Chapter 13

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.

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."

"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.