+He found a pretty half-timber house lying back
+from the road, with a neat semi-circular gravelled
+path leading to a porch covered thick with Virginia
+creeper. Even more than the red brick residence
+of Colonel Brabazon did it look, with its air
+of dainty comfort, the fitting abode of Miss Janet
+and Miss Anne. He rang the bell and interviewed
+another trim parlour-maid. More susceptible to
+smiles than the former, she summoned her master,
+a kindly, middle-aged man, who came out into the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>
+porch. Yes, Honeywood was the name of the previous
+tenants. Two ladies, he believed. He had
+never seen them and knew nothing about a child.
+Messrs. Tompkin &amp; Briggs, the estate agents in the
+High Street, could no doubt give him information.
+Aristide thanked him and made his way to Messrs.
+Tompkin &amp; Briggs. A dreary spectacled youth in
+resentful charge of the office&mdash;his principals, it being
+Saturday afternoon, were golfing the happy
+hours away&mdash;professed blank ignorance of everything.
+Aristide fixed him with his glittering eye
+and flickered his fingers and spoke richly. The
+youth in a kind of mesmeric trance took down a
+battered, dog&#8217;s eared book and turned over the
+pages.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Honeywood&mdash;Miss&mdash;Beverly Stoke&mdash;near St.
+Albans&mdash;Herts. That&#8217;s it,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide made a note of the address. &ldquo;Is that
+all you can tell me?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the youth.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I thank you very much, my young friend,&rdquo; said
+Aristide, raising his hat, &ldquo;and here is something
+to buy a smile with,&rdquo; and, leaving a sixpence on the
+table to shimmer before the youth&#8217;s stupefied eyes,
+Aristide strutted out of the office.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>&ldquo;You had much better have written,&rdquo; said I, when
+he came back and told me of his experiences. &ldquo;The
+post-office would have done all that for you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+&ldquo;You have no idea of business, <em>mon cher ami</em>&rdquo;&mdash;(I&mdash;a
+successful tea-broker of twenty-five years&#8217;
+standing!&mdash;the impudence of the fellow!)&mdash;&ldquo;If I
+had written to-day, the letter would have reached
+Chislehurst on Monday morning. It would be redirected
+and reach Hertfordshire on Tuesday. I
+should not get any news till Wednesday. I go
+down to Beverly Stoke to-morrow, and then I find
+at once Miss Janet and Miss Anne and my little
+Jean! The secret of business men, and I am a business
+man, the accredited representative of Dulau
+et Compagnie&mdash;never forget that&mdash;the secret of
+business is no delay.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He darted across the room to Bradshaw.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;For God&#8217;s sake,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;put that nightmare
+of perpetual motion in your pocket and go mad over
+it in the privacy of your own chamber.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Very good,&rdquo; said he, tucking the brain-convulsing
+volume under his arm. &ldquo;I will put it on top of
+The Times and the family Bible and I will say
+&lsquo;Ha! now I am British. Now I am very respectable!&rsquo;
+What else can I do?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Rent a pew in a Baptist chapel,&rdquo; said I.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>After a three-mile trudge from St. Albans Aristide,
+following directions, found himself on a high
+road running through the middle of a straggy common
+decked here and there with great elms splendid
+in autumn bravery, and populated chiefly by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+geese, who when he halted in some perplexity&mdash;for
+on each side, beyond the green, were indications
+of a human settlement&mdash;advanced in waddling
+flocks towards him and signified their disapproval
+of his presence. A Sundayfied youth in a rainbow
+tie rode past on a bicycle. Aristide took off his
+hat. The youth nearly fell off the bicycle, but British
+doggedness saved him from disaster.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Beverly Stoke? Will you have the courtesy&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Here,&rdquo; bawled the youth, with a circular twist
+of his head, and, eager to escape from a madman,
+he rode on furiously.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide looked to left and right at the little
+houses beyond the green&mdash;some white and thatched
+and dilapidated, others horridly new and perky&mdash;but
+all poor and insignificant. As his eyes became
+accustomed to the scene they were aware of human
+forms dotted sparsely about the common. He
+struck across and accosted one, an elderly woman
+with a prayer-book. &ldquo;Miss Honeywood? A lady
+from London?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That house over there&mdash;the third beyond the
+poplar.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And little Jean&mdash;a beautiful child about four
+years old?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That I don&#8217;t know, sir. I live at Wilmer&#8217;s End,
+a good half mile from here.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide made for the third house past the poplar.
+First there was a plank bridge across a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+grass-grown ditch; then a tiny patch of garden; then a
+humble whitewashed cottage with a small leaded
+casement window on each side of the front door.
+Unlike Hope Cottage, it did not look at all the residence
+of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. Its appearance,
+indeed, was woe-begone. Aristide, however,
+went up to the door; as there was neither knocker
+nor bell, he rapped with his knuckles. The door
+opened, and there, poorly dressed in blouse and
+skirt, stood Miss Anne.</p>
+
+<p>She regarded him for a moment in a bewildered
+way, then, recognizing him, drew back into the
+stone flagged passage with a sharp cry.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You? You&mdash;Mr. Pujol?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Oui, Mademoiselle, c&#8217;est moi.</em> It is I, Aristide
+Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She put her hands on her bosom. &ldquo;It is rather
+a shock seeing you&mdash;so unexpectedly. Will you
+come in?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She led the way into a tiny parlour, very clean,
+very simple with its furniture of old oak and brass,
+and bade him sit. She looked a little older than
+when he had seen her at Aix-en-Provence. A few
+lines had marred the comely face and there was
+here and there a touch of grey in the reddish hair,
+and, though still buxom, she had grown thinner.
+Care had set its stamp upon her.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Miss Honeywood,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;It is on account
+of little Jean that I have come&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+She turned on him swiftly. &ldquo;Not to take him
+away!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then he is here!&rdquo; He jumped to his feet and
+wrung both her hands and kissed them to her great
+embarrassment. &ldquo;Ah, mademoiselle, I knew it. I
+felt it. When such an inspiration comes to a man,
+it is the <em>bon Dieu</em> who sends it. He is here, actually
+here, in this house?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Miss Anne.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide threw out his arms. &ldquo;Let me see him.
+<em>Ah, le cher petit!</em> I have been yearning after him
+for three years. It was my heart that I ripped out
+of my body that night and laid at your threshold.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Hush!&rdquo; said Miss Anne, with an interrupting
+gesture. &ldquo;You must not talk so loud. He is asleep
+in the next room. You mustn&#8217;t wake him. He is
+very ill.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ill? Dangerously ill?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I&#8217;m afraid so.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Mon Dieu</em>,&rdquo; said he, sitting down again in the
+oak settle. To Aristide the emotion of the moment
+was absorbing, overwhelming. His attitude betokened
+deepest misery and dejection.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And I expected to see him full of joy and
+health!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is not my fault, Mr. Pujol,&rdquo; said Miss Anne.</p>
+
+<p>He started. &ldquo;But no. How could it be? You
+loved him when you first set eyes on him at Aix-en-Provence.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>
+Miss Anne began to cry. &ldquo;God knows,&rdquo; said
+she, &ldquo;what I should do without him. The dear
+mite is all that is left to me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;All? But there is your sister, the dear Miss
+Janet.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Anne&#8217;s eyes were hidden in her handkerchief.
+&ldquo;My poor sister died last year, Mr. Pujol.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am very sorry. I did not know,&rdquo; said Aristide
+gently.</p>
+
+<p>There was a short silence. &ldquo;It was a great sorrow
+to you,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It was God&#8217;s will,&rdquo; said Anne. Then, after another
+pause, during which she dried her eyes, she
+strove to smile. &ldquo;Tell me about yourself. How
+do you come to be here?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide replied in a hesitating way. He was in
+the presence of grief and sickness and trouble; the
+Proven&ccedil;al braggadocio dropped from him and he
+became the simple and childish creature that he was.
+He accounted very truthfully, very convincingly,
+for his queer life; for his abandonment of little
+Jean, for his silence, for his sudden and unexpected
+appearance. During the ingenuous <em>apologia pro
+vita sua</em> Miss Anne regarded him with her honest
+candour.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Janet and I both understood,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Janet
+was gifted with a divine comprehension and pity. The
+landlady at the hotel, I remember, said some unkind
+things about you; but we didn&#8217;t believe them. We
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>
+felt that you were a good man&mdash;no one but a good
+man could have written that letter&mdash;we cried over
+it&mdash;and when she tried to poison our minds we said
+to each other: &lsquo;What does it matter? Here God in
+his mercy has given us a child.&rsquo; But, Mr. Pujol,
+why didn&#8217;t you take us into your confidence?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear Miss Anne,&rdquo; said Aristide, &ldquo;we of the
+South do things impulsively, by lightning flashes.
+An idea comes suddenly. <em>Vlan!</em> we carry it out in
+two seconds. We are not less human than the
+Northerner, who reflects two months.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That is almost what dear, wise Janet told me,&rdquo;
+said Miss Anne.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then you know in your heart,&rdquo; said Aristide,
+after a while, &ldquo;that if I had not been only a football
+at the feet of fortune, I should never have deserted
+little Jean?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I do, Mr. Pujol. My sister and I have been
+footballs, too.&rdquo; She added with a change of tone:
+&ldquo;You tell me you saw our dear home at Chislehurst?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And you see this. There is a difference.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What has happened?&rdquo; asked Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>She told him the commonplace pathetic story.
+Their father had left them shares in the company
+of which he had been managing director. For
+many years they had enjoyed a comfortable income.
+Then the company had become bankrupt and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+only a miserable ninety pounds a year had been
+saved from the wreckage. The cottage at Beverly
+Stoke belonging to them&mdash;it had been their mother&#8217;s&mdash;they
+had migrated thither with their fallen fortunes
+and little Jean. And then Janet had died.
+She was delicate and unaccustomed to privation
+and discomfort&mdash;and the cottage had its disadvantages.
+She, Anne herself, was as strong as a horse
+and had never been ill in her life, but others were
+not quite so hardy. &ldquo;However&rdquo;&mdash;she smiled&mdash;&ldquo;one
+has to make the best of things.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Parbleu</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Anne went on to talk of Jean, a miraculous
+infant of infinite graces and accomplishments. Up
+to now he had been the sturdiest and merriest
+fellow.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;At nine months old he saw that life was a big
+joke,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;How he used to laugh.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There&#8217;s not much laugh left in him, poor darling,&rdquo;
+she sighed. And she told how he had caught
+a chill which had gone to his lungs and how the
+night before last she thought she had lost him.</p>
+
+<p>She sat up and listened. &ldquo;Will you excuse me
+for a moment?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She went out and presently returned, standing
+at the doorway. &ldquo;He is still asleep. Would you
+like to see him? Only&rdquo;&mdash;she put her fingers on her
+lips&mdash;&ldquo;you must be very, very quiet.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He followed her into the next room and looked
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>
+about him shyly, recognizing that it was Miss
+Anne&#8217;s own bedroom; and there, lying in a little
+cot beside the big bed, he saw the sleeping child,
+his brown face flushed with fever. He had a curly
+shock of black hair and well formed features. An
+old woolly lamb nose to nose with him shared his
+pillow. Aristide drew from his pocket a Teddy
+bear, and, having asked Miss Anne&#8217;s permission
+with a glance, laid it down gently on the
+coverlid.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes were wet when they returned to the
+parlour. So were Miss Anne&#8217;s. The Teddy bear
+was proof of the simplicity of his faith in her.</p>
+
+<p>After a while, conscious of hunger, he rose to
+take leave. He must be getting back to St. Albans.
+But might he be permitted to come back later in
+the afternoon? Miss Anne reddened. It outraged
+her sense of hospitality to send a guest away from
+her house on a three-mile walk for food. And
+yet&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Pujol,&rdquo; she said bravely, &ldquo;I would ask you
+to stay to luncheon if I had anything to offer you.
+But I am single handed, and, with Jean&#8217;s illness,
+I haven&#8217;t given much thought to housekeeping. The
+woman who does some of the rough work won&#8217;t
+be back till six. I hate to let you go all those miles&mdash;I
+am so distressed&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, mademoiselle,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;You have
+some bread. You have water. It has been a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+banquet many a day to me, and this time it would be
+the most precious banquet of all.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I can do a little better than that,&rdquo; faltered Miss
+Anne. &ldquo;I have plenty of eggs and there is bacon.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Eggs&mdash;bacon!&rdquo; cried Aristide, his bright eyes
+twinkling and his hands going up in the familiar
+gesture. &ldquo;That is superb. <em>Tiens!</em> you shall not do
+the cooking. You shall rest. I will make you an
+<em>omelette au lard</em>&mdash;<em>ah!</em>&rdquo;&mdash;he kissed the tips of his
+fingers&mdash;&ldquo;such an omelette as you have not eaten
+since you were in France&mdash;and even there I doubt
+whether you have ever eaten an omelette like mine.&rdquo;
+His soul simmering with omelette, he darted towards
+the door. &ldquo;The kitchen&mdash;it is this way?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But, Mr. Pujol&mdash;&mdash;!&rdquo; Miss Anne laughed, protestingly.
+Who could be angry with the vivid and
+impulsive creature?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is the room opposite Jean&#8217;s&mdash;not so?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She followed him into the clean little kitchen,
+half amused, half flustered. Already he had hooked
+off the top of the kitchen range. &ldquo;Ah! a good fire.
+And your frying-pan?&rdquo; He dived into the scullery.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Please don&#8217;t be in such a hurry,&rdquo; she pleaded.
+&ldquo;You will have made the omelette before I&#8217;ve had
+time to lay the cloth, and it will get cold. Besides,
+I want to learn how to do it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Tr&eacute;s bien</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide, laying down the frying-pan.
+&ldquo;You shall see how it is made&mdash;the omelette
+of the universe.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+So he helped Miss Anne to lay the cloth on the
+gate-legged oak table in the parlour and to set it
+out with bread and butter and the end of a tinned
+tongue and a couple of bottles of stout. After
+which they went back to the little kitchen, where
+in a kind of giggling awe she watched him shred
+the bacon and break the eggs with his thin, skilful
+fingers and perform his magic with the frying-pan
+and turn out the great golden creation into the
+dish.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said he, pulling her in his enthusiasm,
+&ldquo;to table while it is hot.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Anne laughed. She lost her head ever so
+little. The days had been drab and hopeless of
+late and she was still young; so, if she felt excited
+at this unhoped for inrush of life and colour, who
+shall blame her? The light sparkled once more in
+her eyes and the pink of her naturally florid complexion
+shone on her cheek as they sat down to
+table.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It is I who help it,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Taste
+that.&rdquo; He passed the plate and waited, with the
+artist&#8217;s expectation for her approval.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s delicious.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It was indeed the perfection of omelette, all its
+suave juiciness contained in film as fine as goldbeater&#8217;s
+skin.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, it&#8217;s good.&rdquo; He was delighted, childlike, at
+the success of his cookery. His gaiety kept the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+careworn woman in rare laughter during the meal.
+She lost all consciousness that he was a strange
+man plunged down suddenly in the midst of her
+old maidish existence&mdash;and a strange man, too, who
+had once behaved in a most outrageous fashion.
+But that was ever the way of Aristide. The moment
+you yielded to his attraction he made you feel
+that you had known him for years. His fascination
+possessed you.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Miss Anne,&rdquo; said he, smoking a cigarette, at
+her urgent invitation, &ldquo;is there a poor woman in
+Beverly Stoke with whom I could lodge?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She gasped. &ldquo;You lodge in Beverly Stoke?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why yes,&rdquo; said Aristide, as if it were the most
+natural thing in the world. &ldquo;I am engaged in the
+city from ten to five every day. I can&#8217;t come here
+and go back to London every night, and I can&#8217;t
+stay a whole week without my little Jean. And I
+have my duty to Jean. I stand to him in the relation
+of a father. I must help you to nurse him
+and make him better. I must give him soup and
+apples and ice cream and&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You would kill the darling in five minutes,&rdquo; interrupted
+Miss Anne.</p>
+
+<p>He waved his forefinger in the air. &ldquo;No, no, I
+have nursed the sick in my time. My dear friend,&rdquo;
+said he, with a change of tone, &ldquo;when did you go to
+bed last?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t know,&rdquo; she answered in some confusion.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+&ldquo;The district nurse has helped me&mdash;and the doctor
+has been very good. Jean has turned the corner
+now. Please don&#8217;t worry. And as for your coming
+to live down here, it&#8217;s absurd.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, if you formally forbid me to do so,
+mademoiselle, and if you don&#8217;t want to see me&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How can you say a thing like that? Haven&#8217;t I
+shown you to-day that you are welcome?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Dear Miss Anne,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;forgive me. But
+what is that great vast town of London to me who
+know nobody there? Here in this tiny spot is concentrated
+all I care for in the world. Why
+shouldn&#8217;t I live in it?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You would be so dreadfully uncomfortable,&rdquo;
+said Miss Anne, weakly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; cried Aristide. &ldquo;You talk of discomfort
+to an old client of <em>L&#8217;H&ocirc;tel de la Belle &Eacute;toile</em>?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The Hotel of the Beautiful Star? Where is
+that?&rdquo; asked the innocent lady.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Wherever you like,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;Your bed
+is dry leaves and your bed-curtains, if you demand
+luxury, are a hedge, and your ceiling, if you are
+fortunate, is ornamented with stars.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him wide-eyed, in great concern.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean that you have ever been homeless?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He laughed. &ldquo;I think I&#8217;ve been everything imaginable,
+except married.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Hush!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Listen!&rdquo; Her keen ear had
+caught a child&#8217;s cry. &ldquo;It&#8217;s Jean. I must go.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+She hurried out. Aristide prepared to light another
+cigarette. But a second before the application
+of the flaring match an idea struck him. He
+blew out the match, replaced the cigarette in his
+case, and with a dexterity that revealed the professional
+of years ago, began to clear the table. He
+took the things noiselessly into the kitchen, shut the
+door, and master of the kitchen and scullery washed
+up. Then, the most care-free creature in the world,
+he stole down the stone passage into the wilderness
+of Beverly Stoke.</p>
+
+<p>An hour afterwards he knocked at the front door,
+Anne Honeywood admitted him.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have arranged with the good Mrs. Buttershaw.
+She lives a hundred yards down the road.
+I bring my baggage to-morrow evening.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Anne regarded him in a humorous, helpless way.
+&ldquo;I can&#8217;t prevent you,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but I can give you
+a piece of advice.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Don&#8217;t wash up for Mrs. Buttershaw.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>So it came to pass that Aristide Pujol took up
+his residence at Beverly Stoke, trudging every
+morning three miles to catch his business train at
+St. Albans, and trudging back every evening three
+miles to Beverly Stoke. Every morning he ran
+into the cottage for a sight of little Jean and every
+evening after a digestion-racking meal prepared by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+Mrs. Buttershaw he went to the cottage armed with
+toys and weird and injudicious food for little Jean
+and demanded an account of the precious infant&#8217;s
+doings during the day. Gradually Jean recovered
+of his congestion, being a sturdy urchin, and, to
+Aristide&#8217;s delight, resumed the normal life of childhood.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Moi, je suis papa</em>,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;He has got
+to speak French, and he had better begin at once.
+It is absurd that anyone born between Salon and
+Arles should not speak French and Proven&ccedil;al; we&#8217;ll
+leave Proven&ccedil;al till later. <em>Moi, je suis papa, Jean.</em>
+Say <em>papa</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t quite see how he can call you that, Mr.
+Pujol,&rdquo; said Anne, with the suspicion of a flush on
+her cheek.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And why not? Has the poor child any other
+papa in the whole wide world? And at four years
+old not to have a father is heart-breaking. Do you
+want us to bring him up an orphan? No. You
+shan&#8217;t be an orphan, <em>mon brave</em>,&rdquo; he continued,
+bending over the child and putting his little hands
+against his bearded face, &ldquo;you couldn&#8217;t bear such a
+calamity, could you? And so you will call me
+<em>papa</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Papa</em>,&rdquo; said Jean, with a grin.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There, he has settled it,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;<em>Moi
+je suis papa.</em> And you, mademoiselle?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I am Auntie Anne,&rdquo; she replied demurely.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>
+Saturday afternoons and Sundays were Aristide&#8217;s
+days of delight. He could devote himself entirely
+to Jean. The thrill of the weeks when he had
+paraded the child in the market places of France
+while he sold his corn cure again ran through his
+veins. The two rows of cottages separated by the
+common, which was the whole of Beverly Stoke,
+became too small a theatre for his parental pride.
+He bewailed the loss of his automobile that had
+perished of senile decay at Aix-en-Provence. If he
+only had it now he could exhibit Jean to the astonished
+eyes of St. Albans, Watford&mdash;nay London
+itself!</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I wish I could take him to Dulau &amp; Company,&rdquo;
+said he.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good Heavens!&rdquo; cried Miss Anne in alarm, for
+Aristide was capable of everything. &ldquo;What in the
+world would you do with him there?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What would I do with him?&rdquo; replied Aristide,
+picking the child up in his arms&mdash;the three were
+strolling on the common&mdash;&ldquo;<em>Parbleu!</em> I would use
+him to strike the staff of Dulau &amp; Company green
+with envy. Do you think the united efforts of the
+whole lot of them, from the good Mr. Blessington
+to the office boy, could produce a hero like this?
+You are a hero, Jean, aren&#8217;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, papa,&rdquo; said Jean.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He knows it,&rdquo; shouted Aristide with a delighted
+gesture which nearly cast Jean to the circumambient
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>
+geese. &ldquo;Miss Anne, we have the most wonderful
+child in the universe.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This, as far as Anne was concerned, was a
+proposition which for the past three years
+she had regarded as incontrovertible. She
+smiled at Aristide, who smiled at her, and
+Jean, seeing them happy, smiled largely at them
+both.</p>
+
+<p>In a very short time Aristide, who could magically
+manufacture boats and cocks and pigs and
+giraffes out of bits of paper, who could bark like
+a dog and quack like a goose, who could turn himself
+into a horse or a bear at a minute&#8217;s notice,
+whose pockets were a perennial mine of infantile
+ecstasy, established himself in Jean&#8217;s mind as a kind
+of tame, necessary and beloved jinn. Being a loyal
+little soul, the child retained his affection for Auntie
+Anne, but he was swept off his little feet by his
+mirific parent. The time came when, if he was
+not dressed in his tiny woollen jersey and knee
+breeches and had not his nose glued against the
+parlour window in readiness to scramble to the
+front door for Aristide&#8217;s morning kiss, he would
+have thought that chaos had come again. And
+Anne, humouring the child, hastened to get him
+washed and dressed in time; until at last, so greatly
+was she affected by his obsession, she got into the
+foolish habit of watching the clock and saying to
+herself: &ldquo;In another minute he will be here,&rdquo; or:
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+&ldquo;He is a minute late. What can have happened
+to him?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So Aristide, in his childlike way, found remarkable
+happiness in Beverly Stoke. A very wet summer
+had been followed by a dry and mellow autumn.
+Aristide waxed enthusiastic over the English climate
+and rejoiced in the mild country air. He was
+also happy under my friend Blessington, who spoke
+of him to me in glowing terms. At the back of all
+Aristide&#8217;s eccentricities was the Proven&ccedil;al peasant&#8217;s
+shrewdness. He realized that, for the first time in
+his life, he had taken up a sound and serious avocation.
+Also, he was no longer irresponsible. He
+had found little Jean. Jean&#8217;s future was in his
+hands. Jean was to be an architect&mdash;God knows
+why&mdash;but Aristide settled it, definitely, off-hand.
+He would have to be educated. &ldquo;And, my dear
+friend,&rdquo; said he, when we were discussing Jean&mdash;and
+for months I heard nothing but Jean, Jean,
+Jean, so that I loathed the brat, until I met the
+brown-skinned, black-eyed, merry little wretch and
+fell, like everybody else, fatuously in love with him&mdash;&ldquo;my
+dear friend,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;an architect, to be
+the architect that I mean him to be, must have universal
+knowledge. He must know the first word
+of the classic, the last word of the modern. He
+must be steeped in poetry, his brain must vibrate
+with science. He must be what you call in England
+a gentleman. He must go to one of your great
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+public schools&mdash;Eton, Winchester, Rugby, Harrow&mdash;you
+see I know them all&mdash;he must go to Cambridge
+or Oxford. Ah, I tell you, he is to be a big
+man. I, Aristide Pujol, did not pick him up on
+that deserted road, in the Arabia Petrea of Provence,
+between Salon and Arles, for nothing. He was
+wrapped, as I have told you, in an old blanket&mdash;and
+<em>ma foi</em> it smelt bad&mdash;and I dressed him in my
+pyjamas and made a Neapolitan cap for him out of
+one of my socks. The <em>bon Dieu</em> sent him, and I
+shall arrange just as the <em>bon Dieu</em> intended. Poor
+Miss Anne Honeywood with her ninety pounds a
+year, what can she do? Pouf! It is for me to look
+after the future of little Jean.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>By means of such discourse he convinced Miss
+Anne that Jean was predestined to greatness and
+that Providence had appointed him, Aristide, as
+the child&#8217;s agent in advance. Very much bewildered
+by his riotous flow of language and
+very reluctant to sacrifice her woman&#8217;s pride, she
+agreed to allow him to contribute towards Jean&#8217;s
+upbringing.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Dear Miss Anne,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;it is my right. It is
+Jean&#8217;s right. You would love to put him on top
+of the pinnacle of fame, would you not?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Miss Anne.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Eh bien!</em> we will work together. You will give
+him what can be given by a beautiful and exquisite
+woman, and I will do all that can be done by the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+accredited agent of Dulau et Compagnie, Wine
+Shippers of Bordeaux.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So, I repeat, Aristide was entirely happy. His
+waking dreams were of the four-year-old child.
+The glad anticipation of the working day in Great
+Tower St., E. C., was the evening welcome from
+the simple but capable gentlewoman and the sense
+of home and intimacy in her little parlour no bigger
+than the never-entered and nerve-destroying salon
+of his parents at Aigues Mortes, but smiling with
+the grace of old oak and faded chintz. At Aigues
+Mortes the salon was a comfortless, tasteless convention,
+set apart for the celebrations of baptisms
+and marriages and deaths, a pride and a terror to
+the inhabitants. But here everything seemed to be
+as much a warm bit of Anne Honeywood as the
+tortoise-shell comb in her hair and the square of
+Brussels lace that rose and fell on the bosom of
+her old evening frock. For, you see, since she expected
+a visitor in the evenings, Anne had taken
+to dressing for her sketch of a dinner. For all
+her struggle with poverty she had retained the
+charm that four years before had made her
+touch upon Jean seem a consecration to the
+impressionable man. And now that he entered
+more deeply into her life and thoughts, he found
+himself in fragrant places that were very strange
+to him. He discovered, too, with some surprise,
+that a man who has been at fierce grips with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>
+Fortune all his life from ten to forty is ever so little
+tired in spirit and is glad to rest. In the tranquility
+of Anne Honeywood&#8217;s presence his soul was
+singularly at peace. He also wondered why Anne
+Honeywood seemed to grow younger, and, in her
+gentle fashion, more laughter-loving, every day.</p>
+
+<p>The Saint Martin&#8217;s summer lasted to the beginning
+of December, and then it came to an end, and
+with it the idyll of Aristide and Anne Honeywood.</p>
+
+<p>One Saturday afternoon, when the rain was falling
+dismally, she received him with an embarrassment
+she could scarcely conceal. The usual heightened
+colour no longer gave youth to her cheek; an
+anxious frown knitted her candid brows; and there
+was no laughter in her eyes. He looked at her
+questioningly. Was anything the matter with Jean?
+But Jean answered the question for himself by running
+down the passage and springing like a puppy
+into Aristide&#8217;s arms. Anne turned her face away,
+as if the sight pained her, and, pleading a headache
+and the desire to lie down, she left the two together.
+Returning after a couple of hours with the tea-tray,
+she found them on the floor breathlessly absorbed
+in the erection of card pagodas. She bit her lip
+and swallowed a sob. Aristide jumped up and took
+the tray. Was not the headache better? He was
+so grieved. Jean must be very quiet and drink up
+his milk quietly like a hero because Auntie was
+suffering. Tea was a very subdued affair. Then
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>
+Anne carried off Jean to bed, refusing Aristide&#8217;s
+helpful ministrations. It was his Saturday and
+Sunday joy to bath Jean amid a score of crawly
+tin insects which he had provided for the child&#8217;s
+ablutionary entertainment, and it formed the climax
+of Jean&#8217;s blissful day. But this afternoon Anne
+tore the twain asunder. Aristide looked mournfully
+over the rain-swept common through the leaded
+panes, and speculated on the enigma of woman. A
+man, feeling ill, would have been only too glad for
+somebody to do his work; but a woman, just because
+she was ill, declined assistance. Surely
+women were an intellect-baffling sex.</p>
+
+<p>She came back, having put Jean to bed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear friend,&rdquo; she said, with a blurt of bravery,
+&ldquo;I have something very hard to say, but I must
+say it. You must go away from Beverly Stoke.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; cried Aristide, &ldquo;is it I, then, that give you
+a headache?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s not your fault,&rdquo; she said gently. &ldquo;You have
+been everything that a loyal gentleman could be&mdash;and
+it&#8217;s because you&#8217;re a loyal gentleman that you
+must go.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t understand,&rdquo; said he, puzzled. &ldquo;I must
+go away because I give you a headache, although
+it is not my fault.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s nothing to do with headaches,&rdquo; she explained.
+&ldquo;Don&#8217;t you see? People around here are
+talking.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+&ldquo;About you and me?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Miss Anne, faintly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Saprelotte!</em>&rdquo; cried Aristide, with a fine flourish,
+&ldquo;let them talk!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Against Jean and myself?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The reproach brought him to his feet. &ldquo;No,&rdquo;
+said he. &ldquo;No. Sooner than they should talk, I
+would go out and strangle every one of them. But
+it is infamous. What do they say?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;How can I tell you? What would they say in
+your own country?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;France is France and England is England.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And a little cackling village is the same all the
+world over. No, my dear friend&mdash;for you are my
+dear friend&mdash;you must go back to London, for the
+sake of my good name and Jean&#8217;s.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But let us leave the cackling village.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There are geese on every common,&rdquo; said Anne.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Nom de Dieu!</em>&rdquo; muttered Aristide, walking about
+the tiny parlour. &ldquo;<em>Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!</em>&rdquo;
+He stood in front of her and flung out his arms
+wide. &ldquo;But without Jean and you life will have
+no meaning for me. I shall die. I shall fade away.
+I shall perish. Tell me, dear Miss Anne, what they
+are saying, the miserable peasants with souls of
+mud.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But Anne could tell him no more. It had been
+hateful and degrading to tell him so much. She
+shivered through all her purity. After a barren
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>
+discussion she held out her hand, large and generous
+like herself.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Good-bye&rdquo;&mdash;she hesitated for the fraction of a
+second&mdash;&ldquo;Good-bye, Aristide. I promise you shall
+provide for Jean&#8217;s future. I will bring him up to
+London now and then to see you. We will find
+some way out of the difficulty. But you see, don&#8217;t
+you, that you must leave Beverly Stoke?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Aristide went back to his comfortless lodgings
+aflame with bewilderment, indignation and despair.
+He fell upon Mrs. Buttershaw, a slatternly and sour-visaged
+woman, and hurled at her a tornado of questions.
+She responded with the glee of a hag, and
+Aristide learned the amazing fact that in the matter
+of sheer uncharitableness, unkindness and foulness
+of thought Beverly Stoke, with its population
+of three hundred hinds, could have brought down
+upon it the righteous indignation of Sodom, Gomorrah,
+Babylon, Paris, and London. For a fortnight
+or so Anne Honeywood&#8217;s life in the village
+had been that of a pariah dog.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And now you&#8217;ve spoke of it yourself,&rdquo; said
+Mrs. Buttershaw, her hands on her hips, &ldquo;I&#8217;m glad.
+I&#8217;m a respectable woman, I am, and go to church
+regularly, and I don&#8217;t want to be mixed up in such
+goings on. And I never have held with foreigners,
+anyway. And the sooner you find other lodgings,
+the better.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>For the first and only time in his life words
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>
+failed Aristide Pujol. He stood in front of the virtuous
+harridan, his lips working, his fingers convulsively
+clutching the air.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You&mdash;you&mdash;you&mdash;you naughty woman!&rdquo; he
+gasped, and, sweeping her away from the doorway
+of his box of a sitting-room, he rushed up to his
+tinier bedroom and in furious haste packed his portmanteau.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I would rather die than sleep another night beneath
+your slanderous roof,&rdquo; he cried at the foot
+of the stairs. &ldquo;Here is more than your week&#8217;s
+money.&rdquo; He flung a couple of gold coins on the
+floor and dashed out into the darkness and the rain.</p>
+
+<p>He hammered at Anne Honeywood&#8217;s door. She
+opened it in some alarm.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You?&mdash;but&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; she stammered.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I have come,&rdquo; said he, dumping his portmanteau
+in the passage, &ldquo;to take you and Jean away from
+this abomination of a place. It is a Tophet reserved
+for those who are not good enough for hell. In
+hell there is dignity, <em>que diable!</em> Here there is none.
+I know what you have suffered. I know how they
+insult you. I know what they say. You cannot stay
+one more night here. Pack up all your things.
+Pack up all Jean&#8217;s things. I have my valise here.
+I walk to St. Albans and I come back for you in an
+automobile. You lock up the door. I tell the policeman
+to guard the cottage. You come with me. We
+take a train to London. You and Jean will stay at
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>
+a hotel. I will go to my good friend who saved
+me from Madam Gougasse. After that we will
+think.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&#8217;s just like you,&rdquo; she said, smiling in spite
+of her trouble, &ldquo;you act first and think afterwards.
+Unfortunately I&#8217;m in the habit of doing the reverse.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But it&#8217;s I who am doing all the thinking for
+you. I have thought till my brain is red hot.&rdquo; He
+laughed in his luminous and excited way, and, seizing
+both her hands, kissed them one after the other.
+&ldquo;There!&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;be ready by the time I return.
+Do not hesitate. Do not look back. Remember
+Lot&#8217;s wife!&rdquo; He flourished his hat and was gone
+like a flash into the heavy rain and darkness of the
+December evening. Anne cried after him, but he
+too remembering Lot&#8217;s wife would not turn. He
+marched on buoyantly, heedless of the wet and
+the squirting mud from unseen puddles. It was
+an adventure such as he loved. It was a knightly
+errand, <em>parbleu!</em> Was he not delivering a beautiful
+lady from the dragon of calumny? And in
+an automobile, too! His imagination fondled the
+idea.</p>
+
+<p>At a garage in St. Albans he readily found a car
+for hire. He was all for driving it himself&mdash;that is
+how he had pictured the rescue&mdash;but the proprietor,
+dull and unimaginative tradesman, declined firmly.
+It was a hireling who drove the car to Beverly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>
+Stoke. Anne, unhatted and uncloaked, admitted
+him.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You are not ready?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;My dear friend, how can I&mdash;&mdash;?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You are not coming?&rdquo; His hands dropped to
+his sides and his face was the incarnation of disappointment.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Let us talk things over reasonably,&rdquo; she urged,
+opening the parlour door.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But I have brought the automobile.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He can wait for five minutes, can&#8217;t he?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He can wait till Doomsday,&rdquo; said Aristide.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Take off your dripping coat. You must be wet
+through. Oh, how impulsive you are!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He took off his overcoat dejectedly and followed
+her into the parlour, where she tried to point
+out the impossibility of his scheme. How could
+she abandon her home at a moment&#8217;s notice? Failing
+to convince him, she said at last in some embarrassment,
+but with gentle dignity: &ldquo;Suppose we
+did run away together in your romantic fashion,
+would it not confirm the scandal in the eyes of this
+wretched village?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You are right,&rdquo; said Aristide. &ldquo;I had not
+thought of it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>He knew himself to be a madman. It was not
+thus that ladies were rescued from calumny. But
+to leave her alone to face it for time indefinite was
+unthinkable. And, meanwhile, what would become
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+of him severed from her and little Jean? He sighed
+and looked around the little room where he had
+been so happy, and at the sweet-faced woman whose
+companionship had been so dear to him. And then
+the true meaning of all the precious things that had
+been his life for the past two months appeared before
+him like a smiling valley hitherto hidden and
+now revealed by dissolving mist. A great gladness
+gathered round his heart. He leaned across the
+table by which he was sitting and looked at her and
+for the first time noticed that her eyes were red.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;You have been crying, dear Anne,&rdquo; said he,
+using her name boldly. &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A man ought not to put a question like that at
+a woman&#8217;s head and bid her stand and deliver. How
+is she to answer? Anne felt Aristide&#8217;s bright eyes
+upon her and the colour mounted and mounted and
+deepened on her cheeks and brow.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I don&#8217;t like changes,&rdquo; she said in a low voice.</p>
+
+<p>Aristide slipped noiselessly to the side of her chair
+and knelt on one knee and took her hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Anne&mdash;my beloved Anne!&rdquo; said he.</p>
+
+<p>And Anne neither moved nor protested, but looked
+away from him into the fire.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And that is all that Aristide told me. There are
+sacred and beautiful things in life that one man does
+not tell to another. He did, however, mention that
+they forgot all about the unfortunate chauffeur
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>
+sitting in the rain till about three hours afterwards,
+when Aristide sped away to a St. Albans hotel in
+joyous solitude.</p>
+
+<p>The very next day he burst in upon me in a state
+of bliss bordering on mania.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But there is a tragic side to it,&rdquo; he said when the
+story was over. &ldquo;For half the year I shall be exiled
+to Bordeaux, Marseilles and Algiers as the representative
+of Dulau et Compagnie.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The very best thing that could happen for your
+domestic happiness,&rdquo; said I.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What? With my heart&rdquo;&mdash;he thumped his heart&mdash;&ldquo;with
+my heart hurting like the devil all the
+time?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;So long as your heart hurts,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;you know
+it isn&#8217;t dead.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A short while afterwards they were married in
+London. I was best man and Jean, specklessly attired,
+was page of honour, and the vicar of her own
+church at Chislehurst performed the ceremony. The
+most myopic of creatures could have seen that Anne
+was foolishly in love with her rascal husband. How
+could she help it?</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the newly wedded pair had received
+the exhortation, Aristide, darting to the altar-rail,
+caught Jean up in his arms, and, to the consternation
+of the officiating clergy, the verger, and Anne&#8217;s
+conventional friends, cried out exultingly:</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<em>Ah, mon petit.</em> It was a lucky day for both of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>
+us when I picked you up on the road between Salon
+and Arles. Put your hands together as you do when
+you&#8217;re saying your prayers, <em>mon brave</em>, and say,
+&lsquo;God bless father and mother.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Jean obediently adopted the attitude of the infant
+Samuel in the pictures.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;God bless father and mother,&rdquo; said he, and the
+childish treble rang out queerly in the large, almost
+empty church.</p>
+
+<p>There was a span of silence and then all the
+women-folk fell on little Jean and that was the end
+of that wedding.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">The End</span>.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> The Adventures of the Foundling.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="box2">
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>BY</strong></p>
+
+<h2>William J. Locke</h2>
+
+<p class="center">Author of &ldquo;The Belov&egrave;d Vagabond,&rdquo; &ldquo;Simon the
+Jester,&rdquo; etc.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<em>Cloth</em>  <span style="margin-left: 3em;"><em>12mo</em></span>  <span style="margin-left: 3em;"><em>$1.30 net</em></span>   <span style="margin-left: 3em;"><em>Postage 12 cents</em></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">Illustrations by Arthur I. Keller</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Locke has succeeded in uniting with the firm carefulness
+of his early work the rapid, fluent, vibrating style that
+makes his later books so delightful; therefore it is easy to make
+the deduction that &lsquo;Clementina&rsquo; is the best piece of work he has
+done.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>New York Evening Sun</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Among the novels of the past five years no books have more
+consistently produced an effect at once certain, satisfactory and
+delightful than those of William J. Locke. This latest addition
+to his shelf is full of life and laughter and the love not only of
+man for woman but of man for man and for humanity. Mr.
+Locke is a born story-teller and a master of the art of expression.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>The Outlook</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The book contains a mass of good material, with original
+characterization, and is written in a style piquant and clever.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>The Literary Digest</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A story containing the essence of humanity, with an abundance of
+sensible and sensitive, casual and unobtrusive commentary
+upon life and man, and especially upon woman.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Boston Evening Transcript</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;It contains even more of the popular qualities than are usually
+associated with the writings of this noted author.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Boston Times</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Locke&#8217;s flights into the realms of fancy have been a
+delight to many readers. He has a lightness of touch that is
+entirely captivating, and his remarkable characterization of inconsequent
+people gives them a reality that is very insistent.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Baltimore Evening Sun</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Never has he drawn so deeply from that well that is the
+human heart; never so near those invisible heights which are
+the soul; and, if we are not altogether mistaken, &lsquo;The Glory of
+Clementina&rsquo; will also prove to be that of its author.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Baltimore News</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A fascinating story with delicate, whimsical touches.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Albany Times-Union</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The book seems destined to live longer than any written
+by the author to date, because it is so sane and so fundamentally true.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Philadelphia Enquirer</em></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 100%; color: black; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: -1em;" />
+
+<h1>JOHN LANE CO., NEW YORK</h1>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="box2">
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+<h2>MANALIVE</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>BY</strong></p>
+
+<h2>Gilbert K. Chesterton</h2>
+
+<p class="center">Author of &ldquo;The Innocence of Father Brown,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Heretics,&rdquo; &ldquo;Orthodoxy,&rdquo; etc.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<em>Cloth</em>  <span style="margin-left: 3em;"><em>12mo</em></span>  <span style="margin-left: 3em;"><em>$1.30 net</em></span>   <span style="margin-left: 3em;"><em>Postage 12 cents</em></span>
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">Frontispiece and Jacket Illustration by Will Foster</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Chesterton has undertaken in this quaint narrative to
+make burlesque the vehicle of a sermon and a philosophy. It
+is all a part of the author&#8217;s war upon artificial attitudes which
+enclose the living men like a shell and make for human purposes
+a dead man of him. He speaks here in a parable&mdash;a parable of
+his own kind, having about it a broad waggishness like that of
+Mr. Punch and a distinct flavor of that sort of low comedy which
+one finds in Dickens and Shakespeare. You are likely to find,
+before you are done with the parable, that there has been forced
+upon your attention a possible view of the life worth living.
+&lsquo;Manalive&rsquo; is a &lsquo;Peterpantheistic&rsquo; novel full of Chestertonisms.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>New
+York Times</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;One of the oddest books Mr. Chesterton has yet given us.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>New
+York Evening Globe</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The fun of the book (and there is plenty of it) comes quite
+as much from the extraordinary and improbable characters as
+from the situations. Epigrams, witticisms, odd fancies, queer
+conceits, singular whimsies, follow after one another in quick
+succession.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Brooklyn Eagle</em></p>
+
+
+<p>&ldquo;One of the most humorous tales of modern fiction, combined
+with a very tender and appealing love story.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Cleveland
+Plain Dealer</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The book is certain to have a wide circulation, not only
+because of the name of the author attached to it, but because
+of its own intrinsic worth.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Buffalo Commercial</em></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There can be no doubt as to the iridescent brilliance of the
+book. Page after page&mdash;full of caustic satire, humorous sally and
+profound epigram&mdash;fairly bristles with merriment. The book is
+a compact mass of scintillating wit.&rdquo;&mdash;<em>Philadelphia Public Ledger</em></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 100%; color: black; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: -1em;" />
+
+<h1>JOHN LANE CO., NEW YORK</h1>
+
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol, by 
+William J. Locke
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL ***
+
+***** This file should be named 26154-h.htm or 26154-h.zip *****
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol, by
+William J. Locke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol
+
+Author: William J. Locke
+
+Release Date: July 31, 2008 [EBook #26154]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Anne Storer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Table of Contents added.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+ IDOLS
+ SEPTIMUS
+ DERELICTS
+ THE USURPER
+ WHERE LOVE IS
+ THE WHITE DOVE
+ SIMON THE JESTER
+ A STUDY IN SHADOWS
+ A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY
+ THE BELOVED VAGABOND
+ AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA
+ THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE
+ THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE
+ THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA
+
+
+
+
+ [Illustration: AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FOURTH KISS OUT CAME HER FATHER
+                                                           _See page 34_]
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+ JOYOUS ADVENTURES
+ OF ARISTIDE PUJOL
+
+ BY
+ WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+
+ ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+ ALEC BALL
+
+
+ NEW YORK
+ JOHN LANE COMPANY
+ MCMXII
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     I  THE ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR PATRONNE
+    II  THE ADVENTURE OF THE ARLESIENNE
+   III  THE ADVENTURE OF THE KIND MR. SMITH
+    IV  THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING
+     V  THE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG'S HEAD
+    VI  THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE
+   VII  THE ADVENTURE OF THE MIRACLE
+  VIII  THE ADVENTURE OF THE FICKLE GODDESS
+    IX  THE ADVENTURE OF A SAINT MARTIN'S SUMMER
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                     FACING
+                                                      PAGE
+
+ At the Beginning of the Fourth Kiss Out Came Her
+   Father                           _Frontispiece_
+
+ I Had Knocked Him Down on Purpose. He Was
+   Crippled for Life                                     14
+
+ Anything Less Congruous as the Bride-Elect of the
+   Debonair Aristide Pujol it Was Impossible to
+   Imagine                                               22
+
+ Had Straightway Poured His Grievances into a
+   Feminine Ear                                          32
+
+ I Found Both Tyres Had Been Punctured in a Hundred
+   Places                                                40
+
+ "Madame," said Aristide, "You Are Adorable, and
+   I Love You to Distraction"                            50
+
+ "The Villain Was a Traveller in Buttons--Buttons!"      60
+
+ He Burst into Shrieks of Laughter                       64
+
+ "And You!" shouted Bocardon, Falling on Aristide;
+   "I Must Embrace You Also"                             68
+
+ Standing on the Arrival Platform of Euston Station      78
+
+ "Ah! the Pictures," cried Aristide, with a Wide
+   Sweep of His Arms                                     88
+
+ "I'll Take Five Hundred Pounds," said He, "to
+   Stay in"                                              96
+
+ Between the Folds of a Blanket Peeped the Face of
+   a Sleeping Child                                     110
+
+ He Demonstrated the Proper Application of the Cure     120
+
+ It is a Fearsome Thing for a Man to be Left Alone in
+   the Dead of Night with a Young Baby                  124
+
+ One of the Little Girls in Pigtails Was Holding
+   Him, While Miss Anne Administered the Feeding-Bottle 134
+
+ He Must Have Dealt Out Paralyzing Information          180
+
+ Fleurette Danced with Aristide, as Light as an
+   Autumn Leaf Tossed by the Wind                       188
+
+ Aristide Practised His Many Queer Accomplishments      200
+
+ He Read It, and Blinked in Amazement                   208
+
+ He Might as Well Have Pointed Out the Marvels
+   of Kubla Khan's Pleasure-Dome to a Couple of
+   Guinea-Pigs                                          216
+
+ "I've Caught You! At Last, After Twenty Years,
+   I've Caught You"                                     234
+
+ There He Saw a Sight Which for a Moment Paralyzed Him  238
+
+ Mr. Ducksmith Seized Him by the Lapels of His Coat     242
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+ JOYOUS ADVENTURES
+ OF
+ ARISTIDE PUJOL
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+#The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol#
+
+I
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR PATRONNE
+
+
+In narrating these few episodes in the undulatory, not to say
+switchback, career of my friend Aristide Pujol, I can pretend to no
+chronological sequence. Some occurred before he (almost literally)
+crossed my path for the first time, some afterwards. They have been
+related to me haphazard at odd times, together with a hundred other
+incidents, just as a chance tag of association recalled them to his
+swift and picturesque memory. He would, indeed, make a show of fixing
+dates by reference to his temporary profession; but so Protean seem to
+have been his changes of fortune in their number and rapidity that I
+could never keep count of them or their order. Nor does it matter. The
+man's life was as disconnected as a pack of cards.
+
+My first meeting with him happened in this wise.
+
+I had been motoring in a listless, solitary fashion about Languedoc. A
+friend who had stolen a few days from anxious business in order to
+accompany me from Boulogne through Touraine and Guienne had left me at
+Toulouse; another friend whom I had arranged to pick up at Avignon on
+his way from Monte Carlo was unexpectedly delayed. I was therefore
+condemned to a period of solitude somewhat irksome to a man of a
+gregarious temperament. At first, for company's sake, I sat in front
+by my chauffeur, McKeogh. But McKeogh, an atheistical Scotch mechanic
+with his soul in his cylinders, being as communicative as his own
+differential, I soon relapsed into the equal loneliness and greater
+comfort of the back.
+
+In this fashion I left Montpellier one morning on my leisurely eastward
+journey, deciding to break off from the main road, striking due south,
+and visit Aigues-Mortes on the way.
+
+Aigues-Mortes was once a flourishing Mediterranean town. St. Louis and
+his Crusaders sailed thence twice for Palestine; Charles V. and Francis
+I. met there and filled the place with glittering state. But now its
+glory has departed. The sea has receded three or four miles, and left
+it high and dry in the middle of bleak salt marshes, useless, dead and
+desolate, swept by the howling mistral and scorched by the blazing sun.
+The straight white ribbon of road which stretched for miles through the
+plain, between dreary vineyards--some under water, the black shoots of
+the vines appearing like symmetrical wreckage above the surface--was at
+last swallowed up by the grim central gateway of the town, surmounted
+by its frowning tower. On each side spread the brown machicolated
+battlements that vainly defended the death-stricken place. A soft
+northern atmosphere would have invested it in a certain mystery of
+romance, but in the clear southern air, the towers and walls standing
+sharply defined against the blue, wind-swept sky, it looked naked and
+pitiful, like a poor ghost caught in the daylight.
+
+At some distance from the gate appeared the usual notice as to
+speed-limit. McKeogh, most scrupulous of drivers, obeyed. As there was a
+knot of idlers underneath and beyond the gate he slowed down to a crawl,
+sounding a patient and monotonous horn. We advanced; the peasant folk
+cleared the way sullenly and suspiciously. Then, deliberately, an
+elderly man started to cross the road, and on the sound of the horn
+stood stock still, with resentful defiance on his weather-beaten face.
+McKeogh jammed on the brakes. The car halted. But the infinitesimal
+fraction of a second before it came to a dead stop the wing over the
+near front wheel touched the elderly person and down he went on the
+ground. I leaped from the car, to be instantly surrounded by an
+infuriated crowd, which seemed to gather from all the quarters of
+the broad, decaying square. The elderly man, helped to his feet by
+sympathetic hands, shook his knotted fists in my face. He was a dour and
+ugly peasant, of splendid physique, as hard and discoloured as the walls
+of Aigues-Mortes; his cunning eyes were as clear as a boy's, his lined,
+clean-shaven face as rigid as a gargoyle; and the back of his neck,
+above the low collar of his jersey, showed itself seamed into glazed
+irregular lozenges, like the hide of a crocodile. He cursed me and my
+kind healthily in very bad French and apostrophized his friends in
+Provencal, who in Provencal and bad French made responsive clamour. I
+had knocked him down on purpose. He was crippled for life. Who was I to
+go tearing through peaceful towns with my execrated locomotive and
+massacring innocent people? I tried to explain that the fault was his,
+and that, after all, to judge by the strength of his lungs, no great
+damage had been inflicted. But no. They would not let it go like that.
+There were the gendarmes--I looked across the square and saw two
+gendarmes striding portentously towards the scene--they would see
+justice done. The law was there to protect poor folk. For a certainty I
+would not get off easily.
+
+ [Illustration: I HAD KNOCKED HIM DOWN ON PURPOSE. HE WAS CRIPPLED
+                FOR LIFE]
+
+I knew what would happen. The gendarmes would submit McKeogh and myself
+to a _proces-verbal_. They would impound the car. I should have to go
+to the Mairie and make endless depositions. I should have to wait,
+Heaven knows how long, before I could appear before the _juge de paix_.
