V

between the folds of the blanket peeped the faceof a sleeping childSuddenly, 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 thereaccidentally. 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 dressedin 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 meenough 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 claimedpaternity? 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 neckthe 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.he demonstrated the proper application of the cureAristide breathed a sigh of relief, and after a well-earneddéjeunerwent 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 treatedit 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 achasseurin 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 whoseuse 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 littlecoq 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 gavesuch 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 formeda 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.it is a fearsome thing for a man to be left alone in the dead of night with a young babyTogether 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, toAristide’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 bydozens 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 toJean. 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 anenfant trouvéluridly 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 hisincongruous 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.”one of the little girls in pigtails was holding him, while miss anne administered the feeding-bottleShe laughed, holding the feeding-bottle. “The Palace of the Popes has been standing for sixcenturies, 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 isMarseilles 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 cœur, de tout mon être,” he cried, in a sudden gust of passion.Miss Anne smiled kindly, not dreaming of hisperplexity, amused by his Southern warmth. Miss Janet joined them in the hall. They went in to dinner, Aristide sitting at the centraltable 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 anautomobile 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 restof 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.VTHE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG’S HEADOnce upon a time Aristide Pujol found himself standing outside his Paris residence, No. 213bis, 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. 213bisand 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. 213bis, 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 eyeand 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 havecalled 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 aworld 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 waslike 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, thecastagnettes 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 asomethingSadi-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 theseething 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 refreshthemselves 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 tolisten 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 andtambourine 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. Aristidestood 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 thePlace 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 heldthe 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 robbedmamanit 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.

between the folds of the blanket peeped the faceof 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 thereaccidentally. 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 dressedin 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 meenough 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 claimedpaternity? 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 neckthe 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.

he demonstrated the proper application of the cure

Aristide breathed a sigh of relief, and after a well-earneddéjeunerwent 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 treatedit 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 achasseurin 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 whoseuse 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 littlecoq 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 gavesuch 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 formeda 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.

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, toAristide’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 bydozens 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 toJean. 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 anenfant trouvéluridly 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 hisincongruous 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.”

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 sixcenturies, 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 isMarseilles 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 cœur, de tout mon être,” he cried, in a sudden gust of passion.

Miss Anne smiled kindly, not dreaming of hisperplexity, amused by his Southern warmth. Miss Janet joined them in the hall. They went in to dinner, Aristide sitting at the centraltable 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 anautomobile 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 restof 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.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG’S HEAD

Once upon a time Aristide Pujol found himself standing outside his Paris residence, No. 213bis, 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. 213bisand 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. 213bis, 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 eyeand 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 havecalled 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 aworld 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 waslike 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, thecastagnettes 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 asomethingSadi-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 theseething 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 refreshthemselves 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 tolisten 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 andtambourine 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. Aristidestood 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 thePlace 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 heldthe 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 robbedmamanit 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.

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