Chapter 16

"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?"