+I should have to find a solicitor to represent me. In the end I should
+be fined for furious driving--at the rate, when the accident happened,
+of a mile an hour--and probably have to pay a heavy compensation to the
+wilful and uninjured victim of McKeogh's impeccable driving. And all the
+time, while waiting for injustice to take its course, I should be the
+guest of a hostile population. I grew angry. The crowd grew angrier. The
+gendarmes approached with an air of majesty and fate. But just before
+they could be acquainted with the brutal facts of the disaster a
+singularly bright-eyed man, wearing a hard felt hat and a blue serge
+suit, flashed like a meteor into the midst of the throng, glanced with
+an amazing swiftness at me, the car, the crowd, the gendarmes and the
+victim, ran his hands up and down the person of the last mentioned, and
+then, with a frenzied action of a figure in a bad cinematograph rather
+than that of a human being, subjected the inhabitants to an infuriated
+philippic in Provencal, of which I could not understand one word. The
+crowd, with here and there a murmur of remonstrance, listened to him in
+silence. When he had finished they hung their heads, the gendarmes
+shrugged their majestic and fateful shoulders and lit cigarettes, and
+the gargoyle-visaged ancient with the neck of crocodile hide turned
+grumbling away. I have never witnessed anything so magical as the effect
+produced by this electric personage. Even McKeogh, who during the
+previous clamour had sat stiff behind his wheel, keeping expressionless
+eyes fixed on the cap of the radiator, turned his head two degrees of a
+circle and glanced at his surroundings.
+
+The instant peace was established our rescuer darted up to me with the
+directness of a dragon-fly and shook me warmly by the hand. As he had
+done me a service, I responded with a grateful smile; besides, his
+aspect was peculiarly prepossessing. I guessed him to be about
+five-and-thirty. He had a clear olive complexion, black moustache and
+short silky vandyke beard, and the most fascinating, the most humorous,
+the most mocking, the most astonishingly bright eyes I have ever seen in
+my life. I murmured a few expressions of thanks, while he prolonged the
+handshake with the fervour of a long-lost friend.
+
+"It's all right, my dear sir. Don't worry any more," he said in
+excellent English, but with a French accent curiously tinged with
+Cockney. "The old gentleman's as sound as a bell--not a bruise on his
+body." He pushed me gently to the step of the car. "Get in and let me
+guide you to the only place where you can eat in this accursed town."
+
+Before I could recover from my surprise, he was by my side in the car
+shouting directions to McKeogh.
+
+"Ah! These people!" he cried, shaking his hands with outspread fingers
+in front of him. "They have no manners, no decency, no self-respect.
+It's a regular trade. They go and get knocked down by automobiles on
+purpose, so that they can claim indemnity. They breed dogs especially
+and train them to commit suicide under the wheels so that they can get
+compensation. There's one now--_ah, sacree bete!_" He leaned over the
+side of the car and exchanged violent objurgation with the dog. "But
+never mind. So long as I am here you can run over anything you like with
+impunity."
+
+"I'm very much obliged to you," said I. "You've saved me from a deal of
+foolish unpleasantness. From the way you handled the old gentleman I
+should guess you to be a doctor."
+
+"That's one of the few things I've never been," he replied. "No; I'm not
+a doctor. One of these days I'll tell you all about myself." He spoke
+as if our sudden acquaintance would ripen into life-long friendship.
+"There's the hotel--the Hotel Saint-Louis," he pointed to the sign a
+little way up the narrow, old-world, cobble-paved street we were
+entering. "Leave it to me; I'll see that they treat you properly."
+
+The car drew up at the doorway. My electric friend leaped out and met
+the emerging landlady.
+
+"_Bonjour, madame._ I've brought you one of my very good friends,
+an English gentleman of the most high importance. He will have
+_dejeuner--tout ce qu'il y a de mieux_. None of your cabbage-soup and
+eels and _andouilles_, but a good omelette, some fresh fish, and a bit
+of very tender meat. Will that suit you?" he asked, turning to me.
+
+"Excellently," said I, smiling. "And since you've ordered me so charming
+a _dejeuner_, perhaps you'll do me the honour of helping me to eat it?"
+
+"With the very greatest pleasure," said he, without a second's
+hesitation.
+
+We entered the small, stuffy dining-room, where a dingy waiter, with a
+dingier smile, showed us to a small table by the window. At the long
+table in the middle of the room sat the half-dozen frequenters of the
+house, their napkins tucked under their chins, eating in gloomy silence
+a dreary meal of the kind my new friend had deprecated.
+
+"What shall we drink?" I asked, regarding with some disfavour the thin
+red and white wines in the decanters.
+
+"Anything," said he, "but this _piquette du pays_. It tastes like a
+mixture of sea-water and vinegar. It produces the look of patient
+suffering that you see on those gentlemen's faces. You, who are not
+used to it, had better not venture. It would excoriate your throat. It
+would dislocate your pancreas. It would play the very devil with you.
+Adolphe"--he beckoned the waiter--"there's a little white wine of the
+Cotes du Rhone----" He glanced at me.
+
+"I'm in your hands," said I.
+
+As far as eating and drinking went I could not have been in better. Nor
+could anyone desire a more entertaining chance companion of travel. That
+he had thrust himself upon me in the most brazen manner and taken
+complete possession of me there could be no doubt. But it had all been
+done in the most irresistibly charming manner in the world. One entirely
+forgot the impudence of the fellow. I have since discovered that he did
+not lay himself out to be agreeable. The flow of talk and anecdote, the
+bright laughter that lit up a little joke, making it appear a very
+brilliant joke indeed, were all spontaneous. He was a man, too, of some
+cultivation. He knew France thoroughly, England pretty well; he had a
+discriminating taste in architecture, and waxed poetical over the
+beauties of Nature.
+
+"It strikes me as odd," said I at last, somewhat ironically, "that so
+vital a person as yourself should find scope for your energies in this
+dead-and-alive place."
+
+He threw up his hands. "I live here? I crumble and decay in
+Aigues-Mortes? For whom do you take me?"
+
+I replied that, not having the pleasure of knowing his name and quality,
+I could only take him for an enigma.
+
+He selected a card from his letter-case and handed it to me across the
+table. It bore the legend:--
+
+             ARISTIDE PUJOL,
+                 Agent.
+    213 bis, Rue Saint-Honore, Paris.
+
+"That address will always find me," he said.
+
+Civility bade me give him my card, which he put carefully in his
+letter-case.
+
+"I owe my success in life," said he, "to the fact that I have never lost
+an opportunity or a visiting-card."
+
+"Where did you learn your perfect English?" I asked.
+
+"First," said he, "among English tourists at Marseilles. Then in
+England. I was Professor of French at an academy for young ladies."
+
+"I hope you were a success?" said I.
+
+He regarded me drolly.
+
+"Yes--and no," said he.
+
+The meal over, we left the hotel.
+
+"Now," said he, "you would like to visit the towers on the ramparts. I
+would dearly love to accompany you, but I have business in the town. I
+will take you, however, to the _gardien_ and put you in his charge."
+
+He raced me to the gate by which I had entered. The _gardien des
+remparts_ issued from his lodge at Aristide Pujol's summons and listened
+respectfully to his exhortation in Provencal. Then he went for his keys.
+
+"I'll not say good-bye," Aristide Pujol declared, amiably. "I'll get
+through my business long before you've done your sight-seeing, and
+you'll find me waiting for you near the hotel. _Au revoir, cher ami._"
+
+He smiled, lifted his hat, waved his hand in a friendly way, and darted
+off across the square. The old _gardien_ came out with the keys and took
+me off to the Tour de Constance, where Protestants were imprisoned
+pell-mell after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; thence to the
+Tour des Bourguignons, where I forget how many hundred Burgundians were
+massacred and pickled in salt; and, after these cheery exhibitions,
+invited me to walk round the ramparts and inspect the remaining eighteen
+towers of the enceinte. As the mistral, however, had sprung up and was
+shuddering across the high walls, I declined, and, having paid him his
+fee, descended to the comparative shelter of the earth.
+
+There I found Aristide Pujol awaiting me at the corner of the narrow
+street in which the hotel was situated. He was wearing--like most of
+the young bloods of Provence in winter-time--a short, shaggy, yet natty
+goat-skin coat, ornamented with enormous bone buttons, and a little cane
+valise stood near by on the kerb of the square.
+
+He was not alone. Walking arm in arm with him was a stout, elderly woman
+of swarthy complexion and forbidding aspect. She was attired in a
+peasant's or small shopkeeper's rusty Sunday black and an old-fashioned
+black bonnet prodigiously adorned with black plumes and black roses.
+Beneath this bonnet her hair was tightly drawn up from her forehead;
+heavy eyebrows overhung a pair of small, crafty eyes, and a tuft of hair
+grew on the corner of a prognathous jaw. She might have been about
+seven-and-forty.
+
+Aristide Pujol, unlinking himself from this unattractive female,
+advanced and saluted me with considerable deference.
+
+"Monseigneur----" said he.
+
+As I am neither a duke nor an archbishop, but a humble member of the
+lower automobiling classes, the high-flown title startled me.
+
+"Monseigneur, will you permit me," said he, in French, "to present to
+you Mme. Gougasse? Madame is the _patronne_ of the Cafe de l'Univers, at
+Carcassonne, which doubtless you have frequented, and she is going to do
+me the honour of marrying me to-morrow."
+
+ [Illustration: ANYTHING LESS CONGRUOUS AS THE BRIDE-ELECT OF THE
+                DEBONAIR ARISTIDE PUJOL IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO IMAGINE]
+
+The unexpectedness of the announcement took my breath away.
+
+"Good heavens!" said I, in a whisper.
+
+Anyone less congruous as the bride-elect of the debonair Aristide Pujol
+it was impossible to imagine. However, it was none of my business. I
+raised my hat politely to the lady.
+
+"Madame, I offer you my sincere felicitations. As an entertaining
+husband I am sure you will find M. Aristide Pujol without a rival."
+
+"_Je vous remercie, monseigneur_," she replied, in what was obviously
+her best company manner. "And if ever you will deign to come again to
+the Cafe de l'Univers at Carcassonne we will esteem it a great honour."
+
+"And so you're going to get married to-morrow?" I remarked, by way of
+saying something. To congratulate Aristide Pujol on his choice lay
+beyond my power of hypocrisy.
+
+"To-morrow," said he, "my dear Amelie will make me the happiest of men."
+
+"We start for Carcassonne by the three-thirty train," said Mme.
+Gougasse, pulling a great silver watch from some fold of her person.
+
+"Then there is time," said I, pointing to a little weather-beaten cafe
+in the square, "to drink a glass to your happiness."
+
+"_Bien volontiers_," said the lady.
+
+"_Pardon, chere amie_," Aristide interposed, quickly. "Unless
+monseigneur and I start at once for Montpellier, I shall not have time
+to transact my little affairs before your train arrives there."
+
+Parenthetically, I must remark that all trains going from Aigues-Mortes
+to Carcassonne must stop at Montpellier.
+
+"That's true," she agreed, in a hesitating manner. "But----"
+
+"But, idol of my heart, though I am overcome with grief at the idea of
+leaving you for two little hours, it is a question of four thousand
+francs. Four thousand francs are not picked up every day in the street.
+It's a lot of money."
+
+Mme. Gougasse's little eyes glittered.
+
+"_Bien sur._ And it's quite settled?"
+
+"Absolutely."
+
+"And it will be all for me?"
+
+"Half," said Aristide.
+
+"You promised all to me for the redecoration of the ceiling of the
+cafe."
+
+"Three thousand will be sufficient, dear angel. What? I know these
+contractors and decorators. The more you pay them, the more abominable
+will they make the ceiling. Leave it to me. I, Aristide, will guarantee
+you a ceiling like that of the Sistine Chapel for two thousand francs."
+
+She smiled and bridled, so as to appear perfectly well-bred in my
+presence. The act of smiling caused the tuft of hair on her jaw to
+twitch horribly. A cold shiver ran down my back.
+
+"Don't you think, monseigneur," she asked, archly, "that M. Pujol should
+give me the four thousand francs as a wedding-present?"
+
+"Most certainly," said I, in my heartiest voice, entirely mystified by
+the conversation.
+
+"Well, I yield," said Aristide. "Ah, women, women! They hold up their
+little rosy finger, and the bravest of men has to lie down with his chin
+on his paws like a good old watch-dog. You agree, then, monseigneur, to
+my giving the whole of the four thousand francs to Amelie?"
+
+"More than that," said I, convinced that the swarthy lady of the
+prognathous jaw was bound to have her own way in the end where money was
+concerned, and yet for the life of me not seeing how I had anything to
+do with the disposal of Aristide Pujol's property--"More than that,"
+said I; "I command you to do it."
+
+"_C'est bien gentil de votre part_," said madame.
+
+"And now the cafe," I suggested, with chattering teeth. We had been
+standing all the time at the corner of the square, while the mistral
+whistled down the narrow street. The dust was driven stingingly into our
+faces, and the women of the place who passed us by held their black
+scarves over their mouths.
+
+"Alas, monseigneur," said Mme. Gougasse, "Aristide is right. You must
+start now for Montpellier in the automobile. I will go by the train for
+Carcassonne at three-thirty. It is the only train from Aigues-Mortes.
+Aristide transacts his business and joins me in the train at
+Montpellier. You have not much time to spare."
+
+I was bewildered. I turned to Aristide Pujol, who stood, hands on hips,
+regarding his prospective bride and myself with humorous benevolence.
+
+"My good friend," said I in English, "I've not the remotest idea of what
+the two of you are talking about; but I gather you have arranged that I
+should motor you to Montpellier. Now, I'm not going to Montpellier. I've
+just come from there, as I told you at _dejeuner_. I'm going in the
+opposite direction."
+
+He took me familiarly by the arm, and, with a "_Pardon, chere amie_," to
+the lady, led me a few paces aside.
+
+"I beseech you," he whispered; "it's a matter of four thousand francs, a
+hundred and sixty pounds, eight hundred dollars, a new ceiling for the
+Cafe de l'Univers, the dream of a woman's life, and the happiest omen
+for my wedded felicity. The fair goddess Hymen invites you with uplifted
+torch. You can't refuse."
+
+He hypnotized me with his bright eyes, overpowered my will by his
+winning personality. He seemed to force me to desire his companionship.
+I weakened. After all, I reflected, I was at a loose end, and where I
+went did not matter to anybody. Aristide Pujol had also done me a
+considerable service, for which I felt grateful. I yielded with good
+grace.
+
+He darted back to Mme. Gougasse, alive with gaiety.
+
+"_Chere amie_, if you were to press monseigneur, I'm sure he would come
+to Carcassonne and dance at our wedding."
+
+"Alas! That," said I, hastily, "is out of the question. But," I added,
+amused by a humorous idea, "why should two lovers separate even for a
+few hours? Why should not madame accompany us to Montpellier? There is
+room in my auto for three, and it would give me the opportunity of
+making madame's better acquaintance."
+
+"There, Amelie!" cried Aristide. "What do you say?"
+
+"Truly, it is too much honour," murmured Mme. Gougasse, evidently
+tempted.
+
+"There's your luggage, however," said Aristide. "You would bring that
+great trunk, for which there is no place in the automobile of
+monseigneur."
+
+"That's true--my luggage."
+
+"Send it on by train, _chere amie_."
+
+"When will it arrive at Carcassonne?"
+
+"Not to-morrow," said Pujol, "but perhaps next week or the week after.
+Perhaps it may never come at all. One is never certain with these
+railway companies. But what does that matter?"
+
+"What do you say?" cried the lady, sharply.
+
+"It may arrive or it may not arrive; but you are rich enough, _chere
+amie_, not to think of a few camisoles and bits of jewellery."
+
+"And my lace and my silk dress that I have brought to show your parents.
+_Merci!_" she retorted, with a dangerous spark in her little eyes. "You
+think one is made of money, eh? You will soon find yourself mistaken, my
+friend. I would give you to understand----". She checked herself
+suddenly. "Monseigneur"--she turned to me with a resumption of the
+gracious manner of her bottle-decked counter at the Cafe de
+l'Univers--"you are too amiable. I appreciate your offer infinitely; but
+I am not going to entrust my luggage to the kind care of the railway
+company. _Merci, non._ They are robbers and thieves. Even if it did
+arrive, half the things would be stolen. Oh, I know them."
+
+She shook the head of an experienced and self-reliant woman. No doubt,
+distrustful of banks as of railway companies, she kept her money hidden
+in her bedroom. I pitied my poor young friend; he would need all his
+gaiety to enliven the domestic side of the Cafe de l'Univers.
+
+The lady having declined my invitation, I expressed my regrets; and
+Aristide, more emotional, voiced his sense of heart-rent desolation,
+and in a resigned tone informed me that it was time to start. I left the
+lovers and went to the hotel, where I paid the bill, summoned McKeogh,
+and lit a companionable pipe.
+
+The car backed down the narrow street into the square and took up its
+position. We entered. McKeogh took charge of Aristide's valise, tucked
+us up in the rug, and settled himself in his seat. The car started and
+we drove off, Aristide gallantly brandishing his hat and Mme. Gougasse
+waving her lily hand, which happened to be hidden in an ill-fitting
+black glove.
+
+"To Montpellier, as fast as you can!" he shouted at the top of his lungs
+to McKeogh. Then he sighed as he threw himself luxuriously back. "Ah,
+this is better than a train. Amelie doesn't know what a mistake she has
+made!"
+
+The elderly victim of my furious entry was lounging, in spite of the
+mistral, by the grim machicolated gateway. Instead of scowling at me he
+raised his hat respectfully as we passed. I touched my cap, but Aristide
+returned the salute with the grave politeness of royalty.
+
+"This is a place," said he, "which I would like never to behold again."
+
+In a few moments we were whirling along the straight, white road between
+the interminable black vineyards, and past the dilapidated homesteads
+of the vine-folk and wayside cafes that are scattered about this
+unjoyous corner of France.
+
+"Well," said he, suddenly, "what do you think of my _fiancee_?"
+
+Politeness and good taste forbade expression of my real opinion. I
+murmured platitudes to the effect that she seemed to be a most sensible
+woman, with a head for business.
+
+"She's not what we in French call _jolie, jolie_; but what of that?
+What's the good of marrying a pretty face for other men to make love to?
+And, as you English say, there's none of your confounded sentiment about
+her. But she has the most flourishing cafe in Carcassonne; and, when the
+ceiling is newly decorated, provided she doesn't insist on too much gold
+leaf and too many naked babies on clouds--it's astonishing how women
+love naked babies on clouds--it will be the snuggest place in the world.
+May I ask for one of your excellent cigarettes?"
+
+I handed him the case from the pocket of the car.
+
+"It was there that I made her acquaintance," he resumed, after having
+lit the cigarette from my pipe. "We met, we talked, we fixed it up. She
+is not the woman to go by four roads to a thing. She did me the honour
+of going straight for me. Ah, but what a wonderful woman! She rules that
+cafe like a kingdom; a Semiramis, a Queen Elizabeth, a Catherine de'
+Medici. She sits enthroned behind the counter all day long and takes the
+money and counts the saucers and smiles on rich clients, and if a waiter
+in a far corner gives a bit of sugar to a dog she spots it, and the
+waiter has a deuce of a time. That woman is worth her weight in
+thousand-franc notes. She goes to bed every night at one, and gets up in
+the morning at five. And virtuous! Didn't Solomon say that a virtuous
+woman was more precious than rubies? That's the kind of wife the wise
+man chooses when he gives up the giddy ways of youth. Ah, my dear sir,
+over and over again these last two or three days my dear old parents--I
+have been on a visit to them in Aigues-Mortes--have commended my wisdom.
+Amelie, who is devoted to me, left her cafe in Carcassonne to make their
+acquaintance and receive their blessing before our marriage, also to
+show them the lace on her _dessous_ and her new silk dress. They are too
+old to take the long journey to Carcassonne. 'My son,' they said, 'you
+are making a marriage after our own hearts. We are proud of you. Now we
+can die perfectly content.' I was wrong, perhaps, in saying that Amelie
+has no sentiment," he continued, after a short pause. "She adores me. It
+is evident. She will not allow me out of her sight. Ah, my dear friend,
+you don't know what a happy man I am."
+
+For a brilliant young man of five-and-thirty, who was about to marry a
+horrible Megaera ten or twelve years his senior, he looked unhealthily
+happy. There was no doubt that his handsome roguery had caught the
+woman's fancy. She was at the dangerous age, when even the most
+ferro-concrete-natured of women are apt to run riot. She was
+comprehensible, and pardonable. But the man baffled me. He was obviously
+marrying her for her money; but how in the name of Diogenes and all the
+cynics could he manage to look so confoundedly joyful about it?
+
+The mistral blew bitterly. I snuggled beneath the rug and hunched up my
+shoulders so as to get my ears protected by my coat-collar. Aristide,
+sufficiently protected by his goat's hide, talked like a shepherd on a
+May morning. Why he took for granted my interest in his unromantic, not
+to say sordid, courtship I knew not; but he gave me the whole history of
+it from its modest beginnings to its now penultimate stage. From what I
+could make out--for the mistral whirled many of his words away over
+unheeding Provence--he had entered the Cafe de l'Univers one evening, a
+human derelict battered by buffeting waves of Fortune, and, finding a
+seat immediately beneath Mme. Gougasse's _comptoir_, had straightway
+poured his grievances into a feminine ear and, figuratively speaking,
+rested his weary heart upon a feminine bosom. And his buffetings and
+grievances and wearinesses? Whence came they? I asked the question
+point-blank.
+
+ [Illustration: HAD STRAIGHTWAY POURED HIS GRIEVANCES INTO A
+                FEMININE EAR]
+
+"Ah, my dear friend," he answered, kissing his gloved finger-tips, "she
+was adorable!"
+
+"Who?" I asked, taken aback. "Mme. Gougasse?"
+
+"_Mon Dieu_, no!" he replied. "Not Mme. Gougasse. Amelie is solid, she
+is virtuous, she is jealous, she is capacious; but I should not call her
+adorable. No; the adorable one was twenty--delicious and English; a
+peach-blossom, a zephyr, a summer night's dream, and the most provoking
+little witch you ever saw in your life. Her father and herself and six
+of her compatriots were touring through France. They had circular
+tickets. So had I. In fact, I was a miniature Thomas Cook and Son to the
+party. I provided them with the discomforts of travel and supplied
+erroneous information. _Que voulez-vous?_ If people ask you for the
+history of a pair of Louis XV. corsets, in a museum glass case, it's
+much better to stimulate their imagination by saying that they were worn
+by Joan of Arc at the Battle of Agincourt than to dull their minds by
+your ignorance. _Eh bien_, we go through the chateaux of the Loire,
+through Poitiers and Angouleme, and we come to Carcassonne. You know
+Carcassonne? The great grim _cite_, with its battlements and bastions
+and barbicans and fifty towers on the hill looking over the rubbishy
+modern town? We were there. The rest of the party were buying picture
+postcards of the _gardien_ at the foot of the Tour de l'Inquisition. The
+man who invented picture postcards ought to have his statue on the top
+of the Eiffel Tower. The millions of headaches he has saved! People go
+to places now not to exhaust themselves by seeing them, but to buy
+picture postcards of them. The rest of the party, as I said, were deep
+in picture postcards. Mademoiselle and I promenaded outside. We often
+promenaded outside when the others were buying picture postcards," he
+remarked, with an extra twinkle in his bright eyes. "And the result? Was
+it my fault? We leaned over the parapet. The wind blew a confounded
+_meche_--what do you call it----?"
+
+"Strand?"
+
+"Yes--strand of her hair across her face. She let it blow and laughed
+and did not move. Didn't I say she was a little witch? If there's a
+Provencal ever born who would not have kissed a girl under such
+provocation I should like to have his mummy. I kissed her. She kept on
+laughing. I kissed her again. I kissed her four times. At the beginning
+of the fourth kiss out came her father from the postcard shop. He waited
+till the end of it and then announced himself. He announced himself in
+such ungentlemanly terms that I was forced to let the whole party,
+including the adorable little witch, go on to Pau by themselves, while
+I betook my broken heart to the Cafe de l'Univers."
+
+"And there you found consolation?"
+
+"I told my sad tale. Amelie listened and called the manager to take
+charge of the _comptoir_, and poured herself out a glass of Frontignan.
+Amelie always drinks Frontignan when her heart is touched. I came the
+next day and the next. It was pouring with rain day and night--and
+Carcassonne in rain is like Hades with its furnaces put out by human
+tears--and the Cafe de l'Univers like a little warm corner of Paradise
+stuck in the midst of it."
+
+"And so that's how it happened?"
+
+"That's how it happened. _Ma foi!_ When a lady asks a _galant homme_ to
+marry her, what is he to do? Besides, did I not say that the Cafe de
+l'Univers was the most prosperous one in Carcassonne? I'm afraid you
+English, my dear friend, have such sentimental ideas about marriage.
+Now, we in France----_Attendez, attendez!_" He suddenly broke off his
+story, lurched forward, and gripped the back of the front seat.
+
+"To the right, man, to the right!" he cried excitedly to McKeogh.
+
+We had reached the point where the straight road from Aigues-Mortes
+branches into a fork, one road going to Montpellier, the other to Nimes.
+Montpellier being to the west, McKeogh had naturally taken the left
+fork.
+
+"To the right!" shouted Aristide.
+
+McKeogh pulled up and turned his head with a look of protesting inquiry.
+I intervened with a laugh.
+
+"You're wrong in your geography, M. Pujol. Besides, there is the
+signpost staring you in the face. This is the way to Montpellier."
+
+"But, my dear, heaven-sent friend, I no more want to go to Montpellier
+than you do!" he cried. "Montpellier is the last place on earth I desire
+to visit. You want to go to Nimes, and so do I. To the right,
+chauffeur."
+
+"What shall I do, sir?" asked McKeogh.
+
+I was utterly bewildered. I turned to the goat-skin-clad,
+pointed-bearded, bright-eyed Aristide, who, sitting bolt upright in the
+car, with his hands stretched out, looked like a parody of the god Pan
+in a hard felt hat.
+
+"You don't want to go to Montpellier?" I asked, stupidly.
+
+"No--ten thousand times no; not for a king's ransom."
+
+"But your four thousand francs--your meeting Mme. Gougasse's train--your
+getting on to Carcassonne?"
+
+"If I could put twenty million continents between myself and Carcassonne
+I'd do it," he explained, with frantic gestures. "Don't you understand?
+The good Lord who is always on my side sent you especially to deliver
+me out of the hands of that unspeakable Xantippe. There are no four
+thousand francs. I'm not going to meet her train at Montpellier, and if
+she marries anyone to-morrow at Carcassonne it will not be Aristide
+Pujol."
+
+I shrugged my shoulders.
+
+"We'll go to Nimes."
+
+"Very good, sir," said McKeogh.
+
+"And now," said I, as soon as we had started on the right-hand road,
+"will you have the kindness to explain?"
+
+"There's nothing to explain," he cried, gleefully. "Here am I delivered.
+I am free. I can breathe God's good air again. I'm not going to marry
+Yum-Yum, Yum-Yum. I feel ten years younger. Oh, I've had a narrow
+escape. But that's the way with me. I always fall on my feet. Didn't I
+tell you I've never lost an opportunity? The moment I saw an Englishman
+in difficulties, I realized my opportunity of being delivered out of the
+House of Bondage. I took it, and here I am! For two days I had been
+racking my brains for a means of getting out of Aigues-Mortes, when
+suddenly you--a _Deus ex machina_--a veritable god out of the
+machine--come to my aid. Don't say there isn't a Providence watching
+over me."
+
+I suggested that his mode of escape seemed somewhat elaborate and
+fantastic. Why couldn't he have slipped quietly round to the railway
+station and taken a ticket to any haven of refuge he might have
+fancied?
+
+"For the simple reason," said he, with a gay laugh, "that I haven't a
+single penny piece in the world."
+
+He looked so prosperous and untroubled that I stared incredulously.
+
+"Not one tiny bronze sou," said he.
+
+"You seem to take it pretty philosophically," said I.
+
+"_Les gueux, les gueux, sont des gens heureux_," he quoted.
+
+"You're the first person who has made me believe in the happiness of
+beggars."
+
+"In time I shall make you believe in lots of things," he retorted. "No.
+I hadn't one sou to buy a ticket, and Amelie never left me. I spent my
+last franc on the journey from Carcassonne to Aigues-Mortes. Amelie
+insisted on accompanying me. She was taking no chances. Her eyes never
+left me from the time we started. When I ran to your assistance she was
+watching me from a house on the other side of the _place_. She came to
+the hotel while we were lunching. I thought I would slip away unnoticed
+and join you after you had made the _tour des remparts_. But no. I must
+present her to my English friend. And then--_voyons_--didn't I tell you
+I never lost a visiting-card? Look at this?"
+
+He dived into his pocket, produced the letter-case, and extracted a
+card.
+
+"_Voila._"
+
+I read: "The Duke of Wiltshire."
+
+"But, good heavens, man," I cried, "that's not the card I gave you."
+
+"I know it isn't," said he; "but it's the one I showed to Amelie."
+
+"How on earth," I asked, "did you come by the Duke of Wiltshire's
+visiting-card?"
+
+He looked at me roguishly.
+
+"I am--what do you call it?--a--a 'snapper up of unconsidered trifles.'
+You see I know my Shakespeare. I read 'The Winter's Tale' with some
+French pupils to whom I was teaching English. I love Autolycus. _C'est
+un peu moi, hein?_ Anyhow, I showed the Duke's card to Amelie."
+
+I began to understand. "That was why you called me 'monseigneur'?"
+
+"Naturally. And I told her that you were my English patron, and would
+give me four thousand francs as a wedding present if I accompanied you
+to your agent's at Montpellier, where you could draw the money. Ah! But
+she was suspicious! Yesterday I borrowed a bicycle. A friend left it in
+the courtyard. I thought, 'I will creep out at dead of night, when
+everyone's asleep, and once on my _petite bicyclette, bonsoir la
+compagnie_.' But, would you believe it? When I had dressed and crept
+down, and tried to mount the bicycle, I found both tyres had been
+punctured in a hundred places with the point of a pair of scissors. What
+do you think of that, eh? Ah, _la, la!_ it has been a narrow escape.
+When you invited her to accompany us to Montpellier my heart was in my
+mouth."
+
+"It would have served you right," I said, "if she had accepted."
+
+He laughed as though, instead of not having a penny, he had not a care
+in the world. Accustomed to the geometrical conduct of my well-fed
+fellow-Britons, who map out their lives by rule and line, I had no
+measure whereby to gauge this amazing and inconsequential person. In one
+way he had acted abominably. To leave an affianced bride in the lurch in
+this heartless manner was a most ungentlemanly proceeding. On the other
+hand, an unscrupulous adventurer would have married the woman for her
+money and chanced the consequences. In the tussle between Perseus and
+the Gorgon the odds are all in favour of Perseus. Mercury and Minerva,
+the most sharp-witted of the gods, are helping him all the time--to say
+nothing of the fact that Perseus starts out by being a notoriously
+handsome fellow. So a handsome rogue can generally wheedle an elderly,
+ugly wife into opening her money-bags, and, if successful, leads the
+enviable life of a fighting-cock. It was very much to his credit that
+this kind of life was not to the liking of Aristide Pujol.
+
+ [Illustration: "I FOUND BOTH TYRES HAD BEEN PUNCTURED IN A
+                HUNDRED PLACES"]
+
+Indeed, speaking from affectionate knowledge of the man, I can declare
+that the position in which he, like many a better man, had placed
+himself was intolerable. Other men of equal sensitiveness would have
+extricated themselves in a more commonplace fashion; but the dramatic
+appealed to my rascal, and he has often plumed himself on his calculated
+_coup de theatre_ at the fork of the roads. He was delighted with it.
+Even now I sometimes think that Aristide Pujol will never grow up.
+
+"There's one thing I don't understand," said I, "and that is your
+astonishing influence over the populace at Aigues-Mortes. You came upon
+them like a firework--a devil-among-the-tailors--and everybody,
+gendarmes and victim included, became as tame as sheep. How was it?"
+
+He laughed. "I said you were my very old and dear friend and patron, a
+great English duke."
+
+"I don't quite see how that explanation satisfied the pig-headed old
+gentleman whom I knocked down."
+
+"Oh, that," said Aristide Pujol, with a look of indescribable
+drollery--"that was my old father."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE ARLESIENNE
+
+
+Aristide Pujol bade me a sunny farewell at the door of the Hotel du
+Luxembourg at Nimes, and, valise in hand, darted off, in his impetuous
+fashion, across the Place de l'Esplanade. I felt something like a pang
+at the sight of his retreating figure, as, on his own confession, he had
+not a penny in the world. I wondered what he would do for food and
+lodging, to say nothing of tobacco, _aperitifs_, and other such
+necessaries of life. The idea of so gay a creature starving was
+abhorrent. Yet an invitation to stay as my guest at the hotel until
+he saw an opportunity of improving his financial situation he had
+courteously declined.
+
+Early next morning I found him awaiting me in the lounge and smoking an
+excellent cigar. He explained that so dear a friend as myself ought to
+be the first to hear the glad tidings. Last evening, by the grace of
+Heaven, he had run across a bare acquaintance, a manufacturer of nougat
+at Montelimar; had spent several hours in his company, with the result
+that he had convinced him of two things: first, that the dry,
+crumbling, shortbread-like nougat of Montelimar was unknown in England,
+where the population subsisted on a sickly, glutinous mess whereto the
+medical faculty had ascribed the prevalent dyspepsia of the population;
+and, secondly, that the one Heaven-certified apostle who could spread
+the glorious gospel of Montelimar nougat over the length and breadth of
+Great Britain and Ireland was himself, Aristide Pujol. A handsome
+salary had been arranged, of which he had already drawn something on
+account--_hinc ille Colorado_--and he was to accompany his principal the
+next day to Montelimar, _en route_ for the conquest of Britain. In the
+meantime he was as free as the winds, and would devote the day to
+showing me the wonders of the town.
+
+I congratulated him on his almost fantastic good fortune and gladly
+accepted his offer.
+
+"There is one thing I should like to ask you," said I, "and it is this.
+Yesterday afternoon you refused my cordially-offered hospitality, and
+went away without a sou to bless yourself with. What did you do? I ask
+out of curiosity. How does a man set about trying to subsist on nothing
+at all?"
+
+"It's very simple," he replied. "Haven't I told you, and haven't you
+seen for yourself, that I never lose an opportunity? More than that. It
+has been my rule in life either to make friends with the Mammon of
+Unrighteousness--he's a muddle-headed ass is Mammon, and you can steer
+clear of his unrighteousness if you're sharp enough--or else to cast my
+bread upon the waters in the certainty of finding it again after many
+days. In the case in question I took the latter course. I cast my bread
+a year or two ago upon the waters of the Roman baths, which I will have
+the pleasure of showing you this morning, and I found it again last
+night at the Hotel de la Curatterie."
+
+In the course of the day he related to me the following artless history.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aristide Pujol arrived at Nimes one blazing day in July. He had money in
+his pocket and laughter in his soul. He had also deposited his valise at
+the Hotel du Luxembourg, which, as all the world knows, is the most
+luxurious hotel in the town. Joyousness of heart impelled him to a
+course of action which the good Nimois regard as maniacal in the
+sweltering July heat--he walked about the baking streets for his own
+good pleasure.
+
+Aristide Pujol was floating a company, a process which afforded him as
+much delirious joy as the floating, for the first time, of a toy yacht
+affords a child. It was a company to build an hotel in Perpignan, where
+the recent demolition of the fortifications erected by the Emperor
+Charles V. had set free a vast expanse of valuable building ground on
+the other side of the little river on which the old town is situated.
+The best hotel in Perpignan being one to get away from as soon as
+possible, owing to restriction of site, Aristide conceived the idea of
+building a spacious and palatial hostelry in the new part of the town,
+which should allure all the motorists and tourists of the globe to that
+Pyrenean Paradise. By sheer audacity he had contrived to interest an
+eminent Paris architect in his project. Now the man who listened to
+Aristide Pujol was lost. With the glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner
+he combined the winning charm of a woman. For salvation, you either had
+to refuse to see him, as all the architects to the end of the R's in the
+alphabetical list had done, or put wax, Ulysses-like, in your ears, a
+precaution neglected by the eminent M. Say. M. Say went to Perpignan and
+returned in a state of subdued enthusiasm.
+
+A limited company was formed, of which Aristide Pujol, man of vast
+experience in affairs, was managing director. But money came in slowly.
+A financier was needed. Aristide looked through his collection of
+visiting-cards, and therein discovered that of a deaf ironmaster at St.
+Etienne whose life he had once saved at a railway station by dragging
+him, as he was crossing the line, out of the way of an express train
+that came thundering through. Aristide, man of impulse, went straight
+to St. Etienne, to work upon the ironmaster's sense of gratitude.
+Meanwhile, M. Say, man of more sober outlook, bethought him of a client,
+an American millionaire, passing through Paris, who had speculated
+considerably in hotels. The millionaire, having confidence in the
+eminent M. Say, thought well of the scheme. He was just off to Japan,
+but would drop down to the Pyrenees the next day and look at the
+Perpignan site before boarding his steamer at Marseilles. If his
+inquiries satisfied him, and he could arrange matters with the managing
+director, he would not mind putting a million dollars or so into the
+concern. You must kindly remember that I do not vouch for the literal
+accuracy of everything told me by Aristide Pujol.
+
+The question of the all-important meeting between the millionaire and
+the managing director then arose. As Aristide was at St. Etienne it
+was arranged that they should meet at a halfway stage on the latter's
+journey from Perpignan to Marseilles. The Hotel du Luxembourg at Nimes
+was the place, and two o'clock on Thursday the time appointed.
+
+Meantime Aristide had found that the deaf ironmaster had died months
+ago. This was a disappointment, but fortune compensated him. This part
+of his adventure is somewhat vague, but I gathered that he was lured
+by a newly made acquaintance into a gambling den, where he won the
+prodigious sum of two thousand francs. With this wealth jingling and
+crinkling in his pockets he fled the town and arrived at Nimes on
+Wednesday morning, a day before his appointment.
+
+That was why he walked joyously about the blazing streets. The tide had
+turned at last. Of the success of his interview with the millionaire he
+had not the slightest doubt. He walked about building gorgeous castles
+in Perpignan--which, by the way, is not very far from Spain. Besides, as
+you shall hear later, he had an account to settle with the town of
+Perpignan. At last he reached the Jardin de la Fontaine, the great,
+stately garden laid out in complexity of terrace and bridge and
+balustraded parapet over the waters of the old Roman baths by the master
+hand to which Louis XIV. had entrusted the Garden of Versailles.
+
+Aristide threw himself on a bench and fanned himself with his straw hat.
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_ it's hot!" he remarked to another occupant of the seat.
+
+This was a woman, and, as he saw when she turned her face towards him,
+an exceedingly handsome woman. Her white lawn and black silk headdress,
+coming to a tiny crown just covering the parting of her full, wavy hair,
+proclaimed her of the neighboring town of Arles. She had all the
+Arlesienne's Roman beauty--the finely chiselled features, the calm,
+straight brows, the ripe lips, the soft oval contour, the clear olive
+complexion. She had also lustrous brown eyes; but these were full of
+tears. She only turned them on him for a moment; then she resumed her
+apparently interrupted occupation of sobbing. Aristide was a
+soft-hearted man. He drew nearer.
+
+"Why, you're crying, madame!" said he.
+
+"Evidently," murmured the lady.
+
+"To cry scalding tears in this weather! It's too hot! Now, if you could
+only cry iced water there would be something refreshing in it."
+
+"You jest, monsieur," said the lady, drying her eyes.
+
+"By no means," said he. "The sight of so beautiful a woman in distress
+is painful."
+
+"Ah!" she sighed. "I am very unhappy."
+
+Aristide drew nearer still.
+
+"Who," said he, "is the wretch that has dared to make you so?"
+
+"My husband," replied the lady, swallowing a sob.
+
+"The scoundrel!" said Aristide.
+
+The lady shrugged her shoulders and looked down at her wedding-ring,
+which gleamed on a slim, brown, perfectly kept hand. Aristide prided
+himself on being a connoisseur in hands.
+
+"There never was a husband yet," he added, "who appreciated a beautiful
+wife. Husbands only deserve harridans."
+
+"That's true," said the Arlesienne, "for when the wife is good-looking
+they are jealous."
+
+"Ah, that is the trouble, is it?" said Aristide. "Tell me all about it."
+
+The beautiful Arlesienne again contemplated her slender fingers.
+
+"I don't know you, monsieur."
+
+"But you soon will," said Aristide, in his pleasant voice and with a
+laughing, challenging glance in his bright eyes. She met it swiftly and
+sidelong.
+
+"Monsieur," she said, "I have been married to my husband for four years,
+and have always been faithful to him."
+
+"That's praiseworthy," said Aristide.
+
+"And I love him very much."
+
+"That's unfortunate!" said Aristide.
+
+"Unfortunate?"
+
+"Evidently!" said Aristide.
+
+Their eyes met. They burst out laughing. The lady quickly recovered and
+the tears sprang again.
+
+"One can't jest with a heavy heart; and mine is very heavy." She broke
+down through self-pity. "Oh, I am ashamed!" she cried.
+
+She turned away from him, burying her face in her hands. Her dress,
+cut low, showed the nape of her neck as it rose gracefully from her
+shoulders. Two little curls had rebelled against being drawn up with the
+rest of her hair. The back of a dainty ear, set close to the head, was
+provoking in its pink loveliness. Her attitude, that of a youthful
+Niobe, all tears, but at the same time all curves and delicious
+contours, would have played the deuce with an anchorite.
+
+Aristide, I would have you remember, was a child of the South. A child
+of the North, regarding a bewitching woman, thinks how nice it would be
+to make love to her, and wastes his time in wondering how he can do it.
+A child of the South neither thinks nor wonders; he makes love straight
+away.
+
+"Madame," said Aristide, "you are adorable, and I love you to
+distraction."
+
+She started up. "Monsieur, you forget yourself!"
+
+"If I remember anything else in the wide world but you, it would be a
+poor compliment. I forget everything. You turn my head, you ravish my
+heart, and you put joy into my soul."
+
+He meant it--intensely--for the moment.
+
+"I ought not to listen to you," said the lady, "especially when I am so
+unhappy."
+
+"All the more reason to seek consolation," replied Aristide.
+
+"Monsieur," she said, after a short pause, "you look good and loyal. I
+will tell you what is the matter. My husband accuses me wrongfully,
+although I know that appearances are against me. He only allows me in
+the house on sufferance, and is taking measures to procure a divorce."
+
+ [Illustration: "MADAME," SAID ARISTIDE, "YOU ARE ADORABLE, AND I
+                LOVE YOU TO DISTRACTION"]
+
+"_A la bonne heure!_" cried Aristide, excitedly casting away his
+straw hat, which an unintentional twist of the wrist caused to skim
+horizontally and nearly decapitate a small and perspiring soldier who
+happened to pass by. "_A la bonne heure!_ Let him divorce you. You are
+then free. You can be mine without any further question."
+
+"But I love my husband," she smiled, sadly.
+
+"Bah!" said he, with the scepticism of the lover and the Provencal.
+"And, by the way, who is your husband?"
+
+"He is M. Emile Bocardon, proprietor of the Hotel de la Curatterie."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I am Mme. Bocardon," she replied, with the faintest touch of roguery.
+
+"But your Christian name? How is it possible for me to think of you as
+Mme. Bocardon?"
+
+They argued the question. Eventually she confessed to the name of Zette.
+
+Her confidence not stopping there, she told him how she came by the
+name; how she was brought up by her Aunt Leonie at Raphele, some five
+miles from Arles, and many other unexciting particulars of her early
+years. Her baptismal name was Louise. Her mother, who died when she was
+young, called her Louisette. Aunt Leonie, a very busy woman, with no
+time for superfluous syllables, called her Zette.
+
+"Zette!" He cast up his eyes as if she had been canonized and he was
+invoking her in rapt worship. "Zette, I adore you!"
+
+Zette was extremely sorry. She, on her side, adored the cruel M.
+Bocardon. Incidentally she learned Aristide's name and quality. He was
+an _agent d'affaires_, extremely rich--had he not two thousand francs
+and an American millionaire in his pocket?
+
+"M. Pujol," she said, "the earth holds but one thing that I desire, the
+love and trust of my husband."
+
+"The good Bocardon is becoming tiresome," said Aristide.
+
+Zette's lips parted, as she pointed to a black speck at the iron
+entrance gates.
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_ there he is!"
+
+"He has become tiresome," said Aristide.
+
+She rose, displaying to its full advantage her supple and stately
+figure. She had a queenly poise of the head. Aristide contemplated her
+with the frankest admiration.
+
+"One would say Juno was walking the earth again."
+
+Although Zette had never heard of Juno, and was as miserable and heavy
+hearted a woman as dwelt in Nimes, a flush of pleasure rose to her
+cheeks. She too was a child of the South, and female children of the
+South love to be admired, no matter how frankly. I have heard of
+Daughters of the Snows not quite averse to it. She sighed.
+
+"I must go now, monsieur. He must not find me here with you. I am
+suffering enough already from his reproaches. Ah! it is unjust--unjust!"
+she cried, clenching her hands, while the tears again started into her
+eyes, and the corners of her pretty lips twitched with pain. "Indeed,"
+she added, "I know it has been wrong of me to talk to you like this. But
+_que voulez-vous?_ It was not my fault. Adieu, monsieur."
+
+At the sight of her standing before him in her woeful beauty, Aristide's
+pulses throbbed.
+
+"It is not adieu--it is _au revoir_, Mme. Zette," he cried.
+
+She protested tearfully. It was farewell. Aristide darted to his
+rejected hat and clapped it on the back of his head. He joined her and
+swore that he would see her again. It was not Aristide Pujol who would
+allow her to be rent in pieces by the jaws of that crocodile, M.
+Bocardon. Faith, he would defend her to the last drop of his blood. He
+would do all manner of gasconading things.
+
+"But what can you do, my poor M. Pujol?" she asked.
+
+"You will see," he replied.
+
+They parted. He watched her until she became a speck and, having joined
+the other speck, her husband, passed out of sight. Then he set out
+through the burning gardens towards the Hotel du Luxembourg, at the
+other end of the town.
+
+Aristide had fallen in love. He had fallen in love with Provencal fury.
+He had done the same thing a hundred times before; but this, he told
+himself, was the _coup de foudre_--the thunderbolt. The beautiful
+Arlesienne filled his brain and his senses. Nothing else in the wide
+world mattered. Nothing else in the wide world occupied his mind. He
+sped through the hot streets like a meteor in human form. A stout man,
+sipping syrup and water in the cool beneath the awning of the Cafe de la
+Bourse, rose, looked wonderingly after him, and resumed his seat, wiping
+a perspiring brow.
+
+A short while afterwards Aristide, valise in hand, presented himself at
+the bureau of the Hotel de la Curatterie. It was a shabby little hotel,
+with a shabby little oval sign outside, and was situated in the narrow
+street of the same name. Within, it was clean and well kept. On the
+right of the little dark entrance-hall was the _salle a manger_, on
+the left the bureau and an unenticing hole labelled _salon de
+correspondance_. A very narrow passage led to the kitchen, and the rest
+of the hall was blocked by the staircase. An enormous man with a simple,
+woe-begone fat face and a head of hair like a circular machine-brush was
+sitting by the bureau window in his shirt-sleeves. Aristide addressed
+him.
+
+"M. Bocardon?"
+
+"At your service, monsieur."
+
+"Can I have a bedroom?"
+
+"Certainly." He waved a hand towards a set of black sample boxes studded
+with brass nails and bound with straps that lay in the hall. "The
+omnibus has brought your boxes. You are M. Lambert?"
+
+"M. Bocardon," said Aristide, in a lordly way, "I am M. Aristide Pujol,
+and not a commercial traveller. I have come to see the beauties of
+Nimes, and have chosen this hotel because I have the honour to be a
+distant relation of your wife, Mme. Zette Bocardon, whom I have not seen
+for many years. How is she?"
+
+"Her health is very good," replied M. Bocardon, shortly. He rang a bell.
+
+A dilapidated man in a green baize apron emerged from the dining-room
+and took Aristide's valise.
+
+"No. 24," said M. Bocardon. Then, swinging his massive form halfway
+through the narrow bureau door, he called down the passage, "Euphemie!"
+
+A woman's voice responded, and in a moment the woman herself appeared, a
+pallid, haggard, though more youthful, replica of Zette, with the dark
+rings of sleeplessness or illness beneath her eyes which looked
+furtively at the world.
+
+"Tell your sister," said M. Bocardon, "that a relation of yours has
+come to stay in the hotel."
+
+He swung himself back into the bureau and took no further notice of the
+guest.
+
+"A relation?" echoed Euphemie, staring at the smiling, lustrous-eyed
+Aristide, whose busy brain was wondering how he could mystify this
+unwelcome and unexpected sister.
+
+"Why, yes. Aristide, cousin to your good Aunt Leonie at Raphele. Ah--but
+you are too young to remember me."
+
+"I will tell Zette," she said, disappearing down the narrow passage.
+
+Aristide went to the doorway, and stood there looking out into the not
+too savoury street. On the opposite side, which was in the shade, the
+tenants of the modest little shops sat by their doors or on chairs on
+the pavement. There was considerable whispering among them and various
+glances were cast at him. Presently footsteps behind caused him to turn.
+There was Zette. She had evidently been weeping since they had parted,
+for her eyelids were red. She started on beholding him.
+
+"You?"
+
+He laughed and shook her hesitating hands.
+
+"It is I, Aristide. But you have grown! _Pecaire!_ How you have grown!"
+He swung her hands apart and laughed merrily in her bewildered eyes.
+"To think that the little Zette in pigtails and short check skirt
+should have grown into this beautiful woman! I compliment you on your
+wife, M. Bocardon."
+
+M. Bocardon did not reply, but Aristide's swift glance noticed a spasm
+of pain shoot across his broad face.
+
+"And the good Aunt Leonie? Is she well? And does she still make her
+_matelotes_ of eels? Ah, they were good, those _matelotes_."
+
+"Aunt Leonie died two years ago," said Zette.
+
+"The poor woman! And I who never knew. Tell me about her."
+
+The _salle a manger_ door stood open. He drew her thither by his curious
+fascination. They entered, and he shut the door behind them.
+
+"_Voila!_" said he. "Didn't I tell you I should see you again?"
+
+"_Vous avez un fameux toupet, vous!_" said Zette, half angrily.
+
+He laughed, having been accused of confounded impudence many times
+before in the course of his adventurous life.
+
+"If I told my husband he would kill you."
+
+"Precisely. So you're not going to tell him. I adore you. I have come to
+protect you. _Foi de Provencal._"
+
+"The only way to protect me is to prove my innocence."
+
+"And then?"
+
+She drew herself up and looked him straight between the eyes.
+
+"I'll recognize that you have a loyal heart, and will be your very good
+friend."
+
+"Mme. Zette," cried Aristide, "I will devote my life to your service.
+Tell me the particulars of the affair."
+
+"Ask M. Bocardon." She left him, and sailed out of the room and past the
+bureau with her proud head in the air.
+
+If Aristide Pujol had the rapturous idea of proving the innocence of
+Mme. Zette, triumphing over the fat pig of a husband, and eventually, in
+a fantastic fashion, carrying off the insulted and spotless lady to some
+bower of delight (the castle in Perpignan--why not?), you must blame,
+not him, but Provence, whose sons, if not devout, are frankly pagan.
+Sometimes they are both.
+
+M. Bocardon sat in his bureau, pretending to do accounts and tracing
+columns of figures with a huge, trembling forefinger. He looked the
+picture of woe. Aristide decided to bide his opportunity. He went out
+into the streets again, now with the object of killing time. The
+afternoon had advanced, and trees and buildings cast cool shadows in
+which one could walk with comfort; and Nimes, clear, bright city of wide
+avenues and broad open spaces, instinct too with the grandeur that was
+Rome's, is an idler's Paradise. Aristide knew it well; but he never
+tired of it. He wandered round the Maison Carree, his responsive nature
+delighting in the splendour of the Temple, with its fluted Corinthian
+columns, its noble entablature, its massive pediment, its perfect
+proportions; reluctantly turned down the Boulevard Victor Hugo, past the
+Lycee and the Bourse, made the circuit of the mighty, double-arched oval
+of the Arena, and then retraced his steps. As he expected, M. Bocardon
+had left the bureau. It was the hour of absinthe. The porter named M.
+Bocardon's habitual cafe. There, in a morose corner of the terrace,
+Aristide found the huge man gloomily contemplating an absurdly small
+glass of the bitters known as Dubonnet. Aristide raised his hat, asked
+permission to join him, and sat down.
+
+"M. Bocardon," said he, carefully mixing the absinthe which he had
+ordered, "I learn from my fair cousin that there is between you a
+regrettable misunderstanding, for which I am sincerely sorry."
+
+"She calls it a misunderstanding?" He laughed mirthlessly. "Women have
+their own vocabulary. Listen, my good sir. There is infamy between us.
+When a wife betrays a man like me--kind, indulgent, trustful, who
+has worshipped the ground she treads on--it is not a question of
+misunderstanding. It is infamy. If she had anywhere to lay her head, I
+would turn her out of doors to-night. But she has not. You, who are her
+relative, know I married her without a dowry. You alone of her family
+survive."
+
+It was on the tip of Aristide's impulsive tongue to say that he would be
+only too willing to shelter her, but prudently he refrained.
+
+"She has broken my heart," continued Bocardon.
+
+Aristide asked for details of the unhappy affair. The large man
+hesitated for a moment and glanced suspiciously at his companion; but,
+fascinated by the clear, luminous eyes, he launched with Southern
+violence into a whirling story. The villain was a traveller in
+buttons--_buttons!_ To be wronged by a traveller in diamonds might have
+its compensations--but buttons! Linen buttons, bone buttons, brass
+buttons, _trouser buttons!_ To be a traveller in the inanity of
+buttonholes was the only lower degradation. His name was Bondon--he
+uttered it scathingly, as if to decline from a Bocardon to a Bondon was
+unthinkable. This Bondon was a regular client of the hotel, and such a
+client!--who never ordered a bottle of _vin cachete_ or coffee or
+cognac. A contemptible creature. For a long time he had his suspicions.
+Now he was certain. He tossed off his glass of Dubonnet, ordered
+another, and spoke incoherently of the opening and shutting of doors,
+whisperings, of a dreadful incident, the central fact of which was a
+glimpse of Zette gliding wraith-like down a corridor. Lastly, there was
+the culminating proof, a letter found that morning in Zette's room.
+He drew a crumpled sheet from his pocket and handed it to Aristide.
+
+ [Illustration: "THE VILLAIN WAS A TRAVELLER IN BUTTONS--BUTTONS!"]
+
+It was a crude, flaming, reprehensible, and entirely damning epistle.
+Aristide turned cold, shivering at the idea of the superb and dainty
+Zette coming in contact with such abomination. He hated Bondon with a
+murderous hate. He drank a great gulp of absinthe and wished it were
+Bondon's blood. Great tears rolled down Bocardon's face, and gathering
+at the ends of his scrubby moustache dripped in splashes on the marble
+table.
+
+"I loved her so tenderly, monsieur," said he.
+
+The cry, so human, went straight to Aristide's heart. A sympathetic tear
+glistened in his bright eyes. He was suddenly filled with an immense
+pity for this grief-stricken, helpless giant. An odd feminine streak ran
+through his nature and showed itself in queer places. Impulsively he
+stretched out his hand.
+
+"You're going?" asked Bocardon.
+
+"No. A sign of good friendship."
+
+They gripped hands across the table. A new emotion thrilled through the
+facile Aristide.
+
+"Bocardon, I devote myself to you," he cried, with a flamboyant gesture.
+"What can I do?"
+
+"Alas, nothing," replied the other, miserably.
+
+"And Zette? What does she say to it all?"
+
+The mountainous shoulders heaved with a shrug. "She denies everything.
+She had never seen the letter until I showed it to her. She did not
+know how it came into her room. As if that were possible!"
+
+"It's improbable," said Aristide, gloomily.
+
+They talked. Bocardon, in a choking voice, told the simple tale of their
+married happiness. It had been a love-match, different from the ordinary
+marriages of reason and arrangement. Not a cloud since their
+wedding-day. They were called the turtle-doves of the Rue de la
+Curatterie. He had not even manifested the jealousy justifiable in the
+possessor of so beautiful a wife. He had trusted her implicitly. He was
+certain of her love. That was enough. They had had one child, who died.
+Grief had brought them even nearer each other. And now this stroke had
+been dealt. It was a knife being turned round in his heart. It was
+agony.
+
+They walked back to the hotel together. Zette, who was sitting by the
+desk in the bureau, rose and, without a word or look, vanished down
+the passage. Bocardon, with a great sigh, took her place. It was
+dinner-time. The half-dozen guests and frequenters filled for a moment
+the little hall, some waiting to wash their hands at the primitive
+_lavabo_ by the foot of the stairs. Aristide accompanied them into the
+_salle a manger_, where he dined in solemn silence. The dinner over he
+went out again, passing by the bureau where Bocardon, in its dim
+recesses, was eating a sad meal brought to him by the melancholy
+Euphemie. Zette, he conjectured, was dining in the kitchen. An
+atmosphere of desolation impregnated the place, as though a corpse were
+somewhere in the house.
+
+Aristide drank his coffee at the nearest cafe in a complicated state of
+mind. He had fallen furiously in love with the lady, believing her to be
+the victim of a jealous husband. In an outburst of generous emotion he
+had taken the husband to his heart, seeing that he was a good man
+stricken to death. Now he loved the lady, loved the husband, and hated
+the villain Bondon. What Aristide felt, he felt fiercely. He would
+reconcile these two people he loved, and then go and, if not assassinate
+Bondon, at least do him some bodily injury. With this idea in his head,
+he paid for his coffee and went back to the hotel.
+
+He found Zette taking her turn at the bureau, for clients have to be
+attended to, even in the most distressing circumstances. She was talking
+to a new arrival, trying to smile a welcome. Aristide, loitering near,
+watched her beautiful face, to which the perfect classic features gave
+an air of noble purity. His soul revolted at the idea of her mixing
+herself up with a sordid wretch like Bondon. It was unbelievable.
+
+"_Eh bien_?" she said as soon as they were alone.
+
+"Mme. Zette, to-day I called your husband a scoundrel and a crocodile. I
+was wrong. I find him a man with a beautiful nature."
+
+"You needn't tell me that, M. Aristide."
+
+"You are breaking his heart, Mme. Zette."
+
+"And is he not breaking mine? He has told you, I suppose. Am I
+responsible for what I know nothing more about than a babe unborn? You
+don't believe I am speaking the truth? Bah! And your professions this
+afternoon? Wind and gas, like the words of all men."
+
+"Mme. Zette," cried Aristide, "I said I would devote my life to your
+service, and so I will. I'll go and find Bondon and kill him."
+
+He watched her narrowly, but she did not grow pale like a woman whose
+lover is threatened with mortal peril. She said dryly:--
+
+"You had better have some conversation with him first."
+
+"Where is he to be found?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders. "How do I know? He left by the early train
+this morning that goes in the direction of Tarascon."
+
+"Then to-morrow," said Aristide, who knew the ways of commercial
+travellers, "he will be at Tarascon, or at Avignon, or at Arles."
+
+"I heard him say that he had just done Arles."
+
+"_Tant mieux._ I shall find him either at Tarascon or Avignon. And by
+the Tarasque of Sainte-Marthe, I'll bring you his head and you can
+put it up outside as a sign and call the place the 'Hotel de la Tete
+Bondon.'"
+
+ [Illustration: HE BURST INTO SHRIEKS OF LAUGHTER]
+
+Early the next morning Aristide started on his quest, without informing
+the good Bocardon of his intentions. He would go straight to Avignon, as
+the more likely place. Inquiries at the various hotels would soon enable
+him to hunt down his quarry; and then--he did not quite know what would
+happen then--but it would be something picturesque, something entirely
+unforeseen by Bondon, something to be thrillingly determined by the
+inspiration of the moment. In any case he would wipe the stain from the
+family escutcheon. By this time he had convinced himself that he
+belonged to the Bocardon family.
+
+The only other occupant of the first-class compartment was an elderly
+Englishwoman of sour aspect. Aristide, his head full of Zette and
+Bondon, scarcely noticed her. The train started and sped through the
+sunny land of vine and olive.
+
+They had almost reached Tarascon when a sudden thought hit him between
+the eyes, like the blow of a fist. He gasped for a moment, then he burst
+into shrieks of laughter, kicking his legs up and down and waving his
+arms in maniacal mirth. After that he rose and danced. The sour-faced
+Englishwoman, in mortal terror, fled into the corridor. She must have
+reported Aristide's behaviour to the guard, for in a minute or two that
+official appeared at the doorway.
+
+"_Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?_"
+
+Aristide paused in his demonstrations of merriment. "Monsieur," said he,
+"I have just discovered what I am going to do to M. Bondon."
+
+Delight bubbled out of him as he walked from the Avignon Railway Station
+up the Cours de la Republique. The wretch Bondon lay at his mercy. He
+had not proceeded far, however, when his quick eye caught sight of an
+object in the ramshackle display of a curiosity dealer's. He paused in
+front of the window, fascinated. He rubbed his eyes.
+
+"No," said he; "it is not a dream. The _bon Dieu_ is on my side."
+
+He went into the shop and bought the object. It was a pair of handcuffs.
+
+At a little after three o'clock the small and dilapidated hotel omnibus
+drove up before the Hotel de la Curatterie, and from it descended
+Aristide Pujol, radiant-eyed, and a scrubby little man with a goatee
+beard, pince-nez, and a dome-like forehead, who, pale and trembling,
+seemed stricken with a great fear. It was Bondon. Together they entered
+the little hall. As soon as Bocardon saw his enemy his eyes blazed with
+fury, and, uttering an inarticulate roar, he rushed out of the bureau
+with clenched fists murderously uplifted. The terrified Bondon shrank
+into a corner, protected by Aristide, who, smiling like an angel of
+peace, intercepted the onslaught of the huge man.
+
+"Be calm, my good Bocardon, be calm."
+
+But Bocardon would not be calm. He found his voice.
+
+"Ah, scoundrel! Miscreant! Wretch! Traitor!" When his vocabulary of
+vituperation and his breath failed him, he paused and mopped his
+forehead.
+
+Bondon came a step or two forward.
+
+"I know, monsieur, I have all the wrong on my side. Your anger is
+justifiable. But I never dreamt of the disastrous effect of my acts. Let
+me see her, my good M. Bocardon, I beseech you."
+
+"Let you see her?" said Bocardon, growing purple in the face.
+
+At this moment Zette came running up the passage.
+
+"What is all this noise about?"
+
+"Ah, madame!" cried Bondon, eagerly, "I am heart-broken. You who are so
+kind--let me see her."
+
+"_Hein_?" exclaimed Bocardon, in stupefaction.
+
+"See whom?" asked Zette.
+
+"My dear dead one. My dear Euphemie, who has committed suicide."
+
+"But he's mad!" shouted Bocardon, in his great voice. "Euphemie!
+Euphemie! Come here!"
+
+At the sight of Euphemie, pale and shivering with apprehension, Bondon
+sank upon a bench by the wall. He stared at her as if she were a ghost.
+
+"I don't understand," he murmured, faintly, looking like a trapped hare
+at Aristide Pujol, who, debonair, hands on hips, stood a little way
+apart.
+
+"Nor I, either," cried Bocardon.
+
+A great light dawned on Zette's beautiful face. "I do understand." She
+exchanged glances with Aristide. He came forward.
+
+"It's very simple," said he, taking the stage with childlike exultation.
+"I go to find Bondon this morning to kill him. In the train I have a
+sudden inspiration, a revelation from Heaven. It is not Zette but
+Euphemie that is the _bonne amie_ of Bondon. I laugh, and frighten a
+long-toothed English old maid out of her wits. Shall I get out at
+Tarascon and return to Nimes and tell you, or shall I go on? I decide to
+go on. I make my plan. Ah, but when I make a plan, it's all in a second,
+a flash, _pfuit!_ At Avignon I see a pair of handcuffs. I buy them. I
+spend hours tracking that animal there. At last I find him at the
+station about to start for Lyon. I tell him I am a police agent. I let
+him see the handcuffs, which convince him. I tell him Euphemie, in
+consequence of the discovery of his letter, has committed suicide. There
+is a _proces-verbal_ at which he is wanted. I summon him to accompany me
+in the name of the law--and there he is."
+
+ [Illustration: "AND YOU!" SHOUTED BOCARDON, FALLING ON ARISTIDE; "I MUST
+                EMBRACE YOU ALSO"]
+
+"Then that letter was not for my wife?" said Bocardon, who was not
+quick-witted.
+
+"But, no, imbecile!" cried Aristide.
+
+Bocardon hugged his wife in his vast embrace. The tears ran down his
+cheeks.
+
+"Ah, my little Zette, my little Zette, will you ever pardon me?"
+
+"_Oui, je te pardonne, gros jaloux_," said Zette.
+
+"And you!" shouted Bocardon, falling on Aristide; "I must embrace you
+also." He kissed him on both cheeks, in his expansive way, and thrust
+him towards Zette.
+
+"You can also kiss my wife. It is I, Bocardon, who command it."
+
+The fire of a not ignoble pride raced through Aristide's veins. He was a
+hero. He knew it. It was a moment worth living.
+
+The embraces and other expressions of joy and gratitude being
+temporarily suspended, attention was turned to the unheroic couple who
+up to then had said not one word to each other. The explanation of their
+conduct, too, was simple, apparently. They were in love. She had no
+dowry. He could not marry her, as his parents would not give their
+consent. She, for her part, was frightened to death by the discovery of
+the letter, lest Bocardon should turn her out of the house.
+
+"What dowry will satisfy your parents?"
+
+"Nothing less than twelve thousand francs."
+
+"I give it," said Bocardon, reckless in his newly-found happiness.
+"Marry her."
+
+The clock in the bureau struck four. Aristide pulled out his watch.
+
+"_Saperlipopette!_" he cried, and disappeared like a flash into the
+street.
+
+"But what's the matter with him?" shouted Bocardon, in amazement.
+
+Zette went to the door. "He's running as if he had the devil at his
+heels."
+
+"Was he always like that?" asked her husband.
+
+"How always?"
+
+"_Parbleu!_ When you used to see him at your Aunt Leonie's."
+
+Zette flushed red. To repudiate the saviour of her entire family were an
+act of treachery too black for her ingenuous heart.
+
+"Ah, yes," she replied, calmly, coming back into the hall. "We used to
+call him Cousin Quicksilver."
+
+In the big avenue Aristide hailed a passing cab.
+
+"To the Hotel du Luxembourg--at a gallop!"
+
+In the joyous excitement of the past few hours this child of impulse
+and sunshine, this dragon-fly of a man, had entirely forgotten the
+appointment at two o'clock with the American millionaire and the fortune
+that depended on it. He would be angry at being kept waiting. Aristide
+had met Americans before. His swift brain invented an elaborate excuse.
+
+He leaped from the cab and entered the vestibule of the hotel.
+
+"Can I see M. Congleton?" he asked at the bureau.
+
+"An American gentleman? He has gone, monsieur. He left by the
+three-thirty train. Are you M. Pujol? There is a letter for you."
+
+With a sinking heart he opened it and read:--
+
+     DEAR SIR,--I was in this hotel at two o'clock, according to
+     arrangement. As my last train to Japan leaves at three-thirty, I
+     regret I cannot await your convenience. The site of the hotel is
+     satisfactory. Your business methods are not. I am sorry, therefore,
+     not to be able to entertain the matter further.--Faithfully,
+
+     WILLIAM B. CONGLETON.
+
+He stared at the words for a few paralyzed moments. Then he stuffed the
+letter into his pocket and broke into a laugh.
+
+"_Zut!_" said he, using the inelegant expletive whereby a Frenchman most
+adequately expresses his scorn of circumstance. "_Zut!_ If I have lost a
+fortune, I have gained two devoted friends, so I am the winner on the
+day's work."
+
+Whereupon he returned gaily to the bosom of the Bocardon family and
+remained there, its Cousin Quicksilver and its entirely happy and
+idolized hero, until the indignation of the eminent M. Say summoned him
+to Paris.
+
+And that is how Aristide Pujol could live thenceforward on nothing at
+all at Nimes, whenever it suited him to visit that historic town.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE KIND MR. SMITH
+
+
+Aristide Pujol started life on his own account as a _chasseur_ in a Nice
+cafe--one of those luckless children tightly encased in bottle-green
+cloth by means of brass buttons, who earn a sketchy livelihood by
+enduring with cherubic smiles the continuous maledictions of the
+establishment. There he soothed his hours of servitude by dreams of
+vast ambitions. He would become the manager of a great hotel--not a
+contemptible hostelry where commercial travellers and seedy Germans were
+indifferently bedded, but one of those white palaces where milords
+(English) and millionaires (American) paid a thousand francs a night
+for a bedroom and five louis for a glass of beer. Now, in order to
+derive such profit from the Anglo-Saxon a knowledge of English was
+indispensable. He resolved to learn the language. How he did so, except
+by sheer effrontery, taking linguistic toll of frequenters of the cafe,
+would be a mystery to anyone unacquainted with Aristide. But to his
+friends his mastery of the English tongue in such circumstances is
+comprehensible. To Aristide the impossible was ever the one thing easy
+of attainment; the possible the one thing he never could achieve.
+That was the paradoxical nature of the man. Before his days of
+hunted-little-devildom were over he had acquired sufficient knowledge of
+English to carry him, a few years later, through various vicissitudes in
+England, until, fired by new social ambitions and self-educated in a
+haphazard way, he found himself appointed Professor of French in an
+academy for young ladies.
+
+One of these days, when I can pin my dragon-fly friend down to a plain,
+unvarnished autobiography, I may be able to trace some chronological
+sequence in the kaleidoscopic changes in his career. But hitherto, in
+his talks with me, he flits about from any one date to any other during
+a couple of decades, in a manner so confusing that for the present I
+abandon such an attempt. All I know of the date of the episode I am
+about to chronicle is that it occurred immediately after the termination
+of his engagement at the academy just mentioned. Somehow, Aristide's
+history is a category of terminations.
+
+If the head mistress of the academy had herself played dragon at his
+classes, all would have gone well. He would have made his pupils
+conjugate irregular verbs, rendered them adepts in the mysteries of the
+past participle and the subjunctive mood, and turned them out quite
+innocent of the idiomatic quaintnesses of the French tongue. But _dis
+aliter visum_. The gods always saw wrong-headedly otherwise in the case
+of Aristide. A weak-minded governess--and in a governess a sense of
+humour and of novelty is always a sign of a weak mind--played dragon
+during Aristide's lessons. She appreciated his method, which was
+colloquial. The colloquial Aristide was jocular. His lessons therefore
+were a giggling joy from beginning to end. He imparted to his pupils
+delicious knowledge. _En avez-vous des-z-homards? Oh, les sales betes,
+elles ont du poil aux pattes_, which, being translated, is: "Have you
+any lobsters? Oh, the dirty animals, they have hair on their feet"--a
+catch phrase which, some years ago, added greatly to the gaiety of
+Paris, but in which I must confess to seeing no gleam of wit--became the
+historic property of the school. He recited to them, till they were
+word-perfect, a music-hall ditty of the early 'eighties--_Sur le bi,
+sur le banc, sur le bi du bout du banc_, and delighted them with
+dissertations on Mme. Yvette Guilbert's earlier repertoire. But for him
+they would have gone to their lives' end without knowing that _pognon_
+meant money; _rouspetance_, assaulting the police; _thune_, a five-franc
+piece; and _bouffer_, to take nourishment. He made (according to his own
+statement) French a living language. There was never a school in Great
+Britain, the Colonies, or America on which the Parisian accent was so
+electrically impressed. The retort, _Eh! ta soeur_, was the purest
+Montmartre; also _Fich'-moi la paix, mon petit_, and _Tu as un toupet,
+toi_; and the delectable locution, _Allons etrangler un perroquet_ (let
+us strangle a parrot), employed by Apaches when inviting each other to
+drink a glass of absinthe, soon became current French in the school for
+invitations to surreptitious cocoa-parties.
+
+The progress that academy made in a real grip of the French language was
+miraculous; but the knowledge it gained in French grammar and syntax was
+deplorable. A certain mid-term examination--the paper being set by a
+neighbouring vicar--produced awful results. The phrase, "How do you do,
+dear?" which ought, by all the rules of Stratford-atte-Bowe, to be
+translated by _Comment vous portez-vous, ma chere?_ was rendered by most
+of the senior scholars _Eh, ma vieille, ca boulotte?_ One innocent and
+anachronistic damsel, writing on the execution of Charles I., declared
+that he _cracha dans le panier_ in 1649, thereby mystifying the good
+vicar, who was unaware that "to spit into the basket" is to be
+guillotined. This wealth of vocabulary was discounted by abject poverty
+in other branches of the language. No one could give a list of the words
+in "_al_" that took "_s_" in the plural, no one knew anything at all
+about the defective verb _echoir_, and the orthography of the school
+would have disgraced a kindergarten. The head mistress suspected a lack
+of method in the teaching of M. Pujol, and one day paid his class a
+surprise visit.
+
+The sight that met her eyes petrified her. The class, including the
+governess, bubbled and gurgled and shrieked with laughter. M. Pujol, his
+bright eyes agleam with merriment and his arms moving in frantic
+gestures, danced about the platform. He was telling them a story--and
+when Aristide told a story, he told it with the eloquence of his entire
+frame. He bent himself double and threw out his hands.
+
+"_Il etait saoul comme un porc_," he shouted.
+
+And then came the hush of death. The rest of the artless tale about the
+man as drunk as a pig was never told. The head mistress, indignant
+majesty, strode up the room.
+
+"M. Pujol, you have a strange way of giving French lessons."
+
+"I believe, madame," said he, with a polite bow, "in interesting my
+pupils in their studies."
+
+"Pupils have to be taught, not interested," said the head mistress.
+"Will you kindly put the class through some irregular verbs."
+
+So for the remainder of the lesson Aristide, under the freezing eyes of
+the head mistress, put his sorrowful class through irregular verbs, of
+which his own knowledge was singularly inexact, and at the end received
+his dismissal. In vain he argued. Outraged Minerva was implacable. Go he
+must.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We find him, then, one miserable December evening, standing on the
+arrival platform of Euston Station (the academy was near Manchester), an
+unwonted statue of dubiety. At his feet lay his meagre valise; in his
+hand was an enormous bouquet, a useful tribute of esteem from his
+disconsolate pupils; around him luggage-laden porters and passengers
+hurried; in front were drawn up the long line of cabs, their drivers'
+waterproofs glistening with wet; and in his pocket rattled the few
+paltry coins that, for Heaven knew how long, were to keep him from
+starvation. Should he commit the extravagance of taking a cab or should
+he go forth, valise in hand, into the pouring rain? He hesitated.
+
+"_Sacre mille cochons! Quel chien de climat!_" he muttered.
+
+A smart footman standing by turned quickly and touched his hat.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir; I'm from Mr. Smith."
+
+"I'm glad to hear it, my friend," said Aristide.
+
+"You're the French gentleman from Manchester?"
+
+"Decidedly," said Aristide.
+
+ [Illustration: STANDING ON THE ARRIVAL PLATFORM OF EUSTON STATION]
+
+"Then, sir, Mr. Smith has sent the carriage for you."
+
+"That's very kind of him," said Aristide.
+
+The footman picked up the valise and darted down the platform. Aristide
+followed. The footman held invitingly open the door of a cosy brougham.
+Aristide paused for the fraction of a second. Who was this hospitable
+Mr. Smith?
+
+"Bah!" said he to himself, "the best way of finding out is to go and
+see."
+
+He entered the carriage, sank back luxuriously on the soft cushions, and
+inhaled the warm smell of leather. They started, and soon the pelting
+rain beat harmlessly against the windows. Aristide looked out at the
+streaming streets, and, hugging himself comfortably, thanked Providence
+and Mr. Smith. But who was Mr. Smith? _Tiens_, thought he, there were
+two little Miss Smiths at the academy; he had pitied them because they
+had chilblains, freckles, and perpetual colds in their heads; possibly
+this was their kind papa. But, after all, what did it matter whose papa
+he was? He was expecting him. He had sent the carriage for him.
+Evidently a well-bred and attentive person. And _tiens!_ there was even
+a hot-water can on the floor of the brougham. "He thinks of everything,
+that man," said Aristide. "I feel I am going to like him."
+
+The carriage stopped at a house in Hampstead, standing, as far as he
+could see in the darkness, in its own grounds. The footman opened the
+door for him to alight and escorted him up the front steps. A neat
+parlour-maid received him in a comfortably-furnished hall and took his
+hat and greatcoat and magnificent bouquet.
+
+"Mr. Smith hasn't come back yet from the City, sir; but Miss Christabel
+is in the drawing-room."
+
+"Ah!" said Aristide. "Please give me back my bouquet."
+
+The maid showed him into the drawing-room. A pretty girl of
+three-and-twenty rose from a fender-stool and advanced smilingly to meet
+him.
+
+"Good afternoon, M. le Baron. I was wondering whether Thomas would spot
+you. I'm so glad he did. You see, neither father nor I could give him
+any description, for we had never seen you."
+
+This fitted in with his theory. But why Baron? After all, why not? The
+English loved titles.
+
+"He seems to be an intelligent fellow, mademoiselle."
+
+There was a span of silence. The girl looked at the bouquet, then at
+Aristide, who looked at the girl, then at the bouquet, then at the girl
+again.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said he, "will you deign to accept these flowers as a
+token of my respectful homage?"
+
+Miss Christabel took the flowers and blushed prettily. She had dark hair
+and eyes and a fascinating, upturned little nose, and the kindest
+little mouth in the world.
+
+"An Englishman would not have thought of that," she said.
+
+Aristide smiled in his roguish way and raised a deprecating hand.
+
+"Oh, yes, he would. But he would not have had--what you call the cheek
+to do it."
+
+Miss Christabel laughed merrily, invited him to a seat by the fire,
+and comforted him with tea and hot muffins. The frank charm of his
+girl-hostess captivated Aristide and drove from his mind the riddle of
+his adventure. Besides, think of the Arabian Nights' enchantment of the
+change from his lonely and shabby bed-sitting-room in the Rusholme Road
+to this fragrant palace with princess and all to keep him company! He
+watched the firelight dancing through her hair, the dainty play of
+laughter over her face, and decided that the brougham had transported
+him to Bagdad instead of Hampstead.
+
+"You have the air of a veritable princess," said he.
+
+"I once met a princess--at a charity bazaar--and she was a most
+matter-of-fact, businesslike person."
+
+"Bah!" said Aristide. "A princess of a charity bazaar! I was talking of
+the princess in a fairytale. They are the only real ones."
+
+"Do you know," said Miss Christabel, "that when men pay such compliments
+to English girls they are apt to get laughed at?"
+
+"Englishmen, yes," replied Aristide, "because they think over a
+compliment for a week, so that by the time they pay it, it is addled,
+like a bad egg. But we of Provence pay tribute to beauty straight out of
+our hearts. It is true. It is sincere. And what comes out of the heart
+is not ridiculous."
+
+Again the girl coloured and laughed. "I've always heard that a Frenchman
+makes love to every woman he meets."
+
+"Naturally," said Aristide. "If they are pretty. What else are pretty
+women for? Otherwise they might as well be hideous."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, to whom this Provencal point of view had not
+occurred.
+
+"So, if I make love to you, it is but your due."
+
+"I wonder what my fiance would say if he heard you?"
+
+"Your----?"
+
+"My fiance! There's his photograph on the table beside you. He is six
+foot one, and so jealous!" she laughed again.
+
+"The Turk!" cried Aristide, his swiftly-conceived romance crumbling into
+dust. Then he brightened up. "But when this six feet of muscle and
+egotism is absent, surely other poor mortals can glean a smile?"
+
+"You will observe that I'm not frowning," said Miss Christabel. "But you
+must not call my fiance a Turk, for he's a very charming fellow whom I
+hope you'll like very much."
+
+Aristide sighed. "And the name of this thrice-blessed mortal?"
+
+Miss Christabel told his name--one Harry Ralston--and not only his name,
+but, such was the peculiar, childlike charm of Aristide Pujol, also many
+other things about him. He was the Honourable Harry Ralston, the heir
+to a great brewery peerage, and very wealthy. He was a member of
+Parliament, and but for Parliamentary duties would have dined there that
+evening; but he was to come in later, as soon as he could leave the
+House. He also had a house in Hampshire, full of the most beautiful
+works of art. It was through their common hobby that her father and
+Harry had first made acquaintance.
+
+"We're supposed to have a very fine collection here," she said, with a
+motion of her hand.
+
+Aristide looked round the walls and saw them hung with pictures in gold
+frames. In those days he had not acquired an extensive culture. Besides,
+who having before him the firelight gleaming through Miss Christabel's
+hair could waste his time over painted canvas? She noted his cursory
+glance.
+
+"I thought you were a connoisseur?"
+
+"I am," said Aristide, his bright eyes fixed on her in frank admiration.
+
+She blushed again; but this time she rose.
+
+"I must go and dress for dinner. Perhaps you would like to be shown your
+room?"
+
+He hung his head on one side.
+
+"Have I been too bold, mademoiselle?"
+
+"I don't know," she said. "You see, I've never met a Frenchman before."
+
+"Then a world of undreamed-of homage is at your feet," said he.
+
+A servant ushered him up broad, carpeted staircases into a bedroom such
+as he had never seen in his life before. It was all curtains and
+hangings and rugs and soft couches and satin quilts and dainty
+writing-tables and subdued lights, and a great fire glowed red and
+cheerful, and before it hung a clean shirt. His poor little toilet
+apparatus was laid on the dressing-table, and (with a tact which he did
+not appreciate, for he had, sad to tell, no dress-suit) the servant had
+spread his precious frock-coat and spare pair of trousers on the bed. On
+the pillow lay his night-shirt, neatly folded.
+
+"Evidently," said Aristide, impressed by these preparations, "it is
+expected that I wash myself now and change my clothes, and that I sleep
+here for the night. And for all that the ravishing Miss Christabel is
+engaged to her honourable Harry, this is none the less a corner of
+Paradise."
+
+So Aristide attired himself in his best, which included a white tie and
+a pair of nearly new brown boots--a long task, as he found that his
+valise had been spirited away and its contents, including the white
+tie of ceremony (he had but one), hidden in unexpected drawers and
+wardrobes--and eventually went downstairs into the drawing-room. There
+he found Miss Christabel and, warming himself on the hearthrug, a
+bald-headed, beefy-faced Briton, with little pig's eyes and a hearty
+manner, attired in a dinner-suit.
+
+"My dear fellow," said this personage, with outstretched hand, "I'm
+delighted to have you here. I've heard so much about you; and my little
+girl has been singing your praises."
+
+"Mademoiselle is too kind," said Aristide.
+
+"You must take us as you find us," said Mr. Smith. "We're just ordinary
+folk, but I can give you a good bottle of wine and a good cigar--it's
+only in England, you know, that you can get champagne fit to drink and
+cigars fit to smoke--and I can give you a glimpse of a modest English
+home. I believe you haven't a word for it in French."
+
+"_Ma foi_, no," said Aristide, who had once or twice before heard this
+lunatic charge brought against his country. "In France the men all live
+in cafes, the children are all put out to nurse, and the women, saving
+the respect of mademoiselle--well, the less said about them the better."
+
+"England is the only place, isn't it?" Mr. Smith declared, heartily. "I
+don't say that Paris hasn't its points. But after all--the Moulin Rouge
+and the Folies Bergeres and that sort of thing soon pall, you know--soon
+pall."
+
+"Yet Paris has its serious side," argued Aristide. "There is always the
+tomb of Napoleon."
+
+"Papa will never take me to Paris," sighed the girl.
+
+"You shall go there on your honeymoon," said Mr. Smith.
+
+Dinner was announced. Aristide gave his arm to Miss Christabel, and
+proud not only of his partner, but also of his frock-coat, white tie,
+and shiny brown boots, strutted into the dining-room. The host sat at
+the end of the beautifully set table, his daughter on his right,
+Aristide on his left. The meal began gaily. The kind Mr. Smith was in
+the best of humours.
+
+"And how is our dear old friend, Jules Dancourt?" he asked.
+
+"_Tiens!_" said Aristide, to himself, "we have a dear friend Jules
+Dancourt. Wonderfully well," he replied at a venture, "but he suffers
+terribly at times from the gout."
+
+"So do I, confound it!" said Mr. Smith, drinking sherry.
+
+"You and the good Jules were always sympathetic," said Aristide. "Ah! he
+has spoken to me so often about you, the tears in his eyes."
+
+"Men cry, my dear, in France," Mr. Smith explained. "They also kiss each
+other."
+
+"_Ah, mais c'est un beau pays, mademoiselle!_" cried Aristide, and he
+began to talk of France and to draw pictures of his country which set
+the girl's eyes dancing. After that he told some of the funny little
+stories which had brought him disaster at the academy. Mr. Smith, with
+jovial magnanimity, declared that he was the first Frenchman he had ever
+met with a sense of humour.
+
+"But I thought, Baron," said he, "that you lived all your life shut up
+in that old chateau of yours?"
+
+"_Tiens!_" thought Aristide. "I am still a Baron, and I have an old
+chateau."
+
+"Tell us about the chateau. Has it a fosse and a drawbridge and a Gothic
+chapel?" asked Miss Christabel.
+
+"Which one do you mean?" inquired Aristide, airily. "For I have two."
+
+When relating to me this Arabian Nights' adventure, he drew my special
+attention to his astuteness.
+
+His host's eye quivered in a wink. "The one in Languedoc," said he.
+
+Languedoc! Almost Pujol's own country! With entire lack of morality, but
+with picturesque imagination, Aristide plunged into a description of
+that non-existent baronial hall. Fosse, drawbridge, Gothic chapel were
+but insignificant features. It had tourelles, emblazoned gateways,
+bastions, donjons, barbicans; it had innumerable rooms; in the _salle
+des chevaliers_ two hundred men-at-arms had his ancestors fed at a
+sitting. There was the room in which Francois Premier had slept, and one
+in which Joan of Arc had almost been assassinated. What the name of
+himself or of his ancestors was supposed to be Aristide had no ghost of
+an idea. But as he proceeded with the erection of his airy palace he
+gradually began to believe in it. He invested the place with a living
+atmosphere; conjured up a staff of family retainers, notably one
+Marie-Joseph Loufoque, the wizened old major-domo, with his long white
+whiskers and blue and silver livery. There were also Madeline Mioulles,
+the cook, and Bernadet the groom, and La Petite Fripette the goose girl.
+Ah! they should see La Petite Fripette! And he kept dogs and horses and
+cows and ducks and hens--and there was a great pond whence frogs were
+drawn to be fed for the consumption of the household.
+
+Miss Christabel shivered. "I should not like to eat frogs."
+
+"They also eat snails," said her father.
+
+"I have a snail farm," said Aristide. "You never saw such interesting
+little animals. They are so intelligent. If you're kind to them they
+come and eat out of your hand."
+
+ [Illustration: "AH! THE PICTURES," CRIED ARISTIDE, WITH A WIDE SWEEP
+                OF HIS ARMS]
+
+"You've forgotten the pictures," said Mr. Smith.
+
+"Ah! the pictures," cried Aristide, with a wide sweep of his arms.
+"Galleries full of them. Raphael, Michael Angelo, Wiertz, Reynolds----"
+
+He paused, not in order to produce the effect of a dramatic aposiopesis,
+but because he could not for the moment remember other names of
+painters.
+
+"It is a truly historical chateau," said he.
+
+"I should love to see it," said the girl.
+
+Aristide threw out his arms across the table. "It is yours,
+mademoiselle, for your honeymoon," said he.
+
+Dinner came to an end. Miss Christabel left the gentlemen to their wine,
+an excellent port whose English qualities were vaunted by the host.
+Aristide, full of food and drink and the mellow glories of the castle in
+Languedoc, and smoking an enormous cigar, felt at ease with all the
+world. He knew he should like the kind Mr. Smith, hospitable though
+somewhat insular man. He could stay with him for a week--or a month--why
+not a year?
+
+After coffee and liqueurs had been served Mr. Smith rose and switched on
+a powerful electric light at the end of the large room, showing a
+picture on an easel covered by a curtain. He beckoned to Aristide to
+join him and, drawing the curtain, disclosed the picture.
+
+"There!" said he. "Isn't it a stunner?"
+
+It was a picture all grey skies and grey water and grey feathery trees,
+and a little man in the foreground wore a red cap.
+
+"It is beautiful, but indeed it is magnificent!" cried Aristide, always
+impressionable to things of beauty.
+
+"Genuine Corot, isn't it?"
+
+"Without doubt," said Aristide.
+
+His host poked him in the ribs. "I thought I'd astonish you. You
+wouldn't believe Gottschalk could have done it. There it is--as large as
+life and twice as natural. If you or anyone else can tell it from a
+genuine Corot I'll eat my hat. And all for eight pounds."
+
+Aristide looked at the beefy face and caught a look of cunning in the
+little pig's eyes.
+
+"Now are you satisfied?" asked Mr. Smith.
+
+"More than satisfied," said Aristide, though what he was to be satisfied
+about passed, for the moment, his comprehension.
+
+"If it was a copy of an existing picture, you know--one might have
+understood it--that, of course, would be dangerous--but for a man to go
+and get bits out of various Corots and stick them together like this is
+miraculous. If it hadn't been for a matter of business principle I'd
+have given the fellow eight guineas instead of pounds--hanged if I
+wouldn't! He deserves it."
+
+"He does indeed," said Aristide Pujol.
+
+"And now that you've seen it with your own eyes, what do you think you
+might ask me for it? I suggested something between two and three
+thousand--shall we say three? You're the owner, you know." Again the
+process of rib-digging. "Came out of that historic chateau of yours. My
+eye! you're a holy terror when you begin to talk. You almost persuaded
+me it was real."
+
+"_Tiens!_" said Aristide to himself. "I don't seem to have a chateau
+after all."
+
+"Certainly three thousand," said he, with a grave face.
+
+"That young man thinks he knows a lot, but he doesn't," said Mr. Smith.
+
+"Ah!" said Aristide, with singular laconicism.
+
+"Not a blooming thing," continued his host. "But he'll pay three
+thousand, which is the principal, isn't it? He's partner in the show,
+you know, Ralston, Wiggins, and Wix's Brewery"--Aristide pricked up his
+ears--"and when his doddering old father dies he'll be Lord Ranelagh and
+come into a million of money."
+
+"Has he seen the picture?" asked Aristide.
+
+"Oh, yes. Regards it as a masterpiece. Didn't Brauneberger tell you of
+the Lancret we planted on the American?" Mr. Smith rubbed hearty hands
+at the memory of the iniquity. "Same old game. Always easy. I have
+nothing to do with the bargaining or the sale. Just an old friend of
+the ruined French nobleman with the historic chateau and family
+treasures. He comes along and fixes the price. I told our friend
+Harry----"
+
+"Good," thought Aristide. "This is the same Honourable Harry, M.P., who
+is engaged to the ravishing Miss Christabel."
+
+"I told him," said Mr. Smith, "that it might come to three or four
+thousand. He jibbed a bit--so when I wrote to you I said two or three.
+But you might try him with three to begin with."
+
+Aristide went back to the table and poured himself out a fresh glass of
+his kind host's 1865 brandy and drank it off.
+
+"Exquisite, my dear fellow," said he. "I've none finer in my historic
+chateau."
+
+"Don't suppose you have," grinned the host, joining him. He slapped him
+on the back. "Well," said he, with a shifty look in his little pig's
+eyes, "let us talk business. What do you think would be your fair
+commission? You see, all the trouble and invention have been mine. What
+do you say to four hundred pounds?"
+
+"Five," said Aristide, promptly.
+
+A sudden gleam came into the little pig's eyes.
+
+"Done!" said Mr. Smith, who had imagined that the other would demand a
+thousand and was prepared to pay eight hundred. "Done!" said he again.
+
+They shook hands to seal the bargain and drank another glass of old
+brandy. At that moment, a servant, entering, took the host aside.
+
+"Please excuse me a moment," said he, and went with the servant out of
+the room.
+
+Aristide, left alone, lighted another of his kind host's fat cigars
+and threw himself into a great leathern arm-chair by the fire, and
+surrendered himself deliciously to the soothing charm of the moment. Now
+and then he laughed, finding a certain comicality in his position. And
+what a charming father-in-law, this kind Mr. Smith!
+
+His cheerful reflections were soon disturbed by the sudden irruption of
+his host and a grizzled, elderly, foxy-faced gentleman with a white
+moustache, wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honour in the buttonhole
+of his overcoat.
+
+"Here, you!" cried the kind Mr. Smith, striding up to Aristide, with a
+very red face. "Will you have the kindness to tell me who the devil you
+are?"
+
+Aristide rose, and, putting his hands behind the tails of his
+frock-coat, stood smiling radiantly on the hearthrug. A wit much less
+alert than my irresponsible friend's would have instantly appreciated
+the fact that the real Simon Pure had arrived on the scene.
+
+"I, my dear friend," said he, "am the Baron de Je ne Sais Plus."
+
+"You're a confounded impostor," spluttered Mr. Smith.
+
+"And this gentleman here to whom I have not had the pleasure of being
+introduced?" asked Aristide, blandly.
+
+"I am M. Poiron, monsieur, the agent of Messrs. Brauneberger and
+Compagnie, art dealers, of the Rue Notre Dame des Petits Champs of
+Paris," said the new-comer, with an air of defiance.
+
+"Ah, I thought you were the Baron," said Aristide.
+
+"There's no blooming Baron at all about it!" screamed Mr. Smith. "Are
+you Poiron, or is he?"
+
+"I would not have a name like Poiron for anything in the world," said
+Aristide. "My name is Aristide Pujol, soldier of fortune, at your
+service."
+
+"How the blazes did you get here?"
+
+"Your servant asked me if I was a French gentleman from Manchester. I
+was. He said that Mr. Smith had sent his carriage for me. I thought it
+hospitable of the kind Mr. Smith. I entered the carriage--_et voila!_"
+
+"Then clear out of here this very minute," said Mr. Smith, reaching
+forward his hand to the bell-push.
+
+Aristide checked his impulsive action.
+
+"Pardon me, dear host," said he. "It is raining dogs and cats outside. I
+am very comfortable in your luxurious home. I am here, and here I
+stay."
+
+"I'm shot if you do," said the kind Mr. Smith, his face growing redder
+and uglier. "Now, will you go out, or will you be thrown out?"
+
+Aristide, who had no desire whatever to be ejected from this snug nest
+into the welter of the wet and friendless world, puffed at his cigar,
+and looked at his host with the irresistible drollery of his eyes.
+
+"You forget, _mon cher ami_," said he, "that neither the beautiful Miss
+Christabel nor her affianced, the Honourable Harry, M.P., would care to
+know that the talented Gottschalk got only eight pounds, not even
+guineas, for painting that three-thousand-pound picture."
+
+"So it's blackmail, eh?"
+
+"Precisely," said Aristide, "and I don't blush at it."
+
+"You infernal little blackguard!"
+
+"I seem to be in congenial company," said Aristide. "I don't think our
+friend M. Poiron has more scruples than he has right to the ribbon of
+the Legion of Honour which he is wearing."
+
+"How much will you take to go out? I have a cheque-book handy."
+
+Mr. Smith moved a few steps from the hearthrug. Aristide sat down in the
+arm-chair. An engaging, fantastic impudence was one of the charms of
+Aristide Pujol.
+
+"I'll take five hundred pounds," said he, "to stay in."
+
+"Stay in?" Mr. Smith grew apoplectic.
+
+"Yes," said Aristide. "You can't do without me. Your daughter and your
+servants know me as M. le Baron--by the way, what is my name? And where
+is my historic chateau in Languedoc?"
+
+"Mireilles," said M. Poiron, who was sitting grim and taciturn on one of
+the dining-room chairs. "And the place is the same, near Montpellier."
+
+"I like to meet an intelligent man," said Aristide.
+
+"I should like to wring your infernal neck," said the kind Mr. Smith.
+"But, by George, if we do let you in you'll have to sign me a receipt
+implicating yourself up to the hilt. I'm not going to be put into the
+cart by you, you can bet your life."
+
+"Anything you like," said Aristide, "so long as we all swing together."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, when Aristide Pujol arrived at this point in his narrative I, his
+chronicler, who am nothing if not an eminently respectable, law-abiding
+Briton, took him warmly to task for his sheer absence of moral sense.
+His eyes, as they sometimes did, assumed a luminous pathos.
+
+ [Illustration: "I'LL TAKE FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS," SAID HE, "TO STAY IN"]
+
+"My dear friend," said he, "have you ever faced the world in a foreign
+country in December with no character and fifteen pounds five and
+three-pence in your pocket? Five hundred pounds was a fortune. It is
+one now. And to be gained just by lending oneself to a good farce, which
+didn't hurt anybody. You and your British morals! Bah!" said he, with a
+fine flourish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aristide, after much parleying, was finally admitted into the nefarious
+brotherhood. He was to retain his rank as the Baron de Mireilles, and
+play the part of the pecuniarily inconvenienced nobleman forced to sell
+some of his rare collection. Mr. Smith had heard of the Corot through
+their dear old common friend, Jules Dancourt of Rheims, had mentioned it
+alluringly to the Honourable Harry, had arranged for the Baron, who was
+visiting England, to bring it over and dispatch it to Mr. Smith's house,
+and on his return from Manchester to pay a visit to Mr. Smith, so that
+he could meet the Honourable Harry in person. In whatever transaction
+ensued Mr. Smith, so far as his prospective son-in-law was concerned,
+was to be the purely disinterested friend. It was Aristide's wit which
+invented a part for the supplanted M. Poiron. He should be the eminent
+Parisian expert who, chancing to be in London, had been telephoned for
+by the kind Mr. Smith.
+
+"It would not be wise for M. Poiron," said Aristide, chuckling inwardly
+with puckish glee, "to stay here for the night--or for two or three
+days--or a week--like myself. He must go back to his hotel when the
+business is concluded."
+
+"_Mais, pardon!_" cried M. Poiron, who had been formally invited, and
+had arrived late solely because he had missed his train at Manchester,
+and come on by the next one. "I cannot go out into the wet, and I have
+no hotel to go to."
+
+Aristide appealed to his host. "But he is unreasonable, _cher ami_. He
+must play his _role_. M. Poiron has been telephoned for. He can't
+possibly stay here. Surely five hundred pounds is worth one little night
+of discomfort? And there are a legion of hotels in London."
+
+"Five hundred pounds!" exclaimed M. Poiron. "_Qu'est-ce que vous chantez
+la?_ I want more than five hundred pounds."
+
+"Then you're jolly well not going to get it," cried Mr. Smith, in a
+rage. "And as for you"--he turned on Aristide--"I'll wring your infernal
+neck yet."
+
+"Calm yourself, calm yourself!" smiled Aristide, who was enjoying
+himself hugely.
+
+At this moment the door opened and Miss Christabel appeared. On seeing
+the decorated stranger she started with a little "Oh!" of surprise.
+
+"I beg your pardon."
+
+Mr. Smith's angry face wreathed itself in smiles.
+
+"This, my darling, is M. Poiron, the eminent Paris expert, who has been
+good enough to come and give us his opinion on the picture."
+
+M. Poiron bowed. Aristide advanced.
+
+"Mademoiselle, your appearance is like a mirage in a desert."
+
+She smiled indulgently and turned to her father. "I've been wondering
+what had become of you. Harry has been here for the last half-hour."
+
+"Bring him in, dear child, bring him in!" said Mr. Smith, with all the
+heartiness of the fine old English gentleman. "Our good friends are
+dying to meet him."
+
+The girl flickered out of the room like a sunbeam (the phrase is
+Aristide's), and the three precious rascals put their heads together in
+a hurried and earnest colloquy. Presently Miss Christabel returned, and
+with her came the Honourable Harry Ralston, a tall, soldierly fellow,
+with close-cropped fair curly hair and a fair moustache, and frank blue
+eyes that, even in Parliament, had seen no harm in his fellow-creatures.
+Aristide's magical vision caught him wincing ever so little at Mr.
+Smith's effusive greeting and overdone introductions. He shook Aristide
+warmly by the hand.
+
+"You have a beauty there, Baron, a perfect beauty," said he, with the
+insane ingenuousness of youth. "I wonder how you can manage to part with
+it."
+
+"_Ma foi_," said Aristide, with his back against the end of the
+dining-table and gazing at the masterpiece. "I have so many at the
+Chateau de Mireilles. When one begins to collect, you know--and when
+one's grandfather and father have had also the divine mania----"
+
+"You were saying, M. le Baron," said M. Poiron of Paris, "that your
+respected grandfather bought this direct from Corot himself."
+
+"A commission," said Aristide. "My grandfather was a patron of Corot."
+
+"Do you like it, dear?" asked the Honourable Harry.
+
+"Oh, yes!" replied the girl, fervently. "It is beautiful. I feel like
+Harry about it." She turned to Aristide. "How can you part with it? Were
+you really in earnest when you said you would like me to come and see
+your collection?"
+
+"For me," said Aristide, "it would be a visit of enchantment."
+
+"You must take me, then," she whispered to Harry. "The Baron has been
+telling us about his lovely old chateau."
+
+"Will you come, monsieur?" asked Aristide.
+
+"Since I'm going to rob you of your picture," said the young man, with
+smiling courtesy, "the least I can do is to pay you a visit of apology.
+Lovely!" said he, going up to the Corot.
+
+Aristide took Miss Christabel, now more bewitching than ever with the
+glow of young love in her eyes and a flush on her cheek, a step or two
+aside and whispered:--
+
+"But he is charming, your fiance! He almost deserves his good fortune."
+
+"Why almost?" she laughed, shyly.
+
+"It is not a man, but a demi-god, that would deserve you, mademoiselle."
+
+M. Poiron's harsh voice broke out.
+
+"You see, it is painted in the beginning of Corot's later manner--it is
+1864. There is the mystery which, when he was quite an old man, became a
+trick. If you were to put it up to auction at Christie's it would fetch,
+I am sure, five thousand pounds."
+
+"That's more than I can afford to give," said the young man, with a
+laugh. "Mr. Smith mentioned something between three and four thousand
+pounds. I don't think I can go above three."
+
+"I have nothing to do with it, my dear boy, nothing whatever," said Mr.
+Smith, rubbing his hands. "You wanted a Corot. I said I thought I could
+put you on to one. It's for the Baron here to mention his price. I
+retire now and for ever."
+
+"Well, Baron?" said the young man, cheerfully. "What's your idea?"
+
+Aristide came forward and resumed his place at the end of the table. The
+picture was in front of him beneath the strong electric light; on his
+left stood Mr. Smith and Poiron, on his right Miss Christabel and the
+Honourable Harry.
+
+"I'll not take three thousand pounds for it," said Aristide. "A picture
+like that! Never!"
+
+"I assure you it would be a fair price," said Poiron.
+
+"You mentioned that figure yourself only just now," said Mr. Smith, with
+an ugly glitter in his little pig's eyes.
+
+"I presume, gentlemen," said Aristide, "that this picture is my own
+property." He turned engagingly to his host. "Is it not, _cher ami_?"
+
+"Of course it is. Who said it wasn't?"
+
+"And you, M. Poiron, acknowledge formally that it is mine," he asked, in
+French.
+
+"_Sans aucun doute._"
+
+"_Eh bien_," said Aristide, throwing open his arms and gazing round
+sweetly. "I have changed my mind. I do not sell the picture at all."
+
+"Not sell it? What the--what do you mean?" asked Mr. Smith, striving to
+mellow the gathering thunder on his brow.
+
+"I do not sell," said Aristide. "Listen, my dear friends!" He was in the
+seventh heaven of happiness--the principal man, the star, taking the
+centre of the stage. "I have an announcement to make to you. I have
+fallen desperately in love with mademoiselle."
+
+There was a general gasp. Mr. Smith looked at him, red-faced and
+open-mouthed. Miss Christabel blushed furiously and emitted a sound half
+between a laugh and a scream. Harry Ralston's eyes flashed.
+
+"My dear sir----" he began.
+
+"Pardon," said Aristide, disarming him with the merry splendour of his
+glance. "I do not wish to take mademoiselle from you. My love is
+hopeless! I know it. But it will feed me to my dying day. In return for
+the joy of this hopeless passion I will not sell you the picture--I give
+it to you as a wedding present."
+
+He stood, with the air of a hero, both arms extended towards the amazed
+pair of lovers.
+
+"I give it to you," said he. "It is mine. I have no wish but for your
+happiness. In my Chateau de Mireilles there are a hundred others."
+
+"This is madness!" said Mr. Smith, bursting with suppressed indignation,
+so that his bald head grew scarlet.
+
+"My dear fellow!" said Mr. Harry Ralston. "It is unheard-of generosity
+on your part. But we can't accept it."
+
+"Then," said Aristide, advancing dramatically to the picture, "I take it
+under my arm, I put it in a hansom cab, and I go with it back to
+Languedoc."
+
+Mr. Smith caught him by the wrist and dragged him out of the room.
+
+"You little brute! Do you want your neck broken?"
+
+"Do you want the marriage of your daughter with the rich and Honourable
+Harry broken?" asked Aristide.
+
+"Oh, damn! Oh, damn! Oh, damn!" cried Mr. Smith, stamping about
+helplessly and half weeping.
+
+Aristide entered the dining-room and beamed on the company.
+
+"The kind Mr. Smith has consented. Mr. Honourable Harry and Miss
+Christabel, there is your Corot. And now, may I be permitted?" He rang
+the bell. A servant appeared.
+
+"Some champagne to drink to the health of the fiances," he cried. "Lots
+of champagne."
+
+Mr. Smith looked at him almost admiringly.
+
+"By Jove!" he muttered. "You _have_ got a nerve."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Voila!_" said Aristide, when he had finished the story.
+
+"And did they accept the Corot?" I asked.
+
+"Of course. It is hanging now in the big house in Hampshire. I stayed
+with the kind Mr. Smith for six weeks," he added, doubling himself up in
+his chair and hugging himself with mirth, "and we became very good
+friends. And I was at the wedding."
+
+"And what about their honeymoon visit to Languedoc?"
+
+"Alas!" said Aristide. "The morning before the wedding I had a
+telegram--it was from my old father at Aigues-Mortes--to tell me that
+the historic Chateau de Mireilles, with my priceless collection of
+pictures, had been burned to the ground."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING
+
+
+There was a time when Aristide Pujol, in sole charge of an automobile,
+went gaily scuttering over the roads of France. I use the word
+advisedly. If you had heard the awful thing as it passed by you would
+agree that it is the only word adequate to express its hideous mode of
+progression. It was a two-seated, scratched, battered, ramshackle tin
+concern of hoary antiquity, belonging to the childhood of the race. Not
+only horses, but other automobiles shied at it. It was a vehicle of
+derision. Yet Aristide regarded it with glowing pride and drove it with
+such daredevilry that the parts must have held together only through
+sheer breathless wonder. Had it not been for the car, he told me, he
+would not have undertaken the undignified employment in which he was
+then engaged--the mountebank selling of a corn-cure in the public places
+of small towns and villages. It was not a fitting pursuit for a late
+managing director of a public company and an ex-Professor of French in
+an English Academy for Young Ladies. He wanted to rise, _ma foi_, not
+descend in the social scale. But when hunger drives--_que voulez-vous_?
+Besides, there was the automobile. It is true he had bound himself by
+his contract to exhibit a board at the back bearing a flaming picture of
+the success of the cure and a legend: "_Guerissez vos cors_," and to
+display a banner with the same device, when weather permitted. But,
+still, there was the automobile.
+
+It had been lying for many motor-ages in the shed of the proprietors of
+the cure, the Maison Hieropath of Marseilles, neglected, forlorn, eaten
+by rust and worm, when suddenly an idea occurred to their business
+imagination. Why should they not use the automobile to advertise and
+sell the cure about the country? The apostle in charge would pay for his
+own petrol, take a large percentage on sales, and the usual traveller's
+commission on orders that he might place. But where to find an apostle?
+Brave and desperate men came in high hopes, looked at the car, and,
+shaking their heads sorrowfully, went away. At last, at the loosest of
+ends, came Aristide. The splendour of the idea--a poet, in his way, was
+Aristide, and the Idea was the thing that always held him captive--the
+splendour of the idea of dashing up to hotels in his own automobile
+dazed him. He beheld himself doing his hundred kilometres an hour and
+trailing clouds of glory whithersoever he went. To a child a moth-eaten
+rocking-horse is a fiery Arab of the plains; to Aristide Pujol this
+cheat of the scrap-heap was a sixty-horse-power thunderer and devourer
+of space.
+
+How they managed to botch up her interior so that she moved unpushed
+is a mystery which Aristide, not divining, could not reveal; and when
+and where he himself learned to drive a motor-car is also vague. I
+believe the knowledge came by nature. He was a fellow of many weird
+accomplishments. He could conjure; he could model birds and beasts out
+of breadcrumb; he could play the drum--so well that he had a kettle-drum
+hanging round his neck during most of his military service; he could
+make omelettes and rabbit-hutches; he could imitate any animal that ever
+emitted sound--a gift that endeared him to children; he could do almost
+anything you please--save stay in one place and acquire material
+possessions. The fact that he had never done a thing before was to him
+no proof of his inability to do it. In his superb self-confidence he
+would have undertaken to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden or
+navigate a liner across the Atlantic. Knowing this, I cease to bother my
+head about so small a matter as the way in which he learned to drive a
+motor-car.
+
+Behold him, then, one raw March morning, scuttering along the road that
+leads from Arles to Salon, in Provence. He wore a goat-skin coat and a
+goat-skin cap drawn down well over his ears. His handsome bearded face,
+with its lustrous, laughing eyes, peeped out curiously human amid the
+circumambient shagginess. There was not a turn visible in the long,
+straight road that lost itself in the far distant mist; not a speck on
+it signifying cart or creature. Aristide Pujol gave himself up to the
+delirium of speed and urged the half-bursting engine to twenty miles an
+hour. In spite of the racing-track surface, the crazy car bumped and
+jolted; the sides of the rickety bonnet clashed like cymbals; every
+valve wheezed and squealed; every nut seemed to have got loose and
+terrifically clattered; rattling noises, grunting noises, screeching
+noises escaped from every part; it creaked and clanked like an
+over-insured tramp-steamer in a typhoon; it lurched as though afflicted
+with loco-motor ataxy; and noisome vapours belched forth from the open
+exhaust-pipe as though the car were a Tophet on wheels. But all was
+music in the ears of Aristide. The car was going (it did not always go),
+the road scudded under him, and the morning air dashed stingingly into
+his face. For the moment he desired nothing more of life.
+
+This road between Arles and Salon runs through one of the most desolate
+parts of France: a long, endless plain, about five miles broad, lying
+between two long low ranges of hills. It is strewn like a monstrous
+Golgotha, not with skulls, but with huge smooth pebbles, as massed
+together as the shingle on a beach. Rank grass shoots up in what
+interstices it finds; but beyond this nothing grows. Nothing can grow.
+On a sunless day under a lowering sky it is a land accursed. Mile after
+mile for nearly twenty miles stretches this stony and barren waste. No
+human habitation cheers the sight, for from such a soil no human hand
+could wrest a sustenance. Only the rare traffic going from Arles to
+Salon and from Salon to Arles passes along the road. The cheery passing
+show of the live highway is wanting; there are no children, no dogs,
+no ducks and hens, no men and women lounging to their work; no
+red-trousered soldiers on bicycles, no blue-bloused, weather-beaten
+farmers jogging along in their little carts. As far as the eye can reach
+nothing suggestive of man meets the view. Nothing but the infinite
+barrenness of the plain, the ridges on either side, the long, straight,
+endless road cleaving through this abomination of desolation.
+
+To walk through it would be a task as depressing as mortal could
+execute. But to the speed-drunken motorist it is a realization of dim
+and tremulous visions of Paradise. What need to look to right or left
+when you are swallowing up free mile after mile of dizzying road?
+Aristide looked neither to right nor left, and knew this was heaven at
+last.
+
+ [Illustration: BETWEEN THE FOLDS OF THE BLANKET PEEPED THE FACE OF A
+                SLEEPING CHILD]
+
+Suddenly, however, he became aware of a small black spot far ahead in
+the very middle of the unencumbered track. As he drew near it looked
+like a great stone. He swerved as he passed it, and, looking, saw that
+it was a bundle wrapped in a striped blanket. It seemed so odd that it
+should be lying there that, his curiosity being aroused, he pulled up
+and walked back a few yards to examine it. The nearer he approached the
+less did it resemble an ordinary bundle. He bent down, and lo! between
+the folds of the blanket peeped the face of a sleeping child.
+
+"_Nom de Dieu!_" cried Aristide. "_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"
+
+He ought not to have said it, but his astonishment was great. He stared
+at the baby, then up and down the road, then swept the horizon. Not a
+soul was visible. How did the baby get there? The heavens, according to
+history, have rained many things in their time: bread, quails, blood,
+frogs, and what not; but there is no mention of them ever having rained
+babies. It could not, therefore, have come from the clouds. It could not
+even have fallen from the tail of a cart, for then it would have been
+killed, or at least have broken its bones and generally been rendered a
+different baby from the sound, chubby mite sleeping as peacefully as
+though the Golgotha of Provence had been its cradle from birth. It could
+not have come there accidentally. Deliberate hands had laid it down; in
+the centre of the road, too. Why not by the side, where it would have
+been out of the track of thundering automobiles? When the murderous
+intent became obvious Aristide shivered and felt sick. He breathed
+fierce and honest anathema on the heads of the bowelless fiends who had
+abandoned the babe to its doom. Then he stooped and picked up the bundle
+tenderly in his arms.
+
+The wee face puckered for a moment and the wee limbs shot out
+vigorously; then the dark eyes opened and stared Aristide solemnly and
+wonderingly in the face. So must the infant Remus have first regarded
+his she-wolf mother. Having ascertained, however, that it was not going
+to be devoured, it began to cry lustily, showing two little white specks
+of teeth in the lower gum.
+
+"_Mon pauvre petit_, you are hungry," said Aristide, carrying it to the
+car racked by the clattering engine. "I wonder when you last tasted
+food? If I only had a little biscuit and wine to give you; but, alas!
+there's nothing but petrol and corn-cure, neither of which, I believe,
+is good for babies. Wait, wait, _mon cheri_, until we get to Salon.
+There I promise you proper nourishment."
+
+He danced the baby up and down in his arms and made half-remembered and
+insane noises, which eventually had the effect of reducing it to its
+original calm stare of wonderment.
+
+"_Voila_," said Aristide, delighted. "Now we can advance."
+
+He deposited it on the vacant seat, clambered up behind the wheel, and
+started. But not at the break-neck speed of twenty miles an hour. He
+went slowly and carefully, his heart in his mouth at every lurch of the
+afflicted automobile, fearful lest the child should be precipitated from
+its slippery resting-place. But, alas! he did not proceed far. At the
+end of a kilometre the engine stopped dead. He leaped out to see what
+had happened, and, after a few perplexed and exhausting moments,
+remembered. He had not even petrol to offer to the baby, having
+omitted--most feather-headed of mortals--to fill up his tank before
+starting, and forgotten to bring a spare tin. There was nothing to be
+done save wait patiently until another motorist should pass by from whom
+he might purchase the necessary amount of essence to carry him on to
+Salon. Meanwhile the baby would go breakfastless. Aristide clambered
+back to his seat, took the child on his knees, and commiserated it
+profoundly. Sitting there on his apparently home-made vehicle, in the
+midst of the unearthly silence of the sullen and barren wilderness,
+attired in his shaggy goat-skin cap and coat, he resembled an up-to-date
+Robinson Crusoe dandling an infant Friday.
+
+The disposal of the child at Salon would be simple. After having it fed
+and tended at an hotel, he would make his deposition to the police, who
+would take it to the Enfants Trouves, the department of State which
+provides fathers and mothers and happy homes for foundlings at a cost to
+the country of twenty-five francs a month per foundling. It is true that
+the parents so provided think more of the twenty-five francs than they
+do of the foundling. But that was the affair of the State, not of
+Aristide Pujol. In the meanwhile he examined the brat curiously. It was
+dressed in a coarse calico jumper, very unclean. The striped blanket was
+full of holes and smelled abominably. Some sort of toilet appeared
+essential. He got down and from his valise took what seemed necessary to
+the purpose. The jumper and blanket he threw far on the pebbly waste.
+The baby, stark naked for a few moments, crowed and laughed and
+stretched like a young animal, revealing itself to be a sturdy boy about
+nine months old. When he seemed fit to be clad Aristide tied him up in
+the lower part of a suit of pyjamas, cutting little holes in the sides
+for his tiny arms; and, further, with a view to cheating his hunger,
+provided him with a shoe-horn. The defenceless little head he managed to
+squeeze into the split mouth of a woollen sock. Aristide regarded him in
+triumph. The boy chuckled gleefully. Then Aristide folded him warm in
+his travelling-rug and entered into an animated conversation.
+
+Now it happened that, at the most interesting point of the talk, the
+baby clutched Aristide's finger in his little brown hand. The tiny
+fingers clung strong.
+
+A queer thrill ran through the impressionable man. The tiny fingers
+seemed to close round his heart.... It was a bonny, good-natured,
+gurgling scrap--and the pure eyes looked truthfully into his soul.
+
+"Poor little wretch!" said Aristide, who, peasant's son that he was,
+knew what he was talking about. "Poor little wretch! If you go into the
+Enfants Trouves you'll have a devil of a time of it."
+
+The tiny clasp tightened. As if the babe understood, the chuckle died
+from his face.
+
+"You'll be cuffed and kicked and half starved, while your adopted mother
+pockets her twenty-five francs a month, and you'll belong to nobody, and
+wonder why the deuce you're alive, and wish you were dead; and, if you
+remember to-day, you'll curse me for not having had the decency to run
+over you."
+
+The clasp relaxed, puckers appeared at the corners of the dribbling
+mouth, and a myriad tiny horizontal lines of care marked the sock-capped
+brow.
+
+"Poor little devil!" said Aristide. "My heart bleeds for you, especially
+now that you're dressed in my sock and pyjama, and are sucking the only
+shoe-horn I ever possessed."
+
+A welcome sound caused Aristide to leap into the middle of the road. He
+looked ahead, and there, in a cloud of dust, a thing like a torpedo came
+swooping down. He held up both his arms, the signal of a motorist in
+distress. The torpedo approached with slackened speed, and stopped. It
+was an evil-looking, drab, high-powered racer, and two bears with
+goggles sat in the midst thereof. The bear at the wheel raised his cap
+and asked courteously:--
+
+"What can we do for you, monsieur?"
+
+At that moment the baby broke into heart-rending cries. Aristide took
+off his goat-skin cap and, remaining uncovered, looked at the bear, then
+at the baby, then at the bear again.
+
+"Monsieur," said he, "I suppose it's useless to ask you whether you have
+any milk and a feeding-bottle?"
+
+"_Mais dites donc!_" shouted the bear, furiously, his hand on the brake.
+"Stop an automobile like this on such a pretext----?"
+
+Aristide held up a protesting hand, and fixed the bear with the
+irresistible roguery of his eyes.
+
+"Pardon, monsieur, I am also out of petrol. Forgive a father's feelings.
+The baby wants milk and I want petrol, and I don't know whose need is
+the more imperative. But if you could sell me enough petrol to carry me
+to Salon I should be most grateful."
+
+The request for petrol is not to be refused. To supply it, if possible,
+is the written law of motordom. The second bear slid from his seat and
+extracted a tin from the recesses of the torpedo, and stood by while
+Aristide filled his tank, a process that necessitated laying the baby on
+the ground. He smiled.
+
+"You seem amused," said Aristide.
+
+"_Parbleu!_" said the motorist. "You have at the back of your auto a
+placard telling people to cure their corns, and in front you carry a
+baby."
+
+"That," replied Aristide, "is easily understood. I am the agent of the
+Maison Hieropath of Marseilles, and the baby, whom I, its father, am
+carrying from a dead mother to an invalid aunt, I am using as an
+advertisement. As he luckily has no corns, I can exhibit his feet as a
+proof of the efficacy of the corn-cure."
+
+The bear laughed and joined his companion, and the torpedo thundered
+away. Aristide replaced the baby, and with a complicated arrangement of
+string fastened it securely to the seat. The baby, having ceased crying,
+clutched his beard as he bent over, and "goo'd" pleasantly. The tug was
+at his heart-strings. How could he give so fascinating, so valiant a
+mite over to the Enfants Trouves? Besides, it belonged to him. Had he
+not in jest claimed paternity? It had given him a new importance. He
+could say "_mon fils_," just as he could say (with equal veracity) "_mon
+automobile_." A generous thrill ran through him. He burst into a loud
+laugh, clapped his hands, and danced before the delighted babe.
+
+"_Mon petit Jean_," said he, with humorous tenderness, "for I suppose
+your name is Jean; I will rend myself in pieces before I let the
+Administration board you out among the wolves. You shall not go to the
+Enfants Trouves. I myself will adopt you, _mon petit Jean_."
+
+As Aristide had no fixed abode whatever, the address on his
+visiting-card, "213 bis, Rue Saint-Honore, Paris," being that of an old
+greengrocer woman of his acquaintance, with whom he lodged when he
+visited the metropolis, there was a certain amount of rashness in the
+undertaking. But when was Aristide otherwise than rash? Had prudence
+been his guiding principle through life he would not have been selling
+corn-cure for the Maison Hieropath, and consequently would not have
+discovered the child at all.
+
+In great delight at this satisfactory settlement of little Jean's
+destiny, he started the ramshackle engine and drove triumphantly on his
+way. Jean, fatigued by the emotions of the last half-hour, slumbered
+peacefully.
+
+"The little angel!" said Aristide.
+
+The sun was shining when they arrived at Salon, the gayest, the most
+coquettish, the most laughing little town in Provence. It is a place all
+trees and open spaces, and fountains and cafes, and sauntering people.
+The only thing grim about it is the solitary machicolated tower in the
+main street, the last vestige of ancient ramparts; and even that, close
+cuddled on each side by prosperous houses with shops beneath, looks
+like an old, old, wrinkled grandmother smiling amid her daintier
+grandchildren. Everyone seemed to be in the open air. Those who kept
+shops stood at the doorways. The prospect augured well for the Maison
+Hieropath.
+
+Aristide stopped before an hotel, disentangled Jean, to the mild
+interest of the passers-by, and, carrying him in, delivered him into the
+arms of the landlady.
+
+"Madame," he said, "this is my son. I am taking him from his mother, who
+is dead, to an aunt who is an invalid. So he is alone on my hands. He is
+very hungry, and I beseech you to feed him at once."
+
+The motherly woman received the babe instinctively and cast aside the
+travelling-rug in which he was enveloped. Then she nearly dropped him.
+
+"_Mon Dieu! Qu'est-ce que c'est que ca?_"
+
+She stared in stupefaction at the stocking-cap and at the long flannel
+pyjama legs that depended from the body of the infant, around whose
+neck the waist was tightly drawn. Never since the world began had babe
+masqueraded in such attire. Aristide smiled his most engaging smile.
+
+"My son's luggage has unfortunately been lost. His portmanteau, _pauvre
+petit_, was so small. A poor widower, I did what I could. I am but a
+mere man, madame."
+
+"Evidently," said the woman, with some asperity.
+
+Aristide took a louis from his purse. "If you will purchase him some
+necessary articles of costume while I fulfil my duties towards the
+Maison Hieropath of Marseilles, which I represent, you will be doing me
+a kindness."
+
+The landlady took the louis in a bewildered fashion. Allowing for the
+baby's portmanteau to have gone astray, what, she asked, had become
+of the clothes he must have been wearing? Aristide entered upon a
+picturesque and realistic explanation. The landlady was stout, she was
+stupid, she could not grasp the fantastic.
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_" she said. "To think that there are Christians who dress
+their children like this!" She sighed exhaustively, and, holding the
+grotesque infant close to her breast, disappeared indignantly to
+administer the very greatly needed motherment.
+
+ [Illustration: HE DEMONSTRATED THE PROPER APPLICATION OF THE CURE]
+
+Aristide breathed a sigh of relief, and after a well-earned _dejeuner_
+went forth with the car into the Place des Arbres and prepared to ply
+his trade. First he unfurled the Hieropath banner, which floated
+proudly in the breeze. Then on a folding table he displayed his
+collection of ointment-boxes (together with pills and a toothache-killer
+which he sold on his own account) and a wax model of a human foot on
+which were grafted putty corns in every stage of callosity. As soon as
+half-a-dozen idlers collected he commenced his harangue. When their
+numbers increased he performed prodigies of chiropody on the putty
+corns, and demonstrated the proper application of the cure. He talked
+incessantly all the while. He has told me, in the grand manner, that
+this phase of his career was distasteful to him. But I scarcely believe
+it. If ever a man loved to talk, it was Aristide Pujol; and what
+profession, save that of an advocate, offers more occasion for wheedling
+loquacity than that of a public vendor of quack medicaments? As a matter
+of fact, he revelled in it. When he offered a free box of the cure to
+the first lady who confessed the need thereof, and a blushing wench came
+forward, the rascal revelled in the opportunity for badinage which set
+the good-humoured crowd in a roar. He loved to exert his half-mesmeric
+power. He had not the soul of a mountebank, for Aristide's soul had its
+high and generous dwelling-place; but he had the puckish swiftness and
+mischief of which the successful mountebank is made. And he was a
+success because he treated it as an art, thinking nothing during its
+practice of the material gain, laughing whole-heartedly, like his great
+predecessor Tabarin of imperishable memory, and satisfying to the full
+his instinct for the dramatic. On the other hand, ever since he started
+life in the brass-buttoned shell-jacket of a _chasseur_ in a Marseilles
+cafe, and dreamed dreams of the fairytale lives of the clients who
+came in accompanied by beautifully dressed ladies, he had social
+ambitions--and the social status of the mountebank is, to say the least
+of it, ambiguous. Ah me! What would man be without the unattainable?
+
+Aristide pocketed his takings, struck his flag, dismantled his table,
+and visited the shops of Salon in the interests of the Maison Hieropath.
+The day's work over, he returned to inquire for his supposititious
+offspring. The landlady, all smiles, presented him with a transmogrified
+Jean, cleansed and powdered, arrayed in the smug panoply of bourgeois
+babyhood. Shoes with a pompon adorned his feet, and a rakish cap
+decorated with white satin ribbons crowned his head. He also wore an
+embroidered frock and a pelisse trimmed with rabbit-fur. Jean grinned
+and dribbled self-consciously, and showed his two little teeth to the
+proudest father in the world. The landlady invited the happy parent into
+her little dark parlour beyond the office, and there exhibited a parcel
+containing garments and implements whose use was a mystery to Aristide.
+She also demanded the greater part of another louis. Aristide began to
+learn that fatherhood is expensive. But what did it matter?
+
+After all, here was a babe equipped to face the exigencies of a
+censorious world; in looks and apparel a credit to any father. As the
+afternoon was fine, and as it seemed a pity to waste satin and
+rabbit-fur on the murky interior of the hotel, Aristide borrowed a
+perambulator from the landlady, and, joyous as a schoolboy, wheeled the
+splendid infant through the sunny avenues of Salon.
+
+That evening a bed was made up for the child in Aristide's room, which,
+until its master retired for the night, was haunted by the landlady, the
+chambermaids and all the kitchen wenches in the hotel. Aristide had to
+turn them out and lock his door.
+
+"This is excellent," said he, apostrophizing the thoroughly fed, washed,
+and now sleeping child. "This is superb. As in every hotel there are
+women, and as every woman thinks she can be a much better mother than I,
+so in every hotel we visit we shall find a staff of trained and
+enthusiastic nurses. Jean, you will live like a little _coq en pate_."
+
+The night passed amid various excursions on the part of Aristide and
+alarms on the part of Jean. Sometimes the child lay so still that
+Aristide arose to see whether he was alive. Sometimes he gave such
+proofs of vitality that Aristide, in terror lest he should awaken the
+whole hotel, walked him about the room chanting lullabies. This was in
+accordance with Jean's views on luxury. He "goo'd" with joy. When
+Aristide put him back to bed he howled. Aristide snatched him up and
+he "goo'd" again. At last Aristide fed him desperately, dandled him
+eventually to sleep, and returned to an excited pillow. It is a fearsome
+thing for a man to be left alone in the dead of night with a young baby.
+
+"I'll get used to it," said Aristide.
+
+The next morning he purchased a basket, which he lashed ingeniously on
+the left-hand seat of the car, and a cushion, which he fitted into the
+basket. The berth prepared, he deposited the sumptuously-apparelled Jean
+therein and drove away, amid the perplexed benisons of the landlady and
+her satellites.
+
+Thus began the oddest Odyssey on which ever mortals embarked. The man
+with the automobile, the corn-cure, and the baby grew to be legendary in
+the villages of Provence. When the days were fine, Jean in his basket
+assisted at the dramatic performance in the market-place. Becoming a
+magnet for the women, and being of a good-humoured and rollicking
+nature, he helped on the sale of the cure prodigiously. He earned his
+keep, as Aristide declared in exultation. Soon Aristide formed a
+collection of his tricks and doings wherewith he would entertain the
+chance acquaintances of his vagabondage. To a permanent companion he
+would have grown insufferable. He invented him a career from the day of
+his birth, chronicled the coming of the first tooth, wept over the
+demise of the fictitious mother, and, in his imaginative way, convinced
+himself of his fatherhood. And every day the child crept deeper into the
+man's sunny heart.
+
+ [Illustration: IT IS A FEARSOME THING FOR A MAN TO BE LEFT ALONE IN THE
+                DEAD OF NIGHT WITH A YOUNG BABY]
+
+Together they had many wanderings and many adventures. The wheezy, crazy
+mechanism of the car went to bits in unexpected places. They tobogganed
+down hills without a brake at the imminent peril of their lives. They
+suffered the indignity of being towed by wine-wagons. They spent hours
+by the wayside while Aristide took her to pieces and, sometimes with the
+help of a passing motorist, put her together again. Sometimes, too, an
+inn boasted no landlady, only a dishevelled and over-driven chambermaid,
+who refused to wash Jean. Aristide washed and powdered Jean himself, the
+landlord lounging by, pipe in mouth, administering suggestions. Once
+Jean grew ill, and Aristide in terror summoned the doctor, who told him
+that he had filled the child up with milk to bursting-point. Yet, in
+spite of heterogeneous nursing and exposure to sun and rain and piercing
+mistral, Jean throve exceedingly, and, to Aristide's delight, began to
+cut another tooth. The vain man began to regard himself as an expert in
+denticulture.
+
+At the end of a fairly-wide circuit, Aristide, with empty store-boxes
+and pleasantly-full pockets, arrived at the little town of
+Aix-en-Provence. He had arrived there not without difficulty. On the
+outskirts the car, which had been coaxed reluctantly along for many
+weary kilometres, had groaned, rattled, whirred, given a couple of
+convulsive leaps, and stood stock-still. This was one of her pretty
+ways. He was used to them, and hitherto he had been able to wheedle
+her into resumed motion. But this time, with all his cunning and
+perspiration, he could not induce another throb in the tired engines.
+A friendly motorist towed them to the Hotel de Paris in the Cours
+Mirabeau. Having arranged for his room and given Jean in charge of the
+landlady, he procured some helping hands, and pushed the car to the
+nearest garage. There he gave orders for the car to be put into running
+condition for the following morning, and returned to the hotel.
+
+He found Jean in the vestibule, sprawling sultanesquely on the
+landlady's lap, the centre of an admiring circle which consisted of two
+little girls in pigtails, an ancient peasant-woman, and two English
+ladies of obvious but graceful spinsterhood.
+
+"Here is the father," said the landlady.
+
+He had already explained Jean to the startled woman--landladies were
+always startled at Jean's unconventional advent. "Madame," he had said,
+according to rigid formula, "this is my son. I am taking him from his
+mother, who is dead, to an aunt who is an invalid, so he is alone on my
+hands. I beseech you to let some kind woman attend to his necessities."
+
+There was no need for further explanation. Aristide, thus introduced,
+bowed politely, removed his Crusoe cap, and smiled luminously at the
+assembled women. They resumed their antiphonal chorus of worship. The
+brown, merry, friendly brat had something of Aristide's personal charm.
+He had a bubble and a "goo" for everyone. Aristide looked on in great
+delight. Jean was a son to be proud of.
+
+"_Ah! qu'il est fort--fort comme un Turc._"
+
+"_Regardez ses dents._"
+
+"The darling thing!"
+
+"_Il est_--oh, dear!--_il est ravissante!_"--with a disastrous plunge
+into gender.
+
+"_Tiens! il rit. C'est moi qui le fais rire._"
+
+"To think," said the younger Englishwoman to her sister, "of this wee
+mite travelling about in an open motor!"
+
+"He's having the time of his life. He enjoys it as much as I do," said
+Aristide, in his excellent English.
+
+The lady started. She was a well-bred, good-humoured woman in the early
+thirties, stout, with reddish hair, and irregular though comely
+features. Her sister was thin, faded, sandy, and kind-looking.
+
+"I thought you were French," she said, apologetically.
+
+"So I am," replied Aristide. "Provencal of Provence, Meridional of the
+Midi, Marseillais of Marseilles."
+
+"But you talk English perfectly."
+
+"I've lived in your beautiful country," said Aristide.
+
+"You have the bonniest boy," said the elder lady. "How old is he?"
+
+"Nine months, three weeks and a day," said Aristide, promptly.
+
+The younger lady bent over the miraculous infant.
+
+"Can I take him? _Est-ce que je puis_--oh, dear!" She turned a whimsical
+face to Aristide.
+
+He translated. The landlady surrendered the babe. The lady danced him
+with the spinster's charming awkwardness, yet with instinctive feminine
+security, about the hall, while the little girls in pigtails, daughters
+of the house, followed like adoratory angels in an altar-piece, and the
+old peasant-woman looked benignly on, a myriad-wrinkled St. Elizabeth.
+Aristide had seen Jean dandled by dozens of women during their brief
+comradeship; he had thought little of it, as it was the natural thing
+for women to do; but when this sweet English lady mothered Jean it
+seemed to matter a great deal. She lifted Jean and himself to a higher
+plane. Her touch was a consecration.
+
+It was the hour of the day when infants of nine months should be washed
+and put to bed. The landlady, announcing the fact, held out her arms.
+Jean clung to his English nurse, who played the fascinating game of
+pretending to eat his hand. The landlady had not that accomplishment.
+She was dull and practical.
+
+"Come and be washed," she said.
+
+"Oh, do let me come, too," cried the English lady.
+
+"_Bien volontiers, mademoiselle_," said the other. "_C'est par ici._"
+
+The English lady held Jean out for the paternal good-night. Aristide
+kissed the child in her arms. The action brought about, for the moment,
+a curious and sweet intimacy.
+
+"My sister is passionately fond of children," said the elder lady, in
+smiling apology.
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I, too. But Anne--my sister--will not let me have a chance when she is
+by."
+
+After dinner Aristide went up, as usual, to his room to see that Jean
+was alive, painless, and asleep. Finding him awake, he sat by his side
+and, with the earnestness of a nursery-maid, patted him off to slumber.
+Then he crept out on tiptoe and went downstairs. Outside the hotel he
+came upon the two sisters sitting on a bench and drinking coffee. The
+night was fine, the terraces of the neighbouring cafes were filled with
+people, and all the life of Aix not at the cafes promenaded up and down
+the wide and pleasant avenue. The ladies smiled. How was the boy? He
+gave the latest news. Permission to join them at their coffee was
+graciously given. A waiter brought a chair and he sat down. Conversation
+drifted from the baby to general topics. The ladies told the simple
+story of their tour. They had been to Nice and Marseilles, and they were
+going on the next day to Avignon. They also told their name--Honeywood.
+He gathered that the elder was Janet, the younger Anne. They lived at
+Chislehurst when they were in England, and often came up to London to
+attend the Queen's Hall concerts and the dramatic performances at His
+Majesty's Theatre. As guileless, though as self-reliant, gentlewomen
+as sequestered England could produce. Aristide, impressionable and
+responsive, fell at once into the key of their talk. He has told me that
+their society produced on him the effect of the cool hands of saints
+against his cheek.
+
+At last the conversation inevitably returned to Jean. The landlady had
+related the tragic history of the dead mother and the invalid aunt. They
+deplored the orphaned state of the precious babe. For he was precious,
+they declared. Miss Anne had taken him to her heart.
+
+"If only you had seen him in his bath, Janet!"
+
+She turned to Aristide. "I'm afraid," she said, very softly, hesitating
+a little--"I'm afraid this must be a sad journey for you."
+
+He made a wry mouth. The sympathy was so sincere, so womanly. That which
+was generous in him revolted against acceptance.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said he, "I can play a farce with landladies--it happens
+to be convenient--in fact, necessary. But with you--no. You are
+different. Jean is not my child, and who his parents are I've not the
+remotest idea."
+
+"Not your child?" They looked at him incredulously.
+
+"I will tell you--in confidence," said he.
+
+Jean's history was related in all its picturesque details; the horrors
+of the life of an _enfant trouve_ luridly depicted. The sisters listened
+with tears in their foolish eyes. Behind the tears Anne's grew bright.
+When he had finished she stretched out her hand impulsively.
+
+"Oh, I call it splendid of you!"
+
+He took the hand and, in his graceful French fashion, touched it with
+his lips. She flushed, having expected, in her English way, that he
+would grasp it.
+
+"Your commendation, mademoiselle, is sweet to hear," said he.
+
+"I hope he will grow up to be a true comfort to you, M. Pujol," said
+Miss Janet.
+
+"I can understand a woman doing what you've done, but scarcely a man,"
+said Miss Anne.
+
+"But, dear mademoiselle," cried Aristide, with a large gesture, "cannot
+a man have his heart touched, his--his--_ses entrailles, enfin_--stirred
+by baby fingers? Why should love of the helpless and the innocent be
+denied him?"
+
+"Why, indeed?" said Miss Janet.
+
+Miss Anne said, humbly: "I only meant that your devotion to Jean was all
+the more beautiful, M. Pujol."
+
+Soon after this they parted, the night air having grown chill. Both
+ladies shook hands with him warmly.
+
+Anne's hand lingered the fraction of a second longer in his than
+Janet's. She had seen Jean in his bath.
+
+Aristide wandered down the gay avenue into the open road and looked at
+the stars, reading in their splendour a brilliant destiny for Jean. He
+felt, in his sensitive way, that the two sweet-souled Englishwomen had
+deepened and sanctified his love for Jean. When he returned to the hotel
+he kissed his incongruous room-mate with the gentleness of a woman.
+
+In the morning he went round to the garage. The foreman mechanician
+advanced to meet him.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"There is nothing to be done, monsieur."
+
+"What do you mean by 'nothing to be done'?" asked Aristide.
+
+The other shrugged his sturdy shoulders.
+
+"She is worn out. She needs new carburation, new cylinders, new
+water-circulation, new lubrication, new valves, new brakes, new
+ignition, new gears, new bolts, new nuts, new everything. In short, she
+is not repairable."
+
+Aristide listened in incredulous amazement. His automobile, his
+wonderful, beautiful, clashing, dashing automobile unrepairable! It was
+impossible. But a quarter of an hour's demonstration by the foreman
+convinced him. The car was dead. The engine would never whir again. All
+the petrol in the world would not stimulate her into life. Never again
+would he sit behind that wheel rejoicing in the insolence of speed. The
+car, which, in spite of her manifold infirmities, he had fondly imagined
+to be immortal, had run her last course. Aristide felt faint.
+
+"And there is nothing to be done?"
+
+"Nothing, monsieur. Fifty francs is all that she is worth."
+
+"At any rate," said Aristide, "send the basket to the Hotel de Paris."
+
+He went out of the garage like a man in a dream. At the door he turned
+to take a last look at the Pride of his Life. Her stern was towards him,
+and all he saw of her was the ironical legend, "Cure your Corns."
+
+At the hotel he found the bench outside occupied chiefly by Jean. One
+of the little girls in pigtails was holding him, while Miss Anne
+administered the feeding-bottle. Provincial France is the happiest
+country in the world--in that you can live your intimate, domestic life
+in public, and nobody heeds.
+
+"I hope you've not come to tell Jean to boot and saddle," said Miss
+Anne, a smile on her roughly-hewn, comely face.
+
+"Alas!" said Aristide, cheered by the charming spectacle before him. "I
+don't know when we can get away. My auto has broken down hopelessly. I
+ought to go at once to my firm in Marseilles"--he spoke as if he were a
+partner in the Maison Hieropath--"but I don't quite know what to do with
+Jean."
+
+"Oh, I'll look after Jean."
+
+"But you said you were leaving for Avignon to-day."
+
+ [Illustration: ONE OF THE LITTLE GIRLS IN PIGTAILS WAS HOLDING HIM,
+                WHILE MISS ANNE ADMINISTERED THE FEEDING-BOTTLE]
+
+She laughed, holding the feeding-bottle. "The Palace of the Popes has
+been standing for six centuries, and it will be still standing
+to-morrow; whereas Jean----" Here Jean, for some reason known to
+himself, grinned wet and wide. "Isn't he the most fascinating thing of
+the twentieth century?" she cried, logically inconsequential, like most
+of her sex. "You go to Marseilles, M. Pujol."
+
+So Aristide took the train to Marseilles--a half-hour's journey--and in
+a quarter of the city resembling a fusion of Jarrow, an unfashionable
+part of St. Louis, and a brimstone-manufacturing suburb of Gehenna, he
+interviewed the high authorities of the Maison Hieropath. His cajolery
+could lead men into diverse lunacies, but it could not induce the
+hard-bitten manufacturer of quack remedies to provide a brand-new
+automobile for his personal convenience. The old auto had broken down.
+The manufacturer shrugged his shoulders. The mystery was that it had
+lasted as long as it did. He had expected it to explode the first
+day. The idea had originally been that of the junior partner, a
+scatter-brained youth whom at times they humoured. Meanwhile, there
+being no beplacarded and beflagged automobile, there could be no
+advertisement; therefore they had no further use for M. Pujol's
+services.
+
+"Good," said Aristide, when he reached the evil thoroughfare. "It was a
+degraded occupation, and I am glad I am out of it. Meanwhile, here is
+Marseilles before me, and it will be astonishing if I do not find some
+fresh road to fortune before the day is out."
+
+Aristide tramped and tramped all day through the streets of Marseilles,
+but the road he sought he did not find. He returned to Aix in dire
+perplexity. He was used to finding himself suddenly cut off from the
+means of livelihood. It was his chronic state of being. His gay
+resourcefulness had always carried him through. But then there had been
+only himself to think of. Now there was Jean. For the first time for
+many years the dragon-fly's wings grew limp. Jean--what could he do with
+Jean?
+
+Jean had already gone to sleep when he arrived. All day he had been as
+good as gold, so Miss Anne declared. For herself, she had spent the
+happiest day of her life.
+
+"I don't wonder at your being devoted to him, M. Pujol," she said. "He
+has the most loving ways of any baby I ever met."
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle," replied Aristide, with an unaccustomed huskiness in
+his voice, "I am devoted to him. It may seem odd for a man to be wrapped
+up in a baby of nine months old--but--it's like that. It's true. _Je
+l'adore de tout mon coeur, de tout mon etre_," he cried, in a sudden
+gust of passion.
+
+Miss Anne smiled kindly, not dreaming of his perplexity, amused by his
+Southern warmth. Miss Janet joined them in the hall. They went in to
+dinner, Aristide sitting at the central _table d'hote_, the ladies at a
+little table by themselves. After dinner they met again outside the
+hotel, and drank coffee and talked the evening away. He was not as
+bright a companion as on the night before. His gaiety was forced. He
+talked about everything else in the world but Jean. The temptation to
+pour his financial troubles into the sympathetic ears of these two dear
+women he resisted. They regarded him as on a social equality, as a man
+of means engaged in some sort of business at Marseilles; they had
+invited him to bring Jean to see them at Chislehurst when he should
+happen to be in England again. Pride forbade him to confess himself a
+homeless, penniless vagabond. The exquisite charm of their frank
+intimacy would be broken. Besides, what could they do?
+
+They retired early. Aristide again sought the message of the stars; but
+the sky was clouded over, and soon a fine rain began to fall. A bock at
+a cafe brought him neither comfort nor inspiration. He returned to the
+hotel, and, eluding a gossip-seeking landlady, went up to his room.
+
+What could be done? Neither the sleeping babe nor himself could offer
+any suggestion. One thing was grimly inevitable. He and Jean must part.
+To carry him about like an infant prince in an automobile had, after
+all, been a simple matter; to drag him through Heaven knew what
+hardships in his makeshift existence was impossible. In his childlike,
+impulsive fashion he had not thought of the future when he adopted Jean.
+Aristide always regarded the fortune of the moment as if it would last
+forever. Past deceptions never affected his incurable optimism. Now Jean
+and he must part. Aristide felt that the end of the world had come. His
+pacing to and fro awoke the child, who demanded, in his own way, the
+soothing rocking of his father's arms. There he bubbled and "goo'd" till
+Aristide's heart nearly broke.
+
+"What can I do with you, _mon petit Jean_?"
+
+The Enfants Trouves, after all? He thought of it with a shudder.
+
+The child asleep again, he laid it on its bed, and then sat far into the
+night thinking barrenly. At last one of his sudden gleams of inspiration
+illuminated his mind. It was the only way. He took out his watch. It was
+four o'clock. What had to be done must be done swiftly.
+
+In the travelling-basket, which had been sent from the garage, he placed
+a pillow, and on to the pillow he transferred with breathless care the
+sleeping Jean, and wrapped him up snug and warm in bedclothes. Then he
+folded the tiny day-garments that lay on a chair, collected the little
+odds and ends belonging to the child, took from his valise the rest of
+Jean's little wardrobe, and laid them at the foot of the basket. The
+most miserable man in France then counted up his money, divided it into
+two parts, and wrote a hasty letter, which, with the bundle of notes, he
+enclosed in an envelope.
+
+"My little Jean," said he, laying the envelope on the child's breast.
+"Here is a little more than half my fortune. Half is for yourself and
+the little more to pay your wretched father's hotel bill. Good-bye, my
+little Jean. _Je t'aime bien, tu sais_--and don't reproach me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About an hour afterwards Miss Anne awoke and listened, and in a moment
+or two Miss Janet awoke also.
+
+"Janet, do you hear that?"
+
+"It's a child crying. It's just outside the door."
+
+"It sounds like Jean."
+
+"Nonsense, my dear!"
+
+But Anne switched on the light and went to see for herself; and there,
+in the tiny anteroom that separated the bedroom from the corridor, she
+found the basket--a new Pharoah's daughter before a new little Moses in
+the bulrushes. In bewilderment she brought the ark into the room, and
+read the letter addressed to Janet and herself. She burst into tears.
+All she said was:--
+
+"Oh, Janet, why couldn't he have told us?"
+
+And then she fell to hugging the child to her bosom.
+
+Meanwhile Aristide Pujol, clad in his goat-skin cap and coat, valise in
+hand, was plodding through the rain in search of the elusive phantom,
+Fortune; gloriously certain that he had assured Jean's future, yet with
+such a heartache as he had never had in his life before.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG'S HEAD
+
+
+Once upon a time Aristide Pujol found himself standing outside his Paris
+residence, No. 213 _bis_, Rue Saint Honore, without a penny in the
+world. His last sou had gone to Madame Bidoux, who kept a small green
+grocer's shop at No. 213 _bis_ and rented a ridiculously small back room
+for a ridiculously small weekly sum to Aristide whenever he honoured the
+French capital with his presence. During his absence she forwarded him
+such letters as might arrive for him; and as this was his only permanent
+address, and as he let Madame Bidoux know his whereabouts only at vague
+intervals of time, the transaction of business with Aristide Pujol,
+"Agent, No. 213 _bis_, Rue Saint Honore, Paris," by correspondence was
+peculiarly difficult.
+
+He had made Madame Bidoux's acquaintance in the dim past; and he had
+made it in his usual direct and electric manner. Happening to walk down
+the Rue Saint Honore, he had come upon tragedy. Madame Bidoux, fat, red
+of face, tearful of eye and strident of voice, held in her arms a
+little mongrel dog--her own precious possession--which had just been run
+over in the street, and the two of them filled the air with wailings and
+vociferation. Aristide uncovered his head, as though he were about to
+address a duchess, and smiled at her engagingly.
+
+"Madame," said he, "I perceive that your little dog has a broken leg. As
+I know all about dogs, I will, with your permission, set the limb, put
+it into splints and guarantee a perfect cure. Needless to say, I make no
+charge for my services."
+
+Snatching the dog from the arms of the fascinated woman, he darted in
+his dragon-fly fashion into the shop, gave a hundred orders to a
+stupefied assistant, and--to cut short a story which Aristide told me
+with great wealth of detail--mended the precious dog and gained Madame
+Bidoux's eternal gratitude. For Madame Bidoux the world held no more
+remarkable man than Aristide Pujol; and for Aristide the world held no
+more devoted friend than Madame Bidoux. Many a succulent meal, at the
+widow's expense--never more enjoyable than in summer time when she set a
+little iron table and a couple of iron chairs on the pavement outside
+the shop--had saved him from starvation; and many a gewgaw sent from
+London or Marseilles or other such remote latitudes filled her heart
+with pride. Since my acquaintance with Aristide I myself have called on
+this excellent woman, and I hope I have won her esteem, though I have
+never had the honour of eating pig's trotters and chou-croute with her
+on the pavement of the Rue Saint Honore. It is an honour from which,
+being an unassuming man, I shrink.
+
+Unfortunately Madame Bidoux has nothing further to do with the story I
+am about to relate, save in one respect:--
+
+There came a day--it was a bleak day in November, when Madame Bidoux's
+temporary financial difficulties happened to coincide with Aristide's.
+To him, unsuspicious of coincidence, she confided her troubles. He
+emptied the meagre contents of his purse into her hand.
+
+"Madame Bidoux," said he with a flourish, and the air of a prince, "why
+didn't you tell me before?" and without waiting for her blessing he went
+out penniless into the street.
+
+Aristide was never happier than when he had not a penny piece in the
+world. He believed, I fancy, in a dim sort of way, in God and the Virgin
+and Holy Water and the Pope; but the faith that thrilled him to
+exaltation was his faith in the inevitable happening of the unexpected.
+He marched to meet it with the throbbing pulses of a soldier rushing to
+victory or a saint to martyrdom. He walked up the Rue Saint Honore, the
+Rue de la Paix, along the Grands Boulevards, smiling on a world which
+teemed with unexpectednesses, until he reached a cafe on the Boulevard
+des Bonnes Filles de Calvaire. Here he was arrested by Fate, in the form
+of a battered man in black, who, springing from the solitary frostiness
+of the terrace, threw his arms about him and kissed him on both cheeks.
+
+"_Mais, c'est toi, Pujol!_"
+
+"_C'est toi, Roulard!_"
+
+Roulard dragged Aristide to his frosty table and ordered drinks. Roulard
+had played the trumpet in the regimental band in which Aristide had
+played the kettle drum. During their military service they had been
+inseparables. Since those happy and ear-splitting days they had not met.
+They looked at each other and laughed and thumped each other's
+shoulders.
+
+"_Ce vieux Roulard!_"
+
+"_Ce sacre Pujol._"
+
+"And what are you doing?" asked Aristide, after the first explosions of
+astonishment and reminiscence.
+
+A cloud overspread the battered man's features. He had a wife and five
+children and played in theatre orchestras. At the present time he was
+trombone in the "Tournee Gulland," a touring opera company. It was not
+gay for a sensitive artist like him, and the trombone gave one a thirst
+which it took half a week's salary to satisfy. _Mais enfin, que
+veux-tu?_ It was life, a dog's life, but life was like that. Aristide,
+he supposed, was making a fortune. Aristide threw back his head, and
+laughed at the exquisite humour of the hypothesis, and gaily disclosed
+his Micawberish situation. Roulard sat for a while thoughtful and
+silent. Presently a ray of inspiration dispelled the cloud from the
+features of the battered man.
+
+"_Tiens, mon vieux_," said he, "I have an idea."
+
+It was an idea worthy of Aristide's consideration. The drum of the
+Tournee Gulland had been dismissed for drunkenness. The vacancy had not
+been filled. Various executants who had drummed on approval--this being
+an out-week of the tour--had driven the chef d'orchestre to the verge of
+homicidal mania. Why should not Aristide, past master in drumming, find
+an honourable position in the orchestra of the Tournee Gulland?
+
+Aristide's eyes sparkled, his fingers itched for the drumsticks, he
+started to his feet.
+
+"_Mon vieux Roulard!_" he cried, "you have saved my life. More than
+that, you have resuscitated an artist. Yes, an artist. _Sacre nom de
+Dieu!_ Take me to this chef d'orchestre."
+
+So Roulard, when the hour of rehearsal drew nigh, conducted Aristide to
+the murky recesses of a dirty little theatre in the Batignolles, where
+Aristide performed such prodigies of repercussion that he was forthwith
+engaged to play the drum, the kettle-drum, the triangle, the cymbals,
+the castagnettes and the tambourine, in the orchestra of the Tournee
+Gulland at the dazzling salary of thirty francs a week.
+
+To tell how Aristide drummed and cymballed the progress of Les
+Huguenots, Carmen, La Juive, La Fille de Madame Angot and L'Arlesienne
+through France would mean the rewriting of a "Capitaine Fracasse." To
+hear the creature talk about it makes my mouth as a brick kiln and my
+flesh as that of a goose. He was the Adonis, the Apollo, the Don Juan,
+the Irresistible of the Tournee. Fled truculent bass and haughty tenor
+before him; from diva to moustachioed contralto in the chorus, all the
+ladies breathlessly watched for the fall of his handkerchief; he was
+recognized, in fact, as a devil of a fellow. But in spite of these
+triumphs, the manipulation of the drum, kettle-drum, triangle, cymbals,
+castagnettes and tambourine, which at first had given him intense and
+childish delight, at last became invested with a mechanical monotony
+that almost drove him mad. All day long the thought of the ill-lit
+corner, on the extreme right of the orchestra, garnished with the
+accursed instruments of noise to which duty would compel him at eight
+o'clock in the evening hung over him like a hideous doom. Sweet singers
+of the female sex were powerless to console. He passed them by, and
+haughty tenor and swaggering basso again took heart of grace.
+
+"_Mais, mon Dieu, c'est le metier!_" expostulated Roulard.
+
+"_Sale metier!_" cried Aristide, who was as much fitted for the
+merciless routine of a theatre orchestra as a quagga for the shafts of
+an omnibus. "A beast of a trade! One is no longer a man. One is just an
+automatic system of fog-signals!"
+
+In this depraved state of mind he arrived at Perpignan, where that
+befell him which I am about to relate.
+
+Now, Perpignan is the last town of France on the Gulf of Lions, a few
+miles from the Spanish border. From it you can see the great white
+monster of Le Canigou, the pride of the Eastern Pyrenees, far, far away,
+blocking up the valley of the Tet, which flows sluggishly past the
+little town. The Quai Sadi-Carnot (is there a provincial town in France
+which has not a _something_ Sadi-Carnot in it?) is on the left bank
+of the Tet; at one end is the modern Place Arago, at the other Le
+Castillet, a round, castellated red-brick fortress with curiously long
+and deep machicolations of the 14th century with some modern additions
+of Louis XI, who also built the adjoining Porte Notre Dame which gives
+access to the city. Between the Castillet and the Place Arago, the Quai
+Sadi-Carnot is the site of the Prefecture, the Grand Hotel, various
+villas and other resorts of the aristocracy. Any little street off it
+will lead you into the seething centre of Perpignan life--the Place de
+la Loge, which is a great block of old buildings surrounded on its four
+sides by narrow streets of shops, cafes, private houses, all with
+balconies and jalousies, all cramped, crumbling, Spanish, picturesque.
+The oldest of this conglomerate block is a corner building, the Loge de
+Mer, a thirteenth century palace, the cloth exchange in the glorious
+days when Perpignan was a seaport and its merchant princes traded with
+Sultans and Doges and such-like magnificoes of the Mediterranean. But
+nowadays its glory has departed. Below the great gothic windows spreads
+the awning of a cafe, which takes up all the ground floor. Hugging it
+tight is the Mairie, and hugging that, the Hotel de Ville. Hither does
+every soul in the place, at some hour or other of the day, inevitably
+gravitate. Lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, merchants, lovers,
+soldiers, market-women, loafers, horses, dogs, wagons, all crowd in a
+noisy medley the narrow cobble-paved streets around the Loge. Of course
+there are other streets, tortuous, odorous and cool, intersecting the
+old town, and there are various open spaces, one of which is the broad
+market square on one side flanked by the Theatre Municipal.
+
+From the theatre Aristide Pujol issued one morning after rehearsal,
+and, leaving his colleagues, including the ever-thirsty Roulard, to
+refresh themselves at a humble cafe hard by, went forth in search of
+distraction. He idled about the Place de la Loge, passed the time of day
+with a cafe waiter until the latter, with a disconcerting "_Voila!
+Voila!_" darted off to attend to a customer, and then strolled through
+the Porte Notre Dame onto the Quai Sadi-Carnot. There a familiar sound
+met his ears--the roll of a drum followed by an incantation in a
+quavering, high-pitched voice. It was the Town Crier, with whom, as with
+a brother artist, he had picked acquaintance the day before.
+
+They met by the parapet of the Quai, just as Pere Bracasse had come to
+the end of his incantation. The old man, grizzled, tanned and seamed,
+leant weakly against the parapet.
+
+"How goes it, Pere Bracasse?"
+
+"Alas, mon bon Monsieur, it goes from bad to worse," sighed the old man.
+"I am at the end of my strength. My voice has gone and the accursed
+rheumatism in my shoulder gives me atrocious pain whenever I beat the
+drum."
+
+"How much more of your round have you to go?" asked Aristide.
+
+"I have only just begun," said Pere Bracasse.
+
+The Southern sun shone from a cloudless sky; a light, keen wind blowing
+from the distant snow-clad Canigou set the blood tingling. A lunatic
+idea flashed through Aristide's mind. He whipped the drum strap over the
+old man's head.
+
+"Pere Bracasse," said he, "you are suffering from rheumatism,
+bronchitis, fever and corns, and you must go home to bed. I will finish
+your round for you. Listen," and he beat such a tattoo as Pere Bracasse
+had never accomplished in his life. "Where are your words?"
+
+The old man, too weary to resist and fascinated by Aristide's laughing
+eyes, handed him a dirty piece of paper. Aristide read, played a
+magnificent roll and proclaimed in a clarion voice that a gold bracelet
+having been lost on Sunday afternoon in the Avenue des Platanes, whoever
+would deposit it at the Mairie would receive a reward.
+
+"That's all?" he enquired.
+
+"That's all," said Pere Bracasse. "I live in the Rue Petite-de-la-Real,
+No. 4, and you will bring me back the drum when you have finished."
+
+Aristide darted off like a dragon-fly in the sunshine, as happy as a
+child with a new toy. Here he could play the drum to his heart's content
+with no score or conductor's baton to worry him. He was also the one and
+only personage in the drama, concentrating on himself the attention of
+the audience. He pitied poor Roulard, who could never have such an
+opportunity with his trombone....
+
+The effect of his drumming before the Cafe de la Loge was electric.
+Shopkeepers ran out of their shops, housewives craned over their
+balconies to listen to him. By the time he had threaded the busy strip
+of the town and emerged on to the Place Arago he had collected an
+admiring train of urchins. On the Place Arago he halted on the fringe of
+a crowd surrounding a cheap-jack whose vociferations he drowned in a
+roll of thunder. He drummed and drummed till he became the centre of the
+throng. Then he proclaimed the bracelet. He had not enjoyed himself so
+much since he left Paris.
+
+He was striding away, merry-eyed and happy, followed by his satellites
+when a prosperous-looking gentleman with a very red face, a prosperous
+roll of fat above the back of his collar, and the ribbon of the Legion
+of Honour in his buttonhole, descending the steps of the great
+glass-covered cafe commanding the Place, hurried up and laid his finger
+on his arm.
+
+"Pardon, my friend," said he, "what are you doing there?"
+
+"You shall hear, monsieur," replied Aristide, clutching the drumsticks.
+
+"For the love of Heaven!" cried the other hastily interrupting. "Tell me
+what are you doing?"
+
+"I am crying the loss of a bracelet, monsieur!"
+
+"But who are you?"
+
+"I am Aristide Pujol, and I play the drum, kettle-drum, triangle,
+cymbals, castagnettes and tambourine in the orchestra of the Tournee
+Gulland. And now, in my turn, may I ask to whom I have the honour of
+speaking?"
+
+"I am the Mayor of Perpignan."
+
+Aristide raised his hat politely. "I hope to have the pleasure," said
+he, "of Monsieur le Maire's better acquaintance."
+
+The Mayor, attracted by the rascal's guileless mockery, laughed.
+
+"You will, my friend, if you go on playing that drum. You are not the
+Town Crier."
+
+Aristide explained. Pere Bracasse was ill, suffering from rheumatism,
+bronchitis, fever and corns. He was replacing him. The Mayor retorted
+that Pere Bracasse being a municipal functionary could not transmit his
+functions except through the Administration. Monsieur Pujol must desist
+from drumming and crying. Aristide bowed to authority and unstrung his
+drum.
+
+"But I was enjoying myself so much, Monsieur le Maire. You have spoiled
+my day," said he.
+
+The Mayor laughed again. There was an irresistible charm and roguishness
+about the fellow, with his intelligent oval face, black Vandyke beard
+and magically luminous eyes.
+
+"I should have thought you had enough of drums in your orchestra."
+
+"Ah! there I am cramped!" cried Aristide. "I have it in horror, in
+detestation. Here I am free. I can give vent to all the aspirations of
+my soul!"
+
+The Mayor mechanically moved from the spot where they had been standing.
+Aristide, embroidering his theme, mechanically accompanied him; and,
+such is democratic France, and also such was the magnetic, Ancient
+Mariner-like power of Aristide--did not I, myself, on my first meeting
+with him at Aigues-Mortes fall helplessly under the spell--that, in a
+few moments, the amateur Town Crier and the Mayor were walking together,
+side by side, along the Quai Sadi-Carnot, engaged in amiable converse.
+Aristide told the Mayor the story of his life--or such incidents of it
+as were meet for Mayoral ears--and when they parted--the Mayor to lunch,
+Aristide to yield up the interdicted drum to Pere Bracasse--they shook
+hands warmly and mutually expressed the wish that they would soon meet
+again.
+
+They met again; Aristide saw to that. They met again that very afternoon
+in the cafe on the Place Arago. When Aristide entered he saw the Mayor
+seated at a table in the company of another prosperous, red-ribboned
+gentleman. Aristide saluted politely and addressed the Mayor. The Mayor
+saluted and presented him to Monsieur Querin, the President of the
+Syndicat d'Initiative of the town of Perpignan. Monsieur Querin saluted
+and declared himself enchanted at the encounter. Aristide stood
+gossiping until the Mayor invited him to take a place at the table and
+consume liquid refreshment. Aristide glowingly accepted the invitation
+and cast a look of triumph around the cafe. Not to all mortals is it
+given to be the boon companion of a Mayor and a President of the
+Syndicat d'Initiative!
+
+Then ensued a conversation momentous in its consequences.
+
+The Syndicat d'Initiative is a semi-official body existing in most
+provincial towns in France for the purpose of organising public
+festivals for the citizens and developing the resources and
+possibilities of the town for the general amenity of visitors. Now
+Perpignan is as picturesque, as sun-smitten and, in spite of the icy
+tramontana, even as joyous a place as tourist could desire; and the
+Carnival of Perpignan, as a spontaneous outburst of gaiety and
+pageantry, is unique in France. But Perpignan being at the end of
+everywhere and leading nowhere attracts very few visitors. Biarritz is
+on the Atlantic coast at the other end of the Pyrenees; Hyeres, Cannes
+and Monte Carlo on the other side of the Gulf of Lions. No English or
+Americans--the only visitors of any account in the philosophy of
+provincial France--flock to Perpignan. This was a melancholy fact
+bewailed by Monsieur Querin. The town was perishing from lack of
+Anglo-Saxon support. Monsieur Coquereau, the Mayor, agreed. If the
+English and Americans came in their hordes to this paradise of mimosa,
+fourteenth century architecture, sunshine and unique Carnival, the
+fortunes of all the citizens would be assured. Perpignan would out-rival
+Nice. But what could be done?
+
+"Advertise it," said Aristide. "Flood the English-speaking world with
+poetical descriptions of the place. Build a row of palatial hotels in
+the new part of the town. It is not known to the Anglo-Saxons."
+
+"How can you be certain of that?" asked Monsieur Querin.
+
+"_Parbleu!_" he cried, with a wide gesture. "I have known the English
+all my life. I speak their language as I speak French or my native
+Provencal. I have taught in schools in England. I know the country and
+the people like my pocket. They have never heard of Perpignan."
+
+His companions acquiesced sadly. Aristide, aglow with a sudden impudent
+inspiration, leant across the marble table.
+
+"Monsieur le Maire and Monsieur le President du Syndicat d'Initiative, I
+am sick to death of playing the drum, the kettle-drum, the triangle, the
+cymbals, the castagnettes and the tambourine in the Tournee Gulland. I
+was born to higher things. Entrust to me"--he converged the finger-tips
+of both hands to his bosom--"to me, Aristide Pujol, the organisation of
+Perpignan-Ville de Plaisir, and you will not regret it."
+
+The Mayor and the President laughed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But my astonishing friend prevailed--not indeed to the extent of being
+appointed a Petronius, _arbiter elegantiarum_, of the town of Perpignan;
+but to the extent of being employed, I fear in a subordinate capacity,
+by the Mayor and the Syndicat in the work of propagandism. The Tournee
+Gulland found another drum and went its tuneful but weary way; and
+Aristide remained gloriously behind and rubbed his hands with glee. At
+last he had found permanence in a life where heretofore had been naught
+but transience. At last he had found a sphere worthy of his genius. He
+began to nourish insensate ambitions. He would be the Great Benefactor
+of Perpignan. All Roussillon should bless his name. Already he saw his
+statue on the Quai Sadi-Carnot.
+
+His rise in the social scale of the town was meteoric, chiefly owing to
+the goodwill of Madame Coquereau, the widowed mother of the Mayor. She
+was a hard-featured old lady, with a face that might have been made of
+corrugated iron painted yellow and with the eyes of an old hawk. She
+dressed always in black, was very devout and rich and narrow and
+iron-willed. Aristide was presented to her one Sunday afternoon at the
+Cafe on the Place Arago--where on Sunday afternoons all the fashion of
+Perpignan assembles--and--need I say it?--she fell at once a helpless
+victim to his fascination. Accompanying her grandmother was Mademoiselle
+Stephanie Coquereau, the Mayor's niece (a wealthy orphan, as Aristide
+soon learned), nineteen, pretty, demure, perfectly brought up, who said
+"_Oui, Monsieur_" and "_Non, Monsieur_" with that quintessence of modest
+grace which only a provincial French Convent can cultivate.
+
+Aristide's heart left his body and rolled at the feet of Mademoiselle
+Stephanie. It was a way with Aristide's heart. It was always doing that.
+He was of Provence and not of Peckham Rye or Hoboken, and he could not
+help it.
+
+Aristide called on Madame Coquereau, who entertained him with sweet
+Frontignan wine, dry sponge cakes and conversation. After a while he was
+invited to dinner. In a short space of time he became the intimate
+friend of the house, and played piquet with Madame Coquereau, and grew
+familiar with the family secrets. First he learned that Mademoiselle
+Stephanie would go to a husband with two hundred and fifty thousand
+francs. Aristide's heart panted at the feet of Mademoiselle Stephanie.
+Further he gathered that, though Monsieur Coquereau was a personage of
+great dignity and importance in civic affairs, he was as but a little
+child in his own house. Madame Coquereau held the money-bags. Her son
+had but little personal fortune. He had reached the age of forty-five
+without being able to marry. Marriage unauthorized by Madame Coquereau
+meant immediate poverty and the testamentary assignment of Madame
+Coquereau's fortune to various religious establishments. None of the
+objects of Monsieur Coquereau's matrimonial desire had pleased Madame
+Coquereau, and none of Madame Coquereau's blushing candidates had caused
+a pulse in Monsieur Coquereau's being to beat the faster. The Mayor held
+his mother in professed adoration and holy terror. She held him in
+abject subjection. Aristide became the confidant, in turn, of Madame's
+sour philosophy of life and of Monsieur's impotence and despair. As for
+Mademoiselle Stephanie, she kept on saying "_Oui, Monsieur_" and "_Non,
+Monsieur_," in a crescendo of maddening demureness.
+
+So passed the halcyon hours. During the day time Aristide in a corner of
+the Mayor's office, drew up flamboyant circulars in English which would
+have put a pushing Land and Estate Agent in the New Jerusalem to the
+blush, and in the evening played piquet with Madame Coquereau, while
+Mademoiselle Stephanie, model of modest piety, worked pure but nameless
+birds and flowers on her embroidery frame. Monsieur le Maire, of course,
+played his game of manilla at the cafe, after dinner, and generally
+came home just before Aristide took his leave. If it had not been for
+the presence of Mademoiselle Stephanie, it would not have been gay for
+Aristide. But love gilded the moments.
+
+On the first evening of the Carnival, which lasts nearly a fortnight in
+Perpignan, Aristide, in spite of a sweeter "_Oui, Monsieur_" than ever
+from Mademoiselle Stephanie, made an excuse to slip away rather earlier
+than usual, and, front door having closed behind him, crossed the strip
+of gravel with a quick step and flung out of the iron gates. Now the
+house had an isolated position in the new quarter of the town. It was
+perky and modern and defaced by all sorts of oriel windows and tourelles
+and pinnacles which gave it a top-heavy appearance, and it was
+surrounded by a low brick wall. Aristide, on emerging through the iron
+gates, heard the sound of scurrying footsteps on the side of the wall
+nearest to the town, and reached the corner, just in time to see a
+masquer, attired in a Pierrot costume and wearing what seemed to be a
+pig's head, disappear round the further angle. Paying no heed to this
+phenomenon, Aristide lit a cigarette and walked, in anticipation of
+enjoyment, to the great Avenue des Plantanes where the revelry of the
+Carnival was being held. Aristide was young, he loved flirtation, and
+flirtation flourished in the Avenue des Plantanes.
+
+The next morning the Mayor entered his office with a very grave face.
+
+"Do you know what has happened? My house was broken into last night. The
+safe in my study was forced open, and three thousand francs and some
+valuable jewelry were stolen. _Quel malheur!_" he cried, throwing
+himself into a chair, and wiping his forehead. "It is not I who can
+afford to lose three thousand francs at once. If they had robbed _maman_
+it would have been a different matter."
+
+Aristide expressed his sympathy.
+
+"Whom do you suspect?" he asked.
+
+"A robber, _parbleu!_" said the Mayor. "The police are even now making
+their investigations."
+
+The door opened and a plain clothes detective entered the office.
+
+"Monsieur le Maire," said he, with an air of triumph, "I know a
+burglar."
+
+Both men leapt to their feet.
+
+"Ah!" said Aristide.
+
+"_A la bonne heure!_" cried the Mayor.
+
+"Arrest him at once," said Aristide.
+
+"Alas, Monsieur," said the detective, "that I cannot do. I have called
+on him this morning and his wife tells me that he left for the North
+yesterday afternoon. But it is Jose Puegas that did it. I know his
+ways."
+
+"_Tiens!_" said the Mayor, reflectively. "I know him also, an evil
+fellow."
+
+"But why are you not looking for him?" exclaimed Aristide.
+
+"Arrangements have been made," replied the detective coldly.
+
+Aristide suddenly bethought him of the furtive masquer of the night
+before.
+
+"I can put you on his track," said he, and related what he knew.
+
+The Mayor looked dubious. "It wasn't he," he remarked.
+
+"Jose Puegas, Monsieur, would not commit a burglary in a pig's head,"
+said the policeman, with the cutting contempt of the expert.
+
+"It was a vow, I suppose," said Aristide, stung to irony. "I've always
+heard he was a religious man."
+
+The detective did not condescend to reply.
+
+"Monsieur le Maire," said he, "I should like to examine the premises,
+and beg that you will have the kindness to accompany me."
+
+"With the permission of Monsieur le Maire," said Aristide. "I too will
+come."
+
+"Certainly," said the Mayor. "The more intelligences concentrated on the
+affair the better."
+
+"I am not of that opinion," said the detective.
+
+"It is the opinion of Monsieur le Maire," said Aristide rebukingly, "and
+that is enough."
+
+When they reached the house--distances are short in Perpignan--they
+found policemen busily engaged with tape measures around the premises.
+Old Madame Coquereau in a clean white linen dressing jacket,
+bare-headed, defying the keen air, stood grim and eager in the midst of
+them.
+
+"Good morning, Monsieur Pujol, what do you think of this?"
+
+"A veritable catastrophe," said Aristide.
+
+She shrugged her iron shoulders. "I tell him it serves him right," she
+said, cuttingly. "A sensible person keeps his money under his mattress
+and not in a tin machine by a window which anyone can get at. I wonder
+we've not been murdered in our beds before."
+
+"_Ah, Maman!_" expostulated the Mayor of Perpignan.
+
+But she turned her back on him and worried the policemen. They, having
+probed, and measured, and consulted with the detective, came to an exact
+conclusion. The thief had climbed over the back wall--there were his
+footsteps. He had entered by the kitchen door--there were the marks of
+infraction. He had broken open the safe--there was the helpless
+condition of the lock. No one in Perpignan, but Jose Puegas, with his
+bad, socialistic, Barcelona blood, could have done it. These brilliant
+results were arrived at after much clamour and argument and imposing
+_proces verbal_. Aristide felt strangely depressed. He had narrated his
+story of the pig-headed masquer to unresponsive ears. Here was a
+melodramatic scene in which he not only was not playing a leading part,
+but did not even carry a banner. To be less than a super in life's
+pageant was abhorrent to the nature of Aristide Pujol.
+
+Moodily he wandered away from the little crowd. He hated the police and
+their airs of gods for whom exists no mystery. He did not believe in the
+kitchen-door theory. Why should not the thief have simply entered by the
+window of the study, which like the kitchen, was on the ground floor? He
+went round the house and examined the window by himself. No; there were
+no traces of burglary. The fastenings of the outside shutters and the
+high window were intact. The police were right.
+
+Suddenly his quick eye lit on something in the gravel path and his heart
+gave a great leap. It was a little round pink disc of confetti.
+
+Aristide picked it up and began to dance and shake his fist at the
+invisible police.
+
+"Aha!" he cried, "now we shall see who is right and who is wrong!"
+
+He began to search and soon found another bit of confetti. A little
+further along he discovered a third and a fourth. By using his walking
+stick he discovered that they formed a trail to a point in the wall. He
+examined the wall. There, if his eyes did not deceive him, were
+evidences of mortar dislodged by nefarious toes. And there, _mirabile
+visu!_ at the very bottom of the wall lay a little woollen pompon or
+tassel, just the kind of pompon that gives a finish to a pierrot's
+shoes. Evidently the scoundrel had scraped it off against the bricks
+while clambering over.
+
+The pig-headed masquer stood confessed.
+
+A less imaginative man than Aristide would have immediately acquainted
+the police with his discovery. But Aristide had been insulted. A dull,
+mechanical bureaucrat who tried to discover crime with a tape-measure
+had dared to talk contemptuously of his intelligence! On his wooden head
+should be poured the vials of his contempt.
+
+"_Tron de l'air!_" cried Aristide--a Provencal oath which he only used
+on sublime occasions--"It is I who will discover the thief and make the
+whole lot of you the laughing-stock of Perpignan."
+
+So did my versatile friend, joyously confident in his powers, start on
+his glorious career as a private detective.
+
+"Madame Coquereau," said he, that evening, while she was dealing a hand
+at piquet, "what would you say if I solved this mystery and brought the
+scoundrel to justice?"
+
+"To say that you would have more sense than the police, would be a poor
+compliment," said the old lady.
+
+Stephanie raised cloistral eyes from her embroidery frame. She sat in a
+distant corner of the formal room discreetly lit by a shaded lamp.
+
+"You have a clue, Monsieur?" she asked with adorable timidity.
+
+Aristide tapped his forehead with his forefinger. "All is there,
+Mademoiselle."
+
+They exchanged a glance--the first they had exchanged--while Madame
+Coquereau was frowning at her cards; and Aristide interpreted the glance
+as the promise of supreme reward for great deeds accomplished.
+
+The mayor returned early from the cafe, a dejected man. The loss of his
+hundred and twenty pounds weighed heavily on his mind. He kissed his
+mother sorrowfully on the cheek, his niece on the brow, held out a
+drooping hand to Aristide, and, subsiding into a stiff imitation Louis
+XVI chair, rested his elbows on its unconsoling arms and hid his face in
+his hands.
+
+"My poor uncle! You suffer so much?" breathed Stephanie, in divine
+compassion.
+
+"Little Saint!" murmured Aristide devoutly, as he declared four aces and
+three queens.
+
+The Mayor moved his head sympathetically. He was suffering from the
+sharpest pain in his pocket he had felt for many a day. Madame
+Coquereau's attention wandered from the cards.
+
+"_Dis donc_, Fernand," she said sharply. "Why are you not wearing your
+ring?"
+
+The Mayor looked up.
+
+"_Maman_," said he, "it is stolen."
+
+"Your beautiful ring?" cried Aristide.
+
+The Mayor's ring, which he usually wore, was a remarkable personal
+adornment. It consisted in a couple of snakes in old gold clenching an
+enormous topaz between their heads. Only a Mayor could have worn it with
+decency.
+
+"You did not tell me, Fernand," rasped the old lady. "You did not
+mention it to me as being one of the stolen objects."
+
+The Mayor rose wearily. "It was to avoid giving you pain, _maman_. I
+know what a value you set upon the ring of my good Aunt Philomene."
+
+"And now it is lost," said Madame Coquereau, throwing down her cards. "A
+ring that belonged to a saint. Yes, Monsieur Pujol, a saint, though she
+was my sister. A ring that had been blessed by His Holiness the
+Pope----"
+
+"But, _maman_," expostulated the Mayor, "that was an imagination of Aunt
+Philomene. Just because she went to Rome and had an audience like anyone
+else----"
+
+"Silence, impious atheist that you are!" cried the old lady. "I tell you
+it was blessed by His Holiness--and when I tell you a thing it is true.
+That is the son of to-day. He will call his mother a liar as soon as
+look at her. It was a ring beyond price. A ring such as there are few in
+the world. And instead of taking care of this precious heirloom, he goes
+and locks it away in a safe. Ah! you fill me with shame. Monsieur Pujol,
+I am sorry I can play no more, I must retire. Stephanie, will you
+accompany me?"
+
+And gathering up Stephanie like a bunch of snowdrops, the yellow,
+galvanized iron old lady swept out of the room.
+
+The Mayor looked at Aristide and moved his arms dejectedly.
+
+"Such are women," said he.
+
+"My own mother nearly broke her heart because I would not become a
+priest," said Aristide.
+
+"I wish I were a Turk," said the Mayor.
+
+"I, too," said Aristide.
+
+He took pouch and papers and rolled a cigarette.
+
+"If there is a man living who can say he has not felt like that at least
+once in his life he ought to be exhibited at a fair."
+
+"How well you understand me, my good Pujol," said Monsieur Coquereau.
+
+The next few days passed busily for Aristide. He devoted every spare
+hour to his new task. He scrutinized every inch of ground between the
+study window and the wall; he drew radiating lines from the point of
+the wall whence the miscreant had started homeward and succeeded in
+finding more confetti. He cross-examined every purveyor of pierrot shoes
+and pig's heads in Perpignan. His researches soon came to the ears of
+the police, still tracing the mysterious Jose Puegas. A certain
+good-humoured brigadier whose Catalan French Aristide found difficult to
+understand, but with whom he had formed a derisory kind of friendship,
+urged him to desist from the hopeless task.
+
+"_Jamais de la vie!_" he cried--"The honour of Aristide Pujol is at
+stake."
+
+The thing became an obsession. Not only his honour but his future was at
+stake. If he discovered the thief, he would be the most talked of person
+in Perpignan. He would know how to improve his position. He would rise
+to dizzy heights. Perpignan-Ville de Plaisir would acclaim him as its
+saviour. The Government would decorate him. And finally, both the Mayor
+and Madame Coquereau would place the blushing and adorable Mademoiselle
+Stephanie in his arms and her two hundred and fifty thousand francs
+dowry in his pocket. Never before had so dazzling a prize shimmered
+before him in the near distance.
+
+On the last Saturday night of the Carnival, there was a special _corso_
+for the populace in the Avenue des Plantanes, the long splendid Avenue
+of plane trees just outside the Porte Notre Dame, which is the special
+glory of Perpignan. The masquers danced to three or four bands. They
+threw confetti and _serpentins_. They rode hobby-horses and beat each
+other with bladders. They joined in bands of youths and maidens and
+whirled down the Avenue in Bacchic madness. It was a _corso blanc_, and
+everyone wore white--chiefly modifications of Pierrot costume--and
+everyone was masked. Chinese lanterns hung from the trees and in
+festoons around the bandstands and darted about in the hands of the
+revellers. Above, great standard electric lamps shed their white glare
+upon the eddying throng casting a myriad of grotesque shadows. Shouts
+and laughter and music filled the air.
+
+Aristide in a hideous red mask and with a bag of confetti under his arm,
+plunged with enthusiasm into the revelry. To enjoy yourself you only had
+to throw your arm round a girl's waist and swing her off wildly to the
+beat of the music. If you wanted to let her go you did so; if not, you
+talked in the squeaky voice that is the recognized etiquette of the
+carnival. On the other hand any girl could catch you in her grip and
+sweep you along with her. Your mad career generally ended in a crowd and
+a free fight of confetti. There was one fair masquer, however, to whom
+Aristide became peculiarly attracted. Her movements were free, her
+figure dainty and her repartee, below her mask, more than usually
+piquant.
+
+"This hurly-burly," said he, drawing her into a quiet eddy of the
+stream, "is no place for the communion of two twin souls."
+
+"_Beau masque_," said she, "I perceive that you are a man of much
+sensibility."
+
+"Shall we find a spot where we can mingle the overflow of our exquisite
+natures?"
+
+"As you like."
+
+"_Allons! Hop!_" cried he, and seizing her round the waist danced
+through the masquers to the very far end of the Avenue.
+
+"There is a sequestered spot round here," he said.
+
+They turned. The sequestered spot, a seat beneath a plane tree, with a
+lonesome arc-lamp shining full upon it, was occupied.
+
+"It's a pity!" said the fair unknown.
+
+But Aristide said nothing. He stared. On the seat reposed an amorous
+couple. The lady wore a white domino and a black mask. The cavalier,
+whose arm was around the lady's waist, wore a pig's head, and a clown or
+Pierrot's dress.
+
+Aristide's eyes fell upon the shoes. On one of them the pompon was
+missing.
+
+The lady's left hand tenderly patted the cardboard snout of her lover.
+The fierce light of the arc lamp caught the hand and revealed, on the
+fourth finger, a topaz ring, the topaz held in its place by two snakes'
+heads.
+
+Aristide stared for two seconds; it seemed to him two centuries. Then he
+turned simply, caught his partner again, and with a "_Allons, Hop!_"
+raced back to the middle of the throng. There, in the crush, he
+unceremoniously lost her, and sped like a maniac to the entrance gates.
+His friend the brigadier happened to be on duty. He unmasked himself,
+dragged the police agent aside, and breathless, half-hysterical,
+acquainted him with the astounding discovery.
+
+"I was right, _mon vieux!_ There at the end of the Avenue you will find
+them. The pig-headed prowler I saw, with _my_ pompon missing from his
+shoe, and his _bonne amie_ wearing the stolen ring. Ah! you police
+people with your tape-measures and your Jose Puegas! It is I, Aristide
+Pujol, who have to come to Perpignan to teach you your business!"
+
+"What do you want me to do?" asked the brigadier stolidly.
+
+"Do?" cried Aristide. "Do you think I want you to kiss them and cover
+them with roses? What do you generally do with thieves in Perpignan?"
+
+"Arrest them," said the brigadier.
+
+"_Eh bien!_" said Aristide. Then he paused--possibly the drama of the
+situation striking him. "No, wait. Go and find them. Don't take your
+eyes off them. I will run and fetch Monsieur le Maire and he will
+identify his property--_et puis nous aurons la scene a faire_."
+
+The stout brigadier grunted an assent and rolled monumentally down the
+Avenue. Aristide, his pulses throbbing, his heart exulting, ran to the
+Mayor's house. He was rather a panting triumph than a man. He had beaten
+the police of Perpignan. He had discovered the thief. He was the hero of
+the town. Soon would the wedding bells be playing.... He envied the
+marble of the future statue. He would like to be on the pedestal
+himself.
+
+He dashed past the maid-servant who opened the door and burst into the
+prim salon. Madame Coquereau was alone, just preparing to retire for the
+night. Mademoiselle Stephanie had already gone to bed.
+
+"_Mon Dieu_, what is all this?" she cried.
+
+"Madame," shouted he, "glorious news. I have found the thief!"
+
+He told his tale. Where was Monsieur le Maire?
+
+"He has not yet come back from the cafe."
+
+"I'll go and find him," said Aristide.
+
+"And waste time? Bah!" said the iron-faced old lady, catching up a black
+silk shawl. "I will come with you and identify the ring of my sainted
+sister Philomene. Who should know it better than I?"
+
+"As you like, Madame," said Aristide.
+
+Two minutes found them on their journey. Madame Coquereau, in spite of
+her sixty-five years trudged along with springing step.
+
+"They don't make metal like me, nowadays," she said scornfully.
+
+When they arrived at the gate of the Avenue, the police on guard
+saluted. The mother of Monsieur le Maire was a power in Perpignan.
+
+"Monsieur," said Aristide, in lordly fashion, to a policeman, "will you
+have the goodness to make a passage through the crowd for Madame
+Coquereau, and then help the Brigadier Pesac to arrest the burglar who
+broke into the house of Monsieur le Maire?"
+
+The man obeyed, went ahead clearing the path with the unceremoniousness
+of the law, and Aristide giving his arm to Madame Coquereau followed
+gloriously. As the impressive progress continued the revellers ceased
+their revels and followed in the wake of Aristide. At the end of the
+Avenue Brigadier Pesac was on guard. He approached.
+
+"They are still there," he said.
+
+"Good," said Aristide.
+
+The two police-officers, Aristide and Madame Coquereau turned the
+corner. At the sight of the police the guilty couple started to their
+feet. Madame Coquereau pounced like a hawk on the masked lady's hand.
+
+"I identify it," she cried. "Brigadier, give these people in charge for
+theft."
+
+The white masked crowd surged around the group, in the midst of which
+stood Aristide transfigured. It was his supreme moment. He flourished in
+one hand his red mask and in the other a pompon which he had extracted
+from his pocket.
+
+"This I found," said he, "beneath the wall of Monsieur le Maire's
+garden. Behold the shoe of the accused."
+
+The crowd murmured their applause and admiration. Neither of the
+prisoners stirred. The pig's head grinned at the world with its inane,
+painted leer. A rumbling voice beneath it said:
+
+"We will go quietly."
+
+"_Attention s'il vous plait_," said the policemen, and each holding a
+prisoner by the arm they made a way through the crowd. Madame Coquereau
+and Aristide followed close behind.
+
+"What did I tell you?" cried Aristide to the brigadier.
+
+"It's Puegas, all the same," said the brigadier, over his shoulder.
+
+"I bet you it's not," said Aristide, and striding swiftly to the back of
+the male prisoner whipped off the pig's head, and revealed to the
+petrified throng the familiar features of the Mayor of Perpignan.
+
+Aristide regarded him for two or three seconds open-mouthed, and then
+fell back into the arms of the Brigadier Pesac screaming with convulsive
+laughter. The crowd caught the infection of merriment. Shrieks filled
+the air. The vast mass of masqueraders held their sides, swayed
+helplessly, rolled in heaps, men and women, tearing each other's
+garments as they fell.
+
+Aristide, deposited on the ground by the Brigadier Pesac laughed and
+laughed. When he recovered some consciousness of surroundings, he found
+the Mayor bending over him and using language that would have made
+Tophet put its fingers in its ears. He rose. Madame Coquereau shook her
+thin fists in his face.
+
+"Imbecile! Triple fool!" she cried.
+
+Aristide turned tail and fled. There was nothing else to do.
+
+And that was the end of his career at Perpignan. Vanished were the
+dreams of civic eminence; melted into thin air the statue on the Quai
+Sadi-Carnot; faded, too, the vision of the modest Stephanie crowned with
+orange-blossom; gone forever the two hundred and fifty thousand francs.
+Never since Alnaschar kicked over his basket of crockery was there such
+a hideous welter of shattered hopes.
+
+If the Mayor had been allowed to go disguised to the Police Station, he
+could have disclosed his identity and that of the lady in private to
+awe-stricken functionaries. He might have forgiven Aristide. But
+Aristide had exposed him to the derision of the whole of Roussillon and
+the never ending wrath of Madame Coquereau. Ruefully Aristide asked
+himself the question: why had the Mayor not taken him into the
+confidence of his masquerading escapade? Why had he not told him of the
+pretty widow, whom, unknown to his mother, he was courting? Why had he
+permitted her to wear the ring which he had given her so as to spite his
+sainted Aunt Philomene? And why had he gone on wearing the pig's head
+after Aristide had told him of his suspicions? Ruefully Aristide found
+no answers save in the general chuckle-headedness of mankind.
+
+"If it hadn't been such a good farce I should have wept like a cow,"
+said Aristide, after relating this story. "But every time I wanted to
+cry, I laughed. _Nom de Dieu!_ You should have seen his face! And the
+face of Madame Coquereau! She opened her mouth wide showing ten yellow
+teeth and squealed like a rabbit! Oh, it was a good farce! He was very
+cross with me," he added after a smiling pause, "and when I got back to
+Paris I tried to pacify him."
+
+"What did you do?" I asked.
+
+"I sent him my photograph," said Aristide.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE
+
+
+One day, when Aristide was discoursing on the inexhaustible subject of
+woman, I pulled him up.
+
+"My good friend," said I, "you seem to have fallen in love with every
+woman you have ever met. But for how many of them have you really
+cared?"
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_ For all of them!" he cried, springing from his chair and
+making a wind-mill of himself.
+
+"Come, come," said I; "all that amorousness is just Gallic exuberance.
+Have you ever been really in love in your life?"
+
+"How should I know?" said he. But he lit a cigarette, turned away, and
+looked out of window.
+
+There was a short silence. He shrugged his shoulders, apparently in
+response to his own thoughts. Then he turned again suddenly, threw his
+cigarette into the fire, and thrust his hands into his pockets. He
+sighed.
+
+"Perhaps there was Fleurette," said he, not looking at me. "_Est-ce
+qu'on sait jamais?_ That wasn't her real name--it was Marie-Josephine;
+but people called her Fleurette. She looked like a flower, you know."
+
+I nodded in order to signify my elementary acquaintance with the French
+tongue.
+
+"The most delicate little flower you can conceive," he continued.
+"_Tiens_, she was a slender lily--so white, and her hair the flash of
+gold on it--and she had eyes--_des yeux de pervenche_, as we say in
+French. What is _pervenche_ in English--that little pale-blue flower?"
+
+"Periwinkle," said I.
+
+"Periwinkle eyes! My God, what a language! Ah, no! She had _des yeux de
+pervenche_.... She was _diaphane_, diaphanous ... impalpable as
+cigarette-smoke ... a little nose like nothing at all, with nostrils
+like infinitesimal sea-shells. Anyone could have made a mouthful of
+her.... Ah! _Cre nom d'un chien!_ Life is droll. It has no common sense.
+It is the game of a mountebank.... I've never told you about Fleurette.
+It was this way."
+
+And the story he narrated I will do my best to set down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The good M. Bocardon, of the Hotel de la Curatterie at Nimes, whose
+grateful devotion to Aristide has already been recorded, had a brother
+in Paris who managed the Hotel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse (strange
+conjuncture), a flourishing third-rate hostelry in the neighbourhood of
+the Halles Centrales. Thither flocked sturdy Britons in knickerbockers,
+stockings, and cloth caps, Teutons with tin botanizing boxes (for lunch
+transportation), and American school-marms realizing at last the dream
+of their modest and laborious lives. Accommodation was cheap, manners
+were easy, and knowledge of the gay city less than rudimentary.
+
+To M. Bocardon of Paris Aristide, one August morning, brought glowing
+letters of introduction from M. and Mme. Bocardon of Nimes. M. Bocardon
+of Paris welcomed Aristide as a Provencal and a brother. He brought out
+from a cupboard in his private bureau an hospitable bottle of old
+Armagnac, and discoursed with Aristide on the seductions of the South.
+It was there that he longed to retire--to a dainty little hotel of his
+own with a smart clientele. The clientele of the Hotel du Soleil et de
+l'Ecosse was not to his taste. He spoke slightingly of his guests.
+
+"There are people who know how to travel," said he, "and people who
+don't. These lost muttons here don't, and they make hotel-keeping a
+nightmare instead of a joy. A hundred times a day have I to tell them
+the way to Notre Dame. _Pouah!_" said he, gulping down his disgust and
+the rest of his Armagnac, "it is back-breaking."
+
+"_Tu sais, mon vieux_," cried Aristide--he had the most lightning way of
+establishing an intimacy--"I have an idea. These lost sheep need a
+shepherd."
+
+"_Eh bien?_" said M. Bocardon.
+
+"_Eh bien_," said Aristide. "Why should not I be the shepherd, the
+official shepherd attached to the Hotel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse?"
+
+"Explain yourself," said M. Bocardon.
+
+Aristide, letting loose his swift imagination, explained copiously, and
+hypnotized M. Bocardon with his glittering eye, until he had assured to
+himself a means of livelihood. From that moment he became the familiar
+genius of the hotel. Scorning the title of "guide," lest he should be
+associated in the minds of the guests with the squalid scoundrels who
+infest the Boulevard, he constituted himself "Directeur de l'Agence
+Pujol." An obfuscated Bocardon formed the rest of the agency and
+pocketed a percentage of Aristide's earnings, and Aristide, addressed as
+"Director" by the Anglo-Saxons, "M. le Directeur" by the Latins, and
+"Herr Direktor" by the Teutons, walked about like a peacock in a
+barn-yard.
+
+ [Illustration: HE MUST HAVE DEALT OUT PARALYZING INFORMATION]
+
+At that period, and until he had learned up Baedeker by heart, a process
+which nearly gave him brain-fever, and still, he declares, brings terror
+into his slumbers, he knew little more of the history, topography, and
+art-treasures of Paris than the flock he shepherded. He must have
+dealt out paralyzing information. The Britons and the Germans seemed not
+to heed; but now and then the American school-marms unmasked the
+charlatan. On such occasions his unfaltering impudence reached heights
+truly sublime. The sharp-witted ladies looked in his eyes, forgot their
+wrongs, and, if he had told them that the Eiffel Tower had been erected
+by the Pilgrim Fathers, would have accepted the statement meekly.
+
+"My friend," said Aristide, with Provencal flourish and braggadocio, "I
+never met a woman that would not sooner be misled by me than be taught
+by the whole Faculty of the Sorbonne."
+
+He had been practising this honourable profession for about a month,
+lodging with the good Mme. Bidoux at 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honore, when,
+one morning, in the vestibule of the hotel, he ran into his old friend
+Batterby, whom he had known during the days of his professorship of
+French at the Academy for Young Ladies in Manchester. The pair had been
+fellow-lodgers in the same house in the Rusholme Road; but, whereas
+Aristide lived in one sunless bed-sitting-room looking on a forest of
+chimney-pots, Batterby, man of luxury and ease, had a suite of
+apartments on the first floor and kept an inexhaustible supply of
+whisky, cigars, and such-like etceteras of the opulent, and the very
+ugliest prize bull-pup you can imagine. Batterby, in gaudy raiment,
+went to an office in Manchester; in gaudier raiment he often attended
+race meetings. He had rings and scarf-pins and rattled gold in his
+trousers pockets. He might have been an insufferable young man for a
+poverty-stricken teacher of French to have as a fellow-lodger; but he
+was not. Like all those born to high estate, he made no vulgar parade of
+his wealth, and to Aristide he showed the most affable hospitality. A
+friendship had arisen between them, which the years had idealized rather
+than impaired. So when they met that morning in the vestibule of the
+Hotel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse their greetings were fervent and
+prolonged.
+
+In person Batterby tended towards burliness. He had a red, jolly face,
+divided unequally by a great black moustache, and his manner was hearty.
+He slapped Aristide on the back many times and shook him by the
+shoulders.
+
+"We must have a drink on this straight away, old man," said he.
+
+"You're so strange, you English," said Aristide. "The moment you have an
+emotion you must celebrate it by a drink. 'My dear fellow, I've just
+come into a fortune; let us have a drink.' Or, 'My friend, my poor old
+father has just been run over by an omnibus; let us have a drink.' My
+good Reginald, look at the clock. It is only nine in the morning."
+
+"Rot!" said Reginald. "Drink is good at any time."
+
+They went into the dark and deserted smoking-room, where Batterby
+ordered Scotch and soda and Aristide, an abstemious man, a plain
+vermouth.
+
+"What's that muck?" asked Batterby, when the waiter brought the drinks.
+Aristide explained. "Whisky's good enough for me," laughed the other.
+Aristide laughed too, out of politeness and out of joy at meeting his
+old friend.
+
+"With you playing at guide here," said Batterby, when he had learned
+Aristide's position in the hotel, "it seems I have come to the right
+shop. There are no flies on me, you know, but when a man comes to Paris
+for the first time he likes to be put up to the ropes."
+
+"Your first visit to Paris?" cried Aristide. "_Mon vieux_, what wonders
+are going to ravish your eyes! What a time you are going to have!"
+
+Batterby bit off the end of a great black cigar.
+
+"If the missus will let me," said he.
+
+"Missus? Your wife? You are married, my dear Reginald?" Aristide leaped,
+in his unexpected fashion, from his chair and almost embraced him. "Ah,
+but you are happy, you are lucky. It was always like that. You open your
+mouth and the larks fall ready roasted into it! My congratulations. And
+she is here, in this hotel, your wife? Tell me about her."
+
+Batterby lit his cigar. "She's nothing to write home about," he said,
+modestly. "She's French."
+
+"French? No--you don't say so!" exclaimed Aristide, in ecstasy.
+
+"Well, she was brought up in France from her childhood, but her parents
+were Finns. Funny place for people to come from--Finland--isn't it? You
+could never expect it--might just as well think of 'em coming from
+Lapland. She's an orphan. I met her in London."
+
+"But that's romantic! And she is young, pretty?"
+
+"Oh, yes; in a way," said the proprietary Briton.
+
+"And her name?"
+
+"Oh, she has a fool name--Fleurette. I wanted to call her Flossie, but
+she didn't like it."
+
+"I should think not," said Aristide. "Fleurette is an adorable name."
+
+"I suppose it's right enough," said Batterby. "But if I want to call her
+good old Flossie, why should she object? You married, old man? No? Well,
+wait till you are. You think women are angels all wrapped up in feathers
+and wings beneath their toggery, don't you? Well, they're just blooming
+porcupines, all bristling with objections."
+
+"_Mais, allons, donc!_" cried Aristide. "You love her, your beautiful
+Finnish orphan brought up in France and romantically met in London, with
+the adorable name?"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said the easy Batterby, lifting his half-emptied
+glass. "Here's luck!"
+
+"Ah--no!" said Aristide, leaning forward and clinking his wineglass
+against the other's tumbler. "Here is to madame."
+
+When they returned to the vestibule they found Mrs. Batterby patiently
+awaiting her lord. She rose from her seat at the approach of the two
+men, a fragile flower of a girl, about three-and-twenty, pale as a lily,
+with exquisite though rather large features, and with eyes of the blue
+of the _pervenche_ (in deference to Aristide I use the French name),
+which seemed to smile trustfully through perpetual tears. She was
+dressed in pale, shadowy blue--graceful, impalpable, like the smoke,
+said Aristide, curling upwards from a cigarette.
+
+"Reggie has spoken of you many times, monsieur," said Fleurette, after
+the introduction had been effected.
+
+Aristide was touched. "Fancy him remembering me! _Ce bon vieux
+Reginald._ Madame," said he, "your husband is the best fellow in the
+world."
+
+"Feed him with sugar and he won't bite," said Batterby; whereat they all
+laughed, as if it had been a very good joke.
+
+"Well, what about this Paris of yours?" he asked, after a while. "The
+missus knows as little of it as I do."
+
+"Really?" asked Aristide.
+
+"I lived all my life in Brest before I went to England," she said,
+modestly.
+
+"She wants to see all the sights, the Louvre, the Morgue, the Cathedral
+of What's-its-name that you've got here. I've got to go round, too.
+Pleases her and don't hurt me. You must tote us about. We'll have a cab,
+old girl, as you can't do much walking, and good old Pujol will come
+with us."
+
+"But that is ideal!" cried Aristide, flying to the door to order the
+cab; but before he could reach it he was stopped by three or four
+waiting tourists, who pointed, some to the clock, some to the wagonette
+standing outside, and asked the director when the personally-conducted
+party was to start. Aristide, who had totally forgotten the
+responsibilities attached to the directorship of the Agence Pujol and,
+but for this reminder, would have blissfully left his sheep to err and
+stray over Paris by themselves, returned crestfallen to his friends and
+explained the situation.
+
+"But we'll join the party," said the cheery Batterby. "The more the
+merrier--good old bean-feast! Will there be room?"
+
+"Plenty," replied Aristide, brightening. "But would it meet the wishes
+of madame?" Her pale face flushed ever so slightly and the soft eyes
+fluttered at him a half-astonished, half-grateful glance.
+
+"With my husband and you, monsieur, I should love it," she said.
+
+So Mr. and Mrs. Batterby joined the personally-conducted party, as they
+did the next morning, and the next, and several mornings after, and
+received esoteric information concerning the monuments of Paris that is
+hidden even from the erudite. The evenings, however, Aristide, being off
+duty, devoted to their especial entertainment. He took them to riotous
+and perspiring restaurants where they dined gorgeously for three francs
+fifty, wine included; to open-air _cafes-concerts_ in the Champs
+Elysees, which Fleurette found infinitely diverting, but which bored
+Batterby, who knew not French, to stertorous slumber; to crowded
+brasseries on the Boulevard, where Batterby awakened, under a steady
+flow of whisky, to appreciative contemplation of Paris life. As in the
+old days of the Rusholme Road, Batterby flung his money about with
+unostentatious generosity. He was out for a beano, he declared, and hang
+the expense! Aristide, whose purse, scantily filled (truth to say) by
+the profits of the Agence Pujol, could contribute but modestly to this
+reckless expenditure, found himself forced to accept his friend's lavish
+hospitality. Once or twice, delicately, he suggested withdrawal from the
+evening's dissipation.
+
+"But, my good M. Pujol," said Fleurette, with childish tragicality in
+her _pervenche_ eyes, "without you we shall be lost. We shall not enjoy
+ourselves at all, at all."
+
+So Aristide, out of love for his friend, and out of he knew not what for
+his friend's wife, continued to show them the sights of Paris. They went
+to the cabarets of Montmartre--the _Ciel_, where one is served by
+angels; the _Enfer_, where one is served by red devils in a Tartarean
+lighting; the _Neant_, where one has coffins for tables--than all of
+which vulgarity has imagined no more joy-killing dreariness, but which
+caused Fleurette to grip Aristide's hand tight in scared wonderment and
+Batterby to chuckle exceedingly. They went to the Bal Bullier and to
+various other balls undreamed of by the tourist, where Fleurette danced
+with Aristide, as light as an autumn leaf tossed by the wind, and
+Batterby absorbed a startling assortment of alcohols. In a word,
+Aristide procured for his friends prodigious diversion.
+
+"How do you like this, old girl?" Batterby asked one night, at the
+Moulin de la Galette, a dizzying, not very decorous, and to the
+unsophisticated visitor a dangerous place of entertainment. "Better than
+Great Coram Street, isn't it?"
+
+She smiled and laid her hand on his. She was a woman of few words but of
+many caressing actions.
+
+"I ought to let you into a secret," said he. "This is our honeymoon."
+
+"Who would have thought it?"
+
+ [Illustration: FLEURETTE DANCED WITH ARISTIDE, AS LIGHT AS AN AUTUMN
+                LEAF TOSSED BY THE WIND]
+
+"A fortnight ago she was being killed in a Bloomsbury boarding-house.
+There were two of 'em--she and a girl called Carrie. I used to call 'em
+Fetch and Carrie. This one was Fetch. Well, she fetched me, didn't you,
+old girl? And now you're Mrs. Reginald Batterby, living at your ease,
+eh?"
+
+"Madame would grace any sphere," said Aristide.
+
+"I wish I had more education," said Fleurette, humbly. "M. Pujol and
+yourself are so clever that you must laugh at me."
+
+"We do sometimes, but you mustn't mind us. Remember--at the
+what-you-call-it--the little shanty at Versailles----?"
+
+"The Grand Trianon," replied Aristide.
+
+"That's it. When you were showing us the rooms. 'What is the Empress
+Josephine doing now?'" He mimicked her accent. "Ha! ha! And the poor
+soul gone to glory a couple of hundred years ago."
+
+The little mouth puckered at the corners and moisture gathered in the
+blue eyes.
+
+"_Mais, mon Dieu_, it was natural, the mistake," cried Aristide,
+gallantly. "The Empress Eugenie, the wife of another Napoleon, is still
+living."
+
+"_Bien sur_," said Fleurette. "How was I to know?"
+
+"Never mind, old girl," said Batterby. "You're living all right, and out
+of that beastly boarding-house, and that's the chief thing. Another
+month of it would have killed her. She had a cough that shook her to
+bits. She's looking better already, isn't she, Pujol?"
+
+After this Aristide learned much of her simple history, which she, at
+first, had been too shy to reveal. The child of Finnish sea-folk who had
+drifted to Brest and died there, she had been adopted by an old Breton
+sea-dog and his wife. On their death she had entered, as maid, the
+service of an English lady residing in the town, who afterwards had
+taken her to England. After a while reverses of fortune had compelled
+the lady to dismiss her, and she had taken the situation in the
+boarding-house, where she had ruined her health and met the opulent and
+conquering Batterby. She had not much chance, poor child, of acquiring a
+profound knowledge of the history of the First Empire; but her manners
+were refined and her ways gentle and her voice was soft; and Aristide,
+citizen of the world, for whom caste distinctions existed not, thought
+her the most exquisite flower grown in earth's garden. He told her so,
+much to her blushing satisfaction.
+
+One night, about three weeks after the Batterbys' arrival in Paris,
+Batterby sent his wife to bed and invited Aristide to accompany him for
+half an hour to a neighbouring cafe. He looked grave and troubled.
+
+"I've been upset by a telegram," said he, when drinks had been ordered.
+"I'm called away to New York on business. I must catch the boat from
+Cherbourg to-morrow evening. Now, I can't take Fleurette with me. Women
+and business don't mix. She has jolly well got to stay here. I sha'n't
+be away more than a month. I'll leave her plenty of money to go on with.
+But what's worrying me is--how is she going to stick it? So look here,
+old man, you're my pal, aren't you?"
+
+He stretched out his hand. Aristide grasped it impulsively.
+
+"Why, of course, _mon vieux!_"
+
+"If I felt that I could leave her in your charge, all on the square, as
+a real straight pal--I should go away happy."
+
+"She shall be my sister," cried Aristide, "and I shall give her all the
+devotion of a brother.... I swear it--_tiens_--what can I swear it on?"
+He flung out his arms and looked round the cafe as if in search of an
+object. "I swear it on the head of my mother. Have no fear. I, Aristide
+Pujol, have never betrayed the sacred obligations of friendship. I
+accept her as a consecrated trust."
+
+"You only need to have said 'Right-o,' and I would have believed you,"
+said Batterby. "I haven't told her yet. There'll be blubbering all
+night. Let us have another drink."
+
+When Aristide arrived at the Hotel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse at nine
+o'clock the next morning he found that Batterby had left Paris by an
+early train. Fleurette he did not meet until he brought back the
+sight-seers to the fold in the evening. She had wept much during the
+day; but she smiled bravely on Aristide. A woman could not stand in the
+way of her husband's business.
+
+"By the way, what is Reginald's business?" Aristide asked.
+
+She did not know. Reginald never spoke to her of such things; perhaps
+she was too ignorant to understand.
+
+"But he will make a lot of money by going to America," she said. Then
+she was silent for a few moments. "_Mon Dieu!_" she sighed, at last.
+"How long the day has been!"
+
+It was the beginning of many long days for Fleurette. Reginald did not
+write from Cherbourg or cable from New York, as he had promised, and the
+return American mail brought no letter. The days passed drearily.
+Sometimes, for the sake of human society, she accompanied the tourist
+parties of the Agence Pujol; but the thrill had passed from the Morgue
+and the glory had departed from Versailles. Sometimes she wandered
+out by herself into the streets and public gardens; but, pretty,
+unprotected, and fragile, she attracted the attention of evil or
+careless men, which struck cold terror into her heart. Most often she
+sat alone and listless in the hotel, reading the feuilleton of the
+_Petit Journal_, and waiting for the post to bring her news.
+
+"_Mon Dieu_, M. Pujol, what can have happened?"
+
+"Nothing at all, _chere petite madame_"--question and answer came many
+times a day. "Only some foolish mischance which will soon be explained.
+The good Reginald has written and his letter has been lost in the post.
+He has been obliged to go on business to San Francisco or Buenos
+Ayres--_et, que voulez-vous?_ one cannot have letters from those places
+in twenty-four hours."
+
+"If only he had taken me with him!"
+
+"But, dear Mme. Fleurette, he could not expose you to the hardships
+of travel. You, who are as fragile as a cobweb, how could you go to
+Patagonia or Senegal or Baltimore, those wild places where there are no
+comforts for women? You must be reasonable. I am sure you will get a
+letter soon--or else in a day or two he will come, with his good, honest
+face as if nothing had occurred--these English are like that--and call
+for whisky and soda. Be comforted, _chere petite madame_."
+
+Aristide did his best to comfort her, threw her in the companionship of
+decent women staying at the hotel, and devoted his evenings to her
+entertainment. But the days passed, and Reginald Batterby, with the
+good, honest face, neither wrote nor ordered whisky and soda. Fleurette
+began to pine and fade.
+
+One day she came to Aristide.
+
+"M. Pujol, I have no more money left."
+
+"_Bigre!_" said Pujol. "The good Bocardon will have to give you credit.
+I'll arrange it."
+
+"But I already owe for three weeks," said Fleurette.
+
+Aristide sought Bocardon. One week more was all the latter dared allow.
+
+"But her husband will return and pay you. He is my old and intimate
+friend. I make myself hoarse in telling it to you, wooden-head that you
+are!"
+
+But Bocardon, who had to account to higher powers, the proprietors of
+the hotel, was helpless. At the end of the week Fleurette was called
+upon to give up her room. She wept with despair; Aristide wept with
+fury; Bocardon wept out of sympathy. Already, said Bocardon, the
+proprietors would blame him for not using the legal right to detain
+madame's luggage.
+
+"_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ what is to become of me?" wailed Fleurette.
+
+"You forget, madame," said Aristide, with one of his fine flourishes,
+"that you are the sacred trust of Aristide Pujol."
+
+"But I can't accept your money," objected Fleurette.
+
+"_Tron de l'air!_" he cried. "Did your husband put you in my charge or
+did he not? Am I your legal guardian, or am I not? If I am your legal
+guardian, what right have you to question the arrangements made by your
+husband? Answer me that."
+
+Fleurette, too gentle and too miserable for intricate argument, sighed.
+
+"But it is your money, all the same."
+
+Aristide turned to Bocardon. "Try," said he, "to convince a woman! Do
+you want proofs? Wait there a minute while I get them from the safe of
+the Agence Pujol."
+
+He disappeared into the bureau, where, secure from observation, he tore
+an oblong strip from a sheet of stiff paper, and, using an indelible
+pencil, wrote out something fantastic halfway between a cheque and a
+bill of exchange, forged as well as he could from memory the signature
+of Reginald Batterby--the imitation of handwriting was one of Aristide's
+many odd accomplishments--and made the document look legal by means of a
+receipt stamp, which he took from Bocardon's drawer. He returned to the
+vestibule with the strip folded and somewhat crumpled in his hand.
+"_Voila_," said he, handing it boldly to Fleurette. "Here is your
+husband's guarantee to me, your guardian, for four thousand francs."
+
+Fleurette examined the forgery. The stamp impressed her. For the simple
+souls of France there is magic in _papier timbre_.
+
+"It was my husband who wrote this?" she asked, curiously.
+
+"_Mais, oui_," said Aristide, with an offended air of challenge.
+
+Fleurette's eyes filled again with tears.
+
+"I only inquired," she said, "because this is the first time I have seen
+his handwriting."
+
+"_Ma pauvre petite_," said Aristide.
+
+"I will do whatever you tell me, M. Pujol," said Fleurette, humbly.
+
+"Good! That is talking like _une bonne petite dame raisonnable_. Now, I
+know a woman made up of holy bread whom St. Paul and St. Peter are
+fighting to have next them when she goes to Paradise. Her name is Mme.
+Bidoux, and she sells cabbages and asparagus and charcoal at No. 213
+bis, Rue Saint-Honore. She will arrange our little affair. Bocardon,
+will you have madame's trunks sent to that address?"
+
+He gave his arm to Fleurette, and walked out of the hotel, with serene
+confidence in the powers of the sainted Mme. Bidoux. Fleurette
+accompanied him unquestioningly. Of course she might have said: "If you
+hold negotiable security from my husband to the amount of four thousand
+francs, why should I exchange the comforts of the hotel for the doubtful
+accommodation of the sainted Mme. Bidoux who sells cabbages?" But I
+repeat that Fleurette was a simple soul who took for granted the wisdom
+of so flamboyant and virile a creature as Aristide Pujol.
+
+Away up at the top of No. 213 bis, Rue Saint-Honore, was a little
+furnished room to let, and there Aristide installed his sacred charge.
+Mme. Bidoux, who, as she herself maintained, would have cut herself into
+four pieces for Aristide--did he not save her dog's life? Did he not
+marry her daughter to the brigadier of gendarmes (_sale voyou!_), who
+would otherwise have left her lamenting? Was he not the most wonderful
+of God's creatures?--Mme. Bidoux, although not quite appreciating
+Aristide's quixotic delicacy, took the forlorn and fragile wisp of
+misery to her capacious bosom. She made her free of the cabbages and
+charcoal. She provided her, at a risible charge, with succulent meals.
+She told her tales of her father and mother, of her neighbours, of the
+domestic differences between the concierge and his wife (soothing idyll
+for an Ariadne!), of the dirty thief of a brigadier of gendarmes, of her
+bodily ailments--her body was so large that they were many; of the
+picturesque death, through apoplexy, of the late M. Bidoux; the brave
+woman, in short, gave her of her heart's best. As far as human hearts
+could provide a bed for Fleurette, that bed was of roses. As a matter of
+brutal fact, it was narrow and nubbly, and the little uncarpeted room
+was ten feet by seven; but to provide it Aristide went to his own bed
+hungry. And if the bed of a man's hunger is not to be accounted as one
+of roses, there ought to be a vote for the reduction of the Recording
+Angel's salary.
+
+It must not be imagined that Fleurette thought the bed hard. Her bed of
+life from childhood had been nubbly. She never dreamed of complaining of
+her little room under the stars, and she sat among the cabbages like a
+tired lily, quite contented with her material lot. But she drooped and
+drooped, and the cough returned and shook her; and Aristide, realizing
+the sacredness of his charge, became a prey to anxious terrors.
+
+"Mere Bidoux," said he, "she must have lots of good, nourishing, tender,
+underdone beef, good fillets, and _entrecotes saignantes_."
+
+Mme. Bidoux sighed. She had a heart, but she also had a pocket which,
+like Aristide's, was not over-filled. "That costs dear, my poor friend,"
+she said.
+
+"What does it matter what it costs? It is I who provide," said Aristide,
+grandly.
+
+And Aristide gave up tobacco and coffee and the mild refreshment at
+cafes essential to the existence of every Frenchman, and degraded his
+soul by taking half-franc tips from tourists--a source of income which,
+as Director, M. le Directeur, Herr Direktor of the Agence Pujol, he had
+hitherto scorned haughtily--in order to provide Fleurette with underdone
+beefsteaks.
+
+All his leisure he devoted to her. She represented something that
+hitherto had not come into his life--something delicate, tender,
+ethereal, something of woman that was exquisitely adorable, apart from
+the flesh. Once, as he was sitting in the little shop, she touched his
+temple lightly with her fingers.
+
+"Ah, you are good to me, Aristide."
+
+He felt a thrill such as no woman's touch had ever caused to pass
+through him--far, far sweeter, cleaner, purer. If the _bon Dieu_ could
+have given her to him then and there to be his wife, what bond could
+have been holier? But he had bound himself by a sacred obligation. His
+friend on his return should find him loyal.
+
+"Who could help being good to you, little Fleurette?" said he. "Even an
+Apache would not tread on a lily of the valley!"
+
+"But you put me in water and tend me so carefully."
+
+"So that you can be fresh whenever the dear Reginald comes back."
+
+She sighed. "Tell me what I can do for you, my good Aristide."
+
+"Keep well and happy and be a valiant little woman," said he.
+
+Fleurette tried hard to be valiant; but the effort exhausted her
+strength. As the days went on, even Aristide's inexhaustible
+conversation failed to distract her from brooding. She lost the trick of
+laughter. In the evenings, when he was most with her, she would sit,
+either in the shop or in the little room at the back, her blue childish
+eyes fixed on him wistfully. At first he tried to lure her into the gay
+street; but walking tired her. He encouraged her to sit outside on the
+pavement of the Rue Saint-Honore and join with Mme. Bidoux in the gossip
+of neighbours; but she listened to them with uncomprehending ears. In
+despair Aristide, to coax a smile from her lips, practised his many
+queer accomplishments. He conjured with cards; he juggled with oranges;
+he had a mountebank's trick of putting one leg round his neck; he
+imitated the voices of cats and pigs and ducks, till Mme. Bidoux held
+her sides with mirth. He spent time and thought in elaborating what he
+called _bonnes farces_, such as dressing himself up in Mme. Bidoux's
+raiment and personifying a crabbed customer.
+
+Fleurette smiled but listlessly at all these comicalities.
+
+One day she was taken ill. A doctor, summoned, said many learned words
+which Aristide and Mme. Bidoux tried hard to understand.
+
+"But, after all, what is the matter with her?"
+
+ [Illustration: ARISTIDE PRACTISED HIS MANY QUEER ACCOMPLISHMENTS]
+
+"She has no strength to struggle. She wants happiness."
+
+"Can you tell me the druggist's where that can be procured?" asked
+Aristide.
+
+The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "I tell you the truth. It is one of
+those pulmonary cases. Happy, she will live; unhappy, she will die."
+
+"My poor Mme. Bidoux, what is to be done?" asked Aristide, after the
+doctor had gone off with his modest fee. "How are we to make her happy?"
+
+"If only she could have news of her husband!" replied Mme. Bidoux.
+
+Aristide's anxieties grew heavier. It was November, when knickerbockered
+and culture-seeking tourists no longer fill the cheap hotels of Paris.
+The profits of the Agence Pujol dwindled. Aristide lived on bread and
+cheese, and foresaw the time when cheese would be a sinful luxury.
+Meanwhile Fleurette had her nourishing food, and grew more like the
+ghost of a lily every day. But her eyes followed Aristide, wherever he
+went in her presence, as if he were the god of her salvation.
+
+One day Aristide, with an unexpected franc or two in his pocket,
+stopped in front of a _bureau de tabac_. A brown packet of caporal and
+a book of cigarette-papers--a cigarette rolled--how good it would be!
+He hesitated, and his glance fell on a collection of foreign stamps
+exposed in the window. Among them were twelve Honduras stamps all
+postmarked. He stared at them, fascinated.
+
+"_Mon brave Aristide!_" he cried. "If the _bon Dieu_ does not send you
+these vibrating inspirations, it is because you yourself have already
+conceived them!"
+
+He entered the shop and emerged, not with caporal and cigarette-papers,
+but with the twelve Honduras stamps.
+
+That night he sat up in his little bedroom at No. 213 bis, Rue
+Saint-Honore, until his candle failed, inditing a letter in English to
+Fleurette. At the head of his paper he wrote "Hotel Rosario, Honduras."
+And at the end of the letter he signed the name of Reginald Batterby.
+Where Honduras was, he had but a vague idea. For Fleurette, at any rate,
+it would be somewhere at the other end of the world, and she would not
+question any want of accuracy in local detail. Just before the light
+went out he read the letter through with great pride. Batterby alluded
+to the many letters he had posted from remote parts of the globe, gave
+glowing forecasts of the fortune that Honduras had in store for him,
+reminded her that he had placed sufficient funds for her maintenance in
+the hands of Aristide Pujol, and assured her that the time was not far
+off when she would be summoned to join her devoted husband.
+
+"Mme. Bidoux was right," said he, before going to sleep. "This is the
+only way to make her happy."
+
+The next day Fleurette received the letter. The envelope bore the
+postmarked Honduras stamp. It had been rubbed on the dusty pavement to
+take off the newness. It was in her husband's handwriting. There was no
+mistake about it--it was a letter from Honduras.
+
+"Are you happier now, little doubting female St. Thomas that you are?"
+cried Aristide when she had told him the news.
+
+She smiled at him out of grateful eyes, and touched his hand.
+
+"Much happier, _mon bon ami_," she said, gently.
+
+Later in the day she handed him a letter addressed to Batterby. It had
+no stamp.
+
+"Will you post this for me, Aristide?"
+
+Aristide put the letter in his pocket and turned sharply away, lest she
+should see a sudden rush of tears. He had not counted on this innocent
+trustfulness. He went to his room. The poor little letter! He had not
+the heart to destroy it. No; he would keep it till Batterby came; it was
+not his to destroy. So he threw it into a drawer.
+
+Having once begun the deception, however, he thought it necessary to
+continue. Every week, therefore, he invented a letter from Batterby. To
+interest her he drew upon his Provencal imagination. He described
+combats with crocodiles, lion-hunts, feasts with terrific savages from
+the interior, who brought their lady wives chastely clad in petticoats
+made out of human teeth; he drew pictures of the town, a kind of
+palm-shaded Paris by the sea, where one ate ortolans and oysters as big
+as soup-plates, and where Chinamen with pigtails rode about the streets
+on camels. It was not a correct description of Honduras, but, all the
+same, an exotic atmosphere stimulating and captivating rose from the
+pages. With this it was necessary to combine expressions of affection.
+At first it was difficult. Essential delicacy restrained him. He had
+also to keep in mind Batterby's vernacular. To address Fleurette,
+impalpable creation of fairyland, as "old girl" was particularly
+distasteful. By degrees, however, the artist prevailed. And then at last
+the man himself took to forgetting the imaginary writer and poured out
+words of love, warm, true, and passionate.
+
+And every week Fleurette would smile and tell him the wondrous news, and
+would put into his hands an unstamped letter to post, which he, with a
+wrench of the heart, would add to the collection in the drawer.
+
+Once she said, diffidently, with an unwonted blush and her pale blue
+eyes swimming: "I write English so badly. Won't you read the letter and
+correct my mistakes?"
+
+But Aristide laughed and licked the flap of the envelope and closed it.
+"What has love to do with spelling and grammar? The good Reginald would
+prefer your bad English to all the turned phrases of the Academie
+Francaise."
+
+"It is as you like, Aristide," said Fleurette, with wistful eyes.
+
+Yet, in spite of the weekly letters, Fleurette continued to droop. The
+winter came, and Fleurette was no longer able to stay among the cabbages
+of Mme. Bidoux. She lay on her bed in the little room, ten feet by
+seven, away, away at the top of the house in the Rue Saint Honore. The
+doctor, informed of her comparative happiness, again shrugged his
+shoulders. There was nothing more to be done.
+
+"She is dying, monsieur, for want of strength to live."
+
+Then Aristide went about with a great heartache. Fleurette would die;
+she would never see the man she loved again. What would he say when he
+returned and learned the tragic story? He would not even know that
+Aristide, loving her, had been loyal to him. When the Director of the
+Agence Pujol personally conducted the clients of the Hotel du Soleil et
+de l'Ecosse to the Grand Trianon and pointed out the bed of the Empress
+Josephine he nearly broke down.
+
+"What is the Empress doing now?"
+
+What was Fleurette doing now? Going to join the Empress in the world of
+shadows.
+
+The tourists talked after the manner of their kind.
+
+"She must have found the bed very hard, poor dear."
+
+"Give me an iron bedstead and a good old spring mattress."
+
+"Ah, but, my dear sir, you forget. The Empress's bed was slung on the
+back of tame panthers which Napoleon brought from Egypt."
+
+It was hard to jest convincingly to the knickerbockered with death in
+one's soul.
+
+"Most beloved little Flower," ran the last letter that Fleurette
+received, "I have just had a cable from Aristide saying that you are
+very ill. I will come to you as soon as I can. _Ces petits yeux de
+pervenche_--I am learning your language here, you see--haunt me day and
+night ..." etcetera, etcetera.
+
+Aristide went up to her room with a great bunch of chrysanthemums. The
+letter peeped from under the pillow. Fleurette was very weak. Mme.
+Bidoux, who, during Fleurette's illness, had allowed her green grocery
+business to be personally conducted to the deuce by a youth of sixteen
+very much in love with the lady who sold sausages and other
+_charcuterie_ next door, had spread out the fortune-telling cards on
+the bed and was prophesying mendaciously. Fleurette took the flowers
+and clasped them to her bosom.
+
+"No letter for _ce cher Reginald_?"
+
+She shook her head. "I can write no more," she whispered.
+
+She closed her eyes. Presently she said, in a low voice:--
+
+"Aristide--if you kiss me, I think I can go to sleep."
+
+He bent down to kiss her forehead. A fragile arm twined itself about his
+neck and he kissed her on the lips.
+
+"She is sleeping," said Mme. Bidoux, after a while.
+
+Aristide tiptoed out of the room.
+
+And so died Fleurette. Aristide borrowed money from the kind-hearted
+Bocardon for a beautiful funeral, and Mme. Bidoux and Bocardon and a few
+neighbours and himself saw her laid to rest. When they got back to the
+Rue Saint Honore he told Mme. Bidoux about the letters. She wept and
+clasped him, weeping too, in her kind, fat old arms.
+
+The next evening Aristide, coming back from his day's work at the Hotel
+du Soleil et de l'Ecosse, was confronted in the shop by Mme. Bidoux,
+hands on broad hips.
+
+"_Tiens, mon petit_," she said, without preliminary greeting. "You are
+an angel. I knew it. But that a man's an angel is no reason for his
+being an imbecile. Read this."
+
+She plucked a paper from her apron pocket and thrust it into his hand.
+He read it, and blinked in amazement.
+
+"Where did you get this, Mere Bidoux?"
+
+"Where I got many more. In your drawer. The letters you were saving for
+this infamous scoundrel. I wanted to know what she had written to him."
+
+"Mere Bidoux!" cried Aristide. "Those letters were sacred!"
+
+"Bah!" said Mme. Bidoux, unabashed. "There is nothing sacred to a sapper
+or an old grandmother who loves an imbecile. I have read the letters,
+_et voila, et voila, et voila!_" And she emptied her pockets of all the
+letters, minus the envelopes, that Fleurette had written.
+
+And, after one swift glance at the first letter, Aristide had no
+compunction in reading. They were all addressed to himself.
+
+They were very short, ill-written in a poor little uncultivated hand.
+But they all contained one message, that of her love for Aristide.
+Whatever illusions she may have had concerning Batterby had soon
+vanished. She knew, with the unerring instinct of woman, that he had
+betrayed and deserted her. Aristide's pious fraud had never deceived her
+for a second. Too gentle, too timid to let him know what was in her
+heart, she had written the secret patiently week after week, hoping
+every time that curiosity, or pity, or something--she knew not
+what--would induce him to open the idle letter, and wondering in her
+simple peasant's soul at the delicacy that caused him to refrain. Once
+she had boldly given him the envelope unclosed.
+
+ [Illustration: HE READ IT, AND BLINKED IN AMAZEMENT]
+
+"She died for want of love, _parbleu_," said Aristide, "and there was
+mine quivering in my heart and trembling on my lips all the time.... She
+had _des yeux de pervenche_. Ah! _nom d'un chien!_ It is only with me
+that Providence plays such tricks."
+
+He walked to the window and looked out into the grey street. Presently I
+heard him murmuring the words of the old French song:--
+
+    Elle est morte en fevrier;
+        Pauvre Colinette!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE MIRACLE
+
+
+You have seen how Aristide, by attaching himself to the Hotel du Soleil
+et de l'Ecosse as a kind of glorified courier, had founded the Agence
+Pujol. As he, personally, was the Agence, and the Agence was he, it
+happened that when he was not in attendance at the hotel, the Agence
+faded into space, and when he made his appearance in the vestibule and
+hung up his placard by the bureau, the Agence at once burst again into
+the splendour of existence. Apparently the fitful career of the Agence
+Pujol lasted some years. Whenever a chance of more remunerative
+employment turned up, Aristide took it and dissolved the Agence.
+Whenever outrageous fortune chivied him with slings and arrows penniless
+to Paris, there was always the Agence waiting to be resuscitated.
+
+It was during one of these periodic flourishings of the Agence Pujol
+that Aristide met the Ducksmiths.
+
+Business was slack, few guests were at the hotel, and of those few none
+desired to be personally conducted to the Louvre or Notre Dame or the
+monument in the Place de la Bastille. They mostly wore the placid
+expression of folks engaged in business affairs instead of the worried
+look of pleasure-seekers.
+
+"My good Bocardon," said Aristide, lounging by the bureau and addressing
+his friend the manager, "this is becoming desperate. In another minute I
+shall take you out by main force and show you the Pont Neuf."
+
+At that moment the door of the stuffy salon opened, and a travelling
+Briton, whom Aristide had not seen before, advanced to the bureau and
+inquired his way to the Madeleine. Aristide turned on him like a flash.
+
+"Sir," said he, extracting documents from his pockets with lightning
+rapidity, "nothing would give me greater pleasure than to conduct you
+thither. My card. My tariff. My advertisement." He pointed to the
+placard. "I am the managing director of the Agence Pujol, under the
+special patronage of this hotel. I undertake all travelling
+arrangements, from the Moulin Rouge to the Pyramids, and, as you see, my
+charges are moderate."
+
+The Briton, holding the documents in a pudgy hand, looked at the
+swift-gestured director with portentous solemnity. Then, with equal
+solemnity, he looked at Bocardon.
+
+"Monsieur Ducksmith," said the latter, "you can repose every confidence
+in Monsieur Aristide Pujol."
+
+"Umph!" said Mr. Ducksmith.
+
+After another solemn inspection of Aristide, he stuck a pair of
+gold-rimmed glasses on his fleshy nose and perused the documents. He was
+a fat, heavy man of about fifty years of age, and his scanty hair was
+turning grey. His puffy cheeks hung jowl-like, giving him the appearance
+of some odd dog--a similarity greatly intensified by the eye-sockets,
+the lower lids of which were dragged down in the middle, showing the red
+like a bloodhound's; but here the similarity ended, for the man's eyes,
+dull and blue, had the unspeculative fixity of a rabbit's. His mouth,
+small and weak, dribbled away at the corners into the jowls which, in
+their turn, melted into two or three chins. He was decently dressed in
+grey tweeds, and wore a diamond ring on his little finger.
+
+"Umph!" said he, at last; and went back to the salon.
+
+As soon as the door closed behind him Aristide sprang into an attitude
+of indignation.
+
+"Did you ever see such a bear! If I ever saw a bigger one I would eat
+him without salt or pepper. _Mais nom d'un chien_, such people ought to
+be made into sausages!"
+
+"_Flegme britannique!_" laughed Bocardon.
+
+Half an hour passed, and Mr. Ducksmith made no reappearance from the
+salon. In the forlorn hope of a client Aristide went in after him. He
+found Mr. Ducksmith, glasses on nose, reading a newspaper, and a plump,
+black-haired lady, with an expressionless face, knitting a grey woollen
+sock. Why they should be spending their first morning--and a crisp,
+sunny morning, too--in Paris in the murky staleness of this awful little
+salon, Aristide could not imagine. As he entered, Mr. Ducksmith regarded
+him vacantly over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses.
+
+"I have looked in," said Aristide, with his ingratiating smile, "to see
+whether you are ready to go to the Madeleine."
+
+"Madeleine?" the lady inquired, softly, pausing in her knitting.
+
+"Madame," Aristide came forward, and, hand on heart, made her the lowest
+of bows. "Madame, have I the honour of speaking to Madame Ducksmith?
+Enchanted, madame, to make your acquaintance," he continued, after a
+grunt from Mr. Ducksmith had assured him of the correctness of his
+conjecture. "I am Monsieur Aristide Pujol, director of the Agence Pujol,
+and my poor services are absolutely at your disposal."
+
+He drew himself up, twisted his moustache, and met her eyes--they were
+rather sad and tired--with the roguish mockery of his own. She turned to
+her husband.
+
+"Are you thinking of going to the Madeleine, Bartholomew?"
+
+"I am, Henrietta," said he. "I have decided to do it. And I have also
+decided to put ourselves in the charge of this gentleman. Mrs. Ducksmith
+and I are accustomed to all the conveniences of travel--I may say that
+we are great travellers--and I leave it to you to make the necessary
+arrangements. I prefer to travel at so much per head per day."
+
+He spoke in a wheezy, solemn monotone, from which all elements of life
+and joy seemed to have been eliminated. His wife's voice, though softer
+in timbre, was likewise devoid of colour.
+
+"My husband finds that it saves us from responsibilities," she remarked.
+
+"And over-charges, and the necessity of learning foreign languages,
+which at our time of life would be difficult. During all our travels we
+have not been to Paris before, owing to the impossibility of finding a
+personally-conducted tour of an adequate class."
+
+"Then, my dear sir," cried Aristide, "it is Providence itself that has
+put you in the way of the Agence Pujol. I will now conduct you to the
+Madeleine without the least discomfort or danger."
+
+"Put on your hat, Henrietta," said Mr. Ducksmith, "while this gentleman
+and I discuss terms."
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith gathered up her knitting and retired, Aristide dashing
+to the door to open it for her. This gallantry surprised her ever so
+little, for a faint flush came into her cheek and the shadow of a smile
+into her eyes.
+
+"I wish you to understand, Mr. Pujol," said Mr. Ducksmith, "that being,
+I may say, a comparatively rich man, I can afford to pay for certain
+luxuries; but I made a resolution many years ago, which has stood me in
+good stead during my business life, that I would never be cheated. You
+will find me liberal but just."
+
+He was as good as his word. Aristide, who had never in his life
+exploited another's wealth to his own advantage, suggested certain
+terms, on the basis of so much per head per day, which Mr. Ducksmith
+declared, with a sigh of relief, to be perfectly satisfactory.
+
+"Perhaps," said he, after further conversation, "you will be good enough
+to schedule out a month's railway tour through France, and give me an
+inclusive estimate for the three of us. As I say, Mrs. Ducksmith and I
+are great travellers--we have been to Norway, to Egypt, to Morocco and
+the Canaries, to the Holy Land, to Rome, and lovely Lucerne--but we find
+that attention to the trivial detail of travel militates against our
+enjoyment."
+
+"My dear sir," said Aristide, "trust in me, and your path and that of
+the charming Mrs. Ducksmith will be strewn with roses."
+
+Whereupon Mrs. Ducksmith appeared, arrayed for walking out, and
+Aristide, having ordered a cab, drove with them to the Madeleine. They
+alighted in front of the majestic flight of steps. Mr. Ducksmith stared
+at the classical portico supported on its Corinthian columns with his
+rabbit-like, unspeculative gaze--he had those filmy blue eyes that never
+seem to wink--and after a moment or two turned away.
+
+"Umph!" said he.
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith, dutiful and silent, turned away also.
+
+"This sacred edifice," Aristide began, in his best cicerone manner, "was
+built, after a classic model, by the great Napoleon, as a Temple of
+Fame. It was afterwards used as a church. You will observe--and, if you
+care to, you can count, as a conscientious American lady did last
+week--the fifty-six Corinthian columns. You will see they are Corinthian
+by the acanthus leaves on the capitals. For the vulgar, who have no
+architectural knowledge, I have _memoria technica_ for the instant
+recognition of the three orders--Cabbages, Corinthian; horns, Ionic;
+anything else, Doric. We will now mount the steps and inspect the
+interior."
+
+He was dashing off in his eager fashion, when Mr. Ducksmith laid a
+detaining hand on his arm.
+
+"No," said he, solemnly. "I disapprove of Popish interiors. Take us to
+the next place."
+
+ [Illustration: HE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE POINTED OUT THE MARVELS OF KUBLA
+                KHAN'S PLEASURE-DOME TO A COUPLE OF GUINEA-PIGS]
+
+He entered the waiting victoria. His wife meekly followed.
+
+"I suppose the Louvre is the next place?" said Aristide.
+
+"I leave it to you," said Mr. Ducksmith.
+
+Aristide gave the order to the cabman and took the little seat in the
+cab facing his employers. On the way down the Rue Royale and the Rue de
+Rivoli he pointed out the various buildings of interest--Maxim's, the
+Cercle Royal, the Ministere de la Marine, the Hotel Continental. Two
+expressionless faces, two pairs of unresponsive eyes, met his merry
+glance. He might as well have pointed out the marvels of Kubla Khan's
+pleasure-dome to a couple of guinea-pigs.
+
+The cab stopped at the entrance to the galleries of the Louvre. They
+entered and walked up the great staircase on the turn of which the
+Winged Victory stands, with the wind of God in her vesture, proclaiming
+to each beholder the deathless, ever-soaring, ever-conquering spirit of
+man, and heralding the immortal glories of the souls, wind-swept
+likewise by the wind of God, that are enshrined in the treasure-houses
+beyond.
+
+"There!" said Aristide.
+
+"Umph! No head," said Mr. Ducksmith, passing it by with scarcely a
+glance.
+
+"Would it cost very much to get a new one?" asked Mrs. Ducksmith,
+timidly. She was three or four paces behind her spouse.
+
+"It would cost the blood and tears and laughter of the human race," said
+Aristide.
+
+("That was devilish good, wasn't it?" remarked Aristide, when telling me
+this story. He always took care not to hide his light under the least
+possibility of a bushel.)
+
+The Ducksmiths looked at him in their lacklustre way, and allowed
+themselves to be guided into the picture-galleries, vaguely hearing
+Aristide's comments, scarcely glancing at the pictures, and
+manifesting no sign of interest in anything whatever. From the Louvre
+they drove to Notre Dame, where the same thing happened. The venerable
+pile, standing imperishable amid the vicissitudes of centuries (the
+phrase was that of the director of the Agence Pujol), stirred in their
+bosoms no perceptible emotion. Mr. Ducksmith grunted and declined to
+enter; Mrs. Ducksmith said nothing.
+
+As with pictures and cathedrals, so it was with their food at lunch.
+Beyond a solemn statement to the effect that in their quality of
+practised travellers they made a point of eating the food and drinking
+the wine of the country, Mr. Ducksmith did not allude to the meal. At
+any rate, thought Aristide, they don't clamour for underdone chops and
+tea. So far they were human. Nor did they maintain an awful silence
+during the repast. On the contrary, Mr. Ducksmith loved to talk--in a
+dismal, pompous way--chiefly of British politics. His method of
+discourse was to place himself in the position of those in authority and
+to declare what he would do in any given circumstances. Now, unless the
+interlocutor adopts the same method and declares what _he_ would do,
+conversation is apt to become one-sided. Aristide, having no notion of a
+policy should he find himself exercising the functions of the British
+Chancellor of the Exchequer, cheerfully tried to change the ground of
+debate.
+
+"What would you do, Mr. Ducksmith, if you were King of England?"
+
+"I should try to rule the realm like a Christian statesman," replied Mr.
+Ducksmith.
+
+"I should have a devil of a time!" said Aristide.
+
+"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Ducksmith.
+
+"I should have a--ah, I see--_pardon_. I should----" He looked from
+one paralyzing face to the other, and threw out his arms. "_Parbleu!_"
+said he, "I should decapitate your Mrs. Grundy, and make it compulsory
+for bishops to dance once a week in Trafalgar Square. _Tiens!_ I would
+have it a capital offence for any English cook to prepare hashed
+mutton without a license, and I would banish all the bakers of the
+kingdom to Siberia--ah! your English bread, which you have to eat
+stale so as to avoid a horrible death!--and I would open two hundred
+thousand _cafes_--_mon Dieu!_ how thirsty I have been there!--and I
+would make every English work-girl do her hair properly, and I would
+ordain that everybody should laugh three times a day, under pain of
+imprisonment for life."
+
+"I am afraid, Mr. Pujol," remarked Mr. Ducksmith, seriously, "you would
+not be acting as a constitutional monarch. There is such a thing as the
+British Constitution, which foreigners are bound to admire, even though
+they may not understand."
+
+"To be a king must be a great responsibility," said Mrs. Ducksmith.
+
+"Madame," said Aristide, "you have uttered a profound truth." And to
+himself he murmured, though he should not have done so, "_Nom de Dieu!
+Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"
+
+After lunch they drove to Versailles, which they inspected in the same
+apathetic fashion; then they returned to the hotel, where they
+established themselves for the rest of the day in the airless salon, Mr.
+Ducksmith reading English newspapers and his wife knitting a grey
+woollen sock.
+
+"_Mon vieux!_" said Aristide to Bocardon, "they are people of a
+nightmare. They are automata endowed with the faculty of digestion. _Ce
+sont des gens invraisemblables._"
+
+Paris providing them, apparently, with no entertainment, they started,
+after a couple of days, _Aristide duce et auspice Pujol_, on their
+railway tour through France, to Aristide a pilgrimage of unimaginable
+depression. They began with Chartres, continued with the Chateaux of the
+Loire, and began to work their way south. Nothing that Aristide could do
+roused them from their apathy. They were exasperatingly docile, made few
+complaints, got up, entrained, detrained, fed, excursioned, slept, just
+as they were bidden. But they looked at nothing, enjoyed nothing (save
+perhaps English newspapers and knitting), and uttered nothing by way of
+criticism or appreciation when Aristide attempted to review the wonders
+through which they had passed. They did not care to know the history,
+authentic or Pujolic, of any place they visited; they were impressed by
+no scene of grandeur, no corner of exquisite beauty. To go on and on, in
+a dull, non-sentient way, so long as they were spared all forethought,
+all trouble, all afterthought, seemed to be their ideal of travel.
+Sometimes Aristide, after a fruitless effort to capture their interest,
+would hold his head, wondering whether he or the Ducksmith couple were
+insane. It was a dragon-fly personally conducting two moles through a
+rose-garden.
+
+Once only, during the early part of their journey, did a gleam of
+joyousness pierce the dull glaze of Mr. Ducksmith's eyes. He had
+procured from the bookstall of a station a pile of English newspapers,
+and was reading them in the train, while his wife knitted the
+interminable sock. Suddenly he folded a _Daily Telegraph_, and handed
+it over to Aristide so that he should see nothing but a half-page
+advertisement. The great capitals leaped to Aristide's eyes:--
+
+                 "DUCKSMITH'S DELICATE JAMS."
+
+"I am _the_ Ducksmith," said he. "I started and built up the business.
+When I found that I could retire, I turned it into a limited liability
+company, and now I am free and rich and able to enjoy the advantages of
+foreign travel."
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith started, sighed, and dropped a stitch.
+
+"Did you also make pickles?" asked Aristide.
+
+"I did manufacture pickles, but I made my name in jam. In the trade you
+will find it an honoured one."
+
+"It is that in every nursery in Europe," Aristide declared, with polite
+hyperbole.
+
+"I have done my best to deserve my reputation," said Mr. Ducksmith, as
+impervious to flattery as to impressions of beauty.
+
+"_Pecaire!_" said Aristide to himself, "how can I galvanize these
+corpses?"
+
+As the soulless days went by this problem grew to be Aristide's main
+solicitude. He felt strangled, choked, borne down by an intolerable
+weight. What could he do to stir their vitality? Should he fire off
+pistols behind them, just to see them jump? But would they jump? Would
+not Mr. Ducksmith merely turn his rabbit-eyes, set in their bloodhound
+sockets, vacantly on him, and assume that the detonations were part of
+the tour's programme? Could he not fill him up with conflicting
+alcohols, and see what inebriety would do for him? But Mr. Ducksmith
+declined insidious potations. He drank only at meal-times, and
+sparingly. Aristide prayed that some Thais might come along, cast her
+spell upon him, and induce him to wink. He himself was powerless. His
+raciest stories fell on dull ears; none of his jokes called forth a
+smile. At last, having taken them to nearly all the historic chateaux of
+Touraine, without eliciting one cry of admiration, he gave Mr. Ducksmith
+up in despair and devoted his attention to the lady.
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith parted her smooth black hair in the middle and fastened
+it in a knob at the back of her head. Her clothes were good and new, but
+some desolate dressmaker had contrived to invest them with an air of
+hopeless dowdiness. At her bosom she wore a great brooch, containing
+intertwined locks of a grandfather and grandmother long since defunct.
+Her mind was as drearily equipped as her person. She had a vague idea
+that they were travelling in France; but if Aristide had told her that
+it was Japan she would have meekly accepted the information. She had no
+opinions. Still she was a woman, and Aristide, firm in his conviction
+that when it comes to love-making all women are the same, proceeded
+forthwith to make love to her.
+
+"Madame," said he, one morning--she was knitting in the vestibule of the
+Hotel du Faisan at Tours, Mr. Ducksmith being engaged, as usual, in the
+salon with his newspapers--"how much more charming that beautiful grey
+dress would be if it had a spot of colour."
+
+His audacious hand placed a deep crimson rose against her corsage, and
+he stood away at arm's length, his head on one side, judging the effect.
+
+"Magnificent! If madame would only do me the honour to wear it."
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith took the flower hesitatingly.
+
+"I'm afraid my husband does not like colour," she said.
+
+"He must be taught," cried Aristide. "You must teach him. I must teach
+him. Let us begin at once. Here is a pin."
+
+He held the pin delicately between finger and thumb, and controlled her
+with his roguish eyes. She took the pin and fixed the rose to her dress.
+
+"I don't know what Mr. Ducksmith will say."
+
+"What he ought to say, madame, is 'Bountiful Providence, I thank Thee
+for giving me such a beautiful wife.'"
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith blushed and, to conceal her face, bent it over her
+resumed knitting. She made woman's time-honoured response.
+
+"I don't think you ought to say such things, Mr. Pujol."
+
+"Ah, madame," said he, lowering his voice; "I have tried not to; but,
+_que voulez-vous_, it was stronger than I. When I see you going about
+like a little grey mouse"--the lady weighed at least twelve stone--"you,
+who ought to be ravishing the eyes of mankind, I feel indignation
+here"--he thumped his chest; "my Provencal heart is stirred. It is
+enough to make one weep."
+
+"I don't quite understand you, Mr. Pujol," she said, dropping stitches
+recklessly.
+
+"Ah, madame," he whispered--and the rascal's whisper on such occasions
+could be very seductive--"that I will never believe."
+
+"I am too old to dress myself up in fine clothes," she murmured.
+
+"That's an illusion," said he, with a wide-flung gesture, "that will
+vanish at the first experiment."
+
+Mr. Ducksmith emerged from the salon, _Daily Telegraph_ in hand. Mrs.
+Ducksmith shot a timid glance at him and the knitting needles clicked
+together nervously. But the vacant eyes of the heavy man seemed no more
+to note the rose on her bosom than they noted any point of beauty in
+landscape or building.
+
+Aristide went away chuckling, highly diverted by the success of his
+first effort. He had touched some hidden springs of feeling. Whatever
+might happen, at any rate, for the remainder of the tour he would not
+have to spend his emotional force in vain attempts to knock sparks out
+of a jelly-fish. He noticed with delight that at dinner that evening
+Mrs. Ducksmith, still wearing the rose, had modified the rigid sweep
+of her hair from the mid-parting. It gave just a wavy hint of
+coquetry. He made her a little bow and whispered, "Charming!"
+Whereupon she coloured and dropped her eyes. And during the meal,
+while Mr. Ducksmith discoursed on bounty-fed sugar, his wife and
+Aristide exchanged, across the table, the glances of conspirators.
+After dinner he approached her.
+
+"Madame, may I have the privilege of showing you the moon of Touraine?"
+
+She laid down her knitting. "Bartholomew, will you come out?"
+
+He looked at her over his glasses and shook his head.
+
+"What is the good of looking at moonshine? The moon itself I have
+already seen."
+
+So Aristide and Mrs. Ducksmith sat by themselves outside the hotel, and
+he expounded to her the beauty of moonlight and its intoxicating effect
+on folks in love.
+
+"Wouldn't you like," said he, "to be lying on that white burnished cloud
+with your beloved kissing your feet?"
+
+"What odd things you think of."
+
+"But wouldn't you?" he insinuated.
+
+Her bosom heaved and swelled on a sigh. She watched the strip of silver
+for a while and then murmured a wistful "Yes."
+
+"I can tell you of many odd things," said Aristide. "I can tell you how
+flowers sing and what colour there is in the notes of birds. And how a
+cornfield laughs, and how the face of a woman who loves can outdazzle
+the sun. _Chere madame_," he went on, after a pause, touching her little
+plump hand, "you have been hungering for beauty and thirsting for
+sympathy all your life. Isn't that so?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"You have always been misunderstood."
+
+A tear fell. Our rascal saw the glistening drop with peculiar
+satisfaction. Poor Mrs. Ducksmith! It was a child's game. _Enfin_,
+what woman could resist him? He had, however, one transitory qualm of
+conscience, for, with all his vagaries, Aristide was a kindly and
+honest man. Was it right to disturb those placid depths? Was it right
+to fill this woman with romantic aspirations that could never be
+gratified? He himself had not the slightest intention of playing
+Lothario and of wrecking the peace of the Ducksmith household. The
+realization of the saint-like purity of his aims reassured him. When
+he wanted to make love to a woman, _pour tout de bon_, it would not be
+to Mrs. Ducksmith.
+
+"Bah!" said he to himself. "I am doing a noble and disinterested act. I
+am restoring sight to the blind. I am giving life to one in a state of
+suspended animation. _Tron de l'Air!_ I am playing the part of a
+soul-reviver! And, _parbleu!_ it isn't Jean or Jacques that can do that.
+It takes an Aristide Pujol!"
+
+So, having persuaded himself, in his Southern way, that he was executing
+an almost divine mission, he continued, with a zest now sharpened by an
+approving conscience, to revive Mrs. Ducksmith's soul.
+
+The poor lady, who had suffered the blighting influence of Mr. Ducksmith
+for twenty years with never a ray of counteracting warmth from the
+outside, expanded like a flower to the sun under the soul-reviving
+process. Day by day she exhibited some fresh timid coquetry in dress and
+manner. Gradually she began to respond to Aristide's suggestions of
+beauty in natural scenery and exquisite building. On the ramparts of
+Angouleme, daintiest of towns in France, she gazed at the smiling
+valleys of the Charente and the Son stretching away below, and of her
+own accord touched his arm lightly and said: "How beautiful!" She
+appealed to her husband.
+
+"Umph!" said he.
+
+Once more (it had become a habit) she exchanged glances with Aristide.
+He drew her a little farther along, under pretext of pointing out the
+dreamy sweep of the Charente.
+
+"If he appreciates nothing at all, why on earth does he travel?"
+
+Her eyelids fluttered upwards for a fraction of a second.
+
+"It's his mania," she said. "He can never rest at home. He must always
+be going on--on."
+
+"How can you endure it?" he asked.
+
+She sighed. "It is better now that you can teach me how to look at
+things."
+
+"Good!" thought Aristide. "When I leave them she can teach him to look
+at things and revive his soul. Truly I deserve a halo."
+
+As Mr. Ducksmith appeared to be entirely unperceptive of his wife's
+spiritual expansion, Aristide grew bolder in his apostolate. He
+complimented Mrs. Ducksmith to his face. He presented her daily with
+flowers. He scarcely waited for the heavy man's back to be turned to
+make love to her. If she did not believe that she was the most
+beautiful, the most ravishing, the most delicate-souled woman in the
+world, it was through no fault of Aristide. Mr. Ducksmith went his
+pompous, unseeing way. At every stopping-place stacks of English
+daily papers awaited him. Sometimes, while Aristide was showing them
+the sights of a town--to which, by the way, he insisted on being
+conducted--he would extract a newspaper from his pocket and read with
+dull and dogged stupidity. Once Aristide caught him reading the
+advertisements for cooks and housemaids. In these circumstances Mrs.
+Ducksmith spiritually expanded at an alarming rate; and,
+correspondingly, dwindled the progress of Mr. Ducksmith's sock.
+
+They arrived at Perigueux, in Perigord, land of truffles, one morning,
+in time for lunch. Towards the end of the meal the _maitre d'hotel_
+helped them to great slabs of _pate de foie gras_, made in the
+house--most of the hotel-keepers in Perigord make _pate de foie gras_,
+both for home consumption and for exportation--and waited expectant of
+their appreciation. He was not disappointed. Mr. Ducksmith, after a
+hesitating glance at the first mouthful, swallowed it, greedily devoured
+his slab, and, after pointing to his empty plate, said, solemnly:--
+
+"_Plou._"
+
+Like Oliver, he asked for more.
+
+"_Tiens!_" thought Aristide, astounded. "Is he, too, developing a soul?"
+
+But, alas! there were no signs of it when they went their dreary round
+of the town in the usual ramshackle open cab. The cathedral of
+Saint-Front, extolled by Aristide and restored by Abadie--a terrible
+fellow who has capped with tops of pepper-castors every pre-Gothic
+building in France--gave him no thrill; nor did the picturesque,
+tumble-down ancient buildings on the banks of the Dordogne, nor the
+delicate Renaissance facades in the cool, narrow Rue du Lys.
+
+"We will now go back to the hotel," said Mr. Ducksmith.
+
+"But have we seen it all?" asked his wife.
+
+"By no means," said Aristide.
+
+"We will go back to the hotel," repeated her husband, in his
+expressionless tones. "I have seen enough of Perigueux."
+
+This was final. They drove back to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith, without a
+word, went straight into the salon, leaving Aristide and his wife
+standing in the vestibule.
+
+"And you, madame," said Aristide; "are you going to sacrifice the glory
+of God's sunshine to the manufacture of woollen socks?"
+
+She smiled--she had caught the trick at last--and said, in happy
+submission: "What would you have me do?"
+
+With one hand he clasped her arm; with the other, in a superb gesture,
+he indicated the sunlit world outside.
+
+"Let us drain together," cried he, "the loveliness of Perigueux to its
+dregs!"
+
+Greatly daring, she followed him. It was a rapturous escapade--the
+first adventure of her life. She turned her comely face to him and he
+saw smiles round her lips and laughter in her eyes. Aristide, worker
+of miracles, strutted by her side choke-full of vanity. They wandered
+through the picturesque streets of the old town with the gaiety of
+truant children, peeping through iron gateways into old courtyards,
+venturing their heads into the murk of black stairways, talking (on
+the part of Aristide) with mothers who nursed chuckling babes on their
+doorsteps, crossing the thresholds, hitherto taboo, of churches, and
+meeting the mystery of coloured glass and shadows and the heavy smell
+of incense.
+
+Her hand was on his arm when they entered the flagged courtyard of an
+ancient palace, a stately medley of the centuries, with wrought
+ironwork in the balconies, tourelles, oriels, exquisite Renaissance
+ornaments on architraves, and a great central Gothic doorway, with
+great window-openings above, through which was visible the stone
+staircase of honour leading to the upper floors. In a corner stood a
+mediaeval well, the sides curiously carved. One side of the courtyard
+blazed in sunshine, the other lay cool and grey in shadow. Not a human
+form or voice troubled the serenity of the spot. On a stone bench
+against the shady wall Aristide and Mrs. Ducksmith sat down to rest.
+
+"_Voila!_" said Aristide. "Here one can suck in all the past like an
+omelette. They had the feeling for beauty, those old fellows."
+
+"I have wasted twenty years of my life," said Mrs. Ducksmith, with a
+sigh. "Why didn't I meet someone like you when I was young? Ah, you
+don't know what my life has been, Mr. Pujol."
+
+"Why not Aristide when we are alone? Why not, Henriette?"
+
+He too had the sense of adventure, and his eyes were more than usually
+compelling and his voice more seductive. For some reason or other,
+undivined by Aristide--over-excitement of nerves, perhaps--she burst
+into tears.
+
+"_Henriette! Henriette, ne pleurez pas._"
+
+His arm crept round her--he knew not how; her head sank on his shoulder,
+she knew not why--faithlessness to her lord was as far from her thoughts
+as murder or arson; but for one poor little moment in a lifetime it is
+good to weep on someone's shoulder and to have someone's sympathetic arm
+around one's waist.
+
+"_Pauvre petite femme!_ And is it love she is pining for?"
+
+She sobbed; he lifted her chin with his free hand--and what less could
+mortal apostle do?--he kissed her on her wet cheek.
+
+A bellow like that of an angry bull caused them to start asunder. They
+looked up, and there was Mr. Ducksmith within a few yards of them, his
+face aflame, his rabbit's eyes on fire with rage. He advanced, shook his
+fists in their faces.
+
+"I've caught you! At last, after twenty years, I've caught you!"
+
+"Monsieur," cried Aristide, starting up, "allow me to explain."
+
+He swept Aristide aside like an intercepting willow-branch, and poured
+forth a torrent of furious speech upon his wife.
+
+"I have hated you for twenty years. Day by day I have hated you more.
+I've watched you, watched you, watched you! But, you sly jade, you've
+been too clever for me till now. Yes; I followed you from the hotel. I
+dogged you. I foresaw what would happen. Now the end has come. I've
+hated you for twenty years--ever since you first betrayed me----"
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith, who had sat with overwhelmed head in her hands, started
+bolt upright, and looked at him like one thunderstruck.
+
+"I betrayed you?" she gasped, in bewilderment. "My God! When? How? What
+do you mean?"
+
+He laughed--for the first time since Aristide had known him--but it was
+a ghastly laugh, that made the jowls of his cheeks spread horribly to
+his ears; and again he flooded the calm, stately courtyard with the
+raging violence of words. The veneer of easy life fell from him. He
+became the low-born, petty tradesman, using the language of the hands
+of his jam factory. No, he had never told her. He had awaited his
+chance. Now he had found it. He called her names....
+
+ [Illustration: "I'VE CAUGHT YOU! AT LAST, AFTER TWENTY YEARS, I'VE
+                CAUGHT YOU!"]
+
+Aristide interposed, his Southern being athrob with the insults heaped
+upon the woman.
+
+"Say that again, monsieur," he shouted, "and I will take you up in my
+arms like a sheep and throw you down that well."
+
+The two men glared at one another, Aristide standing bent, with crooked
+fingers, ready to spring at the other's throat. The woman threw herself
+between them.
+
+"For Heaven's sake," she cried, "listen to me! I have done no wrong. I
+have done no wrong now--I never did you wrong, so help me God!"
+
+Mr. Ducksmith laughed again, and his laugh re-echoed round the quiet
+walls and up the vast staircase of honour.
+
+"You'd be a fool not to say it. But now I've done with you. Here, you,
+sir. Take her away--do what you like with her; I'll divorce her. I'll
+give you a thousand pounds never to see her again."
+
+"_Goujat! Triple goujat!_" cried Aristide, more incensed than ever at
+this final insult.
+
+Mrs. Ducksmith, deadly white, swayed sideways, and Aristide caught her
+in his arms and dragged her to the stone bench. The fat, heavy man
+looked at them for a second, laughed again, and sped through the
+_porte-cochere_. Mrs. Ducksmith quickly recovered from her fainting
+attack, and gently pushed the solicitous Aristide away.
+
+"Merciful Heaven!" she murmured. "What is to become of me?"
+
+The last person to answer the question was Aristide. For once in his
+adventurous life resource failed him. He stared at the woman for whom he
+cared not the snap of a finger, and who, he knew, cared not the snap of
+a finger for him, aghast at the havoc he had wrought. If he had set out
+to arouse emotion in these two sluggish breasts he had done so with a
+vengeance. He had thought he was amusing himself with a toy cannon, and
+he had fired a charge of dynamite.
+
+He questioned her almost stupidly--for a man in the comic mask does not
+readily attune himself to tragedy. She answered with the desolate
+frankness of a lost soul. And then the whole meaning--or the lack of
+meaning--of their inanimate lives was revealed to him. Absolute
+estrangement had followed the birth of their child nearly twenty years
+ago. The child had died after a few weeks. Since then he saw--and the
+generous blood of his heart froze as the vision came to him--that the
+vulgar, half-sentient, rabbit-eyed bloodhound of a man had nursed an
+unexpressed, dull, implacable resentment against the woman. It did not
+matter that the man's suspicion was vain. To Aristide the woman's blank
+amazement at the preposterous charge was proof enough; to the man the
+thing was real. For nearly twenty years the man had suffered the cancer
+to eat away his vitals, and he had watched and watched his blameless
+wife, until now, at last, he had caught her in this folly. No wonder he
+could not rest at home; no wonder he was driven, Io-wise, on and on,
+although he hated travel and all its discomforts, knew no word of a
+foreign language, knew no scrap of history, had no sense of beauty, was
+utterly ignorant, as every single one of our expensively State-educated
+English lower classes is, of everything that matters on God's earth; no
+wonder that, in the unfamiliarity of foreign lands, feeling as helpless
+as a ballet-dancer in a cavalry charge, he looked to Cook, or Lunn, or
+the Agence Pujol to carry him through his uninspired pilgrimage. For
+twenty years he had shown no sign of joy or sorrow or anger, scarcely
+even of pleasure or annoyance. A tortoise could not have been more
+unemotional. The unsuspected volcano had slumbered. To-day came
+disastrous eruption. And what was a mere laughing, crying child of
+a man like Aristide Pujol in front of a Ducksmith volcano?
+
+"What is to become of me?" wailed Mrs. Ducksmith again.
+
+"_Ma foi!_" said Aristide, with a shrug of his shoulders. "What's going
+to become of anyone? Who can foretell what will happen in a minute's
+time? _Tiens!_" he added, kindly laying his hand on the sobbing woman's
+shoulder. "Be comforted, my poor Henriette. Just as nothing in this
+world is as good as we hope, so nothing is as bad as we fear. _Voyons!_
+All is not lost yet. We must return to the hotel."
+
+She weepingly acquiesced. They walked through the quiet streets like
+children whose truancy had been discovered and who were creeping back to
+condign punishment at school. When they reached the hotel, Mrs.
+Ducksmith went straight up to the woman's haven, her bedroom.
+
+Aristide tugged at his Vandyke beard in dire perplexity. The situation
+was too pregnant with tragedy for him to run away and leave the pair
+to deal with it as best they could. But what was he to do? He sat down
+in the vestibule and tried to think. The landlord, an unstoppable
+gramophone of garrulity, entering by the street-door and bearing down
+upon him, put him to flight. He, too, sought his bedroom, a cool
+apartment with a balcony outside the French window. On this balcony,
+which stretched along the whole range of first-floor bedrooms, he
+stood for a while, pondering deeply. Then, in an absent way, he
+overstepped the limit of his own room-frontage. A queer sound startled
+him. He paused, glanced through the open window, and there he saw a
+sight which for the moment paralyzed him.
+
+ [Illustration: THERE HE SAW A SIGHT WHICH FOR THE MOMENT PARALYZED HIM]
+
+Recovering command of his muscles, he tiptoed his way back. He
+remembered now that the three rooms adjoined. Next to his was Mr.
+Ducksmith's, and then came Mrs. Ducksmith's. It was Mr. Ducksmith whom
+he had seen. Suddenly his dark face became luminous with laughter, his
+eyes glowed, he threw his hat in the air and danced with glee about the
+room. Having thus worked off the first intoxication of his idea, he
+flung his few articles of attire and toilet necessaries into his bag,
+strapped it, and darted, in his dragon-fly way, into the corridor and
+tapped softly at Mrs. Ducksmith's door. She opened it. He put his finger
+to his lips.
+
+"Madame," he whispered, bringing to bear on her all the mocking
+magnetism of his eyes, "if you value your happiness you will do exactly
+what I tell you. You will obey me implicitly. You must not ask
+questions. Pack your trunks at once. In ten minutes' time the porter
+will come for them."
+
+She looked at him with a scared face. "But what am I going to do?"
+
+"You are going to revenge yourself on your husband."
+
+"But I don't want to," she replied, piteously.
+
+"I do," said he. "Begin, _chere madame_. Every moment is precious."
+
+In a state of stupefied terror the poor woman obeyed him. He saw her
+start seriously on her task and then went downstairs, where he held a
+violent and gesticulatory conversation with the landlord and with a man
+in a green baize apron summoned from some dim lair of the hotel. After
+that he lit a cigarette and smoked feverishly, walking up and down the
+pavement. In ten minutes' time his luggage with that of Mrs. Ducksmith
+was placed upon the cab. Mrs. Ducksmith appeared trembling and
+tear-stained in the vestibule.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The man in the green baize apron knocked at Mr. Ducksmith's door and
+entered the room.
+
+"I have come for the baggage of monsieur," said he.
+
+"Baggage? What baggage?" asked Mr. Ducksmith, sitting up.
+
+"I have descended the baggage of Monsieur Pujol," said the porter in his
+stumbling English, "and of madame, and put them in a cab, and I
+naturally thought monsieur was going away, too."
+
+"Going away!" He rubbed his eyes, glared at the porter, and dashed into
+his wife's room. It was empty. He dashed into Aristide's room. It was
+empty, too. Shrieking inarticulate anathema, he rushed downstairs, the
+man in the green baize apron following at his heels.
+
+Not a soul was in the vestibule. No cab was at the door. Mr. Ducksmith
+turned upon his stupefied satellite.
+
+"Where are they?"
+
+"They must have gone already. I filled the cab. Perhaps Monsieur Pujol
+and madame have gone before to make arrangements."
+
+"Where have they gone to?"
+
+"In Perigueux there is nowhere to go to with baggage but the railway
+station."
+
+A decrepit vehicle with a gaudy linen canopy hove in sight. Mr.
+Ducksmith hailed it as the last victims of the Flood must have hailed
+the Ark. He sprang into it and drove to the station.
+
+There, in the _salle d'attente_, he found Aristide mounting guard over
+his wife's luggage. He hurled his immense bulk at his betrayer.
+
+"You blackguard! Where is my wife?"
+
+"Monsieur," said Aristide, puffing a cigarette, sublimely impudent and
+debonair, "I decline to answer any questions. Your wife is no longer
+your wife. You offered me a thousand pounds to take her away. I am
+taking her away. I did not deign to disturb you for such a trifle as a
+thousand pounds, but, since you are here----"
+
+He smiled engagingly and held out his curved palm. Mr. Ducksmith foamed
+at the corners of the small mouth that disappeared into the bloodhound
+jowls.
+
+"My wife!" he shouted. "If you don't want me to throw you down and
+trample on you."
+
+A band of loungers, railway officials, peasants, and other travellers
+awaiting their trains, gathered round. As the altercation was conducted
+in English, which they did not understand, they could only hope for the
+commencement of physical hostilities.
+
+"My dear sir," said Aristide, "I do not understand you. For twenty years
+you hold an innocent and virtuous woman under an infamous suspicion. She
+meets a sympathetic soul, and you come across her pouring into his ear
+the love and despair of a lifetime. You have more suspicion. You tell me
+you will give me a thousand pounds to go away with her. I take you at
+your word. And now you want to stamp on me. _Ma foi!_ it is not
+reasonable."
+
+Mr. Ducksmith seized him by the lapels of his coat. A gasp of
+expectation went round the crowd. But Aristide recognized an agonized
+appeal in the eyes now bloodshot.
+
+"My wife!" he said hoarsely. "I want my wife. I can't live without her.
+Give her back to me. Where is she?"
+
+"You had better search the station," said Aristide.
+
+The heavy man unconsciously shook him in his powerful grasp, as a child
+might shake a doll.
+
+"Give her to me! Give her to me, I say! She won't regret it."
+
+ [Illustration: MR. DUCKSMITH SEIZED HIM BY THE LAPELS OF HIS COAT]
+
+"You swear that?" asked Aristide, with lightning quickness.
+
+"I swear it, by God! Where is she?"
+
+Aristide disengaged himself, waved his hand airily towards Perigueux,
+and smiled blandly.
+
+"In the salon of the hotel, waiting for you to prostrate yourself on
+your knees before her."
+
+Mr. Ducksmith gripped him by the arm.
+
+"Come back with me. If you're lying I'll kill you."
+
+"The luggage?" queried Aristide.
+
+"Confound the luggage!" said Mr. Ducksmith, and dragged him out of the
+station.
+
+A cab brought them quickly to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith bolted like an
+obese rabbit into the salon. A few moments afterwards Aristide,
+entering, found them locked in each other's arms.
+
+They started alone for England that night, and Aristide returned to the
+directorship of the Agence Pujol. But he took upon himself enormous
+credit for having worked a miracle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"One thing I can't understand," said I, after he had told me the story,
+"is what put this sham elopement into your crazy head. What did you see
+when you looked into Mr. Ducksmith's bedroom?"
+
+"Ah, _mon vieux_, I did not tell you. If I had told you, you would not
+have been surprised at what I did. I saw a sight that would have melted
+the heart of a stone. I saw Ducksmith wallowing on his bed and sobbing
+as if his heart would break. It filled my soul with pity. I said: 'If
+that mountain of insensibility can weep and sob in such agony, it is
+because he loves--and it is I, Aristide, who have reawakened that
+love.'"
+
+"Then," said I, "why on earth didn't you go and fetch Mrs. Ducksmith and
+leave them together?"
+
+He started from his chair and threw up both hands.
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_" cried he. "You English! You are a charming people, but you
+have no romance. You have no dramatic sense. I will help myself to a
+whisky and soda."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF THE FICKLE GODDESS
+
+
+It may be remembered that Aristide Pujol had aged parents, browned and
+wrinkled children of the soil, who had passed all their days in the
+desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the
+salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same
+unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus
+butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide
+soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the
+mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed
+without Aristide struggling somehow south to visit _ses vieux_, as he
+affectionately called them, and whenever Fortune shed a few smiles on
+him, one or two at least were sure to find their way to Aigues-Mortes in
+the shape of, say, a silver-mounted umbrella for his father or a deuce
+of a Paris hat for the old lady's Sunday wear. Monsieur and Madame Pujol
+had a sacred museum of these unused objects--the pride of their lives.
+Aristide was entirely incomprehensible, but he was a good son. A bad son
+in France is rare.
+
+But once Aristide nearly killed his old people outright. An envelope
+from him contained two large caressive slips of bluish paper, which when
+scrutinized with starting eyes turned out to be two one-thousand-franc
+notes. Mon Dieu! What had happened? Had Aristide been robbing the Bank
+of France? They stood paralyzed and only recovered motive force when a
+neighbour suggested their reading the accompanying letter. It did not
+explain things very clearly. He was in Aix-les-Bains, a place which they
+had never heard of, making his fortune. He was staying at the Hotel de
+l'Europe, where Queen Victoria (they had heard of Queen Victoria) had
+been contented to reside, he was a glittering figure in a splendid
+beau-monde, and if _ses vieux_ would buy a few cakes and a bottle of vin
+cachete with the enclosed trifle, to celebrate his prosperity, he would
+deem it the privilege of a devoted son. But Pujol senior, though
+wondering where the devil he had fished all that money from, did not
+waste it in profligate revelry. He took the eighty pounds to the bank
+and exchanged the perishable paper for one hundred solid golden louis
+which he carried home in a bag curiously bulging beneath his woollen
+jersey and secreted it with the savings of his long life in the mattress
+of the conjugal bed.
+
+"If only he hasn't stolen it," sighed the mother.
+
+"What does it matter, since it is sewn up there all secure?" said the
+old man. "No one can find it."
+
+The Provencal peasant is as hard-headed and practical as a Scottish
+miner, and if left alone by the fairies would produce no imaginative
+effect whatever upon his generation; but in his progeniture he is more
+preposterously afflicted with changelings than any of his fellows the
+world over, which, though ethnologically an entirely new proposition,
+accounts for a singular number of things and _inter alia_ for my
+dragon-fly friend, Aristide Pujol.
+
+Now, Aristide, be it said at the outset, had not stolen the money. It
+(and a vast amount more) had been honestly come by. He did not lie when
+he said that he was staying at the Hotel de l'Europe, Aix-les-Bains,
+honoured by the late Queen Victoria (pedantic accuracy requires the
+correction that the august lady rented the annexe, the Villa Victoria,
+on the other side of the shady way--but no matter--an hotel and its
+annexe are the same thing) nor did he lie in boasting of his prodigious
+prosperity. Aristide was in clover. For the first, and up to now as I
+write, the only, time in his life he realized the gorgeous visions of
+pallid years. He was leading the existence of the amazing rich. He could
+drink champagne--not your miserable _tisane_ at five francs a quart--but
+real champagne, with year of vintage and _gout american_ or _gout
+anglais_ marked on label, fabulously priced; he could dine lavishly at
+the Casino restaurants or at Nikola's, prince of restaurateurs, among
+the opulent and the fair; he could clothe himself in attractive raiment;
+he could step into a fiacre and bid the man drive and not care whither
+he went or what he paid; he could also distribute five-franc pieces to
+lame beggars. He scattered his money abroad with both hands, according
+to his expansive temperament; and why not, when he was drawing wealth
+out of an inexhaustible fount? The process was so simple, so sure. All
+you had to do was to believe in the cards on which you staked your
+money. If you knew you were going to win, you won. Nothing could be
+easier.
+
+He had drifted into Aix-les-Bains from Geneva on the lamentable
+determination of a commission agency in the matter of some patent fuel,
+with a couple of louis in his pocket forlornly jingling the tale of his
+entire fortune. As this was before the days when you had to exhibit
+certificates of baptism, marriage, sanity and bank-balance before being
+allowed to enter the baccarat rooms, Aristide paid his two francs and
+made a bee line for the tables. I am afraid Aristide was a gambler. He
+was never so happy as when taking chances; his whole life was a gamble,
+with Providence holding the bank. Before the night was over he had
+converted his two louis into fifty. The next day they became five
+hundred. By the end of a week his garments were wadded with bank notes
+whose value amounted to a sum so stupendous as to be beyond need of
+computation. He was a celebrity in the place and people nudged each
+other as he passed by. And Aristide passed by with a swagger, his head
+high and the end of his pointed beard sticking joyously up in the air.
+
+We see him one August morning, in the plentitude of his success,
+lounging in a wicker chair on the shady lawn of the Hotel de l'Europe.
+He wore white buckskin shoes--I begin with these as they were the first
+point of his person to attract the notice of the onlooker--lilac silk
+socks, a white flannel suit with a zig-zag black stripe, a violet tie
+secured by a sapphire and diamond pin, and a rakish panama hat. On his
+knees lay the _Matin_; the fingers of his left hand held a fragrant
+corona; his right hand was uplifted in a gesture, for he was talking. He
+was talking to a couple of ladies who sat near by, one a mild-looking
+Englishwoman of fifty, dressed in black, the other, her daughter, a
+beautiful girl of twenty-four. That Aristide should fly to feminine
+charms, like moth to candle, was a law of his being; that he should lie,
+with shriveled wings, at Miss Errington's feet was the obvious result.
+Her charms were of the winsome kind to which he was most susceptible.
+She had an oval face, a little mouth like crumpled rose petals (so
+Aristide himself described it), a complexion the mingling of ivory and
+peach blossom (Aristide again), a straight little nose, appealing eyes
+of the deepest blue veiled by sweeping lashes and fascinating fluffiness
+of dark hair over a pure brow. She had a graceful figure, and the
+slender foot below her white pique skirt was at once the envy and
+admiration of Aix-les-Bains.
+
+Aristide talked. The ladies listened, with obvious amusement. In the
+easy hotel way he had fallen into their acquaintance. As the man of
+wealth, the careless player who took five-hundred-louis banks at the
+table with the five-louis minimum, and cleared out the punt, he felt it
+necessary to explain himself. I am afraid he deviated from the narrow
+path of truth.
+
+"What perfect English you speak," Miss Errington remarked, when he had
+finished his harangue and had put the corona between his lips. Her voice
+was a soft contralto.
+
+"I have mixed much in English society, since I was a child," replied
+Aristide, in his grandest manner. "Fortune has made me know many of your
+county families and members of Parliament."
+
+Miss Errington laughed. "Our M. P.'s are rather a mixed lot, Monsieur
+Pujol."
+
+"To me an English Member of Parliament is a high-bred conservative. I
+do not recognize the others," said Aristide.
+
+"Unfortunately we have to recognize them," said the elder lady with a
+smile.
+
+"Not socially, madame. They exist as mechanical factors of the
+legislative machine; but that is all." He swelled as if the blood of the
+Montmorencys and the Colignys boiled in his veins. "We do not ask them
+into our drawing rooms. We do not allow them to marry our daughters. We
+only salute them with cold politeness when we pass them in the street."
+
+"It's astonishing," said Miss Errington, "how strongly the aristocratic
+principle exists in republican France. Now, there's our friend, the
+Comte de Lussigny, for instance----"
+
+A frown momentarily darkened the cloudless brow of Aristide Pujol. He
+did not like the Comte de Lussigny----
+
+"With Monsieur de Lussigny," he interposed, "it is a matter of
+prejudice, not of principle."
+
+"And with you?"
+
+"The reasoned philosophy of a lifetime, mademoiselle," answered
+Aristide. He turned to Mrs. Errington.
+
+"How long have you known Monsieur de Lussigny, madame?"
+
+She looked at her daughter. "It was in Monte Carlo the winter before
+last, wasn't it, Betty? Since then we have met him frequently in
+England and Paris. We came across him, just lately, at Trouville. I
+think he's charming, don't you?"
+
+"He's a great gambler," said Aristide.
+
+Betty Errington laughed again. "But so are you. So is mamma. So am I, in
+my poor little way."
+
+"We gamble for amusement," said Aristide loftily.
+
+"I'm sure I don't," cried Miss Betty, with merry eyes--and she looked
+adorable--"When I put my despised five-franc piece down on the table I
+want desperately to win, and when the horrid croupier rakes it up I want
+to hit him--Oh! I want to hit him hard."
+
+"And when you win?"
+
+"I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Miss Betty.
+
+Her mother smiled indulgently and exchanged a glance with Aristide.
+This pleased him; there was an agreeable little touch of intimacy in
+it. It confirmed friendly relations with the mother. What were his
+designs as regards the daughter he did not know. They were not evil,
+certainly. For all his southern blood, Latin traditions and
+devil-may-care upbringing, Aristide, though perhaps not reaching our
+divinely set and therefore unique English standard of morality, was a
+decent soul; further, partly through his pedagogic sojourn among them,
+and partly through his childish adoration of the frank, fair-cheeked,
+northern goddesses talking the quick, clear speech, who passed him by
+when he was a hunted little devil of a _chasseur_ in the Marseilles
+cafe, he had acquired a peculiarly imaginative reverence for English
+girls. The reverence, indeed, extended to English ladies generally.
+Owing to the queer circumstances of his life they were the only women
+of a class above his own, with whom he had associated on terms of
+equality. He had, then, no dishonorable designs as regards Miss Betty
+Errington. On the other hand, the thoughts of marriage had as yet not
+entered his head. You see, a Frenchman and an Englishman or an
+American, view marriage from entirely different angles. The
+Anglo-Saxon of honest instincts, attracted towards a pretty girl at
+once thinks of the possibilities of marriage; if he finds them
+infinitely remote, he makes romantic love to her in the solitude of
+his walks abroad or of his sleepless nights, and, in her presence, is
+as dumb and dismal as a freshly hooked trout. The equally honest Gaul
+does nothing of the kind. The attraction in itself is a stimulus to
+adventure. He makes love to her, just because it is the nature of a
+lusty son of Adam to make love to a pretty daughter of Eve. He lives
+in the present. The rest doesn't matter. He leaves it to chance. I am
+speaking, be it understood, not of deep passions--that is a different
+matter altogether--but of the more superficial sexual attractions
+which we, as a race, take so seriously and puritanically, often to our
+most disastrous undoing, and which the Latin light-heartedly regards
+as essential, but transient phenomena of human existence. Aristide
+made the most respectful love in the world to Betty Errington, because
+he could not help himself. "_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" he cried when from my
+Britannic point of view, I talked to him on the subject. "You English
+whom I try to understand and can never understand are so funny! It
+would have been insulting to Miss Betty Errington--_tiens!_--a purple
+hyacinth of spring--that was what she was--not to have made love to
+her. Love to a pretty woman is like a shower of rain to hyacinths. It
+passes, it goes. Another one comes. _Qu'importe?_ But the shower is
+necessary--Ah! _sacre gredin_, when will you comprehend?"
+
+All this to make as clear as an Englishman, in the confidence of a
+changeling child of Provence can hope to do, the attitude of Aristide
+Pujol towards the sweet and innocent Betty Errington with her mouth like
+crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and peach-blossom complexion, her soft
+contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald
+description, and as per what can, by imaginative effort, be pictured
+from the Pujolic hyperbole, by which I, the unimportant narrator of
+these chronicles, was dazzled and overwhelmed.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Betty.
+
+"Do you think of no one who brings you good fortune?" asked Aristide. He
+threw the _Matin_ on the grass, and, doubling himself up in his chair
+regarded her earnestly. "Last night you put five louis into my bank----"
+
+"And I won forty. I could have hugged you."
+
+"Why didn't you? Ah!" His arms spread wide and high. "What I have lost!"
+
+"Betty!" cried Mrs. Errington.
+
+"Alas, Madame," said Aristide, "that is the despair of our artificial
+civilization. It prohibits so much spontaneous expression of emotion."
+
+"You'll forgive me, Monsieur Pujol," said Mrs. Errington dryly, "but I
+think our artificial civilization has its advantages."
+
+"If you will forgive me, in your turn," said Aristide, "I see a doubtful
+one advancing."
+
+A man approached the group and with profuse gestures took off a straw
+hat which he thrust under his right arm, exposing an amazingly flat head
+on which the closely cropped hair stood brush-fashion upright. He had an
+insignificant pale face to which a specious individuality was given by a
+moustache with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a monocle with a
+tortoise shell rim. He was dressed (his valet had misjudged things--and
+valets like the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a fairly
+white flannel suit.
+
+"Madame--Mademoiselle." He shook hands with charming grace. "Monsieur."
+He bowed stiffly. Aristide doffed his Panama hat with adequate ceremony.
+"May I be permitted to join you?"
+
+"With pleasure, Monsieur de Lussigny," said Mrs. Errington.
+
+Monsieur de Lussigny brought up a chair and sat down.
+
+"What time did you get to bed, last night?" asked Betty Errington. She
+spoke excellently pure French, and so did her mother.
+
+"Soon after we parted, mademoiselle, quite early for me but late for
+you. And you look this morning as if you had gone to bed at sundown and
+got up at dawn."
+
+Miss Betty's glance responsive to the compliment filled Aristide with
+wrath. What right had the Comte de Lussigny, a fellow who consorted with
+Brazilian Rastaquoueres and perfumed Levantine nondescripts, to win such
+a glance from Betty Errington?
+
+"If Mademoiselle can look so fresh," said he, "in the artificial
+atmosphere of Aix, what is there of adorable that she must not resemble
+in the innocence of her Somersetshire home?"
+
+"You cannot imagine it, Monsieur," said the Count; "but I have had the
+privilege to see it."
+
+"I hope Monsieur Pujol will visit us also in our country home, when we
+get back," said Mrs. Errington with intent to pacificate. "It is modest,
+but it is old-world and has been in our family for hundreds of years."
+
+"Ah, these old English homes!" said Aristide.
+
+"Would you care to hear about it?"
+
+"I should," said he.
+
+He drew his chair courteously a foot or so nearer that of the mild lady;
+Monsieur de Lussigny took instant advantage of the move to establish
+himself close to Miss Betty. Aristide turned one ear politely to Mrs.
+Errington's discourse, the other ragingly and impotently to the
+whispered conversation between the detached pair.
+
+Presently a novel fell from the lady's lap. Aristide sprang to his feet
+and restored it. He remained standing. Mrs. Errington consulted a watch.
+It was nearing lunch time. She rose, too. Aristide took her a pace or
+two aside.
+
+"My dear Mrs. Errington," said he, in English. "I do not wish to be
+indiscreet--but you come from your quiet home in Somerset and your
+beautiful daughter is so young and inexperienced, and I am a man of the
+world who has mingled in all the society of Europe--may I warn you
+against admitting the Comte de Lussigny too far into your intimacy."
+
+She turned an anxious face. "Monsieur Pujol, is there anything against
+the Count?"
+
+Aristide executed the large and expressive shrug of the Southerner.
+
+"I play high at the tables for my amusement--I know the principal
+players, people of high standing. Among them Monsieur de Lussigny's
+reputation is not spotless."
+
+"You alarm me very much," said Mrs. Errington, troubled.
+
+"I only put you on your guard," said he.
+
+The others who had risen and followed, caught them up. At the entrance
+to the hotel the ladies left the men elaborately saluting. The latter,
+alone, looked at each other.
+
+"Monsieur."
+
+"Monsieur."
+
+Each man raised his hat, turned on his heel and went his way. Aristide
+betook himself to the cafe on the Place Carnot on the side of the square
+facing the white Etablissement des Bains, with a stern sense of having
+done his duty. It was monstrous that this English damask rose should
+fall a prey to so detestable a person as the Comte de Lussigny. He
+suspected him of disgraceful things. If only he had proof. Fortune, ever
+favoring him, stood at his elbow. She guided him straight to a table in
+the front row of the terrace where sat a black-haired, hard-featured
+though comely youth deep in thought, in front of an untouched glass of
+beer. At Aristide's approach he raised his head, smiled, nodded and
+said: "Good morning, sir. Will you join me?"
+
+Aristide graciously accepted the invitation and sat down. The young
+man was another hotel acquaintance, one Eugene Miller of Atlanta,
+Georgia, a curious compound of shrewdness and simplicity, to whom
+Aristide had taken a fancy. He was twenty-eight and ran a colossal
+boot-factory in partnership with another youth and had a consuming
+passion for stained-glass windows. From books he knew every square
+foot of old stained-glass in Europe. But he had crossed the Atlantic
+for the first time only six weeks before, and having indulged his
+craving immoderately, had rested for a span at Aix-les-Bains to
+recover from aesthetic indigestion. He had found these amenities
+agreeable to his ingenuous age. He had also, quite recently, come
+across the Comte de Lussigny. Hence the depth of thought in which
+Aristide discovered him. Now, the fact that North is North and South
+is South and that never these twain shall meet is a proposition all
+too little considered. One of these days when I can retire from the
+dull but exacting avocation of tea-broking in the City, I think I
+shall write a newspaper article on the subject. Anyhow, I hold
+the theory that the Northerners of all nations have a common
+characteristic and the Southerners of all nations have a common
+characteristic, and that it is this common characteristic in each
+case that makes North seek and understand North and South seek and
+understand South. I will not go further into the general proposition;
+but as a particular instance I will state that the American of the
+South and the Frenchman of the South found themselves in essential
+sympathy. Eugene Miller had the unfearing frankness of Aristide Pujol.
+
+"I used rather to look down upon Europe as a place where people knew
+nothing at all," said he. "We're sort of trained to think it's an
+extinct volcano, but it isn't. It's alive. My God! It's alive. It's Hell
+in the shape of a Limburger cheese. I wish the whole population of
+Atlanta, Georgia, would come over and just see. There's a lot to be
+learned. I thought I knew how to take care of myself, but this
+tortoise-shell-eyed Count taught me last night that I couldn't. He
+cleaned me out of twenty-five hundred dollars----"
+
+"How?" asked Aristide, sharply.
+
+"Ecarte."
+
+Aristide brought his hand down with a bang on the table and uttered
+anathemas in French and Provencal entirely unintelligible to Eugene
+Miller; but the youth knew by instinct that they were useful,
+soul-destroying curses and he felt comforted.
+
+"Ecarte! You played ecarte with Lussigny? But my dear young friend, do
+you know anything of ecarte?"
+
+"Of course," said Miller. "I used to play it as a child with my
+sisters."
+
+"Do you know the _jeux de regle_?"
+
+"The what?"
+
+"The formal laws of the game--the rules of discards----"
+
+"Never heard of them," said Eugene Miller.
+
+"But they are as absolute as the Code Napoleon," cried Aristide. "You
+can't play without knowing them. You might as well play chess without
+knowing the moves."
+
+"Can't help it," said the young man.
+
+"Well, don't play ecarte any more."
+
+"I must," said Miller.
+
+"_Comment?_"
+
+"I must. I've fixed it up to get my revenge this afternoon--in my
+sitting room at the hotel."
+
+"But it's imbecile!"
+
+The sweep of Aristide's arm produced prismatic chaos among a tray-full
+of drinks which the waiter was bringing to the family party at the next
+table. "It's imbecile," he cried, as soon as order was apologetically
+and pecuniarily restored. "You are a little mutton going to have its
+wool taken off."
+
+"I've fixed it up," said Miller. "I've never gone back on an engagement
+yet in my own country and I'm not going to begin this side."
+
+Aristide argued. He argued during the mechanical absorption of four
+glasses of _vermouth-cassis_--after which prodigious quantity of black
+currant syrup he rose and took the Gadarene youth to Nikola's where he
+continued the argument during dejeuner. Eugene Miller's sole concession
+was that Aristide should be present at the encounter and, backing his
+hand, should have the power (given by the rules of the French game) to
+guide his play. Aristide agreed and crammed his young friend with the
+_jeux de regle_ and _pate de foie gras_.
+
+The Count looked rather black when he found Aristide Pujol in Miller's
+sitting room. He could not, however, refuse him admittance to the game.
+The three sat down, Aristide by Miller's side, so that he could overlook
+the hand and, by pointing, indicate the cards that it was advisable to
+play. The game began. Fortune favored Mr. Eugene Miller. The Count's
+brow grew blacker.
+
+"You are bringing your own luck to our friend, Monsieur Pujol," said he,
+dealing the cards.
+
+"He needs it," said Aristide.
+
+"_Le roi_," said the Count, turning up the king.
+
+The Count won the vole, or all five tricks, and swept the stakes towards
+him. Then, fortune quickly and firmly deserted Mr. Miller. The Count
+besides being an amazingly fine player, held amazingly fine hands. The
+pile of folded notes in front of him rose higher and higher. Aristide
+tugged at his beard in agitation. Suddenly, as the Count dealt a king as
+trump card, he sprang to his feet knocking over the chair behind him.
+
+"You cheat, monsieur. You cheat!"
+
+"Monsieur!" cried the outraged dealer.
+
+"What has he done?"
+
+"He has been palming kings and neutralizing the cut. I've been watching.
+Now I catch him," cried Aristide in great excitement. "_Ah, sale voleur!
+Maintenant je vous tiens!_"
+
+"Monsieur," said the Comte de Lussigny with dignity, stuffing his
+winnings into his jacket pocket. "You insult me. It is an infamy. Two of
+my friends will call upon you."
+
+"And Monsieur Miller and I will kick them over Mont Revard."
+
+"You cannot treat _gens d'honneur_ in such a way, monsieur." He turned
+to Miller, and said haughtily in his imperfect English, "Did you see the
+cheat, you?"
+
+"I can't say that I did," replied the young man. "On the other hand that
+torch-light procession of kings doesn't seem exactly natural."
+
+"But you did not see anything! _Bon!_"
+
+"But I saw. Isn't that enough, _hein_?" shouted Aristide brandishing his
+fingers in the Count's face. "You come here and think there's nothing
+easier than to cheat young foreigners who don't know the rules of
+ecarte. You come here and think you can carry off rich young English
+misses. Ah, _sale escroc!_ You never thought you would have to reckon
+with Aristide Pujol. You call yourself the Comte de Lussigny. Bah! I
+know you----" he didn't, but that doesn't matter--"your _dossier_ is in
+the hands of the prefect of Police. I am going to get that _dossier_.
+Monsieur Lepine is my intimate friend. Every autumn we shoot together.
+Aha! You send me your two galley-birds and see what I do to them."
+
+The Comte de Lussigny twirled the tips of his moustache almost to his
+forehead and caught up his hat.
+
+"My friends shall be officers in the uniform of the French Army," he
+said, by the door.
+
+"And mine shall be two gendarmes," retorted Aristide. "_Nom de Dieu!_"
+he cried, after the other had left the room. "We let him take the
+money!"
+
+"That's of no consequence. He didn't get away with much anyway," said
+young Miller. "But he would have if you hadn't been here. If ever I can
+do you a return service, just ask."
+
+Aristide went out to look for the Erringtons. But they were not to be
+found. It was only late in the afternoon that he met Mrs. Errington in
+the hall of the hotel. He dragged her into a corner and in his
+impulsive fashion told her everything. She listened white faced, in
+great distress.
+
+"My daughter's engaged to him. I've only just learned," she faltered.
+
+"Engaged? _Sacrebleu!_ Ah, _le goujat!_"--for the second he was
+desperately, furiously, jealously in love with Betty Errington. "_Ah, le
+sale type! Voyons!_ This engagement must be broken off. At once! You are
+her mother."
+
+"She will hear of nothing against him."
+
+"You will tell her this. It will be a blow; but----"
+
+Mrs. Errington twisted a handkerchief between helpless fingers. "Betty
+is infatuated. She won't believe it." She regarded him piteously. "Oh,
+Monsieur Pujol, what can I do? You see she has an independent fortune
+and is over twenty-one. I am powerless."
+
+"I will meet his two friends," exclaimed Aristide magnificently--"and I
+will kill him. _Voila!_"
+
+"Oh, a duel? No! How awful!" cried the mild lady horror-stricken.
+
+He thrust his cane dramatically through a sheet of a newspaper, which he
+had caught up from a table. "I will run him through the body like
+that"--Aristide had never handled a foil in his life--"and when he is
+dead, your beautiful daughter will thank me for having saved her from
+such an execrable fellow."
+
+"But you mustn't fight. It would be too dreadful. Is there no other
+way?"
+
+"You must consult first with your daughter," said Aristide.
+
+He dined in the hotel with Eugene Miller. Neither the Erringtons nor the
+Comte de Lussigny were anywhere to be seen. After dinner, however, he
+found the elder lady waiting for him in the hall. They walked out into
+the quiet of the garden. She had been too upset to dine, she explained,
+having had a terrible scene with Betty. Nothing but absolute proofs of
+her lover's iniquity would satisfy her. The world was full of slanderous
+tongues; the noblest and purest did not escape. For herself, she had
+never been comfortable with the Comte de Lussigny. She had noticed too
+that he had always avoided the best French people in hotels. She would
+give anything to save her daughter. She wept.
+
+"And the unhappy girl has written him compromising letters," she
+lamented.
+
+"They must be got back."
+
+"But how? Oh, Monsieur Pujol, do you think he would take money for
+them?"
+
+"A scoundrel like that would take money for his dead mother's shroud,"
+said Aristide.
+
+"A thousand pounds?"
+
+She looked very haggard and helpless beneath the blue arc-lights.
+Aristide's heart went out to her. He knew her type--the sweet
+gentlewoman of rural England who comes abroad to give her pretty
+daughter a sight of life, ingenuously confident that foreign
+watering-places are as innocent as her own sequestered village.
+
+"That is much money, _chere madame_," said Aristide.
+
+"I am fairly well off," said Mrs. Errington.
+
+Aristide reflected. At the offer of a smaller sum the Count would
+possibly bluff. But to a Knight of Industry, as he knew the Count to be,
+a certain thousand pounds would be a great temptation. And after all to
+a wealthy Englishwoman what was a thousand pounds?
+
+"Madame," said he, "if you offer him a thousand pounds for the letters,
+and a written confession that he is not the Comte de Lussigny, but a
+common adventurer, I stake my reputation that he will accept."
+
+They walked along for a few moments in silence; the opera had begun at
+the adjoining Villa des Fleurs and the strains floated through the still
+August air. After a while she halted and laid her hand on his sleeve.
+
+"Monsieur Pujol, I have never been faced with such a thing, before. Will
+you undertake for me this delicate and difficult business?"
+
+"Madame," said he, "my life is at the service of yourself and your most
+exquisite daughter." She pressed his hand. "Thank God, I've got a friend
+in this dreadful place," she said brokenly. "Let me go in." And when
+they reached the lounge, she said, "Wait for me here."
+
+She entered the lift. Aristide waited. Presently the lift descended and
+she emerged with a slip of paper in her hand.
+
+"Here is a bearer cheque, Monsieur Pujol, for a thousand pounds. Get the
+letters and the confession if you can, and a mother's blessing will go
+with you."
+
+She left him and went upstairs again in the lift. Aristide athirst with
+love, living drama and unholy hatred of the Comte de Lussigny, cocked
+his black, soft-felt evening hat at an engaging angle on his head and
+swaggered into the Villa des Fleurs. As he passed the plebeian crowd
+round the petits-chevaux table--these were the days of little horses and
+not the modern equivalent of _la boule_--he threw a louis on the square
+marked 5, waited for the croupier to push him his winnings, seven louis
+and his stake on the little white horse, and walked into the baccarat
+room. A bank was being called for thirty louis at the end table.
+
+"_Quarante_," said Aristide.
+
+"_Ajuge a quarante louis_," cried the croupier, no one bidding higher.
+
+Aristide took the banker's seat and put down his forty louis. Looking
+round the long table he saw the Comte de Lussigny sitting in the punt.
+The two men glared at each other defiantly. Someone went "banco."
+Aristide won. The fact of his holding the bank attracted a crowd round
+the table. The regular game began. Aristide won, lost, won again. Now it
+must be explained, without going into the details of the game, that the
+hand against the bank is played by the members of the punt in turn.
+
+Suddenly, before dealing the cards, Aristide asked, "_A qui la main?_"
+
+"_C'est a Monsieur_," said the croupier, indicating Lussigny.
+
+"_Il y a une suite_," said Aristide, signifying, as was his right, that
+he would retire from the bank with his winnings. "The face of that
+gentleman does not please me."
+
+There was a hush at the humming table. The Count grew dead white and
+looked at his fingernails. Aristide superbly gathered up his notes and
+gold, and tossing a couple of louis to the croupiers, left the table,
+followed by all eyes. It was one of the thrilling moments of Aristide's
+life. He had taken the stage, commanded the situation. He had publicly
+offered the Comte de Lussigny the most deadly insult and the Comte de
+Lussigny sat down beneath it like a lamb. He swaggered slowly through
+the crowded room, twirling his moustache, and went into the cool of the
+moonlit deserted garden beyond, where he waited gleefully. He had a
+puckish knowledge of human nature. After a decent interval, and during
+the absorbing interest of the newly constituted bank, the Comte de
+Lussigny slipped unnoticed from the table and went in search of
+Aristide. He found him smoking a large corona and lounging in one wicker
+chair with his feet on another, beside a very large whisky and soda.
+
+"Ah, it's you," said he without moving.
+
+"Yes," said the Count furiously.
+
+"I haven't yet had the pleasure of kicking your friends over Mont
+Revard," said Aristide.
+
+"Look here, _mon petit_, this has got to finish," cried the Count.
+
+"_Parfaitement._ I should like nothing better than to finish. But let us
+finish like well-bred people," said Aristide suavely. "We don't want the
+whole Casino as witnesses. You'll find a chair over there. Bring it up."
+
+He was enjoying himself immensely. The Count glared at him, turned and
+banged a chair over by the side of the table.
+
+"Why do you insult me like this?"
+
+"Because," said Aristide, "I've talked by telephone this evening with my
+good friend Monsieur Lepine, Prefect of Police of Paris."
+
+"You lie," said the Count.
+
+"_Vous verrez._ In the meantime, perhaps we might have a little
+conversation. Will you have a whisky and soda? It is one of my English
+habits."
+
+"No," said the Count emphatically.
+
+"You permit me then?" He drank a great draught. "You are wrong. It helps
+to cool one's temper. _Eh bien_, let us talk."
+
+He talked. He put before the Count the situation of the beautiful Miss
+Errington. He conducted the scene like the friend of the family whose
+astuteness he had admired as a boy in the melodramas that found their
+way to Marseilles.
+
+"Look," said he, at last, having vainly offered from one hundred to
+eight hundred pounds for poor Betty Errington's compromising letters.
+"Look----" He drew the cheque from his note-case. "Here are twenty-five
+thousand francs. The signature is that of the charming Madame Errington
+herself. The letters, and a little signed word, just a little word.
+'Mademoiselle, I am a _chevalier d'industrie_. I have a wife and five
+children. I am not worthy of you. I give you back your promise.' Just
+that. And twenty-five thousand francs, _mon ami_."
+
+"Never in life!" exclaimed the Count rising. "You continue to insult
+me."
+
+Aristide for the first time abandoned his lazy and insolent attitude and
+jumped to his feet.
+
+"And I'll continue to insult you, _canaille_ that you are, all through
+that room," he cried, with a swift-flung gesture towards the brilliant
+doorway. "You are dealing with Aristide Pujol. Will you never
+understand? The letters and a confession for twenty-five thousand
+francs."
+
+"Never in life," said the Count, and he moved swiftly away.
+
+Aristide caught him by the collar as he stood on the covered terrace, a
+foot or two from the threshold of the gaming-room.
+
+"I swear to you, I'll make a scandal that you won't survive."
+
+The Count stopped and pushed Aristide's hand away.
+
+"I admit nothing," said he. "But you are a gambler and so am I. I will
+play you for those documents against twenty-five thousand francs."
+
+"Eh?" said Aristide, staggered for the moment.
+
+The Comte de Lussigny repeated his proposition.
+
+"_Bon_," said Aristide. "_Tres bon. C'est entendu. C'est fait._"
+
+If Beelzebub had arisen and offered to play beggar-my-neighbour for his
+soul, Aristide would have agreed; especially after the large whisky and
+soda and the Mumm Cordon Rouge and the Napoleon brandy which Eugene
+Miller had insisted on his drinking at dinner.
+
+"I have a large room at the hotel," said he.
+
+"I will join you," said the Count. "Monsieur," he took off his hat very
+politely. "Go first. I will be there in three minutes."
+
+Aristide trod on air during the two minutes' walk to the Hotel de
+l'Europe. At the bureau he ordered a couple of packs of cards and a
+supply of drinks and went to his palatial room on the ground floor. In a
+few moments the Comte de Lussigny appeared. Aristide offered him a two
+francs corona which was ceremoniously accepted. Then he tore the
+wrapping off one of the packs of cards and shuffled.
+
+"Monsieur," said he, still shuffling. "I should like to deal two hands
+at ecarte. It signifies nothing. It is an experiment. Will you cut?"
+
+"_Volontiers_," said the Count.
+
+Aristide took up the pack, dealt three cards to the Count, three cards
+to himself, two cards to the Count, two to himself and turned up the
+King of Hearts as the eleventh card.
+
+"Monsieur," said he, "expose your hand and I will expose mine."
+
+Both men threw their hands face uppermost on the table. Aristide's was
+full of trumps, the Count's of valueless cards.
+
+He looked at his adversary with his roguish, triumphant smile. The Count
+looked at him darkly.
+
+"The ordinary card player does not know how to deal like that," he said
+with sinister significance.
+
+"But I am not ordinary in anything, my dear sir," laughed Aristide, in
+his large boastfulness. "If I were, do you think I would have agreed to
+your absurd proposal? _Voyons_, I only wanted to show you that in
+dealing cards I am your equal. Now, the letters----" The Count threw a
+small packet on the table. "You will permit me? I do not wish to read
+them. I verify only. Good," said he. "And the confession?"
+
+"What you like," said the Count, coldly. Aristide scribbled a few lines
+that would have been devastating to the character of a Hyrcanean tiger
+and handed the paper and fountain pen to the Count.
+
+"Will you sign?"
+
+The Count glanced at the words and signed.
+
+"_Voila_," said Aristide, laying Mrs. Errington's cheque beside the
+documents. "Now let us play. The best of three games?"
+
+"Good," said the Count. "But you will excuse me, monsieur, if I claim to
+play for ready money. The cheque will take five days to negotiate and if
+I lose, I shall evidently have to leave Aix to-morrow morning."
+
+"That's reasonable," said Aristide.
+
+He drew out his fat note-case and counted twenty-five one-thousand-franc
+notes on to the table. And then began the most exciting game of cards he
+had ever played. In the first place he was playing with another person's
+money for a fantastic stake, a girl's honour and happiness. Secondly he
+was pitted against a master of ecarte. And thirdly he knew that his
+adversary would cheat if he could and that his adversary suspected him
+of fraudulent designs. So as they played, each man craned his head
+forward and looked at the other man's fingers with fierce intensity.
+
+Aristide lost the first game. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. In
+the second game, he won the vole in one hand. The third and final game
+began. They played slowly, carefully, with keen quick eyes. Their
+breathing came hard. The Count's lips parted beneath his uptwisted
+moustache showed his teeth like a cat's. Aristide lost sense of all
+outer things in the thrill of the encounter. They snarled the
+stereotyped phrases necessary for the conduct of the game. At last the
+points stood at four for Aristide and three for his adversary. It was
+Aristide's deal. Before turning up the eleventh card he paused for the
+fraction of a second. If it was the King, he had won. He flicked it
+neatly face upward. It was not the King.
+
+_"J'en donne."_
+
+_"Non. Le roi."_
+
+The Count played and marked the King. Aristide had no trumps. The game
+was lost.
+
+He sat back white, while the Count smiling gathered up the bank-notes.
+
+"And now, Monsieur Pujol," said he impudently, "I am willing to sell
+you this rubbish for the cheque."
+
+Aristide jumped to his feet. "Never!" he cried. Madness seized him.
+Regardless of the fact that he had nothing like another thousand pounds
+left wherewith to repay Mrs. Errington if he lost, he shouted: "I will
+play again for it. Not ecarte. One cut of the cards. Ace lowest."
+
+"All right," said the Count.
+
+"Begin, you."
+
+Aristide watched his hand like cat, as he cut. He cut an eight. Aristide
+gave a little gasp of joy and cut quickly. He held up a Knave and
+laughed aloud. Then he stopped short as he saw the Count about to pounce
+on the documents and the cheque. He made a swift movement and grabbed
+them first, the other man's hand on his.
+
+"_Canaille!_"
+
+He dashed his free hand into the adventurer's face. The man staggered
+back. Aristide pocketed the precious papers. The Count scowled at him
+for an undecided second, and then bolted from the room.
+
+"Whew!" said Aristide, sinking into his chair and wiping his face. "That
+was a narrow escape."
+
+He looked at his watch. It was only ten o'clock. It had seemed as if his
+game with Lussigny had lasted for hours. He could not go to bed and
+stood confronted with anti-climax. After a while he went in search of
+Eugene Miller and having found him in solitary meditation on stained
+glass windows in the dim-lit grounds of the Villa, sat down by his side
+and for the rest of the evening poured his peculiar knowledge of Europe
+into the listening ear of the young man from Atlanta.
+
+On the following morning, as soon as he was dressed, he learned from the
+Concierge that the Comte de Lussigny had left for Paris by the early
+train.
+
+"Good," said Aristide.
+
+A little later Mrs. Errington met him in the lounge and accompanied him
+to the lawn where they had sat the day before.
+
+"I have no words to thank you, Monsieur Pujol," she said with tears in
+her eyes. "I have heard how you shamed him at the tables. It was brave
+of you."
+
+"It was nothing." He shrugged his shoulders as if he were in the habit
+of doing deeds like that every day of his life. "And your exquisite
+daughter, Madame?"
+
+"Poor Betty! She is prostrate. She says she will never hold up her head
+again. Her heart is broken."
+
+"It is young and will be mended," said Aristide.
+
+She smiled sadly. "It will be a question of time. But she is grateful to
+you, Monsieur Pujol. She realizes from what a terrible fate you have
+saved her." She sighed. There was a brief silence.
+
+"After this," she continued, "a further stay in Aix would be too
+painful. We have decided to take the Savoy express this evening and get
+back to our quiet home in Somerset."
+
+"Ah, madame," said Aristide earnestly. "And shall I not have the
+pleasure of seeing the charming Miss Betty again?"
+
+"You will come and stay with us in September. Let me see? The fifteenth.
+Why not fix a date? You have my address? No? Will you write it down?"
+she dictated: "Wrotesly Manor, Burnholme, Somerset. There I'll try to
+show you how grateful I am."
+
+She extended her hand. He bowed over it and kissed it in his French way
+and departed a very happy man.
+
+The Erringtons left that evening. Aristide waylaid them as they were
+entering the hotel omnibus, with a preposterous bouquet of flowers which
+he presented to Betty, whose pretty face was hidden by a motor-veil. He
+bowed, laid his hand on his heart and said: "_Adieu, mademoiselle._"
+
+"No," she said in a low voice, but most graciously, "_Au revoir_,
+Monsieur Pujol."
+
+For the next few days Aix seemed to be tame and colourless. In an
+inexplicable fashion, too, it had become unprofitable. Aristide no
+longer knew that he was going to win; and he did not win. He lost
+considerably. So much so that on the morning when he was to draw the
+cash for the cheque, at the Credit Lyonnais, he had only fifty pounds
+and some odd silver left. Aristide looking at the remainder rather
+ruefully made a great resolution. He would gamble no more. Already he
+was richer than he had ever been in his life. He would leave Aix.
+_Tiens!_ why should he not go to his good friends the Bocardons at
+Nimes, bringing with him a gold chain for Bocardon and a pair of
+ear-rings for the adorable Zette? There he would look about him. He
+would use the thousand pounds as a stepping-stone to legitimate fortune.
+Then he would visit the Erringtons in England, and if the beautiful Miss
+Betty smiled on him--why, after all, _sacrebleu_ he was an honest man,
+without a feather on his conscience.
+
+So, jauntily swinging his cane, he marched into the office of the Credit
+Lyonnais, went into the inner room and explained his business.
+
+"Ah, your cheque, monsieur, that we were to collect. I am sorry. It has
+come back from the London bankers."
+
+"How come back?"
+
+"It has not been honoured. See, monsieur. 'Not known. No account.'" The
+cashier pointed to the grim words across the cheque.
+
+"_Comprends pas_," faltered Aristide.
+
+"It means that the person who gave you the cheque has no account at this
+bank."
+
+Aristide took the cheque and looked at it in a dazed way.
+
+"Then I do not get my twenty-five thousand francs?"
+
+"Evidently not," said the cashier.
+
+Aristide stood for a while stunned. What did it mean? His thousand
+pounds could not be lost. It was impossible. There was some mistake. It
+was an evil dream. With a heavy weight on the top of his head, he went
+out of the Credit Lyonnais and mechanically crossed the little street
+separating the Bank from the cafe on the Place Carnot. There he sat
+stupidly and wondered. The waiter hovered in front of him. "_Monsieur
+desire?_" Aristide waved him away absently. Yes, it was some mistake.
+Mrs. Errington in her agitation must have used the wrong cheque book.
+But even rich English people do not carry about with them a circulating
+library assortment of cheque books. It was incomprehensible--and
+meanwhile, his thousand pounds....
+
+The little square blazed before him in the August sunshine. Opposite
+flashed the white mass of the Etablissement des Bains. There was the old
+Roman Arch of Titus, gray and venerable. There were the trees of the
+gardens in riotous greenery. There on the right marking the hour of
+eleven on its black face was the clock of the Comptoir National. It was
+Aix; familiar Aix; not a land of dreams. And there coming rapidly across
+from the Comptoir National was the well knit figure of the young man
+from Atlanta.
+
+"_Nom de Dieu_," murmured Aristide. "_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"
+
+Eugene Miller, in a fine frenzy, threw himself into a chair beside
+Aristide.
+
+"See here. Can you understand this?"
+
+He thrust into his hand a pink strip of paper. It was a cheque for a
+hundred pounds, made payable to Eugene Miller, Esquire, signed by Mary
+Errington, and marked "Not known. No account."
+
+"_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" cried Aristide. "How did you get this?"
+
+"How did I get it? I cashed it for her--the day she went away. She said
+urgent affairs summoned her from Aix--no time to wire for funds--wanted
+to pay her hotel bill--and she gave me the address of her old English
+home in Somerset and invited me to come there in September. Fifteenth of
+September. Said that you were coming. And now I've got a bum cheque. I
+guess I can't wander about this country alone. I need blinkers and
+harness and a man with a whip."
+
+He went on indignantly. Aristide composed his face into an expression of
+parental interest; but within him there was shivering and sickening
+upheaval. He saw it all, the whole mocking drama....
+
+He, Aristide Pujol, was the most sweetly, the most completely swindled
+man in France.
+
+The Comte de Lussigny, the mild Mrs. Errington and the beautiful Betty
+were in league together and had exquisitely plotted. They had conspired,
+as soon as he had accused the Count of cheating. The rascal must have
+gone straight to them from Miller's room. No wonder that Lussigny, when
+insulted at the tables, had sat like a tame rabbit and had sought him in
+the garden. No wonder he had accepted the accusation of adventurer. No
+wonder he had refused to play for the cheque which he knew to be
+valueless. But why, thought Aristide, did he not at once consent to sell
+the papers on the stipulation that he should be paid in notes? Aristide
+found an answer. He wanted to get everything for nothing, afraid of the
+use that Aristide might make of a damning confession, and also relying
+for success on his manipulation of the cards. Finally he had desired to
+get hold of a dangerous cheque. In that he had been foiled. But the trio
+has got away with his thousand pounds, his wonderful thousand pounds. He
+reflected, still keeping an attentive eye on young Eugene Miller and
+interjecting a sympathetic word, that after he had paid his hotel bill,
+he would be as poor on quitting Aix-les-Bains as he was when he had
+entered it. _Sic transit_.... As it was in the beginning with Aristide
+Pujol, is now and ever shall be....
+
+"But I have my clothes--such clothes as I've never had in my life,"
+thought Aristide. "And a diamond and sapphire tie-pin and a gold watch,
+and all sorts of other things. _Tron de l'air_, I'm still rich."
+
+"Who would have thought she was like that?" said he. "And a hundred
+pounds, too. A lot of money."
+
+For nothing in the world would he have confessed himself a
+fellow-victim.
+
+"I don't care a cent for the hundred pounds," cried the young man. "Our
+factory turns out seven hundred and sixty-seven million pairs of boots
+per annum." (Aristide, not I, is responsible for the statistics.) "But I
+have a feeling that in this hoary country I'm just a little toddling
+child. And I hate it. I do, sir. I want a nurse to take me round."
+
+Aristide flashed the lightning of his wit upon the young man from
+Atlanta, Georgia.
+
+"You do, my dear young friend. I'll be your nurse, at a weekly
+salary--say a hundred francs--it doesn't matter. We will not quarrel."
+Eugene Miller was startled. "Yes," said Aristide, with a convincing
+flourish. "I'll clear robbers and sirens and harpies from your path.
+I'll show you things in Europe--from Tromsoe to Cap Spartivento that you
+never dreamed of. I'll lead you to every stained glass window in the
+world. I know them all."
+
+"I particularly want to see those in the church of St. Sebald in
+Nuremberg."
+
+"I know them like my pocket," said Aristide. "I will take you there. We
+start to-day."
+
+"But, Mr. Pujol," said the somewhat bewildered Georgian. "I thought you
+were a man of fortune."
+
+"I am more than a man. I am a soldier. I am a soldier of Fortune. The
+fickle goddess has for the moment deserted me. But I am loyal. I have
+for all worldly goods, two hundred and fifty dollars, with which I shall
+honorably pay my hotel bill. I say I am a soldier of Fortune. But," he
+slapped his chest, "I am the only honorable one on the Continent of
+Europe."
+
+The young man fixed upon him the hard blue eyes, not of the enthusiast
+for stained glass windows, but of the senior partner in the boot factory
+of Atlanta, Georgia.
+
+"I believe you," said he. "It's a deal. Shake."
+
+"And now," said Aristide, after having shaken hands, "come and lunch
+with me at Nikola's for the last time."
+
+He rose, stretched out both arms in a wide gesture and smiled with his
+irresistible Ancient Mariner's eyes at the young man.
+
+"We lunch. We eat ambrosia. Then we go out together and see the
+wonderful world through the glass-blood of saints and martyrs and
+apostles and the good Father Abraham and Louis Quatorze. _Viens, mon
+cher ami._ It is the dream of my life."
+
+Practically penniless and absolutely disillusioned, the amazing man was
+radiantly happy.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF A SAINT MARTIN'S SUMMER
+
+
+My good friend Blessington, who is a mighty man in the Bordeaux
+wine-trade, happening one day to lament the irreparable loss of a
+deceased employe, an Admirable Crichton of a myriad accomplishments and
+linguistic attainments whose functions it had been, apparently, to
+travel about between London, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Algiers, I
+immediately thought of a certain living and presumably unemployed
+paragon of my acquaintance.
+
+"I know the very man you're looking for," said I.
+
+"Who is he?"
+
+"He's a kind of human firework," said I, "and his name is Aristide
+Pujol."
+
+I sketched the man--in my desire to do a good turn to Aristide, perhaps
+in exaggerated colour.
+
+"Let me have a look at him," said Blessington.
+
+"He may be anywhere on the continent of Europe," said I. "How long can
+you give me to produce him?"
+
+"A week. Not longer."
+
+"I'll do my best," said I.
+
+By good luck my telegram, sent off about four o'clock, found him at 213
+_bis_ Rue Saint-Honore. He had just returned to Paris after some mad
+dash for fortune (he told me afterwards a wild and disastrous story of a
+Russian Grand-Duke, a Dancer and a gold mine in the Dolomites) and had
+once more resumed the dreary conduct of the Agence Pujol at the Hotel du
+Soleil et de l'Ecosse. My summons being imperative, he abandoned the
+Agence Pujol as a cat jumps off a wall, and, leaving the guests of the
+Hotel guideless, to the indignation of Monsieur Bocardon, whom he had
+served this trick several times before, paid his good landlady, Madam
+Bidoux, what he owed her, took a third-class ticket to London, bought,
+lunatic that he was, a ripe Brie cheese, a foot in diameter, a present
+to myself, which he carried in his hand most of the journey, and turned
+up at my house at eight o'clock the next morning with absolutely empty
+pockets and the happiest and most fascinating smile that ever irradiated
+the face of man. As a matter of fact, he burst his way past my
+scandalized valet into my bedroom and woke me up.
+
+"Here I am, my dear friend, and here is something French you love that I
+have brought you," and he thrust the Brie cheese under my nose.
+
+"-- -- --," said I.
+
+If you were awakened by a Brie cheese, an hour before your time, you
+would say the same. Aristide sat at the foot of the bed and laughed till
+the tears ran down his beard.
+
+As soon as it was decent I sent him into the city to interview
+Blessington. Three hours afterward he returned more radiant than ever.
+He threw himself into my arms; before I could disentagle myself, he
+kissed me on both cheeks; then he danced about the room.
+
+"_Me voici_," he said, "accredited representative of the great Maison
+Dulau et Compagnie. I have hundreds of pounds a year. I go about. I
+watch. I control. I see that the Great British Public can assuage its
+thirst with the pure juice of the grape and not with the dregs of a
+laboratory. I test vintages. I count barrels. I enter them in books. I
+smile at Algerian wine growers and say, 'Ha! ha! none of your _petite
+piquette frelatee_ for me but good sound wine.' It is diplomacy. It is
+as simple as kissing hands. And I have a sustained income. Now I can be
+_un bon bourgeois_ instead of a stray cat. And all due to you, _mon cher
+ami_. I am grateful--_voyons_--if anybody ever says Aristide Pujol is
+ungrateful, he is a liar. You believe me! Say you believe me."
+
+He looked at me earnestly.
+
+"I do, old chap," said I.
+
+I had known Aristide for some years, and in all kinds of little ways he
+had continuously manifested his gratitude for the trifling service I had
+rendered him, at our first meeting, in delivering him out of the hands
+of the horrific Madam Gougasse. That gratitude is the expectation of
+favors to come was, in the case of Aristide, a cynical and inapplicable
+proposition. And here, as this (as far as I can see) is the last of
+Aristide's adventures I have to relate, let me make an honest and
+considered statement:--
+
+During the course of an interesting and fairly prosperous life, I have
+made many delightful Bohemian, devil-may-care acquaintances, but among
+them all Aristide stands as the one bright star who has never asked me
+to lend him money. I have offered it times without number, but he has
+refused. I believe there is no man living to whom Aristide is in debt.
+In the depths of the man's changeling and feckless soul is a principle
+which has carried him untarnished through many a wild adventure. If
+he ever accepted money--money to the Provencal peasant is the
+transcendental materialised, and Aristide (save by the changeling
+theory) was Provencal peasant bone and blood--it was always for what he
+honestly thought was value received. If he met a man who wanted to take
+a mule ride among the Mountains of the Moon, Aristide would at once have
+offered himself as guide. The man would have paid him; but Aristide, by
+some quaint spiritual juggling, would have persuaded him that the
+ascent of Primrose Hill was equal to any lunar achievement, seeing that,
+himself, Aristide Pujol, was keeper of the Sun, Moon and Seven Stars;
+and the gift to that man of Aristide's dynamic personality would have
+been well worth anything that he would have found in the extinct volcano
+we know to be the moon.
+
+"The only thing I would suggest, if you would allow me to do so," said
+I, "is not to try to make the fortune of Messrs. Dulau & Co. by some
+dazzling but devastating _coup_ of your own."
+
+He looked at me in his bright, shrewd way. "You think it time I
+restrained my imagination?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"I will read The Times and buy a family Bible," said Aristide.
+
+A week after he had taken up his work in the City, under my friend
+Blessington, I saw the delighted and prosperous man again. It was a
+Saturday and he came to lunch at my house.
+
+"_Tiens!_" said he, when he had recounted his success in the office, "it
+is four years since I was in England?"
+
+"Yes," said I, with a jerk of memory. "Time passes quickly."
+
+"It is three years since I lost little Jean."
+
+"Who is little Jean?" I asked.
+
+"Did I not tell you when I saw you last in Paris?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It is strange. I have been thinking about him and my heart has been
+aching for him all the time. You must hear. It is most important." He
+lit a cigar and began.
+
+It was then that he told me the story of which I have already related
+in these chronicles:[A] how he was scouring France in a ramshackle
+automobile as the peripatetic vendor of a patent corn cure and found a
+babe of nine months lying abandoned in the middle of that silent road
+through the wilderness between Salon and Arles; how instead of
+delivering it over to the authorities, he adopted it and carried it
+about with him from town to town, a motor accessory sometimes
+embarrassing, but always divinely precious; how an evil day came upon
+him at Aix-en-Provence when, the wheezing automobile having uttered
+its last gasp, he found his occupation gone; how, no longer being able
+to care for _le petit_ Jean, he left him with a letter and half his
+fortune outside the door of a couple of English maiden ladies who,
+staying in the same hotel, had manifested great interest in the baby
+and himself; and how, in the dead of the night, he had tramped away
+from Aix-en-Provence in the rain, his pockets light and his heart as
+heavy as lead.
+
+ [A] The Adventures of the Foundling.
+
+"And I have never heard of my little Jean again," said Aristide.
+
+"Why didn't you write?" I asked.
+
+"I knew their names, Honeywood; Miss Janet was the elder, Miss Anne the
+younger. But the name of the place they lived at I have never been able
+to remember. It was near London--they used to come up by train to
+matinees and afternoon concerts. But what it is called, _mon Dieu_, I
+have racked my brain for it. _Sacre mille tonnerres!_" He leaped to his
+feet in his unexpected, startling way, and pounced on a Bradshaw's
+Railway Guide lying on my library table. "Imbecile, pig, triple ass that
+I am! Why did I not think of this before? It is near London. If I look
+through all the stations near London on every line, I shall find it."
+
+"All right," said I, "go ahead."
+
+I lit a cigarette and took up a novel. I had not read very far when a
+sudden uproar from the table caused me to turn round. Aristide danced
+and flourished the Bradshaw over his head.
+
+"Chislehurst! Chislehurst! Ah, _mon ami_, now I am happy. Now I have
+found my little Jean. You will forgive me--but I must go now and embrace
+him."
+
+He held out his hand.
+
+"Where are you off to?" I demanded.
+
+"The Chislehurst, where else?"
+
+"My dear fellow," said I, rising, "do you seriously suppose that these
+two English maiden ladies have taken on themselves the responsibility of
+that foreign brat's upbringing?"
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_" said he taken aback for the moment, hypothesis having
+entered his head. Then, with a wide gesture, he flung the preposterous
+idea to the winds. "Of course. They have hearts, these English women.
+They have maternal instincts. They have money." He looked at Bradshaw
+again, then at his watch. "I have just time to catch a train. _Au
+revoir, mon vieux._"
+
+"But," I objected, "why don't you write? It's the natural thing to do."
+
+"Write? _Bah!_ Did you ever hear of a Provencal writing when he could
+talk?" He tapped his lips, and in an instant, like a whirlwind, he
+passed from my ken.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aristide on his arrival at Chislehurst looked about the pleasant, leafy
+place--it was a bright October afternoon and the wooded hillside blazed
+in russet and gold--and decided it was the perfect environment for Miss
+Janet and Miss Anne, to say nothing of little Jean. A neat red brick
+house with a trim garden in front of it looked just the kind of a house
+wherein Miss Janet and Miss Anne would live. He rang the bell. A
+parlour-maid, in spotless black and white, tutelary nymph of Suburbia,
+the very parlour-maid who would minister to Miss Janet and Miss Anne,
+opened the door.
+
+"Miss Honeywood?" he inquired.
+
+"Not here, sir," said the parlour-maid.
+
+"Where is she? I mean, where are they?"
+
+"No one of that name lives here," said the parlour-maid.
+
+"Who does live here?"
+
+"Colonel Brabazon."
+
+"And where do the two Miss Honeywood live?" he asked with his engaging
+smile.
+
+But English suburban parlour-maids are on their guard against smiles, no
+matter how engaging. She prepared to shut the door.
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"How can I find out?"
+
+"You might enquire among the tradespeople."
+
+"Thank you, mademoiselle, you are a most intelligent young----"
+
+The door shut in his face. Aristide frowned. She was a pretty
+parlour-maid, and Aristide didn't like to be so haughtily treated by a
+pretty woman. But his quest being little Jean and not the eternal
+feminine, he took the maid's advice and made enquiries at the prim and
+respectable shops.
+
+"Oh, yes," said a comely young woman in a fragrant bakers' and
+confectioners'. "They were two ladies, weren't they? They lived at Hope
+Cottage. We used to supply them. They left Chislehurst two years ago."
+
+"_Sacre nom d'un chien!_" said Aristide.
+
+"Beg pardon?" asked the young woman.
+
+"I am disappointed," said Aristide. "Where did they go to?"
+
+"I'm sure I can't tell you."
+
+"Do you remember whether they had a baby?"
+
+"They were maiden ladies," said the young woman rebukingly.
+
+"But anybody can keep a baby without being its father or mother. I want
+to know what has become of the baby."
+
+The young woman gazed through the window.
+
+"You had better ask the policeman."
+
+"That's an idea," said Aristide, and, leaving her, he caught up the
+passing constable.
+
+The constable knew nothing of maiden ladies with a baby, but he directed
+him to Hope Cottage. He found a pretty half-timber house lying back from
+the road, with a neat semi-circular gravelled path leading to a porch
+covered thick with Virginia creeper. Even more than the red brick
+residence of Colonel Brabazon did it look, with its air of dainty
+comfort, the fitting abode of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. He rang the bell
+and interviewed another trim parlour-maid. More susceptible to smiles
+than the former, she summoned her master, a kindly, middle-aged man, who
+came out into the porch. Yes, Honeywood was the name of the previous
+tenants. Two ladies, he believed. He had never seen them and knew
+nothing about a child. Messrs. Tompkin & Briggs, the estate agents in
+the High Street, could no doubt give him information. Aristide thanked
+him and made his way to Messrs. Tompkin & Briggs. A dreary spectacled
+youth in resentful charge of the office--his principals, it being
+Saturday afternoon, were golfing the happy hours away--professed blank
+ignorance of everything. Aristide fixed him with his glittering eye and
+flickered his fingers and spoke richly. The youth in a kind of mesmeric
+trance took down a battered, dog's eared book and turned over the pages.
+
+"Honeywood--Miss--Beverly Stoke--near St. Albans--Herts. That's it," he
+said.
+
+Aristide made a note of the address. "Is that all you can tell me?"
+
+"Yes," said the youth.
+
+"I thank you very much, my young friend," said Aristide, raising his
+hat, "and here is something to buy a smile with," and, leaving a
+sixpence on the table to shimmer before the youth's stupefied eyes,
+Aristide strutted out of the office.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You had much better have written," said I, when he came back and told
+me of his experiences. "The post-office would have done all that for
+you."
+
+"You have no idea of business, _mon cher ami_"--(I--a successful
+tea-broker of twenty-five years' standing!--the impudence of the
+fellow!)--"If I had written to-day, the letter would have reached
+Chislehurst on Monday morning. It would be redirected and reach
+Hertfordshire on Tuesday. I should not get any news till Wednesday. I go
+down to Beverly Stoke to-morrow, and then I find at once Miss Janet and
+Miss Anne and my little Jean! The secret of business men, and I am a
+business man, the accredited representative of Dulau et Compagnie--never
+forget that--the secret of business is no delay."
+
+He darted across the room to Bradshaw.
+
+"For God's sake," said I, "put that nightmare of perpetual motion in
+your pocket and go mad over it in the privacy of your own chamber."
+
+"Very good," said he, tucking the brain-convulsing volume under his arm.
+"I will put it on top of The Times and the family Bible and I will say
+'Ha! now I am British. Now I am very respectable!' What else can I do?"
+
+"Rent a pew in a Baptist chapel," said I.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a three-mile trudge from St. Albans Aristide, following
+directions, found himself on a high road running through the middle of a
+straggy common decked here and there with great elms splendid in autumn
+bravery, and populated chiefly by geese, who when he halted in some
+perplexity--for on each side, beyond the green, were indications of a
+human settlement--advanced in waddling flocks towards him and signified
+their disapproval of his presence. A Sundayfied youth in a rainbow tie
+rode past on a bicycle. Aristide took off his hat. The youth nearly fell
+off the bicycle, but British doggedness saved him from disaster.
+
+"Beverly Stoke? Will you have the courtesy----"
+
+"Here," bawled the youth, with a circular twist of his head, and, eager
+to escape from a madman, he rode on furiously.
+
+Aristide looked to left and right at the little houses beyond the
+green--some white and thatched and dilapidated, others horridly new and
+perky--but all poor and insignificant. As his eyes became accustomed to
+the scene they were aware of human forms dotted sparsely about the
+common. He struck across and accosted one, an elderly woman with a
+prayer-book. "Miss Honeywood? A lady from London?"
+
+"That house over there--the third beyond the poplar."
+
+"And little Jean--a beautiful child about four years old?"
+
+"That I don't know, sir. I live at Wilmer's End, a good half mile from
+here."
+
+Aristide made for the third house past the poplar. First there was a
+plank bridge across a grass-grown ditch; then a tiny patch of garden;
+then a humble whitewashed cottage with a small leaded casement window on
+each side of the front door. Unlike Hope Cottage, it did not look at all
+the residence of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. Its appearance, indeed, was
+woe-begone. Aristide, however, went up to the door; as there was neither
+knocker nor bell, he rapped with his knuckles. The door opened, and
+there, poorly dressed in blouse and skirt, stood Miss Anne.
+
+She regarded him for a moment in a bewildered way, then, recognizing
+him, drew back into the stone flagged passage with a sharp cry.
+
+"You? You--Mr. Pujol?"
+
+"_Oui, Mademoiselle, c'est moi._ It is I, Aristide Pujol."
+
+She put her hands on her bosom. "It is rather a shock seeing you--so
+unexpectedly. Will you come in?"
+
+She led the way into a tiny parlour, very clean, very simple with its
+furniture of old oak and brass, and bade him sit. She looked a little
+older than when he had seen her at Aix-en-Provence. A few lines had
+marred the comely face and there was here and there a touch of grey in
+the reddish hair, and, though still buxom, she had grown thinner. Care
+had set its stamp upon her.
+
+"Miss Honeywood," said Aristide. "It is on account of little Jean that I
+have come----"
+
+She turned on him swiftly. "Not to take him away!"
+
+"Then he is here!" He jumped to his feet and wrung both her hands and
+kissed them to her great embarrassment. "Ah, mademoiselle, I knew it. I
+felt it. When such an inspiration comes to a man, it is the _bon Dieu_
+who sends it. He is here, actually here, in this house?"
+
+"Yes," said Miss Anne.
+
+Aristide threw out his arms. "Let me see him. _Ah, le cher petit!_ I
+have been yearning after him for three years. It was my heart that I
+ripped out of my body that night and laid at your threshold."
+
+"Hush!" said Miss Anne, with an interrupting gesture. "You must not talk
+so loud. He is asleep in the next room. You mustn't wake him. He is very
+ill."
+
+"Ill? Dangerously ill?"
+
+"I'm afraid so."
+
+"_Mon Dieu_," said he, sitting down again in the oak settle. To Aristide
+the emotion of the moment was absorbing, overwhelming. His attitude
+betokened deepest misery and dejection.
+
+"And I expected to see him full of joy and health!"
+
+"It is not my fault, Mr. Pujol," said Miss Anne.
+
+He started. "But no. How could it be? You loved him when you first set
+eyes on him at Aix-en-Provence."
+
+Miss Anne began to cry. "God knows," said she, "what I should do without
+him. The dear mite is all that is left to me."
+
+"All? But there is your sister, the dear Miss Janet."
+
+Miss Anne's eyes were hidden in her handkerchief. "My poor sister died
+last year, Mr. Pujol."
+
+"I am very sorry. I did not know," said Aristide gently.
+
+There was a short silence. "It was a great sorrow to you," he said.
+
+"It was God's will," said Anne. Then, after another pause, during which
+she dried her eyes, she strove to smile. "Tell me about yourself. How do
+you come to be here?"
+
+Aristide replied in a hesitating way. He was in the presence of grief
+and sickness and trouble; the Provencal braggadocio dropped from him and
+he became the simple and childish creature that he was. He accounted
+very truthfully, very convincingly, for his queer life; for his
+abandonment of little Jean, for his silence, for his sudden and
+unexpected appearance. During the ingenuous _apologia pro vita sua_ Miss
+Anne regarded him with her honest candour.
+
+"Janet and I both understood," she said. "Janet was gifted with a divine
+comprehension and pity. The landlady at the hotel, I remember, said some
+unkind things about you; but we didn't believe them. We felt that you
+were a good man--no one but a good man could have written that
+letter--we cried over it--and when she tried to poison our minds we said
+to each other: 'What does it matter? Here God in his mercy has given us
+a child.' But, Mr. Pujol, why didn't you take us into your confidence?"
+
+"My dear Miss Anne," said Aristide, "we of the South do things
+impulsively, by lightning flashes. An idea comes suddenly. _Vlan!_ we
+carry it out in two seconds. We are not less human than the Northerner,
+who reflects two months."
+
+"That is almost what dear, wise Janet told me," said Miss Anne.
+
+"Then you know in your heart," said Aristide, after a while, "that if I
+had not been only a football at the feet of fortune, I should never have
+deserted little Jean?"
+
+"I do, Mr. Pujol. My sister and I have been footballs, too." She added
+with a change of tone: "You tell me you saw our dear home at
+Chislehurst?"
+
+"Yes," said Aristide.
+
+"And you see this. There is a difference."
+
+"What has happened?" asked Aristide.
+
+She told him the commonplace pathetic story. Their father had left them
+shares in the company of which he had been managing director. For many
+years they had enjoyed a comfortable income. Then the company had become
+bankrupt and only a miserable ninety pounds a year had been saved from
+the wreckage. The cottage at Beverly Stoke belonging to them--it had
+been their mother's--they had migrated thither with their fallen
+fortunes and little Jean. And then Janet had died. She was delicate and
+unaccustomed to privation and discomfort--and the cottage had its
+disadvantages. She, Anne herself, was as strong as a horse and had never
+been ill in her life, but others were not quite so hardy. "However"--she
+smiled--"one has to make the best of things."
+
+"_Parbleu_," said Aristide.
+
+Miss Anne went on to talk of Jean, a miraculous infant of infinite
+graces and accomplishments. Up to now he had been the sturdiest and
+merriest fellow.
+
+"At nine months old he saw that life was a big joke," said Aristide.
+"How he used to laugh."
+
+"There's not much laugh left in him, poor darling," she sighed. And she
+told how he had caught a chill which had gone to his lungs and how the
+night before last she thought she had lost him.
+
+She sat up and listened. "Will you excuse me for a moment?"
+
+She went out and presently returned, standing at the doorway. "He is
+still asleep. Would you like to see him? Only"--she put her fingers on
+her lips--"you must be very, very quiet."
+
+He followed her into the next room and looked about him shyly,
+recognizing that it was Miss Anne's own bedroom; and there, lying in a
+little cot beside the big bed, he saw the sleeping child, his brown face
+flushed with fever. He had a curly shock of black hair and well formed
+features. An old woolly lamb nose to nose with him shared his pillow.
+Aristide drew from his pocket a Teddy bear, and, having asked Miss
+Anne's permission with a glance, laid it down gently on the coverlid.
+
+His eyes were wet when they returned to the parlour. So were Miss
+Anne's. The Teddy bear was proof of the simplicity of his faith in her.
+
+After a while, conscious of hunger, he rose to take leave. He must be
+getting back to St. Albans. But might he be permitted to come back later
+in the afternoon? Miss Anne reddened. It outraged her sense of
+hospitality to send a guest away from her house on a three-mile walk for
+food. And yet----
+
+"Mr. Pujol," she said bravely, "I would ask you to stay to luncheon if I
+had anything to offer you. But I am single handed, and, with Jean's
+illness, I haven't given much thought to housekeeping. The woman who
+does some of the rough work won't be back till six. I hate to let you go
+all those miles--I am so distressed----"
+
+"But, mademoiselle," said Aristide. "You have some bread. You have
+water. It has been a banquet many a day to me, and this time it would
+be the most precious banquet of all."
+
+"I can do a little better than that," faltered Miss Anne. "I have plenty
+of eggs and there is bacon."
+
+"Eggs--bacon!" cried Aristide, his bright eyes twinkling and his hands
+going up in the familiar gesture. "That is superb. _Tiens!_ you shall
+not do the cooking. You shall rest. I will make you an _omelette au
+lard_--_ah!_"--he kissed the tips of his fingers--"such an omelette as
+you have not eaten since you were in France--and even there I doubt
+whether you have ever eaten an omelette like mine." His soul simmering
+with omelette, he darted towards the door. "The kitchen--it is this
+way?"
+
+"But, Mr. Pujol----!" Miss Anne laughed, protestingly. Who could be
+angry with the vivid and impulsive creature?
+
+"It is the room opposite Jean's--not so?"
+
+She followed him into the clean little kitchen, half amused, half
+flustered. Already he had hooked off the top of the kitchen range. "Ah!
+a good fire. And your frying-pan?" He dived into the scullery.
+
+"Please don't be in such a hurry," she pleaded. "You will have made the
+omelette before I've had time to lay the cloth, and it will get cold.
+Besides, I want to learn how to do it."
+
+"_Tres bien_," said Aristide, laying down the frying-pan. "You shall see
+how it is made--the omelette of the universe."
+
+So he helped Miss Anne to lay the cloth on the gate-legged oak table in
+the parlour and to set it out with bread and butter and the end of a
+tinned tongue and a couple of bottles of stout. After which they went
+back to the little kitchen, where in a kind of giggling awe she watched
+him shred the bacon and break the eggs with his thin, skilful fingers
+and perform his magic with the frying-pan and turn out the great golden
+creation into the dish.
+
+"Now," said he, pulling her in his enthusiasm, "to table while it is
+hot."
+
+Miss Anne laughed. She lost her head ever so little. The days had been
+drab and hopeless of late and she was still young; so, if she felt
+excited at this unhoped for inrush of life and colour, who shall blame
+her? The light sparkled once more in her eyes and the pink of her
+naturally florid complexion shone on her cheek as they sat down to
+table.
+
+"It is I who help it," said Aristide. "Taste that." He passed the plate
+and waited, with the artist's expectation for her approval.
+
+"It's delicious."
+
+It was indeed the perfection of omelette, all its suave juiciness
+contained in film as fine as goldbeater's skin.
+
+"Yes, it's good." He was delighted, childlike, at the success of his
+cookery. His gaiety kept the careworn woman in rare laughter during the
+meal. She lost all consciousness that he was a strange man plunged down
+suddenly in the midst of her old maidish existence--and a strange man,
+too, who had once behaved in a most outrageous fashion. But that was
+ever the way of Aristide. The moment you yielded to his attraction he
+made you feel that you had known him for years. His fascination
+possessed you.
+
+"Miss Anne," said he, smoking a cigarette, at her urgent invitation, "is
+there a poor woman in Beverly Stoke with whom I could lodge?"
+
+She gasped. "You lodge in Beverly Stoke?"
+
+"Why yes," said Aristide, as if it were the most natural thing in the
+world. "I am engaged in the city from ten to five every day. I can't
+come here and go back to London every night, and I can't stay a whole
+week without my little Jean. And I have my duty to Jean. I stand to him
+in the relation of a father. I must help you to nurse him and make him
+better. I must give him soup and apples and ice cream and----"
+
+"You would kill the darling in five minutes," interrupted Miss Anne.
+
+He waved his forefinger in the air. "No, no, I have nursed the sick in
+my time. My dear friend," said he, with a change of tone, "when did you
+go to bed last?"
+
+"I don't know," she answered in some confusion. "The district nurse has
+helped me--and the doctor has been very good. Jean has turned the corner
+now. Please don't worry. And as for your coming to live down here, it's
+absurd."
+
+"Of course, if you formally forbid me to do so, mademoiselle, and if you
+don't want to see me----"
+
+"How can you say a thing like that? Haven't I shown you to-day that you
+are welcome?"
+
+"Dear Miss Anne," said he, "forgive me. But what is that great vast town
+of London to me who know nobody there? Here in this tiny spot is
+concentrated all I care for in the world. Why shouldn't I live in it?"
+
+"You would be so dreadfully uncomfortable," said Miss Anne, weakly.
+
+"Bah!" cried Aristide. "You talk of discomfort to an old client of
+_L'Hotel de la Belle Etoile_?"
+
+"The Hotel of the Beautiful Star? Where is that?" asked the innocent
+lady.
+
+"Wherever you like," said Aristide. "Your bed is dry leaves and your
+bed-curtains, if you demand luxury, are a hedge, and your ceiling, if
+you are fortunate, is ornamented with stars."
+
+She looked at him wide-eyed, in great concern.
+
+"Do you mean that you have ever been homeless?"
+
+He laughed. "I think I've been everything imaginable, except married."
+
+"Hush!" she said. "Listen!" Her keen ear had caught a child's cry. "It's
+Jean. I must go."
+
+She hurried out. Aristide prepared to light another cigarette. But a
+second before the application of the flaring match an idea struck him.
+He blew out the match, replaced the cigarette in his case, and with a
+dexterity that revealed the professional of years ago, began to clear
+the table. He took the things noiselessly into the kitchen, shut the
+door, and master of the kitchen and scullery washed up. Then, the most
+care-free creature in the world, he stole down the stone passage into
+the wilderness of Beverly Stoke.
+
+An hour afterwards he knocked at the front door, Anne Honeywood admitted
+him.
+
+"I have arranged with the good Mrs. Buttershaw. She lives a hundred
+yards down the road. I bring my baggage to-morrow evening."
+
+Anne regarded him in a humorous, helpless way. "I can't prevent you,"
+she said, "but I can give you a piece of advice."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Don't wash up for Mrs. Buttershaw."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So it came to pass that Aristide Pujol took up his residence at
+Beverly Stoke, trudging every morning three miles to catch his
+business train at St. Albans, and trudging back every evening three
+miles to Beverly Stoke. Every morning he ran into the cottage for a
+sight of little Jean and every evening after a digestion-racking meal
+prepared by Mrs. Buttershaw he went to the cottage armed with toys
+and weird and injudicious food for little Jean and demanded an account
+of the precious infant's doings during the day. Gradually Jean
+recovered of his congestion, being a sturdy urchin, and, to Aristide's
+delight, resumed the normal life of childhood.
+
+"_Moi, je suis papa_," said Aristide. "He has got to speak French, and
+he had better begin at once. It is absurd that anyone born between Salon
+and Arles should not speak French and Provencal; we'll leave Provencal
+till later. _Moi, je suis papa, Jean._ Say _papa_."
+
+"I don't quite see how he can call you that, Mr. Pujol," said Anne, with
+the suspicion of a flush on her cheek.
+
+"And why not? Has the poor child any other papa in the whole wide world?
+And at four years old not to have a father is heart-breaking. Do you
+want us to bring him up an orphan? No. You shan't be an orphan, _mon
+brave_," he continued, bending over the child and putting his little
+hands against his bearded face, "you couldn't bear such a calamity,
+could you? And so you will call me _papa_."
+
+"_Papa_," said Jean, with a grin.
+
+"There, he has settled it," said Aristide. "_Moi je suis papa._ And you,
+mademoiselle?"
+
+"I am Auntie Anne," she replied demurely.
+
+Saturday afternoons and Sundays were Aristide's days of delight. He
+could devote himself entirely to Jean. The thrill of the weeks when he
+had paraded the child in the market places of France while he sold his
+corn cure again ran through his veins. The two rows of cottages
+separated by the common, which was the whole of Beverly Stoke, became
+too small a theatre for his parental pride. He bewailed the loss of his
+automobile that had perished of senile decay at Aix-en-Provence. If he
+only had it now he could exhibit Jean to the astonished eyes of St.
+Albans, Watford--nay London itself!
+
+"I wish I could take him to Dulau & Company," said he.
+
+"Good Heavens!" cried Miss Anne in alarm, for Aristide was capable of
+everything. "What in the world would you do with him there?"
+
+"What would I do with him?" replied Aristide, picking the child up in
+his arms--the three were strolling on the common--"_Parbleu!_ I would
+use him to strike the staff of Dulau & Company green with envy. Do you
+think the united efforts of the whole lot of them, from the good Mr.
+Blessington to the office boy, could produce a hero like this? You are a
+hero, Jean, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes, papa," said Jean.
+
+"He knows it," shouted Aristide with a delighted gesture which nearly
+cast Jean to the circumambient geese. "Miss Anne, we have the most
+wonderful child in the universe."
+
+This, as far as Anne was concerned, was a proposition which for the past
+three years she had regarded as incontrovertible. She smiled at
+Aristide, who smiled at her, and Jean, seeing them happy, smiled largely
+at them both.
+
+In a very short time Aristide, who could magically manufacture boats
+and cocks and pigs and giraffes out of bits of paper, who could bark
+like a dog and quack like a goose, who could turn himself into a horse
+or a bear at a minute's notice, whose pockets were a perennial mine of
+infantile ecstasy, established himself in Jean's mind as a kind of
+tame, necessary and beloved jinn. Being a loyal little soul, the child
+retained his affection for Auntie Anne, but he was swept off his
+little feet by his mirific parent. The time came when, if he was not
+dressed in his tiny woollen jersey and knee breeches and had not his
+nose glued against the parlour window in readiness to scramble to the
+front door for Aristide's morning kiss, he would have thought that
+chaos had come again. And Anne, humouring the child, hastened to get
+him washed and dressed in time; until at last, so greatly was she
+affected by his obsession, she got into the foolish habit of watching
+the clock and saying to herself: "In another minute he will be here,"
+or: "He is a minute late. What can have happened to him?"
+
+So Aristide, in his childlike way, found remarkable happiness in
+Beverly Stoke. A very wet summer had been followed by a dry and mellow
+autumn. Aristide waxed enthusiastic over the English climate and
+rejoiced in the mild country air. He was also happy under my friend
+Blessington, who spoke of him to me in glowing terms. At the back of
+all Aristide's eccentricities was the Provencal peasant's shrewdness.
+He realized that, for the first time in his life, he had taken up a
+sound and serious avocation. Also, he was no longer irresponsible. He
+had found little Jean. Jean's future was in his hands. Jean was to be
+an architect--God knows why--but Aristide settled it, definitely,
+off-hand. He would have to be educated. "And, my dear friend," said
+he, when we were discussing Jean--and for months I heard nothing but
+Jean, Jean, Jean, so that I loathed the brat, until I met the
+brown-skinned, black-eyed, merry little wretch and fell, like
+everybody else, fatuously in love with him--"my dear friend," said he,
+"an architect, to be the architect that I mean him to be, must have
+universal knowledge. He must know the first word of the classic, the
+last word of the modern. He must be steeped in poetry, his brain must
+vibrate with science. He must be what you call in England a gentleman.
+He must go to one of your great public schools--Eton, Winchester,
+Rugby, Harrow--you see I know them all--he must go to Cambridge or
+Oxford. Ah, I tell you, he is to be a big man. I, Aristide Pujol, did
+not pick him up on that deserted road, in the Arabia Petrea of
+Provence, between Salon and Arles, for nothing. He was wrapped, as I
+have told you, in an old blanket--and _ma foi_ it smelt bad--and I
+dressed him in my pyjamas and made a Neapolitan cap for him out of one
+of my socks. The _bon Dieu_ sent him, and I shall arrange just as the
+_bon Dieu_ intended. Poor Miss Anne Honeywood with her ninety pounds a
+year, what can she do? Pouf! It is for me to look after the future of
+little Jean."
+
+By means of such discourse he convinced Miss Anne that Jean was
+predestined to greatness and that Providence had appointed him,
+Aristide, as the child's agent in advance. Very much bewildered by his
+riotous flow of language and very reluctant to sacrifice her woman's
+pride, she agreed to allow him to contribute towards Jean's upbringing.
+
+"Dear Miss Anne," said he, "it is my right. It is Jean's right. You
+would love to put him on top of the pinnacle of fame, would you not?"
+
+"Of course," said Miss Anne.
+
+"_Eh bien!_ we will work together. You will give him what can be given
+by a beautiful and exquisite woman, and I will do all that can be done
+by the accredited agent of Dulau et Compagnie, Wine Shippers of
+Bordeaux."
+
+So, I repeat, Aristide was entirely happy. His waking dreams were of the
+four-year-old child. The glad anticipation of the working day in Great
+Tower St., E. C., was the evening welcome from the simple but capable
+gentlewoman and the sense of home and intimacy in her little parlour no
+bigger than the never-entered and nerve-destroying salon of his parents
+at Aigues Mortes, but smiling with the grace of old oak and faded
+chintz. At Aigues Mortes the salon was a comfortless, tasteless
+convention, set apart for the celebrations of baptisms and marriages and
+deaths, a pride and a terror to the inhabitants. But here everything
+seemed to be as much a warm bit of Anne Honeywood as the tortoise-shell
+comb in her hair and the square of Brussels lace that rose and fell on
+the bosom of her old evening frock. For, you see, since she expected a
+visitor in the evenings, Anne had taken to dressing for her sketch of a
+dinner. For all her struggle with poverty she had retained the charm
+that four years before had made her touch upon Jean seem a consecration
+to the impressionable man. And now that he entered more deeply into her
+life and thoughts, he found himself in fragrant places that were very
+strange to him. He discovered, too, with some surprise, that a man who
+has been at fierce grips with Fortune all his life from ten to forty is
+ever so little tired in spirit and is glad to rest. In the tranquility
+of Anne Honeywood's presence his soul was singularly at peace. He also
+wondered why Anne Honeywood seemed to grow younger, and, in her gentle
+fashion, more laughter-loving, every day.
+
+The Saint Martin's summer lasted to the beginning of December, and then
+it came to an end, and with it the idyll of Aristide and Anne Honeywood.
+
+One Saturday afternoon, when the rain was falling dismally, she received
+him with an embarrassment she could scarcely conceal. The usual
+heightened colour no longer gave youth to her cheek; an anxious frown
+knitted her candid brows; and there was no laughter in her eyes. He
+looked at her questioningly. Was anything the matter with Jean? But Jean
+answered the question for himself by running down the passage and
+springing like a puppy into Aristide's arms. Anne turned her face away,
+as if the sight pained her, and, pleading a headache and the desire to
+lie down, she left the two together. Returning after a couple of hours
+with the tea-tray, she found them on the floor breathlessly absorbed in
+the erection of card pagodas. She bit her lip and swallowed a sob.
+Aristide jumped up and took the tray. Was not the headache better? He
+was so grieved. Jean must be very quiet and drink up his milk quietly
+like a hero because Auntie was suffering. Tea was a very subdued affair.
+Then Anne carried off Jean to bed, refusing Aristide's helpful
+ministrations. It was his Saturday and Sunday joy to bath Jean amid a
+score of crawly tin insects which he had provided for the child's
+ablutionary entertainment, and it formed the climax of Jean's blissful
+day. But this afternoon Anne tore the twain asunder. Aristide looked
+mournfully over the rain-swept common through the leaded panes, and
+speculated on the enigma of woman. A man, feeling ill, would have been
+only too glad for somebody to do his work; but a woman, just because she
+was ill, declined assistance. Surely women were an intellect-baffling
+sex.
+
+She came back, having put Jean to bed.
+
+"My dear friend," she said, with a blurt of bravery, "I have something
+very hard to say, but I must say it. You must go away from Beverly
+Stoke."
+
+"Ah!" cried Aristide, "is it I, then, that give you a headache?"
+
+"It's not your fault," she said gently. "You have been everything that a
+loyal gentleman could be--and it's because you're a loyal gentleman that
+you must go."
+
+"I don't understand," said he, puzzled. "I must go away because I give
+you a headache, although it is not my fault."
+
+"It's nothing to do with headaches," she explained. "Don't you see?
+People around here are talking."
+
+"About you and me?"
+
+"Yes," said Miss Anne, faintly.
+
+"_Saprelotte!_" cried Aristide, with a fine flourish, "let them talk!"
+
+"Against Jean and myself?"
+
+The reproach brought him to his feet. "No," said he. "No. Sooner than
+they should talk, I would go out and strangle every one of them. But it
+is infamous. What do they say?"
+
+"How can I tell you? What would they say in your own country?"
+
+"France is France and England is England."
+
+"And a little cackling village is the same all the world over. No, my
+dear friend--for you are my dear friend--you must go back to London, for
+the sake of my good name and Jean's."
+
+"But let us leave the cackling village."
+
+"There are geese on every common," said Anne.
+
+"_Nom de Dieu!_" muttered Aristide, walking about the tiny parlour.
+"_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_" He stood in front of her and flung out
+his arms wide. "But without Jean and you life will have no meaning for
+me. I shall die. I shall fade away. I shall perish. Tell me, dear Miss
+Anne, what they are saying, the miserable peasants with souls of mud."
+
+But Anne could tell him no more. It had been hateful and degrading to
+tell him so much. She shivered through all her purity. After a barren
+discussion she held out her hand, large and generous like herself.
+
+"Good-bye"--she hesitated for the fraction of a second--"Good-bye,
+Aristide. I promise you shall provide for Jean's future. I will bring
+him up to London now and then to see you. We will find some way out of
+the difficulty. But you see, don't you, that you must leave Beverly
+Stoke?"
+
+Aristide went back to his comfortless lodgings aflame with bewilderment,
+indignation and despair. He fell upon Mrs. Buttershaw, a slatternly and
+sour-visaged woman, and hurled at her a tornado of questions. She
+responded with the glee of a hag, and Aristide learned the amazing fact
+that in the matter of sheer uncharitableness, unkindness and foulness of
+thought Beverly Stoke, with its population of three hundred hinds, could
+have brought down upon it the righteous indignation of Sodom, Gomorrah,
+Babylon, Paris, and London. For a fortnight or so Anne Honeywood's life
+in the village had been that of a pariah dog.
+
+"And now you've spoke of it yourself," said Mrs. Buttershaw, her hands
+on her hips, "I'm glad. I'm a respectable woman, I am, and go to church
+regularly, and I don't want to be mixed up in such goings on. And I
+never have held with foreigners, anyway. And the sooner you find other
+lodgings, the better."
+
+For the first and only time in his life words failed Aristide Pujol. He
+stood in front of the virtuous harridan, his lips working, his fingers
+convulsively clutching the air.
+
+"You--you--you--you naughty woman!" he gasped, and, sweeping her away
+from the doorway of his box of a sitting-room, he rushed up to his
+tinier bedroom and in furious haste packed his portmanteau.
+
+"I would rather die than sleep another night beneath your slanderous
+roof," he cried at the foot of the stairs. "Here is more than your
+week's money." He flung a couple of gold coins on the floor and dashed
+out into the darkness and the rain.
+
+He hammered at Anne Honeywood's door. She opened it in some alarm.
+
+"You?--but----" she stammered.
+
+"I have come," said he, dumping his portmanteau in the passage, "to take
+you and Jean away from this abomination of a place. It is a Tophet
+reserved for those who are not good enough for hell. In hell there is
+dignity, _que diable!_ Here there is none. I know what you have
+suffered. I know how they insult you. I know what they say. You cannot
+stay one more night here. Pack up all your things. Pack up all Jean's
+things. I have my valise here. I walk to St. Albans and I come back for
+you in an automobile. You lock up the door. I tell the policeman to
+guard the cottage. You come with me. We take a train to London. You and
+Jean will stay at a hotel. I will go to my good friend who saved me
+from Madam Gougasse. After that we will think."
+
+"That's just like you," she said, smiling in spite of her trouble, "you
+act first and think afterwards. Unfortunately I'm in the habit of doing
+the reverse."
+
+"But it's I who am doing all the thinking for you. I have thought till
+my brain is red hot." He laughed in his luminous and excited way, and,
+seizing both her hands, kissed them one after the other. "There!" said
+he, "be ready by the time I return. Do not hesitate. Do not look back.
+Remember Lot's wife!" He flourished his hat and was gone like a flash
+into the heavy rain and darkness of the December evening. Anne cried
+after him, but he too remembering Lot's wife would not turn. He marched
+on buoyantly, heedless of the wet and the squirting mud from unseen
+puddles. It was an adventure such as he loved. It was a knightly errand,
+_parbleu!_ Was he not delivering a beautiful lady from the dragon of
+calumny? And in an automobile, too! His imagination fondled the idea.
+
+At a garage in St. Albans he readily found a car for hire. He was all
+for driving it himself--that is how he had pictured the rescue--but the
+proprietor, dull and unimaginative tradesman, declined firmly. It was a
+hireling who drove the car to Beverly Stoke. Anne, unhatted and
+uncloaked, admitted him.
+
+"You are not ready?"
+
+"My dear friend, how can I----?"
+
+"You are not coming?" His hands dropped to his sides and his face was
+the incarnation of disappointment.
+
+"Let us talk things over reasonably," she urged, opening the parlour
+door.
+
+"But I have brought the automobile."
+
+"He can wait for five minutes, can't he?"
+
+"He can wait till Doomsday," said Aristide.
+
+"Take off your dripping coat. You must be wet through. Oh, how impulsive
+you are!"
+
+He took off his overcoat dejectedly and followed her into the parlour,
+where she tried to point out the impossibility of his scheme. How could
+she abandon her home at a moment's notice? Failing to convince him, she
+said at last in some embarrassment, but with gentle dignity: "Suppose we
+did run away together in your romantic fashion, would it not confirm the
+scandal in the eyes of this wretched village?"
+
+"You are right," said Aristide. "I had not thought of it."
+
+He knew himself to be a madman. It was not thus that ladies were rescued
+from calumny. But to leave her alone to face it for time indefinite was
+unthinkable. And, meanwhile, what would become of him severed from her
+and little Jean? He sighed and looked around the little room where he
+had been so happy, and at the sweet-faced woman whose companionship had
+been so dear to him. And then the true meaning of all the precious
+things that had been his life for the past two months appeared before
+him like a smiling valley hitherto hidden and now revealed by dissolving
+mist. A great gladness gathered round his heart. He leaned across the
+table by which he was sitting and looked at her and for the first time
+noticed that her eyes were red.
+
+"You have been crying, dear Anne," said he, using her name boldly.
+"Why?"
+
+A man ought not to put a question like that at a woman's head and bid
+her stand and deliver. How is she to answer? Anne felt Aristide's bright
+eyes upon her and the colour mounted and mounted and deepened on her
+cheeks and brow.
+
+"I don't like changes," she said in a low voice.
+
+Aristide slipped noiselessly to the side of her chair and knelt on one
+knee and took her hand.
+
+"Anne--my beloved Anne!" said he.
+
+And Anne neither moved nor protested, but looked away from him into the
+fire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And that is all that Aristide told me. There are sacred and beautiful
+things in life that one man does not tell to another. He did, however,
+mention that they forgot all about the unfortunate chauffeur sitting in
+the rain till about three hours afterwards, when Aristide sped away to a
+St. Albans hotel in joyous solitude.
+
+The very next day he burst in upon me in a state of bliss bordering on
+mania.
+
+"But there is a tragic side to it," he said when the story was over.
+"For half the year I shall be exiled to Bordeaux, Marseilles and Algiers
+as the representative of Dulau et Compagnie."
+
+"The very best thing that could happen for your domestic happiness,"
+said I.
+
+"What? With my heart"--he thumped his heart--"with my heart hurting like
+the devil all the time?"
+
+"So long as your heart hurts," said I, "you know it isn't dead."
+
+A short while afterwards they were married in London. I was best man and
+Jean, specklessly attired, was page of honour, and the vicar of her own
+church at Chislehurst performed the ceremony. The most myopic of
+creatures could have seen that Anne was foolishly in love with her
+rascal husband. How could she help it?
+
+As soon as the newly wedded pair had received the exhortation, Aristide,
+darting to the altar-rail, caught Jean up in his arms, and, to the
+consternation of the officiating clergy, the verger, and Anne's
+conventional friends, cried out exultingly:
+
+"_Ah, mon petit._ It was a lucky day for both of us when I picked you
+up on the road between Salon and Arles. Put your hands together as you
+do when you're saying your prayers, _mon brave_, and say, 'God bless
+father and mother.'"
+
+Jean obediently adopted the attitude of the infant Samuel in the
+pictures.
+
+"God bless father and mother," said he, and the childish treble rang out
+queerly in the large, almost empty church.
+
+There was a span of silence and then all the women-folk fell on little
+Jean and that was the end of that wedding.
+
+
+                                THE END.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA
+ BY
+ William J. Locke
+
+ Author of "The Beloved Vagabond," "Simon the Jester," etc.
+
+ _Cloth_      _12mo_      _$1.30 net_      _Postage 12 cents_
+
+ Illustrations by Arthur I. Keller
+
+"Mr. Locke has succeeded in uniting with the firm carefulness of his
+early work the rapid, fluent, vibrating style that makes his later books
+so delightful; therefore it is easy to make the deduction that
+'Clementina' is the best piece of work he has done."--_New York Evening
+Sun_
+
+"Among the novels of the past five years no books have more consistently
+produced an effect at once certain, satisfactory and delightful than
+those of William J. Locke. This latest addition to his shelf is full of
+life and laughter and the love not only of man for woman but of man for
+man and for humanity. Mr. Locke is a born story-teller and a master of
+the art of expression."--_The Outlook_
+
+"The book contains a mass of good material, with original
+characterization, and is written in a style piquant and clever."--_The
+Literary Digest_
+
+"A story containing the essence of humanity, with an abundance of
+sensible and sensitive, casual and unobtrusive commentary upon life and
+man, and especially upon woman."--_Boston Evening Transcript_
+
+"It contains even more of the popular qualities than are usually
+associated with the writings of this noted author."--_Boston Times_
+
+"Mr. Locke's flights into the realms of fancy have been a delight to
+many readers. He has a lightness of touch that is entirely captivating,
+and his remarkable characterization of inconsequent people gives them a
+reality that is very insistent."--_Baltimore Evening Sun_
+
+"Never has he drawn so deeply from that well that is the human heart;
+never so near those invisible heights which are the soul; and, if we are
+not altogether mistaken, 'The Glory of Clementina' will also prove to be
+that of its author."--_Baltimore News_
+
+"A fascinating story with delicate, whimsical touches."--_Albany
+Times-Union_
+
+"The book seems destined to live longer than any written by the author
+to date, because it is so sane and so fundamentally
+true."--_Philadelphia Enquirer_
+
+
+JOHN LANE CO., NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+ MANALIVE
+ BY
+ Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+ Author of "The Innocence of Father Brown," "Heretics," "Orthodoxy," etc.
+
+ _Cloth_      _12mo_      _$1.30 net_      _Postage 12 cents_
+
+ Frontispiece and Jacket Illustration by Will Foster
+
+"Mr. Chesterton has undertaken in this quaint narrative to make
+burlesque the vehicle of a sermon and a philosophy. It is all a part of
+the author's war upon artificial attitudes which enclose the living men
+like a shell and make for human purposes a dead man of him. He speaks
+here in a parable--a parable of his own kind, having about it a broad
+waggishness like that of Mr. Punch and a distinct flavor of that sort of
+low comedy which one finds in Dickens and Shakespeare. You are likely to
+find, before you are done with the parable, that there has been forced
+upon your attention a possible view of the life worth living. 'Manalive'
+is a 'Peterpantheistic' novel full of Chestertonisms."--_New York Times_
+
+"One of the oddest books Mr. Chesterton has yet given us."--_New York
+Evening Globe_
+
+"The fun of the book (and there is plenty of it) comes quite as much
+from the extraordinary and improbable characters as from the situations.
+Epigrams, witticisms, odd fancies, queer conceits, singular whimsies,
+follow after one another in quick succession."--_Brooklyn Eagle_
+
+
+"One of the most humorous tales of modern fiction, combined with a very
+tender and appealing love story."--_Cleveland Plain Dealer_
+
+"The book is certain to have a wide circulation, not only because of the
+name of the author attached to it, but because of its own intrinsic
+worth."--_Buffalo Commercial_
+
+"There can be no doubt as to the iridescent brilliance of the book. Page
+after page--full of caustic satire, humorous sally and profound
+epigram--fairly bristles with merriment. The book is a compact mass of
+scintillating wit."--_Philadelphia Public Ledger_
+
+
+JOHN LANE CO., NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol, by
+William J. Locke
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